Based on a documentary data and interviews collected during a two-year project (ERC Starting Grant, 2012-2014), this paper considers gender-specific narratives and motives for affiliation of female and male members of the National front party (France) and of the Lega Nord party (Italy), exploring the impact of intersecting relations of gender, class and age on political engagement; and analyses the gendered repertoires used by the informants to make sense of activism. The paper also examines how gender is both reproduced and challenged through political engagement both within the party and in the activists’ lives, and how this is shaped by class, age and the life-cycle.