The Gospel of Progressivism: Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930

5: Ben Lindsey and Women Progressives

125 O n his national lecture tours, Judge Ben Lindsey often celebrated the political work of Colorado clubwomen. His collaboration with activist women was more interesting to eastern audiences because of early twentieth-century debates about women’s suffrage.1 Since 1893, Colorado women had voted on an equal footing with men. Women in Illinois and eastern states, by contrast, waited another twenty years for the vote in most elections . National women’s suffrage campaigners in these years reported regularly on the Colorado experiment. Progressives were keen to highlight the achievements Colorado women secured with the vote. During the 1912 congressional debate over whether to extend equal suffrage to the territory of Alaska, for example, Colorado congressman Edward Taylor credited the “influence and energy” of the state women’s club federation for much Progressive legislation. The vote had empowered women to secure passage of a host of educational, juvenile court, protective labor, public health, temperance, and social welfare reforms. “It is the feminine interest in motherhood, in the child, and in the home,” the congressman insisted, “that has compelled the passage of these laws.” Enfranchising mothers meant “the Ben Lindsey and Women Progressives Ben Lindsey and Women Progressives 126 protection of the home and the family relations, of childhood and womanhood ,” and the “safeguarding of public health and morals.”2 As Taylor suggested , women’s support for Progressive social reform was often linked with motherhood in Colorado. In her 1914 address to the Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs (CFWC), president Lerah McHugh affirmed that clubwomen represented “the concentrated motherhood of America.”3 The Federated Women’s Club Legislative Committee had from its earliest days devoted its primary attention to a maternalist agenda: education reforms, protecting child crime victims and reforming wayward youth in juvenile courts; women’s and child-labor laws; mothers ’ pensions; and maternal and child health care initiatives.4 Municipal housekeeping goals played a significant role in the agenda of Colorado women, as they reflected an expansion of motherhood beyond the domestic sphere outward to the city and state as a whole. Women’s Progressivism in Colorado drew heavily on such broad goals, which acquired a radical edge in alliances with labor reformers. Nonpartisanship remained a central demand of women’s Progressivism. Club leaders like Sarah Platt Decker guided voting women along nonpartisan paths by endorsing civil service, creating independent associations, and attacking party machines. Denver’s Civic Federation of 1895, the Women’s Nonpartisan Association of 1908, and the Public Service League of 1910 all arose under women’s leadership to offer voters alternatives to party mobilization . Decker and other leaders allied themselves frequently with male Protestant moralists who attacked Mayor Speer’s Democratic machine for its ties to corporate utilities and saloon owners. Denver woman’s club member and journalist Ellis Meredith also insisted that clubwomen should engage politically to ensure “that the city is made decent for childish feet.”5 Early club leaders invoked maternalist rhetoric not just to create distance from party leaders but ultimately to call for a restructuring of the political system. In hopes of securing nonpartisan mobilizations of female voters, women Progressives cooperated closely with one of the state’s most flamboyant male reformers, juvenile court judge Ben Lindsey. The alliance that Colorado clubwomen formed with Lindsey confirms the importance of cross-gender coalitions in the state. Activist women needed access to positions of political authority that men like Lindsey held, and he in turn relied heavily on the grassroots network that clubwomen mobilized.6 Their alliance on behalf of child protection and maternal legislation revealed the potential of women’s Progressivism. Ben Lindsey, Mothers’ Ally With his muckraking manifesto of 1909, Lindsey cast himself as a defender of domestic life against “the Beast.” The judge offered the most compelling ex- Ben Lindsey and Women Progressives 127 ample of the possibilities for circumventing party machinery in seeking both office and influence. He credited Denver’s mothers, female workers, and the Christian Citizenship Union with his success in a 1908 campaign for reelection as an independent when both parties snubbed him. Lindsey successfully appealed , as he put it, to “women—not so much their suffrage leaders or their [party] politicians—as the mothers in the homes and the working women in the factories and shops.” The judge rallied the majority of the city’s female and union voters who “saved the juvenile court” on several occasions and circumvented party...