Chapter 7

Chapter 7: "Race War and White Women"

Main Argument:

Women were central to the white power movement. White women played a crucial symbolic and practical role in the white power movement of the 1980s. This was exemplified during the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial of movement leaders.

Background

• In the 1980s, the white power movement emphasized the symbolic importance of white women's reproduction and the creation of a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest.
• Symbolically, the white power movement invoked the purity and vulnerability of white women to justify its ideology and violence. Leaders portrayed the movement as necessary for the defense of white women from the threats of interracial relationships, non-white birth rates, and government/Zionist betrayals.
• White women were instrumental to the movement's operation and growth. They created important social ties through marriage, supported paramilitary activities, and spread propaganda. The framed their roles as wives and mothers of the white race. Mothers of future Aryan warriors.

White Women as Symbols

White power propaganda and rhetoric emphasized the purity, chastity, and vulnerability of white women.

• White women were portrayed as "the mothers of future Aryan warriors" who needed to be protected.
• White power iconography showed white women at the center of unified Klan and neo-Nazi groups and included depiction of the Virgin Mary.
• The protection of white women, white children and domestic spaces was used as a justification for racial violence throughout U.S. history.
• The movement connected the symbolism around white women to broader societal debates of the 1980s related to women's changing roles, reproduction, and the family. Issues like the ERA, abortion, contraception, welfare, and immigration were framed as threats to white women's fertility and the white birth rate.
• The movement placed importance on white women as reproductive vessels for the race.
• The white power movement strategically leveraged existing cultural ideas about protecting white female purity and fertility as a call to action and as a way to widen its appeal. The symbolic white woman helped to unify and motivate the movement.

Women's Activism and Support Roles

White women were active participants in the white power movement of the 1980s, even though their roles were restrained and controlled by the male-dominated structure.

• Women attended and even co-owned paramilitary training camps. While the men focused on weapons and combat training, women learned survivalist skills like canning food, making supplies, and preparing for nuclear war.
• Women provided support work to enable the men's violent activities. This included disguising male activists, driving getaway cars, destroying evidence, transporting people and weapons, designing group medallions, and proofreading major movement writings.