Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right.

Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right. By Catherine E. Rymph. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2006. Pp. xvi, 338. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5652-5; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2984-6.)

In their 1990 book, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA (New York), Donald G. Mathews and Jane De Hart suggested that advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment could have looked back at the battle for woman suffrage to gain insight into their opposition. In her book on Republican Party women, Catherine E. Rymph argues that the intervening sixty years of women's political activism is crucial to understanding the rise of conservatism. Focusing on the efforts of Republican women to influence national and party policy, Rymph reveals that the political choices made by enfranchised women, working as citizens and party members, resulted in an array of political strategies--strategies complicated by gender roles and tensions between professional party women and volunteer women. These conflicts between Republican women helped shape the Republican Party's post-World War II platform, and its response to feminism and grassroots conservative women became instrumental in moving the Republican Party to the right in the 1980s.

Rymph charts the role of these partisan women by comparing the leaders, members, and policies of the Republican National Convention's Women's Division and the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW). Seeking access to party elite and the opportunity for a political career, the Women's Division wanted women integrated within the party structure. They also were less conservative than the NFRW. The NFRW sought to maintain women-specific organizations, often to the dismay of their leaders, articulating their politics in crusading terms that celebrated women's disinterestedness and moral superiority. Federation women upheld women's place in the home and claimed that women's politics were a natural outgrowth of their maternal and domestic concerns. As Federation women remained more conservative than the party, these tensions between gender ideologies and the party continued into the 1960s. Even in the 1970s, however, Republican feminists still felt that Republican individualism was a natural fit with feminist politics. The unpredictable rise of Phyllis Schlafly gave voice to Republican women who had long believed they were doing the "the housework of government" for the party but that their conservative views on women's equality and foreign and domestic policy were ignored by the party's liberal elite.

Rymph contends that women throughout this period were the party's central grassroots activists. They built partisan networks among women and youth, disseminated literature, and went door-to-door, and during the cold war, the importance of their political housework grew. As the Republican Party silenced its feminists in the 1980s, it also adopted a more feminized style of politics in line with the crusading style of Federation women. Thus, women's political housework and the Federation's devotion to a particular vision of gender politics gave rise to modern American conservatism.

Rymph convincingly builds the relationship between Republican women's entrance into politics, their ideas of womanhood, and the party's antifeminism. This historical development, however, also paralleled the dismissal of black Republican women--loyal party members--from the party's ranks. Rymph acknowledges that the party got whiter but does not substantially examine the relationship between race and Republican gender ideologies. When some southern white women joined the Democrats for Eisenhower campaign in 1952, they found a political home for their ideas about womanhood, motherhood, whiteness, and politics. While this example might be beyond the scope of the book, it suggests that it is necessary to understand the gendered language of antifeminist, conservative women in conjunction with the racialized language of motherhood and womanhood to fully understand women's contributions to the rise of the right.

ELIZABETH GILLESPIE MCRAE

Western Carolina University