Maternalism and the Mayor: Dottie Do-Good’s War on Sin in Postwar Portland

Dorothy McCullough Lee, the first female mayor of Portland, Oregon, was elected to office in the midst of a post-World War II crime panic. Her career illuminates a key ideological shift that would later ground the rise of New Right women’s politics. During the Progressive Era, women activists had advocated for social maternalism, which asserted that the state must care for its most vulnerable citizens materially as well as morally. In the postwar era, republican women would increasingly shift toward a new moral maternalism. Moral maternalism abandoned social welfare issues and focused instead on protecting America’s most vulnerable citizens—women and children—from unsavory moral influences like communism and sexual immorality.