“I am still in utter disbelief by Thursday’s verdict. Never in my life did I imagine my own government would charge me as a criminal for exercising my religious liberties and rights to free speech, which are guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They are trying to stop our voices, put fear in our hearts and take away the inalienable rights given to us by God. But I will not let that happen to this praying great-grandma as long as I have breath. #j6prayingrandma” Rebecca Lavrenz, @J6PrayingGrandma on X
71-year-old Rebecca Lavrenz is, of course, referring to her recent conviction on charges related to her participation in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. The question to ask ourselves is why on earth Lavrenz was so surprised that her actions do, in fact, have consequences.
In truth, Lavrenz was probably right to be surprised that she was both tried and convicted for her involvement in the January 6th insurrection. The United States as a whole has a history of ignoring the role of women (well—White women, that is) in far-right and extremist movements, for a variety of reasons. One is a numbers game—even within the January 6th insurrection, women represent only 13% of a total of 766 federal cases. American women are also less likely to perpetrate mass violence, representing less than 3% of mass shooters. And even when women are openly part of far-right movements, we often refer to them through their relations to the men in the organization (see historian Kathleen Belew’s thread on what she calls the “and girlfriend” trope).
But women are, and always have been, a large part of the far-right. From Lana Lokteff’s disturbingly popular White nationalist talk show Radio 3Fourteen to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s relentless social media rants, far-right women (and their reprehensible ideologies) are here to stay. So how could we stop dismissing their involvement, and start holding them accountable for their behavior?
To start, we can try to identify the ways in which American society continues to excuse far-right women from responsibility and look for patterns in these excuses. The more people who identify and call out these patterns, the more likely institutions and society at large are to adopt this stance. For instance, Kathleen Belew’s thread on the “and girlfriend” trope, mentioned above, was sparked by The Washington Post’s decision to refer to Atomwaffen member Sarah Clendaniel as simply the girlfriend of founder Brandon Russell, instead of as a co-conspirator who was arrested at the same time—thus minimizing her role in the attempted attack. Belew’s and others’ criticism prompted the Post to change the language of their article, making it clear that Clendaniel was, in fact, an active participant in the incident.
We can also take note of how far-right women challenge our standard views of moral responsibility, and use them as foils to craft theories of responsibility that are better able to account for the harms these women cause. As explicit White supremacists, the harms of far-right women are often uncontroversial and can provide clear examples of the existential stakes that are present when letting them off the hook. I want to note here that this work would not be possible without the intellectual tradition of Black feminist thought, which has been calling out the harms White women across the ideological spectrum cause by upholding White supremacy for a long time (see Angela Davis and Audre Lorde for a start). In that spirit, let me point out some of the specific harms far-right women cause (other than the prosecutable crimes committed by women like Clendaniel and Lavrenz).
Ayla Stewart, a former tradwife influencer best known for her “White baby challenge,” was the only woman invited to speak at the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into the crowd. While Stewart did not directly take part in the attack, she was nonetheless acting as a spokesperson for the same rhetoric that cost Heyer her life. In fact, another (now former) White supremacist woman, Samantha Froelich, was so convinced that she had blood on her hands for her part in Identity Evropa (a neo-Nazi group that helped plan the rally), that she left the group and testified against them at the Charlottesville trials (see Froelich’s story in detail in Episode 3 of the Netflix documentary series Web of Make Believe).
Even when White supremacist rhetoric (which makes up much, if not all, of the U.S. far-right) doesn’t have immediately deadly consequences, one can argue that simply holding such views is morally reprehensible, and causes harms to reverberate throughout society. To be a White supremacist is to hold that a system of oppression that places White lives over and above all others is a valid form of social organization—and one that you want to actively maintain. This denies the basic dignity of all humans, upheld in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this simple phrasing: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” It’s hard to imagine how anyone who holds White supremacist views could fail to cause harm. A White supremacist mother and homemaker will spread her reprehensible views to her children, harming them and readying them to harm others. Even if she somehow manages to avoid the harms that come through daily interactions (could a White supremacist truly avoid harming all Black coworkers, service workers, neighbors, etc. that she interacts with during her entire life?), her children will still not only bear some manner of harm, but will likely continue to spread those harms as well.
I’ve argued that far-right women are a harmful threat worth taking seriously. What narrative patterns are used to excuse far-right women from responsibility for these sorts of harms? As I see it, there are two primary narratives that have been used to let far-right women off the hook for their beliefs and behavior. The first is what I call the misogyny narrative. The reasoning goes like this: far-right women are themselves victims of the misogynistic men in their movements, and thus are victims of oppression. We can’t hold people responsible for what they do under conditions of oppression, so far-right women should be excused from responsibility. The second narrative is the infantilization narrative. This narrative tells us that (White) women, unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (White) men. This infantilization positions (White) women as perpetually naïve children, who must be cared for by White male paternalism. (Note that the White modifier is important—the infantilization narrative is either not applied to women of color and Black women in particular, who are never seen as innocent children, or is applied only to justify horrendous oppression and abuse).
Let me briefly examine each narrative more deeply. The misogyny narrative is correct to note that far-right women are uncontrovertibly victims of (often severe) misogyny. For instance, Tracy Llanera argues that the better alt-right women promote racist hate as visible and vocal propagandists, the more hostility they face from their fellow group members for acting outside the prescribed ‘traditional’ feminine role. Llanera recounts the toxic threats female alt-right propagandists face; hate mail, threats of rape and violence not just from their critics but also from their fellow alt-right sympathizers, and abuse against their families. This seems to be pretty clearly the type of misogynistic abuse that Kate Manne argues is meant to keep women in line with patriarchal norms. Feminist theory has long argued that this oppression severely complicates our responsibility practices—bringing into question how much control women can have over their actions under a patriarchal society, and how much knowledge they can have of alternative ways of living. For far-right women, their involvement in a highly misogynistic sub-group complicates this picture even further by heightening the demands of patriarchal expectations.
The problem with this argument is that it relies on a standard view of moral responsibility that posits that agents must have sufficient knowledge and control in order to be held responsible for their actions. We may think that a drugged person does not have full control of their actions due to the influence of the drug on their behavior, or that a young child is not yet capable of the kind of knowledge needed for solving detailed ethical dilemmas—and that a far-right woman in a highly misogynistic organization has very little choice about how to live her life. But not only do far-right women often demonstrate high levels of control over their lives (see Lauren Southern for a good example), the standard view is far from the only way to think of moral responsibility. Non-volitionalist views like that of Angela Smith deny that someone must have voluntary control of their actions in order to be held responsible. On such theories, people quite often simply don’t care about whether someone voluntarily chose to act when assigning moral responsibility. Instead, people most often care about the content of an action or attitude. To use Smith’s opening example from her 2005 article, if I forget a friend’s birthday by accident, do I not (rightly) blame myself for my oversight despite the fact that I did not choose to forget? This emphasis corresponds with the examples we have of far-right women: when someone espouses a racist idea, I do not blame them for actively choosing to be racist (though if they persist in the face of alternative ideas and evidence my blame may increase)—instead, I blame them because the attitude of racism is reprehensible, regardless of one’s actively choosing to be racist.
For the misogyny narrative, shifting away from a focus on far-right women’s control over how they gained their racist beliefs or how much choice they had in their options in life allows us instead to focus on the harms that they have caused. Simply holding a White supremacist attitude works to uphold systems of oppression—and far-right women often do much more than simply hold racist beliefs.
Like the misogyny narrative, the infantilization narrative is also premised on actual (often historical, though still in practice at times today) oppression. In patriarchal societies, women’s subordination is often seen as “natural” or as the “God-given” order of things. The infantilization narrative proposes that women are incapable of freedom in the same way as men, and so must be protected and have their actions directed by men. But in the American far-right, this same female subordination is used as an excuse to fuel campaigns of terror against Black and other people of color. The first Ku Klux Klan arose after the end of the Civil War as a vigilante terrorist organization using the narrative of imperiled White womanhood to fuel their campaign of terror and brutality against the recently freed Black population. (For a more recent example of how White supremacists use this narrative, see historian Kathleen Belew’s discussion of Louis and Sheila Beam in Chapter 7 of her book Bring the War Home.)
But the infantilization narrative is used by women as well—and the phenomenon known as “White women’s tears” provides a perfect example (note that this phenomenon is not exclusive to far-right women, though they do provide plenty of examples of it). The White woman crying invites others (particularly White men) to comfort and coddle her according to the infantilization narrative—like a crying child, she must be rescued by someone else. But White women can also intentionally weaponize their emotions and tears to invoke the infantilization narrative and the protection of White patriarchal structures. Consider the case of the White woman Amy Cooper calling the police and accusing Black man Christian Cooper of threatening her life—Christian was simply birdwatching in Central Park and had asked Amy to leash her dog, as per park rules. One of the most famous (and horrific) examples is that of Carolyn Bryant, whose false accusations that Emmett Till grabbed her led to his lynching—she cried wolf, and the White men around her responded with violence in the name of her “protection.”
The infantilization narrative provides a ready-made social response to White women’s tears. It proposes that women are too vulnerable to deal with their distress on their own, so those around them must cater to their emotional, social, and physical needs—no matter who or what is ignored or harmed in the process. On a standard view of moral responsibility, the infantilization narrative holds that women do not have sufficient knowledge or control to be responsible for their behavior—it reverts them to the status of children, underdeveloped in knowledge capacities and under the protection of others in their choices. Here, the main problem is that the infantilization narrative is simply false. Women are not, in fact, less capable than men simply by virtue of their gender. They are, in fact, men’s equals—and a feminist response to any attempts to excuse women based on the infantilization narrative would be to say so. Another possible response in light of non-volitionalist views of moral responsibility is sidestepping questions of knowledge and control entirely. A non-volitionalist view proposes that your actions reflect your underlying moral judgments, and that we can attribute those to you without having to question how much knowledge or control you had over your actions. So for Amy Cooper and Carolyn Bryant, we can say that their actions reflect underlying racist judgments that are morally reprehensible—and cause (respectively) potential and actual harms.
Why focus on far-right women at all? I think that using the example of far-right women makes it easy to understand who exactly we are exempting from responsibility with the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization. By insisting that these women, too, are answerable for their actions, we can say that any woman, regardless of whether we agree with her ideology, has the potential to be called upon to answer for her actions and beliefs that harm others. In this way, I believe that endorsing a non-volitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to an unjust and unequally oppressive world. Instead of the paternalistic denial of women’s agency of the infantilization narrative, or the misogyny narrative’s refusal to acknowledge that victims of misogyny can still perpetuate that misogyny themselves, a non-volitionalist account of responsibility allows us to hold these women up as rational agents who are capable of answering for their behavior.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Katie Peters
Katie Peters is a PhD Candidate in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Philosophy, completing a dissertation on far-right women and moral responsibility. She also works on problems in virtue and vice epistemology, particularly intellectual humility. For more information, visit her website, and see her new article on the misogyny and infantilization narratives in the latest Special Edition of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.
