Does Gender Matter in the United States Far-Right?

This article examines how scholarly templates shape what is studied about women in the far-right, using data about women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and contemporary organized racism. First, it presents two templates that historically made women and gender issues invisible to scholars of the US right: the template of the rightist as male and the template of Nazi Germany as the prototype of far-right. Second, it considers three templates that exist in current scholarship: the template of historical continuity, the template of belief-driven activism, and the template of gender as a category of analysis. These latter templates have not precluded the study of women and gender on the right, but they have led to problems of focus and interpretation. It concludes by posing four questions that are likely to be particularly productive in the next stages of studies of gender in rightist movements in the US as well as for studies of extreme right and fascist movements more broadly across the globe.