Female Conservatism and Political Activism
by Sarah Goldberg
Gender is not binary, though much of political science and politics treat it as such. This is particularly true of the political right, whose identity depends on traditional gender roles. While everyone’s experiences shape their political identity, conservatives coalesce around significant principles that create their collective identity. Traditional gender norms have been validated, justified, and upheld in the conservative sphere. In both the political and private spheres, gender norms, emphasized by conservatives, prescribe distinct roles to women surrounding family and household tasks. In this paper, I will first discuss the conservative sphere of political participation and what values exist in that sphere. I will then touch on how those political preferences resulted in political activism and specific policy choices. Lastly, I will discuss what that historical activism tells us about modern conservative women and their policy positions.
Female Conservatism Identity and its Roots
Scholars trace current American conservatism to several historical factors (Dudas, 2017). This includes opposition to the New Deal programs of the 1930s, the growth of libertarianism after World War II, and reactions in the South to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Dudas, 2017). These trends increased the political participation of women and a more robust formation of a conservative identity. This identity has several aspects, including the desire to uphold traditional family values rooted in patriarchy, the belief in small government, and, for some, the desire to maintain white supremacy (Dudas, 2017). For women, these three aspects of conservatism reinforce their place in the ascriptive hierarchy and the importance of their roles as leaders of the private sphere. While not all conservatives are segregationists, it is essential to include the historical presence of white supremacy within the conservative movement (McRae, 2018). Those beliefs were critical to shoring up a more substantial conservative base with a broader umbrella under which conservative women could fit. Over time, segregationist women began using sweeping Federal policies such as the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act as examples of government overreach (McRae, 2018). In doing so, they could reach out to other conservative women who shared a piece of their collective identities, unwilling to relinquish their power as the moral arbiters of their homes (McRae, 2018). While for conservative women in general, this increased their autonomy to self-govern, for segregationists, this upheld their protection for white societies’ place in the hierarchy and helped maintain white societies’ distance from Black society (McRae, 2018). The importance conservative women placed and still place on their role in the private domain includes their roles as mothers and in the upbringing and education of their children. The more central this motherhood role is to a woman’s sense of identity, the more likely it will be politicized (Greenlee et al., 2017). Therefore, many women have embraced what Greenlee and Deason call a politicized parent identity, leading to the types of activism I will outline in the following section (Greenlee et al., 2017). When government policies crept into the private domain or challenged traditional roles or white supremacy, women were at the heart of the opposition, fearing more extensive government policies would also mark the end of many of their core beliefs (McRae, 2018).
History of Conservative Policies and Political Activism
There is a rich history of female activism across party lines. Conservative women, in particular, have worked to uphold their place as the authority over the private domain. Many of these women found success in their activism due to their place outside of institutionalized politics, allowing them to position themselves as nonpartisan. Furthermore, they used their moral positions as mothers to galvanize support and uphold themselves as moral authorities (McRae, 2018). During the Jim Crow era of the segregated South, Mildred Lewis Rutherford centered her focus on oversight of public education to sustain racial segregation (McRae, 2018). Rutherford galvanized white women to the cause, guaranteeing that the school curriculum reinforced white supremacy and diluted the fraught history of slavery in favor of celebratory stories of America (McRae, 2018). These women were known as “anti-radicals” as a response to what they perceived as radical changes to the social/political order, which sought to standardize the public education system and increase equity (McRae, 2018). In response to these efforts to organize public education, white women in the South successfully lobbied for a statewide textbook adoption (McRae, 2018). These textbooks solidified the teachings of the racial order of the South while also censoring books that spoke of Black achievement and that contained “socialistic tendencies.” (McRae, 2018, pg. 49). In centralizing and providing free textbooks that reinforced Jim Crow politics, the statewide curriculum was not only passed down to white children but to Black children as well (McRae, 2018). White women, having understood the power that local self-governance and the sovereign rights of the states granted them, sought to retain that power (McRae, 2018). This later created a schism among white women like Mary Dawson Cain, who spread anti-civil rights sentiments through her editorials in the 1940s (McRae, 2018). During this time, many women like Cain, who had previously supported the Democratic Party, began moving to the Republican Party (McRae, 2018). This was largely due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies, which began to supersede the state’s rights to govern themselves (McRae, 2018). Anti-radicals started to coalesce around the Republican Party and gain national support by turning away from overt talk of segregation (McRae, 2018). However, even as their rhetoric shifted towards support for states’ rights, they also opposed bills that sought to end racial violence (McRae, 2018).
Nevertheless, the support of states’ rights was seen as a connection point by white segregationist women, who saw how their ideas aligned nationally (McRae, 2018). The conservatism of white women coalesced further when, in the 1950s, UNESCO stated that race was a social construct, as opposed to a biological difference, which the United Nations reaffirmed (McRae, 2018). This concerned the women of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), an organization founded by women who descended from American Revolutionary soldiers, which still exists today (McRae, 2018)(National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890). DAR became concerned with the UN’s involvement in domestic affairs as U.S. courts began invoking the UN’s Human Rights Declaration in their filings. This declaration, which was drafted after World War II and outlined universal human rights standards, was used to overturn U.S. property laws regarding racial exclusion (McRae, 2018). DAR declared the UN a threat to private property, Christianity, and minority (in this case, white folks’) rights (McRae, 2018). Anti-radical women, as they had previously done, yielded the power of the pen and issued newsletters to parents, which connected the intrusions by the UN to communism and promoted isolationism and white supremacy (McRae, 2018). As the Civil Rights Act passed in 1957 and mass marches and protests began, white women again centralized their activism on education (McRae, 2018). They concealed white supremacist language and organized their movement under the guise of conservatism, all while censoring textbooks that promoted racial equity (McRae, 2018). Their position turned to colorblindness—opposed to color-focused—a position mirrored in rhetoric today (McRae, 2018)(The Heritage Foundation, 2023). This largely untold history of white women’s political activism highlights their grassroots efforts. They created resistance to perceived radical change through education activism, media influence, lobbying efforts, and grassroots organizing.
What History Tells Us About Present-Day
As I am sure so many others have, I assumed that our present-day political rhetoric was novel and distinct to this historical period. I had very little understanding of the repackaging of language that has been done around the same core principles and values reflected in the conservative movements starting in the 1920s, which have continued to this day. While white conservative women no longer focus their efforts on legal segregation, they still maintain their white supremacist politics through debates on curriculum, school prayer, book banning, and limiting the federal government (McRae, 2018). Political rhetoric today still mirrors the rhetoric of Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s. Schlafly warned that ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment would threaten the patriarchal and religious view of society in which families worked best, with women running the private domain and men working in the public domain (Deckman, 2016). Modern-day conservative women see big government as harmful, as did their historical counterparts, with differences in its manifestation. The government's intrusion into things such as sex education and the institution of marriage is still considered government overreach. Government meddling in the private realm is unsavory, as this is where our moral center is formed, something that should be left for the private domain (Deckman, 2016). This also means that conservative women in general, particularly Tea Party women, reject government overregulation and government assistance, associating it with dependence and rejecting the presumption that women are incapable of taking care of themselves (Deckman, 2016). This can be attributed partly to the construction of modern conservatism, which emphasizes individual rights while attempting to keep its strong family structure and paternalism (Dudas, 2017). The focus on paternal rights, evoked by William F. Buckley and enforced through Reagan’s politics, reinforced that the core of politics is rooted in private family life with the government as the father figure and women as mothers (Dudas, 2017).
Conservative women still focus on their roles as mothers with groups such as Concerned Women of America and Armed Informed Mothers, who center motherhood on their political objectives (Greenlee et al., 2017). This has been reflected historically in white conservative female politics and continues to be salient to their identity. This could be a critical factor that increases their political behaviors, which employ motherhood rhetoric when defending their conservative ideologies (Greenlee et al., 2017). Motherhood is central to the anti-abortion movement, as the decision to have an abortion—or not—is deeply tied to the very definition and significance of motherhood, as Luker argues (Luker, 1985). These conservative mothers use blogs and social media to connect to others, just as their historical counterparts used papers and newsletters (Greenlee et al., 2017) (McRae, 2018). The ubiquity of the Internet, particularly for white mothers, may amplify the connection between politics and their identity as parents (Greenlee et al., 2017). With this historical knowledge of conservative ideologies, it is not surprising that we continue to see a focus on maintaining traditional power structures in current politics (Dudas, 2017). For years, conservatives have navigated the paradox of promoting individual freedoms while simultaneously advocating for paternalistic rights. Despite this contradiction, they have still managed to coalesce around a message emphasizing 'rights' while also restricting access to those rights for certain groups. (Dudas, 2017). This explains why Donald Trump can claim himself a protector of women (whether they like it or not) while also having played a pivotal role in restricting the right to an abortion that American women enjoyed for nearly 50 years (Nehamas & Green, 2024). The conservative right continues to focus on religious freedom while also limiting the rights of people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. This mirrors the historical principles of white conservative women who attempted to uphold the tenets of the Jim Crow South. The threat to traditional values that conservative women feel is taking place in society ultimately threatens their place in it. It continues to build a culture of mass resistance to change.
References:
Deckman, M. (2016). Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the CHanging Face of the American Right. New York University Press.
Dudas, J. R. (2017). Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism. Stanford University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brandeis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4768823.
Greenlee, J. S., Langner, C. A., Deason, G., Thomas, M., & Bittner, A. (2017). Identity and Activism in an Era of Politicized Motherhood. In Mothers and Others: The Role of Parenthood in Politics. University of British Columbia Press.
Luker, K. (1985). Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. University of California Press.
McRae, E. G. (2018). Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Oxford University Press.
National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. (1890, 2024). Daughters of the American Revolution. https://www.dar.org
Nehamas, N., & Green, E. L. (2024, October 31). Trump Says He’ll Protect Women, ‘Like It or Not,’ Evoking His History of Misogyny. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/us/politics/trump-women-like-it-or-not.html
The Heritage Foundation. (2023, 2024). Project 2025. https://www.project2025.org/playbook/
