Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 106; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaz579
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
Resumo“We, the women, have a big stake in these issues,” proclaimed Florence Sillers Ogden as she spoke in favor of segregation to eight hundred women assembled in Mississippi in 1948 (p. 132). The description of the speech comes at the midpoint in Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's brilliantly argued Mothers of Massive Resistance, encapsulating the book's central thesis: white southern women were deeply committed to Jim Crow. McRae locates the roots of “massive resistance” as early as the 1920s. She tells this story through women she describes as segregation's “constant gardeners”: Ogden, Nell Battle Lewis, Mary Dawson Cain, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker, who promoted segregation in newspaper columns and issue-based campaigns in North Carolina, Mississippi, and South Carolina (p. 1). She sets the stage with an earlier generation who promoted white supremacy whether as ideologues or bureaucrats. First, readers meet women of the segregationist bureaucracy: midwives, nurses, social workers, teachers, or registrars, such as Margaret Aileen Goodman, whose decisions about marriage licenses were part of the everyday maintenance of “racial integrity” (p. 37). The second chapter describes the passionate ideologue Mildred Lewis Rutherford, a leader in the United Daughters of the Confederacy who campaigned throughout the 1920s and 1930s to portray the Confederate cause positively in textbooks and organized others to remain vigilant against challenges to white supremacy in education. For the rest of the book, McRae analyzes the careers of Cain, Ogden, Dabney, and Lewis, who claimed that their role as mothers extended to participation in formal politics, authorizing them to be moral guardians of southern traditions.
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