“Housewife fascism” on the move And people wonder why they have been designated as an extremist organization. This is not a new phenomenon in America: 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,…