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

Notes

183 notes Introduction 1. ”Joint Congressional Committee,” 748. 2. See, for example, Charles Selden, “The Most Powerful Lobby in Washington,” 5, 93–96. 3. Many scholars, however, have contributed to what is becoming a broad portrait of women’s continued reform activities during the 1920s. See, for example, Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal; Amy Butler, Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA Debate, 1921–1929; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935; and Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Organizations in American History. 4. I recognize, of course, that the term postsuffrage period is problematic, considering that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did little to enfranchise African American women in the Jim Crow South. As used throughout this work, the term postsuffrage period means the period immediately following passage of the suffrage amendment, not a period in which all women had the right to vote. 5. Here, I borrow liberally from Seth Koven and Sonya Michel’s definition of maternalism as women’s exploitation of “their authority as mothers to expand women’s rights in society,” as well as to win social legislation for women, children , and wage earners and to formulate “searching critiques of state and society” (“Introduction: ‘Mother Worlds,’” 2–4). 6. Most helpful to my analysis of women’s progressive reform agenda is Kathryn Kish Sklar’s investigation of women’s use of “gender-specific legislation” to promote the welfare of the social body in general (“Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” 658–77). 7. See Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945”; and Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, edited by Gordon, 9–35. 8. Koven and Michel, “Introduction: ‘Mother Worlds,’” 28. For more on historians ’ examination of organized women’s maternalist politics, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930”; and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Politics of Social Provision in the United States, 1870s–1920s. 9. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State, 5; Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform, 74. 10. Scholars have long debated the extent to which national women’s organizations represented the interests of women at grassroots levels. See William Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970; Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy; and Dorothy Johnson, “Organized Women as Lobbyists in the 1920s.” 11. For more on the extent to which organized women successfully pursued reform through organizations outside of the domain of formal political channels, see Elizabeth Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925. 12. Many historians have analyzed women’s political and electoral behavior in the 1920s. See, for example, Sara Alpern and Dale Baum, “Female Ballots: The Impact of the Nineteenth Amendment”; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920”; Anna Harvey, Votes without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920–1970; and Paul Kleppner, “Were Women to Blame? Female Suffrage and Voter Turnout.” 13. Andersen, After Suffrage, 156–58. For the reception of organized women’s agenda in national politics, see also Baker, “Domestication of Politics.” For a discussion of the state’s role in mediating between competing interest groups, see Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America, 233–34; and Howell Harris, “The Snares of Liberalism? Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Shaping of Federal Labour Relations Policy in the United States, ca. 1915–47.” 14. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 110. 15. For more on the public sphere, or civil society, see ibid., 109–42; Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, 289–339; Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880; and Sklar, “Historical Foundations...