Sisters in Hate: American Women and White Extremism

by Seyward Darby

WOMEN ARE SUPPOSED to be nice. It’s a belief inscribed in our social gospel. There’s even a name for it: the women-are-wonderful effect. Psychologists coined the phrase based on research showing that people tend to assign more positive attributes to women than they do to men, qualities like “happy,” “good,” and “nurturing.”3 To meet these expectations, women are conditioned to be polite and self-effacing. A study described in a 2009 book found that young girls “quickly learn to smile, work quietly, be neat, defer to boys, and speak only when spoken to.”4 The effect cultivates benevolent sexism, as women are pigeonholed as pleasing, civilizing, and selfless forces. They are told to absorb misogyny without complaint, and they are often policed and punished when they don’t.

Its nice to see what all women already know written down

Conservative women’s activism derived from their faith, their community, and their fear that change might compromise their interests. Race was also a source of division. Research showed that black women tended to favor the amendment,17 while its adversaries drew strength from the memberships of racist organizations like the Klan, the John Birch Society, and Women for Constitutional Government, which described its female-led opposition to civil rights as a matter of “racial self-respect.”18 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. White supremacists, including female ones, saw a complex threat that they intended to stop.

Not much has changed

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.22 In 2017, more than 60 percent of white women in Alabama voted for Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate, despite the Republican candidate being accused of sexual assault and misconduct with teenage girls.23 And that was just one year after exit polls showed that Trump won roughly 53 percent of votes cast by white women.

See abortion laws that disproportinally neg impact woc

“the gender gap in politics is really a color line.”24

Recent polls show that fewer than half of American women, including millennials,33 identify as feminist.34 Viral campaigns like #WomenAgainstFeminism invite anyone who opposes the movement to say so publicly. One reason for this opposition, surely, is the prevalent caricaturing of women’s rights advocates as obnoxious and undesirable. Unflattering depictions serve to warn other women: Do you really want to risk being described like that?

Wtf.

ANALYSES OF THE far right often dismiss the elevation of motherhood as a way of keeping

women subservient to men by convincing them that they have more power than they actually do. As Corinna’s story shows, the hate movement can sideline women who