"Originally perceived as a feminist (after the gender of "Taylor Caldwell" became known) the Buffalo author provoked screams of distaff outrage with her repeated public proclamations that a woman's place "is in the kitchen and the bedroom." These sounds were promptly drowned, however, in the chorus of protest that attended publication of such works as Captains and the Kings, which purported to connect the French Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the New Deal and the Kennedy family assassinations as an ongoing "plot" hatched and moved forward by a consortium of bankers, industrialists and international financiers. Not all the reaction was hostile, of course: Taylor Caldwell became a policy board member of the extreme right wing Liberty Lobby and the darling of the John Birch Society, which honored her with a plaque as a great "American Patriot and Scholar.""