Challenge and Change: Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism, and the Baby Boom Generation by June Melby Benowitz (review)

June Melby Benowitz seeks to demonstrate the connections between the old Right, the new Right, and the Tea Party by exploring the activism of mostly white, middle-class conservative women who hoped to influence the political and social thinking of their time against big government, communism, race mixing, and immorality. Although the definition of who constitutes the right wing changes across time and region, most rightist women shared similar conservative ideals and moral codes, a distrust of government, and a desire to halt or minimize social change.

The first section of Challenge and Change: Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism, and the Baby Boom Generation, “Our School, Our Children,” looks at education, health, and civil rights through common themes: federal government intrusion into private lives, communist conspiracies, and protecting child safety. Benowitz contends right-wing women experienced degrees of success, such as influencing curriculum and textbook selection and causing some progressive educators to be removed, but they could not undo the Supreme Court’s bans on segregation and school prayer. Rightists fought against the fluoridation of public water systems and polio vaccine requirements for children, saying these interventions jeopardized children’s health as corporations profited. Right wingers questioned the use of intelligence tests, which they claimed brainwashed children, and mental health professionals who labeled people on the Far Right as unstable. Opposition to school desegregation and busing uniquely united northern and southern rightists as they addressed fears of miscegenation while steering clear of racist rhetoric.

Part 2, “Protesting the Protests,” focuses on right-wing reactions to a changing society. Benowitz explores the decline in moral values as evidenced by the growth of secularism, the erosion of patriotism, the proliferation of sex education, and the rise of antiwar sentiment. Mothers were the “first line of defense” to save America from outside threats by saving future generations (p. 183). Student protests against the Vietnam War were unsettling to rightists who often saw their baby-boomer children questioning the draft and willing to settle for peace without victory. The Right also found young people’s support of women’s liberation and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) bothersome. Protection of families, rightists held, was more important than the amendment, and they warned against unisex toilets, women being drafted, homosexuality, and expansion of abortion should the amendment pass. In this instance, right-wing women gained the upper hand as they mobilized swiftly to defeat the ERA.

The book argues that rightist women, especially, were motivated by their anxieties about what the future held for their families and their desire to extend women’s roles within the political culture. This same argument could be made for left-leaning and moderate women activists throughout history and, therefore, is not unique to the Right. Nevertheless, rightists’ emphasis on tradition and individual rights made it a challenging task to advance their agenda.

Benowitz makes extensive use of primary sources. Particularly intriguing are the selections and analyses of letters between the women highlighted, the U.S. president, and organizational leaders. These excerpts clearly illustrate the evolution of their viewpoints, and it is here the book is at its best.

Challenge and Change offers a cohesive picture of the issues and the people who pushed the Right’s agenda, and how both changed over time. Benowitz explores an array of issues, organizations, and leaders, including Lucille Cardin Crain, Frances Bartlett, and Phyllis Schlafly, to demonstrate similarities and differences in approach. The book enhances our understanding of how and why the new Right cultivated support in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the growing influence of women in the movement. It succeeds in making direct connections between the old Right, the new Right, and the Tea Party, although the last receives less emphasis.