“America’s Gunpowder Women”

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-207
Author(s):  
Chris Suh
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White American ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
White American Women ◽  
Feminist Movements

This article uncovers the little-known story of how the novelist Pearl S. Buck used her authority as a popular expert on China to pose a direct challenge to her white middle-class American readers in the post-suffrage era. Through provocative comparisons between Chinese and white American women, Buck alleged that educated white women had failed to live up to their potential, and she demanded that they earn social equality by advancing into male-dominated professions outside the home. Although many of her readers disagreed, the novelist’s challenge was welcomed by the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which sought to abolish all gender-based discrimination and preferential treatment through the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This story revises our understanding of the post-suffrage era by showing the vibrancy of feminist debates in the final years of the Great Depression, and it provides a new way into seeing how racialized thinking shaped American conceptions of women’s progress between first- and second-wave feminist movements.

The Myth of the Gender Gap

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-218
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
White Identity ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White American ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
White American Women

Taking their cue from anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly, the GOP celebrated traditional gender roles and demonized feminism as part of a Long Southern Strategy. The Republican Party dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform in 1980, which many feminists believed would cost the party women voters. When the gender gap emerged during the next election cycle with more women than men voting for Democrats, a myth took hold. However, the gender gap is not universal because anti-feminism and Modern Sexism remain deeply burrowed into southern white identity where they have been reinforced religiously and politicized continually by the GOP. When geography and identity are brought to bear on the myth of the gender gap, it looks remarkably different. Where it does not disappear completely, it is reversed, with southern white women proving more conservative than southern white men and dramatically more so than white American women as a whole.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

When the Old Left Was Young … and Went to Washington

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Consumer Rights ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
Old Left ◽  
National Woman's Party

This chapter introduces a group of young radicals, male and female, who ascended with surprising rapidity in the Roosevelt administration. Many of the younger group advocated women's sexual emancipation and conducted their personal lives accordingly. Women in the younger cohort were less likely to make “maternalist” arguments that stressed women's innate differences from men, and they identified less exclusively with women-only organizations. These women did not call themselves “left feminists,” but the term usefully distinguishes them from nonfeminist leftists and from the “pure” feminists of the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment antagonized advocates of wage and hour laws for women. However, not all women in government were left feminists. Those who were gained force from the fact that they often knew one another, through shared interests in labor, poverty, housing, public health and health insurance, consumer rights, and international peace—interdependent causes that in their vision had a feminist subtext.

The Not-So-New Southern Sexism

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-157
Author(s):  
Angie Maxwell ◽  
Todd Shields
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
White Womanhood

The stereotype of southern white womanhood is anything but new, and manipulating it for political gain became a critical part of the Long Southern Strategy. The stereotype strips women of their power, intelligence, and strength, casting them as delicate and in need of constant protection. Antebellum southern white men manufactured that vulnerability to justify the strict laws segregating the races that would protect white women from predatory black men. This notion of southern white womanhood clashed with Second-Wave Feminism and the ultimately failed effort to secure an Equal Rights Amendment. The feminist loss, however, was a major GOP gain, as the Republican establishment realized that traditional gender roles could be the next way to appeal to southern white voters. In due course, the GOP’s messaging tapped into and perpetuated a Modern Sexism, characterized by a distrust of ambitious women, a demonization of feminism, and a growing resentment toward working women.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union ◽  
Compensation Law ◽  
International League

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

Are White Women Showing Up for Racial Justice? Intergroup Contact, Closeness to People Targeted by Prejudice, and Collective Action

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda R. Tropp ◽  
Özden Melis Uluğ
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
White Women ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Willingness To Participate ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White American ◽  
Positive Contact ◽  
White American Women ◽  
Justice Studies

Although scholars have suggested that relationships with people of color can enhance White people’s commitment to racial justice, many women of color have questioned whether White people, and White women in particular, actually “show up” to protest for racial justice. Focusing on the contact experiences and closeness White women have with people from racial and ethnic groups different from their own, we tested how these relationships may predict their reported motivations to engage in protests for racial justice. With a broad online sample of White American women (Study 1), and White women who attended the 2017 Women’s March (Study 2), our results showed that both positive contact and closeness to people targeted by prejudice predicted White women’s willingness to participate in protests for racial justice (Studies 1 and 2). Only closeness to people targeted by prejudice significantly predicted actual participation in collective action for racial justice (Studies 1 and 2) and also predicted motivation for racial justice among those who attended the 2017 Women’s March (Study 2). Findings suggest that White women’s inclinations to protest for racial justice may be linked to the close relationships they have with people targeted by prejudice, while more general forms of positive contact may not be related to such action. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ ’s website at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684319840269 . Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ' s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index

Constitutional Orphan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
African American Women ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Perceived Need ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
National League ◽  
Voter Suppression

This book explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters (NLWV), and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth Amendment, and connects that with the NWP’s perceived need for southern congressional votes for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election. And it evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA; and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth Amendment could be used today to expand gender equality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document