Women and White Supremacy: A Historiographical Essay

Zoey Hanson

His 697: US Women’s History Since 1865

Dr. Mandy L. Cooper

5 December 2022
 Hanson 1

Introduction

Several books have been written on white supremacist politics and its effects on Black

Americans. Works such as Glinda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights,

1919-1950. and Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence,

and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South demonstrate how people of color,

specifically women, were able to transcend oppressive politics to advocate for themselves, their

families, and their communities. However, one population often missing from these narratives is

white women and their perpetuation of white supremacy. Though these women are occasionally

mentioned in passing, they often have no agency in shaping or implementing white supremacy.

For example, Rosen offers a heart-wrenching analysis of how black women attempted to

navigate the politics of white supremacy through their voices, specifically speaking out against a

long, and violent history of sexual violence by white men against black women. Example after

example of Rosen’s narrative reveals how white men used rape and sexual violence to secure

white supremacy. However, nowhere in these accounts do white women. Most of the men

committing these acts of sexual violence had wives, so what part might they have played in

supporting the system? Upon deeper analysis of the historiography, it becomes painfully clear

that women have always maintained and supported white supremacist activities and politics. The

field of white women in white supremacy reveals that white women have played a critical role in

the history of race politics, long before the women of anti-segregation of the 1960s or the new

right of the 1980s. Women were slaveholders, members of the Ku Klux Klan, defenders of the

Confederacy, and sometimes outright supporters of violence against Americans of color.

In general, studies tend to fall into three camps regarding the place and magnitude of

women in white supremacist politics.1 The first views women as the primary motivation for men

upholding white supremacy. In these works, the women are often the excuse and sometimes the

instigators of white supremacy, but they play few active roles. The second camp views women

as partners with men. In these studies, women cooperate closely with men to uphold the values

of white supremacy. The last camp provides the most agency to women, portraying them as

white supremacists in their own right. In these works, white women outright support white

supremacy, engage in political lobbying for white supremacist politics, and commit acts of

violence against Americans of color. Sometimes, these women were unaware of their white

supremacist tendencies such as advocates for progressive and civil rights movements that simply

excluded and discouraged activists of color. While it is important to consider all three of these

approaches to women in white supremacy, the third camp offers the most potential for individual

agency and can reshape how we view the history of white supremacist politics and actions.

Camp I: The Feminine Image

The first group of historians highlight the role women play in perpetuating white

supremacy, not necessarily through the women themselves, but through the imagery of

femininity. This group of authors provide interesting insight into how men justified their white

supremacist actions. Often the justifications included the ‘protection’ of white women. Most

books on white supremacist politics touch on the image of womanhood as motivation and

justification. The most popular example authors refer to is the image of the black rapist or the

importance of motherhood to ‘saving’ children from families of color. These ideals are often

portrayed across the historiography, regardless of white women’s role. For example, Crystal
1
However, it is important to remember that some authors fit into two camps, and sometimes all three. These camps
simply act as guides to dominant portrayals and themes of women in white supremacy.
 Hanson 3

Feimster’s Southern Horrors; Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching though focused on

public violence such as lynching, dedicates a significant amount of time to the theory of violence

to protect white women from (fabricated) rape. This is especially relevant in Feimster’s focus on

Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching advocacy as Wells purposefully challenged these

justifications.

While many authors dedicate only a portion of their analysis to the image of the woman

as justification, Linda Gordon dedicates most of her study in the Great Arizona Orphan

Abduction to feminine imagery. Using a unique case study, Gordon details how women used

racist rhetoric to instigate men into abducting children illegally from adopted homes. When the

white women of Arizona realized that Irish – i.e., white - children were being adopted out to

Hispanic women, they leapt into action, though not physically. Using racialized stereotypes,

white women demanded rescue for these children from ‘prostituting’ women, Mexican food, and

poverty. The orphans and broken racial boundaries specific to the southwest convinced women

to organize. Their voices would encourage posses of men to take these children from their new

homes: “Women were among the most vocal participants, and their influence turned the crowd’s

fury [toward ‘rescuing the children].”2 The women used only their voices and racialized

language to perpetuate racism against Hispanic mothers, which was physically represented in the

actions of their men who removed the children from their new homes. As a result, Gordon

argues, these women erased any ideas of respectable Mexicans who were not worthy of caring

for a white child, despite the white women never stepping foot in a Mexican home.3

The methodology of focusing almost exclusively on women as justification and

motivation for male acts of white supremacy makes Gordon rather unique and classifies her in

2
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) 114.
3
Gordon, Great Arizona, 199-200.
 Hanson 4

the first camp of the historiography. Other authors have done similarly, portraying women

upholding white supremacy without having to dirty their hands, however, Gordon has taken that

a step further, demonstrating how the white women of Arizona were able to use their image and

white supremacy to their advantage by manipulating men who already carried similar beliefs.

Overall, this group of historians is the smallest of the three described here, not because there is a

lack of examples, but because it is scattered throughout works of white supremacy. The

magnitude of the theme across studies highlights the importance of the feminine image to white

supremacy in the mind of men, while also demonstrating the need for authors, like Gordon, to

analyze the implications of these ideals and their effect on Americans of color.

Some authors have done exemplary jobs of making such connections; however, they

focus on masculine imagery and ideals. In their works, the feminine is almost completely

missing. For example, Gail Bederman does an ideal analysis of the effects of images on white

supremacy in her work Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in

the United States, 1880-1917. However, Bederman lacks the feminine perspective, arguing

instead that ideas of masculinity and manliness shaped white supremacist ideas about civilization

and race. Similarly, Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters

Foreign People at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917, equates barbarianism with masculinity. In

other words, keeping virtues of masculinity was essential to America’s efforts at imperialism and

the civilizing mission. Again, Jacobson portrays the intimate connection between gendered

imagination and racism but entirely from the masculine perspective. As the field advances,

historians should use Bederman and Jacobson’s studies as guides for making such connections

but should move beyond an exclusively masculine methodology. An increased focus on

femininity should be incorporated into similar studies. Gendered imagery existed across the

gender spectrum and should therefore be considered at all levels from masculine to feminine.

Camp II: “Co-Whites”

The second camp in the historiography of women in white supremacy highlights the

necessary cooperation between men and women to uphold white supremacist ideals. Emeka

Aniagolu refers to these women as “Co-Whites,” arguing that women who may have supported

racial equality ‘betrayed’ the cause to “transform themselves into ‘co-whites’ or ‘co-partners’

with White men in the governance of the racial status quo of power and privilege…rather than to

transform that racial status in favor of racial equality for all.”4 In short, white women, being

beneficiaries of white supremacy, collaborated with white men to solidify white supremacist

politics. Aniagolu’s argument perfectly describes this second group of historians that focus on

collaboration across gender to perpetuate white supremacy. These women did not expect men to

carry out white supremacist acts, nor did they expect to do them on their own. This is perhaps the

most realistic of the three camps. These works demonstrate that no group operates in isolation

and how it takes multiple populations to uphold ideals like white supremacy.

Two authors that affirm Aniagolu’s ‘co-whites’ approach are Elizabeth R. Varon in We

Mean to Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia and Margaret D. Jacobs in

White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous

Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Varon and Jacobs both demonstrate

how white women worked with white men to shape white supremacist policies and operated as a

critical component of the institutions created by those men.

4
Emeka Aniagolu, Co-Whites: How and Why White Women “Betrayed” the Struggle for Racial Equality in the
United States, (Lanham, Maryland.: University Press of America, 2011) 11-12.
 Hanson 6

Varon seeks to prove that women were active in politics in the antebellum south.5 She

argues that upper and middle-class white women were not only present, but played an “active,

distinct, and evolving role in the political life of the old south.”6 She, however, gives a disclaimer

that places her within this second camp in which she demonstrates how women and men

collaborated across the public sphere to shape policy: “To be sure, [women] did not lay claim to

the male prerogatives of voting, office-holding, and public speaking, but they did use legislative

petitions, voluntary associations, political campaigns, and published reports, appeals, essays, and

novels to register their political views.”7 Jacobs presents a similar argument where women used

traditional ideas of motherhood as the foundation of activism and social reform.8 She

demonstrates that white women, acting within policies created by white men, were “some of the

most vocal proponents of the assimilation policy for American Indians that promoted boarding

schools,” and women played an active role as educators in these schools to enforce

assimilationist policies.9

However, major differences are evident in these works, demonstrating that historians do

not need to agree to demonstrate the cooperation between men and women in the maintenance of

white supremacy. Jacobs analyzes the active role women played within indigenous boarding

schools. As teachers, these women were the first defense against Indigenous culture. Women

policed young Indigenous peoples’ bodies and taught 'civilizing’ lessons. “Reformers identified

education as a necessary ingredient in their program of Indian assimilation,” and women were

5
While Varon’s work may be set before 1865, it is an important work that demonstrates women’s effect on politics
from within the men’s sphere and is a fantastic example of inter-gender cooperation.
6
Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counter: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia, (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 1.
7
Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 1-2.
8
Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of
Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
xxix.
9
Jacobs, Mother to a Dark Race, xxix.
 Hanson 7

essential to the success of boarding schools and therefore assimilation.10 Varon, in contrast, is not

directly interested in policies of white supremacy. Instead, she focuses on a variety of

movements and women’s activism within those movements. This included temperance,

abolition, and most relevant, pro-colonization. Varon does not necessarily sanctify southern

white women, but she does portray them in a mostly positive light, a theme that is not prevalent

in many other books of the historiography.

There is an interesting shift in Varon’s work that would likely be challenged by other

historians. Varon argues that most southern antebellum women were against slavery and

believed in abolition. However, as succession approached, the idea grew that women were not

victims of the system of slavery, as previously believed, but were its beneficiaries. Therefore,

women had a new “public duty to defend slavery.”11 While authors in the historiography would

certainly echo that white women were the beneficiaries of slavery and white supremacy, such as

Aniagolu does, they would likely argue that this shift was not as dramatic and decisive as Varon

portrays. Authors such as Stephanie Jones-Rogers in her work They Were Her Property: White

Women as Slave Owners in the American South, have demonstrated that women were

perpetrators and beneficiaries of racism long before the 1850s. Therefore, while white women

may have been arrested for teaching enslaved children to read or condemned slavery, does not

mean that white women were exempt from encouraging white supremacist policies and actions.

Southern women worked within the chattel slave system in ways that benefitted them.

It is important to note that regardless of what camp a historian belongs to, important

themes exist throughout their studies. For example, Jacob’s work is reminiscent of Gordon’s.

Both authors highlight the role of maternalism and racialized rhetoric in women’s assertion of

10
Ibid., 30.
11
Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 70.
 Hanson 8

white supremacy. Though one author analyzes Hispanic, and the other, Indigenous populations,

there is a clear pattern in white women’s strategies of white supremacy. We have previously seen

how women in Arizona used racialized rhetoric to justify removing children from Hispanic

households to ‘save’ them. Very similar language exists in Jacob’s analysis of Indigenous

boarding schools. The white women who participated in assimilation via boarding schools used

motherhood as a justification for separating Indigenous children from their families. Again, this

was done using racialized rhetoric in which Indigenous women were portrayed as backward,

impoverished, unclean, and uncivilized, a situation from which these children, again, needed to

be saved.12

As in Arizona, women used the image of maternalism and racial stereotypes to separate

children from families of color in exchange for white influence. Jacobs does an excellent job of

summarizing the effects of maternalism when she states, “The ways in which well-meaning

white women became intimately involved in promoting a policy that tore apart Indigenous

families demonstrates the limits of a politics of maternalism. Most materialists lacked the

capability to imagine indigenous women as at once very similar to and quite different from

themselves,” thus reflecting Gordon’s Arizonian women’s reactions to Hispanic mothers.13 The

important theme of maternalism exists across narratives, regardless of the active or inactive role

played by women. This shows that the camps of the historiography are not fixed and definite,

however, maternalism also demonstrates that women, as much as men, used their roles as

mothers and leaders of the domestic sphere to execute man-made policies of assimilation,

racism, and white supremacy.

Camp III: Dirtied Hands

The third and final camp of historians offers the most interesting insight into white

supremacy. In older monographs, women take little part in the perpetuation of white supremacy.

However, many new authors have proven that not only did women participate in creating a white

supremacist culture and politics, but they often took leading responsibilities in creating and

upholding racism, sometimes as loudly and violently as the men. The historians of this camp

carry several themes within their studies. The most dominant themes, however, are power and

activism.

In each work, women mobilized and organized themselves to execute a white

supremacist system. For some women, this meant outward racism through groups like the

Women of the Ku Klux Klan or the segregationist movement. For others, white supremacist

rhetoric was not their primary intention, instead, they used it as a tool to accomplish other goals

like suffrage or memorialization efforts. Either way, in all these women's organizations, the role

of reclaiming a semblance of power is clear. Each author demonstrates how white women used

white supremacy to their benefit, by shaping it to fit their cause and to position themselves above

Americans of color, therefore claiming a sense of power that they lacked under an American

patriarchal society. These women did not need men to shape or enforce white supremacy, they

were white supremacists, organizing under the auspices of motherhood and morality. Through

these themes, the third camp of historians demonstrates the social, cultural, and political effects

of women’s involvement in white supremacy. Splitting these authors according to these themes

is difficult because all express both throughout their narratives, but some are stronger than others

in one or both themes.

Organization and networks are essential to any movement, including women’s efforts at

white supremacy. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Rebecca Brückmann do an especially

impressive job of displaying women organizing for white supremacy in their respective works

Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy and Massive

Resistance: White Women, Class, and Segregation.

Brückmann argues that grassroots activists, pivotally led by southern women, organized

against the Civil Rights movement and desegregation, “building on decades of segregationist

ideology, laws, policies, and customs.”14 Brückmann, using reactionary activism against Brown v

Board of Education of Topeka, demonstrates how white women, who had always maintained

ideals of white supremacy, organized, again, under the cover of motherhood to combat

desegregation. The women not only organized and protested but condemned some men for their

failure to protect segregation. These women took what they saw as a threat to racial hierarchies

into their own hands. Brückmann carefully explains that segregation was not the sole target of

these women activists, but “segregationist women’s support for massive resistance was a matter

of white supremacist principle [and Brown} offered them the opportunity to publicly

intervene.”15

McRae refers to women of white supremacist activism as the “mass in massive

resistance:” the women who were central to the movement and any success it had.16 McRae,

similarly to Brückmann, argues that white women, driven by ideas of race, motherhood, politics,

and culture, formed the networks and grassroots movements that maintained the foundations of

white supremacy and segregationist activism. The women of McRae’s narrative follow a similar

path to those in Brückmann’s: they used a rhetoric of motherhood and child protection to create

grassroots movements that actively defended Jim Crow through anti-bussing, textbook, and

14
Gail Brückmann, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-
1917, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 2.
15
Brückmann, Manliness, 3.
16
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 4.
 Hanson 11

segregationist campaigns. McRae specifically uses four women activists, following their actions,

motivations, and reactions as an example of larger trends across the movements and masses.

Ultimately, Brückmann and McRae have very similar works, expertly portraying the

centrality of women to upholding segregation politics. Both authors also analyze the importance

of networks to the white supremacist movements. Brückmann however, only briefly focuses on

the theme, arguing that white southern women were adept at forming social activist networks

based on white supremacist ideologies, ultimately strengthening their movement. This

implication of networking based on supremacist ideologies is reinforced in Kathleen M. Blee’s

Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Blee proves that several women looked

fondly upon their time in the KKK because it allowed them to meet, and form relationships, with

“like-minded women,” much like Brückmann’s women organized according to ideology.17

McRae provides more detail regarding the importance of networks and relationships to

white supremacy among women. McRae dedicates two chapters to the theme of networks,

demonstrating how women in the post-war period had especially increased opportunities to share

political and cultural ideas of racial hierarchies nationally. It is here that McRae expertly

demonstrates the importance of race to several women’s movements, proving that white

supremacists were never a homogenous group. McRae shows that geographically the networks

of white supremacy amongst women were vast and reached beyond the South and that the

women had fundamentally different goals but were united by white supremacy.

Women activists that looked to uphold Jim Crow created networks with other women in

movements such as the temperance movement, those involved with anti-communism, and anti-

court packing and anti-social security causes. Again, this is confirmed by Kathleen Blee when

17
Katherine M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920, (Berkley: University of California Press,
1995) 1.
 Hanson 12

she demonstrates how the KKK recruited women from the prohibition, temperance, anti-

immigration, and anti-radicalism efforts. These various women, though they sought different

results, relied on each other for support and strategies, all of which had a foundation in racial

politics. These women found a common enemy in Americans of color and used it as an

opportunity to collaborate. These networks ingrained white supremacy in other movements,

granting pride to white supremacist women as their ideology extended geographically and

infiltrated countless new groups. The details on networks demonstrated by McRae reveal the

intricacies of white supremacy and the importance of networks among women to its

maintenance, something other authors hint at, but do not provide much analysis to. Brückmann

argues these networks, friendships, and collaborations amongst women activists of varying

causes made “white women…self-conscious agents in [white supremacist] movement[s].”18 Her

quote perfectly summarizes what many of the historians in the third camp attempt to do.

As the authors in the third camp of the historiography have made clear, all women in

activist networks ultimately sought to regain a sense of power. Oftentimes, white supremacist

rhetoric and action allowed for a sense of release from patriarchal power such as the women in

the Klan or the Daughters of the Confederacy.19 However in other instances, white supremacist

attitudes were used as a defense mechanism against movements that did not align with certain

18
Brückmann, Manliness, 4.
19
Karen L. Cox’s Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of
Confederate Culture, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019) reveals how the Daughters of the Confederacy
(UDC) played a “vital role…in shaping the social and political culture of the New South” (page 25). The shaping of
political and social culture often included the perpetuation of the Lost Cause and other narratives harmful to Black
Americans. However, Cox also makes clear that the UDC served as a way for southern white women to assert their
influence and power in southern society. This is confirmed in Glenda Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow: Women and
the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2019) in which she demonstrates the complex nature of white women in the Jim Crow South. For example, she
details how the UDC was used as an organization for women to combat patriarchy while also heavily oppressing
black women. She uses Gabrielle De Rosset Waddell as an example: Waddell became the state president of the UDC
and was simultaneously the first white woman to attend a meeting for women’s interracial cooperation. These
examples from the UDC demonstrate how power, whether against the patriarchy or to oppress Americans of color,
was central to many of these women’s white supremacist organizations.
 Hanson 13

progressive women’s causes. These women, who were focused on achieving women’s rights,

oftentimes discounted other activists of color who may have sought something else.

Faye E. Dudden demonstrates the tug-of-war between white woman suffragists and black

suffragists after the Civil War in her study Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage

and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. She perfectly portrays how white women, who

had once supported black Americans’ rights to vote and equality, had turned to racist rhetoric

when they realized that suffrage would only mean black male suffrage.20 The women who had

once been allies of the black freedom struggle now positioned themselves above black men,

arguing that they, as white women, should receive the vote first. Black men became their

enemies because they, in the minds of these women, stood in opposition to their goal. The

approach of revealing the racist tendencies of women who were seen as ‘ahead of their time’

demonstrates that women upholding white supremacy did not always have to be extreme KKK

members or segregationists; sometimes, they were leaders of national movements for equality.

Cathleen Cahill’s Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage

Movement, does a similarly excellent job of portraying this understated racism in the name of

activism. However, she pushes beyond simple racist rhetoric and analyzes how suffragists of

color navigated the divide between race and gender. She also moves beyond Dudden by

expanding her scope and disregarding the black-white binary that is found in similar works.

Cahill’s largest strength in comparison with other authors is her expert ability to display the

double consciousness suffragists of color experienced as a result of racism from white

20
Crystal Nichole Feimster similarly and expertly demonstrates the effects of racist rhetoric in advancing one cause
over another in her work Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2011). Feimster uses Rebecca Latimer Felton as an example of racist rhetoric. Felton,
though advocating for women’s protection from rape, targets activists such as Ida B. Wells and anti-lynching
campaigns. Felton encourages white supremacist violence in the name of anti-rape advocacy, infamously arguing
that if protecting women from rape meant lynching a thousand Black Americans a week, then so be it. Ultimately,
Felton, as the first female senator, is a progressive figure, but her racist rhetoric was extremely harmful and allowed
for the perpetuation of white mob violence and brutal lynching.
 Hanson 14

suffragists; women of color often had to choose between their womanhood and their ethnicity.

The narratives of the suffragist of color present how women navigated white supremacy that

acted against them, rather than its perpetuation with little reaction, as seen in many of the works

in the third camp. Women of color forced people to acknowledge their presence through

collective action whether white suffragists wanted them to or not.

Cahill, however, also presents an interesting idea not demonstrated in other works in the

historiography: the internalization of white supremacy by women of color. To advance their

causes, much like the white women of Dudden’s narrative, the suffragists of color found

themselves using racist rhetoric to discount other groups. For example, Indigenous suffragists

attempted to put themselves firmly on the white side of the racial binary to ally with white

suffragists, however, this meant racist language toward black suffragists. However, the

Indigenous women faced the same oppression when Hispanic suffragists emphasized their

European heritage and conquest of Indigenous peoples to place themselves above Natives in

terms of rights to citizenship and suffrage. Therefore, not only was the racist rhetoric that is

present in so many other studies used by white women to oppose women of color, but it also

became an internalized weapon for women of color to use against one another.

Women, both white and of color, used white supremacy to advance their individualized

goals. Each of the authors in this camp detail how women were perpetrators of white supremacy

through their activism. Certainly, this is the most interesting approach of the three camps. These

historians demonstrate the complexity of white supremacist politics in America since the Civil

War. These works are the most successful in demonstrating the active role women played in

shaping white supremacist politics. The women are truly self-conscious, independent, agents of

history. The women in these narratives, and the women alone, formed strategies, used rhetoric,
 Hanson 15

and acted, in defense of white supremacy. They either overtly displayed racism through

organizations such as the KKK and UDC or used it as a strategy to advance their own cause,

such as white suffragists. Overall, to truly understand the impact of women in white supremacy,

the third camp of the historiography offers the most telling and potent examples. The histories of

this camp are growing and continue to evolve as time progresses. No longer are white

supremacists limited to the Klan as in Blee’s book, written in 1991. Now, the historiography has

advanced to include more intricate themes like the internalization of white supremacy in Cahill’s

2020 study or the complexity of white women’s place in society, such as in Glenda Gilmore’s

2019 Gender and Jim Crow. As the field progresses, an increasing number of historians are

likely to add even more nuance to the narratives of women in white supremacy.

Conclusion

Overall, the field of women perpetrators of white supremacy is strong. The field

continues to grow more complex and nuanced, allowing for increased insight. Three camps seem

to have developed regarding women’s role in upholding white supremacy. However, as the field

progresses, it would be beneficial for historians to consider all three approaches to women’s role

in white supremacist systems. Women were the motivation for male white supremacists,

cooperated with men, and formed their own organizations and strategies to uphold racism.

Historians must begin to consider all three as one and the same. Ultimately, white supremacists

are complex, and it is important to demonstrate that complexity. Authors have already begun to

pursue nuance, especially in the intersecting themes of motherhood and racist rhetoric.

Hopefully, the field will continue in this direction until historians can grasp the complete nature

of women’s role in white supremacy.

We need to understand women’s role in white supremacy because it challenges

misconceptions that women were not involved in upholding the system until the anti-

segregationists of the 1960s. Many of the works named here are set before Civil Rights and

demonstrate that the chronology of white supremacist women is longer than expected. Women’s

place in white supremacy runs deep. Women have shaped and implemented white supremacist

politics across space and time in the United States. It is important to comprehend this longer

chronology if we are to understand the causes and effects of white supremacy in America.

Women’s participation may very well change how we understand the system and how it was

implemented throughout American history.

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 Hanson 18

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