Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,2 (A+), University of Potsdam (Anglistics/ American Studies), course: America in War and Peace: Jazz Age to World War II, language: English, abstract: After the Civil War, many Southerners were dissatisfied with their situation. The lost war and the fact that many existences were destroyed due to the collapse of the Southern economy, stirred the anger among many of them. The abolition of slavery that was forced upon them and which until then was the basis of their economic prosperity, was the more serious. This discontent then changed to hate towards the former slaves. Many former slave holders came together and formed what became known as the first Ku Klux Klan, an organization that tried to overthrow the system and to return to the old one by lynching and intimidating black citizens. This dark chapter of American history should not remain the only one. After the disappearance of the first Ku Klux Klan, partly because of the passing of the “Ku Klux Klan Acts” of 18701, racial frictions played a minor role, although they never completely disappeared. In the following decades the American people were especially at the end of the century concerned with the ongoing industrialization and development of the country. World War I even saw the involvement of African Americans in the service. It was not until the end of the war and the end of all war enthusiasm that Americans were confronted with the legacy of the Civil War outcomes. The racial turmoil of the post-war era led to the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, generally referred to as the second Klan. Although similar in its basic principles, the two organizations had different ideas altogether. One major difference was the foundation of a female branch of the Ku Klux Klan – the “Women of the Ku Klux Klan”.

Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.

This dissertation examines the role of women in the Ku Klux Klan movement in Dallas in the 1920s. Previous studies of women and the Klan have analyzed the role of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan organization in relation to the all male Klan. Some scholars have examined the role gender played in the Klan movement. But little has been written about women's influence on the Klan prior to the organization of the WKKK or klanswomen's influence on the Klan, once they organized. The Klan appealed to elite and middle class Progressive Dallas club women who lent to the Klan their administrative and political skills, and their social influence. Through the use of political skills honed as Progressive club women seeking social change and urban improvements, women appealed to the Klan to enforce moral reform. Women encouraged and supported the Klan's vigilante violence. In some instances, women perpetrated vigilante acts of their own. Having gained full suffrage in 1920, Dallas women also wielded political influence in Dallas elections.

Publisher Fact Sheet Why women join hate groups, how they participate in them, & why they stay.

This dissertation examines women in the Massive Resistance movement and the Ku Klux Klan of the classic Civil Rights period, 1954-1968. Specifically, it illustrates the way in which these women used their assigned gender roles as women, and specifically as mothers, to further white supremacist goals. White women have been an integral part of white supremacy in the United States from the beginning, yet are rarely portrayed as such. White supremacist movements are most often viewed through a male lens and gender in white supremacy is most often focused on how white men perform gender within the movements. While that is changing, with a growing catalog of scholarship on women in the Second Ku Klux Klan (1915-1929) and racist women in contemporary times, there is still a dearth of research being published on white supremacist women of the Classic Civil Rights period. The works that are available thus far are focused exclusively on the women of the Massive Resistance movement. As women won gains in other areas of society, some translated those gains into the white supremacist movement beginning with the Second Klan, but particularly so with the Third Klan (1954-1979) and the Massive Resistance movement. This work argues that though some women were taking a more public role in the work to promote and preserve white supremacy, that they still did so within carefully constructed gender roles, and in socially acceptable ways. These white women used many pathways to secure the racial hierarchy, but always did so without threatening the sexual hierarchy. These women were satisfied with taking a back seat to the white men in their lives in exchange for the benefits that accrued with white supremacy.

The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

Elegantly written and meticulously researched, this book offers a major new interpretation of the Ku Klux Klan in America, placing the organization in its context of class and gender as well as race and religion.

This short-read compares the actual and theoretical similarities between the "Invisible Empire" known as the Women's Ku Klux Klan, and modern gynocentrism or feminism. The KKK originated in the Southern United States in 1865, in part, to perpetuate the "chivalry" of the South in favor of women. The gynocentric chauvinism of the Klan, historically, has been identical to the gynocentric exclusivity of modern feminism. The book shows how the women's suffrage movement in the U.S. was really a KKK motivated campaign to dilute the voting power of African-American men conveyed to those men under the Fifteenth Amendment. The book describes early American feminists who promoted racism in order to achieve gains, for women, at the expense of African-Americans struggling after the Civil War. The book is well-documented, with endnotes, with citations to notable works by both men and women authors.