White women the architects of racism
“This is an ambitious and well-written book, and McRae makes compelling case that white southern segregationists had more power to fortify and shape white supremacy and the rise of massive resistance than historians to date have recognized. Readers will find that one of the most striking features of this book is the haunting familiarity of these white supremacist tropes in our current political discourse, evidence that this history is vitally important to the ongoing struggle for racial justice.” — Zoë Burkholder, History of Education Quarterly “A valuable addition to the politically urgent study of whiteness in American History.”–Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Library Journal, starred review “The crystal-clear message of this thoroughly researched and impressively documented book is that white supremacy remains a powerful force in the United States.”–Kirkus Reviews “A strikingly original and unsettling analysis of the ‘long segregation movement.’ Tracking this struggle to maintain racial difference and distance from the eugenics mania of the 1920s through the watershed of the 1940s to the Boston busing crisis and the rise of the New Right, Elizabeth McRae paints a vivid portrait of hard-working white women in local communities across the country who, drawing on their moral authority as mothers, fought to protect white privilege, sometimes explicitly, through the tactics of massive resistance, sometimes covertly, under the guise of school choice and limited government. A must read for understanding the politics of white supremacy over the past half century and in our own time.”–Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Women have long been marginalized in studies of segregation, but Mothers of Massive Resistance makes a powerful case for placing them at the center of our attention. In this smartly argued book, Elizabeth McRae shows that southern white women not only brought massive resistance into being, but then sustained its growth at the grassroots in vitally important ways.”–Kevin Kruse, Princeton University “A product of extraordinary research, McRae’s gracefully written account captures the critical role white women of the South played in defending segregation even as it exposes the deep-seated cultural assumptions that led them to battle.”–Dan Carter, University of South Carolina “Brilliantly demonstrates how white women were both the everyday architects of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South and fully connected to national movements to enforce racial segregation and promote political conservatism. It excavates the grassroots activism of female segregationists in their roles as suffragists, social workers, eugenicists, school teachers, textbook censors, journalists, storytellers, garden clubbers, party activists, anticommunists, and most of all as wives and mothers.”–Matthew Lassiter, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South “This deeply researched history of women and the work of segregation represents a major revision of Jim Crow and gender history. We see just how widespread and unrelenting, coordinated and feminine anti-integration efforts became over the early and mid-twentieth century–within and beyond the south. Indeed, women were the ‘mass in massive resistance.'”–Michelle Nickerson, author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right “A fascinating, meticulously researched, and damning look into the myriad ways white women have consciously worked to aid racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and sanctify their racially pure vision of white motherhood…McRae’s book shines a harsh light on our status as collaborators and progenitors in the mainstream white-supremacist movement, and is essential reading for any white woman who seeks to understand our history-and our responsibility to those we’ve failed.”–Kim Kelly, Bitch Magazine “A sharp look at mainstream, everyday segregationism: the segregationism of respectable white women…McRae’s book is an excellent history of white women’s politics generally, but it’s especially strong as a history of white women acting to protect ‘their’ public schools…McRae’s project fulfills nearly all the requirements for a feminist history. She uncovers the role women played in a well-known historical movement, in which powerful or violent men-Klan members or George Wallace-are usually assigned the lead. She shines a light on their under-recognized, feminized work to shape and support that movement. She even demonstrates how women responded to gendered and class-based limitations on their power to perpetuate segregation in the public sphere with creativity and resilience.”–Rebecca Stoner, Pacific Standard “An essential addition…McRae’s book is likely to endure as a work that helps to permanently transform our understanding of the relationship between the Jim Crow South and what she calls Jim Crow Nation, and the emergence of the New Right. McRae rightly calls the political mobilization of segregationist women in the South and elsewhere a women’s movement. These conservative women, previously unheralded in the historical literature, staked their claim as political actors, calling on their traditional-and powerful-role as mothers to express their views and exert influence on a host of political and cultural issues, while never completely disguising the fidelity to white supremacy that animated and joined together their various causes.”–Zachary J. Lechner, H-South, H-Net Reviews “McRae…makes the compelling case that reducing massive resistance to a decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s obscures its political evolution and renders its activists reactionaries…Examining this resistance through the eyes of four southern white segregationists…McRae reveals that these women and their southern sisters were…part of a widespread political mobilization. Though initially these women publicly promoted the importance of maintaining de jure segregation and ‘white over black,’ over time they came to emphasize other fears…but ideas of white supremacy always remained under the surface. For McRae, the forced busing controversies of the 1970s…brings home the idea of an expanded notion of massive resistance and the idea that racism in the US has been persistent and pervasive, occurring across vast periods of time and crossing regional boundaries. McRae deserves kudos for her extensive research.”–Choice
