The Counterrevolution of Postwar Women's Activism

In 1936, a country club opened in Rosedale, Mississippi, a small town located in Bolivar County, a few miles east of the Mississippi River. The establishment of an elite social space for white planters and their families would not have been especially noteworthy except for the source of its funding—the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Relying on the premise that natural recreation options in the area were unsafe for children, Florence Sillers Ogden petitioned and won federal funding to provide a park and swimming pool as a more appropriate alternative. When the "park" opened in 1936 it included a golf course, tennis courts, a clubhouse, and a pool—and it was open only to whites.

Ogden's success in winning funding from the WPA exemplified the ways in which, prior to organized resistance to the civil rights movement, elite white women in the South honed their contribution to the preservation of white supremacy. Relying on her social connections and activism within civic organizations, Ogden solicited white women's support in her petition to the WPA. Through such work, Ogden and her allies developed the unique authority white women would claim as they openly opposed federal desegregation mandates. Acting as guardians of future generations, women like Ogden positioned themselves firmly within the work of preserving white supremacy and sought federal assistance for that work. As a member of the planter class in the Mississippi Delta, she knew that federal interventions in the form of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the WPA could go beyond economic relief and directly toward securing a longstanding social order from which women like Ogden benefited. By 1952, however, faced with a Democratic Party becoming more openly supportive of organized labor and desegregation, Ogden led other white women to defect from the only political party that had found any success in Mississippi for nearly a century to canvass for Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican presidential nominee.

Ogden's trajectory from New Deal supporter to Republican activist sits alongside similar, yet uniquely situated, profiles of white women's resistance and activism in Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. The daily policing, enforcement, and maintenance of segregation was, McRae deftly argues, women's work, and their defense of the racial hierarchy provided "the mass in massive resistance" (McRae 4). In her focused examination of Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, McRae tracks the persistence of white supremacy as the central tenet of their organizing by recognizing the rapidly shifting environments within which they acted. McRae shows how women's increasing work within higher education, journalism, politics, and civil service during the Progressive Era helped shape their later resistance to civil rights reforms. White women's oversight of education, maternity, marriage, and civic activism prior to the civil rights movement normalized their authority over those spheres in ways that made their activism within the resistance movement natural, not exceptional. McRae tracks their work in politics, culture, and public service from the New Deal to the Second Wave, finding consistencies in their positions that render more one-dimensional labels like "liberal" or "conservative" less helpful in locating women within white resistance work. While reading Mothers of Massive Resistance, readers will be struck that, rather than awakening only to post-World War II desegregation mandates, these women had already built and defined expertise and leadership in white supremacist politics long before. Their securing of the borders of race and class—not only in the South but elsewhere—was born within club work and women-dominated professions that emerged decades prior to the Brown...