WOMEN'S VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS
American women have cooperated with one another in voluntary associations since the time of the American Revolution, and their organizations continue to function as an important vehicle for exerting influence in the public arena. Throughout most U.S. history, popular belief held that "women's place was in the home," that their talents should be applied solely within the domestic setting. Until modern times women were unwelcome in most groups founded by men for civic action, self-improvement, or social interaction. Yet throughout history women routinely defied the proscriptions against their public role and met with one another to create a collective voice for change. In this way American men have come to accept women's use of organizations to help shape the nation's political, social, and economic life.
During the War for Independence, the Daughters of Liberty raised funds for George Washington's army, setting a precedent that would be followed by future generations in wartime. Ladies Relief Societies and similarly named organizations provided material and moral support during every subsequent military conflict in which American soldiers were engaged. No doubt the toleration during wartime for women's activities outside the home arose from the fact that they were engaged in patriotic work during an emergency; moreover, war relief activities would have been viewed as an extension of what was seen as their normal caretaking function.
In peacetime, however, women generally faced constraints against collective action through association. Nevertheless, antebellum women founded a great number of associations to address the social issues of their day. These groups served as one of women's few outlets to express their opinions and to work for change. The period saw the emergence of women's temperance societies, which called first for the moderate use of alcohol and later for total abstinence. Temperance groups expanded their activities and took stands on other reform causes, including easier divorces for wives of alcoholics, the adoption of more comfortable clothes for women, and improved diets. The movement eventually evolved into one of the largest organizations of women in America, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (wctu), founded in 1873. This group, which catapulted its late-nineteenth-century president, Frances Willard, to a position of worldwide importance, worked also for such reforms as woman suffrage, free kindergartens, and social purity.
Women in the northern states in the 1830s founded groups in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Salem to seek the abolition of slavery. Protestant churches also generated many organizational efforts, including moral reform societies, missionary associations, and charitable enterprises. And numerous secular groups engaged in benevolent work, creating asylums, homes for the friendless, and schools for industrial education.
After the outbreak of the Civil War, women on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line applied their organizational experience to wartime relief activities. In the North, the U.S. Sanitary Commission enlisted the help of women to provide nursing care, raise funds for supplies, and prepare donated food and clothing for soldiers for the Union cause, and in the South, Confederate women provided similar social services.
After the war ended, women's organizational activities blossomed. Multitudes of local groups formed for a variety of social, educational, and civic purposes. They sprang up in large cities and small towns, and enrolled usually, although not exclusively, white, middle-class, middle-aged women—those with enough freedom from housekeeping and child-raising responsibilities to attend monthly or weekly meetings. The clubs, varying in size from half a dozen to several hundred, often allied with regional and national networks, thereby generating increased support for the projects they undertook. For example, churchwomen forged alliances to assist the goals of their religious institutions. National groups like the Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, Woman's American Baptist Home Missionary Society, Women's Relief Societies of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and later the National Council of Catholic Women, National Council of Jewish Women, and Hadassah, received support from branches in great numbers of communities. Their members worked for a multitude of worthwhile projects including the founding and supporting of schools, orphanages, and settlement houses, although appreciation by the men heading the religious institutions was sometimes grudging or lacking altogether.
The late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of women's auxiliaries to men's organizations. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, created a woman's division for the female relatives of its members. The Woman's Relief Corps was founded in 1883 as a counterpart to the Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War Union Veterans Association, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was created in 1903 as an outgrowth of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans. Similarly, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution formed when the Sons of the American Revolution refused admission to female descendants of revolutionary soldiers. Secret societies, or fraternal orders, a phenomenon that boomed in the late nineteenth century, inspired wives and daughters of members to create parallel associations. Order of the Eastern Star, Order of the King's Daughters, Job's Daughters, Ladies of the Maccabees, Order of the Rainbow, and Daughters of Norway are examples of these.
A major development in the organizational history of American women was the so-called woman's club movement. Among its key founders was New York journalist and syndicated columnist Jane Cunningham Croly, who established the Sorosis club in 1868, and Julia Ward Howe, a Boston reformer and writer who started the New England Woman's Club in the same year. The women who attended these early gatherings were seeking social and intellectual exchange, unlike women in many of the other groups who were targeting specific causes. They constituted a who's who of leading nineteenth-century women in literature, science, reform movements, and other professions and included such notables as astronomer Maria Mitchell, physician Mary Putnam Jacobi, and author Sara Willis Parton. Women in large cities and small towns all over America were inspired to create similar groups for self-improvement, public service projects, and mutual support for ambitions that reached beyond their immediate households. The proliferation of these clubs was encouraged by the Association for the Advancement of Women, an alliance of public-minded women who sponsored an annual three-day conference in a different city every year from 1873 to 1897. At each conference the slate of speakers attracted large audiences for lectures concerning the capabilities of modern women, inspiring many in their audiences to form women's clubs.
By 1890, despite some complaints that members were neglecting their responsibilities to home and family, the nationwide woman's club phenomenon was well under way. In fact, it was sufficiently broad that delegates from sixty-three clubs in seventeen states met in New York City at the behest of Sorosis to form the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Among the clubs that sent representatives were the Woman's Club of Indianapolis, New Century Club of Philadelphia, Old and New of Malden, Massachusetts, and Century Club of San Francisco. The federation was to serve as an umbrella organization and a clearinghouse for the burgeoning numbers of women's clubs, although it came to influence even unaffiliated clubs. The federation's leaders urged members to formalize their groups: they should incorporate, write a constitution, follow parliamentary procedure, and hold an annual election of officers. They suggested study topics, provided bibliographies, and held biennial conventions to help clubs in their study of topics ranging from the plays of William Shakespeare to the history and art of other nations, current events, and modern women novelists. The federation also encouraged the membership to examine social issues of the day, including civil service reform, conservation of natural resources, immigration, public health, and improved education. Because clubs throughout the nation usually focused their lobbying on the same legislation, the woman's club movement was influential in securing many municipal, state, and federal reforms. The Home Teacher Act, Pure Food and Drug Act, well baby clinics, registration of nurses, inspection of milk, and protection of the redwood trees are a representative handful of the programs these clubwomen supported.
Black women, welcome in only a few of the white women's clubs such as the New England Woman's Club, formed a network of their own. The National Association of Colored Women (later National Association of Colored Women's Clubs) was formed in 1896 with the merging of the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the Colored Woman's League. Members undertook many projects of an educational, social, and reform nature, but they also addressed the issue of racial injustice in America.
With the advent of the twentieth century and a changing society, new organizations focused on modern women's concerns. Factory women created labor organizations to seek improved working conditions, and the Women's Trade Union League linked the drive for woman suffrage with the improvement of industrial conditions. Businesswomen allied in the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Organizations, Altrusa, and Soroptimist. Nurses, schoolteachers, music teachers, cosmeticians, home economists, anthropologists, lawyers, mothers—all formed groups to share their occupational concerns. Composers, writers, and painters founded the National League of American Penwomen.
The association movement encompassed girls and young women, too. This period saw the formation of working girls' clubs, Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, Four-H Club Girls, the Young Women's Christian Association, and sororities, such as Alpha Chi Alpha, Delta Zeta, and Omicron Nu. Debutantes in major American cities joined the Junior League to engage in charitable works. Growing numbers of colleges invited graduates to join alumnae associations, which supported educational projects. Many institutions of higher learning allied their alumnae with the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which later became the American Association of University Women.
Politics absorbed the attention of many women's groups. The National Woman Suffrage Association and American Woman Suffrage Association, rival groups dedicated to attaining the franchise for women, had been founded in the late 1860s. The two factions merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (nawsa). But Alice Paul, objecting to what she felt were ineffective strategies, created the Congressional Union in 1913 (later called the National Woman's party) and adopted more militant tactics to achieve woman suffrage. (Anti- woman suffrage associations were also formed.) Once women were granted the ballot in 1920, the new voters could join the League of Women Voters, the still-active National Woman's party, or the women's committees of the various political parties. Women seeking to use their newly won vote to shape public policies continued to work through organizations to increase their effectiveness. Women in every state created women's legislative councils, often sponsored by existing women's groups, to monitor the progress of acts under consideration by state legislators. At the federal level, women's groups lobbied Congress via the Women's Joint Congressional Committee and supported the creation of the Women's Bureau within the national government.
Those interested in specific reforms organized such groups as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the American Birth Control League, and the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War. International alliances developed through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Inter-American Union of Women, and the International Council of Women.
The size and influence of many women's associations peaked in the mid-1920s but had begun to wane by the end of the decade. Some probably were frightened off by attacks from conservatives, who charged that certain of the groups advocated Bolshevik-style solutions for American social problems. Many women were simply unable to pay club dues after the stock market crash of 1929. On the other hand, the suffering caused by the Great Depression motivated many to redouble their charitable efforts. And in World War II, some club memberships surged briefly, as women once again performed wartime relief work. After the war, several women's organizations successfully pressured Congress to reconsider the inclusion of an Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution.
The reawakening of the feminist movement, beginning in the late 1960s, plus the increased numbers of women entering the work force, drew contemporary women away from their traditional volunteer work in associations. But it also sparked the creation of new women's groups to address the new issues. Formed now were the National Organization for Women, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, informal consciousness-raising groups, and networks of career women. In the struggle over abortion rights, prochoice, Planned Parenthood, and right-to-life groups enlisted women on both sides of the question. So, too, the renewed push for sexual equality inspired some women to challenge the policies of male-only groups, notably the Rotary Club, and the courts increasingly supported their demand that women be admitted. Women's associations continue to serve a wide membership today, uniting women, as always, to address the social questions that touch their lives.
Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620-647; Karen J. Blair, The History of American Women's Voluntary Organizations, 1810-1960: A Guide to Sources (1989).
Karen J. Blair
See also American Woman Suffrage Association; General Federation of Women's Clubs; League of Women Voters; National American Woman Suffrage Association; National Organization for Women; National Woman Suffrage Association; National Woman's Party; United States Women's Bureau; Woman's Christian Temperance Union; Women's Trade Union League.
