The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  41. List of suffrage prisoners, in Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote (New York, 1920), pp. 205–11; Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, p. 145.

  42. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 73.

  43. Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 276.

  44. Christine A. Lunardini and Thomas J. Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage: A New Look,” Political Science Quarterly 95 (Winter 1980–81), p. 656; McDonagh and Price, “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era,” pp. 415–35; John D. Buneker, “The Urban Political Machine and Woman Suffrage: A Study in Political Adaptability,” The Historian 33 (February 1971), pp. 264–79.

  45. Editor’s preface to Younger, “Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist,” pp. 32–33; Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 97.

  46. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights, pp. 113–21.

  47. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, pp. 111–19, 121–28. Appendix 4 is a partial list of those arrested with descriptions. Sara Bard Field, who went to jail, pointed out that the youth of those arrested was exaggerated; among those she mentioned as middle-aged was Mary Beard. Field Oral History; Havemeyer, “The Suffrage Torch,” Scribner’s 72 (May 1922), pp. 528–29; “The Prison Special,” Scribner’s (June 1922), pp. 661–76.

  48. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, p. 109. An oral history done in 1975 with one NWP member, Hazel Hunkins Hallinan, elicited more extensive comments on the uses of racism in the D.C. jail than can be found in the printed accounts. Hallinan recalled that Alice Paul never wanted the prisoners to discuss their fears of the black male prisoners whom, as she remembered, wardens allowed to roam the hallways of the women’s lockup. Interview, January 22, 1975, in Washington, D.C., pp. 221–22, at http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt2r29n5pb&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=

  d0e16106&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=oac.

  49. A balanced account of Catt’s political reasoning is Robert Booth Fowler, Carrie Catt, Feminist Politician (Boston, 1986), pp. 145–53; Catt, entry in “Votes for All: A Symposium,” The Crisis, November 1917, p. 20; Catt to Jacobs, 1917, in Politics and Friendship, ed. Bosch, p. 165.

  50. Fowler, Carrie Catt, p. 139; Nicoletta F. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York, 2002), p. 161.

  51. Gardener to Wilson, November 27, 1918, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 53, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, N.J., 1986), p. 217; Lunardini and Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage,” pp. 655–71. On Gardener see Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, p. 141.

  52. Wilson’s evolution can be traced in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 53, in letters of November 9, November 29, December 2, 1918, and January 11, March 2, March 22, April 5, April 30, May 6, 1919. The letters are mostly between Wilson and his private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, on whom he relied as presidents do now on their chiefs of staff. See also diary entries of Dr. Cary Grayson, Wilson’s physician and friend, May 8, 1919, and of Ray Stannard Baker, May 9, 1919. The State of the Union endorsement is ibid., p. 277. See also Lunardini and Knock, “Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage,” pp. 655–56.

  53. Flexner, Century of Struggle, chapter 22.

  54. The surprise vote came from Harry Burn, a Republican from the eastern part of the state whom the antis counted in their column. His mother wrote him ordering him to vote for suffrage. Flexner, ibid., pp. 303, 317–24. Mrs. Burn’s missive is quoted on p. 323. Burn, a Republican, represented McMinn County, which was Unionist during the Civil War but riven by savage partisan warfare, with women on the home front inevitably pulled into the reprisals and counterreprisals. Nothing is known about Mrs. Burn; she may have inherited her suffrage sentiments from a Republican family, or she may have come to the issue via the WCTU. On McMinn County see Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), pp. 80–84.

  55. Evans, The Feminists; Pugh, “Rise of European Feminism,” pp. 155–73. Suffrage was in several cases granted only to portions of the female population.

  56. Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, p. 152. A list of “Countries in Which Women Vote” in 1920 is in Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, p. 204. On postwar plans see Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, pp. 66–73; on the British, see Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, p. 185 and in general chapter 10. For the Geneva conference see the IWSA’s newspaper Jus Suffragii (London), July 1920; Adele Schreiber and Margaret Matheson, Journey Towards Freedom: Written for the Golden Jubilee of the International Alliance of Women (Copenhagen, 1955).

  57. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 145.

  58. Letter from Tillman reprinted in The Crisis, January 1915, p. 141; Gordon, in Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, p. 118.

  59. Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow, p. 224.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DEMOCRATIC HOMEMAKING AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  1. Eastman, in Kerber, “On the Importance of Taking Notes (And Keeping Them),” Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional, ed. Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), p. 58.

  2. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics Before and After 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), pp. 153–76; Marjorie Connelly, “How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait,” New York Times, November 7, 2004, section 4, p. 4; for the women’s vote since 1990 see Stansell, “Feminism and Misogyny in the Primaries,” Dissent (Fall 2008), p. 37.

  3. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, chapter 3. On the distance of pure feminism, even the most appealing kind, from antifascism and anticolonialism, see Susan Pedersen, “Women’s Stake in Democracy: Eleanor Rathbone’s Answer to Virginia Woolf,” The Harry Ransom Humanities Center Papers in British Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2000; and “Satire and the Civilizing Mission: Winifred Holtby Looks at Africa,” paper delivered at the Conference on Women, Art and Politics in the Twentieth Century, Princeton University, April 2005.

  4. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993).

  5. Modern Girl Conference, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, March 2007; Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, p. 83.

  6. Badran, “Competing Agenda,” Global Feminisms, ed. Smith; Ellen Fleischman, “Nation, Tradition, and Rights: The Indigenous Feminism of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1929–1948,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire, ed. Fletcher, Mayhall, and Levine; Anna Macias, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Conn., 1982). International conferences were also structured by other national rivalries and power imbalances. As fascism and total mobilization for war absorbed Japanese suffragists in the 1930s, for example, the uplifting of women in primitive Asian states became one rationale for Japanese imperialism. One woman explained her idealistic motives for what she saw as a Japanese rescue of the women of Asia: “When I went to China, I saw girls who were blinded with needles at birth, who were sold to Hong Kong, or who played music by the side of the road. In India the situation of women was awful.… So, I hoped for the awakening of all women in Asia, including Japan.” Kora [Wada] Tomi, quoted in Mackie, Feminism in Japan, pp. 108–9. On the Latin Americans, see Ellen DuBois and Lauren Derby, “The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan American and United Nations Women’s Rights Activist,” Women’s Studies International Forum, www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif; Megan Threlkeld, “The Pan American Conference of Women, 1922: Successful Suffragists Turn to International Relations,” Diplomatic History 31 (November 2007), pp. 801–974.

  7. Sirota’s parents were European Jews; her father, a renowned pianist, went to Japan in the 1930s to teach and stayed on in order to escape the Nazis. Beate was sent to the United States for the duration, where she went to Mills College. See Beate Sirota Gordon, The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir (Tokyo, 1997), pp. 103–39. In 2004, a panel of the
governing party denounced the women’s rights article in the constitution as promoting “egoism in postwar Japan, leading to the collapse of family and community.” See “A Women’s Cause in Japan: Rights Drafter Returns to Rescue Her Legacy,” International Herald Tribune, May 30, 2005.

  Having grown up in Japan, Sirota was intensely sympathetic to the situation of Japanese women. The draft she wrote guaranteed women economic and social entitlements as well as juridical rights, public assistance for pregnant and nursing mothers, and the prohibition of the widespread practice whereby husbands forced their wives to adopt children of concubines. The sections on social rights were omitted from the final draft. See Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, pp. 120–22; Molony, “Frameworks of Gender in Twentieth-Century Asia,” pp. 535–38; Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 180–82.

  The article won support from the Japanese suffrage movement, which had collapsed in the 1930s. Ichikawa Fusae, the leader and chief spokesperson, had grown to political adulthood in the 1910s in the shadow of the daring feminism of her New Woman predecessors in Seitosha (Bluestockings). Fusae, while blacklisted by SCAP, supported the constitution. See Takeda Kiyoko, “Ichikawa Fusae: Pioneer for Women’s Rights in Japan,” Japan Quarterly 31 (Oct.–Dec. 1984), p. 413.

  8. Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan, pp. 120–23, 130–36; Mire Koikari, “Exporting Democracy? American Women, ‘Feminist Reforms,’ and Politics of Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 23 (Winter 2002), p. 29; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), p. 440; Douglas MacArthur, Courage Was the Rule: General Douglas MacArthur’s Own Story (New York, 1964), pp. 204–5; James D. Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 3, Triumph and Disaster, 1945–1964 (Boston, 1985), pp. 134–35.

  9. The news reflected movement in many countries. The 1950s marked intense activity among Egyptian feminists, for example, who broadened their class base and presence on the left, and entered the workforce at all levels, incurring the denunciations of religious conservatives for their adoption of supposedly Western values. See Badran, “Competing Agenda,” in Global Feminisms Since 1945, ed. Smith, pp. 23–26. The patterns of reporting on women’s rights are evident in scanning major newspapers between 1946 and 1955: the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times.

  10. Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” American Historical Review 79 (March 1993), passim.

  11. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 120–21, 137; Susan Householder Van Horn, Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900–1986 (New York, 1988), chapter 7; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, p. 240.

  12. Suggestive comparisons about the meaning of family and private life can be found in Donna Harsch’s arguments about women in postwar Communist bloc countries. See Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton, N.J., 2007).

  13. America’s Working Women: A Documentary History—1600 to the Present, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby (New York, 1976), p. 405; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 301.

  14. On employment patterns, see Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J., 2003), p. 44; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1987), pp. 100–101.

  15. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, N.J., 2004), chapter 1.

  16. From 1950 to 1960, female college and university faculty declined from 25.0 to 22.0 percent of the total, lawyers from 3.5 to 3.3 percent, and physicians from 6.1 to 6.0 percent. Figures in Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, p. 219.

  17. Arnold W. Green and Eleanor Melnick, “What Has Happened to the Feminist Movement?,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (New York, 1950), p. 291.

  18. Judith Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York, 2004), pp. 2–3.

  19. See Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven, Conn., 2003), which remains the best book on women in popular culture in the 1930s and ’40s.

  20. Women’s Bureau, in Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987), p. 49.

  21. See the calls for a “new feminism” in the immediate aftermath of the war quoted in Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, 1982), p. 157.

  22. Orville Prescott, review of Women Today: Their Conflicts, Their Frustrations and Their Fulfillments, ed. Elizabeth Bragdorn, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, May 11, 1953, p. 25.

  23. The classic essay is Daniel Bell, “The End of Ideology in the West” (1960), reprinted in The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook, vol. 2., ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York, 2001), pp. 339–44.

  24. Green and Melnick, “What Has Happened to the Feminist Movement?,” p. 278.

  25. Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1958, p. 6.

  26. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York, 1947), pp. 240–41. Historians cite the book as a locus classicus of a hegemonic 1950s misogyny, enthusiastically greeted, but in fact the critical reception was mixed. Margaret Mead wrote a highly critical review for the New York Times (January 26, 1947). Green and Melnick, in the Gouldner volume cited above, gently mocked Farnham for her comically strenuous advocacy of full-time domesticity (p. 283); her influence seemed already to be waning in 1951, when they wrote. By that year, Farnham had shifted to writing about adolescents—the clinical population she was trained to treat—and toned down her invective against women. See “Talk with Dr. Farnham,” New York Times, September 30, 1951. See also Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique,” p. 1476.

  27. Selma Robinson, “103 Women Sound Off,” McCall’s (1959), reprinted in Women’s Magazines 1940–1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Boston, 1998), pp. 186–87. Farnham herself, in reprising “The Lost Sex” in a 1952 collection of essays about women, turned to more anodyne prescriptions that women should learn home economics and become active in their children’s schools, maybe even go back to college and take a part-time job. “The Lost Sex,” in Women, Society, and Sex, ed. Johnson E. Fairchild (New York, 1952), pp. 33–52.

  28. Steinbeck quoted in Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique,” p. 1469.

  29. See, for instance, the intriguing comment on “Should Women Vote?” in the “Letters” column, Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1958, p. 6. On the LWV, see Susan Ware, “American Women in the 1950s: Nonpartisan Politics and Women’s Politicization,” in Women, Politics and Change, ed. Tilly and Gurin, pp. 281–99.

  30. For the roots of small politics in the 1940s, see Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond, pp. 149–57. A political scientist looking at the parties in a 1947 survey found that women party workers had “virtually preempted the bottom of the political ladder” as election clerks, assistant precinct captains, and poll workers, although most complained that they had no influence on party matters and no patronage to dole out. Melnick and Green’s comments on the 1947 study, in “What Has Happened to the Feminist Movement?,” p. 281. The study is Marguerite J. Fisher, “Women in the Political Parties,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 251 (May 1947), pp. 87–93, and an article by Florence Allen in the same volume, “Participation of Women in Government,” pp. 94–103. See also Jo Freeman, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics (Lanham, Md., 2002), chapters 1 and 9 and passim; Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), chapters 4–6.

  31. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conse
rvatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, N.J., 2005), pp. 48–61.

  32. Cobble gives capsule biographies of the principals in The Other Women’s Movement, chapter 1.

  33. Ibid., chapter 6.

  34. Baker, quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, p. 259.

  35. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987).

  36. On maternity provisions see Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, pp. 127–30.

  37. Lucy Freeman, “The Distaff Side,” review of Women, Society, and Sex, ed. Fairchild, New York Times, July 27, 1952.

  38. “Introduction by Mrs. Peter Marshall,” Life, December 24, 1956, pp. 2–3.

  39. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York, 1989), p. xix.

  40. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between the Wars (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), p. 206.

  41. Philip Roth, “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’ The Words of Saul Bellow,” New Yorker, April 25, 2005, p. 72. See also Paula Fox, The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Wartime Europe (New York, 2006).

  42. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. xxii.

  43. Ibid., p. 267.

  44. Ibid., p. 451.

  45. Ibid., p. 619.

  46. Ibid., p. 615.

  47. Smith, “The Devil’s Doorway,” The Spectator (London), November 20, 1953, pp. 602–3.

  48. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Subjection of Women,” Partisan Review 20 (1953), pp. 321–31; see also Atlantic Monthly 191 (April 1953); Clyde Kluckhohn, “The Female of Our Species,” New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1953, p. 3; see the advertisement in the New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1953, p. 14; bestseller lists in issues of March 15, April 5, 1953. Beauvoir’s name was used in the crossword puzzle in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, September 5, 1954; and in a jingle, New York Times, December 23, 1954. See also William Phillips, “A French Lady on the Dark Continent,” Commentary 16 (July 1953), pp. 25–29. The continuing controversy over Howard Parshley’s English translation is described in Sarah Glazer, “Lost in Translation,” New York Times Book Review, August 22, 2004, pp. 13–14.