Lecture: Women and Politics in the 1920s

1. Women and Politics
in the 1920s
HIUS157/Prof. Rebecca Jo Plant

2. Post-Suffrage Developments
• Expectations of a “woman’s bloc”
• Congressional victories
– Woman’s Bureau (1920)
– Cable Act (1922)
• Gave married women their own nationality
– Motivated in part by reluctance to naturalize immigrant wives
– Women only guaranteed independent citizenship if they married
foreigners “eligible for citizenship” (non-Asians)
– Child Labor Amendment sent to the states (1924)
• Background: Keating-Owens Act (1916) declared
unconstitutional
– Sheppard-Towner Act (1921)

3. Children’s Bureau, 1912
• Background: Many of the accomplishments of
the early 1920s had long been championed by
the Children’s Bureau
• Branch of the Dept. of Commerce and Labor
– Govt agency run by women in pre-suffrage era
– Adm. bureaucracy, but also the embodiment of a
grassroots movement
• Stressed scientific knowledge
– But maternal knowledge produced and by women

4. CB’s activities
• Conducted studies on infant and child
mortality
• Promoted birth and death registration
• Fought against child labor
• Published pamphlets on childrearing;
responded to letters
– Infant Care, 1914 (Mrs. Mae West, mother of 5)
• Importance of schedules
• Emphasized relief for the mother
– After World War I
• Pamphlets increasingly written by male professionals
• Growing concern over infant/child psychology

5. Making a poster for the Children’s Bureau,
1923

6. A Children’s Bureau chart, 1923

7. Sheppard-Towner Act
(1921-29)
• Funded educational efforts to improve
maternal and infant health
• Visiting nurses, exhibits, pamphlets
• Supported by WC and MC women
• Administered by volunteers
• Denounced as “socialized medicine” by the
AMA; as “bolshevism” by the far right

8. Conservative Backlash
• General context: Red Scare
– 1924 “Spider Web” chart
• Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923)
– Struck down minimum wage laws for women
• National Women’s Party supports decision
• Child Labor Amendment fails
• Congress kills Sheppard-Towner Act (1929)
– DAR reverses itself
• Diminishing concern about women voters
– Not voting as a bloc; voting in smaller numbers than men

10. Anti- Child Labor Amendment Cartoon (1924)

11. Rise of a grassroots, right-wing
women’s movement
• Women’s Patriotic Committee on National
Defense (1925)
– National umbrella organization of many women’s
patriotic and conservative groups
– Anti-internationalist; pro-militarist
– Also attacked social welfare legislation
– Chilling effect on women’s movement
• Mainstream women’s groups become reluctant to support
reform

12. Split in the prewar coalition of
progressive women
• 1921 National Women’s Party hosts convention
– Alice Paul argues for removing all laws that restricted
women’s freedom
– Florence Kelley and others are alarmed
• 1923 NWP introduces an Equal Rights
Amendment
– “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States
and every place subject to its jurisdiction”
– Virtually all women’s groups opposes it

13. ERA: Pros and cons
• Pro ERA position
– “Protection” classed women with children
– Laws did not really protect women
• Mandatory maternity leave; kept them from
earning more money
• Con ERA position
– ERA would imperil all legislative victories based
on the recognition that women were different
than men

14. Fundamental differences
• ERA supporters valued
– Individual/competition
– Attacked emphasis on sexual difference
– Stressed the right of married women to work
– Women won’t gain equality until they’re treated
equally—the same as men
• ERA opponents stressed
– Needs of families and communities
– Idea of women’s double burden
– Need for a family wage
– Belief that “equal” treatment led to further oppression
of women

15. Gold Star Mothers’ Pilgrimages
• Bereft mothers of WWI dead organize after the war
• GSM lobby for government-funded pilgrimages
• Congress passes bill in 1929
– Same year that Sheppard Towner Act killed
– Government honors “patriotic mothers,” but not the
programs of progressive maternalists
– Reflects shift to a more conservative political climate
• Program sends more than 6,000 to Europe for two-
week stays (1930-1933)

17. Gold Star Mothers
Grant Park,
Chicago, 1918