White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
Starred review from January 1, 2018
In her debut monograph, historian McRae (history, Western Carolina Univ.) reframes white women's mid-20th-century resistance to desegregation in the American South as one chapter in the long history of women's participation in white supremacist politics after Reconstruction. Challenging historical narratives that marginalize white women's political role, McRae argues that women's work was central to the creation and enforcement of Jim Crow policies and practices. She documents the many ways in which conservative women in the South participated in national and international political networks, helping to weave a white supremacist agenda into the fabric of conservative politics from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, McRae demonstrates how white female social workers, school teachers, registrars, journalists, socialites, and students labored daily to police the color lines within their own communities. Beginning with the passage of the Racial Integrity Act in Virginia (1924) and ending with opposition to school integration in Boston (1974), this work documents how conservative white women fought to preserve a racial order that privileged them, systematically and violently, over their nonwhite neighbors. VERDICT A valuable addition to the politically urgent study of whiteness in American history.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from November 15, 2017
A fresh look at "the story of grassroots resistance to racial equality undertaken by white women" who "took central roles in disciplining their communities according to Jim Crow's rules."For McRae (History/Western Carolina Univ.), whose dissertation and essay in the 2005 anthology Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction mark her long interest in the subject, the story centers on four politically active women: Nell Battle Lewis from North Carolina, Mary Dawson Cain and Florence Sillers Ogden from Mississippi, and Cornelia Dabney Tucker from South Carolina. They were part of a large network of like-minded white women stretching across the South and even to California and Massachusetts. Throughout the book, McRae amply shows the determination and skill of these women in shaping resistance to racial equality through their efforts in social welfare, education, electoral politics, and popular culture. Black-and-white photographs, documents, and excerpts of their writings create a powerful picture of these segregationists at work. (No selections, however, appear from Ogden's newspaper column, "Dis an Dat," written in black dialect as a reminder of the social order she aimed to preserve.) Although the author is a scholar, her writing is free from pedantry and filled with details that will prove eye-opening for many readers. As she notes, female segregationists were the "crucial workforce" of the white supremacy movement, shaping ideas about sex, marriage, motherhood, culture, and education. McRae takes readers from the 1920s, through World War II, the reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and on to the present day, illuminating the connection between white supremacy and the anti-communist crusade of the Cold War, opposition to the United Nations, and the larger conservative political movement.The crystal-clear message of this thoroughly researched and impressively documented book is that white supremacy remains a powerful force in the United States.
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