Moms for Liberty didn't appear out of thin air. They're building on a long history of white, conservative women who, for decades, have used their motherhood as a tool for political credibility. And it all started in 1960s California, where thousands of middle-class moms transformed into suburban warriors and helped build the modern-day conservative movement.
Moms for Liberty didn't appear out of thin air. They're building on a long history of white, conservative women who, for decades, have used their motherhood as a tool for political credibility. And it all started in 1960s California, where thousands of middle-class moms transformed into suburban warriors and helped build the modern-day conservative movement.
This season's cover art features a photograph by Jonathan Wilkins.
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Julie:
In 1954, a young woman named Bea Gathright took a big leap. She packed up her things, and moved from rural Iowa to the Sun Belt – Orange County.
There, on the coast of Southern California…
Lisa McGirr:
Everything was spanking new. You could see a suburban development opening up, and 10, 12, 15 trucks coming the same day in which everybody's unpacking at the same time.
Julie:
When Bea arrived in the OC, she registered as a Democrat.
Lisa McGirr:
Because she was told by the registrar, the Democrats are for the little people.
Julie:
And the little people, the working man – this was the community Bea had come from. She’d grown up one of nine siblings during the Great Depression. Her family was Protestant, and religious.
In Orange County, Bea and her husband started a family. In a lot of ways, she became what we might think of as a pretty predictable Republican voter. White, religious, middle-class, a stay-at-home mom. But for years, she stayed registered as a Democrat.
Lisa McGirr:
And it was only in Orange County itself, and in actually a neighbor asking her to host an event of a conservative speaker who was going to talk about the threats to Americanism through communism, that she hosted this person on her patio. And she said she began to get educated.
Julie:
On her patio, surrounded by other suburban moms, Bea discovered that she was a conservative.
I’m Julie Kohler, and this White Picket Fence.
This season, we’re examining mothers as a political force. Last week, we looked at the resurgence of a specific type of mothers’ activism. It is conservative, mostly white, and uses the rhetoric of “parental rights” to spark moral panic and declare war on public schools. It’s a style of activism that we’ve seen a lot of over the years.
Back in the 1970s, it gained notoriety when Anita Bryant, a former Miss America and Florida orange juice spokesperson, launched her Save the Children campaign…
Archival Anita Bryant:
In our campaign, we talk about the danger of the homosexual becoming a role model to our children. I’m not talking necessarily of child molestation in the physical. I’m talking about the psychological, which is even more detrimental.
Julie:
In 2008, it was evoked by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who portrayed herself as a “mama grizzly”…
Archival Sarah Palin:
No the mama grizzlies, they rear up. And you know if you thought pit bulls were tough, well you don’t wanna mess with the mama grizzlies, and I think there are a whole lot of those in this room.
Julie:
To understand how this image of motherhood became so ingrained in right-wing politics… we’re going back to the birth of the modern conservative movement. And explore the role that white, stay at home moms played in its creation.
Because the truth is, the movement would never have grown into the political powerhouse it became without the "housewife activism" of Bea and many others like her.
Our story for this episode starts in the years following the end of World War II.
Michelle Nickerson :
There were several kind of converging developments in American history at the time.
Julie:
That’s Michelle Nickerson. She’s a professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago, where she specializes in women and conservatism.
Michelle Nickerson:
One of the most important was McCarthyism and the fear of communism in the United States.
Julie:
It was the height of the Cold War.
Archival PSA:
In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing.
Julie:
There were embargoes, psychological warfare, espionage rings, and a Space Race. By the early 1950s, the Red Scare had much of the U.S. in its claws.
Archival PSA:
If he openly declares himself a communist, we take his word for it.
Michelle Nickerson:
It had actually become a political movement in and of itself, where people joined organizations to fight communism, to try and find communists in their community.
Archival PSA:
If a person consistently reads and advocates the views expressed in a communist publication, he may be a communist
Julie:
You might think of this as an era where politicians like Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee were publicly weeding out communists.
But what actually happened was much more expansive…and insidious. Witch hunts for subversives broke out across the U.S.
Archival:
But there are other communists who don’t show their real faces, who work more silently
Julie:
Individuals saw themselves as personally responsible for national security. And many of the people who took up this mantle… were mothers.
Michelle Nickerson:
Women saw themselves as, you know, that person with their foot in the door that would prevent the danger from entering the household like that they were the last stop against that infection of ideas.
Lisa McGirr:
These are largely women who identify primarily as wives and mothers. They are stay at home moms. They see themselves as the safeguards of their children's future. And, you know, they have the time.
Julie:
Lisa McGirr is a professor of history at Harvard, where she’s an expert on the social history of politics. You also heard her at the top of this episode.
Lisa McGirr:
I mean, they say the men were off to work. We have the time to safeguard freedom. And they saw it as their duty and obligation to do so.
Julie:
At the same time, the U.S. was in the middle of an economic boom. And what this financial golden era created… was an obsession with what historians like Michelle call Post-war Domesticity.
Michelle Nickerson:
So there was this kind of middle class celebration of the nuclear family, and an urge to go back to a time of tranquility and traditional living. So many women chose to be stay-at-home mothers, they called themselves housewives. And they, you know, decided that raising children was not only important, but it was really just all they, they thought that they should focus their attention on. But then of course, reality intervenes.
Julie:
That reality was… many of these newfound housewives were not entirely satisfied.
During World War II, women had entered the workforce in huge waves, filling in for men who’d gone overseas. For four years, women had fueled the American economy – and then, when the men came back, these women were expected to… just go home.
Being a housewife was rebranded as a career – a life’s purpose. But a lot of women wanted their purpose to extend beyond raising their families.
Michelle Nickerson:
So there was a lot of soul searching, especially among women who had a degree of affluence, et cetera. And the weird thing I found is that unlike Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, and so many other women who became feminists, these women instead took their conservative ideas and their fears of communism and followed those into American politics. And they became grassroots activists, um, who directed their attention on finding communists…
Julie:
Right in their own towns and cities.
A new kind of conservative mother was emerging. She was educated and deeply invested in her kids’ lives. She was staunchly anti-communist – which was shorthand for anti-liberal. She was a protector. She was, to quote Maurice Cunningham from our last episode – A Mama Bear. But not just any mama bear…
Michelle Nickerson:
Because women were closer to children, because women spent more of their daily hours in their homes, in the schools, and in the community, they felt like they could see a problem brewing long before men could. Women believed they had a special instinct, there was something unique about women that made them able to see communism and see subversion and dangers in their midst. Like that to be a mother was to have some kind of maternal instinct that allowed you to, um, tune in to pick up on signs of trouble that men couldn't.
Julie:
Schools became the natural focal point for these mothers to exercise their special instincts. With the Red Scare raging all around them, they became convinced that communists – masquerading as left-wing thinkers – were trying to harm their kids.
The danger of what was called “progressive education” became something of a bat signal for these new conservative moms.
Michelle Nickerson:
When we're talking about communism, we're talking about race integration, right? The belief that, integrating black and white students together is a form of social subversion. It's dangerous, and the people who are promoting it are radicals.
Julie:
Of course, integration wasn’t being masterminded by communist radicals. But society was changing. Then, like now, a group of white mothers positioned themselves to defend the status quo. It was a backlash movement. Just like today.
But what made this newfound activism so powerful was that it tapped into…something deep. A fear of harm being done to children. And an image of mothers as having something of a superpower. The ability to sense danger – and snuff it out. Even if you can’t stomach what these mothers were fighting for, there is something…quite relatable in how they positioned themselves.
Look, I don’t think moms have an innate ability to suss out danger. But do I think you experience one of the most extreme forms of vulnerability … when you become a parent. Because you can’t protect your child from everything. So there’s a very understandable desire to try to control what you can to maximize their safety —- even if it’s sometimes, or often, just an illusion.
So, all of these elements – the Red Scare, the dissatisfied housewives, the budding ideas about women and conservatism – they all came to a head in Southern California, in the 1960s – where the word of the decade… was New.
Lisa McGirr:
Orange County was a very new booming region in the fifties, sixties and seventies. It was undergoing profound growth.
Julie:
Here’s Lisa McGirr again. Before World War II, Orange County was a community of small towns, farms, and ranches.
Lisa McGirr:
And it's really the military expansion of the defense industries and military bases during World War II, and then the defense industry and the wake of the war with the Cold War that the county undergoes tremendous growth. So basically the population of Orange County doubles between, uh, 1960 and 1970 and doubles again thereafter. So we're talking about a massive population boom.
Julie:
This wave of California migrants was fairly homogenous. White, upwardly mobile, and from older, more traditional parts of the country. And with this big surge of new residents came a need to build. Quickly.
New houses. New highways. Everything was being developed from the ground up. And that kind of growth was being led by former ranchers and private developers who had a very particular kind of vision for what Orange County should be. A bastion for private enterprise, private property, and individual rights.
They made this a reality by embedding those conservative ideals into the built environment. Very few public spaces. Decentralized neighborhoods. Urban sprawwwwwl. The ultimate suburbs.
Lisa McGirr:
And so very little sense of community. So these men and women sort of just starting to raise families coming into these new places were really hungry, I think, for establishing roots and establishing new communities
Julie:
Remember Bea Gathright, that woman from Iowa? She was one of several women that Lisa McGirr interviewed for her book, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. And her story is a great example of what happened to many women in the OC.
By the early 1960s, Bea is a young mom, in a new Orange County housing development. She’s thousands of miles from where she grew up – just like most of her neighbors. Everyone there has been uprooted. Everyone is looking for connection.
And then one day, a friend asks if she can host a gathering on Bea’s patio. With a featured speaker talking about the communist threat to America. Suddenly, a lightbulb goes off for Bea.
Lisa McGirr:
I think it's a sense of the speakers kind of providing a set of explanations around developments that are occurring in both the schools and in California more broadly. And number one, the sort of liberalism within the school curriculum. Number two, what's beginning to happen up at Berkeley. What the conservative movement provides for these women is an explanation for why.
Julie:
An explanation for why public school classrooms are suddenly looking, and sounding, so different. Why thousands of students up in Berkeley are staging massive sit-ins and causing chaos in the name of free speech. Of course, none of this was in the Communist manifesto. But for women like Bea, conservatism made it clear who was responsible…
Lisa McGirr:
And therefore how one could protect oneself against it.
Julie:
And it not only changed her mind – it inspired her to act. Armed with this new knowledge, Bea became an activist. And she also took on a new identity – she, and the other women sitting around her patio, were conservatives.
More after the break.
[Midroll]
Julie:
Back to Orange County.
When Bea and other women were waking up to their newfound political identities, the word “conservative” was still very new – at least, in the way we understand it today.
It had really only entered the lexicon around 1958. Here’s Michelle Nickerson again.
Michelle Nickerson:
Before that, it's really just a small group of intellectuals who are trying to push the word conservative, um, really to describe what at one point was called liberal. You know, the liberals of the early 20th century were the people who were fighting the welfare state and who were championing economic freedom. But then they found that that word was hijacked during the depression era by the supporters of Roosevelt. And so the word liberal moved to the left. So these intellectuals started pushing the word conservative to imagine who they were. And then when Barry Goldwater published “Conscience of a Conservative” in the late 1950s, then all of a sudden it took off. And, suddenly, they had a movement.
Julie:
In 1958, Barry Goldwater was a senator from Arizona. Today, he’s known as a founder of modern conservatism.
Michelle Nickerson:
And so where they once called themselves, uh, Patriots or patriotic women, or they, really didn't have a way of describing their importance other than they were fighting communism as they saw it. Now, they were conservatives.
Julie:
Communism became something of a decoder ring for these women – shift your perspective juuuust right, and the world suddenly clicks into focus. You are not just a mom, scared for your children, in a rapidly changing world – you are a conservative. And you are not alone.
These new suburban warriors in California found common cause with another powerful force in the fledgling conservative movement: the John Birch Society.
Today, the John Birch Society is known for being an extremely right wing fringe group.
Over the years, they’ve fanned conspiracy theories about communists putting fluoride in our water, integration being the gateway to a global, Soviet government, and the existence of semi-secret, international cabal of left-wing politicians. But back then, they were still finding their footing.
The same year that Barry Goldwater wrote his book…. a businessman by the name of Robert Welch decided to take on all things anti-American. Which meant: communist. He assembled a crew of midwestern manufacturers and industrialists, and began creating a conservative syllabus. Complete with literature, resources, speakers…
Lisa McGirr:
That help to basically mold what is, I'd say, a fairly amorphous discontent, but nonetheless, a discontent with issues around what children are being taught in schools with issues around increasing penetration of liberal ideas.
Julie:
Here’s Lisa McGirr again.
Lisa McGirr:
But the John Birch Society serves as a force to bring together and to provide a kind of framework and explanation for what is wrong with the nation, and also a kind of solution of how to guard against it.
Julie:
Sun Belt suburban women were the perfect audience for the John Birch Society. The organization gave them a container for their activism. A structure. A way to get engaged.
Lisa McGirr:
They sometimes went around together to do precinct work with their children when they weren't off to school. So they had a set of networks – a lot of this activity took place in homes in the suburbs, at kitchen tables, at bridge clubs, on patios and backyard barbecues. So it was a really home-based, movement. Uh, and women were largely those obviously in the home, uh, who had the time to do the letter envelope, stuffing, letter writing, and precinct signing. So they were really, in many ways, the foot soldiers, uh, in this mobilization. And in fact, there was one study of the John Birch Society in California in the 1960s, which showed that women were actually disproportional within the rank and file even though there were far fewer, at the ranks of the kind of leadership level.
Julie:
But this wasn’t a one-way relationship. The women of the OC – women like Bea – and the John Birch society fed off one another. The John Birchers legitimized all the fears that these women had been harboring. And these women, these mothers, these suburban warriors – they gave a homegrown, grassroots, moralist face to the society’s agenda.
Lisa McGirr:
So the, there's an intersection between the grassroots and this national conservative movement that is really very important to understanding how this mobilization unfolds. One needed the other.
Julie:
One of the first big mobilizations happened in 1960, involving, what else – school board meetings.
As Lisa documents in her book… It all started when Joe Dvorman, a school board trustee, hosted a meeting for the OC chapter of the ACLU in his backyard. Word spread – quickly. Joe was already an outsider in the suburban scene. He was from New York, Jewish and liberal. Even worse, the meeting was about abolishing local chapters of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Joe’s association with the ACLU could only signal one thing: communism.
Someone wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, outraged that this kind of meeting was happening under their noses. The suburban warriors heard the call – and came running.
They stormed school board meetings, demanding that Joe tell them whether he was a communist. They formed committees dedicated to removing him. They rang doorbells, they circulated petitions. A women’s auxiliary force was created to flex power within the school district. Within a year, they’d recalled not just Joe, but two other liberal trustees. All three spots were filled by conservative replacements.
In 1964, riding a wave of local successes like this one, the OC suburban warriors…. went national, when they set their sights on a presidential nominee. And they found their man in that senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater.
Goldwater Campaign song:
In your heart you know he’s right.. So go Goldwater, let’s go Goldwater, let’s go Goldwater all the way! Just make a note to cast your vote for Mr. USA. Goldwater!
Lisa McGirr:
For these men and women, when they saw that Goldwater basically well had a chance of winning the Republican party presidential nomination, they had a chance of perhaps shifting the direction of the nation by bringing one of their own into, Washington politics.
Archival Goldwater Speech:
The task of preserving and enlarging freedom at home, and of safeguarding it from the forces of tyranny abroad is great enough to challenge all our resources and to require all our strength.
Lisa McGirr:
They moved from the kind of localist mobilization to one that was far more strategic in connecting to Republican party politics through, in particular the California Republican Assembly.
Archival Goldwater Speech:
Let our republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.
Lisa McGirr:
And in 64, it's really the kind of incredible energies of these grassroots foot soldiers that holds really on their kitchen tables, you know, sort of get people to sign, basically to have Goldwater succeed in becoming the nominee.
Archival News Reporter:
Barry Goldwater Jr., and the candidate’s three other children work in a campaign that’s notable for participation by families of all candidates. Also pitching in to help is Peggy Goldwater. Though by nature the shyest of all the contenders’ wives, she, with or without her husband or children makes public appearances where she thinks it might further the cause.
Lisa McGirr:
They go to San Francisco and they have generated such a strong mobilization that Goldwater wins over Nelson Rockefeller, who was the far more moderate Republican. And of course, California was a very large state, very significant, and put Goldwater over the top to become the Republican nominee in 1964.
Goldwater Campaign Ad:
In your heart, you know he’s right. Vote for Barry Goldwater.
Julie:
Goldwater’s nomination proved that grassroots organizing, fueled by suburban mother foot soldiers… worked. And even though he didn’t win the general election – in fact, he lost by a landslide, to Lyndon Johnson – conservatives doubled down on those tactics.
And repurposed them – over and over again – until they orchestrated a complete takeover of the Republican Party.
Even more importantly, what these forces – the suburban organizing, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater campaign – solidified was an ideology – one that’s still alive and well. It framed mothers as not just protectors of children – but as defenders of freedom. It villainized big government and planted fears that those in power – elites – were out to indoctrinate kids.
It also validated moms – or at least a certain kind of mom – and gave them a larger purpose.
Do you sense something is wrong, even if you can’t quite name it? Follow that hunch. Tell your friends. Tell their friends. Tell the people at the school board meetings. At the neighborhood barbecue. In the parking lot, after church.
This final space, church, eventually became integral to the Orange County suburban warriors– and to the larger conservative movement.
In the 1960s, a new kind of church began dotting the coast of California. They were bigger. More modern. These megachurches integrated folk music into their services. Hosted Bible studies. Sold Christian-themed consumer goods. That longing for community, for a gathering space, finally had a real place to land.
But these new churches weren’t just different in style. They also preached a more conservative theology. And as the Evangelical movement blossomed, that theology was mainstreamed. And politicized.
Lisa McGirr:
Evangelical conservative churches provided a kind of sense of an answer in the word of God, of kind of moral absolutes, a sense of security, I think, in an insecure world. And their conservative theology basically pointed in a very conservative political direction. So by the 1970s, what were kind of concerns over, you know, sort of social change and the demise of these older sets of values, whether it be traditional roles for men and women concerns over shifting gender roles and women's liberation, gay rights, and of course, abortion. By the late 1970s, they mobilized nationally into public view and into politics, through the moral majority.
Julie:
When Ronald Reagan arrived on the scene – first as governor of California, then as a presidential candidate – these forces merged. The anti-communist John Birchers and Moral Majority megachurchers found common ground with economic libertarians. Together, they elected a president, and established themselves as a serious political machine.
Over the course of 40 years, fueled by millions of dollars, this coalition moved fringe ideas into the political mainstream and embedded themselves in all branches of government—at the local, state, and federal levels.
Which brings us back to today. And to the emergence of groups like Moms for Liberty. When you understand this history, it’s easy to see Moms for Liberty as just a modern-day reincarnation of the OG suburban warriors. After all, their rhetoric is sometimes eerily familiar.
Michelle Nickerson:
I remember that, you know, I was in the kitchen, I was doing the dishes
Julie:
Recently, Michelle Nickerson was listening to the radio, and a story about Moms for Liberty and their fear mongering around Critical Race Theory came on.
Michelle Nickerson:
And I remember, putting down the, the towel and then, you know, getting quiet so I could just listen and a little bit more closely. And I, it just kind of hit me kind of like, a blue streak through my head. Like, it was like, oh my God. Like that's progressive education. It's a similar way of conceptualizing a particular change or conspiracy theory by co-opting a word, right. And changing the meaning of that word. So, um, and I realized that it, you know, it was something that I saw recapitulated several times over in the movements that I study and, and even today, um, taking a word or a term and almost kind of weaponizing it by layering other meanings on it.
Julie:
As chilling as today’s backlash movement is -– it’s helpful to see the parallels. And to understand this is a long-standing force in our politics
But in order to fully understand this moment, we also need to look to the future. And understand where this style of conservative mothers’ activism is trying to take us. The scary thing is – It’s bigger than dismantling public education. This is a movement that is trying to build an ethno-nationalist state. And it’s not going to let a little thing like democracy stand in its way.
If you don't believe me... well, all you have to do is take a look at what's happening a few thousand miles away, in Hungary, where there's a leader who is doing...just that. All under the veneer of honoring motherhood and so-called traditional families. We'll get to that... next week!
White Picket Fence is a Wonder Media Network production. Our producers are Maddy Foley and Taylor Williamson with production support from Abbey Delk. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Executive Producer is Jenny Kaplan. Original music by Sean Petell.
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