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Chapter 4 stopping the “revolution by legislation”: antiradicals unite against social Welfare reform in the autumn of 1926, dar president general Grace Brosseau took an action that would have been inconceivable only five years earlier. Brosseau withdrew her group’s long-standing support for maternalist-inspired reform. since the beginning of the twentieth century, the dar had followed the political lead of other middle-class women’s voluntary groups, operating as part of the lobbying arm of the “female dominion.” While the hereditary association was not a leading light of female reform, it had consistently lent its prestige to the legislative agenda conceived by the federal children’s Bureau, advocating for government funding of maternal health programs and legal restrictions on child labor. When the sheppard-towner act first came up for consideration in 1921 the dar leadership greeted this measure with enthusiasm. once it was enacted into law, dar members joined the other women cheering the victory enjoyed by the children’s Bureau.1 the support enjoyed by this measure—even in this relatively conservative voluntary association—meant that in those early years after female suffrage, the activists associated with the Woman Patriot had little audience for its warnings about government programs for the health and welfare of mothers and children. Half a decade later, the dar had undergone its own revolution. the establishment of the national defense committee within the dar in 1925 transformed the political priorities of the organization in a way that marked a watershed for women’s politics. this subcommittee became the group’s political arbiter, demanding that all other concerns be subservient to 114 chapter 4 stopping revolutionary radicalism. Brosseau declared that “the day for filling programs with papers on colonial doorways or the decline in modern art has passed.”2 national defense committee chairman Flora Walker asserted that women needed to counteract all “pernicious influences” by checking “their intrusion at your fireside, their invasion of the schoolroom, their usurpation of pulpit and pew . . . for the purpose of overthrowing the present form of the united states Government.”3 this focus on counterrevolution meant that the WPPc’s once-marginal conspiracies resonated with leaders of one of the most prestigious women’s groups of the time. after years of providing at least passive support for female reform efforts, dar leaders accepted the charge that seemingly respectable women leaders were masterminding a “revolution by legislation.” they began championing the notion that the nation’s political and economic system would be destroyed after intrusive social welfare programs weakened the patriarchal family, making the country powerless to prevent a radical takeover.4 When the dar embraced the WPPc’s logic, it rejected the tenets of maternalist reform that had inspired its leaders to promote measures like the sheppard-towner act and various state and federal initiatives to restrict child labor since the beginning of the twentieth century.5 this prompted an acrimonious break with the rest of the “female dominion” that undergirded the federal children’s Bureau. the resulting conflicts ultimately destabilized the political world of middleclass clubwomen, whose interlocking voluntary associations had provided institutional support for progressive reform since the turn of the twentieth century.6 the WPPc began to develop a wider following during the national debate over a constitutional amendment that would have granted congress the power to regulate child labor. the measure—which was approved by congress in 1924 and had nothing to do with global radicalism—was the product of decades of activism by progressive activists in the united states. Yet the proposed amendment stirred fears about Bolshevism among many americans, allowing the tiny coterie of female activists associated with the WPPc to make the question of communism central to the state-by-state ratification fight. the links they made between “interference” in the family and revolution set the scene for the quick and “bewildering” demise of what reformers had understood to be an “immensely popular measure.”7 the child labor amendment had its Waterloo in Massachusetts, where voters delivered a crushing defeat to the ratification campaign. elated by this victory, the women behind the Woman Patriot returned to Washington stopping the “revolution by legislation” 115 determined to enlist help in preventing additional female reform legislation. thanks to the national defense committee, they found the dar particularly receptive to their efforts to portray maternalist reform as incompatible with patriotism. WPPc leader Mary Kilbreth reported that the dar president general had left a 1926 encounter “entirely our friend, apparently willing to be guided, and...

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