Defending Their Liberties: Women's Organizations during the McCarthy Era

This dissertation investigates the consequences of the anti-communist fervor on middle-class, white women's organizations between 1945 and 1960. In order to assess the effect of anti-communism on women, this study concentrates on the League of Women Voters of the United States, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Woman's Party, and the American Association of University Women. This approach permits an examination of anti-communism's impact on women on a grass-roots level rather than a focus on prominent women in politics, the arts, and education. My dissertation considers not only how external anti-communist forces encouraged or hindered the efforts of these organizations, but also how these women, collectively and individually, influenced the expression and achievements of McCarthyism. The records of these organizations reveal the extent to which anti-communism shaped the positions and goals of these groups as well as instances in which individual women came under attack from anti-communist and right-wing elements. These records also indicate that certain women and their organizations contributed to McCarthyism and used red-baiting techniques to their own political advantage. Despite the large body of scholarship concerned with the Cold War and McCarthyism, historians have, for the most part, ignored the effect of the anti-communist crusade of the fifties on American women. The role of women's organizations in the anti-communist consensus reveals not only the extent to which McCarthyism pervaded American society, it also contributes to our understanding of women's political cultures after World War II.