Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US | Michael Feola

The activist group Moms for Liberty has become the new face of the culture wars around education. The group was founded in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, and rose to prominence through outspoken opposition to school mask mandates. The group has now spread across the United States, its membership fueled by the Republican-led moral panic over a “woke ideology” that is supposedly sweeping public schools and “indoctrinating” children. At present, the group counts 285 chapters in 45 states.

As the group has grown, so too have its political ambitions. Moms for Liberty places particular emphasis on capturing local school boards in order to secure greater control over school policy. More broadly, the group endorses legislation that would limit the topics that can be discussed in the classroom (for instance, Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation), and they promote policies that allow parents to target books for removal from school libraries and classrooms.

The materials challenged by Moms for Liberty reflect the “war on wokeness” announced by conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis. Group members regularly disrupt school board meetings to rail against books that address the nation’s history of racial violence (maligned under the fuzzy category of “critical race theory”). Likewise, the group condemns materials that explore gender identity or advocate for LGBTQ+ acceptance – particularly those that explore transgender identity. Librarians, teachers and parents who defend these materials have been repeatedly harassed by group members as “groomers” or “pedophile sympathizers”.

The caustic tone of the group’s activism has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify it as an extremist organization. As a movement, Moms for Liberty draws from the long history of rightwing women’s activism in the US – particularly in such activists’ identity as mothers. Where mothers’ movements are often associated with projects of social welfare, a counter-tradition of women’s activism has politicized motherhood to pursue staunchly conservative aims.

As the historian Michelle Nickerson demonstrates, the period surrounding the cold war is a useful lens for understanding how mothers’ movements became a pillar of American conservatism. Like Moms for Liberty, these groups responded to cultural change by condemning the spread of progressive ideologies through public school systems. Fueled by anti-communist panic, they fought for the removal of textbooks, teachers and administrators they judged to be tainted by progressive ideals. A defining feature of these groups was how they leveraged cultural beliefs surrounding motherhood for political ends. They invoked motherhood to argue that they were uniquely connected to the domestic sphere and childrearing and therefore uniquely able to speak for the moral interests of parents, families and children.

Moms for Liberty pulls deeply from this established playbook of “housewife populism”. Behind their challenges to school policies rests a repeated assertion: as mothers, they possess a right to speak for the welfare of children, as opposed to government bureaucrats, educational elites or teachers’ unions (who they deride as the “K-12 mafia”). This insistence rests at the heart of the slogan that defines the group: “We don’t co-parent with the government”. In the Moms for Liberty worldview, parents hold an “innate” or “natural” right to decide what their children should be learning, the health protocols they should observe, or the ideas they are exposed to. And parents must wield this right in an uncompromising, militant sense to protect their children against elite campaigns of “woke indoctrination”.

The specific aims pushed by Moms for Liberty reflect a more troubling thread from the history of rightwing mothers’ activism. Scholars such as Elizabeth Gillespie McRae have detailed how white mothers’ organizations were some of the most committed players in the mid-century project of “massive resistance” fought to preserve the Jim Crow order. This segregationist battle was particularly concerned with legal mandates for school desegregation. And one of its battlegrounds remains central to the mission of Moms for Liberty: textbooks and school curricula. In the south and beyond, mothers’ organizations fought to eliminate books and teachings that highlighted white violence or white supremacy. Furthermore, they routinely attempted to remove books from the curriculum that highlighted Black contributions to the nation, its history, or its culture.

The challenges posed by Moms for Liberty, then, exceed its disruptive brand of activism, its ties to far-right organizations, or the campaigns of harassment its members have allegedly waged against school boards or rival parent groups. More broadly, the group’s mission resonates with an established history of rightwing mothers’ movements that focused on schools in order to block movements for social equality and to preserve structures of white supremacy.

Moms for Liberty channels this troubled racial legacy while broadening its exclusionary mission to sexuality and gender identity. Group chapters persistently invoke motherhood and parental rights as cudgels to shape public schools toward their particular vision of history, race, sexuality and faith. Narratives that complicate conservative visions of gender identity are demonized as efforts to corrupt children and are targeted for removal. In this way, Moms for Liberty weaponizes family rights to undercut equal access to schools for other families with other values. This project becomes more ominous yet through the group’s cozy relationship with Republican officials who have pushed for policies to limit support and visibility for already vulnerable LGBTQ+ students.

The culture wars have long fastened upon schools as institutions that shape the future of the nation. The threats posed by Moms for Liberty exceed business as usual in the culture wars. Instead, group chapters routinely exploit the moral authority of the family to erase other ways of experiencing race, gender, or sexuality – while reshaping schools and curricula around their own fears, interests, and beliefs.

In doing so, Moms for Liberty continues one of the most troubling aims pursued by historical rightwing mothers’ groups: to hijack public institutions to stall the tides of cultural change.

• Michael Feola is a professor of government at Lafayette College, a contributor to publications including Slate and The Washington Post, and the author of a forthcoming book on the far right, Rage of Replacement