Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare by Erica J. Ryan (review)

The Colorado judge Ben Lindsey became notorious for his 1927 book, The Companionate Marriage, not simply because it advocated divorce reform and the legalization of contraception but also, as Erica J. Ryan’s new book demonstrates, because his ideas fanned the flames of an already burning public conversation that linked gender nonconformity with economic and political radicalism. In Red War on the Family, Ryan traces these associations to Americans’ responses to the Russian Revolution. Fearful of socialism and communism at home, many Americans mobilized a counternarrative of “Americanism,” which Ryan describes as “a loosely constructed but coherent ideology” that celebrated the patriarchal family, heterosexuality, patriotism, assimilation, and capitalism (166). Other historians have identified the emergence of this discourse in the 1920s, but Ryan’s signal contribution is to locate its construction and deployment at the granular levels of local politics, popular culture, and social reform. Her chapters establish the prevalence of anti-Bolshevism in the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s and explain how communism became a conceptual foil for all things “American.” Most importantly, Ryan’s study portrays the conservatism of the 1920s as essential for understanding the interplay between gender norms and American capitalism.

The chapters span a wide range of topics, but the book stands out for its textured analysis of modern heterosexuality’s roots in American conservative reaction to the gendered implications of the Russian Revolution. Ryan writes: “More than a practice—more than an identity, even—by the late 1920s heterosexuality had become a social system,” thanks to the popularity of Americanism (12). Changes to Soviet marriage and divorce laws, which eliminated marriage ceremonies (the Russian government recognized civil marriage only) and facilitated easy divorce, became shorthand for the revolution’s potential. American radicals celebrated these changes for heralding women’s full equality under communism, while conservatives believed they were witnessing the totalitarian destruction of the family. Ryan coyly observes that critics of Russian marriage and divorce laws inadvertently revealed their understanding of women as men’s property when they warned that the new laws “nationalized” Russian women, “a form of property being taken away from individual men and opened up to society as a whole” (60). Ryan excels at these close readings and interpretations of radicals’ and conservatives’ responses to Bolshevism, unpacking analogies between private property (capitalism), patriarchy (heterosexuality), and American patriotism.

Historicizing the creation, uses, and consequences of a cultural discourse can prove tricky for the historian, but Ryan amply illustrates the ideologies that bubbled to the surface of American politics and culture. While much of the book covers familiar ground for historians of the 1920s, Ryan’s discussion of the Own-Your-Own-Home (OYOH) movement in Portland, Oregon, strikes out in a new direction. Ryan identifies OYOH as “one of the nation’s earliest homeownership campaigns” (79). Unlike the housing boom that would shape the post–World War II American suburbs, OYOH targeted working-class men and women. Yet like the suburban ideals of the 1950s, OYOH was explicitly heterosexual: it celebrated the connections among male breadwinning, homeownership, capitalism, and patriotic citizenship. A chapter on nativism in the 1920s connects efforts to “Americanize” immigrants to the era’s emphasis on traditional gender roles. This point reiterates one that historians of immigration and ethnicity have made in previous works, but Ryan shows how the Red Scare elevated the stakes in assimilationist rhetoric and programs. Americanism privileged the family as a locus for citizenship and capitalism and as a bulwark against radicalism.

Religious ideas (and the individuals who espoused them) were central actors in this drama between progressive and conservative gender ideologies. Advocates of Americanism identified atheism as one of the most objectionable traits of “Bolshevism” (at least, the popularized idea of it that most Americans encountered). By the late 1920s, religious liberals and progressives would help broker a truce with social scientists, uniting with them...