| This dissertation examines the activism and belief systems of conservative women during the 1920s and 1930s. These women, many veterans of the antisuffrage movement, began to create a gendered conservative ideology in the interwar period that I define as patriotic maternalism. Patriotic maternalism is the fusion between a militant patriotism that defended American values and institutions against subversive forces and a sense that motherhood provided women with the unique ability to safeguard American ideals. This study focuses on the largest patriotic group of the interwar period, the Daughters of the American Revolution, as well as a cross-section of the numerous all-female conservative organizations that flourished during the 1920s and 1930s. The primary individual in this study is Elizabeth K. Dilling, a strident anti-New Deal and anticommunist activist in the 1930s. The DAR, Dilling, and other women's groups based their gendered conservative ideology on three traditionally female realms: the home, the school, and the church. Citing their unique interest in protecting children and youth from what they considered hostile "isms"---communism, socialism, pacifism, feminism, and modernism---they acted out their convictions in the public sphere. Conservative women also entered new territory when they began to claim the issue of national defense as a legitimate area for female concern. The Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense was an outgrowth of that concern as well as an important meeting point between female patriotic organizations and their male counterparts. The activism and beliefs of these patriotic maternalists suggest not only a strong ideological continuity with their predecessors, the antisuffragists, but also with their successors, the conservative women of the 1980s and 1990s. |
