Fascism and the Women's Cause

by Alex Charnley, Michael Richmond

The instrumentalisation of women's rights and the agency of women is central to the contemporary fascist conjuncture, with transphobia integral to contemporary narratives of civilisational decline which have allowed fascism to pick itself up and re-engage its old myths around masculinity, deviance, and culture.

While feminist movements in the United States and Britain each developed their own relations with state power, with race and with colonialism, Fascism and the Women's Cause investigates the tangled roots of the women's struggle, interweaving historical and theoretical threads as it analyses the historical scenes and figures of the fight for women's suffrage, the involvement of women in the early 20th century far right (namely the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and the 1930s British Union of Fascists), and the manifestations of the women's cause today in violent moral panics against queer and racialised people as gender critical feminists openly advocate for explicit far right and fascist politics.

190 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

Reviews

[holly]

Extremely insightful analysis of the historic and present day relationship between feminism and fascism in the US and UK

[áine]

Really insightful and timely, lovely historical analysis of an under appreciated topic! Very interesting to see how fascism recreates itself in present compared to the past.