Glen Jeansonne's Women of the Far Right

...They testified before Congress, picketed the White House, unrolled banners in the 112 • DISSENT Books Senate Gallery, "sat-in" outside the offices of members of Congress who refused to see them, circulated petitions, ran mass meetings and marches, and participated in political campaigns...

...The most important question this book raises but fails to answer in sufficient depth is: "What made these women such fierce anti-Semites...

...It should be noted that men can also resort to the "mother racket," as feminist critics of maternalist politics call it...

...This I would rate as an important step toward their goal of an anticommunist, antilabor, and anti-New Deal America...

...In the early nineteenth century, abolitionist women justified their "sallying forth" from home to circulate antislavery petitions on the grounds that they were protecting the chastity and sanctity of the slaves' and slaveowners' families...

...Bigots cling to their biases tenaciously, regardless of the opposition, because dogmas provide security...

...Although the women did not challenge capitalist patriarchy, their insistence on women's political power, their creation of separatist organizations led exclusively by women, and their demonstration of female solidarity in fighting for their cause entitles them at least to the status of "protofascist protofeminists...

...Using the Vietnam antiwar movement as his measure of success, he points out that the women never blocked a troop train, obstructed the draft, or seriously jeopardized the war effort...

...The Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion, an America First mothers' group, urged women to "Buy Christian, Vote Christian, Employ Christian, and Boycott all Sponsors of the English Jew-controlled radio...

...Consequently feminist theorists who postulate a special relationship of women, mothers in particular, to antimilitarism have given insufficient consideration to women's peace protest from the right, and to militarist women who support what liberals and leftists consider unjust or imperialist wars...

...It was in this tradition that the California women active in the National Legion of Mothers claimed that they were fighting for their boys...

...It was proclaimed again in 1995 by the thirty thousand women from nongovernmental organizations who gathered at the Fourth International UN Decade of Women Conference in Beijing...

...Male right-wing isolationists of the 1930s, led by Father Coughlin and Gerald K. Smith, have received a good deal of study, and women's peace history has become a rapidly growing enterprise...

...He regards the America First mothers not as conservatives, but as extremists, bigots, and reactionaries...

...It indicates that several millions more could have been "fellow travelers"—petition signers, letter writers to elected officials and the local press, one-time participants in meetings or marches, or financial contributors...

...And in 1915, the professional women who organized the Women's Peace Party, most of whom were not biological mothers, identified themselves as "the mother half of humanity" and the "custodians of life of the ages" to support their demand that women be given "a share in deciding between war and peace in all the courts of high debate—within the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the state...

...The America First mothers exhibited many of the features of other paranoid political movements...

...Playing the "mother card," or justifying women's political activity in the name of motherhood and family protection, goes back to the postrevolutionary period, when the concept of republican motherhood was used by women, and sympathetic men, to justify the fight for women's education...

...He must know from his own previous books on Gerald Smith and Huey Long that these women were no more hysterical than their male counterparts...

...This is a feminist argument that has been made by progressive women's peace organizations since the last half of the nineteenth century...

...SPRING • 1997 .115...

...An earlier examination of the America First mothers by Laura McEnaney, published in Diplomatic History in 1994, argues that the rank and file were conservative Christian women, anxiously defending the traditional nuclear family, orthodox gender roles, and Christianity itself...

...The author reveals his own male biases and sentimental assumptions regarding motherhood when he charges that the women's tactics and objectives "contradicted their maternal values and reinforced the stereotype that women are hysterical...

...Slanders and slurs against Jews by the leaders of the America First mothers' movement were both fanciful and vicious...

...The Molly Pitchers also professed that "no Jew is a true American...

...In fact one of the flaws in the book is the absence of a comparative framework...

...Jeansonne relies on the most highly regarded works in feminist history and theory to answer the question he poses: whether or not the America First women were feminists...

...The America First mothers' movement (not to be confused with the America First Committee, which women supported in large numbers throughout the 1930s) did not surface as a separate women's organization until the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of World War II...

...It is also a welcome corrective to the popular notion that almost everyone in the United States supported "the good fight," and to the tendency in women's peace studies to assume that female peace protest is always on the side of the angels...

...involvement in a second World War only twenty years after the first, the mothers' movement evidently hit a responsive chord among a large constituency of conservative women...

...The movement was obviously not just a small group of "loonies" or "little old ladies in tennis shoes," as they used to be called in the bad old sexist and ageist days...

...Nativism—the unifying ideology of the America First mothers—tends to raise ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural differences into ultimate, non-negotiable oppositions...

...However, if only one million were actively involved in the America First mothers' movement, that is still an enormous accomplishment...

...Unfortunately, he has not integrated feminist understandings sufficiently to see that there is no such thing as an inflexible party line for feminism...

...What may seem paradoxical to some is that the leaders of the America First mothers were also strong supporters of women's political rights...

...It would have deepened our understanding of the America First mothers' movement and the problems we face today with militant racists and anti-Semites if Jeansonne had placed the America First women in a continuum from their populist foremothers to contemporary nationalist/nativist/ racist/movements...

...Its political direction, however, is always dictated by the women's received ideology—their religious beliefs and worldview...

...Jeansonne opens up a piece of history about which we have known too little and need to know more...

...Understanding and empathizing with the fear and rage of the fanatical nativists, loathsome as that may be, is an essential step toward developing strategies for bridging explosive differences without sacrificing the rights of minorities and the poor...

...Jeansonne concludes that although the mothers forged a mass movement and energized the crusade against U.S...

...They wanted to replace the men then in power with men who shared their values and prejudices, and with whom they could share rights, privileges, and power...

...neutrality, bring down President Roosevelt and the New Deal, destroy communists and labor unions, and end Jewish control over the economy, the government, and the media...

...Jeansonne tells us that to understand such fervent racists and anti-Semites as the leaders of the America First mothers' movement we must comprehend the role of anxiety and paranoia in their lives...

...From its beginnings as the National Legion of Mothers (NLM) in Los Angeles, it grew rapidly to include some fifty to one hundred groups...

...The America First women, who were white, middle class for the most part, and middle-aged, organized self-consciously under the banner of motherhood...

...I would not dismiss the America First mothers' feminist credentials so completely...

...Solutions to the Jewish problem discussed by leaders of the mothers movement ranged from sterilization to mass murder...

...The fact is that the leaders of the American First mothers' movement possessed many attributes of "bourgeois feminism," in the parlance of 1970s Marxist feminism...

...It would have been worthwhile to attempt an explanation of their contrasting worldviews...

...I would have liked to have seen the women's groups compared with the male-led right-wing organizations and the left-leaning pacifist women's organizations of the same period...

...She accused Thomas Dewey of hiding the fact that he was Jewish and that he'd been a cantor in a synagogue...

...It is true that in the Midwest many were of German origin and followed the leadership of Germany in both their Anglophobia and their hatred of Jews...

...Both their nativism and their racism were demonstrated in their warning that Mexicans might soon invade the United States and join with Southern blacks to end white supremacy...

...The major goals of the movement, according to its own literature, were to keep America out of the war in Europe by maintaining strict U.S...

...But the majority of the women were not of German origin, and most were Protestants, so they were not blindly following Father Coughlin...

...They stated openly that they based their isolationist rhetoric on maternal arguments in order to attract the average patriotic woman seeking to protect her son...

...The movement peaked in early 1941 in the fight to defeat the Lend Lease Bill, which allowed Britain to purchase arms on credit from the United States...

...Last year the New York Times reported that vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, in an attempt to narrow the gender gap favoring President Clinton, told two hundred women at a Jewish Center in Tucson, Arizona that a Dole administration would apply the type of diplomacy that a mother would love and "not bomb Baghdad without talking to someone...

...Opposing Eisenhower for President in 1950, she coined the slogan "Ike the Kike is the Candidate of the Jews...

...It is too much trouble to bring him up into the world to have him fight in the battles of foreign nations," one of the organizers, who had come to witness the opening of the NLM headquarters told a reporter from the Los Angeles Herald Express...

...It is interesting to note that although veterans of the 1960s peace movement believe, with chagrin, that they invented many of the tactics that were later adopted by the right-to-life movement, Women of the Right makes clear that the righttolife movement already had its own models in the America First mothers movement of the later 1930s and 1940s...

...Frances Willard, the leader of the movement, who was also a suffragist and flirted with socialism, was fond of saying that the WCTU was "like having a score of mothers for every boy...

...For many women, however, maternal political rhetoric is more than a ploy...

...It is a felt response, generated by gender socialization, maternal work, by women's status at a particular SPRING • /997 • 113 Books historical moment, and by class and race...

...Sensing their status, security, and identity assaulted, the mothers chose to view complex social, economic, and political events as the result of conspiracies by evil "others...

...We have had monographs and articles on the Women's Peace party of 1915, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women's Peace Union, founded in 1921, and Women Strike for Peace, but female peace activism of the right has remained largely unexamined...

...Glen Jeansonne's investigation of the "America First" mothers' movement, a massive network of ultraright isolationist women's organizations that flourished in the Midwest and on both coasts from 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is an informative and often shocking book...

...Among bigots, he explains, obsessive anxieties can be assuaged most simply by scapegoating...

...In the 1880s and 1890s the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), campaigning under the banner of God, Family, and Native Land, described itself as "organized mother love...

...His estimate seems inflated to me...

...In April 1941, the isolationist Cathrine Curtis circulated a "Mothers Day Petition" against involvement in the war, which declared that men had no right to destroy life without the consent of women, and that war resulted from failure to include women in the peace process...

...Elizabeth Dilling, a self-styled "Tory superpatriot," author of The Red Network: A Who's Who and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, even extended her paranoia to the Republican candidates for the presidency...

...Having been a student peace activist in the late 1930s and a fulltime activist in Women Strike for Peace in the 1960s, I know how hard it is to move millions of women, or even numbers large enough to appear to be millions...

...He devotes a major portion of the book to the leaders' rhetoric and the movement's literature, demonstrating that the mothers were viciously anti-Semitic and that many were supporters of Nazi Germany...

...He concludes that "Understanding that the mothers were not femi114 • DISSENT Books nists is as important as understanding that the mothers were not political conservatives...

...intervention in World War II, they failed to meet their goals because they did not disable the body politic...

...The mothers demanded political equality with the men of their race and class, but insisted on preserving their privileges of race and class...

...In their opposition to U.S...

...Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, leader of the largest and most active mothers' organization, the Chicago-based We the Mothers Mobilize for America, charged that Jews had caused not only World War I but the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln...

...Jeansonne adamantly rejects this analysis...

...We the Mothers maintained in its literature that Jewish money had financed the Russian revolution, and that most refugees from Nazism were communists...

...Jeansonne believes that there may have been as many as five to six million women involved...

...It is impossible to assess the total following of the America First mothers' movement because the movement chose to forgo membership lists...

...Another declared, "It would be a disgrace to women, she 'who are nailed in agony to the cross to give life,' if they cannot, do not, as an army of mothers, keep the country out of war...

...Yet he acknowledges that by involving women in right-wing activism, the movement strengthened the right in numbers and influence and thus helped to create the conditions that led to McCarthyism...

...The America First mothers were energetic, militant, creative, and independent of the men's movement...