The Right-Wing Mothers of Wartime America

Glen Jeansonne describes the anti-war, anti-liberal and antisemitic Mothers’ Movement that attracted a mass following in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

February 1941: Barbara Withrop gives last-minute instructions to volunteers departing for Washington D.C. to protest Lend-Lease.The Second World War broke out as Adolf Hitler’s Panzers rolled into Poland on September 1st, 1939. In the United States there arose a mass movement of women outraged not by Hitler’s atrocities, but by the inclination of the American government to aid those in peril. ‘What this country needs is an American revolution’, declared Agnes Waters, one of their leaders. ‘A good old-fashioned revolution of mothers’.
 

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