History of Women in the United States: Volume 17/2 Social and Moral Reform [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110971095, 9783598416958

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Edited by Nancy F. Cott Series ISBN 3-598-41454-4

1.

Theory and Method in W o m e n ' s History ISBN 3-598-41455-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41477-3 Part 2

2.

Household Constitution and Family Relationships ISBN 3-598-41456-0 Domestic Relations and Law ISBN 3-598-41457-9

3.

4.

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work ISBN 3-598-41458-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41475-7 Part 2

11.

W o m e n ' s Bodies: Heal th and Childbirth ISBN 3-598-41465-X

12.

Education ISBN 3-598-41466-8

13.

Religion ISBN 3-598-41467-6

14.

Intercultural and Interracial Relations ISBN 3-598-41468-4

15.

W o m e n and War ISBN 3-598-41469-2

16.

W o m e n Together: Organizational Life ISBN 3-598-41470-6

17.

Social and Moral Reform ISBN 3-598-41471-4 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41695-4 Part 2

5.

The Intersection of Work and Family Life ISBN 3-598-41459-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41476-5 Part 2

6.

Working on the Land ISBN 3-598-41460-9

7.

Industrial Wage Work ISBN 3-598-41461-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41693-8 Part 2

18.

W o m e n and Politics ISBN 3-598-41472-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41697-0 Part 2

8.

Professional and White-Collar Employments ISBN 3-598-41462-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41694-6 Part 2

19.

Woman Suffrage ISBN 3-598-41473-0 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41696-2 Part 2

20. 9.

Prostitution ISBN 3-598-41463-3

Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality ISBN 3-598-41474-9

10. Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ISBN 3-598-41464-1

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Π

•

Social and Moral Reform

PART 2

Edited with an Introduction by

Nancy F. Cott Yale University

K G · Saur Munich · New Providence · London · Paris · 1994

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to either correct or minimize this effect. Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of women in the United States : historical articles on women's lives and activities / edited with an introduction by Nancy F. Cott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: 1. Theory and method in women's history — 2. Household constitution and family relationships — 3. Domestic relations and law — 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work — 5. The intersection of work and family life — 6. Working on the land -- 7. Industrial wage work -- 8. Professional and white-collar employments — 9. Prostitution - 10. Sexuality and sexual behavior — 11. Women's bodies — 12. Education — 13. Religion ~ 14. Intercultural and interracial relations — 15. Women and war — 16. Women together - 17. Social and moral reform — 18. Women and politics — 19. Woman suffrage — 20. Feminist struggles for sex equality. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (set) 1. Women-United States-History. 2. Women-United States-Social conditions. I. Cott, Nancy F. HQ1410.H57 1992 305.4Ό973—dc20 92-16765 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP - Einheitsaufnahme History of Women in the United States: historical articles on women's lives and activities / ed. with an introd. by Nancy F. Cott. - Munich ; New Providence ; London ; Paris : Saur. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 NE: Cott, Nancy F. (Hrsg.) Vol. 17. social and moral reform - (1994) Pt. 2. - (1994) ISBN 3-598-41695-4

®

Printed on acid-free paper/Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier All Rights Strictly Reserved/Alle Rechte vorbehalten K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 1994 A Reed Reference Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America Printed/Bound by Edwards Brothers Incorporated, Ann Arbor ISBN 3-598-41695-4 (vol. 17/part 2) ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (series)

Contents Series Preface Introduction

xi xiii

Part 1 Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America CARROLL SMITH ROSENBERG

3

The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America MARY P. RYAN

26

The Forten-Purvis Women of Philadelphia and the American Anti-Slavery Crusade JANICE SUMLER-LEWIS

46

Race, Sex, and the Dimensions of Liberty in Antebellum America JEAN MATTHEWS

54

The Origins of Temperance Activism and Militancy among American Women JED DANNENBAUM

71

Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860 CHRISTINE STANSELL

89

Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860 IAN R . T Y R R E L L

116

The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen's Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes SANDRA E. SMALL

141

ν

CONTENTS

Women Who Were More Than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen's Teaching JACQUELINE JONES

163

Yankee Schoolmarms and the Domestication of the South SYLVIA D. HOFFERT

176

The Charitable and the Poor: The Emergence of Domestic Politics in Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1880 LEEANN WHITES

190

"The Ladies Want to Bring about Reform in the Public Schools": Public Education and Women's Rights in the Post-Civil War South KATHLEEN C. BERKELEY

206

Temperance, Benevolence, and the City: The Cleveland NonPartisan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874-1900 MARIAN J. MORTON

220

Their Sisters' Keepers: An Historical Perspective on Female Correctional Institutions in the United States: 1870-1900 ESTELLE Β. FREEDMAN

236

The "New Woman" in the New South ANNE FIROR SCOTT

255

Feminism and Temperance Reform in the Boulder WCTU KATHERINE HARRIS

266

Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and the Settlement House, 1889-1894 JOHN P. ROUSMANIERE

280

vi

CONTENTS

Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

302

Domesticating the Nineteenth-Century American City MARLENE STEIN WORTMAN

335

Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930 JILL CONWAY

377

Part 2 Hull-House as Women's Space HELEN LEFKOWITZ HOROWITZ

391

Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers KATHRYN KISH S KLAR

426

Poverty, Respectability, and Ability to Work SUSAN ESTABROOK KENNEDY

446

The Bonds of Belonging: Leonora O'Reilly and Social Reform MARY J. BULARZIK

464

Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women's Trade Union League and the Labor Movement NANCY SCHROM DYE

488

Mother's Day: The Creation, Promotion and Meaning of a New Holiday in the Progressive Era KATHLEEN W. JONES

503

Early Community Work of Black Club Women GERDA LERNER

525

vii

CONTENTS

School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919 J A M E S L. LELOUDIS II

535

Organized Women as Lobbyists in the 1920's DOROTHY E. JOHNSON

559

Social Feminism in the 1920s: Progressive Women and Industrial Legislation J. S T A N L E Y LEMONS

577

After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties ANNE FIROR S C O T T

586

The National Women's Relief Society and the U.S. SheppardTowner Act LORETTA L. HEFNER

607

The Southern Summer School for Women Workers M A R Y FREDERICKSON

621

The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942 HENRY E. B A R B E R

635

The Ladies and the Lynchers: A Look at the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching KATHLEEN ATKINSON MILLER

647

Women against Prohibition DAVID E. K Y V I G

667

Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace Versus HUAC AMY SWERDLOW

685

viii

CONTENTS

The Gender Basis of American Social Policy VIRGINIA SAPIRO

713

Copyright Information

731

Index

737

ix

Series Preface In the space of one generation, women's history has become the fastest-growing area of scholarship in U.S. history. Since the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, insistent questions about the historical meanings of "woman's place" have sowed and reaped a garden of scholarship. Where scholarly works used to be bare of mention of women, academic enterprise has now produced a vigorous growth of books and articles, bringing to light diverse women of every region, race, class and age. This research is marked by a renovating intent that refuses to accept as "human" history a history of men. Interest is lively and debate is stimulating and sought after attendance at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women rivals the size of the annual convention of the American Historical Association. While books in women's history are daily increasing in numbers and strength, as in any fast-developing field the scholarly literature in the form of articles is most expansive and up-to-the-minute. All the history journals now publish articles on women's work, domestic settings, family relations, household matters, female politics and organizations and so forth, and new journals have sprung into being to concentrate on such topics. Women's historians publish in numerous regional and thematic history journals as well as in feminist outlets and in journals of other social science disciplines. This series brings together a collection of outstanding articles from the field, almost all written in the past twenty years and more than half published during the 1980s. It brings together, in volumes organized by topic, essays otherwise widely dispersed. These volumes reprint only articles that originally appeared in journals, not chapters of books; review articles are not included. Articles have been chosen for overall quality and for range. Each one was chosen for one or more of the following reasons: because it is the standard authority on its subject matter, represents an important statement on a topic by a recognized scholar; presages an important book to come; provides a first look at new evidence or new methods; or opens an untapped area or new controversy. Older articles have been reprinted if their data or interpretation have not been surpassed or if they marked an important stage in the historiography, even if since superseded. The historical coverage of the series extends from the Revolutionary era to the 1960s. The articles themselves are dated from the 1940s through 1988. Volumes are organized by topic rather than time period. Within each volume, the

xi

xii

SERIES PREFACE

articles are ordered chronologically (with respect to substance), so that the whole can be read as an historical overview. The only exception to this ordering principle is Volume One, on Theory and Method, in which the contents are arranged in order of publication. Within each volume there is an attempt to include articles on as diverse kinds of women as possible. None of the volume topics is regionally or racially defined; rather, all volumes are topically designed so as to afford views of women's work, family lives, and public activities which cut across races and regions. Any volume in the series stands on its own, supplying as full a treatment of a designated subject matter as the scholarly literature will provide. Several groupings of volumes also make sense; that is, volumes two through five all center around domestic and family matters; volumes five through nine consider other varieties of women's work; volumes nine through eleven concern uses and abuses of women's bodies; volumes twelve through fourteen look at major aspects of socialization; and volumes fifteen through twenty include organizational and political efforts of many sorts. As a whole, the series displays in all its range the vitality of the field of women's history. Aside from imbuing U.S. history with new vision, scholarship in this area has informed, and should continue to inform, current public debate on issues from parental leave to the nuclear freeze. By bringing historical articles together under topical headings, these volumes both represent accurately the shape of historical controversy (or consensus) on given issues and make historians' findings most conveniently available for current reference.

Introduction It is no exaggeration to say that women have been the welders and mainstays of community improvement in the U.S., linking their task of family nurturance with the welfare of their local communities. Articles in this volume show the vastrange and number of women's efforts to bring charity to the poor, to oppose prostitution, to end alcoholic excess, to improve public education, to "Americanize" immigrants, to regulate the conditions of women and children in industry, to improve public health and sanitation, to prevent racially-motivated lynching, and much more. Taken together they indicate women's continuing public activity and the central contributions of women's voluntary efforts to the development of modern state-based social policy. As discussed in prior volumes, women's organized benevolence originated in response to both state and church, or to both national andreligious, stimuli: that is, in response to Revolutionary war demands for women's extraordinary services, and to the evangelical impulse of the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Throughout U.S. history, the Protestant women involved in social and moral reform have, interestingly, mixed these national and religious motives, so that explicitly evangelical efforts have been directed to the nation's safety and order, and, on the other hand, advocates of explicitly secular aims have couched them in Biblical language and seen them as infused with God's grace. Therefore, while it has been important for historians to note distinctions between the church-based reform organizations which have numerically dominated U.S. women's history, and the strictly secular ones, the ideological similarities between these two categories of organizations (especially in the nineteenth century) are perhaps as striking as their differences. This seems to be as true of the community activities of black women as of white. The social and moral reforms pursued by women's associations have been seen in several aspects: perhaps foremost, as modes of self-assertive public action and self-realization by women. Often, in looking at women's efforts on behalf of the poor or needy—others than themselves—historians have asked how the female reformers' advancement of their own rights and status has been involved. Nineteenth-century participants put all sorts of women's activities outside the home, from charity and benevolence to directly self-interested pursuit of education or professional advancement, under the one rubric, "the woman movement," and historians have had to consider what kind of relation these activities bear to each other. The question whether the trajectory of religious-based social reform, in particular, led participants toward women's rights activity, or substituted for or led xiii

xiv

INTRODUCTION

away from it, has been of interest. For instance, research has made clear, that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, begun in 1874, bulked larger than any other women's organization for a quarter-century, its members far outnumbering those in woman suffrage associations. Its scores of local chapters pursued welfare and reform efforts ranging much beyond the ending of alcohol consumption. Its bold and charismatic leader Frances Willard made the leap and the link from women's associational activities to national politics. Willard's own aim to increase women's stature and power in the public arena and the home seems indisputable, but historians have been much more divided about whether thousands of women's participation in local WCTU chapters reinforced pre-existing conceptions of the limitation on the female "sphere" or challenged them. Two other aspects of women's work in social and moral reform have drawn historians' attentions and have generated historiographical controversies. These reform efforts have often been a stage for interactions between women of different classes and backgrounds: between the elite and the poor, between middle-class matrons and working-class wage-earners, between Protestant evangelicals and those whom they would convert, between white Northern teachers and freed black slaves, between native-born Americans and immigrants. Historians have probed motives and behavior and results, questioning how radical, or how serious, or how altruistic were women reformers—how far they were able to understand or identify with the situation of the women whom they claimed to benefit, or how far, perhaps, they were protecting their own class position or group self-interest, rationalizing the social order without changing the relative distribution of power. Such questions often come up in connection with the great outburst of ameliorative reform endeavors—sometimes denominated "municipal housekeeping"—conducted by middle-class women's clubs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This era brings to the fore a third important aspect of social and moral reform work of women's groups, as precursors and goads to state welfare policy. During this era women's groups exposed corrupt or inefficient municipal services, founded municipal institutions for the arts and humanities (such as libraries, symphonies, and historical associations), pressed for pure food and drug regulations, established playgrounds and drinking fountains, started kindergartens, investigated and lobbied for reform of working conditions in factories and sweatshops and department stores for women workers, and found a hundred other improvements to be made in ordinary standards of urban living. Most of the issues of health, safety and social welfare about which women formed and forwarded voluntary efforts have since been absorbed by government agencies, as legitimate and necessary affairs of state. Integration of these new findings by women's historians into the standard political history of the United States in the progressive era has yet to take place. It has yet to be fully assessed just how significant women's voluntary activities were, as compared to the political theories of male

INTRODUCTION

XV

academics and intellectuals, and the consolidation of power in economic life, and the model of European social democracies, and the leadership of male politicians and reformers at the municipal, state and national levels, in creating the interventionist state of the twentieth century. It is clear, however, that some women—for instance, settlement house resident, factory inspector, social investigator, social theorist and inveterate reformer Florence Kelley—were leaders in this development, and that the endeavors of masses of women to make basic human welfare a concern of representative government cannot be left out of any accurate picture of the process of state development over the past hundred years. Articles in the present volume illuminate all these aspects of women's social and moral reform efforts. The contents of this volume overlap with many concerns of those in volume XVI and volume XVIII. This one concentrates on the reform aims of allwomen networks and associations, as distinct from internal dynamics of organizations (the focus in XVI, Women Together: Organizational Life), or women's reform efforts pursued in concert with men (the focus in XVIII, Women and Politics).

391

S O C I A L AND M O R A L R E F O R M

Hull-House as Women's Space B y H e l e n Lefkowitz H o r o w i t z Architecture

at its best should

do so, it must, as commonly

help make understood,

turn of the century, Jane Addams's that is reflected

in its exterior

comfortable sensibly

Hull-House

decoration

the people

relate form

served many functions,

and interior

spaces.

H I ' L L - H O U S E BEGAN as an educated woman's struggle to find m e a n i n g by immersing herself in the p r o b l e m s of an i m m i g r a n t n e i g h b o r h o o d . It e m e r g e d as a p i o n e e r settlement house, offering a range of social services to the fragmented industrial city at the turn of thejcentury. As H u l l H o u s e attracted residents, it became an alternative h o m e that enabled educated women to live in the city and to link their work to reform. An exploration of the buildings of Hull-House reveals the settlement's c o m p l e x and evolving purposes. T h e original H u l l mansion offered the appealing vision of a cultured h o m e in the slums. As H u l l - H o u s e grew into a large institution, new buildings spread out from the original dwelling to shelter the d e v e l o p i n g social conscience of the settlement. T h e i r Q u e e n A n n e and P r a i r i e style exteriors suggested the settlement house's link to o t h e r buildings designed for progressive purposes, a n d their aesthetic interiors recalled the reformist hopes of the Arts and Crafts movement. For its college-educated women residents, the settlement r e m a i n e d h o m e as well as workplace. In its plan and scale the e x p a n d e d H u l l mansion evoked the women's college dormitory, set incongruously, albeit appropriately, on the busy street of an immigrant n e i g h b o r h o o d in a great city.

In September 1889, when J a n e Addams moved with Ellen Gates Starr to the second floor of the Helen Lefkowitz HorowiU Scripps College.

who use it To

to function.

is associate professor

of historv at

At the something

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

f o r m e r h o m e of C h a r l e s ]. H u l l on Chicago's West Side, she was s e e k i n g a way out of t h e d e p r e s sion that h a d e n g u l f e d h e r since h e r father's d e a t h . The d a u g h t e r of a p r o m i n e n t miller, leading citizen, a n d state senator from C e d a r v i l l e . Illinois, J a n e A d d a m s h a d h o p e d to b e c o m e a doctor. But h e r father's d e a t h i m m e d i a t e l y following h e r g r a d u a t i o n f r o m R o c k f o r d A c a d e m y in Illinois shattered h e r sense of p u r p o s e . Treatm e n t by rest c u r e advocate S. Weir Mitchell in his hospital a n d at h e r sister's h o u s e , w h e r e she was literally b o u n d to a b e d . . . f o r six m o n t h s , " was followed by seven years of s p i r i t u a l wandering as J a n e A d d a m s a t t e m p t e d to live t h e life of t h e lady. After t h e family m o v e d to B a l t i m o r e . J a n e A d d a m s ' s s t e p m o t h e r e n c o u r a g e d h e r in t h e p r o p e r p u r s u i t s of t h e l e i s u r e d w o m a n — a little charity, a lot of c u l t u r e , a n d travel in Europe. T h e effort c r i p p l e d her. a n d she r e m a i n e d d e e p l y d e p r e s s e d . As she wrote to h e r f r i e n d Hilen Gates Starr in 1886. "I have f o u n d my faculties. m e m o r y [ , ] r e c e p t i v e faculties a n d all. perfectly inaccessible locked u p away f r o m me." At the u r g i n g of h e r s t e p m o t h e r , Jane A d d a m s m a d e a n o t h e r trip to E u r o p e . T h i s time she found a p u r p o s e for h e r life that u l t i m a t e l y c u r e d h e r depression, but it was not the o n e her s t e p m o t h e r e n v i s i o n e d . Jane A d d a m s spent six weeks in Lond o n to observe t h e city's East E n d a n d T o y n b e e H a l l , the o r i g i n a l social s e t t l e m e n t f o u n d e d in 1884 in Whitechapel by Samuel A. Barnett. which located O x f o r d University m e n in the midst of L o n d o n ' s poor. With h e r f o r m e r s c h o o l m a t e a n d traveling c o m p a n i o n Ellen Starr, w h o h a d taught at Chicago's f a s h i o n a b l e K i r k l a n d School, she r e t u r n e d to A m e r i c a c o m m i t t e d to a p l a n : the two would rent a h o u s e in t h e slums of some great citv. T h e v chose Chicago. Like many advent u r o u s M i d w e s t e r n e r s in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h century. t h e two w o m e n were attracted by t h e sheer force a n d p o w e r of the new m e t r o p o l i s . In t h e m o n t h s before c a r r y i n g out this scheme,

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

J a n e A d d a m s visited various districts of Chicago and spoke to potentially interested audiences. At the Armour Mission she got a warm response from Allen Bartlit Pond, a young, socially conscious architect who taught there. T h e son of a Michigan journalist and prison warden, Allen Pond went to the University of Michigan and joined his older brother Irving in the office of S.S. Beman d u r i n g the years of design and construction of the model town of Pullman. In 1886, the two established their own practice and, in the decades that followed, came to specialize in an architecture of social concern, especially settlement houses and student unions. Allen Pond eventually became an active force in many Chicago reform efforts. When he first met J a n e Addams however, this remained far in the future. After her talk, Pond offered to walk with her around the neighborhood and help her find an appropriate place for a beginning. A solid middle-class d w e l l i n g from an earlier Chicago appealed to the two. T h e original house built in 1856 for Charles J . H u l l , as Pond later recalled, was spacious for that day and excellently built. In addition to the drawing-room, library, dining-room and the other usual apartments of a northern house of the period, there was an octagonal office in a one-story wing to the south, opening from the library and on to the veranda. The material was a purplish-red brick On three sides of the house were broad verandas; a low-gabled roof covered the high attic surmounting the second story, and the wide eaves were carried by heavily molded brackets. [The Brickbuilder, 1902] As Chicago had grown and industrialized, the surrounding area, once the western edge of the city, became the zone bordering the downtown core: the wood dwellings which framed the Hull mansion now housed immigrants and their sweatshops and served as warehouses and small neighborhood businesses. "Dingy, forlorn and prematurely old, the first story was used as the office of a furniture factory... and the second story, drenched

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM by the rains that poured through innumerable holes in the neglected tin roof, had long been the home of shifting and shiftless tenants." To the north of the Hull mansion, a shed served as an undertaking concern; to the south, "toppling and decayed frame buildings used by dealers in coal, hay and feed and second-hand bottles" had upper floors which served as tenements. T h e house, however, "still preserved a conspicuous individuality" and appealed to Pond "as the first bit of historic background., .which he had found in Chicago," a survivor of the Fire of 1871. At this juncture, the house must have struck Jane Addams as the proper expression of her still vague scheme. Behind its rather tattered appearance, it had a solid construction and fine features, contrasting markedly with its somewhat disreputable neighbors. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr originally intended the house to provide a handsome home for women of culture. Addams herself described the beginnings: We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in another part of the city, with the photographs and other impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany. While all the new furniture which was brought was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character with the fine old residence. Probably no young matron ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure. [ Twent\ Years at Hull-House, 1910]

Yet unlike other women of her class, Jane Addams never expected merely to enjoy privately the pleasures of a cultivated life. She wanted to share that life with her impoverished immigrant neighborhood. As she wrote in her 1895 essay " T h e Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements": "The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent." Thus the two women invited into HullHouse their neighbors —immigrants from Ger-

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

I'»comfortable with traditional women 's roles, Jane Addami moved to Hull-House in 1889 lo take up settlement work. Gift of Hull-House

many, Italy, Poland, and B o h e m i a — for a reading of G e o r g e Eliot's Romola. As they responded to the needs of their surroundings, J a n e Addams and Ellen Starr stretched their sense of neighborliness to include a wide range of social services and reform activities, but they never lost the sense of the importance of creating a cultured h o m e and extending it to others. O t h e r middle-class women in Chicago had lost the ability to meet as neighbors with those outside their limited world. In the decades after the Civil War, the rapid growth of Chicago, indus-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

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HISTORY O F WOMEN IN THE UNITED S T A T E S

trialization. and the great influx of immigrants had reordered the city. A new. fragmented geography divided urban space into functional areas. Commerce seized the center of the city. Around its core lived the poorest residents who sought work in factories. Those able to pay for transportation chose residences in the developing suburbs. at increasing distances. Jane Addams reflected on the changes: Hull-House itself had "once stood in the suburbs, but the citv has steadily grown up around it and its site now has corners on three or four foreign colonies." Physical conditions had become miserable. T h e streets are inexpressibly dirty,...sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond descript i o n . . . Rear tenements flourish; many houses have no water supply save the faucet in the back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the street pavements. \Twenlv Years at Hull House. 1910]

Nothing alleviated the plight of the poor. They lived apart from institutions and from those with "the social tact and training, the large houses, and the traditions and customs of hospitality." They had no open spaces of green, no libraries or art galleries, no gymnasia, no club rooms or places for festivity outside the saloons. HullHouse cut through the social geography of the city to offer those spaces for cultural and social activity that the immigrant quarters lacked. In choosing to live in the Nineteenth Ward, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr drew on the English precedents of Toynbee Hall and the creation of novelist Walter Besant's imagination, the Palace of Delight. In Besant's novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Angela Messenger, the heiress of a brewery fortune, decided to create in London's East End a Palace of Delight, a large structure with a ballroom, theater, gymnasium, library, club rooms, coffee and tea rooms, and a school for music and the arts and crafts. She planned it as a

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

place within the poor's "reach, at no cost whatsoever, absolutely free for all, the same enjoyments as are purchased by the rich." T h o u g h the attempt in London to bring into reality a Palace of Delight failed, J a n e Addams drew on its example for H u l l - H o u s e . Walter Besant did not specify the architectural style of his East End Palace. H e described the theater as similar to those of the ancient Romans, suggesting that B e a u x Arts classicism might have expressed his vision, an impression reinforced by the axial symmetry of the plan for the main building. But as they shaped H u l l - H o u s e , J a n e Addams and Allen Pond worked from the very different aesthetic of J o h n Ruskin and his Arts and Crafts followers, and visually H u l l - H o u s e resembled T o y n b e e H a l l . The founders of Toynbee Hall thought to set down a bit of Oxford in the slum of London's East End. Its architecture of simplified G o t h i c in collegiate quadrangle form reflected these intentions. Both the architect and the client of H u l l House knew Toynbee Hall at first hand, and Allen Pond himself favored the quadrangle as the best expression of the settlement impulse. Yet J a n e Addams felt that H u l l - H o u s e ought to be oriented toward the n e i g h b o r h o o d more than a traditional quadrangle allowed. As H u l l - H o u s e added building after building, it surrounded a small enclosed yard, giving a much needed patch of green. Yet this did not create a real quadrangle because the surrounding buildings opened not only on the inner court but also onto the street. W h i l e residents always needed some sense of retreat, they wanted the neighbors to have easy access. W h e n the first two buildings were added onto each side of the original house, the three structures formed an open court, which became a play area for neighborhood children. In 1896, a resident suggested that such "open spaces, bare or bricked as they are, defend the mass of buildings from the dread likeness to an institution. T h e plavgound porches of the Children's Build-

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES ing, where there are flowers up to the last moment, and the easy-going aspect of the outside benches and their frequenters, help out the welcome." But an institution Hull-House became, and one of sizeable dimensions. Over the course of sixteen years, beginning in 1891, Hull-House added twelve buildings to provide places for the neighborhood to congregate, play, meet, and study. The complex of thirteen buildings covered one square block of approximately five acres. When the original terms of the sublease expired, Jane Addams entered into an ever-widening series of lease agreements with the owner, Helen Culver, the niece of Charles J. Hull. As the lease time lengthened, the property widened, and philanthropic monies became available, Addams felt freer to build. The settlement erected the Butler Art Gallery (1891), the coffeehouse and gymnasium (1893), a third story on the original Hull mansion and the Children's House (1896), the Jane Club for working women (1898), a new coffeehouse with theater above (1899), an apartment building with a men's club on the first floor (1902), a Women's Club building (1904), a residents' dining hall ( 1905), a Boy's Club ( 1906), and a nursery (1907). In each case, client and architect worked closely, united by a shared sense of settlement purposes. As Jane Addams put it, "We always went over the scheme together before anything was said in regard to the building." When Irving Pond wrote of the work of his partnership with his brother, he conveyed no consciousness of working within any architectural style. He regarded architecture as "an art ....the beautified expression, of life." Its forms "to be vital... must be fused in the fire of individuality." Consciously or not, however, the Ponds worked largely within the Queen Anne idiom as architects were applying it in England. The Queen Anne style combined a number of seemingly irreconcilable elements: a taste for English vernacular buildings of the seventeenth

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

and eighteenth centuries; a renewed interest in Renaissance and Georgian detail ; and complex, asymmetrical massing of forms. As Mark Girouard, the recent chronicler of the Queen Anne aesthetic, has put it, the style served both "sweetness and light." T h e sons and daughters of the Victorians cultivated a conscious aesthetic attitude. and they commissioned "sweetness" in the dainty houses designed by Richard Norman Shaw. But they also sought "light" in the temperance movement, the London board schools, and the education of women. From 1873 through the 1890s (even to 1910 in Newnham College, Cambridge), Queen Anne gave architectural expression to progressive ideas. While a certain extravagance accompanied many Queen A n n e buildings, the brick public buildings took a plainer style. In the 1870s, London board school architects E.R. Robson and Basil Champneys designed basic rectangular block schools with steeply pitched roofs, d o r m e r windows, prominent chimney stacks, multi-paned windows, and an occasional Flemish gable. T h e y used contrasting bricks enlivened by white woodwork. Many of the buildings that the Ponds designed for H u l l - H o u s e were a pared-down version of this style. T h e turn-of-the-century view of H u l l - H o u s e from Halsted and Polk that Irving Pond favored shows the strong influence of Que^n Anne. By then, the Butler Art Gallery had its third story with its steeply pitched roof pierced by dormers. T h e decorative brickwork of the second story conveyed a Flemish feeling, emphasized by the diamond-paned, leaded windows. Pond repeated this brickwork as he added to the original mansion a "hooded top story of fanciful brick." T h e Children's House, given by Mary Rozet Smith, with its large welcoming veranda, continued many of these decorative elements, while adding Palladian windows, a small cupola, and pilasters along the Polk Street side. Each H u l l - H o u s e building

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405

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES assumed an independent form, but brickwork and a c o m m o n floor height marked frequently by stringcourses united the complex. Pond added variety through differing roof treatments and decorative details. As seen from the internal quadrangle, the gables, the steeply pitched roofs, and the octagonal study intensified the picturesque quality of H u l l - H o u s e . W h e t h e r consciously chosen or not, the Queen A n n e style fit H u l l - H o u s e ' s aims. In the England of the 1870s, progressive thought favored the style. T o A m e r i c a n reformers in the 1890s, the Pond brothers' Q u e e n A n n e designs must have looked absolutely right. W h i l e Q u e e n A n n e governed the shape of the exterior of much of H u l l - H o u s e , the ideas of J o h n Kuskin and the Arts and Crafts movement influenced the design of its interior spaces. Ruskin had a profound impact on both the philosophy and the appearance of H u l l - H o u s e . His writings deeply affected J a n e A d d a m s and Ellen Starr, and s o m e of their most powerful statements read like glosses on his work. Ruskin's works taught the original residents not o n l y the need for the elite to b r i n g c u l t u r e to the masses, but o p e n e d t h e i r eyes to the h o r r o r s of industrial society and its loss of m e a n i n g f u l work. H u l l - H o u s e led the Arts and Crafts movement in C h i c a g o in the mid-1890s. O n October 22, 1897, the Chicago Arts a n d Crafts Society was founded at H u l l - H o u s e and i n c l u d e d a m o n g its active architect m e m b e r s the Pond brothers. Talented craftsmen set up metal and woodworking shops at H u l l - H o u s e . Ellen Gates Starr went to England to study traditional bookbinding in the 1890s and r e t u r n e d to set up a b o o k b i n d e r y in the settlement. A Labor M u s e u m o p e n e d in 1900 as a working demonstration of arts a n d crafts principles. T h e interior decoration of the L a b o r M u s e u m expressed the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. A photograph probably from the early 1890s shows Ellen Starr and J a n e Addams taking tea at a small table

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM in t h e L a b o r M u s e u m b e s i d e a g e n e r o u s b r i c k e d f i r e p l a c e with s h e l v e s a b o v e h o l d i n g d e c o r a t i v e c r o c k e r y a n d a vase o f lilies a r r a n g e d a f t e r t h e style o f t h e P r e - R a p h a e l i t e s . T h i s s c e n e c a p t u r e d t h e cozy a t m o s p h e r e o f an E n g l i s h c o u n t r y cottage as it was r e i n t e r p r e t e d a n d i d e a l i z e d in t h e late n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y by t h e A r t s a n d C r a f t s m o v e m e n t . T h e H u l l - H o u s e c o f f e e h o u s e took this r e v i v a l i s m e v e n further. A s c e n e p a i n t i n g o f an K n g l i s h c o u n t r v i n n e t c h e d on its street s i d e d e c o r a t e d t h e s i m p l e block b u i l d i n g . The s e t t l e m e n t ' s A r t s a n d C r a f t s a e s t h e t i c i s m s o m e t i m e s c o n f l i c t e d with its social goals. H u l l H o u s e i n t e n d e d t h e c o f f e e h o u s e to s e r v e b o t h as t h e d i s p e n s a r y o f hot food a n d as a g a t h e r i n g p l a c e for t h e n e i g h b o r h o o d . H o w e v e r , t h e d e c o r intimidated s o m e of those the settlement hoped to attract. A c o n t e m p o r a r y o b s e r v e r e x p l a i n e d . When the coffee house was opened, with its stained rafters, its fine photographs, and its rows of blue china mugs, it had a reflective visit from one of its neighbors. He looked it over thoroughly and without prejudice, and said decisively: 'Yez kin hev de shovel gang or yez kin hev de office gang, but yez can't hev 'em both in the same room at the same toime.' Time has shown the exactness of the statement. Its clientele ...have selected themselves, and it is not the man in overalls who is the constant visitor, but the teacher, the clerk, and the smaller employer of the region. T h e laboring man sends his children for bread and soup and prepared food, but seldom comes himself, however well within his means the fare may be. [Dorothea Moore, "A Day at Hull House," The American Journal of Sociology, 1897] W h e n t h e s e t t l e m e n t o u t g r e w t h e o r i g i n a l coffeeh o u s e , H u l l - H o u s e b u i l t a s e c o n d o n e with a more conventional exterior. T h e C h i c a g o Arts and Crafts Society played a c r i t i c a l r o l e in t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f C h i c a g o ' s second great a r c h i t e c t u r a l style, the P r a i r i e school, a n d later H u l l - H o u s e b u i l d i n g s e x p r e s s e d its aest h e t i c . A f t e r 1900 t h e h o l d o f Q u e e n A n n e g r a d u a l l y l o o s e n e d in s u c c e s s i v e H u l l - H o u s e b u i l d -

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ings, and the cleaner lines of the P r a i r i e style came to dominate. T h i s spareness and horizontality of decorative treatment corresponded to the movement of H u l l - H o u s e into the twentieth century. Along Polk Street, box-like forms with flat roofs enclosed the gymnasium, the Women's Club, and the Boy's Club. As H i i l l - H o u s e residents became more involved in social reform, its architecture carried forward the innovative architectural tendencies at work in the city. Reform, which at the end of the nineteenth centurv had a Queen A n n e face, took on a Prairie school exterior in the twentieth centurv. T h e coffeehouse did not attract workers to linger, but it provided a source of inexpensive, nutritious food that they could purchase and take home, potentially freeing the women of the n e i g h b o r i n g households of some of the obligation of food preparation. W h i l e the coffeehouse's nostalgic architecture looked back to the past, its purpose confronted resolutely, if ineffectively, the present. T h e coffeehouse initiated HullHouse's efforts to confront the social needs of its immigrant neighborhood. T h e settlement carefully set up the public kitchen. First the neighborhood dietaries were thoroughly investigated. to see whether the need for better food and less sketchv preparation actually existed, and why the people were paying for what they ate. T h e n o n e of the residents went down to Boston, and took a trainingcourse in public kitchen m a n a g e m e n t and supervision. W h e n she r e t u r n e d , she worked out all details carefully, simple shining ovens, glittering c o p p e r tanks, and ingenious, convenient containers for distribution of h e r wares.

T h e effort met only with a modest response that hardly matched the hopes of the settlement. T h e neighbors "preferred what they were used to eating, and what 'they'd ruther,' to the nutritious." A more ambitious and successful plan began simply in 1891 when J a n e Addams went to Mary Kenney, an Irish working woman and trade union organizer, to ask h e r to form a cooperative boarding club for unmarried working women. Addams

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

offered to donate furnishings and the first month's rent. T h e club of six, which then hired a cook a n d general worker, grew r a p i d l y in n u m b e r and, in 1898, the settlement erected the J a n e C l u b b u i l d i n g . W h i l e officially the J a n e C l u b was not a part of Hull-House, the Ponds designed the b u i l d i n g , a H u l l - H o u s e benefactor paid for it, and the rent that the women paid went to the settlement. T h e women lived in twenty s i n g l e and four d o u b l e rooms, u n u s u a l l y private quarters for working women at the turn of the century. In addition, the three-story structure housed a laundry, trunk room, kitchen, serving room, d i n i n g room, d r a w i n g room, library, and bath and toilet rooms. W h i l e groups such as the YWCA also tried to provide housing for working women at the turn of the century, the J a n e C l u b differed in at least one important way: the women themselves formed the cooperative enterprise. T h e y had no housemother or external supervision: the group made their own rules. And the cooperative allowed men to visit in its pleasant wicker parlor. Jane Addams never approved of working mothers, but she h a d to face the realities of the immigrant c o m m u n i t y in which she lived —a living wage required the labor of more than a single household breadwinner. In response Hull-House created a creche —a n u r s e r y for v e r y y o u n g children —and in 1895 built the Children's House. T h e creche had two bedrooms, a d i n i n g room, kitchen, toilet room, and "sunshine porch" protected by wire netting on the second floor. T h e kindergarten took the third floor, music classes the fourth, and the boys' club the first. In 1907, the Crane Nursery, adjacent to the playground fronting on Ewing Street, superceded the Children's House. Originally, the settlement hoped to i n c l u d e within this c o m p l e x H u l l House's most daring social experiment. It planned twenty-six flats for "the poorest families that can

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES pay rent at all" to adjoin the creche and kindergarten. T h e apartments had an unusual design for each contained a "stair hall, living room, bedroom and bathroom which opens directly on the outer air," unlike the typical tenement, ventilated only by an airshaft. H u l l - H o u s e , however, never constructed the apartments. T h e s e attempts to meet the e c o n o m i c needs of Chicago's Nineteenth Ward by p r o v i d i n g a food dispensary, a nursery, and housing for working women found expression in separate buildings. H u l l - H o u s e provided appropriate space within its many structures for almost all of its efforts to improve the surrounding immigrant neighborhood and Chicago itself: the clinic for medical care, meeting rooms for labor and reform groups, apartments for investigators of urban conditions, and the dining hall and parlors for debates on the ideas and methods of social change. H u l l - H o u s e moved into ever-widening areas of reform because it attracted e x t r a o r d i n a r y women who pushed Jane Addams to develop a more comprehensive understanding of h e r task. In 1890, J u l i a Lathrop moved to H u l l - H o u s e to begin a long career of social service; and in 1891, factory reformer Florence Kellev became a resident. O t h e r settlements in Chicago —such as the Chicago C o m m o n s and the University Settlement—and settlements in o t h e r cities provided stimulation and the challenge of new approaches. As dynamic reformers came to H u l l - H o u s e , they attracted others. By 1894. interest grew to such an extent that the residents limited their numbers to twenty. T h e settlement grew constantly, however, and by 1929 there were seventy residents. Two kinds of women came to H u l l - H o u s e to live. Some, like Jane Addams, had been well educated but lacked a clear direction. Others, such as Dr. Alice H a m i l t o n , had surmounted obstacles to become the first generation of professional women. For each group, Hull-House served different, but c o m p l e m e n t a r y needs.

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H I S T O R Y O F W O M E N IN THE UNITED S T A T E S

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Between 1891 and 1907, Hull-House added twelve buildings to the original Hull mansion to form a complex covering a full square block.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM J a n e A d d a m s always understood that the settlement served not only the neighborhood but women like herself. In her essav. " T h e Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," she reflected on those women whose world closed in on them after leaving school. Imbued with a sense of service and knowledgeable about the world, "the daughter comes back from college and begins to recognize her social claim to the 'submerged tenth.'" It was then that "the family claim is strenuously asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, ill-advised in her efforts T h e girl loses something vital out of her life which she is entitled to. S h e is restricted and unhappy." T h e settlement offered the necessary outlet for the energies of these young women, a place where they might escape from the constraints of the traditional feminine role a n d encounter the broader society. For those "cultivated into unnourished, over-sensitive lives," H u l l - H o u s e promised the "solace of daily activity." Alice H a m i l t o n already had found meaningful work: she c a m e to Chicago as a medical doctor to work at R u s h Laboratory and then as a professor at Women's Medical College of Northwestern University. She turned to public health to link her practice to the service of others, and, in time, became the leading authority on industrial diseases and the first woman professor at H a r v a r d Medical School. At H u l l - H o u s e she directed her professional skills toward social reform. For a busy single woman practicing in a rough and bustling city, the settlement offered itself as a haven and promised commitment and community. A place of cooperative living, the settlement lightened the burdens of the latenineteenth-century household. Unlike the single family house, it offered the larger sociability and fellowship of a female community —especially vital to women whose emotional world revolved around other women. T h e women residents shared the original Hull

413

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

m a n s i o n . ( T h o s e not a c c o m m o d a t e d in the house lived in a p a r t m e n t s a r o u n d the court.) It is unclear w h e t h e r residents shared r o o m s with o n e a n o t h e r o r lived singly, w h e t h e r they t h o u g h t of t h e i r r o o m s as individuals' personal p r o p e r t y or rotated t h e m . T h e r e is n o floor p l a n o f t h e u p p e r two stories of t h e h o u s e i l l u s t r a t i n g how t h e r o o m s flowed into e a c h other. In 1895, w h e n A l l e n P o n d enlarged the house, he created fourteen

bed-

r o o m s and four b a t h r o o m s o n t h e s e c o n d and t h i r d floors. In 1902, h e r e d e s i g n e d a suite o f two r o o m s a n d a d j o i n i n g bath for J a n e

Addams's

personal use. S h e insisted, however, that the bathr o o m have an o p e n i n g o n t o t h e hallway for the o t h e r r e s i d e n t s . T h i s suggests that t h e w o m e n of H u l l - H o u s e c o n s c i o u s l y c h o s e to live in a h o m e like a t m o s p h e r e . As b u i l d i n g s filled out the H u l l H o u s e c o m p l e x , o t h e r l i v i n g possibilities, such as s e p a r a t e a p a r t m e n t s o r h o t e l r o o m s s t r u n g a l o n g a corridor, c e r t a i n l y existed, but these alternatives did not provide the women of H u l l - H o u s e with t h e l i v i n g a r r a n g e m e n t s that t h e y s o u g h t . In 1898. B e a t r i c e a n d S i d n e y W e b b , f o u n d e r s of English p a r l i a m e n t a r y socialism, visited H u l l H o u s e . Beatrice Webb shared the usual admiration of ] a n e A d d a m s . but she d i d not e n j o y h e r stay. A l t h o u g h the sore throat a n d fever s h e h a d c o n tracted may have c o n t r i b u t e d to lier distaste, s h e found the physical a n d social s e t t i n g o f t h e settlem e n t a trial to be e n d u r e d . " H u l l - H o u s e itself." s h e wrote ill h e r diarv. " i s a s p a c i o u s m a n s i o n , with all its r o o m s o p e n i n g . A m e r i c a n

fashion,

into e a c h other. T h e r e a r e not d o o r s , or. m o r e exactly, n o shut d o o r s : t h e r e s i d e n t s w a n d e r from r o o m to r o o m , visitors w a n d e r h e r e , t h e r e and e v e r y w h e r e ; t h e w h o l e g r o u n d floor is. in fact, o n e c o n t i n u o u s p a s s a g e l e a d i n g n o w h e r e in particular." T h e women residents of H u l l - H o u s e sought not o n l v a set of tasks a n d a c o m m i t m e n t to t h e w i d e r society, they c h o s e to live t o g e t h e r in a c o m m u n a l setting. " T h e restless m o v e m e n t s of

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the residents from room to r o o m " that so bothered Beatrice Webb was central to H u l l - H o u s e women's shared lives. As Edith Abbott, resident with h e r sister Grace from 1908 until the 1920s, r e m e m b e r e d , "We were a k i n d of family g r o u p together —a very a r g u m e n t a t i v e family g r o u p , for we often disagreed." In a d d i t i o n to the residents' library, parlor, and the m a i n reception hall, t h e downstairs h e l d the octagonal office w h e r e t h e head residents transacted the m a i n business of the settlement. Unlike the increasing separation d u r i n g the nineteenth c e n t u r y of h o m e and office with their o p p o s i n g values of n u r t u r e a n d marketplace, at H u l l - H o u s e t h e two were r e u n i t e d . Living in t h e h o u s e m e a n t a full u n i o n of work and life. T h e d i n n e r table d r a m a t i c a l l y d e m o n s t r a t e d this u n i o n . Residents took breakfast at their table in t h e coffeehouse, a restaurant i n t e n d e d both for t h e m a n d for the n e i g h b o r h o o d . To accomm o d a t e those whose r o u n d s began early or whose work kept them u p late, no set h o u r governed breakfast. "We a r g u e d , " Edith Abbott recalled, "in relavs, over the m o r n i n g newspaper." Resid e n t s h a d lunch a n d d i n n e r c o m m u n a l l y in the d i n i n g hall, a separate r o o m serviced by t h e coffeehouse kitchen. O r i g i n a l l y the residents sat a r o u n d an oval table. Dinner, served at six, was "the m e e t i n g g r o u n d of t h e day," a time for the transaction of business a n d t h e t h r a s h i n g out of issues. As t h e n u m b e r s increased, the settlement built a new d i n i n g hall w h e r e the resid e n t s ate at long, r e c t a n g u l a r tables u n d e r chandeliers. As Edith Abbott r e m e m b e r e d it: Miss Addams liked to have dinner a more formal occasion than the residents made of the breakfast table. In the large and quite beautiful dining-room with a great fireplace at one end and a very large old mahogany sideboard at the other end, there were three long mahogany tables, each of which could seat fourteen persons. But even when all the tables were used, the room still seemed very spacious. We tried to be prompt for a six o'clock dinner, for the dining-room, like every other common room in the House, was used in the

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES evening for a club or a class, and we were expected to leave before the club arrived. M iss Addams usuali ν sat at the head of the middle table, and d u r i n g the d i n n e r hour she often rapped on her glass for attention while she told us something that she thought was new and i m p o r t a n t . . . o r she read a letter from someone like Lillian Wald of New York, or Mrs. Barnett of London. I Social Sevice Review, 1950] As the settlement attracted the interested

and

c u r i o u s as g u e s t s , d i n n e r b e c a m e a t i m e of intell e c t u a l a n d p o l i t i c a l c o n t r o v e r s y . Visitors a g r e e d that H u l l - H o u s e was o n e of t h e best s a l o n s in A m e r i c a for d i s c u s s i n g c u r r e n t issues. B e a t r i c e W e b b d i d not a g r e e . H e r c o m m e n t s a b o u t t h e " t e r r i f i c o r d e a l " of h e r first e v e n i n g at H u l l - H o u s e c o n v e y t h e t e n o r of that life as s e e n by E n g l i s h

middle-class standards. "First

an

uncomfortable dinner, a large party served, higg l e d e p i g g l e d v . " T h e n t h e o n g o i n g s t r e a m of visitors w h o all h a d to be i n t r o d u c e d , t h e n a l e c t u r e followed by "a severe heckling." B e y o n d this harsh b e g i n n i n g , she d e s c r i b e d t h e " r o u g h a n d r e a d y r e s t a u r a n t " with its " u n a p p e t i s i n g f o o d , " a n d t h e " s c a n t y s e r v i c e " of t h e s e t t l e m e n t , e x e m p l i f i e d by t h e r e s i d e n t s t h e m s e l v e s a n s w e r i n g t h e front door. B e a t r i c e W e b b disliked t h e i n f o r m a l i t y of H u l l H o u s e life a n d its s h a r i n g of c e r t a i n d o m e s t i c tasks. J a m e s W e b e r L i n n , J a n e A d d a m s ' s n e p h e w , biographer, and H u l l - H o u s e resident, recalled, " E v e r y r e s i d e n t d i d what c a m e to h a n d in t h e H o u s e as o u t of it — c o o k e d a n o c l e a n e d

and

w a s h e d w i n d o w s a n d r e p l a c e d f u r n i t u r e that was constantly shoved here and there a n d everywhere." F l o r e n c e Kelley r e m e m b e r e d h e r introduction to H u l l - H o u s e o n an e a r l y s n o w y

midwinter

m o r n i n g . S h e waited in t h e c o m p a n y of a Kicka p o o I n d i a n for t h e d o o r to o p e n . " I t was M i s s A d d a m s w h o o p e n e d it, h o l d i n g o n h e r left a r m a s i n g u l a r l y u n a t t r a c t i v e , fat, p u d g y baby b e l o n g i n g to t h e c o o k , w h o was b e h i n d h a n d with b r e a k fast. M i s s A d d a m s was a little h i n d e r e d in h e r m o v e m e n t s by a s u p e r - e n e r g e t i c

kindergarten

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

419

c h i l d , left b y its m o t h e r w h i l e s h e w e n t to a s w e a t s h o p f o r a b u n d l e o f c l o a k s to b e f i n i s h e d . " T h e o p e n a n d c a s u a l m a n n e r o f H u l l - H o u s e was a f o n d m e m o r y to F l o r e n c e K e l l e y , w h o t h e n m o v e d in to stay for m o r e t h a n s e v e n y e a r s ; it was " s c a n t y s e r v i c e " to B e a t r i c e W e b b . However received, the informal

atmosphere

o f s e l f - h e l p was i n t e n t i o n a l . E d i t h A b b o t t r e c a l l e d t h a t J a n e A d d a m s r e f u s e d to get a s w i t c h b o a r d because she liked to have the arrangements simple and "like a home, not like an institution." O n e of the long time neighborhood friends was emploved to answer the telephone during the day but after five o'clock the residents took charge of answering both the doorbell and the telephone. We all enjoved our evenings "on door." (or the neighbors came in with news and with requests of many kinds. [Social Service Review, 19f>0| J a n e A d d a m s d i d not h a v e a s e c r e t a r y in t h e e a r l y years a n d p a r c e l l e d out t h e m a i l that n e e d e d a n s w e r i n g at b r e a k f a s t . W h i l e t h e r e s i d e n t s ate w h e n it best s u i t e d t h e m , t h e y " a l l l i k e d to b e there when

Miss A d d a m s a p p e a r e d with

her

b u n d l e o f m a i l . . . . M i s s A d d a m s h a d a gay, p l e a s a n t , f r i e n d l y wav with h e r that m a d e life i n t e r e s t i n g for all o f us." W h i l e the p u b l i c q u a l i t v of H u l l - H o u s e grated o n B e a t r i c e W e b b ' s n e r v e s , it was w h a t

Alice

H a m i l t o n w a n t e d . A r e s i d e n t f r o m 1898 u n t i l 1919, A l i c e H a m i l t o n

s t a y e d at

Hull-House

b e c a u s e " t h e life t h e r e s a t i s f i e d e v e r y l o n g i n g , for c o m p a n i o n s h i p , f o r t h e e x c i t e m e n t o f n e w e x p e r i e n c e s , for c o n s t a n t i n t e l l e c t u a l

stimula-

t i o n , a n d f o r t h e s e n s e o f b e i n g c a u g h t u p in a b i g m o v e m e n t w h i c h e n l i s t e d m y e n t h u s i a s t i c loyalty." B o t h h e r m o t h e r a n d h e r s i s t e r j o i n e d h e r at t h e settlement. H u l l - H o u s e was a busy, p u b l i c p l a c e . W h i l e most o f its r e s i d e n t s c o u l d h a v e l i v e d as s h e l tered middle-class w o m e n , they p e r c e i v e d such l i v e s as e n e r v a t i n g a n d f u t i l e . B y acts o f w i l l , t h e v c h o s e a life o f a c t i o n a n d c o m m u n i t y , a n d t h e s h a r e d life in t h e s e t t l e m e n t t h a t t h e y c r e a t e d

420

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES sustained their choice. It freed women from both the family claim and the demands of housekeeping. it created an extended family of like-minded women, and it reached out to include an ongoing stream of visitors who represented the vital social movements of the time. T h o u g h primarily a women's place of work and residence, Hull-House always included men, at least in supporting roles. T h i s is in contrast to other women's institutions of the same era, which more strictly separated the genders. In several of the eastern women's colleges, academic women lived and worked in c o m m u n i t i e s of women. Women's college faculty and a l u m n a e formed the College Settlement Association, implicitly limiting it to women. While J a n e Addams formed her most intense friendships with other women — Ellen Starr and later Mary Rozet Smith — she never attempted to limit h e r public world to women. Originally the male residents lived in a cottage on Polk Street and dined at H u l l - H o u s e . T h e y came into the settlement when the third floor was added to the B u t l e r Art Gallery. In 1902, H u l l - H o u s e built apartments for m a r r i e d couples. Some H u l l - H o u s e women consciously chose a world which welcomed men. Edith Abbott had tried teaching at a women's college but found that, like her sister, she "believed in coeducation." S h e enjoyed the "vigorous activity of Chicago's Halsted Street," so different from " t h e cool aloofness of a New England college for women." She liked the argumentativeness, the bustle, and even the evening dances organized for G r e e k neighbors which attracted "so few G r e e k women that the women residents, young and old, were called in 'to help the Greeks dance.'" Women dominated Hull-House, however. It is in terms of their needs in the A m e r i c a n industrial city that the settlement can best be understood. An unmarried middle-class woman at the turn of the century remained an anomaly. If she

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

chose to live an active life away from the h o m e she had known as a child, she n e e d e d an a l t e r n a tive that the city d i d not offer. First of all, she r e q u i r e d a place w h e r e she c o u l d live respectably. I n a world that d i v i d e d those of h e r sex into "true women" a n d "loose women," she n e e d e d to keep the protection that a m i d d l e - c l a s s h o m e afforded. A woman with work in the w o r l d h a d to f i n d freedom from the d e m a n d i n g b u r d e n of a s i n g l e - f a m i l y establishment. In s e p a r a t i n g herself from the f a m i l i a l a n d social w o r l d she had known, she n e e d e d a n u r t u r i n g c o m m u n i t y . H e r c o m m i t m e n t to the issues of h e r t i m e r e q u i r e d h e r to m a k e a connection between h e r work a n d the b r o a d e r social questions of the citv. Hull-House met these needs. As it did, it drew on an alternative familiar to these women: the college. Many of the settlement workers had been among the pioneers who went to college in the years after the Civil War. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr attended Rockford Seminary, which gained collegiate status a few years after they graduated ; Julia Lathrop went to Vassar; Florence Kelley, Cornell. In the settlement these women recreated critical elements of the life that they had known. Until the 1960s, American colleges treated their women students quite differently from their men. While men often enjoyed the freedom of college towns, women lived in residence halls that shared common characteristics. Unlike a men's dormitory, the building itself—whether designed for 25 at Smith or 400 at Vassar —took the form of a house. Public rooms were grouped around a central entrance on the first floor; a stairway separated the private rooms on the upper floors. Until the 1920s, college women generally lived in suites and shared common bathrooms, an arrangement that fostered intimacy. In many seminaries and colleges, women students performed a limited amount of domestic work to cut costs. Unlike the work of a household, this involved clearly defined duties of approximately an h o u r each day. Col-

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

Organized in 1893 as a public kitchen, the coffeehouse was more successful in attracting local businessmen, teachers, and social groups to its restaurant facilities. University of Illinois at Chicago, The Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection.

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424

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES lege women also took their meals communally, silting at long tables headed by teachers. W h i l e students in the years after World War I found such arrangements c o n f i n i n g and offensive to their sense of privacy, those who preceded them e x p e r i e n c e d college life as liberating and transforming. College offered to women in the late nineteenth century an alternative world of meaning and purpose and gave to that world the physical structure of the residence hall. H u l l - H o u s e recreated this college world for adult women in the city. It took the form of a n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y women's d o r m i t o r y — the house plan, with its separation of downstairs public space and upstairs familial private space, was e x p a n d e d to accommodate twenty to fifty women. W h i l e m i n i m i z i n g domestic work, it required some shared tasks, such as being "on door." In the d i n i n g hall, residents took communal meals, and J a n e Addams headed the central table and made announcements and reported news. As the buildings spread a r o u n d the city block, first in Q u e e n A n n e , then in P r a i r i e style architecture, and created courtyards, many residents must have recalled their alma maters. Yet in two critical respects, the settlement differed from the college. W h i l e the dominant experience for college women was the women's college with its all-female community, H u l l - H o u s e included men at m e a l t i m e and in c o m m o n work. W h i l e college life provided an alternative world for women, it was o n e cut off from the political, economic, and social realities of the day. Connection and integration provided the very reason for H u l l - H o u s e . T h e settlement linked the private lives of reform-minded women to the harsh facts of the nineteenth-century city. B r e a k i n g through the geography of industrial Chicago, it attempted to offer to an impoverished immigrant n e i g h b o r h o o d the amenities available to the m i d d l e class. B y the twentieth century, the settlement added efforts to meet basic needs of

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

food, c h i l d care, a n d s h e l t e r for w o r k i n g w o m e n , as well as to serve as the c e n t e r for v a r i e d r e f o r m efforts. In c r e a t i n g the s e t t l e m e n t , the w o m e n of H u l l - H o u s e r e j e c t e d any n o t i o n s o f seclusion to p l u n g e into the life of t h e i r time. T h e y p l a c e d t h e i r d o r m i t o r y not on a c o u n t r y estate o u t s i d e P o u g h k e e p s i e , but on H a l s t e d Street in the heart of C h i c a g o .

For Further Reading For a more complete exploration of Jane Addams's life see Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); and John C. Farrell, Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace (Baltimore: T h e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). A fuller treatment of the cultural concerns of Hull-House is found in Helen L. Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), chapter 6. Guy Szuberia has written well on the architecture of the settlement houses in "Three Chicago Settlements: T h e i r Architectural Form and Social Meaning,"/ournal of the Illinois State Historical Society 14 ( 1977): 114-29. On the Queen Anne style, see Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For more information on the settlement and college women, see John P. Rousmaniere, "Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: T h e College Woman and the Settlement House, 1889-94," The American Quarterly 22 (1970): 4^-66; and Helen L. Horowitz, Alma Mater (New York: Knopf, forthcoming, 1984).

425

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers

Kathryn Kish Sklar

What were the sources of women's political power in the United States in the decades before they could vote? How did women use the political power they were able to muster? This essay attempts to answer these questions by examining one of the most politically effective groups of women r e f o r m e r s in U.S. history—those who assembled in Chicago in the early 1890s at Hull House, one of the nation's first social settlements, f o u n d e d in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Within that group, this study focuses on the r e f o r m e r Florence Kelley (1859—1932). Kelley joined Hull House in 1891 and remained until 1899, when she moved to Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York, where she lived for the next twenty-seven years. According to Felix F r a n k f u r t e r , Kelley "had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first thirty years of this century," for she played "a powerful if not decisive role in securing legislation for the removal of the most glaring abuses of o u r hectic industrialization following the Civil War."' It was in the 1890s that Kelley and her colleagues at Hull House developed the patterns of living and thinking that guided them throughout their lives of reform, leaving an indelible imprint on U.S. politics.2 This essay attempts to determine the This essay benefited from research assistance by the late Elizabeth Weisz-Buck. I am grateful to her a n d to Alice Kessler-Harris, Estelle Freedman, and Rosalind Rosenberg for their valuable comments. 1. Q u o t e d in the foreward, Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), p. 5. 2. T h e best brief source on J a n e A d d a m s is Anne Firor Scott's entry in Edward J a m e s ,

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427

extent to which their political power and activities flowed from their collective life as coresidents and friends and the degree to which this power was attributable to their close affiliation with male reformers and male institutions. T h e effects of both factors can be seen in one of the first political campaigns conducted by Hull House residents—the 1893 passage and the subsequent enforcement of pathbreaking antisweatshop legislation mandating an eight-hour day for women and children employed in Illinois manufacturing. This important episode reveals a great deal about the sources of this group's political power, including their own collective initiative, the support of other women's groups, and the support of men and men's groups. Finally, it shows how women reformers and the gender-specific issues they championed helped advance class-specific issues during a time of fundamental social, economic, and political transition. One of the most important questions asked by historians of American women today is, T o what degree has women's social power been based on separate female institutions, culture, and consciousness, and to what degree has it grown out of their access to male spheres of influence, such as higher education, labor organization, and politics?3 This essay advances the commonsense notion that women's social power in the late nineteenth century depended on both sources of support. Women's institutions allowed them to enter realms of reality dominated by men, where, for better or for worse, they competed with men for control over the distribution of social resources. Thus although their own communities were essential to their social strength, women were able to realize the full potential of their collective power only by reaching outside those boundaries. *

*

*

T h e community of women at Hull House made it possible for Florence Kelley to step f r o m the apprenticeship to the journeyman stage in

Janet Wilson James, and Paul Boyer, eds.. Notable American Women, 1607-1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:16-22. For biographical information about Florence Kelley, see Louise C. Wade's entry in ibid., 2:316-19; Goldmark; and Dorothy Rose Blumberg, Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer (New York : Augustus M. Kelley, 1966). 3. See esp. Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism. 1870-1930," Feminist Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 512-29; and Rosalind Rosenberg, "Defining O u r T e r m s : Separate Spheres" (paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, April 1984).

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

her r e f o r m career. A study of the 1893 antisweatshop campaign shows that the c o m m u n i t y provided f o u r f u n d a m e n t a l sources of s u p p o r t for her growth as a r e f o r m e r . First, it supplied an emotional and economic substitute f o r traditional family life, linking her with other talented women of h e r own class and educational and political background and thereby greatly increasing her political and social power. Second, the community at Hull House provided Kelley with effective ties to other women's organizations. T h i r d , it enabled cooperation with men r e f o r m ers and their organizations, allowing h e r to draw on their s u p p o r t without submitting to their control. Finally, it provided a creative setting f o r her to p u r s u e a n d develop a r e f o r m strategy she had already initiated in New York—the a d v a n c e m e n t of the rights and interests of working people in general by s t r e n g t h e n i n g the rights and interests of working women and children. As a community of women, Hull House provided its members with a lifelong substitute for family life. In that sense it resembled a religious order, supplying women with a radical degree of independence f r o m the claims of family life and inviting them to commit their energies elsewhere. When she first crossed the snowy threshold of Hull House "sometime between Christmas and New Year's," 1891, Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky was fleeing f r o m her husband and seeking r e f u g e for herself and her three children, ages six, five, and four. "We were welcomed as though we had been invited," she wrote thirty-five years later in her memoirs. 4 T h e way in which Kelley's family dilemma was solved reveals a great deal about the sources of s u p p o r t for the political activity of women r e f o r m e r s in the progressive era: help came first and foremost f r o m women's institutions but also f r o m the recruited s u p p o r t of powerful men reformers. J a n e A d d a m s supplied Kelley with room, board, and employment and soon after she arrived introduced her to Henry Demarest Lloyd, a leading critic of American labor policies who lived with his wife Jessie and their young children in nearby Winnetka. T h e Lloyds readily agreed to add Kelley's children to their large nursery, an a r r a n g e m e n t that began a lifelong relationship between the two families. 5 A sign of the extent to which responsibility for Kelley's children was later assumed by members of the Hull H o u s e community, even after her departure, was the fact that J a n e Addams's closest personal friend, Mary Rozet Smith, regularly and quietly helped Kelley pay for their school and college tuition. 6

4. Florence Kelley, "1 Go lo Work," Survey 58, no. 5 (June 1, 1927): 2 7 1 - 7 7 , esp. 271. 5. Nicholas Kelley, "Early Days at Hull House," Social Service Review 28, no. 4 (December 1954): 4 2 4 - 2 9 . 6. Mary Rozet Smith sent money to Kelley on many occasions. See Mary Rozet Smith to Florence Kelley, October 6, 1899, J a n e A d d a m s Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago; Florence Kelley to Dearly Beloved [Mary Rozet Smith], February 4, 1899, Swarthmore

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429

A bit stunned by her good fortune, the young m o t h e r wrote her own m o t h e r a summary of her circumstances a few weeks a f t e r reaching Hull House: "We are all well, and the chicks are happy. I have fifty dollars a m o n t h and my board and shall have more soon as I can collect my wits e n o u g h to write. I have charge of the Bureau of Labor of Hull House here and am working in the lines which I have always loved. I d o not know what m o r e to tell you except this, that in the few weeks of my stay here I have won f o r the children and myself many and dear friends whose generous hospitality astonishes me." 7 This combination of loving friendship and economic support served as a substitute for the family life f r o m which she had just departed. "It is understood that I am to resume the maiden name," she continued to her mother, "and that the children are to have it." It did not take Kelley long to decide to join this supportive community of women. As she wrote Friedrich Engels in April 1892, "I have cast in my lot with Misses Addams and Starr for as long as they will have me." 8 T o h e r m o t h e r she emphasized the personal gains Hull H o u s e brought her, writing, "I am better off than I have been since I landed in New York since I am now responsible myself for what I do." Gained at great personal cost, Kelley's independence was her most basic measure of well-being. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, her autonomy was the p r o d u c t of her affiliation with a community. O n e significant feature of Hull House life was the respect that residents expressed for one another's autonomy. Although each had a "room of h e r own," in Kelley's case this room was sometimes shared with otiier residents, and the collective space was far more i m p o r t a n t than their small private chambers.' Nevertheless, this intimale proximity was accompanied by a strong expression of personal individuation, reflected in the formality of address used at Hull House. By the world at large Kelley was called Mrs. Kelley, but to her close colleagues she was "Sister Kelley," or "Dearest F. K.," never Florence. Miss Addams a n d Miss Lathrop were never called Jane or Julia, even by their close friends, although Kelley College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers; Mary Rozet Smith to Florence Kelley, July 12, 1900, Addams Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago. 7. Florence Kelley to Caroline Kelley, Hull House, February 24, 1892, Nicholas Kelley Papers, New York Public Library (hereafter cited as NK Papers). 8. Florence Kelley to Friedrich Engels, Hull House, December 29, 1887, Archiv, Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, fund I, schedule 5. I am grateful to Dorothy Rose Blumberg for the use of her microfilm copy of these letters, some of which have been printed in her '"Dear Mr. Engels': Unpublished Letters, 1884—1894, of Florence Kelley (-Wischnewetzky) to Friedrich Engels," Labor History 5, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 103-33. Kelley's correspondence with Engels began in 1884, when she decided to translate his Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 (New York: J. W. Lovell Co., 1887). Until 1958 hers was the only English translation of this classic work. 9. See Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1981), pp. 162-74.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

occasionally took the liberty of calling A d d a m s "gentle J a n e . " It was not that Hull H o u s e was bleak and business-like, as one resident o n c e described male settlements in New York, but rather that the colleagues recognized and appreciated one another's individuality. T h e s e were superb conditions for social innovation since the residents could d r a w on mutual s u p p o r t at the same time that they were encouraged to p u r s u e their own distinct goals. T h i s respect for individuality did not prevent early Hull House residents f r o m expressing their love for one another. Kelley's letters to J a n e A d d a m s often began "Beloved Lady," and she frequently addressed Mary Rozet Smith as "Dearly Beloved," referring p e r h a p s to Smith's special status in Addams's life. Kelley's regard for Addams and Addams's for h e r were revealed in their correspondence after Kelley left in 1899 Addams wrote her, "I have had blows before in connection with Hull House but nothing like this"; and Mary Rozet Smith a d d e d , "I have had many pangs for the dear presiding lady." Later that year A d d a m s wrote Hull H o u s e sometimes seems a howling wilderness without you " Kelley seems to have f o u n d the separation difficult since she protested w h e n her name was removed from the list of residents in the Hull House Bulletin. A d d a m s replied, "You overestimate the importance of the h u m b l e Bulletin," but she promised to restore Kelley's name, explaining that it was only removed to "stop people asking for her." Fourteen years later in 1913 Addams wrote "Sister Kelley," "It is curious that I have never gotten used to you being away from (Hull House], even after all these years!" 10 O n e source of the basic trust established a m o n g the t h r e e major r e f o r m e r s at Hull House in the 1 8 9 0 s - J a n e Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley—was similarity of family background. Not only were they all of the u p p e r middle class, but their fathers were politically active men who helped Abraham Lincoln f o u n d and develop the Republican Party in the 1860s. J o h n Addams served eight terms as a state senator in Illinois William L a t h r o p served in Congress as well as in the Illinois legislature' and William Kelley served fifteen consecutive terms in Congress All were vigorous abolitionists, and all encouraged their daughters' interests in public affairs. As J u d g e Alexander Bruce remarked at the joint memorial services held for Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelley after their deaths in 1932 Both of them had the inspiration of great and cultured mothers and both had great souled fathers who, to use the beautiful language of

10. J a n e A d d a m s lo Florence Kelley, [ J u n e 1899], NK Papers; Mary Rozet Smith to Florence Kelley, September 14.1899, A d d a m s Papers; and J a n e A d d a m s to Florence Kelley November 8, 1899, NK Papers. Also J a n e A d d a m s to Florence Kelley, N o v e m b e r 22 1899 NK Papers; and J a n e Addams to Florence Kelley, July 5, 1913, Special Collections, Columbia University.

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J a n e Addams in speaking of her own lineage, 'Wrapped their little daughters in the large men's doubtlets, careless did they fit or no.'"" These three remarkable women were participating in a political tradition that their fathers had helped create. While they were growing up in the 1860s and 1870s, they gained awareness through their fathers' experience of the mainstream of American political processes, thereby learning a great deal about its currents—particularly that its power could be harnessed to fulfill the purposes of well-organized interest groups. Although Hull House residents have generally been interpreted as reformers with a religious motivation, it now seems clear that they were instead motivated by political goals. In that regard they resembled a large proportion of other women social settlement leaders, including those associated with Hull House after 1900, such as Grace and Edith Abbot, whose father was Nebraska's first lieutenant governor, or Sophonisba Breckinridge, daughter of a Kentucky congressman. 12 Women leaders in the social settlement movement seem to have differed in this respect from their male counterparts, who were seeking alternatives to more orthodox religious, rather than political, careers. In, but not of, the Social Gospel movement, the women at Hull House were a political boat on a religious stream, advancing political solutions to social problems that were fundamentally ethical or moral, such as the right of workers to a fair return for their labor or the right of children to schooling. Another source of the immediate solidarity among Addams, Lathrop, and Kelley was their shared experience of higher education. Among the first generation of American college women, they graduated from Rockford College, Vassar College, and Cornell University, respectively, in the early 1880s and then spent the rest of the decade searching for work and for a social identity commensurate with their talents. Addams tried medical school; Lathrop worked in her father's law office; Kelley, after being denied admission to graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, studied law and government at the University of Zurich, where she received a much more radical education than she would have 11. See the biographies of Addams, Lathrop, and Kelley in James et al., eds. (η. 2 above); and Rebecca Sherrick, "Private Visions, Public Lives: T h e Hull-House Women in the Progressive Era" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1980). Judge Bruce's remarks are in the transcription "Memorial Services for Mrs. Florence Kelley, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, Hull House, Chicago, May 6, 1932," Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, Stale Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison (typescript, 1932), pp. 20-21. In this description of her lineage, Addams adapted lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. 12. T h e political and secular backgrounds of women social settlement leaders can be seen in the biographies of the twenty-six listed as settlement leaders in the classified index of James et al., eds. (η. 2 above), vol. 3. More than a third had fathers who were attorneys or judges or held elected office. Only one was the daughter of a minister—Vida Scudder, whose father died when she was an infant.

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had she remained in Philadelphia. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the social settlement movement was the right movement at the right time for this first generation of college-educated women, who were able to gain only limited entry to the male-dominated professions of law, politics, or academics." While talented college women of religious backgrounds and inclinations were energetically recruited into the missionary empires of American churches, those seeking secular outlets for their talents chose a path that could be as d a u n t i n g as that of a missionary outpost. Except f o r the field of medicine, where women's institutions served the needs of women physicians a n d students, talented women were blocked f r o m entering legal, political, and academic professions by male-dominated institutions and networks. In the 1890s the social settlement movement supplied a perfect structure for women seeking secular means of influencing society because it collectivized their talents, it placed and protected them among the working-class immigrants whose lives d e m a n d e d amelioration, and it provided t h e m with access to the male political arena while preserving their i n d e p e n d e n c e f r o m male-dominated institutions. Since Hull House drew on local sources of f u n d i n g , often family f u n d s supplied by wealthy women,' 4 J a n e Addams f o u n d it possible to finance the settlement's activities without the assistance or control of established religious or educational institutions. In 1895 she wrote that Hull H o u s e was modeled after T o y n b e e Hall in London, where "a g r o u p of University m e n . . . reside in the p o o r e r quarter of L o n d o n for the sake of influencing the people there toward better local government and wider social a n d intellectual life." Substituting "college-trained women" for "University m e n , " Hull House also placed a greater emphasis on economic factors. As Addams continued, " T h e original residents came to Hull H o u s e with a conviction that social intercourse could best express the growing sense of the economic unity of society." She also emphasized their political autonomy, writing that the first residents "wished the social spirit to be the u n d e r c u r r e n t of the life of Hull-House, whatever direction the stream might take." 15 U n d e r Kelley's influence in 1892, the social spirit at Hull House turned decisively toward social r e f o r m , bringing the community's formidable energy and talents to bear on a historic campaign on behalf of labor legislation for women and children. 1 6

13. For t h e most complete study of the settlements, see Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: O x f o r d University Press, 1967). 14. J a n e A d d a m s , "Hull-House: A Social Settlement," in Hull House Maps and Papers (Boston: T h o m a s Crowell & Co., 1895), pp. 2 0 7 - 3 0 , esp. p. 230. 15. Ibid., p p . vii, 2 0 7 - 8 . 16. For Kelley's singular influence on Addams's shift from philanthropist to r e f o r m e r

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Meredith Tax's Rising of the Women contains the most complete account of this campaign, which culminated in the passage of landmark state legislation in 1893. There Tax justly reproves Jane Addams for assigning Hull House more than its share of the credit for the campaign. T h e settlement did play a critical leadership role in this venture, but it was never alone. Indeed it was part of a complex network of women's associations in Chicago in the 1890s." About thirty women's organizations combined forces and entered into local politics in 1888 through the Illinois Women's Alliance, organized that year by Elizabeth Morgan and other members of the Ladies Federal Union no. 2073 in response to a crusading woman journalist's stories in the Chicago Times about "City Slave Girls" in the garment industry. 18 The alliance's political goals were clearly stated in their constitution: "The objects of the Alliance are to agitate for the enforcement of all existing laws and ordinances that have been enacted for the protection of women and children—as the factory ordinances and the compulsory education law. T o secure the enactment of such laws as shall be found necessary. To investigate all business establishments and factories where women and children are employed and public institutions where women and children are maintained. To procure the appointment of women, as inspectors and as members of boards of education, and to serve on boards of management of public institutions."" Adopting the motto "Justice to Children, Loyalty to Women," the alliance acted as a vanguard for the entrance of women's interests into municipal and state politics, focusing chiefly on the passage and enforcement of compulsory education laws. One of its main accomplishments was the agreement of the city council in 1889 "to appoint five lady inspectors" to enforce city health codes.™ The diversity of politically active women's associations in Chicago in the late 1880s was reflected in a list of organizations associated with the alliance.21 Eight bore names indicating a religious or ethical affiliation, in 1892, see Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Lift and Legend ofJane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 77. 17. Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 18801917 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 23-89, 302, n. 40. The number and variety of women's organizations in Chicago in the 1890s can be seen in the multitude whose remaining records are listed in Andrea Hinding, Ames Sheldon Bower, and Clark A. Chambers, eds., Women's History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States, vol. 1, Collections (New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1979), pp. 228-57. 18. See Ralph Scharnau, "Elizabeth Morgan, Crusader for Labor Reform," Labor History 14, no. 3 (Summer 197S): 340-51. 19. Newspaper clipping, [November] 1888, Thomas J. Morgan Papers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, box 4, vol. 2. 20. Alliance motto in the Chicago Daily lnterocean (November 2, 1889), Morgan Papers; women inspectors are mentioned in the Chicago Tribune (July 26, 1889). 21. The list is reprinted in Tax, p. 301.

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such as the Woodlawn branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Ladies Union of the Ethical Society. Five were affiliated with working women or were trade unions, such as the Working Women's Protective Association, the Ladies Federal Union no. 2703, and (the only predominantly male organization on the list) the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly. Another five had an intellectual or cultural focus, such as the Hopkins Metaphysical Association or the Vincent Chatauqua Association. Three were women's professional groups, including the Women's Press Association and the Women's Homeopathic Medical Society. Another three were female auxiliaries of male social organizations, such as the Lady Washington Masonic Chapter and the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Two were suffrage associations, including the Cook County Suffrage Association; another two were clubs interested in general economic reform, the Single Tax Club and the Land Labor Club no. 1; and one was educational, the Drexel Kindergarten Association. Florence Kelley's 1892 entrance into this lively political scene was eased by her previous knowledge of and appreciation for the work of the alliance. Soon after its founding she had written the leaders a letter that was quoted extensively in a newspaper account of an alliance meeting, declaring, "The child labor question can be solved by legislation, backed by solid organization, and by women cooperating with the labor organizations, which have done all that has thus far been done for the protection of working c h i l d r e n . I n Chicago Kelley was perceived as a friend of the alliance because in 1889 and 1890 she had helped organize the New York Working Women's Society's campaign "to add women as officials in the office for factory inspection." According to Kelley, the Society, "a small group of women from both the wealthy and influential class and the working class, . . . circulated petitions, composed resolutions, and was supported finally in the years 1889 and 1890 in bringing their proposal concerning the naming of women to factory inspectorships to the legislature, philanthropic groups and unions."" As a result in 1890 the New York legislature passed laws creating eight new positions for women as state factory inspectors. This was quite an innovation since no woman factory inspector had yet been appointed in Great Britain or Germany, where factory inspection began, and the only four previously appointed in the United States had been named within the last two years in Pennsylvania." Writing in 1897 about this event, Kelley emphasized the political autonomy of the New York Working Women's Society: "Their 22. Newspaper clipping, November 1888, Morgan Papers, box 4, vol. 2. 23. Florence Kelley, "Die weibliche Fabrikinspektion in den Vereinigten Staaten," in Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, ed. H. Braun (Tübingen: Edgar Jaffe, 1897), 11:128-42, 130, translated by J. Donovan Penrose as "Women as I nspectors of Factories in the United States" (typescript). 24. Ibid.

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proposal to add women as officials in the office for factory inspection was made for humanitarian reasons; in no way did it belong to the goals of the general workers' movement, although it found support among the unions." 25 T h u s when Kelley arrived at Hull House, she had already been affiliated with women's associations that were independent of trade unions even though cooperating with them. For Kelley on that chilly December morning the question was not whether she would pursue a career in social reform but how, not whether she would champion what she saw as the rights and interests of working women and children but how she would do that. T h e question of means was critical in 1891 since her husband was unable to establish a stable medical practice, even though she had spent the small legacy inherited on her father's death the year before on new equipment for his practice. Indeed so acute were Kelley's financial worries that, when she decided to flee with h e r children to Chicago, she borrowed train fare from an English governess, Mary Forster, whom she had probably befriended at a neighborhood park. 26 Chicago was a natural choice for Kelley since Illinois divorce laws were more equitable, and within its large population of reform-minded and politically active women she doubtlessly hoped to find employment that would allow her to support herself and her children. Although the historical record is incomplete, it seems likely that she headed first to a different community of women—that at the national headquarters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)." She had been well paid for articles written for their national newspaper, the Union Signal—the largest women's newspaper in the world, with a circulation in 1890 of almost 100,000—and the WCTU was at the height of its institutional development in Chicago at that time, sponsoring "two day nurseries, two Sunday schools, an industrial school, a mission that sheltered f o u r thousand homeless or destitute women in a twelve-month period, a f r e e medical dispensary that treated over sixteen h u n d r e d patients a year, a lodging house for men that had . . . provided temporary housing f o r over fifty thousand men, and a low-cost restaurant." 28 Just after Kelley arrived, the WCTU opened its Women's Temple, a twelvestory office building and hotel. Very likely it was someone there who told Kelley about Hull House. T h e close relationship between Hull House and other groups of women in Chicago was exemplified in Kelley's interaction with the Chicago Women's Club. T h e minutes of the club's first meeting after Kelley's 25. Ibid. 26. Florence Kelley to Caroline Kelley, February 24, 1892, NK Papers. 27. In "Early Days at Hull House" (n. 5 above), Nicholas Kelley wrote that his mother "became a resident at Hull House almost at once after we came to Chicago" (p. 427). 28. Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), pp. 90, 98, 142.

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arrival in Chicago show that on J a n u a r y 25, 1892, she spoke u n d e r the sponsorship of J a n e A d d a m s on the sweating system a n d urged that a committee be created on the p r o b l e m . " Although a R e f o r m D e p a r t m e n t was not created until 1894, minutes of March 23, 1892, show that the club's H o m e Department "decided u p o n cooperating with Mrs. Kelly [JIC] of Hull House in establishing a B u r e a u of Women's Labor." T h u s the club took over part of the f u n d i n g and the responsibility for the counseling service Kelley had been providing at Hull House since February. (Initially Kelley's salary for this service was f u n d e d by the settlement, possibly with emergency monies given by Mary Rozet Smith.) In this way middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen were drawn into the settlement's activities. In 1893 J a n e A d d a m s successfully solicited the s u p p o r t of wealthy clubwomen to lobby for the antisweatshop legislation: "We insisted that well-known Chicago women should accompany this first little g r o u p of Settlement folk who with trade-unionists moved u p o n the state capítol in behalf of factory legislation." A d d a m s also described the lobbying Hull House residents conducted with o t h e r voluntary associations: "Before the passage of the law could be secured, it was necessary to appeal to all elements of the community, and a little g r o u p of us addressed the o p e n meetings of trades-unions a n d of benefit societies, c h u r c h organizations, and social clubs literally every evening for three months."' 0 T h u s Hull House was part of a larger social universe of voluntary organizations, and one important feature of its political effectiveness was its ability to gain the s u p p o r t of middle-class a n d working-class women. In 1893 the cross-class coalition of the Illinois Women's Alliance began to dissolve u n d e r the pressure of the economic depression of that year, and in 1894 its leaders disbanded the g r o u p . Hull H o u s e r e f o r m e r s inherited the fruits of the alliance's five years of agitation, and they continued its example of combining working-class a n d middle-class forces. In 1891 Mary Kenney, a self-supporting typesetter who later became the first woman organizer to be employed by the American Federation of Labor, established the J a n e Club adjacent to the settlement, a cooperative b o a r d i n g h o u s e for young working women. In the early 29. Minutes of board meeting, March 23, 1892, Chicago W o m e n ' s C l u b Papers, Chicago Historical Society. See also H e n r i e t t e G r e e n b a u m Frank a n d Amalie H o f e r J e r o m e , comps., Artnals of the Chicago Women's Club for the First Forty Years of Its Organization, ¡876— 1916 (Chicago: Chicago W o m e n ' s Club, 1916), p. 120. Kelley d e f i n e d "sweating" as "the f a r m i n g out by competing m a n u f a c t u r e r s to competing contractors t h e material for garments, which, in turn, is distributed a m o n g competing men a n d w o m e n to be made up. T h e middle-man, or contractor, is t h e sweater (though he also may be himself subjected to pressure f r o m above), and his employees a r e the sweated or o p p r e s s e d " ("Sweating System in Chicago," Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois, 1892 [Springfield, 111.: State Printer, 1893]). 30. J a n e Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1912), pp. 202, 201.

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1890s Kenney was a key figure in the settlement's efforts to promote uniom organizing among working women, especially bookbinders." Thus the combination of middle-class and working-class women at Hull House in 1892—93 was an elite version of the type of cross-class association represented by the Illinois Women's Alliance of the late 1880s—elite because it was smaller and because its middle-class members had greater sociali resources, familiarity with American political processes, and exposure to higher than average levels of education, while its working-class members (Mary Kenney and Alzina Stevens) were members of occupational and organizational elites." By collectivizing talents and energies, this community made possible the exercise of greater and more effective political power by it members. A comparison of Florence Kelley's antisweatshop legislation, submitted to the Illinois investigative committee in February 1893, with that presented by Elizabeth Morgan dramatically illustrates this political advantage. T h e obvious differences in approach indicate that the chief energy for campaigning on behalf of working women and children had passed from working-class to middle-class social reformers." Both legislative drafts prohibited work in tenement dwellings, Morgan's prohibiting all manufacturing, Kelley's all garment making. Both prohibited the labor of children under fourteen and regulated the labor of children aged fourteen to sixteen. Kelley's went beyond Morgan's in two essential respects, however. Hers mandated an eight-hour day for women in manufacturing, and it provided for enforcement by calling for a state factory inspector with a staff of twelve, five whom were to be women. The reasons for Kelley's greater success as an innovator are far from clear, but one important advantage in addition to her greater education and familiarity with the American political system was the larger community on which she could rely for the law's passage and enforcement. Although Elizabeth Morgan could draw on her experience as her husband's assistant in his work as an attorney and on the support of women unionists, both resources were problematic. Thomas Morgan was erratic and self-centered, and Elizabeth Morgan's relationship with organized women workers was marred by sectarian disputes originating within the male power structure of the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly. For example, in January 1892, when she accused members of the 31. See Eleanor Flexner and Janet Wilson James's entry for Mary Kenney O'Sullivan in James et al., eds. (η. 2 above), 2:655-56. 32. A typesetter and leading labor organizer, Alzina Parsons Stevens became Kelley's chief deputy in 1893, moving into Hull House that year. See Allen F. Davis's entry for Stevens in James et al., eds. (η. 2 above), 3:368-69. 33. Testimony of Florence Kelley and Elizabeth Morgan, Report and Findings of theJoint Committee to Investigate the "Sweat Shop" System, together with a Transcript of the Testimony Taken by the Committee (Springfield, III.: State Printer, 1893), pp. 144-50, 135-40, respectively.

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Shirtwaist Union of being controlled by her husband's opposition within the assembly, "a half dozen women surrounded [her] seat in the meeting and d e m a n d e d an explanation. She refused to give any and notice was served that charges would be preferred against her at the next meeting of the Ladies' Federation of Labor."" Perhaps Morgan's inability to count o n a supportive community explains her failure to provide for adequate enforcement and to include measures for workers over the age of sixteen in her legislative d r a f t . C o m p a r e d to Kelley's, Morgan's bill was politically impotent. It could not enforce what it endorsed, and it did not affect adults. Kelley's d r a f t was passed by the Illinois legislature in J u n e 1893, providing for a new office of enforcement and for an eight-hour day f o r women workers of all ages. After Henry Demarest Lloyd declined an invitation to serve as the state's first factory inspector, reform governor J o h n Peter Altgeld followed Lloyd's recommendations and appointed Kelley. T h u s eighteen months after her arrival in Chicago, she f o u n d herself in charge of a dedicated and well-paid staff of twelve mandated to see that prohibitions against tenement workshops and child labor were observed and to enforce a pathbreaking article restricting the working hours of women and children. Hull House provided Kelley and other women reformers with a social vehicle for i n d e p e n d e n t political action and a means of bypassing the control of male associations and insitutions, such as labor unions a n d political parties; at the same time they had a strong institutional framework in which they could meet with other reformers, both men and women. T h e d r a f t i n g of the antisweatshop legislation revealed how this process worked. In his autobiography, Abraham Bisno, pioneer organizer in the g a r m e n t industry in Chicago and New York, described how he became a regular participant in public discussions of contemporary social issues at Hull House. He joined "a g r o u p . . . composed of H e n r y D. Lloyd, a p r o m i n e n t physician named Bayard Holmes, Florence Kelley, and Ellen G. [Starr] to engage in a campaign for legislation to abolish sweatshops, and to have a law passed prohibiting the employment of women more than eight hours a day."55 Answering a question about the a u t h o r of the bill he endorsed at the 1893 hearings, Bisno said, "Mrs. Florence Kelly [sic] wrote that u p with the advice of myself, Henry Lloyd, and a n u m b e r of prominent attorneys in Chicago." 56 T h u s as the chief a u t h o r of the legislation, Florence Kelley drew on the expertise of Bisno,

34. Newspaper clipping, Morgan Papers, box 4, vol. 6. 35. Abraham Bisno, Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer: An Autobiographical Account of Bisno's Early Life and the Beginnings of Unionism in the Women's Garment Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 202-3. 36. Report and Findings . . . . p. 239.

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o n e of the most dedicated and talented union organizers; of Lloyd, one of the most able elite reformers in the United States; and, surely among the " p r o m i n e n t attorneys," of Clarence Darrow, one of the country's most able r e f o r m lawyers. It is difficult to imagine this cooperative effort between Bisno, Kelley, and Lloyd without the existence of the larger Hull House g r o u p of which they were a part. T h e i r effective collaboration exemplified the process by which members of this remarkable community of women r e f o r m e r s moved into the vanguard of contemporary r e f o r m activity, for they did so in alliance with other groups and individuals. What part did the Hull House community, essential to the d r a f t i n g and passage of the act, have in the statute's enforcement? Who benefited and who lost f r o m the law's enforcement? Answers to these questions help us view the community more completely in the context of its time. D u r i n g the f o u r years that Kelley served as chief factory inspector of Illinois, h e r office and Hull House were institutionally so close as to be almost indistinguishable. Kelley rented rooms for her office across the street f r o m the settlement, with which she and her three most able deputies were closely affiliated. Alzina Stevens moved into Hull House soon a f t e r Altgeld appointed her as Kelley's chief assistant. Mary Kenney lived at the J a n e Club, and Abraham Bisno was a familiar figure at Hull House evening gatherings. J a n e Addams described the protection that the settlement gave to the first factory inspection office in Illinois, the only such office h e a d e d by a woman in her lifetime: " T h e inception of the law had already become associated with Hull House, and when its ministration was also centered there, we inevitably received all the odium which these first e f f o r t s entailed. . . . Both Mrs. Kelley and her assistant, Mrs. Stevens, lived at Hull-House; . . . and one of the most vigorous deputies was the President of the Jane Club. In addition, one of the early m e n residents, since dean of a state law school, acted as prosecutor in the cases brought against the violators of the law."" T h u s the law's enforcement was j u s t as collective an undertaking as was its drafting and passage. Florence Kelley and Alzina Stevens were usually the first customers at the Hull H o u s e C o f f e e Shop, arriving at 7:30 for a breakfast conference to plan their strategy for the day ahead. Doubtlessly these discussions continued at the end of the day in the settlement's dining hall. O n e important aspect of the collective strength of Kelley's staff was the socialist beliefs shared by its most dedicated members. As Kelley wrote to Engels in November 1893, "I find my work as inspector most interesting; and as Governor Altgeld places no restrictions whatever upon o u r f r e e d o m of speech, and the English etiquette of silence while in the civil service is u n k n o w n here, we are not hampered by our position and t h r e e of my deputies and my assistant are outspoken Socialists and active in 37. Addams, Twenty Years al Hull-House, p. 207.

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agitation."" In his autobiography Bisno described the "fanatical" commitment that he, Florence Kelley, and most of the "radical group" brought to their work as factory inspectors. For him it was the perfect job since his salary allowed him for the first time to support his wife and children and his work involved direct action against unfair competition within his trade. "In those years labor legislation was looked on as ajoke; few took it seriously," he later wrote. "Inspectors normally . . . were appointed from the viewpoint of political interest. . . . T h e r e were very few, almost no, court cases heard of, and it was left to our department to set the example of rigid enforcement of labor laws."39 Although they were replaced with "political interests" after the election of 1896, this group of inspectors showed what could be accomplished by the enactment of reform legislation and its vigorous enforcement. They demonstrated that women could use the power of the state to achieve social and economic goals. Kelley and her staff began to take violators of the law to court in October 1893. She wrote Lloyd, "I have engaged counsel and am gathering testimony and hope to begin a series of justice court cases this week."40 She soon completed a law degree at Northwestern University and began to prosecute her own cases. Kelley found her work enormously creative. She saw potential innovations in social reform all around her. For example, she thought that the medical chapter of her annual report would "start a new line of activity for medical men and factory inspectors both." 41 True to her prediction, the field of industrial medicine later was launched at Hull House by Alice Hamilton, who arrived at the settlement in 1 897.42 Thus the effects of this small band of inspectors continued long after their dispersal. The community of women at Hull House gave them their start, but their impact extended far beyond that fellowship, thanks in part to the settlement's effective alliance with other groups of women and men. *

*

*

Historians of women have tended to assume that protective labor legislation was imposed on women workers by hostile forces beyond their control—especially by men seeking to eliminate job competition. T o some degree this was true of the 1893 legislation since, by closing tenement 38. Florence Kelley to Friedrich Engels, N o v e m b e r 21, 1893, Archiv, Institute of Marxism-Leninism. 39. Bisno, pp. 148-49. 40. Florence Kelley to Henry Demarest Lloyd, O c t o b e r 10, 1893, Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. 41. Ibid. 42. See Barbara Sicherman's entry for Alice Hamilton in Barbara Sicherman a n d Carol H u r d Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge, Mass.: H a r v a r d University Press, 1980), pp. 303-6.

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dwellings to garment manufacture and by depriving sweatshop contractors of the labor of children under fourteen, the law reduced the number of sweatshops, where women and children predominated, and increased the number of garment workers in factories, where men prevailed. Abraham Bisno was well aware of the widespread opposition to the law and took time to talk with offenders, "to educate the parents who sent their children to work, and the employers of these children, the women who were employed longer than eight hours a day, and their employers."" J a n e Addams also tried to help those who were deprived of work by the new law: "The sense that the passage of the child labor law would in many cases work hardship, was never absent from my mind during the earliest years of its operation. I addressed as many mothers' meetings and clubs among working women as I could, in order to make clear the objective of the law and the ultimate benefit to themselves as well as to their children."" Did the children benefit? While further research is needed on this question, recent scholarship pointing to the importance of working-class support for the schooling of working-class children has revised earlier estimates that children and their families did not benefit. At best the law was a halfway measure that encouraged but could not force parents to place their children in school. Nevertheless, Florence Kelley was pleased with the compliance of parents and school officials. As she wrote Henry Demarest Lloyd, "Out of sixty-five names of children sent to the Board of Education in our first month of notifying it when we turned children under 14 yrs. of age out of factories, twenty-one were immediately returned to school and several others are known to be employed as nursegirls and cashgirls i.e. in non-prohibited occupations. This is good co-operation."" While schools were inadequate and their teachers frequendy prejudiced against immigrants, education was also an important route out of the grinding poverty that characterized immigrant neighborhoods. T h u s it is not surprising that a large minority of parents complied with the law by enrolling their children in school. T h e chief beneficiaries of the law, apart f r o m those children who gained f r o m schooling, were garment workers employed in factories.

43. Bisno, p. 149. 44. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-Home (n. 30 above), p. 205. 45. Florence Kelley to Henry Demarest Lloyd, October 10, 1893, Henry Demarest Lloyd Papiers. Charity campaigns raised funds for some children whose families could not survive wiithout their wages and for those who needed clothes to attend school, but the numbers (of needy children vastly exceeded the abilities of charities or temporary relief agencies no provide for them. Believing that it was the responsibility of society to provide scholanhiips for needy children, Kelley helped establish an agency that drew on public and private soiurces of funding.

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Most of these were men, but about one in four were women/ 6 The 1893 law was designed to prevent the erosion of this factory labor force and its replacement by sweatshop labor. Bisno described that erosion in his testimony before the state investigating committee early in 1893, stating, "Joseph Beifeld & Company have had three hundred and fifty employees some eleven or twelve years ago inside, and they have only eighty now to my knowledge, and they have increased their business about six times as much as it was eleven years ago." 4 ' This decline of the factory population inevitably caused a decline of union membership since it was much more difficult to organize sweatshop workers. Thus as a union official Bisno was defending his own interests, but these were not inimical to all women workers. Demonstrating the support of women unionists for the law's enforcement, members of the Women's Shoemakers Union chastized the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly in February 1894 for their lukewarm support of the by-then-beleaguered eight-hour restriction. They "introduced resolutions, strongly condemning the manufacturers of this City for combining to nullify the state laws. . . . The resolutions further set forth that the members of the Women's Shoemakers Union effected as they were by the operation of the Eight hour Law unanimously approved the Law and for the benefit of themselves, for their sister wage workers and the little children, they pleaded for its maintenance and Enforcement." 48 Although some women workers—particularly those who headed households with small children—must have opposed the law's enforcement, others, especially single women and mothers able to arrange child care, stood to gain from the benefits of factory employment. In a study completed for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1892, Florence Kelley found that 48 percent of Chicago working women lacked the "natural protectors" of fathers or husbands." Viewing them as a permanent feature of the paid labor force, she pointed to the importance of their wages to their families, thereby refuting the notion that all working women were supported by male wage earners. Although the historical evidence does not reveal how many, some young women who had formerly worked in sweatshops and whose families relied heavily on their wages doubtlessly benefited from the legislation by moving into larger factories with better working conditions. 46. Bisno testimony, February 1893, in Report and Findings . . . (n. 33 above), p. 242. Bisno estimated that, of the two unions he had helped create in Chicago, the (male) Cloak Makers Union had about 230 members, the Women's Cloak Makers Union about 30 to 50. This ratio of five to one was probably greater than that among garment factory workers since more men than women tended to join unions. 47. Ibid., p. 236. 48. Mrs. T. J. Morgan to the Illinois Women's Alliance, Chicago, February 28, 1894, Morgan Papers, folder 9. 49. Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois (n. 29 above), p. xlvi.

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T h e 1893 statute made it possible for women as well as men to move from exploitative, low-paying sweatshops into larger shops and factories with power machinery, unions, and higher wages. While the law's prohibition of tenement manufacturing obviously enabled such mobility, its eight-hour clause was no less instrumental since it attacked the basic principles of the sweating system—long hours and low wages. T h e average working day in the garment industry was about ten hours, but in some sweatshops it could be as long as twelve, thirteen, or fourteen hours. Μ Reducing the working day from ten to eight hours did not significantly decrease production in factories with electric or steam-powered machinery since productivity could be raised by increasing a machine's speed or a worker's skill level. However, the eight-hour law drove many subcontractors or "sweaters" out of business since it eliminated the margin of profit created by workers' long hours at foot-powered sewing machines. From the sweatshop workers' perspective, it reduced wages even further since they were paid by the piece and could finish a much smaller amount of goods in eight hours. T h e wages of factory workers, by contrast, were likely to remain the same since negotiations between employers and employees customarily included a consideration of what it cost to sustain life, a factor absent from the sweaters' calculations.51 Another group who benefited indirectly from this "antisweating ' legislation were the men who worked in industries employing large numbers of women workers. Historians of protective labor legislation in England and the United States have noticed the tendency of male coworkers to benefit from legislation passed to protect women. This was true as early as the 1870s in Massachusetts and as late as the 1930s, when many states had laws limiting the hours of women but not the hours of men." The strategy of extending the legislation de facto to men seems to have been a deliberate intent of Kelley and her staff in the mid-1890s. At a high point in her experience as a factory inspector, Kelley wrote Engels on New Year's Eve, 1894: "We have at last won a victory for our 8 hours law. The Supreme Court has handed down no decision sustaining it, but the Stockyards magnates having been arrested until they are tired of it, have instituted the 8 hours day for 10,000 employees, men, women and children. We have 18 suits pending to enforce the 8 hours law and we think we shall establish it permanently before Easter. It has been a painful struggle of eighteen months and the Supreme Court may annul the law. But I have great hopes that the popular interest may prove too strong."" 50. Bisno testimony (n. 46 above), p. 240. 51. Bisno (n. 35 above), p. 124. 52. Ronnie Steinberg, Wages and Hours: Labor and Reform in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 59-87. 53. Florence Kelley to Friedrich Engels, Hull House, December 31, 1894, Archiv, Institute for Marxism-Leninism.

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When the eight-hour clause of the law was declared unconstitutional in 1895, therefore, it was beginning to affect industrywide changes in Chicago's largest employer, extending far beyond the garment industry. The biggest losers from the enforcement of the 1893 legislation, as measured by the volume of their protest, were Chicago's manufacturers. Formed for the explicit purpose of obtaining a court ruling against the constitutionality of the eight-hour law, the Illinois Manufacturers' Association (IMA) became a model for other state associations and for the National Association of Manufacturers, formed in 1895.* After 1899, when Kelley embarked on a thirty year campaign for state laws protecting working women and children, the National Association of Manufacturers was her constant nemesis and the chief rallying point of her opposition. Given the radical ideas and values behind the passage and enforcement of the 1893 legislation, it is no surprise that, at this stage of her career, Kelley's success inspired an opposition that remained her lifelong foe. After the court decision the Chicago Tribune reported, "In far reaching results the decision is most important. It is the first decision in the United States against the eight-hour law and presents a new obstacle in the path of the movement for shorter hours." An editorial the next day declared: "Labor is property and an interference with the sale of it by contract or otherwise is an infringement of a constitutional right to dispose of property. . . . The property rights of women, says the court, are the same as those of men."" For the first but not the last time in her reform career Florence Kelley encountered opponents who claimed the banner of "women's rights." In 1921 with the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, the potential conflict between women's rights and the protection of women workers became actual. Nearly a generation earlier in 1895 the opposition was clearly a facade for the economic interests of the manufacturers. What conclusions can be drawn about the Hull House community from this review of their activities on behalf of antisweatshop legislation? First, and foremost, it attests to the capacity of women to sustain their own institutions. Second, it shows that this community's internal dynamics promoted a creative mixture of mutual support and individual expression. Third, these talented women reformers used their institution as a means of allying with male reformers and entering the mainstream of the American political process. In the tradition of earlier women's associa54. Alfred H. Kelley, "A History of the Illinois M a n u f a c t u r e r s ' Association" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1938), pp. 1-62. In 1890 Illinois was third in the United Stales in the value of its m a n u f a c t u r e d products and sixth in the n u m b e r of children u n d e r t h e a g e of sixteen employed in manufacturing (see J a n e t J e a n Zuck, "Florence Kelley a n d t h e Crusade for Child Labor Legislation in the United States, 1892-1932" [M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1946], p. 18). 55. Chicago Tribune (March 15, 16, 1895).

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tions in the United States, they focused on the concerns of women and children, but these concerns were never divorced f r o m those of men and of the society as a whole. U n d e r the leadership of Florence Kelley, they p u r s u e d gender-specific r e f o r m s that served class-specific goals. I n these respects the Hull House community serves as a paradigm for women's participation in Progressive reform. Strengthened by the support of women's separate institutions, women reformers were able to develop their capacity for political leadership free f r o m many if not all of the constraints that otherwise might have been imposed on their power by the male-dominated parties or groups with which they cooperated. Building on o n e of the strengths of the nineteenth-century notion of "women's sphere"—its social activism on behalf of the rights and interests of women and children—they represented those rights and interests innovatively and effectively. Ultimately, however, their power encountered limits imposed by the male-dominated political system, limits created more in response to their class-specific than to their gender-specific reform efforts. Department of History University of California, Los Angeles

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POVERTY, RESPECTABILITY, AND ABILITY TO WORK

SUSAN ESTABROOK KENNEDY

ABSTRACT Early in tbe twentieth century, Progressive reformers selected working-class women as one of many groups wbicb bad become disadvantaged as a result of tbe impact of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization on American society. Tbese middle-class reformers brought tbe tools of investigation, muckraking, social settlement work, and sociology to bear on tbe difficulties faced by working-class women in tbeir homes and workplaces. Tbe Progressives faced an essential dilemma between protection and selfprotection: tbe promotion of trade unionism could put working-class women into a position of asserting power in tbeir own right and working for improvement of conditions on tbeir own terms; protective legislation and charitable activities might take care of women who seemed unable to care for themselves. As efforts to organize working-class women met with slim success, and as cooperative efforts between working-class women and affluent allies broke down, middle- and upper-middle-class reformers increasingly turned to regulatory legislation to solve the practical problems which working-class women faced in living and working. By tbe eve of World War I, emphasis had shifted away from opportunity and toward protection.

PROGRESSIVE REFORMERS DISCOVER WORKING-CLASS WOMEN Until the early twentieth century, working-class women had largely been left to their own devices to survive, cope with poverty and difficult conditions, and struggle upwards toward middle-class security and respectability. The American Dream was based on the assumption that people could and should take care of themselves, and that everyone had an inherent right to independent action. Social Darwinists believed that each person must bear final responsibility for his or her own status in society, since position was supposedly determined by ability, ambition, and hard work. Consequently, most early efforts to help working-class women came under the heading of charity or philanthropy, justifiable only in times of crisis. Preliminary efforts to aid working-class women through social or public institutions continued to face these prevailing attitudes and obstacles. Moreover, the determination of Americans to succeed on their own often stood in the way of people taking advantage of this kind of help. For a number of years, reformers themselves were determined that their work would be directed at the creation of opportunities in which people could do for themselves, rather than the establishment of custodial protection for the disadvantaged. By the eve of World War I, however, many workers in the cause of reform had become disappointed in the working-class women they sought to help. Increasingly, therefore, the

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energies of the middle-class reformers focused on changes in the law or in social institutions to extend to working-class women the protection they evidently needed but could not secure by their own efforts. The road to protectionism was not a direct one, however; nor did the protectionists begin as protectionists. At the turn of the century, a new generation of moral activists called "Progressives" arose out of the middle-class, the colleges, and the professions, vowing to make order out of America's chaotic growth, to redress some of the imbalances in modern society, and to remove artificial barriers which stood in the way of ideal democracy and social mobility. At no time did these reformers constitute a single united group with an agreed-upon agenda of necessary changes. Rather, they formed coalitions, occasionally supporting one another's separate causes in the interest of broad principles of democracy and opportunity becausc most Progressives agreed that the traditional democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers for an agricultural society in the late eighteenth century had been seriously altered by the realities of modern expansion, industrialization, and urbanization. And they wished both to restore those original ideals of freedom and democratic participation and to improve the "quality of life" of their contemporaries, especially by improving the efficiency of human effort. At the same time, these reformers did not wish to assume personal or state control over individual lives. In offering the protection of society or government to the disadvantaged, such as working-class women, Progressives stressed availability and opportunity rather than management and custody. They hoped to create open situations in which people would be free to help themselves. And if their relations with working-class women eventually deteriorated into a "feminism of good works," their initial plans called for independence within a framework of protection. Yet the balance of these two forces - protection and independence - remained a crucial dilemma for the Progressives and their successors.

INVESTIGATORS EXAMINE NEW SOCIAL REALITIES In approaching any problem, Progressives placed considerable value on orderly, moral, practical, and scientifically sound evaluation and solution. The Gilded Age had generated vague imbalances and discontents. Before launching corrective action, the reformers wanted to know exactly what the difficulties were and how far they extended. For the first time in American history, therefore, reformers began as fact-finders; and for the first time, they developed a significant body of data about the actual living and laboring conditions of working-class women. Some of the earliest investigators were authors or journalists. Helen Stuart Campbell, for example, had already earned one reputation as a writer of children's stories in the 1860s and another as an activist in the home economics movement in the 1870s before she published Tbe Problem of tbe Poor in 1882, a description of a New York City waterfront mission which included arguments on the bad effects of low pay for women. She remained with this theme, exposing the impossibility of living decently on such wages, in a magazine series published in 1886 as Mrs. Hemdon's Income. And in the same year, she

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began a weekly series of articles for the New York Tribune on conditions of women working in department stores and the needle trades; eventually collected as Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Tbeir Trades and Their Lives, the stories were published as a book in 1887. Four years later, the American Economic Association gave an award to her survey of conditions among American and European working women, which was published in 1893 under the title Women Wage-Earners. Helen Campbell dramatized working-class women; rather than dealing with them abstractly or statistically, she presented graphic stories of women like Rose Haggerty, seamstress-turned-prostitute to care for her invalid mother and small brothers and sisters, or Lotte Bauer who died of hemmorrhage over her sewing machine after the foreman had cheated her of wages and seduced her younger sister. The shock value of these pieces began to make middle-class readers aware of living conditions of their "social inferiors." (1) Another journalist, Mary Heaton Vorse, used the same techniques to draw public attention to strikes of textile workers at Lawrence in 1912, steel workers in 1919 and 1937, mill hands in Passaic, New Jersey in 1926, and the United Textile Workers in North Carolina in 1929. (2) Some middle-class women, such as Dorothy Richardson and Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, actually entered working-class occupations long enough to gather materials for books on conditions there. Dorothy Richardson produced a particularly sensational account of grim lodging houses, prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, death by fire and diptheria, and insanity as she reported on her work in paper box factory, as an artificial flower maker, a white goods operator, a jewelry case maker, and a shaker in a laundry, before an old friend rescued her from a white slaver and sent her to a night school stenography course which would open the path to respectable white-collar employment. Mrs. Van Vorst and her sister-in-law also wrote detailed descriptions of their work in a variety of occupations such as a Pittsburgh pickle factory and pointed up the unequal treatment of men and women workers in each case. (3) Most of these books concluded with a plea for charitable intervention and philanthropy to educate working-class women toward moral uplift and more efficient work habits. Occasionally, an author like Mary Heaton Vorse preached unionization and worker solidarity. But most of these writers believed that working-class women were still unable to help themselves. Domestic reformers also found themselves investigating conditions while they worked out solutions. In Boston, for example, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union was organized in 1877 "for the advancement of women." After 1890, when Mary Morton Kimball Kehew became director, the Union increasingly moved toward educational work, establishing training programs in housekeeping, dressmaking, and sales while offering job counselling based on its investigations of opportunities for skilled labor among women, jobs for girls in manufacturing, and in such industries as paper box making. Social factfinding became more organized when Susan Myra Kingsbury became director of the research department in 1907. A veteran of social research in England and Massachusetts, Kingsbury developed systematic field studies and used Boston area graduate students to compile information, which she analyzed and published as pamphlets and books on such topics as labor laws and industrial home work. (4) Charitable organizations also began to move in the direction of scientific collection of information to support their good works. When Mary Richmond went to work for the

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Bíaltimore Charity Organization Society in the late 1880s as assistant treasurer, she also vcolunteered as a "friendly visitor" to gather data on the recipients of charitable gifts. At fiirst, charity organization leaders welcomed these case studies as a guarantee that the geenerosity of wealthy contributors would not be misused, but gradually, thorough resecarci? became the basis for perfecting treatment of problems uncovered. Mary Richmond caarried this philosophy and method with her to Philadelphia in 1900 and then to New Yfork in 1909 when she was named Director of the Charity Organization Department of thhe two-year-old Russell Sage Foundation. Under her leadership, the Foundation financed sttudies of communities, ethnic groups, occupations, working conditions, and labor regulaitions - frequently including or focusing on working-class women. (5) Bietween 1907 and 1917 the Russell Sage Foundation sponsored the investigation and diistributed the results of a collection of industrial surveys aimed at "improvement of scocial and living conditions in the United States." The Foundation frequently cooperated wrìth other agencies in these studies; the Pittsburgh Survey, for example, used foundation fuinds for four major and several minor investigations. Similarly, the Foundation paid imvestigators who compiled the materials on standards of living among New York City wvorking-men's families for the New York State Conference of Charities and Corrections. Im funding and publishing these collections, the Russell Sage Foundation fulfilled the diouble function of awakening middle-class readers to industrial and working-class condit i o n s and of gathering evidence for reformers to use in pressing for state regulation of wvages, hours, health, safety, and related standards. Authors of the Pittsburgh Survey learned that not only were the facts of women's work generally unknown outside the imdustries in which they labored, but employers themselves frequently knew practically ncothing about the women who worked for them. In almost every study, the surveyors aiimed at a double presentation of evidence: on the one hand numerical compilations of wvages, hours, regularity of employment, family budgets, categories of workers, and similaar data satisfied the cry of reformers for statistical and scientific weapons for their argum e n t s in favor of protective legislation; on the other hand, personal stories of the survey suubjects dramatized the human side of their problems. When Katharine Anthony wrote Miotbers Wbo Must Earn, a study of female employment in the West Side distria of Manhaattan in 1914, she presented tables showing numbers of widows and wives of disabled nvien working, proportions of households which took in boarders, and ranges of earnings b>y these women breadwinners. She reported further that almost all of the 370 women innvestigated had told her, "If I had to do over, I'd never marry." In addition, the pampbhlets and books usually concluded with an appeal for reform. The Standard of Living Aimong Workingmen's Families in New York City (1909) appealed for a scale of wages baased on the cost of living; Women in tbe Bookbinding Trade (1913) protested against nijght work for women; and A Seasonal Industry: A Study of tbe Millinery Trade in New Y(ork (1917) argued for both minimum wage laws and alternative means of employment too give work during slack seasons. (6) V/arious charitable and reform groups conducted similar investigations to bolster their apppeals for improvements. The Women's Trade Union League studied the ethnic compositidon of the white goods industry and the effects of irregular employment on usable wages. Trhe same group compiled information on wages, hours, working conditions, and length of ecmployment of women in various cities and trades; they exposed inhuman conditions

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of women and children earning their livings in tenements; and they raised issues of employers' responsibilities for the moral downfall of underpaid workers. Chicago's Juvenile Protection Association surveyed working conditions of waitresses, hotel maids, and other women workers, while the Immigrants' Protective League collected information on Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, and Bulgarians living in Chicago. By 1910 books on working women could draw on materials gathered in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, Oregon, and California. (7) Eventually, even the United States government joined in the collection of information. The first Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, had employed twenty special investigators as early as 1888 to collect information on industrial hours, wages, employment conditions of women and children, housing and living costs, for inclusion in his annual reports. At least one of his employees, Mary Clare de Graffenried publicized this social data in prize-winning essays which, like the work of Helen Campbell, exposed some of the economic difficulties of women. (8) But the federal government did little beyond the decennial census to gather materials specifically on women. By the early twentieth century, however, pressure had mounted for a thorough investigation of industrial, social, moral, educational, and physical conditions of employed women and children. In 1906, Congress authorized a study, (9) and between 1910 and 1913, the Commissioner of Labor issued a massive nineteen-volume Report on Conditions of Women and Child WageEarners in the United States. (10) In addition to historical studies of women in industry and women in trade unions, investigators collected information on age, hours, terms of employment, health, morals, literacy, sanitation, means of protection, organization, and laws for women and children workers in dozens of trades including cotton textiles, men's ready-made clothing, glass, silk, and laundry work. Although the studies formally involved only employed persons, they also uncovered rich materials about the personal and home lives of members of the working classes, particularly relating low earnings and poor working conditions to family budgets, health, morality, education, and the need for society to be concerned about these women and children. Pioneer sociologists and social workers also developed case-work studies to accumulate factual knowledge and often publicized the results of their social investigations. Teachers of social work began to separate their practical reform-oriented tasks from the theoretical work of the sociologist, and developed schools devoted to the training of professional investigators, analysts, administrators, settlement-hours workers, and staffs of the growing number of local and governmental agencies devoted to social improvement. Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott worked at the University of Chicago, where they concentrated on housing and juvenile questions. Both, wrote extensively, not only out of their own researches but also as publicists making government and foundation survey results available in the popular journals of the day in order to educate middle-class readers to some of the problems of industrial and working-class life. Susan Myra Kingsbury, with her reputation as a social researcher already established by studies of women and children in factories and homes, joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College in 1915 as professor of social economy and director of the first academic department offering post-graduate training in social services. Kingsbury emphasized practical application of theoretical training, encouraging students in field experience and research; students worked in factories and social welfare agencies during the summers. Later, Kingsbury would also pioneer

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in worker education. (11) The information-gatherers hoped to use their results to press for reforms on behalf of working-class women.

SOCIAL WORKERS ENTER THE NEIGHBORHOODS Meanwhile, from the schools, the charities, and the tradition of good works came the settlement house workers and social housekeepers who would go into the neighborhoods to show working-class women how to improve their lives in practical ways. Dozens of religious and social reformers established social settlements in ghetto areas of large cities, first intending to civilize the immigrants by their middle-class example, and later turning to investigation, lobbying, unionization, and legislation in the attack on urban poverty and impotence. Settlement workers found women especially useful in their efforts to penetrate the ghetto. The most famous of the Chicago settlements, Hull House, was established in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Both women were educated in a women's seminary; both had strong leanings toward religion; both travelled abroad and studied European settlements. While Jane Addams handled fund-raising and executive administration, Ellen Starr won support from the city's fashionable elite. Determined to "live with the poor," they rented the dilapidated Hull Mansion on Chicago's West Side, surrounded by Sicilian, Italian, Greek, Russian, and German immigrants. At first, the two young women concentrated on acculturation, attempting to share fine arts and the literature of Shakespeare and Browning with their new neighbors. But gradually, they came to view the settlement as "an institution attempting to learn from life itself," and within four years Hull House had become a day nursery, playground, cooperative boardinghouse for working girls, medical dispensary, and cooking and sewing school as well as a theatre, music school, and art gallery. By 1895, the residents had gathered and published an extensive collection of materials on tenement and factory conditions, which they used to press for factory inspection, child labor laws, and a host of other industrial and welfare legislation. Sunday afternoon teas at Hull House brought poor women together with trade unionists and social philosophers; one girl remembered, "we began to feel that we were part of something that was more important than just our own problems." (12) If settlement workers began with modest middle-class ambitions, their surroundings usually educated them rather quickly to social realities. Hull House provided early training for social activists like Mary Eliza McDowell. In 1894, she was organizing a women's club at Dr. Graham Taylor's Chicago Commons; the dozen immigrant women who met on Monday evenings apparently spent considerable time praising one another as "ladies" and singing patriotic songs. But a few years later, "Fighting Mary" McDowell had become the "Garbage Lady" and the "Angel of the Stockyards." Living among the Irish, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian, and Slavic immigrants in the "back of the yards" distría behind the stockyards and meat-packing plants, she directed the University of Chicago Settlement and established day nurseries, English classes, garbage disposal, and a neighborhood playground while unionizing stockyard workers and agitating for the vote for women in municipal elections. (13)

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And the work multiplied. So many settlements in so many poor neighborhoods, sometimes more than one in a section. In addition to Hull House and the Commons, Chicago had Benton House, Gads Hill Center, Olivet Community Center, Erie Neighborhood House, Emerson House, and a dozen others operated by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Catholics, universities, and independents. (14) New York City also had many settlement houses, the most famous at Henry Street where Lillian Wald combined settlement work with her commitment to public health nursing. By 1913, the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service was organizing two hundred thousand visits each year, maintaining first aid stations, and providing convalescent facilities - all at fees "most considerate of the dignity and independence of the patient." As in Chicago, New York settlements combined philanthropy with social work; the Lewisohns, for example, brought dance and theatre to Henry Street and built the Neighborhood Playhouse. (15) Every large and industrial city had its settlements, such as Denison House in Boston, Asacog House in Brooklyn, College Settlement in Philadelphia, and Kingsley House in New Orleans.

IMMIGRANTS' PROBLEMS REQUIRE AID Settlement workers and other concerned reformers took up a host of issues at the turn of the century, often bringing a professional element of organization to causes which had been in private charitable hands in the past. Immigrants, for example, had drawn on several networks of informal ethnic or religious group support in making their first adjustments to America. Earlier settlers from many districts of Italy met paisani at Castle Garden or Ellis Island and helped them find temporary lodging or directed them to transportation to their destinations further inland. The United Hebrew Charities performed similar services for Jewish newcomers, and women's groups assisted with settlement in cities like Pittsburgh. But immigrants sometimes suffered exploitation by older compatriots, losing money or tickets or possessions, and tales increased of innocent country girls lured into white slavery by those who posed as protectors. By 1908, the founders of Hull House and others like Sophonisba Breckinridge and Grace Abbott created the Immigrants Protective League, an agency to aid transient, stranded, bewildered, or unemployed immigrants in the Chicago area. The IPL remained in its headquarters at Hull House for the next eleven years and in 1919 became a state-wide operation, often using the University of Chicago Graduate School of Social Service to assist in its investigations and placements. Educators also tried to assist the assimilation of immigrants through language, civics, and lifestyle training. Preconceived notions about immigrant women led school personnel, social workers, and homevisitors to design Americanization programs which offered domestic instruction, such as cooking, while men learned through work-forms and public involvement. Immigrant women learned English words for household items; men learned words like "machinery" and "foreman" and "vote." In these efforts, the professionals developed programs which were less effective than those structured by the immigrants themselves, in which they learned political awareness and use of the network of public social services. On the other hand, educators enjoyed more success when they taught immigrant and working-class girls a trade, often combining vocational training in dressmaking or sewing or cord work with citizenship lessons and sometimes religious education

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ass well. Settlement houses also became interested in vocational training. Henry Street, for e >x ample, established a model shop in 1897 and offered scholarships to girls who wished too learn there. Lenora O'Reilly, veteran of the Knights of Labor and the Working Womem's Society of the 1880s, worked with Lillian Wald on this project and later helping to esstablish the Alliance Employment Bureau, which by 1902 had evolved into the Manhattaan Trade School, offering apprenticeships and teaching citizenship. Similarly, Boston's Rtutland Corner House offered temporary shelter and employment to women who met its crriteria of "poverty, respectability, and ability to work," training inmates in its laundry amd sewing rooms. (16) SOCIAL ORDER DEMANDS MORAL REFORM Rteformers showed particular concern for the morals of the poor, worrying both about exploitation of young women and dangers to the social order. Early in the ninteenth centuiry, the hired prostitute had been the middle-class man's substitute for the wealthy geentleman's mistress. By the mid-1800s, with strict Victorian mores required of middleamd upper-class females, the prostitute served as an outlet for men who chose to believe thhat ladies did not enjoy sex and accepted it only out of duty and for reproduction. Some wromen voluntarily chose prostitution, trading youth and strength for income during a shhort career which often ended in crime, disease, and death. Toward the end of the centuiry, however, critics noticed increases in entrapment or "white slavery;" young women f e l t that they were suited for no other life after they had been raped or seduced. Unsophisticated immigrant girls seemed especially vulnerable, as did factory workers, subject too the whim of foremen who demanded sexual favors if work was not to be rejected. By 1S917, for example, the National Council of Jewish Women's Department of Immigrant Aiid was taking newly-arrived girls and their fiances to City Hall for a civil marriage ceremtony "for their protection." Observers like Jane Addams complained that theatrical m«elodramas and cheap literature lured girls to the brothel by dazzling them with pictures off a life not possible on their sweatshop wages. After watching a street girl solicit custormers, make the mistake of picking up a policeman, go through New York's night court, tekll of her desires for pretty clothes and pleasant times, and reject the help of a probation offficer, a reporter moralized, "To blame Florence is as impossible as to help her; . . . she haas had absolutely no education in the control of natural tendencies by spiritual strength. Stiie wants feathers and fun." Labor reformers frequently connected low wages with iimmorality, arguing that women were driven to sell their bodies because they could η cot buy food, clothing, and shelter on their meager wages. Public moralists, clergymen, amd charitable groups personally raided red-light districts in attempts to enlighten prostituites to the evils of their situation. Others established community and state vice commisskons to regulate the trade of pimps and madams as well as to arrest and try to rehabilitate giirls like "Florence." (17) Rtescue for unwed mothers and delinquent girls also interested moral reformers, who fojund most of the objects of their charity among working-class women. Kate Waller Β urrett, wife of a Virginia preacher, first hoped to save the souls of outcasts and prostituites but met with little success. Instead she earned a medical degree in Georgia and oppened a home for unwed mothers. With financial support from Charles N. Crittention,

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she helped organize a memorial to his little dead daughter, the National Florence Crittendon Mission, a group of more than fifty homes across America. Dr. Barrett established strict rules for the houses, forbidding matrons to listen to the "nauseating details" of the girls' downfall and requiring that every girl work in the home, where she would remain until her child was six months old. Furthermore, Dr. Barrett urged unwed mothers to keep their babies rather than offering them for adoption, although she did suggest that they move to a new place to avoid embarrassing the families they had disgraced. "1 am Virginian enough," she said, "to believe that a name should be protected." (18) Like many other reformers, Barrett mingled her concern for the condition of society's outcasts with her interest in sharing her own middle-class and religious values with them.

THE FAMILY MUST BE MAINTAINED Most working-class women, however, were more concerned with growing numbers of babies than with the niceties of their genealogy. By 1910, every thousand native-born married women were bearing 3,396 children·, foreign-born married women delivered 4,275 babies per thousand. Mid-wives and visiting nurses sometimes assisted during these births, and a physician might be called in desperate cases. But childbearing in the slums meant great risks of damage and death to both mother and child, and even religious mothers referred to pregnancy as "a curse of God." Many of these women feared conception and used crude methods of abortion, such as jumping off tables and drinking poisons or household chemicals to free themselves of pregnancies they could not prevent. When one woman in miscarriage pleaded with the physician to help her avoid future pregnancies, he advised her to make her husband sleep on the roof; six months later, he attended her again - when she died of an unsuccessful self-induced abortion. The middle class had some access to contraceptives, although the law forebade sale or distribution of information or devices·, but the working-class remained outside the birth control movement until Margaret Sanger established the magazine Woman Rebel in 1914 to give information to working women. Under federal indictment for violation of the law, she fled to England, learned more about birth control, and returned to open the first birth-control clinic in America in 1916. Margaret Sanger argued that true freedom for women would come only when they controlled their bodies. Various socialists, liberals, anarchists, and Utopians agreed and supported the Sanger crusade, especially when it reached out to working-class women. Emma Goldman, long an advocate of birth control and survivor of a jail sentence for lecturing on it, defined birth control as "largely a workingman's question, above all a working woman's question." Other liberals tried to test the obscentity law in court without real success. At the same time, working-class women failed to respond to the Sanger message in large numbers, probably because of ethnic and religious reservations as well as ignorance. Large families meant more earners·, churches forbade contraception; and many women were too modest to inquire about methods. Sanger, herself, eventually gravitated toward middle-class women who received her message more eagerly. She had begun by arguing that the lower classes could use birth control as a weapon against the system which oppressed them. But by the 1920s, she had moved to a Malthusian doctrine which blamed the working-class's misery on its own

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fecundity, and she preached birth control as a means for the dominant classes to regulate society by controlling the reproduction of the unfit. (19) Meanwhile, other reformers aided working-class women in their efforts to deal with the problem of these children. Hannah Bachman Einstein established the Widowed Mothers' Fund Association in New York to keep families intact and spare widows the necessity of working outside the home. Concerned with the family as a "fundamental social institution," Einstein believed that society had a duty to protect mothers who would rear healthy, responsible citizens. She urged the organization of a state-sponsored system to aid dependent mothers and participated in the investigation which led to the creation in 1915 of independent local child welfare boards to extend public aid to dependent widows with young children, work later expanded in the 1920s. (20) Labor reformers also dealt with child issues, worrying for example about Bohemian woman cigar-makers who were forced to compensate for lack of male support but earned only slightly more than the housekeepers who cared for their children. Critics praised their ambition to provide for their families but registered concern about the effect of an absent working mother on small children. (21)

CONDITIONS OF LABOR NEED CONTROL Eventually, many of the Progressive reformers who wanted to help working-class women came to believe that reform laws could solve some of these problems. Champions of employed women especially turned to the law; and the Progressive Era generated an enormous amount of protective legislation at local and state levels to regulate wages, hours, and working conditions. When the investigations and muckraking exposes revealed the magnitude of these social evils, when working-class women seemed unable to alter their own situations, and when reformers took the position that society and the state held some responsibility for the welfare of its members, a protective framework of law appeared to be the way to eliminate obstacles and create opportunities for social and economic betterment. Reformers acknowledged that such laws interfered with a totally free labor market, that some even limited freedom of contract; but they argued that society should feel justified in regulating women working because of the social effects of women's work. Although some male unionists fought protective legislation, preferring that workers gain benefits for themselves rather than accepting society's guardianship, many AFL groups supported labor legislation for women to protect the income and employment of adult males; and Samuel Gompers hoped that the state would safeguard the working woman who was, after all, "a possible mother," in his words. (22) Regulation of hours of women's work took two main forms: limitation of the workday and workweek, and prohibition of night work for women. As early as 1845, Massachusetts factory women had argued for a ten-hour workday, but Jacksonian ideas about producers' freedom and nineteenth-century reluctance to interfere in private business arrangements delayed first the legislation and then its enforcement. After 1900, however, reformers' activities stirred the public conscience and forced laws in several states. By 1913, thirty-nine states either regulated the maximum number of hours worked by women or forbade the employment of women at night. Sometimes advocates of protection

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compromised; unable to overcome legislative indifference and employers' opposition to an eight-hour law in Illinois, its supporters settled for ten hours and promoted the legislation as a health measure to avoid court rulings on freedom of contract which had cast out an earlier eight-hour law. (23) But California and Washington accepted eight hours after waitresses, laundry workers, and factory laborers testified at the hearings. (24) And Oregon not only outlawed night work, but, in the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Muller v. Oregon in 1908, received the stamp of constitutionality on such protective legislation for women. (25) Between 1913 and 1917, several states such as Wisconsin, Oregon, and Kansas were persuaded by information on fatigue and efficiency to initiate flexible laws under which industrial commissions could regulate women's hours according to the degrees of strain in various occupations; and other areas of the country began to study the physiological values of a limited (usually an eight-hour) workday. (26) Successes in the hours movement heartened reformers who were working on minimum wage legislation. Women remained clustered in unskilled, low paying, seasonal trades where they received unequal wages for equal work, suffered from lack of opportunity to move upward, were not taken seriously as earners, and had their demands for adequate income dismissed on the grounds that they were only working for "pin money." Defenders of freedom of contract and the free labor market continued to argue for individual opportunity, and a few women organizers tried to promote unionization rather than legislation. But critics charged that monopoly rights and special privilege now stood in the way of working women earning a living wage or improving their standard of living by themselves. And investigators frequently linked low pay with immorality, arguing that women who could not survive on such meager earnings had little practical alternatives to dishonor and sexual degradation. Advocates of the minimum wage for women argued that it was a "socially just and economically advantageous" means of providing the women with health and moral standards, and of sparing society and employers the immorality induced by poverty. In 1911, responding to these accummulated arguments, Massachusetts passed the first state minimum wage law, to be followed by ten other states in the next six years. (27) Progressives also sought legislation and state-controlled standards of working conditions of industrial women. Massachusetts and other states established licensing of home work, refusing applications from workplaces with sanitation or health problems. New York showed concern for occupational diseases and industrial poisons, such as the use of white lead powder in embroidery factories. Industrial accidents (which often produced the working widow) pointed up the need for compensation laws. And some states required regular inspection of factories. (28) But it sometimes took a horrifying disaster to teach both public and legislators what the investigators' statistics and the reformers' theoretical arguments could not. New York State had had factory inspection since the late nineteenth century; investigators looked at fire escapes, sanitation facilities, and general working conditions. But owners of the loft buildings which housed so many factories and sweatshops often failed to meet even the minimal standards set by early state laws. The Arch Building in Greenwich Village, for example, had only two staircases rather than the three required and the structure which should have been fireproof had excessive amounts of wood. Moreover, owners of the

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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the top three floors, kept their doors locked to prevent employees stealing and to keep out union organizers; the managers held no fire drills, and the only access to the one fire escape was through a shuttered window with rusted fasteners. On Saturday afternoon, 25 March 1911, fire broke out in the factory where five hundred men and women, mostly Italian and Eastern European Jews, were finishing work. Firemen arrived within three minutes and took another four minutes to assemble their equipment, By then, "bundles of cloth" were hurtling out of the windows; observers thought that loyal employees were trying to save expensive dress materials. But spectators were horror-stricken when the bundles turned out to be women who had leaped or fallen a hundred feet to the street - 146 died. On Wednesday, April 5, the East Side mourned its dead; eighty thousand marched silently up Fifth Avenue in the rain for four hours in a funeral procession which had been announced in four languages. A crowd of a quarter million looked on. Relief contributions of more than $120,000 poured in, but some workers refused to be grateful. Young Rose Schneiderman said that she would be "a traitor to these poor bodies" if she talked fellowship; and she indicted oppressors and public officials who held the lives of people so cheap and property so sacred. (29) But the response to the Triangle tragedy highlights the dilemma of the Progressive age protection or self-protection? The women who died in 1911 had been among the twenty thousand strikers of 1909-1910 demanding safety and sanitation measures in the shops. Rose Schneiderman, in denouncing sentimental sympathy for the dead and their surviving sisters, called for a strong working-class movement as "the only way they can save themselves." The governor of New York responded by appointing the State Factory Investigating Commission, which reported in 1912, 1913, and 1914, offering evidence which supported passage of laws to safeguard life and health of factory workers, shorten the work week in factories and stores, and enforce existing safety and welfare legislation. (30) In reacting to the growing awareness of the consequence of rapid and unplanned industrial growth, however, reformers had not yet decided who should take responsibility for improving the evil effects of that change. After an investigation of safety and shop conditions affecting eighteen thousand New York workers, a representative of the Women's Trade Union League called both for laws and their enforcement and for organization of the workers. (31)

SELF-HELP AND COOPERATION APPEAR TO FAIL Middle- and upper-class women particularly found it difficult to find consistent ways to help working-class women while respecting their personal dignity. The Women's International Union Label League, organized in 1899, attempted to fight the sweat-shop and promote worker welfare by encouraging trade unionism. League efforts concentrated on promoting the use of goods which carried a label showing that they had been manufactured by organized workers. Leaders believed that women represented considerable purchasing power, which they could use to force employers to permit unionization in order to earn the label for their products. (32) Similar tactics appealed to early members of the state and national Consumers' League who investigated department stores and published "white lists" of those who treated their employees fairly, urging that consumers patronize those merchants and boycott others who did not comply. (33) The

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Women's Trade Union League, on the other hand, represented a closer personal interacton between reformers and workers, but had problems reconciling its objectives of unionism, feminism, and protectionism. Established by settlement workers and union leaders during the 1903 annual convention of the American Federation of Labor in Boston, the Women's Trade Union League sought economic rights for women through a combination of trade unionism and political action. From the beginning, the WTUL had a membership of working girls and "allies," middleand upper-class women dedicated to encouraging unionization and improvement of workers' conditions. Their original concept seemed to favor the independent working woman, since the constitution called for a majority of trade unionists on the executive board, and early leaders stressed organization over legislation. Between 1903 and 1906, the National WTUL and leagues in Boston, Chicago, New York, and other cities concentrated on making themselves known to unions and workers. After 1907, when Margaret Dreier Robins of Chicago took the presidency, the WTUL became more active, providing speakers and meeting places for new and poor unions, supporting organizers like Rose Schneiderman and Mary Anderson, establishing union locals especially in t h e garment trades, and supporting strikes such as the Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909-1910. While the "allies" endorsed the principle of unionization for working women, many feared the radical tactics of organizations like the IWW; WTUL leaders, therefore, remained close to the AFL from which they received superficial support. Moreover, League concerns for worker improvement brought them closer to AFL craft unionism than to schemes for industrial organization of all workers, both skilled and unskilled. Since so many workingclass women fell into the category of unskilled labor, however, the WTUL had only limited successs in convincing them of the need for unionization. Discouraged, many "allies" turned either to personal rescue efforts (some attempting to "educate" working girls at tea parties or visits to art galleries) or to non-union means of helping workers. After 1911, conventions spoke of the need for protective legislation, the union labor, and t h e potential of suffrage to win equity for women. Although the WTUL continued to assert that the problems of working women would only be solved when they became part of the American labor movement, leaders increasingly advanced social welfare rather than labor organization. Finally, workers and allies divided over priorities, and while the WTUL continued in existence for many years, its energies were divided over a broad spectrum of tactics for social betterment. (34) Many feminist reformers linked the struggle for industrial freedom with the fight for women's political freedom. Progressive organizations devoted to moral or labor or social reform often shared membership with groups working for adoption of the Anthony Amendment to grant women the vote. Suffragists frequently argued that the franchise would give women the means of controlling their own destinies while they used the vote to correct society's wrongs. Labor reformers urged working women to support the amendment for their own good; groups such as the AFL and WTUL continually passed pro-suffrage resolutions. (35) But recalcitrants like Mother Jones denounced suffrage as a panacea for middle- and upper-class women, without benefit to the working men and women who were (in her terms) "in slavery." She reminded women, "You don't need a vote to raise hell." (36) Moreover, twentieth-century suffragists made no particular effort

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to include working-class women in their organizations or to offer them constructive ideas for the use of the vote to help with their problems.

PROGRESSIVES BECOME PROTECTIONISTS If the reformers at first hoped that the working-class women themselves would provide solutions to their own problems, solutions which public-spirited citizens could support and facilitate, most reformers eventually came to the conclusion that the women they wanted to help could not or would not generate their own salvation. From the beginning, some reformers probably harbored the fear that open opportunity would fail, and they may have made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Themselves the products of middle-class homes and schools, the uplifters frequently assumed that their values were both neutral and correct; and they shared (or imposed) these attitudes with the working-class women who became the objects of their good deeds. Many reformers would have preferred that the working-class woman evolve into a good housewife rather than a trade union activist. When she failed to do either, the reformers increasingly turned to protective solutions to give working-class women some of the things they seemed unable to achieve for themselves - home and industrial safety, control of wages and hours, preservation of the family in the face of disaster, and personal morality. Perhaps working-class women agreed with the shift in the direction of public protection; perhaps they did' not. But few were asked. Reform generally came from middle-class reformers who assumed and retained direction of both independent and cooperative efforts. Where the reformers worked alone, they observed, analyzed, and made decisions on behalf of the working-class women they intended to save. Where they engaged in activities with the working-class women, the reformers generally took leading roles because of their greater knowledge and skills in dealing with the public sphere. A few working-class women attempted to organize genuine cooperation; some even argued for independent activities. But, on the whole, the reformers prevailed. Neither the investigators nor the social workers nor the moral reformers nor the legislative advocates nor the social feminists nor the suffragists ever established a permanent working relationship vñtb working-class women, although these progressives and humanitarians were willing to manipulate the public and political American system to accomplish a great deal for working-class women.

Susan Estebrook Kennedy, Associate Professor of History Virginia Commonwealth University, Riebmond, VA 23284

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Acknowledgement. This article is adapted from Kennedy's book. If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Women in America (Indiana University Press, 1979). (1) Charlotte Croman, foreword to reprint of Prisoners of Poverty (New York: Garrett Press, Inc., 1970), pp. v-x; Ross E. Paulson. "Helen Stuart Campbell," Notable American Women 1, 280-81. (2) Mary Heaton Vorse papers, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. (3) Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day· The Story of a New York Working Girl (New York: The Century Company, 1905); Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vont, The Woman Who Toils: Being tbe Experience of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1903). (4) Women's Educational and Industrial Union papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College; Eva Whiting White papers, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Robert Sklar, "Mary Morton Kimball Kehew," Notable American Women 2, 313-14; Susan Myra Kingsbury papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; Mildred Fairchild Woodbury, "Susan Myra Kingsbury," Notable American Women 2, 335-36. (5) Mary Richmond papers, Columbia University School of Social Work; Muriel W. Humphrey, "Mary EUen Richmond," Notable American Women 3, 152-54. (6) "Industrial Studies of the Russell Sage Foundation, 1943", Mary Van Kleeck papers, Wayne Sate, box 10; Van Kleeck papers. Smith; Van Kleeck, "Industrial Investigations of the Russell Sage Foundation" (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Committee on Women's Work, 1915). (7) "The Stress of the Seasons," Survey 29 (8 March 1913), 806; Lola Carson Toex, "Working Women in Maryland," Life and Labor 3 (April 1913), 100-4; Ethel Mason and S.M. Franklin, "Low Wages and Vice - Are They Related?" Life and Labor 3 (April 1913), 108-11; Louise deKovcn Bowen, Tbe Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants (Chicago: Juvenile Protection Association, 19X2); Immigrants' Protection League papers. University of Illinois at Chicago Circle; Annie Marion Mac Lean, Wage-Earning Women (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910). (8) Lola CarT Steelman, "Mary Clare de Griffenried," Notable American Women 1, 452-54. (9) "Women Wage-earners," Nation 82 (22 February 1906), 152-53; "Women and Children in Industry," Outlook 83 (5 May 1906), 12. (10) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910-1913). (11) Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge," Notable American Women 1, 233-36; Grace and Edith Abbott papers. University of Chicago; Jill Ker Conway, "Grace Abbott," Notable American Women 1, 2-4. (12) Jane Adams papers, Smith; Ellen Gates Starr papers. Smith; Hull House papers, Hull House; Christopher Lasch (ed.), Tbe Social Thought of Jane Adams (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965); Allen F. Davis, Spearheads of Reform: Tbe Social Settlements and tbe Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Mary Anderson, with Mary N. Winslow, Woman at Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1915), p. 32. (13) "Commons Women's Club" in Chicago Commons papers, Chicago Historical Society, box 11; Mary McDowell papers, Chicago Historial Society; Caroline M. Hill, Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping: A Symposium (Chicago: Millar Publishing Company, n.d.). (14) Settlement house papers at the Chicago Historical Society and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. (15) Lillian Wald papers, New York Public Library and Columbia University; Allan Edward Reznick, "Lillian D. Wald: The Years at Henry Street" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1973); Theatre Collection, New York Public Library; Marian Rich, "Irene Lewisohn," Notable American Women 2, 400-2. (16) Maxine Seller, "The Education of the Immigrant Woman, 1890-1935," paper, Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, 1976; Columbia Religious and Industrial School for Jewish Girls

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papers, American Jewish Historical Society, annual reports, 1909-1911; Francis Hovey Howe, "Leonora O'Reilly, Socialist and Reformer, 1870-1927," (Honors Thesis, Radcliffe College, 1952), pp. 20-55; Rutland Comer House papcTS, SchlesingerRaddiffe. (17) Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York; The Dial Press, 1976), p. 169; Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby (eds.), America's Working Women (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 91-100; Grace Abbott, The Immigrant and the Community (New York: The Century Comapny, 1917), pp. 55-80; Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), pp. 28-29, 56-57; Clara E. Laughlin, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1913), pp. 22-40; Samuel Gompcrs, "Women's Wages and Morality," American Federationist 20 (June 1913), 465-67; Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark, Women m Industry: Decision of the United States Supreme Court m Curt Muller vs. State of Oregon Upholding the Constitutionality of the Oregon Ten Hour Law for Women and Brief for the State of Oregon (New York: Reprinted for the National Consumers' League, 1908), Ellen Martin Henrotin papers, Schlesinger Radcliffe. (18) Kate Waller BarTett, Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home (Washington: National Florence Crittenton Mission, 1903): Carol L. Urness, "Kate Harwood Waller BarTett," Notable American Women 1, 97-99. (19) Margaret Sanger papen and Planned Parenthood Federation of America papers. Smith and Library of Congress; David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 7 0 7 1 , 76, 112-14; Singer, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York·. W.W. Norton 4c Co., 1938); Emma Goldman, "Testimony Before a Court on April 20, 1916," The Masses 8 (June 1916), 27. (20) Roy Lubove, "Hannah Bachman Einstein," Notable American Women 1, 566-68; Ellen Malino James, "Sophie Irene Simon Loeb," Notable American Women 1, 416-17. (21) Alice Gannett, "Bohemian Women in New York," Life and Labor 3 (February 1913), 49-52. (22) Claire de Graffenried, "Conditions of Wage Earning Women," Forum 15 (March 1893), 6882; Annie Marvin MacLean, "Factory Legislation for Women in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 3 (September 1897), 183-205 ; Josephine C. Goldmark, "The Necessary Sequel of Child-Labor Laws," American Journal of Sociology 11 (November 1905), 312-25; Frank P. Miles, "Statutory Regulation of Women's Employment - Codification of Statutes," Journal of Political Economy 14 (December 1906), 109-18; "May the Legislature Protect Women and Children," Outlook 83 (11 August 1906), 824; Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, "Legislative Control of Women's Work," Journal of Political Economy 14 (February 1906), 107-9; Lorinda Perry, The Millinery Trade in Boston and Philadelphia: A Study of Women in Industry (New York: The Vail-BIow Co., 1916); Charles E. Persons, Mabel Parton, Mabelle Moses, et al, Labor Laws and Their Enforcement, with Special Reference to Massachusetts ed. Susan M. Kingsbury (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911); Ernst Freund, "The Constitutional Aspect of the Protection of Women in Industry," Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 1 (1910), 162-84; Samual Gompcrs, "Good Work for Women by Women," American Federationist 17 (August 1910), 68586. (23) Alice Henry, "The Campaign in Illinois for the Ten-hour law," American Federationist 17 (August 1910), 669-72; Josephine Goldmark, "The Illinois Ten-Hour Decision," Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 1 (1910), 185-87; Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, "The Illinois Ten-hour Law," Journal of Political Economy 18 (June 1910), 465-70. (24) Irene Osgood Andrews, "Diary of Judicial Decisions," Life and Labor 2 (July 1912), 213-14. (25) Brandeis and Goldmark, Women in Industry·, Josephine Goldmark papers, Schlesinger^Radcliffe; Josephine C. Goldmark, "Labor Laws for Women," Survey 29 (25 January 1913), 552-55;Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency: A Study in Industry (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Survey Associates, 1912); Brandeis and Goldmark, The Case Against Nigbtwork for Women: The People of the State of New York, Respondent, Against Charles Schweinler Press, A Corporation, Defendent-Appelant: Summary of "Facts of Knowledge" submitted on Behalf of tbt• People [1914] (New York: National

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Consumers' League, [1918]. (26) Agnes Nestor, "The Trend of Legislation Affecting Women's Hours of Labor," Life and Labor 7 (May 1917), 81-82¡ Hours and Health of Women Workers: Report of the Illinois Industrial Survey (Springfield, 1U.: Schnepp and Barnes, 1919); "Regulation of Women's Working Hours in the United States," American Labor Legislation Review 8 (December 1918), 339-54; Jacob Andrew Lieberman, "Their Sisters' Keepers: The Women's Hours and Wages Movement in the United Sutes, 1890-1925" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1971). (27) "Women in Economics," American Federationist 9 (July 1902), 366-67; "American Women at Men's Work," Harper's Weekly 51 (8 June 1907), 831-, Irene Osgood Andrews, "Relation of Irregular Employment to the Living Wage of Women," American Labor Legislation Review 5 (June 1915), 287418; Annie Marion MacLean, Women Workers and Society (Chicago: A.C. McGurg and Co., 1916), pp. 2-3; H.A. Millis, "Some Aspects of the Minimum Wagc," Journal of Political Economy 22 (February 1914), 132-59; Helen Marot, "Trade Unions and the Minimum Wage Boards," American Federationist 22 (November 1915), 966-69; Rev. John A. Ryan, "Guaranteeing a Living Wage by Law," Life and Labor 2 (March 1912), 84-85; Margaret Dreier Robins, ' T h e Minimum Wage," Life and Labor 3 (June 1913), 168-72. (28) Susan M. Kingsbury and Mabclle Moses, "Licensed Workers in Industrial Home Work in Massachusetts," Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State Board of Labor and Industry, Industrial Bulletin No. 4 (Boston: Wright and Poner Printing Co., 1915); Alice Hamilton papers, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Eastman, Work Accidents. (29) Margaret Purdy Gibson papers, John N. Olin Library, Cornell University; Martha Bensley Bru ere, "The Triangle Fire," Life and Labor 1 (May 1911), 13 7-41 ¡William Mailly, "The Triangle Trade Union Relief," American Federationist 18 (July 1911), 554-47; Rose Schneiderman, with Lucy Goldthwaitc. All for One (New York: Paul S. Erikson, Inc., 1967), pp. 100-3; Tom Brooks, "The Terrible Triangle Fire," American Heritage 7 (August 1957), 54-57, 110-111; Leon Stein. The Triangle Fire (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962); Corrine J. Naden, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, March 25, 1911: The Blaze that Changed an Industry (New York: Franklin Watts, 1971). (30) New York State Factory Investigating Commission, Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, 1912 (Albany: The Argus Company, 1912); Second Report, 1913 (Albany: J.B. Lyon Compnay, 1913); Third Report, 1914 (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1914), Fourth Report, 1914 (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1915). (31) Alice Henry, "The Way Out," Life and Labor, 2 (April 1912), 120-21. (32) John B. Andrews and W.D.P. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions, vol. χ of Report on Conditions of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910-1913), p. 159; Mamie Brettel, "Woman's Union Label League," American Federationist 12 (May 1905), 276; Anna Fitzgerald, "Woman's International Union Label League and Trades Union Auxiliary," American Federationist 22 (September 1915), 731. (33) National Consumers' League papers. Library of Congress; Consumers' League of Connecticut, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Consumers' League of Massachusetts, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Mary W. Dewson papers, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Maud Nathan papers, Schlesinger-Radcliffe; Nathan, The Story of an Epoch-Making Movement (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926); Nathan, Once Upon a Time and Today (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1933); Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953); Dorothy Ross Blumberg, Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1966); Allis Rosenberg Wolfe, "Women, Cosumerism, and the National Consumers' League in the Progressive Era , 1900-1933," Labor History 16 (Summrer 1975), 378-92. (34) For internal commentary on the Women's Trade Union League, see articles and reports on conventions in Life and Labor 1-10 (1911-1921) and Life and Labor Bulletin after 1921; also Gladys Boone, The Women's Trade Union League in Great Britain and the United States of America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915), pp. 61-65, 70-71, 89-114; Anderson, pp. 32-39, 50-60; Schneiderman,

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pp. 77-82; Mary E. Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins: Her Life, Letten and Work (New York: Island Press Cooperative, Inc., 19S0); James J. Kenneally, "Women and Trade Unions, 1870-1920: The Quandry of the Reformer," Labor History 14 (Winter 1973), 42-55; Allen F. David, "The Women's Trade Union League: Origins and Organization," Labor History 5 (Winter 1964): 3-17; Agnes Nestor, Women's Labor Leader: An Autobiography (Rockford, III.: Bellevue Books, 1954); Robin Miller Jicoby, "The Women's Trade Union League and American Feminism," Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1975), 126-40. (35) Lillian CarT, "Women of the World Unite: The Lesson of the Washington Parade," Life and Labor 3 (April 1913), 112-16; Agnes O'Brein, "Suffrage and the Woman in Industry," Life and Labor 5 (August 1915), 132-33; Mabel Kanka, "Women's Struggle for Emancipation," One Big Union Monthly 12 (December 1920), 22-23; Samuel Gompers, "Labor and Woman Suffrage," American Federationist 27 (October 1920), 937-39; Agnes Nestor, "Ushering in the New Day," Life and Labor 11 (June 1921): 168-71. (36) Mary Jones, Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1925), p. 202.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

THE BONDS OF BELONGING: LEONORA O'REILLY AND SOCIAL REFORM By MARY J . BULARZIK*

The feminist movement in the United States usually is described as middle class, emphasizing questions of status, legal equality, and professional achievement rather than the economic needs of working class women. At the same time the labor movement has been seen as male-dominated and often chauvinistic, one in which women have played at best a marginal role. But some working class women have gone against these stereotypes to be actively involved feminists as well as labor organizers. Who were these women organizers? What factors in their ethnic backgrounds—a large number were Jewish or Irish—supported their activism in the workplace? What enabled them to transcend the boundaries of woman's role"? What were the gains, as well as the conflicts, for the female labor organizer who worked with feminist groups? One period in which a number of these women were active was the Progressive era, a time when a strong and vital woman's movement existed along with a multitude of social reform activities and a growing labor movement. Since these working women obviously were not the middle class women experiencing status deprivation whom historians have seen as the prime movers behind the early woman's rights movement, their path to feminism must have been a very different one. 1 I have chosen to study this problem of working class women's activism through a case study of Leonora O'Reilly (1870-1927), * The author wishes to thank Mari Jo Buhle, Roslyn Feldberg, Morton Keller, Kenneth Muzal, and Judith Smith for their comments and criticism of earlier drafts of this article. 1 For this interpretation, see Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl," American Studies Journal, 10 (Spring 1969), 5-15. Also see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977), 5-10. 0023-656X |8312401 -060 $01.00 © 1983 The Tamiment Institute

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an Irish-American activist well known during her lifetime but nearly forgotten today. 2 1 have focused on her work with the New York branch of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), an organization unique in that it encompassed working women ("workers") and middle class reformers ("allies"), feminist and trade unionists. While not the only organization in which O'Reilly was active, the WTUL engaged a major share of her time and energy, and exemplifies the type of situation in which class, ethnic and feminist values intersected. O'Reilly was not the average working class woman of her day. By definition, organizers and activists are not "typical." Yet some of the qualities which set her apart from other working class women were attributes that she shared with other female organizers. In this way a study of her life can give us insights into the decisions and careers of her colleagues. *

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Leonora O'Reilly was fond of saying that she came from three generations of working women. Her intense identification with both the working class milieu in which she grew up and her focus on women's position in society remained with her throughout her life. Born of Irish immigrant parents in New York City in 1870, she grew up in poverty as her widowed mother struggled to earn a bare living for the small family. At the age of 11, she began work in a collar factory; her formal education was postponed for fifteen years. Her practical industrial experience soon was supplemented by participation in trade union organizing, as Mrs. O'Reilly took her daughter to union meetings even as a child. In 1886 she joined an Assembly of the Knights of Labor and acquired several mentors and sponsors who gave her glimpses of 2

The major source for this paper is the Leonora O'Reilly Collection in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. (hereafter, LOR Papers). A sketch of O'Reilly's life appears in Edward James, Janet James and Paul Boyer, eds., Notable American Women (Cambridge, MA, 1971). Also useful is Frances Hovey Howe, "Leonora O'Reilly: Socialist and Reformer, 1879-1927" (AB Honors Thesis, Radcliffe College, 1952). The best work on the New York Women's Trade Union League is Nancy Schrom Dye, "The Women's Trade Union League of New York, 1903-1920," unpublished PhD diss. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1974 (published as As Equals and As Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, & the Women's Trade Union League of New York (Columbia, MO, 1980). Ellen Lagemann, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers (Cambridge, MA, 1979), appeared after I had completed this paper; however, I find her interpretation of O'Reilly unconvincing.

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the wider possibilities, given more education, open to someone with her talents. Her activities quickly ranged beyond the Knights. Already in 1886 she organized a Working Women's Society, an inspiration for the organization of the Consumer's League by Josephine Shaw Lowell. She joined with other trade unionists and labor sympathizers in the Social Reform Club of the 1890s. In 1897 she organized a women's local of the United Garment Workers in New York. But she also searched for alternatives for women workers, seeking to change them from unskilled (and thus exploited) to skilled craftsworkers. She directed a garment workers' co-op at the Henry Street settlement in 1897, and in the following year enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to become an industrial sewing teacher. After graduating in 1900 she continued her activities as head worker at Asacog House, a Brooklyn settlement house with which she had been involved since 1899. From 1902 to 1909 she taught at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, convinced that industrial education was a necessary step in working women's emancipation. O'Reilly became one of the first members of the New York chapter of the Women's Trade Union League when it was founded in 1903. For the next decade, much of her speaking, writing and organizing centered on the League. That organization allowed her to combine her interests in the labor movement and in organizing women. Thus the League held promise of satisfying what she experienced as often competing sets of loyalties and priorities. Yet conflicts led O'Reilly to resign briefly from the Leasue in 1905, and permanently in 1915. Though central to her life, the League was not the only recipient of her time and energy. She adopted a daughter (Alice) in 1907. She was a member of the NAACP, the Socialist Party, and the New York Woman Suffrage Party. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, she undertook an extensive survey of safety conditions in tenement factories. With the coming of war in Europe in 1914, she became increasingly concerned with pacifism and the socialist ideal of the co-operation of working people across national boundaries. She was a delegate to the 1915 Women's Conference held in The Hague. Her Irish heritage also made her reluctant to see the

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US enter a war on the British side. Her pacifist ideals and ethnic loyalties conflicted with the support shown by the mainstream labor movement to the war policies of the government. In the work of her early years O'Reilly managed to escape from what Jane Addams called the "family claim" on a young woman's services and time. But in her later years, as her mother's health failed, Leonora retired from public life to care for her. Other factors complicated the choice: health problems plagued her after she resigned from the League, and she often turned down requests to speak out of sheer exhaustion. She continued to work sporadically, including raising money for the Irish Free State. But even this level of activity was too much. Her course on "Problems and Progress of Labor" offered at the New School in 1925-6 was one of the few new public activities in which she engaged. In 1927 she died of heart disease. She was only 57. *

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The changing emphasis on class, feminist and ethnic loyalties at various times in O'Reilly's life were as much a product of the historical events of her time as of her intellectual development. Like many of the female pioneers in labor organizing, O'Reilly was Irish. Though other Irish-American women organizers come immediately to mind—Leonora Barry, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—the effect of their Irish heritage on propelling these women into organizing has not been studied. The large number of Irish women in the female labor force in the 19th century may be one reason for the prevalence of women of Irish descent among the early women organizers. Demography, economic realities and cultural traditions combined to cause this pattern of labor force participation. There was a relatively high proportion of women in the Irish immigration; during the period 1899-1910, the highest of all immigrant groups. The poverty of these immigrants made paid work a necessity for the women. Both the tradition of late marriage and a less familycentered ethnic community than Jews or Italians made it more acceptable for Irish women, especially single women, to be gainfully employed. 3 3

Robert Kennedy, The Irish: Emigration. Marriage, and Fertility (Berkeley, 1973), 84; E.P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their children, 1850 to 1950 (New York,

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This acceptance of the single woman as worker, rather than maintenance of a tradition which tried to keep all females out of the labor force (as in Italian communities) helps to explain the number of Irish female labor activists. 4 It would also be a source of support for O'Reilly's decision not to marry, and a tradition in which that decision would not be considered deviant. A career as an "organizer" paralleled the experience of many Irish males in politics—a field not open to women at this point. The fact that many male labor organizers were Irish made that role a familiar one in the Irish-American community. Further evidence that it was Irish-American women's marital status, rather than gender, which was the controlling factor in their social acceptance as workers lies in the fact that other Irish-American organizers dropped out of the labor movement upon marriage. In this they followed the general pattern of working class women's participation in the 19th century labor force. Seeming exceptions were widowed (Mary Kenney O'Sullivan) or broke up their marriages (Elizabeth Gurley Flynn). Terence Powderly's reaction to organizer Leonora Barry's marriage (to a union man) aptly sums up the expectations trade union men had for the primacy of marriage over career for women: . . .The request for the services of Sister Barry comes from other localities but she cannot comply, in fact, Sister Barry's days are numbered. Y o u will never, in all probability, rest eyes on her again. I know you will unite with me in sorrowing over this, for us, unhappy event, but the fates are against us and soon the name of Sister Barry will exist only in the fond remembrance of the members of our Order and her many friends outside of it. She has not yet been called across the dark river but she will soon be buried in the bosom of a Lake that shall wash away all claim that we may have to her, and the papers will chronicle the event in this way: On April 17th, at St. Louis, Mrs. L.M. Barry of Amsterdam, N.Y. to O.R. Lake of St. Louis, M o . , the Rev. Mr. officiating. The bride was dressed in a Brother Glocking, words fail and you will have to describe the bridal outfit yourself....5 1956), 18-19, 99. For 1899-1910 data. Alice Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the Unorganizable," Labor History 17 (1976), 10. * Barbara Klaczynska, "Why Women Work: A Comparison of Various GroupsPhiladelphia, 1910-1930," Labor History 17, (1976), 73-87. 8 Terence Powderly, Letter to R. Glocking, April 10, 1890, quoted in Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, Susan Reverby, eds., America's Working Women (New York, 1976), 125.

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Other Irish working class women organizers also saw paid work as necessary and not outside the "women's sphere." Mary Kenney (O'Sullivan) casually commented in her autobiography, "My father died when I was 14. So I had Mother to take care of." She went to work in a printing company, cared for her sick mother, and did all the housework in the evenings. 0 It is clear that this cultural pattern made it somewhat easier for Irish-American women to enter and remain in the labor force, and subsequently to take themselves seriously as workers—a necessity for organizational work. For Leonora O'Re'lly, this cultural attitude reinforced rather than overshadowed her economic need to be in the labor force. Her entry into paid work as a young girl was not atypical for female working class adolescents; what was unique was a lifelong persistence in a career instead of marriage and domestic work. Much of the history of Irish-Americans stresses the conservative, Catholic, and anti-reform traditions of the group. Yet in the labor movement of the 1880s and 1890s—especially in the Knights of Labor—social radicalism merged with Irish nationalism. Class and ethnic differences overlapped as the majority of the workers were immigrants and the majority of the middle class were native-born. 7 It was out of this Irish working class radical tradition that Leonora O'Reilly came to intellectual maturity and developed many of her convictions. True, the liberal Yankee Progressive reformer tradition she met in her friends in the League did much to influence her thinking. But her original radical impulse had been set much earlier than this, in her exposure to the philosophy and ideals of the Knights of Labor. She joined the Knights in 1886 at the high point of their influence. It was the year in which Henry George ran for mayor of New York. She read his books; they added to her growing awareness of class consciousness. Formal religion, however, seemed to play little part in O'Reilly's upbringing or system of beliefs. In a community such as the Irishβ

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Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, TS Autobiography, 16, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Why her brothers did not take responsibility for the care of their sick mother is not mentioned. Thomas N . Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Phil., 1966); Eric Foner, "Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America," Marxist-Perspectives, 1 (Summer 1978), 45.

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American, in which the influence of the Catholic Church loomed so large, a lack of emotional, moral, or intellectual involvement with the Church meant that she had to find another focus for her activities. And in fact her commitment to the labor movement and socialism had many religious and moral undertones. In this she was similar to many Protestant Progressive reformers whose commitment to the "co-operative commonwealth" inspired their actions. Hers was a "Christian Socialism," the belief that change was necessary yet possible within the system, rather than Marxian socialism and class warfare. Socialism held more promise for her than did organized religion, which she felt made particularly strict demands upon women : Any woman, for instance, suspected of having cast behind her the Bible and all practices of devotion and the elementary articles of the common creed, would be distrustfully regarded even by those w h o wink at the same kind of mental boldness in men. Nay, she would be so regarded even by some of the very men who have themselves discarded as superstitious what they still wish women to retain as law and gospel. 8

Her Irish heritage and the issues of the Irish-American community did much to shape O'Reilly's life. Her own style remained "very Irish" in phrase and speech. An example is a letter to Pauline Newman: "To be sure, Paul, Dear, 'tis a topsy turvy world. But steady yourself on your seat, tuck your hat tight down on your head with one hand, hold tight to the pilot wheel of labor. . . . e The most basic element in the complex identity of Leonora O'Reilly was her identification with the working class and the labor movement, the organization she saw as necessary to defend that class. "I represent that great mass of women upon whom civilization lay the burden with few of the opportunities or luxuries of life," was her introduction to a speech on woman's suffrage. Her particular concern was for working class women. She based her right to speak for the working women on the cumulative 8

Leonora O'Reilly (hereafter, LOR), Diary entry, Jan. 28, 1898; Diary entry from essay on "religious conformity," 1902, LOR Papers, β LOR Letter to Pauline Newman, May 19, 1919, quoted in Barbara Werthcimer, We Were There (New York, 1977), 277-8.

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experience of herself, her mother and grandmother in the labor force, "an ancestral and personal experience of daily intercourse of 55 years and more."10 This fundamental identification with her class origins never left O'Reilly. But it is inaccurate to conclude that her career was based on a highly developed class consciousness. I would like to distinguish here between class consciousness in the sense of a class-for-itself, with interests ultimately at odds with the ruling class, and trade union consciousness—the idea that the working class should organize to support its legitimate economic demands, but that these demands can be met without major social upheaval. It is a distinction between revolution and reform. O'Reilly ultimately came down on the side of reform. Yet class co-operation was always an ambiguous issue for her. At times she was convinced that her "own people" must "solve their own problems in their own way" without middle class interference. But she did not move through these insights to the idea of class warfare. While she never forgot her background, her convictions were better understood as trade union consciousness than as class consciousness per se. O'Reilly's commitment to trade unionism and the working class thus had emotional as well as intellectual components. As her major talent was for speaking and organizing rather than writing, she produced little analytical material on the labor question. Her inclination for practical work rather than theoretical speculation led her to concentrate on trade unions and industrial education (especially for girls) as a means of reforming American society. Unions were engaged in class struggle, though not class warfare: Labor unions accept the affects of the present industrial system and are engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with capitalists [They] have no time to indulge in dreams that are natural to bodies of men whose aim is the radical transformation of the entire conditions of industrial life.

Her vision of social change was more businesslike, less romantic and Utopian than the socialism of the Russian Jews in the garment unions. Yet her commitment to the labor movement did have a strong moral undercurrent. A basic tenet of her trade 10

LOR Suffrage speech, 1911, unpub. review of The Long Day, 1905; LOR Papers.

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union philosophy was "the principle of Altruism. An injury to one is an injury to all." 11 If trade unions were one method by which the working class could improve its economic position, industrial education was another. Beginning in the late 1890s, O'Reilly continued to be involved in aspects of industrial education for most of her life, as a teacher at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a frequent lecturer to working women's groups, and with various programs of the New York City Board of Education. This was more than a job. At times it seemed to occupy a place in her thoughts as important as organizing in the workplace: "To every generation there came a knocking at the door—ours is for industrial education for all the people—the strongest institutions are the broadest at the base. 90% of our children never get into the high school— must be earning a living before that a g e . . . .12 Trade schools for girls were important to O'Reilly because through them girls could learn skilled trades, as boys had through apprenticeship. When women workers became skilled workers, they could then claim and fight for equal wages with men. And they would be accepted by the craft unions of the AFL—or at least could be organized along the same lines. Thus she saw women's suffrage as a means to economic equality, the only secure base for emancipation: "Therefore I say to you: Women, whether you wish to or not, your first step must be to gain equal political rights with men. The next step after that must be 'equal pay for equal work,'" Economics was the basic issue: "O my sisters Economic Independence is your only salvation—When will you want it—When get it?'" 3 But the very intensity or her class identification proved problematic in her later work with the WTUL. Allies often came to the group with a very different concept of class than did working women. "Before you, I was so unconscious about this class & that class & this stupid difference and that stupid difference," complained Laura Elliot, a wealthy ally with whom O'Reilly had several clashes. "Girls were just girls to me, and now you people 11 LOR Notes for speech, 1908, LOR Papers. 12 LOR Diary entry, Dec. 7, 1904, LOR Papers. is LOR Speech to the Men's Club of the People's Home, New York World, Mar. 30, 1899, Diary entry, Aug. 3, 1909, LOR Papers.

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are putting all sorts of ideas into my head and making me timid and self-conscious." 14 Class differences were much more evident to the working class women from the beginning. Rose Schneiderman was at first reluctant to join the League: "I had reservations about the organization because of its m e m b e r s h i p . . . . I could not believe that men and women who were not wage earners themselves understood the problems that workers faced." O'Reilly was periodically enraged by her wealthy allies' attitude of "the Lady with something to give her sister." 15 Many of the working class women of the League were socialists who felt that class meant one's relationship to the means of production. "Sisterhood" could reach across class boundaries, but did not abolish them. Good intentions did not eliminate the advantage the "allies" enjoyed in society—and in the League— because of their class background. This never seemed clear to some of the "allies." Those who considered themselves socialists often defined a "classless society" to mean that class could be ignored between colleagues of various backgrounds. Laura Elliot, for example, defined herself as a "Marxist" to Leonora: this meant that the classes had different functions, and needed each other to bring about what she called the "Human Counterpunctual [sic] Symphony." Laura Elliot therefore felt that she had a right to "help" working class girls: "They know I am doing them good because I keep pounding it into them that I a m . . . . instead of running about [with boys, they] had better get on to their Cosmic j o b . . . 1 6 O'Reilly's was one of the strongest voices in rejecting this condescension on the part of more privileged women. Some complained that she was too hard on them: Surely if we who can do less than you, we who are not so close to vital things, can learn anything from you, do you not know that we are teachable? . . . you should not pour out scorn upon others even if you feel that they do not see with all your vision. 17 14

L a u r a Elliot Letter to L O R , J a n . 1911, L O R Papers. Rose Schneiderman, "A Cap-Mr.ker's Story," The Independent 58 ( 1 9 0 5 ) , 935, quoted in N a n c y Dye, 87; L O R , N o t e on back of letter, 190S, quoted in Dye, 312. 10 Laura Elliott Letter to L O R , J a n . 1911, L O R Papers. 17 H a r r i e t Laidlow ( N . Y . W o m a n S u f f r a g e P a r t y ) Letter to L O R , Sept. 30, 1912, L O R Papers. 13

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For the "allies," class was something to be overcome. Women could transcend their class backgrounds. To the working women, class was a constant, real presence, which had controlled their lack of education, their income, and their future possibilities. Recognizing its effect, not ignoring it, was the important thing. Middle class feminists' perception that their sex rather than their class was the main obstacle in their life may well have been correct. But so may the perception of working class women that class rather than sex was the immediate source of their economic insecurity. Yet this dichotomy is itself too simple. Those working class women who joined groups such as the League and became organizers, speakers, writers, and social workers did not remain "typical" members of their class. Their own relationship to the means of production had changed. "Allies" were not above reminding class spokeswomen of this. The relative social mobility experienced by working class organizers did transform O'Reilly's life. Yet her sense of herself remained working class. She and others like her worked out of necessity and not to gain a sense of "independence." The effect of different class background came up in the question of getting paid for organizing and feminist work. The "allies" who joined the League were well-off, did not have to worry about working for a living, and could often afford to donate large sums to the group. Margaret Dreier Robbins never collected her salary when President of the NWTUL, but self-supporting working class women had to worry continually about where their money was coming from. O'Reilly's work was partially subsidized over the years by some of the wealthy women with whom she worked. Although this was the only way she could be freed from full time labor in tenement garment shops, it had its drawbacks. Her early mentor Louisa Perkins sent her support money in 1897 to finish her education. Perkins took pains to assure her, "This salary is just the same as any other faithfully earned. Your own to spend in any way you c h o o s e . . . Y e t she goes on: "Shall I send you $18 once a fortnight; holding the rest that you may every once in a while, put it in the Bank?" 1 8 !8 Louisa Perkins Letter to LOR, 1897, LOR Papers.

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O'Reilly believed that the speaking, writing, and organizing she did was work which deserved payment. As she became more in demand as a speaker, she grew more insistent about her right to be paid. Here she came into conflict with what has been called the concept of the women's movement as a service bureau. Women activists were assumed to be idealistic volunteers, amply rewarded by their dedication to the movement, rather than professionals who should be paid for their work. Out of both economic necessity and conviction, O'Reilly began to make it clear that if her services were considered valuable, she should be paid. That this was misunderstood is evident in some of her correspondence. The secretary of a working girls' club from the Bronx responded that they felt they could not afford her fee, implied it was more than she was worth, and asked her to find them another speaker "just as good as yourself" who would come for free! 10 Some of her feminist friends understood and supported her on this issue. Long-time activist Harriot Stanton Blatch wrote: I can quite comprehend your position in regard to payment for your work. Payment, I have found, has two good reasons; first—it reimburses one for wear and tear, and second—it wards off a whole lot of unimportant appeals. . . . Payment has a remarkably quieting effect upon certain enthusiasts. Believe me, I am with you. 2 0

The stark poverty of O'Reilly's early childhood left a residue of anxiety. The "glorious privilege of being independent" never seemed quite secure. Occasionally the strength of her determination to change society disconcerted her upper class friends; they accused her of being too intense and unable to relax. "You, like the Jews, seem to be oppressed with Oppression," complained Laura Elliot. "I know, Nora, you have a contempt for people who weep much," wrote another friend. O'Reilly's comment on Margaret Hinchley might have applied to herself: "She is as proud as only the poor Irish can be when they have made good against mighty odds and have the conceit to know themselves as few others can know them." Even her friends remember her enthusiasm for the labor cause as somewhat "dogmatic." 2 1 19 20 21

Eve Diamond (Bronx Girls' League) Letter to LOR, Dec. 18, 1912, LOR Papers. Harriot Stanton Blatch Letter to LOR, Jan. 25, 1912, LOR Papers. Laura Elliott Letter to LOR, Jan. 1911, Mary Wolfe Letter to LOR, 1911, LOR Letter to M. Hay, Dec. 29, 1917, LOR Papers. Pauline Newman, quoted in Barbara Wertheimer, 277.

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The necessity of the poor to be always conscious of the need for money is poignantly recorded in Leonora's diary entries from 1920 to 1924. Her mother Winifred's health was failing during those years; and, more terrifying to the daughter, she became senile. She no longer remembered where she lived; could not accept that the house in Brooklyn belonged to them and wanted to return to her apartment in New York; and ceaselessly planned to "leave" so as not to be a "burden" on her daughter. . . . She must be going, she cannot stay to become a burden . . . then the quiet talk, the explanation . . . Peace and content for a little while only to begin again with the fear of being a burden—Poor dear mother what a g o n y — h o w well the need of the poor to earn their bread has been burned into the marrow of her being. . . .--

The loss of this central emotional support in her life devastated Leonora. Her diary entries reflect this. . . 'then you won't mind having me with you, I have no where else to go.' Everytime she says this it has the same shock for me I seem to lose my hold on life momentarily—" Her mother looked for Alice, forgetting the child had died. " . . . Ye Gods how these slips of mother's mind takes my breath away. . . " 2 3 In many ways O'Reilly accepted the primacy of the "family claim" in these last years of her life. She had cared for and nursed Victor Drury, a socialist reformer and longtime friend from her Knights of Labor days, from 1914 until his death in 1918. 24 Then came the long years in which the mother became the dependent of the daughter she had nurtured. These personal crises, and her own sense of service, were a factor in her withdrawal from public life along with her weak heart and her disillusionment with the content and progress of reform. In a letter to Mary Dreier, she spoke of this: . . . Dear heart, I fear you do not sense that I am a semi-prisoner here — I cannot go out when I like, I cannot stay out for any length of time when I g o out. I do not use the wire here and I am in fear and dread of being rung up from the outside lest it cause unnecessary pain in the sick room. 22 23 24

LOR Diary entry, Feb. 3, 1923, LOR Papers. LOR Diary entry, Dec. 15, 1922, Diary entry, Oct. 12, 1922, Diary entry, Oct. 5, 1922, LOR Papers. Arthur Brisbane, a mutual friend and socialist reformer, aided O'Reilly by paying Drury's bills during these years.

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She noted in a diary entry of September 1923: "Went to the butcher store alone, the first time mother has been left in the house alone since March 1922." Her days were filled with housework—which she begins to refer to as " I T " — a n d for the first time she began to comment on how domestic work, and not only exploitative wage labor, consumed the lives and energies of her sisters: "All day at the little things that eat up the lives of millions of women e v e r y w h e r e . . . . " 2 5 But these were private musings, not public speeches or articles. Very few feminists of the time (besides Charlotte Perkins Gilman) connected domestic life with women's oppression. It was common in all their experiences, but the idea that domestic labor, rather than poorly paid factory labor, was the source of much exploitation of working class women, was not part of mainstream feminist or trade union theory. *

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What did feminism mean for the working class woman? For those in the labor force out of necessity and not choice, their impulse towards feminism could come from personal experience of the particular problems that paid work posed for women, and a consciousness of the "double burden" faced by women who had to do housework after a long day in the shop. Questions of economics loomed larger than questions of status in their analysis of feminist strategy. If feminism is restricted to putting the needs of women above the needs of her class, then O'Reilly (along with most working class women organizers of her day) was not a "feminist." She stressed the importance of women and men working together in unions. "Men and women who toil today must make common cause together in their unions and at the ballot box." She spoke of the ideal society as an androgenous one: . . . It is not that women are asking to be men. We do not want to be men. . . . We are both needed, and women have their work to do. The most wonderful men are the ones a little soft and womanly, and the most wonderful woman is the woman who is a little bit hard 25

LOR Letter to Mary Dreier, Dec. 2, 1917, Diary entry, Sept. 11, 1923, Diary entry, Feb. 16, 1923, LOR Papers.

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and masculine when it needs to be. . . . the perfect human being is not that one or this one, but the two together. 20

This, however, was her public face. In her private correspondence she was more cynical about the co-operation women workers could expect from their male colleagues: "One of the most difficult tasks before the League was to prove to our brother workers that when women were to be organized, women could do the job as well as men, and may hap, were a wee bit better than their own good selves." 27 Even in her work for suffrage, she emphasized its economic usefulness. Though she worked with the New York State Suffrage League, she put much time into organizing a Wage-Earners' Suffrage League in 1911, with voting membership "confined to members of labor organizations and to working women from the factories, shops or other places where a trade union might be possible." Middle class allies could only join as associate members and "contribute service." 28 But if feminism is defined as a penetrating concern for the progress of women, then undoubtedly O'Reilly was a feminist. "Women real women any where and every where are what we must nourish and cherish," she wrote to a friend. "Personally I suffer real torture dividing the womans movement into the Industrial group and all the other groups. . . ." 2 9 In a speech to working girls she spoke of the importance of sisterhood: "The discussions that are brought about by trying to help sister organizations to clear up their difficulties makes the ties of sisterhood felt by all so banded in a common cause a real thing not existing only in their constitutions but part of their lives. . . Her continual message to women was "Organize! . . . While we are unorganized the women who dare speak for us will be victimized. . . . " 3 0 An early source of her feminist consciousness lay in her strong identification with her mother and her mother's world view. Her 20

Alice Kessler-Harris uses this definition of "feminist" in writing about Jewish women organizers. See "Organizing the Unorganizable," 23. LOR D r a f t (Aug. 1911) of article published in ' T h e Woman Voter," Oct. 1911, Speech, "What the State Owes Its Women," 1913, LOR Papers. " L O R Letter, 1915, LOR Papers. 28 Papers on Wage Earners' League for Woman Suffrage, 1911, L O R Papers. 2» LOR Letter to M. Hay, Dec. 29, 1917, LOR Papers. 30 LOR, Speech to working girls, 1896(7), Labor Day speech, 1898, L O R Papers.

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father's death when Leonora was only a year old meant that her mother was both economic support and emotional influence. They shared a perspective on the importance of the labor struggle. The fact that her mother—and grandmother—had been in the workforce made it easier for her to concentrate on a career rather than on a traditional life of marriage and motherhood. 31 There is little evidence that Leonora regretted not having a more conventional life with husband and marriage. Only rarely does she reflect on the atypicalness of her situation. In a diary entry on the marriage of a friend she notes her own reaction as if an outside observer: . . . L O R turned to the scene of the preparations for the marriage, which w a s to be legalised at 3 : ? 0 pm. 'Twas with a peculiar tugging at the heart and strange conflutions of the thought and feelings that she w a t c h e d the display and honor given to those w h o act with societies sanction. 3 2

In her speeches she accepted society's dictate that the home was women's responsibility. "First and foremost, we are homemakers and possibly home-keepers. . . ." Yet she saw this as a reason to be involved in public life: ". . . it is in the home and school that the nation is trained." Her view of children had a similar basis: "Don't you know that every normal woman wants to be a mother? But the intelligent woman, the moral woman, today insists on a decent environment for her children... ." Her own solution to this "normal" wish for children was to adopt a daughter in 1907. Alice's death in 1911 was a blow: ". . . every child's face only helps to tear open the wound." 3 3 Instead of creating a traditional family, Leonora found her emotional and financial support in a female network of feminist and trade union activists. Leonora's personal support network 31

32 33

This is very similar to the "apprenticeship" of the "intimate mother-daughter relationship" of the earlier middle class world studied by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in "The Female World of Love and Ritual," Signs, 1-1, 15-16. LOR Diary entry, Sept. 30, 1898, LOR Papers. LOR, "Women's Opportunities in the Civil Service," Paper presented to the National Society of Women Workers, Buffalo, Aug. 19, 1901, Speech on suffrage, July 14, 1912, Diary entry, Jan. 29, 1911, LOR Papers. This solution of adopting a daughter was surprisingly widespread among single women professionals and activists in the late 19th—early 20th century. Several of the Blackwell sisters had adopted children. Other friends of O'Reilly's—Pauline Newman, Agnes O'Brien—had also adopted little girls. Twentieth century prison activist Miriam Van Waters followed this pattern. Whether this reflects a conscious separation by these women of "marriage" and "motherhood" is an interesting question.

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480

consisted largely of women. Although she maintained some longterm friendships with men—Victor Drury, Arthur Brisbane, Henry Faxon, Jean-Baptiste Hubert—the bulk of her correspondence, and her most emotional attachments, were with women. A major example of sisterly support transcending class boundaries was her relationship with Mary Dreier, a middle class reformer and W T U L activist. T h e theme of mutual admiration and support runs through their letters. "The fortitude and beauty of Mary D. affects me like a grand amen," Leonora wrote in 1900. It was Leonora's influence that brought Mary and her sister Margaret (later Margaret Dreier Robins) into the League. 34 Mary's letters to Leonora reveal a friendship deeper than a working relationship. "You can't know how dear you are to me," Mary wrote in 1910, "and how everlasting grateful I am to you for having been so patient—you brought me into this wonderful life—truly the 'more abundant l i f e ' . . . ." She calls Leonora "dearest friend" and refers to "the unwritten language when only hearts answer each other." 3 3 Their friendship survived a growing divergence in their personal priorities. Leonora's resignation from the W T U L in 1915 was a decision to put work in the labor movement above work with a feminist group, coupled with growing pacifist convictions: ". . . the all absorbing subject to me today is how to bring Peace on Earth. It seems to me the organiz[ed] w[or]kers must play a f u n d a m e n t a l ] part in bringing peace about." Her official reason for resigning was poor health; and indeed her own and her mother's failing health did combine to pull her more and more out of public life. Mary's decision was to focus more firmly on the woman's rights struggle: the enfranchisement of all women is the paramount issue for me. . . . the attitude of the labor men to the working women has changed me from being an ardent supporter of labor to a somewhat rabid supporter of women and to feel that the enfranchisement of women and especially my working sisters is the supreme issue. . . . the same reason is compelling me to give up my other work and devote myself to suffrage. It has not been an easy decision for me to reach, but my 34

LOR Diary entry, Jan. 15, 1900, LOR Papers. Mary E. Dreier, Margaret Robins (New York, 1950), 21. 35 Mary Dreier Letter to LOR, June 1910, LOR Papers.

Dreier

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own supreme conviction is that this is the path I must go now. Dearest L e o n o r a — I just wanted you to know this from me direct— 3 0

Leonora chose labor politics; Mary preferred feminist politics. Yet this may be too simple a dichotomy. The personal re-evaluation of their work faced by both Leonora and Mary during these years was typical of the impact which World War I had on activists. For those who believed in peaceful progress toward Christian socialism, the outbreak of war produced both sadness and pessimism. Leonora's withdrawal from much public life during these years is, then, overdetermined: personal health and family reasons, long-standing conflicts about the ultimate success of the League, the pacifism of a Christian Socialist, combined to rechannel her energies. Though her friendship with Mary Dreier was of major importance to Leonora, she also formed strong bonds with other activist women. These friendships were part of a pattern of crossclass sisterhood also present in other women's groups of the time. Working class women filled the roles of protégé and inspiration for the middle class women in the groups. In return, they received access to education, travel and intellectual development not available to them in the working class communities from which they came. 37 As a "real" worker dedicated to her mission, O'Reilly served as an inspiration to many of the young women—and especially to the allies—in the League. The letters of Laura Elliot, Laura Greisheimer, Peake Faxon, Mary Wolfe, Agnes O'Brien, and of course Mary Dreier, are filled with evidence of this relationship. "I am so new to this work that I am not always sure of my values," wrote Laura Elliot in 1911. She found Leonora a great inspiration: "Somehow you are one of the best expressions of the Cosmic Purpose I have met. . . ." Peake Faxon, another young ally from Kansas City, felt similar sentiments about Leonora's place in her life. "We struggled on and on for love of you — a n d what you stood for." 3 8 30 37 38

LOR Draft of letter to Mary Dreier, July(?) 1916; MD Letter to LOR, Sept. 16, 1916, LOR Papers. See Mitchell Snay, "Limits to Fellowship," unpub. paper, Brandeis Univ. 1977, on the importance of "sisterhood" at Denison House, a Boston Settlement house. Laura Elliott Letters to LOR, Jan. 1911, Peake Faxon Letters to LOR, 1912, Agnes Johnson Letter to LOR, 1912, LOR Papers.

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Other letters reveal a deep emotional attachment to Leonora. Mary Wolfe wrote that her husband was jealous of their long friendship: "It was only last summer for the 100th time that David accused me of always having loved you better than I did him. Very often, I think that's true." She poured out her feelings in a long letter to Mary Dreier after Leonora's death: "I was about 15 when I first met Nora O'Reilly. She was my first great love. To me she was beautiful sunlight bringing sweetness and light into all that was dark and ugly." Mary Dreier's memorial poem in Life & Labor Bulletin may not be great poetry, but does express Leonora's place as symbol: You held the torch aloft when we were young For us to follow gallantly, Whether we did or not, you held the torch. Your passionate faith and fervor drew us on And your true eloquence our spirits fired. You taught us never, never to despair . . .3;)

While Leonora was an emotionally supportive figure, I aro concerned not to portray her as a placid saint. Her fiery Irish temper often led her to lash out at those whom she considered misguided or less dedicated than herself. Her criticisms, though perhaps accurate, hurt her more sensitive co-workers. As a working class woman she seemed to be more comfortable with an aggressive verbal style than did her middle class colleagues. One episode in which this can be seen was her temporary resignation from the W T U L in 1905. The spark which touched this off was the publication of The Long Day by Dorothy Richardson. Purporting to be a firsthand "story of a New York working girl,"it chronicled the experiences and exploitation of women in the sweatshops of New York. It met with great popular success at the time. Historians have used it as a valuable genuine document with which to reconstruct the lives of working women. O'Reilly saw the book as a prime example of the exploitation of working women by their middle class sisters. She was particularly upset by what she saw as Richardson's middle class scorn for the "immorality" of the working girl. In an era in which 39

Mary Wolfe Letter to LOR, 1917 (she did eventually leave her husband of 15 years after a baby girl was born); Mary Wolfe Letter to Mary Dreier, 1927; Mary Dreier, Life and Labor Bulletin, May 1927, LOR Papers.

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public concern with the "social evil" was widespread. Richardson's contention that working girls drifted casually into prostitution undoubtedly accounted for some of the book's popular appeal. While Richardson had moved beyond the idea of the prostitute as innately depraved, she still blamed the working women for their own situation. She refers to "the shame and iniquity underlying a discouragingly large part of the work-girls' world," by which she meant not their miserable exploitation for low wages but sexual immorality. Her analysis of this is naive: It is rare indeed that one finds a female delinquent w h o has not b;en in the beginning a working girl. For, sad and terrible though it be, the truth is that the majority of "unfortunates" whether of the specific criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not because they are inherently vicious, but because they were failures as wage earners. They were failures as such, primarily for no other reason than they did not like to work. 4 0

O'Reilly was enraged at the implication that working women were lazy, or that there was a strong connection between working women and immorality. She was angry, too, that the public accepted Richardson's story as a first-hand account by a typical working woman. "It is more like the true story of a reporter in search for sensational copy," she fumed. Finally she was upset that the League had promoted and published chapters of the book. I may have felt that I had reason to believe I could b s of better use to my o w n people s o m e where else but n o w I k n o w that any body that will g o out of its way to publish chapters of the book of "The Long D a y " — t h a t rank exploitation of working w o m e n of N e w York without one scrap of sympathy or understanding of t h e m — I know I do not belong among its members. 4 1

In several respects, O'Reilly was right. Dorothy Richardson was not a typical working woman but a doctor's daughter from Prospect, Pennsylvania. She had worked as a teacher, and from 1896 was a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Deb's The Social Democrat, and the New York Herald. Like the Van Vorst *0 Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day (New York, 1905), 275, 277. 41 LOR, unpub. review of The Long Day, 1905, Letter to League Board, Dec. 29, 1905, LOR Papers. For another example of working women protesting the assumption that low wages led to prostitution, see Mary Blewett, "The Union of Sex and Craft in the Haverhill Shoe Strike of 1895," Labor History 20 (1979), 373.

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sisters and other middle class women concerned with the plight of the "working girl" Richardson took a series of jobs and reported on her experiences. In her case it does seem this was partly out of economic necessity and not simply a journalistic stunt. But her middle class background and education gave her opportunities not readily available to other working women. 42 Her moralizing condescension towards working girls typified that attitude of "the Lady with something to give her sisters" that O'Reilly so loathed. Episodes such as this brought to the forefront the contradictions which a woman so conscious of her working class background felt in working with a group whose public stance was so middle class. O'Reilly attempted to publish a review of The Long Day which expressed her point of view. This specific incident led her to reflect, as she was often to do again, that League members were basically "outsiders" to working class struggles: "the Trade Unionists must work out and solve their own problems in their own way. . . . While in the field we can be treated as interlopers which all of us are who do not carry Union cards . . ." 4 3 Gertrude Barnum, the League Executive Secretary, refused to accept the resignation, though she conceded many of O'Reilly's criticisms. But she disagreed with O'Reilly's analysis of the League members as meddling outsiders, and pointed out that O'Reilly's own position as a teacher in the Manhattan Trade School for Girls gave her an economic situation which seemed "privileged" to some of the workers who contacted the WTUL. The article O'Reilly wrote with so much passion never was published. "The poor article that had so much of my life's blood in it, is I fear destined to remain pigeonholed. This is indeed a source of pain for me for I sincerely believe those things should be said publicly. I suppose I must try again some other way." 44 But at this point O'Reilly's belief in sisterhood outweighed her depression over misunderstanding between the classes. Similar issues surfaced as one of the reasons for her later, and 42

43 44

Elliot Brownlee & Mary M. Brownlce, Women in the American Economy (New Haven, 1976), 204; Robert Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York, 1971), 71-2. Dorothy Richardson (1875-1955) later became a press agent for Producer David Belasco and eventually for Paramount Pictures. LOR, resignation letter from the WTUL, 1905, LOR Papers. She tried to get the New York Journal to publish the review. LOR Diary entry, Jan. 20, 1906, LOR Papers.

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final, resignation from the League in 1915. As she wrote to Mary Dreier: Trade U n i o n s are necessary [but] . . . the powers that be in the labor movement of N Y State d o not and will not recognize an outside body's right to help with the work. . . . B y keeping in the struggle we will hinder rather than help the rank and file from getting Real light as to who it is that is playing foul in the game. 4 5

Again, the response of the "allies" was to tell O'Reilly that she had become one of them. But this time Mary Dreier put it in feminist terms: If all w o m e n had done what you propose to d o — t h e r e never w o u l d have been a chance of our ever learning even to read and write—the fathers and brothers were not keen for that—and did not want an outside influence like a school to mar the quiet simplicity and w h o l l y trustfulness of the w o m e n folks. Dear—it's the same old story another time. . . . 4 0

Though formal ties ended, O'Reilly remained part of the feminist network of the WTUL. Her status as a protégé in the League was not unique. Many of the allies deliberately groomed young working class women for leadership in the labor movement. "It has been my dream to develop young women to be a help in the awakening of their class," Mary Beard confessed. Mary Dreier held similar notions: "The purpose of the League was to discover the strong women in the trades. . . ." Rose Schneiderman had benefactors (Irene and Alice Lewisohn) who financed her education. Clara Lemlich, famous as the young girl who sparked the waistmakers' strike of 1909, was a less satisfactory protégé. "She has no initiative," complained Mary Beard. 47 O'Reilly tried to pass on the advantages and support she had received to protégés of her own. One of the foremost was Margaret Hinchley, a fiery young speaker and organizer who had particular appeal to working class audiences. O'Reilly advised her on speaking engagements, demanded a suitable fee for her, and had the League's share of the speaking fees set aside as the "Margaret Hinchley Fund." Originally the idea was to start a 45 4C 47

LOR Letter to Mary Dreier, Aug. 31, 1915, LOR Papers. Mary Dreier Letter to LOR, Sept. 6, 1915, LOR Papers. Mary Beard Letter to LOR, July 21, 1912, LOR Papers; Marv Dreier, 1906, quoted in Dye, 313; Rose Schneiderman, All For One (New York, 1967), 83; May Beard Letter to LOR, July 21, 1912, LOR Papers.

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fund to support other struggling young organizers. But in December 1917, O'Reilly tried to persuade League members to use the "Fund" to provide Margaret with a year free from financial worries—similar to that provided so long ago for herself by Louisa Perkins—"as if she were a professor off on his leave of absence after seven years teaching." She asked her colleagues in the Suffrage Party to contribute to this cause as well. "What I had hoped was that the Party could see a way to do that 'bit' for Margaret as a token of women's real togetherness in spite of some slight differences." 4 8 "Sisterhood" was a concept that meant more than sharing emotional support to O'Reilly. Through her untiring efforts to put the needs of her sisters before her own she inspired the devotion of many of her colleagues. Only the quiet depression which filled the last pages of her diaries and her early death give glimpses of the cost of this life of self-sacrifice. Insights gained from an ethnic community, a feminist ideology, and the trade union movement were a source both of support and of conflict for women such as Leonora O'Reilly. Each provided her with a sense of community, a moral and ethical mission, a sense of working for something larger than one's individual fulfillment. The conflicts of her adult life came primarily from the clash of feminist and class loyalties. Her Irish background provided her with elements of a political tradition which she could use in shaping her own convictions, as well as a cultural context which justified her remaining single and dedicating her life to the service of social reform. The more traditional aspects of that community she came to terms with early in her life. O'Reilly herself asserted that the major focus of her life was the labor movement; her loyalties were to her working class origins. My own conclusion is that her female support network provided the validation, context, and mediation between conflicting priorities which enabled her to succeed in a non-traditional role. This is not to say that the organized feminist movement had first 48

LOR Letter to M. Hay, Dec. 29, 1917, LOR Papers. Another protegée was Rose Cohen, author of Oui of the Shadow.

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priority in her life; the labor movement certainly was that. But "sisterhood" rather than trade union brotherhood provided the community of support she needed. O'Reilly tried again and again to synthesize the various commitments in her life. She never gave up hope that all could work together. "It is upon the L a b o r Question that present Socialism is founded: Socialism is incipient Sociology. T h e Labor Question leads to Socialism. Socialism leads to Sociology. Sociology leads to Harmony." 4 9 Yet in reality her various commitments and perceptions led to conflicts, especially in terms of priorities. These conflicts were not unique to O'Reilly. T o some extent, her conflicts were representative of those experienced by many women of her time and background. Her inability to deny one for the other is not a "failure" but a measure of her understanding of the complexities of life. T o the end she was not so much a theorist as an activist.

49

LOR Draft of article on the "Labor Movement and Life," 1924, LOR Papers.

487

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FEMINISM OR UNIONISM? T H E NEW YORK WOMEN'S T R A D E UNION L E A G U E A N D T H E LABOR M O V E M E N T Nancy S c h r o m Dye

By the turn of the t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y , more t h a n 3 5 0 , 0 0 0 w o m e n were gainfully employed in New York City. The m a j o r i t y of these w o m e n , like the m a j o r i t y o f f e m a l e wage earners in the United States generally, w o r k e d in service o c c u p a t i o n s . N e a r l y 1 50,000 were personal servants and d o m e s t i c w o r k e r s . Additional tens of t h o u s a n d s labored as retail clerks, waitresses, and laundresses. 1 A substantial and rapidly growing minority of female laborers made u p New York C i t y ' s industrial w o r k f o r c e . In 1900, 1 3 2 , 5 3 5 w o m e n w o r k e d in the city's m a n u f a c t u r i n g e s t a b l i s h m e n t s . 2 As a center for the m a n u f a c t u r e of n o n d u r a b l e goods and as t h e h o m e of t h e w o m e n ' s a n d men's clothing trades, New York e m p l o y e d m o r e f e m a l e industrial w o r k e r s t h a n a n y other American city.-' Female f a c t o r y w o r k e r s in New York City l a b o r e d in a large n u m b e r of i n d u s t r i e s and were involved in a broad variety of w o r k processes. T h o u s a n d s of w o m e n s t r i p p e d , rolled, and packed cigars. T h e y assembled paper b o x e s , dipped and w r a p p e d candies, trimmed hats, and created artificial flowers and f e a t h e r s . T h e heaviest c o n c e n t r a t i o n of female industrial workers was in t h e needle trades. A p p r o x i m a t e l y 6 5 , 0 0 0 w o m e n were engaged in t h e m a n u f a c t u r e of c l o t h i n g : over 1 5 , 0 0 0 were e m p l o y e d in t h e men's garment industry and over 5 0 , 0 0 0 in t h e w o m e n ' s r e a d y - m a d e clothing t r a d e s . ^ Despite t h e growing i m p o r t a n c e of w o m e n in N e w York City's industrial w o r k force, very few of t h e m were organized. Union m e m b e r s h i p was rare a m o n g early t w e n t i e t h century New York City w o r k i n g w o m e n . T r a d e u n i o n m e m b e r s h i p statistics p a i n t a dismal picture of w o m e n ' s record f r o m 1 9 0 0 to 1 9 0 9 . A l t h o u g h m o r e than 3 5 0 , 0 0 0 w o m e n were e m p l o y e d in the city at t h e t u r n of t h e c e n t u r y , fewer t h a n 1 0 , 0 0 0 belonged to u n i o n s . 5 What was more, a l t h o u g h t h e n u m b e r s of female w o r k e r s increased during the first d e c a d e of t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y , t h e n u m b e r of female u n i o n i s t s in New York City followed a d o w n w a r d t r e n d f r o m 1 9 0 0 to 1909, particularly d u r i n g the economic depression of 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 0 8 . 6 The experiences of the W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League of New Y o r k , a feminist labor organization f o u n d e d late in 1 9 0 3 , are valuable f o r u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h e special difficulties involved in organizing early t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y w o r k i n g w o m e n . In a d d i t i o n , t h e history of the N e w York League is useful f o r e x a m i n i n g t h e p r o b l e m s f e m i n i s t s f a c e d in synthesizing a c o m m i t m e n t t o the w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t with a c o m m i t m e n t t o organized labor. T h e New York W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League, like its parent o r g a n i z a t i o n , the National W o m e n ' s Trade Union League o f A m e r i c a , was m a d e u p of f e m a l e social

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reformers and female workers. These diverse elements of the League's coalition worked together t h r o u g h o u t t h e early t w e n t i e t h century to build a w o m e n ' s labor movement in New York City. In its early years, f r o m late 1903 through 1912, the New York WTUL's m a j o r goal was to integrate w o m e n into the established trade u n i o n movement. To this end, WTUL members initiated union organizing campaigns in city industries which e m p l o y e d large numbers of w o m e n and helped establish several dozen unions. As a self-styled " c e n t r a l b o d y of w o m e n , " 7 t h e League led major organizing efforts among w o m e n in the needle trades. In addition, members worked occasionally with groups of t o b a c c o workers, textile workers, paper box makers, retail clerks, waitresses, and laundresses, a m o n g others. T h e League also worked to change male trade unionists' negative a t t i t u d e s toward w o m e n . Through speeches, personal contacts, and literature, m e m b e r s a t t e m p t e d to e d u c a t e unionists to women's changing place in the industrial w o r k force and to convince t h e m that w o m e n could be c o m m i t t e d and effective t r a d e u n i o n members. Finally, as feminists, League members stressed that w o m en should learn to be active, f o r c e f u l unionists, b o t h in their workplaces and in their organizations. The W o m e n ' s Trade Union League o f New York made i m p o r t a n t and lasting contributions to w o m e n ' s unionism in the early twentieth century. T h r o u g h its publicity and organizing efforts, the League introduced thousands of female wage earners to the labor m o v e m e n t . Working in a time of public hostility to unionism, the WTUL helped put several unions o n a stable footing, including two large locals of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. In addition, the League helped create a favorable climate of public o p i n i o n for w o m e n ' s organizing e f f o r t s and was influential in altering m a n y male trade unionists' negative attitudes t o w a r d w o m e n ' s union activities. Finally, the WTUL served as an important training ground for working women and for upper-class female social reformers alike. In a time when established trade unions gave w o m e n virtually no o p p o r t u n i t i e s for leadership or a u t o n o m y , working women could o c c u p y positions of responsibility in the League. As WTUL members they gained confidence in their abilities and invaluable experience as labor organizers, lobbyists, and public speakers. Despite these contributions, however, actual League efforts to organize w o m e n and integrate t h e m into t h e established labor movement met with d i s a p p o i n t m e n t and frustration. With t h e i m p o r t a n t exceptions of t h e waistmakers' union (International Ladies' G a r m e n t Workers' Union Local 25) and the white-goods (underwear) workers' union (ILGWU Local 62), it was rare that t h e League established organizations that lasted longer t h a n a few seasons and that included women f r o m more t h a n one or two shops. Many of t h e strikes t h e League led failed and many of t h e others were, at best, holding actions fought to maintain present working conditions. Then, t o o , although the WTUL was influential in helping to convince many male unionists of t h e necessity of organizing w o m e n , m e m b e r s were always dissatisfied with the slow progress t h e y made in insuring w o m e n ' s equality within the early twentieth-century trade union movement. In large part, t h e problems t h e WTUL faced in organizing w o m e n and in trying to

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change w o m e n ' s status in t h e city labor movement were due to external realities. Unskilled and semiskilled w o r k e r s in seasonal industries had very little bargaining power with their employers. League members also discovered early in their work that w o m e n presented special difficulties for union organizers. Women were usually t e m p o r a r y workers who remained in the labor force f r o m four to six years between g r a d u a t i o n f r o m school and marriage. Women also changed positions frequently, o f t e n holding as m a n y as two or three d i f f e r e n t industrial j o b s in a year. 8 Finally, according to t h e WTUL, many w o m e n were reluctant t o j o i n a union—a reluctance that the League att r i b u t e d to w o m e n ' s traditional passivity and timidity. Women typically t h o u g h t o f themselves as daughters, sisters, and f u t u r e wives and m o t h e r s rather than as workers in their own right. W o m e n ' s attitudes t o w a r d work, League members decided, were "a major stumbling block in improving industrial c o n d i t i o n s . " ' The New York League also experienced serious difficulties in its relationship with the American trade union movement—difficulties which do much to explain t h e problems the WTUL faced in organizing w o m e n and in combining unionism and feminism. The League began its work in a time when the d o m i n a n t and most successful f o r m of labor organization was t h e craft union, exemplified by t h e national trade unions that made u p t h e American Federation of Labor. T h e A.F. o f L. was formed in the late nineteenth-century to organize and protect the status o f skilled w o r k m e n in traditional trades such as c a r p e n t r y and cigarmaking. A. F. of L. unions were composed of skilled c r a f t s m e n working in a single trade. Unlike the industrial unions that would c o m e to dominate American mass-production industries later in the t w e n t i e t h century, A. F. o f L. craft unions were highly selective in their membership and did not incorporate all workers in a given industry. Skilled cigarmakers, for e x a m p l e , were eligible for membership in the p o w e r f u l A. F. of L. cigarmakers' u n i o n ; unskilled cigar workers w h o p e r f o r m e d manual and machine processes were n o t . T h e Federation's unions' strength derived f r o m t h e fact t h a t their members were sufficiently skilled to c o m m a n d bargaining power w i t h their employers and sufficiently a f f l u e n t to build large u n i o n treasuries. Both t h e leadership and the rank and file of A. F. o f L. unions were o f t e n o p e n l y antagonistic t o w a r d the unionization of w o m e n . In part, A. F. of L. a t t i t u d e s toward w o m e n stemmed f r o m t h e Federation's general a n t i p a t h y toward the growing numbers of unskilled workers in t h e American labor force. F e d e r a t i o n leaders also argued that w o m e n , because t h e y were usually t e m p o r a r y workers, cared little for maintaining hard-won wage and h o u r standards. "It is the men w h o suffer through t h e w o m e n who who are e m p l o y e d in t h e m a n u f a c t u r e of clothing," o n e member of the United Garment Workers wrote bitterly. "While the men through long years of struggle have succeeded in eliminating t h e contracting evil and the r o t t e n system of piece work t h e girls . . . are now trying to deprive t h e older members of t h e G a r m e n t Workers of the b e n e f i t s because [they] . . . can a f f o r d t o work for small wages and care nothing a b o u t t h e condition of the t r a d e . " 1 0 Throughout its first years t h e WTUL—upper-class and working-class m e m b e r s a l i k e adhered scrupulously to t h e policies and principles of t h e A. F. of L. T h e League

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stressed that c l o s e c o o p e r a t i o n with the F e d e r a t i o n w a s desirable and that whenever an an A. F . o f L . u n i o n e x i s t e d in a t r a d e in which L e a g u e organizers w e r e active, w o m e n should apply for membership.

F o l l o w i n g the A. F . o f L . e x a m p l e , the L e a g u e tried to

a d o p t a c r a f t o r i e n t a t i o n in its o w n o r g a n i z i n g e f f o r t s . In p a r t , t h e L e a g u e ' s d e c i s i o n to link its f a t e with that o f the A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n of L a b o r derived f r o m early m e m b e r s ' desire t o gain the respect o f A . F . o f L. leaders. Upper-class L e a g u e leaders in particular were self-conseious a b o u t their s t a t u s as " o u t s i d e r s , " e s p e c i a l l y in a p e r i o d m a r k e d b y a great deal o f suspicion a n d distrust between the labor m o v e m e n t a n d the general p u b l i c . In a d d i t i o n , the L e a g u e ' s first m e m b e r s w a n t e d t o c o n v i n c e the A. F . o f L . l e a d e r s h i p that t h e y were not f e m i n i s t s intent u p o n elevating the interests o f w o m e n a b o v e the solidarity o f the w o r k i n g class. "We d o n ' t want p e o p l e t o think that b e c a u s e we have called a m e e t i n g o f w o m e n unionists that we think w o m e n can at all stand a l o n e in organization or that they s h o u l d be organized separate [ii'c] f r o m the men where t h e y w o r k , " o n e early L e a g u e leader s t a t e d . 1

1

Finally, the L e a g u e ' s decision t o f o l l o w A. F . o f L . principles and organizing techniques also i n d i c a t e d t h a t the first L e a g u e members—working-class and upper-class a l i k e a t t r i b u t e d f e m a l e w o r k e r s ' p r o b l e m s m o r e to their e c o n o m i c role as w o r k e r s than t o their social role as w o m e n . P r o b l e m s that w o m e n f a c e d in the work f o r c e , then, could be solved b y integrating t h e m into the established labor m o v e m e n t . " T o secure complete o r g a n i z a t i o n o f an i n d u s t r y , " a l e a d i n g W T U L working-class m e m b e r stated in 1 9 0 8 , " t h e r e m u s t b e c o o p e r a t i o n b e t w e e n all its m e m b e r s , m e n and w o m e n t o g e t h e r . " 1 2 B y t r y i n g t o f o l l o w A . F . o f L . p r a c t i c e s , the N e w Y o r k L e a g u e w a s caught in a d o u b l e b i n d . L e a g u e m e m b e r s were well aware o f the A. F . o f L . ' s discriminatory practices a n d negative a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d w o m e n , yet given the structure o f the early t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y l a b o r m o v e m e n t , t h e y had little choice but t o push w o m e n to j o i n A. F . o f L . u n i o n s . In their e f f o r t s to integrate w o m e n into the m a l e - d o m i n a t e d labor m o v e m e n t a n d in their desire to a p p e a r as r e s p e c t a b l e trade unionists to the A. F. o f L., L e a g u e m e m b e r s were o f t e n f o r c e d t o s u b o r d i n a t e their c o m m i t m e n t t o feminism for a c o n s e r v a t i v e t r a d e union p h i l o s o p h y that w a s usually i n c o m p a t i b l e with their c o n s t i t u e n t s ' n e e d s as w o r k e r s and as w o m e n . It is b y e x a m i n i n g the L e a g u e ' s early organizing m e t h o d s and activities that the d i f f i c u l t i e s the L e a g u e e n c o u n t e r e d with the early t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y labor m o v e m e n t can best be illustrated. E a r l y in the o r g a n i z a t i o n ' s h i s t o r y , N e w Y o r k L e a g u e leaders d e c i d e d that female w o r k e r s ' o p e n e x p r e s s i o n o f d i s c o n t e n t with their w o r k i n g c o n d i t i o n s w a s the single most i m p o r t a n t prerequisite for s u c c e s s f u l u n i o n i z a t i o n . 1

3

A c c o r d i n g l y , the W T U L

s u p p o r t e d s p o n t a n e o u s w o m e n ' s strikes. L e a g u e organizers w a l k e d through East Side f a c t o r y n e i g h b o r h o o d s l o o k i n g for s h o p strikes. When they f o u n d f e m a l e pickets, m e m b e r s circulated leaflets a b o u t their w o r k and invited the strikers t o c o m e to W T U L h e a d q u a r t e r s for a s s i s t a n c e . The W T U L ' s p o l i c y o f s u p p o r t i n g s p o n t a n e o u s strikes w a s an i m p o r t a n t independent stand. B e c a u s e the c i t y ' s u n i o n s were c o n c e r n e d with c o n s o l i d a t i n g and stabilizing their m e m b e r s h i p s and their treasuries, m a n y r e f u s e d t o assist strikes that were not a p p r o v e d in a d v a n c e . T h e U n i t e d G a r m e n t Workers, for e x a m p l e , labeled such activ-

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ities " w a n t o n strikes" and refused to give strikers organizational or financial assistance. The union, as one study concluded, " l o o k s rather askance u p o n recruits w h o appear under such circumstances." 1 4 Because most labor u n i o n s were i n d i f f e r e n t or hostile, women on strike turned t o the League far more readily t h a n t o male u n i o n s f o r practical advice and financial assistance. Small groups of w o m e n f r e q u e n t l y appeared before the WTUL Executive Board to explain their reasons for striking and t o ask f o r the League's help. When w o m e n asked for assistance, t h e Executive Board almost invariably pledged financial and organizational aid and dispatched a c o m m i t t e e of organizers and allies—as upper-class League m e m b e r s were called—to w o r k w i t h t h e strikers. The Board placed one major condition on its o f f e r s of assistance: t h e w o m e n had t o declare their loyalty to the American Federation of L a b o r . 1 5 Bringing the strike to a victorious end was t h e League's first task. Every element of the League's coalition of upper-class and working-class w o m e n had a role to play in this work. Upper-class members served as volunteer pickets and visited strikebreakers at home. Other allies organized consumer b o y c o t t s , street meetings, and publicity campaigns. The League appealed to its affluent sympathizers to give their working-class sisters financial help. Wealthy allies put u p bail for arrested strikers and League members who were lawyers provided legal counsel. 1 6 After the strikers went back to work, League m e m b e r s remained with the w o m e n to help put the small organization on a p e r m a n e n t f o o t i n g . Using t h e individual shop as the basic unit of organization, WTUL m e m b e r s a t t e m p t e d to fashion a small but stable shop union. The little union was usually styled along craft lines. If t h e strikers were garment finishers, for instance, the union's m e m b e r s h i p was m a d e u p of finishers. WTUL organizers were very concerned with t h e new u n i o n ' s s t r u c t u r e . T h e y taught the elected leaders how to hold meetings, drilled t h e m in the intricacies of parliamentary procedure, and helped t h e m establish policies concerning dues, m e m b e r s h i p , grievances, and elections. T h r o u g h o u t , the League stressed t h e i m p o r t a n c e of orderly, businesslike methods. Once the League had established a small organization, its organizers w o r k e d t o imbue the new union members with trade union principles. T h r o u g h o u t t h e early years, League members were of one mind regarding the direction organization should t a k e . For the WTUL, trade union principles were s y n o n y m o u s with the goals and p h i l o s o p h y of the A. F. of L. WTUL w o m e n accepted the superiority of craft u n i o n i s m . In addition, they forcefully impressed upon female workers that militant u n i o n i s m should be eschewed in favor of practical, orderly, businesslike m e t h o d s . League propaganda on behalf of the A. F. of L. even included "inspiring" lectures on " S a m u e l G o m p e r s in the ranks." 1 ' The stories Gertrude Barnum, a leading upper-class m e m b e r , w r o t e for labor newspapers, although at t h e conservative end of the League's ideological s p e c t r u m , provide some illustrations of the trade union philosophy WTUL m e m b e r s i n t r o d u c e d to their small shop unions. Barnum's stories included a n u m b e r of stock characters. The "pale Russian Jewish girl" who was usually "explaining a Marxian socialist t r a c t " was one character. The silly young w o m a n who read " d r e a m b o o k s " and s e n t i m e n t a l novels

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w a s a n o t h e r . T h e s t o r i e s ' h e r o i n e s w e r e A m e r i c a n - b o r n w o r k e r s w i t h g o o d business sense w h o u n d e r s t o o d t h e f u t i l i t y o f b o t h Marxist t r a c t s a n d s e n t i m e n t a l novels. They tried t o i m b u e t h e i r sister w o r k e r s w i t h self-respect and a sense of c r a f t s m a n s h i p . When a p r o b l e m a r o s e in t h e w o r k s h o p , t h e A m e r i c a n w o m a n w o u l d a n s w e r t h e J e w i s h radical or t h e s e n t i m e n t a l n o v e l r e a d e r w i t h g o o d business a c u m e n : What can we d o ? W h a t ' s t h e a n s w e r ? D o y o u w a n t t o k n o w ? Well, y o u ask t h e c u t t e r s .

They

d i d n ' t get t h e i r t e n h o u r s a n d scale o f p r i c e s by w r i t i n g l i t e r a t u r e . . . . T h e y got it b y b e i n g skilled c u t t e r s t h a t w e r e n e e d e d in t h e j a c k e t b u s i n e s s a n d t h e n laying d o w n t h e h o u r s a n d t h e prices they w o u l d s t a n d f o r . I t ' s u p t o us t o p u t u p t h e k i n d o f s e w i n g t h e y c a n ' t f i n d f r o m e v e r y i m m i g r a n t t h a t l a n d s at G o v e r n o r ' s I s l a n d and t h e n get t h e c u t t e r s t o s t a n d by us f o r w h a t ' s c o m i n g t o us. . .

T h e L e a g u e ' s o r g a n i z i n g w o r k h a d a f e m i n i s t c o m p o n e n t as well. W T U L m e m b e r s agreed t h a t f o r w o m e n t o b e s u c c e s s f u l u n i o n m e m b e r s , t h e y n e e d e d p r a c t i c e in selfa s s e r t i o n as w e l l as i n s t r u c t i o n in t r a d e u n i o n i s m . Far t o o o f t e n , t h e L e a g u e stressed, w o m e n a l l o w e d m e n t o d o m i n a t e t h e i r a c t i v i t i e s a n d their t h i n k i n g . T o c o u n t e r this passivity, L e a g u e m e m b e r s a t t e m p t e d t o e d u c a t e w o m e n t o e x p r e s s t h e m s e l v e s o p e n l y and f o r c e f u l l y . In a d d i t i o n , t h e W T U L insisted t h a t w o m e n elect their o w n u n i o n officers, chair t h e i r o w n m e e t i n g s , s e t t l e t h e i r o w n d i s p u t e s , a n d m a k e t h e i r o w n decisions w i t h o u t a n y a s s i s t a n c e f r o m m a l e c o w o r k e r s or relatives. T h e L e a g u e ' s s e c r e t a r y , Helen M a r o t , d e s c r i b e d t h e s u c c e s s f u l o p e r a t i o n of t h i s process in a small u n i o n o f g a r m e n t finishers.

The w o m e n handled

their o w n m e e t i n g s a n d t h e s t r i k e t h e m s e l v e s — o n l y g e t t i n g advice and c o o p e r a t i o n f r o m o t h e r s . This is in m a r k e d c o m p a r i s o n t o t h e a d v i c e o f t h e m e n w h o had c o m e t o h e l p t h e m . T h e y had s t a r t e d t h e idea a m o n g t h e girls t h a t t h e y m u s t h a v e a leader. It w a s i n t e r e s t i n g t o see h o w the girls t o o k u p t h e idea o f b e i n g t h e i r o w n l e a d e r s a n d h o w their interest i n c r e a s e d as t h e y e l e c t e d different people on different

c o m m i t t e e s .

O n c e t h e L e a g u e d e e m e d a s h o p u n i o n s u f f i c i e n t l y stable, W T U L l e a d e r s urged the w o m e n t o a f f i l i a t e w i t h an A. F. o f L. u n i o n .

Because m o s t of t h e u n i o n s t h e League

helped f o r m w e r e c o m p o s e d of small g r o u p s o f w o m e n in t h e n e e d l e t r a d e s , this usually m e a n t a f f i l i a t i n g w i t h e i t h e r t h e U n i t e d G a r m e n t W o r k e r s or t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

A f f i l i a t i o n i n v o l v e d t w o tasks for t h e W T U L . First, League

m e m b e r s had t o p e r s u a d e t h e w o m e n t o cast their lot w i t h a larger l a b o r b o d y .

Second,

the L e a g u e c o m m u n i c a t e d w i t h t h e A. F. o f L. u n i o n a n d urged its o f f i c e r s to grant t h e n e w w o m e n ' s o r g a n i z a t i o n a c h a r t e r a n d f i n a n c i a l and o r g a n i z a t i o n a l assistance. When L e a g u e o f f i c e r s a s k e d an i n t e r n a t i o n a l u n i o n to grant a c h a r t e r t o a w o m e n ' s organ i z a t i o n , t h e y w e r e n o t a s k i n g t h e A. F . o f L. a f f i l i a t e t o assimilate w o m e n i n t o existing locals.

R a t h e r , t h e y w e r e suggesting t h a t A. F. o f L. a f f i l i a t e s i n c o r p o r a t e w o m e n in a

parallel f a s h i o n c o n s i s t e n t w i t h c r a f t - u n i o n p r i n c i p l e s . A local o f f e m a l e b u t t o n h o l e w o r k e r s , f o r e x a m p l e , c o u l d c o e x i s t side b y side w i t h a local of skilled male g a r m e n t c u t t e r s ; a local o f cigar s t r i p p e r s c o u l d c o e x i s t in t h e s a m e u n i o n w i t h a local of cigar makers. O n c e a small s h o p o r g a n i z a t i o n a f f i l i a t e d w i t h a n a t i o n a l u n i o n , t h e W T U L ' s w o r k was o f f i c i a l l y c o m p l e t e d . T h e N e w Y o r k L e a g u e did not consider its e f f o r t s successful, h o w e v e r , u n l e s s t h e n e w local r e c e i v e d s u f f i c i e n t assistance f r o m t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l .

The

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

League expected t h e union t o help finance an organizing campaign, to lend its a u t h o r i t y t o help settle shop disputes, and to give t h e new female m e m b e r s b e n e f i t s equal to those which men received. T h e League also e x p e c t e d t h e new m e m b e r s to assert t h e m selves in union affairs. League leaders urged w o m e n t o seek representation o n the union's executive board and t o serve as delegates t o labor c o n v e n t i o n s . 2 0 In short, t h e League's organizational task ended with t h e integration of w o m e n as equal m e m b e r s into t h e established labor movement. The Women's Trade Union League of New York met w i t h a few spectacular successes in its early organizing work. T h e 1 9 0 9 shirtwaist strike, in which more than 2 0 , 0 0 0 shirtwaist makers answered the call f o r a general w a l k o u t , was the most notable examp l e . 2 1 For the most part, however, it was rare for a shop organization to complete t h e slow progression f r o m s p o n t a n e o u s strike to established union. One of t h e major difficult ies that hampered the League's w o r k was its m e m b e r s ' insistence on a d o p t i n g A. F. of L.-style craft unionism and shop-by-shop organizing m e t h o d s which were designed for organizing skilled workers. League members, for example, discovered early in their organizing w o r k that an employer could easily replace unskilled or semiskilled w o m e n , especially if the w o m e n could not win the support of skilled male workers in a w a l k o u t . Thus, w o m e n had little leverage in negotiations with their employers. WTUL organizers discovered how powerless women were when t h e y a t t e m p t e d to negotiate strike s e t t l e m e n t s for small groups of workers. Records suggest that it was unusual f o r t h e fledgling unions the WTUL assisted to wrest written c o n t r a c t s f r o m employers. Verbal agreements concerning wages, hours, and working conditions appear t o have been more c o m o n m . 2 2 Although few records reporting c o m p l e t e League c o n f e r e n c e s with m a n u f a c t u r e r s exist, one in particular illustrates t h e weak n a t u r e of t h e a g r e e m e n t s t h e WTUL was able to win. In the initial conference with a certain m a n u f a c t u r e r , the employer agreed to reinstate the strikers, abolish fines for lateness and p e t t y errors o n the j o b , and give the w o m e n time to wash before they left in t h e evening. At t h e second conference, wages were discussed. The m a n u f a c t u r e r refused t o pay t h e w o m e n their previous piece rates. "We discussed the whole s i t u a t i o n , " t h e WTUL strike c o m m i t t e e stated, "and felt that it was the best we could do for an unorganized g r o u p in an unskilled trade . . . we put the whole matter b e f o r e t h e strikers, which was a 15% r e d u c t i o n [in wages] instead of 35% which they a c c e p t e d . . . , " 2 3 At o n e p o i n t , t h e League discouraged strikers in unskilled trades f r o m d e m a n d i n g u n i o n r e c o g n i t i o n . Such a demand, members stressed, was " p r e m a t u r e . " 2 4 Although the League recognized that unskilled w o m e n had virtually no leverage with their employers, the organization usually tried to f o r m miniature craft unions. The League labeled every work process a craft and a t t e m p t e d t o f o r m separate " c r a f t " unions in all work situations in which w o m e n were e m p l o y e d r a t h e r t h a n advocating industrial organization methods by which all t h e w o r k e r s in a given i n d u s t r y - s k i l l e d and unskilled—would be included in o n e union. Craft organization was unsuited t o t h e realities of most w o m e n ' s w o r k and was an ineffective way to unionize them. T o organize successfully along craft lines required

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workers' s t r o n g personal identification with the work processes they perform and a high level of j o b skill. Buttonhole workers, for instance—female or m a l e - c o u l d not organize a r o u n d such a mechanized, m o n o t o n o u s , and specialized work process. Because most w o m e n w o r k e d in industries in which processes were becoming increasingly mechanized and specialized, craft organization was o u t d a t e d for t h e m . 2 5 What was more, unskilled w o r k e r s in small " c r a f t " u n i o n s were isolated and powerless. Even when t h e League's small unions affiliated with A. F. of L. internationals, this problem was still a c u t e , for afiiliation with a craft union did not guarantee the support of skilled workers' locals. It made little difference w h e t h e r or not a small union of b u t t o n h o l e workers could claim affiliation with the ILGWU or the United Garment Workers if skilled tailors and cutters who worked alongside t h e m did not include the women in their c o n t r a c t s . The League discovered these difficulties in its work with United Garment Workers' Local 102, a small union of female b u t t o n h o l e makers in the men's garment industry that t h e W T U L helped launch in 1905. The League complained that although the union was a legitimate and full-fledged United Garment Workers' affiliate, the international r e f u s e d t o w i t h d r a w the union label f r o m shops that employed unorganized b u t t o n h o l e w o r k e r s despite its stated policy of allowing only organized shops to use the label or t o hire an organizer to work with the w o m e n . 2 6 The WTUL also reported example a f t e r e x a m p l e of male locals' unilateral decision-making without regard for Local 102. Men called strikes, for instance, w i t h o u t consulting the local and without including its m e m b e r s in their s e t t l e m e n t s . 2 7 What was more, affiliation did not guarantee t h a t t h e international would concern itself with the affairs of the small w o m e n ' s local. When a small League-sponsored union o f female white-goods machine operators affiliated with t h e ILGWU in 1909, for instance, the ILGWU granted the w o m e n a charter, but did not promise substantial organizational or financial assistance. The international i n f o r m e d the small u n i o n , now ILGWU Local 62, that before it would pay for an organizer " t h e union m e m b e r s must show their power to organize thems e l v e s . " 2 8 It was several years b e f o r e t h e international hired an organizer and appointed officers—all male—for t h e small union and backed its agitation for a general s t r i k e . 2 9 T h e A. F. o f L. position o n union dues also posed difficulties for the League. The dues that m a n y international unions charged were impossibly expensive for a w o m a n who w o r k e d for six or seven dollars a week. What was more, international unions such as the ILGWU, which had low dues b y A. F. of L. standards, pressured locals in t h e w o m e n ' s t r a d e s to raise their dues and initiation fees. In practice, League-sponsored shop u n i o n s had low dues: five or t e n cents a week was the usual a m o u n t . Nevertheless, League m e m b e r s apparently e x p e c t e d w o m e n to pay whatever dues and initiation fees an A. F. of L. affiliate required. As Rose Schneiderman, a leading working-class member, s t a t e d , " b e f o r e you get big wages, you njust pay big d u e s . " 3 0 The League's organizing work was complicated further by the seasonal character of much of N e w York City's industry. In m a n y of the needle trades, the busy season began in late S e p t e m b e r and peaked in late March or early April, with a t e m p o r a r y slow season in J a n u a r y . The summer and early fajl m o n t h s were the slack season in nearly

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all b r a n c h e s of t h e c l o t h i n g i n d u s t r y . In s o m e t r a d e s , m o r e t h a n 6 0 p e r c e n t o f t h e w o r k f o r c e w a s laid o f f d u r i n g t h i s slow p e r i o d . - ' 1

B e c a u s e League m e m b e r s s o o n

l e a r n e d t h a t little c o u l d b e a c c o m p l i s h e d d u r i n g t h e s e t i m e s , t h e y s t r u c t u r e d their o r g a n i z i n g e f f o r t s t o c o i n c i d e w i t h the b u s y s e a s o n s . 3 2

But t h e League o r g a n i z e d o n

a s h o p - b y - s h o p basis—a m e t h o d t h a t m e t w i t h A. F. o f L. a p p r o v a l b u t w h i c h was unsuited t o seasonal f l u c t u a t i o n s . T h e League w o u l d b u i l d a small u n i o n d u r i n g t h e b u s y season o n l y t o see it d e c l i n e o r collapse over t h e s u m m e r m o n t h s . W o m e n lost i n t e r e s t , f o u n d w o r k in o t h e r s h o p s or t r a d e s , or g r e w d i s c o u r a g e d w h e n t h e small o r g a n i z a t i o n c o u l d n o t m a i n t a i n w o r k i n g c o n d i t i o n s or wage l e v e l s . 3 3 T h e L e a g u e ' s a d h e r e n c e t o A. F. of L. policies is well i l l u s t r a t e d b y its t r e a t m e n t o f t h e Progressive R o l l e d C i g a r e t t e Makers, a small i n d e p e n d e n t u n i o n c o m p o s e d primarily of w o m e n . T h e u n i o n a p p l i e d for L e a g u e a f f i l i a t i o n late in 1 9 0 7 . In r e s p o n s e t o W T U L o f f i c e r s ' q u e s t i o n i n g a b o u t its s t a t u s as an i n d e p e n d e n t u n i o n , t h e C i g a r e t t e M a k e r s e x p l a i n e d t h a t o r i g i n a l l y t h e y had w a n t e d t o a f f i l i a t e w i t h t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Cigar Makers, a p o w e r f u l A. F. o f L. I n t e r n a t i o n a l , b u t t h a t t h a t o r g a n i z a t i o n had rej e c t e d t h e m b e c a u s e t h e i r piece r a t e scale w a s t o o l o w . T h e y did not w a n t t o a f f i l i a t e w i t h t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l T o b a c c o W o r k e r s b e c a u s e t h e I T U r e f u s e d t o grant their u n i o n a c h a r t e r a n d w o u l d a c c e p t t h e m e m b e r s o n l y as i n d i v i d u a l s . High dues a n d e x p e n s i v e initiation fees m a d e this alternative u n t e n a b l e . 3 ' ' T h e L e a g u e ' s E x e c u t i v e Board i n f o r m e d t h e small u n i o n t h a t it could n o t be a c c e p t e d as a W T U L a f f i l i a t e u n t i l t h e League had " d e t e r m i n e d w h e t h e r or not t h e y w e r e antagonistic t o t h e A m e r i c a n F e d e r a t i o n of Labor." 3 ->

T h e W T U L secretary p r o m p t l y w r o t e

t o A. F. of L. p r e s i d e n t S a m u e l G o m p e r s i n q u i r i n g a b o u t t h e u n i o n ' s s t a t u s . He r e p l i e d t h a t t h e A. F. o f L. c o n s i d e r e d t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n a d u a l u n i o n b e c a u s e its m e m b e r s ref u s e d t o a f f i l i a t e w i t h t h e T o b a c c o W o r k e r s . As a r e s u l t o f G o m p e r s ' ruling, t h e small u n i o n a p p a r e n t l y w a s d e n i e d premission t o a f f i l i a t e w i t h t h e L e a g u e . 3 6 T h e L e a g u e ' s d e a l i n g w i t h t h e cigarette w o r k e r s i l l u s t r a t e b o t h t h e L e a g u e ' s subservience t o t h e A. F. o f L. in its early years a n d t h e d i l e m m a small w o m e n ' s u n i o n s faced. By insisting t h a t a u t o n o m o u s u n i o n s a f f i l i a t e w i t h t h e A. F . o f L., t h e L e a g u e was somet i m e s a s k i n g f e m a l e w o r k e r s t o act against s o m e o f t h e i r o w n interests. T h e C i g a r e t t e M a k e r s h a d g o o d r e a s o n s t o avoid a f f i l i a t i n g w i t h t h e T o b a c c o W o r k e r s - r e a s o n s t h a t m a n y small u n i o n s c o u l d give. High d u e s a n d i n i t i a t i o n f e e s a n d c u r t a i l m e n t o f local a u t o n o m y l i m i t e d t h e a d v a n t a g e s of a f f i l i a t i o n . I n t e r n a t i o n a l u n i o n s ' d i s c r i m i n a t o r y p r a c t i c e s t o w a r d w o m e n p r o v i d e d a d d i t i o n a l r e a s o n f o r o r g a n i z a t i o n s t o avoid a f f i l i a t i o n . F r o m 1 9 1 2 o n w a r d s t h e N e w York League b e c a m e increasingly disillusioned w i t h t h e labor m o v e m e n t . O n e m e a s u r e of its g r o w i n g d i s e n c h a n t m e n t with t h e A. F. of L. w a s its progressive willingness t o admit i n d e p e n d e n t u n i o n s t o League m e m b e r s h i p . 3 ^ T h e slow p r o g r e s s o f w o m e n ' s u n i o n i s m in t h e c i t y , p a r t i c u l a r l y in t r a d e s o u t s i d e t h e c l o t h i n g i n d u s t r i e s , t h e city u n i o n s ' d i s c r i m i n a t o r y policies t o w a r d its f e m a l e m e m b e r s a n d w o m e n ' s locals, a n d t h e h e a v y h a n d e d m a n n e r in w h i c h t h e United T e x t i l e W o r k e r s u n d e r m i n e d t h e 1 9 1 2 L a w r e n c e textile strike p r o m p t e d W T U L m e m b e r s ' r é é v a l u a t i o n of A. F. of L. p o l i c i e s . 3 ^

T h e most p e r c e p t i v e L e a g u e m e m b e r s e v e n t u a l l y realized

t h a t their o r g a n i z a t i o n ' s i d e n t i f i c a t i o n w i t h t h e A. F. o f L. saddled t h e m w i t h m e t h o d s

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and an ideology that were dysfunctional. A few members began to see the importance of organizing unskilled workers along industrial lines. In other words, they began to argue that all workers in a given industry—skilled and unskilled alike—must be organized together.-^ However, members could not implement or formulate alternatives to the existing trade union structure. Few League members entertained ideas about breaking away from the labor movement and creating new types of unions for unskilled and semiskilled workers. The reasons for this were several. First, most League members' acceptance of craft union principles and loyalty to the American Federation of Labor were deeply ingrained. Although some members eventually dismissed the principles of the A. F. of L. intellectually, they seemed to remain trapped by a desire to appear as respectable trade unionists in the eyes of Federation leaders. To have advocated separate women's unions or to have criticized the labor movement openly would have been to confirm labor leaders' suspicions that WTUL members were really nothing more than a group of wealthy and meddlesome philanthropists. League members were acutely aware of their status as outsiders in the labor movement, and their fear of being considered dual unionists or feminists who lacked any sense of working-class consciousness possibly prevented them from taking action. As the League's secretary reminded the executive board, the WTUL was "not an official part of the trade union movement" and because the organization was composed "of two groups of people, unionists and sympathizers, [it] is in danger of creating a feeling that the latter look for strength to forces other than l a b o r . " 4 0 Probably more important in explaining the League's insistence on following A. F. of L. policies, however, was the fact that there were simply no satisfactory alternatives that the WTUL, acting as an independent albeit relatively wealthy organization, could have implemented. The League's theoretical alternatives to A. F. of L. cooperation and craft unionism included separate independent unions for women, federated women's unions, a separate labor federation for female workers, and industrial unions. In the early twentieth century, however, none of these were realistic or viable possibilities. The most obvious alternative to an integrationist policy was to form separate independent women's unions. Female workers themselves sometimes expressed a preference for segregated organizations. At one conference, for instance, a spokeswoman for a small United Garment Workers' local recalled that although her union had included men originally, members were happier with a separate organization. "The reason why the women had to draw out from the men was because the men wanted to come late to the meetings and stay late while the women wanted to go early and come home early.'"* 1 Sex-segregated unions, then, could follow the rhythms and contours of a working woman's day and could take into account the probability that she had domestic responsibilities as well as outside work. On other occasions, women complained to the League that men monopolized their union meetings or that they were afraid to express themselves in meetings with m e n . 4 2 Then, too, separate organizations may have offered women more possibilities for leadership roles. In short, separate organizations may have facilitated the WTUL goals of feminist unionism in ways that A. F. of L. unions could not.

498

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

The League, however, understandably rejected the alternative of separate women's unions on ideological and economic grounds. To have pursued such a course would have been tantamount to dual unionism.*-' League leaders recognized that there was no better way to alienate organized labor. A consideration of working women's economic situation was even more important in explaining why the WTUL had no choice but to reject separate independent unions for women. Because women were unable to pay substantial dues, such organizations were usually too poor to survive more than a season or two, let alone offer its members benefits or finance a strike. Because women were usually temporary, transient workers, turnover among members in women's unions was rapid, making it difficult to build a stable permanent organization. 4 4 Finally, because most women were unskilled workers, such unions could not expect to meet with success in bargaining. One possible solution to the problems that separate women's unions faced might have been a federation of female workers. An autonomous federation may have solved the problems posed by the separate organization of economically weak and unskilled female workers and provided the means to circumvent the obstructionist tactics and discriminatory practices of the labor movement at the same time. Occasionally, League members suggested that the WTUL create a federation of women unionists. The New York Executive Board discussed and rejected this alternative as early as 1 9 0 6 . A leading working-class member, Rose Schneiderman, reintroduced the idea at the National Women's Trade Union League convention in 1909. She explained that a women's federation could be open to all female workers who could not recruit enough individuals in their own occupations to form a viable organization. Women could come together regardless of trade and pool their resources. A federation could avoid the difficulties common to women's unions: its membership and treasury could be large enough to ensure permanency and stability. Schneiderman also suggested that a federation could offer benefits of particular interest to women. Because customary union benefits were rarely an attraction to women who did not stay permanently in the work force, she proposed offering a marriage benefit in place of the standard union death b e n e f i t . 4 6 Schneiderman probably borrowed her ideas from the National Federation of Women Workers which the British Women's Trade Union League organized in 1906. The English federation was self-sustaining and open to any female w o r k e r . 4 7 The New York League did not take any action to implement Schneiderman's proposal for a separate women's labor federation. Nor did the WTUL organize federal unions—a form of organization the A. F. of L. recognized and which w o m e n who organized independently sometimes adopted. A federal union included women f r o m several unrelated occupations. The A. F. of L. approved such a structure if none of the trades involved was covered by an affiliate's jurisdiction. A plan for WTUL-chartered independent federal unions surfaced once in the League's history. In 1921, the Eastern Leagues' Conference, composed of the New York, Boston, and Philadelphia branches, asked the National Women's Trade Union League to petition the A. F. of L. for permission to charter independent women's federal unions. According to the League plan, these federal unions could organize women who were

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excluded f r o m A. F. of L. organizations. W T U L representatives met with Federation leaders in August 1921, to discuss plans for such unions. Because t h e A. F. of L. had always r e j e c t e d independent u n i o n s f o r w o m e n , let alone unions chartered by a n o t h e r o r g a n i z a t i o n , it was not surprising t h a t t h e F e d e r a t i o n ' s Executive Council flatly rej e c t e d t h e League's proposal, stressing t h a t t h e A. F. of L. was o p p o s e d to separate w o m e n ' s organizations on t h e g r o u n d t h a t " w o m e n marry and leave the trade. . . . T h e locals o u g h t to be mixed, and o f f i c e r e d b y men who are p e r m a n e n t in the trade."4®® Both a separate federation o f female w o r k e r s and federated unions o f f e r e d possibilities f o r fulfilling the WTUL's feminist goals. In such organizations, female workers may have achieved a u t o n o m y and handled responsibilities in ways that t h e y could n o t in t h e male-dominated labor m o v e m e n t . What was more, such organizations could have d e d i c a t e d themselves to meeting t h e special problems of female laborers. Organizing tactics, dues, and b e n e f i t s could have b e e n tailored t o w o m e n ' s specific needs. However attractive these alternatives m a y have been f r o m a feminist viewpoint, t h e y posed m a j o r practical and e c o n o m i c d i f f i c u l t i e s . It seems highly unlikely that federal w o m e n ' s u n i o n s or a w o m e n ' s labor f e d e r a t i o n composed largely of unskilled workers in u n r e l a t e d trades could have c o m m a n d e d a n y significant e c o n o m i c power base. Finally, the Women's Trade Union League might have w o r k e d for the f o r m a t i o n of industrial u n i o n s rather t h a n a d h e r i n g t o t h e increasingly irrelevant craft union model. There is n o d o u b t that WTUL leaders were familiar with t h e principles of industrial u n i o n i s m . S o m e of t h e m , most n o t a b l y secretary Helen M a r o t , eventually stressed the superiority o f industrial organization f o r unionizing unskilled female and male workers.· 4 ' What was more, the League w o r k e d closely with the I n t e r n a t i o n a l Ladies' Garment Workers Union which was o f t e n characterized as a semiindustrial union. T h e League's most spectacular successes in its early years, most n o t a b l y t h e 1909 shirtwaist strike, were with ILGWU locals t h a t i n c l u d e d skilled as well as unskilled workers in their r a n k s . 5 0 It would have been impossible, however, for t h e WTUL t o have launched a campaign for industrial u n i o n i s m in a labor m o v e m e n t t h a t had no significant industrial t r a d i t i o n . The League's o n l y m o d e l for c o m p l e t e industrial unionism was t h e Industrial Workers of the World a n d t h a t organization, in addition to incurring the hostility of t h e established t r a d e u n i o n m o v e m e n t , was not spectacularly successful in its unionizing efforts. The fact is t h a t in t h e early t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y United States, t h e American Federation of L a b o r r e p r e s e n t e d the only model for successful trade unionism, despite its obvious a n d severe disadvantages for f e m a l e workers. Thus, t h e Women's T r a d e U n i o n League o f New York had little success in creating u n i o n s t h a t were effective, stable labor organizations and that met t h e WTUL's feminist objectives o f giving w o m e n o p p o r t u n i t i e s for self-assertion and responsibility. Alternatives such as separate w o m e n ' s u n i o n s or w o m e n ' s federal unions, while perhaps attractive f r o m a feminist s t a n d p o i n t , m a d e little sense f r o m a trade unionist point of view. Yet t h e course t h e League pursued of a t t e m p t i n g to integrate w o m e n into t h e labor m o v e m e n t by following t h e principles and practices of t h e A. F. of L. was rarely satisfactory. Moreover, given t h e a t t i t u d e s of male t r a d e unionists, the structure o f t h e early t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y labor m o v e m e n t , and t h e weak e c o n o m i c position o f most

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working women, neither A. F. of L-style c r a f t u n i o n s nor i n d e p e n d e n t w o m e n ' s organizations could meet female workers' needs. T h e W o m e n ' s Trade Union League's goal of creating a feminist labor movement remained unrealized.

NOTES lU. S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of t h e Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Occupations (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.), vol. 19, p. 6 4 0 . 2 Ibid. 3 U . S . Congress, Senate, Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, "Wage-Earning Women in Stores and Factories," S. Doc. 6 4 5 , 61st Cong., 2d sess., 1 9 1 0 , 5: 25. 4 U . S . Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, p. 6 4 0 . These figures are imprecise: the 1900 Census did n o t list figures for w o m e n ' s and m e n ' s g a r m e n t trades by name, but instead listed "tailoresses," "seamstresses," and "sewing machine o p e r a t o r s . " 5Wo men could be found in garment, cigar, and printing unions. Outside the trades covered by established trade u n i o n s ' j u r i s d i c t i o n , only a small h a n d f u l o f w o m e n were organized. No u n i o n s existed in many of t h e occupations that employed large n u m b e r s o f w o m e n . L a u n d r y workers, hotel and restaurant workers, retail store clerks, and paper b o x workers, a m o n g o t h e r s , were totally unorganized. New York, Department of Labor, Annual Report, 1904, 2: 4. ' N e w York, Department of Labor, Annual Report, 1904, 3: 3 4 , Table 0, " N u m b e r and Membership of Labor Unions in Each City, 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 0 8 . " 7 " T h e Women's Trade Union L e a g u e - N e w York Activities, 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 6 , " 1 9 2 2 , National Women's Trade Union League Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as NWTUL papers, LC). »The best discussion of the seasonal aspect of industrial e m p l o y m e n t and its e f f e c t s on w o m en's e m p l o y m e n t patterns is Louise Odencrantz, " T h e Irregularity of E m p l o y m e n t o f W o m e n Factory Workers," Survey 22 (May 1, 1909): 196-210. 9 " T h e Women's Trade Union League: Mass Meeting o n t h e C o m p l e t i o n of First Year's W o r k , " Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, May 11, 1 9 0 6 , p. 2. 10

Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, J u n e 16, 1 9 0 5 , p. 1. 11 Union Labor Advocate, August 1907, p. 18. 12 New York Call, July 4, 1908, p. 5. l^Mary Dreier, "Expansion Through Agitation and E d u c a t i o n , " Life and Labor 11 (June 1921): 163; Minutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League of New Y o r k , March 1 9 0 6 , W o m e n ' s Trade Union League of New York Papers, New York State L a b o r Library, New Y o r k , N.Y. (hereafter cited as WTUL of NY papers). l^Mabel Willett, The Employment of Women in the Clothing Trade (New Y o r k : C o l u m b i a University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 1 9 0 2 ) , p. 184. 15 M i n u t e s , Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League o f New Y o r k , April 24, 1 9 0 7 , WTUL of NY papers; Secretary's Report, Women's Trade Union League of New Y o r k , J u l y 2 5 , 1 9 0 7 , WTUL of NY papers. 1 ' T h i s summary of the WTUL's organizational process is based on the organization's Executive Board meeting minutes, the secretary's reports, and published Annual Reports, W T U L of NY papers. l 7 M i n u t e s , Meeting of Regular Membership, W o m e n ' s T r a d e Union League of N e w Y o r k , December 1908, WTUL of NY papers. l ^ G e r t r u d e Barnum, " A Story with a Moral," Weekly Bulletin of the Clothing Trades, N o v e m b e r

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20, 1908, p. 6; Gertrude Barnum, "At the Shirtwaist Factory, A Story," Ladies' Garment Worker 1 (June 1910), p. 4. ^ S e c r e t a r y ' s Report, Women's Trade Union League of New York, November 26, 1907, WTUL of NY papers. 20 "Resolutions Adopted by the Third Biennial Convention," Life and Labor 1 (November 1911): 343. Although the 1909 general strike of the shirtwaist makers was not successful in bringing about a uniform settlement in the trade, it did put the shirtwaist union, Local 25, ILGWU, on a permanent footing. The best day-to-day coverage of the strike is found in The New York Call, November 24, 1909 to February 15, 1910. 22This conclusion is tentative; evidence is fragmentary and impressionistic because few records of League dealings with employers are extant. 23" Report of the Organizer," Women's Trade Union League of New York, January 14, 1914, WTUL of NY papers. ^ S e c r e t a r y ' s Reports, Women's Trade Union League of New York, April 24, 1907, WTUL of NY papers. 25see Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom; The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) for a disucssion of work identification and craft unionism. 2ÊMinutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League of New York, 1905 (exact date obliterated); Minutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League of New York, March 28, 1907, April 24, 1907, September 26, 1907, WTUL of NY papers. 2 7 Wo men's Trade Union League o f N e w York, Annual Report, 1906-1907, p. 11. 28Minutes, Executive Board, March 23, 1909, WTUL of NY papers; Rose Schneiderman, "The White Goods Workers of New York," Life and Labor 3 (May 1913): 134; Minutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, December 22, 1908, WTUL of NY papers. Ladies' Garment Worker, 1911-1913, passim, for progress of Local 62. ^ N a t i o n a l Women's Trade Union League, Proceedings of the Interstate Conference, 1908, pp. 26-27. Louise Odencrantz, "The Irregularity of Employment of Women Factory Workers," Survey 22 (May 1, 1909): 196-210; "The Stress of the Seasons," Survey 29 (March 8, 1913): 806. 32Minutes, Executive Board, June 30, 1905, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, WTUL of NY papers; Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, Annual Report, 1906-1907, p. 6. ^ N a t i o n a l Women's Trade Union League, Proceedings of the Interstate Conference, 1908; Minutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, September 27, 1906, WTUL of NY papers; New York Call, December 24, 1910, p. 4. 34Minutes, Meeting of Regular Membership, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, October 28, 1907, WTUL of NY papers. 35lbid. 36unfortunately, the League's decision in this matter was not included in the extant WTUL materials. No further mention of the union appears in League records. 37in 1913, for example, the League, after acrimonious controversy, decided to allow a small independent union of retail clerks to affiliate, despite the fact that the retail clerks' union officers refused to affiliate with the A. F. of L. retail clerks' organization. Minutes, Special Executive Board Meeting, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, May 27, 1913, WTUL of NY papers; Minutes, Executive Board, Women's Trade Union League o f N e w York, July 24, 1913, WTUL of NY papers. 38Although the New York League was not directly involved in the Lawrence strike, members expressed their disapproval of how the United Textile Workers handled the uprising. Minutes, National Women's Trade Union League Executive Board, April 17-19,1912, p. 15, NWTUL papers, LC. 39 S ee , for example, Helen Marot, American Labor Unions (New York: Henry Holt, 1915).

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^ S e c r e t a r y ' s R e p o r t , W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League of N e w Y o r k , April 2 7 , 1 9 1 1 , W T U L o f NY papers. ^ N a t i o n a l W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League, Proceedings of the 1908 Interstate Conference, pp. 19-20; M i n u t e s , E x e c u t i v e B o a r d , W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League o f N e w Y o r k , O c t o b e r 2 5 , 1 9 0 6 , WTUL of NY papers. 4 2 M i n u t e s , E x e c u t i v e B o a r d , W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League o f N e w Y o r k , S e p t e m b e r 2 7 , 1 9 0 6 , WTUL o f N Y p a p e r s . 4 3 T h e A. F. o f L. o r g a n i z e d o n the principle o f o n e u n i o n for each t r a d e in o r d e r ing c r a f t s m e n a m o n g themselves. F e d e r a t i o n u n i o n s a d h e r e d t o strict j u r i s d i c t i o n a l d u a l u n i o n w a s a u n i o n w h i c h a t t e m p t e d t o o r g a n i z e w o r k e r s in a t r a d e over w h i c h u n i o n claimed j u r i s d i c t i o n . A c c o r d i n g t o t h e F e d e r a t i o n , t h e n , it w a s illegitimate. 4 4 j o s e p h i n e Casey t o Rose S c h n e i d e r m a n , O c t o b e r 7, 1 9 0 9 , Rose S c h n e i d e r m a n Library, New York University, New York, N.Y.

t o avoid dividboundaries. A an A. F. o f L. papers, T a m i m e n t

^ M i n u t e s , E x e c u t i v e B o a r d , W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League o f N e w Y o r k , March 1 9 0 6 , W T U L o f NY papers. ^ N a t i o n a l W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n L e a g u e , Proceedings of the Second Biennial Convention, 1909, p. 3 7 . For i n f o r m a t i o n o n t h e English N a t i o n a l F e d e r a t i o n o f W o m e n W o r k e r s see M a r y M a c a r t h e r , " I n t o I n d u s t r y T h r o u g h t h e F r o n t D o o r , " Life and Labor 9 (August 1 9 1 9 ) : 1 9 9 ; K a t h e r i n e Graves Busbey, " T h e W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n M o v e m e n t in G r e a t B r i t a i n , " U n i t e d S t a t e s D e p a r t m e n t of Labor, Bulletin ( J u l y 1 9 0 9 ) . 4 8 " M a t t e r s Involving A c t i o n o n t h e Part o f t h e N a t i o n a l W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League, S u b m i t t e d by the E a s t e r n L e a g u e s ' C o n f e r e n c e , J u n e 4-5, 1 9 2 1 , " Ν W T U L ; " I l l u s t r a t i o n s o f N e e d of Federal C h a r t e r s f o r W o m e n , " N W T U L p a p e r s ; E t h e l S m i t h , J o C o f f i n , Elisabeth C h r i s t m a n t o N a t i o n a l W o m e n ' s T r a d e U n i o n League E x e c u t i v e B o a r d , A u g u s t 2 5 , 1 9 2 1 , N W T U L p a p e r s . 49Helen M a r o t , American Labor Unions, By a Member (New Y o r k : H e n r y H o l t , 1 9 1 5 ) . 5 0 T h e I L G W U c o u l d be classified as a s e m i i n d u s t r i a l u n i o n in s t r u c t u r e b e c a u s e it organized a major local in e a c h o f t h e w o m e n ' s g a r m e n t t r a d e s t h a t i n c l u d e d all b u t t h e m o s t h i g h l y skilled w o r k e r s . T h e u n i o n w a s n o t fully i n d u s t r i a l in s r t u c t u r e , h o w e v e r , b e c a u s e t h e c u t t e r s o r g a n i z e d separately in t h e i r o w n local.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

Kathleen

W. Jones

Mother's Day: The Creation, Promotion and Meaning of a New Holiday in the Progressive Era

Although the sentimentalized image of American motherhood was a product of the nineteenth century, it was not until the Progressive era that Americans adopted a special holiday in honor of that vision. The plan to reserve one Sunday each year for honoring mothers originated with Anna Jarvis, a Philadelphia spinster who intended to memorialize the anniversary of her mother's death through a public holiday. However, initial observances of the new holiday, in May of 1908, did not win immediate popular approval for the continuation of the project. This essay will examine the cultural motives and pressures that transformed Mother's Day from the crank idea of one woman into an annual social custom. I shall show how the holiday was conceived by Jarvis, furthered by the American Sunday school movement, but not popularly accepted until the meaning of the new celebration was defined by the Protestant churches and then redefined into a secular celebration of traditional but menaced American values. Ministers and lay contributors to weekly church magazines used the holiday to express their fear that middle-class Protestant culture, the culture so aptly characterized by the symbol of "Mother," was increasingly threatened in the Progressive era. Through sermons and didactic stories, concerned Protestants made of Mother's Day an adult celebration of their version of American values. When the holiday proved to be a powerful tool to sustain morale during World War I, the celebration of Mother's Day became a secular expression of loyalty to national ideals. Thus the history of the creation and promotion of the new holiday suggests that during the Progressive era the observance of Mother's Day fulfilled a social function beyond the purely personal mother-child relationship it ostensibly honored. Anna Jarvis, the woman who originated the idea for a special

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES day commemorating the relationship between mother and child, was born in 1864, the daughter of a Grafton, West Virginia grain merchant. 1 As a young woman, Anna taught at the Grafton high school until, at age twenty-eight, she left West Virginia to join her brother Claude in Philadelphia. Claude possessed a substantial income as the owner of a flourishing urban taxi concern and his wealth enabled Anna to socialize with other prominent Philadelphians, connections she would later exploit when she began to gather influential supporters for her Mother's Day scheme. The move to Philadelphia proved permanent, Anna remaining there until her death in 1948. 2 The nature of Anna's relationship with her mother and the anxiety she experienced when Mrs. Jarvis died were the catalysts for her zealous promotion of Mother's Day. Mrs. Ann M. Jarvis had personified the image of nineteenth-century womanhood. She bore eleven children, taught Sunday school in the Grafton Methodist Episcopal Church, and was remembered by neighbors as the peacemaker who prevented a split of the local church congregation during the Civil War. For Mrs. Jarvis, Anna was a special child, the first of her daughters to survive infancy. Uncomfortable with signs of Anna's independence, Mrs. Jarvis vetoed her daughter's first plan to leave Grafton for Kentucky, but she could not prevent Anna's move to Pennsylvania. When Anna's father died in 1902, Mrs. Jarvis followed Anna to Philadelphia, bringing with her another daughter, Elsinore, who was virtually blind and dependent upon the family for support. The elderly woman continued to live with her two spinster daughters until her death in May 1905. Anna was then forty-one years old and for the first time, free of her mother's scrutiny. Anna was inconsolable after her mother's death. She first tried to rationalize the death by accusing the presiding physician of malpractice. As a symbol of devotion to the memory of her mother, she erected in her home a small altar with dried funeral flowers. To friends who sent messages of condolence, Anna responded with glowing tributes to her mother. Mrs. Jarvis had been a "noble Christian character," her daughter rhapsodized, "a masterpiece as a mother and a gentlewoman" whose "ambitions had been restrained by the ties of motherhood, home-making, and years of frail health." Anna believed that it was only her mother's sacrificial devotion to her family which had prevented Mrs. Jarvis from becoming "a woman of prominence." 3 Still in mourning two years later, Anna commemorated the anniversary of her mother's death by arranging for two memorial services, one a private church gather-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM ing in Philadelphia, the other a special Sunday meeting for the mothers in the congregation of Mrs. Jarvis' church in West Virginia. She also established a Mother's Day committee to inaugurate the May anniversary of her mother's death as a day in honor of all unselfish Christian mothers. Showing a shrewd organizational ability, Anna recruited a group of Philadelphians with wealth and social standing. In addition to brother Claude, the committee was composed of John Wanamaker, the department store owner, and H. J. Heinz, whose fortune came from food processing. The inclusion of an editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer gave the committee access to the media and ensured publicity for its ideas. But it was Anna Jarvis who dominated the group. Within three years of her mother's death, she had made the promotion of Mother's Day her full-time vocation. Anna's determination to bring into existence a public observance of the anniversary of her mother's passing has been explained as a symptom of "pathological mourning," the psychological inability to accept the finality of Mrs. Jarvis' death. 4 This explanation suggests that Mrs. Jarvis' death aroused Anna's feelings of ambivalence toward her parent. Her mother had interfered with Anna's desire to leave West Virginia; Mother Jarvis' move to Philadelphia had once again circumscribed her daughter's activities. Her mother's final illness demanded months of patient care from a reluctant daughter. It is possible that Anna's unconscious rage created feelings of guilt, which, after her mother's death, surfaced in a need to create a public memorial to prove her love for her parent. However, Anna's anger was probably directed less at her mother than at the social role Mrs. Jarvis tried to force upon her daughter. Not bound by the confines of femininity, Mrs. Jarvis' sons had been permitted to migrate from the small West Virginia town. It was both economically necessary and socially acceptable for brother Claude to leave his mother to seek his fortune, and veneration of mother's memory was one of the values young men were expected to carry with them. But Anna's ambitions and abilities were thwarted by her mother's definition of women's proper sphere. Social imperatives defined Anna's role as nurse and nurturer, a role Anna's mother fulfilled perfectly but one Anna repeatedly rejected. Through her Mother's Day campaign, Anna was able to release her drive for personal power and make use of her organizational skills, attributes her mother would have considered unwomanly. As "founder of Mother's Day," Anna gained the national prominence she felt her mother had never received and had denied to her daughter. Anna eagerly sought the publicity given her as pro-

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moter of the holiday honoring motherhood. Each year she issued to the press her personal Mother's Day message. When the day became a popular May festivity, she copyrighted the day and the decorations, fearful that someone would deprive her of her accolades. In the 1920s she threatened lawsuits against songwriters who incorporated a Mother's Day theme and against Frank E. Hering, a man who claimed that the celebration of Mother's Day had been his idea four years before Anna Jarvis initiated her crusade. As part of her campaign, Anna championed a congressional resolution to give national recognition to the holiday and sent letters to governors and mayors urging them to issue Mother's Day proclamations. In 1908 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the day had been "widely observed." Some New York City churches sponsored a day for mothers, and a memorial service was again held in Anna's hometown of Grafton. 5 But Anna found the initial response very discouraging, for the proposed day to honor mothers was at first rejected by several women's organizations and scorned by the United States Senate. The idea of a day venerating motherhood incensed members of the newly established Woman's Committee of the American Socialist Party. The committee was created in 1908 to formulate an American Socialist response to the "woman question," a term used as a journalistic catchall for issues relating to women's political rights and social roles. Before the creation of the Woman's Committee, Socialist propaganda had frequently extolled the joys o f motherhood and argued that women would gladly stay home if only their husbands and fathers were paid adequate wages. The party expected that the Socialist women who served on the new committee would not deviate from this standard Socialist view. In 1908, however, the Woman's Committee assumed a more militant stance and questioned party ideology that limited women's choices. As one of its first acts, the committee planned a "Woman's D a y " and presented it to the party as an alternative to the Jarvissponsored May holiday. Socialist women intended to celebrate the whole of woman's potential, not just her maternal instincts, and sought to make women's equality a significant part of the Socialist program. By 1914, faced with internal dissension and financial difficulties, the party would repudiate the type of feminism represented in the Woman's Committee. But, in 1908, party members tolerated the uncharacteristic position of the Socialist women and celebrated the new Woman's Day in February 1909. 6 Militant socialist feminists were not the only women who initially objected to the romanticized maternal imagery of Mother's Day. When Anna Jarvis offered her idea to the National Congress

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

of Mothers in 1907, this organization of more traditional women also shunned her advances and greeted the plan with "little faith." 7 The Congress of Mothers did not at first lend its support to a project designed to advance the Victorian sentimentalization of motherhood because their concept of modern motherhood favored the practice of "scientific" childrearing methods and the acquisition of specialized training in child care. In 1909 the only acknowledgment of the holiday by the National Congress of Mothers Magazine was a brief Mother's Day poem which the author dedicated to the mothers' organization, though the organization's "professionalization" of motherhood clashed with the poem's mawkish description of maternity.® But the initial reluctance of the organization gave way to speedy acceptance, once the popularity of the day had been established in the nation. By 1910, Anna Jarvis could even accuse the Congress of Mothers of selfishly using the holiday to promote their own narrow goals. The original unwillingness of women's groups to sponsor a day honoring mothers was paralleled by actions in the United States Congress, where on the Saturday morning before Mother's Day, 1908, the Senate engaged in a forty-minute Mother's Day debate. 9 Freshman Senator Elmer Burkett from Nebraska introduced the resolution, "That Sunday, May 10,1908, be recognized as Mother's D a y , " and urged Senate members and employees to wear a white flower in honor of the occasion. Having consulted with "some older in service as t o the propriety of [the resolution]," Burkett was quite unprepared for the derisive comments it elicited. Republican Senator John Kean from N e w Jersey moved to strike out all the words after "resolved" and substitute the Fifth Commandment. Other senators described the resolution as "unnecessary" and "belittling to the sentiment o f motherhood." Facetiously decrying the "invidious distinction" made by aday formothers, one senator suggested a father's day, and days for cousins, aunts and uncles, but mention of a mother-in-law day drew the greatest laughter from the assembly. The opposition piously agreed that above all others, they revered the holy name of mother, but the sentiment was simply " n o t a proper subject for legislation." T o defend his resolution, Senator Burkett vainly appealed to rural fears that urbanization threatened the moral fibre of the nation. The midwesterner, after reminding the Senate that farm boys w h o left home t o take advantage of the opportunities in the city were instead corrupted by its evil ways, contended that Mother's Day would "get the boys together and make them think o f home and mother and the surroundings there." Because Burkett's plea was supported in the Senate by other

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES midwestern Progressives and by southern Democrats, while the issue was opposed by old-line Republicans like Kean of New Jersey, the debate on the Mother's Day resolution might be interpreted as an issue of partisan politics. 10 The conjunction of conservative southern Democrats and midwestern Progressives suggests that Mother's Day appealed to Americans who felt threatened by the vast social change engendered by city life. Whether they were Progressives trying to reform and control the social changes or conservatives attempting to preserve old values, concerned Americans could unite behind the ideals of order and morality symbolized by "mother." Still, most senators remained unconvinced of the usefulness of the holiday. As the New York Times reported in 1908, Burkett's version of Mother's Day was "gravely" referred to the judiciary committee where it was permitted to "sleep peacefully." 11 Not until 1914, when legislators recognized that Mother's Day was a nationwide celebration, did a Mother's Day resolution finally pass both houses of Congress.12 Following the directions of the congressional resolution, President Wilson then issued the first Mother's Day proclamation, praising American mothers for the "services" they rendered the nation. American business interests were also slow to capitalize on the sales potential of Mother's Day. Department store advertisements sometimes encouraged Mother's Day celebrants to give small personal gifts such as a Mother's Day card, a box of candy, or possibly a portrait of "Whistler's Mother." 1 3 The Mother's Day section of the advertisement, however, was usually a minor part of an extensive full-page store promotion. In the first ten years of observances, only one Philadelphia store indicated that Mother's Day should be celebrated by making a major purchase, in this case a Victrola for mother's use in her leisure time. 14 Merchant support did help to promote the day in Philadelphia, but commercial interests did not significantly influence the sweeping acceptance of the day during the Progressive era. 15 Thus Mother's Day was neither demanded by women, legislated into existence, nor advertised to increase department store sales. Even the Philadelphia Inquirer, which in 1908 gave generous coverage to Mother's Day festivities, doubted that the "good sentiment" behind the idea had to be formalized into a special celebration. As an Inquirer editorial noted, "That mothers deserve to be especially honored needs no demonstration, but it is not a fact that they are not so revered today." 1 6 The inauspicious beginning of Mother's Day was not due to insufficient veneration of motherhood, yet the popular acceptance of the holiday honoring mothers was still unsecured.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM To make the celebration of Mother's Day into a national custom, the patronage of a large group was needed, a group capable of giving the holiday far-reaching publicity. The Sunday schools of the nation were the first institutions to see the potential benefits to be gained from the annual salute to the maternal role. In her search for potential Mother's Day supporters, Anna Jarvis had approached George W. Bailey with her idea. Bailey was chairman of the Executive Committee of the World's Sunday School Association, and, in 1910, he persuaded a national Sunday school convention to officially endorse the celebration of Mother's Day in American Sunday schools.17 When the Sunday schools accepted the holiday, the national observance of Mother's Day was assured. The American Sunday school movement reached the pinnacle of its authority and prestige during the Progressive era.18 Over the course of the nineteenth century, American Sunday schools had assumed responsibility for the religious education of the Protestant young. By the 1900s church schools were structured institutions with age grading in the classrooms and lessons appropriate to each age level. The religious presses supplied Sunday school teachers with materials on weekly themes, and the movement was watched over by unifying national organizations like the World's Sunday School Association. Sunday school leaders measured the quality of their religious instruction by the number of young people they reached, and a major device used to ensure large numbers of participants was the subordination of Biblical instruction to weekly entertainment. This entertainment frequently involved the celebration of special holidays, a contemporary book of Sunday school programs listing over two hundred special days commemorated in church schools. 19 Children were amused with anniversary days, patriotic days, recruiting days, and days to encourage youthful benevolence and reform activities. In 1908, Children's Day was widely observed in May or June as a day specifically designed to entice potential members to Sunday school classes. Thus Mother's Day observances were tailor-made for Sunday schools seeking high attendance records. By 1912 religious publishing firms were offering to the church schools a selection of Mother's Day materials designed to attract youngsters to the Sunday meetings. Church presses produced special programs for Mother's Day, invitation cards, and celluloid carnations to distribute as mementoes.20 Teachers and ministers were assured that advance publicity through postcard invitations and newspaper coverage (churches were encouraged to buy space if necessary) would secure a large audience. The "successful observance" of the day was defined in terms of attendance, and

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES ministers were advised that because of the "human appeal of the day" it was a "unique opportunity . . . to reach the unchurched and the occasional church-attendant." 2 1 Sunday schools were instructed to issue special invitations to mothers and to seat them in a place of honor for the day. It was even suggested that the churches provide rocking chairs and child care for very young children, thereby enabling more mothers to attend. 2 2 Leaders hoped that the attention t o mothers would enlist the cooperation of the home in the Sunday school's effort to gain recruits. On Mother's Day, Sunday schools tried to inculcate respect for adults in their young charges, a theme guaranteed to impress parents with the usefulness of Sunday school attendance. Mother's Day stories for young readers preached the rewards of obedience and an appreciation of parental sacrifices. In these juvenile stories young people were portrayed as neglectful, selfish, even resentful of mother's guidance (which was always gentle and morally beyond question) and of mother's efforts to make their lives pleasant (the families were usually poor). The painful recognition of mother's sacrifice, often prompted by a glimpse of mother's unspoken disappointment, led the daughter or son to repent selfish ways and to participate eagerly in mother's efforts to make life comfortable for everyone in the family. The youths depicted in "Mother's Way," a 1915 Mother's Day story, resolved to give the "best present" a mother could receive on Mother's Day—"five nice children." 23 As presented to young people, Mother's Day symbolized the wisdom and power of adults. In a period of increased family dislocation, heightened interest in adolescence, and growing awareness of juvenile delinquency, Mother's Day tales for young people reflected parental anxiety. 24 The editor of a collection of Mother's Day stories and poems capsuled the feeling when she wrote that the proper celebration of the new holiday would "help to restrain the present tendency towards filial disrespect." 25 Since Sunday schools functioned to a degree as surrogate parents, their Mother's Day celebrations emphasized obedience to parents and acquiescence to adult expectations. Through the patronage of the Sunday schools, the celebration of Mother's Day became an annual May custom. Although the Sunday schools wanted to communicate to their charges the value of respect for adults, the celebration of the holiday also coincided with the need of the Sunday schools to enlarge their audience. Thus Mother's Day was exploited to serve special concerns long before it became in the 1950s the second largest retail sales holiday. However, the continued celebration of Mother's Day by the Sunday schools depended on the continued entertainment value of the

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM holiday. If the ratings dropped, Mother's Day would be replaced by a new festivity. To persist as a popular custom, the observance of Mother's Day required support from outside the Sunday schools. The popularity of Mother's Day survived because the celebration of the holiday expanded beyond the confines of Sunday school classrooms and entered the church proper. Mother's Day activities in the Sunday schools were designed principally to attract children. Through church observances, Mother's Day also became an adult celebration. As an adult holiday, Mother's Day acquired a social meaning exceeding Anna Jarvis' wish that each individual honor "the mother of [his or her] heart."24 The writers of Mother's Day literature in weekly church magazines used the day to affirm the strength of a particular image of American culture which glorified Christian motherhood, masculine morality, and cultural homogeneity. 27 For Protestant churches, the holiday observed on the second Sunday in May was an excuse to laud these selected virtues and to criticize the cultural deviants who ignored these values. Like women's groups, business interests, and the Senate, Protestant churches were initially slow to perceive the value of Mother's Day. Although the Senate had no precedent to justify the passage of the Mother's Day resolution, Protestant churches frequently celebrated special days without specific Biblical basis. Yet that tradition did not sway the Thirtieth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which met in May 1908. The convention voted to observe the 1908 Mother's Day, but it rejected a proposal to make the day part of the annual church calendar. The sentiment of the conference was captured by one delegate who complained that with so many special days, "we can hardly have Sundays for religion."28 Although individual Methodist ministers preached Mother's Day sermons, the holiday did not become an official part of the Methodist church calendar until the next General Conference in 1912. 29 By that time the Protestant churches had learned to use the Mother's Day device as a means to attract their most faithful supporters, middle-class females. Many ministers, at first doubtful of the wisdom of a special day to honor mothers, soon saw the occasion as an opportunity to deliver sermons defining woman's role and describing the ideal of Christian motherhood. 30 Domesticity was the essence of Christian motherhood. Devoted heart and soul to home-building, Christian mothers reveled in sewing, cooking, and cleaning. They nursed the ill and dried the dishes with equal emotional fervor. But the primary duty of the Christian mother was childrearing. These ladies, according to one Protestant minister's 1909 Mother's Day sermon, "organized no

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES crusades in the interest of so-called 'women's rights,' . . . never postured upon the platform as social and political revolutionists, but in a larger and higher sense they contributed to the real need of the times, inspiring honesty, loyalty, and patriotism in the hearts of their children and so strengthening and guaranteeing the foundation of our National greatness." 31 For Christian mothers, then, power resided in home and family. As women were reminded from the pulpits every Mother's Day, the hand that rocked the cradle ruled the world. Of all the Mother's Day images used by the churches, none was more prevalent than that of the self-sacrificing mother. The Biblical story of Hannah was frequently the text for Mother's Day sermons, Hannah being the Biblical type of the woman who willingly devoted her life to childrearing and religion. For years Hannah waited patiently and prayed fervently for the birth of a child. When at last her prayers were answered, the woman who had so desired a child happily relinquished her son to God's control. 32 Unlike Hannah, contemporary Mother's Day mothers, although deserving praise, were sometimes dissatisfied with their lives of sacrifice. While the heroines of Mother's Day literature might be tired (both physically and spiritually) of housework and childrearing, the weary mother who escaped her duties nevertheless returned to her work rather than face the loneliness and guilt she experienced when away from her brood. 33 One of these mothers was subtly chastised by her children who offered to wash the dishes as a Mother's Day gift. 34 The supreme maternal sacrifice was life itself, and the mothers in Mother's Day literature often freely sacrificed their lives to ensure the recovery of a dying child. 3S As it had Hannah, faith and prayer sustained these mothers in their devotion to home and family. Religious journals extravagantly praised the piety of Christian mothers, often making indistinguishable a mother's love of her child and God's love of mankind. An anecdote from the Presbyterian Advance, which was printed for Mother's Day, illustrates the equation of Mother with God. "When the teacher of a group of small children, after describing the transcendent beauties which shone in the character of Jesus without mentioning His name, asked the little ones if they knew to whom she was referring, one cried out exultantly: 'You must mean my mother.'" 3 6 The child's response confirmed the saintly character the Christian mother was expected to exhibit. This religious ideal of Christian motherhood was not invented by the churches especially for Mother's Day. Rather, the ministers and lay contributors to church journals shaped the new holiday to conform to the version of motherhood presented in nineteenth-

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century childrearing literature, and then used the image to criticize the newer ideal of contemporary motherhood. 37 In Mother's Day literature the virtues of "old-fashioned" motherhood were sometimes contrasted with the scientific expertise advocated by the contemporary child study movement and the National Congress of Mothers.38 Most often, however, the opposite of the self-sacrificing Christian mother was presented as the selfish "new woman." These females^the notorious "bridge-whist brigade"—were the mothers who appeared to find an afternoon with friends more rewarding than time spent with their babies. One Methodist editorial shrilly identified the purpose of Mother's Day as prevention of this modern "shrinking from motherhood." 39 Progressive middle-class Anglo-Saxon Americans were already aware of how a "shrinking from motherhood" had led to "race suicide." The decline in the birth rate among college-educated women and the soaring birth rate of the immigrant population were seen as proof that the superior WASP component was losing its hegemony in the United States. Some Americans turned to immigration restrictions and eugenics as means to defend against the undesirables. Mother's Day, on the other hand, was an offensive attack, created to maintain a sense of identity among white Protestants and to institutionalize a feminine role whose popularity seemed to be waning. A more immediate threat to the older female image was the reemergence of the woman suffrage movement and the appearance of militant feminism. For two years, from 1908 to 1910, Socialist women assisted more conservative suffragists in amassing signatures on suffrage petitions to present to Congress. In 1910 voters in Washington approved a suffrage referendum, the first state to do so since Idaho in 1896. California was won for woman suffrage in 1911, and in 1912 there were suffrage referenda on ballots in six states. The techniques of the suffragists included elaborate parades in Washington, D. C., and in New York City. In Ohio even on Mother's Day, the campaign director told her audience, "Men have monopolized Mother's Day in the past, but this year we suffragists are going to have it." 4 0 The growing popularity of Mother's Day within the churches corresponded to the revival of suffrage activities. As suffragists became more visible and more vocal, ministers increasingly used Mother's Day to criticize female demands for public power. Mother's Day sermons before 1910 tended to praise Christian mothers; after 1910 the holiday messages chastised women who deviated from the prescribed role. It has been suggested that Protestant ministers were more supportive of woman suffrage than any other male profession, but

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Protestant church organizations were slow to support the movement. 4 1 In 1908, a national Methodist conference passed a social welfare creed dedicating the church to social concerns, but a woman suffrage resolution was not approved until 1916. Presbyterians discussed the issue in that year, then refused to take any action. 42 At best, American Protestant church leaders were ambivalent about the goals of the suffragists. On Mother's Day, therefore, the churches, if not overtly antisuffrage, could glorify a more conservative image of women. Even a liberal Methodist editorial that expressly supported woman's rights was written to assure readers that on Mother's Day, at least, the modern woman's place was still exclusively at home. 4 3 The Protestant churches' deification of Christian motherhood enabled them to justify their support of political rights for women on traditional grounds. Mother's Day was associated with a particular image of women, but the church literature made it clear that the holiday was meant to be celebrated by men. Stories and poems for Mother's Day always described a situation involving parent and child, and when the stories were written for youngsters, the sex of the child was as frequently female as male. However, Mother's Day stories for adults usually explored the relationship between a mother and her grown son. The subject of these stories was often a young man who had left home to participate in the male-dominated world of business enterprise and thus had forfeited the direct influence and moral guidance of his Christian mother. Though the Mother's Day stories were not overtly antibusiness, the authors were concerned about a work ethic that seemed to encourage men to devalue the private, family life represented by mother. Sometimes the son was so preoccupied with business that he neglected his aged parent. One college professor, who through his neglect had lost contact with his mother, was prodded by a brother to return home for a visit. The visit was made just in time, for the professor's mother died that same evening, leaving him with feelings of guilt for having so long delayed his trip. Returning to his students, he lectured them on the value of remembering mother. 44 The hero of another story was a successful businessman who, upon receiving a letter from his mother, locked his office door and slowly read the epistle, withdrawing into the world of his childhood. 45 Although the world of the son and that of the mother were clearly antithetical, Mother's Day writers did not so much reject the son's world as keep alive the fantasy of the more peaceful, less harried world symbolized by mother. Stories of mother-son relationships also revealed the antiurban sentiment of the writers. Senator Burkett, in his 1908 speech to

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM Congress, had hinted that Mother's Day was supposed to immortalize a rural family environment. The Mother's Day stories reprinted in weekly church magazines show an explicit dislike of urban life. The vision of mother and home was an amulet that protected sons alone in the city. Frequently the Mother's Day son was tempted by the evils of the city and only the memory of his mother sufficed to keep him pure. The world was so full of "tempters," wrote one male poet, that it had almost overthrown "the good" in him, but the example of his mother's "higher, nobler life" had saved him from demoralization. The memory of mother strengthened his resolve and enabled him to lead a life worthy of his mother's trust. 46 If sons did succumb to such city temptations as alcohol, the memory of mother was often all that was needed to bring repentance. 47 Even hardened criminals could be reformed by reminding them of the expectations of a Christian mother. 4 8 The stories of Christian mothers and grown sons illustrated how Protestant church leaders saw Mother's Day as a way to regain control of masculine behavior. Recently historians have documented the feminization of the Protestant churches in the nineteenth century. Although studies of membership figures are not adequate to assess the accuracy of this change, ministers and the public believed that American churches had come to be dominated by their female members. With their congregations predominantly female, ministers felt they had been pushed out of the masculine world of business and community leadership and forced to assume instead a feminine role as keeper of the values honored in the abstract but ignored in practice. 49 The antibusiness, antiurban sentiments of the Mother's Day tales suggest that one reason for the appeal of Mother's Day might be found in the efforts of the Protestant churches to interpret the day as one of male homage to ministerial values. The celebration of Mother's Day was in part, therefore, a ministeriell device to maintain the clergy's status. The antiurban bias of the stories also suggests that Mother's Day in the Progressive era was part of the general dissatisfaction with the direction being taken by American society. The growing ethnic diversity of American cities disturbed many Americans during the Progressive years. Self-satisfied upper- and middle-class native Americans discovered poverty in the city slums among unassimilated immigrants. Awareness of ethnic divisions and class stratification made the growing strength of the Socialist party a particularly menacing threat. There were, in addition, distinct religious divisions within the nation. The myriad Protestant religious denominations had come

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES to an accord symbolized by the formation in 1908 of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, but there were creeds outside the Protestant fold. Although the Irish Catholic immigration had been an earlier phenomenon, the position of Catholicism in American life was far from settled in the early twentieth century, as Italian and Slavic Catholic immigrants poured into the cities. The entry of Eastern European Jewish immigrants also threatened the native Protestant hegemony. The hysterical nativist feeling of these years, which culminated in the immigration exclusion acts, underscored the terror felt by native Protestant middle-class Americans as they faced these striking cultural divisions. 50 In this unsettled situation, the celebration of Mother's Day made a reassuring statement about the quality of American society. Mother's Day was a patriotic expression of national unity and strength. On Mother's Day church leaders followed nineteenthcentury tradition and praised mothers as the source of the nation's might. "Our mothers are the most potent people in the world today," Rev. Frederick Shannon wrote in the Presbyterian. "We do not underestimate the work of the statesmen, the physicians, the ministers, the bankers, the educators, for we are all workers together, but we cannot over-estimate the importance of the mothers. Tell me what a nation's mothers are and I will tell you what the nation itself is." 51 Not only ministers drew this conclusion. When Governor Colquett urged Texans to wear a small American flag along with the Mother's Day carnation, he was only making explicit the connection between motherhood and the nation. 52 For both church and government officials, then, the celebration of Mother's Day instructed the nation that a common ethic united all Americans. Mother's Day became a symbol of consensus because native Americans were sure that their version of mother love could be found in every class and culture. As a West Coast magazine expressed the belief, "This Memorial [Mother's Day] is to commemorate no anniversary related to creed, to class or to country; it is to observe generally the common debt of all mankind, our obligation to our mothers." 53 There were Jewish rabbis who celebrated Mother's Day and Catholic worshipers who marked the day with special festivities. Newspaper reporters spotted carnations on people from all economic classes. In a 1910 letter to Anna Jarvis, the governor of Mississippi summarized the belief that the day drew all Americans together. The day canceled class divisions because it was a celebration where "rich and poor can meet on the common ground of love, reverence and appreciation for the mother." 5 4 Mother's Day was an important expression of the longed-for cohesiveness of American culture.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM Because the celebration of Mother's Day was a denial of cultural divisiveness, it is not surprising that in 1917, when the United States marched troops into Europe to aid the Allies, Mother's Day became a part of the national war effort. Mother's Day stories had a special poignancy during the war as sons did sail away from home to face the dangers of the world. To be "the feller your mother thinks you are" was to be brave in the trenches and loyal to the values of home and country. 55 The churches connected Mother's Day with the war effort, and church journals featured Mother's Day articles with wartime themes. But the military also participated in the promotion of Mother's Day with special services ordered in the nation's army camps. Anna Jarvis attended the Camp Chillicothe, Ohio, observances as soldiers stood at attention for one minute in honor of their mothers and then recited the Lord's Prayer. 56 It was the Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the American Expeditionary Force, that first suggested a special Mother's Day mail in 1918. All military men were to take time on Mother's Day to write a letter to mother. The Secretary of War approved the idea, and on the second Sunday in May the YMCA distributed stationery to all men in uniform. "Pack the page with love and good cheer," the Stars and Stripes advised. "Fill it to the brim with reassurance, for you know how mothers worry." Soldiers were told to label the mail "Mother's Letter" for special handling, and it was reported that censors worked extra shifts to speed the delivery process. S7 The congressman who helped sponsor the letter-writing campaign said of these letters, "It is a tribute at once to the name of 'Mother,' to the traditions of the service of the Army and the Navy of the United States, and is at the same time indicative of the wonderful esteem in which woman is held in our Republic." 58 During the war, Mother's Day rhetoric was directed to the women at home as much as to the men in uniform. From both pulpits and Congress in 1917 and 1918 mothers were praised for their willing sacrifice of sons to the war effort. Mother's Day was "special" these years because women felt "most deeply the pangs of war." 59 Congress passed another Mother's Day resolution in 1918, directing the attention of the whole nation "to the patriotic sacrifice made by the mothers of our land in freely offering their sons to bear arms and, if need be, die in defense of liberty and justice." 60 Mrs. Bixby, a mother who had lost five sons in the Civil War, became the exemplary Mother's Day heroine, a contemporary Hannah. Her sacrifice was to serve as a model for mothers during the American "war to end all wars."

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Mother's Day rhetoric emphasized a mother's willingness to part with her sons because after years of suffrage propaganda, the loyalty of women to the war effort was in doubt. Suffrage arguments prior to the war had held out the promise of perpetual peace as a bonus result of woman suffrage. Suffragists argued that if government were responsible to mothers as well as to men, the legislators would be less likely to take the nation into war, since women were inherently less warlike than the aggressive male. 61 Even the Methodist Christian Advocate, with its ambivalent view of woman suffrage, suggested in a 1915 editorial that the activity of women in government was a force for good; female participation would bring an end to war since a mother's loss of a son was a greater suffering than any borne by men. 62 Because some suffrage workers and female activists opposed the war, the values honored on Mother's Day reassured Americans that true women would willingly support this war even though they had had no voice in its declaration. After the war, Mother's Day was no longer the exclusive preserve of the churches. Although government bodies had passed resolutions and issued proclamations to support Mother's Day, the holiday, during its first ten years of existence, was primarily a Sunday school and church celebration. The wartime observances helped to secularize the holiday, as military participation adopted the symbolic image of mother to a theme of patriotic national unity. In the next decade, churches continued to make appropriate observances on the second Sunday in May, but Gold Star Mothers and Ku Klux Klan also promoted their version of morality on Mother's Day. Celebration of Mother's Day in the schools became a regular yearly occurrence, and in the 1930s Eleanor Roosevelt worked to establish the Golden Rule Foundation, an organization which used Mother's Day to advocate maternal health activities. Thus by 1918 Mother's Day had become a permanent annual custom, although it was quite different from the holiday originally envisioned by Anna Jarvis. While Jarvis and the American Sunday school movement each contributed to the creation of Mother's Day, it was the Protestant churches that equated the celebration of Mother's Day with the deification of a feminine role. In Sunday schools on Mother's Day children were instructed to respect their parents. In making Mother's Day an adult holiday honoring Christian motherhood, the churches reversed the order and told mothers to be "slaves" to their children. 63 Only by willingly enslaving themselves to home and family could mothers hope to influence positively the child's character and conduct. The character and conduct of individuals, especially grown sons,

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM were the concerns of the Protestant churches. Mothers had replaced church and God as the source of morality in American culture. However, feminism threatened to change mothers into mere mortals. The suffrage movement, although conservative in its ideology, did seek to replace woman's private influence with public power through the vote. By worshiping the perfect mother on Mother's Day, the culture found proof that women were still performing their social function. An annual custom of paying homage to an image ensured the continued existence of that image even if women did gain access to the ballot. In a larger sense, however, Mother's Day did more than simply deny an emerging feminism and exalt Christian motherhood. The celebration of Mother's Day was counterforce to the problems created by urbanization, immigration, and the polarization of economic classes. On Mother's Day, middle-class Americans could see that the disparate elements of the culture were united by a common bond, and love of the nation became tied to love of mother. The function of Mother's Day as a unifying annual ritual was made obvious as the nation at war prepared to observe the new national holiday. The celebration of Mother's Day by the military secularized the observances as well as the social meaning of the day. Mother's Day became synonymous with American culture, and celebration became a sign of American loyalty to the state. Thus any explanation of why Mother's Day was established in the decade from 1908 to 1918 must stress three aspects. Although the structure of the day was formed to fit Anna Jarvis' personal needs, her influence alone was not powerful enough to establish the holiday. When the Sunday schools adopted Jarvis' project and began their own promotion, the holiday had the backing necessary to develop into an annual custom. Without the professional structure of the American Sunday school movement and its organization and media network, Mother's Day would not have won the widespread attention the new holiday did receive. Most importantly, however, it took a constellation of social problems to give meaning to and provide a function for the new holiday. Protestant middle-class Americans thought their world order was being threatened by feminism, socialism, urbanization, and immigration. For this class of Americans, celebration of Mother's Day was reassurance that their world still existed and that their culture was still supreme. Mother's Day was from the first an expression of one group's vision of social order. Without this social meaning, Anna Jarvis' holiday "in honor of

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the best mother who ever lived" would have remained simply a private memorial service.64 Rutgers University New Brunswick, New

Jersey

Notes 1. Mother-centered festivals were celebrated ¡11 other cultures long before Anna Jarvis proposed Mother's Day. T h e R o m a n s held a yearly festival in honor of feminine fertility, but the c o n t e m p o r a r y Mother's Day bears no resemblance to this custom. In preindustrial England, "Mothering S u n d a y " was observed on the f o u r t h Sunday in Lent. Originally marked by visits to one's "Mother C h u r c h , " the church of baptism, the holiday later provided an opportunity for apprentices to return h o m e for the day, usually with small gifts for mother. This observance was no longer widespread by the nineteenth century. T h e Mother's Day organized by Julia Ward Howe in the 1870s provided a more direct connection, in name, if not in sentiment, to Anna Jarvis' Mother's Day. Howe urged mothers to devote the day to the promotion of world peace. See Robert J. Myers, Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays (Garden City, Ν. Y.: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 1 4 3 - 4 5 ; "Sacred Festival," (Mothering Sunday), Economist, 210 (1964), 895; and Louisa Hall Tharp, Three Saints and a Sinner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), p. 351. 2. Information on Anna Jarvis and her family can be found in Howard H. Wolfe, Mother's Day and the Mother's Day Church (privately printed, 1962), pp. 2 4 8 - 6 3 . In addition, I am indebted to Professor James P. Johnson of Brooklyn College for allowing me to see his suggestive biographical study of Anna Jarvis, since published as " H o w Mother Got Her D a y , " American Heritage, 30 (Apr./May 1979), 14-21. 3. Quoted in Anna Jarvis, "Recollections of Ann M. Jarvis," TS, Anna Jarvis Papers, A & M 1175, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Library, Morgantown, W. Va., η.p. The life of Mrs. Jarvis has been described by James P. J o h n s o n , "Death, Grief, and Motherh o o d : The Woman Who Inspired Mother's D a y , " Wesf Virginia History, 39 (Jan./Apr. 1978), 187-94. 4. James P. J o h n s o n , " H o w Mother G o t Her D a y , " advances the argument that "pathological m o u r n i n g " drove Anna Jarvis to memorialize her mother through the creation of Mother's Day. J o h n s o n then extends this conclusion to suggest that the popularity of Mother's Day is rooted in a universal desire to be with mother yet be free f r o m her control. 5. "Mothers' Day is Widely Observed," Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 May 1908, p. 9; and "Mothers' Day Observed Here," New York Times, 10 May 1908, p. 18. 6. "Socialist Women of New York Protest Plan for 'Mother's D a y , ' " New York Call, 10 June 1908, p. 5; " L e t t e r to the Editor," Socialist, The Workingman's Paper (Seattle), 20 J u n e 1908, p. 4. 7. "Mothers Will Be Honored T o d a y , " Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 May 1910, p. 1 ; and "Mothers' Day T o d a y , " Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 May 1908, p. 40. In 1907 and 1908, the National Congress of Mothers Magazine did not mention Mother's Day.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

8. T h e p o e m , " M o t h e r s ' D a y , " by C. H. St. Clair, was representative of the quality of p o e t r y p r o d u c e d for M o t h e r ' s Day: " T h e r e ' s a word surpassing all others / Since mortals o n earth saw t h e s u n : / 'Tis t h e sacred, t h e h o l y word Mother, / As it fell f r o m the first h u m a n t o n g u e . " National Congress of Mothers Magazine, 31 (May 1909), 271. 9. Cong. Ree., 9 May 1908, pp. 5 9 7 1 - 7 4 . 10. I n f o r m a t i o n on the political persuasion of the p a r t i c i p a n t s can be f o u n d in George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (New Y o r k : H a r p e r and R o w , 1 9 5 8 ) , passim. 11. "Against a Mothers* D a y , " New York Times, 10 May 1 9 0 8 , sec. 2, p. 7. 12. Cong. Ree., 7 May 1914, pp. 8 2 3 3 , 8 2 7 6 . 13. See t h e Strawbridge and Clothier advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 May 1914, p. 7, offering " a n excellent a s s o r t m e n t of M O T H E R ' S D A Y POST C A R D S at 14, 34, and 54 e a c h , " and t h e same store's Philadelphia Inquirer advertisement, 13 May 1 9 1 6 , p. 7, typical of "Whistler's M o t h e r " offerings. 14. " M o t h e r spends most of her t i m e in t h e h o m e , so f o r her it s h o u l d be t h e pleasantest place o n earth. Make it pleasant with music. " A d v e r t i s e m e n t for Snellenberg's D e p a r t m e n t Store, " G e t M o t h e r a V i c t r o l a , " Philadelphia Inquirer, 1 3 May 1 9 1 6 , p. 8. 15. J o h n Wanamaker, a m e m b e r of A n n a Jarvis' M o t h e r ' s Day c o m m i t t e e and a leading Republican politician, was t h e first Philadelphia m e r c h a n t t o i n c o r p o r a t e a Mother's Day message in n e w s p a p e r advertisements. W a n a m a k e r considered himself an advertising i n n o v a t o r , and his flair f o r merchandising was evident in his response to M o t h e r ' s Day. T h e day was used as a public relations gimmick; his d e p a r t m e n t s t o r e held annual M o t h e r ' s Day p r o g r a m s of music a n d recitations and gave a w a y w h i t e carnations t o c u s t o m e r s . Wanamaker was r e p u t e d t o have said t h a t he w o u l d r a t h e r be a f o u n d e r of M o t h e r ' s Day t h a n t h e king of England. See t h e W a n a m a k e r ' s D e p a r t m e n t S t o r e advertisements published in t h e Philadelphia Inquirer each S a t u r d a y b e f o r e M o t h e r ' s Day, during t h e years f r o m 1 9 0 8 t o 1 9 1 8 , a n d t h e b i o g r a p h y b y W a n a m a k e r ' s friend, t h e evangelist Russell Conwell, The Romantic Rise of a Great American (New Y o r k : Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1 9 2 4 ) , pp. 2 1 6 - 1 7 . 16. " M o t h e r ' s D a y , " Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 May 1 9 0 8 , p. 8. 17. " M o t h e r ' s Day in the S u n d a y School," Presbyterian Advance, 1 May 1 9 1 3 , p. 16. 18. T h e growth of t h e American S u n d a y school m o v e m e n t has been described b y R o b e r t W. Lynn and Elliott Wright in The Big Little SchoolSunday Child of American Protestantism (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Chapter 4, " A Pinch of Harvard, A H e a p of T a m m a n y H a l l , " pp. 5 6 - 7 6 , analyzes the popularity of Sunday schools during t h e Progressive era. 19. Marion Lawrence, Special Days in the Sunday Schools (New Y o r k : Fleming H. Revell Co., 1916), p p . 7 - 8 . This a u t h o r specifically refers t o the e n t e r t a i n m e n t value of special days. 20. See, for example, M o t h e r ' s Day advertisements in t h e Sunday School Times, 11 April 1914, p. 243. 21. Rev. Jesse Halsey, " T h e Work of t h e Pastor: Suggestions for M o t h e r ' s D a y , " Homiletic Review 71 (May 1 9 1 6 ) , 381. T h e Homiletic Review was published for use by Protestant ministers a n d c o n t a i n e d s e r m o n o u t l i n e s and suggestions for prayer meetings as well as f e a t u r e articles on t h e role of t h e minister. 22. " M o t h e r ' s Day in the S u n d a y S c h o o l , " P r e s b y t e r i a n Advance, 1 May 1 9 1 3 , p. 16.

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23. "Mother's Way," Christian Advocate, 6 May 1915, pp. 610-11. See also "Their Mother's Day," Christian Advocate, 11 May 1916, p. 637. 24. The fear surrounding the discovery of the juvenile delinquent and the increasing interest in adolescence exemplified by G. Stanley Hall's monumental study of the subject published in 1904 is discussed by Joseph E. Kett in Hites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), chaps. 7 and 8. 25. Susan Tracy Rice, ed., Mother's Day: Its History, Origin, Celebration, Spirit, and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1915), p. x. 26. Mother's Day in Honor of the Best Mother Who Euer Lived—The Mother of Your Heart (Philadelphia: B. F. Enery, 1915) was the Mother's Day program prepared by Anna Jarvis, her "official program" for the holiday. 27. Mother's Day literature refers to the body of anecdotes, stories, and poems published especially for the holiday. Many of the poems were traditional favorites such as Rudyard Kipling's "Mother Ό Mine." The stories were written around a Mother's Day setting, although the values reflected in the stories were not unique to Mother's Day literature. Mother's Day literature was most abundant in church magazines, weekly journals published by the individual denominations and filled with church happenings, world news, editorial comment, and mail order advertisements. The Christian Advocate, printed in New York, was the organ of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Presbyterian, the official newsletter of American Presbyterians, and the Presbyterian Advance, published in Kentucky, offered that denomination's point of view. By 1912 the appropriate May issue of each of these magazines was devoted to Mother's Day. The Churchman, an Episcopalian paper, and the Congregationalist, for the years 1908 through 1918, occasionally printed Mother's Day poems, but more frequently the day was simply ignored. Both magazines appear to have been directed to a more literate class of readers, more concerned with solutions to pressing world problems than the glorification of motherhood. The Sunday School Times, an independent weekly for church school teachers, devoted one issue each year to Mother's Day suggestions. 28. "Thirtieth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Proceedings Day-by-Day," Christian Advocate, 21 May 1908, p. 852; "Thirtieth General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Proceedings Day-by-Day," Christian Advocate, 11 June 1908, p. 1001. 29. "Thirty-first General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Proceedings Day-by-Day," Christian Advocate, 23 May 1912, pp. 7 5 3 - 5 4 . 30. A 1912 editorial (the first to mention Mother's Day in this journal for ministers) doubted the need for the holiday but approved the sentiment. "Mother's Day," Homiletic Review, 63 (May 1912), 344. The May 1914 edition printed a Mother's Day prayer and sermon outline. Reference to Mother's Day celebrations in church news columns printed each Saturday in both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times suggested increasing ministerial observance of Mother's Day. 31. Excerpted in "Mother's Day Observed Here," New York Times, 10 May 1909, p. 18. 32. The story of Hannah is found in I Samuel 1:1-28. For a classic 1900s explanation of the Biblical story, see Margaret Sangster, The Women of the Bible, A Portrait Gallery (New York: Christian Herald Bible House, 1911 ), pp. 1 3 6 - 3 9 . When sermon titles were printed in the Saturday listings of Sunday church services, the story of Hannah was most often mentioned as the subject for discussion. Other favorites were "True Womanhood," and Mary, the mother of Jesus.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

33. Lulu Linton, " T h e Undertone," Presbyterian Advance, 2 May 1918, pp. 10-11. 34. " A Mothers' Day G i f t , " Christian Advocate, 7 May 1914, p. 645. 35. " T h e Mother," Sunday School Times, 2 April 1912, p. 260; and the Mother's Day sermon given by Rev. Daniel E. Weigle of Messiah Lutheran Church excerpted in "United City Pays Reverent Homage on Mother's Day," Philadelphia inquirer, 13 May 1912, p. 2. 36. " A Mother's Influence," Presby terian Advance, 7 May 1914, p. 15. 37. Bernard Wishy gives an analysis of this literature in The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern Child Nurturing (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). See also Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 6 0 , " American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1974), 151-74. 38. See, for example, " T h e Glory of Motherhood," Christian Advocate, 7 May 1914, p. 628. This writer preferred "the old-fashioned mothers who knew no better science of child-nurture than loving service day and night." 39. " T h e Distinctions of Motherhood," Christian Advocate, 6 May 1915, p. 595. 40. "Suffragists to Storm Ohio," New York Times, 6 May 1912, p. 1. 41. Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 18901920 (Garden City, Ν. Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 75. 42. "Methodists Favor Votes for Women," New York Times, 24 May 1916, p. 11 ; "Presbyterians Fail to Vote on Suffrage," New York Times, 27 May 1916, p. 6. 43. The ambivalent feelings revealed by those who favored participation of women in government can be seen in "The Distinctions of Motherhood," Christian Advocate, 6 May 1915, p. 595. 44. Marion Wathen Fox, " T h e Professor's Unexpected Visit, A Mother's Day S t o r y , " Sunday School Times, 13 April 1914, p. 251, 260. 45. " A Letter f r o m Mother," Christian Advocate, 7 May 1914, p. 640. 46. "Mother's Day," Presbyterian, 7 May 1913, p. 14. 47. An example of this frequently used theme can be found in "He Promised His M o t h e r , " Christian Advocate, 11 May 1913, pp. 618-19. 48. " T h e Distinctions of Motherhood," Christian Advocate, 6 May 1915, p. 595. 49. This theme has been developed by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 50. The xenophobia rampant in the Progressive era is discussed in John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1970); and in Mártin Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970). Chapter 15, "Perils—The City," is concerned with threats to Protestant hegemony. 51. Rev. Frederick D. Shannon, "Our Debt to Motherhood," Presbyterian, 13 May 1914, p. 18. 52. " T o Honor Texas Mothers," New York Times, 20 Arpil 1912, p. 16. 53. "Mother's Day," Sunset, 24 (May 1910), 581. 54. Governor E. F. Noel, Letter to Anna Jarvis, 1 April 1910, Anna Jarvis Papers, A & M 1175, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Library, Morgantown, W. Va. 55. " T h e Man My Mother Thinks I Am," Christian Advocate, 9 May 1918, p. 586. 56. " 4 2 , 0 0 0 Soldiers to Pray in Unison," Neu» York Times, 12 May 1918, P. 8.

57. "Mother's Letter Plan Gives Every Man in A.E.F. Special Opportunity

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f o r Observing M o t h e r ' s D a y , " Stars and Stripes, 3 May 1 9 1 8 , p. 1 ; " H o m e F o l k s Waiting f o r G r e a t S h i p l o a d of M o t h e r ' s L e t t e r s , " Stars and Stripes, 1 0 May 1 9 1 8 , p p . 1 - 2 . 58. " E x t e n s i o n of R e m a r k s of Hon. A u g u s t i n e L o n e r g a n , " Appendix to Cong. Ree., 31 May 1 9 1 8 , p. 4 1 5 . 59. " M o t h e r ' s D a y , " Presbyterian, 9 May 1918, p. 4. 60. Cong. Ree., 9 May 1 9 1 8 , p p . 6 2 3 5 , 6 2 7 4 . 61. K r a d i t o r , The ¡deas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 50. 6 2 . " T h e D i s t i n c t i o n s of M o t h e r h o o d , " Christian Advocate, 6 May 1915, p. 5 9 6 . 63. Ibid. 6 4 . " M o t h e r ' s Day in H o n o r of ' T h e Best M o t h e r Who Ever Lived'—The M o t h e r of Y o u r H e a r t " was A n n a Jarvis' official program title.

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EARLY C O M M U N I T Y

WORK O F BLACK CLUB

WOMEN

by

GERDA LERNER Black women organized, throughout the nineteenth century, at first on a local, later on a state and national level, to undertake educational, philanthropic and welfare activities. Urbanization, the urgent needs of the poor in a period of rapid industrialization and the presence of a sizeable group of educated women with leisure led to the emergence of a national club movement of white women after the Civil War. Similar conditions did not begin to operate in the black communities until the 1890's, when local clubs in a number of different cities began almost simultaneously to form federations. In 18% the newly formed National Association of Colored Women ( N A C W ) united the three largest of these and over a hundred local women's clubs. 1 The activities of the black w o m e n ' s club movement were recorded by the pioneering black historians. 2 However, the continuity and extent of this work and its significance have largely escaped the notice of historians. There is as yet no adequate history of the black women's club movement and no interpretative literature. 3 Because of the widely scattered nature of this effort, the fluid structure of the N A C W and the Gerda Lerner is Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. New Orleans, Louisiana, December, 1972 1 Fannie Barrier Williams, "Club Movement Among Negro Women", i n j . W. Gibson and W. H. Crogman. (eds.). Progress of a Race. (Atlanta. Ga: J. L. Nicholas Co.. 1903): Mary Church Terrell. " T h e History of the Club Movement". The Afrit-American Women's Journal. 1940. Typescript copy in Mary Church Terrell Papers. Library of Congress. * L. C. Scruggs, M. D., Women of Distinction, (Raleigh, N.C.: The Author. 1893): N. F. Mosseli, The Work of the Afro-American Woman. (Philadelphia: GeorgeS. Ferguson Co.. 1908); Nationul Encyclopedia of the Colored Race. Clement Richardson, (ed.). (Montgomery. Alabama: National Publishing Co., 1919): Hallie Quinn Brown. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. (Xenia: The Aldine Publishing Co., 1926) are among the earlier books listing outstanding black women. 3 Elizabeth L. Davis, Lifting ΛΛ They Climb: The National Association of Colored Women, (n.p.: The National Association of Colored Women, 1933) and Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, The Story of the Illinois Federation of Colored Women's Clubs: 1900-1922, (n.p.: n.d., (1922)), an uncritical and disorganized assemblage of records and documents pertaining to the NACW and one of its subsidiaries; Emma Field, " T h e Women's Club Movement in the United States: 1877-1900". M.A. Thesis in History. Howard University, 1948.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES succession of its publications, it has been difficult even to trace its actual strength and to follow its development. Close study of women's clubs in several communities suggests that the importance of their work has been seriously underestimated. Contrary to widely held racist myths, black communities have a continuous record of self-help, institution-building and strong organization to which black women have made continuous contributions. This article will focus on only a few representative examples of this kind of work. The impulse for organizing arose wherever an urgent social need remained unmet. Most frequently, women's clubs were formed in order to provide kindergartens, nursery schools or day care centers for black children. The virtual absence of social welfare institutions in many Southern communities and the frequent exclusion of Blacks from those that existed, led black women to found orphanages, old folks' homes and similar institutions. The founding and support of educational institutions had been a continuous activity in the black community since the days of slavery, but the extent to which women contributed and often sustained this effort has yet to be recorded. Since Reconstruction days the school teacher in her one-room schoolhouse was sustained by fund-raising committees of black church ladies' auxiliaries long before she was the beneficiary of white philanthropy. In the case of the most important female founders of black educational institutions—Emma J. Wilson, Cornelia Bowen, Lucy Lainey, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Nanny Burroughs and Mary McLeod Bethune—the schools became centers for community organizations, women's activities and a network of supporting institutions. 4 Mary Margaret Washington, director of Girls Industries and later dean of women at Tuskegee Institute, organized the Tuskegee Women's Club and was its president from its inception in 1895. This club can serve as a prototype for hundreds of its kind. Composed of a relatively small membership of educated women—from 35 to nearly a hundred—it offered social and recreational programs, literary discussions, guest lecturers and self-study circles whose interests ranged from health and hygiene topics to Afro-American history. 4 For background information on these institutions see: Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, (N .Y .: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915) and Henry A. Bullock. A History of Negro Education in the South, from 1619 to the Present, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). My generalizations are based on extensive reading in the papers of Mary McLeod Bethune, Amistad Research Center, Dillard University and Rosenwald Fund Papers, Fisk University; the Mary Margaret Washington Papers which are found in the Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress; the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Papers at the Schlesinger Library, RadclifTe College. Much information can be found in the publications of the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, Departments of Records and Research, Nos. 1-10, (Tuskegee, 1949-1961) and in the publication of the Hampton Institute, The Southern Workman, 1872-1939.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM Membership in the club denoted a certain social standing in the community and was not infrequently used to enforce the snobbish and restrictive attitudes of the leadership. The welfare activities, as reported in club records, show strong class prejudices on the part of the club women and reflect a patronizing, missionary attitude in dealing with the poor. These shortcomings were characteristic of the women's club movement of both races, but they should not overshadow the large amount of socially useful work done by these clubs. Mothers' meetings provided uplifting educational discussions, advice on child care, home economics, vegetable gardening and sewing. Missionary, temperance and welfare activities, and work at the local jail and settlement house was carried on in a regular way. Added to this variety of services were the running of a Sunday school, Bible teaching and—in many cases—of a kindergarten. The Tuskegee Club also ran a small library and took part in some suffrage and political activities. Similar work was carried on in hundreds of black communities and in conjunction with many schools and colleges. 5 In the 1890's the long tradition of women's organized effort in support of some local charitable or educational institution was transformed into something new and different by the emergence of multipurpose women's clubs, embracing a broad range of activities and interests. The immediate stimulus of their formation was political: the defense of the race against lynchings. In 1892, Ida B. Wells, the intrepid Memphis journalist and newspaper editor, exposed the economic motives for the brutal lynching of three black businessmen, urged resistance, boycott and emigration as a weapon for black survival. As a result of her stand, her newspaper office and equipment were destroyed, and her life was threatened, should she dare return to the city. Ida B. Wells responded by organizing a nation-wide anti-lynching crusade. Her constant theme was to expose lynching as an integral part of the system of racial oppression, the motives for which were usually economic or political. She hit hard at the commonly used alibi for lynchings, the charge of " r a p e " , and dared bring out into the open the most taboo subject of all in Victorian America—the habitual sexual abuse of black women by white men. Thus, she expressed what was to become the ideological direction of the organized movement of black women—a defense of black womanhood as part of a defense of the race from terror and abuse.® 5

Report of the Tuskegee Women's Club; 1904-1905, (n.p., 1906). Pamphlet. * On Ida B. Wells see: Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice. The Autobiography of ida Β. Wells, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). For Ida B. Wells' view on rape and lynchings, see: Ida B. Wells. A Red Record, (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895). This and the views of other women's club leaders on lynching are cited in Gerda Lerner (ed.). Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 193-215.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES On the eve of her departure for England, where she would inspire the organization of the British Anti-Lynching Society, Ida B. Wells spoke at a fund-raising rally in her support, organized by a group of prominent New York women. This 1892 meeting, which brought together Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston, Victoria Earle Matthews of New York and Dr. Susan McKinney of Brooklyn, inspired the formation of the two first black women's clubs. The New York and Brooklyn women formed the Women's Loyal Union and somewhat later, Mrs. St. Pierre Ruffin organized the Woman's Era Club of Boston. On her return from England Mrs. Wells-Barnett helped to organize the first women's club in Chicago in 1893. The Ida B. Wells Club met weekly on "Ladies' Day" in the club house of the all-male Tourgee Club. Its members did charitable work, operated a kindergarten, brought prominent cultural and political leaders to town for lectures and were politically active in defense of the race against lynchings, police brutality and discrimination.7 Following shortly upon the organization of the first club in Chicago the Phillis Wheatley Club was organized in 18% to work for neighborhood improvements. It began to operate a day nursery in 1904 and in 1908 set up a home for girls. Within a decade there were seven colored women's clubs active in the city of Chicago.8 Several of the leaders of this organizing effort—Ida B. Wells, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell—freely acknowledged that they had been influenced by the success of the white women's club movement. The general encouragement of voluntary efforts to solve social ills, which prevailed in the Progressive period, may have contributed to the "spirit of organization" which seemed to take hold of many minds at once during the decade. The example of successful effort in one place immediately fired enthusiasts in another to solve their problems by way of a women's club. The move toward a national organization was actively promoted by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who organized the First National Conference of Colored Women in Boston in 1895. The National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded the same year with Mrs. Mary Margaret Washington as president. It united 36 women's clubs in twelve states, including the New Era Club. Meanwhile a similar movement toward national unity had taken place under the leadership of the Washington Women's Club and led to the formation of the National League of Colored Women under Mrs. Mary Church Terrell's leadership. There ensued a brief rivalry for leadership of the 7

Duster, Ida B. Wells, pp. 78-81. • E. L. Davis, Illinois Federation . . . . pp. 95-%, 99-101. See also Alan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto: 1890-1920, (Chicago: Universrity of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 101-102.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM national organization, which was resolved when the two groups united in 1896 and drew large numbers of new affiliates into the National Association of Cojored Women. The national federation movement greatly spurred organizational activity and put it on a more business-like basis. The reporting of club activities in the various women's journals lent dignity and a sense of direction to the small groups of local women, taught them more sophisticated methods of organization and provided channels for the training of leadership. It is notable that these activities seemed to cluster around colleges or urban centers. A great many women's clubs responded specifically to the needs of migrants to urban centers. Victoria Earle Matthews, founder and president of the Women's Loyal Union, perceived the need for social work among black girls who had recently arrived in New York City from the South seeking employment. She founded the White Rose Mission in 1897 as a shelter and rescue home and set up branches in various cities. Typically, the White Rose Mission expanded its work to that of a settlement house, offering recreation, literary and cultural events and classes on Negro History. Jane Edna Hunter founded the Working Girls' Home Association (renamed the Phillis Wheatley Association) in Cleveland in 1911. Originally designed to serve as a shelter for black girls denied admission to the city's YWCA, it soon became a settlement house, offering a full range of social and educational activities, an employment agency and a summer camp. Under Jane Hunter's guidance similar institutions sprang up in a number of cities and several states. An example of a women's club first concerned with national goals and later with local work is the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C. Created in 1892, it helped to organize the first national organization of black women. Its local work consisted of establishing a training center for kindergarten teachers and then setting up and maintaining seven free kindergartens and several day nurseries. As was the case in many of these pioneering efforts, the kindergartens, orphanages and old people's homes were taken over by local or state authorities as soon as they had proven themselves successful. The Washington kindergartens were incorporated into the public school system of the city, most of the black teachers employed in them being graduates of the League's training school. 9 The Atlanta Neighborhood Union is remarkable among all these successful institutions for its continuity of service from 1908 to the • On Victoria Earle Matthews see: J. E. Bruce, "Noted Race Women I Have Known and Met", J. E. Bruce Manuscript, Schomburg Collection, Ν. Y. Public Library and Woman's Era, II, #5 (Aug. 1895) and III, #5 (Jan. 1897). On Colored Woman's League of Washington D.C., see: Andrew F. Hilyer, (ed.). The 20th Century Union League Directory: A Historical, Biographical and Statistical Study of Colored Washington. (Washington, D.C. Union League, 1901), p. 155-56.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES present, for the sophisticated level of organization sustaining it and for the wide range and scope of its services. Like Hull House in Chicago, with which it can adequately be compared, it represents an unusual organizational achievement under the leadership of an unusual woman. Yet, as can be seen from the above brief account, the Neighborhood Union can also be viewed as a representative prototype. 10 In 1908 faculty wives and women residing in the neighborhood of Spelman and Morehouse Colleges met in order to find some means of relieving the urgent need for playspace for their children. There was in Atlanta not a single playground or park for black children. The women persuaded the administration of Morehouse College to allow the use of part of its grounds for a playground. Since the college insisted on adequate supervision, the women themselves undertook to organize it and to raise funds for necessary equipment. This involved contacting local businesses and securing donations of equipment and of workmen to install it. This venture brought the women closer together, gave them confidence in their own ability and inspired them to look out for other community problems in need of solving. Before long, the small group of women defined its aim more ambitiously as the "moral, economic and social advancement of Negroes" in Atlanta. Branch organizations were set up in different parts of the city, united in the Neighborhood Union; educational work was begun, and a wide range of social service projects were undertaken. Yearly carnivals and Fourth of July celebrations for children were major neighborhood events. Neighborhood home and street clean-up campaigns, gardening and improvement drives, support of anti-TB and Red Cross campaigns and the establishment of summer Bible schools for children were among the earlier activities, which became regularly established traditions. Children's clubs combined recreation, education and day care and, incidentally, attracted the children's mothers to further activities. Considering the bad state of educational facilities for Blacks, a Social Improvement Committee was set up in 1913 to "better conditions of the Negro in the public schools in Atlanta." This committee undertook a six-months' fact-finding investigation in which every colored school was visited and inspected. Deplorable physical conditions, severe overcrowding, double sessions with one teacher teaching both sessions, were widely prevalent. The committee's action-oriented response to these findings is instructive: Members of the committee

"' All information about the Atlanta Neighborhood Union is based on study of the Neighborhood Union Papers. Trevor Arnett Library, Atlanta University. Also on a typescript in these papers. " S u r v e y of the Work of the Neighborhood U n i o n " by W. Walter Chivers (undated). Excerpts from the Neighborhood Union Papers are reprinted in Lerner. G . , (ed.). Black Women pp. 500-509.

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lobbied with the mayor and members of the City Council, and systematically visited white religious leaders and influential white women. The latter were induced to visit some of the colored schools and their support for reform measures was secured. Public meetings were arranged, at which slide shows brought the school conditions before large audiences. Petitions were circulated and the board of education was put under constant pressure. These tactics resulted in the establishment of an additional school in temporary quarters, the raising of the salaries of black teachers and continued pressure on politicians around school issues. However, such pressure was inadequate to alter the racist neglect of black schools. The issue was still hot in 1923; another school survey revealed "seating capacity is only 42% of total enrollment. The children are on triple sessions . . . there is/are an average of 72 children for each teacher employed." By then, a schoolby-school survey revealed that only two per cent of black children were getting what the committee considered ' 'adequate school work." In 1915 the Neighborhood Union established a Health Center, which offered a medical clinic, health education activities and nursing services. This work was expanded and sustained for over three decades. Thus the Health Committee reported that in 1927 nearly a thousand children "were examined in 36 health clinics, 82 mothers are enrolled in Mothers' Clubs, two new Boys' Clubs have been organized. . . . [In 1928] 27 medical clinics were held, in which more than 800 school children were examined and treated. Three health classes were organized for 78 women in the community, two new Boys' Clubs were organized with an enrollment of 112; two Girls' Clubs were organized; and almost 3000 pieces of literature were distributed." And in 1931/2, at the height of the depression, "[T]he Health Clinic at the Neighborhood Union House was enlarged to include medical and dental clinics and mothers' clinics for home care of the sick. A registered nurse, a doctor and a dentist were in attendance. Over 4000 people used the services of the Health center. 684 preschool-age children were treated, 176 families were supplied with milk, and 432 children were supplied with cod liver oil." Annual participation in anti-tuberculosis drives and Red Cross campaigns organized by Neighborhood Union women brought the black community health services from which it had previously been excluded. Home improvement and clean-up campaigns were oriented both toward self-help and the exerting of political pressure. Typically, housing conditions in the black ghetto were sub-standard, over-crowding severe. A 1917 housing survey organized by the Neighborhood Union revealed consistently appalling conditions: no street lights, unpaved streets; inadequate trash and garbage removal; homes lacking adequate toilet facilities; contaminated water supply. The survey was continued

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES in 1921, when over 5000 homes were visited. The result of that single campaign was 40 houses repaired, two streets paved, lights put on one street, improvements made in twelve streets, plumbing repaired in one house, sewers put on two streets, toilets repaired in one house, and street improvements made in twenty streets. The Neighborhood Union purchased a building in 1922, which became the center for its varied activities. It housed the health clinic, social service staff, mothers' clubs, Boy and Girl scout troops, homemaking and woodworking classes and a great many more activities. The settlement house also took an interest in the Herndon Day Nursery, The Gate City Free Kindergarten which had been founded by Mrs. Lugenia Hope, and in the colored YWCA. In the same way in which Hull House became the focal point for a broad range of reform activities, so the Neighborhood Union serviced the various needs of the community for several generations. Women who were active in the Neighborhood Union in the 1930's had, as children, grown up in and around that settlement house. Neighborhood Union committees functioned in a business-like manner, volunteer secretaries kept meticulous records, often written in long-hand in school notebooks. An example of the way drives were organized is the "Plan of Work: of the Atlanta Colored Women's War Council," a group formed during World War I for the purpose of providing recreational facilities for colored soldiers. The Neighborhood Union was drawn into this war-time activity; its organization can be considered typical and representative of Atlanta leadership. The city was divided into nine zones, each zone subdivided into neighborhood units. In each such unit various committees were appointed, whose leaders had to report to the city-wide committee and who were responsible for engendering grass-roots activity. Over 500 women were mobilized for this work within a short time, which speaks for the effectiveness of leadership. 11 Obviously, the faculty wives of Morehouse and Spelman Colleges and of Atlanta University, many of them college-trained themselves, provided the leadership and the constant feedback with the college community. Sociologists and students were used to help with surveys, medical personnel were incorporated in the health work, and education leaders organized classes in the community. It is difficult from the available record to estimate the exact number of activists, but they cannot have exceeded 100 at any given time. Yet during the various "drives" and campaigns several hundred neighborhood women were mobilized as canvassers, petition circulators and organizers. To give a few examples: 11 "Plan of Work: Atlanta Colored Women's War Council", Neighborhood Union Pipers, in Ibid., pp. 498-500.

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The 1921 clean-up campaign was carried on by 83 women volunteers. It was organized by districts headed by captains. Each of 2500 homes was visited twice. Improvements made as a result of the campaign were dutifully recorded by the volunteers; In one month activity in 1924 the Health committee reported that 217 home visits were made; six meetings held, 32,000 pieces of literature distributed and 16,000 people reached with educational material. Even allowing for some exaggeration on the part of reporters, it is obvious that such activities must have involved hundreds of neighborhood women; During the depression of 1932 the Unemployment Relief Committee numbered 200 active volunteers in addition to "regular workers." The Neighborhood Union of Atlanta, Georgia was for almost thirty years under the leadership of Mrs. Lugenia Hope, wife of the president of Atlanta University. This dynamic leader, characteristic of her generation, worked in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. Yet her leadership spirit generated not only a remarkable local reform drive, but moved on to the national scene. Under her direction, Atlanta women had for some time been prodding white women in support of their cause. The first steps had been to involve white women in bettering the schools in the colored ghetto. The next, to prove that the black community supported various white community campaigns such as Red Cross and Community Chest. The World War I activities of black women raised the issue of integration in the YWCA to a new level. Although the national YWCA had appointed its first "secretary for colored work", Eva Bowles, in 1913, and had, by 1920, increased its black national staff to 12, YWCA branches in all Southern cities operated on a strictly segregated basis. Workers in the black community, handpicked by local white boards and national colored secretaries from the national staff, were prevented by a tacit "hands-ofF policy on racial matters from working in the South. The result was a perpetuation and reinforcement of segregation and discrimination within the YWCA. The issue came into the open over the assignment of a black field worker to work in the Atlanta black community. The Atlanta club leaders asked for the replacement of this field worker to whom they objected because they considered her unresponsive to their interests. They went on to demand the right to select their own staff. As one participant in this campaign put it, "the principle involved is not one . . . of policy, but the race question, pure and simple. The question is whether or not colored women can in some communities cooperate with white women " The summery of the work in the Y W C A are based on a study of the YWCA Papers, Smith College and of the YWCA Manuscript in the Neighborhood Union Papers. Some of these items are reprinted in Lcmcr (cd.). Black \¥onteny pp. 477-489. Quote: undated typescript. [Probably 1921]

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES and at the same time keep their self-respect." 1 3 A skillfully orchestrated campaign, which was led by Mrs. Lugenia Hope, led the national board to reverse its policy and set a precedent by asking black women to submit a slate of candidates they considered suitable for appointment. In 1921, as a direct outgrowth of this controversy, the YWCA national board appointed its first black member, Mrs. Charlotte Hawkins Brown. Mrs. Hope and the Atlanta women continued their struggle against discrimination by initiating efforts for an interracial meeting of black and white Southern club women as early as 1919. The meeting took place a year later at Tuskegee Institute and led to several decades of interracial cooperation among women in the fight against lynchings. By 1929, 805 interracial county committees were functioning in the Southern states, obviously with varying degrees of effectiveness. 1 ' 1 The work of black clubwomen contributed to the survival of the black community. Black women's clubs were, like the clubs of white women, led by educated, often by middle-class women, but unlike their white counterparts, black club women frequently successfully bridged the class barrier and concerned themselves with issues of importance to poor women, working mothers, tenant farm wives. They were concerned with education, self and community improvement, but they always strongly emphasized race pride and race advancement. Their inspiring example of self-help and persistent community service deserves to be more closely studied by historians, especially those interested in urban history.

" YWCA Manuscript, Box 5, Neighborhood Union Papers. 14 This summary based on a study of the papers of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Atlanta, University of Atlanta. See also reprints from these piapers in Lerner (ed.). Black Women . . .. pp. 461-467.

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School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919

James L. Leloudis Π "Revolutionize the state!" With that injunction, Charles D. Mclver opened his address before a gathering of young women on the evening of March 20, 1902. His audience was receptive, but it was hardly a revolutionary cadre. Mclver, president of the North Carolina Normal and Industrial College for Women at Greensboro, was speaking to two hundred juniors and seniors whom he had called together to discuss means of upgrading the state's white public schools. The revolution he envisioned was the industrial transformation of North Carolina. He implored his listeners to pursue that goal by improving the physical condition of schools with the same energy they devoted to keeping their homes and churches "neat and attractive." If such "housekeeping" seems tame as a revolutionary act, it nonetheless inspired the students. After President Mclver's speech, they founded the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses (WABPS) and urged the press to spread word of their organization across the state. The association flourished in subsequent years as a major voice in the crusade for New South industrialism and as a primary channel for white women's participation in public affairs.1 The WABPS won wide acclaim and support from the outset. The Raleigh News and Observer greeted its creation as "an event of deep satisfaction," while editors of the Biblical Recorder and the Progressive Farmer offered to promote the group's work. With that assistance the association quickly enlisted thousands of women in programs designed to make schools more attractive, sanitary, and comfortable. By 1905 those programs had proved so successful that teachers attending the Summer School of the South at Knoxville, Tennessee, decided to implement them on a regional basis. The educators lames L. Leloudis Π is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where his adviser is Donald C. Mathews. This essay has been awarded the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award (or 1982. 1 E. C. Brooks, "Women Improving School Houses," World's Work, 12 (Sept. 1906), 7937. Fora more detailed account of the meeting, see Virginia Terrell Lathrop, "Alumnae for 'School Betterment,' 1902," Alumni News: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 60 (Spring 1972), 11.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES formed the Interstate Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses and elected delegates to establish state chapters modeled on the North Carolina association. Within two years the delegates had organized women in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. North Carolina's WABPS maintained a position of regional leadership in school-improvement work until 1919, when many of its local chapters began to merge with the newly founded North Carolina Congress of Parents and Teachers. A subsequent decline in membership forced the association to close its state headquarters during the same year, although several local chapters continued to operate independently through the mid-1920s. 1 The North Carolina WABPS was one of many reform organizations that emerged during the Progressive Era offering women new public roles as agents of social change. By joining those groups, women moved from the home into public life and wielded new forms of power. Their activities raise a host of questions concerning female reform and the emergence of the New South: How did women activists organize their campaigns? What motivated their efforts? How did sex role prescriptions and class identity affect their strategies? What was the place of male authority in female voluntary societies? How did women influence the course of regional and national development? These queries remain largely unanswered by a historical literature that is centered upon more prominent male reformers and national organizations. Nevertheless, they are of vital importance to students of southern education and of progressivism in general. The southern movement for improved schools drew its strength from local groups comprised mostly of women; therefore, any attempt to explain the content and legacy of educational progressivism in the region must begin by placing women's studies in the mainstream of historical inquiry. A focus on women is helpful in two ways. First, it sheds new light on the debate over the ideological foundations of progressive schooling. Educational reform in the New South cannot be understood in the simple terms of either altruism or self-interest. Association women and their supporters among state school officials exhibited genuine concern for poor whites and struggled to improve standards of health and material comfort among school children and their families. The women, especially, viewed their work as " a labor of love" that would relieve "present hard conditions of ignorance and illiteracy, weakness and poverty." Yet these humanitarian concerns ultimately supported a program of social control. The association was intent upon training ' R. D. W. Connor, The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina (lUleigh, 1905), 6, 13, 17; Proceedings of the Tenth Conference for Education in the South, Pinehurst, N.C., April 9-11. ¡907 (Richmond, 1907), 109-11; Lathrop, "Alumnae for 'School Betterment,'" 22. The Congress of Parents and Teachers is known today as the ParentTeacher Association. A small group of educators and female civic leaders organized its North Carolina chapter in November 1919 as part of a national movement to promote parental cooperation in child-welfare reforms. For more on the congress, see Elmer S. Holbeck, An Analysis of the Activities and Potentialities for Achievement of the Patent-Teacher Association, with Recommendations (New York, 1934); N. A. Edwards, North Carolina Congress of Parents and Teachers: History ((Greensboro, 1945)).

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children "to fill the positions defined by circumstances" without going "so far as to make [them] discontented with their lot or [to] fill their minds with vain ambition." 1 It sought to aid students by molding them into a manageable labor force rather than by preparing them to be critical participants in the reshaping of southern society. This paradox was not the product of hypocrisy but resulted instead from a unified vision of uplift and development that both informed and constrained school-improvement programs. Although sympathetic toward the poor, that vision could not satisfy their needs. It faltered in both its boosterism and philanthropy by refusing to address the issues of racial, class, and regional inequality that underlay the southern condition.4 The study of women reformers also reveals the mixture of personal need and public enterprise that guided educational work during the early twentieth century. Women joined the association not only out of commitment to a New South but also in response to anxiety over their womanhood generated by the effects of economic development. As the twin forces of urban and industrial growth began to transform the South in the late nineteenth century, many women found their mothers' lives inappropriate models for feminine behavior and turned to reform activities as a means of adapting old values to a new society. Thus the WABPS was related to the New South on two levels: it would help modernize the region and would aid white, middle-class women in coping with the personal consequences of that process. Association women used the organization to restructure both their lives and the southern economy. Their actions, in turn, established a pattern of reform that has persisted as a central factor in regional development policy. ' Edith Royster to Charles D. Mclver, Sept. 9, 1903, box 11, Charles Duncan Mclver Papers (Walter Clinton Jackson Library, University of North Carolina, Greensboro); Elvira E. Moffitt to Charles D. Mclver, June 13, 1902, box 10, ibid.; Moffitt, manuscript of a lecture at the Caraer School, April 1903, pp. 6-7, folder 6, Elvira Evelyna Moffitt Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). The Elvira Evelyna Moffitt Papers contain the richest available group of manuscripts related to the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses (WABPS). ' Historians have long disagreed in their evaluation of school reform. Liberal scholars have argued that progressive educators sought to cure the social ills of industrialism by offering children a democratic, humanistic education that would enable them to build a new egalitarian social order. Others have been less charitable. Revisionists insist that the reformers were concerned more with social engineering than with social reconstruction and that they intended to sustain the growth of a corporate state by training students in appropriate skills and social attitudes. Both groups of historians, despite the acrimony of their debate, fail to provide more than a superficial treatment of reform ideology. Liberals accept the rhetoric of reform at face value, while revisionists characterize humanitarian claims as a mask for social control. New South educators, however, sought to serve children's best interests even as they pursued policies of intervention and coercion. Indeed, they perceived no contradiction between their technique of control and their purpose of uplift. We therefore should ask not whether the reformers' intentions were good or evil but rather why they acted as they did, what personal and social forces guided and constrained their projects, why their efforts failed, and how the legacy of that failure has influenced current educational policy. These questions will take us out of a debate over the aims of school reform and provide a better understanding of how changing structures of power and ideology shaped social action in the New South. They will also produce a history that is useful to contemporary policy makers concerned with regional development and the human costs of industrialism. For a review of the literature on progressive education, see Ronald D. Cohen and Raymond A. Mohl, The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling (Port Washington, N.Y., 1979), 160-75.

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The connection between the association and women's private lives became apparent when its founders held their first public meeting in Greensboro on April 3, 1902. President Mclver's students adopted a constitution that contained strict gender-specific requirements for membership. Female members of the WABPS paid no dues but were expected to participate regularly in the association's work and to vote in the annual election of officers. Men, on the other hand, were required to pay one dollar a year to join as "associate members" with no voting privileges. The association requested that its male patrons limit their services to the provision of money, labor, and advice. As a female officer explained on a later date, the organization was "purely feminine." "We allow the men to pay the money to carry on this work," she boasted. "We do not pay one cent, but every man that becomes an associate member gives one dollar and then he does the work we ask him to do. When we come to our election of. . . officers . . . we never let him vote. The women do all the voting in this Association and the men pay all the money—taxation without representation, if you please." 1 The officer's assertive tone, however, belied the association's compliance with ordinary forms of male-female relations. Women modeled the organization after their own households, assuming responsibility for its affairs yet relying upon male support and approval to conduct their work. The association represented a translation of the white, middle-class home—itself a female institution sustained by male labor and money—into public life. This adherence to domestic forms enabled the association to enter the traditionally male domain of public affairs without fear of condemnation. Indeed, men generally applauded women's involvement in school-improvement work. When a chapter of the association was organized in Wake County in 1902, the mayor of Raleigh and the superintendent of the Wake County Board of Education joined to wish the ladies immediate success. Similarly, in 1908, the superintendent of the Vance County Board of Education informed Lula M. Mclver, Charles's wife and colleague, that he was "very anxious" for her to visit his county and begin the improvement work there. Women in the WABPS enjoyed such enthusiastic approval because they accepted the primacy of male authority. The association looked for guidance to what its members considered superior "man's judgment" and pursued aims that had been proposed originally by Charles D. Mclver and other men in positions of public leadership.6 Male endorsements helped the WABPS to grow rapidly. With permission of the state Board of Education, the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly sponsored the association's first annual conference in June 1902 for the purpose of s Constitution and By-Laws: Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina (Greensboro, 1902), S; Mrs. W. R. (Sue V.| Hollowell, "Report of Women's Work in North Carolina," Proceedings of the Ninth Conference for Education in the South, Lexington. Ky.. May 2-4. ¡906 (Chattanooga, 1906), 59. * Mimeographed letter, n.d., box 3, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina (Walter Clinton Jackson Library); R. Edwards to Lula M. Mclver, Nov. 6, 1908, box 1, ibid.·, Moffitt, note, n.d., vol. 19, p. 9, Moffitt Papers; Royster to Charles D. Mclver, Dec. 18, 1902, box 10, Mclver Papers.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM proselytizing teachers and inaugurating a membership drive. Ten of President Mclver's students volunteered during the conference to stump the state and to organize local auxiliaries. They spent the summer lecturing to church meetings, county teachers' institutes, community picnics, and intimate gatherings in private homes. The students' tireless labor met with remarkable success, especially in urbanized counties. They recruited more than two thousand members by September 1902 and over the next four years established branch associations in seventy of the state's ninety-six counties. 7 Never before, except through the church, had so many North Carolina women been brought together in a single organization. The popularity of the WABPS among women was due in large measure to the changing status of white, middle-class housewives. These women had grown up in rural homes in which their mothers had held responsibility for rearing large numbers of children and had played important roles as producers by growing food and making clothes. The industrial transformation of the southern economy in the late nineteenth century brought with it a move to town, a decline in family size, and greater access to commercial goods such as canned food and ready-made clothing. These changes combined to undercut women's traditional domestic duties and to reduce housewives to a position of lesser importance as consumers and symbols of their husbands' economic success. This loss of responsibility robbed many women of their sense of purpose in life. One lady noted that "women who had been fully occupied with the requirements of society . . . were now tossed to and fro amidst the exigencies and bewilderments of strange and for the most part painful circumstances, and were eager that new adjustments should relieve the strained situation, and that they might find out what to do."' She and other middle-class women found the cure for their malaise in a strategy of role perfection. Rather than taking up feminist demands for the reorganization of social authority, WABPS members created new public activities that affirmed their identity as wives and mothers. Participation in school reform enabled them to regain a sense of personal dignity by expanding and elaborating upon traditional notions of femininity. The reformers employed prevailing conceptions of women as housekeepers, guardians of virtue, and counselors of youth to legitimate their work. As Elvira Evelyna Moffitt, leader of the association in Wake County, observed, the women in the WABPS meant, not to "invade the kingdom of men," but only 'Connor, Woman's Association, 13; Lathiop, "Alumnae lot 'School Betterment,'" 10-11; Brooks, "Women Improving School Houses," 7937. A survey of the Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina indicates that the organization fared best in counties with large towns or cities, counties such as Alamance, Buncombe, Cumberland, Durham, Edgecombe, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, New Hanover, Wake, and Wayne. • Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1S30-1930 (Chicago, 1970), 134-63. For more on urbanization and its impact on family size, see Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill, 19S4), 483; Robert M. Dinkel, "Peopling the City: Fertility," in The Urban South, ed. Rupert B. Vance and Nicholas ). Demerath (Chapel Hill, 1954), 78-107. The quotation is from Caroline E. Merrick, Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories (New York, 1901), 172.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES to assist local school committees. She explained that men were u n f a m i l i a r with the basic elements of child rearing because they worked away from home and left their wives to take "charge of the children." The men on school committees therefore often became so involved in "larger undertakings," such as hiring teachers and managing school funds, that they lost sight of the " 'little things' that in reality make the sum and substance of educational success." The women desired to remedy that neglect by using their domestic skills to make schoolhouses into "school homes" where children could learn virtues that were both the benchmarks of middle-class propriety and the behavioral ideals of industrial society. In performing that work, the women regained their lost self-esteem and perfected their traditional role in a public as well as private capacity. As one recruiter explained, women who had felt worthless as housewives flocked to her meetings and left with assurance that through the association they could once again attain the noble standards of motherhood.9 The WABPS mobilized women in its school-improvement programs through a tripartite hierarchy of state, county, and district associations, which ensured that the psychic benefits of betterment work were distributed according to individual need. 10 Groups at each level of the hierarchy held specific responsibilities. The state association included members of the county and district branches and was in fact synonymous with the WABPS. Delegates from the branch organizations met in annual conventions and elected five executive officers and five field agents, all of whom worked out of a central office in Greensboro. The executive officers dealt primarily with matters of planning. They consulted with the state Departments of Public Instruction, Agriculture, and Public Health on the development of improvement programs; issued regular advisory bulletins,- and sent the field agents on lecture tours intended to create a sense of urgency and opportunity among local women. Officers of the county associations, in turn, used information from the state headquarters to establish improvement priorities in their communities and to direct the work of subordinate district associations. 11 Together, these management activities shaped the efforts of individual members into a coherent campaign. District associations were the workhorses of the WABPS. Local women organized themselves around individual schools and assumed responsibility ' Moffilt, speech before the Wake County Betterment Association, Aug. 8, 1902, p. 10, folder S, Moffitt Papers; Moffitt, manuscript of a lecture at the Garner School, p. 3; Mrs. Ε. E. Moffitt, "For Better School Houses," Raleigh News and Observer, Sept. 14, 1902, pp. 9-10; Lula M. Mclver, untitled essay, n.d., pp. 4-5, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; Sue V. Hollowell to Charles D. Mclver, Dec 21, 1903, box 11, Mclver Papers. 10 The following analysis is based upon theoretical observations in Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), S-S2. Mancur Olson argues that a social movement can survive only if it is organized in a manner that enables it to provide its members with psychic or material rewards commensurate with their investments of time and energy. " Lathrop, "Alumnae for 'School Betterment,'" 10-11; Connor, Woman's Association, 15; Mrs. E. E. Moffitt, "Woman's Association," Raleigh Morning Post, Oct. 19, 1902, pp. 3, 5; James Yadkin Joyner, "Ways and Means of Carrying on the Work," Proceedings and Addresses of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Session of the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly, Charlotte, N.C., fune 16-19, 1908 (Raleigh, 1909), 326-31.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM for actually conducting improvement programs.11 Their chances of success depended upon support from lower-class parents who viewed the school as an avenue to economic security and social mobility for their children. District associations generally financed their projects with money solicited from students and parents at school picnics and plays. A teacher in Edgecombe County, for instance, raised more than thirty dollars by having her students bring lunch baskets for a class auction. On occasion, the district organizations also sponsored larger events. In 1906 the women in Raleigh directed a performance of "Cinderella in Flowerland" with a cast and crew of children from all of the city's schools. The operetta drew a large crowd and raised more than enough money to support the Raleigh Township association during the following year. 11 The neat division of labor within the association provided rewarding positions for a variety of members. Some women, such as Moffitt and Lucy Bramlette Patterson of Winston-Salem, felt compelled to assume leadership and win recognition as figures of importance. Both ladies spent their later adult lives as executive officers of the WABPS and satisfied their ambitions by managing the association's programs.14 They also found opportunities for personal growth and development in the traveling and speaking engagements connected with executive work. Patterson, for example, was a shy woman who " The Raleigh Township association, for example, had three subdivisions that managed the needs of the city's five schools. See Moffitt, note, Oct. 30, 1903, vol. 19, Moffitt Papers; "Improve School Houses,1 ' Raleigh Morning Post, Nov. S, 1903, p. 3; "To Improve School Houses, ' ' Raleigh News and Observer, Nov. S, 1903, p. 6. On the responsibilities of district organizations, see Lucy B. Patterson to Charles D. Mclver, Dec. 27,1902, box 10, Mclver Papers. » Emma Servis Speight to Mary Taylor Moore, n.d., box 2, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; "Medals Awarded to Happy Pupils," Raleigh News and Observer, June 1, 1906, p. 5. For more on fund-raising activities, see Jennie J. White to Lula M. Mclver, Dec. 4, 1908, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; and Moffitt, note, Dec. 2, 1903, vol. 19, Moffitt Papers. 14 Moffitt was the daughter of Jonathan Worth, a prominent Whig politician and governor of North Carolina from 1865 to 1868. She married three times and was thrice widowed. Her husbands were all successful lawyers and politicians. Moffitt held leadership positions not only in the WABPS but also in the Daughters of the Revolution, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Colonial Dames, King's Daughters, Virginia Dare Association, State Confederate Monument Association, North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, YMCA Ladies' Auxiliary, and the North Carolina Peace Society. She also served on the editorial board of the North Carolina Booklet, a historical publication of the Daughters of the Revolution. See "Survey of the Elvira Evelyna Moffitt Papers" (Southern Historical Collection); C. Samuel Bradshaw, "Elvira Worth Moffitt," in Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Samuel A. Ashe, Stephen B. Weeks, and Charles L. Van Noppen (8 vols., Greensboro, 1905-1917), Vin, 349-53. Lucy B. Patterson was maiTied to J. Lindsay Patterson, a prominent Winston-Salem attorney. She was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, helped found the North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs, organized the Winston Embroidery Club, and served as the state's representative on the Republican National Executive Committee. See Lou Rogers, Tar Heel Women [Raleigh, 1949), 169-74. Both women held a variety of state and county offices within the WABPS. They each served on the executive committees of their respective county associations; Moffitt worked as vice-president of the state association; and Lucy B. Patterson held the presidency of the Interstate Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses. See Patterson to Charles D. Mclver, Dec. 27, 1902, box 10, Mclver Papers; Moffitt to Charles D. Mclver, April 22, 1903, box 11, ibid.·, Connor, Woman's Association, 9; and Edwards, North Carolina Congress of Paren ts and Teachers, 117.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES succumbed to "stage-fright" whenever she spoke to more than a small group of friends. Several months of work as a state organizer, however, helped her to cultivate new self-confidence. With exuberant pride, she reported to Charles D. Mclver in August 1903 that she had addressed " a big crowd for fifteen minutes and didn't get frightened!"15 Her short involvement in the association's campaign had taught her that despite her inhibitions she was capable of expressing herself in public with poise and persuasive force. Such self-discovery often had a profound impact upon women's perceptions of themselves. Patterson and her colleagues adhered to the comfortable and familiar precepts that had defined their mothers' lives but in practice established anew standard of feminine conduct. Organizers who felt "unwomanly" when they began their work quickly came to accept public agitation as a respectable female activity. After addressing several audiences, Leah D. Jones no longer found herself "embarrassed and frightened" by seeing her name "posted quite publicly on trees and houses as a lecturer." " I felt that I was certainly doing nothing unwomanly," she wrote, "when I sat in some school house, with women and children close around me . . . or . . . stood in front under the trees and discussed with fathers as well as mothers the need to have the school attractive."' 6 Association work taught Iones and other women that they could succeed in what had previously been considered strictly male undertakings. The women's view of themselves as competent and resourceful individuals, however, did not constitute a feminist consciousness." This fact became clear in 1912 and 1913 when the association joined the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly and Federation of Women's Clubs in a campaign to have women appointed to local school boards. Edith Royster, president of the Wake County association and of the Teachers' Assembly, argued that board membership was appropriate for women because it was a position of "trust and honor" rather than a political office. That distinction was crucial, for it avoided the issue of social authority and implied acceptance of sexual inequality. Royster considered board membership a privilege that men should bestow upon women in recognition of their special interest in education rather than a right to which women held legitimate claim. Her attitude reflected the peculiar blend of old and new values that pervaded the work of state and county leaders. These women wished to move out of the home and involve themselves in public affairs, yet they remained unprepared to question their subordinate status. They " Patterson to Charles D. Mclver, Aug. 1, 1903, box 11, Mclver Papers. See also Royster to Charles D. Mclver, Sept. 9, 1903, ibid. 14 Leah D. Jones, newspaper clipping, "Better School Houses," n.p., n d , box 3, Records of the Woman's Association (or the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. " I use the term "feminist consciousness" to denote an awareness of and a determination to transform the social and economic systems that have structured women's lives and defined their subordination to men. My reading of the WABPS supports Ellen DuBois's contention that reform activity based upon the traditional values of "woman's sphere" does not progress automatically into feminist politics. Indeed, such activity has as often as not precluded the development of feminism. For further discussion of the relationship between "woman's sphere" and feminism, see Ellen DuBois et al., "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium," Feminist Studita, 6 (Spring 1980), 26-64; Christine Stariseli, "A Review Essay," ibid., 65-75.

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sought to expand the femmine sphere within the established structure of social relations without altering the sexual division of power. " The issue of feminism remained even more remote for the association's rank and file, most of whom acted out of motherly concern for children in their communities. Young teachers without children and middle-aged women whose children were grown comprised 87 percent of the female membership. 1 ' Unable to fulfill their maternal role within the home, these women became "school-mothers" by participating in district associations. They adopted neighborhood children as their own and labored to nurture their new charges by carefully monitoring the details of school life. This work resolved the women's longings for the emotional warmth of a family and confirmed their feminine identity. As Ira T. Turlington of Smithfield explained, "I miss my own children less because of the love I give the school children and the love they give me in return. It is a better solace than fancy work, bridge whist, or transcendentalism. " 1 0 The district associations' focus on individual schools made these psychic rewards both personal and immediate. Local WABPS women acquired certain knowledge that they were "doing some real sure enough good" by observing directly the results of their handiwork, an experience that would have been ,a "Judd's Reasons for Naming Women," Raleigh News and Observa, Feb. 28, 1913, p. 10; Edith Roystei, "President's Address," Proceedings and Addresses of the Thirtieth Annual Session of the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly, Raleigh, N.C., Nov. 26-29, 1913 (Raleigh, 1914), 100-02. Zebulon |udd, a prominent educator and superintendent of public schools in Wake County, was the women's official spokesman. His appointment perhaps best demonstrates the unwillingness of women members to confront traditional notions of female subordination. Through private letters and formal resolutions the women urged the state legislature to expand board membership but deferred to men in all public activities that might have given "even the 'appearance' of lobbying." "Fighting," Edith Royster warned, "is not our sphere." Some women noted that this timidity and close adherence to the dominant sexual ideology provoked ridicule and disrespect from legislators who refused to treat women's concerns seriously. Sallie Southall Cotten, for example, complained that the men "are tearing up our letters and saying rude things about our 'meddling' in legislation." Even as they chafed at male arrogance, however, the reformers could bring themselves to do no more than repeat earlier assurances that "there is no 'new woman' attitude about the movement." See newspaper clipping, Ada V. Womble, "Women Can Now Serve on School Boards," n.p., o d., vol. 3, Sallie Southall Cotten Papers (Southern Historical Collection); Edith Royster, "President's Address," Proceedings and Addresses of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Session of the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly, Greensboro, N.C., Nov. 27-30. 1912 IRaleigh, 1913), 76; Sallie Southall Cotten to Moffitt, Feb. 3, 1913, folder 14, Moffitt Papers; Edith Royster, "Woman's Work at Holly Springs," Atlantic Educational Journal, 6 (Sepc. 1910), 26. For a more detailed discussion of the women's nonconfrontational tactics see Anastatia Sims, "Women and Politics: The North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs, 1902-1918" (unpublished paper in possession of James L. Leloudis Π). The state legislature narrowly approved the school board measure in March 1913.

" Computed from Moffitt, manuscript lists of Raleigh Township and Wake County members, vols. 18 and 19, Moffitt Papers; Twelfth Census of the United Sutes, 1900, Manuscript Population Schedule, Wake County, N.C. Moffitt organized the Raleigh district association in 1903 and began at that time to keep erratic lists of WABPS members throughout Wake County. Her lists are the only ones of their kind. Seventy-one of eighty-three female members were located in the census. Forty-six had no children (forty-one unmarried teachers, one unmarried regular member, and four married women without children) and sixteen had no more than one child under twelve years of age. The average age of the married women was forty years. u Ira T. Turlington, Child Study as an Aid to Discipline: Paper Read before the State Primary Teachers'Association, Winston, N.C.. Nov. 1909 (Raleigh, 1910), 14-15.

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impossible in more diffuse campaigns to enhance entire school systems. This high rate of return on investments of time, energy, and self-esteem was crucial to the association's survival, for it sustained women through terms of membership that commonly ranged between five and ten years.11 Such devotion marked the association's success in fitting the benefits of betterment work to the needs and uncertainties of individual lives. Association women maintained their loyalty and enthusiasm in the face of what must have seemed insurmountable odds. North Carolina's white public schools were in utter disrepair when the WABPS began its work in 1902. The state had at that time 8,094 school districts, 840 of which had no school facilities of any kind. Another 829 had only log huts. Children in the remaining districts attended school in what Charles Lee Coon, City Superintendent of Public Instruction in Salisbury, described as "shabbily built board structures." He noted that the typical building of this type consisted of a single room with six windows, none of which had curtains or blinds. The children sat on uncomfortable homemade benches facing a teacher who had a chair but no desk. A "dilapidated wood stove.. .. red with rust and dirt, " stood in the center of the room. In winter, it barely warmed the cold wind that blew through cracks in the walls. The schoolhouse had no steps, but instead an inclined plane of dirt leading to its door. The yard was always muddy, and the general appearance of the surroundings was "anything but attractive." Coon concluded from these observations that North Carolina's schools provided a totally inadequate environment in which to prepare children for adult life. 11 The association's goal was to transform these "unattractive, cheerless schools" into "places of beauty and refinement." Its members pursued that objective through improvement projects which they divided into two categories: health and beautification. The health programs addressed matters of sanitation and comfort in the classroom. They included such tasks as removing rubbish from around school buildings, cleaning out wells, replacing water buckets with coolers, installing ceiling vents, and constructing sanitary privies. The association also encouraged its members to provide their schools with efficient heating systems and comfortable desks and chairs. The beautification projects complemented these health measures by creating a pleasant environment in and around the school. Inside the building, WABPS members hung maps and pictures of famous men, installed window shades, constructed display cases and bookshelves, painted walls, and polished stoves. Outside, they removed underbrush and stumps from the yard, set out saplings, planted vegetable and flower gardens, built paved walkways, and laid out large grassy plots for students to use as playgrounds. Once completed, these im11 Ceneireve Jennings to Lula M. Mclver, Dec. 10, 1908, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. Moffitt's manuscript lists of Raleigh Township and Wake County members provide some indication of the average length of membership. The lists lack the information necessary for a systematic analysis; many of them are either undated or do not specify which of the county's various district organizations they describe. They do suggest, however, that most women remained in the association for a period of five to ten years. Moffitt, manuscript lists of Raleigh Township and Wake County members, vols. 18 and 19, Moffitt Papers.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM provements were to provide children with a haven in which to develop fully their moral and physical capacities.13 The association hoped that it could eventually remodel North Carolina's educational facilities to conform with the ideal schoolhouse depicted in photographs that adorned its annual reports. That school was a one- or tworoom structure nestled in a grove of trees and surrounded by flowers. A small steeple or cupola sat atop its roof and housed the school bell.14 The building possessed all the idyllic charm of a modest Victorian cottage and represented the transfer of woman's aesthetic talents and motherly skills from the domestic sphere into the public realm. Through the model school, association women attempted to give substance to their conception of the surroundings required in rearing children to responsible adulthood. That conception emerged from a combination of their personal experiences as mothers and the cultural conventions of middle-class life. The association's efforts to provide young white southerners with a healthy and beautiful environment were part of a larger educational crusade devised to breathe new life into the faltering industrial campaigns of the New South movement. That movement had begun during the last quarter of the nineteenth century as northern and southern businessmen, financiers, and publicists joined to rebuild the region. These men chose, not to revitalize the Old South's cash-crop economy, but rather to build a new economic order based upon factory production and diversified agriculture. They dreamed of developing a prosperous South that would "out-Yankee the Yankee" as a national center of commerce." That vision inspired bold new ventures in manufacturing and agricultural experimentation, yet its fulfillment constantly eluded its proponents' grasp. The South remained so firmly bound to cash crops in the 1890s that it had to import grain to feed its population. The region also failed to keep pace with the North and West in industrial growth. In 1900 it held a smaller percentage of the nation's factories and investment capital than it had claimed before the Civil War. Furthermore, its inhabitants continued to live in relative, poverty. The estimated per capita wealth of the United States in 1900 was $1,165 as compared to $509 for the South.14 Despite the efforts of New South advocates, the region remained at the turn of the century the poorest and most underdeveloped section of the nation. Southern boosters blamed their homeland's persistent problems on the shiftlessness of lower-class whites. Walter Hines Page, editor of the Raleigh State Chronicle and a member of the prominent group of middle-class reformers " Connor, Woman's Association, 12. " Moffitt, "Address to Patrons and Pupils—Reddish School House," 1904, p. 3, folder 7, Moffitt Papers. The best description of the association's projects appears in Wake County Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses, open letter, March 7, 1908, vol. 18, ibid. " S e e Connor, Woman's Association, photographs following pp. 30, 38, 54; Charles H. Mebane, The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public Schooihouses in North Carolina (Raleigh, 1908), photographs following pp. 8, 16,24,40. " For an overview of the New South movement, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970). " Woodward, Origins of the New South, 318-19.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES known as the Watauga Club, characterized the common white as "the real curse of the land. He is the fellow for whom Southern civilization sacrifices itself. . . . Better white men cannot rise for . . . the sorry Southern white man. His like exists in other parts of the country, but he does not set the pace elsewhere." In Page's view, southern laborers, whether fanners or factory operatives, had "become not only a dead weight but a definite opponent of social progress."17 Page and his associates traced the inertia of southern labor to a combination of poor public health conditions and the "narcotic influences" of the Old South's aristocracy. They charged that the old elite preserved on their plantations and in their lifestyle both the South's love affair with cotton and the antebellum ideal of leisure. Because aristocrats occupied positions of political and economic power, common men and women respected and imitated their behavior. Thus a "smothering atmosphere" of "old thoughts" stifled efficiency, thrift, and innovation among southern workers and farmers. The white laboring classes remained "listless . . . and backward-looking" and denied the South the benefits of modernity. 2 · Directors of public health agencies added that the effects of disease compounded those of cultural stagnation. In 1902, for example, Charles W. Stiles identified the hookworm as "the cause of the proverbial laziness of the 'cracker.'" He and others attributed the chronic ill health of poor whites to their "filthy" habits of personal hygiene. Perhaps most disturbing was the widespread failure to build and use sanitary privies: Although the privy was in old times called a " n e c e s s a r y , " it is startling to find how many persons do not consider such a structure to be a necessary adjunct to the human dwelling. T h e absence of a privy can fairly be called uncivilized. . . . It ought to go without saying that every person should have the opportunity to use a properly constructed privy at all times, and should also be compelled to use it, and never under any circumstances be allowed to deposit his discharges in any other place.

The health officials' concern in reporting and attempting to police such intimate aspects of personal life was both to relieve human suffering and to increase worker productivity. Malaria, hookworm, and the wide variety of gastrointestinal ailments common among southern laborers seldom proved fatal. They instead produced days of debilitating fever and nausea, which made their victims lethargic and nearly unable to work. According to the International Health Board, a Rockefeller Foundation agency concerned primarily with health problems in the South, the "loss of efficiency" from such diseases " Burton J. Hendrick, The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Waller H Page. 1855-1913 (Boston, 1928], 393; Walter H. Page, "The Forgotten Man," State Normal Magazine, 1 (lune 1897), 80. " |ohn Milton Cooper, Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American. 1855-1918 (Chapel Hill, 1977), ioti; [Walter Hines Page), The Southerner: A Novel: Being the Autobiography of Nicholas Worth (New York, 1909), 316; Hendrick, Training of an American, 161, 168, 176-81, 393. Sec also "An Education Adapted to Our Needs—We Need an Education That Will Make Skillful, Honest Workers," Southern Education Notes, March 10, 1902, p. 6; Walter H. Page, "Study of an Old Southern Borough," Atlantic Monthly, 47 (May 1881), 648-58.

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was "probably the most serious obstacle to the development of civilization in the region."" Leaders of the New South movement turned to school reform as a primary means of reshaping "habits of life" and improving living conditions among southern working people. They formulated their strategy in the annual sessions of the Conference for Education in the South. The conference began in 1898 at Capon Springs, West Virginia, as an informal gathering of ministers, businessmen, and educators who were interested in southern economic and social development. Its meetings attracted little attention until the fourth session convened in Winston-Salem in April 1901. Delegates attended from each of the southern states, and Robert Curtis Ogden, a clothing manufacturer from New York and president of the conference, brought along a number of prominent northerners, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr. After several days of deliberation, the conferees decided to undertake a campaign to improve public education in the South. Ogden appointed the Southern Education Board (SEB) to supervise the project. Over the next eight years, Rockefeller donated more than $53 million to support the board's work and that of its affiliated agencies.30 The SEB chose to begin its campaign in North Carolina because of the state's reputation for regional leadership in public education. Ogden placed the program under the direction of Charles D. Mclver, the board's secretary, and Governor Charles Brantley Aycock. On February 13, 1902, these men organized the state's educational leaders into the Central Campaign Committee for the Promotion of Public Education and charged them with persuading individual counties to consolidate small school districts, adopt local school taxes, and repair or replace deteriorating schoolhouses. Five weeks later, Charles D. Mclver established the WABPS as a woman's auxiliary to the all-male commit" "Germ of Laziness Found," New York Sun, Dec. 5, 1902, p. 1; George W. Lay, "The Sanitary Privy," Bulletin of the North Carolina Board of Health, 25 (April 1910), 27; International Health Board, Fourth Annual Report, cited by George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South. 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967), 276. » Woodward, Origins of the New South, 402-03. The Southern Education Board included: Robert Curtis Ogden, J. L. M. Curry, Charles W. Dabney, Edwin A. Alderman, Charles D. Mclver, H. B. Frissell, Ceorge Foster Peabody, Wallace Buttrick, William H. Baldwin, )r., Albert Shaw, Walter Hines Page, and H. H. Hanna. The board served as the executive committee of the Conference for Education in the South and as a "central propaganda agency" for the southern educational crusade. Its field agents organized local school campaigns and operated a Bureau of Investigation and Information designed to win public acceptance of "sound constructive educational policies." The Southern Education Board received most of its funds through the Cenerai Education Board, founded in 1903 by lohn D. Rockefeller, Sr. The General Education Board's purpose was to systematize educational philanthropy throughout the nation, with a special emphasis on developing a "comprehensive educational policy" in the South. Rockefeller ensured full cooperation between the two organizations by including seven members of the Southern Education Board among the General Education Board's trustees. The result was an effective division of labor in which the Southern Education Board managed public relations and the General Education Board supervised the disbursement of private educational funds. See Wycldiffe Rose, "The Educational Movement in the South," in U.S. Congress, House, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior: Report of the Commissioner of Education, 2 vols., 58 Cong., 2 sess., 1904, I, 359-90¡ Charles W. Dabney, Universal Education in the South (2 vols., Chapel Hill, 1936), Π, 32-73, 123-52; and Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board, A Foundation Established by lohn D. Rockefeller (New York, 1962), 1-24.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES tee. Like its parent organization, the association received substantial funding and direction from the SEB. The board provided five hundred dollars a year to cover the expenses of the state field agents and helped finance most of the association's organizational and public relations activities. Through Charles D. Mclver and the committee's careful supervision, the SEB also shaped the women's projects in accordance with its own program for reform." Mclver organized the WABPS as a middle-class association devoted to the rehabilitation of the laboring poor. Membership lists for the Raleigh Township and Wake County chapters demonstrate the class dimensions of the association's work. These local groups had 108 members in 1904, 44 of whom were women teachers and principals. The remaining associate members and the husbands of the regular female members were all merchants, bankers, professional men, and prosperous farmers. 31 These men and women viewed themselves as the vanguard of a New South and considered it their duty to train the children of less-fortunate whites in the ways of progress. Moffitt likened herself to a diver probing "the depths of darkness to bring to light the pearls that need but to be polished." Sue V. Hollowell, president of the association in 1903, expressed a similar sense of mission. She explained that WABPS women assumed the responsibility of "those who are more fortunate . . . to make bright, beautiful spots in the lives of those who know not what sunshine and brightness is." Through their school-improvement work, the women strove to "raise the masses to a higher plane of life. " " The WABPS based its mission of uplift upon the belief that a child's environment was the major factor shaping its character. "As a child's surroundings are," exclaimed Mary Taylor Moore, "so is he liable to be." Like progressive reformers elsewhere, the association women had come to view the perceived moral defects of the laboring classes as products of their "social environment" rather than inherent personal evil, and they were moving to replace traditional attempts at individual uplift with broader programs of environmental manage11 Edgar W. Knight, Public School Education in North Carolina (Boston, 1916), 333¡ Lula M Mclver, manuscript of an address before the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly, n.d., p. 3, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. Records of the Southern Education Board's contributions are scattered throughout the Mclver Papers. For a sense of the association's subordination to Charles D. Mclver and the board and of the relationship between its projects and larger regional programs in education, public health, and agriculture, see the Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction lor the years 1902-1918 |Raleigh, 1902-1919); and Dabney, Universal Education, II, 177-233, 246-77. 11 These men included thirteen merchants and shopkeepers, twelve farmers, five bankers, five editors and publishers, five college professors, four county and state government officials, three attorneys, two ministers, two office managers, two manufacturers, one physician, and one insurance agent. The occupations of nine men are unknown. These figures slightly underestimate the true status of several members, since six men held positions on the executive boards of two or more financial, commercial, or manufacturing establishments. Sources: Moffitt, manuscript lists of Raleigh Township and Wake County members; Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, Manuscript Population Schedule, Wake County, N.C.; Directory of the City of Raleigh. 1888 (Raleigh, 1888); Moloney's Raleigh. N.C.. City Directory. 1899-1900 (Atlanta, 1899|; Moloney's 1901 Raleigh City Directory (Atlanta, 1901); Raleigh. N.C., Directory. 1903-1904 (Richmond, 1903).

" Moffitt, "Address to Patrons and Pupils—Reddish School House," 6-7; Hollowell, "Report of Women's Work in North Carolina," 58.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM ment. Moffitt explained the assumptions underlying this new outlook in a speech before the Raleigh Township association. She noted that "there is an embryo" of a productive citizen "in every human being that grows to good or evil, governed by circumstances and ambition." That embryo often withered and died in laboring-class children simply "for the want of direction" and a suitable environment. The association's duty was to correct this situation by creating schools that would motivate children "to aspire to higher ideals and perfect them to the highest place." 3 4 It sought to meet that responsibility by addressing its reforms specifically to the deficiencies of laboring-class life identified by New South spokesmen. The association designed its beautification programs to free children from their antebellum legacies of laziness and cash-crop farming. The beautiful schoolhouse and yard were to break the bonds of idleness by altering children's outlook on life and imbuing them with new values. "A child seeing the pleasant school house and its attractive surroundings gets a new impulse," Moffitt declared, and "new hope springs up in his breast and a new life opens to his view." Each aspect of the school contributed to that awakening. The pictures of famous men provided students with role models, fostering in them " a spirit of self-reliance and individuality." "A single picture" of Sir Galahad or of a minuteman might, "by its silent influence," call "youth to high and noble endeavor." The pleasing atmosphere created by freshly painted walls, clean window shades, and landscaped lawns added a contempt among pupils for their "low, groveling, canine conditions of life." When these effects combined, they imparted to schoolchildren both the desire and self-confidence to strive for a better life. In pursuit of that desire, Moffitt observed, a child was "driven to l a b o r . " " School gardens presumably operated in a similar manner to liberate southern children from the region's ancient commitment to cash crops. The association advised teachers that most children grew up on small cotton or tobacco farms where they had little or no exposure to diversified planting and learned the "practical part of tilling the soil, but not the science of i t . " The agricultural practices of their ancestors therefore became habitual with them before they reached adulthood. WABPS field agents claimed that school gardens could circumvent that cycle of ignorance by demonstrating the benefits of crop rotation and diversification to children while they were still at an impressionable age. Children witnessed "the fundamental principles of farming" in the gardens 1 4 Clipping, Mary Taylor Moore, "The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public Schoolhouses in North Carolina," Southern School and Home, n.d., box 3, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; Moffitt, speech, "Which Name?" Aug. 1902, pp. 9-11, vol. 18, Moffitt Papers. For a discussion of the changing strategies of progressive reformers, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America. 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 220-32. " Moffitt, speech, "Tenants' Children To Be Looked After," fune 1903, p. 2, vol. 18, Moffitt Papers; untitled newspaper clipping, n.p., Aug. 27, 1902, ibid.·, newspaper clipping, "The South's Summer School," n.p., 1902, ibid.; Moffitt, speech, " T o Teachers' Institute," Aug. 1902, p. 6, folder 5, ibid ·, magazine clipping, J. O. Kern, "School Sanitation and Decoration," n.p., n.d., box 3, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina.

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just as they learned the "fundamental truths of arithmetic, geography, or grammar" in the classroom. T h a t experience then sparked an enthusiasm among rural students for adopting " n e w discoveries in f a r m i n g " and "bringing up their farms by the well-tried experiments made at the A[gricultural] and M(echanical) C o l l e g e . " T h e agents predicted that such enlightened pupils could reverse the direction of southern agriculture within a single generation if every school had its own garden. 3 6 The WABPS maintained, however, that beautification would be ineffectual unless accompanied by improvements in public health. Association members shared with health officials a belief that intellectual and physical development were inseparable and that the school's duty was to educate the " w h o l e c h i l d . " Dr. Watson S. Rankin, secretary of the North Carolina State Board of Health, explained this assumption in an address before the state Teachers' Assembly in 1910. " E d u c a t i o n , " he observed, " i s rapidly passing through three evolutionary stages toward an ideal in which three essential constituents will be found": The first stage, now past, had for its dominant idea to teach the child to read, write, and figure. . . . Having prepared the soil of the mind, it was left to receive the grains of knowledge that fall perchance as seed are strewn haphazard over the field by the wind. The second stage, developing now very rapidly, is characterized by the dominant idea of equipping the cultivated mind with practical knowledge of everyday use—sanitary, domestic, and agricultural science. More attention is being given to seed selection and the time of planting. The third and final stage in the completion of the ideal is characterized by the dominant idea of assured usefulness·, and assured usefulness means a healthy body. Thus the ideal school would cultivate in students not only new moral values but also the capacity to act upon t h e m . Having mastered the inner reaches of children's minds, it now remained for the WABPS to apply the principles of management and control to their bodies. Association women undertook that task through health programs designed to transform sick and feeble children into a productive citizenry. 3 7 These programs were to work in three ways to invigorate students' minds and bodies. First, the comfort-oriented improvements would help students gain proficiency in basic intellectual skills by providing a correctly designed school environment. Ceiling vents removed from classrooms the " v i t i a t e d " air that produced headaches, while the installation of contoured desks and chairs cured the back pains caused by sitting on uncomfortable homemade benches. Once liberated from these distracting ailments, students could focus their full attention on learning to read, write, and cipher. T h e WABPS considered this concentration of effort a vital component of proper schooling " Untitled history of the Wake County Association (or the Betterment of Public School Houses, p. 11, folder 48, Moffitt Papers; Moffitt, manuscript of a lecture at the Gamer School, 7-8. See also Mrs. Charles Price, speech, "A Log School House," box 3, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. " Watson S. Rankin, "The Importance of the Recognition of Physically Defective Children by the Teacher," Bulletin of the North Carolina Board of Health, 25 (Sept. 1910), 243-44; Moffitt, "Address to Patrons and Pupils—Reddish School House," 6-7.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM because training in the three R's constituted an education for "progress and efficiency." Literacy and numeracy made working-class children accessible to the New South elite who relied upon the written word and the statistical rhetoric of the social sciences to promote and validate their social vision. Unless children were prepared to accept that vision, Moffitt warned, they would become unruly citizens incapable of comprehending or attacking "the difficult problems of life" in the factory and on the farm. 3 · Laborers who could not read or perform simple arithmetic also could not be governed. The sanitation projects were meant to make the work force dependable as well as tractable by guarding children's physical strength against the effects of disease. Moffitt took special interest in these projects and regularly invited physicians to attend meetings of the Raleigh Township association. The doctors lectured on the need to drain school yards and to construct sanitary privies, advising the women that such efforts would help reduce the incidence of yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, and cholera. 3 * Moffitt also led a campaign to replace water buckets with pressurized coolers. "Children," she observed, "are often careless to put the dipper back into the bucket with water in i t . " As a result, the entire water supply became contaminated with the "germs of disease." Coolers remedied the problem by providing children with "unpolluted water" and flushing waste water down a drain. 40 Moffitt and state health officials believed that these simple techniques of sanitary engineering would begin to bring the human body and its maladies under control, thereby diminishing the South's health-related problems of labor inefficiency. 41 Finally, the sanitation and comfort projects would work together to secure the South's industrial transformation within the routines of domestic life. Moffitt explained that the projects made schools into "models of cleanliness" where students learned to "hate ugliness in the home and in the street." As children became disgusted with the conditions in which they lived, they would encourage their parents to adopt the principles of "sanitation, ventilation, and neatness" they were taught in the classroom. Moffitt believed that the parents, embarrassed by their children's low opinion of them, would consent readily and begin to reinforce rather than undermine the redeeming influence of the school. In this way, the school would ultimately become a " A. W. McAlister, "Who Can Help to Eliminate Adult Illiteracy?" in Adult Illiteracy in North Carolina and Plans for Its Elimination, ed. W. C. Crosby IRaleigh, 1915), 21; Mrs. T. W. Lingle, "A Social Service Call to the Women of North Carolina," ibid., 29; Moffitt, "Which Name?" p. 2; Moffitt, manuscript of a lecture at the Garner School, 3. " For a description of lectures by physicians R. H. Lewis and Dixon Carroll, see Moffitt's notes on the meeting of the Centennial division of the Raleigh Township association, March 8, 1904, vol. 19, Moffitt Papers. For more on the association's efforts to control these diseases, see Moore, speech, n.d., pp. 6-7, box 2, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; Lula M. Mclver, speech, n.d., p. 3, box 1, ibid. 4 0 Moffitt, "Which Name?" p. 2. See also Mary Hunter to Lula M. Mclver, March 6, 1912, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. 41 William T. Sedgwick, "The Call to Public Health," Bulletin of the North Carolina Board of Health, 24 (Feb. 1910), 170.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES "community center" through which the values and habits of an entire population could be transformed, managed, and controlled. 41 Association members trusted that this broad package of reform activities would bring the New South dream to fruition by enabling educators to produce the "abundant supply" of fanners and laborers, "properly trained and disciplined," that the region's economy seemed to require. Improved schools would change lethargic southerners into a "happy and progressive" people no longer content to lounge on their porches and in the doorways of factories. They would instead employ the principles of scientific agriculture in their fields and work diligently at their machines to produce the "industrial progress" and "material prosperity" the "Great Southland" needed to rise above and dominate the North. In the minds of its members, the WABPS appeared to bold the key to the South's future. With the association's assistance, North Carolina and her neighbors could at last take their rightful place as jewels in the "diadem of the nation's crown." 4 3 These expectations became a source of both satisfaction and disappointment for association members. In the area of school improvement, the women experienced astounding success. Their public relations activities helped raise the tax revenues necessary to build on the average more than one new schoolhouse a day during the years 1902-1910. This construction program, when combined with the association's renovation projects, increased the value of North Carolina's public school property from $1,466,770 to $5,862,969. 4 4 These accomplishments, however, proved inadequate either to alter the state's economy or to alleviate poverty. The land devoted to cotton and tobacco rose from 21 percent to 31 percent of the state's total cultivated acreage between 1900 and 1920. As a result, farm tenancy increased by 26 percent and per capita farm income fell to a level less than half the average for nonsouthern states. Although North Carolina's industries more than doubled the value of their products during the same decades, they too posted a discouraging record. Manufacturers remained locked into a system of primary production that severely depressed industrial wages. In 1919 factory workers earned an average of $757 a year—the forty-fifth lowest industrial wage in the nation. 45 Programs " Moffitt, "For Better School Houses"; Mrs. W. R. (Sue V.| Hollowell, "What Women Ait- Doing for School Betterment," Raleigh News and Observer, Aug. 13, 1905, p. 17; Connor, WonO&'s Association, IS; Moffitt, manuscript of a lecture at the Garner School, 2. " "The South Has Raw Material—Educated Labor Will Develop It," Southern Education Notes, March 10, 1902, p. 4; untitled history of the Wake County association, 3-4, 10; Moffitt, "Which Namei" 11; Moffitt, "Address to Patrons and Pupils—Reddish School House," 7. 44 Manuscript history of the WABPS, 1908, pp. 6-8, box 1, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 405-06; Mebane, Woman's Association, 5; Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1908/09-1909/10 (Raleigh, 1910), pt. II, 193. For an example of the association's work on behalf of local tax referendums, see Myrtle Scarboro to Moore, July 20, 1904, box 2, Records of the Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina. 45 U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900: Agriculture, pt. 2: Crops and Irrigation (Washington, 1902), 78, 213, 422, 526; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States,

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of moral and physical uplift could not cure these ills, for they mistook poverty's symptoms for its causes. North Carolina's plight was rooted far more deeply in the structure of its economy than in the health and character of its poor white population. The state's difficulties resulted from a combination of its internal pattern of development after the Civil War and its relation to the rest of the American economy. During the 1870s and 1880s, both freedmen and white yeomen threatened the authority of North Carolina's agrarian elite by refusing to submit to gang labor and attempting to survive as independent subsistence fanners. Large landholders, however, squelched this quest for autonomy by exploiting the regional credit shortage caused by federal banking regulations. Using their control over local financial institutions to withhold scarce credit resources from small farmers, the agricultural elite established a new labor system based upon tenancy and enforced by the crop lien. Large planters operated as furnishing agents for smaller growers, providing seed, supplies, and food in return for a lien on the next year's harvest. To ensure repayment of the loans, often with interest as high as 120 percent, these rural merchants required their clients to plant crops that could be sold for cash. This credit arrangement enabled the landed elite to control the rural labor force and economy by gradually forcing independent farmers into subordinate positions as either tenants or perpetual debtors. 44 Farmers who abandoned the land found conditions only slightly better in the mill villages and industrial towns that dotted the North Carolina landscape after the turn of the century. Their earnings remained low, and the authority of employers pervaded nearly every aspect of their lives. Businessmen had few opportunities or incentives to sponsor high-wage manufacturing. The preservation of nonwage agricultural labor left the buying power of the state's population seriously underdeveloped and forced manufacturers to enter into a dependent relationship with northern concerns as suppliers of unfinished goods. North Carolina's only advantage in the production of those materials was its abundant supply of cheap labor. Industrialists preserved that competitive edge by promoting a paternalistic system of labor relations through which they exerted control over their employees and suppressed labor agitaT a t o J» the Year 1920, vol. 6: Agriculture, pc. 2: The Southern States (Washington, 1922), 230. Betwten 51 percent (1900) and 56 percent (1920) of all cultivated land was planted in corn, hay, and (wage. These crops provided necessary foodstuffs for both the human and livestock populations The remaining cultivated land was devoted to the production of assorted vegetables, cereals, and fiuits. North Carolina agriculture clearly became less rather than more diversified during the first rwo decades of the twentieth century. On the consequences of increased cash-crop production, see Samuel Huntington Hobbs, Jr., North Carolina: Economic and Social (Chapel Hill, 1930|, 119; Maurice Leven, Income in the Various States: Its Sources and Distribution: 1919, 1920, and 1921 (New York, 1925), 263. North Carolina's industries are discussed in Lefler and Newsome, Noni Carolina, 534-43; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 308-11; and Leven, Income in the Variais States, 123. " Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Conen Tenancy, 1880-1890 (New York, 1976), 3-88; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, "Debt Peonige in the Cotton South after the Civil War," Journal of Economic History, 32 (Sept. 1972), 641-f9.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES tion. The Kiwanians of Marion, North Carolina, expressed the purpose of these practices in an advertisement celebrating the docility of southern workers. "Under no more than reasonably fair treatment of its help," they boasted, "every factory or branch of industry is certain to be able to secure adequate, satisfactory and contented labor." 47 This entire economic structure relied for stability upon the enforcement of strict racial segregation. North Carolina's New South elite protected its power against challenges from below by denying blacks full political participation and all but menial industrial jobs. Creation of a racial caste system provided the elite with an efficient mechanism for imposing its authority and containing labor unrest. The exclusion of blacks from political power and industrial employment established an "unfree" rural labor force that had little choice but to accept conditions of debt peonage. The availability of such labor enabled landholders to stabilize production costs and stifle agrarian protests by lowering standards of living for both black and white tenants. Poor whites found it futile to resist this mistreatment, for landlords simply responded with threats of employing blacks who would work for less. The poverty generated by tenancy and sustained by racial competition also depressed industrial wages and undercut workers' movements. Industrialists were able to entice laborers off the land with extremely low wages and could easily tap into a ready supply of tenants with whom to replace unruly employees.41 The abasement of blacks at once guaranteed the hegemony of the New South elite and reinforced a pattern of social relations that precluded rapid development of a vigorous and diversified economy. The failure of association women to recognize the basic structural problems of the southern economy originated in their class background and role expectations. As members of the white middle class, they envisioned a New South developed and governed by managers of capital such as their husbands. The women had little reason to question the institutional arrangement of southern society or to seek a fundamental redistribution of power and authority. From their perspective, the nascent industrial order seemed just, progressive, and replete with opportunities for self-improvement and social mobility. This view rendered the association incapable of explaining the misery of poor whites in terms other than the inadequacies of lower-class life. The WABPS argued that common whites suffered penury and disease because they mismanaged their land, lived in squalid homes, and lacked ambition. It sought to remedy that situation by engineering a new environment that would imbue workers' children with middle-class values and thereby lead them to prosperity. This tactic placed the burden of change on the victims of social inequality " Dwight Β Billings, Jr., Planten and the Making of a "New South": Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979), 224-15; Harry Boytc, "The Textile Industry : Keel of Southern Industrialism," Radical America, 6 |March-April 1972), 4-49. The quotation is from Sinclair Lewis, Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929 (New York, 1929), 31. " Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure, 281-87. The best study of disfranchisement is ). Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South. 1880-1910|New Haven, 1974).

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM by focusing on perceived defects in white working-class culture and ignoring the structural roots of poverty, illness, and despair. It also revealed the dilemma of reformers caught unwittingly between humanitarian impulses and the limitations of their own world view. Association women voiced genuine concern for white laborers but were unprepared to provide the working class with the political and economic resources necessary to improve its condition. The strictures of class also made the association unresponsive to the plight and special needs of southern blacks. The racial ideology of the New South dictated that blacks receive only that education necessary to prepare them for their "place" in the segregated social and economic order. White school officials therefore sought to limit black schooling to instruction in proper forms of racial deference and the technical skills of agricultural and manual labor.49 The WABPS generally had no cause to challenge these measures, since they were grounded in social arrangements that made possible the achievements of the white middle class. On occasion, however, its members found their class identity overcome by a sense of feminine duty toward the welfare of children. In 1905, for instance, Hollowell violated the association's constitution by attempting to organize an integrated chapter in Granville County. Charles D. Mclver and the state superintendent of public instruction, James Yadkin Joyner, quickly censured her, proclaiming that WABPS members might aid blacks in forming independent betterment associations but never were to become directly involved in black school improvement.10 That reprimand stood as clear warning that the participation of white women in public school reform was contingent upon their willingness to subordinate humanitarian concerns to prior racial and class loyalties. The reformers' conception of womanhood left them little choice but to abide such restrictions. Within traditional roles as wives and mothers, they had limited access to the channels of power controlled by men and were confined to the practices of housekeeping as means of ordering their society. Their position enabled them to pursue social reform only in accordance with priorities established by their husbands, priorities that had the effect of tidying up the world rather than making it anew. The women therefore ignored black education altogether and sought to rehabilitate lower-class whites by translating the coaeeras Of the home, for beauty and cleanliness into public life. This strategy misdirected the association into an obsession with aesthetics and environmental purity and an interest in the outward appearances of poverty rather than the " Louis R. Harlan has written the standard work on black education in the South during the Progressive Era. He attributes the inadequacies of black education to white racism and a lack of "moral firmness" among reformers. See Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States. 1901-1915 (Chapel Hill, 19S8). For an analysis focused more on the underlying issues of political economy, sec Donald Spivey, Schooling far the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915 (Westport, 1978). m The constitution excluded black women and men from membership. See Constitution and By-Laws, 4. For an account of the incident, see Charles D. Mclver to lames Yadkin Joyner, Dec. 5, 190S, lames Yadkin Joyner Series, Southern Education Board Papers (Southern Historical Collection).

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES inequities from which it grew. 5 1 The irony of civic domesticity, however, was that it contributed to a growing self-awareness among white women even as it restricted the scope of reform. Social action organized around traditional conceptions of womanhood pushed against the boundaries of feminine propriety and awakened women to their capacity for public expression. Progressive school reform ultimately proved more liberating for its practitioners than for its subjects. T h e WABPS failed to bring prosperity to North Carolina, yet it offered white, middle-class women a new measure of dignity and self-respect. This blend of success and failure shaped the decision of local chapters to merge with the Congress of Parents and Teachers in 1919. Having achieved their short-term goal of school improvement, the women in the WABPS lacked a strategy capable of directing further efforts to build a New South. Their emotional involvement in the association and the psychological rewards of their work, however, were too great for them to allow their local associations to become inactive or to disband. This situation generated intense frustration and anxiety for the women, which they in tum projected onto parents. Patterson voiced the sentiments of association members in 1918, explaining that the subversive influence of "ignorant parents" had prevented the WABPS from realizing any permanent benefits from its work. This diagnosis of the association's failure placed the onus of guilt outside the organization and mandated a fresh approach to the task of school reform. It transformed abandonment of the WABPS from an act of betrayal into one of devotion and prepared the women to join the Congress of Parents and Teachers with a clear conscience. Association women transferred their loyalty to the new organization in an attempt to revitalize their betterment work and their pursuit of psychic gratification. 52 Membership in the congress required little change in local WABPS chapters. The women who established the congress adopted both the association's organizational structure and its desire to modernize the South. They altered only its methods. The congress worked to bring parents and teachers into a close relationship. Its leaders believed that through such contact teachers could 11 All white southern reformers worked under extremely inhospitable circumstances during the early twentieth century, and most were limited in one way or another by their heritage and environment. Nevertheless, more radical strategies for reform were available to the WABPS. Several of these strategies are examined in )acquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: ¡esse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching |New York, 1979); Mary Evans Frederickson, "A Place to Speak Our Minds: The Southern School for Women Workers" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1981); and Marion Winifred Roydhousc, "The 'Universal Sisterhood of Women': Women and Labor Reform in North Carolina, 1900-1932" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1980). Unlike members of the WABPS, the women discussed in these works challenged both patriarchal authority and the structural sources of racial and class inequality. By failing to adopt this dual critique of southern society, WABPS women rejected the only means of solving fully their own problems as well as those of the laboring poor. For a similar discussion of the limitations of women's reform outside the South, see [ill Conway, "Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930," Journal of Social History, 5 (Winter 1971-72), 164-77. 11 "Recommendations of the Forsyth Association," box 10, Mclver Papers. This analysis is based upon theoretical observations on goal transformation in Mayer N. Zald and Roberta Ash, "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay and Change," Socio/ Forces, 44 |March 1966), 327-41. For a comparative perspective on this issue, see David L. Sills's study of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. David L. Sills, The Volunteers: Means and Ends in a National Organization (Clencoe, 111., 1957).

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM educate parents " s o that [theyj might better be able to cope with existing conditions and meet more intelligently the problem of rearing a child in a changing civilization." In embracing this plan of action, members of the WABPS appropriated a new means of attaining their original objectives. They moved to perpetuate their local organizations and their quest for a New South by joining the congress and carrying the school's lessons on ambition, cleanliness, and economic progress directly into children's homes. The women proposed to make their state both modern and affluent by raising " t h e standards of home life" and developing "wiser, better trained parenthood." 5 1 They would no longer seek to create a New South by simply molding children within the school but would now reach directly into the home to gain more complete control over the process of child rearing. The association's merger with the Congress of Parents and Teachers ended a reform enterprise that illustrated both the limitations and the complexities of southern educational progressivism. School reform in the New South was concerned only marginally with matters of curriculum and children's cognitive development. It focused instead upon promoting social change and adjusting southerners to industrial life. Women used school reform to restructure their lives in a manner that satisfied their need to feel useful and respected without violating established notions of womanhood. Their efforts, like those of progressive reformers elsewhere, marked a pervasive feminization of American politics and culture. As never before, the domestic realm of women had become a model for social policy. While they worked to resolve personal crises, the women also labored to develop a healthy and tractable population capable of sustaining a conservative modernization of southern society. The association's work derived from a truly benevolent attitude. Conditions among poor whites were indeed deplorable and demanded attention. Members of the WABPS, however, grounded their projects in a sense of moral superiority that generated inappropriate tactics and robbed their humanitarianism of meaning. The women sought to save white, working-class children from the world of their parents by remaking them in a middle-class image rather than freeing them to shape their own lives. This approach to reform perpetuated social inequality by denying poor whites a voice in the restructuring of the southern economy. It also helped lay the foundation for a school system that historically has claimed the noble purpose of social amelioration, while failing to recognize the structural roots of poverty in the New South. Since 1920, southern educators have instituted new programs such as vocational high schools and community colleges, each of which has fallen short in its promise of uplifting the poor. Like members of the WABPS, these policy makers accepted industrialism and public education as cures for the South's ills without considering the roles of class and race in > Fur discussion of the structure and goals of the Congress of Parents and Teachers, see Harold D. Meyer, The Parent-Teacher Association: A Handbook for North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1922); Holbeck, Analysis of the Activities and Potentialities for Achievement, 10-12,· Mrs. Joseph Garibaldi, "Work of Parent-Teacher Associations in North Carolina," North Carolina Education, 14 dune 1920), 7.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES distributing the rewards of economic development. 54 The disappointment of the WABPS and its successors in their search for regional prosperity and social betterment has not grown from a lack of concern or sincerity. It has instead been the natural product of a reform ethos both unable and unwilling to confront fundamental questions of power, authority, and social justice. " For background on high-school vocational training and community colleges, see Kenyon Bertel Segner, m, A History of the Community College Movement in North Carolina, 1927-1963 (Kenansville, N C., 1974). State officials promoted both programs as means oí fostering industrial development and increasing per capita income by training skilled labor. Vocational education has indeed spurred industrial growth—North Carolina ranks second among the states for the number of nonagricultural workers employed in manufacturing—but has done little to redress racial and class inequities in the distribution of wealth. Black workers in North Carolina earn 44 percent less than whites, remain concentrated in semiskilled and unskilled occupations, and suffer an unemployment rate three times greater than that for whites. See Peter R. Stroup, "An Analysis of the Low Earnings of North Carolina's Black Workers," North Carolina Business and Economic Review, 1 (July 1976), 7-14; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington, 1980), 94. North Carolina workers in general also remain poor relative to the working population of the United States as a whole, even after adjustments for regional differences in the cost of living. In 1980 they earned (he lowest average industrial wage in the nation. These economic ills have persisted throughout the twentieth century because of continued de facto segregation, a concentration of low-profit industries, and state policies that discourage and even thwart unionization. See U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1981 (Washington, 1981), 406; Emil Malizia, "The Earnings of North Carolina Workers," University of North Carolina News Letter, 60 (Dec. 1975), 1-3; Barbara Koeppel, "Something Could Be Finer than To Be in Carolina," The Progressive, 40 (June 1976), 20-23.

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ORGANIZED WOMEN AS LOBBYISTS IN THE 1920'S by Dorothy E. Johnson

Ί^ΗΕ B A T T L E for the Nineteenth Amendment and its ratification on August 2 6 , 1 9 2 0 , brought differing predictions as to the use which enfranchised women would make of their ballots. Many contended that feminine voters would promote social reforms, improvements in the status of the female sex, greater democracy and efficiency in government, and the cause of peace. Others argued that women were not a homogeneous group but were subject to differing influences within society. Consequently, they would be divided, just as men were, in the way they cast their votes. Judging from the federal lobbying activities of major women's organizations during the 1920's, there was truth in both of these points of view. A third attitude, which emerged after a few years experience with the Nineteenth Amendment, reflected the outcome less accurately. This was that women suffrage produced no results. "Nothing has been changed, except that the number of docile ballot-droppers has approximately been doubled," one such skeptic wrote early in 1 9 2 4 . ' Even within the brief interim since the constitutional change, women's organizations had achieved by themselves or with others several victories of deep concern to them. Numerous non-partisan women's organizations attempted to a greater or lesser degree, to influence federal legislation during the 1920's. Among the most active of these were the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Consumers' League, the National Women's Trade Union League, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the National League of Women Voters, and the American Association of Dr. Johnson is Aisocätc Professor of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She received her Ph.D. from Western Reserve Univenity in 1960, and is presently writing a book on the lobbying activities of women's organizations between the wars. Her studies in this area were the basis of this article.

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University Women. The oldest and largest of these was the General Federation of Women's Clubs, formed in 1890. Although it suffered a decline during World War I, it was revitalized in the early 1920's under the leadership of Mrs. Alice Ames Winter, one of the most dynamic and popular presidents in the history of the organization. During her four years in office (1920-24), the GFWC increased in membership, purchased a headquarters in Washington, D.C., established an International Relations Department, and strengthened its Legislative Department for more effective action on issues of importance to the group. 1 Its wide range of interests suggested the need for an extensive legislative program. The National Consumers' League and the National Women's Trade Union League were similar in general purpose. The NCL, organized in 1899, was primarily concerned with the interests of women and children in industry. Although there were men among its members and its presidents were male, the female sex predominated and women considered it to be one of their organizations. Its general secretary from 1899 until her death in 1932 was the indomitable crusader, Florence Kelley. The NWTUL aimed to promote the welfare and unionization of female workers. Its membership included both wage earning women and sympathetic women of higher economic and social status. Organized in 1907, the league's president for its first fifteen years was Margaret Dreier Robins, wife of reformer Raymond Robins, who had acquired a fortune in the Klondike. After she retired in 1922, the presidents, and generally the other officers as well, were trade union women. While both the NCL and the NWTUL advanced the cause of female workers by other means, each sought legislation not only to protect women on the job but to promote their general welfare. Protection for children was also included in their legislative efforts. The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the National League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women emerged close to the time of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. Of these, the LWV had the broadest legislative program. The offspring of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, it became an independent group in February 1920. Its purpose was to educate women, in a non-partisan fashion, for the wise use of the ballot and to work for whatever legislation its membership thought was needed after a study of the issues involved. The BPW was formed somewhat earlier, in the summer of 1919. It aimed not only to promote the interests of business and professional women but to improve general business standards as well. The members interpreted these objectives liberally and, as a result, the federation's legislative program extended beyond issues only directly related to their careers. The American Association of University Women appeared in 1921, with the merger of two older groups, the Association of

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Collegiate Alumnae and the Southern Association of College Women. Established especially to unite college and university alumnae for educational work, the AAUW was confined in its federal legislative activities to the field of education. There was some disagreement among the membership as to what this limitation meant but the interpretation followed in the 1920's permitted the association to extend its lobbying to measures that only indirectly affected education. All six of these organizations carried on their legislative activities both individually and in cooperation with other groups that took like stands on particular issues. Each of them was a charter member of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, established in November 1920, as a clearing house for the federal legislative efforts of the affiliated organizations. 3 With ten original participants, it attained a membership of twenty-one associations by 1925. 4 The WJCC itself took no position on legislative proposals. Instead, members brought their own endorsements. When several groups took the same stand on an issue, they formed a sub-committee to carry on the work for the cause. The number of sub-committees in existence from session to session of Congress fluctuated. The measures they supported might be directly for the benefit of the female sex, or simply devoted to matters of concern to women. For example, in 1925, there were sub-committees for the child labor amendment, a federal department of education, vocational home economics, the World Court, appropriations for the Women's and Children's Bureaus in the United States Department of Labor, and reclassification of the civil service. There was also a sub-committee to oppose the equal rights amendment to prohibit sex-based differences in the law. WJCC groups believed that this proposal would eliminate statutes that were helpful to women as well as those that were harmful. 5 Most of the work done through the WJCC pertained to domestic matters. For work in behalf of world peace, women's organizations could, if they wished, cooperate through the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. This super-association was established in 1924, with Carrie Chapman Catt as its chairman. The LWV, GFWC, AAUW and NWTUL were all original members. 6 The BPW voted to become affiliated in 1928 but the NCL never became involved. 7 The committee held annual conferences at which delegates of the participating groups heard university professors, government officials and other leading authorities on international relations discuss fundamental causes of war and methods for reducing friction among nations. The conferences also endorsed resolutions and recommendations with reference to peace issues. No action could be taken under the name of the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War unless all the member organizations approved.* Basically, Cause and Cure favored international cooperation, the outlawry of war and disarmament to the lowest point consistent with national defense.

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Helpful in the legislative work of women's organizations was the lobbying experience which certain of their leaders had already accumulated before the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. Maud Wood Park, the first president of the LWV and the first chairman of the WJCC, for example, had led the National American Women Suffrage Association's Congressional Committee when it waged its victorious campaign. Florence Kelley had a long record of activity in behalf of legislation for the welfare of women and children. The NCL, GFWC and NWTUL all contributed, though primarily at the state level, to the adoption of reform legislation in the years before World War I. For carrying on their federal legislative work, a number of women's organizations found it convenient to locate their national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The GFWC, LWV, BPW and AAUW did so from early in the twenties, in most cases from the time the group was established. Some others, like the NWTUL, kept a special office in the national capital for legislative work, while they maintained their regular headquarters elsewhere. The close proximity of women's offices to each other facilitated cooperation when it was desired. Women's associations utilized a wide range of procedures in working for their legislative objectives, whether they acted individually or in cooperation with the WJCC, Cause and Cure or other groups. To aid in its efforts, the LWV followed the example of the Suffrage Association and retained a card index on every important office-holder in Washington—according to Belle Sherwin, the second president, "down to the name of his grandmother and the kind of face-powder used by his wife." 9 For the more active organizations, visits of staff members, national presidents or committee chairmen to members of Congress, other appropriate federal officials and sometimes the White House were regular features of the work. Occasionally, delegations from the grass roots helped to impress upon government officials the wishes of the women. Cause and Cure held its annual conferences in Washington to enable the representatives of the participating organizations to speak with their congressmen or the president. In matters pertaining directly to women and children, the WJCC maintained close contact with the Women's and Children's Bureaus. Whenever congressional hearings were held on any issue of importance to the groups, a qualified person was sent to testify or, at least, letters were filed stating the action desired. At some hearings, one woman spoke for all the members of the WJCC subcommittee involved; at others, several or each of the affiliates sent representatives. In critical situations, an association might get a member who was a leading woman Republican or Democrat to use her influence with key figures in her party. Grass roots activity was an important phase of the lobbying. Members of the different organizations were supposed to be informed on any issue

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before the group took its stand. To add to their knowledge and interest in the subject and to educate and stir the generili electorate, national offices distributed pamphlets, brochures and fliers dealing with the legislation sought or opposed. Both local and national officials sought newspaper publicity. Occasionally, leaders wrote articles which were printed in popular magazines. In addition, the organizations sent out speakers who appeared before any interested audience, not just women. When the radio became common, they utilized it as a means of enlightening and arousing general concern. For some purposes, they collected signatures for mammoth petitions to be sent to appropriate members of Congress. Slogans might be developed to popularize a cause and posters might be displayed. Gimmicks were occasionally used to attract attention. During a campaign for effective action at the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference, for example, the Missouri Women Voters sent carrier pigeons daily to keep President Harding informed as to the number of signatures on their petition. 1 0 To promote special issues, or the legislative program as a whole, local units, especially of the LWV, were urged to consult with senators and representatives when they were home either campaigning or during congressional recesses. At the most useful time while a congressional committee or the Senate or the House considered a measure that the women supported or opposed, the national offices called upon the membership to send a flood of letters and telegrams to Washington. The response was often very good. In their lobbying efforts, the first major victory of the WJCC organizations was the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. This law provided a system of federal aid to the states for maternal and infant health programs. Women found proof of the need for such a measure in certain statistics which the Children's Bureau had collected. According to these, the United States ranked fourteenth, among the sixteen nations of the world that kept adequate records, in its maternal mortality rate during the first decade of the twentieth century. Records for 1913 showed that more American women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four lost their lives from conditions related to childbirth than from any other cause except tuberculosis. By 1919, the death rate had increased so that the United States had moved to the last place among the seventeen nations for which statistics were then available. The tragedy was all the greater in that well over half the deaths were considered preventable. 1 1 In its infant mortality rate, the United States had a better record but it was still poor. According to the latest available statistics up to 1916, the nation ranked eleventh among the principle countries of the world in its death rate for babies under one year of age. It lost one child in every ten during the first twelve months of life. While the country had improved its status by 1920, it still lost most than 200,000 children before they reached the age of one year. Again, many of the fatalities could have been prevented. 1 2

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Women felt keenly the tragedy in the statistics and, particularly after the achievement of suffrage, a number of their organizations gave priority in their legislative programs to the adoption of a plan for federal aid to the states for maternal and infant health. When the WJCC was organized, a subcommittee for this cause was immediately formed and, sooner or later, all the affiliated groups joined. Its chairman was the hard-working Florence Kelley, who could never forget her own mother's tragedy in the death of five of her children. 13 Also important in the struggle for the legislation was the LWV's Maud Wood Park who, like Mrs. Kelley, had lived in a social settlement house and knew the needs of the poor through working among them. A bill for a federally assisted maternal and infant health program had been introduced into Congress as early as July 1918, when Representative Jeanette Rankin of Montana, the first woman member of either house, was the sponsor. The House never debated the proposal. A similar measure that Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas and Representative Horace Towner of Iowa submitted to the next Congress succeeded in passing the upper chamber, but got no farther than a favorable committee report in the House. During the lame duck session, the WJCC and especially the LWV, lobbied intensively to secure a victory but neither a special corps of women on Capitol Hill nor a deluge of letters from the voters at home could induce the House to debate the issue. Nor did efforts to enlist President-elect Harding or a special appeal to the House Rules Committee produce results. Apparently, influential Republicans wished to postpone passage until Harding was in the White House, so that their party could more easily take credit for it.14 In April 1921, Sheppard and Towner introduced new companion bills into their respective houses. Organized women were determined to have success this time. With the assistance of Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, a vice-chairman of the Republican National Committee as well as a prominent LWV member, they quickly put pressure upon Harding to use his influence in behalf of the measure. Accordingly, on April 12, the new president, in his first message to Congress, stated that he assumed "the maternity bill, already strongly approved, will be enacted promptly." 1 5 As before, the women testified in congressional hearings, visited every senator and representative and produced a flood of letters and telegrams from the grass roots. Doubtful members of Congress were the special subjects of attention. Lobbying was particularly intensive during the last weeks of the battle when, according to reports, representatives of the organizations conducted fifty interviews a day. 16 The Senate passed the Sheppard bill on July 22, 1921, by a completely non-partisan vote of sixty-three to seven. 1 7 In the House, action was slower. There, the women had to apply special pressure on the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce which, with a hostile chairman, sat on the proposal for months. Finally, in November, the committee gave the measure

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a favorable report and, on the nineteenth, the House passed it by a vote of 279 to 39. Included in the opposition was the only female representative of the time, Mrs. Alice M. Robertson of Oklahoma who, despite being in politics herself, was an avowed anti-suffragist! 18 The House and Senate quickly ironed out the differences in their bills and Harding signed the measure on November 23. Maud Wood Park, speaking for all those who had fought for it, hailed the act as a "notable Thanksgiving gift to the women and children of America." 1 9 Credit for the adoption of the Sheppard-Towner Act clearly belongs to the women's organizations. This does not mean that the measure was totally lacking in other support. The Children's Bureau did all that it could to secure enactment, and President Harding gave some assistance. Various public health officials juch as Dr. Josephine Baker of New York City, lent their support and some popular magazines published articles of value to the campaign. W. F. Bigelow, the editor of Good Housekeeping, testified before Congress in behalf of the cause, and obtained endorsements of the plan from thirty-four governors. 20 Nevertheless, the WJCC organizations provided the heavy and sustained pressure that was necessary to bring the issue to a successful vote. Awareness of their vigilance definitely affected the action of congressmen. According t o the sympathetic William S. Kenyon, who headed the Senate committee in charge of the bill, the measure would have failed as decisively as it passed if the legislators could have voted secretly in the cloakroom. 2 1 The Sheppard-Towner Act contained the basic features which the women had sought b u t it specified the appropriations to carry out the program for only six years. Unless Congress would agree to continue them for a longer period, federal aid for maternal and infant health would cease in 1927. Consequently, the WJCC began a new drive in 1926, in support of a bill introduced on January 13, to extend the appropriations for another two years. 22 The new campaign turned out to be exceptionally bitter and required such a concentration of resources from the WJCC groups as to affect other aspects of their legislative programs. There had always been some public opposition to the Sheppard-Towner program b u t b y 1926, it had become much more forceful. Most respected among the hostile elements was the American Medical Association, which greatly intensified its lobbying as compared with 1921. It was afraid that federal aid would lead to government competition with private medical practice and to compulsory health insurance. 23 Other antagonists included medical liberty leagues, small state rights organizations and some patriotic associations. Prominent among the latter were two women's groups: the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which had originally supported Sheppard-Towner legislation, 2 4 and the Woman Patriot Publishing Company. The latter was the remnant of

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the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and continued to print its newspaper, The Woman Patriot. The anti-suffragists had raised t h e cry of socialism in the earlier campaign b u t , by now, they had developed their charges into such an elaborate Communist conspiracy that it took thirty-five pages of the Congressional Record to print their petition describing the plot. The conspiracy was supposedly under the generalship of Florence Kelley, who was said to have penetrated women's organizations, including the WJCC, to advance the purposes of the Kremlin. The Children's Bureau was also named as one of her fronts. The Sheppard-Towner Act, it was contended, along with the child labor amendment and a proposal for a federal department of education—all of which the WJCC supported—was an effort to nationalize the children of America and carry on a revolution b y legislation." Added to the conservatism of the times, the arguments of the AMA and the super-patriots created serious difficulties for the Sheppard-Towner bill. In the Senate, a determined group of opponents conducted a fillibuster that the friends of the measure could not break. To save anything, the proponents, including representatives of the women's organizations, finally agreed to compromise; in that way, the measure passed in J a n u a r y 1927. 2 6 As adopted, the law now specified that the Maternity and Infancy Act itself, as well as the new appropriations, should expire on J u n e 30, 1929. Deeply disappointed over the need to compromise and over the limitations in the law, the WJCC subcommittee soon launched a new drive to prevent the federal aid plan from dying. In this it was unsuccessful, though later efforts bore fruit when the Social Security Act of 1935 contained more generous features for a maternal and infant health program than did the 1921 law. The Sheppard-Towner campaigns provide a good illustration of the way in which women's organizations worked for measures of great importance to them. Beyond the maternity and infancy bills, they sought the enactment, and sometimes the rejection, of a variety of proposals during the 1920's. One area of legislation that concerned them was the legal status of women. The only significant federal achievement in this area during the decade was the Cable Act of 1922, which provided independent citizenship for married women. Previous to the passage of this measure, a bride automatically acquired the citizenship of her husband when she made her wedding vow. Bills for independent citizenship had been introduced into Congress repeatedly since 1910 but as long as women's organizations were preoccupied with the suffrage amendment and the establishment of a maternity and infancy program, none of them succeeded. In 1922, the WJCC, and especially the LWV, made the nationality of married women the subject of a major campaign. The heart of their argument was that "a woman is as much an individual as a man is, and her citizenship should no more be

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gained or lost by marriage than should a man's." 2 7 They pointed out also that loyal American-born women had suffered unnecessary hardship because they had acquired the status of an alien through marriage. According to the organizations' wishes, the law that resulted from their drive both permitted women to retain their own citizenship when they wed and required them to become naturalized through their own action. Partly because the groups feared that the bill would not pass if they insisted upon improvements in it, the measure did not eliminate all discrimination in nationality. Only through additional campaigns in the 1930's did women acquire full equality with men in such rights, including the transmission of their citizenship to their children. While the WJCC groups worked at the federal level for equal nationality rights, their branches sought the removal of discriminatory legislation in the states. According to the League of Women Voters, such campaigns during the first decade of suffrage brought about the adoption of 175 laws in thirty-five states and the District of Columbia, to eliminate disabilities for women. These included provisions for equal rights in such matters as pro pert y-holding, contract-making, guardianship, jury service, domicile and salaries for government workers. 28 One feminist organization was impatient with the tedious process of removing legal discriminations individually in state after state. This was the National Woman's Party, re-formed from the militant suffrage group that Alice Paul had led. It championed a Constitutional amendment prescribing that "men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." 2 ® The party secured the introduction of the proposal into the House of Representatives and the Senate in December 1923 and into every Congress thereafter. It also engaged in a militant campaign to promote the amendment. As one aspect of this drive, members tried to obtain endorsements of the proposal from other national women's groups. Not until the 1930's did they have any success in this. The BPW was divided enough in its attitude during the twenties, that it did not take a stand; and the A AUW, which at first opposed the measure, soon found it necessary to assume a neutral position. The NCL, NWTUL, LWV and GFWC, on the other hand, not only objected to the amendment but attempted, at an early stage, to dissuade the Woman's Party from having it brought into Congress, at least without certain changes in the wording. 3 0 There were other women's groups which also disagreed with the proposal, and the WJCC formed a subcommittee to oppose the amendment even before its introduction on Capitol Hill. 31 The amendment produced a bitter and exhausting battle between forces that actually sought a common ultimate goal: the equality of women. Their quarrel was over the method to be used. The WJCC organizations, in a day of

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Conservative judicial decisions, feared that with t h e a m e n d m e n t the courts would rule out more than just legislation that was h a r m f u l to women. T h e y would also overthrow laws which the groups believed were helpful, rather than to extend their benefits to men. Most particularly, the groups were concerned about protective labor legislation for w o m e n , which they championed. In general, they thought the blanket approach was too rigid. At least with the conditions that prevailed in society, they did not believe that equality for w o m e n would always come through laws that were in all respects identical for the sexes. Like treatment might, in some instances, produce inequality. 3 2 The NWP, on the other hand, believed that the laws must b e in every way the same for the sexes if there was to be equality. Its members contended that differences in statutes implied that women were inferior and that labor regulations for female workers only cost women many jobs. They also saw the blanket m e t h o d as the practical way to eliminate legal discriminations. The piecemeal approach, they argued, was so slow that generations of w o m e n would suffer before equality was achieved. 3 3 With the division of women into two camps and opponents more numerous and better respected than friends, the equal rights amendment made no other progress in Congress during the 1920's than to receive four c o m m i t t e e hearings. In this sense, the WJCC groups were victorious. Even before the equal rights a m e n d m e n t was introduced into Congress, a WJCC subcommittee was organized to secure another type of Constitutional change. This was the child labor a m e n d m e n t . It was sought b y groups as different as the American Legion and the American Federation of Labor after t h e Supreme Court, in May 1922, declared unconstitutional a federili child labor law. All the members of the WJCC endorsed the amendment early enough to participate in the Congressional campaign. 3 4 Most of them worked intensively for the proposal, not just individually and as part of the WJCC, but in cooperation with other supporting organizations. When the Permanent Conference for the Abolition of Child Labor was established in J u n e 1922, as a clearing house for groups that favored the Constitutional change, leaders of the NCL, NWTUL, LWV and GFWC were among its officers and board members. T h e proposal passed Congress in J u n e 1924. After the victory, t h e WJCC subcommittee remained in existence to assist state branches of t h e member units in their ratification efforts. It also was responsible for the formation of a new clearing house, Organizations Associated for Ratification of the Child Labor A m e n d m e n t , commonly known as OAR. 3 5 T h e state ratification campaigns proved to be overwhelmingly difficult. The opposition was composed largely of manufacturing interests, certain farm and patriotic organizations and some important elements of the Catholic Church. The Woman Patriot led in the efforts t o paint t h e a m e n d m e n t and its supporters red. WJCC groups worked

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with varying degrees of intensity into 1926, by which time defeats had become so common that discouragement was widespread. The NCL, NWTUL and LWV continued their efforts longer than most but by the end of the decade their energies were being diverted to the life and death struggle over the Sheppard-Towner program. When the 1930's began, only six states had ratified the amendment. Under the impetus of the depression, more legislatures gave their approval but the amendment never secured ratification from enough states to become a part of the Constitution. At the same time that women's organizations promoted the child labor amendment, the Sheppard-Towner program and independent citizenship for married women, they worked for a variety of other social legislation. Such measures pertained to education, prison reform, minority groups, prohibition, consumer legislation and conservation of natural resources. In their concern for education, YVJCC groups were undoubtedly influenced to some degree by the National Education Association, which had affiliated with the clearing house, but they also had their own motivation. The WJCC had subcommittees that worked for a federal department of education, for general assistance to the states for such purposes as reducing illiteracy and equalizing educational opportunity and for special grants for physical education and training in home economics. Bills for the department of education and for general assistance to the states met opposition from the same type of organizations as attacked the child labor amendment. These bills, too, were attacked as Communist inspired. The efforts of the WJCC to attain its educational goals were greatest between 1 9 2 0 and 1 9 2 6 . The GFWC, however, continued the battle to make federal funds for home economics instruction equal to those for other forms of vocational education until 1929, when Congress passed the George-Reed Act, which fulfilled this aim. 36 Women's concern for prison reform involved the care o f female inmates and labor practices regardless of the sex o f the prisoners. The WJCC early sought the establishment of a federal industrial home for women prisoners and achieved victory when Congress passed the Curtis-Graham bill in 1924. Three years later, the home was completed at Alderson, West Virginia. Among the groups that sought the institution, the GFWC was prominent. It also supported the Hawes-Cooper Act of 1929. This measure aimed to prevent the competition o f prison-made goods with the products of private industry and, indirectly, to protect the prisoner from exploitation. The federation was interested in both aspects. 37 The minority groups issues that took the attention of women's groups involved Indians and immigrants. The GFWC devoted much energy to the problems of Indians. It sought larger appropriations to meet their needs: improved medical services and educational facilities, protection o f property rights and betterment of living conditions. Some of the federation's specific

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efforts involved legislation; others just pressure upon the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The group played an important role in the defeat of the Bursum bill and its substitutes in the early 1920's. These proposals threatened the land and water rights of the Pueblo Indians. 3 8 Of a different nature from the federation's concern for the Indians was women's interest in the immigrants. This involved the subject of exclusion. The organizations did not all have the same attitude toward the quota and national origins systems adopted in the 1920's to reduce drastically the number of foreigners entering the United States. The DAR continuously supported such legislation, while various other associations sought modifications to keep families together or to liberalize the law in other ways. 39 Of concern t o more women's groups than immigrants and Indians was the enforcement of prohibition. This was the prime objective of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who intensified ihcir efforts for the cause late in the decade when the Eighteenth Amendment fell under increasing attack. Among other women's organizations, the GFWC was the most active in the work to make prohibition effective. In 1923, a Women's National Committee for Law Enforcement was formed to bring concerned associations together for a vigorous campaign to keep the nation dry. Despite the number of interested groups, however, women's efforts apart from the WCTU, were not as great in behalf of prohibition enforcement as might be expected. By the end of the decade the interest of some of the associations, such as the LWV, was waning. At the same time, female opponents oi "legislated morality" became more conspicuous. In 1929, they established the Women's Organization for Prohibition Reform, with repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment as its objective. Prohibition was, in a sense, consumer legislation. Consumer protection, as the subject is generally understood, was an area of legislation in which the League of Women Voters was especially active. Early in the 1920's the LWV contributed to the enactment of the Packers and Stockyards Law, which would prevent monopoly and unfair practices in the meat-packing industry and to the Filled Milk Law, which would prohibit interstate shipments of milk that contained vegetable oil substitutes for butter i'ats. The league also helped to secure the establishment of a Federal Coal Commission, in 1922, to investigate the coal industry. Later in the decade, it began lo advócate government operation of the fertilizer and power plants at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River and, from 1928 until the passage of the bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, it kept the subject on its priority list for legislative action. 4 0 While the LWV led in women's efforts for consumer legislation, it was the General Federation of Women's Clubs that made conservation of natural resources a special concern. The organization played an important role in the successful campaign for the Federal Water Power Act Amendment ol 1922,

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which prohibited individuals and corporations from acquiring water rights in national parks and monuments. It also supported measures for the protection o f wildlife and forest and water supplies, some of which passed and others o f which failed. At the same time that women's groups worked for social legislation, they sought greater efficiency and economy in government. T o assist in the achievement o f this goal, they championed civil service reform and extension. A WJCC subcommittee, in which the LWV took the lead, contributed t o the passage o f the Classification Act of 1 9 2 3 and particularly to a section which called for standardized rates of pay without sex differentiations. T h e act also provided for uniform classes and grades of employment, as well as for a regulated system o f advancement. T o promote greater democracy, the LWV, in 1 9 2 8 , began to champion the lame duck amendment t o eliminate the short session of the outgoing Congress after an election, and to move the inauguration o f the president from March to J a n u a r y . Its efforts, and those o f other supporters, bore fruit when the amendment was ratified in February 1 9 3 3 . Women's organizations spent a vast amount of time and effort in their campaigns for social legislation and greater efficiency and democracy in government. T h e groups were also active in the cause of peace. Those belonging to the WJCC and the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War conducted intensive lobbying for United States membership in the World Court. T h e y also sought a reduction in armaments. Early in the decade, the LWV added its strength to the campaign of peace societies to secure the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference o f 1 9 2 1 - 2 2 . After Harding summoned the parley, various other WJCC organizations joined the league in an intensive effort to assure that the conference would take meaningful action. T h e y did nothing significant, however, to support the unsuccessful Geneva Conference o f 1 9 2 7 . When Congress responded to the failure of that conference with record-breaking naval appropriations, women's organizations eâme into conflict. Cause and Cure objected to the added expenditures, while the D A R , along with many other patriotic societies, actively supported the bills. Such groups became increasingly isolationist and took the position that the best way to keep the United States at pcace was through military preparedness. 41 Membership in the World Court and disarmament were two aspects of a larger program which Cause and Cure organizations supported for international peace. T h e third feature was the outlawry of war. Several of the groups had already committed themselves to such a cause when Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, submitted lo the United States government, in J u n e 1 9 2 7 , a draft o f a treaty by which France and the United States would renounce war in their dealings with each other. From that time until the Senate ratified the Kcllogg-Briand Pact, in January 1 9 2 9 ,

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the interested women's groups conducted a heavy campaign to assure that a treaty be adopted. They put their strength behind the multilateral agreement finally developed rather than a commitment between the United States and France alone. The work of Cause and Cure has been recognized as of considerable significance in the achievement of the pact. 4 3 Although women's organizations of the WJCC variety encountered serious disappointments in their lobbying efforts, their record of achievement at the federal level during the first decade of suffrage is good. This is particularly true in light of the obstacles to their success. They were championing reforms in a period when conservatism was dominant. They and some of their causes were subjected to scurrilous red smears not only f r o m The Woman Patriot but from other patriotic societies including the DAR. Members of the military establishment, industrial, medical and state rights groups also resorted to charges of Communism to defeat the legislation they did not want. The attack not only tainted the measures in question, it put the victims at a special disadvantage in trying to clear themselves, since it undermined their credibility. The prospects for enactment of the organizations' legislative program were hurt by the fact that there was no woman's bloc in Congress and that their influence within the political parties was very limited. Also, it became clear that women did not vote in as large numbers as men and that there was no solidarity in the way they cast their ballots. Congressmen, therefore, need not fear as much retaliation at the polls if they voted against women's measures as they had originally thought. Differences in the positions they took on particular bills were injurious to women's organizations. To the extent that they opposed each other, the groups undercut the effectiveness of either side as representative of women's point of view. Particularly serious was the split over the equal rights amendment. The fight over it absorbed large amounts of resources from the time that the WJCC groups first learned that the NWP had such a proposal under consideration. The money and womanpower could have been US£d for other purposes, as WJCC groups realized with resentment. Their money shortage was particularly vexing, since in most of their campaigns their opponents, especially the industrialists, had more funds to spend than they did. Weaknesses within the organizations also contributed to difficulties. Officers, in some cases, lacked needed qualities or simply enough time for their duties and, thus hurt the effectiveness of their particular group. Internal friction, where it occurred, was debilitating. The red smear infected some of the women who belonged to the victim organizations. And in certain instances, as with the GFWC in the latter part of the twenties, such members forced modifications in legislative activity. Another weakness was that most of the groups, for much if not all of the decade, had a larger list of goals than

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they could effectively support; they spread themselves too thin. In a few cases, a group a b o damaged itself by devoting large amounts of its resources to a favorite cause after it became obvious that it could not succeed. The NCL's campaign for a child labor amendment is a case in point. 43 Finally, certain organizations were declining in strength and vigor. The NCL reached its peak in 1916 and thereafter was on the downgrade. 44 The NWTUL suffered seriously from declining resources in the 1920's, at the same time that it experienced leadership problems. Offsetting these disadvantages during the early part of the decade, were the rejuvenation of the GFWC and the appearance of new organizations active in the legislative field. Later, however, the General Federation lost some of its vitality. Also, the NLWV, even though it was new, had a sharp drop in its membership by 1928, as compared with the estimated membership in 1924. 45 Taken as a whole, WJCC groups sustained their reform zeal until about 1927, when a decline began in legislative activity. Some of this change definitely resulted from the spread of conservatism among the members and the influence of the red-baiters. In other instances, as with the NWTUL, there was a recognition of the need to bring the organization's activities into line with the available resources in order that such work as was undertaken would have a better chance of success. Even though a number of groups reduced their efforts, they still promoted reforms and the late twenties saw a few very intensive campaigns, particularly from the League of Women Voters. Women, then, continued to work throughout the decade for those causes the prophets had once said they would support. They were also divided in the stands they took on certain issues. Contrary to the skeptics, however, their votes and activities did make a difference. Congressmen knew that women who took the trouble to write, wire and visit them would also go to the polls. The number of successes that the women's groups achieved during a conservative decade indicates that not only the skeptics of the twenties were wrong, so also are those historians who contend that it has made no difference that women got the vote. NOTES 1. Charles E. Russell, "Is Woman Suffrage a Failure?" Century, CVII (Mar. 1924), 725. 2. "Mrs. Thomas G. Winter, President," an unpublished, anonymous biography of the first president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, Archives of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC Headquarters, Washington), Winter Administration Box; "A Powerful Army Against Corrupt Politics," Woman Citizen, VI (2 Jul. 1921), 9. 3. In the case of AAUW, it was the Association of Collegiate Alumnae that originally joined the WJCC. 4. In addition to these six organizations, the following were original members of the WJCC: the American Home Economics Association, the National Congress of Parents

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and Teachers, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Woiten's Christian Temperance Union. Alice L. Edwards to Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, 9 Mar. 1 9 3 3 , Washington, Library o f Congress, B o x 3, Papers of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee. Cited hereafter as WJCC Papers. 5. Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Women's J o i n t Congressional Committee, 3 0 Nov. 1 9 2 5 , Box 6, WJCC Papers. 6. Other organizations present at the first conference, held in 1 9 2 5 , were the National Board of the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Chrijtian Temperance Union, the National Council o f Jewish Women, the Council of Women for Home Missions, and the Federation o f Women's Boards of Foreign Missions o f North America. " A Women's Peace Congress," Woman Citizen, IX (18 Oct. 1924), 22; ibid., "United for World Peace," (7 Feb. 1 9 2 5 ) , 7. 7. "Report of National Committees," Independent Woman, VII (Sept. 1928), 4 1 9 . 8. Minutes of the Continuing Committee o f the Conference on the Cause and Cure o f War, 4 Sept. 1 9 2 5 , (Library of Congress) Series II, Box 33, Papers of the League o f Women Voters. Cited hereafter as LWV Papers. 9. New York Times, 22 Aug. 1 9 2 6 , VIII, 10. 10. Elizabeth J . Hauser, "Eight Months' War against War," Woman Citizen, VI (17 Dec. 1 9 2 1 ) , 23-24. 11. Grace L. Meigs, Maternal Mortality from All Conditions Connected with Childbirth in the United States and Certain Other Countries, U.S. Children's Bureau, Miscellaneous Series No. 6, Bureau Pub'ication No. 19 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1 9 1 7 ) , 7, 10-15, 2 2 - 2 3 ; U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Public Protection of Maternity and Infancy: Hearings on H.R. 2366, 67th Cong. 1st sess., 1 9 2 1 , 2 4 0 . 12. U.S., Children's Bureau, Save the Youngest: Seven Charts on Maternal and Infant Mortality, with Explanatory Comment, Children's Year Follow-up Series No. 2, Bureau Publication No. 61 ([Washington: Government Printing Office, 1 9 1 9 ] ) , 5-6, 8, 12-13; U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, Protection of Maternity, Hearing on S. 1039, 67 Cong., 1 sess., 1 9 2 1 , 18; U.S., House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Public Protection of Maternity and Infancy, Hearings on H.R. 2366, 1921, 2 9 . 13. Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 9 5 3 ) , 9 3 . 14. Dorothy K. Bown, " T h e Sheppard-Towner Bill L o b b y , " Woman Citizen, V (22 J a n . 1 9 2 1 ) , 9 0 7 - 9 0 8 ; Marie S. Edward to Maud Wood Park, 19 J a n . 1 9 2 1 , Scries I, Box 4, LWV Papers; LWV Publicity Release, "Woman's Organizations Make Special Rule Their Plea to Get Sheppard Towner Bill before House," [24 Feb. 1 9 2 1 ] , Series II, B o x 7, LWV Papers; Minutes of the Women's J o i n t Congressional Committee, 14 Feb. 1 9 2 1 , Box 6, WJCC Papers; Maud W. Park, "Sheppard Towner Act: Supplementary Notes," 3 Nov. 1 9 4 3 , Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, Box 18, Papers o f Maud W. Park. Cited hereafter as Park Papers. 15. New York Times, 13 Apr. 1 9 2 1 , 7; ibid., 8 May 1921, VIII, 3; Committee on the Sheppard-Towner Bill to the President of the United States, 5 Mar. 1 9 2 1 , Series 1, B o x 9 3 , LWV Papers; Harriet Taylor Upton to Maud W. Park, n.d., Box 10, Park Papers. 16. Charles A. Seldon, " T h e Most Powerful Lobby in Washington," Ladies Home Journal, X X X I X (Apr. 1 9 2 2 ) , 9 5 . 17. U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 67 Cong., 1 sess., 1 9 2 1 , 6 1 , pt. 4, 4216.

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18. Ibid., pt. 8, 8036. 19. Maud W. Park, "A Triumph for Women," Woman Citizen IX (3 Dec. 1924), 14. 20. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Protection of Maternity and Infancy: Report to Accompany S. 3259, 66 Cong., 3 sess., 1921, H. Rept. 1255, 1, 3. 21. Seldon, ' T h e Most Powerful Lobby in Washington," 95. 22. The BPW had by this time dropped out of the subcommittee though it was still sympathetic, and there were some other changes in the membership. One of the additions was the National Association of Colored Women. 23. James G. Burrow, AMA: Voice of American Medicine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 151-58 and 160-64. 24. Lucille E. La Ganke, "The National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution: Its History, Policies, and Influence 1890-1949" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Western Reserve University, 1951), 331. 25. U.S., Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 69 Cong., 1 sess., 1926, 67, pt. 11, 12918-52. Mrs. Kelley was an avowed socialist, not a Communist. 26. Maud W. Park, "Unfinished Business," (2d ed., Washington: By the NLWV Child Welfare Committee, Jan. 1928), 2, 3, 7-10. (Mimeographed, and in Series II, Box 204 LWV Papers.) 27. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Naturalization and Citizenship of Women, Hearings, 67 Cong., 2 sess., 1922, 570. 28. U.S., Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Equal Rights, Hearings on S.J. Res. 52, 71 Cong., 3 sess., 1 9 3 1 , 4 0 - 4 1 , 50. 29. "The Pending Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," Congressional Digest, 111 (Mar. 1924), 197. 30. Florence Kelley to Freda Kirchwey, 16 J a n . 1922, Library of Congress, Box 54, Papers of the National Consumers' League. Cited hereafter as NCL Papers. Ibid., Florence Kelley, "Conference with Representatives of the National Woman's Party," n.d.; Ethel Smith, "Conference on so-called 'Equal Rights' Amendment proposed by the National Woman's Party," Library of Congress, Entry I, Box 2, Papers of the National Women's Trade Union League. Cited hereafter as NWTUL Papers. 31. Ann Webster, "The J o i n t Congressional Committee," Woman Citizen, VIII (15 Dec. 1923), 18. 32. For a brief representation of some of the WJCC attitudes, see Ethel M. Srpith, Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women (Washington: By the National League of Women Voters, 1929). The journals and newsletters of WJCC organizations both represent the point of view and show the nature of the campaign which the groups waged against the amendment. 33. The official organ of the NWP, Equal Rights, is the best source of information on the activities of the NWP for the amendment, and gives also the arguments of the organization. 34. Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Women's J o i n t Congressional Committee, 19 Nov. 1923, Box 6, WJCC Papers. 35. Ibid., 8 Dec. 1924; Ethel Smith, " R e p o r t of the National Legislative Secretary of the National Women's Trade Union League Covering the Period from J u n e 21, 1924 to J u n e 1, 1925," Entry 1, Box 3, NWTUL Papers; "The Ratification Campaign," Woman Citizen, IX (18 Oct. 1924), 19. 36. Official Report of the Twenty-first Biennial Convention of the CFWC (Seattle, 1932), 81. 37. Ibid., 249-50; "Problems of Prison Labor," General Federation News IX (Nov. 1928), 17.

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38. Official Report of the Seventeenth Biennial Convention of the CFWC (Los Angeles, 1924), 3 7 3 ; J o h n Collier, " R o o m for the Indians," Woman Citizen, VIII (8 Mar. 1924), 9 ; Seldon, "The Most Powerful Lobby in Washington," 18. 39. La Ganke, " T h e National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," 248, 252-57. 40. Proceeding! of the Seventh Annual Convention of the NLWV (St. Louis, 1926), 81; Proceeding! of the Eighth Biennial Convention of the NLWV (Chicago, 1928), 36. 41. La Ganke, ' T h e National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," 193-94. 42. See, for example, J o h n C. Vinson, William E. Borah and the Outlawry of War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, c. 1957), 163; Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 232. 43. Goldmark, Impatient Crusader, 118-19. 44. Margery H. Ennis, " T h e Rise and Decline of the Consumers' League" (unpublished Senior Honors Thesis, Radcliffe College, 1964), 28, 39. 45. Mayme O. Peak, "Women in Politics," The Outlook CXXXVI (23 J a n . 1924), 136, 148; Finance Department, NLWV, Comparative Statement of Membership and Quota Payments for 1927-28, 1928-29, Series II, Box 329, LWV Papers. The estimated figure of 2,000,000 for 1924 may well be overly large. The National League did not collect statistics for individual memberships in its early years. The figure for its 1927-28 year was 92,722. That for 1928-29 was incomplete.

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SOCIAL AND MORAL R E F O R M

SOCIAL FEMINISM IN THE 1920s: PROGRESSIVE WOMEN AND INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION By J. STANLEY LEMONS

The women's rights movement became one of that host of reform efforts falling under the rubric of Progressivism in the early twentieth century. The majority of women involved were "social feminists" who put social reform ahead of purely feminine issues.1 The inequities facing women made many of them sympathetic to demands for social reform generally; indeed, some of the most prominent leaders of the social justice wing of progressivism were women, such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Τ .il lian Wald.* For the most part, however, women's reform efforts were in the traditional sphere reserved for women, namely, Home and Motherhood, which included the morals, health, education and welfare of children. Hence, they strongly supported prohibition, pure food and drugs, control and prevention of venereal disease, elimination of prostitution and the double standard, creation of juvenile courts and reformatories for children, child labor laws, and compulsory school attendance. The reform drive among women's organizations did not end with the 1920s. In fact, new organizations appeared in order to undertake new efforts; and some saw the suffrage victory of 1920 to be not the end of the road but to signal the starter's gun for a new race. T o be sure, the Tbe term is William L. O'Neill'» "Feminism as a Radical Ideology," Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, edited by Alfred F. Young (DeKalb, 1968), 276. * Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: Tb« Social Settlements end the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, 19*7). 1

J. STANLEY LEMONS is an Associate Professor of History at Rhode Island

College.

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response varied. Professional women's groups tended to focus increasingly on professional advancement. The reorganized National Woman's Party introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in 1922-1923 and campaigned for it down to the present. The National Consumers' League, National Women's Trade Union League, National League of Women Voters, American Association of University Women, General Federation of Women's Qubs, Parent-Teachers Associations, YWCA, and others, in varying degree, carried the progressive impulse through the 1920s.' The National League of Women Voters (N.L.W.V.) was one of the most important social feminist organizations. It was created in 1919-1920 by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the principal organization in the fight for the franchise. In the 1920s the League fought for many reforms, including maternity and infancy protection, federal regulation of marketing and distribution of food, federal aid to education, and improved pure food and drug laws. Seeking consumer protection and lower costs through government intervention, the N.L.W.V. became the only citizen's organization in the 1920s to endorse and campaign for Senator George Norris' Tennessee Valley Project. After 1922 it fought government efforts to divest itself of the Muscle Shoals facilities and, after 1927, it undertook a massive educational campaign to popularize and generate support for Norris' plan.* The TVA proposal twice passed Congress and twice was vetoed (by Coolidge in 1928 and by Hoover in 1931 ) before winning legislative and executive approval in the Roosevelt Administration; and the only non-governmental party present at the signing was Belle Sherwin, N.L.W.V. president, who received one of the ceremonial pens. Again, the League adopted a liberal labor platform in 1920, which included the right of collective bargaining, hours and wage laws, equal pay, federal employment service, protective legislation for working women, and prohibition of child labor.8 It worked so diligently for various aspects of social security legislation in the 1920s and 1930s that a N.L.W.V. representative was once more the only non-governmental party present at the signing of the 1935 Social Security Act. The N.L.W.V. was also instrumental in getting the national women's • J. Stanley Lemons, "The New Woman in the New Era: The Woman Movement from the Great War to the Great Depression," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1967, 70-108, 180-228. * N.L.W.V., Proceedings (1921), 60; IVornan Citizen, V (April 25, 1921), 1186; "Unde Sam Needs a Yardstick!" XPoman Citizen, XI (December, 1926), 33; "The Excursion," Dorothy Kirchwey Brown MSS, Box 1, folder 25, Schlesinger library, Raddiffe; Preston J. Hubbard, Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920-1932 (Nashville, 1961), 218. »"Women Voters Demand Justice," Life and Labor, X (March, 1920), 77-78.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

organizations to coordinate their lobbying efforts in Washington. In 1920 it brought ten groups together to form the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (W.J.C.C.). Though membership fluctuated, reaching a peak of twenty-one organizations from 1924 to 1927, the W.J.C.C. maintained pressure on behalf of progressive and feminist legislation throughout the decade. Friends and foes alike attested to its effectiveness.* The League spearheaded similar efforts to create Women's Legislative Councils in all the states. Such activities, among other things, permitted women to range outside their traditional sphere—to defend the primary election, to urge fiscal reform, and to support such issues as city manager government, governmental reorganization, women jurors, and anti-lynching bills.1 The campaign for legislation to protect working women and to abolish child labor especially reflected the social feminist orientation. Such efforts began well before the 1920s, but ran into increasing difficulty in this decade. Protection of women workers advanced uncertainly, and the child labor crusade received a stunning setback just as victory seemed near. The labor movement itself troubled and divided all progressive men and women. Some endorsed it; many feared it more than they did monopolies.1 Consequently, the struggle to aid industrial women, even the effort to unionize them, usually was justified only in traditional terms— the protection of motherhood and family. Some efforts were even antiunion. The YWCA, for example, courageously adopted an industrial action program in 1920, though faced by threats from conservative businessmen to withhold donations. But, in fact, the " Y " hoped to substitute • Charles A. Seiden, "The Most Powerful Lobby in Washington," Ladies Home Journal, X X I X (April, 1922), 5; [Editorial], Journal of the American Medical Association, LXXVII (February 11, 1922), 434; "Mrs. Catt to Name New Federal Department," Woman Patriot, VI (April 1, 1922), 1. T "Constructive Legislation," Woman Citizen, V (November 20, 1920), 66; "How the National League Works Through the States," ibid., V (January 1, 1921), 848-831; "Missouri Women's Conference," ibid., V (January 15, 1921), 896; "Righting Old Wrongs," ibid., V (March 19, 1921), 1088-1089; "Progress in Delaware," ibid., V (April 9, 1921), 1155; "We are Coming Hundreds of Thousands Strong," ibid., 1158-1171; "Women Voters and State Legislatures," ibid., VI (June 4, 1921), 24-25; Report of Executive Secretary to the Annual Convention of the Minnesota League of Women Voters, October 18, 1921, N.L.W.V. Papers, Series II, Box 1, Minnesota file, Library of Congress; Marion Weston Cottle, "Government Efficiency," Women Lawyers' Journal, XI (May, 1922), 24; "The Organized Work of Women in One State," Journal of Social Forces, I (September, 1923), 613-613; Mary O Cowper, "The North Carolina League of Women Voters," ibid., II (March, 1924), 424; Julia Margaret Hicks, "League Life—On the Bill Side," Woman Citizen, XII (September, 1927), 28-29; also see: Anne F. Scott, "After Suffrage: The Southern Woman in the Twenties," Journal of Southern History, X X X (August, 1964), 298-318. • George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (New York, 1958), 99-103.

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for trade unions, "There seems to be no reason why the Industrial Centers of the Association," one contemporary stated, "should not take the place of trades unionism and more than fill it."9 Support for labor legislation by a feminist bloc tested its mettle, for it had to fight merciless red-baiting, retrogressive court decisions, a hostile and unsympathetic general public, and extreme feminists who questioned this bloc's commitment to the cause of women's equality. The entire labor movement suffered substantial setbacks in the 1920s at the hands of the courts, the open-shop movement, and labor's own conservatism. But unionism among women was especially weak due to the special character of industrial women and the unwillingness of labor unions to organize them.10 In the 1920s the number of wage-earning women rose from 8.5 million to 10.7 million; but the American Federation of Labor made little more than pro-forma gestures in their direction. It did not attempt to reach the unskilled worker, the category into which most women fell. In addition, the average industrial woman was single, younger than the average male worker, and tended to view her work as a temporary situation. Except for blacks, no class of adult workers was more exploited or vulnerable to exploitation than women. Their special problems produced special solutions: the creation of the National Consumers' League (begun in 1899), the National Women's Trade Union League (begun in 1903), the United States Women's Bureau (itself a product of the women's rights movement in 1920), and protective legislation. Protective legislation has become a target of the new feminism and of Women's Liberation of the 1970s, who believe it to be the work of misguided individuals seeking to block the advancement of women. But its original supporters saw such legislation as liberating, the result of hardheaded efforts to take advantage of Victorian sentimentality in order to win some protection for an under-class in a legal and political climate hostile to the labor movement. To appreciate how the effort was conducted, one need only to compare the concrete social and economic data that comprises Brandeis' brief, in Mueller v. Oregon of 1908, with the sentimental language used by Justice David Brewer in rendering the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Brewer stated that woman's 9

Harry A. Stewart, "Where the Ύ Stands Now," Good Housekeeping, LXX (June, 1920), 104. For a general history of the labor movement in the 1920s, see: Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Baltimore, I960); on the impact of red-baiting and battles with extreme feminists, see: Lemons, op. cil., chapters VHI-IX.

10

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

"physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal functions— having in view not merely her own health but the well-being of the race— justify legislation to protect her from the greed as well as the passion of men." 1 1 Protective legislation was not always written for women alone, but court decisions struck down laws protecting men. State and federal court decisions gradually reinterpretated the Constitution after 1890 to embody the conservative concepts of laissez faire and rights of property. "Liberty of contract" was almost always construed to benefit management—with protection of women being the exception. By rejecting an hours law for men ( 1903) while sustaining an hours law for women ( 1908), the Court made clear that laws limiting "liberty of contract" were only for the latter." Consequently, the National Consumers' League, Women's Trade Union League, YWCA, League of Women Voters, and the Women's Bureau continually worked to broaden protection for men as well as women. The most effective reform efforts resulted from the collaboration of trade-union women and their middle-class allies working through the women's legislative councils. In the 1920s the Women's Bureau, headed by Mary Anderson, a trade-union veteran, aided the effort. It publici2ed the information which had been left to the social workers and the Consumers' Leagues in the past, and it advocated a set of industrial standards similar to those of the National Women's Trade Union League. This included equal pay, a six-day work week, an eight-hour day, minimumwage laws, no night work for women, prohibition of women from certain industries which had been shown to be more dangerous for them than for men, improved working conditions, and the appointment of qualified women to positions of authority in state departments of labor.1* The A.F.L. labor program lagged far behind that of the Women's Trade Union League in the 1920s. Along with those items adopted by the Women's Bureau, the Women's Trade Union League called upon government to end the threat of unemployment with an adequate employment service, social insurance against sickness, accident, industrial disease, and unemployment, as well as to supply public works in de11 11 ls

Quoted in Bernstein, op. cit., 227. For a fuller discussion of this period and the courts' decisions, see: Richard C. Cortner, Tie Wagner Act Cases (Knoxville, 1964). N.W.T.U.L., Proceedings (1919), 6-7; ' T h e League of Women Voters," Life and Labor, IX (May, 1919), 118; N.L.W.V., Proceedings (1921) 58-59: Elizabeth Prezier, "Harnessing Industry With the Vote," Ladies Home Journal, X X X I X (November, 1922), 24.

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pressed times and to nationalize the mines, railroads, communications, and utilities.14 The National Consumers' League was among the first to endorse compulsory health insurance and social security; and, as already noted, the League of Women Voters supported liberal labor ideas and social security legislation. The period of rapid progress for protective industrial legislation occurred between 1911 and 1921, but continued effort in the 1920s brought only diminished success. The increasingly effective opposition included industrial and manufacturers' associations, vengeful anti-feminists, right-wing organizations like the Sentinels of the Republic, some business and professional women, and such extreme feminists as the National Woman's Party. The courts, cooperating with these adversaries, laid a withering hand on women's protective legislation. The minimum-wage movement advanced until 1923 when, in the name of "liberty of contract," it was nearly struck dead—and the National Woman's Party hailed the defeat of the statute involved as a victory for equal rights.1· In 1923 seventeen states and the District of Columbia had minimumwage laws for women; but by 1930, after a series of court reversals, only six remained in varying degrees of unenforcement and ineffectiveness. However, modest advances marked other types of protective legislation. In 1921, for example, thirteen states had night-work prohibitions; in 1931 there were sixteen. From 1921 to 1931 the number of states setting the forty-hour week increased from five to nine, and the eight-hour day for private employees rose from nine states to ten.1* Gearly the speed of reform was greatly slowed, but it was not due to any lack of effort by social feminists who continually fought the conservative tendencies of state legislatures across the nation. 14

"Program of the Committee oil Social and Industrial Reconstruction of the National Women's Trade Union League," Life and Labor, IX (March, 1919), 51-53; N.W.T.U.L., Proceedings (1919), 62; N.W.T.U.L., Proceedings (1922), 97-98; Valborg E. Fletty, "Public Services of Women's Organizations," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1952, 208. " The split which developed in the feminist ranks in the 1920s over the issue of protective legislation still exists. In the most recent hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment before Congress, professional women and the new feminists favored it, readily admitting it will end protective industrial laws, while the National Consumers' League, the trade-union women, and women associated with government agencies concerned with industrial women opposed it. For example, see: "Women's Equal Rights Amendment," Congressional Digest, L (January, 1971). 18 Night Work Laws in the United States, Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Bulletin No. 7 (Washington, 1920); Eight Hour Day in Federal and State Legislation, Bulletin No. 5 (1921); State Laws Affecting Working Woman, Bulletin No. 16 (1921); State Laws Affecting Working Women, Bulletin No. 63 (1927); Florence P. Smith, Chronological Development of Labor Legislation for Women in the United States, Bulletin No. 66-11 (1932).

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM Social workers led in the movement to eliminate the curse of child labor. The National Child Labor Committee (N.C.L.C.), begun in 1904, helped secure a federal child labor law in 1916, but a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional two years later. I l e N.C.L.C. spurred Congress to pass another measure in December 1918, to take effect in April 1919. While these laws stood, the N.C.L.C broadened its program to encompass the whole scope of child welfare. "Conservation of the child," a concept which included education, society, family, and the child's need to play, was the keynote of the child labor forces in 1919. They felt that child labor resulted from ignorance, poverty, lack of opportunity, and inadequate and inappropriate education.11 The United States Children's Bureau received a special appropriation in 1918, its "Children's Year"; and it involved most women's organizations in efforts to upgrade state requirements in infancy and maternity hygiene, child care, and mothers' pensions. Its results were significant only if measured by official state action. In 1917 eight states had child welfare divisions: by 1920 thirty-five had a Child Hygiene or Child Welfare Division. Thirty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii established committees to cooperate with the federal government.1* This apparatus became the basic machinery through which the SheppardTowner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act was to operate in the 1920s. This act of 1921 was the first great victory of organized women after winning the vote." The new bureaus and commissions opened a new block of positions for women physicians. It was not by chance that women's organizations lined up behind the Sheppard-Towner Act and the Child Labor Amendment in the 1920s, or that women physicians endorsed these proposals when the A.M.A. denounced them as socialism arnd state medicine. Biding on a tide of concern for children, the American Child Hygiene Association, N.C.L.C., National Consumers' League, Women's Trade Union League, and the League of Women Voters were successful from 1918 to 1924 in persuading individual states to elevate staindards in child welfare. The women's legislative lobbies in many staites worked to have children's codes drawn up and adopted. Such codes would embody all laws relating to children: work, guardianship, age of For a full discussion of the 'The Crusade for Children," see: Clarke Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (Minneapolis, 1963), 12-15, 28-58. 1 1 '"Children's Bureau Handicapped by Inadequate Appropriations," Medical Womatfs Journal, X X V I I (June, 1920), 172-173. " J I . Stanley Lemons, "The Sheppard-Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920s," Journal of American Hittory, LV (March, 1969), 776-786. 17

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584

consent, juvenile delinquency, care of the handicapped and mentally retarded, child support, and school attendance. By 1921 seventeen states had commissions drafting a children's code, and 1924 found twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia with code commissions.20 The Supreme Court derailed this broad view in 1922 by declaring that the second federal child labor law was also unconstitutional. Not until near the end of the decade did the crusaders return to the comprehensive approach. The 1922 setback caused proponents of federal action to quarrel over the question of what to do next. Almost immediately a constitutional amendment was introduced, but both the wording and the timing caused much disagreement. The majority, led by Florence Kelley, wanted an amendment to enable Congress to legislate; but a minority, led by Julia Lathrop, who had only recently resigned as head of the Children's Bureau, felt that the times were inauspicious. Miss Kelley, however, continued to seek an amendment. Believing that the National Child Labor Committee was dragging its feet, she relied upon the National Consumers' League and the other women's groups. She worked primarily through the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, and its members did not disappoint her. Finally, a new amendment was introduced, and backed by twenty organizations—mostly women's—it easily passed Congress in June 1924. Rapid passage of the Amendment was a sweet victory. It gave hope at a time when the reform impulse was weakening. In 1925 those groups favoring the amendment formed a coordinating committee called Organizations Associated for Ratification of the Child Labor Amendment. Most of the associated organizations were women's organizations, and the centrality of women to this drive was demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the alliance were nearly all women: Mrs. Arthur Watkins ( P T A ) was chairman, Julia Lathrop was vice-chairman, Marguerite Owen ( N . L . W . V . ) was secretary-treasurer, and the steering committee consisted of four women, Rose Schneiderman and Nelle Swartz ( N . W . T . U . L . ) , Florence Kelley (N.C.L.), Irene Osgood Andrews (American Association for Labor Legislation), and two men, Owen Lovejoy and Wiley Swift (N.C.L.C.). But Julia Lathrop was right; the times were wrong, and their hopes were dashed by a resounding defeat in an "advisory referendum" in Massachusetts and a nearly complete rejection of the amendment by state legislatures. Of the forty-two state 10

"The Carrie Chapman Catt Citizenship Course: The Work of the Children's Bureau," Woman Citizen, V (January 22, 1921), 916-917; "Child Welfare Legislation," Mtdical Woman's Journal, X X X I (March, 1924), 79.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM legislatures which met in 1924 and 1925, only four ratified; and the total was only six by 1930. A cascade of red-baiting directed against the women's organizations produced internal dissension within them. The General Federation of Women's Clubs continued its endorsement of the amendment after a struggle, but withdrew from the Women's Joint Congressional Committee. The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Qubs withdrew its endorsement for a year before coming out weakly again in 1927. But other groups, such as the Medical Women's National Association, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Trade Union League, remained steadfast. The National Child Labor Committee became increasingly timid after 1926, which made the League of Women Voters bitter toward it and caused a despairing Florence Kelley to lament: "Why, why did I ever help to start the National Child Labor Committee?"" The general protection of women and children had to wait upon the New Deal. T h e Child Labor Amendment was revived for another attempt at ratification in 1933 but resulted in little progress; however, New Deal legislation made further efforts unnecessary since in most cases it eliminated the blight of child labor. Industrial women benefited from New Deal labor reforms: minimum wages, right of collective bargaining, social security, and hours legislation. Laws such as minimum wages, which covered women only in previous times, now came to include men. The crisis of the Depression supplied the impetus for passage and fulfillment of labor legislation for which substantial numbers of "social feminists" had fought in the 1920s. They partly carried the reform movement in this decade. Even in defeat, they supported and promoted various causes which won out in the more favorable reform climate of the 1930s.

"Florence Kelley to Lillian Wald, April 13, 1927; Grace Abbott to Wald, April 7, 1927, Lillian Wald MSS, file 1, drawer 5. New York Public Library. For a more complete story of the defeat of the child labor amendment, see: Richard B. Sherman, 'The Rejection of the Child Labor Amendment,' 'Mid-America, XLV (January, 196}), 3-17.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN T H E UNITED STATES

After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties By A N N E

FIROR

SCOTT

I N FEW PARTS OF THE COUNTRY WAS THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

awaited with higher expectations than among an earnest group of Southern women. Not unlike the present-day Southern liberal who yearns for a federal civil rights bill because the road to state and local legislation is so long and rocky, Southern women who had labored for state suffrage and for social reform against an opposing tide looked to the federal amendment for help. For them the vote had also become a symbol of something much larger— the image of the "new woman." Long constrained by Southern tradition about woman's place in Southern life, they saw the amendment as a grant of freedom and a new measure of independence. One of these women remarked in a private letter in 1920 that she was planning a trip to Europe because "once we really get into politics (i. e., once the suffrage amendment is ratified) I will never be able to get away."1 Another, in North Carolina, thought "the advent of women into political life" would mean "the loosening of a great moral force which will modify and soften the relentlessly selfish economic forces of trade and industry in their relation to government. The ideals of democracy and of social and human welfare will undoubtedly receive a great impetus."2 For many years these earnest women had organized themselves, talked to legislators, worked for or against congressmen in their home districts, testified at hearings, haunted the polls on election day, cajoled money, written newspaper articles, watched the progress of more advanced Northern and Western women—and now, at last, had the federal help that promised to open the way to substantial achievement. By 1920 Southern women had come to exert increasing in1 Madeline McDowell Breckinridge to Allie S. Dickson, March 20, 1920, in Breckinridge Family Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). 1 Notes for speech in Mary O. Cowper Papers (Mrs. Cowper, Durham, N. C.).

MRS. SCOTT

is assistant professor of history in Duke University.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

fluence in public affairs, but many of the problems that concerned them were still unsolved: the dislocations caused by industrialization, the conditions of work for women and children, the inadequacies of the educational system, the lack of opportunity for many children, prison conditions, the ravages of alcohol and disease, injustice to Negro citizens. To all such problems, and some new ones they would discover along the way, the newly enfranchised women now addressed themselves with renewed hope. Their successes as well as their failures have tended to vanish—in Vann Woodward's phrase—in that twilight zone between living memory and written history. An examination of what they tried to do, of the goals reached, the obstacles encountered, the failures endured, throws new light on the South in the twenties and upon the springs and motives behind the emancipation of Southern women. What this record shows will depend upon the questions we ask. If we ask whether woman suffrage led to progress in social reform in the Southern· states and to a more active political life for women, the answer is clearly that it did. If we ask in addition whether the broader hope, the dream of a new life for Southern women in which their independence, their right to think for themselves, to work for the things they believed in, to be respected as individuals regardless of sex, was accomplished in the twenties, the answer must be much more qualified. It may be worth recalling at the outset that early in the nineteenth century the South had adopted a more rigid definition of the role of women than any other part of the country and had elevated that definition to the position of a myth. There were inherent contradictions in the elements of women's role as the culture defined it: women were supposed to be beautiful, gentle, efficient, morally superior, and, at the same time, ready to accept without question the doctrine of male superiority and authority. On matters not domestic they were to be seen and not heard, while in the domestic sphere it was taken for granted that a woman would rule. For those without inherited means, marriage was the only road to economic security (as for inherited wealth, its control passed at marriage into the hands of the husband). For those who did not marry, the only acceptable pattern was to become the pensioner—and often de facto servant—of some male relative. Hints that some women felt the contradictory nature of these expectations, and resented them, appeared from time to time before the Civil War. After the war, changes which seemed

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likely to alter the culture pattern appeared on all sides; but, as part of the comforting glorification of the past with which the South tended to evade present problems, the image of the Southern Lady—whatever the reality—survived relatively unchanged.8 The force of this cultural image was so strong that Southern women had to follow a more devious road to emancipation than those elsewhere. It was only after long apprenticeship in such outwardly safe organizations as church societies and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union that they began to venture into women's clubs and suffrage organizations.4 From this process a few women emerged as recognized leaders. These few had in common impressive social standing and family background, intelligence, courage, and a degree of inner security that permitted them to survive criticism. Such were Madeline Breckinridge in Kentucky, Mary Munford in Virginia, Nellie Somerville in Mississippi, Sallie Cotten in North Carolina, Pattie Jacobs in Alabama—each highly respected in her own state by men as well as women.5 Now, with the power of the ballot and the new freedom it symbolized, they hoped not only to be more effective in public life but also to modify significantly Southern thought about the proper role of women.· * W. J. Cash goes so far as to argue that woman's role was more rigidly defined after Appomattox and emancipation than before. The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 131. He cites no evidence; and, on the basis of much reading in diaries, letters, newspapers, and church and organization records, I think he overstates his case. «Anne Firor Scott, T h e "New Woman' in the New South," South Atlantic Quarterly, LXI (Autumn 1962), 473-83. 8 The obituaries upon Madeline Breckinridge's untimely death in 1920 suggest she was Kentucky's leading citizen as well as its leading woman. Certainly she had a hand in almost every reform movement in that state for twenty years; and, by way of the Lexington, Ky., Herald, her voice was widely heard. A close study of her biography reveals all the elements that created the Southern "woman movement" See Sophronisba Preston Breckinridge, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, a Leader in the New South (Chicago, 1921 ) and Breckinridge Family Papers. • Madeline Breckinridge, for example, regularly advised every woman to read Margaret Fuller, John Stuart Mill, and Olive Shreiner. The private papers of the women upon whom this study is centered reveal their vision of an ideal woman, educated and fully developed and free to undertake the work that interested her most They were so often criticised for wanting to "be like men" that it is worth pointing out that their ideal human being was not a man but some other woman (Jane Addams, Anna Howard Shaw, Frances Willard, for example) and that they did not think men were doing a very good job with politics and government or in shaping society generally. What they aimed for was not freedom to be like men but freedom to be themselves. Economic independence loomed large in the minds of the pioneers—they had nothing against marriage, and most were married, but they objected to it as an economic necessity. It is interesting to find exactly the same arguments in the most recent compre-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

They were well aware that the older image of the Southern Lady, although undergoing modification in a number of ways, was still very much alive in 1920. The image was, of course, made up of a number of components, some external: beauty, gentleness, winning ways. Other components related to appropriate behavior: modesty, domesticity, chastity, and submission to male opinions. It was a lovely image that could be maintained with a minimum of strain whenever the woman in question was lucky enough to be well endowed with the outward qualities (the proportionate number so endowed was doubtless about the same in 1920 as in 1820). But it was the definition of appropriate behavior that women were most anxious to modify. In earlier years the effective leaders of the movement had had to conform behavior to the image. As a Virginia woman remarked in 1918, "the wise suffrage leaders here have realized . . . that success depends upon showing their cause to be compatible with the essentials of the Virginia tradition of womanliness, and both instinct and judgment have prevented the adoption here of the more aggressive forms of campaigning."7 In the twenties, maintaining the ladylike image was still considered to be good politics, but the active women continued to alter behavior remarkably. A few of the more radical wanted to dispense, once and for all, with what they called the "chivalric nonsense" that put woman on a pedestal in order to keep her out of the affairs of the real world. A young North Carolina woman, for example, reflected: Last year I travelled from one end of our State to another. I saw thousands of women, old and young, mothers and little girls, working in stores and factories ten or eleven or twelve hours a day; or worse, working in the factory all night, and taking care of their homes by day. And I asked, where is this chivalry that so protects women? And I saw working in the fields, hoeing cotton and com and doing all kinds of hard labor, women and children, white as well as black. And again I asked, whom does chivalry protect? In the last session of the legislature, I heard arguments about a bill which would have raised the hensive work on the subject, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, trans, and ed. (New York, 1953). Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow were active suffrage women, and their novels are ridi in oblique attacks on the existing system. See especially Glasgow, Virginia (New York, 1913) and Johnston, Hagar (Boston, 1913). Both novels will repay careful reading for anyone interested in the inner springs of the woman movement. T Orie Latham Hatcher, "The Virginia Man and the New Era for Women," Nation, CVI (June 1, 1918), 651.

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amount allowed from the estate to a widow and her children for the first year of widowhood. And many were the jokes made and the slurs slung about mothers who would spend the amount for silk stockings instead of on the care of children. Respect for motherhood, reverence for womanhood, was not the ruling thought when the bill was considered, for it was voted down. It was not the political rights nor any of the deeds of the "new woman" who took the working women from their homes and made them labor as if there was no such thing as chivalry and pedestals. . . . Genesis says that after the Lord had created male and female, he gave them dominion over the earth and then he rested. The two were created to work out welfare for all on earth. Why not go on with the work and stop babbling about chivalry when there is no chivalry except for the small class whosefinancialconditions prevents their needing it.8 The older ideal of the Southern Lady cropped up in another way when the opponents of reforms for which women worked used it as a weapon. It was hardly politic to argue in public that one believed in child labor or enjoyed the profits that stemmed from women laboring long hours into the night, but—given the Southern frame of reference—it was quite possible to attack the proponents of reform on the ground that they were "unwomanly" and thus to discredit the cause for which they fought. This was done repeatedly, and the cry was often echoed, of course, by other men who feared for their own domestic comforts. Even before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified state suffrage organizations began to turn themselves into leagues of women voters with the announced purpose of educating newly enfranchised citizens and working for "needed legislation." Leaders gathered in Chicago for intensive training, organized by a political scientist from the University of Chicago, and went home with instructions to pass along all they had learned. "Citizenship schools" blossomed over the Southern landscape, and courses with reading lists worthy of graduate instruction in political science were found side by side with mundane classes in election law, registration procedures, and How to Mark a Ballot. The troops were receiving basic training.® At the same time every state had its legislative council in which 8 Mary O. Cowper, "That Pedestal Again," North Carolina League of Women Voters, Monthly News, November 1927. See also the very interesting series of articles by Nell Battle Lewis in Raleigh, N. C., Netos and Observer, May 1920, in which she discusses the question thoroughly and perceptively. * Charles E. Merriam, The Chicago Citizenship School," Journal of Social Forces, I (September 1923), 600.

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women's groups of the most diverse kinds joined together to work for legislation. The Alabama council was typical; it was made up of sixteen organizations, ranging from the Women's Trade Union League to the Methodist Home Missionary Council. Despite their diverse origins the organized women were in surprising accord on legislative goals. Whether the goal was a social reform such as the abolition of child labor, or a political one such as the reorganization of thé state government, veterans of the suffrage movement were political realists and skilled lobbyists. Their lobbying technique, developed before they had any votes to deliver, was based upon tact and superior information rather than upon threats. Though they were trying to throw off the shackles of chivalry, women voters were not above appealing for chivalric responses in a good cause. An example of typical methods may be seen in a letter from a Virginia lady of the old school describing her efforts to persuade Congress to adopt a child labor amendment: I got busy about the child labor amendment and stirred up the Virginia Federation of Labor and the Ministerial Union of Richmond which means all the Protestant clergymen of the city . . . the Federation of labor sent official communications to all senators and all congressmen and our papers have given us good notices. . . . I carried your summary of the situation to our leading morning paper and he promised to use it and comment on it editorially.10 A favorite device was the publication of complete lists of legislators with their views on various issues presented for the voters' information. Indeed, education of the electorate was a basic technique, and there was always an effort to develop support for their programs among "the people back home." The experience of the suffrage campaign came into play at every tum. The ideological milieu of the twenties was nowhere conducive to social reform. The Red Scare had affected every part of the country, and programs considered mild in 1912 were now labeled Bolshevik.11 The reform-minded women in the South were lit1 0 Kate Pleasants Minor to Mrs. John J. O'Connor, April 18, 1924, in League of Women Voters of the United States Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Virginia file. 1 1 Note, for example, die comment of the foremost woman progressive of the day: "Social progress during the decade from 1919 to 1929 was conditioned at every turn by the fact that we were living in the midst of post-war psychology. . . . Any proposed change was suspect, even those efforts that nad been considered praiseworthy before the war. To advance new ideas was to be radical, or even a bolshevik. . . . Throughout the decade this fear of change, this tendency to play

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tie disturbed at the outset by the fact that many of the causes in which they had long been interested were now termed radical. The president of the Tennessee League of Women Voters remarked mildly, Some good souls are pleased to call our ideas socialistic. They are indeed uncomfortable often for some folk. Some timid souls of both sexes are only half converted to the new order . . . [yet] every clear thinking, right feeling and high minded man and woman should consecrate Ids best talents to the gradual re-organization of society, national and international.12 The ink was scarcely dry upon the suffrage amendment before legislatures began to realize that women now expected more respectful attention than in the past. "The men were scared to death of what the women might do," one North Carolina woman recalled.18 In that state, as a measure of insurance against reprisal for having rejected the suffrage amendment, the governor and legislature agreed to appoint the president of the Federated Clubs as commissioner of charities and public welfare, one legislator being overheard to remark that she was "pretty, anyway, and won't give us any trouble." The insurance turned out to be inadequate, for in short order North Carolina women, abetted behind the scenes by the same pretty welfare commissioner, were demanding that the Woman's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor be invited to survey the working conditions of women in North Carolina textile mills. Textile manufacturing was a major economic interest in the state, and working conditions in the mills were frequently bad, safe was registered most conspicuously in the fields of politics, but it spread over into other fields as well." Jane Addams, The Second Twenty years at Hull House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (New York, 1930), 153. Or this characterization from the center of Southern liberalism: "Besides there is mighty little freedom of opinion anywhere in the old South as you know. . . E. C. Branson to R. W. Hogan, Chapel Hill, N. C., December 17, 1922, in Eugene Cunningham Branson Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library ). 1 1 Report of the President, Tennessee League of Women Voters, January 1923, in League of Women Voters Papers, Tennessee file. ι» Interview with Mrs. Kate Burr Johnson of Raleigh, N. C., November 1, 1963. See also comment of the Georgia women who drew up a bill in 1921 to remove the civil disabilities of women: These legislators were so courteous and obliging the women could scarcely believe it was the Georgia Legislature. They gave everything asked for and asked 'is there anything more we can do for you?1 " Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others (eds.), The History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., New York, 1881-1922), VI, 142.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

wages were low, and many children were employed. The millowners reacted strongly. The women were accused of being unwomanly to mix in things about which they knew nothing, of being dangerous radicals or at the very least dupes of Northern manufacturers bent on spoiling the competitive advantage that child labor and cheap female labor gave the South. The YWCA, one of the groups joining in the request for a survey, was threatened with a loss of contributions. The state president of the League of Women Voters was hailed before a self-constituted jury of millmen and lectured severely. The suggestion reached her that her husband's sales of mill machinery would diminish rapidly if she and the league continued their interest in women's working conditions. Families divided as wives argued with husbands about the survey. Textile men brought pressure upon the governor and upon agencies of the state government. In 1926 the governor, while standing firm against allowing "outsiders" to meddle in North Carolina's business, agreed to order his own Child Welfare Department to make the study—but nothing happened. In 1929 when the Gastonia strike became a national issue, the North Carolina League of Women Voters, in publishing an explanation of the strikers' side of the argument, remarked that if the women's request for a survey of working conditions had been granted the problems that had led to a bloody strike might have been ameliorated.14 North Carolina women were more successful in their efforts to bring about stronger state child labor laws.15 In every Southern state, in fact, women worked strenuously against the use of child labor. Many of them supported the federal child labor amendment that Congress adopted in 1924 and then went on to work for its ratification by their state legislatures. In the meantime, an intensive effort to establish broad programs of child welfare took shape. In Virginia, for example, the women urged the legislature to set up a Children's Code Commission and, having The story of the long fight between millmen and North Carolina women's groups is covered in detail in Mary O. Cowper Papers. Mrs. Cowper was executive secretary of the North Carolina League of Women Voters. The outlines as given here are confirmed by Mrs. Kate Burr Johnson, who was commissioner of welfare during the 1920s and was working behind the scenes with the women's groups. For contemporary analysis, see Nell Battle Lewis, "The University of North Carolina Gets Its Orders," Nation, CXXII (February 3, 1926), 114-15. Nora Houston of Virginia who was active in the effort to improve working conditions was also a painter and left at her death a dramatic painting of the Gastonia strike. « North Carolina League of Women Voters, Monthly News, 1922-1926.

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secured it, persuaded the governor to appoint five of their number to it. When the commission brought in twenty-four recommendations for new laws, ranging from a statewide juvenile court system to compulsory education, the women turned their attention once more to the legislature, and as a result of their unceasing toil eighteen of the twenty-four recommendations became law in the 1922 session.1' That same year a combination of women's groups in Georgia secured the passage of a children's code, a child-placement bill, and a training school bill but failed when they joined forces with the Federation of Labor for a legislative limitation on hours of work for women. The hearing on this last proposal brought out "every cotton mill man in Georgia," and, while the eloquent testimony of Mrs. Elliott Cheatham persuaded the committee to report the bill, the millowners' influence in the legislature prevented it from being brought to a vote. Two years later efforts to secure ratification of the federal child labor amendment also failed in the Georgia legislature, and women in the state then turned to efforts to strengthen state laws.17 Similar issues, all of them demonstrating the increasing influence of women, appeared in the other Southern states. In Arkansas, where as early as 1919 the suffrage organization had come out for minimum wages and maximum hours in all cotton mills, the federal child labor amendment was ratified by the legislature. Credit was given jointly to a woman legislator, the Arkansas Federation of Labor, and the women's organizations. The wife of the man who had led the floor fight against the amendment was reported to be delighted that he had failed; of her it was said, "she expressed the spirit of Arkansas women in politics."18 One result of the growing movement against the exploitation of women and children in the mills was an increasingly close association between Southern women and the labor movement. Lucy Randolph Mason, bluest of Virginia bluebloods, who was to become an organizer for the CIO, noted in 1930: "For a number of years many of us southern women have been concerned over the lack of social control in the development of southern in14 Adele Clark Papers (Miss Clark, Richmond). Miss Clark helped organize the campaign. See also Eudora Ramsay Richardson, "Liberals in Richmond,' Plain Talk, VI (February 1930), 213-19. 1 1 Mrs. E. B. Chamberlain to Mrs. Solon Jacobs, October 25, 1922, and Report to Director of Southeastern Region, January 10, 1924, in League of Women Voters Papers, Georgia file. 1 8 Miss Earl Chambers to Marguerite Owen, October 2, 1924, ibid., Arkansas file.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

dustry. Vast numbers of southern women are becoming more acutely conscious of the need of safeguards, which have already been supplied by most of the states. . . ."1β Association with labor unions actually had begun during the fight for suffrage when trade unions, along with the Farmers Alliances, were virtually the only male organizations to support woman suffrage. As early as 1910 the Georgia Suffrage Association reported holding its convention in the halls of "the Federation of Labor, its true friend,"20 Now, in the twenties, women's interests were in line with labor concerns, and they not only found a good press in liberal journals such as the New Republic but also co-operated with labor unions.21 Particularly important in deepening woman's concern for industrial labor was the work of the YWCA. Even before the first World War, the YWCA had undertaken to bring college students in touch with the facts of industrial life, and in the twenties a student-industrial movement flourished. Its legislative program included the abatement of poverty, abolition of child labor, a living wage as a minimum in every industry, an eight-hour day, and protection of workers from the hardships of continued unemployment. Through the YWCA, students at Randolph Macon were studying the problems of coal miners, while those at Converse delved into social legislation, and at Westhampton, unemployment Girls from these and other colleges served on a regional committee for student-industrial co-operation, seeking, as they put it, to Christianize the social order.22 Part of this program included a series of summer institutes for factory girls that by 1927 had evolved into the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, directed and financed by Southern women. The school grew steadily through the twenties and early thirties. The nature of its sympathies was evident in 1928 when strikers from the Marion Manufacturing Company were invited to the campus to tell their story and were afterward joined by students and faculty in a march through Marion. It was the opinion of the »» Lucy R. Mason to Henry P. Kendal], December 31, 1930, in Lucy Randolph Mason Papers (Manuscripts Collection, Duke University Library, Durham, N. C.). »o Stanton and others ( eds. ), History of Woman Suffrage, VI, 125. 2 1 There is ample evidence for this in League of Women Voters Papers, state files, and Mary O. Cowper Papers. Common interests made inevitably for co-operation. 22 Gladys Biyson, student secretary, YWCA, to Lucy Somerville, March 23, 1923, in Somerville Family Papers (Woman's Archives, Radcliffe College Library, Cambridge, Mass.).

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Nation that "This small group of women . . . are playing an important part in the fight against economic slavery in the South."2* When unionization became a genuine possibility during the New Deal, a large proportion of the women graduates of the Summer School became active organizers. There is something appealing in the picture of a group of well-to-do Southern women, of ladylike mien, busy training labor organizers. Nor is there the least doubt, from the record, that they knew what they were doing. They were not innocent philanthropists taken in by hardbitten radicals.*4 The Southern Council on Women and Children in Industry, organized in 1931 to bring about a shorter working day and an end to night work in all the textile states, was another joint effort growing out of the experience of women in their separate states. The council hired Lucy Mason to organize their campaign. Calling to the colors a few progressive-minded millmen who agreed with her objectives, she then set out to convert some of those who did not agree, recognizing clearly that pressure on the legislatures could not succeed without the support of some of the millowners.®5 From a national point of view the concern for child welfare was reflected in the passage in 1921, largely due to the work of women over the nation, of the Sheppard-Towner Act for maternal and infant health. Nineteen of twenty-six Southern senators voted for the bill. In the House, 91 of the 279 votes in support of the bill came from the South and only 9 of 39 votes against it.28 This support for a federal welfare program from Southern members of Congress is less impressive than the enormous amount of follow-up work that Southern women undertook to secure appropriation of the required matching funds from state legislatures and then to report on the actual results of the public health work thus instituted. It is not too much to say that the co-operative state work within the framework of the Sheppard-Towner Act brought about a revolution in maternal and infant health.27 " Marion Bonner, "Behind the Southern Textile Strikes," Nation, CXXIX (October 2,1929), 352. 1 4 See Lucy P. Gamer, "An Education Opportunity for Industrial Girls," Journal of Social Forcea, I (September 1923), 612-13, and Alice M. Baldwin Papen (Manuscripts Collection, Duke University Library). 1 5 Lucy Randolph Mason Papers, box 1. " Congressional Record, 67 Cong., 1 Sess., 4216, 8036-37. " T h i s story is reflected in detail in League of Women Voters Papers, state files. See especially all the state-by-state reports on. the operation of the law and

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

In some ways the most intriguing of all the public activities of Southern women in the twenties was their racial work. The roots went back at least to 1901 when Miss Belle Bennett encouraged the Woman's Board of Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to undertake work among Negro girls and offered a personal contribution to that end. From that year forward the board annually appropriated money in behalf of work among Negroes. In 1910 another Methodist, Mary DeBardelben of Alabama, volunteered for missionary service, not in far-off lands but among Southern Negroes. In 1915 yet another Southern Methodist, Mrs. Lily H. Hammond, published a pathbreaking book in which she pleaded for a permanent burial of the "old Negro mammy" and some sensible attention to the needs of Mammy's daughters.18 The real breakthrough came in 1920 at an extraordinary meeting of Southern churchwomen in Memphis at which four Negro women spoke forthrightly of the needs of Southern Negroes. One of them told of having been forcibly removed by twelve white men from a Pullman car while on her way to Memphis. In the emotional stir of the moment, the ninety-odd white women, representing a number of churches, agreed that talk was not enough and constituted themselves the Woman's Department of the Commission on Inter-racial Cooperation. Headed by Mrs. Luke Johnson of Griffin, Georgia, and supported by leading women in every state, units of tms organization set up interracial committees to attack common social and economic problems. When the National League of Women Voters decided in 1924 to establish a Committee on Negro Problems with membership from every state that had more than fifteen per cent Negro population, members from eight Southern states accepted appointment. Many of these women had been active in their local interracial committees, of which there were eventually some eight hundred functioning in the South. In Tennessee white women organized a special citizenship school for Negro women. Many of die committeewomen took personal responsibility for their Negro fellow citizens, as did Mary Cooke Branch Munford of Richthe collection of letters from Texas women who benefited from i t Reports of the Children's Bureau also contain details of the actual workings of the law. " Noreen Dunn Tatum, A Crown of Service: A Story of Woman's Work in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, from 1878-1940 (Nashville, I960), 32, 65, 234; Lily Hardy Hammond, In Black and White: An Interpretation of Southern Life (New York, 1914). See also Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of WHO. Alexander (Chicago, 1961), 82-96.

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mond, who made a room of her house permanently available to Negroes for public meetings, or a busy doctor's wife in Alabama who waged a one-woman campaign for better Negro education. When the Richmond city council considered a segregation statute in 1929, it was Lucy Randolph Mason, almost singlehandedly, who brought about its defeat.29 The most spectacular work in this field began in the thirties. It started with the organization in 1930, under the imaginative leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames, a Texas woman who had been active in a dozen reform movements, of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. At its peak this organization had 40,000 small-town and rural churchwomen enrolled in an effort to put an end to the most spectacularly disgraceful as>ect of the Southern race problem. While the federal antilynching aw was blocked in the United States Senate, this band of Southem women took upon themselves the sometimes heroic responsibility of opposing any specific threat of a lynching in their own towns or counties. The crusade against lynching was the most dramatic aspect of women's interracial work. Less visible, but of great significance, was the way in which groups of white and Negro women in the twenties were sitting down together to tackle common problems in an atmosphere of forthright discussion. Though a few Negro women were careful publicly to eschew any desire for social equality, most of them hammered away on equal rights in court, an end to segregation and discrimination in transportation, the Negro's need for the ballot, and every other sensitive issue that stood between whites and blacks in the South during this period of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.30 Although women's interests tended to center upon measures that had a humanitarian element, especially those affecting disadvantaged groups and children, they devoted much time to more strictly political questions. After learning the mechanics of government, they turned their efforts to the improvement of governmental organizations. Studies of local and state governmental structure were published and used in schools and by other organ-

{

18 Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 2, 1929. See also Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York, 1947) for evidence of the significance of the YWCA in breaking through traditional racial barriers. 30 The story of women's interracial work is in Jessie Daniel Ames Papers ( Mrs. Ames, Tryon, N. C. ). Mrs. Ames pioneered the antilynching group and was for twelve years executive secretary of the Woman's Department of the Inter-Racial Commission. What is given here is a mere glimpse into a complex and fascinating story that deserves a chapter or a book all to itself.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

izatíons. In Virginia in 1922 women's groups worked for an executive budget and improved election laws. A year later the state legislative chairman of the Virginia League of Women Voters reported that she was in daily attendance at budget hearings.31 In 1924 her organization concentrated its attention on the improvement of tax administration and reported it had won an initial skirmish in the legislature by securing active consideration of the question despite orders from the Democratic machine that the subject was not to be raised. In the same legislature Virginia women voters worked for a bill to create a uniform fiscal year and were successful in their effort.32 The League had also supported bills, that failed to pass, for civil service, creation of a conservation department, county government reform, and reforms in the state educational machinery. Similar interests and similar campaigns developed in other states. Women in Georgia and Tennessee, after initial forays into the question of more efficient government, became convinced that the supreme obstacle lay in outmoded state constitutions; and in both states campaigns for constitutional reform were launched in the twenties and were eventually successful.83 Kentucky women in 1927 began to work for home rule for cities, improvements in local charters, and the adoption of city manager government. To an interest in the structure of government was added a concern for making government more democratic. Because of their long exclusion from politics, women were sensitive to the implications of "consent of the governed." It was they who invented the now commonplace idea of "getting out the vote." In some places women's work led to spectacular increases in the percentage of qualified voters going to the polls. In Alabama 54.4% of the qualified voters went to the polls in 1924 after women sponsored a get-out-the-vote campaign, compared to less than 30X in 1920. One county, where the women had been particularly active, got out 84.1% of its qualified voters.84 Florida in the same year reported a 65.935 increase over 1920 in the qualified voters going to the polls.38 The poll tax was the subject of dual concern. Women's groups 31 Nora Houston to Maud Wood Park, December 12, 1923, in League of Women Voters Papers, Virginia file. 3 2 Miss M. E. Pidgeon to Belle Sherwin, 1924, ibid. 33 Ibid., Georgia and Tennessee files. 3 4 Report on the Get Out the Vote Campaign, November 29, 1924, ibid., Alabama file. 3 5 Mrs. J. B. O'Hara to Ann Webster, September 2, 1924, ibid., Florida file.

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opposed the tax, but in the meantime they set out to collect money for the payment of poll taxes in order to increase the number of qualified voters. In 1925 Louisiana women collected $30,000 to this end. The work of North Carolina women for the Australian ballot, that finally succeeded in 1929, was part of the same interest in making the operation of government more democratic. Close to home, yet a long way from women's traditional concerns, were two other political issues that developed strength in Southern women's groups in the twenties: government ownership of Muscle Shoals and the regulation of utility rates. Interest in both these questions developed from studies of the cost of living, and women in Alabama and Tennessee became enthusiastic supporters of what was to become the Tennessee Valley Authority. On these as on other questions the politically active women seem to have taken a pragmatic view without much concern for traditional free enterprise arguments. In all their enterprises, political or social, women knew that the main road to influence lay through political parties. Interest in artisan politics antedated suffrage, and unofficially some women ad long taken an interest in party fortunes. It had been the accepted doctrine that the national suffrage organization should be nonpartisan since it hoped to get support from both parties for the national amendment. That this principle was occasionally honored in the breach is made clear when we find Jane Addams trying to recruit Jean Gordon of Louisiana for the Progressive party in 1912 or discover Mrs. Breckinridge on a speaking tour for die Democrats in 1916. A keen interest in party methods and organization had been one of the by-products of the highly organized national suffrage campaign.86 Carrie Chapman Catt, the commanding general of the final suffrage drive, was intent that women should find their way not just to the outskirts but to the center of power in the political parties. At the Victory Convention in Chicago in 1920 she had told them:

E

The next battle is going to be inside the parties, and we are not going to stay outside and let all the reactionaries have their way on the inside! Within every party there is a struggle between progressive and reactionary elements. Candidates are a compromise between these extremes. You will be disillusioned, you will find yourselves in the political penumbra where most of the men are. They will be glad to see 8 4 See Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (New York, 1924) and Maud Wood Park, Front Door Lobby, Edna Lamprey Stantia!, ed. (Boston, I960).

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

you, you will be flattered. But if you stay long enough you will discover a little denser thing which is the umbra of the political party— the people who are picking the candidates, doing the real work that you and the men sanction at the polls. You won't be welcome, but there is the place to go. You will see the real thing in the center with the door locked tight. You will have a hard fight before you get inside . . . but you must move right up to the center.*7 At the outset, a considerable number of Southern women set out to become active in party politics. Party organizations welcomed them, if not with enthusiasm at least with a realistic appreciation of their potential voting power. Some states began at once the custom that has since become standard of appointing a woman as vice-chairman of the state party committee. A considerable number of Southern women showed interest in running for elective office; and, though numerous obstacles lay between almost any woman and nomination, enough persisted so that by 1930 only Louisiana had yet to have women in the state legislature. But only a few, a very few, Southern women seem to nave made their way to that mysterious center of power to which Mrs. Catt had directed them. One of these was Mrs. Nellie Nugent Somerville of Greenville, Mississippi, whose political influence preceded the Nineteenth Amendment. As soon as it was legal to do so she ran for the state legislature in a campaign that was a model of thorough organization and was elected. She had been observing party organization long enough to know the ropes, and she hoped the newly enfranchised women would be similarly observant, She advised them to be certain they had a hand in choosing county committees and reminded them: "It now becomes the duty of women voters to take lively interests in the details of political machinery. When any meeting or election is ordered by your political party be sure you take part in it."*8 The chief obstacle to following such advice was the unwillingness of male politicians to promote women of independent mind and political skill. They preferred more amenable females, and hence the forthright and well-trained suffrage veterans often found themselves at odds with the entrenched politicians.*· "Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, a Biography (New York, 1944), 325-26. " Article in Jackson, Miss., Woman Voter, November 19, 1923. For the details of Mrs. Somerville's campaign, see letters of her daughter, September 1923, in Somerville Family Papers. *· See analysis of first woman vice chairman of the Democratic National Com-

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Mrs. Somerville herself managed to surmount the obstacles, and in 1924 Mississippi Democrats were divided into Somerville and Percy factions. At the showdown, hers won. She also served as a member of the committee on permanent organization of the 1924 Democratic National Convention and marshaled William G. McAdoo supporters in imposing array.40 Her record in the legislature suggests that she understood the effective use of political power. When a bill she had initiated failed to pass, the fact was reported as news—as a rule anything she offered did pass— and her colleagues were frequently quoted in praise of her hard work and effectiveness as a lawmaker.41 Another politically minded woman who reached a position of genuine power in the party was Sue Shelton White of Tennessee, an independent comi: reporter, secretary to members of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and from 1920 to 1926 secretary to Senator Kenneth McKellar. In 1915 she drafted the first mother's pension law to be presented to the Tennessee legislature, finally passed in 1920. She went from Senator McKellar's office to practice law in Jackson, Tennessee, and was sufficiently effective in Democratic politics to be invited to work for the Democratic National Committee. With Nellie Davis (Tayloe) Ross she helped lay the groundwork for the extensive women's program of the party during the early Franklin D. Roosevelt years. A fellow lawyer, who was general counsel of the Federal Social Security Board, said at her death: Sue knew politics from the inside and from the outside. Politics were more than a game to her, though I think she relished the intricacies of the game. She used her political acumen as an instrument for the promotion of the general welfare. And she wielded the instrument with a grace and effectiveness that delighted the wise and distressed the stupid. 42

Mrs. Somerville and Miss White were exceptional rather than typical, but women in politics ranged from those who were effective politicians in their own right to those who blamed the men for mirtee, Emily Newell Blair, "Women in the Political Parties," American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annuls, C X L I I I (May 1929), 217-29. 4 0 Clippings and note in Somerville Family Papers. 41 Ibia., clippings. She had the additional distinction of providing the state with another successful woman politician, her daughter Lucy who followed her in the legislature in the 1930's and ultimately became a federal judge. 4 2 J a c k Tate in Sue Shelton White Papers (Woman's Archives, Radcliffe College Library).

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

not permitting them to gain nomination. The success stories make good reading, but the overall picture of women's efforts to exercise real influence in the political parties, South or North, was not one to gladden Mrs. Catt's heart. Sue White analyzed the Southern situation in 1928 in a letter to Mary Dewson of the Democratic National Committee: Women have been discouraged by the rank and file of the party organization. . . . We still have the old anti-suffrage attitude in the south, women have been indifferent, and their indifference has been preached to them, aided, abetted and encouraged. They have viewed politics as something they should stay away from. They have been told so and have believed it and the few feminists who have tried to push in have been slapped in the face. . . . And the few women who have been artificially reared up as leaders are not leaders of women and have been reared not to lead women but to fool them.43

Miss White's analysis was confirmed by Emily Newell Blair, the national vice-chairman of the Democratic party in the twenties. In Mrs. Blair's view, at the very beginning, competent women— the genuine leaders—had essayed party politics, but when they showed themselves unwilling to be rubber stamps they were replaced by women more willing to be led. These were the artificial leaders to whom Miss White referred.44 An increasing number of Southern women did undertake simple party work of the doorbell-ringing and envelope-stuffing variety—a trend that still continues. And whether they helped make policy or not, women voters as voters affected the outcome of elections. Women claimed to have defeated James E. Ferguson and elected William P. Hobby governor of Texas in 1920. In Mississippi Henry L. Whitfield, former president of Mississippi State College for Women, was elected governor in 1923, largely through the efforts of alumnae of the college. South Carolina women thought they had a large hand in die defeat of Cole Blease. One South Carolina woman who worked through the whole campaign remarked innocently, "We made no partisan stand, we merely got out the vote." Tennessee Democrats, perhaps looking for a scapegoat, blamed the women for the Republican victory in Tennessee in the 1920 election. The women themselves claimed credit for the return of Cordell Hull to Congress three years later.45 « Sue Shelton White to Mary Dewson, November 23, 1928, ibid. Blair, "Women in the Political Parties." 4 5 These claims appear in letters and reports to the National Office of the

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HISTORY OF WOMEN DM THE UNITED STATES

Evidence of the increasing effectiveness of women voters may be deduced from the vituperative attacks leveled at them. In addition to the accusations that they were being used by Northern manufacturers, they were accused of being radical, unfeminine, of organising Negro women, and of using "illegitimate pressine" to put across the measures of a "feminist bloc." David Clark, perhaps the South's bitterest enemy of child labor regulation, went so far as to claim that more babies died after the Sheppard-Towner Act was in operation than before. His Textile Bulletin attacked women harshly. The Associated Industries of Kentucky circulated a condemnation of "political women" reprinted from the Dearborn, Michigan, Independent. The Louisville Herald suggested the reason: "As we have said, the woman voter is making herself felt in ways not chartered for her. We will not go to the length of saying she is always welcome in these channels, but there are times when one may gauge the need for one's activity and curiousity by the ungracious manner of one's reception."" Many of the women who undertook a more active role in Southern politics in the twenties had encountered this ungracious reception. But their motivation was deeply rooted. Those who had been trained during the two or three decades before suffrage were eager to move into a more active and effective political role in 1920. By then their general goals had been formulated. Their underlying motivation is complex, but at least two main drives seem clear: first, the drive to assert themselves as individual human beings with minds and capacities that could be used; and, second, the drive to improve the world in which they lived. The balance of these motives varied from person to person. Some, like Lucy Mason, were primarily interested in social reform: When I was fourteen, a missionary's sermon made me want to be a missionary myself. Later I recognized that religion can be put to work right in one's own community. It was this belief that took me into the Equal Suffrage League, and later the League of Women Voters, both of which were interested in labor and social legislation.47 Others thoroughly enjoyed the game of politics and the feeling of power that might occasionally go with it. Nearly all felt that signifLeague of Women Voters in League of Women Voters Papers. The information about Governor Whitfield is contained in Lucy Somerville Howorth to author, February 5, 1964.