During the 1920s, at least half a million white Protestant women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). In some states, they made up half of the Klan's membership. In Women of the Klan, Kathleen M. Blee writes that WKKK members leveraged their influence on their communities to "spread hatred through neighborhoods, family networks, and elusive webs of private relations" (p. 3). Women significantly bolstered the Klan's violence, and were, as Blee writes, "major actors in the Klan, responsible for some of its most vicious, destructive results" (p. 1).

"For thousands of native-born Protestant women [...] the women's Klan of the 1920s was not only a way to promote racist, intolerant, and xenophobic policies but also a social setting in which to enjoy their own racial and religious privileges. These women recall their membership in one of U.S. history's most vicious campaigns of prejudice and hatred primarily as a time of friendship and solidarity among like-minded women[...] In an effort to recruit members among women newly enfranchised in the 1920s, the Klan also insisted that it was the best guarantor of white Protestant women's rights. The political efforts of a women's order, the Klan claimed, could safeguard women's suffrage and expand women's other legal rights while working to preserve white Protestant supremacy."

Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1-2.