The Women's Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920-30

Conclusion

171 Conclusion On December 1, 1930, the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee celebrated the tenth anniversary of its founding at the Dodge Hotel in Washington, D.C. Opening the celebration was Carrie Chapman Catt, who regaled committee members with humorous anecdotes about her early contacts with members of Congress when women were still a foreign and somewhat ominous presence on the political stage. Ten years after the creation of the WJCC, organized women had good reason to be proud of their progress as political actors, Catt noted. Combining their efforts under the large umbrella of the WJCC, they had managed to make a significant impact on public policy, as evidenced by the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, increased appropriations for the Women’s Bureau, independent citizenship for married women, the prohibition of interstate shipments of filled milk, civil service reclassification, the Packers and Stockyards Control Act, a compulsory education law for the District of Columbia, and a federal prison for women. Committee members had also successfully lobbied against passage of the equal rights and Wadsworth-Garrett amendments and the dismantling of the U.S. Children’s Bureau.1 The year 1930 also marked the ten-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, an occasion recognized in several articles in the Woman Citizen that considered women’s political accomplishments over the past decade. One such article, written by Sara Schuyler Butler of the New York Republican State Committee, correctly observed that the woman voter had entered the political arena burdened equally by the “exaggerated optimism of her friends” and the “exaggerated pessimism 172 Conclusion of her critics.” Yet the past ten years had demonstrated that the advent of women’s suffrage had brought neither a political millennium nor a political calamity, Butler noted, but rather a steady process of political education among newly enfranchised women and a growing, albeit at times begrudging, willingness among men to share a portion of the political stage with their female counterparts. Judge Florence Allen of the Ohio State Supreme Court took a similar view of women’s progress in politics over the past decade. Women’s suffrage, she asserted, had resulted in several important accomplishments, not the least of which was women’s significant role in convincing legislators and the American public that the government had a responsibility to protect human life, regulate the conditions of work, and promote higher standards of public education.2 Much of the success of women’s social reform efforts during the 1920s stemmed from the tradition of separate female institutions, the strength and efficiency of women’s grassroots networks, the surviving progressive impulse in Congress and society, and the ease with which class-oriented goals were defined in gendered terms. For a time, the skillful blend of these factors within the WJCC allowed organized women to transcend the growing tensions in American society between rural sentiments and urban values, individual initiative and collective responsibility , and, perhaps most significant, national regulation and local autonomy.3 In addition, the very nature of the WJCC’s structure and purpose created a political space in which women could overcome their individual differences in a shared, cooperative commitment to social reform and at the same time pursue their own particular legislative and political agendas. Yet organized women’s successes in the political arena during the 1920s certainly did not outweigh their failures and disappointments. World War I and the reactionary political climate that followed undercut the faith in human progress, laid bare deep divisions in American society, and, ultimately, weakened the reform impulse so vital to real social and political change. In a decade in which most Americans revered individualism and feared centralized control, organized women’s far-reaching, progressive agenda proved extremely vulnerable to attacks from those who wished to reduce or contain the federal government’s involvement in the economy and society. Without a strong popular sentiment for reform , organized women lacked the resources to fight the effort to prevent further federal expansion and, ultimately, the authority to claim that their vision of progressivism represented the public interest. Stripped of this claim, which had always been the cornerstone of their political Conclusion 173 power and influence, organized women could no longer overcome the tensions within American society or the diverse interests within their own reform coalition. Despite the tremendous toll the contentious campaigns of the 1920s had taken on the WJCC’s ability to pursue social reform, the committee survived...