In 1939, a group of Methodist churchwomen formed the Woman's
Division of Christian Service (WDCS), combining more than one million
members from six women's missionary societies that had existed since
the 1800s. The WDCS was civic in 1939: Its membership was broad,
widespread, and active; it was decentralized, linking local churchwomen to
national settings through autonomous “federated” chapters; and
its primary mission focused on nurturing good citizenship through the
education of public opinion and missionary enterprise. Members of the WDCS
were motivated by a complex set of beliefs. They embraced citizen activism
in “public affairs,” but eschewed the messier stuff of
“politics”—that part of the public realm, churchwomen
believed, driven by “pressure groups” and
“partisanship” rather than the public interest or reasoned
public opinion. Shortly after World War II, however, the Woman's
Division changed in ways that made these distinctions more tenuous. Within
a decade, the WDCS began sending a paid legislative representative to
Capitol Hill to carry churchwomen's political interests to national
elites. In 1963, they staffed an office at the Church Center for the
United Nations and began centrally coordinating local church activities
with international causes. In 1972, the division was renamed the United
Methodist Women (UMW), a “newly inclusive organization”; by
this time, they were employing a staff of 26, operating a full-time
legislative affairs office in Washington, DC, and regularly holding
“consciousness raising” sessions to discuss matters such as
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In the early 1980s,
leaders of the division worked to secure “NGO” status to
become part of a growing sector of nongovernmental organizations in the
United States and a more effective partner with their international
sister, the World Federation of Methodist Women.
In approximately three decades, the primary organization of Methodist
womanhood had been transformed from a mass membership association focused
on civic action and education to a highly professionalized, centralized,
and more explicitly political organization, self-consciously redesigning
itself to become an NGO in an internationalized civic realm. Although not
all groups embraced change as readily, a similar story could be told for
other women's associations after World War II. “Let organized
women of color forget their fear of being called political!”
exclaimed a member of the National Association of Colored Women's
Clubs (NACWC), the oldest, and at one time largest, civic association of
African-American women in the nation. Moving beyond their traditional
focus on community activities, African-American clubwomen of the 1950s
experimented with new political tactics, hiring a lobbyist, creating a
public relations program, adopting business management principles, and
endorsing protest. Clubwomen in the primarily white General Federation of
Women's Clubs (GFWC) made similar pro-nouncements about the need to
modernize the identity that inspired club organizing. “The day of
the sewing circle is past,” the GFWC president declared in the
New York Times in 1948. These and other groups—the American
Association of University Women (AAUW), National Federation of Business
and Professional Women's Clubs (BPW), League of Women Voters (LWV),
and Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA)—participated in
a transformation in postwar civic life by adopting, in various degrees,
new organizational strategies: collecting statistical data, appointing
observers to the UN, maintaining roll-call voting records at national
headquarters, or filing amicus curiae briefs with the Supreme Court.
In short, postwar women's associations were pioneers of
experimentation with the sorts of organizational structures, identities,
and strategies that would come to define modern-day interest groups,
helping to pave the way for new forms of female activism in the latter
half of the twentieth century. This transformation did not occur without
consequence. Prior to World War II, women's associations had promoted
a particular kind of female activism, one that was diversified, embraced
expansive social aims relevant to the lives of a broad segment of the
population, and claimed legitimacy on behalf of female citizens in the
public realm. Ascendant organizations in the second half of the twentieth
century may have been more attuned to emerging political opportunities and
better able to secure material and political benefits for women alongside
the 1960s emergence of the second-wave women's movement. But newer
organizations also promoted a less-inclusive gender politics; they
provided fewer opportunities for the participation of ordinary citizens,
relied more on leaders than on rank-and-file members, and were less likely
to mobilize diverse sets of women into broader forms of political
participation.
This essay argues that the postwar era was a critical period in which
women's civic associations were compelled to “become
political.” “Becoming political” did not simply mean
seeking influence in the American political process—something that
women's associations had always done. It meant, instead, a change in
the ways leaders and members sought influence—in the organizational
strategies and structural arrangements they employed to further their
goals and in the identities around which they marshaled members and
validated female activism. A variety of postwar developments contributed
to the shift from civic to political, including socioeconomic factors and
changes in the realities of women's lives; institutional factors,
such as the declining status of bureaucratic agencies dedicated to
women's policy concerns; the appearance of new social actors and
social movement organizations alongside the nationalization of civil
rights struggles; changing racial and gender identities; and the formation
of the United Nations, which created new avenues for civic engagement on a
global scale. These developments redefined female citizens'
participation in public affairs after World War II. Leaders, in
particular, realized that their associations lacked the capacity to
benefit from new political opportunities without significant internal
change and without reinventing clubwomen's and churchwomen's
sense of what could legitimately be called “civic” work.
Organizationally, they pushed their associations toward greater
centralization, professionalization, and modernization, developments not
uncommon to self-preservation impulses of social groups during times of
uncertainty. More important, leaders and members of women's
associations were pressured to “drop the mask of old-time
nonpartisanship,” as the Woman's Home Companion put
it, traversing a boundary that had legitimized the female voluntary
association, and indeed female citizenship itself, for the first half of
the twentieth century (Holly 1955).
Evidence for this argument is gleaned from the convention proceedings,
correspondence, and national magazines of three long-standing women's
associations: the Woman's Division of Christian Service, the General
Federation of Women's Clubs, and the National Association of Colored
Women's Clubs. Although past research suggests that associations such
as these reached prominence in earlier decades of the twentieth century
only to become anachronistic by the New Deal (Chafe
1972; Giddings 1984; Wesley 1984; White 1999),
new research suggests that the WDCS, GFWC, and NACWC were among the most
significant membership organizations of the postwar associational boom.
These were quintessential civic associations in the sense
understood by scholars like Robert Putnam (2000)
and Theda Skocpol (2003); widespread federations
of active local chapters, they were both sources of political leverage and
important schools of citizenship for millions of American women.
There were certainly other significant associations, including the
AAUW, BPW, LWV, YWCA, National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), and
National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) (Gruberg
1968; Hartmann 1994, 1998; Lynn 1994; Stuhler 2000; Ware 1992).
Like the WDCS, GFWC, and NACWC, these organizations were chapter based;
they emphasized training for citizenship; they promoted a public voice for
women; and historically they identified their purposes as educational,
civic, or nonpartisan, rather than political per se. However, these
associations were smaller and their memberships tended to be more elite;
few matched the WDCS, GFWC, or NACWC's size or prevalence in the
lives of average women who might not otherwise be politically engaged. The
WDCS and GFWC enrolled more than 1% of the U.S. female population in 1955
(Skocpol 2003);1
According to Skocpol (2003), among
women's associations, only the Order of the Eastern Star (auxiliary
to the Masons) and the Woman's Missionary Union also crossed the 1%
mark in the mid–twentieth century.
similarly, the NACWC
enrolled more than 1% of the black female population in many states and
remained one of the last autonomous organizations of African-American
clubwomen.
2 A foremost work on the NACWC is
White's Too Heavy a Load (1999),
which argues that the association became obsolescent after Mary McCleod
Bethune formed the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. However,
White's research was conducted before the complete NACWC records were
available and, therefore, presumes a fate for the NACWC that itself is
worthy of inquiry.
This essay focuses on the WDCS, GFWC, and
NACWC because they were among the largest associations of the 1950s within
their target populations, and because they represent the economic, racial,
religious, and geographic diversity of postwar civic engagement.
This essay extends a burgeoning revisionist history that has recast
the mid–twentieth century, not as the “doldrums” of
women's activism (Rupp and Taylor 1987),
but rather as a critical period in which women remained politically active
and feminist ideas germinated in a variety of institutions and
organizations (e.g., Cobble 2004; Deslippe 2000; Hartmann
1998; Meyerowitz 1994; Ware 1992). It also reexamines the dominant account in
the civic engagement literature, one that views the 1950s as a
“golden era” of associational activity but that fails to
consider how political and civic participation have been historically
constructed along the lines of gender (Putnam
2000). The origins of associationalism were closely connected to
gender roles, separating men and women into different associations and
reinforcing a gendered construction of politics (see Andersen 1992; Lebsock 1992;
Sklar 1995; Skocpol
1992). Men's and women's associations may have shared the
joys and frustrations of rising and falling memberships, but postwar civic
decline had different political consequences for male and female
citizenship. If previous research has made strides in thinking about how
and why civic life changed (Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003), it has covered less ground explaining
how these changes mattered to particular groups of citizens, especially as
these were defined by gender, race, or class. Thus, this essay contributes
to the literature on American political development by highlighting the
relational nature of political change and the processes through which
social groups, in responding to change, themselves transform.
POSTWAR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND THE DYNAMICS OF
CHANGE
American civic life changed profoundly after World War II. Following a
brief expansion in the immediate postwar years, by the early 1960s most
civic associations—including business and professional associations
and male and female fraternal organizations—had experienced periods
of rapid and severe membership loss, a pattern of deterioration that would
characterize the fate of civic groups throughout the second half of the
twentieth century. This decline was accompanied by (and perhaps
precipitated by) new forms of citizen participation, including the rise of
modern-day interest groups, or what Putnam (2000) calls “tertiary organizations,” that
differed not only in organizational form and strategy from old-line civic
associations but also in ideological purpose and mission.
Putnam's Bowling Alone is an essential starting place
for documenting civic change after World War II, but it is less helpful
for understanding the causes of that change. For Putnam, generational
replacement, demographic shifts such as the movement of women into the
labor force, and urban sprawl are responsible for civic disengagement. Yet
Putnam' s critics (e.g., Skocpol 2003;
Skocpol and Fiorina 1999) have rightly pointed
out that his discussion of civic decline hinges on factors outside the
polity, unrelated to politics or political institutions. In contrast,
Skocpol (2003) argues that the “great
civic transformation” resulted in part from sociocultural
changes—new technologies and shifting attitudes about race and
gender, for example—but it was also intimately connected to
political and institutional change, including a burst of federal
legislation that bolstered liberal activism and the emergence of the
“rights revolutions” of the 1960s and 1970s. Additional
changes, Skocpol suggests, including the receptiveness of the courts to
organized interests, an increasingly professionalized Congress, and
reorganization within the federal bureaucracy, multiplied
“entry” points for particular types of organizations to access
the political system. As a result, professionally managed organizations
and interest and advocacy groups flourished, gradually overshadowing
membership associations of the civic generation. There were other
important developments after World War II that Skocpol's
institutionalist account overlooks. Of significant consequence (and
surprisingly absent from almost all research on postwar political
development), the formation of the United Nations in 1945 changed
political opportunities for voluntary associationalism, creating
incentives and providing resources for civic groups to mobilize members
around international causes. Indeed, emerging opportunities for the kinds
of professionally managed organizations Skocpol identifies are perhaps
best seen in the burst of NGO organizing that followed the UN's
formation.
More important than the particular factors Skocpol includes (or fails
to include) among the causes of the postwar civic transformation is the
dynamic of political change she identifies. In particular, she emphasizes
the ways institutional change can reshape organizational incentives and
political opportunities, encouraging political actors to adopt particular
organizational forms and tactics and to utilize certain resources. In
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992),
she called this the “fit” between the identities, goals, and
capacities of social groups and changing political arrangements (see also
Clemens 1997). Simply put, institutions shape
the ways and extent to which social groups participate in the public
realm. In the postwar era, the reorganization of agencies within the
federal bureaucracy and the composition of political coalitions may have
strengthened the position of some groups, such as veterans' lobbying
organizations, at the same time that they undermined others (Skocpol 1995). Women's voluntary associations
were especially limited in national policy influence after World War II by
the accelerated weakening of the Children's and Women's Bureaus,
bureaucratic allies that had previously enabled their authority in social
welfare domains. Institutional change also affects the ways social groups
understand their own identities and evaluate possibilities for political
action (Lieberman 1995). If the increasing
openness of the courts created new levers of political influence for civil
rights organizations, for example, it also unsettled the radically
decentralized organization that had sustained the mobilization of
African-American women for half a century; clubwomen would be compelled to
refashion their own strategies and organizational identity in
response.
The challenge for scholars of American political development is not
simply to identify the causes of the postwar transformation in civic life
but to grasp more fully the ways in which change occurred in and across
different kinds of organizations. The formation of the UN, for example,
was especially important to women's associations, which were removed
from meaningful participation in national political institutions and
hopeful that an international arena might offer greater legitimacy in the
face of limited welfare state expansion at home. Yet at the same time that
the UN heightened the stakes of civic engagement, it simultaneously
compelled clubwomen and churchwomen to question the goals and tactics of
their associations, pushing them away from locally rooted community
activities toward centralized, elite-led organizations in which
women's rights were conceived as human rights. Deborah Minkoff (1995) has shown that the postwar era was a period of
profound organizational growth and diversification, particularly for
African Americans and for women. The watershed in organizational activity,
however, was constituted by and primarily benefited newly formed advocacy
and protest organizations; long-standing voluntary associations focused on
local action and citizenship did not fare as well. In short, processes of
political change are inherently relational. Skocpol underemphasizes this
point. In Diminished Democracy (2003),
she suggests that organizational innovation in the 1960s and 1970s
resulted from elite abandonment of old-line voluntary associations;
careerist leaders, eager to cast off outdated organizational identities,
particularly those drawn around gender and race, she argues, were pushed
to centrally managed organizations. Although this view recognizes the
significance of race and gender to associationalism (which Putnam's
does not), it views postwar civic engagement in ecological terms and
overlooks processes of change within particular organizations struggling
to reinvent themselves in a changed political landscape.3
I am grateful to Elisabeth Clemens for helping me to see this
point.
In contrast, this essay suggests that leaders—and
members—of women's associations responded to postwar change in
dynamic ways; they were eager to take their place in national and
international domains but unsure about how to integrate new organizational
forms in an historically gendered universe of civic associationalism.
HOW WERE THEY CIVIC? WOMEN'S
ASSOCIATIONS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the 1950s, members of the General Federation of Women's Clubs,
the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Methodist
Woman's Division of Christian Service continued, in renewed form, a
century-long tradition of female civic engagement. Each traced its roots
to the “women's era” of organizing, a movement among
American women who had entered public life through autonomous mutual
benefit societies, missionary societies, charitable institutions, literary
and educational circles, antislavery associations, and self-help groups.
In what has become a familiar story to students of gender and American
political development (Baker 1984; Clemens 1993, 1997; Cott, 1987; Gordon 1994; Lerner [1972] 1992; Scott
1991; Skocpol 1992), women's
associations at the turn of the twentieth century—groups like the
GFWC, National Consumers' League (NCL), or Women's Trade Union
League (WTUL)—related their causes to a broad maternalist rhetoric
that claimed the moral best interest of society and to a distinct mode of
activism rooted in public education and nonpartisan political
mobilization. A contemporary described this approach as “the
maternal and housekeeping instinct made community-wide and trained in its
outlook” (Buck 1949). In the first part of
the twentieth century, this brand of activism proved especially effective
when combined with decentralized organizations linking together local,
state, and regional federations. Female reformers of the Progressive era
pressured legislatures to pass bills along nonpartisan lines, secured
favorable rulings from courts otherwise unsympathetic to organized
interests, and developed close ties with civil servants in newly created
administrative agencies in ways that furthered their public goals and
bolstered the mobilization of members.
Although their associations have never been static, the organizational
and identity-related features that sustained women's voluntary
associations in the early twentieth century had lingering consequences for
female mobilization in later decades. Of particular importance, the
Progressive era opposition between “civic” and
“political” hinged on gendered understandings of citizenship.
Nonpartisan mobilization was successful prior to suffrage, for example,
because women were removed from formal channels of political
participation; the same approach may have been limited after 1920, when it
became more important to link organizational goals to electoral targets
and to integrate party politics with women's interests (Harvey 1998; see also Andersen
1992; Lemons 1973). Organized womanhood
met significant institutional challenges in the New Deal, when structures
of governance and policy implementation shaped citizenship in terms of
gender. As Suzanne Mettler (1998) suggests, the
emergence of dual federalism thwarted the mobilization of a nationalized
women's movement at precisely the time when state-by-state approaches
were no longer as effective in achieving policy change on behalf of women.
Nonetheless, women's organizations continued to mobilize during and
after the New Deal, further adapting strategies in response to political
and institutional change. Scholars have noted the emergence of a
“New Deal network of women,” for example, in which a small set
of female professionals picked up an agenda that once required a mass
movement, creating a policymaking role for women, recruiting women into
government positions, demanding political patronage, and generating
awareness of women as a group (Ware 1981; see
also Muncy 1991).
This legacy of organizational adaptation—an ongoing process that
simultaneously reaffirmed and reinvented Progressive era traditions of
female organizing—informed the structures, strategies, and
identities of women's voluntary associations such that by the 1950s,
the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS could still be aptly called “civic.”
The purposive goals of women's associations were closely connected to
particular membership and organizational characteristics. They had active,
widespread, and generally unrestricted memberships in which face-to-face
interactions among local members (not a mere affiliation with a distant
national headquarters) were the norm. Each enrolled sizable portions of
the female population; in the 1950s, membership reached 826,000 clubwomen
in the GFWC, between 50,000 and 100,000 African-American women in the
NACWC, and almost two million churchwomen from 26,000 local church
societies in the WDCS. The organizational structures of these groups,
moreover, were decentralized, linking local members to national action
through federated state and regional chapters. Decentralized structures,
what one GFWC member called the “clubwoman's trinity: club,
state, and the general federation,” were important in a number of
respects. They created an internal career path for members and helped
coordinate unified action while preserving local autonomy, for example
(Skocpol 2003). More important, as Clemens
(1997) and Skocpol (2003) have argued, federated chapter-based
associations encouraged “two-way communication” between
members and leaders, fostering translocal identities, educating members
about the politics of state and nation, and, in the process, transmitting
important political information and skills to ordinary female
citizens.
There were differences among these organizations, the most important
of which fell along race and class lines in complex ways. The GFWC's
practice of maternalism, for example, was inextricably linked to white
middle-class notions of female propriety. Similarly, NACWC members were
primarily elite and professional women, and the association's
emphasis on racial uplift—what clubwomen called “a finer Negro
womanhood”—was infused with class politics (White 1999). Yet black clubwomen's civic
activities were inseparable from efforts to combat racial as well as
gender oppression. The Woman's Division shared with the GFWC and
NACWC a moral reform tradition rooted in middle-class conceptions of
womanhood (Frances Willard's “evangelical domesticity”),
but its sheer size made it more racially and economically diverse.
Segregation continued as the norm in church societies well into the
mid-1950s, but as the church became increasingly involved in civil rights
struggles, the WDCS took greater steps than either the GFWC or the NACWC
to bridge racial divisions and to foster cross-class relations, building
alliances with civil rights organizations and labor unions, for
example.
Despite these differences, as civic associations, the GFWC,
NACWC, and WDCS shared similar conceptions of citizenship, helping to
define their relationships with other organizations and a shared role in
the American political process. As Elisabeth Clemens (1993) notes, forms of organization signal an identity,
both to an organization's own members and to others. Beyond their
concrete policy goals—which in the 1950s ranged from federally
funded day care to education to environmental conservation to equal
pay—clubwomen's and churchwomen's emphasis on
nonpartisanship and public education enabled them to differentiate their
organizations from “political,” “pressure,” or
“special interest” groups. “The [GFWC] has no
axe to grind—no selfish interests,” one of its leaders
explained. This mission of clubwomen was, instead, to
“formulate” public opinion, “wholly without prejudice
and with an ever expanding civic consciousness” (“Editorial” 1946).4
General Federation of Women's Clubs Archives (hereafter
GFWCA), Dorothy (Mrs. Hiram Cole) Houghton, Second Vice-President, June
1947, New York, NY, Convention Records (RG 3), 1947 Convention
Proceedings.
To be sure, the NACWC clarified, women's
voluntary associations sought to expand “the opportunity for
organized women to serve efficiently in all fields relating to
government,” but this goal did not qualify them as a
“political” organization; rather, the NACWC was an
“educational” group: “We prepare our women on questions
of local as well as national scope,” one leader explained,
“[so] that they will be prepared to act intelligently and
not be led by the opinions or decisions of others.”
“Individual responsibility” was the “key to effective
citizenship participation.”
5 Pamphlet,
“Legislation Committee: 1955–1956 Program”; and
“Government by Public Opinion,” Records of the National
Association of Colored Women's Clubs, 1895–1992, Part 1:
Minutes of National Conventions, Publications, and President's Office
Correspondence (microfilm) (Bethesda: University Publications of America,
1994) (hereafter NACWC, Part 1).
In this vein, clubwomen and
churchwomen were encouraged to become active citizens by voting, joining
political parties, participating in debates, testifying before legislative
committees, and, when possible, running for public office. Civic life was
a “means to develop our own personalities,” suggested leaders
of the WDCS (
Ransohoff 1950). A dense network of
local chapters, moreover, was most likely to generate a broad and
diversified, rather than a parochial, approach to public life. “No
superficial snap judgments will do in club life or in politics,” one
GFWC president explained (
Buck 1948).
These, then, were the features that made the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS
civic: decentralized operations; widespread, active face-to-face
memberships; an identity of nonpartisan, or “nonpolitical”; an
approach to politics emphasizing the education of public opinion; purposes
defined by “good citizenship” understood as active
participation and individual responsibility in the public realm.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this combination of
structure, strategy, and identity was significant, not only because it
afforded women's associations leverage in a public realm that impeded
their participation in conventional political channels. Just as important,
the features that made the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS civic promoted the
capacities and dispositions of democratic citizenship among millions of
American women, enlarging their public roles and advancing gender
equality. As the president of the GFWC wrote in 1948, club life was
“an excellent training ground for women as citizens” (Buck 1948).
POSTWAR OPPORTUNITIES AND OBSTACLES
Despite the strain of wartime on organizational resources and
apprehension that anticommunist fears might chill female activism, World
War II generally expanded women's civic universe, further unsettling
the division between women's public and private lives and broadening
their international consciousness. Clubwomen became “almost
overnight world citizens and global thinkers,” commented one leader
of the GFWC; the New York Times reported that her federation
added more than five million international members between 1947 and
1948.7
Minutes and Records of the Golden
Jubilee 50th Anniversary and 25th National
Convention of the National Association of Colored Women, July
27–August 2, 1946, NACWC, Part 1.
The formation of the
United Nations in 1945 expanded the possible reach of U.S. civic
engagement further, “challeng[ing] woman to make the
sphere of her endeavor and activity the ‘world
household’”—a task for which the special qualities of
female citizenship seemed a good fit (
“Untitled” 1945).
Although African-American women faced extraordinary obstacles to
political participation in the mid–twentieth century, members of the
NACWC were nonetheless equally encouraged by early civil rights victories.
Following Harry Truman's 1948 executive order instituting equal
treatment in the armed forces, for example, Mary McLeod Bethune declared
before a convention of clubwomen that “woman's day is
here!” A “social era is being born,” another NACWC
leader confirmed, pointing to the growing significance of the
“women's vote” after World War II.8
“Government by Public Opinion”; Marguerite I.
Hall, National Chairman, Legislation, to Legislative Chairmans
[sic] of All Clubs, June 5, 1951, State Correspondence,
Ella Phillips Stewart Administration, NACWC, Part 1.
Others
proudly noted widening opportunities as evidenced by the election of state
and local black women legislators in Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and
Pennsylvania (
Boehm 1995).
Nonetheless, women's associations faced a series of obstacles
that largely prevented them from linking local civic activities to
political development in the mid–twentieth century. Shifting
arrangements of national political institutions blocked familiar doors of
policy authority for female reformers after World War II, and this made
the mobilization of clubwomen and churchwomen more of a struggle. Neither
the Truman nor Eisenhower administrations made domestic reform a priority,
while a divided Congress left new departures in social policy to states
and localities (Skocpol 1995; Sundquist 1968). Several prominent women's
associations, including the GFWC, NCL, BPW, and WTUL, for example, backed
a national equal pay bill, but their influence was confined to the
states—although 13 states passed equal pay laws between 1946 and
1960, 104 similar bills failed between the 79th and
87th Congresses (C. Harrison 1989;
Laughlin 2000; Zelman
1982). “You know we are being criticized because we are not
quickly passing the legislation coming before our Congress,”
asserted a GFWC vice president to clubwomen's 1947 convention.
“Many of the issues we have stood for have not been implemented as
we have hoped,” agreed a disappointed member of the WDCS; others
complained about “isolationist senators” unfriendly to
“needed foreign policies” (Stevens
1945; Stevens, Weber, and Bender 1951).
Progress in civil rights domains proved especially disappointing to
African-American clubwomen and Methodist churchwomen. Three years after
the creation of Truman's Commission on Civil Rights, leaders of the
WDCS observed that “the legislative score is zero.” The only
“bright spots” in the area of civil rights “were
nonlegislative” (“Toward Brotherhood”
1950).
Changes in administrative agencies further undercut both the moral
authority that female reformers claimed over domestic policy and their
long-standing routes to political influence. Leaders in the GFWC, central
members of a postwar “progressive coalition” that included the
AAUW, YWCA, NCJW and LWV (Lynn 1992), were
particularly frustrated by the powerlessness of chief bureaucratic allies
in social policy domains. Following the first White House Conference on
Children in a Democracy in 1940, for instance, the GFWC spearheaded a
national movement among women's associations concerned with juvenile
delinquency, issues that President Truman defined as belonging
“logically and practically to the women of America.”
Opportunities to have a meaningful impact in these areas, however, were
limited by the lack of real policy authority in the Children's Bureau
and underfunding and understaffing of the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, formed in 1953. As was the case with equal pay, several
states passed juvenile delinquency legislation in the early 1950s, but
General Federation leaders regularly complained about a lack of federal
support for their localized efforts.
Time-tested methods of public education and decentralized, nonpartisan
organizing seemed ill-equipped to respond to emerging national issues in
other policy areas, too. Conflicts between national- and state-level
organizing were thrown into stark relief with the increasing
nationalization of civil rights struggles. Although federal aid to
education had long been on the GFWC's national agenda, for instance,
by 1952, clubwomen had dropped it from their program in response to a
stalemate between the president and Congress, and to growing tensions
between federal and state governments bubbling over civil rights issues.
The GFWC president in 1952 noted that “many state's
[sic] members object to Federal aid to
education.” “We have had many requests from states not to
bring up the matter again,” she continued, “and, of course, we
believe in states' rights” (in E. Harrison 1952). If
states' rights issues masked racism within clubwomen's own ranks
(and it is likely that they did), these tensions nonetheless suggested
that General Federation leaders were unsure about how to combine an
increased role for the federal government in social policy with a
tradition of civic action and local responsibility. Leaders of the
Methodist Woman's Division found themselves in frequent conflict with
local churchwomen over similar matters; a handful of members accused the
Woman's Division of adopting the programs of civil rights groups like
the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, rather than positions that had been democratically developed by
churchwomen themselves.
African-American clubwomen were also unsure about how to pursue a
nationalized struggle for racial equality with the features that defined
them not as a political group but as a civic group. It was increasingly
clear to the NACWC leadership that clubwomen's state-by-state efforts
on behalf of black womanhood were doomed to fail so long as the federal
government could override state legislation and so long as southern and
border states continued to block antidiscrimination measures. The
“absence of a unified continuity of purpose and a misunderstanding
of program building and the amount of effort expended on amateurish and
out moded [sic] procedures,” an association
pamphlet asserted, were of special concern. But political tactics
prominent among burgeoning civil rights organizations did not easily map
onto clubwomen's civic identity or their local strategies for molding
public opinion. As a result, the NACWC suffered strained relations with
groups like the National Council of Negro Women and the NAACP. “The
NCNW tends to glamorize their Inter racial [sic] work
more than does NACW[C],” one clubwoman noted. In an overt
reproach to civil rights organizations, one prominent NACWC leader argued
that African Americans had not yet achieved full freedom as citizens, but
that this freedom would not come about by “ranting,”
“rioting,” or “displaying the worst side of our
race,” but only in “quiet ways and quiet talk with those of
EQUAL Christian minds who are trying to help us.”9
1946 Convention Minutes, NACWC, Part 1.
Leaders of the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS initially looked inward for
solutions to stalled progress and to the increasingly evident decline in
organizational memberships. The Woman's Division partially blamed
itself for congressional stalling on key legislative issues: “So few
of us have protested by letter, wire, or personal contact!” leaders
cried (“Midcentury” 1951). Mary
Church Terrell told a conference of African-American clubwomen that
“we are not as strong as we should be because we have failed to
publicize what we are doing.”11
Sadie
Mae Tillman and Mrs. Porter Brown to Conference and Jurisdiction Officers
of the Woman's Society of Christian Service, December 10, 1959,
Tillman, Sadie Mae (Mrs. J. Fount) Correspondence, 1954–1964,
Records of the Women's Division of Christian Service of the General
Board of Ministries, United Methodist Church Archives—General
Commission on Archives and History, Madison, New Jersey (hereafter WDSCA);
Ernest E. Goodman to Dr. Rosa L. Gragg, February 17, 1960, Rosa L. Gragg
Administration, Correspondence, NACWC, Part 2.
Associational
records suggest that organizational proliferation in the 1950s was an
added strain. More than 90% of all local GFWC clubs had been organized
prior to 1930, while competition from younger organizations limited the
expansion of existing state federations.
13 State President of the Missouri Federation of Colored
Women's Clubs to President Christine S. Smith, Christine S. Smith
Administration, Smith Correspondence, NACWC, Part 1; “A Voice That
Is Still,” National Notes leaflet, undated, Jennie D. Moton
Administration (from Moton Family Papers), NACWC, Part 1; GFWCA, President
Chloe Gifford, Report to the Executive Committee (undated),
Presidents' Papers (RG 2), Papers of Chloe Gifford,
1958–60.
In the WDCS, leaders complained of
“documented instances” in which clubwoman were “making
sizable gifts to both national and local organizations” other than
their own. A public relations consultant hired by the NACWC noted that
“several organizations similar in composition and purpose to
[the] NACWC had appeared on the national scene” and had
“succeeded in winning wide acceptance and support from the
public.” In consequence, the consultant concluded, the NACWC was
“losing its identity.”
15 “Primer on Political Action,” pamphlet, Program
Resources—Folder 2, 1942–1964, Christian Social Relations,
WDCSA; “Women's Clubs and Public Affairs,” editorial,
National Notes, c. 1950, 24, NACWC, Part 1; “A Look at the
1960–62 Calendar,” GFWCA, Program Records (RG 7), Katie
Ozbirn, 1960–1962, emphasis in original.
Following a well-publicized convention of the GFWC in 1949, the
New York Times queried Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a clubwoman)
about the potential for women's associations to make a difference in
postwar political affairs. She replied, with a laugh, that “that
depends on how much you really do. If all you do is talk and pass
resolutions, that has very little value, but if you go into your
communities with a real education program, that has great
value.”16
GFWCA, Report to Board of
Directors, September 20–22, 1961, Washington, D.C., Presidents'
Papers (RG 2), Papers of Katie Ozbirn, 1960–62.
Roosevelt's remarks captured the sense that women's clubs were
increasingly vulnerable to charges of frivolity, yet she may have
overestimated the potential of women's associations'
conventional arrangements and strategies in a changed political
environment. This fact was more obvious to associational leaders.
“Club life has been a struggle, a struggle to keep club women
supporting a club program,” one NACWC state president complained.
“I fear that younger organizations, better informed, may usurp our
place,” another worried. Organizational adaptation after World War
II was, thus, provoked by opportunity and crisis. This fact was perhaps
best captured by GFWC president Chloe Gifford when, in 1960, she asked of
her federation: “What does it stand for? What does it do? How does
it do it?”
17 GFWCA, Resolutions and
Legislation (RG18).
CHANGING FORMS OF FEMALE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT,
1945–1960
Changing institutional and political realities after World War II
created incentives for associational leaders to begin experimenting with
new organizational methods. For some, the choice was clear: “We
haven't got time to sit building up public opinion brick by
brick,” one GFWC leader argued; “we've got to insist on
being with men in key positions.”19
Convention Minutes 1941, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; 1946
Convention Minutes, NACWC, Part 1.
A “lack of familiarity
of technique of action rather than lack of interest in social
problems,” a WDCS pamphlet explained, “often proves the
stumbling block.” Churchwomen needed to be convinced that
“political action is not just another interest; it is the way
democracy works.” “Let organized women of color forget their
fear of being called political!” one NACWC member declared. Instead,
clubwomen should “gird themselves for a fight at the polls.”
“The time has come,” agreed the GFWC president, “when we
should discard the outmoded idea that we are a
non-political
organization because we are
not” (
Neff 1945).
20 Mrs. Mamie
Moore, “Across the Nation and Around the World for Freedom,”
speech presented to the Southeast District State Association of Colored
Women's Clubs Meeting, June 20, 1960, Zanesville, Ohio, NACWC, Part
2; Convention minutes 1946, NACWC, Part 1.
If leaders articulated
a shared vision of the future of female activism, however, in practice the
GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS differed in the extent to which they adopted new
structures, strategies, and identities.
The General Federation of Women's Clubs
Decentralized structures had been an asset for the GFWC in the early
part of the twentieth century, but they proved an obstacle to national
action after World War II. The “isolation of local clubs” was
a frequent topic in the pages of the General Federation
Clubwoman; members complained about diffuse and unorganized programs
at the state and local levels, overlap and redundancy with the programs of
other civic organizations, and the failure of many clubs to follow through
on projects in compliance with national headquarters (Mandigo 1950). “Other women's national and
international organizations,” GFWC President Katie Ozbirn argued,
prospered “due to continuity” of their programs. The BPW, for
example, was successful because, she argued, unlike the radical
decentralization of the GFWC, “each and every local club [of
the BPW] … adopt[ed] the program [of the
national] totally.”21
Irene McCoy
Gaines Administration, NACWC, Part 1; “Work Tool to Aid in
Implementation of Anti-Segregation Legislation,” Rosa Slade Gragg
Administration, NACWC, Part 2; Moore, “Across the Nation and Around
the World for Freedom”; Mrs. Willie Mae Taylor, Report of the
Resolutions Committee, July 30, 1964, NACWC 34th Biennial
Convention and 68th Anniversary Session, Denver, Colorado,
1964, NACWC, Part 1.
In this vein, GFWC leaders took steps toward
greater coordination of clubwomen's civic activities; they sent
prepared speeches to local speakers to ensure consistency of the
clubwomen's message and created a communications office to help
publicize achievements. They also hired a public relations consultant and
reinvigorated “club institutes”—sessions in which
national leaders traveled to local chapters to promote uniformity of
programs. Although the General Federation had a long-established
headquarters in Washington, DC, leaders augmented their center of
operations in the postwar years, adopting “business
principles” and “modern” financial and personnel
systems. In addition to streamlining and centralizing some club
activities, the GFWC created departments of public affairs and legislation
in the 1950s to keep local clubs informed of developments on Capitol Hill
and to provide instructions to local members on particular actions,
congressional letter-writing campaigns, for example. Members were also
mobilized into emergent policy domains, such as programs designed to
“translate” UN programs to citizens at the local level.
Clubwomen eagerly turned their public opinion skills toward new
causes—they sent more than six thousand telegrams and distributed
more than 40 thousand pieces of literature in support of the UN—but
they regarded more drastic change cautiously. Following the BPW's
new, and much publicized, postwar strategy of endorsing specific female
candidates for political office, for example, the GFWC struggled over
whether and how to adopt similar tactics without jeopardizing
long-standing traditions of nonpartisan civic involvement; in the end,
they decided not to make this move. Similarly, a 1956 publicity memo
explained that although the GFWC had registered as a lobby—as was
required, at the time, of all groups with an active legislative
program—the federation remained distinct from special-interest
groups. “To really function as a lobby group,” the memo
explained, “we would need a sizeable full-time staff working at
GFWC, plus a professional representative.”22
Tressie M. Tabor to Rosa Gragg, April 19, 1961, Rosa Slade
Gragg Administration, 1958–1964, NACWC, Part 2; Convention Minutes,
Twenty-Ninth Biennial Convention of the NACW, August 2, 1954, District of
Columbia, NACWC, Part 1.
In contrast, one leader suggested, the
federation merely participated in “some lobbying, in the sense of
appearance at congressional hearings and in sending requests for support
of GFWC-approved legislation.”
23 “Handbook for the Woman's Society of Christian
Service, 1964,” Christian Social Relations, Records of the
Women's Division, WDSCA.
Rather than supporting specific
laws or partisans, clubwomen supported principles.
The reality of most club members remained centered in local
nonpartisan civic activities. As the Woman's Home Companion
wryly noted in 1955, the GFWC was among those women's groups
“still heavy on orchids and light on results” (Holly 1955). Coupled with the lack of institutional
supports that had once sustained middle-class women's civic
engagement in social policy domains, the political legitimacy of the GFWC
suffered. Membership dropped precipitously in the early 1960s. The
federation did continue to mobilize an aging cohort of middle-class,
primarily white women in civic affairs—nearly eight thousand local
clubs wrote letters to members of Congress in 1962, for instance. But
clubwomen's programs in the 1960s and their steadfast commitment to
nonpartisan local action seemed increasingly at odds with pressing
national issues, such as civil rights (still conspicuously absent from the
federation's agenda), and with the willingness of other women's
associations to take stronger political—and partisan—stands on
matters related to gender equality. If larger transformations in the
organization of civil society expanded the possible reach of
clubwomen's public activism, these same transformations
simultaneously confined the impact of the GFWC to state and local, and
increasingly conservative, issues.
The National Association of Colored Women's
Clubs
Many African-American clubwomen, too, were reluctant to politicize
their association, although leaders of the NACWC pushed them in that
direction with determination. As early as 1941, Jennie Booth Moton, the
NACWC president, worried that clubwomen were in danger of becoming
“hopeless back numbers,” unless they became “more
conscious of National politics”; the association, she insisted,
needed “lobbyists and live wire politicians regularly on the job in
Washington, D.C.” Five years later, NACWC leaders were adamant about
the need to nationalize. Clubwomen should “join forces with every
other organization among us using its efforts to orient all minority
groups into American life,” the national president, Christine Smith,
argued in 1946.24
United Church Women of the
National Council of Churches, “The New Nations, Women and the
Church, 1959–1960,” booklet, Women Folder 1, 1956–1958,
WDCSA.
Smith urged the association to affiliate with the National
Council of Negro Women (NCNW), a motion that clubwomen had rejected when
former NACWC president, Mary McCleod Bethune, first formed the council in
1935 (
White 1999). Although such a move would
have symbolized national unity, members again turned down the motion. The
NCNW represented a new kind of national interest group, serving as a
coordinating committee for existing black women's organizations and,
thanks to Bethune's national prominence, making regular use of
insider strategies and pressure-group tactics (
Giddings
1984;
Gordon 1994;
White 1999). In part, it was the council's
growing visibility in the mid–twentieth century that pushed
association leaders toward greater professionalization and modernization,
at times over members' objections.
Like the GFWC, the NACWC became more centralized in the 1950s.
Association leaders instituted new financial and personnel systems in
their headquarters operations, formed a board of trustees, and established
a centrally coordinated program “to be followed by each club.”
They hired two public relations coordinators over the course of the
mid–twentieth century, each an attempt, explained one prominent
leader, to “increase the level of prestige of the
organization.” Additional changes included strengthening ties with
political elites, stabilizing the association's treasury, appointing
an observer to the UN, and securing tax-exempt status and a federal
charter. Clubwomen in the NACWC were somewhat more accepting of new
political strategies than their GFWC counterparts. They formed a
legislative committee shortly after World War II and, more significantly,
answered Moton's call for “live wire politicians” with
the appointment of a lobbyist “to look after the interests of all
women,” “to work for the passage of civil rights
legislation,” and “to make known the opinion of the Negro
women” to elected officials.25
Background Papers: Reports—“One New Inclusive
Organization” 1971, Records of the Women's Division,
WDCSA.
Civil rights legislative and judicial victories further convinced the
NACWC of the need for new methods of political influence. Following the
Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown, for example, the
NACWC called on local and state federations to help with its
implementation. The repercussions of Brown were strongest among
the NACWC leadership, who, in communications, began discussing the promise
of emerging social movement strategies. “We can achieve full
citizenship,” the NACWC president argued, “only through laws
enacted by the elected representatives of all the people, and by Supreme
Court decisions interpreting the law.” The association's
legislative director encouraged clubwomen to “work closely with
[their] nearest N.A.A.C.P. branch,” because
“coordinated efforts are more effective than isolated ones.”
“Withhold from buying from Woolworth's, Kresges, Grants and
Kress Variety stores,” directed another leader, because, along with
the ballot, the dollar was a powerful political tool in the “Fight
for Freedom.” Clubwomen were encouraged to conduct block-system
voter registration campaigns, to “join the NAACP and support all of
their programs,” and to hold protests and nonviolent demonstrations
in support of southern students involved in integration struggles.
Stepping beyond their traditional emphasis on citizen education, the
association's resolution committee publicly declared clubwomen's
“faith in the philosophy of the Non-violent approach to the solution
of the problems of racial conflict.” Representing a major shift in
organizational strategy, the association went “on record” in
support of electoral candidates who endorsed civil rights
legislation—a step the GFWC had been unwilling to take, and a step
that many clubwomen believed moved the association closer to the status of
a Washington insider.26
Twenty-Fifth
Annual Report, 1963–1964, 66, Records of the Women's
Division, WDCSA.
Many in the association hoped that their involvement in highly visible
civil rights campaigns would “increase public understanding”
of the NACWC in the face of weakening public stature. After a decade of
fits and starts in which membership rose and fell, convention delegates
seemed increasingly willing to admit that the NACWC was becoming
insignificant among national organizations. They mulled over the new
“science” of public relations as one possible way to
revitalize the association, and experimented with involvement in emerging
policy issues, such as the investigation of employment discrimination and
policy brutality, and federally funded research and development programs.
At the same time that NACWC leaders tried to modernize their association,
however, they also continued to assert the importance of a civic approach
to organizing black womanhood—a contradiction that may have
confounded some members. One member worried that “lack of knowledge
of the purpose of the association” was leading some clubs to
withdraw from the NACWC. Another argued in convention that political
action would not “cure the disease of prejudice” without
“the kind of sound and unified public opinion” that clubwomen
had a special role in formulating. Clubwomen were never far removed from
the civil rights movement, but they were reluctant to sacrifice what one
member defined as the “human element” of civic organizing that
could not be captured by merely passing laws or politicking with national
leaders.27
Journal of the Executive
Committee, New York, NY, September 21, 1948, WDCSA.
By the
mid-1960s, the association was struggling under financial strain,
membership loss, and weakened connections to both political elites and
other black organizations. Ultimately, NACWC leaders failed to transform
clubwomen's civic engagement into nationalized civil rights
activism.
The Woman's Division of Christian Service
To a greater extent than did the GFWC or NACWC, the WDCS undertook the
reeducation of its own membership after World War II, teaching churchwomen
“how to become more effective in influencing legislation”
through new organizational and political tactics (Bartlee 1946). They published a “Primer of
Political Action,” held training seminars in Washington, DC, and
discussed in convention “good and bad” “pressure group
strategies.” Similar to positions created by other groups, the
division formed a “Washington Office Representative” to
transmit legislative information to local members; unlike similar offices,
it became a full-scale legislative agency, employing lobbyists and experts
on “world political-action techniques” by the 1960s.
Foreshadowing strategies common to modern-day interest groups, the WDCS
started publishing a record of congressional activities in its national
magazine, Methodist Woman, in the early 1950s; by the end of the
decade, they were maintaining a roll-call voting record at their national
headquarters. Methodist churchwomen's efforts to centralize their
association were more drastic than clubwomen's, too; in the 1960s,
the WDCS officially separated the administration of “local church
activities” from the most political arm of the division, leaving a
core group of leaders at the national level responsible for developing a
legislative agenda and, in the words of one governing board leader,
“more effective ways of translating the interest thus generated into
action in local situations” (Stevens
1978).28
Minutes of the National
Association of Colored Women's Clubs, 1974, Atlanta, Georgia, Records
of the NACWC, Part 1.
With advice from an outside consulting
firm, the WDCS reduced administrative staff, eliminated officers'
positions in local chapters, reorganized the division around “sound
management principles,” and sought to place “a charismatic
leader” in a general executive position. Opportunities for
leadership in the WDCS increasingly depended on expertise; one leader
noted that “the old plan of moving up—from one office to
another—is inadequate…. Today offices are highly specialized
and we have to get the best person to fit that office” (
Exman 1952;
Stevens
1978).
The eagerness with which the WDCS embraced organizational change may
have been facilitated by its ties to other institutions increasingly
active in new forms of public activism. In 1952, for example, the WDCS
adopted the strategy of “friend-of-the-court” (amicus) briefs,
in support of the NAACP legislation against school segregation, following
a similar move by the National Council of Churches (Stevens 1978). Likewise, churchwomen began collecting
statistical data on the social and economic position of blacks in
conjunction with groups like the United Council of Church Women, in an
effort to advance shared policy goals and to bolster liaison relationships
with the UN. The World Federation of Methodist Women (WFMW), the
international sister of the WDCS, emerged in the late 1960s as the central
vehicle for churchwomen's international work, generating
international coalitions, mobilizing churchwomen around emerging global
issues—environmentalism, refugee issues, health care—and
drawing the WDCS into a lengthy campaign, begun in 1955, to gain official
nongovernmental organization status with the UN (which would be granted in
1983). “Increasing international awareness,” commented leaders
of the division, affirmed their faith in particular sorts of political
action—public appeals to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for
example.29
Convention Proceedings, 1947;
Untitled speech, September 11, 1962, GFWCA, Presidents' Papers (RG
2), Papers of Margaret Long Arnold, 1962–64.
Indeed, it was
the WDCS that, in 1963, provided the critical financial backing for the
Church Center for the United Nations, thereby formalizing the
participation of religious associations in UN activities.
In 1964, following a major reorganization of the Methodist Church,
missionary work was permanently separated from the WDCS, ending a
century-long tradition of female missionary organizing and leaving the
national Woman's Division to more overtly political causes. In 1972,
culminating a decade of organizational change, the WDCS was reinvented as
a “new inclusive organization,” the United Methodist Women
(UMW). The name “United Methodist Women,” leaders argued,
implied “a less rigid structure,” described “not merely
a meeting but a being,” avoided “faddish terminology,”
and was “easily identifiable and descriptive.”30
GFWCA, Presidents' Papers (RG 2),
Chapman, 1954–56.
The new organization, still governed by
the Women's Division (having changed its name in 1968 from
Wom
an's to Wom
en's—a reflection of
changing gender identities), claimed approximately 1.5 million members,
employed a staff of 26, and was described by one leader, tellingly, not as
a civic association but as a “superstructure, a business organized
for efficiency, doing bookkeeping, accounting, evaluation of program;
setting goals and trying to solve problems” (
Campbell 1975, 15, 19). While the new organization was
intended to strengthen local organizing, centralization and coordination
were key goals. The meaning of the division's long-running slogan,
“All Action is Local,” suggested one prominent leader,
“varied with the changing times and the earth's
shrinkage.”
6 “5,102,000 Overseas
Join Clubwomen,” New York Times, 25 May 1948.
With
this transformation, the UMW sustained mobilization and political action
well beyond the 1950s, remaining a politically significant, if changed
organization.
CONCLUSION: THE CIVIC ROOTS OF MODERN
FEMINISM
The 1950s opened to the origins of the modern women's movement.
Not all clubwomen and churchwomen identified as feminists—the
Woman's Division defined itself as “part of the movement to
improve the status of minority social, economic, and racial groups,”
rather than “feminist”10
“State Women's Club Federations Warned to Admit
Girls Over 16 or Face a Decline,” New York Times, 13 May
1953.
—but many members of the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS did
view their associational activities as part of an ongoing struggle for
gender equality. A member of the NACWC in the early 1960s explained that
“the Black Woman has become a part of Women's
Liberation,” but noted that clubwomen had been “liberated for
so long we just call it work.”
12 Cited
in Doris Greenberg, “Treaty is Backed by Women's Clubs,”
New York Times, 30 April 1949.
Changes in the realities
of women's lives may have necessitated a new gender politics. White
argues, for example, that the NACWC, and to some extent the NCNW, failed
to appreciate the diversity inherent in black womanhood and, thus, did not
recognize the complex intersections of race, gender, and class that
defined African Americans' realities—what Bethune had called
the “particularity flung at NACWC clubwomen” (
White 1999, 174). Historically inclusive of more
particularized identities, clubwomen's and churchwomen's civic
identities may have conflicted with heightened racial and gender
consciousness emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. In the
GFWC, one member accused her federation of failing to support enlarged
public roles for women: “When a woman pokes her head up above the
group, you shoo her down…. You don't stand behind your
women.” “Changes in woman's traditional roles have had
dislocating effects for all,” agreed the GFWC president in 1962.
“The phenomenon of the American clubwoman is not new,” she
continued, “but her avocation of clubwoman is increasingly
challenging.”
18 “No Smugness
Seen in Women's Clubs,” New York Times, 22 June
1947.
Struggles over identity were closely linked to struggles over
organization and strategy. Clubwomen and churchwomen confronted such
questions as Who are we? How should we organize? What is the difference
between a “civic” and a “political” group? The
changing landscape of postwar civic engagement may be best characterized,
as Skocpol (2003) suggests, as a shift
“from membership to management,” rather than a story of simple
decline. Nonetheless, past research has underappreciated the ways
particular organizations responded and, in some cases, transformed. Of
particular importance, postwar civic engagement was circumscribed by a
gendered construction of politics, one that shaped the ways association
leaders and members evaluated opportunities for political participation
and attempted to reinvent their organizations in response to political and
institutional change. Clubwomen and churchwomen understood themselves to
be nonpartisans, and they understood their associations to be engaged
primarily in the education of citizenship. New
strategies—affiliating with the UN, engaging in litigation,
endorsing electoral candidates—necessitated a change not only in
organizational structure but also in the self-understandings that informed
clubwomen's and churchwomen's civic participation. Political
scientists and historians have largely failed to recognize larger
transformations in the organization of civil society, the backdrop against
which female civic engagement was recast as modern interest-group
politics.
The implications of the transformation in female civic engagement are
perhaps best captured in the hesitancy with which clubwomen and
churchwomen responded to postwar change. In convention, local members
worried that overt political strategies would compromise a long history of
decentralized female participation rooted in public education and
nonpartisan civic engagement. Citizenship, one clubwomen explained, was
“more than a ballot dropped in a box on election day.”
“Why must our nose be in politics?” one churchwomen asked;
another agreed that local church activities ought not to include
“women's lib” (in Campbell
1975, 136). These expressions of uncertainty, in retrospect, make
mid-twentieth-century women's associations easy targets for
allegations of cultural conservatism. To the extent that modern forms of
political activism are beset by particularized interests and disunity,
there is an interesting irony to this argument. Female voluntary
associations have never been completely inclusive; leaders of the GFWC,
NACWC, and WDCS in the 1950s represented the well-to-do, and most, though
not all, aspired to and promoted middle-class notions of womanhood. But
female civic engagement promoted a broad civic identity and a wide range
of social and political issues with the potential to transcend what might
have otherwise been a divisive and fragmented group of female citizens. As
civic associations, these organizations shaped conceptions of female
citizenship among American women by promoting the values and providing the
skills that political theorists from Tocqueville to Putnam have argued are
essential for democracy. Perhaps most remarkable was the degree to which
broad-based democratic concerns became central to the lives of ordinary
citizens. These values, skills, and concerns resulted from a careful blend
of participatory, decentralized structures linked to national initiatives;
broad-based, very large, and relatively diverse memberships; an emphasis
on good citizenship; and a focus on the education of public opinion and
nonpartisan participation in public affairs. “There is no clearer
expression of the democratic process than in voluntary
organizations,” suggested the GFWC president in 1954.14
Lucy Greenbaum, “Clubwomen Hear Pleas to
Help DP's,” New York Times, 25 June 1947.
It is not clear that modernized associations or newly emerging
interest groups or NGOs mobilized female citizenship in the same ways or
even that this was one of their goals. Reinvented organizations remained
important to women's social, political, and material progress. The
United Methodist Women, for example, continued to shape churchwomen's
political participation over the course of the twentieth century,
enrolling more than one million members in 25 thousand local chapters at
the dawn of the twenty-first century (“Active
Culture” 1999). Yet large memberships were no longer
necessary for the UMW to obtain its goals. Similarly, although the civil
rights movement undoubtedly increased African Americans' engagement
as American citizens, its impact on long-standing voluntary associations
is less clear. It is certain that as “civic” and
“political” organizing came into conflict in the
mid–twentieth century, the experiences of clubwomen and churchwomen
at the grassroots were altered. The postwar era did not simply substitute
national forms of organizing for local forms. The transformation was much
more complex than that. Women's associations were also involved in an
ideological struggle over the very meanings and purposes of being
“civic.” Their deliberations offer new insight into the
politics of gender in later decades by focusing on organizational changes
that occurred between the first- and second-wave women's movements.
Future research should continue to address questions about the ways in
which organizations born of the postwar era mobilized female citizenship
in different ways, toward different ends. This research is crucial if we
seek a fuller appreciation of how gender has mattered to American
political development and civic engagement, and if we seek a better
understanding of the ways in which female citizens have been incorporated
into the polity.
