Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right

Description

Mothers 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

Michelle M. Nickerson is associate professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago. She is coeditor of Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region.

"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