Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow Lauren Ashley Bradford discusses women’s violence and archival absences

On April 16, 2025, Lauren Ashley Bradford (PhD candidate in History, Strassler Center for Holocuast and Genocide Studies, Clark University), the 2024–2025 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave a public lecture about her doctoral research into white women’s participation in racial violence in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America.

She opened her lecture by exploring women’s absences from historical narratives, a result, she argued, of systematic erasure through archival or cataloguing practices. Before the late 20th century, women’s records were frequently filed under male relatives’ names or categorized as domestic (rather than political or intellectual), regardless of their content, or organized around men of power and influence. These practices, she explained, make it especially difficult to uncover documentation of women who committed or facilitated racial violence – an issue compounded by court records and other sources that often pathologized or downplayed their roles in violence, especially in comparison to men. She asserted that evidence of women’s violence was often destroyed because it contradicted prevailing social norms about feminine nature and behavior.

The lack of women’s representation in archives results in a skewed historical record, Bradford argued, which continues to shape modern interpretations of gender and violence. This absence forms a self-perpetuating cycle: the perceived and actual lack of women in archives contributes to their omission from historical accounts, reinforcing the belief in their limited historical significance and perpetuating their ongoing exclusion in archival work.

Bradford framed her research as tackling a dual erasure in historical archives: the exclusion of women as agents of violence and the downplaying or obscuring of the harsh realities of Jim Crow.

Bradford framed her work as a challenge to the notion that women were primarily bystanders or supporters within systems of racial oppression. Her project instead examines how women participated directly and publicly in violence that reinforced racial hierarchies, particularly in moments of mass atrocity. Through archival research and survivor testimony, she aims to recover and analyze these histories. Tracing the scope of her work in the archives in Germany, she offered a glimpse into her research process.

She then introduced the comparative scope of her dissertation, which focuses on “Aryan” or white women in Nazi Germany and Austria and white supremacist women in the American South and Midwest during the Jim Crow era. While women’s roles as camp guards or nurses have been more frequently studied, Bradford’s research centers on their involvement in public acts of racial violence, including pogroms, lynchings, and individual and communal attacks. Her aim is to explore how gender and racial ideology intersected to shape women’s actions and the spaces and social structures in which they occurred.

In the lecture, Bradford focused on two case studies. After presenting the historical background, she focused first on the 1917 East St. Louis massacre, a violent eruption of white mob violence against the black community that Bradford argues was methodical rather than spontaneous. Although it precedes her project’s primary timeline of 1919–1945, she explained that the case helped shape her research trajectory. She described how white women, alongside men and children, took part in the destruction of homes and businesses, and in acts of extreme brutality, including beatings and sexual violence. One newspaper at the time reported that women and girls had “blood in their stockings,” a phrase that inspired the title of Bradford’s dissertation. She highlighted the investigative work of journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, whose report was so damning it was initially suppressed by U.S. military intelligence.

Her second case study focused on the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, specifically in the town of Niederwern, Bavaria. Drawing on a postwar trial file spanning over 1,000 pages, Bradford traced the actions of several women who participated in the destruction of Jewish homes, the looting of property, and the physical abuse of Jewish neighbors. She reconstructed their movements across town using survivor testimony and trial records, demonstrating how their participation was not incidental but deliberate and sustained. Some women assaulted elderly victims, while others destroyed household items and prevented others from taking goods, insisting that all Jewish property be destroyed.

Bradford noted that while several women were charged after the war, only a few served time, and even those sentences were minimal. She also shared that trial records for women-only cases have often been discarded by archives in recent decades, which adds to the erasure her work seeks to confront.

The final portion of her lecture focused on her initial findings from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which contains nearly 59,000 testimonies from genocide survivors. Bradford explained that the archive’s indexing system does not include clear subject headings for perpetrators or for women in those roles, making searches difficult and time-consuming, mirroring the archival omissions and erasures she had previously discussed. Despite this limitation, she has already identified some compelling testimonies that complement her archival findings. In one, a male survivor remembered his surprise at seeing a woman holding a baby while making approving comments about the burning of a synagogue. In another, a young girl described returning to her family’s home to find it destroyed and learning that a neighbor who tried to intervene was later targeted himself.

Bradford discussed several themes emerging in her research. She noted the frequent presence of children during acts of violence and highlighted how women incorporated domestic symbols – like aprons used to carry stones or loot – into violent acts. She also observed how women who were later tried for their actions often emphasized their roles as caregivers or widows to elicit sympathy and avoid prosecution.

In concluding her lecture, Bradford argued that her comparative study reveals important parallels between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. In both cases, white women were not merely passive enablers but active participants in shaping landscapes of terror. Their actions – whether in urban or rural settings – helped enforce racial boundaries and contributed to the social and geographic marginalization of Jews and black Americans. Bradford underscored the importance of studying perpetrators who fall outside the expected mold, as doing so deepens our understanding of how ordinary people participate in systemic violence.

She framed her work as especially urgent in the current moment, when white supremacist movements are reemerging and efforts to censor histories of racism and antisemitism are gaining ground. Her project, she emphasized, is not only a contribution to the fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but also a call to acknowledge and examine the roles that individuals – including women – play in upholding systems of oppression.

In the discussion following her lecture, questions and topics included comparisons between gendered dynamics of violence in Germany and the United States, the role of denunciation, the challenges of recovering lost or obscured trial records, and the relationship between antisemitism and racism. She discussed plans to further explore women’s motivations and the language used to describe them in legal and testimonial sources.

Read more about Lauren Ashley Bradford here.