Funding Feminism provides an extended exploration of the role of big money in the history of the women's movement. Arguing that her topic has been “underappreciated,” Johnson brings together existing biographical scholarship, augments it with additional primary source research, and crafts her narrative around a clear and persuasive theme. She argues that the “trajectory of the women's movement—its priorities, strategies, and successes” can be understood as “deeply affected” by large donations from a relatively small set of “monied women” (2). Johnson defines the women's movement broadly to include the fight to win not only the vote but also access to higher education and to fertility control, while she widens her lens to take in a hundred-year time span. Taking a cue from previous historians like Ellen DuBois, who emphasized Harriet Stanton Blatch's savvy decision to recruit wealthy women into the suffrage struggle, Johnson sets out to “follow the money.”

She begins her story in 1870 because postbellum America saw two key developments—the rise of scientific philanthropy that aimed to solve social problems rather than alleviate suffering, and rise of a women's movement that was organized on a national scale. Such a movement needed funding for extensive campaign expenses, but it faced a financial “catch 22”: women needed financial resources to campaign for their rights, but the lack of rights severely curtailed their access to wealth. Under these circumstances, Johnson argues, a small number of very wealthy women played key roles.

Johnson argues that large donations accounted for both the suffrage movement's emergence from the “doldrums” and its accumulating victories in the 1910s. Johnson shows that personality, ideology, and strategy were not the only factors that set Carrie Chapman Catt's National American Woman Suffrage Association and its rival, Alice Paul's Congressional Union, at odds. Jealousy about funding was also part of the mix. In both organizations, though, crucial funding from wealthy women underwrote the successful drive for the Nineteenth Amendment. Johnson moves on to follow the story after the vote was won, as philanthropic women expanded women's access to higher education, sometimes by underwriting women's colleges, and sometimes by pushing the door open for coeducation. She also writes about wealthy women who contributed to organized efforts to aid working women and tells the story of elite women who supported Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement. She concludes with an extended discussion of how Katharine Dexter McCormick singlehandedly funded the scientific research that led to the birth control pill. In an epilogue, she notes that the funding struggle continues today, mentioning organizations like Emily's List and the Women's Funding Network.

Some episodes in this history are already well-known. Thanks to scholarship by Katharine Kish Sklar, for example, we know who funded Hull House; and we know how Margaret Rossiter first illuminated the way Mary Garrett and other women used “coercive philanthropy” to insist that Johns Hopkins Medical School be open to women. Gracefully crediting earlier scholars, Johnson often augments their work with primary source research and sketches full portraits of lesser-known figures such as Ellen Scripps, founder of Scripps College; or Gertrude Minton Pinchot, who supported Margaret Sanger's work. She also discusses efforts that failed, such as Olivia Sage's foiled attempt to develop a college for women at New York University.

The women Johnson discusses were all born or married into wealthy families, and as a group they were unusually well-educated and disproportionately single or widowed. They were all white: Johnson argues that because discrimination almost completely denied black women access to resources, they were compelled to develop different funding models for their activism. In general, Johnson provides a sympathetic rendering of the motives and goals of these monied white women. They were not, in her view, moved by condescension or power tripping, but were instead sincere feminists determined to fight for women's rights. Despite their sheltered and privileged lives, they had often experienced personal discrimination and faced roadblocks erected by family and friends. In addition to providing money, they braved social disapproval to make feminism acceptable in elite circles like the New York Colony Club. Johnson's tone is unfailingly admiring, passing up opportunities to expand on any unlovely aspects of the story. When the heiress Grace Hoadley Dodge strove to help working women by starting a social club, the “Three P's Circle,” to encourage “purity, perseverance, and pleasantness,” did working women really think that cultivating those three virtues would solve their problems? (86). When Johnson interrogates her sources, she does not pose such cynical questions.

Funding Feminism is weakened by the fact that Johnson fails to provide a comprehensive list of her “monied women” and does not explain her criteria for selecting them. Why these women? Is this all, or the richest, or those for whom the sources are available? And why does she not discuss the Women's Christian Temperance Union, although it was important in much of the period she covers, dwarfing suffrage organizations with its membership rolls and clout? Was the WCTU not interested in attracting wealthy women, or did it try and fail, or are the sources silent on this question? Quibbles aside, this is a very important book whose argument must be taken onboard by all historians who seek to write the history of the women's movement. Johnson's thesis, once ignored, now seems a truism—of course money was necessary (though not sufficient) for the success of feminist activism. The history of the women's movement must interweave and give appropriate weight to all the factors that led to feminist success, including not only talented leadership, persuasive ideology, and political opportunity, but also material resources. Yes, money matters.