In the Name of the Mother, the Nation, and the Race: White Women, the Jim Crow South, & Moralized White Supremacist Feminism

Author

Shayna M. Lawson, CUNY Hunter CollegeFollow

Date of Award

Summer 8-1-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Dr. D’Weston Haywood

Second Advisor

Dr. Aaron Welt

Academic Program Adviser

Dr. Karen Kern

Abstract

This thesis introduces the concept of moralized white supremacist feminism to examine the central role white women played in constructing, legitimizing, and sustaining racial hierarchies in the Jim Crow South through a network of cultural and political organizing, particularly through the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Women’s Ku Klux Klan. Far from passive observers, white women were strategic agents of segregation, leveraging ideals of purity, motherhood, and moral virtue to enforce anti-Black violence and oppression through educational, civic, legal, and symbolic institutions, as well as extra-legal practices. Drawing from archival materials, oral histories, and critical race theory, this study interrogates the entanglement of gender, race, and power in white women's grassroots activism, cultural productions, and legal authority. Yet, this thesis also explores the determined resistance of Black women, who mobilized their labor, testimony, maternal care, and different medias to resist moralized white supremacist feminism. Situating this research alongside the works of scholars, Crystal Feimster, Cheryl Harris, Nancy MacLean, Ruth Frankenberg, and within critical race theory, this thesis fills a critical gap by articulating a historically grounded framework for understanding how racial domination was moralized and mediated through femininity, and resisted through Black women’s counter-memory, care, and writing. The argument contributes to ongoing conversations in critical whiteness studies, feminist historiography, and Black women's intellectual history.

Recommended Citation

Lawson, Shayna M., "In the Name of the Mother, the Nation, and the Race: White Women, the Jim Crow South, & Moralized White Supremacist Feminism" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1409