Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s this book explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation. For decades white women performed duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right.

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women who were active in segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Charleston from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Through her examination, Rebecca Brückmann uncovers and evaluates the roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations of segregationist women in massive resistance in urban and metropolitan settings. Brückmann argues that white women were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy, and they created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. While other studies of mass resistance have focused on maternalism, Brückmann shows that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Through this examination she differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann focuses on the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans that contrasted with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston, who aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Working-class women’s groups chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy.

Impetus for this landmark collection emerged from the extraordinary success of the Moms Gone Mad: Motherhood and Madness Oppression and Resistance International Conference in New York City, 2009. Cultural meanings extolled on motherhood are often overlooked and many women struggle and personalize issues to themselves and remain silent. This anthology synthesizes and roars out marginalized experiences of moms in a culture that relegates unconventional experiences to 'craziness' and her own 'madness'. From a feminist perspective, scholars in motherhood across disciplines and mothers steeped in the experience have come together to capture multifarious experiences of oppression to resistance in a groundbreaking anthology that embodies motherhood empowerment. This book enhances dialogue and revolutionizes our understanding of motherhood constructions and experiences by exploring the underbelly of mothering and subjugated experiences such as women's inhumanity to women and deconstructing notions of 'mommy' in literature/media that are oppressive. Critical examinations of the 'good mother', 'mother-shame', and 'mother-guilt', growing up a daughter of depression, body image and disordered eating in motherhood, postpartum depression are explored as well as experiences such as single motherhood, mothering a child with disability, and childlessness; and perceived anomalies such as losing a child to suicide and postpartum psychosis and more.

This dissertation examines women in the Massive Resistance movement and the Ku Klux Klan of the classic Civil Rights period, 1954-1968. Specifically, it illustrates the way in which these women used their assigned gender roles as women, and specifically as mothers, to further white supremacist goals. White women have been an integral part of white supremacy in the United States from the beginning, yet are rarely portrayed as such. White supremacist movements are most often viewed through a male lens and gender in white supremacy is most often focused on how white men perform gender within the movements. While that is changing, with a growing catalog of scholarship on women in the Second Ku Klux Klan (1915-1929) and racist women in contemporary times, there is still a dearth of research being published on white supremacist women of the Classic Civil Rights period. The works that are available thus far are focused exclusively on the women of the Massive Resistance movement. As women won gains in other areas of society, some translated those gains into the white supremacist movement beginning with the Second Klan, but particularly so with the Third Klan (1954-1979) and the Massive Resistance movement. This work argues that though some women were taking a more public role in the work to promote and preserve white supremacy, that they still did so within carefully constructed gender roles, and in socially acceptable ways. These white women used many pathways to secure the racial hierarchy, but always did so without threatening the sexual hierarchy. These women were satisfied with taking a back seat to the white men in their lives in exchange for the benefits that accrued with white supremacy.

On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. When the court failed to specify a clear deadline for implementation of the ruling, southern segregationists seized the opportunity to launch a campaign of massive resistance against the federal government. What were the tactics, the ideology, the strategies, of segregationists? This collection of original essays reveals how the political center in the South collapsed during the 1950s as opposition to the Supreme Court decision intensified. It tracks the ingenious, legal, and often extralegal, means by which white southerners rebelled against the ruling: how white men fell back on masculine pride by ostensibly protecting their wives and daughters from the black menace, how ideals of motherhood were enlisted in the struggle for white purity, and how the words of the Bible were invoked to legitimize white supremacy. Together these essays demonstrate that segregationist ideology, far from a simple assertion of supremacist doctrine, was advanced in ways far more imaginative and nuanced than has previously been assumed.