Book review of Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond’s Fascism and the Women’s Cause by Katherine Williams.
In their compelling volume Fascism and the Women’s Cause, authors Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond give readers a compelling insight into the ways in which tenets of women’s rights and agency are central to contemporary attempts to reinvigorate fascism in its various guises. Importantly, the authors demonstrate how transphobia today explicitly links the agendas of gender-critical (GC) feminists and fascists as they consolidate–and often amalgamate–their exclusionary ideas surrounding alleged civilisation decline and prescriptive conceptualisations of gender. These shared agendas are evidenced, for example by the ‘gender panic’ fomented by both GC feminists and fascist actors about transgender women accessing public bathrooms. This activism also has a racialised component, particularly with regard to so-called Muslim grooming gangs and the safety of young white girls, as outlined in the introduction to the volume. Crucially, and as the authors show, while this instrumentalisation of issues relating to women’s rights has united this seemingly disparate group of actors, it in fact finds precedence in the feminist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and finds itself at the intersection of women’s activism with dominant ideas about race, gender, and class
The volume is divided into four main parts, with each delving into a movement for women’s rights within a US or UK and examining the extent to which this activism was reconciled, or even made possible, through the far-right and fascist movements of the time. The first part explores early feminist campaigns for suffrage and temperance in the US, including the landmark women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848. Following on from this, the second part investigates the Women’s Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) which emerged during the resurgence of the second KKK movement during the 1920s. The third part unpacks the moral purity campaigns of the suffragettes in the UK and how this activism was located in the broader epistemological terrains of British imperialism. The fourth and final part details how the British Union of Fascists (BUP) became a political home for some disillusioned suffragettes. As the authors show, women across these movements were offered extraordinary opportunities to mobilise under the banners of racism, white supremacy, and class exploitation.
In my view, there are two key strengths to this concise yet meticulously researched volume. The first and most immediate is that it exposes the entanglements between these historical feminist and fascism imaginaries and how this discursive is reflected in the contemporary activism of GC feminists and fascists actors. This is important not only because it shows us that the rhetoric used by the latter in fact has a shared history and does not exist in a vacuum where every woman is an island, but because it demonstrates the core role women played–and still play–in the conception, realisation, and reproduction of fascist leitmotifs. As the authors point out, women’s enfranchisement in the US, for example, was seen by organisations such as the KKK as a singular opportunity to engage women in the fight to protect the interests of white Americans like themselves. Consequently, women brokered their entry onto this particular political stage through both public activism–those who had typically been high profile speakers, lecturers, and campaigners prior to joining the WKKK found themselves elevated to prominent leadership positions in a relatively short period of time–as well as what Kathleen Blee terms “kitchen table activism” (p. 48), e.g., writing letters to politicians, distributing information, and so on. As the volume details, the latter tactic has been revived by US groups such as Moms for Liberty and other anti-trans lobbying groups today. Crucially, what made women’s participation in the WKKK so successful was their strategic synthesis of the personal and the political; they carved out a niche for themselves in terms of defending white homes, family life, and ‘pure’ womanhood within a male-dominated environment typically viewed as hostile to the idea of women’s active political participation. In contrast to the dominant assumption that there is no place for women at the fascist table, women’s suffrage was ultimately considered a boon to the white supremacist cause. This is also reflected in the case of women’s engagement with the BUF, as explored in part four of the volume, in terms of the BUF’s strategic emphasis on the politics of the personal; women’s gendered emotional and physical labour was just as essential to the fascist effort as the blackshirts fighting in the streets. These strictly gendered realms offered women an opportunity to advocate for other women on the one hand, yet kept them sequestered within the realm of their ‘expertise’ as wives and mothers on the other. Despite this blatant gender hierarchy, women remained active and enthusiastic members of these organisations.
The second key strength of this volume, in my mind, is that it also challenges our normative beliefs surrounding the pivotal groups, events, and figures prominent in the larger ‘story’ of feminism, as we understand it today. This relates to the Seneca Falls convention in the US, and the suffragette movement in the UK. While the former is largely heralded as playing a crucial role in paving the way for expanded legal rights and opportunities for women, the authors show us how this campaign was universalised around the experiences of white middle-class women whose personal and political outlooks were irrevocably intertwined with “a consistently racist politics and one that had a particular class character from which it wouldn’t or couldn’t escape–or perhaps even recognise” (p. 28). While, as the authors point out, women leaders during this time tended to be committed abolitionists, the idea that emancipation had put freed male slaves on the same socio-legal footing as women was antithetical to their ideas about who was more ‘deserving’ of equal rights; to figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, sexism was regarded as far more oppressive than racism or class exploitation. As a result of this, their ideas surrounding ‘womanhood’ were not only far removed from the experiences of enslaved, racialised, and working-class women, whom they largely ignored, but saw figures such as Stanton and Anthony drift away from the reform coalition they had been a central part of for decades prior and towards the white supremacist contingent of the Democrat party.
Similarly, the authors demonstrate that the suffragettes’ struggle for women’s rights in the UK context was also deeply embedded in a rigid framework of social norms which privileged the white middle class ‘experience’ and was shaped by moralistic ideas about class, social purity feminism, and women’s suffrage. The latter were intrinsically linked to women’s valourisation of British imperialism, and its perceived ‘civilising’ mission, which, on the ground, translated into taking punitive measures against working class women and sex workers through legislation such as the Poor Law and the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA). The CDA, for example, allowed the police to detain women and forcibly subject them to physical examinations for signs of sexually transmitted infection. Such activism was designed to ‘rescue’ other women from themselves and transform them into the upstanding citizens required by the British Empire to enforce its particular brand of moral and biological supremacy at home and overseas. Furthermore, the authors highlight how suffragette organisations such as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) headed by the Pankhurst family actively disrupted campaigns for Home Rule in Ireland, demonstrating a clear lack of understanding and sympathy for Irish women’s demands for national self-determination within this imperial context. Just as some suffragettes became fascists, the authors observe that the ‘ideological flexibility’ of contemporary GC feminists has seen them come out both in favour of anti-trans legislation couched as both a threat to women and public health, as well as lauding Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza as a ‘stand for civilisation.’
Fascism and the Women’s Cause offers a vital and unvarnished insight into the ways in which historical campaigns for women’s rights often intertwined with far right and fascist ideas about gender, race, class, and empire. The authors encourage us to reevaluate how feminist ‘progress’ has been achieved, and at whose expense—as they show, this is a dynamic which continues to manifest today in terms of the anti-trans activism of GC feminists, fascist actors, and their shared pledge to ‘protect’ women and girls from an Other which, in their view, seeks to undermine reified gender divisions and their racist civilising visions of an ideal future society.
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Dr Katherine Williams (she/her) completed her PhD in Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University in 2023. Her thesis explored the socio-cultural, historical, and political factors underpinning women’s support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Katherine’s research interests include gender, reflexive research methodologies, modern German history and politics, and the contemporary far-right, and has published peer-reviewed work on the methodological challenges of conducting feminist research on far-right women.
Alex Charnley is a postgraduate researcher in far-right and reactionary politics at the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at Bath University. He has co-authored Fascism and the Womens’s Cause (2025, Ebb) and Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics (2022, Pluto Press) with Michael Richmond. From 2012-2018 he was a co-editor and illustrator within the Occupied Times and Base Publication research collectives.
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