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[...]cultural shifts gave the American housewife iconic status in the 1950s, giving women an opportunity to utilize postwar domestic ideology to gain influence over political issues they could link to the home. [...]housewife populism\" reoriented conservative women's focus from national to metropolitan politics. [...]this is an excellent book that should be read alongside Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors (2002) and Donald Critchlow's Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (2007). [...]her use, and in-depth discussion, of oral histories make this a worthy choice for methods and oral-history courses.

This article tells the story of Lottie Beth Hobbs, one of the most important figures of the anti-ERA movement – and therefore a founding mother of the Religious Right. Although opposition of fundamentalist women to the ERA increasingly has been recognized in the founding of the Religious Right, Hobbs’s role remains underexplored. Relying on a moral and political framework indebted to her lifelong commitment to the Churches of Christ, Hobbs spearheaded a rhetorical and ideological shift that first united disparate conservative causes under a “pro-family” banner, then focused their attention on the threat of a tentacular secular humanism. By focusing on Hobbs’s career, this article bridges two scholarly foci on modern American conservatism, one highlighting anti-ERA organizing in the 1970s and the other focused on “family values” activism during the Reagan administration.

Here Christina Wolbrecht boldly demonstrates how the Republican and Democratic parties have helped transform, and have been transformed by, American public debate and policy on women's rights. She begins by showing the evolution of the positions of both parties on women's rights over the past five decades. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Republicans were slightly more favorable than Democrats, but by the early 1980s, the parties had polarized sharply, with Democrats supporting, and Republicans opposing, such policies as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. Wolbrecht not only traces the development of this shift in the parties' relative positions--focusing on party platforms, the words and actions of presidents and presidential candidates, and the behavior of the parties' delegations in Congress--but also seeks to explain the realignment. The author considers the politically charged developments that have contributed to a redefinition and expansion of the women's rights agenda since the 1960s--including legal changes, the emergence of the modern women's movement, and changes in patterns of employment, fertility, and marriage. Wolbrecht explores how party leaders reacted to these developments and adopted positions in ways that would help expand their party's coalition. Combined with changes in those coalitions--particularly the rise of social conservatism within the GOP and the affiliation of social movement groups with the Democratic party--the result was the polarization characterizing the parties' stances on women's rights today.

When Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, since 1945 head of the Catholic Church of Hungary, returned for a visit to the United States in 1973, the world had changed dramatically since his first visit in 1947. After his arrest and show trial in Stalinist Hungary, he had become a symbol of heroic anti-Communist resistance during the Cold War. Through negotiations with the U.S. administration and the Vatican in the wider context of Detente and \"Vatican Ostpolitik, the negative image of Communist Hungary had changed while Cardinal Mindszenty now seemed to have become a person of the past. These changes had a major impact on how the US government, the Vatican, and American-Hungarians interpreted Mindszenty's visits in 1973 and 1974.

During the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification period from 1972 to 1982, evangelical Christian women's organizations played an important role in the debate and discussion over the amendment. Though these organizations were all grouped under the same title of evangelical, they did not all argue for the same side of the ERA debate. Evangelical Christian female leaders and women's organizations supported or rejected the Equal Rights Amendment based on how they defined womanhood. Historical analysis of evangelical women's roles throughout the twentieth century is riddled with attempts at psychological explanation, especially when it was connected to perceived fundamental or literal biblical interpretation. This essay seeks to add nuance to this historiography through discussion and analysis of evangelical Christian women's theological and political ideologies, as well as their definitions of womanhood, and how these ideologies helped inform their stances on the ERA. Before this discussion can begin, though, it is important to define evangelical Christianity.

This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists. Este artículo examina las conexiones transnacionales entre mujeres anticomunistas en Brasil, Chile y los Estados Unidos de las décadas de 1960s a 1980s. El trabajo explora las creencias políticas y redes sobre las que estas mujeres edificaron sus ideas con el fin de promover su papel en el derrocamiento de João Goulart y Salvador Allende y que animaron a otras mujeres a lo largo de las Américas a unírseles en su lucha contra el comunismo. El material muestra que estas mujeres revirtieron el curso de las ideas del momento, se apoyaron como modelos entre sí y entre otras mujeres anticomunistas y construyeron redes transnacionales, basadas en sus conceptos de género, de activistas femeninas anticomunistas. Este artigo examina as conexões transnacionais entre mulheres anticomunistas do Brasil, Chile e Estados Unidos entre as décadas de 1960 e 1980. Exploram-se as crenças políticas e redes de contatos nas quais estas mulheres basearam-se de modo a promover seus papéis nas golpes contra João Goulart e Salvador Allende e para encorajar outras mulheres ao redor das Américas a juntarem-se na luta contra o comunismo. Este artigo demonstra que estas mulheres reverteram o fluxo de ideias, servindo como exemplos umas para as outras e para mulheres anticomunistas, além de desenvolverem redes transnacionais de ativistas anticomunistas femininas.

This article examines Bella Abzug's activities with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict at home and abroad during her congressional career (1971–1977), with a focus on the dilemmas she faced, her approach to overcoming them, and her ability to mobilize like-minded but diverse American women for her struggle. After tracing her Labor Zionist background and her activities in the early 1970s, this article investigates her strategy for defending Israel during and after the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico. Abzug's story offers a useful window into the connection between women's politics and the Middle East question; it also illuminates the active role of a group of American women in making the US-Israeli relationship closer during the 1970s. This article concludes that, ironically, in order to endorse Zionism, Abzug, a staunch critic of the Cold War, relied on the US Cold War strategy of eliminating Communist influence from women's politics.

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.

Very little in my adult life has made me feel my feminism so strongly as the 2016 defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And by “defeat,” I mean her utter evisceration by the press, many Bernie Sanders supporters, the Donald Trump campaign, and a shocking number of regular Americans. The disgusting patriarchal bacchanalia that occurred during the campaign has nearly been matched by the attacks on Clinton that have continued since the election. She has been criticized even for writing a memoir of the election, What Happened, a book that has been variously called too long to read (Frank 2017) and an exercise in shifting responsibility (Zurcher 2017).