Women of the Far Right

[no_hypocrisy]

Not who you think it is.

These are women from the Thirties and the Forties.

I found a book from 1996, Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II by Glen Jeansonne.

Here is the book jacket:

The majority of American women supported the Allied cause during World War II and made sacrifices on the home front to benefit the war effort. But U.s. intervention was opposed by a movement led by ultraright women whose professed desire to keep their sons out of combat was mixed with militant Christianity, anticommunism, and anti-Semitism. This book is the first history of the self-styled "mothers' movement," so called because among its component groups were the National Legion of Mothers of America, the Mothers of Sons Forum, and the National Blue Star Mothers.

Unlike leftists antiwar movements, the mothers' movement was not pacifist; its members opposed the war with Germany because they regarded Hitler as an ally against the spread of atheistic communism. They also differed from leftists women in their endorsement of patriarchy and nationalism. God, they believed, wanted them to fight New Deal liberalism, which imperiled their values, and the internationalists, communists, and Jews, whom they saw as subjugating Christian America.

I see several current themes with Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman as an extension of this movement. (Of course Phyllis Schafly has been around forever propagating these principles.) And this theme of this book also reminds me of the Tea Party and the Religious Right in general.

[Mnemosyne]

1. Phyllis Schafly, a real honey from the past. Good op, thanks! K&R n/t