Joan Marie Johnson's Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 shines a spotlight on influential female donors who financed movements for American women's expanded access to higher education, suffrage, birth control, and labor rights. Adding to an important but very sparse body of related scholarship, Johnson reveals the motivations and actions of (particularly a dozen or so) wealthy white women who donated large sums of money to these related causes.

Johnson's subjects shared several common characteristics. First, they were all white women. The era's rampant racial discrimination in all aspects of American life paved the way for racialized wealth, as white people became the most influential philanthropists. Second, nearly all the women inherited their fortunes. Persistent gender discrimination ensured that few women became wealthy in their own right. (Madame C. J. Walker, an African American entrepreneur and the nation's first self-made female millionaire, defied these barriers, and Johnson encourages research on the philanthropic pursuits of such exceptional women). As the financial beneficiaries of men no longer alive, Johnson's (generally unmarried) wealthy white protagonists had the unique ability to dispense large sums of cash independent of male oversight – and that fact is reflected in the causes they supported, which wealthy white men tended not to fund.

Not all of these donors thought of themselves as feminists, but they fought to help women gain greater social, political, and economic equality with men (a major goal of modern feminism). Like feminists, they saw women as a social class that had long been hindered by the pervasive notion that they were biologically inferior to men and incapable of wielding power outside the domestic realm. To overcome these barriers that many had faced personally – unlike the men in their social circles, who formed the nation's ruling class – the women donated large sums of money to try and open up new opportunities for their sex.

The causes these “monied women” supported were thought to be linked. Greater access to higher education went hand in hand with opening up more professional employment opportunities for women, as did the ability to decide whether and when to have a child. The women came to see the connections between economic and political power, the latter of which began with suffrage. The fact that many of these movements advanced at similar moments in time was therefore not incidental. Johnson illustrates how a single wealthy woman giving simultaneously to one or more of these causes could propel seemingly separate movements at the same time.

Johnson argues that this rare access to influential and coveted capital freed the women to back controversial political movements and defy social conventions – even as their boldness engendered resentments among those whom they purported to help. Ostensibly, these donors aimed to benefit all women. But, Johnson shows, the gains they accrued disproportionately aided fellow upper-class white women. Giving generously to a university under the strict condition that it begin admitting women would not help, for instance, poorer women and immigrants who could not afford the tuition, take time away from work for schooling, or even have their applications considered because of discriminatory practices. These limitations, Johnson contends, could make monied women's calls for equality ring hollow. They could also lead activists on the ground to resent the wealthy white female benefactors their movements had to depend upon for crucial funding. This was especially true since many financial gifts came with strings attached, including ones that gave donors outsized influence in exchange for their largess.

By closely tracing the money in these ways, Johnson's research sheds light on many of these movements for women's rights, even on some of the most heavily trodden historiography. The divisions between radical and liberal suffrage organizations, for example, have been extremely well documented. Yet Johnson breaks new ground by revealing that some of those divides were the result of a single donor mandating that the radical National Woman's Party (NWP) maintain its distance from the liberal National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Such revelations, especially in today's climate – as a flourishing of feminist activism grows alongside the gap between the rich and the poor, and the wealthy's legal ability to curry influence with massive political contributions – make Joan Marie Johnson's Funding Feminism a much-needed addition to the historical record.