Women of the US Right may seem like an odd inclusion in a forum dedicated to analyzing global modes of public-making. In the historiography, these actors have been characterized as decidedly domestic creatures, “mothers,” “suburban warriors,” “housewives,” and “red-hunting homemakers.”1 Yet conservative and right-wing women in the United States matter to histories of global publics for two reasons: First, they challenged visions of global publics in the mid-twentieth century, using distinct forms of communication and mobilization. Even if they had little desire to affiliate with a global public themselves, these women certainly reflected on practices of globalizing and sought to counter them. Second, US right-wing women are an example of a self-styled counterpublic: women who rejected mainstream liberal women’s associations and their exhortations to become world citizens. Taking seriously these antagonists of global public-making complicates conceptualizations of gendered citizenship beyond the nation, while analyzing their thought and practice adds to a “polymorphous” understanding of global publics as they cut across national politics and visions of global publicness.2 In an age of increased political polarization, understanding historical constructions of female counterpublics may also shed light on the dynamics of an ever more fragmented public-at-large.
In the interwar United States, a significant number of women aligned themselves with right-wing organizations, in opposition to both the New Deal and popular as well as elite internationalism. Right-wing women often spent considerable time meticulously researching the activities and tactics of their opponents, real or imagined. After 1945, networks of mostly white, affluent women convinced, via “kitchen-table mobilization,” scores of white American mothers and housewives to join what would come to be known as the modern US conservative movement. Although the intellectual and political leaders of the New Right were mostly men, women played a crucial role in grassroots organizing and mobilizing new electoral coalitions. Conservative women’s activism as a moral crusade received an additional boost in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to US anticommunism. By the early 1960s, a new political configuration emerged that was distinct from the Old Right and a counterpoint to left-leaning social and political movements of the same period.
Scholars have noted the extent to which right-wing women in the 1940s and 1950s regarded themselves as rebels against a political consensus. Their subjective experience was one of “awakening” after a period of unease, of “something’s-just-not-feeling-right” when encountering authority figures.3 As the theorist Michael Warner has argued, counterpublics constitute themselves in tension with a larger public. Their members make “different assumptions about what can be said and what goes without saying,” yet they need not necessarily be subordinated or dominated in any other way. What makes someone a member of a counterpublic is engagement with a “horizon of opinion and exchange,” mediated in specific ways.4 White conservative women can thus reasonably be regarded as a counterpublic, despite their often privileged socioeconomic status. Their arguments can be found in the ephemera typical for the movement—newsletters, pamphlets, and small publications—disseminated via diffuse networks such as small bookshops and mailing lists. They worked with technologies that could be used in the privacy of suburban homes, such as the mimeograph, connecting the everyday to broader political horizons. White conservative women also engaged in intense scrutiny of the discursive practices and protocols of their political adversaries well before they regarded themselves as part of a political movement. One such area of scrutiny became mainstream US women’s organizations’ embrace of world citizenship.
Consider, for example, Lucille Cardin Crain, an upper-middle-class writer-activist. Born in 1901 in Québec, Crain migrated to the United States as an infant. She found her political calling in the New Deal era when she embraced consumer advocacy and taxpayer rights and cultivated links to libertarian public intellectuals such as Ayn Rand. Crain founded a short-lived taxpayer advocacy organization in 1941 but then turned her attention to international affairs. The United States’ entry into World War II radicalized Crain, when she began to allege that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt had nefariously dragged the nation into war. She moved from economic libertarianism to uncompromising anticommunism, which became her main political focus. Crain started issuing warnings about women being co-opted into an international collectivism from 1946. Her teaching background qualified her for her role as editor of the subscriber-based Educational Reviewer (1949–1953), a publication dedicated to exposing progressive bias in education. In the early 1950s, she became a member of Vigilant Women for the Bricker Amendment. This organization supported the adoption of Senator Bricker’s 1951 amendment to the US Constitution, which would have radically curtailed the United States’ ability to sign up to international treaties and was opposed by liberal women’s groups such as the League of Women Voters.5
But before Crain moved into the realm of policy advocacy, she engaged in public-making. In 1948, a significant turning point in the global Cold War, Crain and her coauthor Anne Burrows Hamilton published a pamphlet called Packaged Thinking for Women, which historians of women in the US conservative movement have recognized as a key early document in female mobilization. Although this narrative is often framed in the context of domestic anticommunism, the role of the United States in the world and the idea of women as world citizens appear prominently in the document. The pamphlet denounced the “political structure of American women,” which appropriated the voices of half of the US population to support not only an internationalist and interventionist foreign policy but also the UN and UNESCO. The United States’ major women’s organizations, with a combined membership of ten million, allegedly stood for “some kind of world government and world citizenship,” and these organizations used adult education to indoctrinate their members, the pamphlet argued.6 Crain and Hamilton further claimed that the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee colluded with the US government, and that women’s organizations promoted the liberalization of world trade, an anti-globalist argument that sits in tension with Crain’s earlier “fusionist” views that combined economic libertarianism and anticommunism.
Domestic and Foreign Affairs Distribution Service Flyer for a book-distribution service, insert in Packaged Thinking for Women (1948). Note the references to “party-line requirements” and friendship networks. Photo from author’s collection.
In Crain and Hamilton’s analysis, the organized US women’s movement sought to integrate middle-class white women into global structures, not so much in terms of economic participation but in terms of creating the appearance of public support for global governance proposals, such as the plan for international control of atomic energy. For instance, Crain and Hamilton cited lengthy passages from reports of the Program Information Exchange, a coordinating body for US civic associations and NGOs, which in their interpretation showed how ordinary citizens were being instrumentalized. One quoted report referred to “opinion-forming organizations which place control of atomic energy and its relationship with the UN at the top of the list of most-discussed and most-written-about subjects in recent months,” a telling formulation according to Crain and Hamilton. They suggested that grassroots support for the UN was being simulated and orchestrated from above. From this perspective, women’s organizations such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women who had joined the Program Information Exchange did not represent the “authentic voice” of American women. Crain and Hamilton exhorted their audience to “think for yourself”—in other words, to become part of a counterpublic via an act of cognition.7 Their analysis resonated with other women authors, and “packaged thinking” became a catch phrase in some publications. Edith Alderman Deen, the women’s editor of the Fort Worth Press, amplified Crain and Hamilton’s explicitly gendered appeal in her column, and also entered into a correspondence with Crain.8
Crain and Hamilton made no secret of whom they regarded as political adversaries: “New Dealers, left liberals, [those who are even] lefter,” as well as female public intellectuals speaking on foreign affairs in the 1940s, such as the novelist Pearl S. Buck and the think tank pundit Vera Micheles Dean. They also explicitly pitted their readers against other counterpublics, the civil rights movement, and those American intellectuals who allied publicly with anticolonial and antiracist campaigns and international communism, for example Eslanda and Paul Robeson. Via an antagonistic discursive strategy that accused these adversaries of nefarious intentions, Crain and Hamilton sought to transform their female readers from a passive audience into an active association while at the same time critiquing existing civic associations for their “mass production” of opinion.9
Clipping, Fort Worth Press, November 4, 1948. Lucille Cardin Crain Papers, University of Oregon Library Special Collections.
What can we take away from Packaged Thinking as a political intervention in the context of public-making? As international questions dominated American politics in the early Cold War, it is unsurprising they were a topic of intense political debate. But to fully explain the role of these issues in conservative movement-making, we have to take into account publicness and narratives of women’s citizenship. As Megan Threlkeld has argued, the early and mid-twentieth-century United States was a place where female empowerment was sought through claims about women’s duties as “citizens of the world.”10 Yet these claims were vehemently contested by women on the Right, and their significance in terms of understanding alternative visions of the global can only be fully evaluated if this opposition is investigated. Scholars have for some time pointed out that right-wing movements were both able to imagine themselves as part of a wider, transnational community and successful in forging intellectual and organizational networks across national boundaries.11 The period of the early Cold War saw the emergence of a transnationally networked Right, which shared some of Crain and Hamilton’s perspectives.
Crain and Hamilton were makers of a domestic counterpublic. Their influential pamphlet, passed around within local networks of conservative women and reprinted multiple times, targeted the discursive protocols of a wider, gendered public that they regarded both as overly integrated with the American political system and as too invested in a gendered form of world citizenship. There was a global dimension to Crain and Hamilton’s analysis, but it lay in its antagonistic and de-globalizing intent. Exhorting their readers to think for themselves and stop being a mere audience, Crain and Hamilton co-created an activist movement, one that positioned itself against more established associations and reaped political victories in the decades that followed.
More recently, media studies scholars have employed the conceptual tool of the counterpublic to analyze a very different phenomenon, the politicization of online parenting forums in twenty-first-century Britain. The discursive structures and practices of such spaces have offered some women a horizon of opinion and exchange that has, in the context of politically contested feminisms, become “a training ground for agitational activities directed toward the wider publics.”12 Now, as in the 1940s, fights over who can speak for women involve not only fiery rhetoric but competition over resources, institutions, and visibility in a wider public sphere.
Author Biography
Katharina Rietzler teaches at the University of Sussex, England. Rietzler is the coeditor, with Patricia Owens, of Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and, with Owens, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan, of Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Funding support for this article was provided by the British Academy, Award SRG2223\230551.
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (Boulder, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 2008).
Valeska Huber and Jürgen Osterhammel, introduction to Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, 1870–1990, ed. Valeska Huber and Jürgen Osterhammel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–60, here 7.
Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 51, 52.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 56, 57.
June M. Benowitz, Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 125–26, 147–48; Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 37; Florence Kaczorowski, “‘The Heart and Soul of Patriotic America’: American Conservative Women Crusading for the ‘Bricker Amendment’ (1953–1957),” European Journal of American Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10647.
Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 54, 77; Laura Constantinescu Pierce, “My, What Big Lies You Have! Women, Conservative Politics, and Unmasking the Big, Bad Communist Wolf in Cold War America, 1945–1960” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2015), 46–61; Lucille Cardin Crain and Anne Burrows Hamilton, Packaged Thinking for Women, supplement, American Affairs (Autumn 1948): 1–30, here 4, 6, 23.
Crain and Hamilton, Packaged Thinking, 19, 29. On liberal US women’s organizations, see Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
Edith Alderman Deen to Mrs. Kenneth C. Crain, January 18, 1949; Crain to Deen, January 31, 1949, Lucille Cardin Crain Papers, University of Oregon Library Special Collections, 65/12.
Crain and Hamilton, Packaged Thinking, 29, 19, 20, 27. On the association-audience nexus, see Huber and Osterhammel, introduction to Global Publics, 16–18.
Megan Threlkeld, Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
Martin Durham and Margaret Power, eds., New Perspectives on the Transnational Right (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Sarah Pedersen, The Politicization of Mumsnet (Bingley: Emerald, 2020), 94. Pedersen’s analysis focuses on debates on sex and gender identity; both gender-critical and transfeminist authors have highlighted the political salience of structures of inclusion and exclusion in different discursive arenas, at national and transnational levels. Holly Lawford-Smith, Gender-Critical Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 132, 139–40; Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 229–31, 237.
