Republican Women

“An important contribution to recent scholarship examining the relationship between feminism, conservatism, and women’s political activism. . . . Will prove valuable to anyone wishing to understand the rise of conservatism as well as the place of women within the conservative movement.” — Historian

“Well-researched and its chronological arrangement provides a coherent structure to the story. . . . A highly-readable, worthwhile history of the elite females who carved out a place for women in the GOP at the national level.” — Florida Historical Quarterly

“A tightly focused monograph. . . . A well-researched example of how gender concerns can be integrated with political history.” — Indiana Magazine of History

“Historians of modern conservatism and the Republican Party would be well served to read Rymph’s book, as she sheds light on an understudied aspect of the GOP. . . . A highly-readable, worthwhile history of the elite females who carved out a place for women in the GOP at the national level.” — Florida Historical Quarterly

“An impressive national history of Republican women. . . . Especially significant for revealing how Republican women both contested and supported a political shift to the right that was decades in the making. . . . An important perspective on a growing body of scholarship on partisan women. . . . Lays a solid foundation for further studies.” — Annals of Iowa

“[Rymph’s] well-researched book does an excellent job of chronicling the struggles of Republican women to define their place within the GOP. . . . An important contribution to recent scholarship examining the relationship between feminism, conservatism, and women’s political activism. . . . Rymph’s book will prove valuable to anyone wishing to understand the rise of conservatism as well as the place of women within the conservative movement.” — Historian

“Rymph furnishes an insightful, well-nuanced history of female activism associated with the twentieth-century Republican party. . . . [Republican Women] ultimately makes important contributions to the bodies of scholarship on women, feminism, and politics.” — Journal of American History

“Rymph convincingly builds the relationship between Republican women’s entrance into politics, their ideas of womanhood, and the party’s antifeminism.” — Journal of Southern History

“Well written and carefully argued, Republican Women is a valuable addition to the small but growing literature on women’s political history. It provides a detailed and extended view of Republican Party women that illuminates with great clarity both the dilemma of outsiders attempting to move from the margins to the center of party politics and also the persistence of a crusading moralistic political style that retains great appeal for the contemporary Republican Right.” — Jane De Hart, University of California, Santa Barbara

“This book represents the best of what the new women’s political history has to offer: an interpretation that reshapes both women’s history and political history equally well. Rymph’s delineation of women’s partisan activity in the postsuffrage era gives an in-depth overview of women’s struggles in the Republican Party that has more texture and historical context than previous broad surveys. She also revisits the perennially important question of separatism versus integration as a strategy for women’s advancement, and does a very good job of keeping questions of race and African American women’s participation central to the story, not just a footnote or afterthought.” — Susan Ware, editor of Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century