Politically desperate housewives: women and conservatism in postwar Los Angeles.

As Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower made efforts to liberalize relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, progressive Californians gestured warmly toward Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan during his unofficial visit to the United States in 1959. The trip represented one of several goodwill tours made by the premier as part of Khrushchev's initiative to establish economic ties with the United States and cool the cold war. (1) California's new governor, Edmund "Pat" Brown, greeted Mikoyan heartily, suggesting that the superpowers convene another peace conference in his home state under redwood trees. (2) Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, hosted a dinner for Mikoyan that included distinguished Los Angeles civic leaders, business executives, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, the former mayor of Los Angeles, and spouses. (3)

The welcome wagon greeting Mikoyan infuriated others. In New York and Los Angeles, Hungarian demonstrators met his plane to remind television viewers of Soviet atrocities committed against their countrymen in the failed revolution of 1956. (4) A group of conservative women in southern California, meanwhile, prepared to express their opposition in the more personal style they had cultivated from their living rooms. The Network of Patriotic Letter Writers coordinated a campaign against Eric Johnston's dinner guests. The secretary of one network cell tracked down their addresses and assigned each of her members to a different guest. Marie Koenig of Pasadena received instructions to send a note of protest to Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Brayton of the Brayton Ellis Company at their home in Hillsborough, California. (5)

The Pasadena-based Network of Patriotic Letter Writers was one of many activist groups that flourished in southern California during the 1950s and 1960s. Even as moderate civil rights forces gained ground and liberals won key offices throughout the region, the right thrived alongside the left. (6) Conservative activism took the form of study group formation, newsletter circulation, book publishing, lecturing, letter writing, and serious reading of the voluminous literature that proliferated. (7) By the 1960s, activists also opened more than thirty-five conservative bookstores throughout Los Angeles and its suburbs. (8)

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Women became influential in the grassroots right. Mainly middle- and upper-class wives and mothers between the ages of thirty and sixty, they enthusiastically joined groups that vowed to stop communism. Although few organizations restricted membership by sex, many grew into women-only or women-dominated organizations by virtue of their schedules, priorities, and styles. Daytime meeting hours, a focus on children and the community, a tendency to operate in the background and emphasize their spiritual contributions to society, and orientation toward intensive grassroots activities such as canvassing, phone-calling, and letter-writing defined a female political culture on the right. Conservative men also participated in most of these activities, but women unintentionally created institutions friendly to their lifestyles and intellectual needs. Lack of professional status, moreover, forced them to work outside of established partisan channels and capitalize on their flexible schedules as their means of making an impact. (9)

The political work performed by conservative women during this era calls into question the meaning of the word housewife. Examination of their individual lives and organizational activity reveals that they became formidable activists who embraced the ideals of domesticity, familial togetherness, and social tranquility that elevated stay-at-home motherhood as a feminine ideal after World War II. Indeed, their affluence gave most of them the choice to become and remain full-time homemakers. However, most also enjoyed the privileges of education, society, free time, and access to cultural and political events in a major city--all of which exposed them to messages that competed with the domestic ideal. At cocktail parties, they met guests involved with blockbuster deals or massive construction projects for the aerospace industry. They read books and newspapers, which drew them into after-church and poolside conversations about political and economic affairs. Some worked part-time in education, business, law, public relations, or other fields before, while, or after raising their children. Upwardly mobile, they embraced the "housewife" ideal as represented by television's Leave It to Beaver mother June Cleaver, but they also aspired to realize much more for themselves, their families, their communities, and the world. (10)

This essay, excerpted from a larger examination of women's involvement in the state's cold war conservative movement, (11) explores the role of four southern California women as right-wing activists. Although their personal histories cannot stand for the careers of all conservative women, they do shed light on the step-by-step process of political consciousness formation that gave shape to their conservative outlook. Right-wing politics attracted conservative women by offering them opportunities to apply their educational backgrounds and to form meaningful intellectual bonds with others involved in the struggle for a conservative order. Past experiences--including clashes with radicals, marriages to staunch conservatives, and childhoods in segregated or all-white communities that fostered suspicion of civil rights efforts--committed them to the postwar conservative movement. "Politically desperate" to have their voices heard, they were by no means hysterical or pathological but rather approached their activist work with a fervor and an urgency that demand scrutiny.