Review

This monograph about right-wing American women and political activism during the Great Depression and World War II applies "jargon-free" gender and class analysis to a little known phenomenon in social history. Some of the material in Days of Discontent was previously explored in Glen Jeansonne's book, Women of the Far Right: The Mother's Movement and World War II (Chicago University Press, 1996). Jeansonne linked the mother's movement to male extremist leaders he had previously written about. Benowitz, who acknowledges her debt to Jeansonne's earlier study, approaches the topic from the perspective of women's history and women's movements. It is this perspective, enriched by her broad grasp of women's history and combined with an extensive use of primary source material, which renders Days of Discontent an invaluable addition to United States social history. Students and teachers of United States women's history will find the book indispensable. It should be mandatory reading for all instructors of United States history and would be excellent collateral reading for students in advanced courses and seminars.	1
June Melby Benowitz has previously written about American women and religion. In this study, she has gone beyond using the surveillance files of the FBI, an admittedly rich source, to the papers of individual right-wing women leaders found in state historical records, the Eleanor Roosevelt collection, and the papers of the Boston and Minnesota Jewish Community Councils. This wide range of materials provides rich details of the lives of several of the leading conservative women and makes the case that often complex personal and political factors led women to join right-wing movements. For example, Elizabeth Dilling, a self-published author and lecturer and early anticommunist, grew up in a fatherless home with a breadwinner mother. Dilling took a direct route to the right and never deviated from her conservative Christian beliefs, despite her own marriage ending in divorce. She was an unremitting anticommunist, an anti-Semite and isolationist. These beliefs were predominant themes of the right-wing politics of the period and held by many of the women discussed in Days of Discontent. However, not all the right-wing women described in this book were consistent reactionaries like Dilling. Some, like Cathrine Curtis, were economic conservatives angered by the government expansion of the New Deal. Others, like divorcee Grace Wick, turned from earlier liberal positions to right-wing politics when she encountered economic hardship. In 1935 she marched as "one of the forgotten women of the New Deal" on the Portland, Oregon streets clad in a lace trimmed barrel to advertise her plight. In general, the right-wing women leaders were from the upper middle or upper classes in American society; were middle-aged (in their forties or fifties) when the New Deal occurred; had reached adulthood when suffrage was granted; were intelligent, well-educated and sometimes professionals. Benowitz observes that the characteristics of these women were not dissimilar from women leaders of mainstream organizations except for their different politics and conservative Christian beliefs. The issues which did separate right-wing women from mainstream were extreme anti-Semitism, racism and paranoia.(p. 116)	2
An invaluable section of this study is the chapter given to examining mainstream women's thought in this period through women's magazines, National Women's Party records, and letters written to Eleanor Roosevelt and others. What is so striking in this construct of the era is its climate of social and political conservatism. Mainstream women shared in the isolationist beliefs of the period. Many of them expressed sentiments of religiosity, anti-Semitism, anticommunism, racism and nativism. Their widespread belief in peace and neutrality and anxiety over approaching war led thousands of American mainstream women to join in the mother's peace organizations led by the far-right. After the Pearl Harbor attack, women's membership in these organizations declined. Benowitz explores the gender-based rhetoric of the mother's movement and leaders. Can we call these women feminists? Jeansonne had concluded that since none of these women challenged patriarchy or authority they were not feminists. While an accurate observation, he leaves much unsaid. They clearly wanted to enlarge woman's sphere and many believed in woman's moral superiority and had supported the earlier suffrage movement. While Benowitz observes that these women were too narrow and elitist to be called feminist, she observes the materialism at the root of their ideology and notes its similarity to the beliefs of women in the Klu Klux Klan and in Nazi Germany. In a last chapter on postwar conservatism, the author speculates on the legacy of the earlier right-wing women. Although their voices faded with age, their challenge to changing morality and their fear of government lingered, forming the groundwork for the right-wing leaders who followed.	3
Emerita, State University of New York at Oneonta Joan Smyth Iversen

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.