How Women Quietly Power the White Nationalist Movement

Women play a crucial role in the white nationalist movement. One journalist embedded with them to learn how they were recruited and how one woman escaped.

Some of the most overlooked members of the white nationalist movement are women. It’s a purposeful choice. White nationalists cling to outdated beliefs that place women in the home and out of public view, but women also play a crucial role in softening the images of the men who promote the movement to the public.

Seyward Darby unpacks this little-seen layer in her book Sisters in Hate. She follows three women involved in the white nationalist movement. One is a former member, and the other two were still part of the movement at the time of the book’s writing. (Those two distanced themselves from Darby as her book’s subject and her lack of racism became clearer.)

It’s a worthwhile exploration of not only women’s understudied role but also of the history of white nationalist and other hate movements.

Women Have Long Played a Crucial Role in Hate Movements

One of the historical examples Darby recounts is Carolyn Bryant, who accused Emmett Till of grabbing her waist in 1955. Her husband and half-brother killed Till so gruesomely that the image of his corpse galvanized the civil rights movement. In 2018, Bryant admitted to a journalist that she lied about Till’s advances.

The two men who killed Till got most of the attention in the story’s retelling, but Darby saw great significance in recognizing Bryant’s role in Till’s lynching:

“It was a searing reminder of another way in which the women-are-wonderful effect is problematic: It risks blinding people to the ways in which women can be terrible. Disbelief about women’s complicity in the worst forms of bigotry stretches across time and cultures.”

Women aren’t forced to join the white nationalist movement. They choose to join it after being recruited by members who often have much in common with the women they target. White nationalists target niche communities, like trad wives or wellness influencers to appear normal. Layering racist beliefs onto wellness gurus who believe too hard in purity doesn’t always work, but it’s a surprisingly effective technique.

The women who join get more than a group of fellow racists to commiserate with. Darby quotes a historian who observed some of the reasons people joined the KKK in such large numbers:

“‘Its allures were manifold,’ writes historian Linda Gordon. ‘They included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit.’”

The white nationalist organizations that built movements and became powerful offered an ecosystem that provided benefits to different parts of a member’s life. Effective organization made groups like the KKK uniquely capable of committing violence against Black Americans and getting away with it.

The combination of organization and noxious beliefs made the most successful white nationalist groups uniquely beneficial for members and dangerous for their enemies.

What About the Sexism?

Men may get the types of benefits that Gordon described, but women are given a specific place: well below white nationalist men. The movements under the alt-right umbrella believe women belong in domestic roles subservient to men. It’s part of the regressive worldview that their racism is such a prominent part of.

Men and women alike redefine obvious disparities in rights as the duties of motherhood. Foregoing a career is spun to care for a home and children. Allowing men to overrule women by default becomes a delegation of decision-making to the head of the household.

The woman who left the white nationalist movement in Darby’s book, Corinna Olsen, was happy to run an online show and blog for the white nationalist movement. But she also wanted independence rather than becoming a mother. She was useful to the movement until she clashed with fundamental beliefs that accompanied the racist beliefs.

“As Corinna’s story shows, the hate movement can sideline women who aren’t dedicated to having and raising children,” Darby wrote. “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. Whether they’re in a dominant order or a fringe crusade, women are getting something they want out of their position as mothers: validation, security, solidarity, visibility, purpose, bragging rights.”

After seeing Corinna leave the movement, it’s natural to wonder how to pull people out of it. The most tempting method—confronting them with the true unreasonableness of their beliefs—isn’t effective in extreme cases:

“The further from reality someone’s belief is, the less likely they are to course correct. In fact, trying to get them to do so can backfire spectacularly: Research shows that people sometimes double down on their misperceptions when presented with the truth.”

When Corinna failed to get the community and status she hoped to find from the white nationalists, she became an FBI informant, then left the movement. It takes a combination of failures of the movement and obvious flaws in the movement’s worldview to push ideologues out of hateful movements. Arguments only go so far—especially if people are locked into positions they arrived at without good arguments to begin with.