Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism

5. Class Bridging and the World of Female Reform

5 Class Bridging and the World of Female Reform Woman’s place is Home. . . . But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and Family need their mother. —Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eighty Million Women Want, 1910 When journalist Rheta Childe Dorr sought to justify women’s active role in public life, she easily turned to a maternalist metaphor that was commonplace among women reformers in 1910.1 That metaphor wove together the “natural” claims of women as moral protectors of home and family with the argument that the fulfillment of such responsibilities required governmental action and, above all, woman suffrage. This “domestication of politics ,” which grew directly out of the gendered world of nineteenth-century women’s reform activism, profoundly influenced the ideological and programmatic direction of the Progressive movement. Through a host of voluntary organizations,women confronted what Mary Beard called “the breeding places of disease, as well as of vice, crime, poverty, and misery.”2 The habit of mind by which women domesticated municipal reform also led many to downplay the significance of class differences.As historian Paula Baker has noted,“‘Woman’ was a universal category in the minds of organized women. . . . Because all women shared certain qualities, and many the experience of motherhood,what helped one group of women bene- fited all. ‘Motherhood’ and ‘womanhood’ were powerful integrating forces that allowed women to cross class, and perhaps even racial, lines.”3 Women reformers conceived “the people” as a category that bridged class differences and acted on that conception.They successfully constructed a “fe- male dominion” of reform, centered in the settlement houses, the influence of which reached into a host of national movements, most notably the Mother’s Congresses, the National Consumer’s League, and the Women’s Trade Union League.4 A cross-class maternalism functioned as the necessary and, in the eyes of many, natural basis for women’s claims to a voice in public life. The barriers to women’s social and political activism had dictated that women organize on a gendered basis around “women’s issues” such as prohibition , female suffrage, and protective legislation. Those barriers lay not only in the realm of politics, where the campaign for the vote faced formidable opposition, but also in the labor movement. Because the AFL resisted organizing women and fighting for social insurance and government regulation of working conditions, these battles also took a gendered turn.5 Maternalism functioned as a cross-class justification for women’s public activity that many hoped would also provide an opening for broader reform. At the same time, cross-class social action and claims on behalf of women’s public space were never simple or uncontested.Class-bridging efforts at times barely disguised the different agendas that separated the class interests of working-class women and their maternalist allies.6 Women’s activism in the late nineteenth century revolved around three primary poles—suffrage, temperance, and settlement house reform. The failure of Republicans and Democrats to support suffrage promoted the construction of an autonomous political culture rooted in such women’s organizations as the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Although some activists embraced the world of partisan politics,these organizations appealed directly to women,formed local units that were female in composition,and built a web of alliances with other women’s organizations, including the expanding network of women’s clubs, that were fundamentally nonpartisan. Out of these domains of nineteenth-century female reform, women brought to the emerging Progressive movement a language and organizational experience that affirmed the vision of a classless social order of freely associating individuals. The gendered concerns of maternalist reformers led others to articulate a broader set of reform questions:Why not protection for all workers? Why not safe living and working conditions for all? Why not shorter hours and social insurance that would benefit whole families? Some years back, historian Anne Firor Scott noted the “historical invisibility” of women’s voluntary associations in accounts of progressive reform.Although recent scholarship has largely remedied that shortcoming, the observations 108 . reinventing “the people” of some Progressive Era commentators remain poignant.A journalist in 1910 noted,“Right under the...