How Can Alt-Right Women Exist in a Misogynistic Movement?
Because racism. These white women would rather be second-class citizens in an all white society than be considered equal with black people in an egalitarian society.
I think Elle did a great job in that Charlottesville segment; I was impressed with her access and poise throughout. The question you pose is the one that drew me to this story in the first place: How can alt-right women exist — or, going a step further, be vocal advocates — in such a misogynistic movement? The answer isn’t simple. Lokteff and other sources provided several different responses, revealing complicated — or confused — views of gender dynamics.
First, they do not agree that the rhetoric uttered by movement leaders like Richard Spencer is misogynistic. (I quote him in the story as saying that women should not be able to make foreign policy because “their vindictiveness knows no bounds.”) They insist this language is merely cognizant of biological, predetermined, symbiotic differences between men and women: Men are strong and assertive, while women are soft and emotional; men should lead and women should follow, providing their men with support and counsel. To protect the white race, men should run countries, make policy, and fight wars, while women should perpetuate bloodlines, nurture family units, and inculcate new generations with pro-white beliefs. I remember one source telling me what people outside the alt-right might find misogynistic she thinks is “just true.”
The corollary to this answer is that these women detest feminism. Many of them came to the alt-right as anti-feminists first, not unlike the men you mention. Their reasons were myriad, but at base I think a lot of them felt ostracized by, angry with, or otherwise disappointed in feminism, which they would define in caricature: an ideology that celebrates man-hating, racially diverse, fat, ugly women demanding whatever they want from the world. The women I examined believe that the progressive feminist agenda castigates traditional wives and mothers and depicts the white man as public enemy number one. (They would call that real racism.) They argue that feminism, which they see as the spawn of washed-up, Marxist, lesbian, and/or Jewish women in the early 1900s has perverted the natural gender order by convincing women to be more like men and men to be more like women.
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