This is the story of how a new movement of women changed American politics during the first decade of female enfranchisement. At the end of the seventy-two-year struggle for suffrage, most Americans expected the nation’s polity to be remade by new women voters. But they envisioned an entirely different type of transformation from the one forced by a coalition of women led by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the American Legion Auxiliary. These women launched the first broad-based, explicitly conservative movement of women in American history. Part of the mission of this new movement was to destroy...

In the winter of 1919, the moral danger posed by Bolshevism was detailed for American newspaper readers by a representative of the U.S. Department of Commerce. After suffering a stint in jail in the new Soviet republic, Roger E. Simmons returned to the United States, where he testified to a crowded Senate hearing room that radical policies had transformed more than factories, farms, and political institutions. He told his audience that it was Russia’s women who were suffering most cruelly in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution. He recounted how Bolsheviks had forced women of “frail physique” and “gentle breeding”...

Female reformers saw that single crude drawing—the 1924 Spider Web Chart—as the most devastating attack by male War Department officers on women activists. For the previous two years, peace activists had been locked in battle with the Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department after demanding the abolition of chemical weapons. The leader of the division, Brigadier General Amos Fries, had responded to these calls by accusing the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the National Council for Prevention of War of being agents of revolutionary communism.¹ Indeed, when secretary of war John Weeks issued an...

As Claire Oliphant looked out over the auditorium of the Red Cross building on a February morning in 1925, she surveyed what she hoped would be the cadres of a new women’s movement. The national president of the American Legion Auxiliary told the women who had gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Conference on National Defense as Peace Insurance that they carried the mantle of heroic female forebears. “Loyal American women have always come to the front in time of a national need with a smile upon their faces and a grim determination to do their part in building Christianity,...

In the autumn of 1926, DAR president general Grace Brosseau took an action that would have been inconceivable only five years earlier. Brosseau withdrew her group’s long-standing support for maternalist-inspired reform. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the DAR had followed the political lead of other middle-class women’s voluntary groups, operating as part of the lobbying arm of the “female dominion.” While the hereditary association was not a leading light of female reform, it had consistently lent its prestige to the legislative agenda conceived by the federal Children’s Bureau, advocating for government funding of maternal health programs and legal...

In 1926, antiradical consciousness-raising efforts bore fruit. A conservative insurgency erupted in women’s clubs across the country. The polemics and surveillance reports amassed by antiradical groups did not sit collecting dust in the nation’s capital. Instead, they were used by antiradical leaders to remake the landscape of women’s politics from the ground up. The DAR’s National Defense Committee distributed reams of propaganda to its chapters in all corners of the nation. The result was a correspondence course in countersubversion. DAR members were encouraged to fashion themselves into experts on revolutionary radicalism. Mastering this “study material” was more than just an...

By 1929, many civically engaged women had accepted a central tenet of antiradicalism. The WPPC petition and the DAR blacklists had popularized the idea that social welfare legislation had been created by radical leaders promoting “a program dictated by Moscow, by the leaders of the Russian communist party.”¹ According to this logic, a federal mandate to regulate child labor and the public health programs funded by the Sheppard-Towner Act would force “the federal dictation of our children, education and religion as in Soviet Russia.”² These assertions seemed ludicrous to traditional reformers, who found it “discouraging to find how many people...

The women who embraced the Spider Web Chart as a blueprint for activism reshaped politics in the United States. As they wrested control of established institutions from traditional reformers in the decade after enfranchisement, they redrew the map of women’s politics, balkanizing an empire that had once been united under the flag of social improvement. As they drew new political boundaries, they divided women who had once worked together in the same world of female voluntary associations, where unspoken assumptions about class and racial superiority had bound together ideologically diverse clubwomen. By the New Deal, the antiradical campaign had established...