ABSTRACT
This chapter explores women's involvement in racial violence associated with the major organized White supremacist groups in the United States: the Ku Klux Klan, White power skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Racial terrorism is considered here as terrorism undertaken by members of an organized White supremacist or pro-Aryan group against racial minorities to advance racial agendas. The chapter explores women's roles in racial terrorism from the immediate post-Civil War era to the present. It concerns a proposition about the relationships among women's participation, definitions of the enemy, and the organization of terroristic violence in the US White supremacist movement. Organized white supremacism has a history, appearing episodically in response to perceptions of gains by racial, ethnic, or religious minorities or political or ideological opportunities. Most White supremacist groups in the immediate postbellum period directed their violence at racial minority groups, but the ultimate target of their actions was the state apparatus imposed on the defeated southern states during the Reconstruction era.
