Abstract
In this scholarly work, McRae, a historian, carefully documents how “it was often white women who shaped and sustained white supremacist politics” (p. 3). She carefully traces the grassroots and media activities of women from 1920 to the antibusing movement in the 1970s.
While documenting efforts around the nation, she zooms in on four ardent Southern segregationists in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia (Nell Battle Lewis, Florence Sillers Ogden, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker). Over several chapters, we learn of the specific grassroots activities of these women such as writing newspaper articles, organizing rallies, leading PTAs, and creating essay contests for high school students. Although they were all segregationists, she maintains they were not consistently conservatives. She defines segregationists as those who “maintain a system that separates white and black Americans in public life, public institutions, cultural expressions and customary practice” (p. 15).
She sees the Progressive Movement as helping to institutionalize segregation in the South, through creating formal records of identifying who was black, white, or mixed race. It was white Southern women, contrary to the countervailing story line of white Southern liberal women, who were in the forefront of maintaining segregation through their roles in education, social services, electoral politics, and the media. We learn about Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), anticommunism, antipathy to Eleanor Roosevelt, antipathy to the United Nations, opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, and Louise Day Hicks, among thousands of other people, organizations, and issues. She traces how later, white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party and migrated to the Republicans. One called herself a “Jeffersonian Democrat” and we hear traces of libertarian ideology in that choice of a political label for herself. From the 1960s, these segregationist women built coalitions with Northern segregationists and national conservative movements.
This is an important scholarly work for historians, political scientists, and feminists. It provides details of who was doing what during a 50-year time span throughout the South. It is carefully researched and documented with over 7,000 footnotes in 67 pages including primary sources in 17 manuscript collections from Mississippi to Massachusetts, 48 contemporary periodicals, digitized collections court cases, government documents, and secondary sources including books, theses, dissertations, and unpublished papers. This book will be of value primarily as a resource for future scholars who will want to document how segregation was inculcated in the culture and maintained in the Southern states and later how integration, primarily in the schools, was resisted in both South and North.
The book follows a chronological trajectory and within each chapter identifies incidents and activities that support her thesis. She clearly explicates how these women use motherhood and protection of children and fear of “miscegenation” to legitimize their advocacy for segregation. Traditional gender roles are used as the weapon to fight their battles for white supremacy. In later chapters, the subtext of class emerges. White middle-class women need to subordinate women of color. These women are their domestic servants who enable them to fulfill their roles as good mothers, homemakers, and grassroots activists.
The book’s strength, in accumulating a huge trove of evidence supporting the author’s thesis, is also its weakness. This is a tough read for anyone attempting to plough through specific details of newspaper articles, club bulletins, textbook, and curriculum policies in town after town, over 50 years and 240 pages. It could have used more careful editing as it sometimes reads like a dissertation where every detail, no matter how trivial, had to be included. This reviewer was at a disadvantage because the advance copy she was given to review did not have an index, so it was impossible to cross-reference names, dates, and topics.
While this book is not suitable as a text for social policy students, it does have value as a resource guide for doctoral students and other researchers studying social history, social policy, civil rights, and social justice.