Societal Dynamics and Cultural Critiques

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The LA church that produced the freedom story was a fountain of those kinds of beliefs, but it wasn't the only one. Southern California was blossoming into a hotbed of right-wing activity.
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As the aerospace
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industry created new jobs, and as Walt Disney built a theme park, millions poured into suburban towns like Anaheim and Pasadena.
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Southern California is booming.
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Michelle Nickerson is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.
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And what you see is this very educated and affluent population of mostly white transplants who are eager to form new communities to get involved.
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They enjoyed the creature comforts that came with their shiny suburban homes. I just love the convenience and modern styling of this building gas range.
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You know, I'm so proud of it. It's almost indecent of me.
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But even if they embraced the mid-century homemaker ideal, some women wanted more than that. Michelle Nickerson interviewed several of them for her book Mothers of Conservatism.
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More than one woman I talked to said, well, I just didn't want to sit around by the pool all day, or I, you know, I just was not comfortable playing bridge all the time. And I felt as if I had something that I wanted to do for the world.
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Some women went out and joined the workforce, but others found purpose elsewhere.
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I guess I just veered to politics as something exciting to do.
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That's Marie Canig, a Pasadena resident who Nickerson interviewed in 2001.
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I was just a plain-on, narrow patriotic American. And probably the best way to be an American is to get yourself involved in patriotic organizations.
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Canig discovered a community of women just like her. They met up in groups with names like The Freedom Club, The American Public Relations Forum, and The Tuesday Morning Study Club.
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These organizations would meet in people's homes. You might be served coffee. And even though these were not called women's organizations, it was almost always women who showed up. The seats would be lined up in rows, and they would listen to a speaker.
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We Americans don't realize how lucky we've been thus far in avoiding the cold, materialistic, human controls imposed by collectivism, communism, socialism.
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James W. Fifield, the host of The Freedom Story Radio Show, ran one of the clubs.
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I said thus far, but I fear for the future. In fact, there are already signs of decay.
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In gathering after gathering, the message was very clear. A creeping leftist threat was chipping away at American values. And for women like Marie Canig, everything started to click into place. I guess I've
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learned a lot and figured out that there was something peculiar going on in the country.
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These women, they're very concerned about the idea that freedom-loving, ordinary folk are being threatened by dangerous ideas. In
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the 1950s, American society was changing in ways that frightened them.
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They were concerned about immigrants. They were concerned about desegregation. And they found handy explanations for those fears in communism.
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There's the current idea that any social change is almost sure to be an improvement. Communism and socialism are being sold to great masses of people just on that basis.
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Beliefs like these cut across class lines, and they weren't limited to one political party. At this point, the term conservative wasn't even really being used as an identifier. But these women formed the vanguard of what would soon become a powerful national force. And suburban Los Angeles was the perfect place for it to happen.
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California is the home of these new networks of super highways. And what it means is that women with automobiles can move around, and it makes them pretty effective at political organizing.
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To counter the Communist threat,
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California women like Marie Koenig got together in study groups. They held workshops and collaborated on newsletters and leaflets. Practically every minute that didn't take up the laundry and the cooking and the shopping, you know, was involved in all of these organizations.
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Canning believed that women were fulfilling a vital role in the fight against international socialism. Well,
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you know, men don't have time to be running around doing the things that we women do. They don't have time to go and sit and write letters or whatever.
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They see themselves as thoroughly modern women, even though they themselves have chosen a more traditional path.
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They embraced the term housewife as a badge of honor, even if they didn't love the chores. They believed in traditional gender roles and took pride in what they saw as their innate female qualities. Because it was those attributes that made mothers the perfect red hunters.
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Kind of this understanding of a mother's instinct. The notion that women were more patient and attuned to their environment that made them better at recognizing communism as it was unfolding before everyone's eyes.
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The California women saw an opportunity to support the fight in Washington that was being led by Senator Joseph
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McCarthy. It is a
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pattern of deliberate
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communist infiltration.
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Impossible, you say, yes, unbelievable. Yes, but there you have it. It
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is all a matter of cold record.
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McCarthy was on a mission to drive out the subversive's he claimed were hiding in the top ranks of government. The housewife activists saw a threat lurking closer to home. They feared that their communities were falling under the influence of so-called experts. Leftist administrators, academics, and social scientists who were using their authority to gain control of Americans' lives. And as mothers, their most immediate concern was with their children's schools. They
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come to perceive changes happening in the classrooms. They come to see this as communistic and parents are in an uproar.
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They
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were alarmed by teaching methods that emphasized kids' emotional well-being and by the use of educational materials developed by
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the UN. And parents interpret this as a form of indoctrination. So the
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women took action. They wrote into newspapers attacking the new policies and tried to stymie the plans of administrators at every step. Two women ultimately got elected to the Los Angeles School Board. They fought to ban educational material and got teachers fired and blacklisted. They
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realized they actually could do this and it developed a kind of momentum.
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As the housewife activists notched victory after victory, membership in their organizations continued to grow and their tactics started being emulated across the country.

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