This is just not what I imagined it would be and I should have expected it by the academic publisher but I didn't. I'm very interested in the trad wife trend and some of the ridiculousness from that side of the aisle but more than a juicy tell-all it felt more like a case study, which is good if that's what you're looking for.

I’ve been chipping away at reading this because I honestly couldn’t handle reading it in one sitting. This is an eye-opening glance behind the curtain into the minds of women who think their purpose in life is to essentially be a stepford wife. I’m flabbergasted that this viewpoint exists and I hate knowing that young, impressionable people are coming across this type of subservience regularly enough that they think it’s okay. Sending vibes to Eviane Leidig because this could not have been easy to research.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this arc ebook in exchange for an honest review.

It's good to see some research into the women of the far right: who would militate against their own empowerment? As Eviane Leidig points out, the far right is antifeminist, and so are the women presented here.

These women are political influencers with a lifestyle twist, promoting not just anti-Islamic and anti-feminist ideals, but presenting an idyllic view of what a "traditional" life would be. Women, they say, are unhappy in this world of hookup culture, in the world of careers and maybe "trying to have it all". Women in general, they say, would prefer it to tend to their home and kids exclusively.

Leidig has put a lot of effort into following them and recording their public-facing views and evolution, and it's good to see an account of how they use platforms, what sort of content they upload, and how they handle the paradoxical position of being very visible activist women advocating for women staying in the home; how they manage to be political women militating against women in politics.

For me, this is new territory and I'm always a fan of seeing new research.

But Eviane Leidig's work has a few blind spots - and they mostly have to do with how she explains the far right. She lacks the generosity I've come to expect from other non-fiction work about people and groups published in recent years.

Leidig doesn't want to engage too deeply with these women's beliefs, and prefers to skirt on their surface. She doesn't present their world view the way they see it, nor does she explain how they prop up their philosophy in real life. She doesn't want to see the world through <i>their</i> eyes and make it compelling.

"But the far right is wrong!" you might cry out. "They are misleading people! They are spouting lies! Spreading misinformation!"

Well... Yes, they are. And Leidig rightly points out that speaking about them in this book offers them yet another platform and yet more "advertising", of a sort.

Now, politically, I'm on Leidig's side. I personally think the far right is bad news, that it's wrong on most counts, that it doesn't want to see its faults, and that it's built on nostalgia and imagination rather than on seeing people as people - if it ever got to impose its views, we'd all suffer. (AGAIN. Just like before when ideologies took precedent. Looking at you, fascism, communism and others.)

But I do think we need to lend a generous ear to the far right, especially in research. Dismissing their point of view without explaining their appeal and inner logic doesn't help anyone recognize and counter those ideas in the wild. And we do have answers - far right concerns make a lot of sense from the inside, but they can be taken apart from the outside, by pointing out where they fall apart, what information they misrepresent and so on.

Otherwise, this book is just for those of us who are already leaning left (although it's really not hard to lean lefter than the far right) and who know how to read between Leidig's lines.

This was a different story all together. Definitely eye opening in the way that surprises you with how politics and social media work together in a manner as to fully convince you that their way is the right way.

Eviane Leidig's "The Women of the Far Right" is an analysis of the the many stripes of TradCon women, women who believe that their place is in the home, subservient to their husband, raising the children, and also supporting the white christian ethnostate. They do it through Instagram, through YouTube, most certainly through Twitter (as the book was written at the start of Musk's takeover but read during the parts where things have gotten bad). I was hoping for a slightly deeper dive into the recruitment tools used by these influencers or the dichotomy between their school of thought and the Men's Rights sphere of the far right, but Leidig's work was still a good primer for the space, the women involved, and the threat at hand.

My thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

I was very favorably disposed to the topic, as someone who has had many friends and colleagues fall down the sorts of "rabbit holes" Leidig describes. However, I found the treatment of the topic in this book to be quite poor. Th style utilizes frequent editorial interjections interspersed with more academic summary of the opinions of those the author studies. When beliefs are described, they are frequently labeled: "X falsely claims, Y erroneously argues, Z hypocritically supposes..." It is quite clear from the beginning where the author's sympathies lie, and quite unclear why every belief attributed to a villain in the story needs these caveats. I imagine someone reading this book for clues on whether or not they should take these influencers and their claims seriously would be quite dissuaded based on the obvious slant.

That is not to say even academic authors ought to avoid normative claims. It is to say that an author needs to carefully and fairly reconstruct the positions of those they oppose, and then present argument sufficient to support the condemnation that follows. But here the author tends to lean heavily on too little argument and too little evidence and make broad conclusions from both. In one of the most egregious examples of this, the author claims that there is proof that the husband of one influencer under consideration *approves* of far-right, fascist ideology. The evidence for his approbation? His familiarity with the works and thought of Evola. I would hope, as an author of a book on far-right figures, that Leidig would conceded that familiarity or even interest in the works of a fascist thinker does not constitute evidence that one approves of fascism. To be clear, I have no doubt that the man Leidig pegs as a far-right sympathizer at best and an actual fascist at worse is sympathetic to those ideas, or perhaps embraces them wholeheartedly. The problem is that the evidence provided does not lead me to that conclusion. In fact, the reader can reliably expect that every time the author uses the word "thus," what follows will not, in fact, follow from the argument and evidence provided.

The part of this book I was most disappointed in what the criticism of far-right influencers using studies. This is the part of the book I had the most hope for, and thus the letdown was the greater for it. I agree with the author that, to the extent that these far-right influencers use studies, they are almost always using them badly. Showing this would require both a more fair treatment of the positions of the influencers themselves and a more systematic review of the studies they employ, to show how the latter does not support the former. This is not what I found here. If one is to say that one tactic used by the far-right to advance a pernicious agenda is "using studies," one must also be prepared to explain what precisely about their use of studies is pernicious. This section of the book attempts this, but falls short.