Nice Insurrectionist Mommies
A convicted Capitol rioter invoked her motherhood as a last defense before prison. But motherhood is perfectly compatible with a violent, anti-democratic project.
In a CNN interview days before reporting to prison, Jan. 6 rioter Rachel Powell made a last-minute public relations appeal.
“Is this what you expected from an insurrectionist; a terrorist?” Powell asked a CNN reporter as she rolled out pie dough inside a carefully cottagecore home. “How’d I have time to plan an insurrection when my life is busy like this? Making pies and raising babies.”
Powell, who became known as the “Pink Hat Lady” and “Bullhorn Lady” after smashing a Capitol window with an ice pick while wearing a pink hat and shouting orders to rioters through a bullhorn, began a nearly five-year prison sentence this month. She spent the last days before her sentence describing herself on social media as unfairly persecuted. (She told CNN she hopes for a pardon from a re-elected Donald Trump). Many of those appeals emphasized Powell’s identity as a mother and grandmother, particularly within the lexicon of a certain pro-natalist, conspiracy-crunchy, homeschool-hyping vision of femininity popular on the right.
Powell and other women who exist in this sphere of militant domesticity have long sought to avoid the consequences of their participation in an anti-democratic project. They dodge the paramilitary movement’s full implications by falling back on stereotypes about women’s frailty and gentle nature. But white womanhood—particularly white motherhood—has always been part of the far-right mission, with women both the targets of and often willing participants in a project of oppression. And messaging like Powell’s does more than draw a veil over the image of reactionary violence. It serves as a thesis statement in right-wing gender roles, casting women as homemakers and helpmeets of insurrection, and men as insurrection’s natural leaders, called to violently defend the purity and availability of subservient (implicitly white) women.
Journalist Seyward Darby, whose 2020 book Sisters In Hate chronicled the far-right women’s movement, said Powell’s self-depiction as a mother and homemaker was not in conflict with the image of Powell smashing Capitol windows.
“It couldn't be more in keeping with the far-right project,” Darby told me. “For generations, in America and elsewhere, women on the far right have used domesticity, femininity, and motherhood as cover for dangerous ideas and actions. They use what amount to sexist tropes—’making pies and raising babies’ is a great way to sum them up—to normalize and soften their image in the cultural consciousness. They want to project the idea that they're harmless—’nice white ladies,’ to use a popular phrase. It's an insidious trend.”
The far-right’s anti-feminist aims, which seek to degrade women’s autonomy and dignity, can occasionally make women into the movement’s more persuasive advocates.
“Femininity and motherhood are paraded out as tempering forces or outright distractions from the violence and hate intrinsic to the far-right project,” Darby said. “I think often about what one of the subjects of my book said at a 2017 conference on white nationalism: ‘A soft woman saying hard things can create repercussions throughout society,’ Lana Lokteff told a room of spectators. ‘Since we aren’t physically intimidating, we can get away with saying big things.’ Big, to be clear, can mean cruel, extreme, or inciting.”
Powell has never described herself as a member of the right-wing paramilitary movement, although she marched with members before storming the Capitol. In 2020, she joined armed members of the far right for a paranoid vigil at Gettysburg National Military Park, where she participated in the harassment of a man in a Black Lives Matter shirt. She later attended rallies alongside Infowars founder Alex Jones and members of the violent far-right group the Proud Boys.
Women, especially mothers, have often acted as the connective tissue of outwardly distinct right-wing scenes. In Bring The War Home, a 2018 history of the white power movement, historian Kathleen Belew describes women as a social link between terroristic white supremacist groups and the more acceptable sphere of conservative, stay-at-home motherhood.
“Motherhood spanned the distance between housewife populism and paramilitary violence,” Belew writes, pointing to the social ties and the literature that flowed between extremists and their more genteel counterparts in the 1980s.
That whitewashing of the movement’s more extreme ends went on to influence public perception of far-right movements at a 1987 seditious conspiracy trial for 13 white power activists—the last trial of its kind before the Justice Department pursued a similar case against extremist groups that led the 2021 Capitol attack.
“Women in the white power movement would shape the sedition trial, both because of the symbolic invocation of their bodies as terrain in need of defense, and because the work real women did in forming the movement, furthering its war on the state, and performing white womanhood to garner sympathy from jurors and the public,” Belew writes. “This worked precisely because the movement story about women’s purity resonated with mainstream Americans. White power women were both symbols of and actors in a common struggle: to protect white women’s chastity and racial reproduction and, with it, the future of whiteness itself.”
Powell, and many other mothers on the militant right, do not frame their motherhood in the explicit language of white reproduction. If asked, many would aggressively deny participation in a white power project. Many would even believe themselves.
And yet the smooth coordination between the extreme and acceptable right, mediated by women, is still crucial to the reactionary movement’s operations. Capitol rioters were only able to organize en masse on Jan. 6 due to a permit secured by a pro-Trump women’s group, led by a mother-daughter pair.
“Women for Trump and allied rightist women’s organizations were the Trojan horse of the deadly insurrection,” journalist Nina Burleigh wrote shortly after the attack, noting that the pre-riot rally’s largest donor was the heiress to a grocery store fortune (a mother herself), who funneled money to a female Trump advisor who, in turn, helped coordinate the Jan. 6 rally with a prominent conspiracy theorist and the group “Moms for America.”
Most of the defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack are men. The most visible paramilitary groups in the riot—the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys—are mostly or entirely men, and glorify visions of male protectorship over female servitude. These demographics, in which an attacker like Powell is a minor oddity, obscure women’s central role in Jan. 6, and make it easier for someone like Powell to portray herself as an innocent mother caught up in the heat of the moment.
In her CNN interview, Powell expressed regret for the effect her actions have had on her children. She does not express regret for attempting to thwart the democratic process.
“I have a lot of remorse for ruining my family’s life,” she said. “In one day, I destroyed everything, really for nothing. I don’t have remorse for attending protests. I don’t have remorse for speaking out and saying that I believe the election was stolen.”
The emphasis on family and children is almost enough to cushion the statement’s political implications. Capitol rioters took up fists and ice picks in service of a movement that wants to roll back women’s rights, confining them to marginalized, domestic, and reproductive roles.
“The far right ultimately wants to erase the gains of feminism,” Darby said. “So for women in this space, getting married, having children, and keeping a nice home are in fact political acts, choices made in service of a wider cause. They aren't separate from the project's extreme goals—they're among them.”
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! Here’s what I’ve been reading around the parentsphere over the past week:
-Israel’s war on Gaza is taking an unspeakable toll on Palestinian children and expectant mothers. An estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the past 100 days, the Financial Times reports, citing figures from the NGO Save The Children. In Gaza, where approximately half the population is under 18, those figures are consistent with the overall estimated death toll, which is nearing 25,000. The killings are no longer confined to Gaza, but have spread to the West Bank, where a Palestinian-American teenager was among nearly 370 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since Oct. 7.
“The American society does not know the true story,” the father of Louisiana-born teenager Tawfiq Ajaq said at his son’s funeral, according to the Associated Press. “Come here on the ground and see what’s going on. ... How many fathers and mothers have to say goodbye to their children? How many more?”
Miscarriages in Gaza have increased 300 percent since the outbreak of war, Jezebel reports, with Gaza’s few remaining (and over-capacity) hospitals often unable to treat women who are in labor. Those deliveries that are performed in hospitals have been further complicated by lack of basic medical supplies, food, and postnatal care.
-Fast-food restaurants are the biggest offenders of America’s child labor crisis, the Washington Post reports. Franchises like McDonald’s and Chik-fil-A drove child labor violations in 2023, with more than three-quarters of all violations in the year’s first nine months taking place in food service. Meanwhile, some of the most dangerous jobs in the food industry are also being filled by children. A Mississippi poultry plant is facing a $212,646 fine after a 16-year-old worker was killed after becoming trapped in a conveyor belt this summer, Bloomberg reports. The child, an immigrant from Guatemala, was too young to work at the poultry plant—a fact of which the company claimed ignorance.
-An Oklahoma lawmaker has pre-filed a bill to allow Animal Control to enter schools and remove children who dress as furries. Nevermind the visceral hatred of children necessary to suggest such a humiliating policy; the recent right-wing panic about furries is a stand-in for fears about LGBTQ+ youth (the furry scene is famously queer-friendly), which homophobic lawmakers arguing to limit trans youths’ bathroom access by conflating them with hoaxes about furry-identifying students who want to use litter boxes in schools. (The litter box thing isn’t real.) As Them notes, the same Oklahoma representative who pre-filed the bill has also worked on legislation to ban use of public funds on “sexual choice, sexual orientation, drag queens, or similar topics in public education.”
-The anti-choice “March For Life” in D.C. last week came as the movement reckons with its broad electoral unpopularity.
“Moreover, anti-abortion leaders know that their side has a seven-state losing streak in votes on abortion-related ballot measures. Even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky, the outcomes favored keeping abortion access legal,” PBS reports.
“In this year’s election, several more states are expected to have abortion-rights ballot measures, and Democratic candidates in many tight races are likely to highlight their support for abortion access.”
That’s it for this weekend’s MomLeft! If you liked this newsletter, feel free to subscribe or forward it to a friend.