Women’s struggle for greater political rights and higher social status came to a peak in the years between 1900 and 1920. In 1900, only a few American states granted women the right to vote. Few women practiced law, due to longstanding exclusions from law schools and the bar. A host of other laws and customs kept women from full equality. Protective labor legislation kept them from night work and prescribed their hours of work. By the 1920s, some feminists came to view these laws as barriers to women’s equality. During the first 20 years of the 20th century, women poured their energy into gaining the vote and other political rights. Volunteer organizations laid the groundwork for women’s intense civic engagement. At the same time, the woman suffrage movement faced a new challenge from feminism, an ideology of equality between the sexes that went from the single-minded pursuit of the vote into broader issues of women’s equality.
In the years between 1900 and 1930, women in the United States were faced with inequality in every area of social, political, and economic life. As the 20th century began, they lacked the vote, could not serve on juries, and did not, for the most part, have the right to run for elected office. School suffrage in some states had opened the door for women to run for school superintendent, but apart from this position, they did not serve in government. In social life, married women continued to be subordinate to their husbands, and most took his name at marriage. They had no easy access to birth control. They had only recently received the right to own property, have custody of their children, and retain their own wages. In practice, few women had control over how family money was spent.
In the workplace, women faced discrimination and even exclusion from certain occupations and lacked the political clout or the union organization to fight back. While female labor force participation slowly rose from 1900 to 1930, most women continued to hold low-wage semiskilled jobs and often had only seasonal employment. There was little job security and even less opportunity for promotion. For married women, who constituted only a small proportion of the labor force, there was even less opportunity, as employers often refused to hire married or older women by preference. Family work also kept married women from regular employment, and those who needed income had to take in sewing, laundry, or boarders.
The poverty, poor working conditions, and uncertainty of working women’s lives prompted many to organize. For working-class women, it most often meant turning to the labor movement, but middle - and upper-class women also were aware of working women’s plight and turned toward new forms of organization. In 1903, settlement house workers, trade unionists, and reformers met to form the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL). Based on a British model of cross-class alliance, the NWTUL urged women workers to organize unions and informed the public about their needs. Like the National Consumers’ League, the NWTUL supported maximum hour and minimum wage laws and even local ordinances that required stores to have seats for women workers. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, originally organized as a forum for women’s educational and social needs, evolved a new agenda of legislation to improve workplace conditions and require new safety standards, such as barring the manufacture of phosphorous matches. Suffrage
Suffragists marching in New York City, 1913 (Library of Congress)
Organizations also developed new approaches to mobilizing women for the vote, and they began to work with working-class women in suffrage campaigns.
The commitment to women’s equality was evident in the work of CHARLOTTE Perkins Gilman. A follower of progressive sociologist Lester Ward, Gilman believed in social evolution, social progress, and equality of opportunity between the sexes. As a result of her 1898 work, Wo-men and Economics, Gilman became the leading intellectual of the women’s movement in the United States during the early 20th century. In Women and Economics, Gilman spoke of the high cost to society and individual women of their isolation in the home and exclusion from the world of paid work. She urged women to move out of home occupations into arenas previously dominated by men.
By the turn of the century, the struggle for women’s equality generated a new BIRTH CONTROL movement to combat state and federal laws against the distribution of birth control information or devices. Radicals Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Mary Ware Dennett challenged conventional respectability and the law in speaking publicly about sex and contraception. They urged women to exercise their sexual freedom and control their reproductive capacity free from state interference. Without birth control, women were prevented from achieving full economic status and rights in their sexual freedom.
Sanger’s work in promoting birth control brought her into the public spotlight. Her work as a practical nurse had brought her to understand the lack of control women had over their own bodies. The public relations strategy she used deepened public awareness and challenged laws that suppressed the free circulation of contraceptive information. She published a journal, The Woman Rebel, beginning in 1914, and a pamphlet, Family Limitation, which gave advice to women about various birth control methods. In 1916 Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. New York State law specified in Section 1142 that no one could give information to prevent conception to anyone for any reason. Sanger and two of the clinic’s staff members were arrested for violating the law. While she fled to Europe to evade prosecution and later returned to a successful public acquittal, Sanger changed her emphasis by 1919 from women’s control of their own bodies to eugenic reasoning about better babies.
The struggle for women’s equality inspired women’s activism in an ever-broadening range of causes. The prime obstacle, however, was women’s lack of voting rights. When Carrie Chapman Catt, head of the National American Woman Sueerage Association, publicly argued “Why Women Want to Vote” in early 1915, the first of her reasons was justice, and the second was that voting was the duty of women citizens. Society, Catt believed, needed women’s skills and labor in schooling, dealing with unemployment, and caring for the indigent. An important aspect of her argument was its blend of the two schools of feminist thought. Catt argued both for women’s “sameness” (their similarity to men) and their “difference” as reasons to grant women the same political capacities as men.
The struggle for women’s equality took a turn for the better when, in 1920, the required number of states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Although many people thought the need for the women’s movement ended with its passage, women still faced many enormous obstacles in their pursuit of equal rights. Alice Paul was a leader in seeking to pull down the obstacles to women’s equality. She believed that women’s rights would be won only through ongoing struggle. Even though the vote advanced the cause of women’s equality, it did not satisfy them. As leader of the National Woman’s Party, Paul took the next step by drafting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. This amendment, she argued, would guarantee that men and women would have uniform, equal rights throughout the United States. The proposed amendment generated immediate response, most of it negative, from many former suffragists. They also had fought for protective labor legislation for women workers, and they saw the ERA as a threat to these protections. In support of the era, Suzanne La Follette in her book, Concerning Women, argued against protective legislation for women. She believed labor laws that applied only to women allowed employers to discriminate against them. For women to have equal opportunity for industrial employment, labor standards must apply equally to men and women. La Follette believed full economic independence and personal autonomy would be achieved only through true sex equality.
Women advocates now moved in different and sometimes opposing directions. In 1919, Carrie Chapman Catt proposed that the enormous National American Woman Suffrage Association reconfigure itself as the League of Women Voters. Its agenda focused on three main areas: equal legal status for women, efficiency in public welfare, and international peace through cooperation. Catt’s preference was for women to remain aloof from partisan commitments and independent from party politics.
Many agreed that woman suffrage was an outstanding victory, but they felt that the great expectations held for it were not realized and claimed that there were few female candidates for elective office. Still, despite the failure of women to vote as a bloc or even in sufficient numbers, many aspects of politics were transformed when women gained the right to vote. Party women insisted on representation in state and national committees, and women began appearing at national political conventions. Women lobbyists and federal agency employees were able to pass the SHEPPARD-TowNER Act (1921) and the Cable Act (1922), which granted women access to maternal health programs and equal citizenship after marriage. The agenda of political parties had shifted under the influence of women voters and their organizations.
Women like settlement leader Jane Addams, known for founding Hull-House and the social work movement, turned thus reform convictions to a new direction. Addams believed that, in order for women to have equality, violence in its many forms must be suppressed. In particular, to free women of their inferior status, the possibility of war must be controlled through peace organizations and war itself eventually outlawed. At the outbreak of World War I, Addams poured her energy into the peace movement. She helped to found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Addams, like other feminists of her generation, was a target for the postwar anti-radicalism of the Red Scare. While A. Mitchell Palmer focused on immigrant radicals and militant labor organizers, other politicians viewed women’s organizations as a threat. In the 1920s, a spider chart of the red network located Addams as the leader of the WILPF at its center. She was, some claimed, “the pinkest of the pink.” The postwar period also gave rise to anti-feminism and a trend toward stifling social conformity in the relations between the sexes. Opponents of women’s equality used a conservative defense and sought to constrict women’s sphere to the domestic realm through appeals to scripture and contemporary social scientific theories, which placed emphasis on physical differences between men and women. Practitioners of psychology found common ground with conservative thinkers by opposing the gains of women. They used the theories of Sigmund Freud to bolster beliefs in the biologically determined and divinely sanctioned subordination of women. Sexologists turned to Havelock Ellis for a new celebration of heterosexual marriage. Their psychobiological approach claimed that “biology is destiny” for women. In contrast, new studies by anthropologist Margaret Mead downplayed sexual differences and argued for a much greater range of gender identity and sexual practice.
The 1920s and the 1930s saw a group consciousness among minority women. This generated a new energy toward the gain in women’s status and rights. The longstanding National Association of Colored Women focused its agenda on confronting racial oppression. It also continued to unite black clubwomen across the United States, who had the “double task” of struggling for race oppression and sex emancipation.
The struggle for women’s rights went through a period of scrutiny at the end of the 1920s. Some saw feminism as outdated, since women had the vote. Others believed things had gone too far and claimed the pursuit of sexual equality was destructive to society. The indisputable legacy of the postwar debate was its understanding of the paradox of how to be a human being and a woman too.
See also Adkins v. Children’s Hospital; labor and labor movement; Muller v. Oregon; New Woman.
Further reading: Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); Angela Howard and Sasha Ranae Adams Tarrant, Redefining the New Woman, 1920-1963 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997); Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1973).
—Marcia M. Farah
World History
