The New Woman and the Politics of the 1920S

Author(s): Lynn Dumenil

Source: OAH Magazine of History , Jul., 2007, Vol. 21, No. 3, Reinterpreting the 1920s
(Jul., 2007), pp. 22-26
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American
Historians
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 Lynn Dumenil

The New Woman and

the Politics of the 1920s

The politics of the 1920s are often portrayed in fairly drab terms. Although a broad group of women supported the suffrage
Sandwiched between the more compelling eras of Progressivism campaigns, they were far from united. With few exceptions, black
and the New Deal, the decade seems comparatively uneventful women were excluded from the white-dominated suffrage groups.
as Americans turned their backs on reform while conservative big Racism, as well as a fear that black participation in the movement would
business reigned over a "politics of normalcy." However, many scholars confirm southern perceptions that expanding the suffrage to women
have challenged this stereotypical view of the eclipse of reform, and would disrupt well-established black disenfranchisement in that region,
none more resoundingly than historians of American women. led white suffragists to rebuff black women's overtures at cooperation.
Conventional textbook treatment usually includes a brief mention White women themselves were divided, especially after Alice Paul
of the passage of the women's formed the Congressional
suffrage amendment in 1920 Union in 1914. This group, the
and perhaps a discussion of the members of which tended to be
"new woman" embodied in one young and radical, launched a
of the most pervasive icons of campaign for a national suffrage
the decade, the flapper. A more amendment and broke with
in-depth analysis, however, that the more conservative National
includes changes in the family American Women Suffrage
and sexual mores, women's Association (NAWSA), directed
participation in the work force, by Carrie Chapman Cart, which
and the political activism of these had focused on a state by state
newly enfranchised citizens, approach to enfranchisement.
offers a vehicle for broadening Congressional Union members
our understanding of the picketed the White House
social, economic, and political during World War I to protest
developments of the era. This that while the country fought
essay on women and politics a war for democracy abroad it
focuses on African American denied women their democratic
and white women's efforts to rights at home. Distressed by
expand their political influence such militant tactics, NAWSA
once enfranchised. Their leaders continued their more
activism illustrates women's role moderate campaigns in which
in developing political pressure they emphasized women's
groups in the early twentieth Three suffragists casting votes in New York City, 1917. The accompanying caption
wartime service to the country.
century and demonstrates both read, "Calm about it. At Fifty-sixth and Lexington Avenue, the women voters showed
This uneasy alliance of a
the continuation of reform?and wide variety of women, using
no ignorance or trepidation, but cast their ballots in a businesslike way that bespoke
its limits?in the so-called "jazz study of suffrage." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-75334.) different tactics, finally over
age" (1). came determined opposition,
It should not be surprising and in 1920 the federal amend
that women activists would play an important role in the effort to keep ment passed, extending the vote to women throughout the nation.
the Progressive Era reform spirit alive in the 1920s. In the suffrage White women leaders entered the new decade with optimism about
campaign's last stages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth their newly enlarged public responsibilities. As they sought to expand
century, women's demand for the vote had been intertwined with the their political influence, they debated among themselves as to how,
ferment for social justice. The practical uses of the vote attracted both and whether, they should act within the Democratic and Republican
upper and middle-class white and black reformers as well as working parties. Because suffragists had claimed that women were unsullied
class women to the campaign. by the corruption of political parties, many now had grave reservations

22 OAH Magazine of History July 2007

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To encourage voter registration, members of the Cincinnati League of Women Voters prominently display the results of their efforts on a downtown billboard, 1926.
(Image courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-14420.)

about working within the established party system. Indeed, the League seven in 1928), and none to the Senate, but hundreds served at the
of Women Voters (1920), the successor organization of NAWSA, state level in legislatures and executive positions earmarked as women's
was established as a nonpartisan group that urged women's active jobs, such as secretary of education and secretary of state. Women
citizenship rather than the support of a particular political party or were more successful in local government, in part because many of
specific candidates. Some former suffragists followed Alice Paul's lead these positions were nonpartisan and thus seemingly more in keeping
into the National Woman's Party (NWP), which became a single issue with ideas that women should operate "above politics." Despite these
organization that after 1923 focused exclusively on an equal rights inroads, female officeholders generally operated within the context of
amendment to build on the success of constitutional enfranchisement. prevailing assumptions that women should keep to women's issues,
Others attempted to exert influence within the Republican and or "municipal housekeeping," the same assumption that limited their
Democratic parties. While many progressive women reformers had ability to wield much power within their political parties. As the New
long been connected to the reformist wing of the Republican Party, York Time's magazine, Current History, summed it up, "Where there
some now began to support the Democrats, attracted by the urban is dignity of office but little else, or where there is routine work, little
liberalism that was emerging in the party in New York state. glory, and low pay, men prove willing to admit women to an equal share
In 1920, both Democrats and Republicans recognized women's in the spoils of office" (2).
issues in their platforms, presumably taking women at their word that Although one focus of white activist women's energies centered
they would use their combined votes as a powerful political tool. They specifically on breaking down the barriers to their participation in
opened up places within the organizational structure of their parties partisan politics, equally important was the determination to use their
for female members, although the positions granted were marginal in new political clout to continue the reforms of the Progressive era.
terms of power or influence. Women became officeholders as well; only Scholars term the approach of these women "maternalism," a fluid
a handful were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (a high of concept that usually refers to the idea that women's nurturing roles in

OAH Magazine of History July 2007 23

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the home could be brought into the public arena to implement social passed laws extending women's legal rights and implementing social
reforms, especially those concerning poor women and children. In the reforms, by the end of the decade, progress had slowed. Women were
1920s, white women continued what had begun in the Progressive era: particularly discouraged by the failure of the effort to get a child labor
a women's "dominion of reform," of interlocking groups of women amendment through Congress. Indeed, most national legislation
who lobbied successfully for mothers' pensions for impoverished supported by women lobbyists was unsuccessful. Congress successively
dependent women, education and industrial reform, wage and hour cut the Sheppard-Towner Acf s appropriations and finally ended the
laws for working women, a wide range of child health programs on the program in 1929. By the end of the decade, many women activists
state level, as well as a broad extension of women's legal rights (3). were frustrated because, while both political parties seemed eager to
The lobbying efforts of these women underline the importance of woo the woman's vote by making rhetorical appeals to women's role
women activists in pioneering twentieth-century interest group politics as homemaker, they paid significantly less attention to the specific
(4). Progressive era women activists had worked mostly at the state level, reforms demanded by the "women's lobby" (6).
but this changed in the 1920s. An astute recognition of the growing Moreover, the women's rights movement itself was in shambles,
importance of national associations' lobbying efforts in Washington, with white women divided among themselves as to tactics and goals.
D.C. led fourteen women's organizations to form the Women Joint Ironically, the problems hindering a sustained feminist movement to
Congressional Committee (WJCC), with the goal of promoting federal some extent grew out of the success of the suffrage battle. Before national
legislation backed by the member organizations. National leaders suffrage was achieved, a great many women?equally excluded from
mobilized women's groups throughout the country as they passionately this basic right of citizenship?could come under the same umbrella of
advocated for the Child Labor Amendment?after the Supreme Court "votes for women." Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the
invalidated a second national child labor law in 1921. Although that lines that divided women?class, race, age, ideology?became more
effort ultimately failed, the women's lobby saw an early success in the significant. By gaining the individual right they had so vigorously sought,
federal Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which gave matching federal they laid the groundwork for the fracturing of female communities. As
funds to states to provide health care and other services for mothers one activist ruefully put it in 1923, "The American woman's movement,
and children. and her interest in great moral and social questions, is splintered into a
Women's groups also lobbied on behalf of disarmament and the hundred fragments under as many warring leaders" (7).
peace movement. A number of organizations, such as the League of This fragmentation was particularly evident in the ferocious debate
Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, and the General over the NWP's proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which stated that,
Federation of Women's clubs, coordinated a drive to put pressure on "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States
President Warren Harding to support disarmament Their lobbying was and every place subject to its jurisdiction." Under the leadership of
a decisive factor in the convening of the Washington Conference on the Alice Paul, the NWP focused so exclusively on the ERA as a means
Limitation of Armament in 1922, although women were disappointed of achieving the political and economic equality that the newly coined
that more was not accomplished. Later in the decade, it was again term feminism soon came to refer exclusively to their specific agenda.
women's groups, especially the Women's International League for Peace Women interested in broader social reform, especially the sex-specific
and Freedom, that led the way in securing U.S. support for the Kellogg labor laws that they had worked so hard to achieve for working women
Briand Peace Pact of 1928 that countered isolationist sentiments to in the states, were alarmed at this "blanket amendment," which they
renounce war "as an instrument of national policy" (5). feared would undermine labor protection for women.
Yet, as was the case with their entry into partisan politics, women Another serious issue that hampered women's efforts in behalf of
activists had limited success in lobbying. Although many states had reform was the white racism and indifference that limited black and
white women activists' ability to work together.
African American women hoped that suffrage
would allow them to address issues such as Jim
Crow, lynching, male disenfranchisement, the
sexual abuse of black women, and economic
discrimination, goals that underlined their
view that the elevation of black women was
inseparable from racial progress. Even before the
suffrage amendment passed, African American
women's organizations had embarked on voter
registration campaigns in states that had given
women the vote. After the amendment was
ratified, black women redoubled their efforts,
focusing especially on the South, where the
majority of blacks still lived. White southern
ers, however, resisted black female registration
through official channels that had been used
since the late nineteenth century to deny suffrage
to black men?tax qualifications, educational
tests, grandfather clauses, and harassment.
Black women, through the National
Association of Colored Women (NACW), assisted
Colored Women Voter Leagues were formed in several southern states to help both women and men qualify by the NAACP, fought back. They assembled
as voters, ca.1919-1920. (Image courtesy of Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Re
evidence in behalf of the Tinkham bill, designed
search in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenoz and Tilden Foundations).

24 OAH Magazine of History July 2007

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 and women still gave their votes to the Republicans in 1932, but by
1934 a shift toward the Democrats was clear. The networks that African
American women had created in the 1920s became a mainstay of black
political organizing in the 1930s. Now, however, that organizing was
increasingly in support of the Democrats, as blacks became a part of
the urban liberal coalition that was reshaping the Democratic Party.
While the difficulties all women reformers faced arose in part from
women's disunity, the underlying problem was the decade's overall
conservative political climate. Observers in the 1920s, citing declining
voter participation during the decade (roughly half of those eligible
voted), assumed that women's nonvoting accounted for the decline.
With only sparse data of voting by sex available, many historians have
echoed this assumption. More recent studies, however, maintain that
women's participation in elections varied significantly by location and
by election. Women in states that had only recently enfranchised them
seemed less likely to vote than those living in states such as California
where they had longer experience with the electoral process. What is
most interesting is that men's voting decreased in this period as well,
following a long-standing trend of declining engagement in partisan
politics. Jane Addams ruefully commented in 1924 that the question
should not be "Is Woman Suffrage Failing?", but rather, "is suffrage
failing?" (9). Both men and women were not voting in large numbers,
which points to a political climate of disaffected or disinterested
citizenry; and it is this broader context of American politics, not
women's failures as voters, that offers the most compelling explanation
for the difficulties women reformers faced (10).
A related problem was a political climate hostile to reform that
made it impossible to sustain the prewar enthusiasm for progressive
measures. On the national scene, the Republicans, now largely divested
of their progressive elements, dominated the White House and
Congress, and, reflecting in part the parties' ties to corporate business
interests, resisted efforts to expand federal regulatory powers or raise
Nina Oter-Warren (left) of Santa Fe campaigned for the U.S. House of Represen taxes to pay for social welfare legislation. The Prohibition amendment
tatives in 1922 after making sure New Mexico ratified the suffrage amendment. ratified in 1919 further increased many Americans' wariness of
The widely respected Latina Republican won over 49,000 votes. (Image courtesy intrusive social reforms. Prohibition met with vigorous opposition.
the New Mexico State Archives, Bergere Collection, #21252). Many Americans resented and circumvented the law and others worried
that the ineffectual effort to control alcohol consumption had fostered
contempt for law. That women reformers were so closely associated
to reduce congressional representation of states that restricted with the controversial amendment surely fueled hostility to the social
women's suffrage. When this tactic failed, black women approached reforms women activists promoted in the 1920s. Finally, the widening
white women's organizations to elicit some support for enforcing the prosperity of the period may well have influenced many Americans
Nineteenth Amendment. But neither the League of Women Voters, nor to turn toward new consumer and leisure pleasures and away from
the NWP was willing to support the antidisfranchisement efforts of political engagement and concern for the nation's poor.
black women voters in the South. Perhaps most damaging to reform and especially women's part in
Black women had one advantage over white women: they were it was the "Red Scare" of 1919 to 1921. Prompted initially by American
all concentrated in a single party, the Republican. But even here, in fear of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the revolutionary ambitions
the Republican party, which could have used their votes, they met of the fledgling Communist Party in the United States to topple this
with frustration. In the states outside the South, they organized nation's government, Americans succumbed to a hysteria in which
"Republican Clubs" to support the candidates of the party of Lincoln wild-eyed Bolsheviks seemed to be lurking around every corner. The
and Radical Reconstruction. And in 1924 they created the National Red Scare quickly expanded to target a wide range of people and
League of Republican Colored Women (NLRCW), with the slogan, "We associations deemed "un-American," and led to the deportation of
are in politics to stay and we shall be a stay in politics" (8). Initially "suspicious" immigrants, the suppression of the labor movement, and
the GOP was attentive to black women leaders, inviting them to massive violations of civil liberties. It also helped to fuel the growth
their first national conference of women leaders, where the NLRCW of the second Ku Klux Klan, an organization opposed to immigrants,
president, Nannie Burroughs, spoke. The white feminist Ruth Hanna Catholics, Jews and blacks, that achieved significant popularity and
McCormick drew on black women's support in her futile effort to influence in the early 1920s. Finally, the Red Scare contributed to the
move from the House of Representatives to the Senate in 1928. But passage of restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s and in addition
while the Republicans offered symbolic nods to black voters' issues, became a weapon for opponents of reform legislation, who could
by 1929, African Americans were beginning to feel disillusionment now argue that efforts to increase government's role in regulating the
with Hoover's and the Republicans' lack of concern for the problems economy or protecting workers and the poor would lead American
facing black Americans in the context of the depression. Black men down the same path as Russia.

OAH Magazine of History July 2007 25

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 Red Scare hysteria particularly focused on a number of women's Endnotes
groups, including those in the Women's Joint Congressional Committee i. For further discussion of the "New Woman" in the 1920s and bibliographic
and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which they resources, see Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and
Society in the 10.20s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), 98-144, 321-25.
claimed were spreading Bolshevism in the United States. Jane Addams,
2. Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston:
in particular, came in for forceful criticism. Attempts by opponents to
Twayne, 1987), 69.
discredit women reformers with claims that they were Bolsheviks points 3. On the maternalist reforms and organized women, see Robyn Muncy,
to a further dilemma facing women activists. Preeminent among the Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York:
opponents of reform were right-wing women's organizations. The Oxford University Press, 1991).
Women Sentinels of the Republic was a small but vocal group that 4. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University
opposed social reform as the forerunner of Bolshevism. The Daughters Press, 1987), 97.
of the American Revolution, initially interested in women's social 5. Rhodri Jeffreys-J ones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of
American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
reform efforts, had by mid-decade also taken up the antiradical hysteria.
Press, 1994), 32-34.
Women in an auxiliary of the all-male Ku Klux Klan supported some
6. Anna L. Harvey, Votes without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics,
reforms like Prohibition, but like other right-wing women's groups 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104-135.
promoted what was called "one-hundred percent Americanism," and 7. Brown, Setting a Course, 50.
were suspicious of the liberal goals of the white women's lobby and 8. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the
hostile to black women's demands for equal citizenship. 1920s," in African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965, ed. Ann D.
With these counterpressures, then, it is not surprising that the Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
reform agenda of women's groups stalled in the nation's capitol and Press, 1997), 144.
9. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 102.
it is impressive that women activists accomplished as much as they
10. Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics
did on the local and state level. In the process, they helped keep the
before the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Cott, The
reform spirit alive, if not well. Black women created and sustained Grounding of Modern Feminism, 104-108, 318-19.
organizational efforts that would give them more political influence in
the 1930s, and white women developed lobbying skills that would serve Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History at
as a crucial bridge to the social welfare reforms of the 1930s introduced
Occidental College. She is the author of 'The Modern Temper American
by President Franklin D. Roosevelf s New Deal. Q Culture and Society in the 1920s; Freemasonry and American Culture
1880-1930 and coauthor of Through Women's Eyes: An American His
tory with Documents. She is currently working on a study of American
women during World War L

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