Right-Wing Women

Four years ago, a French exchange student taking my module on women's history approached me to say that she was reading Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin, and had I heard of her? There's nothing more infectious than intellectual excitement in a young person, so I dusted off my preconceptions about Andrea and began re-reading, and teaching Dworkin. I have since appreciated how she makes students pay attention - her memorable phrase 'The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too' is just the right side of provocative for Gen Zs bored with sex-positivity. It is those belonging to an older generation who, while appreciating Dworkin's style, often proceed to explain how wrong she was. Progressives admire the 'ringing, prophetic quality' of Dworkin's prose but conclude that she failed to come to the correct conclusions on prostitution, pornography and male violence. Conservatives see the attraction of her 'uncompromising' and 'utterly sincere' views but warn readers that 'Dworkin was the enemy of a few bad things and every good thing'. And yet they cannot leave her alone, perhaps because she put her finger on aspects of women's lives that are genuinely painful or difficult to analyse.

For historians, one such difficult phenomenon has been the sizeable number of women on the right of the political spectrum, from those who were drawn to anti-feminism or religious fundamentalism to those on the hard right, embracing antisemitism, nativism, fascism, white supremacy and similar ideologies, ideologies that shaped both domestic and foreign relations. In the interwar United States, perhaps as many as one million women aligned themselves with radical right organisations (Benowitz 2002, 174). Women in these movements opposed US intervention in World War II and in some cases supported fascist regimes. What were their motivations? To answer this question, historians have engaged with Right-Wing Women and its psychological explanations. Dworkin argued that right-wing women were dependent on men for protection, needed to 'survive somehow on male terms' and projected the anxiety and rage caused by men who hurt them on groups designated as external threats. 'Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols …' (Dworkin 1983, 34).

Glen Jeansonne, author of a classic study of women in the US far right, put forward a more nuanced narrative. He suggested that Dworkin was wrong in her assumption of 'a male conspiracy to enslave women' and her ascribing of a false consciousness. At the same time, Jeansonne speculated that it was indeed the 'furies within', insufficiently rationalised frustration and lack of agency, that 'overcame' women of the far right (Jeansonne 1996, 186). Julie Gottlieb, an authority on right-wing British women, similarly critiques Dworkin for her assumption that her actors were brainwashed by men (Gottlieb 2018, 91). But, Gottlieb has written elsewhere, historians are left 'with the thorny question of how women can support political movements that negate all humanitarian instinct, relegate them once again to the domestic sphere, and place a premium on their role of breeding sons for future wars' (Gottlieb 2004, 106). Yet again, Dworkin is vindicated for asking the right questions, without necessarily providing the answers. 

For historians of international thought, these questions also matter. Although right-wing women's international thought may not seem like an obvious candidate for recovery (especially to those for whom recovery should be limited to worthy subjects), it is an important aspect of women's intellectual production, first, due to the undeniable political influence it had, and second, because its analysis remedies the erasure of women's international thought in all its diversity. Such recovery work also resonates in the contemporary context of a global resurgence of right-wing movements, sometimes under the leadership of women and often intensely concerned with gender. And yet, the not infrequent proximity of some of this thought to conspiracy theory makes it difficult to take seriously and to analyse on its own terms - though one might add that this has not kept scholars from methodically scrutinising and evaluating Lothrop Stoddard's or Carl Schmitt's intellectual output. But women such as the American Mid-Westerner Elizabeth Dilling who amassed a large, far-right following with her sloppily compiled and paranoia-ridden tracts can hardly be regarded as complex thinkers (Jeansonne 1996, 17-27).

However, this is not the case for all American women who were 'rightward-bound'. Take, for instance, Lucille Cardin Crain, a minor figure in the right-wing mobilisation of white American women after World War II. Crain's background does not quite conform to the caricature of the white American nativist whose projection of fear and hatred on an 'other' underlay any concern with war and international politics. Born in 1901 in French Canada, Crain migrated to the United States as a child, coming of age at a time when her Catholic faith would have placed her just outside the '100% Americanism' embraced by the racist and xenophobic organisations that flourished in the 1920s United States. Crain became an anti-New Dealer, advocating for small government, and had links to the libertarian Ayn Rand. Just before US entry into World War II Crain founded a taxpayer rights organisation, We, the People, Inc. but soon began to join the anti-communist crusade (Benowitz 2002, 125-6; 147-148).

In the late 1940s, Crain moved from the now familiar 'fusionist' combination of economic libertarianism and anti-communism to a distinctive gendered analysis of foreign policy formation in the post-World War II United States. In 1948, Crain and her co-author Anne Burrows Hamilton made waves with their pamphlet Packaged Thinking for Women. The extent to which international questions appear as a salient dividing line in the document is remarkable. The pamphlet denounced the alleged bias of mainstream US women's organisations that committed their members to an internationalist and interventionist foreign policy. Crain and Hamilton claimed that these organisations abused their position. Rather than emancipating women, and giving them a voice, they narrowly circumscribed foreign policy positions that were appropriate for women as international citizens (Rietzler 2022, 109-111). It is not necessary to agree with Crain's and Hamilton's analysis to acknowledge that it was concerned with fundamental questions about the making of foreign policy in mass democracies, the domestic and international dimensions of gendered citizenship, and the role of public opinion in international politics.

Crain and Hamilton did indulge in red-baiting, targeting a broad swathe of liberal institutions ranging from the Federal Council of Churches to the League of Women Voters, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Foreign Policy Association, all of which they portrayed as subversive agents of indoctrination. Crain and Hamilton thus critiqued and potentially undermined the institutional structures that made intellectual production possible for many of the women international thinkers that have been 'recovered' in the last few years, and indeed, mentioned in Packaged Thinking for Women: the civil rights activist Eslanda Robeson, the novelist Pearl S. Buck and the think tank researcher Vera Micheles Dean. (Crain & Hamilton 1948, 16, 20, 22). That means that Crain and Hamilton, too, matter for the ongoing process of recovery and the historical reconstruction of processes of intellectual erasure of women's international thought. At the same time, it is hard to regard them straightforwardly as easily manipulated 'haters', motivated by a fear of men, especially when they exhorted right-wing women to question and query what was presented to them as conventional wisdom.

There is one female figure analysed in Right-Wing Women that does have a great deal of agency: Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative crusader against the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. Dworkin, who, in the late 1980s found some common ground with Schlafly as they both opposed pornography, paid her grudging respect. Ruthless and 'cold-blooded', she was 'that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls … It is likely that her ambition is to use women as a constituency to effect entry into the upper echelon of right-wing male leadership.' (Dworkin 1983, 29, 30) If this was indeed a conscious strategy, it did not, as Dworkin was well aware, work out for Schlafly, and neither did it work out for those liberal and progressive women who were singled out by Crain and Hamilton. Oddly, for a writer writing with such conviction, Dworkin was reluctant to acknowledge similar intellectual and ideological commitment in other women. How wrong she was.

References:

Andrews, Helen. 'Andrea Dworkin Didn't Care', Compact, 6 May 2022.

Benowitz, June M. Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933-1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).

Crain, Lucille Cardin; Hamilton, Anne Burrows. 'Packaged Thinking for Women', American Affairs, Supplement to Autumn 1948 issue.

Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (London: The Women's Press, 1983).

Gottlieb, Julie V. 'Modes and Models of Conservative Women's Leadership in the 1930s', in Julie V. Gottlieb and Clarisse Berthezène, eds., Rethinking Right-Wing Women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the Present, edited by (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 89-103.

Gottlieb, Julie V. 'Right-Wing Women in Women's History: A Global Perspective: Introduction', Journal of Women's History 16, no. 3 (2004): 106-7.

Jeansonne, Glen. Women of the Far Right: The Mother's Movement and World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Rietzler, Katharina. '"Mrs Sovereign Citizen": Women's International Thought and American Public Culture, 1920s-1950s', in Christopher McKnight Nichols & David Milne, eds., Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 92-111).

Srinivasan, Amia. 'Andrea Dworkin's Conviction', London Review of Books, 6 October 2022.