2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel explores rising apocalypticism in right-wing women’s discourse in the United States, from 1970 to the present. A burgeoning historiography has reframed the New Right revolution as the harvest of decades of women’s grassroots activism. Within its massive cultural outpouring lay a violent and graphic rhetoric about a coming end of days, one mediated by women. Ideas of the end of the world had implications for how women perceived political issues such as birth control, faith, racial integration, immigration, and abortion, and would also frame future debates around climate change. These papers trace this strand of rhetoric from fringe to mainstream, from the women in a white power movement usually understood as masculine and paramilitary, to the place of ecumenical rhetoric in framing anti-abortion activism, to the New Christian Right evangelical women’s publications on the End Times. Together, these panels raise fruitful questions about women’s agency; their role in shaping discourse within movements and organizations often understood as being led by men; and the connective power of profoundly violent, apocalyptic rhetoric.