In 1979, Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), which would quickly become the nation’s largest lobbying group for conservative women. With chapters across the country, CWA has been responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of conservative women to become active for conservative causes at the local, state, and federal levels. LaHaye began her career as a megachurch pastor’s wife and the author of marital and spiritual advice for evangelical women. When she turned her attention to politics, she used the language and networks of evangelical women’s culture to mobilize others. Her story demonstrates how even women who took on definitive political leadership roles had to negotiate persistent ambivalence within conservative evangelical communities, both about politics in general and about women’s roles within it. LaHaye’s relationship with Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly also highlights the limits of ecumenical cooperation within the New Christian Right, even as that movement was defined by new alliances between conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.
Leslie Dorrough Smith , Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford and New York: OUP, 2014), pp. 256. £22.99.
