POSTWAR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE

American civic life changed profoundly after World War II. Following a brief expansion in the immediate postwar years, by the early 1960s most civic associations—including business and professional associations and male and female fraternal organizations—had experienced periods of rapid and severe membership loss, a pattern of deterioration that would characterize the fate of civic groups throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This decline was accompanied by (and perhaps precipitated by) new forms of citizen participation, including the rise of modern-day interest groups, or what Putnam (2000) calls “tertiary organizations,” that differed not only in organizational form and strategy from old-line civic associations but also in ideological purpose and mission.

Putnam's Bowling Alone is an essential starting place for documenting civic change after World War II, but it is less helpful for understanding the causes of that change. For Putnam, generational replacement, demographic shifts such as the movement of women into the labor force, and urban sprawl are responsible for civic disengagement. Yet Putnam' s critics (e.g., Skocpol 2003; Skocpol and Fiorina 1999) have rightly pointed out that his discussion of civic decline hinges on factors outside the polity, unrelated to politics or political institutions. In contrast, Skocpol (2003) argues that the “great civic transformation” resulted in part from sociocultural changes—new technologies and shifting attitudes about race and gender, for example—but it was also intimately connected to political and institutional change, including a burst of federal legislation that bolstered liberal activism and the emergence of the “rights revolutions” of the 1960s and 1970s. Additional changes, Skocpol suggests, including the receptiveness of the courts to organized interests, an increasingly professionalized Congress, and reorganization within the federal bureaucracy, multiplied “entry” points for particular types of organizations to access the political system. As a result, professionally managed organizations and interest and advocacy groups flourished, gradually overshadowing membership associations of the civic generation. There were other important developments after World War II that Skocpol's institutionalist account overlooks. Of significant consequence (and surprisingly absent from almost all research on postwar political development), the formation of the United Nations in 1945 changed political opportunities for voluntary associationalism, creating incentives and providing resources for civic groups to mobilize members around international causes. Indeed, emerging opportunities for the kinds of professionally managed organizations Skocpol identifies are perhaps best seen in the burst of NGO organizing that followed the UN's formation.

More important than the particular factors Skocpol includes (or fails to include) among the causes of the postwar civic transformation is the dynamic of political change she identifies. In particular, she emphasizes the ways institutional change can reshape organizational incentives and political opportunities, encouraging political actors to adopt particular organizational forms and tactics and to utilize certain resources. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992), she called this the “fit” between the identities, goals, and capacities of social groups and changing political arrangements (see also Clemens 1997). Simply put, institutions shape the ways and extent to which social groups participate in the public realm. In the postwar era, the reorganization of agencies within the federal bureaucracy and the composition of political coalitions may have strengthened the position of some groups, such as veterans' lobbying organizations, at the same time that they undermined others (Skocpol 1995). Women's voluntary associations were especially limited in national policy influence after World War II by the accelerated weakening of the Children's and Women's Bureaus, bureaucratic allies that had previously enabled their authority in social welfare domains. Institutional change also affects the ways social groups understand their own identities and evaluate possibilities for political action (Lieberman 1995). If the increasing openness of the courts created new levers of political influence for civil rights organizations, for example, it also unsettled the radically decentralized organization that had sustained the mobilization of African-American women for half a century; clubwomen would be compelled to refashion their own strategies and organizational identity in response.

The challenge for scholars of American political development is not simply to identify the causes of the postwar transformation in civic life but to grasp more fully the ways in which change occurred in and across different kinds of organizations. The formation of the UN, for example, was especially important to women's associations, which were removed from meaningful participation in national political institutions and hopeful that an international arena might offer greater legitimacy in the face of limited welfare state expansion at home. Yet at the same time that the UN heightened the stakes of civic engagement, it simultaneously compelled clubwomen and churchwomen to question the goals and tactics of their associations, pushing them away from locally rooted community activities toward centralized, elite-led organizations in which women's rights were conceived as human rights. Deborah Minkoff (1995) has shown that the postwar era was a period of profound organizational growth and diversification, particularly for African Americans and for women. The watershed in organizational activity, however, was constituted by and primarily benefited newly formed advocacy and protest organizations; long-standing voluntary associations focused on local action and citizenship did not fare as well. In short, processes of political change are inherently relational. Skocpol underemphasizes this point. In Diminished Democracy (2003), she suggests that organizational innovation in the 1960s and 1970s resulted from elite abandonment of old-line voluntary associations; careerist leaders, eager to cast off outdated organizational identities, particularly those drawn around gender and race, she argues, were pushed to centrally managed organizations. Although this view recognizes the significance of race and gender to associationalism (which Putnam's does not), it views postwar civic engagement in ecological terms and overlooks processes of change within particular organizations struggling to reinvent themselves in a changed political landscape.³

In contrast, this essay suggests that leaders—and members—of women's associations responded to postwar change in dynamic ways; they were eager to take their place in national and international domains but unsure about how to integrate new organizational forms in an historically gendered universe of civic associationalism.

HOW WERE THEY CIVIC? WOMEN'S ASSOCIATIONS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In the 1950s, members of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the Methodist Woman's Division of Christian Service continued, in renewed form, a century-long tradition of female civic engagement. Each traced its roots to the “women's era” of organizing, a movement among American women who had entered public life through autonomous mutual benefit societies, missionary societies, charitable institutions, literary and educational circles, antislavery associations, and self-help groups. In what has become a familiar story to students of gender and American political development (Baker 1984; Clemens 1993, 1997; Cott, 1987; Gordon 1994; Lerner [1972] 1992; Scott 1991; Skocpol 1992), women's associations at the turn of the twentieth century—groups like the GFWC, National Consumers' League (NCL), or Women's Trade Union League (WTUL)—related their causes to a broad maternalist rhetoric that claimed the moral best interest of society and to a distinct mode of activism rooted in public education and nonpartisan political mobilization. A contemporary described this approach as “the maternal and housekeeping instinct made community-wide and trained in its outlook” (Buck 1949). In the first part of the twentieth century, this brand of activism proved especially effective when combined with decentralized organizations linking together local, state, and regional federations. Female reformers of the Progressive era pressured legislatures to pass bills along nonpartisan lines, secured favorable rulings from courts otherwise unsympathetic to organized interests, and developed close ties with civil servants in newly created administrative agencies in ways that furthered their public goals and bolstered the mobilization of members.

Although their associations have never been static, the organizational and identity-related features that sustained women's voluntary associations in the early twentieth century had lingering consequences for female mobilization in later decades. Of particular importance, the Progressive era opposition between “civic” and “political” hinged on gendered understandings of citizenship. Nonpartisan mobilization was successful prior to suffrage, for example, because women were removed from formal channels of political participation; the same approach may have been limited after 1920, when it became more important to link organizational goals to electoral targets and to integrate party politics with women's interests (Harvey 1998; see also Andersen 1992; Lemons 1973). Organized womanhood met significant institutional challenges in the New Deal, when structures of governance and policy implementation shaped citizenship in terms of gender. As Suzanne Mettler (1998) suggests, the emergence of dual federalism thwarted the mobilization of a nationalized women's movement at precisely the time when state-by-state approaches were no longer as effective in achieving policy change on behalf of women. Nonetheless, women's organizations continued to mobilize during and after the New Deal, further adapting strategies in response to political and institutional change. Scholars have noted the emergence of a “New Deal network of women,” for example, in which a small set of female professionals picked up an agenda that once required a mass movement, creating a policymaking role for women, recruiting women into government positions, demanding political patronage, and generating awareness of women as a group (Ware 1981; see also Muncy 1991).

This legacy of organizational adaptation—an ongoing process that simultaneously reaffirmed and reinvented Progressive era traditions of female organizing—informed the structures, strategies, and identities of women's voluntary associations such that by the 1950s, the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS could still be aptly called “civic.” The purposive goals of women's associations were closely connected to particular membership and organizational characteristics. They had active, widespread, and generally unrestricted memberships in which face-to-face interactions among local members (not a mere affiliation with a distant national headquarters) were the norm. Each enrolled sizable portions of the female population; in the 1950s, membership reached 826,000 clubwomen in the GFWC, between 50,000 and 100,000 African-American women in the NACWC, and almost two million churchwomen from 26,000 local church societies in the WDCS. The organizational structures of these groups, moreover, were decentralized, linking local members to national action through federated state and regional chapters. Decentralized structures, what one GFWC member called the “clubwoman's trinity: club, state, and the general federation,” were important in a number of respects. They created an internal career path for members and helped coordinate unified action while preserving local autonomy, for example (Skocpol 2003). More important, as Clemens (1997) and Skocpol (2003) have argued, federated chapter-based associations encouraged “two-way communication” between members and leaders, fostering translocal identities, educating members about the politics of state and nation, and, in the process, transmitting important political information and skills to ordinary female citizens.

There were differences among these organizations, the most important of which fell along race and class lines in complex ways. The GFWC's practice of maternalism, for example, was inextricably linked to white middle-class notions of female propriety. Similarly, NACWC members were primarily elite and professional women, and the association's emphasis on racial uplift—what clubwomen called “a finer Negro womanhood”—was infused with class politics (White 1999). Yet black clubwomen's civic activities were inseparable from efforts to combat racial as well as gender oppression. The Woman's Division shared with the GFWC and NACWC a moral reform tradition rooted in middle-class conceptions of womanhood (Frances Willard's “evangelical domesticity”), but its sheer size made it more racially and economically diverse. Segregation continued as the norm in church societies well into the mid-1950s, but as the church became increasingly involved in civil rights struggles, the WDCS took greater steps than either the GFWC or the NACWC to bridge racial divisions and to foster cross-class relations, building alliances with civil rights organizations and labor unions, for example.

Despite these differences, as civic associations, the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS shared similar conceptions of citizenship, helping to define their relationships with other organizations and a shared role in the American political process. As Elisabeth Clemens (1993) notes, forms of organization signal an identity, both to an organization's own members and to others. Beyond their concrete policy goals—which in the 1950s ranged from federally funded day care to education to environmental conservation to equal pay—clubwomen's and churchwomen's emphasis on nonpartisanship and public education enabled them to differentiate their organizations from “political,” “pressure,” or “special interest” groups. “The [GFWC] has no axe to grind—no selfish interests,” one of its leaders explained. This mission of clubwomen was, instead, to “formulate” public opinion, “wholly without prejudice and with an ever expanding civic consciousness” (“Editorial” 1946).⁴

To be sure, the NACWC clarified, women's voluntary associations sought to expand “the opportunity for organized women to serve efficiently in all fields relating to government,” but this goal did not qualify them as a “political” organization; rather, the NACWC was an “educational” group: “We prepare our women on questions of local as well as national scope,” one leader explained, “[so] that they will be prepared to act intelligently and not be led by the opinions or decisions of others.” “Individual responsibility” was the “key to effective citizenship participation.”⁵ In this vein, clubwomen and churchwomen were encouraged to become active citizens by voting, joining political parties, participating in debates, testifying before legislative committees, and, when possible, running for public office. Civic life was a “means to develop our own personalities,” suggested leaders of the WDCS (Ransohoff 1950). A dense network of local chapters, moreover, was most likely to generate a broad and diversified, rather than a parochial, approach to public life. “No superficial snap judgments will do in club life or in politics,” one GFWC president explained (Buck 1948).

These, then, were the features that made the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS civic: decentralized operations; widespread, active face-to-face memberships; an identity of nonpartisan, or “nonpolitical”; an approach to politics emphasizing the education of public opinion; purposes defined by “good citizenship” understood as active participation and individual responsibility in the public realm. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this combination of structure, strategy, and identity was significant, not only because it afforded women's associations leverage in a public realm that impeded their participation in conventional political channels. Just as important, the features that made the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS civic promoted the capacities and dispositions of democratic citizenship among millions of American women, enlarging their public roles and advancing gender equality. As the president of the GFWC wrote in 1948, club life was “an excellent training ground for women as citizens” (Buck 1948).

POSTWAR OPPORTUNITIES AND OBSTACLES

Despite the strain of wartime on organizational resources and apprehension that anticommunist fears might chill female activism, World War II generally expanded women's civic universe, further unsettling the division between women's public and private lives and broadening their international consciousness. Clubwomen became “almost overnight world citizens and global thinkers,” commented one leader of the GFWC; the New York Times reported that her federation added more than five million international members between 1947 and 1948.⁷

The formation of the United Nations in 1945 expanded the possible reach of U.S. civic engagement further, “challeng[ing] woman to make the sphere of her endeavor and activity the ‘world household’”—a task for which the special qualities of female citizenship seemed a good fit (“Untitled” 1945).

Although African-American women faced extraordinary obstacles to political participation in the mid–twentieth century, members of the NACWC were nonetheless equally encouraged by early civil rights victories. Following Harry Truman's 1948 executive order instituting equal treatment in the armed forces, for example, Mary McLeod Bethune declared before a convention of clubwomen that “woman's day is here!” A “social era is being born,” another NACWC leader confirmed, pointing to the growing significance of the “women's vote” after World War II.⁸

Others proudly noted widening opportunities as evidenced by the election of state and local black women legislators in Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania (Boehm 1995).

Nonetheless, women's associations faced a series of obstacles that largely prevented them from linking local civic activities to political development in the mid–twentieth century. Shifting arrangements of national political institutions blocked familiar doors of policy authority for female reformers after World War II, and this made the mobilization of clubwomen and churchwomen more of a struggle. Neither the Truman nor Eisenhower administrations made domestic reform a priority, while a divided Congress left new departures in social policy to states and localities (Skocpol 1995; Sundquist 1968). Several prominent women's associations, including the GFWC, NCL, BPW, and WTUL, for example, backed a national equal pay bill, but their influence was confined to the states—although 13 states passed equal pay laws between 1946 and 1960, 104 similar bills failed between the 79^th and 87^th Congresses (C. Harrison 1989; Laughlin 2000; Zelman 1982). “You know we are being criticized because we are not quickly passing the legislation coming before our Congress,” asserted a GFWC vice president to clubwomen's 1947 convention. “Many of the issues we have stood for have not been implemented as we have hoped,” agreed a disappointed member of the WDCS; others complained about “isolationist senators” unfriendly to “needed foreign policies” (Stevens 1945; Stevens, Weber, and Bender 1951). Progress in civil rights domains proved especially disappointing to African-American clubwomen and Methodist churchwomen. Three years after the creation of Truman's Commission on Civil Rights, leaders of the WDCS observed that “the legislative score is zero.” The only “bright spots” in the area of civil rights “were nonlegislative” (“Toward Brotherhood” 1950).

Changes in administrative agencies further undercut both the moral authority that female reformers claimed over domestic policy and their long-standing routes to political influence. Leaders in the GFWC, central members of a postwar “progressive coalition” that included the AAUW, YWCA, NCJW and LWV (Lynn 1992), were particularly frustrated by the powerlessness of chief bureaucratic allies in social policy domains. Following the first White House Conference on Children in a Democracy in 1940, for instance, the GFWC spearheaded a national movement among women's associations concerned with juvenile delinquency, issues that President Truman defined as belonging “logically and practically to the women of America.” Opportunities to have a meaningful impact in these areas, however, were limited by the lack of real policy authority in the Children's Bureau and underfunding and understaffing of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, formed in 1953. As was the case with equal pay, several states passed juvenile delinquency legislation in the early 1950s, but General Federation leaders regularly complained about a lack of federal support for their localized efforts.

Time-tested methods of public education and decentralized, nonpartisan organizing seemed ill-equipped to respond to emerging national issues in other policy areas, too. Conflicts between national- and state-level organizing were thrown into stark relief with the increasing nationalization of civil rights struggles. Although federal aid to education had long been on the GFWC's national agenda, for instance, by 1952, clubwomen had dropped it from their program in response to a stalemate between the president and Congress, and to growing tensions between federal and state governments bubbling over civil rights issues. The GFWC president in 1952 noted that “many state's [sic] members object to Federal aid to education.” “We have had many requests from states not to bring up the matter again,” she continued, “and, of course, we believe in states' rights” (in E. Harrison 1952). If states' rights issues masked racism within clubwomen's own ranks (and it is likely that they did), these tensions nonetheless suggested that General Federation leaders were unsure about how to combine an increased role for the federal government in social policy with a tradition of civic action and local responsibility. Leaders of the Methodist Woman's Division found themselves in frequent conflict with local churchwomen over similar matters; a handful of members accused the Woman's Division of adopting the programs of civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, rather than positions that had been democratically developed by churchwomen themselves.

African-American clubwomen were also unsure about how to pursue a nationalized struggle for racial equality with the features that defined them not as a political group but as a civic group. It was increasingly clear to the NACWC leadership that clubwomen's state-by-state efforts on behalf of black womanhood were doomed to fail so long as the federal government could override state legislation and so long as southern and border states continued to block antidiscrimination measures. The “absence of a unified continuity of purpose and a misunderstanding of program building and the amount of effort expended on amateurish and out moded [sic] procedures,” an association pamphlet asserted, were of special concern. But political tactics prominent among burgeoning civil rights organizations did not easily map onto clubwomen's civic identity or their local strategies for molding public opinion. As a result, the NACWC suffered strained relations with groups like the National Council of Negro Women and the NAACP. “The NCNW tends to glamorize their Inter racial [sic] work more than does NACW[C],” one clubwoman noted. In an overt reproach to civil rights organizations, one prominent NACWC leader argued that African Americans had not yet achieved full freedom as citizens, but that this freedom would not come about by “ranting,” “rioting,” or “displaying the worst side of our race,” but only in “quiet ways and quiet talk with those of EQUAL Christian minds who are trying to help us.”⁹

Leaders of the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS initially looked inward for solutions to stalled progress and to the increasingly evident decline in organizational memberships. The Woman's Division partially blamed itself for congressional stalling on key legislative issues: “So few of us have protested by letter, wire, or personal contact!” leaders cried (“Midcentury” 1951). Mary Church Terrell told a conference of African-American clubwomen that “we are not as strong as we should be because we have failed to publicize what we are doing.”¹¹

Associational records suggest that organizational proliferation in the 1950s was an added strain. More than 90% of all local GFWC clubs had been organized prior to 1930, while competition from younger organizations limited the expansion of existing state federations.¹³ In the WDCS, leaders complained of “documented instances” in which clubwoman were “making sizable gifts to both national and local organizations” other than their own. A public relations consultant hired by the NACWC noted that “several organizations similar in composition and purpose to [the] NACWC had appeared on the national scene” and had “succeeded in winning wide acceptance and support from the public.” In consequence, the consultant concluded, the NACWC was “losing its identity.”¹⁵

Following a well-publicized convention of the GFWC in 1949, the New York Times queried Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a clubwoman) about the potential for women's associations to make a difference in postwar political affairs. She replied, with a laugh, that “that depends on how much you really do. If all you do is talk and pass resolutions, that has very little value, but if you go into your communities with a real education program, that has great value.”¹⁶

Roosevelt's remarks captured the sense that women's clubs were increasingly vulnerable to charges of frivolity, yet she may have overestimated the potential of women's associations' conventional arrangements and strategies in a changed political environment. This fact was more obvious to associational leaders. “Club life has been a struggle, a struggle to keep club women supporting a club program,” one NACWC state president complained. “I fear that younger organizations, better informed, may usurp our place,” another worried. Organizational adaptation after World War II was, thus, provoked by opportunity and crisis. This fact was perhaps best captured by GFWC president Chloe Gifford when, in 1960, she asked of her federation: “What does it stand for? What does it do? How does it do it?”¹⁷

CHANGING FORMS OF FEMALE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, 1945–1960

Changing institutional and political realities after World War II created incentives for associational leaders to begin experimenting with new organizational methods. For some, the choice was clear: “We haven't got time to sit building up public opinion brick by brick,” one GFWC leader argued; “we've got to insist on being with men in key positions.”¹⁹

A “lack of familiarity of technique of action rather than lack of interest in social problems,” a WDCS pamphlet explained, “often proves the stumbling block.” Churchwomen needed to be convinced that “political action is not just another interest; it is the way democracy works.” “Let organized women of color forget their fear of being called political!” one NACWC member declared. Instead, clubwomen should “gird themselves for a fight at the polls.” “The time has come,” agreed the GFWC president, “when we should discard the outmoded idea that we are a non-political organization because we are not” (Neff 1945).²⁰ If leaders articulated a shared vision of the future of female activism, however, in practice the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS differed in the extent to which they adopted new structures, strategies, and identities.