‘“Bring The Boys Home!”: We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America’s Women’s Voice Dissents Against World War II and the Korean War’

One of the most significant ways in which American women responded to World War II was the “Mothers’ Movement”. They made arguments based on maternalism, the primacy of a woman’s role as mother, and claimed that women, as a group, should be the moral conscience of the nation. From February 1941 Chicago’s We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America Inc. (WMMA) protested against war preparedness, the peacetime draft and the Lend-Lease Bill. However, unlike most antiwar groups that collapsed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, these mothers continued their violent rhetorical attacks on President Franklin Roosevelt, his administration, and the war itself throughout the entirety of the conflict and long into the postwar period. Women’s Voice, the group’s monthly newsletter, published from August 1942 to 1961, represented women’s antiwar voices in two ways. First, its title claims to be speaking for all women. (When pushed, a mothers’ representative clarified that they represented approximately 80% of women!) Second, through the “Correspondence” section, the voices of women who were persuaded by WMMA’s viewpoint on the war and those who should be held accountable for the imperiling/loss of their “boys” can be heard.

As this paper will attest although presenting themselves as righteous Christian patriots, their detractors viewed them variously as pro-fascist, anti-British, anti-Semitic, dangerous “propagandists”, the “Mom Menace”, seditionists and therefore “traitors”. During World War II their calls for a negotiated peace with the Nazis and Japan and the impeachment of Roosevelt were particularly contentious, resulting in both WMMA and their president, Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, being indicted by a Grand Jury. Whilst these “mothers” could be dismissed as outliers or “lunatics” (as FDR was inclined to characterize them), they represent an important facet of right-wing responses to both World War II and the Korean War. van Hyning remained a significant figure in the postwar “Mothers’ Movement” taking a stand against world cooperation, especially the United Nations Organization, and, perhaps surprisingly given their anti-Communist origins, Truman, Eisenhower, and their Administrations. These (ultra-) conservative calls for peace reveal an important episode in the long history of women’s involvement in antiwar movements.