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Title: Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II by Glen Jeansonne, Glen Jeanson ISBN: 0-226-39587-1 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: April, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.50

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Female fascists
Comment: The Great Depression of the 1930s certainly ranks as an epochal moment in American history. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the country into an unprecedented period of economic woe. Millions lost their jobs, banks failed in the thousands, and starvation and death stalked every nook and cranny of the country. When President Herbert Hoover failed to alleviate the worst aspects of the Depression, the populace elevated a New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in the 1932 elections. The New Deal the president-elect offered the nation in an effort to solve the economic problems has since become well known to millions of Americans. What isn't as well known about the FDR era is the opposition the president faced from elements of society unenamored with his economic panaceas or his interest in foreign affairs. Millions of Americans, represented by figures like Father Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Huey Long, opposed at every turn the president's foreign and domestic initiatives. Unfortunately, many members of these groups-and many of the leaders-subscribed to vicious anti-Semitic and racist views. Historian Glen Jeansonne knows a little bit about some of these figures; he wrote a biography on Smith along with this book about the mothers' movements of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

"Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II" takes a close look at the mothers' movements at the peak of their power, from roughly the late 1930s to the early 1940s. Many women of the time, horrified at the prospect of losing sons and husbands to yet another war in Europe, came together to oppose Roosevelt's increasing moves towards involving America in problems overseas. Boasting names like the National Legion of Mothers of America, We the Mothers Mobilize for America, and Women United, these groups hoped to bring about change in Washington through petitioning, marching on the nation's capital, and putting pressure on members of Congress. Many of the groups received financial support from big business, from wealthy individuals, and from a sympathetic public. The first and only truly national mothers' organization was led by novelist Kathleen Norris and supported good old fashioned isolationism. The group, sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, moved in the same circles as the isolationist America First Committee. According to Jeansonne, Norris's organization fractured after anti-Semites and racists infiltrated local chapters. The author focuses on the crackpots and loonies who took over the leadership positions of these local groups.

After presenting his thesis and a sketch of the far right during the 1930s, the book provides biographical portraits and a highlight of activities of most of the higher profile mothers. Elizabeth Dilling, for example, receives most of the attention in Jeansonne's treatment. Eventually tried for sedition by the federal government in 1944, Dilling spent most of the 1930s building up a strong resume of anti-Communist and anti-Semitic credentials. A religious woman who brooked little dissension from those around her, Dilling became the most prominent female far right figure of her time even though she never led a large organization. Just when you think things cannot get any wackier than Dilling, Jeansonne introduces chapters on women who did run mothers' groups. There's Cathrine Curtis, a former actress and financial wizard who dabbled in anti-Semitism during her days as head of the Women's National Committee to Keep the U.S. out of the War; Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, the outspoken leader of We the Mothers Mobilize for America based in Chicago; and the incredible Agnes Waters, a loose cannon even on the far right who railed against Jews, blacks, Communists, and anyone else who did not fit her conceptions of a perfect America.

Jeansonne's argument involves the mothers' movements' relationship to feminism, a sticky problem indeed when scholars and proponents of feminism define their belief system in terms of left-wing ideologies and the evils of patriarchy. According to the author, the mothers' movements embraced the traditional roles of women as mothers, as homemakers, and as subservient to men. Many of the mothers did not dispute the idea of men running the country; they simply wanted a different group of men in charge, men who took into consideration female viewpoints. The idea of a liberated woman like Eleanor Roosevelt, who embraced blacks, moral relativism, and female ambition, shocked many members of these reactionary groups (modern women, for the most part, have little difficulty seeing Eleanor as an admirable figure). In short, feminism as we understand it today has little to do with the mothers' movements of the 1930s. Jeansonne's arguments here are solid, and appropriately call for a reassessment of the parameters of feminist discourse.

The author stands on shakier ground when he delves into psychohistorical analysis. Historians placing historical figures on a metaphorical couch run grave risks. The primary problem is one of training: historians do not have the tools to conduct probing insights into the human mind. When Jeansonne attributes Agnes Waters's career as a competition with her successful mother, or analyzes Elizabeth Dilling's unique worldview in psychological terms, the reader vainly seeks for concrete proof of these assertions. Aside from the unfortunate digressions into psychohistory, and some choppiness with the text, "Women of the Far Right" is an amazing catalogue of memorable characters who, for a short time, possessed the potential to significantly alter the course of American history. The era of the Great Depression posed numerous dangers to the United States, and now historians have a better understanding of one more peril thanks to Glen Jeansonne.

Rating: 3
Summary: Women in the Right
Comment: Here is an effort by an historian to tell the practically forgotten story of the strong opposition to World War II that came from various American women's organizations. Although the central protagonists, the women in leadership positions, left relatively small amounts of material behind in the way of personal papers and memorabilia that are the usual primary sources for real historians, Jeansonne appears to have made good use of what is available, and has managed to put up a respectable effort.

The amazing thing revealed in the book to me, was that that the opposition was so strong and the organizations were so large, putting to shame the present paltry efforts against the Gulf wars. The currently held notion that WWII was universally believed to be a "good war" and that our alliance with Stalin was approved of by all, is shown to be wrong--it was opposed by an awful lot of Americans.

Jeansonne's treatment goes a bit overboard in ascribing the most nefarious motives to their opposition--spanning the spectrum from anti-semitism to traitorous Nazism all the way to muddle-headed feminist sentimentality. Mostly he emphasized the first of these motives. It seems that anybody that pointed out that the Jews were in favor of an American alliance with John Bull and Uncle Joe against Germany, which was the truth after all, has to be tarred, as Lindbergh was, as a "rabid" or "ferocious" anti-semite, or, all too often, as a "bigot". These terms would be marked as trite and overused had the book been written as a term paper in freshman English class.

Jeansonne, self-described in the text as a Jew, married to a theologian, is attracted to a bogus, essentially data-free Freudian analysis of pathological personalities which intrudes too frequently in his account and weakens the book considerably.

The lesson that he draws from this episode of our history, interpreted in the light of present mythologies, has to do with that never-ending question of the origins of anti-semitism, and is amazingly attributed by the author to "anxiety" and "nervousness" among the afflicted. A simple conflict of interest between the Americans and Jews, it seems to me, is a much more reasonable, less pseudo-psychological, explanation. His remarks on present efforts to abolish anti-semitism, showing the utter disutility of providing more information on Judaism to Gentiles, and the current fad for "diversity" courses in our schools, though, seems quite on the mark.