#MomsForLiberty may be new to US politics, but their strategy isn’t
The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s had a women’s auxiliary (the #WKKK) that brought the Klan’s anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant politics to places like schools and churches.
But even the women of the WKKK were not political pathbreakers; Though White women had only just secured the right to vote in the United States, women had been mobilizing politically for decades.
Precisely because women had long been excluded from electoral politics, however, they had tended to be most active in institutions considered part of the “women’s sphere”: #schools, #churches, #charities and #settlement houses.
For the women of the WKKK, schools were central targets. As historian Kathleen Blee documents in “Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s,” the WKKK regularly protested schools that they felt were riddled with #Catholic and #foreign #influences.
Particularly because they were so invested in countering Catholics, the WKKK sought to secure more funding and support for public schools as counterweights to private parochial schools. But they wanted those public schools to be #segregated and #overtly #Protestant.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/07/opinions/moms-for-liberty-conservative-women-history-hemmer/index.html