American women’s antiwar movement. In September 1939, less than a month after Hitler’s invasion of Poland triggered the onset of World War II, the National Legion of Mothers of America (NLMA) was established to oppose U.S. entry into the war. Founded by three California mothers of draft-age sons, Frances Sherrill, Mary M. Sheldon, and Mary Ireland, the legion marked the beginning of the "mothers’ movement," a generally right-wing coalition of female isolationists. The NLMA, publicized and probably financed by media magnet William Randolph Hearst, quickly established chapters in cities where Hearst newspapers were published. In Hearst editorials the NLMA was praised for its patriotism and determination to fight all attempts to send young Americans to fight in foreign wars.
Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, also sympathetic to the mothers’ movement, attributed 10 million members to the NLMA. The actual number was probably smaller. In June 1940 some 2 million members voted by mail on resolutions to be put forward by the national organization. Its newspaper, the American Mothers National Weekly, had several million readers. Chapters were organized in at least 39 states.
The NLMA’s founders were not necessarily pacifists but opposed the deployment of U.S. forces for any purpose except defending the nation from attack. One of the legion’s New York chapters recruited a paramilitary group, the Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion, to repel foreign invaders. The NLMA welcomed all women with U.S. citizenship regardless of race, religion, or political party. African American women were enrolled. Nonetheless the NLMA’s membership could broadly be categorized as white, Protestant, and Republican.
The credibility of the NLMA was enhanced in January 1940 when writer Kathleen Norris became the league’s president. A prolific best-selling novelist and short story writer, Norris had been active in the progressive movement of the early twentieth century, supporting pacifism, prohibition, and the abolition of capital punishment. She was also an opponent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and accused the president of trying to dupe the United States into war. Professing the traditional belief that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were moats deep enough to safeguard the American shores, she supported the 1940 election campaign of Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie, and worked unsuccessfully against the passage of the selective service bill authorizing a peacetime draft. In September 1940, NLMA members protested the draft bill outside the U.S. Senate, wearing black dresses and veils and maintaining a "death vigil." The NLMA generated a letter-writing campaign but failed to prevent passage of the Lend-Lease Act.
Norris tried to keep the NLMA from falling into the hands of the far right, repudiating the endorsement of her organization by the notorious Father Charles Coughlin. Despite her efforts, Coughlinites and the pro-Nazi German-American Bund gained control over some chapters and strident anti-Semitism was often voiced at legion meetings. More radical elements of the NLMA began to denounce Roman Catholics as well as Jews, and to demand the impeachment of Roosevelt. Norris expelled some of the legion’s most militant chapters but resigned as president in April 1941 and continued her antiwar work in concert with more moderate isolationists.
With her departure the NLMA splintered into three groups, the National Legion, the Mothers of the U.S.A., and the Women’s National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War. The new organizations coordinated their efforts to abolish the draft, repeal the Lend-Lease Act, and impeach Roosevelt. Without Norris’ leadership the mothers movement became increasingly militant and marginal.
The NLMA was significant because it demonstrated the potential of mobilizing conservative women who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. It was the first major organization to use maternal arguments against Roosevelt’s war policy. The group also encouraged a sense of gender solidarity based on the belief that women would suffer from a war whose course was directed by men.
