| This project reinterprets the post-World War I Red Scare. Using legislative debates, organizational disputes and government intelligence actions I argue that anti-radicalism and anti-feminism combined during the Red Scare to position the patriarchal family as the primary bulwark against radicalism. Because anti-radicals increasingly and effectively linked un-Americanism and feminism throughout the 1920s, I argue that when the politics of gender and feminism are taken into consideration, the Red Scare continued well through 1928. In this context, I explore U.S. understandings of Bolshevism, female citizenship and anti-feminism in the post-suffrage decade, conservatism and anti-statism, and the historical roots of political conservatives' concern for family, gender and public policy.;After World War I, United States citizens did not settle into a care-free peace. "Reds," many contended, were not only dangerous but they were around every corner. The Red Scare--as the central phenomenon of this era is called by historians--has generally been understood to be a political event in which gender played no relevant role. Historians have interpreted the period as one in which the majority of U.S. citizens, exhausted by World War I or following cyclical patterns of extreme nativism, perceived a false threat to the security of the United States, reacted in ways contrary to the ideals of democracy. Politics alone, however, provide an unsatisfactory interpretation of the Red Scare. The tenacity with which anti-radicalism continued after the Scare was assumed to be over, the depth to which the Red Scare penetrated U.S. culture, and the intellectual links made during the Scare between feminism and disloyalty suggest that new historical avenues must be explored if we are to have a fuller historical understanding of the Red Scare. My purpose is to broaden the boundaries of the organizational and ideological landscape in order to give a clearer sense of politics' scope, actors, audience, and consequences, while paying particular attention to the reform and welfare legislation of the 1920s. |
