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The New Era and the New Woman: Lou Henry Hoover and "Feminism's Awkward Age" Author(s): Kendrick A. Clements Source: The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, (Aug., 2004), pp. 425-461 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3642131 Accessed: 19/06/2008 15:22

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The New Era and the New Woman: Lou Henry Hoover and "Feminism's Awkward Age"

KENDRICK A. CLEMENTS

The author is a member of the history department at the University of South Carolina.

Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, demonstrated the strengths and limita- tions of the expanded social definition of womanhood that had been won by reformers during the Progressive Era and World War I As a leader of several business and women's social welfare organizations, she urged young women to follow her example in

seeking professional education and careers as well as upholding traditional domestic roles. Protected by wealth and social status from the most burdensome aspects of do-

mesticity, her public position emphasized the opportunities but understated problems faced by the "new women" in the 1920s and later generations.

Lou Henry Hoover was the wife of Herbert Hoover, one of the most prominent cabinet members in the administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and President himself from 1929 to 1933. Unlike the wives of most officials in these Republican administrations, but like many of her friends, Lou Hoover was active

during the 1920s in a number of public organizations, serving as leader in two of them, the Girl Scouts and the Women's Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation. Both privately and pub- licly, she emphasized her belief that women should pursue public as well as private roles. Although she never pursued the professional career in geology for which she had trained in college, she fitted into the Progressive Era pattern of educated women who, in Estelle Freedman's words, "applied the maternalist values of their mothers'

private world within new professional careers." The admiration her

contemporaries accorded her, "even if relatively few tried to emu- late her," emphasizes the degree to which public perceptions of

I am grateful to the Hoover Presidential Library Association for its support of my re- search, and to Dale Mayer, Marcia Synnott, Molly Wood, Nancy Beck Young, and the five

anonymous readers for the Pacific Historical Review for their help in clarifying my ideas. 1. Estelle B. Freedman, MaternalJustice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tra-

dition (Chicago, 1996), 22.

Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 3, pages 425-461. ISSN 0030-8684 ?2004 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 425

426 Pacific Historical Review

women's social roles had evolved and how the sharp distinction be- tween "separate spheres" had eroded since the late nineteenth cen-

tury, even in the most conservative circles. Hoover did not think or

speak of herself as a feminist, but her view of women's right to a pub- lic role was certainly shaped by the women's movement, even as she

proclaimed women's duty to uphold their traditional domestic func- tion. She greatly underestimated the difficulty of doing both, and because she almost never spoke out on contemporary political is- sues, she avoided some of the conflicts that divided more overtly politicized women. Nevertheless, her contention that women could and should fulfill both public and private roles was fundamental to the discourse about women in the 1920s, as it continues to be today.2

Women's winning of the right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment has become something of a historical red herring. Ratification of the amendment was the culmination of such a long and difficult struggle that it inevitably suggests the end of one his- torical period and the beginning of another. Moreover, because the

struggle was about the right to vote, historians naturally tend to fo- cus on what political effects, if any, the great victory produced. The consensus of both contemporary observers and historians, however, is "that woman suffrage had little impact on women or politics."3

2. The main source for this article is the Lou Henry Hoover Papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (hereafter Hoover Library) in West Branch, Iowa. The col- lection occupies about 150 linear feet and consists of 220,000 items, but it does not doc- ument all aspects of Lou Henry Hoover's life equally. For the 1920s, files on her manage- ment of houses in Washington, D.C., and California, and on her public work as leader of the Girl Scouts and the National Amateur Athletic Federation (NAAF) are quite complete because she employed a series of young college graduates as secretaries to assist her with these activities. On the other hand, her political activities and correspondence with fam- ily and friends generally did not go through the secretaries. As a result, records in these areas are sketchy at best. Nevertheless, existing records make clear her belief that women had a right to a public role equal to that of men and demonstrate the degree to which she preached that conviction publicly.

3. Paula Baker, 'The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political So- ciety, 1890-1920," American Historical Review, 89 (1984), 643. For a contemporary ex- pression of the same view, see Charles Edward Russell, "Is Woman-Suffrage a Failure? "

Century, 107 (1924), 724-730. On the lack of impact on politics by women in the 1920s, seeJ. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, Ill., 1973). J. Stanley Lemons's negative assessment has been modified but not overturned by more recent studies, including Felice D. Gordon, After Winning: The Legacy of the New Jersey Suf- fragists, 1920-1947 (New Brunswick, NJ., 1986); Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in

Lou Henry Hoover 427

Does it then follow that, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to gal- vanize widespread support among women, feminism was dead in the 1920s? 4 Of course not, declared Elizabeth Breuer in 1925; it was sim-

ply that feminism had reached an "awkward age." Having passed "the unthinking hurrah of its first youth," it was now "tackling the

problems of maturity." The "organized movement of women in great active groups" was over, she argued, but

in its place is rising a feminism which is a point of view. That point of view expresses itself not so much in sex-consciousness as in the personal self- consciousness of women who are trying to straddle two horses and ride them both to a victorious finish.

One horse, she continued, was a career, "through which woman can

express herself as an individual in a world of masculine standards." The other was family and children, "which she cannot leave behind if she is to be happy as a woman." The difficulties in riding both

horses, she admitted, might seem enormous, but they were "not in-

surmountable," and every woman who managed both "had made life a more free, a more noble thing."5

Two years later Dorothy Dunbar Bromley echoed Breuer, pro- claiming that the "new style" of feminists believed "that a full life calls for marriage and children as well as a career." They "are keen to make a success of [marriage] and an art of child-rearing. But at the same time they are moved by an inescapable inner compulsion to

Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago, 1996); and Anna L. Harvey, Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970 (New York, 1998). Recent studies in consumer history have suggested that political activism is not the only measure of women's influence in the period. See, for example, Lawrence B. Glickman, 'Toward a

History of Consumer Culture, Women, and Politics," Reviews in American History, 28 (2000), 584-592; Lizabeth Cohen, "Citizens and Consumers in the Century of Mass Con-

sumption," in Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twen- tieth Century (New York, 2001), 145-161.

4. A number of women claimed that direct and important changes resulted from the winning of the suffrage. See, for example, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, 'The Women's Revolution," Current History, 19 (Oct. 1923), 16-22; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Woman's Achievements Since the Franchise," in ibid., 27 (Oct. 1927), 7-14; Mary Austin, 'The Forward Turn," Nation, 125 (July 20, 1927), 57-59.

5. Elizabeth Breuer, "Feminism's Awkward Age," Harper's Magazine, 150 (1925), 545, 551.

428 Pacific Historical Review

be individuals in their own right." They "are convinced that they will be better wives and mothers for the breadth they gain from func-

tioning outside the home."6 Other writers, however, were not so

sanguine. Even with supportive husbands, they argued, it was nei- ther easy nor always possible to be a "new style" feminist.7

To Bromley and Breuer, "new style" feminism meant individual

fulfillment, not "gender identification," as more traditional femi- nists defined the term.8 Nevertheless, they were building on the

heritage of the recent past. The cumulative effect of the "woman movement" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in-

cluding the suffrage campaign and the opportunities opened by World War I, was to begin to construct a new social definition of what it meant to be a woman in the United States. Defined as full cit- izens by the Nineteenth Amendment and increasingly freed of eco- nomic restrictions by other reforms, women like Bromley and Breuer assumed that women could claim full equality with men.

They greatly underestimated, however, the limitations that persist- ent social expectations about women's maternal and homemaking roles would continue to exert. For the most part, the "new style" feminists were young, unmarried women from the middle and up- per-middle classes who felt little unity with older or lower-class women who were more restricted in seeking self-fulfillment.

An element of disappointment and frustration thus pervades much of the writing by and about women in the 1920s, but, in addi- tion to the suffrage victory, the "woman movement" had produced a "pervasive sense of newness" and a possibility of redefining women's roles, which affected even women who spurned "new style" or any other kind of feminism.9 The clubwoman movement of the

6. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, "Feminist-New Style," Harper's Magazine, 155 (1927), 552; emphasis in original. According to Birgitte Sl0and, in Denmark in the same period, "not only did young women generally reject feminist politicsjust as vehemently as they re-

jected their mothers' domestic and family-centered lives, but they also went out of their

way to ridicule 'the emancipated woman . . . ' who did her best to imitate men and in that

process completely lost her feminine charm." Birgitte S0land, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 172.

7. See, for example, "Confessions of an Ex-Feminist," New Republic, 46 (April 14, 1926), 218-220; Diana Freeman, "The Feminist's Husband," in ibid., 52 (Aug. 24, 1927), 15-16; Lorine Pruette, "Should Men Be Protected?" Nation, 125 (Aug. 31, 1927), 200-201; Worth Tuttle, "A Feminist Marries," Atlantic Monthly, 153 (Jan. 1934), 73-83.

8. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 4, 9. 9. Sarah Jane Deutsch, "From Ballots to Breadlines, 1920-1940," in Nancy F. Cott,

ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (New York, 2000), 413.

Lou Henry Hoover 429

late nineteenth century had grounded women's claim for a public role in the extension of the supposedly natural "traits of loving ma-

ternity, intuition, and sensitivity" to encompass public as well as pri- vate obligations. The achievement of the suffrage seemingly entitled women to public roles as citizens as well as mothers.10 The case of Lou Henry Hoover suggests how the lives of women in various walks of life were touched by this sense of a new opportunity and how such non-feminists worked, with mixed results, to enlarge still further the social definition of womanhood.

Born in 1874 in Waterloo, Iowa, Lou Henry grew up in a family that assumed she could and should aspire to anything she could

imagine. Both parents were determined that their daughter would have every opportunity to develop her talents and pursue her inter- ests "without consulting conventional roles."" In 1887 she got the chance to develop her taste for the unconventional when her fam-

ily moved to the new Quaker town of Whittier, in Southern Califor- nia. Lou loved the frontier feeling of Whittier, plunging into a

tomboy life of playing baseball and hunting, fishing, and hiking with her father, who had opened a small bank. At her parents' urging, she also pushed forward with school, enrolling in 1890 in the Los

Angeles Normal School with the idea of becoming a teacher. She

completed two years of the three-year course before her father's bank failed. The family moved to Monterey so he could take ajob as chief clerk in a bank there, and she left Los Angeles to join them,

completing the work for her teaching degree in 1893 at San Jose Normal School. During the next year she worked in the bank and did substitute teaching, expecting to be hired full-time to teach in

Monterey in the fall. In the spring of 1894, however, she attended a lecture by Dr. John Casper Branner, a professor of geology at Stan- ford University. Branner reignited the enthusiasm she had always had for the mountains of California, and she determined to enroll in the geology program at Stanford. Over the next four years, she

proved herself as the only female student in geology and met her fu-

10. KarenJ. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914

(New York, 1980), 1; Priscilla Murolo, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and

Working Girls' Clubs, 1884-1928 (Urbana, Ill., 1997). 11. Anne Beiser Allen, An Independent Woman: The Life of Lou Henry Hoover (West-

port, Conn., 2000), 7.

430 Pacific Historical Review

ture husband, Herbert Hoover, who, although six months younger than she, was a senior the year she entered Stanford. In late 1898, after she graduated and after he established himself as a mining en-

gineer in California and Australia, he asked her to marry him. They were married at her parents' home in Monterey on February 10, 1899, and departed the next day for his new position as a mining en-

gineer in China.12 Lou Henry's experiences as a young woman distinguished her

from the great majority of her contemporaries. Not only did she

grow up in a family that encouraged her to do the same sorts of

things as boys, but in attending college she joined an elite group of

young women making up less than 4 percent of eighteen to twenty- one-year-old females in the United States. In later years that tiny group of college-educated women would provide more than half of all suffrage leaders in California.13 For her part, Lou Henry wrote an

essay as early as 1889 advocating voting rights for women.14

Although Lou Henry was drawn to geology by her personal in-

terests, the sciences, with their growing prestige and their claim to

empirical, impersonal, objective standards for success, offered at- tractive possibilities to women in the early twentieth century. In sci-

ence, it was argued, success was based on achievement; prejudice and discrimination played no role.15 That was a very attractive idea to women hoping for acceptance as equals by their male colleagues, and it attracted women to the professions even when they found, as Lou Henry did at Stanford, that experience did not conform to the-

ory. Had she gone on to pursue a professional career in geology, she would certainly have found the prejudices she encountered at Stan- ford to be serious obstacles to success.

Following her graduation and marriage, Lou Hoover never re-

ally questioned whether the professions were equally open to both men and women. Asked near the end of her life by a young woman whether there was "a future in Geology for a girl," she snapped that "of course" there was, 'just as ... there is a future in anything that

12. Ibid., 5-21. As the family of a bank clerk, the Henrys were respectable but not affluent. Lou Henry was able to attend Stanford only because the university at that time

charged no tuition, which was also what drew Herbert Hoover to the college. 13. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 296, n. 46. 14. Nancy Beck Young, "Searching for Lou Henry Hoover," in Timothy Walch, ed.,

Uncommon Americans: The Lives and Legacies of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover (Westport, Conn., 2003), 20.

15. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 234.

Lou Henry Hoover 431

one is vitally interested in," although she admitted that women sci- entists probably could not yet expect salaries equal to those of their male counterparts.16 Her attitude that "of course" a woman could do

anything she set her mind to was even more bluntly reflected in her answers to a questionnaire about careers for women in engineering: 1. What kinds of Engineering do you consider appropriate for a

woman?

(A). Any she feels capable of and interested in attempting. 2. Why?

(A). Why not? 3. Does man's idea of woman's sphere have a direct bearing on her

career as an engineer? (A). As much as it does in law, medicine, or other professions.

4. Do you consider a woman's physical weakness a great dis-

advantage? (A). A woman who has taken correct care of herself all of her

life should have no so-called "physical weakness." 5. Is the engineering profession a test of her womanliness?

(A). Question incomprehensible to me. 6. Does it tend to make her masculine?

(A). Just what do you mean by that? How? Why? 7. Does it tend to make her unconventional?

(A). If by "unconventional" you mean unusual, it would, wouldn't it?

8. Do you think intuition helps a woman in engineering? (A). Certainly, and imagination and many other useful charac-

teristics of either woman or man.17 The answers reflected Lou Hoover's personal experience with a sup- portive family and husband, as well as her ability to overcome ob- stacles in the geology program at Stanford, but they were not repre-

16. Mary H. Helm to Lou Henry (hereafter L. H.) Hoover,Jan. 15, 1942, and L. H. Hoover to Helm, Feb. 6, 1942, folder "Hoover, Lou Henry, Professions for Women: Views On, 1921-42," box 70, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

17. Zelina Boeshar to L. H. Hoover, May 12, 1921, and L. H. Hoover to Boeshar, May 26, 1921, ibid.; emphasis in original. A 1919 Women's Bureau study indicated that she was too sanguine. The study "showed that women were excluded from 60 percent of all civil-service examinations, including 64 percent of those for scientific and professional positions." William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Cen-

tury (New York, 1991), 66-67. It was true, however, that the adoption of scientific man-

agement practices in business opened new if limited opportunities for women in office work. See Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 5-6.

432 Pacific Historical Review

sentative of the experience of women in the professions in America in general in the early twentieth century. Rather, they represented what she and many other women hoped would become the norm in the near future.

If Lou Henry Hoover's parents were unusual for the times, so was her new husband. Ideally, wrote the psychologist Lorine Pruette, a husband should have "few theories about woman's position, or man's," and that seemed exactly to describe Herbert Hoover.18 An outdoorsman like Lou's father, Bert enjoyed camping and fishing with his new wife and also accepted her as a colleague in business and science. In China, she carried a pistol during the Boxer Rebel- lion and helped to organize the defense of Tientsin. During more

peaceful times she discussed technical mining problems with her husband and other engineers and shared with him the management of the growing family fortune.19 On her own, she became fluent in Mandarin Chinese and used her geological skills to collect interest-

ing local rocks and minerals that she shipped to Stanford for the

university's permanent collection. She also acquired a reading knowledge of medieval Latin sophisticated enough to enable her to collaborate with Bert in translating De Re Metallica, a classical mining treatise. A few years later, when the couple moved to London, she learned, as she put it, to "get along" in French and German, and to

"manage" in Italian and Spanish, although her friends believed she was more proficient in all of these languages than she admitted.20

18. Lorine Livingston Pruette, 'The Evolution of Disenchantment," in Elaine Showalter, ed., These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Old West- bury, N.Y, 1978), 72. The autobiographical essays by feminists of the 1920s that make up this book were originally published as a series by the Nation in 1926-1927.

19. In a letter to her sons, sent about 1932, she wrote of her early years with her hus- band, "For many years after the spring of 1899 I was so very intimately associated with him that I can say almost without exception he carried on no mining or business enterprises or negotiations that I did not know practically all the details of." See typescript, ca. 1932, in folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, undated, L. H. Hoover on Herbert Hoover," box 10, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. At that time, being white in China gave Lou Hoover an authority she might not have had in the United States or Europe. See Louise Michele Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), especially chapter 7.

20. See handwritten biographical notes, undated [1928?], in folder "Hoover, Lou

Henry, Biographical Data," box 60, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. An article

published soon after Herbert Hoover was elected President declared that "she speaks five languages." See "Mrs. Hoover's International Housekeeping," Literary Digest, 99 (Nov. 24, 1928), 46. A particularly insightful interpretation of her is 'Tell Me What She's Really Like: A Discussion of Mrs. Hoover, by a friend" [1932] in ibid. From'the style of this essay and various details in it, I think it is likely the author was Dare Stark McMullin, who lived

Lou Henry Hoover 433

In England, where Herbert Hoover became a partner in the

mining firm of Bewick, Moreing and Company, Lou Hoover fulfilled the social role expected of an important businessman's wife and be-

gan to raise their two sons, HerbertJr., born in 1903, and Allan, born in 1907. At the same time she worked on De Re Metallica, which was

published to great acclaim in 1912, and also published biographical essays on the Dowager Empress of China and John Milne, a British

seismologist.21 When World War I began in August 1914, she en- trusted the boys, now eleven and seven, to a full-time governess and took on more public responsibilities. Like thousands of other Amer- ican women, she found her wartime experience liberating and would seek-in her case successfully-to pursue new opportunities beyond the home after the war. On August 5, 1914, she organized and chaired the Resident American Women's Relief Committee

(subsequently renamed the American Women's War Relief Fund) that provided money and support to American women stranded in London by the war. Later, she joined other women in running a can- teen service, a war hospital, and in helping to maintain Red Cross ambulances. Although her work was overshadowed by her hus- band's larger-scale and better-known relief programs, Lou Hoover's calmness under pressure and executive ability were recognized not

only by other women, but by the all-male American Citizens' Com-

mittee; the latter made her its only female member and warmly sup- ported her work.22

After the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Hoovers returned to the United States, where Herbert Hoover be- came Food Administrator and Lou Hoover staked out a new domain for herself. At one level, she played the role of the dutiful wife and

mother, explaining in an interview that she had been the guinea pig for Food Administration conservation plans. "They tried everything on me first," she said. "Then if I bore up under the experiment[,] they tried it on the rest of America." But she could not resist adding an independent note: "It was no question of minding my husband. In fact, I was not with him so very much-I commuted between Cali-

with the Hoovers for a time after the death of her parents, later served as Lou Henry Hoover's assistant, and remained a close family friend.

21. Rosemary F. Carroll, "Lou Henry Hoover: The Emergence of a Leader, 1874-1916," in Dale C. Mayer, ed., Lou Henry Hoover: Essays on a Busy Life (Worland, Wyo., 1994), 24-25.

22. George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917 (New York, 1988), 6-7; Young, "Searching for Lou Henry Hoover," 21.

434 Pacific Historical Review

fornia, where we lived, and Washington, where he was stationed, and I could have done exactly as I pleased."23 In fact, her role went well beyond trying out Food Administration recipes in the family kitchen. In addition to speaking to a variety of groups on behalf of food conservation and raising money for the relief of Belgian and French civilians living under German occupation (as she had been

doing since 1914), she also took action to provide for the welfare of the young women pouring into Washington, D.C., for war jobs. Along with several of her friends, she leased three houses on I Street and converted them into a Food Administration Club, with a resi-

dence, dining hall, and "rest-house" for female staff. The Food Administration Club was a substantial business. Be-

tween November 1917 and April 1919 the club paid $9,800 to rent the three houses at 1700, 1708, and 1710 I Street, and at least as much again to purchase furniture and equipment for the kitchen and dining service. Room rents from the women who lived at the club (nearly seventy of them by the spring of 1919) brought in about $1,400 in 1919, while the restaurant returned $1,000, dues and rentals of various club rooms for private functions produced almost

$1,600, and a large cafeteria run by Lou Hoover and her associates in the actual Food Administration building made a profit that

helped to subsidize the club. Although some of Lou Hoover's friends donated time and furniture to the enterprise, the club also em-

ployed several women full time, including a manager, a bookkeeper, and various cooks and maids. Water and electric bills, as well as food

purchases, added to the expenses of the operation. For the young women who could not actually be housed in the club's facilities, Hoover and her friends ran a service that located respectable room and board arrangements elsewhere.24

Financed and run entirely by women, the Food Administration Club marked an important transition for Lou Henry Hoover. Al-

though it was associated with her husband's wartime agency, there is no indication that he had any part in its planning or operation. In-

23. Clipping, "Was the 'Trial Goat,' Mrs. Hoover Admits," New York World, Feb. 13, 1921, folder "Clippings, 1921," box 31, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

24. Laurine Anderson Small to L. H. Hoover, April 21, 26, 29, 1919, folder "Small, Laurine Anderson, 1919 March-June," box 7, Personal, 1872-1920, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to LAS [ca. May 1, 1919], folder "Small, Laurine Anderson, un- dated," in ibid.; Allen, An Independent Woman, 74-75; Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: Years of Ad- venture, 1874-1920 (New York, 1951), 273-274.

Lou Henry Hoover 435

deed, even if he had wanted to take part in it, he was far too busy to do so. The club was thus the first time she had undertaken, entirely on her own, to imagine, organize, and run a substantial operation requiring both business acumen and day-to-day administrative skills. It is apparent from her surviving papers that, from the initial

conception to the final audit of the club's books, she operated it in a businesslike way. To run the club she drew upon the training in business and finance given her by her banker father, on her experi- ence as her husband's informal business partner for twenty years, as well as on the practical knowledge acquired as the manager of a

large house staffed by servants. But the enterprise also represented an extension of her experience into a public arena that was new to her and to the friends who worked with her.

The Food Administration Club experience came at an ideal time for Lou Hoover. Living in the United States for the first time in

nearly twenty years, and with her children teenagers, she was ready to pour her boundless energy into new projects. Her experiences in China and Europe had given her a taste for organizing public pro- grams and confidence that she could manage them well. Now her husband's position and the needs of a mobilizing economy swept away any obstacles that might otherwise have stood in her way. The

experience of organizing and managing the Food Administration Club would be the foundation upon which she would build a public career during the 1920s.

The club was not the only way that Lou Hoover enlarged her role during the war years. Prior to the war Herbert Hoover had

gradually withdrawn from active business and turned over manage- ment of most of his fortune to Edgar Rickard in New York, but of course there were many decisions regarding managing and spend- ing money that had to be made by the Hoovers. With Bert devoting every waking moment to war and relief work, those decisions fell

mainly to Lou. Although Rickard's office in New York handled the

family's capital, Lou Hoover became the manager of their daily fi- nances. Small wonder that she was outraged by a widely syndicated article that purported to quote her as saying, "I want to be a back-

ground for Bertie!"25 Nothing could have been further from the

reality.

25. The article, entitled 'The Boudoir Mirrors of Washington," was published in

many papers, including the Boston Sunday Post, Feb. 24, 1924, and the Buffalo News,

436 Pacific Historical Review

The building of the family's new house on the Stanford campus in California showed how the partnership between the Hoovers worked. The Hoovers had always regarded California as home, and

particularly their alma mater, Stanford, where Herbert Hoover was a trustee. In 1901 they purchased, through Charles Henry, Lou Hoover's father, land and a modest cottage in Monterey, but they much preferred to live at Stanford if possible.26 During visits to the United States, they rented houses on the Stanford campus from fac-

ulty friends, and when they returned to the country for good in 1917, they continued this practice. By the late spring of 1917, as it became obvious that the family was likely to remain more or less

permanently in the United States, Lou Hoover began to think about a more lasting arrangement.

On May 14, 1917, she asked her husband by telegraph, "Do

you think it advisable build fifty thousand dollars house or five thou- sand or none at all?" He immediately replied, "You can build any sort of house you wish but if it is to be the ultimate family head-

quarters it should be substantial and roomy. The cost is second-

ary."27 Within these expansive limits (and a subsequent stipulation that the house must be fireproof), the project was to be entirely Lou Hoover's.

A prominent San Francisco architect, Louis C. Mullgardt, heard of the Hoovers' plans through their old friend, Ray Lyman Wilbur, now president of Stanford. Mullgardt eagerly solicited the

commission, and Lou Hoover engaged him-until he leaked their

plans to the press. The report that the head of the Food Adminis- tration, who was constantly urging his countrymen to sacrifice and economize for the war effort, was planning to build an expensive house was extremely embarrassing, and Mullgardt's contract was

April 26, 1924, clippings of it in folder "Clippings, 1924, 'Boudoir Mirrors,"' box 33, Sub-

ject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. Although the article carried no byline, Lou Henry Hoover attributed it to Mary Austin, the western novelist and nature writer who had been a frequent guest of the Hoovers. Even almost twenty years later Lou Henry Hoover was still fuming about the quotation, which she labeled "a figment of Mary's imagination." See L. H. Hoover to Irene Gerlinger, Feb. 16, 1942, folder "Hoover, Herbert, Biographical Comments by LHH," box 59, in ibid.

26. George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874-1914 (New York, 1983), 223.

27. Both telegrams are quoted in George H. Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford Uni-

versity (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 56.

Lou Henry Hoover 437

terminated. They shelved the whole project until the end of the war, when, for $10,000, Lou Hoover quietly purchased the campus home of Professor Albert C. Whittaker, where she and the boys lived when- ever they were not in Washington.28

At the end of the war Herbert Hoover returned to Europe, to attend the peace conference and undertake the feeding of millions of Europeans starving in the postwar chaos. Although he concluded on the basis of his expanding political opportunities that it might be fifteen years before they could expect to live full time in California, he nevertheless urged Lou to "build your house as you planned it."29 She accepted the responsibility, employing Professor Arthur B. Clark of the university art department as general supervisor and consul-

tant, and his architect son Birge as draftsman. It was clear, however, that she was to serve as the principal architect and contractor. "My idea of this architectural job," Arthur Clark told her, "is that it is not on a percentage basis but that you are the architect-in-chief-and that I am sort of an architectural 'secretary.'"30

The house that began to rise inJune 1919 on Lot 14 of the "San

Juan Extension Subdivision" (today 623 Mirada Road) eventually grew to three stories, fifty-seven rooms, and exterior dimensions of 192 by 65 feet. Although "hammered down" into the site, as Birge Clark later put it, and designed to blend into the landscape as much as possible with an irregular plan, flat roofs, and vines and shrub-

bery, the house was nevertheless an enormous building, more than twice as long as its nearest neighbor.31 Built of reinforced concrete

(to meet Bert's insistence that it be fireproof), the house's interior was made warm and comfortable with oak paneling and hardwood floors laid on wooden cross-strips embedded in the concrete below. Thanks to design changes and a rapid postwar increase in the price

28. Louis C. Mullgardt to L. H. Hoover, March 30, 31, 1917; Arthur B. Clark to L. H. Hoover, Sept. 27, 1917, all in folder "Properties and Lots, Stanford House, Corre-

spondence, 1917-19," box 75, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to the editor of the Daily Palo Alto, April 12, 1918, folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, Lou Henry Hoover on Herbert Hoover," box 10, ibid.; Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 56.

29. Edgar Rickard to L. H. Hoover, forwarding a telegram from Herbert Hoover, April 23, 1919, folder "Properties and Lots, Stanford House, Correspondence, 1917-19," box 75, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

30. A[rthur] B[irge] Clark to L. H. Hoover, undated [1919?], ibid. 31. Nash, Herbert Hoover and Stanford University, 58.

438 Pacific Historical Review

of building materials, by the time the house was completed in mid-

1920, its total cost was approximately $170,000, a huge sum for the time.32

Lou Hoover had almost exclusive responsibility for designing and contracting the construction of the house. Bert, absorbed by the task of trying to feed Europe and by a pair of unemployment conferences in the fall of 1919, paid only one brief visit to California in September 1919 and took no active part in the planning or con- struction of the house. She "tried to involve him," said Birge Clark later, "but he was spending most of the time in Washington and

Europe and seemed interested in the house mainly because of Mrs. Hoover's interest."33

Nor did Lou Hoover's Stanford activities end with the building of her house. In late 1919 she purchased the nearby McDowell house, which she used for a period as a guest house for family and friends until she rented it to Professor Walter Miles. Over the course of the next several years, she and her sister used a trust fund set up by their father to finance the construction of seven other small houses on the campus that were rented or sold to faculty members.34 In addition, she acted as her husband's agent in negotiations with the university regarding the establishment of the Hoover Institution and its ongoing work in collecting materials relating to World War I in Europe.35 All in all, her California land dealings, construction

projects, and other business transactions reinforced the confidence, independence, and business experience she had previously ac-

quired through the operation of the Food Administration Club.

Through all of this, Lou continued to commute back and forth

32. "Descriptive Specification for the Erection of a two story and a half Residence To Be Erected for Mrs. Lou Henry Hoover," by A. B. Clark, undated [ca. late 1918-early 1919], folder "Properties and Lots, Stanford House, Correspondence, 1917-19," box 75, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. For subsequent plan changes and escalating con- struction costs, see the documents in folder "Properties and Lots, Stanford House, Cor-

respondence, 1920," ibid. 33. Quoted in Ruth Dennis, The Homes of the Hoovers (West Branch, Iowa, 1986), 33. 34. W. F. Hyde to Edgar Rickard, Dec. 3, 1926, folder "Properties and Lots, Stanford

House, Correspondence, 1921-28," box 75, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; clip- pings from San Jose [Calif.] Mercury Herald, Oct. 26, 1924, and Palo Alto Times, Oct. 28, 1924, folder "Clippings, 1924, Hoover, Lou Henry, Miscellaneous," box 33, ibid.

35. L. H. Hoover to Herbert Hoover, Sept. 25, 1923, Herbert Hoover to L. H. Hoover, Sept. 26, 1923, L. H. Hoover to Ray Lyman Wilbur, Sept. 27, 1923, all in folder "Stanford University, Hoover Institution, 1923-24," box 111, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

Lou Henry Hoover 439

across the country to be with Bert in Washington. During the war the

family, believing Bert's service would be only temporary, rented houses in Washington and kept an apartment in New York so he could stay near the headquarters of the European relief organiza- tion. Following the Republican victory in the election of 1920, it be- came increasingly probable that Herbert Hoover would be invited to join President Harding's cabinet and would thus be in the capital for at least four years, so Lou Hoover began a discreet search for a suitable house to buy. Just before Christmas, the Hoovers signed a contract to buy 2300 S Street for delivery on March 1, 1921. To avoid

tipping off reporters about his plans, the purchase was arranged through the family's holding company, the West Branch Corpora- tion.36 With the Stanford house still not entirely finished, Lou Hoover plunged into furnishing and decorating the new house's

twenty-two rooms, and hiring the eleven full-time servants who

eventually staffed the residence.37 Of course, having servants freed Lou Hoover from the daily

chores of cooking, cleaning, and supervising the children, making it

possible for her to chair a meeting in the early afternoon and then invite all of the members of the organization to her house for tea af- terward. But such efficiency did not come easily. She had to select, train, and supervise the people who worked for her, not only in

Washington but in California as well. To achieve the sort of coordi- nation that permitted her or Bert to invite twenty or thirty people to the house for dinner or a meeting at a moment's notice required a

high order of planning and training. What was more, she was un-

willing to leave the details of entertaining to the staff; so she per- sonally determined furniture arrangements, menus, decorations, and seating plans.38 Maintaining this degree of supervision was

36. Edgar Rickard to L. H. Hoover, Oct. 7, Dec. 23, 1920; L. H. Hoover to Rickard, Dec. 30, 1920, all in folder "Rickard, Edgar, 1920 & undated," box 7, Personal Corre-

spondence, 1872-1920, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. 37. Dennis, The Homes of the Hoovers, 40. 38. For examples of how meticulously Lou Henry Hoover managed domestic mat-

ters, see L. H. Hoover to [Albert] Butler and Carrie [Butler], July 21, 1921, folder "Ser- vants and Aides, Butler, Albert and Carrie, 1921-35," Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Pa-

pers; L. H. Hoover to Mary [Rattley] and Ellis [Sampson], Oct. 25, 1926, and L. H. Hoover to Ellis [Sampson], Nov. 4, 1926, folder "Servants and Aides, General, 1911-28," box 97, ibid.; the detailed instructions for a new secretary in folder "Secretary's Work File, Instructions for Successor, 1924," ibid.; [Dr.] S[amuel]. J. Crumbine to L. H. Hoover, March 18, 29, 1927, and L. H. Hoover to Crumbine, March 23, 1927, folder "American

440 Pacific Historical Review

difficult when she was so frequently away from home for various

meetings and other obligations, but Washington society columnists

unanimously agreed that her entertaining always revealed a dis-

tinctly personal touch. Perhaps more to the point, having a well- trained, efficient staff enabled Lou Hoover to undertake large com- mitments outside the home, gave her further experience in running organizations, and added to her confidence in her executive ability. Just as Herbert Hoover's assistants made sure that he had hotel res-

ervations, clean shirts, and got to meetings on time, so Lou Hoover's domestic staff helped her both to run the family's households and to manage the various organizations in which she took a leading part. Her home, observed an interviewer, was "run like a business."39 For her, as for her friends, the "separate spheres" of public and pri- vate life increasingly overlapped and blended.

Although Herbert Hoover was an unusually liberal and sup- portive husband for his era, he took little or no part in the domes- tic side of family life. Not only did he expect to be able to bring ten or fifteen men to dinner without advance notice, but he left Lou Hoover to oversee the education and lives of their two sons. During the early part of the war he sometimes did not even see the family for weeks or months at a time, and even when they all lived together, he worked long hours and was frequently away from home. On rare occasions he took the boys on a picnic or camping, but it was obvi- ous that, had the Hoovers not been wealthy, Lou Hoover would have been as much a prisoner of her domestic role as any woman. Even in this enlightened family, assumptions about gender roles had not

changed. If Lou Hoover wanted to take on a career outside the fam-

ily, her husband did not object, but both he and she assumed that such responsibilities would be added to her duties as wife and mother, and she never complained. Cornelia Pinchot, also the wife of a prominent Republican, expressed a similar attitude, gaily ex-

plaining that she expected to "bear children, charm her lovers, boss a business, swim the Channel, stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord-all in the day's work! "40

Child Health Assoc., Correspondence, 1923-30," box 16, Girl Scouts and Other Organi- zations, ibid.

39. Ruth L. Stoneham, "Mrs. Hoover Viewed as 'Superlatively Adequate,"' clipping from New York World,July 8, 1928, folder "Clippings, 1928, Biographical," box 34, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

40. Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, "In Search of Adventure," in These Modern Women, 126.

Lou Henry Hoover 441

Advocates of "new style" feminism admitted that being wife, mother, and career woman was not easy. "Too often she cannot have both her love life and her career," wrote Elizabeth Breuer, even as she urged women to try.41 Efficiency engineer Lillian Gilbreth rec- ommended that women adapt the methods of Frederick Winslow

Taylor to the management of the home in order to free themselves for their careers, and advocates of home economics programs in col-

leges made similar arguments.42 A few people suggested that the

only real solution to the problem was for men's attitudes to change in regard not only to women working but to sharing in domestic du- ties as well, although no one pretended that such change would come quickly or easily; even women with supportive husbands found that achieving a real partnership was difficult.43 The slow increase

during the 1920s in the number of married working women testified to both the difficulties in changing men's and women's attitudes and the practical obstacles faced by most women. One expert concluded that the only wives who were really free to pursue careers (as op- posed to women who worked out of necessity) were those whose

family income was great enough to permit the hiring of paid work- ers to run the household and look after the children.44 For such

41. Breuer, "Feminism's Awkward Age," 549. See also Willystine Goodsell, Problems

of theFamily (New York, 1928), 275-277. 42. Lillian Gilbreth, The Homemaker and HerJob (New York, 1927); Alice Beal Par-

sons, Woman's Dilemma (New York, 1926), 208-212; Louise Stanley, "Home-Making Edu- cation in the Colleges," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 143 (1929), 361-367.

43. Goodsell, Problems of theFamily, 275-277; Ernest Rutherford Groves and William

Fielding Ogburn, American Marriage and Family Relationships (New York, 1928), 32-33, 65-70; Ethel Puffer Howes, "The Meaning of Progress in the Woman Movement," in An- nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 143 (1929), 19-20; "Confessions of an Ex-Feminist," 218.

44. Amey E. Watson, "Employer-Employee Relationships in the Home," in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 143 (1929), 54. Amey Watson estimated that only 5 percent of families were wealthy enough to employ servants. The Census Bu- reau classified about 1.4 million people in 1920 and about 2 million in 1930 as private household workers and estimated that there were 24.4 million and 30 million households in the respective years but did not gather figures on how many households employed one or more servants. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that during the 1920s as many as a million women received some help with their household duties from one or more servants. See Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1970), 1: 41, 139. For tables showing women's

employment patterns during the 1920s, see Frank Stricker, "Cookbooks and Law Books: The Hidden History of Career Women in Twentieth Century America,"Journal of Social

History, 10 (1976), 5-6.

442 Pacific Historical Review

women, wealth made choice possible, while the achievement of the vote, plus the widespread discussion of women's roles in the

press, created an atmosphere of liberation that made the option of a part- or full-time career more attractive than it had been to earlier

generations. Despite the reality that her own circumstances-with a wealthy,

supportive husband (and nearly grown children)-were unusual, Lou Hoover sometimes seemed unaware of the problems most women faced. Blithely, she declared that all young women should

pursue careers. "When a girl arrives at the age of 21," she said, "we want her to do things instead of just thinking, to realize the impor- tance of political affairs and to have a well-balanced mind devel-

oped equally by an early education in citizenship, religion, home

making and play." It was not enough, she declared, for women to dedicate themselves to home and family. Any woman who spent all of her time taking care of her home, she proclaimed, was "lazy. The modern home is so small there is but little work to do." And even children were no excuse for a woman not to have a career. "There is no reason why a girl should get rusty in her profession during the five or six years she's caring for her child."45

The reference to a "profession" was, of course, a clue that Lou Hoover was proffering her advice mainly to middle-class college graduates, but she seems to have thought that it was equally relevant for working-class women. Along with the middle-class reformers who founded the American Association for Adult Education and the Workers' Education movement in the early 1920s, Hoover assumed that working women wanted to be taught about the economic and

political forces that shaped their world, rather than receiving prac- tical training or encouragement to organize. A perfect example of her viewpoint was embodied in Bryn Mawr's Summer School for In- dustrial Workers, which, beginning in 1921, offered classes taught by women faculty members on politics, economics, and trade union

history. Touted as providing "women workers with new resources to understand their situations and to develop leadership skills," in re-

ality the program focused on academic analysis of the status quo,

45. "Mrs. Hoover's Smile Is All For Miss '27!" undated clipping [ca. May 18-20, 1927] from an unidentified Milwaukee newspaper; "Marriage No Bar to Real Career, Says Mrs. Hoover," clipping from St. Louis Star, April 20, 1926, both in folders "Clippings, 1928," and "Clippings, 1926," box 10, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, 1921-28, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

Lou Henry Hoover 443

not on provoking change.46 The $1400 that Lou Hoover con- tributed through the YWCA to the support of the program between 1923 and 1926 was, whether she was aware of it or not, devoted more to inculcating middle-class values in the working class than empow- ering women workers.47

With both her advice to female college graduates and her sup- port of the summer schools for women in industry program, Lou Hoover was responding to a common belief among social critics that America was experiencing a "cultural lag." These critics argued that urbanization, industrialization, and technology had changed the

country drastically and that Americans raised in a rural society were

having difficulty adjusting to the transformation. As early as the late nineteenth century such observers had begun to suggest that the

problem was particularly acute for women; their roles as producers had been central to the prosperity of the family in rural society, but

they had lost their economic function in modern households when the production of food and clothing moved outside the home. To recover their economic role, these theorists suggested that women should adjust to the new reality by pursuing external employment.48

In Lou Hoover's version of the cultural lag argument, the prob- lem originated less from the impersonal forces of progress than from the conscious actions of men, but the result was the same. "For

many centuries," she wrote,

the fields of women's industry and man's were sternly parted. But two or three generations ago-or was it slightly more?-he began encroaching on hers. He began to weave her cloths, to bake her bread. He tailored her garments, he dusted and scrubbed and cooked and did her errands for her-more and more in mass production. So that woman, in the aggre- gate, was left for a moment with less industry to be concerned with.

It seemed obvious, she concluded, that when bread and clothing must be purchased, women would "make" the bread and clothing indirectly by working in a shop or a profession.49

46. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 88-89. 47. Clipping from Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 17, 1923, folder "Clippings 1923, Clubs

and Organizations," box 32, ibid. 48. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 274-275. 49. Untitled notes for a talk to Girl Scouts, undated [probably 1920s], folder "Ar-

ticles, Addresses & Statements, Unidentified Fragments, Women in Art and Industry," box 11, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. The idea that industrialization had moved production out of the home to the factory and thus diminished the economic role

444 Pacific Historical Review

As Nancy Cott has observed, the argument being made by Lou Hoover and others in the 1920s was not really a feminist one. By contending that a new, public role for women was a reaction to

changing historical circumstances, rather than a deliberate decision to conquer society's limitations, women like Hoover were asserting their right to work but not really challenging the "gender hierarchy" of American society.50 The sense that change was inevitable enabled Hoover to assume that "of course" a young woman graduating from

college could pursue any career she chose and led Elizabeth Breuer to write that women needed less "sex-consciousness" than "personal self-consciousness."

In addition to her acceptance of the "cultural lag" argument, Lou Hoover's outlook on the place of women in American life was

shaped by her status. Although neither Bert nor Lou was born to

privilege, by the 1920s the Hoovers had become wealthy and politi- cally powerful. In a decade when less than 5 percent of American households employed domestic servants, the Hoovers had eleven full-time at the S Street house and usually two or three at their Stan- ford home, in addition to a series of young college graduates who worked directly for Lou Hoover as private secretaries. Given this de-

gree of support, it was relatively easy for her to fulfill the obligations that fell on her as the wife of a prominent cabinet member and to take a leading role in an enormous number of organizations, but it was hardly realistic for her to assume that "of course" all young women could follow her example.51

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Lou Hoover's privileged position brought with it a heavy load of social and charity work, which she undertook willingly and effectively.52 The list seems end-

of women and the family was relatively common among feminists in the 1920s. See, for

example, Suzanne La Follette, Concerning Women (New York, 1926), 11; Anthony Ludovici, "Woman's Encroachment on Man's Domain," Current History, 27 (Oct. 1927), 21; 'The New Woman," American Review of Reviews, 76 (1927), 539; Groves and Ogburn, American

Marriage, 21; Gwendolyn Hughes Berry, "Mothers in Industry," in Annals of the American

Academy of Political and Social Science, 143 (1929), 315. 50. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 274-275. 51. Other prominent married women whose wealth paid the servants who freed

them from domestic duties and permitted them to pursue public careers included Freda

Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, and Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, wife of Gifford Pinchot. See

June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (New York, 1973), 135, andJohn W. Furlow,Jr., "Cornelia Bryce Pinchot: Feminism in the Post-

Suffrage Era," Pennsylvania History, 43 (1976), 329-346. 52. It may be appropriate here to note that between 1914 and 1929 Herbert Hoover

was also engaged in "charity work." As Belgian relief director, Food Administrator, and

Lou Henry Hoover 445

less: service on the board of trustees of Neighborhood House, a settlement house in Southwest Washington, D.C.; membership in the Women's Auxiliary of the Pan American Scientific Congress; the

presidency of the Women's Auxiliary of the American Institute of

Mining and Metallurgical Engineers; the vice presidency of the Dis- trict of Columbia Overseas League; active membership in her son Allan's parent-teacher organization, where she led a campaign to se- cure more funding from Congress for District public schools; mem-

bership on the board of managers of the Instructive Visiting Nurse

Society in Washington; membership on a national committee set up in 1925 to raise three-quarters of a million dollars for the YWCA;

membership on the Committee on Public Relations of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America; membership on the board of trustees of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations atJohns Hopkins University; and numerous other similar activities. Organizations that sought to promote the welfare of chil- dren were her particular favorites. She was active in the American Child Hygiene Association until it merged in 1923 with the Child Health Organization to form the American Child Health Associa- tion (ACHA), and she continued to work with the new organization, of which Bert became president. The work of these organizations in

expanding prenatal care, reducing infant mortality, and improving health care for young children was close to the hearts of both Hoovers, and they stole surprising amounts of time from their busy schedules to work for the ACHA.53 During the 1920s thousands of

Secretary of Commerce, he hired or augmented the salaries of assistants out of his own

pocket, normally paid his own expenses, and gave away most of his salary to various char- ities. Whether it was his official titles or his gender that accounts for the difference be- tween the way his and his wife's work is regarded may be a matter for speculation. Lou Hoover herself referred to her charitable work as "doing a job." See Anne Hard, "Mrs. Hoover," The Woman Citizen, 19 (Oct. 1926), 41.

53. Clipping, Mary Bainbridge Hayden, "Mrs. Hoover's Complexity of Background Amazes Friends," Washington Evening Star, Nov. 7, 1928, folder "Clippings, 1928, Bio-

graphical," box 34, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; pamphlet, "Neighborhood House: A Social and Industrial Settlement," folder "Clubs and Organizations, Neighbor- hood House (Washington, DC), 1921-24," box 45, Girl Scouts and Other Orga- nizations, ibid.; L. H. Hoover to Mrs. Charles Evans [Antoinette Carter] Hughes,Jan. 5, 1922, folder "Clubs and Organizations, Pan American Scientific Conference, 1916-22," box 47, ibid.; clipping, "[Will] Hays' Own Board Would Ban [Fatty] Arbuckle," undated

[June 1923], no paper, no city, folder "Clippings, 1923, Movie Data," box 32, Subject File, ibid.; L. H. Hoover to Sen. Frank Kellogg, March 1, 1922, folder "Kellogg, Frank B. and Clara, 1921-28 & undated," box 16, Personal, 1921-28, ibid.; L. H. Hoover to General Lord, Nov. 4, 1922, folder "Lo-Lu Miscellaneous," box 17, ibid.; assorted clippings re- garding the Page school in folder "Clippings, 1924, N.A.A.F.," box 33, ibid.; clipping,

446 Pacific Historical Review

women across America continued the prewar practice of organizing women to lobby for social, moral, and welfare reforms. The only ob- vious difference between Lou Hoover's activities and theirs was that, because of her husband's position, she enjoyed opportunities to en- ter organizations at the national leadership level.

Yet, while Lou Hoover willingly accepted an obligation to vol- unteer her time and money in support of many causes, there were some things she shunned. One choice was largely to avoid partisan politics. Although she was credited in the press with being "politi- cally wise," her influence was generally confined to "the inner circle." She urged women to vote and take part in politics, but pri- vately she expressed doubts that the cronies and political hacks with whom President-elect Harding surrounded himself would provide honest, efficient government. In 1928, on the eve of her husband's election to the presidency, she privately lamented the "tremendous cost" of the White House to her and the family. She entered the 1928 campaign only late and reluctantly, and even then, she kept her activities carefully concealed from public view.54 Like other

"Mrs. Hoover Urges Aid to Nurse Drive," Washington Star, Nov. 23, 1924, folder "Clippings, 1924, Instructive Visiting Nurses Soc.," ibid.; clipping, 'Y.W.C.A. to Open Drive for $700,000 for New Building," Washington Post, Nov. 8, 1925, folder "Clippings, 1925, Clubs and Organizations," box 34, ibid.

For Lou Henry Hoover's activities in child health organizations, see folders "Ameri- can Child Health Assoc., Predecessor Organizations, 1922-23" and "American Child Health Assoc., Correspondence, 1923-30," box 16, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. The era's major piece of federal legislation dealing with chil- dren's health was the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided federal matching grants to states to improve maternal and infant health and welfare. I have been unable to determine where the Hoovers stood on the act. Its objects were ones the Hoovers favored, but some conservative critics at the time opposed the act because they thought it gave too much power to the federal government; Herbert Hoover allowed the act to expire in 1929 when he was President. Hoover's 1922 presidential address to the ACHA stressed the im-

portance of "voluntary" actions and deplored "over-centralization." See Robert Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1970-1974), 2: Pts. 7 & 8: 1064-1065.

54. Clipping, "Mrs. [Florence] Harding to Enter Politics in a Quiet, Unobtrusive

Way," Pittsburgh Post, Jan. 12, 1924, folder "Clippings, 1924, Harding, Mrs.," box 33, Sub-

ject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to Thomas T. Gregory, Feb. 23, 1921, folder "Gregory, Thomas T. and Gertrude, 1921-28," box 14, Personal Correspondence, 1921-28, ibid.; Allen, An Independent Woman, 105, 116 (the quotation about cost, from a letter to Allan Hoover, is found on p. 116). Although Jo Freeman notes, in A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Politics (Lanham, Md., 2000), 188, that Herbert Hoover had be-

gun organizing women's committees in California to promote his presidential bid as early as 1924, and nationally in 1927, limited evidence suggests that Herbert Hoover deliber-

ately kept his wife in the dark about his plans. For example, in August 1927, just after

Lou Henry Hoover 447

women in the 1920s, she faced a dilemma. Political power was con- centrated in the parties, but women who gave up their gender unity tojoin the parties lost their "leverage"; on the other hand, those who avoided the traditional parties and followed the separatist route of the National Women's Party could exercise no influence over male

policymakers.55 Lou Hoover chose to avoid this dilemma by taking a third course-gender-unified, non-partisan activism through the

League of Women Voters. Beginning in 1921 and for many years thereafter, she made an annual $1000 contribution to the organiza- tion and participated in its programs. It was essential, she told its members, that they educate women about "the meaning of govern- ment and its machinations," and that the organization remain non-

partisan so that it could speak to the voters "in either party."56 There could sometimes be advantages to at least the appear-

ance of non-partisanship. In December 1923 Lou Henry supported a League of Women Voters resolution calling for the United States to join the Permanent Court of International Justice, an issue that her husband supported but upon which the Republican Party was

bitterly divided. Early the next year she chaired a 1,000-member, non-partisan Women's National Committee for Law Enforcement that called on the administration to enforce Prohibition and clean

Calvin Coolidge announced that he did not "choose" to be a candidate in 1928, the Hoovers stayed with their friends Edgar and Abbie Rickard in New York. After dinner, the two men discussed the political prospects, but when Lou Henry Hoover entered the room, they quickly stopped, resuming their discussion only after she left. See Edgar Rickard Diaries, box 1, 1925 through 1930, at Hoover Library. For evidence of her reluc- tance to take a public role in the 1928 campaign, see L. H. Hoover to Caroline Slade, Aug. 27, 1928, folder "Campaign of 1928, Women's National Committee for Hoover," box 25, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. Although it is hard to imagine that the wife of a prominent Republican official had no opinion about some of the political issues that were so important to many women in the 1920s, the Lou Henry Hoover Papers provide no clues about what she thought of Alice Paul and the National Women's Party, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or other controversial people and issues.

55. For analyses of this dilemma, see Harvey, Votes Without Leverage and the essays by Anna L. Harvey, Elisabeth Israels Perry, and Kathryn Anderson in Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth I. Perry, eds., We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Polit- ical Parties, 1880-1960 (Albuquerque, 1999).

56. Quoted in Helen B. Pryor, Lou Henry Hoover: GallantFirst Lady (New York, 1969), 130; Carolina Slade Clary Morrison to L. H. Hoover, April 13, 1921, and L. H. Hoover to Morrison, April 13, 1921, both in folder "League of Women Voters, Correspondence, 1920-22," box 31, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to Frances Louis Slade, March 23, 1923, folder "League of Women Voters, Cor-

respondence, 1923-28," ibid.

448 Pacific Historical Review

up the Teapot Dome oil scandals that were just coming to light.57 As a member of these supposedly non-partisan organizations, Lou Hoover was able to take positions that would have been much more

problematical if she had sought to speak from within the Republi- can Party as the wife of a cabinet member.

The most important work Lou Hoover did for women during the 1920s, however, was not in any of the charitable organizations in which she was active but in the Girl Scouts and the Women's Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation (NAAF). In both of these organizations, her principal goal was to help young women

adjust to urban, industrial America by demonstrating that non- commercial values could still be relevant to modern life. Through the Scouts and the NAAF, she argued, young women could acquire the independence of mind, leadership experience, and physical health to be able to claim full equality with men in public life and at the same time sustain homes and families.

Lou Hoover began work with the Girl Scouts in 1917 at the in- vitation of founderJuliette Low. In 1921 she began leading her own "Pine Cone" Girl Scout troop, which met on Tuesdays at 2300 S

Street, and she took an increasing role in the national organization, serving as acting commissioner for District of Columbia Scouts in

1917-1918, as a council member in Palo Alto from 1923 to 1927, as national vice president in 1921, as president for two terms between 1922 and 1925, and again as vice president and chairman of the na- tional board of directors from 1925 to 1928.58

57. Resolution on American membership in the Permanent Court of International Justice, signed by Lou Henry Hoover and forty-nine other prominent women, Dec. 1923, folder "League of Women Voters, 1923-28," box 31, Girl Scouts and Other Organiza- tions, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; clipping, "Women Start Movement to Enforce Law," Washington Herald, March 9, 1924, folder "Clippings, 1924, Women's National Committee for Law Enforcement," box 33, Subject File, ibid. Chairing the committee landed her on the cover of Time magazine, but President Coolidge gently dismissed the committee's res- olutions with the observation that they should recommend law obedience instead of en- forcement. Time, April 21, 1924, pp. 5-6.

58. Juliette Low to L. H. Hoover, Dec. 16, 1917, folder "Girl Scouts, Administrative

Correspondence, Low, Juliette, 1917-26," box 3, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; "Lou Henry Hoover: A Tribute from the Girl Scouts" [1944], folder "Girl Scouts, Lou Henry Hoover: A Tribute from the Girl Scouts, 1944," box 12, ibid.; Rebecca Christian, "'Don't ForgetJoy!': Lou Henry Hoover and the Girl Scouts," in

Mayer, Lou Henry Hoover, 38. A good overview of Lou Henry Hoover's Scout work is Su- san Estabrook Kennedy, "Pioneer Girl: Lou Henry Hoover and the Girl Scouts," in Walch, ed., Uncommon Americans, 79-89. The Pine Cone Troop met at the White House from 1929 to 1933. Lou Henry Hoover served as honorary vice president of the Scouts and as council member in Palo Alto from 1933 to her death in 1944.

Lou Henry Hoover 449

"To me," she told a national conference of Scout leaders in Sa- vannah when she was elected president in 1922, "the Outing part of

Scouting has always been the most important." Camping and hiking were "the 'fun' part of scouting," she said, but these activities also had a serious side, providing "wholesome, instructive" recreation that built character and self-reliance. Remembering her own happy days hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting with her father in the mountains of California, and with Bert and their sons across the

world, she believed strongly that Scouts ought to spend as much time as possible under the stars. City girls ought not only to experi- ence "Nature's country," as opposed to the commercialized "amuse- ments" of the town, but should be able to "'do things"' when they got into the wild; farm girls ought to understand that the country was not "a place only for gardens and chickens and housework," but a world of "positive pleasures."59 The models for the Girl Scouts of the present, she told an audience in Tacoma, were the scouts of the Old West, whose wilderness skills enabled them to lead the way for the pioneers, just as their experiences would train present-day Scouts "to lead our future citizens in the best way, to protect the

safety of our national well-being in the years to come."60 It was cer-

tainly no accident that in her analogy she ignored the fact that vir-

tually all of the scouts of the Old West had been male. A secondary purpose of the Scouts, in Lou Hoover's view, was

"domestic training" that would educate girls in "how their homes

are, or should be, run." She emphasized, however, that in urging girls to develop domestic skills, she did not intend to confine them to their homes. "The modern young woman," she said, "whose household burdens have been lightened by the ingenious devices which have practically industrialized the home," was a manager whose experience made her "an ideal companion in marriage with a greater understanding of the problems confronting her husband in the work-a-day world." By gaining practical experience in domes- tic skills and citizenship and practicing what they learned "in solving the problems of the troop," the Scouts were preparing to deal with

59. Remarks to a meeting of Scout leaders in Savannah, Georgia, ca. Jan. 24, 1922, folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, 1922January, Comments on fun of scout camp- ing, Savannah, Georgia," box 3, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; emphasis in original.

60. Clipping, "Mrs. Hoover Greets Tacoma Girl Scouts," Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 6, 1923, folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, 1923July 5-8, Girl Scout Leaders Talk, Tacoma, Washington," box 4, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers.

450 Pacific Historical Review

"the problems of the big outside world." Scouting, she emphasized, taught girls to "direct their own affairs, to teach themselves, and to round out their lives and characters."61 The boundary between the domestic and public spheres had become so permeable, in her

opinion, that if Scouts could be taught the obligations of "personal responsibility" at home, that understanding would inevitably ex-

pand to "neighborhood and civic activities" and then broaden fur- ther "into national and world activities."62

It was not, Lou Hoover declared disingenuously, that Ameri- cans objected to girls having these skills. Modern American families were simply too busy to provide their daughters opportunities to ex-

perience outdoor recreation, to train them in the domestic arts, or to educate them about their civic responsibilities. Whether they came from farms, country villages, "well-to-do" suburbs, or "the small apartments" and "highly congested districts of the city," mod- ern girls did not, in her opinion, receive adequate training in either the "serious and practical side" of life or in recreation.63

Lou Hoover ran the Girl Scouts rather like a substantial na- tional corporation, with branches scattered across the country, a

publishing division (the American Girl magazine, whose circulation increased during her tenure from 6,000 to 50,000), a major per- sonnel recruitment and training operation (in January 1922 she announced a campaign to recruit and train 10,000 new Scout lead-

ers), and other significant operations. As president of the organiza- tion and later as chair of its executive committee, she initiated a

campaign that raised nearly $500,000 to acquire a new national

headquarters building at 670 Lexington Avenue in New York City, secured an additional $500,000 grant from the American Relief

61. Clipping, "Mrs. Hoover New Head of Girl Scouts," Rochester [N.Y.] Post Express, Jan. 27, 1922, folder "Clippings, 1922, January-April," box 8, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; clipping, "Girl Scouts Will Hear Mrs. Hoover Talk to Council," Racine [Wisc.] Times Call, May 19, 1927, folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, 1927 May 18, Opening Meeting Address, Milwaukee, Wisconsin," box 5, ibid. The order of phrases has been changed. Ruth Schwartz Cowan has argued that the increasing number of house- hold appliances in homes of the 1920s, rather than liberating middle-class women, "pro- letarianized" them by forcing them to do the cleaning, cooking, and other tasks previ- ously entrusted to servants. One may wonder, therefore, whether Lou Henry Hoover's

argument that technology had freed women was really true for middle- and working-class women. See Cowan, 'The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home," 23.

62. Remarks in Savannah, Jan. 24, 1922. 63. Clipping, "Mrs. Hoover New Head of Girl Scouts." The order of phrases has

been changed.

Lou Henry Hoover 451

Administration for leader training programs, and persuaded 155

colleges and universities in forty-two states to offer leadership courses.64

Traveling incessantly to visit Scout organizations, she also re- vealed a flair for drawing favorable publicity to the Scouts. A partic- ularly notable example was the "Little House" project. In 1923 the national General Federation of Women's Clubs had built a house in

Washington, D.C., on federal land near the Treasury building to serve as a model of a home for an average family. At the end of the demonstration period, the group offered to give the house to the Girl Scouts. Lou Hoover accepted the offer, secured a new lot for the house, and arranged the financing and logistics of moving it. In

subsequent years the "Little House" became a site for Scout dem- onstrations and a focus of national publicity. The project was so suc- cessful that more than 250 local Scout organizations across the

country acquired their own "Little Houses."65 Lou Hoover's work with the Little House and other Scout ac-

tivities brought the organization a bonanza of publicity during the 1920s that contributed to rapid growth in its membership.66 Equally important but less well known was her success in instituting busi- nesslike practices in the organization's handling of dues, publica-

64. Clipping, "Rockefeller Gives Another $25,000 to Girl Scout Fund," New Bruns- wick [N.J] Home News, Nov. 29, 1924, folder "Clippings, 1924 November-December," box 9, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; Christian, "'Don't

ForgetJoy!'" 44, 46. 65. Typed histories of the Little House are found in folder "Little House, History,

1942," box 12, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; Frank Hall to Philippi Harding,Jan. 3, 1924, folder "Little House, Correspondence, 1924Janu- ary-March," box 11, ibid.; L. H. Hoover to Herbert Hoover, Oct. 15, 1923, folder "Little House, Correspondence, 1923," ibid. Hoover's Girl Scout "Little Houses" preceded by a decade the publication of the first Laura Ingalls Wilder "little house" book, Little House in the Big Woods (1932).

66. Membership figures for this period are elusive. Figures in the press in 1922-1923 range from 110,000 to 350,000; Lou Hoover herself estimated membership in 1927 at 155,000. An official Girl Scout tribute to her after her death in 1944 says that

membership grew from 13,000 in 1917 to 840,000 in 1944. The national Girl Scout Ar- chives in 1990 estimated the growth as from about 10,000 in 1917 to over a million by 1944. A biography of scouting founderJuliette Low gives membership in 1927 as exactly 167,925 but unfortunately does not provide the source of the figure. See clippings in fold- ers "Clippings, 1922January-April," "Clippings, 1923 April," and "Clippings, 1923 Octo- ber-December," box 9, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; "Lou Henry Hoover: A Tribute from the Girl Scouts" [1944]; letter to the author from Dale Mayer,June 21, 2000 (in author's possession); Gladys Denny Shultz and Daisy Gor- don Lawrence, Lady from Savannah: The Life ofJuliette Low (Philadelphia, 1958), 381.

452 Pacific Historical Review

tions, and fund-raising activities. The result was an efficient admin- istrative process that maximized the benefits from every dollar of revenue.67

Impressive as this business success was, however, it was really the message of scouting that mattered most to Lou Hoover and that reveals her role in expanding women's sphere in the 1920s. Essen-

tially, she delivered three intertwined messages: that girls needed to learn domestic skills (an affirmation of women's traditional role); that girls needed to prepare for careers and roles as citizens (an af- firmation of their new, public role); and that, through scouting, girls could learn to prefer non-commercial recreations that would free them (and presumably their families) from servitude to consumer culture. Lou Hoover's scouting message, in short, affirmed the con-

tinuing validity and satisfaction of traditional, pre-industrial, non- commercial activities, but also emphasized that such values could be combined with a fulfilling career in the modern world.

The success of the Girl Scouts under Lou Hoover's leadership during the 1920s produced surprising insecurity among leaders of the Boy Scouts. Some Boy Scout leaders clearly saw the camping and career orientation of the Girl Scouts as a threat to their sense of the

proper hierarchy of the sexes. The "word 'Scout' is, and always has been, associated with men and with things and efforts intensely mas- culine and virile," declared a 1924 Boy Scout memorandum. Others

apparently believed that women had already escaped the gender hi-

erarchy and were on their way to dominating society's values. A Boy Scout leader from Elmira, New York, declared indignantly that the use of the term "Scout" by the girls had "a tendency to cheapen the

organization of the Boy Scouts of America in the eyes of the average boy." Another, from Cincinnati, had no doubt that the situation re- sulted in "thousands of scouts and prospective scouts" being "turned

away disgusted." The Girl Scouts, declared a Hartford leader, were

"feminizing the whole Scout movement."68 Leaders of the Girl

67. Lou Henry Hoover statement to the Girl Scout national meeting, April 22, 1922, folder "Articles, Addresses, & Statements, 1922 April 22, Discussion of G.S. Policies, Wash-

ington, DC," box 3, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to Abbie Rickard, March 28, 1928, folder "Rickard, Abbie, 1927-28," Personal, 1921-28, ibid.

68. All quotations come from a document prepared by Boy Scout executive

James E. West and submitted to the Girl Scouts in May 1924. See Jane Deeter Rippin to L. H. Hoover, with enclosure, May 9, 1924, folder "Controversy with Boy Scouts over Use of Name, 1917-26," box 10, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover

Papers.

Lou Henry Hoover 453

Scouts generally ignored the attacks, and founder Juliette Low at- tributed the whole fuss to a few people in the Boy Scout leadership, but the truth was that the alarmists had perceived a real threat.69 Girl Scout leaders, including Lou Hoover, were in fact encouraging their members to challenge traditional distinctions between mascu- line and feminine activities. In the eyes of Boy Scout leaders "and

many other men observing the new assertiveness of women in the

1920s," programs like Lou Hoover's for the Girl Scouts threatened "the fixed and known hierarchy" of the "protean masculine and feminine" and did nothing less than loose the "baneful influence" of the feminine to dominate society.70

A comparable, although perhaps narrower, message was pro- claimed by Lou Hoover through her work with the Women's Divi- sion of the National Amateur Athletic Federation. The NAAF grew out of the military's concern about the large number of young men who had been found physically unfit for the draft during World War I. In 1922 Secretary of WarJohn W. Weeks and Secretary of the

Navy Edwin Denby discussed with a group of civilians the possibility of creating an organization to promote physical fitness among young people, both boys and girls. Because of her role in the Girl Scouts and her well-known enthusiasm for outdoor activities, Lou Hoover was the only woman included in the planning for the new

organization.71

69. Low to L. H. Hoover, Sept. 1, 1926, ibid. See also Mary A. Rothschild, 'To Scout or To Guide? The Girl Scout-Boy Scout Controversy, 1912-1941," Frontiers, 6 (1981), 115-121.

70. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 272. 71. Lou Henry Hoover, "A Confidential Reminiscence for Miss Hodgkins," en-

closed in Edith Harcourt to Miss [?] Hodgkins, May 29, 1939, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Div., History of NAAF Women's Div., Correspondence, 1939-41," box 39, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers. It is not clear why women were included in the NAAF, given lingering Victorian preferences for women's activities "which could be performed without acquiring an indelicate sweat." Ellen W. Gerber, The American Woman in Sport (Reading, Mass., 1974), 4. The official his-

tory of the Women's Division says only that "very early it was taken for granted that the sit- uation was just as important with respect to women as with respect to men." Alice Allene Sefton, The Womens Division, National Amateur Athletic Federation: Sixteen Years of Progress in

Athleticsfor Girls and Women, 1923-1939 (Stanford, Calif., 1941), 1. A recent study adds to the mystery, suggesting that, as women became more involved in athletics during the 1920s, there was a growing opinion among medical experts that too much exercise was

actually bad for women's health and femininity. George Kent Stanley, The Rise and Fall of the Sportswoman: Women's Health, Fitness, and Athletics, 1860-1940 (New York, 1996), 103-126.

454 Pacific Historical Review

Hoover saw these discussions as a way to open new opportuni- ties for women. Although she believed "in men and women having the same membership and activities in nearly all organizations," in this instance she argued that there were "such fundamentally differ-

ing factors in their athletics that it would be advisable to have them

grouped under separate sub-divisions."72 She did not say why she

thought this, but an explanation may be deduced from the results of a national conference of women's physicians and physical education instructors that she convened, and for which she drafted the agenda, in Washington, D.C., in April 1923. During two days of intensive dis- cussions among the 300 experts, it became obvious that there was

very little reliable information available about the physical effects of athletics on pre-adolescent and adolescent girls, about appropriate standards for women's activities, and about women in competitive athletics. In the end, the group agreed to appoint a number of com- mittees to study these and related questions and adopted resolutions

opposing competitive or commercial sports for women.73 The argument that Lou Hoover made for separate organiza-

tions for men's and women's sports within the NAAF reflected a du-

ality that had permeated women's demands ever since the nine- teenth century. On the one hand, women had sought to be accepted as equals to men because both were human beings, while on the

other, women had been equally insistent that the normal should not be defined by a single, masculine standard. While women wanted "to eliminate sex-specific limitations," they also wished "to protect the interests women had already defined as theirs and give those much greater public scope."74 With Lou Hoover as chair of the ex- ecutive committee from 1923 to 1927 and vice chair thereafter, the

72. Lou Henry Hoover, "A Confidential Reminiscence for Miss Hodgkins." 73. Ibid.; "Minutes of the First Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Na-

tional Amateur Athletic Federation of America," Dec. 29, 1922, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation, Men's Division, Annual Meeting, 1922," folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Annual Meetings, 1923 Wash., DC, Abb-Ath," box 32, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers; L. H. Hoover to Grace Abbott [and others], March 2, 1923, box 33, ibid.; "Resolutions Adopted by the Conference on Athletics and Physical Recreation for Women and Girls," April 6, 7, 1923, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Annual Meetings, 1923 Wash., DC," box 34, ibid.; press release, "Women and Girls' Athletics and Physical Recre- ational Conference Called in Washington by Mrs. Hoover," enclosed in [Susan Bristol] to N[orman?] W[ashington?] Baxter, March 31, 1923, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division Annual Meetings, Wash., DC, Bad-Boy," box 33, ibid.

74. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 19-20.

Lou Henry Hoover 455

Women's Division of the NAAF worked to "build up a sane, con- structive program of athletics for women and girls" that would be "planned with their special needs and conditions as women and girls always in mind, not making girls' athletics merely a copy of what had been developed for boys and men." In particular, the organization stressed "a democracy in athletics in which there would be an op- portunity for athletic recreation in an interesting form for every girl and woman in the country, not only for a privileged or skilled few."75 To implement that idea, Lou Hoover strongly supported the in- troduction of "Play Days" in schools and universities that would pro- vide "relaxation and fun for all, instead of overexertion for a few, bleacher seats for the many, and too strained intentness for all."76 Her goal was to strengthen women through athletics and physical ac-

tivity, not to create or encourage women athletes as such. Given the degree to which commercialism and competition al-

ready dominated men's athletics by the 1920s, Lou Hoover's hope of

establishing a different model for women was not very realistic. But the fact that she made such a major effort in that direction demon- strates that she aimed at a bigger target than just the establishment of recreational programs for women. The ideal of providing "ath- letic recreation in an interesting form for every girl and woman in the country" was part of her overall objective of securing an equal but special place for women in every aspect of American life. Whether or not she deliberately set out to shape the programs of the

75. Pamphlet, "Women's Division, National Amateur Athletic Federation of Amer- ica" [1924], folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Annual

Meetings, 1924 Chicago," box 36, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers (emphasis in original).

76. Lou Henry Hoover, "Foreword to 'Play Day-The Spirit of Sport,'" in Women's Division, National Amateur Athletic Federation, comp. and ed., Women and Athletics (New York, 1930), 67. Advocates of Play Days emphasized that their program offered "a method of giving every girl an opportunity to play with girls from other schools without unneces-

sary strain or the intensive training of a selected group." Margaret M. Duncan, Play Days for Girls and Women (New York, 1929), 1. A competitive athletic program, on the other hand, was alleged to exclude most girls and to encourage competitors to exercise exces-

sively to the detriment of their intellectual ability and femininity. Stanley, The Rise and Fall

of the Sportswoman, 111-112; Ellen W. Gerber, 'The Controlled Development of Collegiate Sport for Women, 1923-1936," in Reet Howell, ed., Her Story in Sport: A Historical Anthol-

ogy of Women in Sports (West Point, N.Y, 1982), 444-454. The argument for the democ-

racy of Play Days certainly appealed to Lou Henry Hoover; she had only scorn for theo- ries that too much exercise was somehow bad for women. Her embrace of the Play Days program, however, may well have had the effect of disarming potential conservative crit- ics of her proposals for universal physical activities for women.

456 Pacific Historical Review

Girl Scouts or the Women's Division of the NAAF to further the goal of equality for women, both programs were based upon her funda- mental assumption that "of course" women should have access to

every opportunity open to men while retaining the moral and nur-

turing characteristics traditionally associated with women. Con-

sciously or unconsciously, she shaped the programs of those orga- nizations with which she was most closely associated to spread that

assumption among other girls and women. Yet, despite Lou Hoover's best efforts, neither the NAAF nor its

Women's Division prospered. The parent organization lacked effec- tive leadership, and a significant number of women athletes dis-

agreed with the Women's Division's opposition to competitive sports. Efforts to find a way of merging with the rival Amateur Athletic Union foundered on this issue, and, in the end, influential female athletes, like their male counterparts, preferred the competitive to the non-competitive model.77 The ideal of sport advanced by Lou

Hoover, which stressed universal fitness rather than competition, participation rather than professionalism, attracted only limited

support in a consumer culture that increasingly favored spectator sports. What was more, the ideal of empowering women through universal participation was in conflict with a more aggressive femi- nist ideal of admission to competition at every level. Lou Hoover

personally contributed $500 to $1,000 a year to keep the organiza- tion going and secured contributions from foundations, including a substantial one from the American Relief Administration, but the Women's Division weakened despite her best efforts. It limped through the 1930s and in 1940 merged with the American Associa- tion for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation to become a di- vision of that organization, rechristened the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport.78

77. Although American women athletes seldom turned professional before the 1930s, they increasingly entered national and international competition during the 1920s. The United States sent a women's team to the Olympics when women's sports were added in 1924, and American swimmer Gertrude Ederle won three gold medals in the

competition. Other notable American women athletes of the decade included Helen Wills, who won seven U.S. and eight Wimbledon singles tennis titles, and Glenna Collett Vare, who won six U.S. amateur golf titles between 1922 and 1935.

78. "Memorandum on Conference between Committees Representing the National Amateur Athletic Federation of America and the Amateur Athletic Union," Sept. 8, 1923, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Amateur Athletic Union, 1923," box 33, Girl Scouts and Other Organizations, Lou Henry Hoover Papers;

Lou Henry Hoover 457

Even making allowances for the special advantages accruing from her privileged position, Lou Henry Hoover was a "new

woman"-not, to be sure, the new woman embodied by either Clara Bow in the movies or Alice Paul in politics, but a woman who, while

affirming her commitment to traditional domestic values, also in- sisted on her right to take advantage of new opportunities created

by an increasingly technological, urbanized culture. Like other middle-class American women of her generation, she enjoyed a

power to shape her environment previously reserved to the chate- laines of great estates or plantations, and far more chances to play a

public role than they had usually had. Increasing access to educa- tion opened new opportunities to her and other educated women; she shared the power to consume or to withhold her consumption to influence producers; she found in growing cities new public spaces that increased her freedom to participate in political and cul- tural affairs; she enjoyed, as a result of technological change, some relief from household drudgery and much greater freedom to travel when and where she wanted, without dependence on male com-

panions. In short, the changes that had swept American society had, as she noted, reduced women's importance in the family but, through the reduction of traditional household burdens, offered them a new opportunity to claim equality with men in the public sphere. "It is an exciting century, this women's century," wrote Sylvia Kopald, "and even though prejudices crumble slowly, they crum- ble."79 Lou Hoover benefited from this new opportunity herself and

application to the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial for a grant to support the Women's Division,June 17,1924, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Rockefeller (Laura Spelman) Foundation, 1924-28," box 41, ibid.; various fi- nancial documents in folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Breckinridge, Aida De Acosta, 1924-29," box 37, ibid., and folder "National Amateur Ath- letic Federation: Women's Division, Membership of Lou Henry Hoover," box 40, ibid.; Ethel Perrin to L. H. Hoover, May 11, 1928, folder "National Amateur Athletic Federa- tion: Women's Division, Olympic Participation, 1922-38," ibid.; "Report of the Fifth An- nual Meeting, Women's Division, NAAF, New York City, January 3-5, 1929" (note es-

pecially the financial report on p. 10), folder "National Amateur Athletic Federation: Women's Division, Annual Meetings, 1929 New York," box 36, ibid.; Dale C. Mayer, "An Uncommon Woman: The Quiet Leadership Style of Lou Henry Hoover," Presidential Stud- ies Quarterly, 20 (1990), 690.

79. Sylvia Kopald, "Where Are the Female Geniuses?" in Freda Kirchwey, ed., Our

Changing Morality: A Symposium (New York, 1924), 108. For a contemporary assessment of these new roles for women, see S[ophonisba] P[reston] Breckinridge, 'The Activities of Women Outside the Home," in Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York, 1933), 709.

458 Pacific Historical Review

sought, particularly through the Girl Scouts and the Women's Divi- sion of the NAAF, to teach girls and young women how to follow in her footsteps.

Of course, there were powerful counterforces working against Hoover's doctrine of just asserting equality. Her insistence on ex-

tending scouting to every class and region of the country suggests that she may have had some inkling of the degree to which her own

experience was the result of special privileges. As Helen and Robert

Lynd showed in their famous study of Muncie, Indiana, the tradi- tional belief that women should devote themselves to being wives and mothers remained strong throughout the 1920s. Even Char- lotte Perkins Gilman, who had scandalized some people by allowing her ex-husband to raise their daughter so she could continue her

career, declared in 1923 that "wifehood and motherhood are the normal status of women, and whatever is right in woman's new posi- tion must not militate against these essentials."80 Lou Hoover's per- sonal secretaries, a series of young women she recruited from

among recent college graduates, stayed with her for only a few years each before resigning to marry and become full-time wives. The same pattern of a few years' work, followed by marriage and full- time homemaking, was evident among American women in general during the decade.81 Feminists might proclaim that the "disheart-

ening and disillusioning" effects of homemaking on middle-class women were turning them into "flabby, soft creature[s] of middle-

age, with no sustained habits of labor and a triumphant incapacity to think straight about any subject," but few men or women believed the message.82

Lou Hoover's answer to women's claim that they needed to stay at home after marriage was that modern appliances had so reduced housework that it was easy to keep a house and sustain a career. Easy for her, perhaps, since she had both appliances and servants to use

them, but not so easy for the majority of women. Bombarded by

80. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York, 1929), 117-118; Charlotte Perkins Gilman is quoted in Sochen, Movers and Shakers, 100. In an extensive review of the article "Woman's Achievements Since the Franchise" published four years later, Gilman included no such argument.

81. Cowan, 'The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home," 19; S.J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1999), 207-209.

82. Lorine Pruette, 'The Married Woman and the Part-Time Job," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 143 (1929), 302-303.

Lou Henry Hoover 459

messages from popular culture that "a woman could achieve a 'real' career only by renouncing an outside job and devoting herself to full-time service in the home," many women simply used their new

appliances not to free themselves for outside work but to seek "a

heightened standard of the quality of housework."83 Lou Hoover's

argument to women-that they could both uphold traditional do- mestic obligations and take on a new public role-worked for her, but not for all American women, for many of whom it simply exac- erbated tension between duty and opportunity. In the ambiguous atmosphere of the 1920s, the future beckoned women even as tra- dition bound them.

Although neither the Girl Scouts nor the Women's Division of the NAAF revolutionized American values or altered the expecta- tions of most women, both were part of an incremental change in the status of women in American society. In popular magazines and movies, the "flapper" embodied "a new sexual freedom; a relaxed dress code; and opportunities to drink, smoke, and dance in pub- lic."84 Lou Hoover would have been horrified if anyone suggested she should become a flapper, but her skirts became shorter, and she wore fewer layers under them than her mother had. She thought nothing of driving her car across the country, going hunting with men, and starting businesses of her own, nor did most Americans find such activities shocking.85 She generally avoided partisan polit- ical activities, but she voted, expressed political opinions, and or-

ganized at least one political pressure group while taking a leading role in the League of Women Voters. Above all, she consistently and

83. John T. Greenan, American Civilization Today: A Summary of Recent Social Trends (New York, 1934), 79; Chafe, The Paradox of Change, 114; Cowan, 'The 'Industrial Pevolu- tion' in the Home," 9-10.

84. Gordon, After Winning, 2. 85. Typescript, "Automobile Trip across Continent, September-October 1921,"

folder 'Trips, Cross Country Drive, 1921," box 112, Subject File, Lou Henry Hoover Pa-

pers; clipping, "Mrs. Herbert Hoover Drove Her Automobile across the Continent," Wash-

ington Times, March 5, 1922, folder "Clippings, 1922, General, March," box 31, ibid.; clip- pings, "Hoover's Wife, Sons and Father-in-Law in Siskiyou after Deer," Yreka [Calif] News, Sept. 13, 1923, and "Siskiyou Reports Many Deer Killed; Mrs. Herbert Hoover Among Those Hunting in Northern County," Sacramento Bee, Sept. 13, 1923, folder "Clippings 1923, LHH and Family," box 32, ibid. During Lou Henry Hoover's drive across country, she was accompanied by her elderly father and a Filipino servant, but she did all the driv-

ing and cooking, as the group camped out most nights. In a period before an extensive

paved, marked, and mapped highway system, the achievement was sufficiently unusual to merit comment in the press.

460 Pacific Historical Review

publicly acted on her assumption that "of course" women could do

anything that men could, and, through the Girl Scouts and the Women's Division of the NAAF, she preached that same argument to thousands of other women-quietly, non-confrontationally, but

insistently. Elaine Showalter has pointed out that "feminists in the 1920s

often saw their problems as the inevitable turmoil of transition."

Facing "discrimination in the job market and continuing responsi- bility for the quality of domestic life," they could see where they wanted to go, but the path was obscured and the obstacles enor- mous.86 Lou Henry Hoover, like Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, Elizabeth Breuer, Dorothy Bromley, and other activists, proposed to ignore the difficulties and simply go directly to the goal. It was a solution that obviously worked for some energetic women, particularly if

they could draw upon wealth and family support, and it enabled them to preach the gospel of independence and even to create or-

ganizations that offered opportunities to other women. Neverthe- less, it was not yet practical for Lou Hoover's own secretaries or for most other American women. Unless the communal living schemes that were invented from time to time became common, most women would not really be free to pursue careers until fundamen- tal changes took place in social attitudes that would permit men and women to share domestic duties.87 As would be evident to future

generations of women who struggled with the same problems, the women's movement had awakened new aspirations without provid- ing an obvious formula for satisfying them. "Now we can begin," Crystal Eastman had declared in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amend- ment was ratified, and the next decade showed both how much re- mained to be done and how little agreement there was among women about how to proceed.88

Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment did indeed disrupt the unity of the women's movement, but it also challenged an old

86. Showalter, "Introduction," in These Modern Women, 14. 87. Ibid., 18-21. Ruefully, Ruth Pickering wrote, in "A Deflated Rebel," that she had

"grown up" by trading "exhilarating defiance" for "an assurance of free and unimpeded self-expression" provided by the support of a sympathetic husband. Ibid., 62. For further discussion of the difficulty women felt in balancing family and career in subsequent de- cades, see Stricker, "Cookbooks and Law Books," 3-13.

88. Crystal Eastman, "Now We Can Begin," inJune Sochen, ed., The NewFeminism in Twentieth-Century America (Lexington, Mass., 1971), 64-69.

Lou Henry Hoover 461

stereotype. Through its affirmation of the fundamental equality be- tween the sexes it opened nearly all women's minds to new possibil- ities. Some were eager to seize them at once; others were not. But on

every side the first melting of the glaciers of conventional expecta- tions was evident. Lou Henry Hoover's mother never imagined her- self having a profession or a public role. Lou Hoover herself could have lived comfortably out of the public eye, as did the wives of most

political leaders in her day, but she embraced the new opportunities that opened to her. From the outset, she assumed her ability and

right to be and do anything of which she was capable. Her circum- stances did not make her typical of American women in the 1920s,

except that she shared a widespread feeling that greater opportunity could and should come to all women and set out to do what she could to bring that about. Whether women voted or not, whether

they joined political parties, ran for office, or successfully lobbied for the passage of new laws, the Nineteenth Amendment's removal of their most evident badge of inferiority began to free them. As

they explored that freedom in a variety of ways, it was inevitable that

they disagreed with each other and with men. In that sense, Eliza- beth Breuer had been exactly correct. Feminism had entered its "awkward age." It was gawky, clumsy, and rebellious-all the things we usually associate with teen-agers-but it also revealed hints of fu- ture beauty, dignity, and achievement. Lou Hoover, older and more mature than the flappers, showed the promise more clearly than

they did, but they were two aspects of the same aspiration among American women in the 1920s. In the next decade economic col-

lapse would shatter the vague and often unexamined sense of opti- mism that buoyed up women in the 1920s, just as it blighted the Hoovers' years in the White House. Second-wave feminism would have to begin again, with different and less optimistic assumptions.