women history

CHAPTER 8

Power and Politics

WOMEN IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900–1920

THE DAY AFTER NEW YEAR’S DAY 1907, women met in New York City determined to find a new way to get the drive for woman suffrage onto a winning path. Their leader, Harriot Stanton Blatch, was the daughter of the nineteenth-century leader of the demand for political equality, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was also a veteran of numerous reform campaigns organized by civic-minded and politically savvy women, with goals ranging from cleaning up municipal political corruption to improving the wages and working conditions of female workers. Woman suffrage had historically been a middle-class movement, but at this meeting wage-earning women, most of them trade union activists, were joining with leisure-class college graduates, professionals, and social reformers. Still, no woman of color was invited to attend.

A modernized cross-class movement for votes for women was one aspect of Progressivism, a period of intense reform activism from the late 1890s to the years just after the conclusion of the First World War in 1918. The Progressive era profoundly altered the role of government in American life. During these years, American liberalism, which had traditionally regarded government as a threat to citizens’ rights, now came to embrace government as the ultimate guarantor of public welfare. Catalyzed by the devastating social consequences of industrial capitalism, the activists of this period battled for new labor laws and social welfare policies, arguing that the fate of society’s most impoverished sector was linked to the general national welfare. Many socially conscious Americans, jolted by the crises of the 1890s, were ready to join in this new spirit of public stewardship.

Women played a leading role during the Progressive period. As one historian writes, “[W]omen filled the progressive landscape.”1 There is considerable irony in the public influence and power women wielded in these years, because most women would not become fully enfranchised until 1920, in the aftermath of World War I. But they were widely mobilized, organized, and ambitious. Indeed, the victory of votes for women was as much a result as a cause of women’s political mobilization in the Progressive era. Earlier Gilded Age developments such as the steady increase of the female labor force, the growth of college education among women, and the spread of women’s organizations laid the basis for women’s dramatic rush into the public arena in the Progressive era.

Around the edges of the broad-based mass mobilization of Progressive-era suffragism was a smaller, more daring, and more modern approach to women’s emancipation for which a new name was invented — feminism. While the achievement of the larger movement was to complete the campaign for equal political rights begun before the Civil War, early twentieth-century feminism foreshadowed the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s.

1903

National Women’s Trade Union League founded in Boston

1905

Supreme Court finds all laws restricting working hours unconstitutional in Lochner v. New York

1907

Harriot Stanton Blatch organizes the Equality League of Self Supporting Women in New York City

1908

Muller v. Oregon upholds regulation of working hours for women

1908

National College Equal Suffrage League formed

1908

Wage Earners Suffrage League organized in San Francisco

1909

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People formed

1909

New York City shirtwaist workers declare general strike

1910

Washington State enacts woman suffrage

1911

Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City kills 146 workers

1911

First mothers’ pension program established in Illinois

1911

California enacts woman suffrage

1912

Textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts

1912

Federal Children’s Bureau established, headed by Julia Lathrop

1912

Jane Addams seconds the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for president on the Progressive Party’s ticket

1912

Eugene Debs gets 6 percent of presidential votes; Socialist Party at its height

1912

Strike of women garment workers in Rochester, New York

1912

Woodrow Wilson elected president

1912

Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona enact woman suffrage

1913

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns form the Congressional Union

1913

Ida B. Wells-Barnett organizes Illinois’s first all-black suffrage club, in Chicago

1914

World War I begins in Europe

1914–1919

Height of African American “Great Migration”

1915

Woman’s Peace Party formed

1915

Campaigns for woman suffrage fail in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania

1915

Jane Addams chairs International Council of Women peace meeting in The Hague

1915

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom founded

1916

Congressional Union becomes National Woman’s Party (NWP)

1916

Margaret Sanger opens birth control clinic in Brooklyn

1917

Second New York referendum enfranchises women

1917

United States enters World War I; Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin votes against declaration of war

1917

Bolshevik Revolution ends Russian participation in war

1917

Women’s Committee of the Council for National Defense established

1917

NWP members begin to picket the White House

1917–1919

Urban race riots from St. Louis to Chicago

1918

Supreme Court overturns Keating-Owen Act limiting child labor

1918

Armistice ends World War I

1920

Federal Woman’s Bureau established

1920

Nineteenth Amendment (woman suffrage) ratified

THE FEMALE LABOR FORCE

A good way to start examining the dramatic changes in women’s public lives in the Progressive era is to present a portrait of women workers. While the more obvious developments for women in this period were political, the underlying changes were economic, as the female labor force changed significantly.

The presence of large numbers of women in the workforce signaled the beginning of true modernity in female roles. Long a symbol of women’s victimhood, the working woman came to stand for women’s active presence in the larger world. The visibility and forcefulness of women workers were particularly manifest through a series of spectacular strikes in the garment and textile industries. Middle- and upper-class reformers made the concerns of working women central to their activities.

Continuity and Change for Women Wage Earners

In 1900, 18.3 percent of the labor force was female, but this figure was rising and would reach 21.4 percent in 1920.2 More than half of the female working population was foreign-born and/or nonwhite. The wage rate for women workers was very low: in 1900, the average woman worker made about half of what the average male worker earned.3 This disparity reflected the fact that men and women largely worked in different occupations and distinct industries, a highly structured sexual division of labor that limited working women’s options even as it shaped the American labor force. Domestic service was still the largest category of female employment, but manufacturing was steadily gaining. The average working woman was young and unmarried. Mothers and wives who worked outside the home for wages were few; only among African Americans did they constitute a significant portion of women workers.

Against this general portrait, new areas of women’s paid work were beginning to emerge in the early twentieth century. Clerical work, once entirely male and a form of apprenticeship in the business world, was a rapidly growing and desirable field for women. The work was clean and safe, and the wages regular. The demand for clerical workers to coordinate the movement of resources, finished goods, and finances through an increasingly complex national economy was expanding. Yet just as clerical work was being feminized, it was becoming mechanized and routinized, and thus losing its capacity to offer upward mobility. In the offices of mail order houses, banks, insurance companies, and large corporations, the labor of secretaries and typists was beginning to look like factory labor, at times even including the use of piece-rate payment.

Women were also gaining greater entry into some professional fields. The gradual opening up of professional opportunities for women constituted a partial solution to the vocational dilemma that Jane Addams’s generation of college graduates had confronted. Overall, the professional sector comprised just 12 percent of the female labor force in 1920, but it played a major role in changing society’s view of paid labor for women.4 Women professional workers expected personal independence and upward mobility from their jobs, and they worked more out of choice than out of need. As such, they paved the way for a new, more positive attitude toward paid labor for women.

The one male-dominated professional field in which women had made any gains by the end of the nineteenth century was medicine; women were between 5 and 6 percent of the profession by 1900. The legal profession was far more hostile to women (compare Figures 6.7, p. 344, and 6.8, p. 346). In 1900, fewer than six hundred women were practicing law in the United States. But as women moved energetically into other aspects of public life, the number of women lawyers began to climb; by 1920, this number had tripled. Inez Milholland, one of the most glamorous figures in the American suffrage movement, applied to Harvard Law School after she graduated from Vassar in 1909 but was rejected. (Harvard Law did not admit its first woman until 1953.) Instead, she attended New York University Law School, where she specialized in labor, criminal, and divorce law.

In 1919, a group of New York City women lawyers were polled on their opinions about “the paradox of vocation and marriage” for women. The majority responded that women could continue professional life after marriage but should make family life a priority and put aside their profession while their children were small. A small minority believed that, with supportive husbands and enough paid household servants, it was possible to rear children and practice their professions simultaneously. Such a solution was available only to middle-class women who could hire maids and nannies. Even so, these professional women were beginning to grapple with the problem that would affect all working women later in the twentieth century.

More women found professional opportunities in the rise of new “female professions” where they did not have to break through a male monopoly. In these years, the profession of social work began to evolve out of the volunteer labor of women reformers in settlement houses. Practitioners were eager to upgrade traditional forms of benevolence by applying new social science methods. Sophonisba Breckinridge, a lawyer and the first American woman to receive a PhD in political science, convinced the University of Chicago to establish the Graduate School of Social Service Administration. By 1920, there were thirty thousand trained social workers, the majority of them women.

Nursing and teaching were the largest professions dominated by women. Since the Civil War, nursing had been shifting from a form of domestic service to a profession. Between 1900 and 1910, there was a tenfold increase in the number of professionally trained nurses. Many professional nurses worked as public health missionaries, going into immigrant homes to teach sanitation methods and to investigate epidemic disease. Teaching, a woman’s occupation at the primary level since the 1830s, was also undergoing changes. In the Progressive era, teachers sought to upgrade their profession, ridding it both of intrusive moral constraints and political interference in hiring. Teacher training was moving from the two-year high-school-level institutions of the late nineteenth century to truly collegiate and university institutions (see Figure 6.6, p. 342). In Chicago, Mary Haley, a second-generation Irish American, organized a powerful teachers’ union, which removed control of appointments from local politicians.

African American women were also part of this move to professionalization, although the growing practice of segregation meant that African Americans were excluded from the white-run training programs and occupational associations that structured professions. In the field of nursing, black women responded by establishing their own schools and a professional association, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, formed in 1908. Ironically, Jim Crow provided opportunities for African American professional women in the separate institutions that served black communities, where they worked as librarians, physicians, and especially as teachers. Largely excluded from the National Educational Association, black women teachers formed their own teachers’ organizations, through which they challenged racial discrimination in teachers’ salaries.

Organizing Women Workers: The Women’s Trade Union League

Despite the expansion of working opportunities for women in the clerical and professional strata, industrial workers, especially young immigrants, were considered the most typical working women of the Progressive era. Constituting 25 percent of the female labor force, they were a crucial factor in the tremendously productive power of the American economy and achieved an unprecedented level of public visibility. Many of the themes of the era — women’s public prominence, their leadership of liberal causes, and their pursuit of independent lives — marked the women’s labor movement of the Progressive period.

Working women received little assistance from the established trade union movement. The male-dominated American Federation of Labor (AFL), which provided the leadership of the trade union movement, regarded women wage earners not as potential union recruits but as either underpaid threats to their members’ jobs or pitiful victims of capitalist greed. If women were to improve their wages and working conditions through labor organization, they were going to have to find assistance from allies of gender, not of class.

The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) formed in 1903 to meet this need. Modeled after a British organization of the same name, the WTUL hoped to reconcile women workers and the organized labor movement. It did so with the reluctant permission of the AFL, the leaders of which were only too relieved to subcontract out the burden of organizing women workers. Membership was open to all committed to the labor organization of women, regardless of class or of union membership. The WTUL also aimed “to develop leadership among the women workers, inspiring them with a sense of personal responsibility for the conditions under which they work.”5

The WTUL was a coalition of women trade union activists and leisure-class women (known as “allies”), primarily drawn from the settlement house movement. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, who had begun her career in Chicago as a skilled bookbinder and had served as the AFL’s first official female organizer, was one of the primary working-class founders (see pp. 310–12). She was aided by Leonora O’Reilly, a garment worker from New York City with connections to the Henry Street Settlement. O’Reilly recruited two wealthy sisters also from New York City, Mary Dreier and Margaret Dreier Robins, who provided most of the financial resources for the WTUL throughout the 1910s. Major chapters emerged in Boston, New York City, and Chicago; smaller groups formed in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

The WTUL’s interclass collaboration struck a different note from the antagonistic class relations between leisured and wage-earning women in the Gilded Age. Nonetheless, Leonora O’Reilly was concerned that the WTUL would become a “charity” organization in which middle-class women approached workers with “the attitudes of a lady with something to give her sister.”6 Despite the organization’s commitment to developing working-class women’s leadership abilities, formal control remained in the hands of leisure-class women until 1922, when Maud Swartz, a typesetter, took over as national president. Still, the WTUL was unique for its cross-class commitment to workers’ empowerment.

Women’s Trade Union League

This photograph (c. 1910) of the headquarters of the Women’s Trade Union League in New York City was probably taken in the midst of the 1910–1911 shirtwaist strike. The mixed-class nature of the WTUL is suggested by the two elegantly dressed women standing on the right, one of whom wears a fur coat.

While the WTUL worked hard on behalf of white and immigrant working-class women, its record was weak when it came to black women workers. Black workers, even more than white working women, faced hostility from the white men who led the American labor movement. They were not admitted into trade unions in this period, were hired at lower wages than white workers, and were employed as strikebreakers. The WTUL’s association with the organized labor movement led it to go along with the AFL’s racist antagonism to black workers throughout its early years.

After World War I, the organization shifted its emphasis from trade union organization to the passage of state maximum workday hours and minimum wage laws for working women. The first director of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, established in 1920, was Chicago WTUL member and shoe worker Mary Anderson. Later, Rose Schneiderman, a garment worker who labored for the league throughout her career, helped to shape New Deal policy toward working women and working families (see pp. 498–508).

The Rising of the Women

A wave of early twentieth-century strikes put the modern wage-earning woman on the labor history map. The most famous of these took place over the winter of 1909–10 in New York City in the shirtwaist (blouse) industry. The strike began when Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), a small male-dominated organization, struck several manufacturers over low wages and bad working conditions. Day after day, the picketers, most of them young Jewish and Italian women, were harassed by thugs their bosses had hired, arrested by police, and fined and jailed by local magistrates. Then they turned to the WTUL. When leisure-class women joined the picket line, they were subjected to the same disrespectful treatment as the striking workers, which made the newspapers take notice. (See Primary Sources: “Parades, Picketing, and Power: Women in Public Space,” pp. 462–69.)

The large clothing manufacturers were able to hold out against the workers by sending their unfinished garments to shops that the ILGWU was not targeting. Facing sure defeat, the union considered calling a general strike of the entire New York City shirtwaist industry. On November 22, 1909, more than fifteen thousand shirtwaist workers showed up at a mass meeting to discuss how to proceed against the manufacturers. As male labor leaders and leisure-class WTUL members on the stage hesitated to speak, seventeen-year-old shirtwaist maker Clara Lemlich spoke from the floor and galvanized the audience to walk off their jobs.

The next day, between twenty and thirty thousand workers, two-thirds of them Eastern European Jews, were on strike. The WTUL provided the strike pay, publicity, and legal support to keep the strike going. Some of the wealthiest women in New York City, including Anne Morgan, daughter of banking magnate J. P. Morgan, publicly endorsed the cause of the workers. The presence and commitment of young women on the picket line challenged the traditional image of women wage earners as passive victims.

After almost three months, the shirtwaist strike was settled. Many, but not all, of the manufacturers agreed to a fifty-two-hour workweek, no more fines for workers’ mistakes, more worker involvement in setting wages, and even paid holidays. But they would not allow the ILGWU to represent the workers in future negotiations. Even so, the strike turned the ILGWU into a much more powerful labor organization. Individual working-class women, including Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, embarked on a lifetime of labor activism.

A tragic epilogue to the shirtwaist strike took place a little over a year later, highlighting why union recognition was so important to the workers. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company had begun locking the doors of its Manhattan factory after the workers arrived, to keep union organizers out and workers in. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the tenth floor. Workers found that they were locked inside the building. Desperately they ran up to the roof. Some were able to escape, but 146 workers, more than a quarter of Triangle’s employees, died. At a mass funeral held a few days later, Schneiderman delivered a bitter eulogy: “This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. . . . Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if [we] are burned to death.”7

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

The actual number of dead was 146. This gruesome newspaper photograph shows the broken bodies of young women who jumped to escape the fire because the doors were locked from the outside and the fire escapes pulled away from the building. A policeman leans over to identify and tag the victims. To the right is the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, site of both the 1909–1910 strike and the 1911 fire. As Rose Schneiderman predicted, it survived long after the workers died. Currently, it is owned by New York University. No one was ever convicted of liability for the tragedy.

In 1912, labor militancy broke out again in the textile factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts. As in the garment industry, textile workers were overwhelmingly immigrant, but the textile industry employed entire families, including children. Textile workers labored long hours for very low wages. Much of the industry was located in company towns, where employers exerted total control and workers could find no local allies. When a Massachusetts law established a maximum of fifty-four working hours per week, Lawrence manufacturers cut the wages of their workers proportionately, and the workers struck.

Because the AFL was not interested in their plight, the workers turned to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical socialist labor organization. One of the organization’s most famous leaders was twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a single mother and an accomplished organizer and public speaker. In Lawrence, Flynn encouraged greater involvement among Italian and other immigrant women, whose enthusiasm for the struggle gave the lie to their reputation as cloistered and conservative peasants. Besides going out on strike, immigrant women took to the streets in parades but also in informal groups, where they taunted and harassed local businessmen, police, and others they deemed unfriendly to their cause.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

A socialist and feminist, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a charismatic organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, a position that took her to the Midwest, West, and New England in the early twentieth century. In 1912, she was crucial in assisting immigrant workers in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike. Here she addresses a crowd of women during the Paterson, New Jersey, silk worker strike in 1913.

The turning point in the strike involved the children of the town’s workers. As police and militia attacks increased, Flynn decided it was time to relocate the younger children to the homes of out-of-town sympathizers. Children on their way to Philadelphia were beaten by Lawrence police, and their mothers were imprisoned for “neglect” by local courts. Nationwide outrage was so great that the employers were forced to agree to the strikers’ demands for a fifty-four-hour week and wage increases as high as 25 percent (see Figure 8.1, p. 463). Ironically, the very magnitude of the Lawrence workers’ victory contributed to the shift of much of the textile industry from New England to the South, in search of a more docile workforce.

The exceptional dedication and militancy of the women of the New York and Lawrence strikes — and other labor conflicts in Paterson, New Jersey; Chicago; and Atlanta — helped to transform the popular image of working women. No longer dependent on others to defend and protect them, they were now appreciated for the ability to fight their own battles. By the beginning of World War I, the number of women in trade unions had quadrupled. Even so, women remained a minority of the labor movement and had many obstacles — lack of male interest, middle-class condescension, and their own timidity — to overcome.

THE FEMALE DOMINION

The WTUL was connected to what one historian has named the “female dominion,” the women’s wing of reform movements in the Progressive era. Middle- and upper-class white women created a network of reform organizations, became active in partisan politics, and lobbied for legislation to benefit poor women and children. Largely excluded from those groups, African American women created their own institutions that promoted social welfare and self-help in their communities. Although black women faced obstacles unknown to white reformers, both groups demonstrated a strong commitment to women’s involvement in the dramatic political changes of the early twentieth century.

Public Housekeeping

Female social reformers frequently drew on the image of “public housekeeping” to describe women’s activism in the Progressive era. “The very multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the help of minds accustomed to . . . a sense of responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people,” explained Jane Addams in 1906 of the reform work that women were doing in Chicago.8 What once could be accomplished from within the home, it was argued, now required that women become leaders in the public realm.

Women’s public housekeeping took many forms. Despite their disfranchisement, women worked to drive out corrupt machine politics and install reform mayors in various cities. They worked to improve slum housing and to establish public amenities in Boston and New York. The Civic Club of Charleston, South Carolina, established playgrounds and then convinced the city council to take them over. Many public libraries were founded by local women’s clubs. Women were involved in the campaign to set health standards for food, especially for the notoriously impure milk supply, a particular threat to infants whose mothers did not breast-feed. Women played a major role in the establishment of special juvenile and family courts. Activist and budding historian Mary Beard chronicled the breadth and depth of this involvement in urban politics in her 1915 book, Woman’s Work in Municipalities. Beard wrote that as women sought to address the problems of disease, “vice, crime, poverty and misery,” they learned that “to ‘swat the fly’ . . . they must swat poor housing, evil labor conditions, ignorance, and vicious interests.”9 These public housekeepers worked through existing national organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and its state affiliates. But they also formed new, more focused groups. Most important was the National Consumers’ League (NCL), formed in 1899 in New York City by Florence Kelley, which brought together women’s consumer organizations in various states. The NCL concentrated on working conditions for women and children.

The Dirty Pool of Politics

The image of civic-minded women sweeping out the dirt from the house of public life captures both the conventional and innovative nature of women’s public activities in this period. The image was widely distributed by suffragists, suggesting that the link between politics and civic housewifery was an effective rhetorical tool with men and women alike.

Historians have developed the term “maternalism” to characterize the ideological core of women’s reform concerns in the Progressive era.10 Maternalist thinking had two parts. First, every sort of program advanced on women’s behalf, even those having to do with women’s wage labor, was justified on the grounds that society needed to protect maternal capacity. Second, the women who designed and advocated for these policies conceived of their own public involvement through the lens of motherhood. The dual meaning of “maternalism” obscured the different ways that standards of motherhood were applied to what were essentially two different classes of women, leisure-class policy makers and their working-class clients. The former legitimated themselves by expressing active maternal concern, wielded from within the public arena, while they viewed the beneficiaries of their policies as dependent and homebound mothers in need of protection. Thus, maternal power and maternal need were separated between two different classes rather than understood as linked and interdependent.

Maternalist Triumphs: Protective Labor Legislation and Mothers’ Pensions

Maternalist presumptions underlay policies designed on behalf of working women and mothers alike. One of reformers’ first goals was to establish a legal maximum workday for working women. However, in 1905, in the case Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any attempt to regulate wage labor relations for men or women was an unconstitutional infringement on individual freedom of contract. At this point, the NCL reasoned that the courts might allow special labor laws only for women workers on the grounds that their future maternal capacity needed to be protected.

An opportunity to test this theory came in 1908 when an Oregon maximum hours law only for women workers was challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court. Josephine Goldmark, NCL secretary, arranged for Louis Brandeis, her brother-in-law and later a member of the Supreme Court, to argue the case. The so-called Brandeis Brief proceeded on two grounds: (1) that “women are fundamentally weaker than men” in defending themselves against the assaults of wage labor and thus must rely on the state to safeguard them and (2) that protection of women’s maternal capacity was necessary for the general welfare. In its 1908 decision Muller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court accepted the argument that while men’s working hours could not be regulated by law, women’s could (see the Appendix, p. A-7). Within a decade, all but nine states had passed maximum hours laws for working women.

These so-called protective labor laws were widely applauded by women activists and working women alike. But there were some limits to this victory. Women in domestic and agricultural labor were for the most part excluded, which meant that the great majority of African American and Mexican American women were not covered. More generally, in exchange for a desired improvement in their working conditions, working women had been formally labeled weaker than men, without the same claim on individual rights. From this perspective, the underlying principle of one of the era’s great achievements for women, protective labor laws, conflicted with those of another great success, equal political rights.

Other protective labor legislation for working women was passed on the basis of maternal capacity. After 1908, many states passed laws prohibiting women from working at night. Female printers and other skilled women workers whose jobs required night work protested. Laws that set minimum wages for women workers, so that any decrease in women’s working hours would not result in lower earnings, were also passed, provoking controversy from employers who objected to the higher labor costs that minimum wage laws would incur. In a 1923 case titled Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the logic of its earlier Muller decision and invalidated minimum wage laws for women, saying that women “are legally as capable of contracting for themselves as men.”11 The Court based this turnaround of perspective on the recently ratified Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution giving women equal voting rights (see the Appendix, p. A-8).

The major forms of legislation directed at mothers were maternal pension programs, to shield mothers who were unsupported by male breadwinners from having to go out into the workplace to earn money, allowing them to stay at home with their children. Thus, the two different reforms — legislation focused on working women’s hours and pensions for nonworking mothers — were closely linked by the maternalist ethic that it was the government’s responsibility to protect motherhood from the incursions of the wage labor system and to conserve women’s best energies for bearing and raising children.

The first mothers’ pension program was established in 1911 in Illinois. A limited number of single mothers, whose neediness was determined by the Juvenile Court, received monthly grants of $50. Not surprisingly, African American mothers barely appeared on the mothers’ pension rolls, kept off by institutional prejudice and their lack of knowledge that these programs existed. By 1920, thirty-eight other states had established mothers’ pension programs with similar structures.

Maternalist Defeat: The Struggle to Ban Child Labor

Ironically, the least successful of the maternalist programs was the one that seems the most basic and obvious: ending child labor. In 1900, an estimated 2 million underage children were reported to be working for wages. While state legislatures passed maximum hours laws and mothers’ pension programs, the campaign to outlaw child labor was one of the first social welfare efforts to focus on the federal government. In 1912, Congress established a Children’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, which became headquarters for the campaign to stop child labor. With little federal funding for its work, the Children’s Bureau used women’s clubs, especially those associated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, to conduct surveys and to lobby for state and federal legislation for children. One measure of their success came in 1916 when Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act, which prohibited paid labor for children under sixteen.

What seemed like an amazingly quick victory in a key Progressive reform soon turned into defeat. Crucial industries such as textile manufacturing and mining relied on child workers and opposed the law. In addition, immigrant families depended heavily on the labor of their children and stubbornly resisted the perspective of middle-class social workers to eliminate it. In 1918, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal law as an unconstitutional violation of states’ rights. Congress passed a constitutional amendment banning child labor in 1924, but its ratification failed, the victim of an energetic “anti”-campaign that labeled it as too “socialistic.” It was not until 1938, with the anti-child-labor provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand, that the practice of child labor in this country was outlawed.

Progressive Women and Political Parties

Despite the rhetoric of maternalism, many female reform activists were drawn to the traditionally male political arena. Even without the franchise, they involved themselves in the 1912 election in anticipation that their voting rights were just over the horizon.

Even though women tended to position themselves as nonpartisan, putting issues and candidates above party loyalty, they could be found in the ranks of all the major parties. Many politically active women reformers, such as the Dreier sisters of the WTUL, could be found in the reform wing of the Republican Party. In 1912, the reformers’ candidate, former president Theodore Roosevelt, lost the Republican Party nomination to incumbent William Howard Taft. As a result, the reform forces bolted the party to create the independent Progressive Party. The Progressives supported woman suffrage and integrated women fully into all their activities. At the Progressive Party’s national convention, the de facto leader of the women reformers, Jane Addams, was chosen to second Roosevelt’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate. Most African American women, however, remained devoted to the regular Republicans, the party of Lincoln.

The 1912 presidential race also featured a strong Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs. While both the Progressive and Socialist Parties advocated woman suffrage and minimum wage laws for women, the Socialists’ ultimate goal was working-class empowerment, whereas the Progressives sought interclass harmony. Socialist women came in different varieties. Kate Richards O’Hare, who had begun her reform career in Kansas as a temperance advocate, was a nationally prominent Socialist writer, journalist, and traveling lecturer. Rose Pastor Stokes, a Russian immigrant factory worker who made headlines when she married a wealthy New York reformer, was also prominent in the party.

In the 1912 election, Roosevelt received more popular votes than the regular Republican nominee, President William Howard Taft, but the winner of the election, profiting from the split in the Republican ranks, was the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had a reputation as a reformer from his years as governor of New Jersey. Democrats did not have a record of cultivating female support, although this was beginning to change as full enfranchisement drew nearer. Debs won only 6 percent of the presidential vote, but Socialists were elected to local and state offices and even to Congress, marking the high point of electoral socialism in American history.

Outside the Dominion: Progressivism and Race

Race was a blind spot for white reformers in the Progressive era. Anti-Asian sentiment against Japanese immigration was strong and growing in the West. In the Southwest, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 swelled the numbers of Mexican immigrants — by 1920 they constituted 12 percent of the population of California — and nativist anxiety about these dark-skinned foreigners also grew stronger.

Inasmuch as the Progressive era coincided with the triumph of Jim Crow policies, however, the brunt of the era’s racism fell on African Americans. In the South, white reformers advocated segregation and the disfranchisement of black men as a means to purge local political corruption. In the North, antiblack prejudice was reinforced by scientific theories of racial hierarchy that were current at the time. Even the most sympathetic whites saw the African American poor as less adaptable than European immigrants to urban industrial society. Given maternalist convictions about the importance of home-based childrearing, male breadwinning, and dedicated mothering, the tendency of black mothers to work outside the home seemed to white reformers to constitute an insurmountable barrier to their improvement.

Nonetheless, African American women shared the reform enthusiasms of the era. The small black middle class provided resources for the establishment of kindergartens for the children of working mothers and founded old-age homes for former slaves without families to care for them. By 1900, four hundred black women’s clubs and societies were affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In addition to the antilynching work with which it had begun, the NACW had divisions for mothers’ clubs, juvenile courts, domestic science, temperance, music, literature, and votes for women. Mary Church Terrell, an 1884 graduate of Oberlin College, was the association’s first president. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909, Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were the most prominent African American women admitted to the inner circle. (See Primary Sources: “Black Women and Progressive-Era Reform,” pp. 454–61.)

Two other important black women of the era were business entrepreneurs, a category that had no real equivalent among white women of the period. Louisiana-born Sarah Breedlove Walker went from being a laundress to being the president of her own highly successful hair care business. As Madam C. J. Walker, she employed thousands of African American women who sold her products door-to-door. Virginia-born Maggie Lena Walker (no relation to Sarah) was the first woman president of a U.S. bank. Wealthy, philanthropic, and community-minded, both women deeply identified with the progress of the women of their race. Maggie Walker described her “great all absorbing interest” as “the love I bear . . . our Negro women . . . blocked and held down by the fears and prejudices of the whites, ridiculed and sneered at by intelligent blacks.”12

Madam C. J. Walker

During the Progressive era, many wealthy women were also reformers and philanthropists, but only one earned her own fortune and was African American. Madam C. J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, was the daughter of former slaves and worked in the cotton fields and as a laundress before she built her immensely successful hair care and cosmetics business. Walker was active in the National Association of Colored Women and was the single largest contributor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s antilynching campaign, which picked up from the earlier efforts of black clubwomen. Walker died in 1919, and her daughter used the money her mother left her to become the most important black woman patron of the Harlem Renaissance.

During the Progressive era, Native Americans also began to serve as public advocates for their people. A generation educated in white institutions had gained familiarity with the dominant culture and acquired the political skills needed to speak for themselves. Their goal was to undo the economic and political dependency that had resulted from late nineteenth-century Indian policy (see pp. 358–63). Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was the leading woman in this first generation of modern Indian activists. (See Primary Sources: “Representing Native American Women in the Late Nineteenth Century,” pp. 390–401.) Writing under her Yankton Sioux name Zitkala-Ša, she advocated both preserving Native culture from destruction and securing full rights of citizenship for Native peoples. She became the secretary of the first secular national pan-Indian reform organization established by Native peoples, the Society of American Indians.13 Other Native women also figured prominently in the Society of American Indians, but the society divided over numerous issues, including full citizenship rights for Native Americans, fearing that U.S. citizenship would weaken tribal communities. But in 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, women were included, because by then the long battle for woman suffrage had come to a victorious end.

First Annual Conference of the Society of American Indians

This section of a 1911 photograph features attendants at the first annual conference of the Society of American Indians. The society valued assimilation for Native Americans, but also emphasized reforms on the reservations and lobbied for citizenship. Women were active in the organization. Pictured here from left to right are Nora McFarland, Sadie Wall, Ester M. Dagenett, Mary E. Finn, Emma D. Johnson, Marie L. B. Baldwin, Angel DeCora Deitz, and Jane M. Butler.

VOTES FOR WOMEN

The labor militancy of women workers and the public involvement of Progressive women reformers together fueled a great and final drive for women’s enfranchisement. Ever since the constitutional amendments of the Reconstruction years (see pp. 292–94), the woman suffrage movement had been accumulating advocates and reformulating its strategy. In 1890, the two rival suffrage societies, the National Woman Suffrage Association (founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (established by Lucy Stone and Henry Ward Blackwell), united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). When Carrie Chapman Catt of Iowa took over the NAWSA presidency from Anthony in 1900, four states, all west of the Mississippi, had granted full voting rights to women.

A New Generation for Suffrage

A new generation of suffrage leaders was determined to expand the movement to the rest of the country and bring it into full conformity with the realities of urban, industrial, modern America. They rejected the outdated nineteenth-century term “woman suffrage” in favor of a more contemporary-sounding slogan, “votes for women.” They were influenced by new developments in the British suffrage movement, which had adopted more public tactics that put pressure on political leaders, as well as increased involvement with working women in the British textile industry. American women were particularly inspired by Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters Christabel and Sylvia. They drew in previously uninvolved classes of women, from the wealthy to the working class, and learned to play legislative politics to their own benefit. They established small, flexible suffrage societies and turned to the most advanced cultural methods and artistic styles, anything to get over the old-fashioned image from which their cause suffered.

The revived movement of the Progressive era came back to life in a series of campaigns for equal political rights at the state level. But appeals to male voters in one state after another were exhausting, repetitive, and, east of the Mississippi River, impossible to win. At this point, suffrage activists shifted their focus back to a federal constitutional amendment, the movement’s original goal in the 1860s. Large but slow to change, NAWSA was challenged by a small, more aggressive group of activists, known as “militants” and “suffragettes” (the latter a derogatory term that British suffrage activists had turned into a label of pride). By the mid-1910s, these two wings of the movement had generated the right combination of female energy, male support, and political will to effect a constitutional amendment for women’s political rights.

Why, then, did it take so long to win votes for women? Organized opposition is part of the answer. Ever since the 1890s, a few mostly upper-class women actively opposed enfranchisement, either on the grounds that political rights would cost women their moral influence over men or that too many “unfit” women would vote. However, suffrage leaders were less concerned with the female anti-suffragists than with powerful male-led special interests — especially the liquor industry and manufacturers who exploited female and child labor — who worked against them from behind the legislative scenes.

But the really significant obstacles that had to be overcome were more elusive. Large numbers of women who otherwise had little in common had to unite in active pursuit of this single goal. Perhaps this was why, unlike the suffragists of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s day, the twentieth-century movement did not emphasize abstract justice but instead stressed the many concrete purposes to which organized political power could be put. With a large, diverse movement of women demanding the vote, male politicians and legislators were gradually compelled to act. That votes for women was a reform long past due did not make its final achievement any less a triumph; it was the most successful mass movement for the expansion of political democracy in American history.

Diversity in the Woman Suffrage Movement

In terms of diversity, the greatest achievement of the twentieth-century woman suffrage movement was its extremely broad class base. Reform collaboration between middle-class reformers and working-class trade unionists greatly facilitated outreach to women wage earners in the suffrage movement. By 1910, several new suffrage organizations were focused on recruiting working women. In San Francisco, Maud Younger, a wealthy woman who organized food servers, established a Wage Earners Suffrage League; similar organizations were founded in Los Angeles, New York City, and elsewhere. More and more suffrage parades featured large divisions of working women, often marching under the banners of their trade or union. Pro-suffrage literature was printed in the languages of immigrants — Yiddish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish — and explained how votes for women would raise women’s wages and improve their working conditions. Wage-earning women brought with them the support of male family members and coworkers, who began to see in votes for women a tool for their own class interests.

Simultaneously, women from the very highest class of society became involved in the movement. Their wealth came from their husbands, but, aspiring to power of their own, they used their money to gain entrée into the world of women’s politics. One of the richest was Alva Belmont, who had divorced one millionaire, William Vanderbilt, in order to marry another, August Belmont. Their money paid the salaries of organizers, rented offices, and supported the publication of newspapers and leaflets. Relations between the wealthy and the wage earning were superficially sisterly. But wealthy suffragists expected to lead the movement, and working-class suffragists were suspicious of their motives. “We want the ballot for very different reasons,” explained Los Angeles working-class suffragist Minna O’Donnell in 1908. “Our idea is self protection; you want to use it [to help] some one else.”14 They approached the vote less in terms of individual rights than of group power.

The growth of suffragism among young college-educated women, whose numbers had been increasing since the 1860s, was also a new development. The College Equal Suffrage League, formed by students and young alumnae at Radcliffe College in 1898 because the administration would not permit pro-suffrage speakers on campus, became a national organization in 1908 under the leadership of Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas. College graduates provided the energy of youth in many other organizations.

In contrast to such bridges across the class gap, the suffrage movement was almost completely racially segregated. NAWSA repeatedly refused to condemn discrimination against African American women and allowed southern white affiliates to refuse them membership. Moreover, southern suffrage leaders such as Kate Gordon of Louisiana and Laura Clay of Kentucky regarded the involvement of African American women as an outright threat to their plans to increase the political involvement of white women in their region. “The South will be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African,” Belle Kearney of Mississippi hopefully predicted in 1903.15

Despite this discouragement, black suffragists continued to insist on their equal political rights. For black women, achieving suffrage was a way to counter the disfranchisement of the men of their race. Starting in the 1890s, African American women began to assert their political rights aggressively from within their own clubs and suffrage societies. “If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot,” explained Adele Hunt Logan of Tuskegee, Alabama, “how much more do black Americans, male and female, need the strong defense of a vote to help secure their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”16

Returning to the Constitution: The National Suffrage Movement

In the Reconstruction years, the suffrage movement had concentrated on getting woman suffrage recognized in the U.S. Constitution. Congress debated a woman suffrage amendment in 1878, but suffrage energies shifted to the state level soon after. The modern revival of the American suffrage movement began in a series of campaigns focused on enfranchisement in particular states (see Map 8.1). In Washington State, where women had briefly voted in the 1880s only to have their suffrage revoked by the territorial legislature, they regained the vote in 1910. The next year, California women won suffrage by less than five thousand votes. In 1915, campaigns were mounted in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and, most important, New York. Despite extraordinary efforts, the eastern campaigns of 1915 failed. Some suffrage leaders were beginning to conclude that the state-by-state approach was futile. Even if every state could be won this way — and many, certainly the entire South, could not — the time and money required were prohibitive. At this point, the momentum of the movement shifted back to an approach that would enfranchise all American women: a U.S. constitutional amendment.

“The Awakening”

Maps comparing states where women did and didn’t have the right to vote became increasingly familiar in the movement’s final years, to indicate that the drive for women’s enfranchisement was growing, its final achievement irresistible. This powerful version, from the popular magazine Puck, refers to the 1915 New York campaign, which was unable to win an eastern state to the suffrage side. Here western women carrying the torch of enfranchisement, are coming to rescue the women of the east from their political purgatory. The poem at the bottom, by Alice Duer Miller, begins “Look forward, women, always; utterly cast away / The memory of hate and struggle and bitterness; / Bonds may endure for a night, but freedom comes with the day, / And the free must remember nothing less. . . .” How does this text help to explain the title, “The Awakening”?

Map 8.1 Woman Suffrage, 1890–1919

The woman suffrage movement in the United States was fought on both the state and federal levels. States traditionally defined their electorates, but starting with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the Constitution prohibited particular forms of disfranchisement. In 1893, Colorado amended its state constitution to include women as voting citizens. By 1914, ten other states, all in the West, had followed suit, granting their women full voting rights, including for president and Congress. The voting power of women in these “suffrage states” became a potent political lever for moving the national parties to support what became the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from disfranchising their citizens on the basis of sex.

NAWSA was slow to make the shift to focus on a federal amendment. Anna Howard Shaw, who had replaced Carrie Chapman Catt as NAWSA president in 1906, was unwilling to redirect organizational resources from the influential state chapters to a centralized national campaign. In 1913, two young women college graduates, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, convinced NAWSA leaders to allow them to take over work on a federal amendment. In their very first act, they signaled their intention to energize a national effort with the same kind of spectacular methods that had worked in state campaigns. They organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. (see Figure 8.4, p. 467), and chose March 3, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, because then the nation’s attention would be on the city. When the president-to-be disembarked from the train, he was told that the crowds he had expected to greet him were down on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching the suffragists. Within a few weeks, the suffrage amendment was being debated in the House of Representatives for the first time in seventeen years.

Fresh off this victory, Paul and Burns formed a new, smaller, more activist, and more disciplined national organization. They named it the Congressional Union because its goal was to pressure Congress to pass a woman suffrage amendment. Paul and Burns understood that the votes of women who were already enfranchised by successful state campaigns in the West provided an important tool for putting political pressure on Congress to move. Accordingly, in 1916 they adjusted the name of their organization to the National Woman’s Party (NWP) with a single plank, getting voting women to push for a constitutional amendment. That year, as President Wilson campaigned to be reelected, a corps of NWP activists fanned out through the West, urging women voters to withhold their votes from the Democrats until Wilson promised actively to back woman suffrage.

Although this tactic failed — Wilson won the election, including in states such as California where women voted — the NWP succeeded in redirecting suffrage energies to the national level. Even NAWSA loyalists who found the NWP’s combative methods distasteful were compelled to develop an alternative way for their organization to push for federal-level enfranchisement. In 1915, NAWSA’s most politically savvy leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, reassumed the national presidency. She mobilized NAWSA’s enormous organizational structure in a concerted lobbying campaign for the federal amendment. Although the NWP and the NAWSA were hostile to each other, belying the notion of a loving sisterhood on behalf of suffrage, their two approaches were complementary, the former raising the political stakes by its radical efforts, the latter negotiating with congressmen to move the amendment forward. Nonetheless, it took another five years, and the upheaval of a world war, before the Constitution was amended to enfranchise women.

THE EMERGENCE OF FEMINISM

As the votes-for-women movement grew, an avant-garde approach to modernizing womanhood that emphasized women’s autonomy was surfacing. To distinguish themselves from the more conventional suffragists, the women who took this approach began to use the term “feminist,” borrowed from the French feminisme. “All feminists are suffragists,” they explained, “but not all suffragists are feminists.”17 Their agenda was a broad one, moving beyond political rights and economic advancement to embrace female individuality, sexual freedom, and birth control.

The Feminist Program

Feminism was a cultural development more than an organized movement. Most of its adherents were middle-class college graduates, aspiring professionals, and artists, but female labor activists and immigrants were also in its ranks. The definition of the word “feminism” was imprecise. On the one hand, feminists believed that women had all the capacities and talents of men; on the other, they believed that women’s distinctive intelligence and powers had not yet been allowed to surface. Whether emphasizing similarities or differences with men, however, they agreed on feminism’s power to disrupt the gender order. “Feminism was something with dynamite in it,” Rheta Childe Dorr wrote. “It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated . . . made of old materials, worn out laws, customs, conventions, fetishes, traditions and taboos.”18 Feminists were proud individualists, impatient with the female tradition of justifying all actions (including social reform) in terms of selfless, maternal service. (See Primary Sources: “Modernizing Womanhood,” pp. 475–79.)

Unlike the votes-for-women movement, feminism placed the cutting edge of change in women’s private lives, not in their public roles. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist favorite for her conviction that the family-oriented life of the middle class was narrow and inefficient, a point she explored in her pathbreaking books Women and Economics (1890) and The Home (1903). Gilman championed collectivizing housework, and New York City feminist Henrietta Rodman organized a communal apartment house for women to realize this vision.

Other feminists challenged the Gilded Age premise of female sexual restraint by insisting that women had sexual desires as well as maternal capacities. They were influenced by British psychologist Havelock Ellis, one of the most eminent among a growing circle of “sexologists.” Although similar to Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, in emphasizing the erotic nature of all humans, Ellis and others, including Swedish feminist Ellen Key, tended to romanticize sexuality by investing it with mystical qualities and insisting that sexual gratification was necessary for emotional health. In contrast to Freud, they also paid special attention to women’s sexuality.

In the spirit of the new feminism, younger women claimed that previous generations of female activists fostered too much “sex antagonism” toward men, and that it was possible for advanced women and men to live and love together in mutual passion. Clustering in inexpensive, often immigrant urban neighborhoods, most famously New York City’s Greenwich Village, they innovated new lifestyles, living with men in “free unions.” A handful of feminists lived openly as lesbians in partnerships with other women that clearly were sexual, in contrast to the ambiguous homosocial relationships of the past (see p. 316).

Feminists’ rejection of Gilded Age middle-class notions of sexual restraint was reinforced by broader trends in the society, especially urban popular culture. The fledgling film industry often portrayed women in ways that emphasized their sexual attractiveness to men, but also their own sexual natures. In vaudeville — live entertainment that featured a variety of comedic skits, song-and-dance acts, and novelty performances — female performers, including Eva Tanguay and Gertrude Hoffmann, became immensely famous and were noted for being independent, unconventional, strong women who were paid top dollar. And like the movies, vaudeville portrayed female sexuality. The enormous popularity of the “Salome” persona, a revealingly clad woman who performed an erotically charged dance number, highlighted women who embraced their sexuality as a source of power and pleasure.

Young working-class women were eager to take advantage of new urban commercial entertainments like dance halls, skating rinks, and amusement parks. Working-class women living apart from their families congregated in “furnished-room” districts of the nation’s cities, which were often associated with prostitution and vice. These areas had a freer sexual climate that allowed experimentation and extramarital cohabitation, both with men and other women. Constrained by their poor wages, many young working-class women inhabited a culture in which male suitors entertained them and bought them gifts in exchange for sexual favors. Elite urban women also began to frequent cabarets — the forerunners of today’s nightclubs, where they learned syncopated dance steps in an atmosphere that suggested to some moral reformers “illicit sexuality.”19 The relative freedom of the urban environment and the attraction of popular amusements thus prompted early twentieth-century women to map out a new sexual terrain that coincided with feminists’ articulation of sexuality as a crucial element of personal identity and fulfillment.

The Birth Control Movement

The most organized and politicized manifestation of cutting-edge feminism in the Progressive era was the campaign for birth control. Earlier women’s rights champions had urged women to undertake pregnancy only voluntarily. Yet they regarded sexuality as fundamentally male, and they did not think it was important — or desirable — for women to have greater amounts of sexual intercourse freed of the threat of pregnancy. Emma Goldman was one of the first to speak widely on women’s right to contraceptive information and methods, not only so that they could avoid unwanted pregnancy but also so that they could enjoy sexual intercourse.

In 1912, Margaret Sanger, a daughter of Irish immigrants, a trained nurse, and a Socialist, followed Goldman’s lead to write and speak on behalf of women’s right to control the frequency of their childbearing. She invented the term “birth control” to describe a practice that had long existed but had not been openly discussed or publicly advocated (see Reading into the Past: “Woman and Birth Control”). Indeed, by the time Sanger began her work, birthrates among native-born white women had already fallen significantly. Sanger, like many feminists, viewed birth control as a means to women’s autonomy. As she put it, “It is none of society’s business what a woman shall do with her body.”20

Yet Sanger’s socialism also led her to focus on the problems of poor women. From her years of nursing, Sanger knew that immigrant women, without any access to private physicians, suffered the most from the public ban on discussions of contraception. At first, Sanger did not have a reliable contraceptive technology to promote. She concentrated instead on teaching young girls necessary reproductive and sexual information through a series of articles titled “What Every Girl Should Know.”

In sending her writings through the U.S. mail, Sanger fell afoul of the Comstock anti-obscenity laws, which had been interfering with the spread of contraceptive information since the 1870s (see pp. 314–16). To avoid arrest, she fled to Europe, where a Dutch feminist doctor, Aletta Jacobs, taught her about the diaphragm (then known as a female pessary), an effective, female-controlled form of contraception. Sanger smuggled these devices into the United States and in 1916, in an immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, opened the first American birth control clinic. Days after the clinic opened, she was arrested for promoting birth control. After her 1917 trial and conviction, she served thirty days in jail. She remained dedicated to the cause of birth control for the next forty years, but she engineered a compromise with physicians by agreeing that diaphragms should be available only through prescription. Contraception became more respectable and more widely disseminated in the 1920s (see p. 493), but in the prewar years, like feminism itself, birth control was a radical idea that challenged conventional notions of women’s sexuality and reproduction.

READING INTO THE PAST

MARGARET SANGER

Woman and Birth Control

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), Socialist, feminist, and birth control pioneer, attributed her determination to dismantle the legal and cultural barriers keeping women from gaining access to contraceptive information to her experience as a visiting nurse among the immigrant working class in New York City. In this excerpt from the typescript of a draft for her speech “Woman and Birth Control,” which she gave during her 1916 American tour, Sanger tells the story of a poor woman who died as a result of too many pregnancies and a self-induced abortion. Sanger did not blame individual men; she understood that the doctor and the husband in her story were trapped inside a system that regarded sexuality as a matter of morality rather than health and disregarded women’s perspectives and needs.

This patient of mine was the wife of a struggling working man and the mother of three children. She was suffering from the results of an attempted abortion performed on her by herself. She lived on Grand St., the main thoroughfare of New York[’s] down-town Ghetto. I found her in a very serious condition and for three weeks both the attending physician and myself labored night and day to bring her out of the valley of the shadow of death. We finally succeeded in restoring her to her family circle. I remember the day I was leaving. The doctor, too, was making his last call. As the doctor put out his hand to say good-bye to her, I saw that she had something to say to him, but was timid and shy about it. I started to leave the room to leave them both alone, but she said, “No, don’t go. How can both of you leave me without telling me something that I can do to avoid a future illness such as I have just passed through?” I was interested to hear the answer of the physician, and came back and sat down beside her. To my amazement he answered her question lightly and jokingly, put her aside by telling her that there was nothing that she could do as long as there were laws upon the statute books, and he advised her to get her husband to change the laws.

Three months later I was aroused from my sleep at midnight. A telephone call from the husband of the same woman, requested me to come immediately, that she was dangerously ill. I arrived to find her beyond relief. Another conception had forced her into the hands of a cheap abortionist and she died at 4 o’clock the same morning, leaving behind her three little children and the frantic, helpless husband.

I arrived home as the sun was coming up from the roofs of that human beehive and I realized how futile my efforts and my work had been. I, too, like the philanthropist, the social worker and the quack had been dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease. I threw my nursing bag into the corner and announced to my family that I would never take it up again, that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for the working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth. I decided I had no moral right to respect a law, — a worn-out piece of parchment, — obsolete in every respect, I had no right to respect this above human life, and I decided to violate it wholesale.

SOURCE: Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 129-12, reproduced online at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=128002.xml.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Who do you think was the audience for Sanger’s dramatic story?

What does she mean by the statement that she “had been dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease”?

THE GREAT WAR, 1914–1918

At the peak of the ferment of change prompted by Progressivism, suffragism, and feminism, international events dramatically altered the American political environment. In August 1914, war broke out in Europe, as a complex set of interlocking alliances pitted the Allied powers (Britain, France, and Russia) against the Central powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Even before the U.S. entered the war nearly three years later, the conflict had already had a significant impact on American women. Labor shortages benefited working women. African American men and women began a large-scale exodus out of the rural South into the industrial cities of the North. Most of these economic opportunities faded at war’s end, but women’s political achievements were more lasting. The war bolstered women’s claims to enfranchisement and propelled passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Pacifist and Antiwar Women

In the two years that the United States watched the war from the sidelines, peace advocacy among American women was widespread. NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt expressed the common sentiment that “when war murders the husbands and sons of women, . . . it becomes the undeniable business of women.”21 In August 1914, women marched silently and solemnly down the streets of New York City to protest the violence of war. Five months later, suffragist and feminist Crystal Eastman organized the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP). With over twenty thousand women members, the WPP was dedicated to resolving the conflict in Europe through peaceful, negotiated means.

In the spring of 1915, forty-seven WPP members joined a thousand women from twelve countries at an international peace conference of women in The Hague, Netherlands. Most were of the leisure class, but some working-class activists, such as Leonora O’Reilly, also attended. The organization they formed, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, still exists today. The participants vowed to meet again when the war ended. For her role in this movement, Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first American woman so honored.

But peace was not in the offing and the United States inched closer to war. President Wilson’s hopes for neutrality were literally sunk by German revival of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, from which the United States was not spared. Wilson’s position, as well as national sentiment, shifted toward entering the war. On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany and its allies.

Once the United States joined the war, women who opposed it were accused of political disloyalty, and the number and prominence of women speaking against militarism plummeted. Nonetheless, Jeannette Rankin, a suffragist from Montana and, in 1916, the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against a formal declaration of war, for which she was turned out of office. Emily Balch was fired from her job as professor of economics at Wellesley College for challenging the government’s right to draft young men to fight. Ida B. Wells-Barnett was threatened with jail for her efforts to defend black soldiers who had been convicted and executed for alleged insurrection in Texas. “I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing,” she defiantly responded, “than to save my skin by taking back what I have said.”22

After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia negotiated a separate peace with Germany and left the war. This transformation of a former ally into a worker-run state intensified suspicion of American Socialists, who never recovered their prewar vitality. Kate Richards O’Hare was sentenced to five years in federal prison for voicing the same kind of sentiments against mothers’ being forced to sacrifice their sons to war that had been common a few years before. Emma Goldman was imprisoned for her antidraft speeches; after the war, along with hundreds of other immigrant radicals, she was permanently deported from the United States and died in exile.

Within the suffrage movement, it was the militant wing that resisted the atmosphere of wartime jingoism. Prior to U.S. entry into the war, NWP members had begun picketing the White House — the first American activists ever to do so — to add to the pressure on President Wilson to support a federal suffrage amendment (see Figure 8.5, p. 468). Although the NWP did not formally oppose the war, it refused to halt its activities once war was declared. On the contrary, it upped the ante, carrying signs provocatively addressed to “Kaiser Wilson,” declaring that “Democracy Should Begin at Home.” Peaceful protest was now perceived as the act of traitors.

From 1917 through 1919, 168 suffrage picketers were arrested, and 97 served up to six months in federal prison. Considering themselves political prisoners, many went on hunger strikes and were forcibly fed through tubes pushed down their noses into their stomachs. NWP leader Alice Paul was repeatedly interrogated by a prison psychiatrist, who wanted to prove that she was mentally ill rather than deeply dedicated to the cause of woman suffrage. She defied her interrogators and insisted that her opinions were political, not paranoid.

Preparedness and Patriotism

While antiwar women and militant suffragists persisted in their protests, the majority of American women, including middle-of-the-road suffragists, threw themselves into the war effort. Wilson had described the United States’ role in idealistic terms, claiming World War I as a war for democracy to spread American ideals throughout the world. Following his lead, the majority of Americans believed that their country was fighting for the ideals of peace and freedom and against autocracy. They hoped that war could be the fruition of many progressive hopes, and they were eager to help make it so. (See Primary Sources: “Uncle Sam Wants You: Women and World War I Posters,” pp. 470–74.)

Activist women also viewed supporting the war as an opportunity to demonstrate not merely their patriotism but their claims to full citizenship. Carrie Chapman Catt set aside her long history of peace advocacy to lead NAWSA into active support for the war. “I am a pacifist, but not for peace without honor,” she wrote in April 1917. “I’d be willing, if necessary, to die for my country.”23 Catt and others who supported the war pushed for the creation of the Women’s Committee of the Council for National Defense (WCND) in 1917. Former NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw became its head. Although the council was ostensibly advisory, the women appointed to the WCND made it a channel for delivering women’s energies to the war effort.

Women’s War Service and Suffrage

Throughout World War I, NAWSA’s journal, the Woman Citizen, published a steady stream of articles and illustrations linking American women’s war service to the suffrage fight. How does this cover justify women’s right to the vote?

The WCND set up state and local branches of the organization, which in turn used women’s organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to mobilize women’s voluntary war work. The WCND also had a subdivision for “colored women,” with African American poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson as its field representative. Women labor activists served on another subcommittee, Women in Industry; this was transformed after the war into the U.S. Woman’s Bureau, led by Mary Van Kleeck.

Women’s prowar activities took many forms. Following the model of suffrage parades, women organized grand public marches to raise money for wartime “Liberty Bonds.” They organized America’s housewives to conserve meat, sugar, and wheat for the war effort. They raised relief funds for refugees in Europe. Several thousand women, organized by the American Red Cross, served as nurses and ambulance drivers on the battlefields of France.

Women were also active in what was called Americanization work. These were efforts to accelerate the assimilation of immigrants into American society, especially Germans, who were suspected of loyalty to America’s opponents. In the Southwest, particular attention focused on Mexican immigrants, often regarded as potentially dangerous radicals because of the ongoing Mexican Revolution that began in 1910. Throughout the nation’s cities, native-born women reformers taught English language, home, and health classes for immigrant women, while also instructing them in wartime food conservation measures.

Japanese Women’s Auxiliary to the Los Angeles Red Cross

During World War I women actively supported mobilization by conserving food and raising funds for the Liberty Loan campaign, a major source of financing for the war. They also supported the American Red Cross, which not only sent nurses to the front but also provided warm garments and medical supplies for the troops. African Americans and immigrants, eager to express their patriotism, participated in these efforts. The women in this photograph were members of the Japanese Women’s Auxiliary to the Los Angeles Red Cross, a group that took much pride in its work and its demonstration of loyalty to the United States.

The biggest contribution that women made to the war effort was through their labor. Although the United States did not enter the war until 1917, by 1915 the economy was already beginning to speed up to provision the Allies and prepare for possible American involvement. As European immigration was slowed to a halt by the naval war in the Atlantic, the accelerating needs of the labor force were met in part by white women workers. The female labor force increased to more than 10 million during the war years, and many women found new and better-paying opportunities in the railroad, steel, and other heavy industries. Harriot Stanton Blatch characterized the situation with brutal honesty: “When men go awarring, women go to work. War compels women to work. That is one of its merits.”24

The Great Migration

World War I was an especially monumental turning point for African Americans, women and men alike. Many seized the opportunity provided by the demand for wartime labor to flee southern segregation and exploitation and head north. Two to three times as many southern blacks, perhaps five hundred thousand, migrated in the decade after 1910 as in the decade before. Chicago’s black population increased by 150 percent, Detroit’s by 600 percent, and New York City’s by 66 percent. This profound shift in population between 1914 and 1920, from the South to the North and from rural to urban life, is known as the Great Migration.

Unlike European and Asian migrations, in which men represented the vast majority, women constituted almost half the number of African American migrants. Their reasons for migrating were in part economic. For the first time, African American women, who had been almost exclusively employed in domestic and agricultural labor, entered factory work, although usually in the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs and only for the brief period of wartime mobilization. “I’ll never work in nobody’s kitchen but my own anymore,” one black woman optimistically declared.25 Even in domestic labor, a woman could earn more in a day up North than in a week in the South. Going north also meant escaping the constant threat of sexual harassment to which black women were exposed in the white homes in which black women worked, and with it the lynching that loomed for any black man who tried to protect his wife or daughters (see Reading into the Past: “African American Women Write about the Great Migration”).

The new migrants needed aid in finding jobs and housing and adjusting to northern urban life. The NACW acted quickly to lift the burden, establishing a Women Wage Earners Association to assist migrating black women workers. The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) also responded by increasing the funding of its Division of Colored Work, designating $200,000 for work with young women in African American communities, and tripling the number of independent black branches. In 1919, the Women’s Trade Union League, which had heretofore ignored the needs of African Americans, hired Irene Goins of Chicago as a special organizer for black women workers.

African American Women at a Baby Clinic in Detroit

When African Americans migrated to cities of the North, they often found the process of adjustment difficult. Few cities offered many social services to their black citizens, and black organizations like the National Association of Colored Women and the Urban League intervened to assist new migrants with housing, employment, and charity. While middle-class blacks were often condescending to the new migrants, whom they viewed as uncultivated, they offered vital services. In Detroit, the Urban League worked with other agencies to create a Baby Clinic, which offered advice on child care and child health and limited medical services. This 1919 photograph depicts the women clients and their children.

For the most part, however, black migrants met hostility in the North. In 1915, Birth of a Nation, one of the first great epics of the American film industry, presented a thoroughly racist account of the Civil War and Reconstruction, including a defense of lynching, to packed houses of white filmgoers across the United States. During and after the war, pent-up racial antagonism exploded in a series of race riots. In 1917, Ida B. Wells-Barnett risked her life to go to East St. Louis, Illinois, to investigate the 150 black people who were, in her words, “slaughtered” in a riot there (see pp. 455–57 and 468). In 1919, another deadly riot erupted in her hometown of Chicago, after a white mob killed an African American child who had wandered onto a whites-only beach. But despite the violence and disappointment African Americans faced in the North, migration offered black women and their families improved economic opportunities and an escape from the dead-end life of the South.

READING INTO THE PAST

African American Women Write about the Great Migration

Poor African Americans left behind few private papers for the historical record, so historians are fortunate to be able to turn to letters that southern migrants wrote to black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Atlanta Journal, as well as to letters written to potential employers and friends and family back home. Women’s letters reveal a variety of concerns. In the first example, a wife hopes to find out about work for her family. In the second, a woman working in Chicago in a meatpacking plant writes to her sister.

Letter from McCoy, Louisiana, April 16, 1917

Dear Editor [of the Chicago Defender]: I have been takeing your wonderful paper and I have saved [each edition] from the first I have received and my heart is upset night and day. I am praying every day to see some one that I may get a pass [a free railway ticket] for me, my child and husband I have a daughter 17 who can work well and myself. please sir direct me to the place where I may be able to see the parties that I and my family whom have read the defender so much until they are anxious to come dear editor we are working people but we cant hardly live here I would say more but we are back in the jungles and we have to lie low but please sir answer and I pray you give me a homeward consolation as we haven’t money enough to pay our fares.

Letter from Chicago, Illinois [undated]

My dear Sister: I was agreeably surprised to hear from you and to hear from home. I am well and thankful to say I am doing well. The weather and everything else was a surprise to me when I came. I got here in time to attend one of the greatest revivals in the history of my life — over 500 people joined the church. We had a Holy Ghost shower. You know I like to have run wild. It was snowing some nights and if you didnt hurry you could not get standing room. Please remember me kindly to any who ask of me. The people are rushing here by the thousands and I know if you come and rent a big house you can get all the roomers you want. You write me exactly when you are coming. I am not keeping house yet I am living with my brother and his wife. My son is in California but will be home soon. He spends his winter in California. I can get a nice place for you to stop until you can look around and see what you want. I am quite busy. I work in Swifts packing Co. in the sausage department. My daughter and I work for the same company — We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many sausages we dont have much time to play but it is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein.

Tell your husband work is plentiful here and he wont have to loaf if he want to work. . . . Well goodbye from your sister in Christ.

P.S. My brother moved the week after I came. When you fully decide to come write me and let me know what day you expect to leave and over what road and if I dont meet you I will have some one ther to meet you and look after you. I will send you a paper as soon as one come along they send out extras two and three times a day.

SOURCE: Journal of Negro History 4 (October 1919): 426, 457–58.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

In the first letter, why might the writer be unwilling to “say more” about conditions in the South? Would a franker letter refer to the sexual assault so many black women experienced?

Do you think the second letter would encourage the writer’s sister to make the trip north? Why or why not?

Winning Woman Suffrage

The United States entered World War I just as momentum for woman suffrage was peaking. Militant suffragists of the NWP demonstrated daily outside the White House, while the NAWSA, under Carrie Chapman Catt’s leadership, steadily lobbied Congress. The victory of woman suffrage in a second New York referendum in 1917 boosted prospects for national victory. Catt had predicted that once New York women were enfranchised, the state’s congressional delegation, the largest in the country, would swing over to woman suffrage and “the backbone of the opposition will be largely bent if not broken.”26 She was right. Two months after woman suffrage won in New York, the House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment establishing full voting rights for all American women. The NWP named it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to signify the long battle that had to be fought to win it.

From the House, the Anthony Amendment went to the Senate, where it confronted the power and resistance of southern Democrats. With the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments still rankling (see p. 292), southern Democrats were opposed to any further federal involvement in voting rights. President Wilson, who was himself a southern Democrat, finally yielded to pressure from suffragists, and went to the Senate to appeal for passage. “We have made partners of women in this war,” he pleaded. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” Nonetheless, when the Senate voted in October 1918, the amendment fell two votes short of passage.

That same month, the war ended in victory for the Allies. Wilson left for Paris to negotiate the peace and fight for the establishment of a “league of nations,” a multinational organization to achieve, in his words, “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”27 A small army of American women activists went with him in hopes of influencing the outcome of the peace conference. Many of these American women then traveled to Zurich to fulfill the promise they had made in The Hague in 1915 to reconvene the international women’s peace movement after the war. When Wilson returned to the United States with the Versailles Treaty, which included establishment of the League of Nations among its provisions, he was unable to convince a skeptical Congress to ratify it, a defeat that literally destroyed him. In October 1919, he suffered a disabling stroke, and for the last year of his presidency, First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson took on many of the tasks of her husband’s office (and was widely maligned for overstepping her bounds).

Through all this, suffragists still had to find the support they needed in Congress and the nation for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Finally, in June 1919, they secured exactly the necessary two-thirds of Congress members to vote for the amendment and the measure went on to the states for ratification. NAWSA’s structure of strong state divisions was crucial in winning endorsement from the necessary thirty-six states. Of these, the only southern states were Texas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee. The final battle came down to Tennessee, one of the only southern states with a viable two-party system. The decisive vote came from a young Republican legislator named Harry Burn, in response to his mother’s urging. “Don’t forget to be a good boy,” she wrote him, “and help Mrs. Catt put the ‘Rat’ in Ratification.”28

On August 26, 1920, seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution. Patterned after the Fifteenth Amendment, it reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” But American women’s struggles for political equality were not yet complete. The courts ruled that the amendment did not affect the political status of women in the American colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, which had to undertake their own campaigns — lasting eight and sixteen years, respectively — for voting rights. Most African American women in the South found that when they tried to register to vote, they were stopped by the same devices used against black men. And for all American women, the battle for parity and power within political parties had just begun. It would take another seven decades for voting women to become a force to be reckoned with in American politics.

CONCLUSION: New Conditions, New Challenges

The gradual move of American women into public life that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century reached its apex in the first decades of the twentieth. In few other periods of American history did women achieve greater public visibility and political influence. The inclusion of women’s equal political rights in the U.S. Constitution, after almost three-quarters of a century of effort, crowned a host of women’s other achievements in the Progressive era.

By the same token, crucial changes were taking place just under the surface. Not only were the numbers of female workers continuing to rise but the place of paid labor in women’s lives was shifting dramatically. Women had entered the Progressive era under the banner of motherhood; they were leaving it, unbeknownst to many of them, under the banner of worker. The sexual revolution and the birth control movement of these years also signified grand changes to come in women’s lives. All of these developments would play out in the next decades as women faced different sorts of challenges and began to envision new collective goals.

CHAPTER 8 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

American Federation of Labor (AFL)

Women’s Trade Union League

shirtwaist strike of 1909

Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire

National Consumers’ League (NCL)

maternalism

Nineteenth Amendment

Muller v. Oregon

Children’s Bureau

National Association of Colored Women (NACW)

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

Wage Earners Suffrage League

College Equal Suffrage League

National Woman’s Party (NWP)

Woman’s Peace Party (WPP)

Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)

Great Migration

People

Inez Milholland

Rose Schneiderman

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Mary Beard

Jane Addams

Mary Church Terrell

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Madam C. J. Walker

Carrie Chapman Catt

Anna Howard Shaw

Alice Paul

Lucy Burns

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Margaret Sanger

Crystal Eastman

Nannie Burroughs

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What were the sources of working women’s labor activism?

Page 419 states that “[W]omen filled the progressive landscape.” How and why did women shape the Progressive movement? What is the significance of the terms “female dominion of reform” and “maternalism”? How do the two terms differ?

How do you explain the final success of the long drive to enfranchise women?

What were the main differences between the emerging feminist movement and the suffrage movement?

How would you characterize the impact of World War I on American women?

Making Connections Women’s activism in this era embraced a wide range of issues and engaged a diverse group of women. What issues and experiences united women? What divided them?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Black Women and Progressive-Era Reform

BLACK WOMEN WERE LARGELY EXCLUDED from the extensive female reform network of the white women reformers who shaped the social justice wing of the Progressive movement, but they, too, avidly supported reforms in their communities, working especially through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), founded in 1895 (see Chapter 6). At the same time, many African American women leaders were increasingly outspoken about civil rights and racial violence in the early twentieth century and became ardent champions of woman suffrage. African American activism during and after World War I also played a part in encouraging black women to engage in international issues, including colonialism and the peace movement. All told, the early twentieth century witnessed a blossoming of black women’s activism over a wide range of issues.

BLACK WOMEN’S CLUB LIFE

THE NACW FLOURISHED in the early 1910s, and by 1914 there were more than a thousand clubs and membership totaled fifty thousand. These clubs focused on racial uplift by providing an array of social services for black communities. They created kindergartens and mothers’ clubs, old-age homes and neighborhood clinics, job-training programs and black branches of the segregated YWCA. Among the most notable organizations was the Atlanta Neighborhood Union, a community agency that tackled a wide range of problems and created settlement houses. The driving force behind the Union, Lugenia Burns Hope, was a prominent black leader in Atlanta whose husband was president of Morehouse College. Hope had consulted with Jane Addams about settlement work in organizing the Atlanta agency, whose motto was “And Thy Neighbor as Thyself.”29 Hope wrote the document excerpted here, which included a summary of the Union’s accomplishments. It is undated but probably dates close to the Union’s founding in 1908. Why do you think the range of the Union’s activities was so great? What concerns seemed to be the most important to the Atlanta women, and what tactics did they use to achieve their goals?

LUGENIA BURNS HOPE

The Neighborhood Union: Atlanta, Georgia (c. 1908)

An Organization for the Moral, Economic and Social Advancement of Negroes

The Neighborhood Union is an outgrowth of an organized effort of a number of Negro women to improve the social conditions of the city — particularly of their neighborhood.

. . . .

A playground has been provided for children.

Fourth of July Carnivals have been held for the amusement of the children, several hundred boys and girls being annually reached.

Clubs have been conducted for the physical and social improvement of children.

Domestic science classes have been conducted.

Many helpful lectures have been delivered to mothers of children.

The services of four trained nurses have been secured for those who are not able to pay for treatment.

Dives of immorality have been broken up.

Needy families have been given aid, some cases being turned over to the Associated Charities.

The people have been urged to keep their back yards and store premises sanitary.

Lights have been secured and holes and other defects in streets have been remedied through the effort of the organization.

Investigations have been made to aid other organizations in improving their work.

Children placed in homes, orphan asylums, and reformatories.

The use of the public school buildings has been obtained and recreation schools conducted in them during the vacation.

A settlement house has been purchased in Lee Street.

Five neighborhoods are now organized in Atlanta.

Immediate Purposes

The Neighborhood Union proposes to organize neighborhoods in each section of the city as speedily as possible. It is our desire to have a settlement house in each neighborhood where the people can gather for their meetings, clubs and classes and feel that it is their very own. Then the work outlined above can be done more systematically and effectively. You can help us to aid you by cooperating with us and calling our attention to the need of clubs and organizations in your particular community.

SOURCE: Gerder Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (Vintage Books: New York, 1973), 502–3.

PROTESTING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, African American leaders, male and female, divided over promoting education and self-help versus challenging segregation and disfranchisement. Embodying the new approach, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 as a mixed-race organization committed to black civil rights. A number of black women were founding members, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, and Maria Baldwin. Although black women and the NACW were divided over the wisdom of civil rights activism, leaders in the North and Midwest were particularly active in organizing units of the NAACP. Although less militant, the NACW also paid attention to civil rights: in 1912 it passed resolutions against segregation in train travel and lynching.30

As the resolution against lynching suggests, African American women in the Progressive era also focused on racial violence, which was evident in both the rise in lynchings and the proliferation of race riots in the nation’s cities (eighteen riots occurred between 1915 and 1919).

One of the worst of the riots took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, an industrial city home to a substantial number of African American migrants in this era. Convinced that blacks were economic competitors, a number of whites invaded the black section of town over several days in July 1917 and went on a rampage resulting in at least thirty-nine black and eight white deaths. African Americans throughout the nation were outraged, and women lent their voices to the protest. They shared in planning the silent protest march in New York City (see Figure 8.6, p. 469), as well as organizing prayer meetings in many cities and towns. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in keeping with her long-standing campaign against racial violence, visited East St. Louis twice and led a delegation to Illinois governor Frank Orren Lowden to insist upon redress. She published a pamphlet, “The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century,” which detailed the causes and nature of the riot and concluded with a call for action. An excerpt from this pamphlet appears below. What solutions does she suggest? Why does Wells-Barnett conclude that federal legislation is the only solution?

IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (1917)

Gov. Lowden need not go far to find evidence of the utter failure of the major part of the forces of the Illinois National Guard to do their duty in stopping wholesale murder and arson in East St. Louis last Monday.

Carlos Hurd of the Post-Dispatch staff, who was an eyewitness of the atrocities on the East Side, told a plain circumstantial story of the outrages he witnessed. The assaults and murders were cold-blooded, deliberate and incredibly brutal. They were not the mob infuriated against particular offenders. They were the work of groups of men and women who sought out and burned out the Negroes and then shot, beat, kicked and hanged them. The work was done in a spirit of flippant, relentless barbarism. Mr. Hurd described it as a man-hunt.

Others who corroborated this testimony called it rabbit-hunting and rat-catching. Nothing like it in unmitigated cruelty has occurred before on American soil. It can be likened only to the fiendish atrocities of Turks in Armenia or the pogroms against the Jews incited by the Russian Black Hundred, in which helpless Jews were smoked or dragged from their homes to be beaten, outraged or murdered on the streets. The black skin, without regard to age, sex or innocence, was the mark for slaughter.

All the impartial witnesses agree that the police were either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities, and that the major part of the National Guard was indifferent or inactive. No organized effort was made to protect the Negroes or disperse the murdering groups. The lack of frenzy and of a large infuriated mob made the task easy. Ten determined officers could have prevented most of the outrages. One hundred men acting with authority and vigor might have prevented any outrage.

The stain cannot be wiped from the record of Illinois, but the State may be vindicated by punishment of the officers responsible for the conduct of the guardsmen; and by the vigorous prosecution of the murder leaders. . . .

In the present state of our National development, the only remedy for the lynching and rioting evil of the American nation is to make it a federal crime. Public sentiment which has encouraged lynchings by silence or by sensational newspaper accounts must be aroused to see the evil to the whole American Nation. It is an awful commentary on our country’s brand of Democracy — that aside from a few newspaper editorials — no persons in this country have spoken out against this black stain save Theodore Roosevelt and a minister of the gospel in a sermon preached in St. Louis, Mo., the Sunday following the massacre.

It rests then with the Negroes everywhere to stand their ground and sell their lives as dearly as possible when attacked; to work as a unit, demanding punishment for rioters; protection for workers, and liberty for all the citizens in our country. It is for the Negro to say whether they will unite their forces to make this country safe for the residence of any Negro anywhere he desires to live in it. It is for them to show whether we can bring sufficient influence to bear to see that the militia of Illinois, for whose wanton murder of hundreds of innocent men, women and children of our race, whom they failed to protect in that awful orgy of human butchery, which took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, on Monday, July 2nd, 1917.

SOURCE: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (Chicago: The Negro Fellowship Herald Press, 1917).

NEGRO WOMEN HOLD HUMILIATION SERVICE

STARTING WITH WELLS-BARNETT’S EXPOSÉ of lynching (see Primary Sources: “Ida B. Wells, ‘Race Woman’,” pp. 325–29), African American women had understood this ritualized form of murder as a way of keeping black men and women subordinated. Picking up on the spirit of black protest against discrimination and violence in the 1910s, a group of African American women in Savannah spoke out about a particularly brutal lynching of eleven African Americans, including Mary Turner. When Turner, eight months pregnant, protested the murder of her husband, who was accused of killing a white man, the mob seized her as well, brutally murdering her and her unborn child. Black women in Augusta, Georgia, called on women of their city and state “to unite in a service of humiliation and prayer as a protection against the awful lynchings that recently disgraced our state, especially that of Mary Turner.” By drawing upon the Protestant tradition calling the nation to humble itself before God’s judgment, the clubwomen seemed to be challenging the whites of the city to consider the morality and possible judgment of their actions by speaking a common Protestant language. Instead of meeting at a church, however, the women, who had just created a federation of City Colored Women’s Clubs, chose to convene at the black branch of the American Red Cross, which in itself suggests their determination to frame themselves as loyal citizens serving the nation. After their prayer service, the women passed resolutions that they sent to President Woodrow Wilson, Governor Hugh Dorsey, and the presidents of the state and local white women’s club federations. These resolutions were published in the Savannah Tribune under the title “Negro Women Hold Humiliation Service.” On what basis do the Augusta women claim a special right to protest the killing of Mary Turner?

CITY COLORED WOMEN’S CLUBS OF AUGUSTA, GEORGIA

Resolution on Lynching (1918)

Whereas, the Negro Womanhood of Georgia has been shocked by the lynching of Mary Turner at Valdosta Sunday May 19, 1918, for an alleged unwise remark in reference to the lynching of her husband; and

Whereas, we the Negro women of the state are aroused by this unwarranted lawlessness and are discouraged and crushed by a spirit of humiliation and dread; and

Whereas, we deplore the migratory movement of the Negro from the South, yet we cannot counsel them to remain in the light of these conditions under which we live; and

Whereas, our labor is in these cotton and corn fields and rice swamps, and in this frightful hour of the great world war, our sons and husbands are giving their lives in defense of the country we all love so dearly; and

Whereas, in every forward movement in our national life the Negro has come to the front and shared in the advance and crimsoned every field of strife from Boston to “no man’s land,” for the principles held sacred by every true American; and

Whereas, we feel that our lives are unsafe as long as this iniquitous institution exists:

We therefore are asking that you use all the power of your great office to prevent similar occurrences and punish the perpetrators of this foul deed and urge that sure and swift justice be meted out to them.

SOURCE: “Negro Women Hold Humiliation Service,” Savannah Tribune, June 8, 1918, Genealogy Bank, http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk (accessed September 29, 2014).

BLACK WOMEN AND THE SUFFRAGE

WHILE LARGELY EXCLUDED FROM white women’s suffrage groups, African American women reformers were ardent supporters of woman suffrage and created their own societies. Among the first was Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Nannie Burroughs (1879–1961) was another outspoken supporter of enfranchising women. Burroughs, whose mother was an emancipated slave, was one of the founders of the Woman’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, an important reform locale for southern black women. Burroughs argued for woman suffrage in this article in The Crisis, the magazine of the recently formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In what way were the arguments that Burroughs made different from those of white suffragists?

NANNIE BURROUGHS

Black Women and the Suffrage (1915)

When the ballot is put in the hands of the American woman, the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written.

Because the black man does not know the value of the ballot, and has bartered and sold his most valuable possession, it is no evidence that the Negro woman will do the same. The Negro woman therefore needs the ballot to get back, by the wise use of it, what the Negro man has lost by the misuse of it. She needs to ransom her race. . . . She carries the burdens of the Church and of the school and bears a great deal more than her economic share in the home.

Another striking fact is that the Negro woman carries the moral destiny of two races in her hand. Had she not been the woman of unusual moral stamina that she is, the black race would have been made a great deal whiter, and the white race a great deal blacker during the past fifty years. She has been left a prey for the men of every race, but in spite of this, she has held the enemies of Negro female chastity at bay. The Negro woman is the white woman’s as well as the white race’s most needed ally in preserving an unmixed race.

The ballot, wisely used, will bring to her the respect and protection she needs. It is her weapon of moral defense. Under present conditions, when she appears in court in defense of her virtue, she is looked upon with amused contempt. She needs the ballot to reckon with men who place no value upon her virtue, and to mould healthy public sentiment in favor of her own protection.

SOURCE: Nannie Helen Burroughs, “Black Women and Reform,” Crisis, August 1915.

INTERNATIONAL PEACE MOVEMENT

MARY CHURCH TERRELL, AN OBERLIN COLLEGE GRADUATE, was a prominent African American activist who campaigned for woman suffrage and against racial discrimination. She was the first president of the NACW and a charter member of the NAACP. She was the only woman of color in the American delegation to the 1904 Berlin International Congress of Women. After World War I, a number of African American women, including Terrell, Burroughs, Margaret Murray Washington, and Addie Hunton, created the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World, to encourage “women in their local communities to learn more about international issues and hence see their day-to-day struggles in a larger global context,” thus explicitly including European colonialism in her crusade.31 Black women were also active in the peace movement. At the end of World War I, Terrell was invited to join the American delegates, including Jane Addams, at a women’s international peace conference in Zurich. Here a new international organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was formed.

In the following excerpt from her 1940 autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, Terrell recalls her satisfaction at being asked to speak before the conference, as well as her frustration with some of her sister delegates who criticized her proposal of a broad antiracist resolution. In what ways did her participation in this venue allow her to recast her understanding of racial injustice in a more international light?

MARY CHURCH TERRELL

A Colored Woman in a White World (1940)

Attending this Congress was as interesting, as illuminating and as gratifying an experience as it falls to the lot of the average woman to enjoy. In the first place, we were a group of women meeting to advocate peace after a war in which the major portion of the civilized world had engaged. I was about to say that women from all over the world were present. But on sober, second thought it is more truthful to say that women from all over the white world were present. There was not a single delegate from Japan, China, India or from any other country whose inhabitants were not white. For the second time in my life it was my privilege to represent, not only the colored women of the United States, but the whole continent of Africa as well, since I was the only one present at that meeting who had a drop of African blood in her veins. In fact, since I was the only delegate who gave any color to the occasion at all, it finally dawned upon me that I was representing the women of all the non-white countries in the world.

On the third day of the Congress Miss Addams called me to her and told me that the American delegates had voted unanimously to have me represent them the next night, Thursday.

[In the meantime, Terrell learned that her resolution was to be presented at the meeting on Thursday morning, and she recalled the conflict within the delegation over its content.]

I had written, rewritten and then done it all over again many times on the steamer [boat], before it was acceptable to the whole delegation. [I intended to protest] . . . against the discriminations, humiliations and injustices perpetrated, not only upon the colored people of the United States, but upon the dark races all over the world. Several members of the delegation objected to [my resolution] and thought they could improve upon it, but none of them expressed exactly the thought which I wished to convey. It was finally agreed to let me present the following resolution to the Congress: “We believe no human being should be deprived of an education, prevented from earning a living, debarred from any legitimate pursuit in which he wishes to engage or be subjected to humiliations of various kinds on account of race, color or creed.”

It was a proud and gratifying moment in my life when I read that resolution in person in Zürich, Switzerland, to the Women’s International Congress for Peace and Freedom. The only delegate who represented the dark races of the world had a chance to speak in their behalf.

I delivered my address that same night. . . . [I]n the first place, I thanked the broad-minded white women of the United States for inviting me to the Congress, making it possible for me to come and for giving me the opportunity to speak. In dealing with less favored groups, I said, if people everywhere had been imbued with the same breadth which they had displayed in this instance, race problems and a few others would long ago have disappeared from the world. It was my duty and my pleasure to state, I declared, that ever since slavery had been abolished in the United States, thousands of white people had helped with money and by personal efforts both to educate the emancipated slaves and their descendants and to lift them to a higher plane.

Then I reviewed the marvelous progress which the group [African Americans] had made along all lines of human endeavor in spite of the almost insurmountable obstacles in certain sections, referred to the fearful injustices of which we are often the victims and reminded my audience that the thousands of colored soldiers who had crossed the sea “to make the world safe for democracy” had fought in Europe for a freedom for others which in some sections of their own country they themselves did not enjoy.

I appealed for justice and fair play for all the dark races of the earth. “You may talk about permanent peace till doomsday,” I predicted, “but the world will never have it till the dark races are given a square deal.” I expressed regret also that at the Peace Conference in Paris “the two most highly civilized and the most Christian nations” in the world had denied racial equality to Japan which she had a right to demand. It was a great opportunity to enlighten the people of Europe on conditions confronting colored people in the United States and I tried to avail myself of it as best I could.

For once in my life I was satisfied with my effort.

SOURCE: Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a WhiteWorld (Washington, DC: Ransdell, 1940), 332–36, http:// 0-solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com.oasys.lib.oxy.edu/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bltc/getdoc.pl?S8294-D034.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What tactics did black women use to promote social reform and social justice?

Two of the documents, the pamphlet on the East St. Louis massacre and the resolution on lynching, are about racial violence. How are they different? How do you account for the difference?

Whether the topic was racial violence, community reform, suffrage, or the peace movement, many of the same national black women leaders’ names emerge as advocates. Why might black activists have seen these issues as integral components of black rights as a whole?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Parades, Picketing, and Power: Women in Public Space

ALTHOUGH AMERICAN WOMEN were never as tightly restricted to the private sphere of the home as nineteenth-century cultural prescriptions suggested, by the turn of the century, women’s presence in the public arena had notably expanded. Working-class women had jobs in factories, shops, and offices and filled crowded city streets. They frequented dance halls and amusement parks. Leisure-class women shopped in department stores, attended college, and participated in reform activities. In this essay, we analyze women’s increased public visibility by examining the ways in which diverse groups of women took to the streets to march and picket, literally opening up new spaces for women in the society. Whether they were agitating for economic rights, the vote, or racial justice, their public visibility had political and cultural significance. The bold occupation of public space was an important demonstration of women’s legitimacy as political actors.

THE STRIKERS

Women laborers had participated in strikes and public demonstrations as early as the 1830s, when the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts, “turned out” in response to lowered wages (see pp. 171–73). Nonetheless, when New York City women shirtwaist workers began picketing in front of their factories in 1909, many observers found their behavior shocking. These mostly young Jewish and Italian women were not only challenging their employers but transgressing against conventional notions of appropriate feminine behavior. When the demonstrations expanded to a general strike of the entire industry and the leisure-class women of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) became involved, the newspaper coverage became more sympathetic. From this point on, the events of the strike were widely reported in the popular press. The women made good copy, and their leaders eagerly sought publicity for the cause.

By 1909, newspapers had the technology to illustrate their stories with photographs. Given the limitations of that technology, these pictures were usually posed and static; the dramatic moments captured on film that would become the hallmark of modern photojournalism were a thing of the future. The hybrid illustration in Figure 8.1 appeared in the New York Evening Journal on November 10, 1909. The photograph shows, as the newspaper caption puts it, “Girl Strikers: each of whom has been arrested five times for picketing.” This somewhat formal picture is coupled with a drawing showing the action of police arresting the resisting women.

Figure 8.1 “Girl Strikers,” New York Evening Journal (November 10, 1909)

The photograph reveals something widely commented on in the newspaper reports. The women look fashionably dressed and, in particular, sport elaborate hats. People hostile to the strikers pointed to their clothing as evidence that the women were not suffering from dire poverty. Male union leaders and WTUL officials retorted that the clothes were cheap and bought through scrimping and going without food. Clara Lemlich was the only working woman to respond in the newspapers: “We’re human, all of us girls, and we’re young. We like new hats as well as any other young women. Why shouldn’t we?”32 Where critics of the strikers saw women dressed above their station, behaving in unladylike ways on the public streets, the strikers saw themselves as attractive, modern young women, willing to fight for their rights and a decent standard of living, dressed in their best to reflect the seriousness of their purpose and action.33 Compare the photograph with the drawing. What response to the strikers did the newspaper editors seek to encourage by publishing this hybrid image?

The shirtwaist strike sparked dozens of garment industry strikes in other cities. Figure 8.2 portrays members of the Rochester, New York, branch of the Garment Workers Union as they picketed in the winter of 1912 for a cut in hours (but not pay), an end to subcontracting, and the union’s right to represent the workers in negotiations with their employers. After four months — and the death of one seventeen-year-old striker shot by an excited employer — the workers won all their demands except union recognition. This image, in which the strikers are the only women in sight, suggests something of the transgressive meaning of women marching on picket lines. During the 1909 New York City shirtwaist strike, the police conducted raids on brothels in the factory neighborhoods, pushing prostitutes into the street to mingle with the picketers. This effort to call into question the sexual respectability of union women proved a theme in many strikes. But note how the Rochester women posed themselves for this photograph. What attitude do they project about their right to take to the streets?

Figure 8.2 Members of the Rochester, New York, Branch of the Garment Workers Union (1913)

THE SUFFRAGISTS

For leisure-class suffragists to move into public space with their demonstrations was also difficult but for different reasons, as they were bound by standards of domestic propriety. The reputation for “respectability” that was key to their difference from the working class seemed endangered by such bold, forthright public activity. Precisely because public parades and demonstrations were such a radical move for leisure-class women, these events drew enormous crowds eager to see a mass violation of ladylike norms.

As the suffrage movement gathered steam in the early twentieth century, activists developed new promotional tactics and turned to the most advanced cultural methods and artistic styles, anything to get over the old-fashioned image from which their cause suffered. In their search to garner publicity and support, they appropriated public spaces and used novel techniques. They turned up on tugboats and in touring cars, appeared in department store windows and movie theaters, had bonfires and dramatic pageants. In Seattle, Lucy Burns even distributed leaflets from a hot-air balloon.

Perhaps the most dramatic innovation designed to provide entertainment and spectacle was the suffrage parade. New York City, home to one of the largest and most well-funded suffrage movements, also featured the most impressive parades. The 1910 and 1911 parades, held right after the settlement of the shirtwaist strike and the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, respectively, were specifically inspired by the public demonstrations of working women, which leisure-class allies had supported. In the 1911 suffrage march, labor organizer Leonora O’Reilly was a featured speaker. Banners highlighted both political and economic rights, and working girls were prominent in the ranks of the paraders. Harriot Stanton Blatch, chief organizer of the marches, understood the symbolic and dramatic possibilities of suffrage parades: “What could be more stirring than hundreds of women, carrying banners, marching — marching — marching! The public would be aroused, the press would spread the story far and wide, and the interest of our own workers would be fired.”34

In 1912 and 1913, the New York City parades were many times more spectacular, no longer foregrounding working women but instead emphasizing the participation of women of all classes (though not always of all races), cooperating for the common cause of woman suffrage. Male supporters also marched. A bill authorizing a referendum to grant full voting rights to the women of New York was before the state legislature, and the parade was intended to impress voters and legislators alike with suffragists’ determination and power. As Figure 8.3 indicates, the crowds watching the 1913 parade on Fifth Avenue were ten and twelve deep. How do the dress and organization of the marchers emphasize their unanimity and discipline?

Figure 8.3 Suffragists Marching down Fifth Avenue, New York City (1913)

The most significant and highly publicized suffrage parade was held in Washington, D.C., in March 1913. This was not only the first suffrage parade to represent the movement on a national level but also one of the first such demonstrations held in the nation’s capital on any issue. Extremely well organized by the young Alice Paul, just beginning her career as the leader of suffragism’s militant wing (see pp. 437–39), the parade drew five thousand women from around the country. Banners identified some groups of marchers by their professions, from factory worker to lawyer. Other participants walked with women’s clubs. Still others rode on floats that depicted women in roles of mother, worker, and citizen. Washington, D.C., was a southern city, and organizers required African American women to march at the back of the parade. The parade culminated at the steps of the U.S. Treasury building, where marchers enacted an allegorical pageant, with individual women performing the roles of America, Peace, Liberty, Hope, Justice, and Charity.35 The Washington Post headline read: “Miles of Fluttering Femininity Present Entrancing Suffrage Appeal.”36 Although condescending, the newspaper’s words vindicated the organizers’ hopes that the attractiveness of the parade and its participants proved that suffrage and femininity were compatible.

The photograph in Figure 8.4 captures women on a float at the parade, with the national capitol in the backdrop. Although Washington, D.C., officials tried to locate the march at a less central site, Paul was adamant that it take place on Pennsylvania Avenue, in the customary place for official parades, and on the day before the presidential inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. Despite the presence of mounted policemen, women marchers were physically attacked.

Figure 8.4 Suffrage Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. (March 1913)

Ironically, the parade’s greatest contribution to the suffrage cause may have been its disruption by enormous crowds of drunken men, the kind who always showed up for a presidential inauguration. The Baltimore American reported that the women “practically fought their way foot by foot up Pennsylvania Avenue through a surging throng.”37 Newspapers all over the country criticized not just the rowdy crowds but the police for failing to protect the marchers. The debacle led to a congressional hearing, which the suffragists skillfully exploited to generate favorable publicity for their cause. Anna Howard Shaw, former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who generally disapproved of radical tactics, knew how to make the most of the episode: “Do you suppose that if we were voters the police would have allowed the hoodlums to possess the streets while we marched?”38 In what ways does this photograph indicate the contested quality of the suffragists’ occupation of this political public space?

In Figure 8.5, taken in 1917, women’s claim to public space for political ends comes full circle, back to picketing. It shows the suffrage militants of the National Woman’s Party, spearheaded by Alice Paul, picketing the White House during World War I. College graduates, they identified themselves by their alma maters. Just as the working-class women illustrated in Figures 8.1 and 8.2 had hoped to attract publicity to their cause, these radical suffragists sought to embarrass President Wilson by graphically pointing out the hypocrisy of a war fought for democracy while women at home were not enfranchised. More moderate suffragists criticized the radicals’ tactics, but how might images such as this one have played a role in bringing Wilson around to support of the suffrage amendment?

Figure 8.5 National Woman’s Party Picketers at the White House (1917)

THE PROTESTERS

A very different kind of public protest took place in July 1917, when ten thousand African American men and women marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue in a “silent” parade, with only muffled drums accompanying the sound of their feet. The parade, organized by the NAACP, was a response to a vicious riot in East St. Louis, Illinois. Black women activists were outspoken in their response. Nannie Burroughs (see pp. 458–59) organized a petition campaign demanding that Congress pass an antilynching law. Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote an account in which she called the riot the “greatest outrage of the twentieth century,” and many black women leaders called for public protests. The National Convention of the Mme. C. J. Walker Agents passed a resolution at their annual meeting that it sent to President Woodrow Wilson, and Walker herself was on the planning committee for the New York parade. The procession, while peaceful, reflected a rising militancy on the part of African Americans who resented the contradiction between American claims to fight a war for democracy and the lack of democracy they experienced at home. The parade featured men, women, and children. This image (Figure 8.6) shows a group of women, most of whom are dressed in white, as they marched together in neat rows. What is the significance of the women’s choice to march separately from the men in this manner?

Figure 8.6 Protest against the East St. Louis Riots, New York City (1917)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Compare the photographs illustrating the strikers (Figures 8.1 and 8.2), the suffragists (Figures 8.3 to 8.5), and the protesters (Figure 8.6). How did these groups take to the streets, and what commonalities and differences do their uses of public space reveal?

A major motivation behind picketing and parading was to capture publicity. What other purposes could these activities serve? What possibilities and dangers did the courting of publicity pose for strikers? For suffragists? For African American women?

What does the popularity among women activists of these mass demonstrations suggest about the public involvement of women in the Progressive era

PRIMARY SOURCES

Uncle Sam Wants You: Women and World War I Posters

PRIOR TO WORLD WAR I, the federal government communicated with citizens primarily through press releases printed in newspapers. In April 1917, however, President Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to promote public support for the war. The CPI established the Department of Pictorial Publicity, which drew on a well-established tradition of using posters for advertising as well as on the skills of well-known magazine illustrators. The federal government used other methods to build support for war needs such as conserving food, recruiting soldiers for the military and workers for war industries, and supporting Liberty Bond and Red Cross fund drives, but the posters were the most colorful and abundant device. Over 20 million copies of 2,500 different posters were produced during the war. State governments and civic associations such as the Red Cross also created these dramatic advertisements to “sell the war.”

Wartime propaganda aimed at creating a strong sense of identification with the nation and an eagerness to support the military effort. Although building the army itself required the coercion of the draft, the government turned to persuasive measures when possible in keeping with the notion that the United States was going to “war for democracy.” The posters reproduced here need to be understood as part of this massive drive to imbue Americans with intense loyalty and patriotism. There was a strong antiwar movement in the country, but dissent was repressed and many protesters were imprisoned and, if not citizens, deported (see pp. 444–45).

Women’s efforts were central to the nation’s call for patriotism. In the midst of the final stages of their drive for citizenship, many women saw themselves, if not quite as regular soldiers, as members of a volunteer army that blanketed the nation in support of various wartime mobilization drives. These activities required exceptional administrative skills, and for some leisure-class women this became full-time work.

Posters, of course, do not convey the complexity of these women’s volunteer activity. The messages were simple. Women were urged to do their part as a demonstration of their citizenship, and their images were widely used to encourage all Americans to support the war. Given the eagerness with which women rushed into the public sphere to support the war, it is ironic that the majority of these images depicted traditional notions of womanhood.

Images of women have been used to represent the United States since the nation was founded. (See Primary Sources: “Gendering Images of the Revolution,” pp. 135–40.)

Posters used female representations to give a feminine face to war aims. A beautiful woman flanked by the U.S. flag or dressed in the Stars and Stripes represented the patriotism of a nation at war. Figure 8.7 depicts a beseeching woman wearing a cap that clearly echoes the American flag. In the backdrop is a European city with its church towers in flames, a potent reminder to Americans safe at home of the devastating war across the Atlantic. The poster in Figure 8.8 features a female form to indicate that America’s honor needed fighting men to protect it. What conventional ideas of femininity do these posters mobilize to bolster their messages?

Figure 8.7 “Let’s End It — Quick with Liberty Bonds”

Figure 8.8 “It’s Up to You. Protect the Nation’s Honor. Enlist Now”

Posters also traded on images of female sexuality. The saucy young woman dressed in a military uniform in Figure 8.9, an image created by well-known artist Howard Chandler Christy, provocatively exclaims, “Gee!! I Wish I Were a Man. I’d Join the Navy.” What does this image suggest about modern notions of female sexuality emerging in the prewar years? How does the cross-dressed figure communicate the proper roles of men and women in wartime?

Figure 8.9 “Gee!! I Wish I Were a Man. I’d Join the Navy.”

Even when posters encouraged women to participate in war activities by buying Liberty Bonds, supporting the Red Cross, knitting socks for soldiers, or conserving food, the images rarely challenged traditional ideas of women’s proper place. Figure 8.10, for example, is a recruitment poster for the Land Army, a voluntary organization formed to mobilize women as temporary farmworkers. How does it link labor on the home front to the war? How are the women agricultural laborers represented?

Figure 8.10 “The Woman’s Land Army of America Training School”

Some posters depicted women supporting the war effort in the workforce. The government distributed one featuring a typist (typing was now almost wholly a female occupation) with the caption “The Kaiser is afraid of you!” On occasion, posters acknowledged women who crossed conventional gender barriers when they took jobs in war work. These images were usually issued by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which produced its own posters. During the war, the YWCA continued its prewar activism on behalf of young working women and distributed the poster depicted in Figure 8.11 as part of its fund-raising campaign. In keeping with YWCA literature that praised women factory workers’ vital contribution to defense, this image emphasizes female strength and solidarity. Note too the graphic style of this image. How does it compare to government posters intended to convey more conventional ideas about women’s war contribution?

Figure 8.11 “For Every Fighter a Woman Worker. Y.W.C.A.”

World War I poster art is also revealing for what it did not picture, in particular the way in which it supported existing racial hierarchies. Government and voluntary agencies worked in black communities to encourage support for war programs. Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s report “Negro Women in War Work,” for example, detailed the fund-raising of the National Association of Colored Women, which raised close to $5 million in the third Liberty Loan drive. Yet despite the record of black women’s participation, apparently no posters represented them or other women of color. Images of European immigrants appeared in a few World War I posters, but the diversity of American women was not reflected in this popular propaganda form.

War posters also failed to depict adequately the full range of ways in which women supported the war effort. The wartime growth in the wage labor force was rarely represented, and instead of images of women performing manual labor, most women depicted in posters were either icons for the nation or wartime volunteers. But if few posters challenged traditional expectations about women’s domestic roles, women themselves did take advantage of wartime opportunities. Not only did working women temporarily break into traditionally male jobs, but suffragists used women’s war service as a way of dramatically demonstrating their claim for full citizenship.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Figures 8.8 and 8.9 are both enlistment posters aimed at young men. What emotional responses do the artists seek to arouse in their intended audience? How are their methods alike, and how do they differ?

Until recently in the United States, only men officially served in combat, and it could be argued that by virtue of asking men to risk death, wartime gave them a heightened claim on citizenship. To what extent do these posters reinforce this notion? To what extent do they challenge it?

What are the similarities and differences between the way in which the World War I posters here use female images for propaganda purposes and the way in which images of women are used in Chapter 3 in Primary Sources: “Gendering Images of the Revolution” (pp. 135–40)?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Modernizing Womanhood

AS THE DRIVE FOR THE VOTE HEATED UP in the years before World War I, another less sharply defined movement emerged among more radical women, who called themselves feminists (see pp. 440–41). While women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Crystal Eastman supported the suffrage campaign, their ideas moved beyond women’s political rights to include more modern themes of economic independence and more modern sexual relationships and marriages. Many feminists had socialist leanings and were associated with the struggles of working-class women; a few were union activists. Self-consciously rebellious, they viewed themselves as breaking from the suffocating conventions of respectable female behavior, demanding instead to be recognized, in the words of Edna Kenton, as “people of flesh and blood and brain, feeling, seeing, judging and directing equally with men, all the great social forces.”39

In July 1914, Edna Kenton’s commentary in The Delineator challenged critics who charged that feminism would undermine the family, marriage, and morality — or, in the words of one author she cited, “Underneath the whole argument [of feminism] lies the idea that woman can never be free and able to perform her earthly mission until she casts law, decency, and morality to the winds.” How does Kenton redefine morality in the following passage?

Edna Kenton Says Feminism Will Give Men More Fun, Women Greater Scope, Children Better Parents, Life More Charm (1914)

The critic is right if he means by law, decency and morality, his law, his decency, his morality for her. This is what has been the matter with the world for so long, that women, bereft of any trade but marriage, or any means of livelihood but dependence upon their family or husbands, were forced, as complete dependents are forced, to take laws and decencies and moralities of others for their own, and to act, not according to their instincts of what was right for them, but according to what others said was right for them. Which brings us to the heart of the Woman Question.

Feminism is not a concrete thing, to be touched with hands or seen of eyes; it is any woman’s spiritual and intellectual attitude toward herself and toward life. It is her conscious attempt to realize Personality; to make her own decisions instead of having them made for her; to sink the old humbled or rebelling slave in the new creature who is mistress of herself.

To define this tremendous woman movement any more closely, for this generation, is to miss its spirituality entirely, for spirituality is an intensely personal thing, and every woman touched with this new flame must be filled with the larger charity that will grant to every other woman the right to seek her own personal goal by her own path.

It is a generation that is made up of experimentation with life; and women to-day, thanks to changed economic conditions, have the chance of sensing their souls through thought plus action as they have never had before.

Thinking one way and acting another is one of the most immoral things in life, and it was merely one of the countless personal immoralities to which women until recently had to bow, if they were to save their bodies alive.

SOURCE: The Delineator, July 1914, 17.

IN 1913, ANOTHER MASS-CIRCULATION PERIODICAL, McClure’s Magazine, noted that “no movement of this century is more significant or more deep-rooted than the movement to readjust the social position of women,” and began a “department for women” to “represent the ideas of the more advanced thinkers of the feminist movement.” High-profile suffrage activist and lawyer Inez Milholland wrote the articles. The following is an extract from her second essay.

INEZ MILHOLLAND

The Changing Home (1913)

PROPERTY RIGHTS IN WOMEN ARE DISAPPEARING

. . . The past fifty years, with their key discoveries in science, have unlocked the secrets of earth and air, have given us modern production and distribution, have brought the ends of the world together in an entirely new sort of neighborhood, with the beginnings of a new common understanding — have, in a word, expanded man’s thought, feeling, and social power as the explorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries expanded his geography.

These discoveries and the resultant harnessing of newly discovered natural laws, have made possible the “social surplus” of which the Socialists say so much. For the first time in human history, the race can produce enough of the necessaries of life to go round. While we have not yet arrived at such a fair distribution, the tendency of modern social and political effort is distinctly taking that direction all over the world.

And, coincidentally with the struggles of workers everywhere for a share in the fruits of life under the new conditions, we see woman, with individual economic independence at last in sight, stirring and striving to free herself from property-subjection to man in industry, and in marriage itself.

THE HOME HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE WOMAN

It is still said, in some quarters, that “woman’s place is the home”; but it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand the phrase. For the home, in the earlier sense of the term, has been pretty effectually removed from the woman. In the traditional idyllic home which apparently still exists in the fancy of many conservative thinkers (but which probably never existed as generally as these thinkers imagine), woman spun, wove, and made clothing, milked and churned, put up foods, and so on. Her duties were many, arduous, sometimes dignified and important. Her “sphere” was defined with some clearness. Within it she exercised a real authority. In addition, she bore and reared children. And she found time for all!

To-day, if woman is to “go back to the home” in the only sense that the phrase can possibly carry, she will have to follow it into the canning factory, the packing-house, the cotton and woolen mills, the clothing factory, the up-State dairy, the railroad that handles the dairy products, the candy factory, etc. As a matter of fact, she has already been forced in considerable numbers to follow these tasks into their new industrial environment. But, whereas in the home she had some authority and certain partnership rights, in industry she has no voice except as she can make herself heard through the medium of a trade union or (less directly) of the vote.

So the “home” has, in part, been removed, and the eight million women actually engaged in industry to-day indicate with some force that woman has had to go with it. To order her “back to the home” is, therefore, nonsense. It is like ordering the cab-driver, displaced by the taxicab chauffeur, back to the stage-coach to compete with the railroad.

MARRIAGE BY INTIMIDATION

No one, of course, — least of all the advanced feminist thinkers, — questions the imperative beauty and value of romantic love. Indeed, the hope is that marriage, far from being undermined or destroyed, can be made real and lasting. . . . What thoughtful women are distinctly beginning to object to is the time-honored belief that it is decent for a woman to bestow her sex, legally or illegally, in exchange for a guarantee of food, shelter, and clothing.

That millions of women have had to do precisely this in the past is too commonly known to be gainsaid. They have had to do it sometimes because there was no other way in which they could live according to reasonable standards of what living is, and sometimes, often, because the prevailing masculine ideal of the ornamental comparatively useless woman has withheld from them the training and equipment that would have enabled them to cope with life as it is.

But, now that the changing economic conditions have forced woman in some degree to meet life squarely and directly, and at the same time have begun to make some sort of economic independence seem possible for almost any individual, she is making the interesting discovery that she can in some measure subsist without throwing herself, legally or illicitly, on the mercy of the individual man. Accordingly, she is pressing and striving to increase her economic opportunity, even to gain some real economic authority; and at the same time she is getting a grip on the lever of political power. . . .

THE NEW POWER OF THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN

. . . [T]hat this new condition carries with it a new social attitude toward divorce goes without saying. The promise of the new relationship between man and woman is that the deeply rooted, perennial mating instinct may begin to work more spontaneously and finely in conditions permitting freer choice. It is beginning to be recognized that real marriage can not be brought into existence through fear of want or through other social intimidation. . . .

A mere casual survey of current books and plays makes it evident that a calm, intelligent study of these elemental facts is rapidly taking the place of our traditional attitude of outward conformity tempered by inner panic. We are beginning to perceive that we can not successfully fit all of life into a preconceived mold; that our real task is to try, soberly and patiently, to learn what this strange substance we call life really is.

SOURCE: “The Changing Home,” McClure’s Magazine, March 1913, 206–19.

THE THEME OF SEXUAL LIBERATION, evident in Milholland’s McClure’s article, appeared repeatedly in feminist writing and was often accompanied by a call for the legalization of birth control. In this article from the radical journal Birth Control Review, Crystal Eastman discusses the far-reaching implications of women’s control over reproduction. Eastman’s concern for economic as well as sexual liberation reflects both her socialist and feminist sensibilities.

CRYSTAL EASTMAN

Birth Control in the Feminism Program (1918)

Feminism means different things to different people, I suppose. To women with a taste for politics and reform it means the right to vote and hold office. To women physically strong and adventuresome it means freedom to enter all kinds of athletic contests and games, to compete with men in aviation, to drive racing cars, . . . to enter dangerous trades, etc. To many it means social and sex freedom, doing away with exclusively feminine virtues. To most of all it means economic freedom, — not the ideal economic freedom dreamed of by revolutionary socialism, but such economic freedom as it is possible for a human being to achieve under the existing system of competitive production and distribution, — in short such freedom to choose one’s way of making a living as men now enjoy, and definite economic rewards for one’s work when it happens to be “home-making.” This is to me the central fact of feminism. Until women learn to want economic independence, i.e., the ability to earn their own living independently of husbands, fathers, brothers or lovers, — and until they work out a way to get this independence without denying themselves the joys of love and motherhood, it seems to me feminism has no roots. Its manifestations are often delightful and stimulating but they are sporadic, they effect no lasting change in the attitude of men to women, or of women to themselves.

Whether other feminists would agree with me that the economic is the fundamental aspect of feminism, I don’t know. But on this side we are surely agreed, that Birth Control is an elementary essential in all aspects of feminism. Whether we are the special followers of Alice Paul, or Ruth Law, or Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner, we must all be followers of Margaret Sanger. Feminists are not nuns. That should be established. We want to love and to be loved, and most of us want children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and free — not clouded with ignorance and fear. And we want our children to be deliberately, eagerly called into being, when we are at our best, not crowded upon us in times of poverty and weakness. We want this precious sex knowledge not just for ourselves, the conscious feminists; we want it for all the millions of unconscious feminists that swarm the earth, — we want it for all women.

Life is a big battle for the complete feminist even when she can regulate the size of her family. Women who are creative, or who have administrative gifts, or business ability, and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves in these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be a sort of supermen, I think. They must develop greater powers of concentration, a stronger will to “keep at it,” a more determined ambition than men of equal gifts, in order to make up for the time and energy and thought and devotion that child-bearing and rearing, even in the most “advanced” families, seems inexorably to demand of the mother. But if we add to this handicap complete uncertainty as to when children may come, how often they come or how many there shall be, the thing becomes impossible. I would almost say that the whole structure of the feminist’s dream of society rests upon the rapid extension of scientific knowledge about birth control.

SOURCE: Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 46–49.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What role does women’s economic independence play in feminist thought?

Why is birth control so crucial to the transformation in women’s lives that feminists anticipated?

What changes in relationships and marriage did feminists promote?

Feminists were self-consciously “modern.” What evidence do you see for this sensibility in these documents?