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Book Review |
The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter January/February, 1998, Vol. 5, No.1.
Women of the Far Right: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1996, 255 pp. Reviewed by John Moser |
In the years 1939-1941, an unlikely coalition which included, among others, conservative Republicans, pacifists, Irish Americans, socialists, and Nazi sympathizers constituted a powerful movement opposed to U.S. involvement in the European war. Generally referred to as "isolationists", there was little that held them together aside from their opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. Though their forces in Congress lost nearly every legislative battle in which they were engaged during this period, their influence was probably crucial in delaying U.S. entry into the war until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In Women of the Far Right, Glen Jeansonne focuses on one of the factions of the isolationist coalition, the so-called "Mothers' Movement." Unlike the male-dominated antiwar organizations such as the America First Committee, mothers' groups such as the National Legion of Mothers of America, the National Blue Star Mothers and the United Mothers of America specifically made gender a significant part of their message. As women and mothers, they claimed to have a special role as the conscience of the nation, restraining the men in Washington who would send their sons to fight and die overseas. Moreover, unlike more mainstream antiwar groups, most of the mothers continued to oppose the war effort even after Pearl Harbor.
However, as Jeansonne is quick to point out, their use of gender did not in any way make them proto-feminists. Although the mothers' groups were woman-centered and woman-led, and not simply auxiliaries of men's organizations, they nevertheless based their antiwar sentiments on a traditional view of woman's role in the home and in society - as manager of the household and nurturer of children. Nor were the mothers pacifists; most of those discussed in Jeansonne's account were vicious anti-Semites and anticommunists who presumably would have welcomed a war against Stalinist Russia. Like many other radical rightwing groups of the period--William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Gerald L.K. Smith's Committee of One Million, and Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice - they believed in the existence of a vast Jewish-communist conspiracy against America and the Christian faith.
The greatest strength of Jeansonne's work lies in its subject matter, for the characters he discusses are endlessly fascinating. From Elizabeth Dilling, described in a German magazine of the time as the "female fuhrer" of the United States, to "Two Gun" Bessie Burchett, a former schoolteacher who argued that education ought to be limited to "a select few white Protestant Americans of high IQ," to Lois de Lafayette Washburn, who unabashedly raised her arm in a Nazi salute during her 1944 trial for sedition, these are the sort of subjects that make for terrific reading. But Jeansonne, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, does far more than tell a good story. While resisting the temptation to overstate the influence of the mothers' groups (who after all remained a fairly small minority even within the isolationist movement), he demonstrates convincingly that they deserve more attention by historians of the period, who have tended to focus on large, male-controlled organizations such as America First. Indeed, even some extreme right-wingers such as Gerald Smith have received more scholarly attention than Elizabeth Dilling, who was arguably more influential on a national level.
Moreover, while he clearly does not sympathize with the beliefs of his subjects, Jeansonne's account is consistently fair-minded throughout. He does not attempt to paint mainstream isolationists, who often had valid and important concerns about American involvement overseas, with the same brush as the often pro-Nazi mothers. He in fact goes out of his way to show the revulsion of some of the more reasonable antiwar figures toward the extremism of Dilling and her ilk. He also takes pains to point out the differences between the mothers and conservative women of today's society; one can easily imagine a lesser scholar taking the opportunity for a cheap shot against such modern nationalists as Jeane Kirkpatrick.
If there is one minor flaw in Women of the Far Right, it is the author's perceived need to place his work withing the context of modern gender theory. For instance, Jeansonne on a number of occasions invokes the writings of Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, and others in an effort to distinguish the mothers from modern feminists. This strikes the reader not so much as annoying as unnecessary, not only because we are highly unlikely to confuse the likes of Bessie Burchett with Betty Friedan, but also because it adds nothing to the analysis. That a substantial minority among American women were willing to support something very much akin to fascism even during World War II is interesting and important in and of itself; what Andrea Dworkin might think of them seems far less relevant.
But fortunately Jeansonne relegates these musings to a few pages in the first and last chapters, so they do not interfere with his story in any significant way. For the most part, Women of the Far Right is an outstanding work of scholarship, shedding considerable light on an element within the isolationist movement that has been ignored for too long. And inasmuch as it illustrates the willingness of some Americans to embrace fascism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it is likely to become an important monograph in the study of this crucial period in U.S. history.