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  • Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism
  • Richard L. Hughes
Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism. By Mary C. Brennan. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2008.

In 1951 a U.S. Senate Subcommittee investigated a recent political election in which Senate Joseph McCarthy and anticommunism fervor helped defeat Democratic incumbent Millard Tydings (MD). Central to the investigation were a number of American women closely linked to McCarthy and a growing anticommunist movement. Despite solid evidence as to the role of the women in creating and mobilizing a potent anticommunist opposition to Tydings, the men on the subcommittee perceived them as spouses and clerical staff largely irrelevant to the case.

In Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade Against Communism, historian Mary C. Brennan argues that historians have also failed to recognize the role of conservative women in both reflecting and shaping the Cold War. Relying on archival collections and the publications of relatively little-known anticommunist organizations, Brennan describes the "gendered affair" of American anticommunism that allowed conservative women to become, paradoxically, accomplished political operatives and social activists while using traditional gender roles to defeat communism (147). In doing so, these anticommunist women both changed the nature of the Cold War and expanded the roles of women in ways that continue to shape our political culture.

Much of Brennan's thoughtful analysis focuses on public figures such as U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Phyllis Schlafly, Jean McCarthy, and Elizabeth Churchill Brown. Virtually all of the women were white, middle-class, and educated, and most framed their new roles as public anticommunists as a feminized crusade to protect American families and gender roles from the dangers of communism. Many of the women who were relatively well-known such as Smith, McCarthy, Brown, and Doloris Thauwald Bridges owed much of their political activity to their husbands' careers. This reality underscores the difficulty in assessing the lives of these largely overlooked individuals. Just as the experiences of American women during the period are often associated with postwar consumerism, the careers of anticommunist women raise questions as to just how much of their unprecedented careers stemmed from the manipulation of a society as deeply committed to patriarchy as anticommunism. Domestic politics, foreign policy, organized religion, and the media remained tightly controlled by men and, in the case of Margaret Chase Smith's public [End Page 129] criticism of Senator McCarthy, women who challenged the anticommunist establishment faced retribution. As a result, the real contribution of Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace lies in the largely anonymous history of female anticommunists on the local level. Here women were less likely to be, in Brennan's words, "one more tool in the crusade" (113). In close proximity to the traditional domestic sphere of women, conservative women on the grassroots level formed clubs, produced newsletters, and shaped suburban institutions in ways that demonized communism and the political Left and valorized traditional gender roles. What is less clear is exactly how their unprecedented efforts as both women and anticommunists inadvertently contributed to the social changes that, in little more a decade, called into question much of the postwar society they had created.

Richard L. Hughes
Illinois State University
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