Thread by @kathleen_belew

As promised, here is a thread about the history of the "and girlfriend" trope. If you're new to this conversation, we're talking about the arrest this week of Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell "and girlfriend" Sarah Clendaniel. WaPo has since updated to call her his partner (1)

https://twitter.com/kathleen_belew/status/1623001941935529984

To review, Clendaniel was pictured wearing Atomwaffen-style paramilitary uniform, gear, and mask; expressed her own white power ideology; and expressed her readiness to sacrifice her own life "for my people" (white people) (2)

This is clearly not "and girlfriend," but rather is a white power activist (meaning someone prepared to take action for their beliefs). It may be that she is also a domestic terrorist. (3)

"And girlfriend" comes from a long, long issue in journalism, movies, and the academy, in which women aren't recognized as political actors when their beliefs don't align with a feminist mode (4)

(Read @MicNick11's masterful book, Mothers of Conservatism, on this) (5)

In other words, when women say "I'm just a wife and mother," or "I'm not political," we have usually taken them at their word--even when, in the case of white power women, they were in fact activists as they said these things. (6)

They have done everything from writing movement ideological treatises, to publishing their own magazines, to driving getaway cars (7)

(On this, read Kathleen Blee's Women of the Klan and Inside Organized Racism and @seywarddarby Sisters in Hate and Jessie Daniels new book) (8)

W/o recognizing antifeminist forms of women's activism, we missed a whole bunch of things. Consider a key activist described in one book as "the young wife" of a movement leader (even as she's doing incredibly important work for the movement in portraying herself as a martyr) (9)

Or another who was in the room when a key declaration of war was written. Did you read it, they asked her in court? "I proofread it for them." Any historian of women wants to know what that means, because it could be commas, but it could be writing the declaration (10)

Perhaps most importantly, if we exclude women as activists, we miss huge chunks of mobilization. How do we know that the paramilitary white power movement of the 1980s flowed into the militias of the 1990s? Women's publications. (11)

So when you see "and girlfriend," or a flat/dumb/shrill rendering of a person that doesn't try to understand them as a person with a worldview and an ideology, please do notice and speak up about it. It's important (12)