Using Mammon for Righteousness

Chapter 5 explores what happened when women approached existing coeducational schools offering restricted gifts to benefit women. These donations either forced a school to open its doors to women or increased the number of women admitted by providing scholarships for women or erecting a women’s building or a women’s dormitory. Like the college founders, these donors believed that women were capable of the same intellectual achievement as men but found that many of America’s best universities resisted coeducation. The women in this chapter, including Mary Garrett, and Phoebe Hearst and the gifts they gave show how money could be wielded to force changes that would benefit women, in the form of access to education and professions formerly restricted to men. Moreover, coeducation at these schools, including Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley, was especially significant. If women were welcomed at these important institutions, they could demonstrate their intellectual and professional capabilities and equality with men.

Dictating with Dollars

Wealthy women’s understanding of financial independence and sisterhood are themes that are crucial to the ideas of women wealthy throughout the book. The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) largely failed to effectively develop a cross-class coalition of wealthy women and labor women. By studying the WTUL in comparison to Grace Dodge’s working girls clubs and YWCA work, and the support of wealthy women for the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike, the chapter explores why many wealthy women sought gender equality. Their interactions with working-class women and their desire to control their own finances drove them to link financial independence with political equality. When the wealthy held the purse strings, cross-class cooperation, while potentially empowering to laboring women, was also a potent source of conflict. Working women resented the fact that Margaret Dreier Robins and Mary Dreier dominated the funding for the WTUL and insisted on having their way, despite the sisters’ deep commitment to feminism and their professed desire for cross-class coalition.

Following the Money

Chapter 1 examines how suffragists recruited wealthy women to the woman suffrage movement, who these donors were, and why they decided to give their money—and sometimes their time—to fight for political equality. This chapter argues that focusing on their feminism highlights a strand of suffragism that called for gender equality rather than emphasized maternalism, the belief that women as mothers (or potential mothers) had the right and the duty to vote in order to protect children and clean up government. Having experienced both the power of money and its limitations influenced the way women linked economic independence and political equality, which they believed were necessary whether one earned wages in a factory, was a professional with a college degree, or inherited a large fortune. Susan B. Anthony had understood that their donations were necessary, and Alva Belmont and Katharine McCormick gave donations essential to winning the right to vote for women.

Introduction

Women are learning something men have traditionally understood: money provides access. —Karen D. Stone Philanthropy lies at the heart of women’s history. —Kathleen D. McCarthy Over the first six decades of the twentieth century, Katharine Dexter McCormick wrote checks totaling millions of dollars to advance political, economic, and personal freedom and independence for women. She gave her time and money to the woman suffrage movement, funded a dormitory for women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to encourage women’s education in science, and almost single-handedly financed the development of the birth control pill. McCormick opposed the militant tactics of some suffragists—such as picketing the White House—which were bankrolled by another woman, Alva Belmont, a southerner who stunned New York society when she divorced William K. Vanderbilt, inheritor of the Vanderbilt fortune. With her flair for the dramatic, Belmont brought crucial publicity to the woman suffrage movement and wielded power with her money, giving tens of thousands of dollars to the national suffrage associations under certain conditions—for example, that organization offices be moved; that she be given a leadership position; and, later, that the movement focus on international women’s rights. Mary Garrett, another generous supporter of the suffrage movement, also understood the coercive power of philanthropy, paying the salary of the dean at Bryn Mawr College—but only if that dean was her partner, M. Carey Thomas—and orchestrating a half-million-dollar gift to Johns Hopkins University to open a medical school, with the condition that the school admit women. These monied women, and many like them, understood that their money gave them clout in society at a time when most women held little power....

Feminism and Science

While Sanger’s early focus was on increasing access to and information about birth control, one of her most loyal supporters, Katharine McCormick, consistently argued for the research and development of a new method of accessible, safe, reliable contraception controlled by women themselves, at a time when diaphragms, condoms, and withdrawal were common methods of birth control. Chapter 7 posits that McCormick’s feminism drove her to back development of the pill, correcting earlier historians who misunderstood her relationship with her husband. I also explain why Sanger and McCormick supported a prescription pill, which could be difficult for some women to obtain, while ostensibly trying to expand access to birth control. The chapter traces the way McCormick’s scientific interest in endocrinology, which developed from her intervention in her mentally ill husband’s medical care, and her feminist philosophy came together in her funding of the development of the birth control pill. At a time when Planned Parenthood was uninterested in research or concerned with developing a new contraceptive method that women could control, McCormick insisted that a pill was both possible and necessary, and she paid for its development by Gregory Pincus and John Rock. She then worked to ensure that women had access to the pill through its distribution at hospital clinics. McCormick single-handedly financed the expansion of reproductive rights for women through the development of the pill.

An Education for Women Equal to That of Men

Some women founded women’s colleges that were designed to offer a rigorous academic program on par with that at the best men’s colleges, such as Harvard. Chapter 4 examines four women’s college founders of Smith College, Newcomb, Sweet Briar, and Scripps College, along with Jane Stanford, cofounder of coeducational Stanford University. They believed deeply in the abilities of women and the need to develop them through higher education. This chapter shows how these college founders defined women’s rights and desired access to education, not only for intellectual growth but also for financial independence. Chapter 4 demonstrates the enormous influence on women’s education that these women collectively had.

Unequal Women Working for Women’s Equality

Chapter 2 demonstrates how having money at their disposal (or a lack of it) affected suffrage association officers’ ability to make decisions about where and how to carry out the suffrage campaign. It also allowed for the development of new tactics and strategies alongside traditional methods. This chapter posits that gifts from wealthy women, including Mrs. Frank Leslie’s million-dollar bequest, paid for organizers to travel to the states to campaign at the state level; initiated a publicity blitz, including newspapers and parades; and financed the “winning plan” that combined state-level efforts with a focus on the federal amendment, ultimately leading to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It offers a new way to understand the split between the two major suffrage associations by focusing on the role of money and conflict between Katharine McCormick and Alice Paul over fundraising. The chapter also examines the conflict that developed when funding disproportionately came from a small number of wealthy individuals. Donors like Alva Belmont tied their gifts to demands, such as who should hold office and where headquarters should be located, causing resentment of money power in the movement.

Epilogue

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Margaret Sanger’s Network of Feminists

Many feminist philanthropists believed that economic and political rights for women were incomplete without the right to control one’s reproduction. America’s leading birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger, was a skilled fund-raiser. She carefully managed a network of society women who supported her organizations, publications, and private life. Chapter 6 takes a new approach to understanding Sanger: by moving the spotlight from Sanger to her supporters, it becomes clear that her strategic turn to wealthy women did not come at the expense of her feminism (even if she did drop her socialism), as has been argued by some historians. This chapter shows that women like Gertrude Minturn Pinchot and Juliet Barrett Rublee rallied behind Sanger, creating a Committee of 100 to defend her and promote the birth control movement. Unafraid of being arrested, their personal lives and their birth control advocacy revealed their feminism. Chapter 6 focuses on the ways that feminism undergirded rich women’s donations, compelled them to take on controversial issues, and pushed them to influence Sanger and shape the movement and the American Birth Control League and Planned Parenthood. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates the social networks of power created by wealthy women.