Mothers of Massive Resistance
White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy

Chances are, when you think about prejudice and hate, you picture men--hooded klansmen or angry lynch mobs. But women were also involved in the politics of segregation and racism. This book is an exhaustive study of how women in America's South and North interfered to keep segregation the rule of th......more

Mothers of Massive Resistance is an academic examination of the role of activist women have played in fighting for segregation both in law (de jure) and in practice (de facto.) Elizabeth Gillespie McRae examines not only how segregationist laws and Jim Crow relied on women’s participation in enforce......more

It is a difficult thing to take a very close look at yourself and at people like you and accept that those people have done terrible things and you have benefited from those things while others have suffered. There's a tendency to say "But I'M not like that," or "But WOMEN aren't like that" and, wel......more

McRae offers this dense and detailed academic scholarship on the historical role of white women in upholding white supremacy over the last century as a lesson for those of us dedicated to dismantling systems of oppression. I read (err, skimmed) this work as a white woman who knows that it is my resp......more

First-class monograph delving into the deep history of women's involvement with (centrality to) the defense of white supremacy over the middle decades of the 20th century. McRae makes a convincing case that it's a mistake to default to images of redneck racists when imagining the dynamics of white s......more