Tiny You

"Tiny You is a game-changer. Jennifer L. Holland brilliantly excavates the stories of the low-profile grassroots activists who built the pro-life crusade—not through the dramatic headline-stealing attacks on abortion clinics, but through unrelenting organizational work in their homes, churches, and shared community spaces. We see how this activism, revealed as lived everyday experience, formed the nucleus of shared white political identity in the era of the culture wars. With a treasure trove of personal narratives acquired through oral and archival history, Holland documents how the movement coalesced around 'fetal civil rights' and made opposition to abortion the most successful single-issue campaign in twentieth-century American history."—Michelle Nickerson, author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right

"U.S. women’s historians have long clamored for more scholarship on women’s experiences in western states and on the social history of religious women. Our current political moment asks us to consider how libertarians and evangelical Christians forged a powerful alliance. In clear and compelling prose, Holland examines the rise of anti-abortion activism in the western United States and offers a kaleidoscopic history of this multiracial, multireligious, and politically diverse region. This is an important book."—Karissa Haugeberg, author of Women against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century

"This outstanding book respects the diverse religious convictions of anti-abortion activists (Catholic, Mormon, and evangelical Protestant) and shows how their language of justice distinguished their success. Yet though they claimed to be leading a pro–civil rights campaign, Holland emphasizes their consistent anti-feminist arguments and brings forward the implicit racist assumptions of the overwhelmingly white movement."—Kathy Olmsted, author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism