Abstract
Resistance to the end of racial segregation in the United States is often isolated to a brief moment in history—the decade after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling—and to a specific context—the South. In her book, Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae claims this framing ignores efforts to uphold racial segregation during the entirety of the twentieth century through the power of networks that spanned the United States. According to McRae, white women were central to these efforts, working in a systemic manner to enforce white supremacist politics on the grassroots level. Her research places a spotlight on actors often represented as secondary to their male counterparts or absent altogether within scholarship.
McRae traces the work of white segregationist women from the 1920s to the 1970s by focusing on southern women and their nationwide connections. She argues that these women used their status as mothers to translate racial politics into everyday language, such as the protection of children and the defense of state’s rights in order to mobilize support for the preservation of a society, defined by white supremacy. McRae demonstrates the widespread appeal of this project as well as how politics grounded in race can shapeshift across time and geographic location.
In part one of the book, McRae explains how white women in the South maintained the color line during the interwar period within the context of social welfare policy, public education, electoral politics, and popular culture. White women, who entered the workplace as nurses, teachers, and administrators, played a central role in categorizing the population according to strict racial guidelines under the law. Within the school system, they enforced narratives of white supremacy and scientific racism through textbook choice, essay contests, and teacher training. Southern politics witnessed the rise of white women activists, who directed their newly acquired voting rights towards sustaining segregation through petitions, canvassing, and publishing. Finally, as storytellers, white women used cultural and scientific arguments to construct segregation as an ideal form of racial relations, supported by both white and black Americans. Across all of these forms of activism, white women emphasized their moral authority as mothers working to make the future safe for their children as they built national networks in order to expand their reach.
Part two of the book investigates how white women’s strategies changed after the Second World War and during the Civil Rights era. McRae argues that white women were a leading force driving the political exodus of white southerners from the Democratic Party as they blamed Democrats for breaking norms of racial distance and initiating reforms that challenged segregation. In the international arena, southern white women translated foreign policy into the language of race and family. They claimed the United Nations was a threat to parental authority, calling for anti-communist vigilance and supporting state’s rights. In the aftermath of Brown, white segregationist women’s activism intensified as they worked to resist the decision, presenting it as constitutional erosion and a threat to their children. They responded by protesting, petitioning, campaigning, threatening violence, encouraging youth activism, and storytelling for white supremacy. Throughout this work, southern white women built nationwide networks that reflected similar rhetoric and segregationist aims. In the book’s conclusion, McRae claims that the 1970s anti-busing protests of Boston demonstrate the national reach of this political vision.
Writing history at the grassroots level is both essential and challenging. McRae takes on a formidable task, drawing on more than 50 collections of manuscripts in addition to archives of newspapers and periodicals from across the country. Her main contributions include bringing in women as central historical actors and demonstrating continuities in social practices rather than the sudden changes we see on paper. However, her book also suffers from the pitfalls of a project of this scale. For instance, its content sometimes lacks focus and attempts to accomplish too much. This is particularly the case within part two, where messages begin to overlap across chapters, paragraphs become long lists of policies, and white women’s work is linked to an increasingly long series of ideological missions. In addition to issues of clarity, at times McRae overreaches her empirics in order to support the claim that white segregationist women were not merely a southern phenomenon. Although the strength of this argument becomes clearer in the final chapter, earlier attempts to draw connections between southern white women and conservative groups in the North are weakened by insufficient contextualization of ideological rhetoric within local practice. Although McRae’s book remains centered on the South, it takes a significant step towards demonstrating the reach and ongoing presence of white supremacist politics across the United States. Her book is relevant to scholars interested in the history of segregation, women’s political activism, and the transformation of white supremacist politics in the United States.