Playing the Mother Card for Fascism

Glen Jeansonne’s investigation of the “America First” mothers’ movement, a massive network of ultraright isolationist women’s organizations that flourished in the Midwest and on both coasts from 1939 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is an informative and often shocking book. It is also a welcome corrective to the popular notion that almost everyone in the United States supported “the good fight,” and to the tendency in women’s peace studies to assume that female peace protest is always on the side of the angels.

Male right-wing isolationists of the 1930s, led by Father Coughlin and Gerald K. Smith, have received a good deal of study, and women’s peace history has become a rap...