{"id":1040,"date":"2018-06-02T13:16:18","date_gmt":"2018-06-02T17:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2018-06-02T13:16:18","modified_gmt":"2018-06-02T17:16:18","slug":"opinion-the-housewives-of-white-supremacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gopplaybook.com\/?p=1040","title":{"rendered":"Opinion – The Housewives of White Supremacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Opinion\u00a0\u00a0By\u00a0Annie Kelly<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ms. Kelly is a Ph.D. student researching the impact of digital cultures on anti-feminism and the far right.<\/p>\n

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Credit<\/span>Illustration by Na Kim; photographs by Bluexhand\/iStock, via Getty Images and Creative Commons<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/header>\n
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In a podcast interview posted last spring, Nicole Jorgenson, a singer and former schoolteacher in North Dakota, explains to her host that she has never been happier since marrying and having children. And yet between cute pastoral anecdotes of growing her own vegetables and making banana bread, it soon becomes clear that Ms. Jorgenson is advocating something sinister \u2014 not just a return to agrarian motherhood.<\/p>\n

She lived in Germany temporarily, she says, but left just before \u201can influx of refugees took over the country.\u201d She just had a child and thinks the new baby is beautiful \u2014 but maybe not quite in the same way all mothers do: \u201cI always wanted children that looked like me,\u201d she says, \u201cblond-haired, blue-eyed babies, but I kind of had to say it under my breath.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time the interviewer begins to gush about how wonderful it is that Ms. Jorgenson and her husband are both of Norwegian heritage \u2014 \u201cyou guys come from the same blood\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s clear what political demographic both women are catering to. Ms. Jorgenson is being interviewed on\u00a0Radio 3Fourteen<\/a>, a white supremacist talk radio program; it is interviewing her because she considers herself a tradwife.<\/p>\n

The digital far right, frequently called the alt-right, is largely regarded as a men-only space. The photographs from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., were striking for the lack of female faces in a sea of button-down-wearing snarls. The movement shares DNA with so-called incels, a network of men who feel women have unfairly denied them sexual relationships. And it is defined in part by its misogyny and its anti-feminist, anti-woman language.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But some members of the alt-right have been weighing whether the absence of women from their movement is a problem. In 2016, the Swedish nationalist Marcus Follin, who calls himself The Golden One on YouTube, made a video titled \u201cThe Women Question.\u201d In it, he urged his followers to dial down the open misogyny and consider new strategies to win over more women to the white nationalist cause. Mr. Follin was responding to statistics from the Austrian presidential election that year, in which female voters helped swing the election away from the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party. \u201cYou might not like that women have the right to vote, you might not like that anyone has the right to vote,\u201d Mr. Follin conceded, \u201cbut it\u2019s about winning a long-term political victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter the tradwives.<\/p>\n

Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children \u2014 being \u201ctraditional wives.\u201d These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like \u201cFemale Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,\u201d \u201cHow I Homeschool\u201d and \u201cYou Might be a Millennial Housewife If\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism. One such advocate who calls herself \u201cWife With a Purpose\u201d made international headlines last year when she issued something she titled \u201cthe white baby challenge<\/a>.\u201d Citing falling white birthrates in the West, she urged her followers to procreate. \u201cI\u2019ve made six!\u201d she wrote. \u201cMatch or beat me!\u201d Wife With a Purpose might be the most prominent and certainly most openly white supremacist of the women who call themselves tradwives, but she is not an anomaly: These accounts veer dizzyingly from Cosmo-style tips on pleasing your husband to racist musings about \u201cghetto music\u201d to, on some occasions, calls to reassert their vision of the white race. The seemingly anachronistic way they dress is no accident. The deliberately hyperfeminine aesthetics are constructed precisely to mask the authoritarianism of their ideology.<\/p>\n

There is nothing particularly new about this message within the far right. And tradwives still constitute a niche digital subculture. There\u2019s a clear market for their message \u2014 the biggest tradwife accounts usually surge to about 10,000 YouTube subscribers in just a year of posting \u2014 but their male alt-right counterparts have 10 times the number of followers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n