Since its founding in 2021, the educational advocacy group Moms for Liberty has been mobilizing conservative mothers across the country against school curriculum they deem indoctrinating, un-American, anti-Christian, and antithetical to their understanding of family values.
They’ve targeted books that explore LGBTQ+ themes, transgender athletes, and curriculum they deride as critical race theory or as too focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. More broadly, they claim to be fighting to protect their parental rights to control what their children learn.
Members of Moms for Liberty have earned seats on school boards, garnered national media attention, and infiltrated the highest levels of conservative policymaking. According to cofounder and CEO Tina Descovich, she has visited President Donald Trump’s White House more than a dozen times.
Moms for Liberty has also made waves in the Philadelphia suburbs, especially in Bucks County, which boasted the largest leadership team of any chapter in the country by April 2025. At a Harrisburg-area event last October, Descovich said: “I am very familiar with Bucks County. Before I knew it existed, I knew the [Bucks County] Beacon existed because they were writing trash pieces about us.”
Groups like Moms for Liberty have proved effective at making political noise — and even notching some policy wins, at least temporarily. Yet, the group is really just a continuation of a decades-long crusade by conservative white women to weaponize public education in the service of a right-wing agenda. While it has largely failed to transform American curriculum, this push has turned these women into key figures in Republican politics who have made fighting the culture wars a GOP priority.
The modern conservative movement since World War II owes much of its success to the work of grassroots education warriors.
These women proudly embraced traditional gender roles. They saw them as a marker of success because many women in their mothers’ generation had to work outside of the home to make ends meet in the Great Depression and wartime years.
Even as some of these conservative women became full-time political activists, they claimed the mantle of traditional homemakers and mothers — which aroused charges of hypocrisy from critics. Yet, they argued that their advocacy work in the traditionally male world of politics and education policy was wholly consistent with traditional gender roles because protecting innocent children from worldly dangers was a natural role for women and mothers.
At their kitchen tables and in PTA meetings across the country, these “suburban warriors” launched far-reaching campaigns against sex education, multicultural curriculum, and other aspects of schooling they deemed antithetical to traditional American values.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as the political parties realigned, these conservative education warriors emerged as a crucial Republican constituency and a core part of the New Right coalition. These white women were galvanized by the recent gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision — which provided a right for women to have legal abortions under certain circumstances — and debates over the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which they claimed (without evidence) would decimate the female homemaking role.
These recent changes threatened to disrupt what the conservative women argued were divinely inspired gender roles, which were embodied by the “traditional” nuclear family of a working male breadwinner, a female homemaker, and kids. They feared that big government-backed forces might take away this ideal life, which many had only recently achieved.
Increasingly, these women looked to public schools as the place to fight their crusade. Taxpayers funded the schools, and they were responsible for shaping the next generation of Americans outside of parental control.
In 1974, the education wars burst onto the national stage in Kanawha County, W.Va., thanks to an ugly and violent struggle over school textbooks. The controversy began after Alice Moore, a 29-year-old mother and the lone woman on the county school board, objected to a newly adopted language arts curriculum she deemed indoctrinating, racially divisive, and steeped in “secular humanism.”
This latter concept wasn’t new. It dated to the late 19th century, and argued that people could gain knowledge through reason, intellect, and logic rather than relying upon religious teaching.
Yet in the 1970s conservatives thrust it into the spotlight, because they needed a fresh villain. Tried-and-true messaging on anti-communism had grown stale. But pushing secular humanism as the latest liberal conspiracy aligned with the New Right’s renewed focus on faith, family, and traditional gender roles, while energizing Christian conservatives.
Moore and her allies saw secular humanism as increasingly influential in education — and as incredibly hostile to Christianity and their narrow definition of divinely inspired traditional family values. It further alarmed them because they saw secular humanism as teaching students to challenge their parents’ authority. Within a few years, the once obscure concept would become the New Right’s star bogeyman.
Throughout the fall of 1974, Moore read excerpts from the textbooks before the school board. She singled out Black nationalist Eldridge Cleaver, whose writings allegedly produced “racial hatred” toward white people. She also took issue with “dialectology,” a study of dialects that included lessons on African American vernacular — what she called “ghetto dialect” — that she believed to be antithetical to American speech.
By October, the controversy had produced two shootings, dozens of arrests, and multiple rounds of bombings, boycotts, and school bus blockades.
Moore’s crusade against secular humanism in West Virginia quickly caught the attention of national conservative organizations. The Heritage Foundation featured Kanawha County in its 1976 study, “Secular Humanism and the Schools: The Issue Whose Time Has Come.” Phyllis Schlafly — the country’s most famous anti-feminist at the time — jumped into the fray, claiming that public education promoted “a tolerance of violence, theft, adultery, obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy.”
In part because organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Schlafly’s Eagle Forum highlighted Moore’s activism for like-minded conservative women, it inspired conservative mothers across the country to wage their own crusades against dirty textbooks. In the ensuing years, they launched repeated battles against seemingly subversive curriculum.
In 1983, in rural East Tennessee, fundamentalist mother Vicki Frost waged her own legal battle against the Hawkins County school board after discovering objectionable material in her daughter’s reading textbook, including alleged depictions of telepathy, witchcraft, and black magic that violated her religious beliefs.
In Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education — a case that became known as “Scopes II” because of Hawkins County’s proximity to the original Scopes trial — Frost and her fellow plaintiffs alleged that the school board’s policies violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Their legal counsel came courtesy of Concerned Women for America, whose founder, Beverly LaHaye, took Frost on a national speaking tour to publicize the alleged dangers of modern textbooks. Although the plaintiffs lost their case on appeal, LaHaye deemed the case a “PR success” that “identified us as a friend of the family.”
The result epitomized the outcome of the broader education wars. Fighting against offensive school curriculums turned many conservative women into key figures in the culture wars, with substantial reach and political impact. They quickly became politically astute grassroots organizers who leveraged their identities as white Christian homemakers and mothers to argue for an educational system rooted in Christianity, the traditional nuclear family, and American exceptionalism.
The impact of these organizers, however, hasn’t necessarily come in the classroom. Most of Moore’s “dirty books” found their way into the Kanawha County curriculum. Frost and the plaintiffs in Hawkins County ultimately lost their case on appeal. In recent years, the majority of school board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty have similarly suffered defeat.
Yet, these organizers have been able to mobilize thousands of culturally conservative women — particularly other white Christian mothers — and bring them into the Republican Party. Their involvement has driven the GOP to make the culture wars a key component of the party’s identity.
These earlier crusaders also created a language that remains a staple of conservative critiques of public education to the present day. More than five decades after Moore’s war, conservative organizations continue to emphasize “parental rights,” “family values,” and “school choice” in their efforts to influence American education.
When groups like Moms for Liberty claim public schools are indoctrinating children with “woke” ideologies such as critical race theory, they rely upon a well-established playbook that conservative women have drawn upon for more than half a century. Despite mixed results in America’s actual classrooms, their political activism has proved a tried-and-true means for both enflaming public opinion and solidifying the role of self-proclaimed traditional mothers and homemakers within modern conservatism.
Allen Fletcher is a public historian and journal editor with research interests in Appalachia, gender, and the history of American education. His current book, “Building Schools, Building Communities: Appalachian Women and the Struggle for Educational Change,” is under contract with LSU Press.
Made By History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.
