# Patricia Buckley Bozell **Patricia Buckley Bozell** (1927–2008) was a conservative Catholic activist and editor. Her marriage joined the two families that did more than any others to build the postwar American right. She was a sister of [[William F. Buckley Jr.]], founder of [[National Review]], and of Senator [[James L. Buckley]]. In 1949 she married [[L. Brent Bozell Jr.]], her brother's Yale debate partner and co-author, who later ghostwrote Barry Goldwater's *The Conscience of a Conservative* (1960). She had ten children, including [[L. Brent Bozell III]], founder of the [[Media Research Center]]. That makes her the matriarch of the [[Bozell Family]] as a political dynasty. ## Triumph and the Catholic hard right In the 1960s the Bozells broke with the fusionist conservatism of *National Review*. Fusionism married free markets to traditional values, and the Bozells found that too liberal, too American and too secular. Patricia helped found and served as managing editor of **[[Triumph (Magazine)]]** (1966–1976), the traditionalist Catholic monthly her husband launched. *Triumph* rejected the idea that the American founding was a neutral framework and argued for a confessional Catholic politics. It was the most important American forerunner of today's [[Integralism]], and its readers were among the first to treat abortion as the defining political issue, years before [[Roe v. Wade]]. ## The 1971 incident Her best-known public moment came in **March 1971** at the Catholic University of America. The radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson, speaking on campus, made remarks about the Virgin Mary that Bozell took as blasphemy. Bozell rushed the stage and tried to slap her. The episode made national news, and it became shorthand for how personal and how religious the new culture war was for its first combatants. ## Why she matters The standard account of the conservative movement runs through the Buckley men. Patricia's life shows a second line: a family branch that thought *National Review* conceded too much to liberal modernity, built its own institutions, and passed down a style of combative, religiously grounded media activism. The MRC under her son and now her grandson [[David Bozell]] is that same line in 21st-century form. ## See also - [[Bozell Family]] · [[Buckley Family]] · [[L. Brent Bozell Jr.]] · [[L. Brent Bozell III]] · [[David Bozell]] - [[William F. Buckley Jr.]] · [[James L. Buckley]] · [[National Review]] - [[Triumph (Magazine)]] · [[Integralism]] · [[Leo B. Bozell]]