AMST 320 Lecture 11/28/11
The first half of the semester we focused on liminal
women as agents of change, and illuminators of the
established status quo of what it meant to be a woman.
This second half we have examined groups of women
from diverse places in American society (politically,
racially, culturally, and by class) who have used
collaboration to effect change. Women who are not
necessarily liminal, but who have entered into cultural
spaces and causes to agitate for human rights, labor
rights, etc. The suffragists, the women’s clubs, the
Latina women agitators in New Mexico all collaborated
with those like and unlike them to effect change. We
will continue on this vein but also examine and explore
how disjuncture is also a part of this history. We can
see this still in issues such as
1. abortion,
2. politics left and right
3. sports
One of the issues that I would like to discuss is that
women’s political success during the 20s was
understood, and now understood to be predicated on
women’s entrance and power within the male political
sphere. Appropriating masculine forms of political
power has been the litmus test for women’s postsuffrage success. While I do not disagree or disparage
with women entering traditional masculine political
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avenues, I think it has been destructive and
counterproductive that we as women have lost our
volunteerist approach to social/political change – much
was accomplished by women at the turn of the century,
a stronger identity as a woman existed, and we have in
many ways suffered as a society with the ideas that the
only legitimate form of power is masculine political
power. Individualism has been a positive turn for
women in many ways, and the 60s movement
exemplified the height of the individual rights of
women. Nonetheless, women’s historical proclivity
toward community organizing for social
welfare(whether culturally or biologically determined
or both) has accomplished much for society, arguably as
much as individual political action, or party affiliated
reform action.
1. popular culture: Piess
a. consumerism
1. cosmetics
2. domestic products – washing machine,
laundry etc.
b. leisure
1. sports, dancing
Peiss:
The cosmetic industry provides an important arena to
examine cultural changes in the 1920s in that it reflects
a burgeoning culture of consumerism and is an example
of an industrial complex that specifically targeted
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women. According to Peiss, advertising campaigns
projected women’s political liberation and
independence through their consumption of beauty
products. Individual self-expression through the use of
makeup was in concert with the new ideas of female
individualism of the 20s embodied in the flapper. While
Peiss criticism of the cosmetic industry is justifiably
harsh, seeing it as calculating and exploitive of women,
she complicates the history, emphasizing women’s
agency in their consumption of cosmetic products.
“Women linked cosmetic use to an emergent notion of
their own modernity, which included wage-work,
athleticism, leisure, free sexual expressiveness, and
greater individual consumption.” The female ideal of
collective work manifest in the women’s organizations
of the 1910s was by the 1920s augmented by a new
political identity emphasizing woman’s individuality
and a new social relationship shifting from female
centered lives to heterosexual companionship. These
changes found expression in an increasingly hedonistic
culture where a new generation of women coming of
age in the 1920s rejected the sexually repressive
Victorianism of their mothers and grandmothers. In
addition, the conservative administration of the 1920s
took a pro-business stance that emphasized
consumption as patriotic and women were the primary
targets. Along with cosmetics, new household industry
products emerged on the market and women were
encouraged to express their newly gained liberties and
American patriotism through purchasing these new
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products. It has been argued that this new generation
of women coming of age during the 1920s, which
focused on leisure, sport, and material consumption,
ideologically drifted away from female cooperative
social reform that dominated the first two decades of
the 20th century.
The traditional history of this new 20s woman saw her
shirk the moral responsibilities of womanhood that
served to inspire the previous generation to social
reform and political activism. Social definitions of
womanhood were strongly contested from the late
nineteenth century onward. The ideal of the “New
Woman represented a departure from concepts of
female identity constituted solely in domestic pursuits,
sexual purity, and moral motherhood. But this new
ideal was an unstable one. For some, the New Woman
was a mannish, political, and professional woman who
had entered the public sphere on her own terms. For
others, the New Woman was a sensual, free-spirited
girl…in the 1920s, the flapper. The flapper was a
complicated figure – she was at once a wage earner,
independent, and sexually available to men; she was
also a romantic, seeking her ultimate fulfillment in
marriage. The cosmetic industry helped reshape the
politically and sexually liberated woman of the 1910s
into a new gender construction; still liberated enough
make money to purchase cosmetic products, but less
threatening to men, remaining sexually available to
them.
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1920s-1930s: women’s organizing—peace, labor and
the turn to conservatism:
Due to the horrors of World War I and the Bolshevik
Revolution, a rising conservatism arose in the 1920s. In
response to the war, a number of women’s
organizations emerged both in support of the war and
military preparedness, such as the Daughter’s of the
American Revolution (DAR), and in opposition to
military armament and action, such as the women’s
peace organizations. International peacewas, arguably,
the major item of concern among organized women in
the 1920s.
The Women’s International League of Peace and
Freedom (WILPF),
the Women’s Peace Union (WPU),
the Women’s Committee for World Disarmament
(WCWD),
and the National Council for the Prevention of War
(NCPW)
were organized by women who viewed the horrors of
the war rooted in male aggressiveness and believed that
the nation and world needed women involvement in
politics and international affairs to quell masculine
aggression. The major women’s organizations, the
LWV, AAUW, WCTU, NFBPW, and the PTA, joined the
peace movement and put world peace as the primary
focus on their agendas. Alice Paul’s rival NWP joined
the cause for peace as well, and it appeared that
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women’s organizations again had a single issue around
which to rally, much like suffrage before. In 1925, Catt
formed an umbrella peace organization,
the National Conference on the Cause and Cure for War
(NCCCW),
through which the leaders of the women’s organizations
came together as an effective, peace-lobbying bloc. By
1930, the membership numbered over five million
women.
The Bolshevik revolution and the patriotic post-war
fervor in the United States gave rise to an aggressive
conservative assault on radical organizations that
espoused socialist and communist politics, and groups
and individuals opposed to war. An anticommunist/socialist, red-baiting climate emerged in the
early 20s and women’s peace organizations were
increasingly attacked as un-patriotic, subversive, even
dangerous. Pacifism was associated with socialism and
as a result, in 1924, the infamous “Spider-Web Chart”
was issued which named virtually every women’s
organization and numerous women leaders associated
with peace and disarmament as linked to the
international spread and threat of socialism. Antifeminist and anti-social welfare reform sentiment was
also reflected in the attack. Links were drawn between
welfare reform legislation and sex-based labor
legislation lobbied by the NCL and WTUL. Even Jane
Addams and her social welfare programs and agitation
were attacked as a driven by socialist ideology and a
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threat to national security. The political and cultural
conservative turns and their attendant repressive
tactics, functioned to differentiate between radical
socialism and progressive socialism, which had
coexisted among the various women’s organizations
prior to gaining the vote. NWP’s militant tactics were
increasingly viewed akin to the worldwide socialist
movement (although Paul and the NWP took a neutral
stand on socialism) and this created an even greater
chasm between the self-identified “bourgeois, nonradical” NAWSA.
In the Republican-dominated 1920s women elected
or appointed by the ruling party often showed more
loyalty to it than to women as a group. “Women’s Bloc”
politics, which had dominated the first two decades of
the 20th century, was increasingly challenged by a new
political strategy in the post-suffrage 20s -- women’s
increased involvement in partisan politics. Two
contesting issues emerged in this new political climate
for women, and women grappled with which strategy
would best advance women’s political power:
traditional voluntarist (indirect mode, lobbying,
pressure group, “women’s bloc” politics) or integration
into men’s traditional party-politics framework (direct
mode, candidacies, and partisan endorsement politics).
Cott argues that both options had drawbacks. The
voluntarist mode perpetuated the “separate spheres”
gendered structure that women fought to overcome
through suffrage. The integration mode risked the
status quo in politics would remain with women and
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their concerns effectively marginalized within the malecontrolled political parties. Women had more past
experience in the voluntarist mode, and it was known to
be a way to gather political momentum; on the other
hand, the gain of suffrage had promised that women
would be able to break free from that mold. (Cott).
There was tension between women’s use of nonpartisan, or “women’s bloc” strategy, which most
women’s organizations employed, and partisan politics,
which ideally created gender equity in the political
machine historically dominated by men. Women were
involved in partisan politics during the Progressive
Party campaign in 1912, but this was due in large part
to the Progressive Party’s whole-hearted support of
women’s reform and suffrage agendas. Historian
Kathryn Anderson wrote an article on an early female
politician Emily Blair and her evolution from her
support for women’s partisan involvement to her
eventual acknowledgment by the end of the 20s that
dropping the sex line was a mistake for feminism
(“Evolution of a Partisan: Emily Newell Blair and the
Democratic Party, 1920-1932”). Partisan politics, Blair
came to realize, meant men could retain their power
without acknowledging women. Blair, co-founder of the
Women’s National Democratic Club in 1923, initially
believed in partisan politics over women’s bloc politics.
In the immediate post-suffrage era, Blair argued that
organized women had limited political power; she
viewed clubwomen as disengaged from political issues
and even the LWV was not focused on organizing
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women as voters. What emerged in the post-suffrage
1920s, then, was a division and “tension between
dropping the sex line and creating a space for women
(separate from their gender identity) in politics.” To
gain true equality, according to Blair and other women
leaders such as Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and
Anna Ickes, women had to enter the traditional partisan
politics of men and gain election to office and political
appointments to committees as individuals, not as
women. By the end of the decade, however, Blair and
other partisan advocates discouragingly acknowledged
that partisan women had not found an equal place
within the political parties.
The Depression Era:
both a conservative backlash and progressive politics
Eleanor Roosevelt:
An advocate for women in the administration
1. Still a tension between special legislation and ERA
2. E. Roosevelt, a product of Victorian Era believed in
women’s moral superiority: basically, men solve
problems with aggression, women serve to pacify
with “understanding hearts.”
3. Influenced her husband to appoint women to
government offices.
a. Florence Allen-1st female judge on the circuit
court of appeals
b. Francis Perkins, former settlement worker,
Secretary of Labor, 1st woman cabinet member
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National Recovery Act—the New Deal
1. Discrimination against women throughout
2. Discrimination against minorities, women
minorities especially affected.
3. WPA barred women from construction jobs, the
major employment offered
4. Relegated women to domestic jobs, sewing, for
which they were paid significantly less
5. Federal government ruled that only one member of
a family could work in the federal civil service—
head of household rule. What happened was that if
both the man and woman from a family worked for
the fed, the woman would resign because women
generally earned less than their husbands.
6. Downwardly mobile white women pushed women
of color out of domestic/service work.
Unions
1. women became very active in union strikes in the
1930s. Carried over into the 1940s and 1950s.
2. because factory women were clustered in massproduction industries such as textile and cannery,
the new labor movement became especially
valuable to them. But the Committee for Industrial
Organization (CIO) only included women when
expedient to their cause and few women became
officers in the labor organizations.
3. Exception: Mexican American women in the
west/southwest.
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4. CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and
Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). This
union dated from 1937 and it was centered in the
food-processing industry. Because 75% of the
workers in this industry were women, UCAPAWA
was fundamentally a women’s union. “Women
organizing Women” was its slogan. 44% of its local
union officers were filled by women. This
undoubtedly influenced the women labor agitation
reflected in the film, Salt of the Earth.
WWII
Women take on male roles
1. emptied workforce filled by women: Rosie the
Riveter.
2. Women served Civil Defense organizations as
vehicle drivers, observers watching for enemy
planes, and air raid wardens. (remember Stella
Atwood and her work in the late 1910s?) Women’s
(Auxiliary) Army Corps (WACS), Navy
WAVES(Women Accepted for Voluntary
Emergency Service), and Women Air Force Service
Pilots (WASPS).
3. When war ended, women were asked to give their
positions back to returning men. 80% of women
wanted to stay in their jobs. Immediate decline,
but then steady rise.
4. Move toward conservativism in post-war era.
1950s: postwar era continuity with the 20s and 30s
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Argument: the history of women’s organizations in the
1950s is characterized by continuity and discontinuity
similar in pattern to the 1920s and 1930s. World
events, such as the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the
sharp cultural turn toward conservativism, and the
redbaiting of McCarthyism provide sharp historical
breaks, which significantly impacted the women’s
organizations of the era. McCarthyism and the Red
Scare had devastating effect on many women’s
organizations; particularly those associated with the
left, such as, women’s peace organizations, as well as,
lesbians and abortionists. Nonetheless, women’s
organizational activity during the postwar era, in large
part, shows greater signs of continuity than
discontinuity. Labor women’s history, women’s peace
movements, civil rights agitation, and conservative
turns in politics and culture are examined to support a
thesis of predominant continuity in the history of
women’s organizations.
Introduction: begins with historiographical overview of
history of women in the 50s. Then examines revisions
on early interpretations or focuses of the postwar era.
Starting with Betty Friedan’s 1963 Feminine
Mystique, I will argue how her view of the 50s as a
retreat to domesticity, suburbanism, the “problem that
had no name” and her emphasis on the discontented
white, middle-class suburban house-wife, provided the
historical interpretive paradigm for postwar women’s
history for nearly three decades. As late as 1988,
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amidst a burgeoning history on ethnic, race, and labor
women histories, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward
Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
reflects the stubbornness of Friedan’s interpretative
model for the history of women in the 1950s. May’s
work centers on the instability of the Cold War era and
how the idealized domestic family served to contain
internal threats and threats abroad: communism,
nuclear holocaust, and subversive cultural
developments (secularism, materialism,
homosexuality). While I hold to much of Friedan and
May’s interpretation of the repressive power the
postwar domestic ideal imposed upon middle-class
white suburban housewives, their homogenization of
women has obscured the history of postwar women of
diversity: for example, ethnic and African American
women’s postwar history, working-class women’s
history, women’s civil rights activism, women in the
peace movements, and lesbian history are not part of
the Friedan/May postwar milieu.
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945-1960. (Joanne Meyerowitz, ed.,
(1994) is a collection of fifteen revisionist essays
reflecting the diversity in women’s history in the
postwar era. In the introduction, Meyerowitz argues
that the old model “flattens” the postwar history of
women, obscuring the racial, ethnic, class, (and I would
add ideological) complexities that existed, and it focuses
on an era that women’s historians have paid less
attention to than either before or after the postwar era.
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Most of the essays in this collection identify historical
continuities between women organizations during the
wartime and postwar eras.
Part I, of IV: five articles dedicated to women’s labor
history in postwar era. Cobble’s article, “Recapturing
Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the
Postwar Era,” emphasizes the critical part union
women had in articulating a new kind of feminism in
the fifties. Arguing for continuity in women’s
organizing, Cobble states that women in the 50s did not
retreat from activism, on the contrary, working-class
feminism flourished in the decade. Cobble supports the
notion that women were integral actors in militant
labor strike in the postwar era. A number of strikes
were particularly women’s strikes. The telephone strike
in 1947 was the largest walkout of women workers in
U.S. history. Retail and food-service strikes at the end of
the 40s and their burgeoning union membership
empowered women unionist to formulate specific
female agendas reminiscent of special legislation
reforms of the 1910s and 20s -- comparative wage,
maternity leave, and day care to name a few. By the
time of her 2004 book she coined the phrase, labor
feminism to describe these women’s labor movements
and labor feminists to describe the women leaders and
strikers.
Susan Lynn’s article, “Gender and Progressive
Politics: A Bridge to Social Activism,” focuses on the
postwar progressive politics movements and their
agitation for the expansion of welfare state, labor
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reform, and particularly racial justice. Civil rights
activism gained momentum in postwar era and a
progressive coalition of middle-class women’s
organizations worked together, employing strategies
and tactics that relied on the female ethic similar to
early 20th century “maternal housekeeping” progressive
women. The AAUW, the LWV, the NCNW, the WILPF,
and the YWCA were among the most important
women’s organizations involved in postwar progressive
reform, the difference between the early 20th century
movement and this one was its focus on racial justice.
Lynn’s study focuses on the YWCA and the American
Friends Service Committee (mixed-sex organization) as
useful models for women’s activism in the years before
and after the war, making a convincing argument for
continuity in women’s organizational activity. The
YWCA was one of the first women’s organizations that
questioned its segregation policies. As early as 1920,
due to black YWCA women’s agitation, the national
YWCA began to move from a biracial organization to an
interracial one. In 1934, the YWCA adopted an
integration policy at all of its national conventions. By
1946, with increased demands of both black and white
members advocating for integration, the YWCA adopted
an “Interracial Charter.” Civil rights measures and
agitation became the major focuses in the YWCA’s
agenda from 1946 on -- antilynching legislation,
abolition of the poll tax, all major civil rights bill before
Congress, and anti-racist education programs to young
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women and girls were all a part of the YWCA’s efforts
during the postwar era.
Daniel Horowitz’s revisionist historical biographies on
Betty Friedan, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The
Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and
Feminism in Cold War America,” in Unequal Sisters and
his subsequent book, Betty Friedan and the Making of
The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold
War, and Modern Feminism (1998) argue that Friedan
was not enlightened to her feminist consciousness
through her discontent as a suburban housewife.
Rather, in his revision of Friedan’s own
autobiographical account in The Feminine Mystique,
Horowitz’s interpretation fits Friedan more into the
Cobble’s schema from her recent publication, The Other
Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social
Rights, (2004) -- that of the middle-class agitator in
labor feminist movements of the 1940s and 50s.
Horowitz emphasizes the continuity between Friedan’s
union labor work during the 1940s and 50s and the
feminism she prompted in the 60s. Horowitz highlights
the damage done to progressive social movements of
the 40s and 50s by McCarthyism, and postulates that
this may have driven Friedan underground or at least
by the early 60s a conservative shift politically from her
radical postwar days. What Horowitz illuminates in his
revision on Friedan, and what is pertinent for this essay,
is the continuity of Friedan’s political-left radicalism,
evident in her tenure as a labor journalist for the EU
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during the postwar years, in spite of repressive
McCarthy-red-baiting era of the early 50s. “Recognition
of continuity in Friedan’s life,” writes Horowitz, “gives
added weight to the picture that is emerging of ways in
which WWII, unions, and those influenced by American
radicalism of the 1940s provided some of the seeds of
protest movements of the 1960s.”
Cobble’s recent work is a synthesis on 20th century
labor women activism, inclusive of ethnic women and
African American women labor activists, identifying
these women as labor feminists (I dig her invention of
this term), true foremothers to later feminists in the 60s
and 70s. Cobble shatters the premise that feminism in
the U.S. was an elitist movement, appealing to white,
middle and upper-class women, but not to workingclass women or women of color. She traces the history
of labor feminism from the working-class movements of
the 1910s, such as the Equality League headed by
Harriot Stanton Blatch, Florence Kelly and the
Consumer’s League, and the WTUL under the leadership
of Mary Anderson, to the 1930s and 40s labor feminist
agitation, and ultimately to current female labor
protests. The 1930s and 40s labor feminists lobbied for
female issue reforms, such as maternity benefits, day
care, and comparable wages, reflecting the special
legislation reforms agitated earlier in the century by the
WTUL, Equality League, Consumer League, and the
Women’s Bureau.
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Cobble presents evidence that post-WWII white, ethnic,
and African American labor feminists ideologically
conflated class concerns with racial discrimination and
civil rights. This had not happened in the 19th c.
woman’s rights movement, or in the fight for suffrage.
Blacks, Latinos, Indians—all minorities, were not on the
suffragists’ agenda.
Female organization with the United Auto Workers
(UAW) is a case in point. Cobble centers on Caroline
Davis, head of the Women’s Bureau in the UAW from
1948 to 1973. Leader of a strong contingent of women
labor unionists, a significant number of whom were
women of color, Davis saw workplace discrimination on
two fronts -- gender and race – and believe that battling
both congruently was “good unionism.”
Cobble also emphasizes generational continuity
between the early century female labor union
leadership with the 30s and 40s leaders, and this
second generations’ mentorship to the next generation
of labor feminists.
Conclusion
The conservative shifts in both the 1920s and 1950s,
expressed in the assaults on radical feminists, women
communists and socialists, labor women, female peace
activists, and women reform associations during both
Red Scare eras arguably influenced many women’s
organizations to retreat from the more radical agendas
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and tactics. Nonetheless, I agree with the current
consensus among historians -- Cott, Banner, Gustafson,
Meyerowitz, Cobble and Peiss -- that the history of
women’s organizations in the 1920s and 1950s argue
more convincingly for continuity than discontinuity.
Cobble’s work particularly emphasizes continuity
within women’s organizations in the labor activism of
ethnic and African American women laborers from the
1910s through the 50s. Do changes in the sexual and
cultural climates provide an argument for
discontinuity? I would argue yes, but to a limited
extent. The younger generation of women coming of
age during the 20s were more independent minded and
sexually liberated, and practiced more self-indulgent
leisure lifestyles in contrast to reform women who,
under the Victorian precepts of true womanhood,
structured their lives around service to others. I think
it is equally arguable for both the 20s and 50s that the
assault on women’s increased political power and social
influence served as an impetus for women to be more
stalwart, more resolute, in their efforts and activism for
change. I see this question still “on the floor” and
continued analysis that links popular culture with
political culture is welcome.
The 1924 Spider Web chart, the advent in1938 of
House Un-American Activities Committee, and
McCarthyism’s attack on women’s peace and labor
organizations during the early 1950s stymied many of
the policies and programs pushed by women’s
organizations, around which they either had to
negotiate or disband. In the 1921, for example, under
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the leadership of Julia Lathrop Lathrop of the
Childrens’ Bureau, Congress passed the SheppardTowner Act. But Lathrop had to negotiate around
conservative, pro-business/pro-medical association
politicians, and couch her agenda as child welfare;
nonetheless, her mother and child welfare agenda was
frustrated with the governments’ decision, influenced
by medical association lobbyists, to cease the program
in 1927. Similarly, the WILPF in the McCarthy era
retreated to more moderate positions to survive.
Women did not have enough individual power after the
vote although many women wanted to effect change
within the male political system of partisan politics as
opposed to non-partisan politics generally associated
with women’s organizations. (they relied on Women’s
Bloc strategies, which had worked effectively to gain
suffrage and other important reforms). Non-partisan
politics went ahead in the 20s, but female partisan
political action proved frustrating. By the late 20s
women’s political action launched a new era of women’s
political engagement, with E. Roosevelt as the catalyst
networking political and social reform female activists,
most of whom, according to Banner in WMA, were the
same women active during the first three decades of the
20th century. ER gathered together women’s
organizations, such as, the League of Women Voters,
the Consumer’s League, and the WTUL, and called a
White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of
Women. (See Banner, WMA). This conference
prompted intense female political activity over the
course of the New Deal. ER lobbied her husband to
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include and appoint women leaders from these
organizations as leaders in his administration and New
Deal programs. According to Banner, women from
organizations such as the Consumer’s League and the
WTUL were appointed to every New Deal agency
concerned with social welfare. With E. Roosevelt’s
influence, FDR appointed Florence Allen as the first
female judge on the Circuit Court of Appeals, and
selected Frances Perkins, a leader in the from the NY
Consumer’s League as Secretary of Labor. Banner
argues that the work and experience these women
gained in the women’s organizations during the first
three decades of the 20th century produced the women
leaders in the Roosevelt administration and the national
political scene, providing additional evidence of
generational continuity in 20th century women’s
organizing.
In spite of the cultural changes in the 1920s and the
new liberalized female generation coming of age, the
most convincing theories argue for continuity among
the women’s organizations. Cott and other historians of
women’s organization and politics in the 20th century,
argue that too much emphasis has been placed on the
Nineteenth Amendment as the watershed moment,
obscuring continuities in women’s political behavior
before and after suffrage. Banner, Cott and others
point to the suffrage leaders, many of whom continued
their voluntarist political activism in the 20s, and
developed expertise in operations of government,
proceeded onto state and national positions as part of
Eleanor Roosevelt’s Women’s Network during the New
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Deal era. Cott, Gustafson and others see striking
continuities in women’s voluntarist politics throughout
the 20th century – the prevalence of the voluntarist
mode of political action; the use of persuasive, lobby
tactics to effect political change; and the types of
agendas pursued which were persistently centered on
what was perceived as “women’s interests” – argue
most convincingly for continuity in the 20s and 50s.
World events, such as, World War I, the passage
of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Bolshevik
revolution and its attendant “red scare” era, the
advent of the Depression, World War II, the postwar
anti-communist paranoia and the Cold War,
McCarthyism and the second “red scare,” function as
historical breaks, or discontinuities, and can be
used to organize the 20th century and help
illuminate the history of women’s organizations
within this framework. The critical importance in
identifying breaks in continuity through these
historical events is that it helps identify patterns of
backlash against women’s advances in American
society, whether in their sexual liberation,
increased control over their bodies, or political
empowerment. Patterns of backlash are evident in
the 1890s, 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s, and locating
the historical moments that effected attacks on
women’s organizations are arguably the most
necessary historical breaks for the study of 20th
century America.
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