From Analog Grandmothers to Digital Daughters: The Right-Wing Womanosphere from the 1970s to Web 2.0

As mainstream analysts grappled with the results of the 2024 election, they also reckoned with their alleged futility in the American media, as voters now increasingly turn to podcasts and social media platforms for news sources. However, scholars of the right-wing have traced this phenomenon to the mid-20th century, noting how actors from GOP nominees to right-wing extremists have thrived in this “affective economy.” Here, right-wingers resisted “liberal” notions of journalistic objectivity by intentionally producing visceral rhetoric and messaging. I will survey how right-wing women’s conception of white femininity and white supremacy from the 1960s to the beginning of the internet age have constituted a vital part of this process, which has reverberated to the present day.

This project places itself in the history of the right-wing information environment, but also the legacy of right-wing women’s relationship to mainstream Republican discourse. I ask: how did right-wing white women from the 1960s to the early 1990s construct and enact whiteness and white supremacy as filtered through performances of femininity? Subsequently, how have these ideologies impacted the right-wing mediascape?

To answer these queries, I turn to the media productions of women-led organizations from political activists like Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye to far-right organizations such as Women’s Freedom Network and Women of Faith, to neo-Nazi organizations such as Today’s Aryan Women, or Sisterhood of the World Church of the Creator. Scholars have contextualized these actors within the history of the New Right, the platforming of “family values” and “morality” in the political realm, and confrontations with the second-wave feminist movement. While I do engage with these narratives, I first and foremost centralize these agents as media figures, who undoubtedly shape the right-wing media rhetoric and technologies.