Journal of Right-Wing Studies

Through an analysis of Moms for Liberty’s rhetoric and organizing strategies, this article situates the group’s “parental rights” advocacy within a broader historical framework. I define a white maternalist political tradition that connects Moms for Liberty to twentieth-century maternalist groups, demonstrating how the organization reproduces strategies developed by activists who, from the 1950s through the 1980s, portrayed “communism” and “secular humanism” as creeping threats to children and violations of parental rights. Like its predecessors, Moms for Liberty claims that children are being indoctrinated—now by a sinister “woke” ideology allegedly infiltrating schools across the nation. I argue that white maternalist groups organizing around education consistently employ three strategies: 1) suturing a range of progressive causes into a single, conspiratorial container of threat; 2) mobilizing grassroots maternal surveillance to identify and uproot those threats within local schools and communities; and 3) engaging in cultural organizing that reproduces the nuclear family and weaponizes motherhood as a source of moral—and ostensibly apolitical—authority. By presenting themselves not as political actors but as concerned mothers, these activists recast efforts to preserve racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies as a brave and selfless defense of home and family. Tracing these continuities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries denaturalizes the rhetorics of apolitical motherhood and child protection that propel these movements, demonstrating instead that these rhetorics are political tools through which far-right activists advance their agendas.