Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers

This chapter examines how women developed forms of antistatist protest in the first half of the twentieth century that posed an oppositional relationship between the family and government. By the 1950s, anticommunism and antistatism became widespread mechanisms of political protest for women on the right much as peace activism and welfare work came to seem natural for women on the left. But unlike the later generation of Cold Warrior women who exerted themselves most forcefully through local politics, conservative women of the early twentieth century made their strongest impact by attacking that national progressive state. They also demonized “internationalism” as the handmaiden to communism, discovering another foe that women's position in the family obliged them to oppose. Consequently, the earliest generation of conservative organizations adopted the habit of calling themselves “patriotic” groups to contrast their own nationalist sentiment with the internationalism of progressives, which they equated with communism. This pattern continued into the post-World War II era.

All Politics Was Local

This chapter documents the formation of conservative activist culture in Los Angeles after World War II. It outlines the historic recipe of political, economic, religious, and ethnic factors that made conservatism so powerful in metropolitan Los Angeles, and then examines the formation of conservative female political culture and consciousness. The grassroots right, already in formation at the beginning of the decade, actively contributed to the beliefs, practices, and institutions that would, by 1960, become known as the “conservative movement.” American conservatism was produced through discourse—political rituals, rhetoric, and performances—before it became a movement with a recognizable name. The activist right toiled locally, not only by concentrating their energy in metropolitan venues, but by generating and continually emphasizing ideals about local community decision-making in an age of government centralization at the federal level.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter examines how housewife populist ideology influenced a new generation of conservative female activists, and questions how the history of women on the right might bring useful scrutiny to the categories and assumptions that frame U.S. feminist and political history. It argues that housewife populism continues to shape conservative beliefs about women's importance to society and American politics, as the career of Alaska's former governor, Sarah Palin, illustrates. After Barack Obama won the election in 2008, Palin's populist style carried over into the conservative Tea Party movement, an alliance of organizations and bloggers that emerged in opposition to government-sponsored economic stimulus, health-care reform, and numerous other grievances directed against the Democratic administration and Congress. The endurance of housewife populist ideology demands that scholars pay closer attention to the ambiguities and paradoxes that conservative women have managed to reconcile and marshal to their own interests, in much the way that suffragists and other skillful political actors in American history achieved their goals.

The “Conservative Sex”

This chapter studies women's influence on conservatism as it entered the movement phase in the early 1960s. Even as they denounced the mass politics they feared, conservatives came to recognize the necessity of stimulating a popular consciousness on the right to thwart momentum growing on the left, especially among youths. The anticommunist crusade that had been building among activists over the 1950s became a natural source from which to draw the necessary vigor to generate a movement, which leaders explicitly recognized. Women activists, already a central part of this crusade, became an essential part of the coalescing conservative movement. They formed chapters of the John Birch Society, a national organization that self-consciously sought to replicate leftist tactics to thwart “communism,” which it conflated with all liberal movements. Women opened “patriotic” bookstores in their neighborhoods that featured their favorite conservative authors. The chapter ends with the presidential election of 1964, when the campaign of Barry Goldwater, which incorporated conservative women in new ways, came to be known as a movement.

“Siberia, U.S.A.”

This chapter documents how activism in education politics turned the attention of conservative women to professional psychology as a logical next target. Fears of “brainwashing” segued into fears of mental health professionals and the policy making they promoted in Washington, D.C., resulting in conservative protest of an amorphous “mental health establishment.” Anticommunist activists characterized psychology as a dangerous medicine that could be used to manipulate thought and, by extension, political will. Although conservative intellectuals scoffed at the conspiracy theories circulated by the “hysterical” housewives, the women's arguments nevertheless found their way into criticism articulated by scholars and politicians by the mid-1960s.

Education or Indoctrination?

This chapter focuses on a series of educational battles in the early 1950s that reveal the step-by-step process of how political ideas germinated in the fabric of women's everyday lives. Starting with the “Pasadena affair” of 1950, it shows how new ideas about “mind control” and “brainwashing” inspired political epiphanies among women otherwise busy with their children's homework and PTA duties. Parents, especially mothers, started to think they saw communism in action. For a few years, conservative women asserted themselves in school politics as activists and school board members in Southern California, forcing teachers to resign and blocking policies they deemed subversive.