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65 Chapter 4 “Whatever your job is, you do it” Of all the responses Fleischman received to “Notes of a Retiring Feminist,” surely the most surprising was an invitation to help revive the organization she had disparaged in her article and that had been dormant for more than two decades. A year after her article was published, she opened her mail and found a note from Jane Grant. “There is a movement afoot to revive the Lucy Stone League,” Grant wrote, and “since the new enthusiasm appears to be in part due to your much discussed piece I feel that you might be interested in such a project.” Would Fleischman like to come to a meeting to discuss a possible rebirth? “I would love to come,” she promptly replied, and on February 16, 1950, she joined about a dozen former members at Grant’s home. After voting in favor of revival, they elected Grant president and Fleischman vice president. Less than two weeks later, Bernays produced a development plan for the group.1 As his plan recommended, the new league was launched at a hotel “press­ lunch­ eon” on March 22. Fleischman was one of the four speakers.2 News stories and opinion pieces about the organization’s revival and its first campaign (to permit married women to use their birth names on 1950 census forms) ran throughout the country for the next two months.3 Seldom noted in those stories, though, was a key change in the league’s goals. As a March 23 press release explained, it would not only work “to protect the rights of married women to use their own names,” but planned to “concern itself with all civil and social rights of women.”4 This broadening of its goals made the league a good match for Fleischman’s own interests. Always using the name Doris E. Fleischman, she wrote letters, chaired committees, helped organize events dealing with women’s issues, and was the league’s representative, including at a Washington, D.C., national conference on women’s pay.5 Sometimes serving as the organization’s spokeswoman, she seemed pleased to be in a position from which she could draw attention to matters that concerned her. One of those concerns was that too many young women were limiting their aspirations and opportunities. “The younger generation of women just wants to be wives,” she told a reporter. “They’re trying to escape their fears by marrying and looking for safety in the home. It isn’t there.”6 Despite her earlier declaration that she was going to take her husband’s name, she did not do so in her league activities. And because some of those activities gave her newfound visibility, they actually helped her become better known as Doris E. Fleischman. She certainly could have carried out her work as Doris Fleischman Bernays since, as its March 23 press release stated, the league’s members were 66 Anonymous in Their Own Names “women and men who favor the right of married women to keep their own names, even if they themselves do not practice it.” The organization’s stationery identified some advisory council members as “Mrs.” rather than “Miss,” and about a quarter of the membership used a “Mrs.” title, some with their husbands’ first names.7 Indeed, when Fleischman’s sister Beatrice joined in 1951, the minutes listed her as Mrs. Martin Untermeyer.8 Yet Fleischman never used any other surname, even though this would have been a chance to begin establishing herself as Mrs. Bernays. Clearly she was less committed to changing her name than she had claimed to be at the end of her 1949 article. If this really had been important to her, she probably would not have gone to that first meeting at Grant’s home. She did go, and as she spent more time with other members from the 1920s, she may have better appreciated some of the reasons she had kept her birth name for so long. Most of those who attended that first February meeting probably came as much to get together with women like themselves as to advance Lucy Stone’s cause. These middle-aged feminists and professional women must have felt like members of a very endangered species in postwar America. They had every reason to share Fleischman’s worries that the current generation of young women was “looking for safety in the home,” and to regret that other hopes from the 1920s had gone unrealized...

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