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  • Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
  • June Melby Benowitz (bio)
Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. By Elizabeth Gillespie McRae. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 352. $34.95 cloth; $34.95 ebook)

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Adding to the growing scholarship on the influence of right-wing women in twentieth-century America is Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's study of white women's resistance to racial equality, dating from the 1920s through the 1970s. In Mothers of Massive Resistance, she argues that white segregationist women were at the center of the history of white supremacist politics, largely due to their ability to capitalize on their roles in public education, social welfare institutions, partisan politics, and popular culture. With evidence gleaned from multitudes of primary as well as secondary sources, she expands on recent scholarship that explores how white women from the grassroots were able to influence the history of race relations in the United States.

Organized chronologically, McRae tells her story using three narrative threads. One is her focus on the lives of four activist women, of whom two—Florence Sillers Ogden and Mary Dawson Cain—were from Mississippi; one—Nell Battle Lewis—was from North Carolina; and one—Cornelia Dabney Tucker—was from South Carolina. While all four were segregationists, Lewis was a reformer whose ideas regarding the rights of African Americans were liberal when compared to the other three. All of these women emphasized their beliefs in "states' rights," in their protests against the federal government's attempts to overturn Jim Crow laws and grant civil rights to blacks.

A second thread in McRae's narrative examines the symbiotic relationship between de jure and de facto segregation through the work white women performed as educators and in social welfare, electoral politics, and culture. In roles such as teachers, social workers, journalists, support personnel in political campaigns, and as mothers, the women found opportunities to sway others, including the younger generation, to push against laws that granted civil rights to African Americans.

The third strand of the narrative in Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the networks the segregationist women created and cultivated. McRae's look into that topic adds to what other historians of [End Page 642] right-wing women have previously discovered regarding the strengths that conservative women found in reaching out and working with one another to resist change in America, particularly changes associated with the New Deal of the 1930s and the civil rights movement. In addition to these women's shared support of segregation, their similar outlooks regarding matters such as what should be taught in public schools and the United States' involvement in international affairs led them to communicate with one another. Mothers of Massive Resistance also provides strong evidence that rightist segregationists learned that they could have their greatest success if they stressed their political conservatism over their views on race.

In her conclusion, McRae examines anti-busing campaigns in such places as Detroit and Boston, in addition to those in southern cities. She clearly shows that white women played important roles in protests against both desegregation and busing. It mattered little whether they were living in the north or the south, in cities or in rural areas.

While her prodigious research is admirable and her evidence is substantial, McRae's arguments would have been stronger if she had devoted more space to comparing what segregationist men were doing parallel to the women's activism. For instance, men were educators too. Also, while they were almost in unanimous support of educational opportunities equal to those of whites, not all African Americans agreed that students should be bused outside of their neighborhoods. McRae did not address that issue. Nevertheless, her monograph is a significant addition to scholarship on women, especially conservative women, and to twentieth-century American society and politics as a whole. [End Page 643]

June Melby Benowitz

june melby benowitz is professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. Books she has authored include Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933–1945 (2002) and Challenge and Change: Right-Wing Women...

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