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Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party.

What’s in a name? The word “conservative” gradually acquired traction as a badge of political identity over the 1950s. In books and journals, intellectuals had been using the term since the late 1940s. The activist right, less interested in debates over philosophy than battles over policy, did not immediately embrace “conservative” when Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and others first published their path-breaking books on the subject. They nevertheless thought, acted, talked, and saw as conservatives before they self-consciously adopted the phrase to identify themselves as a political community at the end of the 1950s. The grassroots right, already in formation

In October of 1955, Los Angeles radio listeners tuned into CBS-KNX heard housewife Jo Hindman in the throes of a raucous debate over library discussion groups. “The most revolutionary and radical thing about the American Heritage Project,” declared Hindman, “is that it takes the library from its traditional role as custodian of books and puts it on the lecture circuit.” Among her adversaries, the station featured Henry Steele Commager, distinguished historian from Columbia University. Through a montage of taped interviews, CBS-KNX pitted comments from Hindman against those of Commager, editor of the common reading used in the American Heritage Project,

“Remove it at your peril,” announced Lucinda Benge to anyone who dared touch the American flag she and other members of Women for America had draped over a balcony at Los Angeles City Hall. “We’ll horsewhip every one of you if you take it down.” Benge’s team of middle-class housewives staged demonstrations that December of 1950 against display of United Nations flags in Los Angeles government buildings. The UN flag represented disrespect for U.S. sovereignty, in their eyes, as an icon that privileged internationalism over patriotism. The protests had started back in August, when several women appeared at a meeting

Conservatism became something different at the end of the fifties; it became a self-conscious movement. The right acquired coherence, momentum, and eventually power as different constituencies embraced “conservative” as a political identity. Activists, clergymen, captains of industry, and Republican Party leaders came to recognize themselves as part of a larger political community that aimed to contain government. That community did not emerge spontaneously but coalesced as the concepts articulated by intellectuals, the populism expressed by activists, and the religious fervor sparked by evangelical leaders settled with each other. Activists faithfully read theNational Review, theFreeman, andHuman Events, flocking

After traveling 1,500 miles and waiting patiently, Stephanie Williams took her seat before the Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular Affairs on Monday, February 20, 1956. As the last to be heard on that mild and clear winter day at the Capitol, she concluded the afternoon’s hearings. The committee would conduct two more in Washington for the Alaska mental health bill, HR 6376, a measure that would enable the territory to hospitalize its own mentally ill residents. The San Fernando Valley mother and activist introduced herself as president of the American Public Relations Forum, an organization that “consists of housewives

Coined by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to describe the new alloy of conservatism that united voters across the southern rim of the country, the term \"Sunbelt\" has since gained currency in the American lexicon. By the early 1970s, the region had come to embody economic growth and an ambitious political culture. With sprawling suburban landscapes, cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles seemed destined to sap influence from the Northeast. Corporate entrepreneurialism and a conservative ethos helped forge the Sunbelt's industrial-labor relations, military spending, education systems, and neighborhood development. Unprecedented migration to the region ensured that these developments worked in concert with sojourners' personal quests for work, family, community, and leisure. In the resplendent Sunbelt the nation seemed to glimpse the American Dream remade.The essays in Sunbelt Rising deploy new analytic tools to explain this region's dramatic rise. Contributors to the volume study the Sunbelt as both a physical entity and a cultural invention. They examine the raised highway, the sprawling prison complex, and the fast-food restaurant as distinctive material contours of a region. In this same vein they delineate distinctive Sunbelt models of corporate and government organization, which came to shape so many aspects of the nation's political and economic future. Contributors also examine literature, religion, and civic engagement to illustrate how a particular Sunbelt cultural sensibility arose that ordered people's lives in a period of tumultuous change. By exploring the interplay between the Sunbelt as a structurally defined space and a culturally imagined place, Sunbelt Rising addresses longstanding debates about region as a category of analysis.