Research Paper on:
Kathleen Blee's Women of the Klan

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
and boys with shaved heads proclaiming white supremacy are shown on the news on various occasions. What is conspicuously absent from such collective memory or media depiction are the women  of the Klan. The author, Kathleen Blee, says that she wrote the book prompted by an old Klan pamphlet dated 1920. She was astonished that a good deal of it  had to do with womens suffrage. Immediately, she knew that there was more to the Klan than was first thought, especially when it came to the women. So, the question  became: Were the women of the Klan hindered or helped by their affiliation with the organization and did their involvement in the civil rights movement impact society in the 1920s?  Ms. Blee writes that the Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana shortly after World War I and was made up of predominantly white, native born, Protestants. The varying  levels of income or social levels was diverse and as a rule were unified by their dislike for certain affiliations and groups such as Catholics, Jews, African Americans, immorality and  substance abuse. "By the mid- 1920s approximately four million women and men had enlisted in its racist, nativist crusade"(Blee, 17-20). There was supposedly a small faction of the Klan operating  before World War I, but by all accounts they were not as organized, nor prolific as they became after the war. Why was this, Blee wondered? There were two historically  active periods of the Klan. The first Klan existed from about 1860 and collapsed in the late 1870s, she states, although women were not openly involved in the Klan,  the concept of protecting "white Protestant womanhood" was the rallying cry of the Klan. Nathan Forrest, the first Grand Wizard testified to congress that white Southern women were being attacked