(19 18-1955)
American isolationist who fused feminism with conservatism. Cathrine Curtis was distinguished by energy, charisma, combativeness, and a talent for organization. She was a prominent figure in the mothers’ movement, a right-wing women’s coalition that sought to keep the United States out of World War II, and a leader of two of its principal organizations, the National Legion of Mothers of America and the Women’s National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War.
Born to rich parents in Albany, New York, Curtis profited as a stock speculator during her teenage years. Later, she owned a citrus farm in Arizona and acted in Hollywood movies. In 1934, a New York City radio station began to air her program, which advocated women’s financial independence and legal equality. After her program was canceled because of her strident criticism of the New Deal, she founded a nonprofit organization, the Women Investors Research Institute, which combined anti-New Deal economic conservatism with women’s rights. By 1939, the institute numbered 300,000 women members. Curtis became a well-known foe of the Roosevelt administration on many issues. Increasingly, her pronouncements encouraged anti-Semitism and notions of vast global conspiracies involving Jews, Communists, and European nations.
Convinced that Roosevelt was leading the nation into war, she founded the Women’s National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War in September 1939. One of the committee’s most visible charter members, aviator Laura In-galls, made promotional flights and speeches on behalf of isolationism and dropped peace pamphlets written by Curtis over the White House. Ingalls would later be convicted of acting as a Nazi agent.
Curtis cultivated allies in the Senate and House of Representatives, who invited her to address congressional committees with her views on U.S. neutrality. Although childless, she prominently employed maternal arguments in her case against war. Curtis also held that when a nation is at war, the interests of women, including concern for their children, are inevitably sacrificed to the needs of the state. She asserted that
Great Britain planned to reincorporate the United States into its empire under cover of World War II. Germany, she claimed, posed no threat. In April 1941, Curtis wrote and circulated an antiwar Mothers’ Day petition, which stated that war resulted from the exclusion of women in political decision making. She was usually able to attract tens of thousands of signatures from a large constituency of American women.
After Pearl Harbor the Women’s National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War disbanded. Still, Curtis continued to denounce administration policies. Her Women Investors Institute focused on combating restrictions on the domestic economy, such as rationing and price controls. In the postwar era, Curtis attempted to remain an outspoken public figure, attacking the United Nations, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the civil rights movement. Her influence declined rapidly, however, and her views appeared increasingly out of step with the times.
