Wisconsin College of the Air; American history, 1876-present; 14; The Women's Movement

Our subject today is the woman movement. Which is an interesting parallel to the progressive movement in two ways in the first place. Because women themselves provided a. Basic grassroots support for progressive reform and organizational support. Progressivism is the first great American Reform movement in which women do play a part. And secondly because the adoption of the women's suffrage amendment the 19th together with it's can combine an 18th Amendment the Prohibition amendment both adopted during the war are always in a sense the one of the triumphs of progressive reforms as well as its last gasp. I came to dinner five. Two waves of feminism in our history. That is in our past history I'm presuming we're in the midst of a third wave today. One of these is the

period which I will now be discussing today that is going from roughly nineteen hundred to 19 20. That was the second the first period of feminist revival or a rival perhaps. Came before the civil war again in the roughly 1830 to 1860. The first question that that poses is why is it cyclical. Why do these things come and go aside from the fact that all American Reform impulses seem to be cyclical. Why this particular impulse given the fact that women have always been at least 50 percent of the population. And that raises the second question of why does it begin at all. In other words if you're going to explain any reform movement like a war you've got to explain why it comes when it dies why doesn't it come earlier or

later or never. All three of these movements have seemed to me have similar origins and so I want to start with the first with a brief explanation because it seems to me to cast considerable light on later feminist movements. The big mystery seems to me concerning feminism is that. Women have presumably been. Under disadvantages legal and social for centuries. In fact I guess it's possible to argue that there are disadvantages date back to the beginnings of civilization. You think for instance of the Greeks all men all preferred each other like Socrates who was gay as could be because the women were not up to his intellectual level. The only people you talk to are what young boys it turned out. Obviously a factor of female education.

Why then if they have been downtrodden for centuries do they suddenly get up tight and say 1792 when the first feminist book comes out Mary Wollstonecraft is an English woman and the connection between English and American feminist movement has always been very very close as it is today. Or why get suddenly uptight in 1830 when the first feminist organizations appear. Why not a century before. Or why not. Constant. Problem. Well the answer is that the present or at least a tentative answer is the whole subject has not been very thoroughly researched and so historians are only beginning to find answers to this problem and they change their mind about every other year. But the tentative answer seems to be that the recent big current contemporary and

by contemporary I mean over the last century. Century and a half position of women is comparatively recent in both England and in the United States and in Western Europe generally. And part of it has to do with the rise of the modern family. The present conception of a family is a relatively recent development. That is they of an institution that's quite internally unified coherent and presents more or less of a single face to the outside world. That I submit is a recent development pretty well confined to the 19th century in fact. Previously what we might think of as a family did not really exist for either the wealthy or the poor or. The wealthy. From the from the king right on down through the aristocracy. Regarded the family as a

device for transferring a name or title and property. It did not have the social functions it does today. It was a means of transferring social position or legal position and wealth. And therefore marriage itself was not again as we think of it today but rather it was a sort of alliance between two independent property holders. For instance the wife was invariably expected to bring to the marriage a dowry a dour right which she held in her own name even in this marriage partnership and the dower was itself made her her economic. It could be law and often was land or it could be a cash settlement slaves in the Old South for instance. And this was her contribution to the economic partnership.

And in this partnership. There is a sense it did not result normally did not result from what we call the day romance which is a perversion of the medieval term romance which really made a scape us. A. Since it did not normally result from affection affection might come but it was it was incidental and later and as a result both sides were more or less often at least free to indulge otherwise the king had a whole train of mistresses for instance that were tolerated by the queen. So did the aristocrats open mistresses and sort o in turns out often did the female member of the of the alliance. This was much less open of course but if you read medieval romantic poetry and I it's been 25 years since I had a chorus and romantic poetry but and I'm to again I'm using the in the old style of romantic I mean escapist.

Like King Arthur and the round table that sort of stuff when you always find romance in those. Or love in those things it's always a matter of the woman sitting up in her castle and in flies a hawk through the window one day turns into a prince who dallies around for a while and then flies away. Which is kind of an allegorical way of saying that she too had her out let's see. Similarly we're among the poorer. Again in the Middle Ages in early modern times there is no particular conception of the family as we know it. There is much more freedom. Again you think you're the image of the eighteenth century poor that you get in Fielding's Tom Jones is a good example. It's kind of simple non morality. Everybody racing around the countryside having a ball is in great contrast to for instance the conception of the Bluenose 19th century

family. Moreover a bun both rich and poor the female had a economic role to play. Children and these conditions were much less important than they are in the later family. They too are a means of passing on a name or a title. Among the wealthy there are very early and quickly turned over to governesses tutors and nurses. Among the poor they're turned into economic vehicles. If it's down on the farm they're doing chores from the moment they can walk. If it's in the cities there they work alongside the rest of the family in the household manufactures and even the though the female in the poor household had an economic role in the pre-industrial manufacturing system which is the whole manufacture in which an entrepreneur or capitalist would would put out as it was called

yarn to be spun our thread to be woven. Put it out to the household and it was done by own members of the family in the household. So again even among the poor there is a an economic and social role for the the woman in pre nineteenth century European and American society. The modern family then is not only of comparatively recent vintage but it is associated with the rise of the middle class. It is a middle class who Joie device or institution. And it reaches its triumph in the 19th century. Which is the great age of the of the middle class and the family of the modern developed a conception of the family follows the 19th century collection of values of middle class values. The success

story for instance the family unit dominated by the father the great. Artistic conception of the 19th century families Clarence day's life with father do you know that play it's an old one. They made it into a movie in about 1950 and so I've. Never seen it. Life with father old by all means dick or Cheaper By The Dozen is another version with a different. Thousands of kids around patriarchical father who dominates the household remember and Clarence day's play he's so domineering that all the clocks in the household have to be set by his watch. On the theory that anything he possessed had to be the perfect. It couldn't possibly be an error not mean or vicious but the dominant personality in which the wife kind of runs around doing his bidding and taking care of all these thousands of kids with no other visible function in this colossus and also to clean this colossal house. Again it's a matter of the middle class you

see they can't afford servants like the upper class could. And yet they do afford all of this these are this furniture in China and so forth it has to be taken care of. Well. And simultaneously then and or an ED junk ome this. Rise of this family unit and which is a child centered Holmes center or domestic centered unit. You necessarily then it seems to me you get the double standard at least. I'm really guessing now. But. In this kind of situation you can easily see how a double standard arises. The woman is the keeper of the house. She she's the queen of the domestic scene. That not only involves the labor of upbringing but it also means that she is responsible for the integrity of the unit that is its virtue and the virtue of the children she becomes of

them the kind of keeper of Saul the the social values admired by society. The husband on the other hand becomes the envoy to the outside world who goes off to his his eight hour or 10 hour a day job deals with the corruption of society orients transgressions and himself to a greater or lesser extent might even become slightly corrupted it's just because of the role it seems to me of this unvoiced this male envoy that this standard arises. And in case what you get is what one historian calls the cult of true womanhood and it becomes in the mid 19th century let's say in the 1830s and 40s a conscious cult. That's very that parallels in many interesting ways the success story. Most of the success literature that we talked about early in this course you know rags to riches if you're good

and pure you get ahead. That's for boys. That's a male literature. The female literature is this cult of what the ideal woman should be the repository of social virtue untainted by society and pretty much kept out of society. By convention if not by law and this literature you'll find in Val host of women's magazines the most famous and enduring of which was go to is lady's book edited by Sir Sarah Josie for hail and but that was only one of many women's magazines in this period that constantly stressed the duties the obligations and the virtue of the young woman. So in the sense that she was brainwashed in the same way that young men were brainwashed with the success story. Trained in a sense so there the role expected of them in society. Now what I'm suggesting here is that in a previous condition when the woman had both more

responsibility in terms of economic roles and greater freedom her situation prior to this was more tolerable what happens with the rise of the family as a virtual social if not physical jail. In which she's confined socially and intellectually and culturally. Under a kind of petty tyranny. And petty tyranny is probably the worst kind of almost anybody can tolerate public tyranny it's the private tyranny that gets you. Paralleling This is the erosion of what few rights women had possessed in the earlier condition and they did possess more legal rights prior to the 19th century than after they even for instance possessed in some rare cases the right to vote. It's been discovered for instance that England had no restrictions on women voting prior to 1832.

Now it's to be sure they didn't. Not very many of them voted but quite. It's quite probable that landed women that is aristocrats voted but they were specifically deprived of the vote in the Reform Bill of 1832 in England. Similarly a couple of early American States permitted women to vote notably New York and New Jersey by their state constitutions. This too was undone in the 1820s. Both women and free Negroes were deprived of the right to vote and there they were locked in pre-Civil War America was often similar. And similarly there was an erosion of their legal rights they became a mere adjunct to the family and one reason for consistently denying them any legal rights is the right to hold independent property or the right to undertake lawsuits without permission of the husband. The whole purpose of that primarily was to hold the family unit together. They felt or feared that if the woman had an independent right to

undertake a lawsuit one result might be a damage to the family unity among other people she might sue is or has been. And indeed that's the common law even today. Husband and wife cannot sue each other except of course where the law's been modified by divorce statutes but otherwise that remains and the purpose is to prevent two members of a family from becoming litigants against each other destroying therefore the King family unity. Indeed divorce itself it seems to me proves my point. The divorce statutes are a product of the late 19th century when it was recognized that. If you're going to preserve the internal unity and integrity of the family which is its purpose. You've got to permit a break up. If it if the

family conditions become intolerable either for instance because the two mates are totally incompatible or because one of them is transgressed outside the family in one way or another. The irony of the CEO of modern divorce laws is that they are the basic pillar of the family in the sense of preserving the unity of the great majority of families that might otherwise have internal discord. Well what I'm suggesting then is that when women began to agitate an object in the 18 20s and 30s it was not that they were suddenly awakening to an age old position of inferiority. It was an objection to a relatively new condition that had just been imposed on them. In short there are the women the feminist movement coincides almost exactly with the decline in women's rights.

With their changed position in society and they began to complain agitate almost immediately. The pre-Civil War movement began in a kind of a small way with many self-improvement organizations education for instance was one of its main drives. And then it fed upon and was reinforced by the pre-Civil War reform movement. Women proved to be extremely good anti-slavery orators for instance you think of the the Greenpeace sisters for instance. And that in turn proved art produced a revolution of rising expectations they found out they were pretty good on the lecture circuit. So they began demanding political rights and of course the women's suffrage movement is born out of this period led by people like Lucretia mocking Elizabeth Cady Stanton and so forth. Well the pre-Civil War movement died with the civil war

that is the first feminist movement dies along with the other reform impulses with the civil war. In a sense it's last dying gasp is Victoria Wood Hall's campaign for the presidency in 1872 and the national radical reformers platform. The first woman candidate for president. She was also the last because she killed herself when she stood on a new stage of a New York theater and publicly endorsed free love. That gave a bad name to the whole movement or at least did it seem to support what men have been saying all along about it. Moreover then she really did give herself a coup de gras when she accused the most prominent preacher of the age Henry Ward Beecher who was a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin authoress. Henry Ward Beecher is far and away the most prominent preacher of the 1860s and said she accused him of philandering with the wife of his best

friend. And he probably was that's a heck of a no way she could prove it. And it was and the reason was it redounded against her she just a scandal monger. I mean to be a lie Germain Greer today standing up and accusing Billy Graham of coat running around with Pat Nixon. If it turned everybody off of the whole women's rights movement and just about killed it for the next generation. Moreover the post-Civil War period of conservatism also marked the let down. Social Darwinism worked against women. The climate of social Darwinism for instance in the 1870s. One guy named Edward H. Clarke published a book called Sex in education in which he argued that education was damaging to women's reproductive organs and that if you if you educate them you're going to debilitate the entire race and turn us all into morons. Well that's

social Darwinism run riot of course. In the 1870s and 80s and 90s the only thing that struggled on was the lingering vestige of the suffrage organization. I still carried on by Susan Anthony Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Stanton these three women died or retired in the 1890s and it marked the end of an era. Thereafter the suffrage organization was taken over by new people who had nowhere near their organizational ability. And you don't hear much about it again until the very eve of World War One. Suffrage itself seems to go by the way as women become interested in other things. The only thing that you can say about this period of the Gilded Age is that the women's suffrage movement did make some limited success on the state level beginning with Wyoming which permitted women to vote in

1869 that was because they didn't have any women but they wanted to attract some and they thought if they let them vote it might bring some in. And Wyoming was followed by other Western states conceivably for the same motivation so that by Nineteen Hundred about four western states mountain states mostly permitted women to vote. By that time the new revival of the second wave of women's woman movement was already underway. And it had several roots and indeed remained in several separate strains throughout its career. The very beginning of it was a myth. It was not an open education for women's rights nor was it an open rebellion against the social system. It began as kind of an outlet for their energies.

And which took the form of reform organizations particularly in the field of temperance women were natural or from the very beginning the very the primary popular support for the Prohibition movement the women's Christians Temperance Union CTU was found in the 1870s the National Prohibition Party born in eighteen eighty again almost of its membership was women. And their argument stemmed directly from their family role in other words having the husband down in the saloon all the time was a misallocation of family resources. If you could get him home you could spend that money on beef steak or something. It was the primary argument. But besides the Prohibition movement and throughout its career women's rights and prohibition were linked arm in arm and eventually both amendments were adopted virtually together during World War One.

Besides that you also got in this period the rise of women's clubs. This too was a matter of of a outlet for intellectual energies otherwise stifled by the the family institution. These women's clubs which reach their heyday in this period between 1890 in one thousand twenty heyday and membership anyway. Started out as social and educational organizations they would sit around and read good books for instance and in simple little sherry in the afternoon. But they almost invariably turned political and when they did especially under the impetus of the muckraking magazines which you remember I've already pointed out were Read more by women than by men. They almost always were progressively oriented they became concerned with the ills of society especially after nineteen hundred. And then reform again perturbing merrily at the local level. Urban reform. Or working reform that is in wages in

hours in child labor. And they provided some of the best local organization for the progressive movement of the city and state level. The third channel in which this new movement took. Was in the form of a settlement house. The Settlement House idea originated. In the frustrations of the college or well educated young woman. Who having been pretty well educated pretty well prepared for a career suddenly emerged from college to find that society had absolutely no opportunities for her. When Jane Adams called the snare of preparation and so they got the idea and Jane Adams which is spelled with two D's. It. Is one of the pioneers of the idea. The idea was to

once they leave college to go to the city slums live among the workers and use their education to educate the people around them not just children. Don't just be a schoolmarm but educate the adults as well. And not only in reading and writing but in their social and political responsibilities. And that was the basic purpose of the settlement house and what it attracted was the number of young women who perform these roles and these got to be in their most successful form anyway the huge establishment. I mean I'm not just talking about a little sell in in downtown Manhattan. Jane Adams hall house in Chicago for instance. H U L L Jean Adams hall house had 14 buildings I mean it was a big operation. And similarly Lily and Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York and Lillian Wald D was the other most famous of the settlement house women.

That too was a very heavily capitalized finance operation that had a major impact on the ghettos of these cities. Moreover the settlement houses themselves tended to train the next generation of feminists. Many of them got their start in these settlement houses. Frances Perkins for instance who became secretary of labor under Franklin Roosevelt the first woman and cabinet member put in some time at whole halls as I recall. And. Similarly one of the most. What's the adjective I need. Electrifying exciting dynamic. There we go. Of the women leaders of this period Florence Kelly. Also got her start at Hall house Florence Kelly.

Now as the daughter of a congressman old Pig-Iron Kelly known as pig iron because of his views on the protective tariff I. Went off to graduate school because no American Graduate schools would admit or went off to Switzerland where she read Marx and the German idealists and became a Marxist socialist It was called in the 1880s married in fact a Russian emigre. That is a communist who had fled from Russia from the Czar and together she and her Russian husband came back to the United States where they promptly got divorced and she moved into in the 1890s into Jean Adams ho house. Got her start there in an eight hundred ninety nine. She was appointed the general secretary of the National Consumers League and the National Consumers League as the first great women's social reform organization. It's modeled on an

English organization. And in other words they're copying from the English feminists who are always about a step ahead of the American feminist and under Florence Kelly what this league did is become interested in problems of social reform that particularly involve women notably women laborers with hours of women and child labor. And they started a national campaign for improvement which got its first major victory in that 10 hour law in Oregon that I mentioned last time defended by Louis Brandeis who was hired by the National Consumers League to defend it and justified by the court in the case of Muller against Oregon. Further years of agitation culminated in the passage of our first child labor law. Which prohibited the products made by child labor in interstate commerce it's our first federal. Labor law in a

sense passed in 1916. Again a major victory for the Consumers League and for this whole women reform movement declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court two years later but and his genuine reform or prohibition of child labor had to await the new deal but nonetheless it was at least for the moment a temporary victory. So what I'm driving at here then is that women provided at the local level the main organizational impetus or one of them. Social reform in the clean up of the cities. And at the national level they interested themselves in particular things such as labor legislation and had as much victory as any other progressives. Now throughout all of this agitation the suffrage question simmered. It did not come until the fore until fairly late. And one reason is that the main leaders of this woman movement in a sense this is the golden age of

feminism in terms of leadership. The main leaders of this movement were not much interested in the suffrage or put it another way they regarded women's suffrage as only one of many things. It was not the be all the panacea that would cure the problems of the world that some later came to think it would be. Take for instance probably the most arresting female thinker of the age Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is probably the best female mind of the age in terms of her writing her thought. She is a socialist. She's one of the few American reformers of this period to be an outright Marxist. But Charlotte Perkins Gilman was much more concerned with the overall role of women in society. Questions of fundamental the role of the family. She questioned the moral standards inherited from Victorian period.

She was much more and anticipated the feminist thought of more recent years than any other thinker this time suffrage to her it was only one part of the ball game. Similarly with Abby Kelly nonetheless it did simmer along. Getting a new state hither and yon. They made one big victory when California granted women's suffrage in 1912 and that same year you remember the Progressive Party indorsed the idea of women's suffrage. But then came a big setback. When the liquor interests decided that women's suffrage was going to kill them did it. And they probably had good reason to think so because it was women who were backing the Prohibition movement. And sold the liquor interests in state after state began pouring money in to the end time women's suffrage movement and the result is that the victory in California was about their last three years later for instance New York refused to consider it and then voted down a

women's suffrage proposal. So it became clearer then by 1913 that they were getting nowhere. That is that on a state by state basis it was going to take them forever. And probably cost more than they could ever muster in financial terms. And they're here in 1913 the suffrage movement got some new blood. That is the old leadership it died away and been replaced by not very effective organizers. But they got some new leadership in 1838 1913 with the arrival of a young English woman named Alice Paul. And this young Englishwoman the English womens movement was much more militant to the than the American one. I mean those English women really were well in first place they invented trashing. They trashed London complete from end day and broke every window in the town in 1912 and

upset cars and they were burning they were used arson and they were a bunch. Anyway coming out of this radical violent movement in England Alice Paul proceeded to use English tactics in the United States and the first thing she did is organize an enormous mass demonstration to coincide with Wilson's inauguration in the spring of 1913. Huge public demonstration that light most now asked him and striations triggered its own counter demonstration and the result was a battle of the sexes a couple thousand men showed up with billy clubs. Police had to move in to save the women and rescue them. And these beaten and battered women of course became murders to their cause. And that's what did it. And what happened after this incident is that only over the country tens of thousands of women began sending money to the suffrage organizations. Women who themselves would not get out and throw rocks at Windows but who were

willing to send their grocery money a few bucks at a time to the suffrage organization. And from that point on the suffrage organizations there were to be one organized before the Civil War. And Alice Paul's new one called the Congressional Union. But both of them were among the most heavily financed reform organizations the United States has ever seen. They had tremendous amount of financial and other volunteer resources at their command. It was Paul's new tactics. Breathe some new life into the old suffrage organization. And in 1916 they got themselves a new president named Carrie Chapman kept. And Carrie Catt proved to be the flip side of Alice Paul Alice was the organizer Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice was the agitator. Carrie Chapman kept the supreme organizer. And before long she came up not only

with a timetable two years for the amendment four years for ratification she figured by 1920 two women would have the vote. And she organized a nationwide seldom has there been any such superb organization as Carrie Catt came up with. The only thing she didn't count on was World War 1 which actually speeded up her timetable in an ironic way. The effect of World War 1 was that it gave American politicians who had already secretly changed their mind. The opportunity to reverse themselves without appearing inconsistent. Woodrow Wilson is a case in point by 1916 Wilson had concluded that women's suffrage was a good thing. Moreover by that time most of the old arguments against it that is that society would go to pot and we'd all become a lot of mishmash E and so forth were disproved by the experience of those states that had long had the women vote and no particular change in their

institutions. What they needed was an excuse and the war provided it. In 1018 Wilson argued that what we need is domestic harmony and unity in the nation. And the chorus of it was the women who were the most disharmonious with their organization. So Wilson advocated women's suffrage as a war measure. They also passed prohibition as a war measure that is the idea that we shouldn't be drinking all this week to be sending it to the troops in France. And so both the 18th Amendment which prohibited liquor authorize Congress to and the 19th Amendment were rushed through Congress as devices of patriotism and whipped through the states in near record time. The women's suffrage amendment the 19th going into effect in 1920. And then came the let down because it turned out as Ali had predicted that it didn't make much difference.

Nobody should have been surprised but the women themselves were disappointed after all the