The Rise of Housewife Populism

Pundits may not be able to agree on whether there is a “War on Women” in Washington, but the current election cycle has made it abundantly clear that women, gender, and family remain fraught topics in national political rhetoric in this country. Women’s voices are audible in these debates among the liberal supporters of President Obama’s proposed “birth control mandate,” and within the ranks of a conservative movement that advocates premarital abstinence and a return to “traditional” gender roles. Yet if the reactions to Michele Bachmann’s belief in wifely submission or Sarah Palin’s identification as a “conservative feminist” are any indication, conservative women are still confounding to many political observers. Michelle Nickerson’s Mothers of Conservatism offers vital historical insight into conservative women and their political significance in the twentieth-century United States.