Challenge & Change: Right-Wing Women, Grassroots Activism & the Baby Boom Generation By June Melby Benowitz

Abstract

June Melby Benowitz’s insightful book explores the issues that contributed to the rise of the New Right. During the early postwar years, the right-wing women who are the subject of this study tried to halt and reverse transformations in racial, sexual, and moral politics. Benowitz shows the creation of a vast network of women, often loosely connected, who felt threatened by what they saw as moral decay, communism, secularism, an expanding government, and an increasingly influential intellectual and scientific elite. What motivated these women and identified them as a political subset was their shared belief in the underlying cause of post-war change—conspiracy. But, as Benowitz demonstrates, these women found ways to expand their campaigns to those who did not share their conspiratorial view, and in doing so they helped form a bridge between the Old Right and New Right, even helping to explain the Tea Party of today.