Politics, Economics, and American Women after the Nineteenth Amendment

Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith by Amy E. Butler. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, 167 pp., $17.95 paperback, $54.50 hardcover.

Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare by Kim E. Nielsen. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001, 224 pp., $22.95 paperback, $54.95 hardcover.

Days of Discontent: American Women and Right-Wing Politics, 1933-1945 by June Melby Benowitz. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002, 230 pp., $40.00 hardcover.

Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policies in the United States by Deborah M. Figart, Ellen Mutari, and Marilyn Power. London: Routledge, 2002, 272 pp., $31.95 paperback, $120.00 hardcover.

Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation by Kate Weigand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001, 264 pp., $18.95 paperback, $57.00 hardcover.

When we study the history of American women, should we focus on the women whose work most directly led to the modern women's movement or on the most influential women? Should we focus on women with the most explicit political views or on the economic and cultural environment in which all women of the time lived?

The five books reviewed in this essay take different approaches to these questions in studying American women during one period of American life. Butler's Two Paths to Equality focuses on the schism of the women's movement in the 1920s, while Nielsen's Un-American Womanhood uncovers the furious right-wing slander campaign directed against all women in the American mainstream women's movement. Benowitz's Days of Discontent continues the story Nielsen starts by describing the actions of extremist right-wing women from 1930 to 1950.

Weigand's book Red Feminism examines women in the American extreme left to address the political and economic impact of gender-based oppression. Finally, Figart, Mutari, and Power's work Living Wages, Equal Wages uses economics, law, and feminist theory to analyze the disparity between the wages of women to those of men. Taken together, these five books show the extent to which our lives were shaped by events 50 to 100 years ago.

Butler's Two Paths to Equality and Nielsen's Un-American Womanhood cover events during the crucial 10 years before and after the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Especially between 1920 and 1929, the decisions made then sealed the fate of a "woman movement" that had developed steadily since the 1840s; consequently, it would largely slumber until the tumultuous 1960s.

In the history of the women's movement between 1910 and 1930, Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith, the major figures of Butler's book, are to one another like the sun and the moon. Paul tended to outshine women with whom she worked. Furthermore, because she deliberately made herself a "self-sacrificing martyr" to women's equality (52), she appeared as a fearless rebel who never compromised her most valued principles.

By contrast, Ethel M. Smith was modest, patient, and reflective—though a match for Paul's intelligence, Smith was but one female leader among many working steadily in a post-1920 women's movement that was much larger and diverse than commonly perceived today. Because Smith worked alongside so many equally bright and articulate women, Butler is probably the first scholar to write her biography. As a representative of the Women's Trade Union League and allied groups, Smith frequently parried the thrusts Paul made as leader of the National Woman's Party (NWP). Butler also made Smith Paul's foil because Smith's rise in the mainstream women's movement paralleled Paul's fall from it; through the 1920s, their paths never strayed far from each other.

Others have well documented how Paul's insistence on the "blanket" abolition of all legal distinctions between women and men in the United States, the nascent "Equal Rights Amendment," brought the NWP into a showdown...