Activist women, schooling and the rise of grassroots Christian conservatism.

This paper argues for the need to better understand the role of mothers and schooling in shaping modern conservative cultural politics. Arguing that 1970s–1980s was a critical period for anti-progressive politics surrounding schooling, the paper examines the activism of Australian Christian morals campaigner Rona Joyner. Joyner's successful provocation of a 1978 governmental ban on social science curriculum materials was a signal event in an international Anglophone reaction against what she and others theorised as dangerously permissive forces in public culture. Pitting 'Christian' parental authority against 'humanist' state overreach in relation to the upbringing of children, Joyner created a detailed vision of the cultural-moral corruption of schools and other social institutions. This paper demonstrates how Joyner represented her labour as a project of both public motherhood and grassroots community activism, and how activist women like Joyner were foundational to the growth of a new contemporary grassroots conservatism expressed as a popular politics of 'the people' against the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]