The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  As Europe staggered out of the catastrophe and regrouped for peace, much seemed open. “With continental regimes crumbling and politicians eying the new and untested ‘women’s vote’ anxiously, even utopian schemes appeared possible,” writes Susan Pedersen about Britain in the months after the war ended. The IWSA, decimated by the division between members on either side of the war, got a second wind and an infusion of members from previously unrepresented countries. At the 1920 conference in Geneva, delegates came from India, Turkey, Japan, Uruguay, Greece, the Baltics, Spain, and Ukraine. News arrived from hardy groups in Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Iraq.56

  International feminists hoped, too, that vigorous female citizens would join together as a force in international diplomacy, a women’s lobby across borders that would stand as a guarantee against another war. The mothers of different nations eyed one another as upholders of the peace, partners in a great postwar reconstruction that would include pensions for mothers, publicly funded kindergartens, health clinics for women and children, and the means of family limitation. The newest of New Women looked across borders and spied partners in rebellion: fellow transgressors and convention defiers, workingwomen, birth control users, ultramodern sophisticates, and lovers of men on equal terms (and lovers of women—cosmopolitan lesbian circles glittered just under the surface of fashionable society in New York, Paris, London, and Berlin).

  The triumph seemed unequivocal. For Americans, it was the single greatest act of mass enfranchisement in their history. For a fleeting moment, the habit of extravagant universalizing about the unity of women seemed based in historical fact.

  Historical judgments, though, have been more skeptical. Later feminists like to point out the hollowness of a triumph that sent women into a male-dominated political system, only to stand on the sidelines for half a century. Was the vote worth the monumental struggle? Wouldn’t it have come automatically, sooner or later? Critics note, correctly, that suffragists were blind to the reality that Jim Crow restrictions immediately separated white women from the African-Americans who campaigned with them for thirty years.57

  But such criticisms fail to comprehend the immensity of the accomplishment, the limitations that suffragists overcame, and the possibilities the Nineteenth Amendment opened up. Indeed, the reason we can find fault now is because of what they did then; their achievement gives us the vantage point from which to criticize their undeniable shortcomings.

  Suffrage dealt a huge blow to the disenfranchisers by removing the most comprehensive reason for exclusion since the republic’s founding: sex. The fact was not lost on them. Defenders of the Southern way of life knew that women’s suffrage represented a grave threat. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Senate demagogue nonpareil from South Carolina, warned that toying with the woman question threw a wrench into white supremacy: “Experience has taught us that Negro women are much more aggressive in asserting the ‘rights of the race’ than the Negro men are.” In Nashville, the fight galvanized aging champions of NAWSA’s Southern strategy, who rallied once more—this time bitterly—to oppose suffrage and the democratic forces behind it. Kate Gordon rued the likelihood that votes for women would have the effect of dampening the violence necessary to withhold African-American political rights. White men wouldn’t beat and maim black women as casually as they did men, she worried: “While white men would be willing to club negro men away from the polls, they would not use the club upon black women.”58

  One group jumped on the chance to close the gap between promise and reality. African-American women saw the gain the Nineteenth Amendment represented even as they knew the limits. Across the South, “colored women’s vote leagues” formed. In November 1920, three months after ratification, knots of women went together to the polls. As they expected, white registrars turned them away. Some took the next step, lodging complaints with the NAACP, local officials, and Wilson himself, in letters protesting the violation of their rights under the Nineteenth Amendment.59 Thus began another battle for the vote. Forty years later, these women and their daughters and granddaughters, still voteless, would form the rank and file of a civil rights movement that again took up the cause of universal democracy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DEMOCRATIC HOMEMAKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Feminism in the Lost Years

  WHAT WOULD A POST-SUFFRAGE feminism look like? Believers had long murmured about a woman’s vote. In the early 1920s, ex-suffragists hoped that an alliance would come together. The question was, what could be accomplished by the eager, creative, energized citizens who helped push through the Nineteenth Amendment? Which ideas could be brought to fruition? “Men are saying, thank goodness that everlasting women’s fight is over,” Crystal Eastman noticed. “Women are saying, ‘Now at last we can begin.’ ”1

  But begin what? And where? Whatever agreement feminists had about goals dissipated after 1920. The irony was that the women’s movement would never recoup the broad unity it had in the run-up to the Nineteenth Amendment. Enfranchised women now had to affiliate on the basis of shared ideology, not shared sex. Indeed, from 1920 to 1980, women’s voting patterns faded into men’s voting patterns. Not until the 1980s did women begin to coalesce into a distinct bloc, when they began to vote against the Republicans and for the Democrats in increasingly large numbers. The gap widened over time, materializing into a full-scale women’s vote in 2008—nearly eighty years after the Nineteenth Amendment—when Hillary Rodham Clinton ran against Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries, and white and Hispanic women voted for her over Obama by wide margins.2

  As a result, feminists found few visible outlets after 1920. In the years after World War I up to the early 1960s, women were active across the political spectrum—as liberal antifascists, socialists, Communists, trade unionists, civil rights activists, New Dealers, pacifists, Democrats, and Republicans. Voluntary organizations proliferated: the League of Women Voters (successor to NAWSA), parent-teacher associations, businesswomen’s clubs and college graduates’ clubs, civil rights groups, religious societies and mothers’ organizations. These were decades of joiners and leaders. But they did not come together under feminist auspices. A young girl born in the 1920s who grew up wanting to change the world could find her principles and associates in many places, but she would not easily locate them in feminism. “Feminism,” the word itself, once sleek and sophisticated, was a threadbare remnant of a bygone era, dowdy and vaguely suspect.3

  Feminism did not die, but the organizational base drastically constricted. For one thing, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), led by Alice Paul, appointed itself flag bearer but retracted into a hard core of single-minded devotees, narrowing its program to achieving another amendment to the Constitution that would abolish all legal distinctions of sex. This was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which it introduced to Congress in 1923. Other ex-suffragists fanned out across the spectrum, some moving into international women’s work, others into the League of Women Voters, still others into the two political parties. Those associated with progressive and labor causes gravitated to trade unions, local and state agencies for public welfare, and the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, established during World War I and directed by Mary Anderson, a former organizer for the Chicago WTUL. Retrospectively called social feminists, these women were active in public policy matters; they plowed their concerns into an agenda devoted to the needs of workingwomen. Social feminists came to play an important part in the 1930s in the New Deal and the trade unions; Frances Perkins, for instance, secretary of labor, came from this background.4

  Explicit debate about feminist ideas dwindled. Uncoupled from political discourse, preoccupations with women’s emancipation gravitated to popular culture. The most visible manifestations of female emancipation were the newest New Women: in the 1920s, the convention-spurning, cigarette-smoking, lipsticked and rouged, jazz-dancing, birth-control-using types known as “modern girls” or flappers. Modern girls also appeared in Britain (Virginia
Woolf called the breed “crop-heads” for their bobbed hair), France, Germany, South Africa, India, and Japan. A 1928 photographic portrait of the Syrian-born Queen Soraya of Afghanistan combines the signatures of the modern girl—bobbed hair, lipstick, and a flapperlike sleeveless chemise—with a regal tiara.5

  Amnesia took hold, or at least massive forgetfulness. It was as if popular culture became the sanctuary for an abandoned purpose, with the high adventure of the political daughters played out in New Women narratives in film that turned on the premise that entrancing things could happen to daring women outside marriage. The fast-talking dames of the wonderful screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s—Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn—delighted audiences with the possibilities they proffered for a relationship with their handsome leading men that was both feisty and erotic.

  During World War II, Rosie the Riveter was another kind of widely heralded figure of delightful competence, representing the sisters’ valiant efforts on the home front to match the striving of their brothers in Europe and the Pacific. But after 1945, the feminist meanings of changed family roles and a briefly restructured labor market would be subdued and then virtually stamped out. Family ideology in the 1950s directed women back to the home, to take their place in the Cold War as homemakers for democracy. A placid, satisfied housewife would tend her darling children, basking in their dependence on an energetic, fully committed male breadwinner.

  Away from the United States, though, the political history leading up to the 1950s looks quite different. First, the interwar years saw women’s rights activity increase in the context of nationalist movements in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, and the Philippines. In the Middle East, the Egyptian Feminist Union, founded in 1923, held the first Pan-Arab Feminist Conference in 1944, which led to the establishment of the Arab Feminist Union. In Latin America, too, women’s movements spread, with uneven success in reforming women’s civil status and winning suffrage. International organizations were points of vital contact for feminist-minded women’s around the world: the WCTU (still influential in Japan in the 1920s), the Young Women’s Christian Association, the International Labor Organization, birth control and suffrage associations, and socialist and Communist international convocations. The Inter American Commission on Women gave Latin American women a platform in Washington and a position they used to press for women’s inclusion in the founding documents of the United Nations.6

  In the Soviet Union, women’s rights were ensconced in economic policies and legal codes. After World War II, the line was also implemented in Eastern bloc nations and in China after the Communist victory there in 1949. Feminism—or more properly, women’s rights, divested of individualist connotations—was thus linked to various unifying projects: pan-Arab, pan-American, nationalist, Communist.

  It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that in 1945 General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan, should turn to women’s rights for his own purposes, including a section on women’s rights as one of the five reforms he instructed the prime minister to implement in the new constitution. MacArthur was no feminist, but he saw the utility of women’s rights; he envisioned wives and mothers endowed with the franchise helping to advance a constitutional democracy—not that different from the United States. “Noble womanhood and the home,” he forecast, “which had done so much to further American stability and progress,” would uplift the barbaric Japanese to a point where they could rejoin the family of nations.7

  The paradox was that except for the Nineteenth Amendment, the United States Constitution had nothing to offer. Beate Sirota, twenty-six and one of two women with SCAP, turned to Germany’s 1919 Weimar constitution for ideas. “Men and women are equal as human beings” was the first sentence she wrote, a plain and powerful statement. Sirota tried to include provisions for social and economic rights, but her superiors stripped the section down to suffrage and formal rights in marriage: Women could choose their husbands, divorce, hold property, and inherit. Japanese leaders bridled, labeling the provisions an imposition of American values, when in fact Japanese feminists—although SCAP did not consult them—had been calling for these reforms since the turn of the century. But the habitual association of women’s rights with Western domination, despite the thick history of non-Western feminist organizing, gained added value in the back-and-forth of postwar politics.8

  The association of explicit women’s rights with supposedly backward decolonizing nations, or problematic ones like Japan, or ascetic, deprived Communist countries was a leitmotif in the American press in the late 1940s and ’50s. When the topic surfaced, it was usually in connection with some foreign land or, alternatively, the United Nations. Along with Japan, New York Times articles covered India, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Greece, Tunisia, Algeria, Argentina, Iran, and those “reluctant Mexicans” who were ceding a few rights to women. The interest was passing and condescending, working to assure Americans that in their own democracy, the need for such activity was moot.9

  In the United States, the nexus of 1950s beliefs about female nature and family roles that Betty Friedan later called “the feminine mystique” resurrected the Victorian ideology of separate spheres. But 1950s domesticity thrived, too, on modernizing elements: consumerism, sexualized marriage, and civic activism. The idea was that men would work while women stayed home, to shop in stores where, unlike in devastated Europe, the aisles were overflowing. They would tend houses large enough for growing families—again, unlike Europe, where people were struggling to find housing, and they would heap on them the riches of consumer goods. In their spare time, they were to participate in benevolent causes, improving their communities and doing their part for democracy. They were to enliven their marriages with sexuality that drew in equal measure from girlish flirtatiousness and the seductiveness of the femme fatale.

  The push back into the home came from above, with policies that forced women out of high-paying, high-skilled wartime jobs by giving preference to returning GIs. But neo-domesticity also came from below, from men’s and women’s desires for a bountiful private life freed from the demands of sacrifice for the nation. Private life held immense promise to a generation whose lives had been overwhelmed by world calamities, their childhoods shadowed by the Depression, their young adulthoods by war. Neo-domesticity was a cultural scenario peopled by whites, but its effects were more diffuse. Blacks and whites, working- and middle-class people were drawn to making families and remaking private lives. One can see the ideals, for example, floating through Ebony, the African-American women’s magazine, where standard fare instructed readers on beauty and homemaking and celebrated domestic pluck.10

  A postwar rise in the birthrate—only brief in Europe—turned into a sustained baby boom in the United States, reversing a 150-year downward trend. By 1957, the average family size of three to four children was 50 percent higher than in 1940; African-American families were at the high end, with an average of four children, and almost a fifth of black women had seven or more children.11 Since women’s duties at home multiplied with more children, full-time motherhood became for middle-class whites a logical way to incorporate the natalist push—although for most black female wage earners, this was not an option.12

  If we see only a hegemonic neo-Victorian system, however, we miss the unpredictable elements of history. Chief among these was the contradiction between domestic ideology and the number of women, black and white, working outside the home. The image of a smoothly humming domestic apparatus of affection, with mother and children freed from worrying about money by a kindly male provider, disguised the reality that all groups of women continued to work in the paid labor force and did so in increasing numbers. Actually, women never stopped working after the war, they just took lower-paying jobs or, if they were middle class, quit for a while and then went back to work in the late 1950s. The number of female paid workers rose over the decade from 29 percent to a third of the labor forc
e. More women stayed home than went to work, but the picture was changing. The big shift was with married women: Almost a third worked by 1960 and a fifth of all female workers were mothers with young children.13 For African-Americans, this was nothing new, but for whites, the shift was historic. Among native-born whites and immigrants, daughters had always been the ones to work outside the house.

  The beginnings of the transformation of the typical workingwoman into a mother meant that for millions, women’s paid work no longer was a transitory stage in life. The trend had enormous implications. Even as neo-domesticity set in, women’s double shift—working at a job and working at home—became a burden for white middle-class mothers, not just the unfortunate poor. Yet there were no provisions for them, nor acknowledgment of their needs. Nor was there, except for a few trade unions, recognition of the fact that their work was necessary to their families, not supplementary income or pin money for frivolities.

  Overwhelmingly, they worked in jobs that were segmented by sex, although the variety of women’s jobs had increased in the service and clerical sectors since the nineteenth century. Classified ads in newspapers specified male or female; employers bluntly informed women they would not earn as much as men doing similar work. Wages were low—60 percent of men’s, on average—and women had little hope for advancement. Schoolteachers seldom became principals; waitresses did not become cooks or restaurant managers; secretaries did not move up to be office heads. Those were men’s jobs. The reigning ideology tried to reconcile the contradiction between the female ghetto and the American faith in meritocracy by casting women’s underpaid work as an emanation of special feminine choices. Teachers weren’t in it for the money, but because they loved children; secretaries took pleasure in waiting on their bosses; waitresses enjoyed the sociability of meeting people and serving them; maids liked tidying up for others.14