Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (review)

In Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae argues for a wholesale reframing of the defining lines that have too often fragmented understandings of the mid-twentieth century. She argues that segregationist women in the South had much in common with women in the North, that segregation was a daily project of everyday people and not just the state, and that the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation mattered much less to people living in a segregationist society than to scholars describing such systems after the fact. McRae's book is much more than an energetic addition to the literature on American conservatism, although its contributions to that field are manifold.

It is McRae's utterly persuasive recalibrations that make this required reading. Every historian of the United States should read this book as an essential history of American white supremacy. So should policymakers, school boards, and high school history teachers. Mothers of Massive Resistance documents the way that the telling and teaching of U.S. history has been distorted to support segregation and inequality over and over again: after World War I, in the Civil Rights Movement, and finally in anti-busing campaigns in the urban north in the 1970s.

One need hardly point out that the same arguments over historical meaning have sprung up in recent years around the way slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are taught in high school textbooks. They have also emerged in ultra-right attempts to modify the curriculum for Advanced Placement U.S. History. McRae's book is indispensable to understanding the genealogy of such debates. Through painstaking archival research that takes seriously the life's work and belief systems of real segregationist women across the South and beyond, both before and after World War II, she offers a precise accounting of how such attempts are fundamentally linked to the long and deliberate projects of white supremacist statecraft and social policing.

While the historiography on twentieth-century American conservatism has well established the central role of women's grassroots organizing, it has often prioritized particular locales at the expense of broader national analysis. McRae's focus on white women as architects and guardians of segregation builds upon studies of similar women in Southern California by scholars including Lisa McGirr and Michelle Nickerson. McRae, like these historians, looks at women's activism in homes, classrooms, storytelling, bookstores, and halls of government. Her detailed narrative accounts of the work and beliefs of particular women will also be familiar to readers of Nickerson and McGirr. But McRae argues that women had more in common across regional boundaries than well-worn narratives of the Civil Rights Movement might imply. Significantly, her focus on the South leaves us with a more complete national narrative of the architecture of white supremacy than one might anticipate. This has to do, once again, with her direct attack on false delineations in historical terminology. McRae argues that dismissing the entire South as inherently racist has not only robbed Southern women of historical agency, but has also worked to excuse the segregationist beliefs and activity of similar women outside of the South. In Mothers of Massive Resistance, she gives us a cross-regional picture of segregationist women, focusing on the networks connecting them with one another and heeding the interlocking components of their ideologies. McRae indeed reveals "white segregationist women's systematic and nationwide support for racial inequality and the dogged persistence of white supremacist politics, policies, and cultural practices in the decades before and after the civil rights movement" (8-9).

Mothers of Massive Resistance is a signal contribution to twentieth century women's and gender history, extending analyses of the "separate spheres" of Republican Motherhood to explore the considerable power women commanded in spaces cast as domestic, including homes, schools, and policies related to reproduction and childrearing. It could be fruitfully taught with work by Kathleen Blee, Natalia Mehlman...