The women of Mountain Brook and the politics of culture: Elite southern women from Reconstruction to political realignment in Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1980

The Women of Mountain Brook explores the formation of a class and how that class preserved its self in times of threat to its interest. The focus is on the cultural politics of a small group of affluent white women in an atypical Alabama community overlooking Birmingham, Alabama. Mountain Brook women are central to and bound by ancestral heritage, kinship, and a common history. Theirs is a kinship dynasty that encompasses several generations.; Mountain Brook women's important contribution to benevolent institutions never undermined the community's economic prosperity, resting as it did on racial and political stability. Affluent women in individual churches and private agencies actively cared for the poor while business leaders demonstrated a remarkable lack of concern, causing charity a "women's fad".; The onset of economic depression and political insurgency in the 1930's led to the establishment of the Community Chest, a top down organization led by the most powerful men and women of Birmingham. The paternalism synonymous with the Chest began to fade with the passage of the Wagner Act and more prosperous times for the white middle class.; Mountain Brook opposed the New Deal and subsequent reform legislation as an affront to their right to determine priorities. Ordinary Alabamians gratefully supported the New Deal and determined efforts to dismantle if on the part of the Mountain Brook Big Mules failed.; In the years between Brown versus the Board of Education and the election of Ronald Reagan, Mountain Brook women emerged as powerful political leaders, and succeeded where the Big Mules had failed. As formidable opponents of civil rights and feminist movements, the women of Mountain Brook, wise in the politics of culture, forged a movement uniting white Evangelical Christians, the major beneficiaries of the New Deal, with the corporate interests of their men, the Big Mules of Mountain Brook.