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This chapter examines the antifeminism of key instigators of the Second Red Scare: staff members of congressional investigative committees and the conservative journalists with whom they cooperated. Their public statements and private correspondence indicate that they associated communism with men's loss of control over women's labor and sexual conduct. For them, the need to stabilize white male supremacy was one reason to oppose communism. Antifeminism, an objective in and of itself, was also a means to other objectives. Leading anticommunists deployed antifeminism, just as they did homophobia, to generate popular enthusiasm for their attacks on the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

This chapter identifies two primary mechanisms that could lead to antifeminist backlash. The first is declining male economic status. Globally, men are losing earning power due to deindustrialization in the Global North and rising unemployment in the Global South. Unemployed and underemployed men lose power within their families, particularly if the wife becomes the primary breadwinner. Men react to this loss of status by turning conservative and striving to reconstruct traditional gender roles. This leads to fights against reproductive rights and in favor of traditional religion. Male resentment from lost earning power also leads to domestic abuse and sexism on its own. It increases societal violence, which leads to sexual violence and male control of women. The chapter then looks at antifeminism in Poland, Yemen, Kenya, Central America, and Argentina.

In 1973, Marabel Morgan published the phenomenally successful evangelical marriage manual Total Woman. Morgan has always insisted that she had no political intention in publishing this book, but its traditionalist vision of marital roles meant that she was very quickly drawn into contemporary arguments about gender, family, and feminism. The boundaries of the political realm were shifting in the 1970s, as Morgan’s experience demonstrates. This chapter traces the mid-twentieth-century development of a national evangelical women’s subculture that produced figures like Morgan and disseminated conservative ideas about gender and family in the purportedly apolitical venues of marital advice, women’s magazines, and inspirational conferences.

In 1979, Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), which would quickly become the nation’s largest lobbying group for conservative women. With chapters across the country, CWA has been responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of conservative women to become active for conservative causes at the local, state, and federal levels. LaHaye began her career as a megachurch pastor’s wife and the author of marital and spiritual advice for evangelical women. When she turned her attention to politics, she used the language and networks of evangelical women’s culture to mobilize others. Her story demonstrates how even women who took on definitive political leadership roles had to negotiate persistent ambivalence within conservative evangelical communities, both about politics in general and about women’s roles within it. LaHaye’s relationship with Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly also highlights the limits of ecumenical cooperation within the New Christian Right, even as that movement was defined by new alliances between conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.

Chapter 4 addresses the supposed “war against boys” and “the end of men” discourse among antifeminists and maintained by mainstream media. Recent book titles such as “Are Men Necessary?,” “Save the Males,” “Is There Anything Good about Men?,” and “The War against Boys” fuel this contemporary moral panic. The war-against-boys rhetoric claims that feminism brought attention to girls’ and women’s needs in education but in doing so feminists subordinated boys’ needs to the point that girls and women got ahead of boys and men. This chapter examines the education environment and responds to the allegation that schools have become feminized, antimale, and toxic to boys. Chapter 4 demonstrates that rather than school being antimale, boys are socialized to view education as incompatible with masculinity. The psychology of male privilege and entitlement as contributions to boys’ and young men’s disengagement with school is considered.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Jack Donovan, one of the American Right’s most innovative and influential new thinkers. He was an adherent of the Alt Right for years, yet unlike most alt-rightists Donovan has always treated race as secondary to his focus on men. Donovan first became known for advocating “androphilia,” meaning love or sex between manly men, while rejecting gay culture and justifying homophobia as a defense of masculinity. However, his larger ideological contribution is the doctrine of male tribalism, which evokes the classical fascist ideal of male bonding through warfare. Rejecting the Christian Right’s emphasis on the patriarchal family, Donovan calls for reorganizing society based on “the gang,” a small, close-knit band of fighters in which men can most fully realize their innate masculinity.