Rotha Lintorn-Orman and the New Fascist Woman

    At the Christmas of 1919, the first full year after the ending of the Great War, a very boyish-looking figure scoured for presents amidst the bustling London crowds. 5ft 6in high, close cropped hair, sparkling eyes, dazzling personality and dressed in male clothes, Rotha Lintorn-Orman, twice decorated for gallantry and known as the female Lawrence of Arabia, spied the year's annual 'Woman at Home' - a fairly erstwhile tome from 'The Home Magazine'.

[Above: Click images for larger view]

Amidst the usual 'dainties' and bodice ripping yarns was one article that excited her - 'Women Living with Women' by Christine Jope-Slade and she knew she would give this to her dear friend, lesbian lover and future fascist Mary Sophia Allen. 96 years later this actual volume with Rotha's inscriptions has now surfaced and we can glimpse the first dawnings of the new fascist woman - bold, exciting, daring, sexually liberated, and passionate. This new dawn for women would explode for future generations into the Feminist and Woman's Liberation movements - and things would never be the same again. Rotha's dedication page glows with intent and purpose:

"To dearest Mary, with all my warmest and heartfelt good wishes. Yes, you are so right, we women must learn to love one another. So with my fullest love, Rotha (Lintorn-Orman), London, 1919."

Annotated against the article's precient entries Rotha's pencil flashes "How true and purposeful" against ideas of comradeship, independence and individuality, ending with an excited note of "PLEASE". Against a sentence of 'interludes of sheer Eve' ... "Mary, I adore my interludes of sheer Eve" ... "R". Finally, she wistfully annotates "How delightful is their ordeal in parody. R." against the joys of a 'stimulating interest in each other's doings generally'.

    For Rotha this was indeed truly intoxicating. Now with the potency of women actually living together this new dawn of the new European woman would quickly become the morning of the new fascist woman. Born of a world in November 1918 that saw the male/female ratio as high as 1:42 in some areas of Britain, as whole streets, villages, towns, lose from 60% to up to even all of its males in the prime years of 18-35 (source: H.M.S.O. official statistics for the Great War 1914-1918) and women doing actual men's jobs, even going to the front like Rotha, working ambulances. For her, like so many others, there would be no going back, indeed, there should be no going back. Women's emancipation was the child born of a necessity in 1918, but fully nutured by the new fascist woman, and Rotha in Britain, led the charge.

    Her dear friend and lover, Mary Sophia Allen (1878 - 1964) to whom this Christmas gift was sent, went the same path. After organizing 'direct action' in The Woman's Suffrage Movement that resulted in three terms of imprisonment, hunger strikes and forced feeding. She helped found Britain's first Women's Police Service and was made its commandant in 1919. She later "adored saintly Adolf" (Adolf Hitler) after meeting him in 1934 and became a fervent Nationalist Socialist, and was later the chief Women's Officer of the British Union of Fascists. She died quietly in 1964.

[Above: Mary Sophia Allen (center) with four members of her force.]

    As for Rotha, she ran the British Red Cross Women's Ambulance Training Division and with her driving passion compelled her parents to divest themselves of a fortune to found the first British Fascist Movement in 1923, the 'Fascisti'. Riddled with morphine addiction as a result of her wounds in WWI she sadly turned to alcohol, and died alone in March 1935. Her legacy lives on, and ' the truth' as that cloying, sickly, extraordinairily boring representatives of the liberal establishment will try to tell you, that the feminist movement is somehow their flagship, is 'a lie'. It's a child born of female fascism and the modern woman isn't that smug, self-righteous, self-promoting distortion of American womanhood like Hillary Clinton [...], and any female reading this will surely know where their identities truly 'lie'.

Contributed in July of 2015

-By Mike & Earl