Challenge and Change

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction

In the mid-twentieth century, a grassroots movement of women—mostly white, middle-class, and conservative—sought to shape the political, cultural, and social ideologies of the baby boomers in what they perceived was a quickly changing world poisoned by communism.

In Challenge and Change, June Melby Benowitz draws on a wide variety of primary sources to highlight the connections between the women of the Old Right, the New Right, and today's Tea Party. Through interviews, as well as through their letters to presidents, editors, and one another, Benowitz allows these women to speak for themselves. She examines the issues that stirred them to action—education, health, desegregation, moral corruption, war, patriotism, and the Equal Rights Amendment—and explores the development of the right-wing women’s movement and its growth from the mid-twentieth into the twenty-first century.