Beginning with the passage of the Racial Integrity Act in Virginia (1924) and ending with opposition to school integration in Boston (1974), this work documents how conservative white women fought to preserve a racial order that privileged them, systematically and violently, over their nonwhite neighbors. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, McRae demonstrates how white female social workers, school teachers, registrars, journalists, socialites, and students labored daily to police the color lines within their own communities. She documents the many ways in which conservative women in the South participated in national and international political networks, helping to weave a white supremacist agenda into the fabric of conservative politics from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. Featuring authors Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy).

Challenging historical narratives that marginalize white women's political role, McRae argues that women's work was central to the creation and enforcement of Jim Crow policies and practices. Her current project examines the role of “school choice” in American public education.In her debut monograph, historian McRae (history, Western Carolina Univ.) reframes white women's mid-20th-century resistance to desegregation in the American South as one chapter in the long history of women's participation in white supremacist politics after Reconstruction. Dixies Daughters The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, World Histories, Public Schools First and various radio shows and podcasts.

This book examines white women’s work in maintaining white supremacy in public education, social welfare policy, politics, and culture in the South and across the nation. Her book, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy published in 2018 was the recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award given by the Organization of American Historians, the Frank and Harriet Owsley Award given by the Southern Historical Association, and the Society for Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. She is the Creighton Sossoman Professor of History at Western Carolina University where she also co-directs the Appalachian Oral History Project. The cover of Elizabeth Gillespie McRaes excellent Mothers of Massive Resistance presents a familiar portrait of the southern desegregation drama. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae Creighton Sossoman Associate Professor of History, Western Carolina University Author, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White SupremacyĮlizabeth Gillespie McRae’s scholarly interests center on race, politics, and education in the postwar United States.

Elizabeth gillespie mcrae