Gillespie McRae, Elizabeth: Mothers of Massive Resistance

Mothers of Massive Resistance tells the story of how white women shaped racial segregation in the South and postwar conservatism across the nation. Through their work in social welfare, public education, partisan politics, and culture, they created a massive resistance that spanned five decades, and continues to mobilize local communities and survive legislative defeat."In Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's revelatory exploration of mid-century white women's segregationist work, we see how the inheritors of that vision learned to speak in new languages, muted enough to pass in a society increasingly hostile to white supremacy but unmistakable to partisans as a continuation of the long struggle against racial equality....Thinking globally, acting locally, McRae's women...forged coalitions with non-southerners who shared compatible values and outlooks. They learned to frame their opposition to desegregation in terms of ostensibly non-racial threats: federal power, communism, the United Nations, and especially the subversion of traditional family structures."-Stephen Kantrowitz, Boston Review