ABSTRACT
In 1920, women won the right to vote, culminating a 72 year struggle for greater access to the political sphere. Women's political goals and ideologies had grown more diverse even before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment as the separate gender spheres of the nineteenth century dissolved. One of the largest and influential right-wing women's organizations of the immediate postsuffrage period was the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). Feminist scholarship on women in contemporary and historical right-wing movements suggests two additional issues that can be explored through an analysis of the 1920s women's Klan movement. The Klan movement of the 1920s was the second historical occurrence of the Ku Klux Klan. Women's participation in the Klan movement began in the early 1920s, when male membership in the KKK was increasing rapidly. Indiana Klanswomen in leadership positions, for whom more biographical information is available, clarify a pattern of Klan membership as an aspect of broad civic and social involvement.
