Feminism and the Realpolitik of Elite Philanthropy

In recent years, historians have returned to the "paradox," as Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle put it in Ruling America (2005), that elites rule in our democracy. "Sometimes they seem to rule with the people's interest in mind," Fraser and Gerstle write, "sometimes not" (p. 1). Philanthropy has been one important practice that enables scholars to study that paradox. Because philanthropy is often studied as a ruling class phenomenon, however, scholars have tended to ignore the difference that gender, race, or ethnicity has on this class practice. Both Joan Marie Johnson's Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 and Molly McClain's Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy expand our understanding of twentieth-century philanthropy by focusing specifically on gender—on elite white women's involvement in ruling America. How did wealthy women engage in philanthropy? What did wealthy women's secondary status—at least relative to wealthy men—mean for their philanthropy? Was their philanthropy different than elite men's? Johnson argues directly and McClain suggests that wealthy white women's experiences of (relative) inequality meant that their philanthropy was more progressive and more engaged by the "people's interest" than the philanthropy practiced by elite men. Johnson furthermore redefines philanthropy, reading it as the realpolitik of elite rule in a capitalist democracy. Johnson's book therefore makes an invaluable contribution to the history of both philanthropy and the women's rights movement in the United States, compelling us to confront important questions about the challenges for democracies when money can dictate political outcomes—even democratic outcomes.

Funding Feminism "follows the money" to provide a riveting new vantage point on the fight for women's rights in the twentieth century. Johnson's thesis is that "the women's movement owes its success to the financial backing of [wealthy] women" (p. 5). Arguing that large-scale "scientific philanthropy" emerges simultaneously with "an organized women's rights movement" (p. 4), Johnson asserts that the "timing and success" of the major gains women made in the twentieth century in suffrage, labor, higher education, and birth control were "dependent on the major gifts only the wealthy could give" (p. 14). Considered within the historiography on philanthropy, there is a bit of sleight of hand here: almost none of the women Johnson tracks created nonprofit foundations—the characteristic expression of scientific philanthropy. Furthermore, even recent studies of philanthropy often focus on it as a "third sector" outside of government and business and therefore exclude direct political donations from their purview. Nonetheless, Johnson is usefully polemical here: elite philanthropy is an expression of the money/power nexus in the United States, she argues, and there is no more clear expression of that than political donations. Philanthropy is the top-down realpolitik of capitalist democracy. As Johnson writes, "access to political power" has always depended on "access to funding" (p. 18). The 2010 Citizens United decision, she says, demonstrates how extreme this dependency has become in our own day, but it also demonstrates that "continuity rather than change over time" is what we must track in political donations of elites (p. 11).

Johnson, however, usefully complicates her definition of philanthropy as top-down realpolitik in terms of the women's movement. First of all, she points out that wealthy women's philanthropy, as opposed to that of men, was a weapon of the comparatively weak: "At a time when … [women] could not vote and when education, professions, and other opportunities were limited for them, philanthropy offered a unique tool" (p. 7). Indeed, because of elite women's secondary status legally and politically, and especially because of their financial vulnerability, their donations and activism were galvanized, according to Johnson, by a situated and experiential understanding of inequality. Like "many philanthropists...