Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

According to a 2009 DHS report, “unique

drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment” had recently emerged, including the recession, stricter gun regulations, and the large number of military veterans struggling to acclimate to civilian life. Most...

Except they weren’t isolated madmen (or -women, for that matter). Even if they acted alone in specific instances of violence, a vast, pernicious apparatus of punditry and disinformation fostered their beliefs and choices. To access it, all they needed was an internet connection.

Corinna told me that she pushed back, saying that a bombing in a city would do more than kill the enemies of white nationalism. It would also kill innocent white people, potential allies. Covington waved her off. In times of war, he said, extreme measures are sometimes necessary.

EXITING HATE IS similar to embracing it. It involves a search for place and purpose, born of personal need.

Leaving white nationalism demands a replacement for the value that hate provides, which sociologists studying deradicalization have described as “an alternative source of self-worth and affirmation.”

Once again, she extricated herself from a culture that she’d let overtake her. She quit bodybuilding. To avoid feeling exposed for too long, however, she would have to slip on a new identity.

“No one wants to know about my best day on the job; about times when I really came through for someone or went far above and beyond or made old Mrs. Jones smile when she saw that I remembered to put the teddy bear in the casket,” she wrote in the blog’s first post. “They want to hear things that will make them cringe and make them glad they work in an office with a desk and a lamp.”

“Normalcy cannot be measured in how long you cry, how often you visit the grave, or how soon you go back to work. Normalcy is only about how you assimilate the loss into your life, as a permanent, unwanted, irreversible change, and what is normal for you may not be normal for another.”

Writing “kangz”—to say nothing of skipping over Discord users’ slurs or agreeing to speak at Unite the Right—was incompatible with Ayla’s claim that she wasn’t racist. Yet she seemed to register no inconsistency.

Throughout her life, Ayla had been in zealous pursuit of meaning; tradlife was just her latest aspiration. And in the models of whiteness and Christianity that she promoted were echoes of other women who had weaponized normalcy to advance racist initiatives.

Historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, whose research focuses on resistance to the civil rights movement, has described the profound impact of “politics that emphasized performing whiteness as synonymous with ‘good’ womanhood.”11

Also, ladies should learn “womanly arts” like cooking and sewing and biological conception.

“A lady does not argue or forcefully assert her opinions in an uncomfortable way when with her family and friends.” Ayla spoke her mind all the time, demanding a restoration of old-fashioned values and deference to white culture. But maybe, in her mind, she got a pass?

Maybe her adversaries were bad enough, and the topics she cared about consequential enough, to warrant unladylike exertions.

She took her infant son to yoga classes with her, where she “gently guided other moms toward vaccine and circumcision alternatives. It was a give and take of support, information and sisterhood.” A friend from back then told me that Ayla emphasized health—her definition of it—above all else.

She described herself as an “anarcho-syndicalist” who believed that all systems, from health care to agriculture to education, should be run by community cooperatives. She didn’t believe in national borders and considered herself anticapitalism and antigovernment. “I do not recognize the police state however I have no need to currently violate any of their laws,” she wrote.

Among the most basic of social equations is this: Whenever and wherever there is a push for women’s liberation, resistance follows.

Andrea Dworkin tried to answer it. She described three types of antifeminism. “Man dominant” was the crudest form, resting on the principle that men should subjugate women because male dominance is natural, necessary, and rooted in love. “Woman superior” held that female power resided in women’s lofty moral sensibility and sexual desirability—not to be confused with their sexual desire. Women’s authority was innate yet limited, physical yet passive. (“She’s ethereal,” Dworkin wrote, “she floats.”) The last type, “separate but equal,” emphasized that the sexes were destined for different spheres of existence, neither of which was better than the other. Women bearing and nurturing children was just as important as men providing for them financially or fighting wars to protect them.

“Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear.”

In fact, the overlapping lines of race, class, and culture complicate both ideas. What about women who benefit—or want to benefit—from existing structures of dominance? We risk stripping them of responsibility when we suggest that the harm they do is merely a way of coping with their own oppression, whether real or presumed.

The women’s Klan, or WKKK, had up to three million members spread across the country; Indiana and Oregon were hotbeds.

Female pioneers in various spheres of American life linked their pro-woman agendas with bigoted ones. Among the most extreme was Alma Bridwell White, the country’s first female bishop.

But the church also openly associated with the KKK, and White wrote several books defending the Klan. She believed that racial segregation was a matter of biblical law and that women’s suffrage was vital to sustaining white supremacy.16

Given the ascendance of the Christian right, this dynamic made sense: Conservative women’s activism derived from their faith, their community, and their fear that change might compromise their interests.

This too made sense: If feminism was, in Andrea Dworkin’s words, “a revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom,”19 its successes could disrupt more than traditional gender roles and relations.

In the South, research shows that white women have played a critical role in moving politics to the right. They’ve been instrumental, for example, in getting states to restrict reproductive rights, which disproportionately affects poor women of color.

They reveal, as political analyst Alexis Grenell wrote in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, that “the gender gap in politics is really a color line.”

The book helped her see her first marriage in a new light: One reason it failed, she told me, was that she didn’t provide her husband with the respect he required.

In other posts, Ayla warned of the ways in which she thought feminism undermined families. She observed that working women often filled caretaking roles—teachers, nurses, secretaries—for clients, bosses, and customers, when they should have been filling them at home. “What a backwards world we live in where Mom doesn’t simply serve her own family in this function,”

Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign was dubbed STOP, the acronym for Stop Taking Our Privileges.27 The slogan referred to the privileges of being a wife and mother, protected by men, unsullied by the unladylike muck of feminism.

Recent polls show that fewer than half of American women, including millennials,33 identify as feminist.

Unflattering depictions serve to warn other women: Do you really want to risk being described like that?

Author bell hooks once described feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Choice feminism isn’t that: It’s the belief that every decision has equal value so long as a woman makes it. If a woman decides to do something, it must be feminist.

Choice feminism flattens or obscures the complex factors that curate and curtail women’s existences: sexism, racism, occupational segregation, late-stage capitalism, economic inequality, and more.

It is easier to be the kind of feminist you want to be than it is to question how that identity might be harmful to other women.

As evidence, the manosphere cited fathers’ struggles to win parental rights in divorce cases, false rape accusations, unfaithful wives, and even circumcision.

More than twenty people died as a result of just those four incidents, and many more were injured. Antifeminist women justified their proximity to dangerous cohorts by calling them provocateurs or extremists and their language the stuff of locker-room banter.44 Much like defenders of expansive gun rights, they said the thing was never a problem—not the semiautomatic weapon, not the toxic ideology.

Ayla’s journey from one resentment and pundit to another proved remarkably easy with the internet’s ubiquitous shortcuts: algorithms recommending what to watch or read next, feedback loops reinforcing certain viewpoints, talking heads making specious connections, memes reducing complex ideas to logical fallacies.

Still a devotee of natural living, she once suggested that sunscreen didn’t protect people from skin cancer. She toggled between contradictions, first criticizing chemical-filled lotions for not working against the sun’s UV rays and then asserting that the sun wasn’t actually dangerous. “Why would God create a sun that gives us cancer yet then not allow us to develop sunblock for thousands of years? It makes no sense.

“That gives people a purpose and an identity.” As for why many people of color were committed to social justice, she said, “It’s a way of taking no responsibility for your own life. It’s really an easy way out. They get to blame, you know, the whites or Christians or men or patriarchy or whatever.”

“If something goes wrong, because life is life and things go wrong, no matter who you are, where you’re at, they can absolve themselves from guilt.” Women who gave birth at home, by comparison, were brave and willing to be accountable.

It was a telling moment, when so many facets of Ayla’s life seemed to converge: her disappointment in feminism, her valorization of natural birth, her commitment to motherhood, her alienation from previous identities, her anxiety about social conditions, her desire to be seen and heard. The Radio 3Fourteen conversation validated Ayla’s choices and offered her a worldview that celebrated them.

Lana asked Ayla if she thought anyone would ever be unkind to a large black or Mexican family. “Probably not,” Ayla said. “I can’t imagine it.”

The conversation went on—and on—applauding white motherhood. Having babies was good science and good politics.

AMERICA LOVES MOTHERS. Or so it claims. In reality, it loves wielding mothers as symbols more than it does the actual women who bear and (or) raise children. Motherhood is used for all manner of political ends as economic conditions, public policy, and social mores make the practical realities of mothering confounding and crushing.

Homeschooling, for starters, was critical. The AWL celebrated the birth of followers’ children by sending out announcements and requesting donations to support new mothers.

Discussions of the chemicals poisoning their children’s food and water could segue into talk of other noxious influences—ideological ones, perhaps, or racial ones.

Yet it’s possible to acknowledge the rampant, persistent sexism of the far right while also giving women the credit they deserve. They aren’t being duped or forced into hate. They have agency, they make choices, and they locate power in places other than standard political authority.

Koonz explains that, in following Scholtz-Klink’s example and direction, Nazi women “made the world a more pleasant place in which to live for the members of their community. And they simultaneously made life first unbearable and later impossible for ‘racially unworthy’ citizens.”23 More to the point, “they made possible a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly.”