After the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis of 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus invoked a hastily passed state law to close the schools rather than integrate them. This is the story of the WEC, the Women's Emergency Committee, a group of respectable, middle-class white women who fought against the law. With passion and sensitivity, Murphy recounts the challenges and triumphs of that battle, which issued from the mutual link Southern white women shared with disfranchised African Americans in their common goal for full citizenship.