Challenge and Change ─ Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism, and the Baby Boom Generation

“A sweeping study of the distaff side of anti-communism/anti-government conspiracy politics.”—Eileen Boris, coeditor ofThe Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues

“Benowitz shows how the conservative women of the 1950s helped to lay the foundation for the ‘New Right.’”—Mary C. Brennan, author ofPat Nixon: Embattled First Lady

In the mid-twentieth century, a grassroots movement of women—mostly white, middle-class, and conservative—sought to shape the political, cultural, and social ideologies of the baby boomers in what they perceived was a quickly changing world poisoned by communism.

In Challenge and Change, June Melby Benowitz draws on a wide variety of primary sources to highlight the connections between the women of the Old Right, the New Right, and today’s Tea Party. Through interviews, as well as through their letters to presidents, editors, and one another, Benowitz allows these women to speak for themselves. She examines the issues that stirred them to action—education, health, desegregation, moral corruption, war, patriotism, and the Equal Rights Amendment—and explores the development of the right-wing women’s movement and its growth from the mid-twentieth into the twenty-first century.

June Melby Benowitz is associate professor of history at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee and the author ofDays of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933–1945 and Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion.