The Political Evolution of Parental Rights: Class, Education, and2SLGBTQIA+ Backlash in North America

The parental rights movement, which gained traction in the 1930s (largely in reaction to child labour reforms), has long resisted progressive reform. By the 1990s, the movement found renewed momentum amid heated debates over charter schools, further embedding the rhetoric of government overreach, privatization, and ethnonationalism into its public messaging4. Although considerable scholarship was produced on movement in the 1990s5, todays engagement with the topic has remained generally disconnected from this initial historiography. Whilenleading scholars like Cris Mayo, whose Distractions and Defractions: Using Parental Rights to Fight Against the Educational Rights of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Diverse Students, (2021)6 rightly frame the parental rights movement as a broadly conservative movement that obscures transphobia by situating its concerns as religiously based parental rights claims, Mayo – along with a variety of other contemporary scholars – have tended to deemphasize how the movement gained traction in the first place7. This is consequential in that the roots of the movement – understood as a fusion between Christian nationalism and a broader coalition of market-driven educationalists find their seeds in
the mid-20th century. In order to understand how British and American right-wing coalitions imported the rhetoric of parental rights into Canada, we must consider both that literature which documents contemporary iterations of the movement, whilst considering the movements historical antecedents. This broadly historiographical approach, when applied to an interprovincial scan of the parental rights movement, will make a novel contribution to the field by mapping the movement whilst framing it as a part of a wider historical process. In essence, if the parental rights movement has evolved as a right-wing coalition bent on dismantling public education with an explicit agenda of white revivalism, how has it consistently regained legitimacy after being deemed illegitimate in the past? By tracing the disinformation propagated by the movement, and linking it to its historical evolutions, we will examine how this longstanding pattern of reinvention has found a new life in the contemporary Canadian contexthighlighting questions of the ongoing cross-border flow of anti-progressive rhetoric. In what follows, we will survey some of the literature which sets the stage for this emphasis.

Faculty Supervisor:

Stephanie Paterson

Student:

Partner:

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Information and cultural industries; Other services (except public administration); Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Concordia University

Program: