"Organized Catholic Womanhood": Suffrage, Citizenship and the National Council of Catholic Women

“Organized Catholic Womanhood”: Suffrage, Citizenship and the National Council of Catholic Women* Jeanne Petit I n 1921, the laywomen of the newly-formed National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW) found themselves on the defensive. The National Catholic Welfare Council Bulletin had reprinted a speech by Archbishop Sebastian G. Messmer of Milwaukee, in which he minimized their work by declaring, “Man is made by God to fight the public battles, not the woman.”1 The NCCW, however, did not take this sitting down. An article in the Bulletin’s next issue, titled “Organized Catholic Womanhood,” did not mention Messmer’s name but did challenge the central premise of his speech by claiming that it was essential that Catholic women take the lead in public debates. Pointing to the changes caused by the Nineteenth Amendment, the anonymous author insisted that Catholic women needed to organize on a national level in order to counteract Protestant and secular women in national debates dealing with “not only the industrial but the moral well-being of woman.” Those who belittled or deemphasized the need for such an organization would achieve that “which the bigot and the anti-clerical so much desire—Catholic women as a united body are pushed into the background submerged in some secular so-called patriotic movement—divided among themselves.” “But,” the article continued, “the vision and wisdom of Catholic women will save us from that day . . . for we live our faith when we realize that we are all parts of the Body of Christ—The Church.”2 83 *This paper was presented at the 2007 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on “Religious Diversity and the Common Good,” directed by Dr. Alan Wolfe of the Boisi Center at Boston College. Members of the seminar provided many helpful suggestions for improving this essay. The author would also like to thank Anita Specht, Janis Gibbs, Natalie Dykstra and John Hanson for their careful read and useful comments on this essay. 1. “Archbishop (S.G.) Messmer’s Forceful Appeal for the Men’s Council: Catholic Clergy Urged to Support Movement in Milwaukee Archdiocese,” The National Catholic Welfare Council Bulletin (June 1921): 23-24. In this speech, Messmer was promoting the newly-formed National Council of Catholic Men. 2. “Organized Catholic Womanhood,” NCWC Bulletin (July 1921): 16. Catholic women, according to the author, had to exercise their rights as citizens in order to defend and live their faith. A year later, the women of the NCCW again found themselves on the defensive, this time when their president, Gertrude Gavin, attended the 1922 Pan-American Women’s Conference in Baltimore sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Gavin left outraged after one of the speakers, Carrie Chapman Catt, had implied that Catholics were ardent opponents of suffrage for women, and another, Lady Astor, referred to the United States as a Protestant country. The NCCW’s executive committee quickly adopted resolutions stating that they deplored “the injection into the deliberations of the League of Women Voters statements concerning the attitude of Catholics toward suffrage which tend to sow dissention and misunderstanding among the members of the League, many of whom are Catholic women.” The resolution also attacked statements “concerning America being a Protestant country, statements out of harmony with historic truth, including the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees freedom of religious belief to all.”3 So again, the women of the NCCW took action when their citizenship status was denigrated, this time by defending their right as Catholics to be respected as equals within national women’s organizations. Since the early nineteenth century, Catholic women had built orphanages, hospitals and schools and performed other forms of what became known as social work, but sisters in religious orders, not laywomen, did most of this work.4 Moreover, most Americans, both Catholic and non-Catholic, did not see this work as political. The women of the NCCW saw themselves as doing something different. In creating a national, political organization for laywomen, they sought to define a civic identity for middle-class Catholic women, one where they would be full participants in the nation’s political process. As the stories above illustrate, however, the Catholic laywomen of the...