Minute Women of the U.S.A.

The Minute Women of the U.S.A. was one of the largest of a number of anti-Communist women's groups that were active during the 1950s and early 1960s. Such groups, which organized American suburban housewives into anti-Communist study groups, political activism and letter-writing campaigns, were a bedrock of support for McCarthyism.

The primary concerns of the Minute Women and other similar groups were the exposure of Communist subversion, the defense of constitutional limits, opposition to Atheism, Socialism and social welfare provisions such as the New Deal; and rejection of Internationalism, particularly in the form of the United Nations. They campaigned to expose supposedly Communist individuals, focusing particularly on school and university administrators.

The Minute Women were a national group founded by Suzanne Stevenson of Connecticut in September 1949. They grew rapidly, especially in Texas, California, West Virginia, Maryland, and Connecticut. By 1952 they had over 50,000 members. They were predominantly white middle and upper-class women aged between thirty and sixty, with school-aged or grown children. Chapters were relatively small, numbering only a few dozen to a few hundred people. The Houston chapter, which later became famous, was one of the largest in the nation with around 500 members. Over sixty of the Houstonian Minute Women were doctors' wives, reflecting medical opposition to socialized medicine.

Unlike many other anti-Communist groups, the Minute Women operated in a semi-covert fashion. Stevenson instructed members to never reveal that they were Minute Women and always present themselves as individual concerned citizens. In her view, political activism was more effective when it appeared to be spontaneous.

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