Fascism and the Women’s Cause

“This book is a tremendous resource and an exciting, theoretically sophisticated achievement. At a time when certain feminisms have reasserted themselves as one of fascism's forms of appearance, Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond's intervention could not be more critical.”

Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019) and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025)

The instrumentalisation of women's rights and the agency of women is central to the contemporary fascist conjuncture, with transphobia integral to contemporary narratives of civilisational decline which have allowed fascism to pick itself up and re-engage its old myths around masculinity, deviance, and culture.

While feminist movements in the United States and Britain each developed their own relations with state power, with race and with colonialism, Fascism and the Women’s Cause investigates the tangled roots of the women’s struggle, interweaving historical and theoretical threads as it analyses the historical scenes and figures of the fight for women’s suffrage, the involvement of women in the early 20th century far right (namely the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and the 1930s British Union of Fascists), and the manifestations of the women’s cause today in violent moral panics against queer and racialised people as gender critical feminists openly advocate for explicit far right and fascist politics.

Alex Charnley is a postgraduate researcher in far-right and reactionary politics at the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies at Bath University. He co-authored Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics (2022, Pluto Press) with Michael Richmond. From 2012-2018 he was a co-editor and illustrator within the Occupied Times and Base Publication collectives.   

Michael Richmond is the co-author of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics (2022, Pluto Press) with Alex Charnley. He was a co-editor of the Occupied Times and of Base Publication. He has written for publications including OpenDemocracy, New Socialist and Protocol.