It was a chastening lesson for any woman tempted to join the cut and thrust of rightwing populism. After Corinna Miazga was elected to the German parliament in 2017 for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, a male colleague suggested she would be better suited to being a pole dancer than an MP.

Miazga did not let it rest, getting her own back by telling a party conference of the lewd intervention by fellow MP Petr Bystron. “An ‘Argh’ went up in the audience,” she recalls. “No one could quite believe I’d dared to reveal this. Many people in the AfD were subsequently angry at me. They said: ‘We know you’re cross, but by bringing this into the public arena, you’ll encourage people to say we have a male-female problem in the party.’”

A surge in rightwing populism across Europe over the past 20 years has been largely male-dominated – sometimes characterised as angry white men voting for angry white men. But this is changing. Angry white women are emerging as an important constituency, too. At least half a dozen women lead rightwing, populist European parties, such as Alice Weidel, of the AfD, and Giorgia Meloni, of the Brothers of Italy. They follow the leads set by Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (formerly Front National) and, before her, Pia Kjærsgaard, co-founder of the rampantly anti-immigration Danish People’s party, and Norway’s finance minister, Siv Jensen, leader of the country’s similarly anti-immigration Progress party.

A new generation of women aged 20 to 50 are in parliament or local government in countries including Germany, France and Italy, following electoral breakthroughs by rightwing populists.

Women are taking to the streets, too. Far-right protests in the UK still tend to be overwhelmingly male, but in continental Europe this is changing. At protest marches in the eastern German city of Chemnitz last year (following gatherings prompted by the stabbing of a local man, allegedly by two immigrants), the neo-Nazi Pegida group had plenty of women in the rank and file. It was similar at a rally last year of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

In France, large numbers of women have taken to the streets as part of the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) anti-government movement, which has attracted people from across the political spectrum from left to far-right, some of whom vote Le Pen, and whose slogans often echo the disillusioned anti-elitism of populism.

“There is evidence the gender gap is shrinking in some countries, although it clearly hasn’t disappeared everywhere,” says Eelco Harteveld of the University of Amsterdam.

This raises the question: what do women see in nationalist populism that was once so dominated by patriarchal ideology? What motivates women to elect, support and even stand for parties and movements that shrink away from modern-day feminism?

Conversations with dozens of European women – voters, MPs and academics – suggest several elements at play.

Many working-class women feel just as “left behind” as their male counterparts. The key predictor of a radical-right vote is the level of a person’s education. Harteveld says that although the precarious manual jobs often associated with far-right voters are still largely male preserves, there is also precarious work in the service sector – where women are more numerous. Political scientists in France have pointed to the disillusionment of retail staff and supermarket cashiers as a case in point.

“The elite in power hasn’t got a clue what life is like for real people, they’re totally cut off,” says Catherine, a cashier at a budget supermarket north-east of Paris, who has demonstrated with the gilets jaunes. Now in her mid-30s, she has been working on supermarket tills since she left school, and votes for Le Pen.

“We can’t make ends meet on low salaries. I’m overdrawn before the end of each month, living on credit, barely able to afford the petrol to get to work or drive my three children where they need to go. We’ve never tried Le Pen in power, so why not give her a chance?” she says.

In Italy, the far right has been particularly adept at winning over women who used to vote for the left. “The left represented by the Democratic party in recent years betrayed leftwing voters and leftwing ideals,” says Gianna Gambaccini, a neurologist who became a council member for Matteo Salvini’s far-right Northern League in Pisa last June.

But not every female populist sympathiser is from marginalised corners of society. Probably the most important factor in rightwing populism among women is the same as it is for men: attitudes to immigration and Islam. “Top of the list is always a person’s view of immigration,” Harteveld says.

Rightwing populist parties are specifically targeting women with a controversial and contested message that immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, brings with it misogynistic cultures that threaten women’s freedom in Europe – from catcalling women in short skirts to sexual assault. As Le Pen put it: “I am scared that the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.”

A spate of sexual assaults blamed on groups of immigrant men in Cologne and Hamburg on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2015 provided ammunition for the far right to argue that immigrants were a physical threat, even though government studies have found that the vast majority of attacks on German women – including domestic violence – are perpetrated by German men.

“I believe we are the only party in Germany who is really fighting for women’s rights, because we point out we’re in danger of losing the freedoms and rights of women for which we’ve fought for centuries,” says the AfD MP Nicole Höchst.

Höchst says she is equally concerned for Muslim women living in Germany, many of whom strive to be educated and find a place in German society, “only to find that in the summer holidays they’re going to be married off to a husband they’ve never met in the country their families originated from”.

Ebba Hermansson, 22, the youngest MP in the Swedish parliament, is gender-equality spokeswoman for the anti-immigration, nationalist Sweden Democrats. She says the issue of keeping women “safe from sexual violence” is one of her main concerns. “If you come from a country where women are not worth as much as men, or women don’t have the right to live their lives as they want, when you come [to Sweden] there’s a shock,” she says. The party’s political opponents have criticised any conflation of crime statistics with immigration.

Leaders such as Le Pen are playing a double game. They reject the term “feminism” because they see it as an instrument of the left, and recoil from equality issues such as gender quotas in politics. Yet they co-opt the notion of “women’s rights”when it suits, chiefly as a pretext to attack what they claim is mass immigration by socially conservative men. Every woman must be protected in their right “to wear shorts or a miniskirt”, Le Pen has argued.

“These are strong women leaders, but they step back from feminism,” says Susi Meret of Denmark’s Aalborg University. One young Italian mayor, Susanna Ceccardi of the male-dominated Northern League, even insists on being called “sindaco”, the masculine word for “mayor”, as opposed to “sindaca”.

These parties believe that “leftwing feminism turns a blind eye to the consequences of immigration,” says Ann-Cathrine Jungar, from Sweden’s Södertörn University.

Yet radical-right politicians in Europe know that the stigma and toxic image of a party affects whether female voters choose it. Some have sought to modernise or soften their image in response. Le Pen, who promotes herself as a twice-divorced single mother, has sought to tone down her party’s anti-abortion stance, move away from the traditional view of women as childbearers and homemakers, and appeal to gay voters. Jensen, who has warned about the “sneaking Islamisation” of Norwegian society, last year controversially won a “gay best friend” award given out by LGBT activists.

The AfD likes to popularise an idealised vision of the nuclear family, with father at work and mother raising children. Miazga speaks of a nostalgia for the deutschmark, for economic stability, social order and the “traditional family”. “I value the traditional family, a sensible time when children were cared for,” she says. “I wish – and maybe this is a funny, romantic feeling – that we could get back to the Germany of the 1990s.”

Yet the party’s promotion of the nuclear family is often at odds with the reality of leading women in the AfD. Weidel, for example, is a gay woman bringing up two children with her partner.

With just four months to go until European elections that will pick a parliament to sit until 2024, the female vote will be crucial to the success of rightwing populists seeking to build on the 50-odd MEPs they have in the 751-seat chamber.

Le Pen’s party, currently polling level with Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche, hopes to harness the fury unleashed by the gilets jaunes movement – and court the high number of working-class women who have taken to the streets. These include single mothers and working mothers on low incomes.

In Italy, Meloni, has already been savvier at appealing to other women. “She attracts more women as she seems to be the only one making the battle for women,” says Letizia Giorgianni, who voted for the party last year.

In Germany, the AfD – which has one of the biggest gender gaps on the European far-right – appears to be only just waking up to the fact that they might have to do things differently to attract female voters. Only about 13% of the AfD’s 30,000 party members are women. In parliament it has 10 female MPs – and 82 male.

Esther Lehnert, a rightwing-populism expert from Berlin’s Alice Salomon University, says the party remains “steeped in chauvinism and sexism. It revels in this sort of leery sexist blokeism.” She recalls some of the AfD’s more controversial election posters, including one showing five naked female behinds, accompanied by the slogan: “For diversity”.

Hochst Höchst is trying to change things. “People are repeatedly asking me why the AfD wants women to go back to the hearth,” says the single mother of four. “It’s simply not true. What we do advocate is that women should have the choice to stay at home if they want to, or to work.”

The newly founded group FridA, or Frauen in der AfD (Women in the AfD), formed in early November, is Höchst’s answer to the charge that the party has not so far done enough to make itself welcoming to female newcomers. “Before I joined the party, there were countless times I was shopping at the market in my hometown and I didn’t approach the AfD information point, because there were only men there. As soon as there were women, I approached them instinctively,” she says.

Lehnert says the future of the party may depend on whether it increases female support. “On a certain level, many people in the AfD recognise that they have to change and attract more women if they’re to have a chance to become an established ‘people’s party’. At the same time, I believe that these chauvinistic habits are so deep-set that I can’t see them arranging themselves differently. Typically, when women start to take up too much space in rightwing populist parties, they will at some point be put back in their place.”

Both Miazga and Höchst see themselves as tough-skinned lone warriors, who regularly work 18 hour days. Both have received threats, with Höchst saying that her house is often smeared with offensive graffiti. Both were once top sportswomen and argue this has helped them to succeed in the AfD. “I could kill every man in the party,” said Höchst, who practices karate. But, she adds quickly: “Of course, I don’t want to.”

Miazga’s favourite phrase when talking about the male-female divide in the party is to joke: “It takes just 10 of us to keep the 82 men in check”.