Description
Book SynopsisMothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of wome
Trade Review"Nickerson has enriched conservative historiography by examining the integral role women played in conservatism's development and implementation and has forced feminist historiography to confront the complications that conservative female activists bring to the literature."--Mary C. Brennan, Journal of American History "Michelle M. Nickerson's carefully crafted study of grassroots conservative activists in Los Angeles County in the 1950s and early 1960s offers an important contribution to the scholarship on twentieth-century conservatism and women's political activism in the pre-Feminine Mystique (1963) 'doldrums.'"--Sylvie Murray, American Historical Review "Mothers of Conservatism provides a useful guide to American grassroots conservatism from before World War I to the present."--Christine Graf, InterLib
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xiii Abbreviations xxv Chapter I: Patriotic Daughters and Isolationist Mothers Conservative Women in the Early Twentieth Century 1 Chapter II: All Politics Was Local Grassroots Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles 32 Chapter III: Education or Indoctrination? Conservative Female Activism in the Los Angeles Public Schools 69 Chapter IV: "Siberia, U.S.A." Psychological Experts and the State 103 Chapter V: The "Conservative Sex" Women and the Building of a Movement 136 Conclusion 169 Appendix: Conservative Bookstores Operating in Southern California in the 1960s 175 Notes 179 Index 217
