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"If social conservatism is not a distinguishing mark of the New Right, what is unique about the New Right is the visible presence of women."-Rebecca Klatch (1)
"McCarthyism got its power from the willingness of the men (few women here) who ran the nation's main public and private institutions to condone serious violations of civil liberties in order to eradicate what they believed was the far more serious danger of Communism."-Ellen Schrecker (2)
Throughout the past two decades, the American historical community has witnessed a renaissance in the study of postwar conservatism. We have come a long way since Alan Brinkley declared the field to be "something of an orphan in historical scholarship" (3). Recent works documenting the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s and studies of conservative intellectual and grassroots movements show us that conservatives actively shaped, rather than merely reacted to, history (4). Nevertheless, the growing subfield of conservative history has its own orphans to contend with, namely women and gender. The largest body of scholarship on women, gender, and the postwar right focuses on antifeminism. Jane DeHart and Donald Mathew's work on Equal Rights Amendment battles, Rebecca Klatch's study of women in the New Right, and Kristin Luker's work on the abortion wars challenge the assumption that conservatism is a male movement. They have also shown the extent to which gender issues drove the New Right agenda (5). But what about the Old Right? What role did women and gender play in McCarthyism and Goldwaterism? As the above quotations from Rebecca Match and Ellen Schrecker suggest, women of the Old Right have been invisible to historians. It is time, however, to address this issue of invisibility and finally answer the question: Did women and gender play important roles or did they not?
A case study of the conservative movement in Los Angeles and its suburbs suggests that yes, women were important actors in the postwar conservative ascendancy. If we look below the surface of formal politics, especially in the conservative stronghold of southern California, we see a very feminine world of grassroots activism. Southern Califonia women show us that postwar gender norms created room for a highly effective female sphere of activism. They also demonstrate that the 1950s...