One of the great rewards of reading Holly McCammon’s excellent study alongside my own has been the revelation that, indeed, American women were incredibly active politically during the supposedly quiescent middle decades of the twentieth century. Rest in peace, June Cleaver metaphor.
Both of our books spotlight the importance of mass membership groups, such as the League of Women Voters and the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, through which American females organized relentlessly both for gender equality issues, such as the right to serve on juries, and for public goods, such as a peaceful world. The books remind us what women accomplish when they combine as women, but for some reasons not well understood, gender-based organizing has become more difficult.
McCammon’s insightful review raises important questions about how we arrived at this crossroads. The issues she identifies in my book are those with which I most struggled. My work advances an argument that is consistent with the assembled evidence, but as I note, there are big challenges inherent in explaining a century of change.
When I began to analyze the data and see the major trends—the rise, then fall, of women’s groups’ presence on Capitol Hill and the broadening, then narrowing, of their policy agendas—I thought it had to be a story rooted in changing patterns of women’s labor force participation. Quite obviously, jobs compete with volunteer groups for people’s time. I continue to believe that women’s work enters the picture in key ways—by, for example, sapping volunteer energies from leading women’s associations and by alienating women from groups emphasizing traditional helpmate roles.
Ultimately, however, I became convinced that “more women working” was just one piece of a complex puzzle. As McCammon notes, women’s labor force participation moved monotonically upward throughout the twentieth century, yet the activism of women’s organizations followed an up-and-down pattern. The asymmetry in the trends makes it hard to finger “women working” as the key explanatory variable.
Instead, the patterns seemed consistent with a policy-driven reconceptualization of “women’s issues.” During the first half of the twentieth century, women’s groups interpreted their mission broadly, consistent with the suffrage amendment’s mandate for civic inclusion and its invitation to women to bring their unique understandings to bear on all manner of public issues. By the 1960s, however, a new federal policy regime developed by the three branches of government was inviting women to make claims against the state for gender-based rights and protections. Facilitating this reconfiguration of women’s relationship with the state, new single-issue groups were displacing multipurpose women’s groups from long-standing public-interest-oriented policy niches. From the mid-1960s onward, we see a stunning increase in the fraction of women’s policy claims that focused on women’s equality and a parallel decline in their presence on Capitol Hill.
Like McCammon, I believe that my book is hardly the last word on the evolution of U.S. women’s organizations over the past century. The book ended on a discouraging note for those who believe that women still have distinctive perspectives on policy questions. I am eager to see new and different approaches for studying the voice of women’s groups—and women as individuals—in democratic governance.
