ABSTRACT
Based on biographical interviews with members of the Front national and the Lega Nord, this chapter examines generational differences in the gendered experiences of populist radical right (PRR) women. First, it considers how women's marginalization in PRR parties is reproduced through a traditional gendered division of work, based on a spatial distinction as well as on a temporal distinction between different times of activism: This is widely justified by the activists through essentialist assumptions. Female members naturalize their own work in the party through reference to caring and the so-called ‘feminine qualities’, deploying an exclusionary discourse around ‘caring for the people’. Second, the chapter examines how PRR women experience this unequal division of work and how they engage with issues of sexism and feminism in the wider society, finding significant generational differences across the two countries. Third, overall PRR women's approaches to feminism are marked overall by liberal individualism. They combine gender essentialist and binary views with critiques of sexism, together with individualized views of gender inequalities based on a neoliberal vocabulary of ‘choice’ and ‘responsibility’. Sexism is either denied or attributed to older generations of party members or to mainstream parties.
