For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality 9780691220598
A history of the twentieth-century feminists who fought for the rights of women, workers, and the poor, both in the Unit
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a m e r i c a i n t h e wor l d Sven Beckert and Jeremi Suri, Series Editors Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality Roberto Saba, American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation Katy Hull, The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism Stefan Link, America’s Antagonists: Making Soviet and Nazi Fordism in the Global Thirties Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History Michael Cotey Morgan, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics Jürgen Osterhammel and Patrick Camiller, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century Edited by Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence & Andrew Preston, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective For a full list of titles in the series, go to https://press.princeton.edu/catalogs /series/title/america-in-the-world.html
For the Many a m e r ic a n f e m i n ists a n d t h e gl oba l f igh t for de moc r at ic e qua l i t y
dorot h y su e cobbl e
pr i ncet on u n i v e r sit y pr e ss pr i ncet on & ox for d
Copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cobble, Dorothy Sue, author. Title: For the many : American feminists and the global fight for democratic equality / Dorothy Sue Cobble. Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2021. | Series: America in the world | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020047372 (print) | LCCN 2020047373 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691156873 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691220598 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women—Political activity—United States—20th century. | Women social reformers—United States—20th century. | Feminism— United States—History—20th century. | Feminists—United States—Biography. | Equality—United States—History—20th century. | Democracy—United States— History—20th century. Classification: LCC HQ1236.5.U6 C63 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1236.5.U6 (ebook) | DDC 320.082/0973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047372 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047373 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Editorial: Priya Nelson, Thalia Leaf Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory Production: Danielle Amatucci Publicity: Alyssa Sanford, Amy Stewart Copyeditor: Gail Naron Chalew Jacket image: Faculty and students from the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Photo Archives, SSWWI_00079 This book has been composed in Classic Arno Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Florika, and her gifts from afar
For t here can be neither freedom, peace, true democracy, or real development without justice. m a ry mcl eod bet hu n e , from h er spe ech “cl ose d door s,” 1936
It takes all the brains that humanity can muster to operate a democracy. m a ry r itt er be a r d, l ett er to et h e l wood, august 9, 1950
c on t e n t s
Prologue: From Equal Rights to Full Rights
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part i. citizens of the world 1 Sitting at the “Common Table”
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2 A Higher “Standard of Life” for the World
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part ii. dr eams deferr ed 3 A “Parliament of Working Women”
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4 Social Justice under Siege
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5 Pan-Internationalisms
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part iii. new deals 6 Social Democracy, American Style
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7 A Women’s “New Deal for the World”
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part iv. universal declar ations 8 Wartime Journeys
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9 Intertwined Freedoms
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10 Cold War Advances
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x c o n t e n t s
part v. r edr eamings 11 The Pivotal Sixties
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12 Sisters and Resisters
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Epilogue: Of the Many, By the Many, For the Many
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Acknowledgments 427 Abbreviations 435 Notes 445 Index 551
p r ol o g u e
From Equal Rights to Full Rights
Leonora O’Reilly. Pencil on paper, 1912, by Wallace Morgan. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
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For the Many is a story of how women changed American politics and moved the United States and the world in a more egalitarian, social democratic direction. A politics for the many, not the few, predominated among politically active US women for much of the twentieth century. Understanding how they and their global allies created a more just and inclusive democracy changes the way we think about the past and future of American politics and America’s relation to the world. Over the course of the last c entury and against g reat odds, the w omen profiled in For the Many articulated a transforming social vision, moved into positions of economic and political power at home and abroad, and enacted reforms of lasting value. For the Many tells the story of individual w omen. Yet it is not a book celebrating individual heroism or the deeds of great women. It is what might be called a collective biography. Famous women—Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frances Perkins, to name a few—grace t hese pages and were indispensable to the intellectual and political revolutions of their day. But just as much attention is given to other women, many from less privileged backgrounds, who traveled alongside them. The courage, inventiveness, and stamina of w omen like Rose Schneiderman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frieda Miller, Maida Springer, Esther Peterson, and countless o thers propelled the struggle for democratic equality. This is a story of women, famous and not so famous, who acted together to change the world. I began my research thinking the egalitarian, social democratic traditions of American women, little understood and often underestimated, worthy of reconsideration. A fter more than a decade I feel that way even more strongly. Today, much of what the w omen in For the Many believed and accomplished is u nder assault. Yet as writer Zadie Smith insisted in 2016, as she accepted a literary prize a few days after Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency, “history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us.”1 The women at the heart of this book sought w omen’s rights in a fairer, more democratic world. They were feminists because they believed women faced disadvantages as a sex—a perspective not widely shared in their day—and they sought to end those disadvantages. Yet they
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wanted more than equality between men and w omen. They wanted a world where all women and men could thrive. To capture their multi- stranded politics, I refer to them throughout the text as “full rights” or “social democratic” feminists. I adopt the modifier “full rights,” their phrase, to foreground their desire for the full array of rights and their belief that civil and political rights are intertwined with social and economic. Real equality, they judged, must be substantive, universal, and multidimensional. I place them in the social democratic tradition because they held fast to economic and political democracy, sought to curb the power of elites, and believed progress must be social.2 Yet full rights feminists and their social democratic politics turn up under different labels as For the Many moves through the twentieth century: “socialist” or “progressive” in the early decades, “New Deal liberal” or “social democrat” in the middle decades, and “left-liberal Democrat” or “democratic socialist” in the 1960s and a fter. Some labels persist; o thers drop by the wayside. I adopt t hese and other labels when appropriate, but not without trepidation. Our political labels, past and present, are frustratingly imprecise and change meaning over time.3 Nor do such labels adequately convey the complexity, contradictions, or dynamism of the politics of individual people or of the communities in which they lived and worked. But whatever their label, the central figures in For the Many shared a desire for a more egalitarian, democratic world, and they fashioned institutions, laws, and social policies in the United States and abroad to realize those aspirations. This is a book about women’s politics, but it is not just about women. Men too advanced the ideas recounted here and at times proved indispensable allies. The women in For the Many organized alongside men in grassroots movements for democracy and social justice. They also joined with like-minded men in various political parties. Before the 1930s, full rights feminists could be found as often in the Progressive, Socialist, or Republican Parties as in the Democratic. But a fter the transformation of the Democratic Party in the 1920s—a revolution led by women—they operated largely within the New Deal framework and saw the Democratic Party as the principal political vehicle carrying forward their broad egalitarian aspirations. From the 1930s to the 1970s,
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coterminous with the heyday of American social democracy, they pursued their aims in the elite governing spaces usually reserved for men, serving as cabinet officers, members of Congress, high-r anking diplomats, and delegates to intergovernmental assemblies. At the same time, they continued to bolster democratic labor and civic organizations outside of government, believing pressure from “below” kept states responsive to the majority. Full rights feminists were not always at home in male-dominated po litical realms or movements. Nor w ere they always welcomed. Men w ere adversaries as well as allies. Women were denied political rights both before and after the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment prohibiting voting restrictions on the basis of sex. Equally frustrating, male-led parties and movements ignored women’s voices, underplayed the disadvantages women faced as a sex, and mistook masculine norms and aspirations as universal. In response, female activists organized separately from men, even as they continued to participate in predominantly male organizations. They constructed women’s committees, caucuses, and divisions inside grassroots movements and political parties. They established independent organizations and created all-female networks. This tradition of female political separatism was strongest in the early twentieth c entury and reemerged in the 1970s, but it never wholly dis appeared. Women from different classes, cultures, religions, and racial groups participated in this female world, and a surprising number of immigrant and working-class women held positions of political and intellectual leadership in it. Still, some of the stiffest opposition faced by full rights feminists came from other w omen, including other feminists. Divisions among US feminists intensified after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and for the next half-century American feminism split into warring camps. From the 1920s to the 1970s, full rights feminists joined with others in a “social feminist” coalition to oppose the National Woman’s Party and its allies.4 Full rights feminists judged the National Woman’s Party, with its unwavering single focus on “equal rights,” or formal legal equality between the sexes, as narrow, individualistic, and elitist. In their view, the pursuit of women’s rights in tandem with other broad social
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reforms was necessary for the majority of w omen to advance. Only by confronting multiple and intertwined injustices, they argued, could the problems of the many, men as well as w omen, be solved. The war between the two camps, symbolized by conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, subsided in the 1970s, but US feminism has continued into the twenty-first century as a contentious, multifaceted movement. Full rights feminists also battled with conservatives—men and women, feminists and non-feminists—on some of the great social and economic issues of the day. They clashed with conservatives over the desirability of social welfare and labor legislation; the role of the state in constraining corporate power and ensuring shared prosperity; and the rights due workers, immigrants, and p eople of color. B ecause they wanted greater democracy and more socialized markets, they disagreed with those who found authoritarian workplaces or unregulated cutthroat capitalism acceptable. They parted ways too with isolationists and go-it-alone nationalists—and not so amicably—over the extent and nature of America’s responsibilities in the world, its relation to international institutions and alliances, and how best to achieve global stability and peace. At the same time, they took issue with t hose on the left who espoused revolutionary violence, or who, a fter the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, conflated socialism with Soviet-style Communism. They rejected authoritarianism from the left and right, opposing the dictatorship of any person or class. They pursued egalitarian reforms through democratic means: popular education, the ballot box, democratic trade unionism, and legislative policy making. They chose nonviolent direct action: marches, strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts. Physical force was a last resort, and for some, never justified. Armed struggle and one-party rule, they believed, were weapons of the arrogant and the unimaginative—better to change hearts and minds through moral suasion and democratic debate. For the Many is a global story. American politics has never been “American-made.” It sprang from the foreign born and the native born, from noncitizen and citizen, from t hose who visited the United States
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for days or stayed years, and from those who never set foot on US soil. The world made America, as Eric Rauchway once put it, and to study American politics one must see its borders as porous and its history affected by global ideas, p eoples, and events.5 For the Many foregrounds the cross-class, multicultural, and multiracial character of social demo cratic women’s movements inside the United States and sees activists outside it as crucial shapers of US women’s politics. Social democratic women forged alliances across geographical borders and built international institutions to move forward their reforms. They learned from women and men in other countries. They believed America’s problems could not be solved apart from the world. In writing this book, I followed the thread of US w omen’s social democratic politics over time and across place, surprised by where it led, heartened by what I found. I picked up the thread as it sprang into view in the years before the First World War. I held on as it crossed borders of nation and culture and into places I had only, and at times wrongly, imagined. I crisscrossed the globe, daunted by the difficulties of international travel and cross-cultural communication. I visited immaculately restored castles and overgrown empty fields, searching for where American full rights feminists and their allies had gathered. I found traces in archival folders delivered by mistake and in mislabeled boxes I opened as an afterthought. Some of my most important discoveries happened when I visited the wrong archive or took the wrong elevator to rooms rarely frequented. I found out more about the “famous” in the untouched letters of the “obscure” than from many days sorting through the voluminous, carefully arranged papers of the “notable.” I lived in countries not my own for long stretches, experiencing some of the fear, disorientation, loneliness, and exhilaration uprooting can bring. How much more intense were those feelings for the women in this book, American born and otherwise, whose sojourns in nations not their own extended for years or lasted a lifetime. In the end, I returned home to an America much in need of the wisdoms of its social democratic foremothers. They too lived in a world of stark inequality and diminishing democracy. They too despaired at the cruelty of political tyrants and the selfishness of capitalist elites. And
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they too pondered the seemingly intractable hierarchies of race, nation, sex, and culture. Their solutions to these problems, though partial, bear revisiting. Today, few dispute the g reat chasm separating rich and poor nations. But it has taken longer to recognize the severity of economic inequality within nations, including within wealthy nations like the United States, where the maldistribution of income and wealth ranks among the worst in the world.6 The full rights feminists in For the Many made solving economic inequality a top priority, and to their credit they sought a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth both within and between nations. Diminishing the stark inequalities in US society meant thinking seriously about America’s role abroad and how its international policies affected o thers. US prosperity rested on global prosperity, which in turn depended on flourishing economies in other nations and raising income and standards of life worldwide. Economic reform, they determined, could not happen without an intellectual revolution. Full rights feminists began their assault on economic inequality in the early twentieth century by attacking the social Darwinist beliefs that justified it. Extreme inequality and mass poverty were not the inevitable result of hereditary differences between the poor and the rich, they insisted. Nor were such problems the product of “natural” market laws, as conventional economic theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held. Economic stratification as well as class and race hierarchies were man made, they proclaimed, and therefore could be unmade. The intellectual revolution they pushed forward enabled the social transformations of the 1930s and later. Today’s resurgent social Darwinism, with its fictional gospel of unalterable market dynamics, engrained racism, and class condescension, must again be dislodged if we are to move toward economic fairness and shared prosperity. Their proposals for lessening economic inequality varied as economic circumstances and political opportunities shifted over the course of the century. Yet some premises did not change: the US economy could not be walled off from the world, and no single remedy would suffice. To tackle inequality at home and abroad, they pressed for a
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package of reforms. They called for the rights of workers to organize and bargain in the United States and other countries; regulation of domestic and global economies; higher international social and l abor standards; and fairer, more democratic systems for determining the rules of state and workplace governance. They believed in the economic benefits of regulated trade and immigration. They defended workers’ freedom of movement across borders and argued for the full rights of men and women of all races, religions, and nationalities. Poverty and oppression anywhere, they insisted, threatened living standards and freedoms everywhere. Ensuring democracy in all realms of society—in government, at work, at home, and in the community—loomed just as large in their politics as fixing the economy.7 They looked to states, intergovernmental bodies, and international organizations as crucial vehicles for economic and social reform and demanded that they be democratized. Yet they never stopped encouraging organization from below. They sought democratic decision-making at work and the freedoms—the right to vote, to free speech, to freely assemble, and to a free press—necessary for civil society to flourish. They created socially inclusive grassroots organizations within and across national boundaries to sustain democracy and promote the full representation of all people. At times, their democratic experiments languished, and authoritarianism gained the upper hand, claiming to be the better route to redistributing wealth and providing economic security. Yet the full rights feminists in For the Many refused to abandon democracy, as messy and frustrating as it was. They believed democratic states, if guided by and beholden to democratic labor and community organizations, could do much to ensure a fair share of wealth and power to the world’s many. As fascism spread in the 1930s, the struggle for h uman rights took on added urgency among social reformers. Yet for many full rights feminists, defending the rights of all people, regardless of race, religion, nationality, or citizenship status, had always been a priority. For some, deeply held religious beliefs in the sanctity of each person motivated their h uman rights advocacy. Support for human rights flowed as well from secular beliefs in fairness and social justice and from personal,
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painful experiences of exclusion and persecution. From early in the twentieth century, full rights feminists conceived of human rights broadly to encompass economic and social guarantees as well as civil and political rights. And by mid-century, as w omen of color moved into positions of leadership in the movement, human rights came to mean ending the global color line and extending self-government to colonized peoples. None of the goals of full rights feminists—economic justice, democracy, or human rights—could be achieved apart from education. Educating the mind and cultivating the spirit were not afterthoughts. Demo cratic workplaces and governments required an educated citizenry. A fairer world rested on expanding h uman capacities for compassion, empathy, and tolerance. Without that, politics—whether left, right or center—could dehumanize and demean. Social democratic feminists pioneered urban settlement houses such as Chicago’s Hull House where rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, engaged in sustained cross- cultural learning. They also created emancipatory education programs for w omen workers in community centers, workplaces, and college campuses across the country. The most famous of t hese experiments in democratic pedagogy and social solidarity, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for W omen Workers in Industry, lasted from 1921 to 1938. A multiracial group of participants from the eight-week residential Bryn Mawr school look back at us from the cover of For the Many. Taken after students voted in 1925—with the Second Ku Klux Klan at its peak nationwide—to open the school to all women, the image evokes the school’s egalitarian spirit and its dedication to resisting prejudice and hate. Bryn Mawr—and the many other education programs encouraged by full rights feminists—proved pivotal in fostering a liberatory, inclusive women’s movement. To be sure, the women in For the Many did not always live up to the democratic and inclusive ideals they espoused, nor did their actions always have the desired effects. They could be ethnocentric and misguided, endorsing policies that sustained rather than dismantled inequities. Power imbalances and hierarchical notions of nations and peoples affected their choices and at times blinded them to the needs and realities
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of others. How to reconcile the competing demands of near and far, of local and global, was hardly self-evident. Still, many rejected the dominant imperial, racist, and elitist presumptions of their day.8 Immigrant women and women of color tended to see p eoples beyond US borders not as “them” but as “us.” Religious and moral values also nourished cosmopolitan proclivities and propelled many t oward more egalitarian alliances. They traveled, they learned, they changed. They navigated differences within their own ranks over how to address the deep and abiding tensions of social class, religion, and race. They a dopted ideas from those they admired and understood, as well as from those they underestimated and misunderstood. Mutually beneficial outcomes could and did occur.9 The story of US w omen’s social democratic politics over the last century was not one of ever upward progress. It moved in fits and starts, with tragic detours and dispiriting defeats alongside celebrations and gains. For the Many opens with the rise of US women’s organizing for political inclusion and economic justice in the early twentieth c entury—a pivotal era for working women’s politics at home and abroad. In the wake of World War I, US full rights feminists deepened their transnational connections with labor and social democratic women outside the United States and won surprising victories on the global stage. Political advance slowed in the 1920s in the face of resurgent conservatism at home and thwarted alliances abroad. Yet as American w omen remade the US Democratic Party in the late 1920s and built dynamic multiracial left- leaning movements from below in the 1930s, democratic egalitarianism revived in the United States, even as much of the world slipped into authoritarianism. From the 1930s to the 1970s, social democratic feminists secured far-sighted and consequential reform. In an oft-repeated and troubling pattern, however, some of the policies closest to their heart, especially those boosting social and economic guarantees, won more adherents abroad than at home. The late twentieth century witnessed widening inequalities among women as well as men, and a feminism for the many remained in the wings, waiting for its next entry onto the stage. Authoritarian regimes have ascendancy in many regions and nations in the twenty-first century, spewing forth their messages of hate and
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fear. Yet a new politics of the many has also emerged. There is a new openness to egalitarian and social democratic ideas among a wide swath of Americans. Women, especially women of color and young w omen, are energized politically and are shifting the conversation about how the US government treats its own citizens and how it interacts with the rest of the world. An alternative politics, premised on social solidarity, inclusion, and equity, is vying to take back parliaments and presidencies. For the Many seeks to enrich our understandings of t hese lost egalitarian traditions and argues for their potential in navigating a way forward.
pa r t i
Citizens of the World
Delegates to the 1919 International Congress of Working Women. Mary Anderson stands at the end of the first row on the left. Britain’s Margaret Bondfield is fourth from the left next to Rose Schneiderman who holds a large black hat. Behind them is Pauline Newman (with bowler hat and tie). Japan’s Tanaka Taka, clutching papers, is fourth from the right. Margaret Dreier Robins is the last figure on the right. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC.
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A democratic wind stirred across much of the world in the early twentieth century. Movements for the rights of w omen, workers, and other disenfranchised groups erupted in the United States as elsewhere. Far from being isolated or parochial, the social democratic branch of US feminism was transnational to its core. It shared ideas, people, and resources across national borders, and many of its leaders were first or second-generation immigrants, spoke multiple languages, and maintained strong cultural and family ties outside the United States. The movement’s guiding political assumptions reinforced its cosmopolitan character. Full rights feminists created a politics dedicated to the common good and they sought to build a more inclusive women’s movement. They reached out to like-minded allies beyond America’s borders—convinced that through transnational alliances they could lift the world’s standard of living and secure women’s representation in the global governance structures emerging after World War I. Part One tells the story of this close-knit community of feminist reformers and narrates the rise of US w omen’s social democratic internationalism in a world reeling from popular insurgencies, collapsing empires, and wartime atrocities. We follow US feminists as they organize at home and abroad to advance w omen’s rights, democracy, and social justice. Their efforts culminated in 1919. US w omen, in alliance with labor and social democratic women from around the world, demanded inclusion in the postwar global institutions emerging at Versailles, crystallized a transnational working women’s agenda, and left their mark on the world’s first set of labor standards.
1 Sitting at the “Common Table”
No organ i zation was more important to the rise of women’s social democratic internationalism in twentieth-century Americ a than the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL).1 Founded in 1903, its princi ples reflected the core ideals of full rights feminism—dedication to democracy and social equality—and its leaders strove to abide by t hose values in their own lives, as well as in the life of the organization. Neither the individual w omen at its helm nor the organization itself succeeded in realizing the quite radical democratic aspirations the WTUL embo died. Nonetheless, women like those who created and led the WTUL moved the United States away from elitism and helped undermine the prevailing social Darwinist disdain for working people. They cleared the way for a social politics that rejected laissez-faire economic ideologies and America First isolationism. The mixed-class group of white women (and some men) who launched the WTUL in Boston wanted an organization that would prioritize the interests of low-income w omen. In their view, none of the elite-led women’s organizations or male-led trade u nions paid adequate attention to working-class women.2 WTUL founders included veteran labor leaders like Knights of Labor radical Leonora O’Reilly and Mary Kenney O’ Sullivan, the first national female organizer for the American Federation of L abor (AFL). The group also included middle-class social reformers such as Wellesley Professor of Political Economy Emily Greene Balch, socialist labor advocate William English Walling, and the revered Jane 15
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Addams.3 Jane Addams and others close to her in the settlement house world were especially crucial in sustaining the early league and shaping its initial philosophy. Addams believed in social services and self-help for the urban poor—what journalist Walter Lippmann famously called “compassion without condescension.” Yet Addams also championed a new “social ethic” of democratic and inclusive group life. Increasing the participation and power of workers—the laboring men and women of all races and cultures—was part of the solution to the great problems of the day. She called on all with “an aroused conscience” to declare, as a m atter of “social justice,” the “complete participation of the working classes in the spiritual, intellectual and material inheritance of the human race.” All must be welcome at the “common table.”4 The league’s attention to class equality and democratic governance was evident in its constitution. Any person who embraced the league’s goals could join, and to advance democratic decision-making and working women’s self-development, its constitution stipulated that a majority of the members of the national and local executive boards must be women “who are or have been trade unionists in good standing.”5 Such rules did not end class privilege in the league: elite white Protestant reformers continued to exert considerable influence. Nor was the organ ization f ree of racial, religious, and cultural tensions and exclusions.6 Even though the WTUL cooperated with Black-led organizations, for example, and some of its leaders w ere among t hose who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored P eople (NAACP), WTUL membership and leadership remained largely white before the 1920s. Still, the league was unusual among white women’s organizations of the day in the power wielded by working-class and immigrant w omen. Low-income w omen from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds comprised the majority of league members, held the majority of executive board seats, and led some of the most active league branches. Their notions of justice and fairness infused league activities and guided its priorities. Within a few years, the league settled on an intertwined agenda of women’s rights, democracy, and industrial justice. Its 1907 “First Plat-
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form” listed “full citizenship for w omen,” the right of workers to orga nize and bargain collectively, a living wage and shorter hours, and equal pay for equal work. Genuine democracy and economic fairness were achievable but only if working people organized into independent trade unions. Worker organization was a necessary counterbalance to the or ganized power of capital, b ecause it preserved democratic decision- making in industry and government. Democratic states could not thrive alongside “despotic workshops,” league president Margaret Dreier Robins thought. “Self-government in industry, as in politics, was essential to a free society.” Worker organization was also a route to developing the full moral, intellectual, and leadership capacities of wage earners. But the larger society had to change as well. America’s immigrant and working classes deserved greater social respect, sympathy, and “communal feeling,” as Jane Addams put it.7 A better world for the many rested on new cultural norms not just changed laws and workplace practices. League w omen identified with a range of early twentieth-century political parties—Socialist, Progressive, Democratic, Republican, Farmer-Labor—and many changed party allegiances as the parties themselves evolved. Diverging political proclivities strained unity at times, especially when overlaid by temperamental differences, with members of a more radical, impatient wing frustrated with their politi cally moderate and socially conservative s isters. League w omen, for example, divided their vote in the bitterly contested four-way 1912 presidential election. Although Wilson’s New Freedom Democrats won the presidency, the political enthusiasms of league women often lay elsewhere. Some warmed to the Socialist Party’s long list of social reforms and its stirring condemnation of plutocratic rule and capitalist worship of profit. Others thrilled when Jane Addams seconded Theodore Roo sevelt’s nomination to head the Progressive Party ticket, the first time a woman had done so, and the party approved a platform of “equal suffrage to men and women alike”; the 8-hour day and a “living wage in all occupations”; “organization of workers, men and w omen”; prohibition of child labor; a “National Health Service”; social insurance for the elderly,
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the ill, and the unemployed; and federal inheritance and income taxes.8 Yet despite the shifting array of party allegiances among members, the league’s overall principles of egalitarianism and representative democracy held firm, placing it in a long and capacious US tradition of social democratic politics. The league shared with the AFL, the largest national trade u nion federation of the day, beliefs in constitutionalism and the rule of law, as well as commitments to making markets and corporations more democratic and equitable. The league cooperated with the AFL, believing the collective empowerment of working people crucial to democracy and economic fairness. Yet the league favored a greater role for the state and for regulatory laws in the economy than did the AFL. Unlike the AFL, it sought broad social welfare measures, including state income subsidies for poor families, and it pressed for fair labor standards laws for adult men, as well as for women and children. Its support for immigrant rights and for more inclusive u nions also provoked conflict with the AFL. The league rejected the AFL’s nativist immigration policies, for example, and sought an American labor movement in which workers of all sexes and backgrounds would be welcome.9 Inspired by the expansive sense of “community internationalism” and “world social citizenship” popularized by Jane Addams, league women believed a more peaceful and just social order rested on ordinary citizens, including working w omen, becoming more involved in world affairs.10 Yet league internationalism also grew out of a shared set of beliefs about the economy and its relation to peace. Peace among nations depended on raising wages and ensuring fair labor standards for all. Like many liberal internationalists of the era, league women favored expanded trade and lower tariffs as a route to global economic growth and prosperity. The league differed markedly, however, from liberal internationalists who accepted unregulated global markets and capital mobility, tolerated autocratic enterprise, and reserved the right to limit “self- determination” to a select few nations and peoples. The WTUL embraced state-and union-regulated economies and political, economic, and social rights for all.11
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Crossing Boundaries The w omen who led the league in its first decades w ere drawn from the rich as well as the poor. They also reflected the league’s mix of native born and immigrant and its religious and ethnic diversity. Margaret Dreier Robins and her younger s ister Mary Dreier, two wealthy w omen of Protestant background, devoted their lives to the league and w ere among its most important leaders. Yet immigrant and working-class women like Leonora O’Reilly, Agnes Nestor, Mary Anderson, Rose Schneiderman, and Maud O’Farrell Swartz contributed just as much intellectually and otherwise. It was a jumbled world of class and cultural difference that at times marginalized some unfairly and produced hurt and misunderstanding. But it was also a world of cooperation, love, mutual learning, and affirmation. The Brooklyn-born Dreier sisters grew up in the 1870s and 1880s in a prosperous and civic-minded German immigrant family. Their father had left Bremen, Germany, for New York in 1849. Within a few years he became New York manager and partner in an English iron distribution firm and married his cousin, the d aughter of a devout German pastor in Bremen. The couple settled in Brooklyn and educated their children in private schools and at home, making sure the four girls absorbed the teachings of the German Evangelical Church. Their father died unexpectedly in 1897, leaving each of his daughters a generous inheritance. Guided by religious values of social responsibility and redemptive possibility, Margaret and Mary initially chose to devote themselves to charity and welfare work. Their lives changed after meeting Leonora O’Reilly at Asacog House, the Brooklyn settlement house where she worked as head resident.12 O’Reilly had experienced the world quite differently than the two Dreier sisters. Born in 1870 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Irish immigrants, O’Reilly left school at age eleven to take a job in a collar factory when her father died. She soon began organizing worker cooperatives for the Knights of L abor, the populist labor federation then at its peak, and in 1886, at age sixteen, she set up a New York Working W omen’s Society to advance the welfare and organization of wage-earning women
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and children. She also found intellectual mentors among her labor comrades. By the time she met the Dreier s isters, she was a sophisticated, well-read political thinker. She had absorbed political economy, history, and philosophy from her Lower East Side self-education group, the Comte Synthetic Circle, and learned French and radical labor theory from French-born anarchist, internationalist, and political refugee Victor S. Drury. In 1897, two New York City philanthropists, impressed by O’Reilly’s far-sighted leadership of the Working Women’s Society, financed her attendance at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. O’Reilly’s zealous advocacy, idealism and “wide vision” captivated the Dreier s isters. In 1904, following O’Reilly’s advice, they joined the New York league.13 Margaret Dreier worked alongside O’Reilly in New York only briefly. After a short stint as president of the New York league, she moved to Chicago and, at age 37, married Raymond Robins. A fierce urban crusader and devout proponent of Social Gospel Christianity, Raymond Robins was known for his histrionic personality and “colorful” past. Abandoned as a child by his once-illustrious family, he had struggled financially, working as a miner in Tennessee and the Rocky Mountains before making a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush and turning to Christianity.14 The couple had no c hildren, and Margaret Dreier Robins devoted her formidable energy and a substantial portion of her growing wealth to the league. Self-assured and commanding, she took naturally to organizational leadership and public speaking. She spoke with a slight German accent, one of her fellow reformers remembered, in a “frank, open, sympathetic manner.”15 By 1907, she was president of both the national WTUL, headquartered in Chicago, and the Chicago branch. A staunch supporter of l abor organization, she integrated the league into the vibrant Chicago community of progressive trade unionists, led by Irish-born Chicago L abor Federation president John Fitzpatrick. The Labor Federation, a powerful citywide organization, united thousands of Chicago’s diverse working classes and was busily organizing the rest. Its commitment to organizing all workers and its unorthodox “open-door policy” (it admitted social reformers, socialists, and other non-unionists sympathetic to labor) suited her perfectly. When
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the L abor Federation elected her to its executive board in 1908, she readily accepted and promptly moved league offices to the Federation’s labor hall.16 Margaret Dreier Robins was equally immersed in the dynamic female world of reform centered at the University of Chicago and Hull House, where the Chicago league held its first meetings. Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, pioneering industrial researchers, made the University of Chicago a world center for “applied sociology” and social work education and linked its programs to Hull House, the nation’s preeminent settlement h ouse. Set up by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, Hull House exemplified the values of democracy, inclusion, and social betterment. The curious and the already committed flocked to it from around the world, looking for solutions to the poverty, social unrest, and inequality plaguing industrializing societies.17 A complicated figure, Margaret Dreier Robins could be haughty and imperious in her interpersonal relations while at the same time acting— often courageously—to defend principles of democratic governance and equality. Robins honored the Chicago league’s commitment to working-class leadership and self-development and in 1913 requested a trade u nion w oman replace her as Chicago branch president. Th ere was no shortage of talent. The executive board chose Agnes Nestor, a veteran strike leader and political lobbyist, from among the many capable candidates. A Michigan-born Irish Catholic unionist, Nestor had led her shop of glove makers out on strike as a young girl and within a few years assumed a national vice presidency of the International Glove Workers’ Union, a union she and her coworker German-born Elisabeth Christman established. Nestor had been the primary force b ehind the 1909 legislative battle for a ten-hour working day in Illinois and, in 1911, fought to expand the law’s coverage to non-industrial w omen. U nder Nestor’s leadership, the Chicago league flourished. It helped win partial voting rights for Illinois w omen in 1913, and in partnership with the Chicago Federation of Labor, it built on the massive 1910 walkout of Chicago garment workers—sparked by Russian immigrant and Hull House night school graduate Bessie Abramowitz—to expand u nionism
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into other female trades. The garment strike led to the formation of the powerful, left-leaning Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a national union, and inspired optimism across the country about the possibilities of organizing immigrants and bringing joint decision- making by labor and management to industry.18 Robins also hired working-class women in staff positions at the national league. Factory worker and u nion official Mary Anderson, whom Robins brought on as a national league organizer in 1913, turned out to be an inspired choice. Anderson had left her family’s rural farm in Lidköping, Sweden, at age sixteen, traveling to America with an older sister, each carrying thirty dollars sent by a third sister already in the United States. Anderson washed dishes at a lumber camp and held other domestic jobs before landing work in a boot factory. She spent thirteen years t here, organizing unions, leading strikes, and negotiating labor contracts. As a league organizer, she assisted in the “great strikes that broke out in Chicago’s International Harvester Works” and endured police violence and jail for peaceful picketing and speaking in public. What she lacked in charisma, she made up in courage, dogged determination, and pragmatic level-headedness.19 Robins added to Anderson’s responsibilities in 1914 by appointing her director of the league’s experimental educational program cosponsored with the University of Chicago. In it, industrial w omen, “accepted without an exam” by the university, studied l abor problems and political economy side by side with college students for six months—with tuition and expenses paid by the league. Afterward, participants engaged in “field work” and hands-on learning for another six months. The pioneering program grew out of the league’s commitment to developing the whole person and its belief in the intellectual and leadership capacities of members of all classes. In addition to the University of Chicago program, the league sponsored lectures and held its own classes on art, music, and creative writing, as well as trade union fundamentals. The “organized girl is the thinking girl,” Anderson declared.20 Mary Dreier, unlike her sister Margaret, stayed in New York for much of her adult life, nestled in a female reform community knit together by intimate friendships and love affairs, as well as shared political passions.
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Like a number of other league leaders, she chose a woman as her life partner. Somewhat introverted, Dreier did not relish being in the spotlight, especially when it meant defending an organization as controversial as the league. In 1906, however, she took on the presidency of the New York league, encouraged by Leonora O’Reilly and urban sociologist Frances Kellor, who became Dreier’s lifelong companion. Kellor had been raised in a poor h ousehold, but she shared Dreier’s dedication to realizing Social Gospel Christian ideals of ameliorating poverty. They had met in 1904 after Kellor chose New York for fieldwork on her second book, Out of Work, a study of joblessness and how employment agencies exploited immigrant and Black female migrants. Within a few years, the two w ere sharing the Dreier f amily mansion in Brooklyn. They remained together until Kellor’s death in 1952.21 Under Dreier’s presidency from 1906 to 1914, the New York league, like its s ister Chicago branch, devoted energy to industrial organizing, labor legislation, and education. Th ere w ere notable victories. Its unflinching support of the mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant shirtwaist makers who sparked the 1909 citywide garment strike, later known as the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” won it respect and new members. The league rejected the class paternalism of supporters like Anne Morgan, J. P. Morgan’s d aughter, and backed the strikers’ non- negotiable demand for independent unionism. The strike, a turning point in US history, helped reinvigorate industrial unionism and bolster the forces within organized labor dedicated to inclusion and state action. A fter the horrific tragedy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 146 young immigrant women died, the league joined the broad- based push in New York for industrial reforms. Mary Dreier sat as the sole woman on the nine-member New York State Factory Investigating Commission. Chaired by State Senator Robert Wagner, with Assemblyman Al Smith as vice chair, the commission’s four years of hearings and investigations provoked a “general awakening” about the need for corporate social responsibility and regulatory oversight. Frances Perkins, former secretary of the New York Consumers’ League and chair of New York City’s Workplace Safety Committee, testified before the commission and was later hired as its director of investigation. Perkins insisted
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commissioners see firsthand the harrowing dangers of industrial workplaces, an experience they never forgot. The work of the commission and its final report, issued in 1915, resulted in dozens of new state and municipal laws, including limits on workplace hours and strict industrial health and safety codes.22 The New York league also contributed to immigrant rights, interracial cooperation, and suffrage advocacy. In 1906, Kellor and Dreier formed the National League for the Protection of Colored Women to assist new migrants with jobs and housing (it later merged with the National Urban League). In 1909, Dreier set aside some of her inheritance and gave O’Reilly a lifetime annuity. O’Reilly was overjoyed. She wanted desperately to have more time for her newly adopted daughter and for political activism. She quit her job as a sewing instructor and combined serving as New York league vice president with work for the Socialist Party and the NAACP, which formed in 1909 to combat racial violence, Jim Crow, and the systematic denial of citizenship rights to African Americans. The NAACP’s early members included O’Reilly, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and other white reformers as well as internationally renowned African American leaders, such as celebrated author and civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois and investigatory journalist and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett.23 O’Reilly also threw herself into the suffrage strugge. By 1912, she was the president of the New York Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, a group she helped found, and a nationally sought-after suffrage speaker. Her speaking fees allowed her to buy a home in Brooklyn, where she lived with her m other and cared for an aging Victor Drury, her childhood teacher.24 O’Reilly was not the only working-class woman to hold a top office in the New York league. In New York, as in Chicago, a majority of the leaders came from the ranks of l abor. Rose Schneiderman and her lifelong companion Maud O’Farrell Swartz were among the most prominent. Born in 1882 in Saven, a small Polish village on the western edge of the Russian Empire, Schneiderman migrated as a child to New York City’s Lower East Side. Her father, like many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, found work as a tailor. Tragically, he died a year later, and Rose and her siblings w ere separated from their m other and put into a
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Jewish orphanage u ntil she could provide for them. At age thirteen, Schneiderman took a job as an errand girl in a department store. Against her m other’s wishes, she found a less respectable but higher paying factory job sewing linings into men’s caps. She and her coworkers orga nized the first female local of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union, a Jewish-led socialist organization, and Schneiderman won office in the national union. When the cap makers shut down the industry in 1907, league w omen joined Schneiderman on the picket line. League leaders recognized her abilities and offered her a stipend, which allowed her to quit her factory job and return to night school. The grueling conditions of tenement labor stayed with her a lifetime, as did her experiences as a strike leader in the 1909 garment uprising and its aftermath. She never forgot the deep abiding fury aroused by the deaths of her fellow workers as fire swept through the locked rooms of the Triangle Company. Shortly after the fire, in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, Schneiderman gave her most famous speech. Only four feet, nine inches tall, with flaming red hair, she spoke almost in a whisper to the thousands gathered there. Her words electrified the crowd. Working people did not need charity, she insisted; they needed political and economic rights, including the right to organize unions. Only then could they stop the system that burned them alive.25 In 1911, Schneiderman accepted a job as the New York league’s lobbyist, where she devoted much of her time to state legislative campaigns for workplace safety and other labor protections. But like O’Reilly, she combined her league work with w omen’s suffrage advocacy and Socialist Party politics. At suffrage rallies and “political equality clubs” across the state, she drew on her industrial experience to demolish anti-suffrage claims that the vote would destroy w omen’s delicacy and charm. “We have women working in the foundries, stripped to the waist, if you please, because of the heat,” she responded to a state legislator’s challenge in 1912. “Yet the Senator says nothing about t hese w omen losing their charm. Surely these women won’t lose any more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in a ballot box once a year than they are likely to lose standing in foundries or laundries all year round.” In 1914, frustrated by her failed bid for New York league president, Schneiderman left the league
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and organized for her u nion, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), for three years. But she returned and on her second try for the presidency, she won. Schneiderman was never fully comfortable in the predominantly Christian world of the league. But she felt more at home t here than in the patriarchal milieu of male trade u nionism. The league, she once noted, even with all its problems, at least shared her dual commitment to workers’ rights and w omen’s equality—and it encouraged, rather than feared, her leadership.26 Schneiderman’s companion of twenty-five years, Irish-born Maud O’Farrell Swartz, arrived in New York in 1901, a twenty-three-year-old former governess in search of a different life. She too would occupy top league posts. Educated in German and French convent schools because her father, an Irish flour miller, could not provide for his large family, she was fluent in French, German, and Italian. In 1905, she signed on as a proofreader in a foreign-language printing firm and married a coworker, Lee Swartz, a typographical unionist. They soon separated, but never divorced b ecause of Maud’s Catholic faith. Schneiderman heard Swartz deliver a pro-suffrage stump speech in Italian and recruited her to the league. A fter joining in 1912, Swartz took advantage of the league’s leadership training school and moved quickly into local and then national office. She succeeded Margaret Dreier Robins as WTUL national president in 1922, and four years later, she passed the reins to Schneiderman, who served as the league’s top national officer until its dissolution in 1950.27
WTUL Allies The league’s emphasis on union action and its inclusion of immigrant and low-income w omen in leadership distinguished it from many other Progressive Era women’s organizations. Still, other groups shared its goals of women’s rights and social justice, and as we have seen, league members often joined multiple reform organizations. Among women’s groups, the WTUL’s closest partners were the National Consumers’ League (NCL) and the Young W omen’s Christian Association (YWCA). Propelled forward by the indomitable spirit of its socialist founder Florence Kelley, the NCL, formed in 1899, relied on public education,
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organized consumer power, and labor legislation to end industrial exploitation and create a fairer economy. As chief factory inspector in Illinois, Kelley found that few sweatshop employers raised workplace standards voluntarily. Organized consumer pressure and state regulation, she concluded, were necessary. Women may lack voting power, Kelley pointed out, but “every person is a consumer” and consumer choices matter. NCL provided the “technical information and organization” consumers needed to exert power in the market and “moralize” buying. It investigated worksites and urged consumers to patronize “humane employers” who made “wholesome products u nder right conditions.” Kelley defined “right conditions” in 1899 as “fair living wages” for all workers, “equal pay for work of equal value, irrespective of sex,” and limits on overtime and child labor.28 NCL and its dozens of local affiliates agitated for decent labor standards for both sexes. But thwarted by conservative courts, which repeatedly ruled government regulations affecting adult male workers unconstitutional, NCL and other full rights feminists concentrated on fair standards for women and children, hoping such laws would serve as an opening wedge for universal regulations. In 1908, when the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon sustained the right of a state to limit women’s hours to ten and proclaimed public interest in women’s “maternal function” more important than women’s right to “freedom of contract,” the push for labor laws specific to women and children picked up speed. Over the next decade, a big-tent movement led by the NCL and the WTUL secured new and improved maximum-hour laws for women in forty-one states. Minimum-wage laws, especially those insisting on a living wage—defined by the league as a wage sufficient for self-support and support of a dependent—met more resistance. A fter Massachusetts passed the first minimum-wage law for women and children in 1912, a dozen other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico followed suit. Although the minimum-wage laws proved disappointing, with wages set low and enforcement minimal, the lowest-paid women and children experienced modest pay gains. In addition to reducing hours and raising pay, fair labor standard laws mandated rest and lunch breaks and instituted workplace health and safety protections.29
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An even broader coalition of reform-minded women helped spread so-called m others’ pension laws across the country. More properly termed “children’s allowances,” such laws provided cash subsidies to dependent children and their caregivers in poor single-headed families. States varied widely in determining which families were eligible. Widowed mothers were entitled to income support in all of the laws, but some states also deemed “abandoned” and never-married mothers, as well as f athers, eligible for income support. Nonwhite and immigrant caregivers often failed to qualify, however, and aid was rarely sufficient for a family. This same network established the US C hildren’s Bureau in 1912 to promote child welfare through expanding “mothers’ pension” benefits and abolishing child labor. Children were best cared for in their own homes, the bureau argued, not in state institutions. They were entitled to education and self- development rather than a childhood of sweated labor.30 The YWCA and the WTUL combined forces a fter the YWCA Industrial Department, the division within the national association responsible for organizing Bible study groups and other w holesome activities for working girls, left behind its focus on individual salvation and embraced Social Gospel Christianity.31 The reorientation of YWCA philosophy and policy in the United States happened in tandem with changes in the World YWCA, the global body established in 1894 by national YWCA groups in Britain, the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway. In 1910, two years after the Federal Council of Churches in the United States endorsed a “social creed” urging Protestant churches to take responsibility for improving social conditions, the World YWCA adopted a similar Social Gospel perspective at its Berlin Conference. Florence Simms, the founder and first head of the YWCA Industrial Department in the United States, had chaired the World YWCA’s study commission on social problems and vowed to take the American YWCA in a daring new direction. As one of her co-conspirators Ernestine Friedmann explained, the American YWCA had begun as “an organization of one class of women for another class of women,” but those “individualistic” and “autocratic” days must come to an end. Under pressure from Simms and the YWCA Industrial Department, the association as a w hole entered a “social viewpoint period,” and in 1911,
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the YWCA biennial convention endorsed “living wages” and the study of social problems as part of a refashioned “industrial charter.”32 Next, Simms declared, the association should back the right of w omen workers to bargain collectively. To encourage such a shift, the Industrial Department established closer cooperation with the league and in 1913 sent its first fraternal delegate to the league’s convention.33 The Industrial Department also set up politically oriented self- governing “industrial clubs” for working w omen. Factory operatives, waitresses, laundry and other low-income w omen workers flocked to these new-style clubs. The national YWCA had long offered housing, food, and employment services to low-income women along with religious instruction; the new industrial clubs moved away from charity and toward a more social, movement-building focus. The clubs met in the neutral space of the YWCA, free of employer oversight. There, women workers shared common problems more freely and chose topics of study—economics, worker rights, trade union organizing—once out of bounds. By 1914, over 375 industrial clubs existed, with many networked into citywide and regional councils. The industrial club movement, however, remained largely white. The YWCA’s segregation policies and its underfunding of Black YWCAs meant few African American women had access to industrial programs. The situation would change as the YWCA hired more African American staff, and Black YWCA membership surged during World War I.34 The women workers in the new industrial clubs insisted employers adopt Christian values of fair treatment and just wages and the YWCA back worker’s right to organize their own u nions. The YWCA’s National Board, which included the wives of corporate anti-union titans such as John D. Rockefel ler, blanched at the idea of collective bargaining. The leaders of the YWCA Industrial Department and the WTUL, however, believed the association would eventually support unions—and when it did, the league and the YWCA would comprise a formidable “industrial w omen’s movement” combining trade unionists and industrial clubwomen.35 The WTUL’s principles of democracy and social justice overlapped as well with the National Association of Colored W omen (NACW), the foremost organization of African American w omen.36 But divergent
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priorities, white racism, and the difficulties of interracial cooperation in an era of strict Jim Crow kept the two organizations on separate tracks. Since its founding in 1896, the NACW, led first by well-to-do writer, educator, and internationalist Mary Church Terrell, had engaged Black clubwomen, mostly elite women, in rescue work and social uplift. But it also took courageous public stands against lynching and called for full citizenship rights for women and men of color. The NACW had a long history of international activism and had sought—w ith and without white allies—to foster interracial cooperation at home and abroad. When the General Federation of W omen’s Clubs in the United States refused to admit African American clubwomen, the NACW affiliated instead with the National Council of Women, the US branch of the International Council of Women, the large multi-issue global women’s organization founded in 1888.37 (The NACW was the only nonwhite affiliate among the thirty-eight US women’s groups in the National Council of W omen.) When the International Council of W omen invited Terrell to address its 1904 Berlin Congress, she accepted, delivering a powerful speech in German on “The Progress of Colored W omen.” Terrell l ater wrote of her conviction that she spoke for colored women in America and for all women of African descent.38 Black membership in the WTUL remained quite small in the World War I era, as did its membership of Asian, Latinx, and other women of color. Even in cities like Chicago with a burgeoning African American working class, the league did not add its first local of mostly Black women until 1918. During wartime, the WTUL condemned job discrimination against Black women, calling a “fair deal for the colored folks” a “test of our democracy,” and initiated organizing drives among African Americans in the stockyards and other sectors—yet the league remained largely white until the 1930s.39
Citizens of the World In the years leading up to World War I, the league paid increasing attention to global affairs and to organizing across national borders. The world is “more and more one great community,” a WTUL report de-
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clared in 1909, and “organization is no longer an American or a Euro pean question, but a world-wide one.” The league’s monthly journal, Life and Labor, started in 1911, poured forth a stream of in-depth portraits of women and labor movements in Europe, as well as Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, and Russia, and featured a regular column, “From Near and Far,” with news from abroad.40 The journal’s editor from 1911 to 1915, Australian-born Alice Henry, had much to do with the journal’s global orientation. A popular lecturer and journalist in Australia by the time she crisscrossed the United States in 1906 on a speaking tour, Henry drew crowds e ager to learn about Australia’s pioneering 1902 women’s suffrage law and the parliamentary victories of the Australian L abour Party, which included Australia’s first Labour prime minister. At age forty-nine, Henry’s pure white hair and grandmotherly mien won sympathy as she spoke forthrightly about her pacifism, stirred by the civilian atrocities of the Second Boer War, and condemned Britain’s imperialist relation to Australia and other nations. Henry identified with the evolutionary traditions of the British Fabian socialists, an affinity reinforced by her recent visits to E ngland and to Scotland, the birthplace of her parents. Yet she parted ways with the majority of turn-of-the-century Fabian socialists who, at the urging of Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, justified British military intervention and imperial power in South Africa.41 Henry’s worldview appealed to Margaret Dreier Robins, who cornered her after a Chicago lecture and convinced her to take charge of league publicity. Henry gave the next twenty years of her life to the league, editing its journal—initially the w omen’s page of the Chicago- based Union L abor Advocate—and directing its educational ventures. She consistently pushed the league to engage with labor and w omen’s movements around the world and was pleased when they did. At the same time, Henry’s “ ‘ White Australia’ antipathy to immigrant diversity and colored p eoples steadily eroded” during her time in Chicago, and she came to affirm the equality of the races and the right of African Americans and immigrants to first-class American citizenship.42 Henry drew other Australian w omen into league work. For the young Australian novelist Miles Franklin who became Henry’s assistant in
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Chicago, Henry and the league were surrogate parents. Franklin remained close to Henry and many league women for the rest of her life, though she never lost her initial conflicted feelings of love and rebellion toward her new f amily. Franklin had fled Australia at age twenty-two after publishing her controversial first novel, My Brilliant C areer. Many had found her frank account of a young girl’s yearning for career over family quite shocking and had criticized her sharply for it. She took refuge at Hull House and found her way to the Chicago league and to her fellow Aussie transplant, Alice Henry. Writing u nder the pseudonym S. M. Franklin, she became Life and Labor’s assistant editor and one of its most frequent contributors.43 Her literary skills and mordant wit made her a popular figure—she met muckraking journalist sensation Ida Tarbell and other literary figures—but Franklin suspected that her Aussie background added to her luster. “In t hose days,” she observed, “Australian humanitarian legislation was the wonder and hope of advanced social reformers, who regarded our experiments as a sounder method of social adjustment than any philanthropic institution.”44 Franklin, however, wearied of “too much sociology” after a few years. In 191, she resigned, and, with multiple unfinished manuscripts tucked in her bag, left for London.45 In choosing England, she followed a path well worn by US women and their reform sisters in Anglophone countries. US league women kept in close touch with their counterparts in Britain. The British WTUL, established in 1873, had been inspired by a British tour of women’s unions in the United States. Thirty years later, US women returned the favor, creating an American WTUL patterned after the British. Philosophically, the two leagues had much in common. Both welcomed women from all classes who prioritized improving the lives of low-income women through worker organization, l abor legislation, and education. Even so, the two organizations evolved in different ways. In 1906, the British Trades Union Congress, the umbrella group to which the majority of trade unions belonged, refused to affiliate the British WTUL, citing its mixed-class membership. In response, British women set up a new organization, the National Federation of W omen Workers, composed purely of women trade unionists. As anticipated,
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the British Trades Union Congress welcomed the National Federation of Women Workers as an affiliate, and the new group gained financial support and legitimacy from its participation in the principal mixed-sex British labor organization. The British WTUL continued as a mixed- class women’s organization outside the Trades Union Congress, helping organize and promote legislation on behalf of wage-earning women. Within a few years, the National Federation eclipsed the British WTUL in numbers and stature.46 In contrast, the US WTUL never set up a purely trade u nion division. It retained its mixed-class character and, although never an affiliate of the AFL, continued as the recognized national voice of women workers.47 US league w omen envied British labor w omen’s record of accomplishment. W omen’s unionism in Britain grew rapidly after 1910, paralleling the upward sweep of British u nionism more generally. And although women remained a small slice of the organized British working classes, their numbers surpassed those in the United States. Britain’s two principal women labor leaders, Margaret Bondfield and Mary Macarthur, were well known in US reform circles and frequently consulted for advice. They spoke at AFL and US league conventions and conferred with Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, and other prominent Americans on their multiple visits to the United States before the war.48 The working-class d aughter of a Somerset lace maker, Bondfield found her way to unionism and to socialism in the 1890s from a discarded union leaflet used to wrap the fish and chips she bought as a beleaguered London shopgirl. By 1902, when she met Macarthur, Bondfield was a seasoned organizer in the National Union of Shop Assistants and a popu lar propagandist, “full of information, earnestness and fire,” for the British Independent L abour Party, the Fabian-leaning socialist body she joined at its founding in 1893.49 Scottish-born Macarthur was the outspoken self-confident d aughter of a prosperous draper. Asked by her father to find out more about the shop assistants’ union he feared, she ended up urging her father’s employees to unionize and joining herself. Bondfield, slightly older, took Macarthur on as a “protégé” and encouraged her rise. “Here was genius,” Bondfield l ater said of Macarthur, “allied to boundless enthusiasm and leadership of a high order.”50 With Bondfield’s tutelage,
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Macarthur became secretary of the British WTUL in 1903 and, in 1906, president and then general secretary of the National Federation of Women Workers. Like Bondfield, she also threw herself into l abor politics. Both women held executive positions in the Women’s Labour League, which later became the women’s section of the British Labour Party, the parliamentary political party to which most British socialists and trade u nionists belonged after 1900. The W omen’s L abour League sought to promote the interests of women politically or, as Macarthur spun it, “bring the mother spirit into politics.”51 Tragically, both w omen, it appears, fell in love with the same man: Scottish-born Will Anderson, an Independent L abour Party leader and member of Parliament.52 In 1911, when Anderson married Macarthur, Bondfield withdrew from public affairs, ill and suffering from “a complete breakdown.”53 But her dedication to reform carried her forward, and with the aid of renewed religious faith, she returned to labor politics and to joint work with Macarthur. Bondfield never married: in service to others, she wrote, one finds “deep joy” and “perfect freedom.”54 Next to Britain, US league ties were strongest with Germany. Before World War I, only the German labor movement surpassed Britain’s in size and influence.55 American w omen reformers avidly followed its rise and stayed abreast of the fierce debates among its socialist leaders. Mary Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins, and Maud Swartz spoke German, as did other league officers like Chicago glove unionist Elisabeth Christman. Many US w omen workers belonged to u nions and socialist- leaning groups led by German immigrants and were influenced by German political culture and social thought. On more than one occasion, the league reached out to Gertrud Hanna, a prominent spokesperson for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and among the top women officials in the German Trade Union Federation (DGB), inviting her to speak at league conventions and to write for Life and L abor. German w omen did not always return the admiration. Neither Hanna nor her more privileged colleague Clara Zetkin, the renown Marxist theorist who led the Socialist W omen’s International Secretariat a fter 1907, held much fondness for “bourgeois feminism,” a label sometimes applied to the US league b ecause of its multi-class composition and
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wealthy top leadership. Nevertheless, German trade union women had a separate labor “Women’s Secretariat,” which Hanna directed a fter 1909, and relations between German and American women trade unionists were cordial.56 Britain and Germany were not the only sources of inspiration for US league w omen in the prewar era. Some resonated with the syndicalist traditions of France or Italy; others looked to Russia and to the anarchist, pacifist, and socialist anti-czarist movements there. Still others followed the legislative and labor party achievements of Australia, communicated so compellingly by Alice Henry and Miles Franklin.57 League interest extended south to Latin America and “east” to Asia as well, even though league ties to those regions w ere episodic and thin. Few league leaders had traveled to Asia or Latin America before World War I, and few had family or friends there. A handful of immigrant women from Asia and Latin America no doubt belonged to the league, but none were in positions of leadership. Language barriers existed as well: league leaders spoke French, German, Italian, and other European languages, but letters in Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish received by the national office had to be sent to professional translators. Equally important, the fraught imperial relation between the United States and regions to the south and “east”—which included multiple US military interventions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific—made sustained cooperative ventures difficult. For the league, achieving solidarity with women in these regions proved much harder than with women in Europe.
A World at War When war erupted on the European continent in the summer of 1914, the WTUL struggled to keep communication open with all sides. It invited “foreign delegates” from Britain, Germany, and France to its 1915 convention and proclaimed “economic justice to workers” a precondition of any lasting peace. In 1915, in a show of support for peace and neutrality, the league encouraged Leonora O’Reilly to represent it at the controversial 1915 Hague Women’s Peace Conference, a Dutch-initiated gathering of some fifteen hundred w omen from twenty-two countries,
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neutrals as well as those at war. Braving the dangerous wartime Atlantic, O’Reilly sailed with forty other US delegates, including Jane Addams who chaired the meeting and later served as president of the W omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the influential organ ization set up at the group’s second meeting four years later.58 O’Reilly found much to admire in Jane Addams’ exhortation for women to exercise more power in global affairs and assert a “new kind of internationalism” more informed by the “human element.”59 She also backed the wide-ranging set of peace principles adopted by the 1915 conference, which emphasized respect for territorial sovereignty, use of arbitration to resolve disputes among nations, democratic control of foreign policy, and rights for w omen. Th ese principles accorded well with O’Reilly’s fierce allegiance to democracy and feminism and her antipathies to British colonialism in Ireland and elsewhere.60 But the lack of attention to working w omen’s concerns at the conference dismayed her. In her speech on the “labor movement as the true peace movement,” she stressed how nations must commit themselves to economic justice and worker organization to prevent war. Th ere is an “industrial war” being waged within nations, she told the distinguished group of peacemakers. “Men, women and children” are being “sacrificed to empire and profit alike by their masters, political and industrial.” The class condescension of some of the delegates, most notably the British, also bothered her. One well-known British feminist, she wrote her mother, “can talk of human beings with tears in her voice,” but has very little understanding of those who are different from her.61 Life and Labor carried O’Reilly’s lengthy account of her Atlantic voyage in full. A month earlier, it ran an enthusiastic report of a different but equally important 1915 peace conference. In June, socialist women from twenty-seven countries, including Germany, France, Austria, and other nations at war with each other, gathered in Berne, Switzerland for the Berne Conference of Socialist and L abour W omen. Margaret Bondfield attended, as did other friends of US league women. At Berne, the women resisted the surging prowar sentiment in their unions and po litical parties and called for international worker solidarity and an end to the fighting.62
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omen’s pleas for an end to the war went unanswered. In April 1917, W the United States declared war on Germany. In response, the WTUL dropped its neutrality policy and officially backed the war effort. Many of its leaders, however, did so with sadness and deep reservations. A few opposed all war on principle; o thers, like O’Reilly, had little sympathy for the British or any imperial power. Still others, like the Dreier sisters, feared for the safety of their German relatives. But with war mobilization underway, league attention soon turned to “safeguarding the interests” of the thousands of women pouring into wartime jobs. When President Wilson asked noted social investigator and league ally Mary van Kleeck to head a new wartime W oman in Industry Service, with Mary Anderson, the league’s national labor organizer, as her assistant, the league was thrilled. A minister’s daughter of Dutch heritage, van Kleeck had a strong Episcopal faith that led her to Christian socialism, to the settlement movement in New York, and eventually to a career of research, writing, and legislative advocacy on behalf of women workers. From her prestigious post at the Russell Sage Foundation, van Kleeck had pioneered studies of w omen’s employment and in 1916 set up the Foundation’s Department of Industrial Studies. To league applause, Wilson also later added Agnes Nestor to Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson’s “labor cabinet,” the only w oman on the seven-member Advisory Council, and Elisabeth Christman to a position with the National War L abor Board.63 At the league’s convention in Kansas City in the summer of 1917, talk shifted to postwar policy, with some delegates urging the need for an international conference of w omen workers to formulate a common set of postwar demands. The convention endorsed a proposal by French feminist and pacifist Gabrielle Duchêne from the Syndicat Général de la Chemiserie Lingerie (General Union of W omen’s Wear Workers) insisting that worker rights be part of any postwar peace treaty. Another French speaker, a l abor inspector and l awyer, praised the US league for its pursuit of international regulation of industry, what she called “industrial internationalism.” She added, “This war has proved to you, as well as to us that we are indeed ‘citizens of the world,’ as your President has said. For this reason, e very regulation for workers should be international.”64
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In 1918, after four long years of war in Europe with millions dead and injured, and Germany on the brink of civil war, an end to the horror seemed at last possible. With peace talks anticipated at Versailles, the US league’s executive board set up a twelve-woman Committee on Social and Industrial Reconstruction. The committee formulated a “working w omen’s charter” with specific labor rights and standards for men and women to serve as the US league’s contribution. The charter called for living wages, shorter hours, compulsory education to age sixteen and no child labor, equal pay and equal opportunity, and social insurance programs covering maternity, old age, sickness, and disability. It demanded “restoration of fundamental political rights” (free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press), the free “movements of peoples among the communities and the nations,” “self-government in industry,” and women’s “full enfranchisement” (described as “politi cal, legal, and industrial equality”).65 There were reasons for optimism on the eve of the Versailles peace talks. President Wilson’s lofty rhetoric of self-determination, democracy, and cooperation among nations had echoed around the world since he had issued his Fourteen Points plan for a lasting peace in January. Hope swelled among progressive reformers on multiple continents for the triumph of “global consciousness” and a renewed commitment to peace and cooperation among all nations. Socialist movements and labor parties had regrouped in Europe and elsewhere, their aspirations emboldened by labor’s wartime contributions. Demands surged for economic and political rights in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Colonized peoples across the world—including those in US territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean and those in the older Euro pean empires—believed greater self-governance and autonomy a possibility. Women’s suffrage was imminent in the United States and recently achieved in some dozen nations, including Canada, Britain, Soviet Russia, and much of Europe. Surely in this era of democracy and rights, l abor women would be heard.66 But as the talks got underway in early 1919, the league followed developments in Versailles with increasing alarm. W omen’s organizations
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from the Allied states, primarily representing suffrage societies, had combined u nder the auspices of an Inter-Allied W omen’s Conference and, among other demands, asked for an official W omen’s Commission, staffed by w omen, to ensure the voices of w omen in shaping a just peace. Rebuffed, the Inter-Allied group considered more limited alternatives such as adding women to the existing commissions, all of which had only men. In the end, the Inter-Allied women had to s ettle with presenting their ideas before two commissions: the League of Nations Commission and the L abor Commission. The Inter-Allied group’s labor subcommittee, which had been meeting weekly since February, began preparing testimony for the L abor Commission. The l abor subcommittee included European trade union women (and some sympathetic men) but no American unionists.67 The WTUL realized it had to act quickly. The L abor Commission had been given a prominent place at the peace talks, due largely to the rising wartime power of workers and fears of social upheaval and spreading radicalism. The league believed the outcome of commission deliberations would have significant consequences for working w omen’s rights and economic justice in the postwar world. Robins cabled league proposals for raising the “standard of life of all men and w omen” to President Woodrow Wilson and informed him of the league’s desire to participate at Versailles. In response, Wilson conveyed his willingness “that the women workers of the country should have one or two representatives in Paris qualified to speak . . . on labor matters.” Margaret Dreier Robins promptly named two prominent labor women, Rose Schneiderman and Mary Anderson, as league representatives. Their “mission” was “to present to the Peace Congress the reconstruction program of the trade union women” of America and “aid in the solution of international labor problems, particularly as they affect women.”68
A Just and Lasting Peace Neither of the league emissaries w ere strangers to travel or to being “foreign.” Both were immigrant Americans returning to a Europe they had left as children. Schneiderman confessed privately to feeling “the
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immensity of the situation” and worried w hether she was up to the task. Her dockside interview with the New York Sun betrayed no such hesitations. Cooperation among governments was possible, Schneiderman told the reporter, if the working classes—those who fought the wars and suffered the vicissitudes of unregulated economic competition— insisted on it. L abor w omen like herself were traveling to Paris to secure fair labor standards for all workers and demand the right of women to participate in setting those standards.69 For Schneiderman, peace in the postwar world rested on industrial justice and greater democracy. When Schneiderman and Anderson arrived in London, they found Mary Macarthur in shock, mourning her husband’s death from the influenza pandemic and struggling to care for an infant daughter.70 They visited a grieving Margaret Bondfield and her colleague Sophy Sanger, a mainstay in the International Association for Labor Legislation. Set up by European academics and reformers in 1900, the International Association had achieved what many thought impossible: a multinational labor treaty, the 1906 Berne Agreement, which limited w omen and children’s night work in factories and prohibited the use of white phosphorus in the manufacturing of matches. A dozen European nations had signed on.71 From the British, the Americans learned about the Peace Treaty proposals adopted at the February 1919 Berne Conference, a major postwar gathering of allied, neutral, and Central Power u nionists and socialists. Conference delegates called for an international labor body, akin to a world labor parliament, with the power to override national labor laws; they also formulated a “Labour Charter” for the postwar world, which included workers’ right to f ree education, shorter hours, living wages, and a comprehensive system of social insurance. Bondfield had attended the Berne Conference—what she described in her memoirs as “the Peace Conference of the Socialist movements of the world”—and served as a member of the group drafting the Labour Charter. She had traveled to Paris as well where she sought guarantees of women’s participation in any new international labor organization from Scottish laborite George N. Barnes, the British War Cabinet member and L abour Party leader heading Britain’s labor delegation to the peace talks.72
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The two Americans admired the political vitality of British labor and its progressive leanings. The British Labour Party supported universal suffrage for both sexes a fter 1912, one of the few parties to do so, with Bondfield and Macarthur prominent suffrage speakers. The Labour Party’s suffrage plank and its embrace of social reform made it popular among working-class w omen, in part b ecause middle-class w omen’s suffrage groups often favored a more restricted “equal suffrage” with men, which as Bondfield and Macarthur pointed out, would enfranchise only a small slice of wage-earning women.73 Full suffrage for British women of all classes and ages would not be achieved until 1928, but after the partial suffrage victory of 1918 extended the vote to some 40 percent of women and the majority of working-class men, L abour Party ranks swelled with large women’s sections of working-class housew ives, wage earners, and cooperative movement enthusiasts.74 The party’s ambitious 1918 agenda envisioned industrial democracy, nationalization of industry, improved labor standards, and social insurance. In a nod to working-class women voters, the party also sought equal pay and “complete emancipation of women.”75 The United States had no comparable labor party, although Schneiderman would try to remedy that situation after the war. The American visitors also felt less connected to the continental European labor and socialist movements than did their British colleagues. Distance was a factor, but the escalating tensions between the AFL and the European labor movement aggravated the geographic divide. Before the war, the AFL had joined the German-led International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), the world’s largest association of national unions, one of the few non-European unions to do so.76 But once the United States entered the war, AFL president Samuel Gompers, an ardent Wilson loyalist and member of the National Defense Council, became suspicious of international efforts involving the Central Powers. He complained angrily both of the socialist and the pro-Kaiser leanings of IFTU leaders and refused to attend the February 1919 Berne Conference. Instead, he urged the IFTU to hold a “purely trade union conference” on “allied land” near the Paris peace talks.77 In Paris, Gompers would have considerable sway. President Wilson named him as one of the few l abor
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delegates to the Versailles talks, where he joined others such as Britain’s George Barnes and France’s Léon Jouhaux on the fifteen-man L abor Commission. After a surprise nomination by Jouhaux, the commission elected him chair.78 After their brief stay in London, Schneiderman and Anderson sped on to Paris, with hopes of presenting the league’s “working women’s charter” to the L abor Commission. But they arrived too late: the commission had adjourned. Only later did they learn of the commission’s recommendations on women’s rights. A fter hearing testimony on March 18 from the Inter-Allied women and others, including French trade unionists who pressed for equal living wages for men and women, the commission had endorsed the principle that “men and w omen should receive equal remuneration for work of equal value,” a phrase later inserted into the Versailles Treaty as one of the “general principles” deemed of “utmost importance” in guiding the proposed International Labor Organization (ILO).79 Yet the commission ignored requests for guarantees of women’s representation on the ILO Governing Body, the organization’s executive council, and women’s voting rights at the ILO’s annual deliberative assembly, the International Labour Conference (ILC). Instead, the commission decided on an ILO constitution that urged but did not require the hiring of a “certain number” of female staff and that merely recommended nations choose “at least” one woman as an adviser (a nonvoting status) “when questions specifically affecting women are to be considered” at the ILC.80 The two league w omen concluded their round of official Versailles meetings with a brief sit-down with President Wilson. A fter making their case for the league’s “working women’s charter,” they asked Wilson to include a woman in the US delegation to the ILO founding ILC slated for the fall in Washington. Wilson listened and ushered them out with the vague promise that he would “give earnest and thoughtful consideration” to their requests.81 The lack of guarantees for women’s voice in the ILO infuriated Schneiderman and Anderson, as did Wilson’s unwillingness to assure women a place in the US delegation to the ILC. After all, the ILO was to be the body responsible for formulating labor standards for the
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world’s workers—women, men, and c hildren. Schneiderman and Anderson decided to stay on in Paris and discuss with French l abor w omen the idea of holding a w omen’s international labor congress and proclaiming their own standards of fairness and justice. They contacted French feminist Gabrielle Duchêne, whom they knew from her 1917 visit to Kansas City, and Duchêne introduced them to Jeanne Bouvier, leader of the National Federation of Clothing Workers, and her young associate, Georgette Bouillot, secretary of the Embroidery Workers’ Union.82 Bouvier was among the most powerf ul figures in France’s largest labor organization, the syndicalist-leaning General Confederation of Labor (CGT). Born in 1865 near Lyon to a rural French artisan family, Bouvier toiled as a child in a nearby silk mill and later worked as a domestic before becoming a dressmaker and organizer of her fellow clothing workers in Paris. She was an ardent suffragist and feminist, incensed by restrictions in French law on women’s economic and political rights and enraged by the marginalization of w omen in the French trade u nion movement. She and Duchêne had campaigned together to change conditions for industrial homeworkers, posing as domestics to ferret out illegal practices. The association they formed, which became the French Division of the International Homework Office, won passage of a 1915 law in France setting minimum wages for homeworkers. Bouvier chaired the labor subcommittee of the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference and in March 1919, Duchêne and Bouvier had joined her in testifying before the L abour Commission.83 The French labor movement was “suspicious” of the WTUL emissaries at first, but a fter determining they were “bona fide labor w omen,” relations warmed. At a ceremonial dinner for the Americans on their last night in Paris, Bouvier toasted to the idea of trade union women gaining seats in global governance and organizing for a different and better world. “Dear American comrades,” she began. “Today w omen demand to be represented” in designing the labor policies that w ill “serve as the base for a new world. This date w ill be engraved in the history of the social evolution of women.” Bouvier reminded the group of the policies labor women had recently endorsed. Drafted by the Comité
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Féminin Français du Travail (French Women’s Labor Committee) and signed by other l abor women, including Schneiderman and Anderson, the statement took as its “base,” or starting point, the l abor charter from the February 1919 Berne conference, the Charte Internationale du Travail (International Charter of Work). But the w omen realized its inadequacy and “thought it necessary to incorporate the principal interests of w omen” in a separate international labor w omen’s charter. The forward-thinking charter called for a generous twelve-week maternity cash “indemnity” for “any woman, w hether gainfully employed or not”; a mother’s “right to a half-time schedule”; equal living wages for men and women; and guarantees of w omen’s participation in ILO decision-making.84 The Americans returned to London to find British labor women equally frustrated with the peace process and enthusiastic about an international conference for w omen workers. The British Trade Union Congress had selected Bondfield as its first woman delegate to the AFL convention in June, and she persuaded Macarthur to “make it a pilgrimage for peace” and go as well. Both promised to speak at the US WTUL convention also slated for June. On May Day, Anderson and Schneiderman joined a crowd of ten thousand in London’s Albert Hall, listening to speeches from Margaret Bondfield and other luminaries such as Irish playwright and Fabian Society founder George Bernard Shaw. Though small in stature, Bondfield’s low, resonant voice had “great carrying power.” She thrilled the crowd with her call for the new working-class British voters, men and women, to use their political power to upend the old economic and social order.85 Anderson left for America a few days later, but Schneiderman stayed on, waiting for a visa allowing her to travel to Zürich for the founding congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Initially denied reentry—a decision she attributed to being “Russian born”—she missed the congress. The extra days in London, however, allowed her time to reconnect with former WTUL colleague Australian Miles Franklin and see her dear friend Mary Dreier, who with Florence Simms and others was in London as part of a YWCA “industrial commission” fostering transatlantic cooperation on “problems affecting the
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woman worker.”86 In late May, Schneiderman crossed the Atlantic for New York, traveling with Bondfield and women in the YWCA group. She left Europe “restored,” as she remembered it, and, like t hose she had befriended, determined to surmount “the vast tragedy of the war” and rebuild “the world on new lines.”87
Turmoil at Home Anderson and Schneiderman returned to a United States seething with unrest. Race riots raged in the bloody “Red Summer” of 1919, with hundreds of deaths. Vigilante attacks and government raids on suspected antiwar sympathizers and radicals were in full swing, and a massive strike wave involving some four million workers was reaching its crescendo.88 Amid this upheaval, the league’s June convention opened in Philadelphia with Bondfield and Macarthur, who brought her infant daughter, in attendance. The stakes were high, and the intensity inside the convention mirrored the surging emotions in the streets, where league w omen, a fter hours, walked the picket lines with striking telephone workers. The unresolved fates of the League of Nations and the newly chartered ILO added to the anxiety pervading the conference. Organized l abor’s divided response offered little reassurance. In Eu rope, the International Federation of Trade Unions called for a “league of peoples” instead of a nation-based, elite-led League of Nations. Other European unionists—still wedded to the idea of an all-labor parliament with supranational authority—objected to the ILO’s tripartite structure of negotiation among government, labor, and employer representatives. There was disappointment too over the ILO’s limited coercive power to enforce its norms. The harshest dismissal, however, came from the Bolsheviks, who denounced the ILO as a tool of Western capitalists intent on curbing worker power and preserving the status quo.89 In the United States, the League and the ILO faced labor opposition from the right and the left.90 Gompers, however, championed both institutions. The ILO, he acknowledged, had shortcomings. His effort to increase labor’s voting power in the ILO had failed. He also lost his bid to insert into the labor
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section of the Versailles Treaty the core premise of the AFL’s proposed Bill of Rights: “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce.” Nonetheless, he judged the ILO a potentially powerful tool for advancing worker interests, including rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining.91 For the “first time in history,” he thundered, “the rights, interests, and welfare of workers received specific recognition in an international treaty.”92 The Versailles Treaty, he reminded critics, proclaimed the “well-being, physical, moral and intellectual, of the industrial working classes of supreme international importance.” And it enumerated such postwar guiding principles as “equal remuneration for work of equal value,” wages adequate for a “reasonable standard of life,” the eight-hour day, sufficient leisure time, and workers’ “right of association.” The AFL convention, held a few days after the WTUL meeting, voted approval of the ILO.93 League president Robins weighed in publicly on these controversies as well, trying to find a way forward in the midst of her disappointments over the Versailles Treaty. She too had supported the AFL’s Bill of Rights and regretted the treaty had no provisions against “human slavery and involuntary servitude.” Like Jane Addams, she also condemned the treaty for its vindictiveness t oward Germany and its failure to live up to Wilson’s promises. Her disillusionment with Wilson in 1919 followed mounting frustration with his wartime policies. She found Wilson’s suspension of domestic civil liberties abhorrent and disagreed with his decision to aid the anti-Bolshevik “white” forces in the Russian Civil War. Yet despite her distaste for the treaty and for Wilson, she urged US membership in the League of Nations and the ILO. By the next summer, she judged the League a handmaiden to “a new imperial order” and complained bitterly of the foreign mandate over Syria and other violations of “territorial integrity,” but in 1919 she held out hope for a different future.94 Peace was attainable only through respect for the liberties and independence of all peoples, Robins believed, and she wanted a League of Nations that would advance those ideals. To her credit, Robins applied human rights principles to domestic as well as international policy. At the 1909 WTUL convention, for example, she and Schneiderman had stood firm against a resolution to support an
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immigration bill excluding “Japanese, Koreans, Hindoos, and other Asiatics,” who were said to be displacing “white men and women” and jeopardizing the “American standard of living.” Schneiderman had spoken first against the proposal, quieting the hall with her pointed rebuttal: “The movement we stand for . . . takes in every human being. It would be a shameful t hing to . . . exclude anyone. We embrace everybody. We believe in universal liberty.” Robins backed Schneiderman, echoing her inclusive h uman rights sentiments, and the resolution was defeated.95 A decade l ater, at the 1919 WTUL convention, Robins and Schneiderman teamed up again to push the league t oward an inclusive vision of labor internationalism. Participants listened raptly as Schneiderman described her mission to Paris, listed the reasons why the league should host an international w omen’s conference in Washington, and declared “a trip abroad for e very working w oman . . . a spiritual and intellectual necessity.” A fter learning of British and French labor women’s support for a world conference, delegates affirmed the ambitious plan. The unity and good feelings dissolved abruptly when Mary Anderson, in a surprising move on the last day, challenged the legitimacy of Schneiderman’s credentials as a league delegate to the planned congress. Schneiderman, Anderson announced, belonged to the ILGWU, a u nion whose AFL affiliation was in doubt. Many w ere aghast, and audibly so, but Robins, glaring down from the podium, kept chaos at bay. She quieted the convention and later, after private pleadings with Anderson, succeeded in keeping Schneiderman on the league delegation.96 The breach with Anderson came at a difficult time for Schneiderman. As an outspoken socialist u nion leader and a Russian Jewish immigrant, she was among the most vulnerable to charges of disloyalty from conservatives, and she needed Anderson’s backing.97 A month after the league convention ended, James Holland, the president of the New York State Federation of Labor, attacked the league in a New York state legislative hearing as the “tail to the Socialist kite,” singling out Schneiderman as a “sham pacifist” and “revolutionary socialist whose subversive beliefs are scantily disguised as peace measures.”98 Holland’s assault was not the first public attack on the league’s politics and the personal integrity of its leaders. Nor would it be the last.
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But Schneiderman had l ittle time for tending to wounds from friends or enemies. In July, a call issued by the league went out to organizations in forty-four nations, urging them to send representatives to Washington, DC, for the “world’s first international congress of working women.” Working w omen must “assume responsibilities in the affairs of the world,” the congress call admonished and, through “mutual faith and joint action,” insist on “universal industrial justice.”99 The time was right, organizers believed, for working women to organize internationally, gain a voice in global governance, and advance an egalitarian politics of women’s rights in a fairer, more just world. Schneiderman, like other league w omen, began feverishly preparing for the congress. To the US league fell such tasks as sending out invitations, determining the eligibility of voting delegates, and arranging travel, accommodations, and entertainment. Reports and background papers had to be prepared, speakers confirmed, and a small army of interpreters found who could translate multiple languages into English and French, the two official conference languages. The AFL shared lists of trade union contacts but little else. Allies in the women’s reform network like immigrant and child welfare advocate Grace Abbott proved more helpful. Abbott served as the US C hildren’s Bureau liaison to the official committee planning the ILC. She offered to promote the w omen’s congress as she traveled in Europe and pass on relevant documents on labor standards and other issues. A longtime friend of the Chicago league, resident at Hull House, and director of the Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago from 1908 to 1917, Abbott would become the second chief of the Children’s Bureau in 1921, where she would continue the drive for child labor laws and social welfare. In May 1919, she had coordinated the Children’s Bureau International Conference on Standards of Child Welfare, bringing experts from Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, Serbia, and Italy to Washington. Its conclusions on child labor, along with the bureau’s research on the health of children and mothers—especially its startling findings about the high rates of maternal mortality—would undergird the debates at the upcoming w omen’s congress and the ILC.100 The YWCA Industrial Department offered aid as well. It lent Ernestine Friedmann to the league for the summer and affirmed its earlier
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plans to hold its national industrial conference in Washington two days before the w omen’s labor congress. The hundreds of young YWCA clubwomen who came to Washington, the Industrial Department de cided, would tackle the same questions as the labor women. They would debate international labor standards, seek a “Christian solution to the labor situation,” and then gather with labor women from around the world to formulate a plan of action.101 Yet the league was worried about how many labor w omen would come to Washington and who they would be. Relations with the US Department of L abor and the State Department had soured. In June the league had anticipated State Department assistance in cabling information about the congress to possible attendees and had met with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, a former United Mine Workers’ officer, who sent the State Department a note approving such a cable. The State Department balked. The conference was not an official function of the State Department, it finally declared in late August. The league would have to send its own cables.102 The August rejection came as a surprise to congress organizers. They knew l ittle of the administration’s growing distrust of the league and its worries about the planned international w omen’s conference. In July 1919 Columbia University professor James Shotwell, a trusted expert on international labor affairs, had warned President Wilson about “Mrs. Raymond Robins.” Robins was “a radical” and “a bitter opponent of the Versailles Treaty and even of the League of Nations”—although deeply torn, Shotwell acknowledged, about both because of her support of the “Labor Clauses.”103 Secretary of Labor Wilson had similar concerns but added a different interpretive twist on Robins: “radicals” like Robins, he argued, saw the “labor features” of the Treaty as “insufficiently radical.” A month l ater he offered another cautionary mini-lecture to the president about the league’s politics. “There are three distinct groups within the League,” he wrote: “a group of radicals, headed by Mrs. Robins; a group of extra-radicals, headed by Rose Schneiderman, which seems for the present to be in the ascendancy; and a group without any definite recognized head that is much more conservative than the others.” He also seemed to regret his initial responsiveness to the
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league’s request for help, admitting the women’s labor congress “may cause some embarrassment” as it is called for the express purpose of “exercising influence upon the ILC.”104 Even Mary Anderson, whom the secretary of labor generally found “level-headed,” was not faring well with the president.105 After Elizabeth Merrill Bass, a prominent Democratic National Committee volunteer and former Chicago Woman’s Club president, sent President Wilson an irate note arguing that Miss Anderson, an “absolutely uneducated” woman without a “mental background,” should not be appointed as head of the new US W omen’s Bureau, he passed on Bass’s concerns to Secretary Wilson and added his own condescending aside about the outsized influence of Margaret Dreier Robins on Anderson, an “influence not likely to lead in the direction of which our judgment would approve.”106 The president’s intervention came too late. Secretary Wilson reported he had already “settled upon Miss Anderson” for the new post.107 Indeed, Anderson’s appointment as director of the US Women’s Bureau had been announced on August 6. Secretary Wilson apologized to the president but held his ground: “I have known Miss Anderson for a considerable time,” he explained. Her close association with radicals like Mrs. Raymond Robins was worrisome, he acknowledged, but she belongs to none of the “three distinct factions” in the league. In fact, she “has the respect of each more than any other woman and for that reason, together with her general ability and disposition, I believe she would make the most efficient successor to Miss Van Kleeck.”108 The Scottish- born secretary of labor did not add that he too spoke with a slight “foreign” accent and that he too knew how it felt to be judged for lacking education and fine manners. Mary Anderson, the first trade union woman appointed to head a federal bureau, had survived in government, but just barely. As labor women from around the world began to arrive in Washington in the chaotic last few days before the conference, no one knew what to expect. President Wilson’s tour across America on behalf of the Versailles Treaty had ended disastrously, with Wilson seriously ill and incapacitated. America’s relation to the League of Nations, the ILO, and the rest of the world was far from settled.
2 A Higher “Standard of Life” for the World
American women were no strangers to international alliances before 1919. In the nineteenth c entury, they had initiated transnational antislavery, temperance, and missionary societies; founded w omen’s suffrage, peace, and social welfare internationals; and joined cross-border labor and socialist movements.1 Yet in 1919, American league women had something different in mind. The year 1919 was a moment of historic opportunity, they and their allies believed, for working w omen around the world to hold their own separate congress, demand a voice in global political and industrial governance, and launch a transnational feminism dedicated to raising the “standard of life” for all.2 In October 1919, w omen from the Americas, Europe, and Asia made their way to Washington for two international labor conferences: the ten-day International Congress of Working W omen from October 28 to November 6, 1919, quickly dubbed the “Women’s Labor Congress” (WLC), and the ILO’s first International Labor Conference (ILC), a four-week affair from October 29 to November 29, 1919, in which only men voted on formulating the world’s first set of international l abor standards. Both gatherings— the women’s and the men’s—proved historic in shaping the postwar global order. The l abor women who came to Washington in 1919 sought women’s full rights and “universal industrial justice.” They did not always speak with one voice about how to advance their shared goals, and at times 51
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the male decision-makers at the ILC ignored and dismissed their concerns. Nonetheless, the actions they took had profound consequences.3 Their public challenges to hierarchies of class, gender, and nation stirred controversy around the world, and in the end, they secured significant and beneficial changes in international labor standards. The political agenda they articulated in 1919 and the bonds they forged among l abor and social democratic women carried the full rights w omen’s movement forward into the 1920s and beyond.
“The First World Gathering of Working Women” On October 28, as Margaret Dreier Robins delivered the welcoming address at the 1919 WLC, she looked out over a diverse crowd of some three hundred women. Some, like Alice Henry, believed it “the first world gathering of working w omen.” Robins’ powerful voice rang out. “Women had no direct share in the terms of the Peace Treaty or in the labor platform,” she declared. “It is a man-made peace.” She urged action: “There can be no compromise with the exploitation of w omen, with unemployment or with poverty.” Mary van Kleeck, who had recently returned to her prestigious perch as chief of the Industrial Studies Division at the Russell Sage Foundation, echoed Robins’ themes. Women should claim their power in world affairs and industry and transform both spheres, she contended. “We are tired of the autocratic use of economic power and of seeing economic power used by a few . . . instead of for the benefit of the many.” Jane Addams called on the women who filled the hall to carry forward the spirit of democracy and insist on peace and social justice. All three spoke too of their desire to learn from women workers in other countries and to forge closer international bonds.4 Most of the women listening to the welcoming addresses that morning were from the United States, Britain, and Europe. But women representatives came from nineteen different nations. Almost all the former Allied countries sent women, as did two new Central European nations: Czechoslovakia, carved from the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a reconstituted Poland. W omen attended as well from Canada,
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Argentina, Cuba, Japan, and India.5 Twelve nations had delegations from “accredited Trade Union organizations”—a category much contested—and held voting rights, with each nation assigned ten votes regardless of its size or the number of w omen in its delegation. But voting delegates were outnumbered by “visitors and guests” who spoke on motions, just as did voters, and often to great effect.6 Yet vast swaths of the globe w ere not represented. No women came from Africa or the M iddle East, and only a few traveled from Latin America, although a dozen had been invited.7 Just as disappointing, no women participated from “the Central Empires, Russia, Finland, the Balkan States, and China,” largely b ecause the US State Department requested the WTUL limit its “official invitations to nations signing the Versailles Treaty.” The league protested and eventually received permission to invite the Central Powers, but authorization came too late for them to attend. Robins was “distressed” about the restrictions and especially angry at losing the opportunity to “welcome a Chinese working woman.” But ever the optimist, she saw “better days coming” and vowed a more international gathering in the future. The WLC, as she recognized, represented only a fraction of the world’s peoples.8 Robins chaired the congress and provided crucial financial support from her personal assets. The American league covered lodging and other costs for many participants, both from the United States and abroad. League funding enabled a large number of working-class women to participate, a rare occurrence at international conferences. Class barriers to international activism in this era w ere significant, especially for w omen. Few non-elite women had the money (or time) for international travel or conference going. Inflexible jobs and lack of family help kept them from travel. In many instances, they could neither pay for themselves nor expect financial support from male-dominated unions or elite-led women’s groups. Some lacked the education and language skills that facilitated international engagement. Still, many were self-taught, well read, spoke multiple languages, and, by necessity or inclination, had acquired substantial cross-cultural capacities. With the economic barriers to internationalism removed, working-class women made their presence felt.
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A majority of the US league’s ten-person delegation came from working-class backgrounds. Leonora O’Reilly, Rose Schneiderman, and Mary Anderson participated, as did Maud Swartz, who was much in demand, given her language fluency and familiarity with France and Italy from her youth. Others included Chicago league president Agnes Nestor, just back from E ngland and France where she studied postwar labor problems as the sole woman on an AFL delegat ion; Julia O’Connor, president of the Boston league and leader of the New England telephone operator’s massive strike in April; and Jewish Lithuanian émigré and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) organizer Pauline Newman. Like Schneiderman, Newman had entered the New York garment sweatshops as a young girl; by her twenties she was a veteran u nion organizer and suffragist, as well as a respected officer in the WTUL and the Socialist Party.9 Other American women, elite and non-elite, crowded into the hall as visitors and observers. Many never forgot the experience. Pauline Newman’s lifelong companion, Frieda Miller, was one of them. Miller had suffered from the tragic deaths of both her parents while still a child but had gone on to college near her home in Wisconsin and then to gradu ate school in Political Economy at the University of Chicago. In 1917, she left her teaching job at Bryn Mawr College to serve as executive secretary of the WTUL branch in Philadelphia, where she met Newman. Newman nursed Miller back to health a fter she contracted influenza during the 1918 epidemic, and the two formed a lasting, though at times troubled, partnership. The events of 1919 moved Miller t oward an internationalist vision. She would hold to it as she stepped into ever more demanding posts in state and federal government over the next four decades.10 Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then-A ssistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, volunteered as a translator for the congress (she spoke French, German, and Italian) and befriended US league leaders for the first time. A journey through a devastated Europe in January 1919—described by her as “haunting, unforgettable”—had intensified her commitment to peace advocacy and internationalism. She had met male labor leaders through her husband’s wartime work with
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u nions and, a month earlier, had been at President Wilson’s ill-fated Industrial Conference, watching as talks over how to end l abor’s massive strike wave deadlocked and AFL labor delegates walked out. But the Washington women’s congress was her first sustained encounter with US league w omen and their international l abor and socialist allies. A fter tea with Robins, France’s Jeanne Bouvier, and other delegates, Eleanor wrote excitedly to her mother-in-law about her “interesting amusing time” and how impressed she was with the WLC, “a very advanced and radical gathering presided over by Mrs. Raymond Robins!”11 High-ranking New York Democratic official Frances Perkins participated as well. Working alongside the league’s Mary Dreier in 1918, she had helped convince newly enfranchised women in New York to elect Al Smith as governor. He appointed her the first woman member of the New York State Industrial Commission. Years l ater, as Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, she recalled 1919 as the moment when her internationalism took shape.12 A large, vocal group of visitors came from the YWCA industrial clubs. Some sixty-five delegates, representing 30,000 clubwomen in twenty-six states, made the trip. Elected by their fellow working w omen back home, most w ere young and in Washington for the first time; some were forever transformed. As promised, the YWCA Industrial Department scheduled its first national conference in Washington a few days ahead of the WLC, with Robins, Anderson, and other league w omen as speakers. It sought a “Christian Solution” to the problems of industrialization and debated the same “industrial standards” the WLC would consider: maternity benefits, shorter hours, and regulation of child labor and night work. The “time is ripe,” Florence Simms declared in the run-up to the conference, for w omen workers “to counsel together” and devise ways of improving “industrial conditions throughout the world.”13 The US voting delegation, though diverse in class and nationality, did not include any African American w omen. Their absence from the delegation did not go unnoticed. Ten prominent African American women reformers sent a letter to the US league once the WLC got underway, protesting the “very limited means” the millions of “negro
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omen laborers in the United States” have “of making their wishes w known and of having their interests advanced through their own representatives.” They asked league leaders “for active cooperation in organ izing the Negro w omen workers of the United States into u nions, that they may have a share in bringing about industrial democracy and social order in the world.” Signatories included former National Association of Colored Women (NACW) president, suffragist, and internationalist Mary Church Terrell; social worker and YWCA national secretary Elizabeth Ross Haynes, assigned in 1919 as a adviser to Van Kleeck at the US Department of L abor; and Nannie H. Burroughs, NACW founder, educator, and secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention. Robins read the letter to the assembly and included it in the official congress proceedings. Yet the league did not add African American w omen to the US delegation, nor did it take immediate action in response to the letter’s request for organizing assistance. E arlier in 1919 the league had resolved to find better ways of meeting the “needs of the colored w oman” and of raising standards in the domestic and agricultural sectors where most women of color found employment. But no concrete steps t oward that end would be taken u ntil a few years later.14 The omission of African American delegates at the WLC underscored the parallel but separate internationalisms of Black and white American women in 1919. African American men and women, for example, in alliance with other subjugated peoples around the world, had vigorously protested their absence in decision-making at the Paris Peace Conference. The NAACP’s W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, and others convened the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in February 1919, concerned over the proposed mandate system for former German colonies in Africa and intent on gaining greater equality for darker-skinned and colonized peoples in the new postwar world.15 Leaders of the National Association of Colored Women like Addie Hunton and Mary Church Terrell were a crucial part of this rising global Black consciousness and they insisted their voices be heard. A prominent clubwoman and YWCA secretary since 1907, Hunton was one of three Black w omen assigned to work with the thousands of Black troops
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in segregated units in France as part of her World War I service in the US Army. She attended the Pan-African Congress and called on Versailles negotiators to honor self-determination and home rule in deciding the fate of African peoples. At the same time, the inclusion of women, she told the overwhelmingly male audience, must be part of any Pan-African vision for the f uture. Terrell spoke at the founding Geneva conference of the W omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) a few months later. Had Rose Schneiderman attended, as she had hoped, she would have certainly applauded the strong statement of h uman rights Terrell delivered and the WILPF l ater endorsed: “holding that no human being on account of his nationality, race, or color should be deprived of education, prevented from earning a living, debarred from any legitimate pursuit he may wish to follow, or subjected to humiliation.” Yet despite its rhetorical commitment to human rights, WILPF, like the league, had problems with racial discrimination in its own ranks. In 1919, as earlier, interracial internationalist endeavors among w omen in the United States remained rare. Unfortunately, the Women’s L abor Congress did not act to change that state of affairs.16 European voting delegates to the WLC included the league’s closest partners: Margaret Bondfield and Mary Macarthur from G reat Britain and Jeanne Bouvier and Georgette Bouillot from France. Italy’s formidable 60,000-member Federation of Textile Workers sent socialist- feminist reformer and writer Laura Casartelli-Cabrini. She had been in the forefront of the Unione Femminile Nazionale (National Women’s Union) campaign creating Italy’s Cassa Nazionale di Maternità (National Maternity Fund).17 Sweden sent two representatives: prominent suffragist and social reformer Kerstin Hesselgren, Sweden’s chief woman factory inspector, and Dr. Alma Sundquist, an expert in social medicine who represented the Sveriges socialdemokratiska kvinnoförbund (Social Democratic Women of Sweden), which became the w omen’s wing of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in 1920.18 Some of the European delegates already held political office in their home countries. Others would win top posts once women gained the right to vote. National Assembly member Luisa Landová-Štychová,
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journalist and anarchist leader in the Syndicate of Working W omen, spoke for Czechoslovakia, as did Prague’s municipal councilor, social democrat Marie Stivinova Majerová, a former domestic worker. Both had been elected in 1918 after Czechoslovakian independence and the enactment of female suffrage, and both, Margaret Bondfield later wrote, “conveyed a sense of power, of clear thinking and fearlessness.”19 Embroidery worker Sophie Dobrzanska, a labor-backed candidate for the Polish Parliament, led the five-person delegation of trade u nion socialists from Poland, a sovereign republic after more than a century of imperial partition. Betzy Kjelsberg, representing the W omen’s Telegraphers’ Association, was Norway’s first w oman factory inspector, an activist in Liberal Party politics, and the instigator of major industrial reform legislation. Among the first women to run for local parliamentary election in Norway, she won her first political post, a seat on the Drammen City Council, in 1905.20 In addition to the nine delegations from the United States and Eu rope, voting representatives came from Canada, Argentina, and India.21 Canada’s Dominion Trades and L abour Congress of Ontario sent Boot and Shoe Union official Kathleen Derry, who was also Canada’s appointee at the ILO conference as a worker adviser and the one w oman in their large twenty-six-member delegation.22 Alicia Moreau, a medical doctor and socialist feminist agitator, had cofounded Argentina’s power ful Unión Feminista Nacional (National Feminist Union) a year earlier and, in May 1919, launched its journal, Nuestra Causa (Our Cause), an international endeavor with correspondents in the United States, Japan, Europe, and across Latin America. Moreau learned her socialism and women’s rights politics from her parents, French refugees from the 1871 Paris Commune, and from teachers such as French antiwar Socialist Party leader Jean Jaurés who visited Buenos Aires in 1911, three years before his assassination.23 India’s Parvatibai Athavale, the only non-Western delegate with voting privileges at the WLC, took a long and circuitous path to Washington, and her voting status was not without controversy. Her story reveals the formidable barriers between US w omen and w omen in poorer regions of the world in this era. At the same time, her remarkable friend-
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ship with Leonora O’Reilly shows how deeply w omen from other countries affected American women’s politics. Born in 1870 into a “religiously inclined” Marathi-speaking Brahmin f amily and widowed at age twenty- six, Athavale was well known in her native country for speaking out on behalf of women’s education and the rights of w idows. After her husband died, she learned to read and write her native language, earned a teacher’s certificate, and rejected the shaved head, traditional garb, and limited public role of a Hindu widowed woman in her time and place. In 1919, however, she was one of thousands of South Asian immigrants living anonymously in New York, where she eked out a living as a dishwasher and domestic.24 Without her chance encounter with O’Reilly, Athavale would not have attended the congress or voted on its proposals. When Athavale left India for the United States in 1918, determined to learn English and raise money for the Widow’s Institute and Girl’s School she had founded, she took an easterly route because of the war and arrived in San Francisco ill and penniless. A sympathetic staffer at the Oakland YWCA found her work at a nearby home for retired missionaries, a job she disliked intensely because of relentless pressure on her to convert to Christianity. She learned English, however, by cleverly saying she would consider “their Christian religion after she read its texts.” E ager to “get free from that Home,” she quit and made her way to New York and to the Young India offices of Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, who, like her, was a Hindu from the Maharashtra region of India. A political exile in the United States since 1915, Rai had started the New York-based India Home Rule League of America in 1917 and edited its monthly journal Young India, a crucial node in the developing connections between W.E.B. Du Bois and others in the NAACP and the anticolonial movements in India. In 1920, Rai returned to Bombay to lead India’s noncooperative movement alongside Mahatma Gandhi and, a few months later, launch the All-India Trade Union Congress, the primary interwar Indian labor organization. The nascent Afro-Asian solidarities he had helped forge persisted.25 Athavale and O’Reilly met one fortuitous afternoon at the Young India office and found they had much in common. Deeply immersed in
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the Irish independence movement, which arose with ferocity after the Easter 1916 Irish uprising against British rule, O’Reilly was sympathetic to self-government for India. When some pamphlets by Gandhi on “Non-Cooperation” arrived at the office for Athavale, describing the boycott tactics of the nationwide civil disobedience campaign he had launched in March 1919, she shared them with O’Reilly so “she might understand the nature of the unrest in India.” O’Reilly promptly applied Gandhi’s tactics to the struggle in Ireland, which by January 1919 had escalated into a guerrilla war between the Irish Republican Army and the British forces. At a lecture the next day she called for the Irish in America to boycott English tea as a way of bolstering the Sinn Féin demand for an independent Irish republic.26 Overjoyed with finding a kindred spirit, O’Reilly insisted Athavale attend the upcoming WLC, where she could represent the women workers of India. Athavale thought little would come of O’Reilly’s impulsive invitation, but two weeks later O’Reilly returned with funds for Athavale’s travel and stay in Washington. They hatched a plan to strike a joint blow for Indian and Irish independence: Athavale would address the congress on India and the dismal conditions of Indian women, speaking in her native tongue; O’Reilly would read an English translation of Athavale’s speech and give her own talk on Ireland’s women and British imperialism. “To our great disappointment,” Athavale later wrote, “the Reception Committee cancelled the addresses of the Irish and Indian delegates.”27 Why such a decision was made remains obscure, but perhaps the powerful British delegation objected.28 Athavale suffered a second disappointment when congress organizers initially rejected her bid for voting rights. O’Reilly, furious, enlisted the help of India’s worker delegate to the ILO conference, Narayan Malhar Joshi, a prominent l abor activist and future general secretary of the All-Indian Trade Union Congress.29 Joshi explained to WLC leaders that Athavale had “worked for the cause of Indian w omen for over twenty years” and “should be considered as entitled to represent them.” In the last days of the congress, Athavale won voting rights representing “Indian working w omen.” Young India hailed her appointment, describing her as a “delegate from the Indian Labor Union of America.”30
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Yet in her memoir, Athavale saw herself as speaking for “Indian female workers in America” and women in India. “Indian women in California, New York, and other states, along with their husbands, are in the working class,” she wanted delegates to know, and affected by “unjust and oppressive laws.” She also sent a written appeal to the congress, asking that delegates call on “the Government of India” to provide education, housing, and maternity benefits to Indian women; fund scholarships for Indian women to visit the United States; “protest” the “shameful treatment” of Indian w omen as “indentured labor” in British colonies; and end Britain’s use “of machine guns and other weapons to put down political and industrial action by the masses of India.” This last appeal was a pointed reference to the April 1919 massacre in Amritsar in which British troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians protesting recently passed laws allowing the jailing, without trial, of suspected political subversives.31 Considerable controversy swirled around another non-Western attendee at the WLC: Japan’s Tanaka Taka, a professor of social work at Japan Women’s University and the only w oman in Japan’s large sixty- person delegation to the ILC.32 But Tanaka’s travails unfolded at the ILC, which opened a day a fter the WLC and lasted to the end of November. In contrast, at the w omen’s congress Tanaka was deemed an “honored guest.” She participated fully in its deliberations and found the all- women’s affair a welcoming oasis of sympathy.33 Perhaps her experiences at the WLC differed from t hose of Athavale b ecause Tanaka was a middle-class, Western-educated woman who had been sent to Washington as an official representative of Japan, an imperial power. Certainly, some women at the congress (and in the US league) assumed Western superiority and viewed those in poorer, less industrialized regions as less “civilized.” But Japan was also seen as an anomaly in the West–East hierarchical scheme because of its defeat of Russia in the 1905 Russo- Japanese War and its wealth, industrial development, and supposed “westernization.”34 Nevertheless, at the all-male ILC, as we shall see, Tanaka fought painful b attles fueled and prolonged by tensions between East and West and by widening class and sex fissures within her own nation.
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A Shared Politics Despite dissent over voting rights and other issues, congress delegates reached agreement on a capacious, far-seeing set of resolutions aimed at raising international labor standards and securing a fairer, safer world. They favored maximum hours of eight a day and forty-four a week for all workers, night-work restrictions for both sexes, no employment for children under age sixteen, a universal right to education, and state funds for mothers “adequate for full and healthy maintenance of m other and child.” They endorsed freedom of movement across borders for p eoples and goods, increased commerce among nations, “equal rights” and “equal wages” for foreign-and native-born workers, and, in a pointed critique of imperial power, an “equal distribution of the raw materials existing in the world.” This last proposal had been presented by the Polish delega tion, alongside calls for the rights of migrants and the regulation of immigration and unemployment by trade u nions and government labor departments. In the view of the league’s Alice Henry, the Polish women’s “astonishing program,” “far ahead of the old nationalism,” aimed at giving the poor countries “a fair chance along with the g reat and rich commercial empires” and amounted to “nothing less than a world table, a world market, a world industry.”35 Women’s right to self-governance underlay all other demands: in a “preliminary” to the endorsed resolutions, the congress asked for a substantially amended ILO constitution guaranteeing the appointment of women as ILC voting delegates.36 The women at the congress, including the Americans, shared a distinctive workingwomen’s politics aimed at realizing sex and social equality. This dual commitment meant they were never fully at home in either the male-led labor movement or the elite-led women’s movement. They chaffed at the trade union movement’s gender conservatism and its inability to recognize sex-specific forms of class exploitation. At the same time, from their perspective, most women’s organizations focused too narrowly on inequalities based on sex. The complicated position the WLC adopted on night-work laws is but one example of how labor women had to navigate between the “same protections or none” stance of some feminists and a “protections for women and children only” idea
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often favored by male unionists. The WLC declared its ongoing adherence to the 1906 Berne agreement limiting night work for women and children only but added that, in the future, night work must also be prohibited for adult men. In other words, the WLC wanted l abor regulation to cover men and women, but in the interim, the laws protecting women and children should be preserved.37 Labor women also prioritized income and health supports for pregnant women and mothers. They made no apology for demanding accommodation for w omen’s bodies; state funds for the work of social reproduction; and women’s right to control when, where, and how much they worked. Rights and benefits for pregnant women and mothers furthered women’s equality, even if w omen were being treated differently than men. It was a “social fundamental,” Mary Macarthur claimed, “no mere industrial or economic m atter.”38 In 1919 (and still today), maternity policy was a matter of life and death, affecting millions. The maternal and infant mortality rate was shockingly high in 1919, even in wealthy industrializing nations. Women bore c hildren in life-threatening situations, with little assurance of adequate care or economic support. Securing protection for those bearing and caring for the next generation was urgent. The maternity standards labor women proposed w ere not framed in either “protectionist” or “maternalist” rhetoric. No one spoke of women’s biology necessitating w omen’s restriction to mothering alone. Rather, the congress favored adequate health services and income support for pregnant w omen and m others and more control by w omen over the length and timing of leave. L abor women sought to lessen the penalties of motherhood and make it more compatible with wage earning. As Robins and other US league women often reiterated, the league stood for both women’s right to employment and societal support for women’s unwaged family labor. American w omen were not political outliers at the WLC: they voted consistently with the majority and in favor of the more progressive positions. At times, such actions meant they parted ways with dominant US political opinion and, in some cases, with the AFL. When the congress divided, for example, over which women should receive maternity
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benefits and how much the monetary allowance should be, the United States sided with France, Britain, Sweden, and Norway in favoring the more inclusive and generous maternity provisions. As Robins explained, speaking for the majority, “We want it understood that all m others, whether they are working or receiving money for their work, or whether they do not need to work, are entitled to this care and protection.” Other nations disagreed and issued a minority report calling for smaller benefit amounts and eligibility l imited to wage-earning m others and the wives of wage earners.39 Similarly, in the immigration debate, US w omen joined the majority in voting for a policy that favored more open borders and laid out a middle path between so-called f ree or unregulated immigration and the restrictive nativist policies gaining ground in the United States and other countries. The WLC declared “it in the highest interests of workers of all countries that emigration be regulated and protected” and called for transnational “labor treaties” negotiated by workers themselves.40 At the insistence of Polish delegates, who pointed to the shocking treatment of striking Polish immigrant steelworkers in the United States, league w omen also backed the right of “foreign workers” to “equal wages” and “equal rights” with “native born workers.” In supporting this resolution, the US league knew of the AFL’s more conservative pronouncements. A few months earlier, at its 1919 convention, the AFL had condemned “Mexican” immigration and called for restrictive new federal legislation with bans on all “oriental” migrants.41 The resolutions endorsed by the WLC reflected shared transnational understandings among l abor w omen. Even so, agreement did not come easily. The exchange over night-work laws became heated at times, with Swedish and Norwegian delegates opposing British and Italian proposals; only after long hours of wrangling did delegates accept a carefully worded proposal by Margaret Bondfield.42 Tensions over national differences in economic circumstances and resources flared too, making the setting of benefits (as in the case of maternity benefits) or universal labor standards difficult. More troubling, the final day of the congress revealed deep-seated racial prejudices and ignorance, which threatened the women’s fragile
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unity. Confusion reigned as the assembly sought to create a permanent organization and elect vice presidents representative of the “world’s peoples.” In search of a basis to classify the “world’s p eoples” other than by nation, the congress revealed the Eurocentric thinking of the day and the utter lack of consensus on “race” and racial categories. After a long afternoon of misunderstandings, delegates settled uneasily on four vice presidents: each representing a different “race”—the “Slavs,” the “Latins,” the “Scandinavians,” and the “Anglo-Saxons”—with a fifth slot reserved for a geographic region, the “Central Powers.” Many remained dissatisfied, with Italy’s Casartelli-Cabrini wanting to know where, for example, Japan fit among t hese categories. The assembly voted not to add an “oriental” vice presidency for the time being, citing “lack of organization,” a view privileging Western trade union forms of organ ization. In a similar vein, they expressed their “great desire” that, at the next convention, the organization of working women would be “so far advanced in the oriental countries, in India, Japan, China, and Egypt, as to secure the representation of working women from those countries.”43 With the adjournment hour long past, the congress finally resolved to build a permanent organization for workingwomen around the world. It elected Robins as president of an interim organization and chose Washington as its headquarters. Barriers to solidarity also existed between American and European women in 1919. Robins held stereot ypes about the “old world” and thought America superior, a worldview explored more fully in the next chapter when we follow her to Europe as she tries to secure support for the new workingwomen’s organization. In 1919, however, with European women visiting the United States, even some of the league’s closest Eu ropean friends confessed, albeit privately, to misgivings about America and American culture. To Bondfield, the United States seemed quite “foreign,” at times shockingly so. She praised the “good w ill” of American women and the “magnificent” women’s congress, but wrote of being “appalled at the raw savagery of these people” [Americans] after hearing “men in responsible positions—governors and mayors” talk about the violent tactics they employed to quell strikers in their communities.44 Bouvier had misgivings of a different sort. She “basked in the general
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good w ill that prevailed at the women’s conference” and took special pleasure in the weekend Potomac River outing to Mount Vernon where she spoke to the group on the shared emancipatory traditions between France and the United States. But the “prosperity” of America “dazzled” and troubled her: she felt “at best a poor relative in the g reat f amily of female u nionism.” America’s enormous wealth made her “nervous” for the “rest of the world” and fearful of “an economic crisis.” She was critical, too, of the United States for “shunning” the ILO, especially since there were “plenty of instances of social injustice” amidst America’s general prosperity that needed correcting.45 Sweden’s Kerstin Hesselgren preferred her own culture and found the ways of Americans unappealing. She felt herself a “fish on dry land” in a “motley,” “chaotic,” “nervous,” and “dirty” United States, with its “horrid food” and “barbaric customs.” The “American Swedes” she met in her travels in 1919 spoke with “irony about America as the ‘Land of Liberty’ ” and feared “being seen as traitors.” To her, the league was hardly “social democratic” in the sense she knew; rather, it accepted people of all political and religious views and, distressingly, made little distinction between “a trade u nion and a religious movement.” The explicitly Christian lyrics of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” sung daily at the congress at the insistence of the Americans, particularly bothered her. Nonetheless, she warmed to the YWCA w omen who shared her h otel and was struck by their “outspoken” and “liberal opinions” on industrial m atters and unions, especially b ecause in the United States, she noted, the labor movement was often seen as “mixed-up with bolshevism and anarchism.”46 Decades later, in 1956, Hesselgren elaborated on the fear of foreigners and radicalism she found in the United States in 1919: “Americans were a bit afraid of us as they thought we might be dangerous. They even went so far as asking the President to send away those ‘Reds, Radicals, and Bolshevists.’ ”47 The political fault lines of 1919, still vivid to Hesselgren in 1956, would only widen as time passed. The formation of national Communist Parties across Europe in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the March 1919 founding of the Communist Third International (Comintern) in Moscow as the revolutionary alternative to socialist and
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social democratic internationalism would tear apart the world’s labor and socialist movements for nearly a century.48 Yet in 1919 these fissures were just appearing. The WLC ended with affirmations of the birth of a new “sisterhood” of working w omen. Delegates wrote affectionate and comradely notes of remembrance as souvenirs, with Schneiderman penning to Bondfield, “Yours for the abolition of wage slavery.” In her closing remarks, Robins returned to themes speakers had struck ten days earlier: the need for women to act in the affairs of the world and shape the policies of government and industry. “It is right that we organize politically; it is right that we organize economically.”49
Debating Global Standards at the ILO fter the WLC adjourned, many of the women in attendance turned A their full attention to influencing the ILO. Already in session for a week, the first meeting of the International Labor Conference (ILC) was a large and chaotic affair, with some forty nations sending close to three hundred representatives, including voting delegates and an unspecified number of nonvoting advisers and staff. Every day for a month, conference participants, press, and observers streamed into the monumental Pan American Union building, the headquarters since 1910 of the regional association of independent American republics and, for some, a symbol of inter-American peace and understanding. The preamble of the ILO Constitution, part of the Versailles Treaty, had asserted: “peace can be established only if it is based on social justice.” And many of those who gathered at the 1919 ILC fervently embraced that premise and sought an organization that would advance both peace and social justice.50 Yet despite the lofty aims of the ILO, women occupied a second-class status at the ILC. The ILO’s tri-partite system of shared decision-making, unique among the new international government bodies set up by the Versailles Treaty, allowed each nation four voting delegates at the ILC: two from government and one each from workers and employers. No nation appointed a woman as a voting delegate and only twenty-three
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omen came as nonvoting advisers.51 As advisers, w w omen w ere in subordinate positions to the male voting delegates they assisted. In addition, some national delegations restricted the participation of advisers in plenary and other official conference meetings, insisting they speak only when authorized by a male voting delegate to do so. But those were not the only indignities. At the opening day of the conference even the seating arrangement reflected w omen’s marginalization. As one prominent Japanese daily described it, “Seats w ere arranged in a horseshoe shape. In the first rows sat the delegates; then around them seats for the advisers. Next came t ables for the newspaper journalists and behind them seats for the general audience. Many of the women advisers,” the reporter added, “sat behind the journalists with the general audience.”52 The situation facing w omen at the 1919 ILC was not quite like the infamous June 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London that spurred the growth of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement, but the parallels are striking. In 1840, w omen delegates were seated b ehind a curtain, and their exclusion from a convention premised on the human rights of all p eoples prompted them to organize on their own behalf. In 1919, the curtain had disappeared, but once again, women were treated as “other” and excluded from full participation at a pivotal international human rights conference, this time involving worker rights. In the hope of swaying conference opinion, Robins had sent each of the WLC resolutions to Britain’s Harold Butler, the British Ministry of Labour official and Labor Commission member serving as secretary general of the ILC. Some had been read aloud as “letters” received and printed for distribution along with other daily briefings.53 But the women at the congress knew the real battle lay ahead as the ILC reached its conclusion. W omen lacked formal voting power and other privileges at the ILC, but they had other routes to influence and they used them. They lobbied behind the scenes and talked directly to the press and the public. They gained seats on key committees and spoke in plenary sessions. The w omen’s congress had emboldened many of the ILC women advisers. It served as an all-women’s caucus where they sharpened their arguments and fortified their spirits. All eight of the w omen l abor advis-
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ers, for example, had participated in the WLC, as had a number of women government advisers.54 US women, however, w ere largely relegated to the sidelines as o thers stepped forward to make the case for WLC resolutions. Grace Abbott was called on to act as secretary to the ILC C hildren’s Committee, and she actively intervened in the debates over child labor standards, arguing for the human right to self-development and education—but she was an exception. Because the United States had neither ratified the Treaty of Versailles nor joined the League of Nations, it did not send an official delegation to the ILC. The situation was frustrating for league women, and, for some, heartbreaking. They had initiated the WLC and were essential to its success. Yet their own country’s resistance to international cooperation made it difficult for them to bring to fruition what they had started. It would not be the last time US w omen faced such constraints. Overall, WLC proposals proved “more daring and more radical” than the standards adopted by the official conference, Italy’s Casartelli- Cabrini rightly observed a fter both conferences ended.55 The ILC adopted less progressive standards on working hours and child labor than those proposed by the WLC, and instead of endorsing night-work restrictions for both sexes, what the WLC had wanted, the ILC voted for a convention covering only women and minors. Other items on the WLC wish list—emigrant rights and ILO guarantees of women’s inclusion—were not even considered by the ILC.56 Yet despite such setbacks, women succeeded in shaping the first set of world l abor standards for the better. The effect they had on the Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (C3) and the Night Work (Women) Convention, 1919 (C4) were the most dramatic. The stakes w ere high: not only did ILO conventions resonate as a “kind of international public opinion,” but each ILO member State was obligated to consider ratification by their own government. If ratified, conventions moved from opinion to binding national law and practice.57 Initially, ILC voting delegates had leaned toward a narrow “protectionist” maternity convention premised on restricting women’s wage work during pregnancy. It gave w omen little control over the timing of
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leave, no income support while on leave, and deemed a short four-week leave after childbirth sufficient. Women advisers intervened and offered quite different proposals. Bouvier (France), Bondfield (Britain), Casartelli-Cabrini (Italy), and Majerová (Czechoslovakia)—all WLC participants—sat on the ILC committee responsible for drafting the convention. British government adviser Constance Smith, an old and trusted friend of the British WTUL, was appointed chair; Sophie Sanger of the International Association of L abor Legislation, also in the British delegation, served as secretary to the committee.58 Bouvier brought the latest research from two French female doctors showing a twelve-week standard (six weeks before and six weeks after delivery) to be a minimum for female and infant health; she and o thers also drew on laws in France and elsewhere already mandating paid leave. The women on the committee produced a majority report calling for, among other items, six weeks of income support before and after childbirth available to all mothers, job-guaranteed leave, and half-hour nursing breaks twice a day. Sweden’s Sigfrid Edström authored a minority report signed only by men. In the plenary debate over the competing proposals, Macarthur, still grieving her husband’s death and with her infant daughter nearby, offered a “vigorous” defense of the rights of all m others to state benefits, health services, and guaranteed job return, taking the conference “like a storm.” Other female advisers reinforced her arguments. The men changed course and approved much of what the women sought.59 The 1919 maternity convention was a significant victory. Instead of no income support and a short break of four weeks, it recommended twelve weeks of paid benefits sufficient to maintain m other and child in good health. It stipulated the right to job return, nursing breaks twice a day, and benefits available to “any female person, irrespective of age or nationality, whether married or unmarried” in “any public or private industrial or commercial undertaking.” Yet the ILC did not extend income support to all mothers as the majority report of the Women’s Labor Congress stressed. Unpaid household and informal sector workers did not qualify. Equally troubling, the maternity convention signaled the ILO’s willingness to let the state, not the woman, decide the timing
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of leave. W omen, the convention stated categorically, “shall not be permitted to work during the six weeks following confinement.”60 But perhaps most troubling of all, the rationale for the convention remained “protectionist” rather than rights based. The ILC rejected the expansive vision of labor women who claimed state benefits for mothers as a social right and put women in charge of decisions about their bodies. All work, including reproductive labor, they argued, deserved society’s respect and financial support. These issues were not resolved in 1919—nor are they today—but the debate had been joined on the international stage.61 Labor women vowed to continue the fight.
Who Speaks for Workers? Who Speaks for Women? Few at the 1919 ILC were surprised by the fierce debate over maternity. No one, however, predicted what one Japanese newspaper termed the “outrageous happening” involving Japan’s Tanaka Taka and the acrimony that erupted over the night work convention.62 Nor did they anticipate the global reverberations of her bold actions at the ILC. In the end, her intervention changed labor law in Japan and shifted world opinion on women’s rights and workplace democracy. Tanaka’s appointment to the Japanese delegation as “advisor on feminine m atters” sparked anger and dissension in Japan before she even arrived in Washington.63 Some objected to a woman in the delegation or to a social work professor appointee rather than a factory woman; others criticized Tanaka’s politics, believing her e ither too favorable to worker rights or not favorable enough; still o thers complained about her lack of familiarity with Japan’s labor-management practices and her years studying in the United States, first at Stanford and then at the University of Chicago.64 Those close to her, including her husband, a philosophy professor sympathetic to American pragmatism and social democracy, worried about her undertaking such a voyage alone while four mouths pregnant. When Tanaka and the others in the Japanese delegation set sail for the United States, Japanese workers, wearing shrouds, thronged the docks in protest, furious at the absence of a representative of the
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30,000-member Yūaikai (Friendly Society), Japan’s most influential labor federation. Tanaka was sympathetic to their cause. She had spoken before women factory workers and met with the w omen’s division of Yūaikai. She insisted Ogata Setsu—a former textile operative at Kanegafuchi Spinning Company, one of the biggest textile companies in the world—accompany her to Washington and offer firsthand testimony. Tanaka vowed publicly to put the demands of Japanese women workers—no night work, shorter hours, equal pay, and greater respect for wage-earning women—before the world.65 In Washington, interest in the Japanese delegation and in Tanaka was intense. Many thought Japan had embarrassed itself at the Paris peace talks and predicted a repeat in Washington. As the only non-Western imperial power, Japan was caught in a delicate balancing act. Would it declare itself equal to the West and agree to the “universal” l abor regulations being proposed by the ILO? Or would it join with other non- Western nations (China, India, Siam [Thailand], and Persia [Iran]) and ask for “special” exemptions and lower standards?66 The Japanese dele gation restricted Tanaka’s interaction with the press in Washington and discouraged her from speaking at the ILC. But Tanaka was determined to fulfill her promise to Japan’s factory women, even if she had to break rules to do so. The opportunity came on November 8 as the ILO Committee on the Employment of Women opened debate on whether Japan should adhere to the proposed night work standards. Japan’s employer representative, Mutō Sanji, managing director of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Com pany, spoke first. He urged the committee to exempt Japan’s textile and mining industries from any convention banning night work. Next in line was Japan’s lead government delegate, Kamada Eikichi, president of Keio University and member of the House of Peers. Perhaps because of Tanaka’s flawless English, Kamada asked her to read aloud his prepared remarks on why the introduction of night-work laws in Japan should be delayed. Tanaka rose and faithfully read his speech. Then, in a surprising act of defiance, she pulled out her own statement, hidden underneath the other sheets of paper, and delivered a rapid-fire exposé of Japanese paternalism and the “misuse of women, physically and mentally, to swell
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the capitalist’s purse” in the textile industry. Japanese employers, she announced, speak of “affectionism” (onjō shugi), or family-like attention to employee needs, as the best solution to labor problems, but female textile operatives are d ying young. “The conference should ban night work for women in Japan and rescue the girl operatives from their pre sent state of horror,” she announced.67 Bedlam broke out. Japanese delegates jumped to their feet, disavowing her report and demanding her removal from the podium. Beside himself with rage, Mutō accused Tanaka of disloyalty to her country and called for an “inquiry” into her “mental condition,” “deranged,” he proclaimed, “by her being in a f amily way.” Unrepentant, Tanaka replied “no less angrily” than Mutō and insisted she “spoke about the real condition of Japanese workers.” The next day the Japanese government dismissed her from the delegation on the grounds that her public presence as a pregnant woman offended their American hosts.68 Tanaka sought the help of Robins, Anderson, and other US league women. She wanted the Americans to meet with the Japanese delega tion and assure the men that in the United States pregnant w omen could speak in public. Robins and Anderson did so, much to the discomfort of all involved. No doubt their intervention helped, as Anderson believed. But when the Japanese government finally reinstated Tanaka, they acted largely in response to the intense Japanese press coverage of the scandal and the growing public sentiment blaming Mutō, not Tanaka, for shaming Japan on the world stage.69 Tanaka’s actions had stirred deep wells of gender and class animosity in Japanese society and unleashed a furious public debate over w hether Japan should conform or confront Western norms and who had the right to speak on behalf of workers and of women. Tanaka’s victory included more than her reinstatement. The Japanese government promised to introduce new legislation limiting night work (albeit gradually) and move toward conformity with the ILO convention, becoming the first Asian nation to do so. The decision, reflected in the amended language of the night work convention, marked a historic break with Japan’s policy of reliance on corporate welfare to protect workers and its opposition to state labor regulation. Tanaka’s attack on
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employer paternalism, one observer concluded, knocked Japan’s “family fable” on its head and legitimized trade u nionism and calls for political and industrial democracy. Her defiant speeches on the world stage also helped overturn Japan’s legal restrictions on women’s political speech, in place since 1890, and launched a new, more militant phase of the battle for female suffrage in Japan.70 In the spring of 1919, Schneiderman and Anderson had concluded that labor women would not tolerate being excluded from the international realms of economic and political decision-making. “Our experience in Paris and in London,” Anderson wrote, “convinced us that the time had come for labor w omen everywhere to get together and work together. We felt that a new era was ahead of us and that this was the time to start women thinking and acting on international m atters.”71 Their reading of the 1919 moment proved prescient. Six months later, labor w omen gathered in Washington and insisted the world recognize the rights of women and of workers. They did not achieve all they had hoped. The WLC was not representative of the world’s w omen workers. Nor did it end with the perfect “sisterhood” Robins pronounced: resentments simmered beneath the public face of consensus, and in some instances, there was no consensus at all. Perhaps most gallingly, the ILC ignored or rejected WLC proposals for night work protections for both sexes and guarantees of w omen’s representational rights. Nonetheless, much was gained. Labor women had acted in the affairs of the world in 1919, wrung concessions from ILC decision-makers, and left their mark on the world’s first set of l abor standards. For some, new friendships and new ways of thinking were set in motion that lasted a lifetime. Indeed, what happened in Washington reverberated long a fter the two conferences ended. The WLC resolutions and the ILO conventions, particularly the 1919 Maternity Convention, inspired and informed full rights feminists in the United States and globally for the next half-century.
pa r t i i
Dreams Deferred
Mary McLeod Bethune, around 1911, with students from the Florida school she founded, the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.
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Full rights feminists sought to build on their momentum in the 1920s, but political backlash and division thwarted their progress at home and abroad. WTUL leaders, working in tandem with partners from the Women’s L abor Congress, struggled to create a v iable organization for the world’s workingwomen and promote women’s interests in male-led international labor groups like the ILO and the European-based International Federation of Trade Unions. At the same time, the league and its allies pursued social justice in 1920s America in the face of a change- weary public, a weakened left, and a fractious women’s movement. They met sustained opposition at home from US business elites, conservative courts, and emboldened reactionaries determined to rid America of “foreigners” and “Bolsheviks” and defend hierarchies of race, class, and sex. During the 1920s, US feminists also pursued w omen’s rights and social justice in newly emerging Pan-Pacific and Pan-American organ izations and African American w omen launched new transnational networks for w omen of color worldwide. By the end of the 1920s, however, the b itter divide among US feminists over what constituted women’s equality had spilled over into the global arena, heightening tensions among feminist internationalists. A rising coalition of legal equality feminists, including National Woman’s Party leaders, targeted international maternity and night work standards for elimination, judging them prime impediments to women’s freedom and equality. Full rights feminists judged otherwise and regrouped globally, bent on preserving their hard-fought 1919 victories.
3 A “Parliament of Working Women”
The 1919 Women’s Labor Congress had voiced support for a permanent international working women’s organization and delegated much of the responsibility for its creation to the Americans. Conflict soon erupted over who should belong to the new organization and whether women workers were better off partnering with their elite sisters or their working-class brothers. Misunderstandings and differences among the key players in this effort—labor women in the United States, Britain, and continental Europe—intensified the conflict. And for US women, the frustrating refusal of their own l abor movement, the AFL, to join the Amsterdam-based social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions severely hampered their efforts at transatlantic solidarity. Yet the 1920s struggle to create an international workingwomen’s organization reveals as much about the common aims and dilemmas of labor and social democratic feminists in the United States and Europe as their differences. The women who had envisioned a working w omen’s international in 1919 continued to share a commitment to ending sex and class inequities in the interwar era. Moreover, as working w omen they wrestled with the same strategic puzzle: how best to move forward a workingwomen’s agenda prioritized by neither elite-led w omen’s organizations nor male-led labor groups. The International Federation of Working W omen, the organization that eventually emerged, did not last long. Even so, it was far from a failure. A vibrant transatlantic network 77
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of full rights feminists had been created. The institutional experiment in working women’s internationalism dissolved, but friendships and po litical bonds persisted.
Auspicious Beginnings With headquarters in Washington, financial support from the Americans, and Margaret Drier Robins as president, the interim organization, christened the International Congress of Working Women (ICWW), got off to a promising start. As letters flowed in from Europe, Latin America and Asia, the ICWW quickly became a node for worldwide exchange about w omen’s rights and labor standards. Women told of joining growing movements for democracy and of championing the 1919 resolutions from the W omen’s L abor Congress at trade u nions, po litical parties, and w omen’s groups. Translated and published, t hese stories appeared, along with other news and commentary, in a global ICWW newsletter. Miriam Shepherd, the newly hired office manager and secretary to the ICWW, reported publishing eleven issues of the newsletter in 1920 and 1921 and sending the 1919 resolutions to a mailing list of some thousand people in forty-nine countries. The resolutions, she learned, had been reprinted and distributed in French, Italian, German, Polish, Czech, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese.1 The ICWW also took steps to be more representative of the world’s women. When an Australian woman complained about the participation of Asian women in the 1919 congress, Shepherd defended that decision and explained why the ICWW encouraged Asian representation. “An international organization of working women which did not offer its friendship to the industrial w omen of the Orient could in no way be sincere in its purpose,” she insisted, nor could it solve the “common problems we face.”2 In late 1920, the ICWW expanded leadership beyond its five vice presidential slots—all positions held by women from the United States, Great Britain, and Europe—and appointed Japan’s Tanaka Taka, India’s Parvatibai Athavale, Argentina’s Alicia Moreau, Canada’s Kathleen Derry, and others as “corresponding members.”3
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Filling the vice presidency slot reserved for the “Central Powers” remained a problem, however. Gertrud Hanna rebuffed the ICWW when it invited her to fill the position, a troubling development in light of her considerable stature in European labor and socialist politics. After the war, she continued to direct the W omen’s Secretariat of the General German Trade Union Federation and act as editor-in-chief of its women’s journal. Adding to her accolades, in 1919, she had won a seat in the Prussian Diet, r unning in the first election a fter the adoption of female suffrage, and once the International Federation of Trade Unions regrouped after the war, she served frequently as a German delegate.4 Hanna suggested the ICWW offer the position to an Austrian representative, and after months of delay, Shepherd announced “with great joy”—and no doubt with g reat relief—that German and Austrian trade unions had appointed Austria’s Anna Boschek. In November 1920 the ICWW proudly added Boschek to its masthead as fifth vice president. Shepherd had reason to be pleased. Like Hanna, Boschek had long advocated for w omen’s rights in the l abor and socialist movements and had even assumed a male name to get around the 1890s law in the Austro-Hungarian Empire banning political activity by women. She had only four years of grammar school education, having left school for a knitting factory job at age eleven, but she had no trouble holding her own in debates over equal pay, social provision, and worker rights. In 1919, she won a seat in the Vienna Council and the National Assembly, serving alongside Adelheid Popp and a handful of other women backed by the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. With the party close to one-third female and with nearly a hundred thousand Austrian women in trade u nions, Boschek enjoyed widespread politi cal support.5
Labor’s New Divisions Unfortunately for US league women, they would receive little encouragement for their internationalist sentiments from the AFL. The seething civil wars among socialists in Europe and elsewhere would not help matters e ither. In 1919, the Communist Third International (Comintern)
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declared Moscow the world center of Communism and demanded socialists around the world establish Communist Parties loyal to it. Soviet- led Communism stood for the revolutionary overthrow—v iolent if necessary—of capitalist and autocratic regimes; socialization of land, property, and enterprise; and a powerful central state, which, at least theoretically, represented the interests of the masses and would eventually “wither away.” This vision, inspiring to some, horrified others. No one was more anti-Bolshevik than AFL president Samuel Gompers. He believed the Bolshevik regime rejected all he held dear. He condemned its violent and autocratic methods, its disregard of civil rights and democracy, its disdain of private property and markets, and its state control of worker organizations. Many trade u nionists, however, initially found much to admire in the new Russia. The European-based International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) welcomed Soviet unions into its ranks in 1919 and hailed Russia’s hopeful experiment in “people’s democracy.” Relations soured quickly. In 1920, the Comintern established a Moscow-based Red International of Labor Unions, known as the Profintern, and declared “an unyielding struggle against the Amsterdam ‘International’ of yellow trade unionism.” It condemned the IFTU as a tepid, cowardly federation, hopelessly wedded to “right-wing,” nonrevolutionary reform strategies. Norway, Finland, and Bulgaria, among o thers, defected to the “red international.” The IFTU struck back. Troubled by its losses and by Bolshevik rhetoric, including calls for immediate “world revolution” in Europe, the IFTU proclaimed itself the social democratic alternative to the Communist international and declared any trade u nion affiliated with the Profintern ineligible for IFTU membership.6 Despite IFTU opposition to the Profintern, Gompers distrusted the IFTU. He judged it a Eurocentric socialist-led l abor body in which AFL interests received low priority and Germany had undue influence. Th ese accusations were not wholly unwarranted. Despite calling itself an “International,” the IFTU remained largely European throughout the 1920s, with the Canadian Trade and L abour Congress one of the few non-European affiliates. IFTU leaders identified as socialist or social democratic, and although the IFTU had relocated its headquarters from
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Berlin to Amsterdam in 1919 and voted down German trade u nion leader Carl Legien’s bid to return as head of the IFTU, Germany was soon the dominant affiliate. In March 1921, the AFL officially withdrew from the IFTU, complaining that it promoted “socialization of industry,” a policy the AFL opposed. The feud with the AFL weakened the IFTU, as did its rivalry with the Profintern, the deepening economic recession, and the loss of democratic governments in Italy, Spain, and the Balkans. Still, by 1924, IFTU ranks had stabilized at an impressive thirteen million, making it one of the largest and most powerful social democratic institutions in the interwar era.7 The WTUL had its own complicated and at times tense interactions with the IFTU, as we w ill see. But unlike the AFL, after the war the league had favored conciliatory relations with Russia, called for an end to the blockade against it, and, at least initially, defended the Bolshevik regime. The league also welcomed restoration of ties with Germany and Austria and at the 1919 W omen’s Labor Congress was among t hose pushing for the “Central Powers” vice presidency slot.8 In the 1920s, as the victors imposed punitive economic measures on the defeated and the United States raised protectionist trade barriers and demanded loan repayment from former Allies, the league argued for cancellation of war debts, elimination of tariffs, and a fairer trade regime.9
Onward to Geneva In early 1921, Shepherd sent out invitations in French, Spanish, and En glish to a second international congress, set for October in Geneva.10 Determined to build support for the congress, Margaret Dreier Robins embarked on a monthlong European tour in September. As she made her way across Europe, she shared her innermost feelings in effusive stream-of-consciousness letters to her longtime Chicago ally, glove maker and national u nion leader Elisabeth Christman. A winning combination of modest and indefatigable, Christman had been the unani mous choice for WTUL secretary-treasurer in 1921, a full-time position requiring her to manage the day-to-day operations of the national organization.11
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In France, the “hideous unemployment,” the angry and violent divisions among socialists, and the “appalling” loss of trade u nion membership left Robins stunned. Jeanne Bouvier, secretary of the Bourse du Travail (the French l abor council), and her coworker Georgette Bouillot were suffering greatly, Robins wrote Christman. The once “radiant” Bouillot, now “pale” and “very very ill,” perhaps with tuberculosis, was “so hurt” by “the divisions and terrible battles among the labour people” that she was “not at all sure she could go on with life itself.” Bouvier, Robins reported, had financial problems and spoke bitterly about the strength of the communists and the betrayal of her friend and collaborator Gabrielle Duchêne. In Bouvier’s view, Duchêne had sided with the “reds.” (In July 1921, the CGT, the French trade union federation to which Bouvier belonged, lost the majority of its members to a new l abor organization, the CGTU, which later affiliated with the “red” International of Labor Unions.) Bouvier complained as well about the loss of “more conservative [union] members to Christian groups” and about male trade u nionists like CGT’s Léon Jouhaux who sidelined w omen’s issues.12 He had turned on her personally too, she believed, after she protested his decision to bring his mistress with him to Washington in 1919 and treat his ocean voyage as a “private pleasure cruise.” Robins sympathized and worried about what could be done, but she forged ahead with her plans to build what she called in a slip, the “International Women’s Trade Union League.”13 Robins was equally unprepared for what she encountered in Amsterdam and Brussels. Befitting the classic stereot ype of the parochial American, she seemed uninformed about the intricacies of European politics. At the same time, European trade unionists brought their own misperceptions. In many countries in Europe, a chasm separated the women’s movement from the l abor movement, perpetuated by mutual misunderstanding and mistrust. On the one hand, those in the women’s movement faulted those in the labor movement for practicing a simpleminded socialism with little interest in the problems of women that might not be solved by socialist revolution. On the other hand, some in the trade unions—socialists and o thers—labeled the w omen’s movement “bourgeois” and judged it a movement of elite feminists uncon-
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cerned with wage earners. Those who espoused the advancement of women’s and labor movements sometimes found themselves ostracized by both movements.14 The European male trade u nion leaders who met Robins freely expressed their prejudices against women’s movements, often salted with half-truths about US culture and politics. They w ere deeply suspicious of this new “international w omen’s labor movement,” Robins reported, and believed it a “bourgeois” w omen’s organization rather than a group primarily of labor women. To make matters worse, they feared it promoted a virulent form of American gender separatism that would destroy worker unity. Robins explained more than once that “we too in America believed in men and women organizing together and that our unions were so organized,” but she made “no impression.” They had “fixed ideas” about the United States, she wrote.15 Robins’ class background and lack of trade union credentials aggravated the situation, as Maud Swartz suspected. Swartz, who served as vice president of the US WTUL and the ICWW, was also abroad in 1921, attending a labor congress in Cardiff, Wales. Robins and Swartz had arranged to travel together and meet in Berlin with Gertrud Hanna, hoping to convince her to reconsider her standoffish attitude toward the ICWW. Both Americans had corresponded with Hanna before the war, and both spoke fluent German. Robins had cousins in Germany with whom she remained friendly. Swartz, however, anticipated problems and asked Robins not to travel to Berlin. It was “better,” she explained, “that a trade unionist should go.” Robins reluctantly agreed.16 With extra time in Amsterdam, Robins made repeated attempts to talk with the male leaders of the IFTU. Finally, she secured “two hours” with Dutch-b orn general secretary Edo Fimmen, a “big man— something like [Idaho] Senator Borah and something like Beethoven” in Robins’ words. Fimmen promised to attend the second congress but “over that same cup of coffee” told her that the “IFTU w ill of course wish to control the Congress.” She then added defiantly, “Well, only the future can answer that.” “Fimmen and e very other labor man” also repeated the “yarn” that “women were not interested, did not like meetings, cared l ittle for the l abor movement and so forth and so forth!” My
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response was to “sputter furiously” about the “scores of women labor leaders” in America, “because we have a woman’s movement in our labor movement supported by the finest of our labor men. Come to Chicago, Come to America! And my American eagle flapped his wings ominously!!”17 Robins exaggerated. Her American eagle did not soar quite as high as she implied. Her assessment of US superiority was based on limited information about other countries and a somewhat rosy picture of the US labor movement and its male leadership. Only a small percentage of US women belonged to trade unions, female top officers were rare if nonexistent, and although the WTUL received support from some male labor leaders like Chicago’s John Fitzpatrick, it encountered unrelenting opposition from others. Indeed, a few weeks before Robins left for Europe, a nasty dispute had erupted between the league and the AFL executive board over the AFL’s refusal to charter “federal labor unions” for women, and she had reacted with anger and disgust.18 Robins traveled on to Brussels, leaving Swartz to meet with Hanna in Germany. She worried about the meeting b ecause Hanna’s blessing, which “has not happened yet,” was essential in securing widespread Eu ropean participation at the congress. As one female leader of the Tailors Union told her in Amsterdam, if “German working women came, and especially if Gertrud Hanna o-kayed the Congress,” she would attend. But Robins had more on her mind than winning over Hanna. As she confided to Christman, she wished for “our Congress” to become “a parliament of working women” to which “socialists, Christians, Communists” could all send delegates. But, she admitted, given the “hatred” and “bitterness” among political and l abor groups she had observed in her travels, it may be “a dream impossible of fulfillment.”19 As planned, the congress opened on October 17 in Geneva’s l’Athenée, a stately neoclassical building revered as the founding site of the International Red Cross. Much to Robins’ chagrin, neither Boschek nor Hanna attended the meeting.20 Even so, w omen traveled to Geneva from some fifteen countries, including China and Japan. Great Britain, the United States, and France sent the largest delegations, with Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and Swit-
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zerland also having voting rights. The World YWCA, the W omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and other influential women’s groups sent observers. Among those who delivered greetings were Albert Thomas, the prominent French socialist and wartime government minister chosen in 1919 as the first ILO Director, Dutch trade unionist and IFTU official Jan Oudegeest, and French CGT leader Léon Jouhaux.21 Robins’ opening address was full of her characteristic ardor. Only “the valor and the wisdom of the women of the world” can solve the twin crises of “rising armaments” and “unemployment.” Working women must make “war against war” and “demand bread and security.” Revealing the depth of her anger at the failures of Versailles and the suffering she had witnessed in Europe, she continued, “Everywhere the springs of fellowship and good will are poisoned by propagandas of hate and economic imperialism. Either unemployment or capitalism must go.”22 Following her address, the congress reached consensus on resolutions on disarmament and unemployment. They urged the “Great Powers” convening at the Washington Naval Conference in November to back “a policy of total disarmament” and consider “in open session the opinion and w ill of the p eoples of the world. Peace can only rest on justice between nations,” they declared, and “justice can only be brought about by creating understanding between p eoples.”23 To solve the “world crisis of unemployment,” the congress pushed nations to “reestablish world trade,” extend credit to war-torn countries, and increase the “purchasing power” of workers by lifting global labor standards. In these debates, as in those of 1919, US women were hardly “exceptional” or alone in their opinions.24 The 1921 congress then weighed in on w hether the ILO should extend maternity, child labor, and other labor standards to agricultural workers, matters they knew the ILC would consider in a few days. L abor women were eager to influence the ILO in 1921. Under the energetic leadership of Thomas, the organization had a growing staff of labor experts in its Geneva office, an ambitious program of research and education, and new member States such as Germany and Austria. ICWW vice president, Italian socialist Laura Casartelli-Cabrini, spoke first. She had
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founded the Unione Agricola Femminile (Women’s Agricultural Union) a year earlier and offered an impassioned plea for legal protections for those now “condemned to live like the beasts of the fields.” She wanted immediate ILC action and universal standards for all workers. Bouvier agreed. The “needs of agricultural workers are the same as those of other workers,” she said, and “whether mothers are black or whatever colour, they have the same right to protection.” Cuba’s Laura G. de Zayas Bazan, journalist and teacher in the Normal School of Havana, had reservations. Although she saw herself as “entirely on the side of the workers,” she feared that applying “European regulations” would “ruin” Cuba’s agricultural industry and hurt its workers. The congress listened to her concerns but backed the more universal standards advocated by Casartelli-Cabrini and Bouvier. With Chairwoman Robins calling on the group to “pronounce what ought to be,” the congress declared, “All workers in offices, factories, shops, and agriculture should benefit from all social laws without distinction as to colour, race, religion, or sex.”25 With the agricultural resolution decided, Robins called on Zung Wei- Tsung, a “fraternal” guest of the congress, to speak about w omen in China. A well-known Chinese YWCA leader, Zung had traveled to Geneva from China with her colleague Shin Tak-Hing, aided by American- born Mary Dingman, chief industrial secretary of the London-based World YWCA.26 In a long speech detailing the exploitation of China’s women and their ongoing struggle for the vote and for educational and economic opportunity, Zung alternately flattered and reprimanded her “Western s isters.” Chinese women are “encouraged and inspired by the great achievements of their Western sisters,” and “they, too, think they are entitled to a fuller and more useful life in the world.” But she warned the group not to get too self-satisfied. “No matter how great may be your achievement or how successful may be your work in your own countries, if the two hundred million Chinese women cannot work with you in your International, the work cannot be considered complete and successful. For whatever is essentially good for the white sisters, that also is good for the red, the black, and the yellow s isters.” Robins expressed her gratitude to Zung for traveling so far and pledged to send, as Zung had requested, an official “word to the working women of China.” Un-
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fortunately, the crowded agenda left no time for the congress to grapple with the profound implications of Zung’s talk.27 The words Zung had hurled at her white Western sisters resonated with Robins, however, and she vowed to seek ways to respond. Drafting the constitution for the new organization, the International Federation of Working Women (IFWW), absorbed much of two days. Participants reaffirmed the 1919 aim of raising “the standard of life of workers throughout the world,” the wording sought by the Americans.28 They also readily agreed on the proper means to that end: organize women into unions, promote international labor standards, and insist on women’s right to self-representation in politics and industry. Deciding who could join the IFWW proved contentious, however, with national delegations pushing for policies similar to those they had in their own countries. The British, for example, favored a broad working-class organization like the British Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organizations, which admitted working-class wage earners and wives active in trade union, political, and cooperative movements. US delegates were less united, but Robins called for an inclusive organ ization, not unlike the WTUL, that would welcome all working women of any political or religious persuasion, w hether in trade u nions or not, as well as their allies from outside the working class. Other nations— France, Belgium, and Poland—disagreed with the expansive proposals of both the Americans and the British: they lobbied for a “strictly economic basis” for the organization, with membership limited to trade unionists. Delegates rose to object to Christian trade unionists or those with Communist sympathies. The group ended up arriving at an awkward compromise: membership would be open to women in organ izations either affiliated with the IFTU or working “in the spirit” of the IFTU. This formulation appeased t hose who desired a purely trade union group, but it allowed the British to send non-trade u nion women from their Standing Joint Committee and the Americans to participate even though the AFL had not joined the IFTU.29 The compromise disappointed Robins. It strayed far from her plan of “accepting working women in all their many divisions, religious and political.” It excluded women trade unionists like those in the Belgium
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Christian Union and o thers organized along a religious basis. Th ose affiliated with the Profintern, what some called “the International of Moscow,” would not be admitted e ither. The IFWW’s “underlying principle,” according to a conference summary released shortly after the congress ended, “is in sympathy with what is known as the middle ground of the g reat trade u nion movement of the world.”30 In other words, the IFWW was primarily a secular, social democratic trade u nion organization. As Robins confided to Christman after the congress ended, her dream of a “Parliament of Working W omen” was “thought quite too Utopian and indicative of a strong leaning to Moscow!”31 If Robins had listened more closely to Bouvier or others she had met in Europe, or if she had spent more time with Britain’s Margaret Bondfield, she would have better understood some of the antipathy to Moscow at the Geneva gathering. Bondfield, for example, retained socialist sympathies throughout her life, but she voted with the majority in the British Labour Party in 1920 (and in the years following) to deny the British Communist Party’s repeated requests for affiliation.32 Her disaffection with Moscow-led Communism grew out of her pacifism and Christian socialism, which owed as much to Robert Owen and John Ruskin as Karl Marx.33 What she observed on a monthlong trip to Rus sia in May and June 1920 confirmed her fears. As part of a British trade union delegation, she met with dozens of prominent figures, including the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin, and Angelica Balabanoff, the aristocratic Russian-born communist intellectual whom Bondfield knew from the 1915 Berne Conference of Socialist and L abour W omen.34 Bondfield talked with Russian wageworkers, farmers, and h ousew ives, and she tried to remain hopeful about the unfolding revolution. Yet in her diary Bondfield wrote of her disturbing May 26, 1920, interview with Lenin, who spoke unapologetically about the use of violence to advance political goals. “Physical force for any purpose whatsoever,” she declared soon a fter, was unacceptable, whether for war or revolution. Thirty years later, in her memoirs, her opinions had not changed. “I have always concurred” with the L abour Party’s denial of affiliation to the Communist Party “because I was against war anyhow, and particularly against civil war.”35
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Robins found the new IFWW constitution troubling in other ways. She feared the decision to align with the IFTU meant a narrowing of the organization’s aim to u nion building and a shift away from legislative advocacy and international policy making. If the organization’s f uture meetings coincided with the IFTU rather than the ILO, it would have less opportunity to affect international labor standards. It would also be less global. The ILO had member nations in all regions of the world; in contrast, the IFTU was almost exclusively European. Non-European women w ere often able to attend the women’s congresses b ecause as ILO delegates they had financial support and help with travel and passports. Robins had cause for concern about the group’s declining influence at the ILO.36 A month before the 1921 women’s congress opened, ILO Assistant Director Harold Butler, whom Robins knew from the 1919 ILC, advised ILO Director Thomas in a confidential memo: “this movement” [referring to the women’s congress] was “likely to be of assistance to the Office” but he did “not expect its decisions to carry a very g reat deal of weight.”37 The 1921 ILC also took l ittle formal note of the resolutions sent it by the women’s congress, including the call for female voting delegates at future ILCs.38 In 1921, as in 1919, the most prominent women at the ILC came from the women’s congress—Bondfield, Bouvier, Casartelli-Cabrini, Laura G. de Zayas Bazan, and Norway’s Betzy Kjelsberg—but their numbers had declined, not grown.39 The 1921 w omen’s congress elected Robins as IFWW president and Maud Swartz as secretary. But IFWW offices would be in London, and Marion Phillips, Chief W oman Officer of the British L abour Party, would manage IFWW financial and administrative affairs from there. The new w omen’s federation was a strange hydra-headed creature, divided in location and authority, with two strong-w illed officers— Robins and Phillips—destined to clash. Phillips played second fiddle to no one. Born into an “eminent Jewish f amily” in Australia, she had won honors at the University of Melbourne in 1904 before earning a doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science. As one sympathetic friend remarked, she had a “first-class brain” and a “warm heart” but did not “suffer fools lightly.”40
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Still, the women left Geneva with bonds renewed and a sense of optimism about the tasks ahead. Eighty women, including “our Chinese and Japanese friends,” Robins wrote, exchanged toasts of fellowship and good will at a concluding dinner. Even the French forgave each other, she remarked, with Bouvier and Duchêne caught up in the “spirit of reconciliation.”41 Beneath the surface, however, nationalist chauvinism lurked. In one of her last letters from Europe, Robins shared her pride in the United States and her sense of its special mission. “The w omen of America can honestly be called blessed. Never can we lose hope and faith in America,” she wrote. “We know we have our black spots but we must come to Europe if we would know how black the night can be.”42
The Brief Life of the Women’s International For the next three years, the new women’s federation wrestled with the question of its relationship to the IFTU. Initially, Robins and Phillips found themselves on the same side. When IFTU officers offered to recommend to their affiliated unions that all IFTU women members join the women’s federation and the IFTU pay their dues, both women were delighted. Phillips foresaw a future in which the w omen’s federation gained “something like two million members” and a stable source of funding. Robins called the proposal “a remarkable beginning in cooperation.”43 What neither anticipated was the resistance the idea would encounter from trade u nion affiliates a few months later at the IFTU congress in Rome. Much of the problem had to do with the German l abor movement’s hostility to the w omen’s federation. The German trade u nions comprised some 40 percent of IFTU membership, and despite repeated entreaties, Hanna still refused involvement with the IFWW. At the Rome congress, speaking for the German u nions, she condemned the very idea of a “separate W omen’s International” and expressed concern over its “bourgeois and purely feminist” elements and its having the power to make decisions affecting IFTU members. She favored instead a consultative group advising IFTU officers, without “power to take decisions binding upon all.” Others—including France’s Jeanne Cheve-
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nard, a Lyon embroiderer, strike leader, and CGT representative who had attended the 1921 women’s congress—defended the proposal, noting the working-class and socialist character of the w omen’s federation and the importance of a separate organization for women. The tide turned a fter Britain’s Tom Shaw expressed skepticism and Phillips changed course: given such “strong opposition,” she said, perhaps the proposal should be reworked. The 1922 Rome congress reaffirmed “the organization of men and women in one trade union” and delayed further discussion of the women’s federation to the next IFTU congress, a year away.44 Phillips wrote the Americans about the “opposition in the Continental countries” to the women’s federation, and in Britain, she confessed, the Trades Union Congress was “not enthusiastic” e ither. She closed her dispiriting tale by detailing how IFWW affiliates w ere falling away: the Fascists had devastated the Italian labor movement, and “from our delegates in Norway and Czechoslovakia I hear absolutely nothing.” Given the circumstances, the w omen’s federation had little choice, she believed, but to consider merging with the IFTU.45 She and Margaret Bondfield may have anticipated a positive outcome for a w omen’s division in the IFTU b ecause of their experiences overseeing mergers in Britain. Phillips had navigated the incorporation of the Women’s Labour League into the British Labour Party in 1918, and women became a potent political force in the party, with large local-level w omen’s groups, female officers in each region, and Phillips as the chief woman’s officer.46 Three years later, Bondfield managed the merger of the National Federation of Women Workers with the National Union of General Workers. Although she desired more “self-government” for women than she won, she carved out a “Women’s District” within the male-led National Union.47 In January 1923, with Maud Swartz presiding as the new president of the WTUL, the league executive board proposed a third international women’s congress where, among other items, the British proposal for merger could be considered.48 (Robins had stepped down as WTUL president a few months e arlier, in part to devote more time to the women’s federation, in part b ecause she believed a working-class w oman
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should hold the top league post.) The British agreed to a third congress, but scheduled it in Austria, to coincide with a planned IFTU educational meeting, despite the desire of the US league for a meeting in Geneva right before the 1923 ILC.49 When the IFWW executive board met in London a few weeks before the opening of the third congress, the conversation did not go well. Bondfield’s handwritten notes, scribbled across the top of her agenda, capture the gulf between Robins and the British: “Mrs. Robins: NOT a department, a separate international. Bondfield: only chance for women is fighting inside trade union movement. American delegation refuse . . . oppose department of any men’s organization.”50 A diminished band of labor sisters met for four days in Vienna in August 1923. France, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, and Sweden held voting rights, as did Britain and the United States, the two nations with the largest number of participants. Nonvoting “fraternal delegates” came from Argentina, Chile, China, Japan, and Romania. Other guests included German trade unionist Johannes Sassenbach, an IFTU secretary general, and ILO official Martha Mundt, the respected German socialist charged as the liaison with women’s organizations.51 Robins welcomed the group with a pointed call for a broadly conceived trade unionism—one attentive to workplace democracy and individual growth, as well as economic equity. Trade u nions can end “industrial feudalism,” she declared, and make it possible for the “intellectual and moral powers of the workers” to emerge.52 Next the congress considered various proposals on world affairs and social policy. The US group found a warm reception for many of its ideas. Siding with the United States, the congress favored state-paid “family allowances” as a “temporary expedient to the economic difficulties developed in capitalist society” and endorsed public grants “available to all” for “special emergencies of childbirth, unemployment, illness, or death of the f amily wage-earner.” Like many labor men and w omen in the 1920s, the group rejected permanent state-paid f amily allowances (which often varied based on the number of dependents). Such payments, it was thought, gave employers an excuse to lower wages, pitted workers against each other, and undercut a more universal system of state benefits.53
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On the last day, the congress listened as Phillips made the case for a “Women’s Section” in the IFTU. Although Bouvier pushed to keep the women’s federation an independent entity, the British proposal eventually gained the votes of everyone except the Americans, who abstained. Because the AFL did not belong to the IFTU, Maud Swartz explained, the US delegation was in “a different position from other countries.” The final decision rested with the league’s national convention.54 The vote in f avor of merger did not come as a surprise. Many delegates were already sympathetic to Phillips’ view a fter hearing her fuller assessment of the situation at an earlier private meeting. Germany is “definitely in opposition to our efforts” to have a “separate organization,” and Austria has the “same view,” she had said. Without “the central Eu ropean trade union movement with us,” we have “little strength.” She pointed to IFWW’s dwindling finances and loss of members, and, citing the British experience, proclaimed the integration of men and women into mixed unions and parties the “natural line of development.” Perhaps hoping to blunt the opposition of Robins and other Americans, she proposed adding an advisory committee to the IFTU W omen’s Department to which the US league could belong even if the AFL remained outside the IFTU. She ended with effusive praise of the US league: because of “the initiative taken by American women in 1919 when they called the first international congress . . . a very g reat change has taken place in the European Trade Union outlook. As a result of that Congress there has been a great stirring of interest in women’s affairs throughout the trade union movement in Europe.”55 The 1923 congress ended with election of officers. Robins, with a heavy heart, watched as Bondfield nominated, and the assembly confirmed, Belgian teacher u nionist and socialist Hélène Burniaux as the next president.56 Swartz remained an IFWW vice president, as did Bondfield and Casartelli-Cabrini of Italy. The new executive board convened briefly after the congress ended, but it never met again. Still, the new officers—in par ticular Edith McDonald, who took over for Phillips in London—carried on with IFWW activities. McDonald sent the resolutions from the 1923 congress to the ILO and translated and distributed the Chinese delegates’ report “as a penny leaflet” to labor and women’s groups.57
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Robins, for her part, continued her fight against the merger, and her irritation with the British women grew. She had always found Phillips doctrinaire and before Vienna had pronounced her “quite unfitted for the work of an organization still in the making.”58 Now Robins’ mistrust extended to Bondfield. When asked about the WTUL hosting a 1924 visit by Bondfield to the United States, Robins was “against it.” A fter all, “Americans are getting rather tired of having English men and women come over and tell us what to do,” she declared. It was an odd assessment given Bondfield’s political prominence at the time. In December 1923, Bondfield had run as a L abour candidate from Northampton and won, making her among the first women (and one of only three Labour w omen) in the British Parliament. Within a month of taking her seat, she became the first w oman to hold a ministerial post when Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister in Britain’s first Labour government, appointed her Parliamentary Secretary to Tom Shaw, the Minister of Labour. Ignoring all that, Robins held fast. No doubt, she also feared Bondfield’s presence at the WTUL June convention where the league’s relation to the women’s federation would be decided.59 Other league w omen did not share Robins’ views. Swartz favored US participation in an IFTU women’s section and, as Mary Anderson later recalled, “conducted a vigorous campaign” for merger. Anderson too remained open to merger, though only if the AFL affiliated with the IFTU. In her view, the “real difficulty in the participation of the WTUL in the scheme proposed was from a trade u nion standpoint and no other” (referring to w hether the league could belong to the IFTU when the AFL did not).60 When Burniaux contacted the league in March 1924 about plans to petition the IFTU for affiliation as a W omen’s Department, the WTUL executive board divided. Relations between Robins and Swartz, already strained, deteriorated. Robins wrote Alice Henry and expressed her disapproval of Swartz continuing as league president, complaining of “the story of Vienna and one or two other incidents in New York.”61 Tellingly, Robins and Swartz parted ways over the benefits of merger for working women at home as well as abroad. In early 1924, the league
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seriously considered a proposal from Gompers to set up a w omen’s department inside the AFL. Robins resisted the idea. She worried an AFL women’s department would put the league “out of business” and believed AFL union presidents showed little interest in or knowledge of women workers. “Those men,” she wrote in confidence to her sister Mary, “died twenty years ago and are just walking around dead!”62 But Swartz and o thers on the league’s executive board saw the situation differently. An AFL women’s department, some pointed out, could be an effective voice for women inside the union movement and persuade more AFL national unions to admit women. In any event, the league never had to vote on the matter. The AFL executive council turned down Gompers’ idea of a women’s department and ignored his plea that “it was time” the AFL pursued “a similar method” to Britain and Germany, which, Gompers erroneously reported, had replaced their “women’s trade union leagues” with “committees.”63 Meanwhile, the IFWW officers moved ahead with their petition to the IFTU, which included a W oman’s Department with a “woman secretary,” a women’s committee, and biannual international w omen’s congresses. Negotiations soured a fter a May 1924 conference in which Hanna resisted IFWW proposals except for “the holding of special conferences for working women, when these should be necessary.” Although Jeanne Chevenard, who replaced Bouvier as IFWW vice president, pushed back, Hanna prevailed. The IFTU offered a W omen’s Committee and the convening of special conferences “when necessary.”64 Some league members, including Swartz, continued to favor US membership in the IFTU Women’s Committee. But with the AFL still outside the ranks of the IFTU, the 1924 WTUL June convention sided with Robins and voted to sever its ties with the IFWW.65 Some anticipated a f uture arrangement allowing for US w omen’s unofficial involvement in the IFTU Women’s Committee, but that was not to be. In December 1924, the IFWW officially dissolved, replaced by an all-European five-member IFTU Women’s Committee with no formal mechanism for US participation.66
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America vs Europe? Why did the experiment with a working women’s international, launched with such optimism in 1919, fall apart? Certainly, l abor w omen confronted a world reeling from the G reat War and gripped by economic crisis and political turmoil. Robins wrote memorably about the strife between communists and socialists in Europe, but other nations, including the United States and Japan, had their own searing sectarian battles. Fascism and antifeminism w ere gaining ground as well, with Mussolini’s Fascist Party seizing control in Italy in 1922, a chilling rehearsal for what was to come. Racial, regional, and national chauvinism all weakened the w omen’s international.67 But were the differences between American and European labor women in the 1920s simply too great to surmount? A 1923 report by Robins’ confidante Elisabeth Christman and the league’s Ethel Smith, published anonymously in Life and L abor Bulletin (the renamed WTUL journal), contended as much. In their account the split boiled down to “different points of view” held by the “American and the European women,” with the American w omen the not-so-subtle heroines in the story. US women “recognize the necessity for a w oman movement within the l abor movement,” the league article maintained. In contrast, “the Eu ropean labor movements emphasize class consciousness and deprecate a woman movement within their own class.” In this viewpoint, “European working w omen agree with European working men.” According to this perspective, working w omen’s internationalism failed b ecause of ideological and strategic transatlantic differences, with American w omen pushing for sex-based organization and European women for class-based.68 This “class” versus “sex,” or “Europe” versus “Americ a” account, taken up by later scholars, has persisted as the dominant interpretive framework.69 Nonetheless, it obscures as much as it reveals. For one, neither European nor American women were of one mind. In Europe, the greatest resistance to sex separatism and to cooperating with “bourgeois” women came from German and Austrian women. Other European labor women, however, were more open to the benefits of sex separatism, with French women in the IFWW repeatedly pushing for separate
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omen’s organizations and institutional autonomy from male- w dominated trade unions. As Bouvier put it in 1927, by affiliating with the IFTU “we reduced the international organization of working women to zero.” In her opinion, mixed organization rarely produced “mixed repre sentation.” Even the British w omen, whom Robins identified as the prime movers against a separate w omen’s international, sought a Women’s Department within the IFTU with resources and authority. True, the majority opinion in Britain swung t oward more integrated structures a fter the war, but British women divided on the question.70 US league w omen did not speak with a single voice e ither, with Robins and Swartz frequently at odds. Indeed, Robins never forgave Swartz for the collapse of the IFWW. “Our own group was not united,” Robins ruefully told Alice Henry decades later: “Swartz broke that unity.”71 It is worth noting too that had the AFL belonged to the IFTU, in all likelihood the league would have maintained formal ties with the Europeans and participated on the IFTU Women’s Committee. The AFL’s distrust of the Germans and of all varieties of European socialism made it difficult, if not impossible, for the WTUL to continue with the experiment in international institution building it had launched in 1919. At bottom, there may have been no right choice for labor women on either side of the ocean. As a minority within a male-dominated labor movement, labor w omen in the United States, just as in Europe, had limited power, regardless of w hether they pursued a separatist or an integrationist strategy. Trade u nions refused to accept them as equals or give their needs sufficient weight; it mattered little whether they pressed from the outside or from the inside. At the same time, all-female organizations prioritized the concerns of middle-class and elite women. Women workers w ere caught “betwixt and between.”72 But what about the persistent idea that class allegiances prevailed among European w omen while having little valence among Americans? After all, the idea that American workers, men and w omen, lack “class consciousness” has had many defenders. Yet neither Europe nor the United States is homogeneous, and thus any construct that posits a singular United States in contrast with a singular Europe is suspect. Moreover, although the “class consciousness” of US w omen—or their “sex
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consciousness” for that matter—no doubt differed from that of women in other countries, t here is l ittle evidence that US w omen cared less about “class” than women elsewhere or lacked a class politics. Like w omen in Europe and other nations, many embraced a workingwomen’s politics aimed at eliminating both class and sex inequities. And as working-class women knew only too well from their own lives, the two w ere inseparable. In the end, an “America” vs “Europe” story is blind to the common aims and dilemmas of l abor women in both regions in the 1920s. It is a parochial tale that impoverishes our histories and denies cross-border solidarities.
From Federation to Friendship fter the IFWW dissolved, US league w A omen found few institutional opportunities for transatlantic labor activism. AFL refusal to join the IFTU stymied league access to the IFTU women’s committee. Similarly, because the United States refused formal engagement with the League of Nations and the ILO, the WTUL remained marginal to t hose venues as well.73 Yet a vibrant transatlantic network of labor and social democratic feminists—many now prominent leaders in domestic and international politics—had been created. These informal bonds helped sustain full rights feminism a fter 1925, and, as l ater chapters narrate, served as the basis for renewed efforts at international policy making in the 1930s and 1940s. Ties between US league w omen and their counterparts in Britain and Scandinavia proved particularly durable after 1925. Margaret Bondfield corresponded regularly with her American friends, a group consisting of Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman, as well as Pauline Newman, Frieda Miller, and Elisabeth Christman. These labor w omen dubbed themselves “the gang.” L ater, in what may have been a reference to the exacting, slow, and arduous work of transnational reform, they christened themselves the “Stone Turners’ Union.”74 The group reveled in Bondfield’s meteoric political rise in the late 1920s, boosted by Britain’s 1928 extension of suffrage to all adult women. In 1929, when the British Labour Party returned to power as the minority governing party, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald appointed Bondfield as Minister of Labour, making her Britain’s first female cabinet member. Only a sliver
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of the British Labour Party’s ambitious agenda was realized in its two brief minority governments in the 1920s. But the progress made since the Great War on universal suffrage and minimum-wage guarantees, as well as winning support for the state’s duty to provide jobs, income, and health care, must have seemed like a revolution to some.75 US women watched with envy from afar. Mary Anderson and other WTUL w omen also stayed in contact with Betzy Kjelsberg and Kerstin Hesselgren. Like Bondfield, both women were influential figures in international affairs in the 1920, as well as in social democratic politics in their own countries.76 Kjelsberg served in the Norwegian national assembly and from 1921 to 1934 represented her nation as a voting delegate at the ILO, often coordinating with Bondfield, Hesselgren, and other l abor w omen to pressure for change.77 Hesselgren was pivotal in Sweden’s social welfare innovations in the 1920s, and US women followed her activities with keen interest. Hjalmar Branting, founder of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), had taken office as Sweden’s first social democratic prime minister in 1920. Shortly after, the majority of Swedish women won the vote, and Hesselgren was among the first w omen elected to parliament, winning support from liberal and social democratic voters. Reelected throughout the 1920s, Hesselgren identified as a “liberal independent,” but she stood with the social democrats for worker rights, greater class equality, and aid to mothers, all areas where Sweden made progress. As chair of a 1926 government committee that led to Sweden’s first maternity insurance law in 1931, Hesselgren cooperated with the Social Democratic Women’s Association, a vocal women’s caucus within the SAP.78 League ties with women in continental Europe were not as strong or as lasting as t hose in Britain and Scandinavia. In France, an aging Bouvier had withdrawn into self-pity and anger, making constructive politi cal alliances difficult. She welcomed a few US visitors to Paris, but her personal attacks on former comrades, including a scathing indictment of Jouhaux in her 1927 book, Deux Époques, Deux Hommes, left her isolated in the own country.79 In Italy, Laura Casartelli-Cabrini withdrew from political activism as well, but in quite different circumstances. In 1920, she had become a featured columnist on w omen’s issues in the
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popular Almanacco della donna Italiana (Italian Women’s Almanac). In the face of Fascist threats, she continued her socialist and labor organ izing and her public advocacy of civil liberties, worker rights, and the needs of m others and children. Even in her last column in 1925, she attacked the Fascists for their violent tactics and disrespect for constitutional freedom. The “great majority of w omen disagreed with Fascist politics,” she declared, on the eve of her removal from the journal by Blackshirts.80 For Casartelli-Cabrini, the loss of transatlantic ties was but one more political avenue now closed, and it saddened her. So “our marriage is broken off, and we must divorce,” she said, after learning of the American withdrawal from the women’s federation. “But we have worked so well together, our aims and our feelings are the same and the links between Europe and the US cannot be broken off so easily.” She added a fervent wish: “I earnestly hope that now and again we may meet, and we shall always find each other with the same passionate feeling of two divided lovers still in love one with the other.”81 The league’s relation to labor women in Austria and Germany was hardly as passionate. But league women continued to follow Anna Boschek and Gertrud Hanna.82 Boschek enjoyed widespread political support from the Austrian unions and the Austrian Social Democratic Party and was reelected to her seat in the National Assembly throughout the 1920s. Hanna remained in the Prussian Parliament, backed by the German Social Democratic Party and the General German Trade Union Confederation, which, as in Austria, had feminized over the course of the 1920s. Known for her defense of minimum-wage laws and protections for homeworkers, Hanna also called for married w omen’s job rights, equal pay, and educational opportunities for w omen, fighting an antifeminist backlash fueled by German unemployment and economic devastation. The G reat War had strained her ties with European trade u nion w omen in the Allied nations, and her opposition to the IFWW prolonged some of t hose tensions. Nonetheless, she cooperated with labor w omen from across Europe and elsewhere as an ILO delegate from Germany and published in the ILO journal, the International Labour Review. And once the w omen’s federation became the IFTU Women’s Committee, or the “IFTU Women’s International,” Hanna
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became a central player in it, working alongside former IFWW leaders Burniaux and Chevenard, among others. Western European nations dominated the IFTU Women’s International—few women from outside that region participated—but it served as a major site for interwar European women’s feminist labor activism.83 Unlike US league women, British and European labor women also put their energies into the Labour and Socialist International (LSI). Set up in 1923, the LSI positioned itself as a broader, more democratic socialist federation than the Comintern (the Third International) and the legitimate heir of the Second International. It attracted some thirty affiliates, including the British L abour Party and major social democratic parties throughout Europe. LSI women formed a Women’s Committee in 1925 and hired Edith McDonald who had lost her job at the IFWW. After a first conference in 1926, with delegates from twelve European nations, Austria’s Adelheid Popp, Gertrud Hanna, and Marion Phillips emerged as officers. According to Popp’s presidential reports, women’s membership in the LSI grew from 800,000 in 1925 to 1,280,000 in 1930. Although the group identified benefits for m others and c hildren, married women’s right to jobs, and w omen’s suffrage as top concerns, such issues remained “marginal to the LSI as a whole.”84 A rival group of European socialist w omen stayed loyal to the Third International in the 1920s and judged the LSI misguided. Many had participated in the Communist Women’s International Secretariat (later Women’s Committee) founded in 1920 and led by Germany’s Clara Zetkin. In the 1920s, the number of women in the Third International and the LSI were roughly comparable.85 But the fortunes of the two socialist internationals would shift markedly in the 1930s, with the Communist International overshadowing rival socialist and anarcho-syndicalist formations. The transatlantic connections US labor w omen established in the 1920s would prove instrumental as they too moved into positions of considerable government authority in the 1930s and after. But given the ascendancy of conservatism in 1920s America, that day seemed far away and certainly not guaranteed.
4 Social Justice under Siege
In 1920s amer ic a, full rights feminists found themselves under siege as conservatives bent on turning back civil and human rights, social welfare legislation, and progressive internationalism gained ascendancy. Most of the opposition came from business elites and a Supreme Court wedded to what it interpreted as Constitutional promises of “freedom of contract” and unregulated markets. The WTUL and other progressive women’s organizations looked for allies in their fight for regulated markets and state provision, but they came away disappointed. A yawning intellectual chasm opened among US feminists in the early 1920s. It expressed itself as a symbolic b attle over the Equal Rights Amendment, but at bottom it concerned different definitions of freedom and equality and competing views of the nature of capitalism and the role of the state. The divide persisted for the next half-century and profoundly affected the course of feminism in the United States and globally. At the same time, newly empowered right-wing women’s groups lashed out at social reformers, spewing special venom at t hose they perceived as internationalists and socialists. They targeted league stalwarts like Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman, as well as such Progressive Era luminaries Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. Full rights feminists fared little better when they sought help from male-led labor organizations and political parties. They found the organized labor movement struggling to retain its wartime gains and the socialist left in retreat. The Palmer raids, which reached full fury in January 1920, with coordinated arrests of thousands of suspected radicals, were but one sign of 102
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the reactionary sentiment that took hold in 1920s America.1 The civil liberties abrogated by the wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts had not been restored at war’s end. Rather, as Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post wrote in protest, a “deportation delirium” ensued, led by Democratic attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer and his sidekick J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous future director of the FBI.2 Any foreign- born person was at risk—law abiding or not—as w ere labor militants and socialists. A wartime crackdown by the Justice Department had already decimated the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist-leaning labor federation whose big-tent unionism and direct-action tactics had spurred mass strikes before the war among the “dispossessed,” largely immigrant farm, factory, and serv ice workers. The IWW condemnation of World War I as an imperialist venture infuriated multiple groups: war veterans, patriotic craft u nionists, conservative capitalists, and state officials.3 The Socialist Party, which also opposed the war, endured government harassment and vigilante violence as well. In New York alone, the state legislature expelled five elected socialist assemblymen in 1920 because of party membership. With Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and other leaders jailed, dozens of local socialist offices closed.4 Fears of “alien” radicals intermixed with racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice. Ku Klux Klan numbers spiked, especially outside the South, as did nativist antipathy toward religious “others,” specifically Catholics. A fter the 1920 arrest and trial of Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Jane Addams wrote that “people all over the world” were shocked by the spectacle of “men being tried on their religious, political, and racial affiliations.”5
Searching for Allies in Labor and Party Politics The WTUL, however, was determined to carry on with its efforts to secure rights for women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. As it had done before the war, it also sought social welfare provision, fair labor standards, and worker organization. The AFL proved an unreliable ally. Although the labor federation favored legislation ensuring
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worker rights to organize, strike, and bargain—policies the league endorsed—its embrace of restrictive immigration policies, hesitancy about government welfare and regulatory measures, and hostility to socialist and social democratic movements at home and abroad made cooperation difficult. No domestic issue separated the league from the AFL more than immigration policy. In 1921, after the election of Republican Warren Harding to the presidency, Congress set strict limits on European mi grants for the first time in US history. Three years l ater, the Immigration Act of 1924 enacted caps on overall migration and permanent “national origin” quotas based on the size of each European national group in the 1890 US population. Th ese restrictions l imited migration from the Jewish, Catholic, and Slavic populations of Southern and Eastern Europe, a goal of the bill’s proponents. In addition, the Immigration Act of 1924 barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” effectively ending all Asian immigration, and it created a Border Patrol overseeing migration flows within the Western Hemisphere, especially between the United States and Mexico. It did not, however, establish quotas on immigration from Mexico or other nations in the Western Hemisphere. The AFL lobbied vigorously for passage of both the 1921 and the 1924 immigration statutes.6 League w omen found AFL immigration policies appalling. So did other full rights feminists steeped in the settlement h ouse tradition of an inclusive Americanism of many nationalities, an ideal urged by child welfare advocate Grace Abbott in The Immigrant and the Community (1917). The denial of citizenship to immigrants already in the United States was equally objectionable. In 1923, for example, when the Supreme Court categorized “Hindus” as “Aryans” but not “white persons,” and thus declared them ineligible for naturalized citizenship, the league exposed the ruling’s fanciful logic and its unjust consequences for South Asians, native-born and foreign-born, living in America.7 The league and the AFL also disagreed over how to create a more inclusive unionism. In 1920, the AFL offered Black workers the option of joining special AFL “federal labor u nions” if an international u nion denied them admission. But it made no such offer to Asian workers,
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convinced that “Orientals” made neither good citizens nor good trade unionists.8 In contrast, the league favored opening up union membership to all races and nationalities. It also petitioned the AFL to grant women the right to form “federal labor u nions” and affiliate directly with the AFL. League leaders met stiff resistance and derision when they presented their case to the AFL executive council in 1921. The meeting devolved into jocularity and male bonding, with the streetcar union vice president starting the fun by remarking that the “rear end of a streetcar is certainly no place for a woman.” Margaret Dreier Robins expressed dismay at the “attitude of the AFL” and its refusal to encourage women’s unionization in certain trades.9 Finally, the labor federation remained ambivalent about state benefit programs such as unemployment or other state aid and opposed labor legislation covering adult male workers. The AFL preferred voluntary, worker-run welfare schemes to state programs and favored labor markets regulated by powerful worker organizations, rather than the state. But the AFL’s minimal state approach, the league argued, was feasible for only a small subset of organized workers. What about the vast majority of women (and men) not in unions? State regulation and social insurance schemes w ere a necessary supplement to building u nion power. Despite t hese tensions, the league and the AFL worked side by side on labor rights. During the war, with the Wilson War L abor Board overseeing labor-management relations, unions had expanded in mining, railroad, garment, construction, and other industries. The league and the AFL sought to preserve t hese gains and expand collective bargaining to other groups. But employers, emboldened by the defeat of radical industrial unionism in the 1919 Steel Strike and confident of support from conservative courts and politicians, were determined to eliminate independent worker organization of any sort—industrial or craft, radical or conservative. In 1922, employers defeated a nationwide strike of the railway shop crafts after courts issued sweeping injunctions banning picketing and other economic action. Unionism did not disappear in the 1920s, but it was considerably weakened.10 With organized labor on the defensive, some league w omen looked to progressive third parties for help. Before the war, the short-lived
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Progressive Party of 1912 had inspired enthusiasm. Leaguers had also put energy into the Socialist Party, at that time a large and geographi cally diverse party of Christian socialists, middle-class progressives, farmers, and workers. By the 1920s, however, the Socialist Party— devastated by wartime defections, government repression, and the 1919 departure of left-wing locals—no longer seemed like a viable option. Its membership tanked after 1919, falling from over a hundred thousand to under twelve thousand in four years. The Communist Party—in 1919 divided into two rival wings but united by 1922—presented itself as an alternative. Few league w omen accepted. Reeling from sectarian infighting and government assault, the American Communist Party remained a “small, weak, isolated party” in the 1920s, a “far cry” from what its founders anticipated.11 In frustration, league w omen turned to farmer-labor third-party efforts and, by 1924, to a revamped Progressive Party. Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swartz, and Agnes Nestor, for example, helped found an independent labor party in 1919 modeled in part on the British Labour Party. They insisted on a W omen’s Section, and in 1920, with w omen voting in the federal election for the first time, their party (now called the Farmer-Labor Party) endorsed Schneiderman for the US Senate seat from New York. The 1920 Farmer-Labor Party platform called for restoration of free speech and freedom of assembly; nationalization of many basic industries; “equal economic, political, and legal rights for all, irrespective of race, color, or creed”; withdrawal of US troops from Soviet Russia; recognition of the republic of Ireland; “self-determination in practice as well as principle for the peoples of Egypt, India, and other oppressed nations”; and social welfare measures, including “protection of motherhood, fatherhood, widowhood, and childhood.”12 Many of the early 1920s progressive third-party efforts in the United States—as well as some of the factions within the Democratic and Republican Parties at the time—resembled social democratic parties in Europe, as Ethel M. Smith, the league’s new national legislative affairs secretary, found out on a 1922 trip to Europe. The “labor parties of England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France,” she wrote, seemed “moderate” and “more like our American Liberals or Progressives than
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like our Socialists.” These labor parties were critical of the Bolsheviks and, like the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions, refused to admit “Russian communists.” The conflation of socialism and Bolshevism in America troubled her, and she believed the “socialist” label was now almost impossible for American progressives to embrace. Schneiderman agreed and resigned from the Socialist Party, though she, like many other leaguers, continued to believe, as she put it, in “some of the tenets of socialism.”13 In 1922, league feminists filled the national board seats set aside for women in the Conference for Progressive Political Action and, along with Jane Addams and many other women, cheered on Senator Robert LaFollette’s 1924 Progressive Party run for president.14 The new Progressive Party stood for “political and industrial democracy,” an end to child labor, “world peace,” and other league priorities. The LaFollette campaign won over liberal Democrats, alienated by their own party’s nomination of conservative John W. Davis; it swept up populist farmers and former backers of Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive Party; it even won endorsement from the AFL and the Socialist Party. The Progressive Party captured 16 percent of the votes in 1924, the largest third party showing in a presidential election up to that time. Even so, Calvin Coo lidge, the Republican incumbent who had become president after Warren Harding’s death in August 1923, emerged the victor. Not all league women abandoned the major parties in 1920 and 1924. A few, like Margaret Dreier Robins, cast their first presidential votes for the Republicans. Robins never forgave Wilson for deploying troops to Russia and for Versailles Treaty betrayals that violated “every honorable principle for which we entered the war” and made “for war not peace.” In 1920, she condemned the “utterly ruthless disregard of constitutional safeguards” by Wilson’s Attorney General Palmer and backed Harding, whom she praised for protesting the 1920 unseating of the Socialists in New York. Robins and her husband also supported Prohibition and had close ties to Herbert Hoover, who during and a fter the war oversaw relief efforts in Europe and famine-stricken Russia and preached the virtues of civic voluntarism, f amily life, and international peace. Robins remained friends with Hoover as his political star rose—he became
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secretary of commerce in Harding’s administration in 1921—and she voted Republican again in 1924.15 Others in the league shared Robins’ disillusionment with Wilson but continued to lean Democratic, attracted by the progressive postwar policies of Democrats in New York and other states. Still, the refusal of the 1924 Democratic Party to condemn the KKK sorely strained their allegiance at the federal level. It would be a few more years before most league women judged the national Democratic Party the best vehicle for their political aspirations.
Social Feminist Allies The league’s most reliable political partners in the 1920s came from the social feminist network of women’s organi zations that comprised the dominant wing of American feminism. The network included the league’s closest prewar allies—the National Consumers’ League and the Industrial Department of the YWCA—and an array of other women’s civic and professional groups who had cooperated on prewar social reform. Some were not as egalitarian and inclusive as the WTUL, but they managed to agree on a broad social reform agenda. The League of Women Voters (LWV), formed a few months before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, was one of the most important postwar additions to the network. Conceived by suffrage icon Carrie Chapman Catt and her close associate Maud Wood Park, who became the organization’s first president, the LWV organized “citizenship schools” to prepare enfranchised w omen for political citizenship and supported social welfare legislation and other measures to secure women’s full equality as citizens. It quickly became one of the largest women’s voluntary associations with some two million members.16 WTUL women also cooperated with various peace groups in the 1920s, though they rejected a strict pacifist stance. Responding to calls from Jane Addams, president of the W omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom, they marched in “Law Not War” demonstrations on behalf of a World Court, as did w omen in China, India, Egypt, and around the world. In 1924, the WTUL and eight other w omen’s organ izations joined the new National Committee on the Cause and Cure of
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War. Set up by Carrie Chapman Catt after she stepped down from her two-decade presidency of the International Alliance of W omen (the influential suffrage and w omen’s rights coalition),17 the National Committee promoted “outlawry of war” treaties, international arbitration, and other alternatives to settling disputes between nations by warfare. Much to the league’s liking, the National Committee recognized the “economic causes” of war and in 1925, with language suggested by Rose Schneiderman, pledged itself to “economic security for all nations,” international commercial codes prohibiting “unfair competition,” “industrial codes between nations,” and “minimum standards of employment” in every country. Such measures, it stressed, would “remove industrial injustices” and promote global peace.18 Most social feminist groups, including the WTUL, belonged to the Washington-based Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), the umbrella group formed in November 1920 to coordinate legislative affairs at the federal level and promote progressive social welfare and labor legislation. In the immediate wake of the suffrage victory, with politicians still worried about what many anticipated as a unified female vote, the WJCC made headway. In 1921, it won passage of the Sheppard- Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, first proposed in 1918 by Montana Representative Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in the US Congress.19 A pioneering piece of state welfare legislation, Sheppard- Towner provided government support and public health serv ices to poor mothers and newborns in rural areas. League feminists saw it as a first step toward bringing US policies in line with the 1919 ILO Maternity Convention. US reformers had been committed to state programs for m others and infants before 1919, but the ringing calls for m others’ rights by Jeanne Bouvier, Mary Macarthur, and other international allies in 1919 had reinforced a sense of urgency and legitimacy among American w omen seeking similar rights.20 The US C hildren’s Bureau, now headed by Grace Abbott, won the right to administer the new law, which reduced maternal and infant mortality rates substantially, as its promoters had hoped.21 The Sheppard-Towner victory proved to be an anomaly. Limits on child labor and other WJCC priorities met opposition from conservative
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politicians, especially in the southern states, and from the Supreme Court. The nation’s first federal legislative attempt to limit child labor, the 1916 Keating-Owen Act, had prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor but did not regulate child labor itself. Nonetheless, in 1918, the Supreme Court pronounced it unconstitutional. Social feminists responded with a proposed amendment to the Constitution prohibiting child labor under the age of eighteen. The Child L abor Amendment squeaked past Congress in 1924. But it never garnered enough support for ratification, despite the unrelenting efforts of Florence Kelley, the general secretary of the National Consumers’ League throughout the 1920s.22 Not all social feminist groups shared the legislative priorities of the WJCC. The National Association of Colored Women, for example, affiliated with the WJCC in 1924, but withdrew soon after because of the committee’s lack of attention to anti-lynching legislation and to the continuing problems of disenfranchisement and Jim Crow discrimination.23 The social feminist movement remained largely segregated in the 1920s. Only a few groups—the YWCA and the WTUL among them—took steps to rethink their priorities and become more racially diverse.24 The change in the racial policies of the YWCA followed an all- consuming b attle over collective bargaining that peaked in 1920. Representatives of the “working girls’ clubs” had endorsed collective bargaining in 1919 at the YWCA industrial conference in Washington. Many had participated in successful strikes for the eight-hour workday in textiles and other industries in 1919 and were eager to spread unionism and raise workplace standards nationally. In 1920, they brought these proposals to the 1920 YWCA National Convention. The college student delegates at the convention, organized into the College Student Group, were demanding that the YWCA end its rule restricting membership to those belonging to a Protestant church, and the two groups joined forces. But elite YWCA leaders preferred “uplift to sharing power” and feared negative reactions from their businessmen husbands and friends should they endorse collective bargaining. A vicious battle erupted. The industrial faction, representing some 800 clubs and thirty thousand members nationwide, prevailed. Good Housekeeping judged it a “mo-
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mentous” turning point for the YWCA and in the “life of American women.” The YWCA entered a new stage of pro-labor advocacy. Industrial clubs designed regional and national conferences on labor questions, and the national YWCA set up study groups for middle-class members and factory internships for college students to dispel myths about the working classes.25 This shift set the stage for the YWCA’s embrace of more racially egalitarian policies, though it happened slowly. The YWCA’s Colored Work Committee became a national program under African American leadership during the war, and by 1919 t here w ere “business and industrial clubs” for African American w omen in twenty-two cities. Pressure for change came largely from this growing African American constituency, but white YWCA clubs and industrial secretaries took action too. In 1922, the Industrial Department met separately from the national YWCA for the first time, and delegates voted to guarantee African American women two of the fourteen seats on its new national leadership council. Within a few years, YWCA summer conferences (except the southern one) voted to desegregate, white and Black industrial councils held joint meetings, and “race relations” became a topic of study in white working girl clubs.26 The WTUL changed its racial policies in the early 1920s as well. In 1922, the league proclaimed its opposition to race-based wage discrimination and, for the first time, listed “equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex or race” on its seven-point platform.27 It also initiated campaigns to organize u nions in laundries, h otels, and other industries in which African American women worked. For advice, the league reached out to Elizabeth Ross Haynes who in 1922 became head of the YWCA’s Council of Colored Work and in 1924, the first black w oman on the YWCA National Board. A graduate of Fisk University, Haynes had worked with Mary van Kleeck and Mary Anderson at the US Department of Labor as a specialist on African American women in industry and was finishing a political science master’s thesis at Columbia University on African Americans and domestic service.28 The league’s unionizing efforts made l ittle headway, even in New York and Chicago. Irene Goins—an African American member of the Chicago
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executive board since 1917 and author of a league report titled “Colored Workers”—was not surprised. African Americans w ere deeply divided over trade u nions and did not yet feel welcome in the trade u nion movement, she reminded her league sisters at the 1922 annual convention. She knew the troubled history of African Americans and u nions from firsthand experience. During the war, she had organized Black women workers for the Chicago Stockyards Labor Council alongside Mary Anderson. Although the Stockyards Labor Council, a coalition of left leaning, industrial-style unions, recruited Black workers, and unions like Chicago’s ILGWU vowed adherence to a no race-discrimination princi ple, many labor groups did neither. Goins also knew that although the national WTUL had valiantly battled prejudice against immigrants, it had only recently turned its attention to African American w omen. In her talk, however, Goins chose diplomacy. She praised individual women like Chicago league president Agnes Nestor who had long advocated interracial cooperation and insisted labor standards legislation cover all races; she noted with approval that local leagues had “eliminated the word ‘white’ in their constitutions.” W ill you “find your way clear to join hands with your sisters of darker hue?” she asked the almost exclusively white audience. It will “help you” and “of course us.”29 Given the obstacles to unionizing African American women, league leaders searched for other ways of joining hands across racial lines. In 1919, the WTUL had gone on record favoring “exactly the same standards” for domestic workers as for workers in “any other occupation.”30 When respected educators and NACW leaders Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Burroughs organized the National Association of Wage Earners in 1921 to raise urban living standards for African American domestic and service workers, the league gladly lent support. Such an initiative, they hoped, would make a difference in the lives of low-income Black workers and lead to joint ventures with NACW and with Bethune, who was soon to become NACW president. A woman of “magnetic personality, striking beauty, and quick intelligence,” Bethune had grown up in rural poverty in South Carolina, the daughter of parents born into slavery. She believed fervently in the dignity of labor and longed for a world in which all of God’s children were
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respected and valued. After the Presbyterian Mission Board refused her a missionary assignment because of her race, she used her training at the Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to become a teacher. In 1904, with her marriage ended and a son to support, she opened a school for girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, dedicated to “Self-Control, Self-Respect, Self-Reliance and Race Pride.” Renamed Bethune-Cookman College in 1923, it eventually became the first fully accredited four-year college for Black men and women in Florida. As president of Florida’s Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and a vice president of NACW, Bethune sought to represent the interests of Black w omen of all classes. In 1924, with Bethune at the helm, NACW backed the National Association of Wage Earners and called for “workers rights” and economic justice for poor women of color.31 Such changes at NACW made interracial organizing and other kinds of cooperative ventures with the league more likely. The league, however, still had a long way to go to win the trust of the African American community. The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Working Women, launched in 1921 by league and YWCA women in cooperation with Bryn Mawr College, helped lessen racism among white w omen and foster interracial cooperation. The impetus for change came from the students themselves. The Summer School, an eight-week residential leadership program for wage-earning women, recruited students largely from YWCA industrial clubs and trade u nions. Its first classes of women came from different religious faiths and multiple nationalities, but none were Black. In 1925, the Summer School students joined with an interracial YWCA committee and petitioned Bryn Mawr to open the school to all women. The interracial YWCA committee had emerged at a YWCA Industrial Department conference in Allentown, Pennsylvania a fter a rousing talk by A. Philip Randolph, the Harlem-based socialist editor of The Messenger and the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a nationwide u nion for Black workers on Pullman railway cars. Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas and other college administrators hesitated, but pressure grew from YWCA w omen like Ernestine Friedmann and league w omen like Schneiderman who sat on the Summer
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School board of directors. Bryn Mawr College relented, and in 1926, the Summer School announced an admissions policy “without distinction of race, creed, or color.” Five African American women enrolled that summer, making them the first Black students to attend Bryn Mawr College.32 The decision was not without controversy. Some white students objected vociferously to sharing meals and living quarters with Black women. O thers feared the entrance of Asian students. One California student supported the policy “without hesitation” before realizing it meant Japanese students might attend as well as Black. But as the school’s director, Bryn Mawr dean Hilda “Jane” Smith, remembered, most students adjusted and came to value the more inclusive norms. At the end of the 1926 session, the students “unanimously recommended” continuation of the new admissions policy. A white student from the South later explained how her opinions about race changed as a result. “I looked at the question only from the point of view of white p eople and not the point of view of the Negroes until I came to the Summer School. It d idn’t take me long to see that I was wrong. I can safely say that my views have broadened more on this question than any other.”33 Local townspeople did not always accept the new integration policies at the labor schools. In 1928, Dean Smith wrote W.E.B. Du Bois reaffirming her commitment to including African American women in a new Vineyard Shore School, a residential eight-month program modeled on the Summer School. She worried, however, about the hardships Black women might endure “coming to a community which is so prejudiced on the Negro question.” She spoke with authority, because a KKK cross had been burned a few months earlier on the front lawn of her Hudson River estate in West Park, New York, the proposed site of the new school.34 Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas often put herself at the center of the story of how the Summer School got started in 1921. On a trip abroad in 1919, which included visits to worker education programs in Britain and Scandinavia, she recounted resting “on a golden hilltop” in the Sahara “surrounded by our own caravan of Arabs, camels, mules and tents” and “rejoicing that British w omen had just been enfranchised.” With American women soon “politically free” too, she wondered “what
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would be the next g reat social advance?” That afternoon, she grandly proclaimed, a vision came to her, and she decided to start the summer school for working women and “hasten the coming of equal opportunity for the manual workers.”35 Yet Thomas’s desert epiphany occurred after much prodding from labor w omen. In December 1919, with the Washington conferences ended, Margaret Dreier Robins had invited Jeanne Bouvier and other international trade unionists to visit Thomas as part of the league campaign to convince elite women’s colleges to open their beautiful leafy campuses, empty in the summer, to working girls. The league’s first flurry of letters in 1913 had failed to get a single answer from any of the colleges, but they kept on asking. When Thomas finally decided to host the school in 1921, Robins was thrilled at her change of heart. “You will rejoice with me,” she wrote Bouvier in 1921, “in knowing that the visit we made to Bryn Mawr College in 1919 has had a most far-reaching effect. For years some of us have been dreaming of this happy day. But our educational leaders also had to see the vision.” Robins had long been waiting for the day “when the industrial worker may look to the colleges for cooperation in solving the problems of industry and equally impor tant when the great heritage of learning, of poetry, of science, may be the common heritage of all.”36 The league’s prospects for new legislation and more u nion members dimmed as the decade wore on, but not so its educational initiatives. The Bryn Mawr Summer School, like the YWCA industrial clubs, prospered in the 1920s, part of a larger global upsurge to democratize education and develop the intellectual capacities of working people that gained force after the war. In the United States, the movement continued the earlier educational initiatives of the league and the YWCA, as well as the study circles, lectures, and lyceums sponsored by socialist parties, trade unions, and city labor councils. The founders of the Bryn Mawr Summer School and others in the movement sought alternatives to the social Darwinist philosophies and economic theories then prevailing in elite institutions of higher learning. Solving the great social and economic questions of the day required engaging the imagination of the working classes and fostering new ways of thinking about the
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economy, property rights, and the value of labor. Class condescension and pejorative views of workers and their capacities had to be confronted. Influenced by American pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey, as well as British and European adult education theorists, Bryn Mawr organizers embraced new pedagogies of experiential and nonhierarchical learning.37 The Bryn Mawr Summer School’s curriculum of economics, litera ture, science, and the arts and its dedication to democratic pedagogy, freedom of expression, and student decision-making were life changing for all involved. Well-known university social scientists, labor organizers, and progressive educators volunteered to staff the school, including its magnetic top administrator, Hilda Smith; her colleague Susan Kingsbury, who directed Bryn Mawr’s Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research, one of the first graduate programs in the country to offer a PhD in social work; and a board of directors on which sat league leaders and working girls elected from the school itself. Kingsbury drafted much of the first curriculum, and Smith communicated the school’s egalitarian vision of “non-vocational education” and “development of the h uman being” to the faculty and to the young college women who volunteered as tutors and lived in the dorms with the students. The goal, Smith often said, was to teach workers “to think” not “what to think.” After studying ethics and social economy at Bryn Mawr and Columbia University, Smith had developed educational programs in poor and immigrant communities in New York, cooperating with Mary van Kleeck at Russell Sage, New York City league w omen, and others. Smith believed devising sound social and economic theories depended on the voices of all being heard. Toward that end, she worked hard to ensure that each year’s school had women of all races, religions, and cultural backgrounds.38 As part of her program of diversity, Smith traveled abroad in 1925 to recruit students for the Summer School’s new scholarship program for foreign students. Britain, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden sent the most participants; o thers came from France and India. The United States, Smith judged, lagged behind adult education in Europe. She traveled widely, staying longest in Germany and in Sweden, where Parlia-
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ment member and WTUL friend Kerstin Hesselgren hosted her for six months. Here was a nation, Smith believed, “whose people emphasized beauty and the development of personality more than material gain.” All seemed “to express a rare conception of f ree and harmonious living. I felt as though I had stepped into some land of Utopia, where I was living five hundred years in the f uture.” Smith had resigned as director of the Summer School in 1925, fed up with “endless committee meetings and clashing personalities,” but she changed her mind after her Swedish voyage. She returned to Bryn Mawr in 1927, resolved to stir the imaginative spirits of industrial workers who in the United States had been “cheated out of their heritage of beauty.”39 The Bryn Mawr Summer School and other worker education programs like it sustained full rights feminism in the “lean years” of the 1920s and prepared a new generation of women for the b attles to come. By 1927, Smith directed a nationwide network of thirty labor schools that included thriving programs at Wisconsin, Vassar, Barnard, and many other colleges.40 Like the YWCA industrial clubs, labor schools were sites where friendships and understandings crucial to inclusive egalitarian social movements and policy happened. Working-class women flourished b ecause the league and its allies believed in their intellectual and political capacities and their abilities to solve their own problems. “Here I found a place for myself,” one student wrote. “I am not just a piece of machinery.”41 In 1911, Rose Schneiderman had famously called for a labor movement dedicated to winning “bread and roses.” She and o thers like her had been denied both “bread,” or an adequate standard of living, and “roses,” the more intangible essentials of a good life. For w omen workers of the early twentieth c entury, the movement to democratize education opened up a path to life’s “roses.”
Warring Feminisms Much of the opposition the league faced in the 1920s came from familiar corners: conservative courts, employers, and politicians. Yet after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the league and its social feminist allies faced a surprising new adversary: the National W oman’s Party
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(NWP). In 1920, believing female suffrage achieved, NWP founder Alice Paul and other leaders from the militant suffragist wing proposed a second, but different, constitutional amendment focusing on the equal l egal treatment of men and women.42 Some longtime suffragists, white and nonwhite, protested this shift in emphasis, given that millions of women, including most African American w omen in the South and many o thers, were still barred from the polls. The b attle for women’s suffrage was not yet over, they argued. Because the Nineteenth Amendment banned discrimination in voting “on account of sex,” it enfranchised women—mostly elite white w omen—whose only obstacle to voting was their sex. But it left disenfranchised t hose w omen who faced restrictions due to race, language, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers, as well as those ineligible for citizenship such as Asian or Native American w omen. In 1921, NWP leaders ignored pleas by Mary Church Terrell and Addie Hunton to carry on the fight for women’s suffrage and dismissed nonwhite w omen’s lack of voting rights as a question of race and hence not a NWP priority. The party remained wedded to its new goal of securing women’s legal equality with men.43 There were other objections to the NWP’s proposed constitutional amendment as well. A growing group of feminists—including Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and WTUL legislative secretary Ethel Smith— worried that a blanket statement of equal legal rights between the sexes would jeopardize social and l abor legislation for w omen and c hildren. They met with NWP leaders in 1921 and 1922, hoping to persuade them to add language to the amendment “safeguarding” maternity legislation and other laws advantageous to w omen. The NWP refused. By 1923 a smaller but united NWP decided that woman-specific legislation was incompatible with the pursuit of l egal equality between men and women and that its loss was a chance they were willing to take. In December 1923, the NWP introduced an Equal Rights Amendment into Congress for the first time. It read in its entirety: “Men and w omen s hall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”44 Social feminist groups soon coalesced into a “counter-lobby” to oppose the ERA. They believed in ending harmful sex discrimination but judged the health and maternity provisions of the new Sheppard-
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Towner Act and the state labor laws that covered millions of women and children in low-paying service, industrial, and agricultural jobs as beneficial. Indeed, t hese reforms w ere among their proudest political achievements. The l abor laws, in their view, kept w omen’s wages above poverty level, reduced long hours, and offered much-needed protection from dangerous and unhealthy work. Rather than repeal regulatory legislation for women, the laws should be extended to men. They sought fair labor standards laws for both sexes and saw the current woman- specific l abor regulations as a means to that end.45 Class and philosophical differences between social feminists and the NWP exacerbated tensions. Alice Paul, who drafted the ERA and was the driving force b ehind its passage, epitomized the ardent individualism and single-issue focus of the NWP. Like most NWP members, she came from a privileged background.46 Raised in a prosperous Quaker family with a father who was a successful businessman and president of the Burlington County Trust Company in New Jersey, Paul graduated from Swarthmore (a college her grandfather helped found) with a biology degree in 1905. As a social worker in London in 1908, she heard British suffragist Christabel Pankhurst speak, and as Paul remembered it, “I became a ‘heart and soul convert.’ ” Paul threw herself into the suffrage fight, learning direct-action and civil disobedience techniques and enduring multiple arrests and jail sentences. Once back in the United States, she drew on these lessons and formed the National Woman’s Party, a rival to the National American Women’s Suffrage Association led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Fearless, uncompromising, and autocratic, Paul inspired devotion in some and fury in others. In the 1920s, she enrolled at American University and added three additional degrees in civil law to the PhD in economics she had earned in 1912 from the University of Pennsylvania. Like many of the women grouped around her, she believed in removing barriers to women’s individual achievement and allowing women the same freedoms as men. Raising the living standards of workers and ending women’s indignities based on race or citizenship status w ere not her principal concerns. Rather, she maintained a dogged, unwavering dedication to the single cause of women’s legal equality with men. “I never doubted that equal rights was the right
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direction,” she told an interviewer at age eighty-seven. “Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me t here is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.”47 For full rights feminists, however, the prob lem with the NWP version of “ordinary equality” was that it meant making women the equals of the men of their class, race, or social circumstance. Given the vast inequalities in American society and the lack of rights of men in disadvantaged groups, securing equal rights between men and women was hardly enough. Animosity between NWP feminists and social feminists worsened in 1923 a fter the Supreme Court in Adkins v. C hildren’s Hospital overturned Washington DC’s minimum-wage law for w omen. Such woman-only legislation, the Supreme Court ruled, was an unconstitutional infringement on women’s liberty of contract. Women, like men, now enjoyed voting rights, the Court declared, and as political equals they should be subject to the same unregulated free market as men. The ruling called wage-and-hour laws for w omen across the country into question and halted the political momentum of the prewar years. A new legal era had opened in which courts thwarted state regulation of the working conditions of women as well as men.48 The NWP applauded the decision. Social feminists were furious. The Court, in their view, had merely given employers the power to exploit the most vulnerable without oversight or restraint. The right to work for starvation wages, Mary Anderson asserted, was no right at all. Mary van Kleeck put it slightly differently at the February 1923 W omen’s Bureau Industrial Conference, with Margaret Dreier Robins, Agnes Nestor, Florence Kelley, Nannie Burroughs, and others nodding in agreement: “It is not sufficient to demand equality of opportunity with men,” she offered, “for this leaves untouched the many disadvantages under which men also suffer.”49 Yet both sides believed they represented the best interests of women, and both sides spoke in the name of w omen’s equality. They held differ ent notions, however, of what women wanted and what equality meant. The “definition of equality” is “one point in the warfare,” Ethel Smith told a New York Times reporter in 1923. The league believes “equality” for women is about “equality in fact,” she asserted, not about “reducing standards.” She continued, making sure the reporter understood how
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the league, too, was feminist and how class differences led to diverging definitions of w omen’s equality. “I am speaking for an organization of feminists too, a group which knows by experience the difference between equality in fact and the pleasant theory which may entertain ladies of Mrs. Belmont’s wealth and leisure.”50 While the ERA promised abstract equality, the league wanted “actual equality of liberty, status, and opportunity between men and women.”51 Mary Anderson echoed Smith’s concerns in a 1925 essay in Good Housekeeping. A single-minded pursuit of formal legal equality with men was far too narrow an agenda for the majority of women, she told readers. Such a strategy promised “doctrinaire equality” without any “social justice.” The “woman question” was interrelated with “other g reat social questions,” and “to insist only upon women’s legal rights no matter what happened to other rights could result in greater inequality.”52 Lessening the economic and social inequities of laissez-faire capitalism had to be part of the feminist agenda. Without such a transformation, feminists risked celebrating a false equality and a false freedom. Yet to the league’s fury, the NWP sided with the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the other business groups leading the “open shop” drive against u nions and the attack on the child labor amendment, a priority for social feminists. The league condemned the laissez-faire economic ideologies espoused by business groups and criticized the NWP for upholding an individualistic, pro-business feminism.53 The NWP further alienated full rights feminists by befriending conservative Republican and Democratic Party politicians who opposed worker rights, social legislation, and more egalitarian policies for immigrants and people of color. Some NWP women championed southern segregationist laws and chafed at the perceived inequality of (white) w omen having fewer rights than “the humblest, most ignorant” men.54 For league w omen, t hese actions confirmed their sense that the NWP cared little about the problems of the disadvantaged, women or men. At the 1926 Women’s Industrial Conference, the ideological divides among feminists were on full display. Night-work laws for women w ere a flash point. So too was the NWP’s sympathy with business groups.
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When the president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) addressed the conference and, according to the league bulletin, “demanded for industry complete freedom to pursue its way unregulated by government or any other consideration but its own sweet will,” NWP women clapped. They picked the wrong speaker to applaud. NAM had recently red-baited social feminist reformers, depicting them as beholden to “Russian Communists,” especially “one Madame Kollontai, whose home is Moscow but whose parish is the world.” The league concluded the NWP’s purported claims of neutrality in the battle over worker rights, labor laws, and social welfare could no longer be believed.55 After the disastrous 1926 conference, social feminists grew ever more determined to defeat the ERA, with Mary Anderson and the W omen’s Bureau in the forefront of the fight. The Women’s Bureau initiated a series of research investigations defending woman-specific laws as in the best interests of the majority of women and coordinated anti-ERA lobbying in Congress.56 Congressional progress on the ERA stalled. But the battle over competing visions of feminism was not over. Indeed, within a few years it would flare up with renewed vigor in regional and international settings, with many of the same players once again at odds over women’s equality and labor standards legislation. The NWP was not the only women’s group opposed to the social feminist legislative agenda in the 1920s. The league had long been a favorite target of self-styled patriot groups, with accusations of “un- Americanism” and disloyalty hurled at Robins and Schneiderman before and a fter the war b ecause of their association with internationalism and socialism.57 In the 1920s, conservatives, including women’s groups like the D aughters of the American Revolution, broadened their assault on social feminism, with the aim, the league’s newspaper asserted, of blocking “social legislation of any kind” and “fomenting a panic about ‘Bolshevism’ in the women’s movement.”58 A so-called spider web chart proved to be a highly effective weapon. Based on a 4,000-page report on “revolutionary radicalism” compiled in 1920 by a US War Department employee eager to undermine peace groups, the chart drew intricate connections among social feminist groups, listing organizations as well as individual w omen and their affiliations. The WTUL, the
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omen’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and other freW quent targets were on the chart, but so too were mainstream groups like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the League of Women Voters, and the W omen’s Christian Temperance Union. All were said to be part of a vast “socialist pacifist movement” linked to “international socialism” and seeking the overthrow of the US government and the imposition of a Bolshevik-style society. In 1924, the Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford’s intemperate newspaper, published the chart in an inflammatory series linking moderate social feminist groups with global Communism. The W omen’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) traced the chart to a librarian in the War Department, Lucy Maxwell Read, a devoted member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and extracted an apology from the Secretary of War John D. Weeks, an anti- suffragist. Weeks acknowledged inaccuracies and promised to destroy all copies of the chart, but the chart and its derogatory labels continued to circulate widely. In 1926, it was read, unchanged, into the Congressional Record.59 As late as 1927, Mary Anderson, still smarting from accusations linked to the chart, wondered, along with Florence Kelley, whether a lawsuit might stop the slander.60 The conservative smear campaign inflicted psychological damage on those slandered, harmed careers, and helped halt the advance of social welfare and labor legislative. Even funding for the Sheppard-Towner Act, the most important legislative achievement of social feminists in the 1920s, languished, and after 1926, it was not renewed.61 The league believed the conservative attacks were “econ omically inspired”: women’s patriot groups were visible on the frontlines but behind them stood powerful business groups. League leaders licked their wounds and looked to the f uture. They believed the tide would turn, perhaps even as soon as the 1928 presidential election. They and other full rights feminists wanted a new-style Democratic Party willing to take on business as usual and make America a more just and inclusive society. They wanted a political party not unlike the social democratic parties many of their allies in other nations were building.
5 Pan-Internationalisms
The wtul struggle for international allies in the 1920s was not fought solely in Washington or Geneva or Vienna. Nor was the European- based Women’s Federation the only transnational women’s organization the US league promoted. The WTUL looked west to the Pacific and south to Latin America for partners, and it joined the regional Pan- Pacific and Pan-American women’s groups that sprang up in the 1920s. As the league reached out to Asian and Latin American women, it encountered familiar obstacles to transnational alliances: clashing agendas between and within nations, differing priorities, and ingrained ethnocentrism. Yet the terrain the league traversed as it turned west and south differed in crucial ways from what it encountered in Europe. Cultural and racial cleavages yawned wider, fortified by pervasive and deeply divisive notions of white Western superiority. Language barriers were a greater problem as well. League leaders spoke many European languages but not Spanish or Portuguese. Neither did they speak Japa nese, Chinese, or other Asian languages. But equally important, the threat and reality of US military and economic dominance loomed larger for women in the Pacific region and the Americas than for women in Europe. In 1898, as a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and Guam. Although the 1901 Platt Amendment ended US military occupation of Cuba, the treaty gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, much like the rights it exercised in the other territories where it was the new “imperial overlord.” Before World War I, 124
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the United States sent troops into the Caribbean and Central America multiple times, relying on Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that justified US interventions in the name of stability and democracy. Despite Wilson’s anticolonial rhetoric, in the 1920s, the United States continued to occupy all or parts of many of these countries.1 To be sure, not all potential US partners in Asia and the Americas experienced such treatment. In China, for example, or in South American nations like Brazil and Argentina, the United States appeared a more ambiguous global actor. At times it seemed like an anticolonial ally against an older European imperial order, and its rhetoric of self- determination and freedom inspired; at other moments, its promises evaporated and the nation stood revealed as a new imperial power. League leaders sought more egalitarian relations among peoples and nations in the 1920s and they spoke out against exploitative economic and social policies pursued by the United States. But as we s hall see, like other women’s organizations led by North American and European women in the interwar years, the league found itself navigating rising nationalist and anticolonial sentiment among its potential Asian and Latin American partners. Americ a’s imperial turn made regional alliances between US and other women difficult, if not impossible.2 This chapter follows the league as it reached beyond Europe and sought to build social justice partnerships in the Pacific and Latin America. But it is important to note that t hese w ere not the only regions of the world that captured the attention of US w omen in the 1920s. Although the league had no formal partnerships with women in Africa, the M iddle East, or Black-majority nations in the Caribbean, other US- led organizations did. Pan-Africanism thrived in the 1920s, and Black Americans stood at the forefront of global movements to create alliances among people of color. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, the influential Pan-Africanist organization formed by Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood in Jamaica in 1914 and later headquartered in Harlem, had millions of followers in some forty countries at its peak in the early 1920s. Older Black-led organizations like the NAACP and the National Association of Colored Women also expanded their Pan- Africanist efforts in the wake of the 1919 Pan-African Congress.3
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In 1922, Mary Church Terrell, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other African American w omen from the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) formed the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) to bring a gender perspective to the Pan-African movement. Acting as a “kind of think tank,” ICWDR recognized a common history of exploitation of the “darker races” based on racism and Western colonialism and sought to unite the “colored” women of the world against these global hierarchies. Although hampered by limited funds, the council supported cultural exchanges involving w omen in the United States, Haiti, and Sierra Leone and helped build a school in Liberia. Members felt a strong kinship with the anticolonial struggles in India and other Asian countries and set up study groups where they delved into “Indian independence movements and Far East history as well as African cultures and politics.”4 With Bethune as its president, internationalism and Pan-Africanism remained a focus for NACW throughout the 1920s. Bethune had dreamed of doing missionary work in Africa as a young woman. She never lost that global consciousness or the desire for transnational connections among women of color. At the same time, she encouraged interracial w omen’s internationalism and pushed white-led women’s organizations to address racial discrimination worldwide. NACW kept its ties to the white-led International Council of W omen, for example, despite having to protest racially segregated banquet seating in Washington, DC, at the International Council’s 1925 Seventh World Congress. Only after sixty-five NACW delegates walked out of the dinner and the featured African American singers refused to perform did the International Council relent and institute “open seating.” In 1927, Bethune made her first trip across the Atlantic. Her encounters with oppressed minority groups in Europe left an indelible impression on her. In a revelatory moment in a rose garden in Berne, Switzerland, she found a metaphor for her work. She observed lovely velvet roses blooming alongside others of every color. Each rose, she would later say, was “satisfied to be itself” and was “given what it needed to thrive.” The world, she believed, should resemble that rose garden.5 Leaders of ICWDR and NACW w ere crucial to the success of the Fourth Pan-African Congress in 1927. The 1921 and 1923 Pan-African
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Congresses had met in Europe, making it difficult for more than a handful of Black w omen from the United States to attend. But when the Pan-African Congress chose to hold its fourth meeting in New York, the situation changed. With Addie Hunton and other ICWDR w omen as the principal fundraisers and planners, the Fourth Congress attracted some five thousand participants, with delegates coming from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and India. No w omen appeared on the list of chief speakers; but many—both white and nonwhite— attended the four-day affair.6 No doubt New York WTUL w omen w ere among t hose who attended the 1927 Pan-African Congress and approved of such proposals as the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Haiti. But the national WTUL did not follow the lead of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and take direct action to try and halt the occupation. WILPF was unusual among predominantly white organ izations in the 1920s in its attention to Haiti and to the interconnections between race and empire. In part, its orientation reflected the advocacy of Mary Church Terrell, Addie Hunton, and other w omen of color who occupied WILPF leadership positions. WILPF’s 1924 Congress on the “New International Order” had included discussions of the persistence and effects of economic imperialism and attracted participants from Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines, Guatemala, and other countries. In 1926, an interracial WILPF group, including Hunton and future WILPF president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch (the Wellesley College economist who had helped found the WTUL in 1903) toured Haiti for three weeks to investigate economic and social conditions. Occupied Haiti, their 250-page indictment of US policies t here, served as the basis for the Haiti resolution passed by the Pan-African Congress in 1927.7
Looking “East” to the Pacific As the prospects of WTUL participation in the Women’s Federation dimmed in the mid-1920s, the league looked for an alternative vehicle for forging East–West connections. At the league’s 1924 convention,
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delegates considered a proposal, backed by the executive board, for an “Oriental Committee.” Such a committee, the board thought, might reconnect the league with the women from Japan, China, and India who had attended the three working women’s congresses and recruit new women from the “Orient” to league programs.8 To sway skeptical delegates and head off any anti-Asian sentiment spilling over from the immigration debates roiling the United States, the board invited speeches from two experts on the situation in China: YWCA secretary Ting Shu Ching, who in 1926 would become the first Chinese woman to hold the top YWCA post in China, and American-born Evelyn Fox, a World YWCA staffer who had recently visited China with league friend Mary Dingman.9 League members, like many other US women activists, had followed with considerable sympathy the Chinese democracy and women’s rights campaigns before the 1912 fall of the Qing dynasty, the last of the imperial dynasties, and in the Republic of China that replaced it.10 Robins and o thers had been angered by the failure of the Versailles Treaty to honor Chinese territorial sovereignty. In 1924, they watched with distress China’s growing disillusionment with US foreign policy and the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment among league members, as among Americans more generally. As league leaders anticipated, both invited YWCA speakers described the deteriorating l abor conditions in China and its effects on US workers without blaming the Chinese working classes. Instead, each criticized the behavior of foreign capitalists in China, including US cap italists, and urged league support for Chinese workers as a way of raising living standards worldwide. Chinese workers, Ting declared, are fighting against a “kind of industrial development in the East” that “menaces” them and “the w hole world of workers.” She urged American women to “take responsibility” for bringing together “an international group” to formulate global solutions.11 Fox, speaking next, elaborated on what those global solutions might be. She pointed first to the culpability of foreign capitalists in creating exploitative l abor relations: “Foreigners own a number of the largest factories,” and “our [US] capital has been invested in the Chinese and Japanese owned mills.” But the “United States, China, and Japan are bound together by their silk and
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spinning industries” in other ways. “Every time we buy silk in our shops, we are tying ourselves by invisible threads to the w omen who are working there.” Without global labor standards and trade unions, she concluded, “girls in the silk mills of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania” are pitted against “working women in India, China, Japan, and other countries of the Orient.” Chinese workers are organizing, Fox reminded the delegates. Two thousand Chinese workers came together in Shanghai on May Day to protest abusive working conditions, show support for the “thousand character” or popular education movement, and hear speakers from Japan’s largest trade u nion federation, the Sōdōmei (successor to the Yūaikai), and other groups. The league, she asserted, must help support this movement.12 With the words of the speakers still resonating, the convention acknowledged the “invisible threads” binding East and West.13 It created a new committee to study industrial developments in Asian nations, “particularly as they concern women, with a view of entering into definite relationship with working women in t hose countries.” The committee’s findings would serve as a “basis for league action” and be circulated to US government officials such as Herbert Hoover, then US Commerce Secretary.14 Surely some league women were aware of the extraordinary political dramas unfolding in China—the increasing influence of Marxist ideas and the rise of anticolonial nationalism after 1919 and, in 1924, the decision of the Kuomintang (the party led by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek) to accept Soviet aid and ally with Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in the First United Front.15 No mention was made, however, of these developments. Robins chaired the WTUL’s efforts and announced ambitious plans for a diverse international advisory board of women “from the Women’s Trade Unions in Europe” (mentioning Gertrud Hanna, Jeanne Chevenard, and Hélène Burniaux as possible appointees) and “from our own continent, Mexico to the southward, the islands, South America and across the Pacific to the Orient.” Agnes Nestor, Rose Schneiderman, and Elisabeth Christman volunteered, as did Canada’s Kathleen Derry, but among the league’s “old European friends,” only Margaret Bondfield and Laura Casartelli-Cabrini stepped forward.16 To diversify the
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committee, Robins reached out to two prominent Chinese YWCA leaders involved in the 1923 W omen’s L abor Congress: Zung Wei-Tsung and Shin Tak-Hing. Both agreed to serve. With help from the World YWCA, Robins also secured the participation of Japan’s Kato Taka, the general secretary of the Japanese YWCA who, alongside Shin, had made the “long and difficult” journey to Vienna for the 1923 congress and knew the United States well from her studies at the University of California.17 Unfortunately, ties with other congress participants from Asia, such as Japan’s Tanaka Taka and India’s Parvatibai Athavale, had not been sustained. Robins and Anderson had befriended Tanaka Taka at the 1919 Women’s Labor Congress, but neither knew much about the personal tragedies she faced a fter returning to Japan.18 She suffered two miscarriages and then withdrew from politics in 1921 to care for a third newborn and an ill and elderly husband. Devastated, she described herself as a “wounded knight, laying by the side of the road, as others fought the battles in which I so longed to join.” She savored the movement’s victories: as we learned e arlier, in 1922, Japan’s Shin Fujin Kyōkai (Association of New Women), which Tanaka cofounded, helped overturn the l egal prohibitions on Japanese women’s political speech and assembly; in 1923, Japan began to bring its maternity protections more in line with ILO guidelines and revise its Factory Act to limit night work for women and youth. Yet Japan’s 1925 Universal Manhood Suffrage Act expanded suffrage rights for Japanese men only, and the concerns of women remained low priorities for the Diet, employers, and male-led social movements.19 The league did not maintain a relationship with Athavale e ither. A fter the 1919 congress, Athavale lived with Leonora O’Reilly and her m other in Brooklyn and spent her time “most happily” discussing current affairs, perfecting her English, and raising funds for Poona Women’s College. Athavale found O’Reilly “worthy of imitation and inspiring,” especially for her independence as an unmarried w oman and her “liberal mind,” which to Athavale meant she “not only opposed class distinctions but national distinctions and held that international problems could not be settled without the mutual aid of all nations.” Yet the
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friendship, strong as it was, did not translate into formal collaborations between the league and Indian women. With her health failing, O’Reilly could do little to institutionalize what she had begun in 1919. Athavale served for a time as a “corresponding member” of the W omen’s Federation. But in 1921, Athavale returned to her home country, where she erected a new main building at the Women’s College of Poona, a signal event in the history of women’s education in India.20 League w omen kept abreast of India’s rising anticolonial and labor protests but lacked ties with the activists involved. Life and Labor Bulletin published accounts of India periodically, hailing the Bombay textile worker strikes in 1926 and the founding of the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) of 1927, with its mixed group of “several English w omen and Indians of all religions, castes, and classes” as proof of the “renais sance of Indian womanhood.”21 The AIWC, the largest Indian w omen’s rights group, initially targeted educational access for women and girls but soon broadened its agenda. The league also applauded Indian women’s leadership in the All India Trade Union Congress and in India’s independence movement led by the Indian National Congress (INC). In December 1927, in response to w omen activists, the INC passed a “Women’s Charter,” demanding equal pay, maternity leave for factory women, and “equal standards of morality.”22 With ties to Japan and India frayed, the league’s efforts to forge links with Asian women ended up concentrating on China. Robins justified this development, explaining that the committee arose as a partial “answer to the plea of Miss Shin at the 1923 Vienna Congress for the Women’s Federation to help the Chinese w omen.” Yet even with its narrowed mandate, the committee struggled to enter “into definite relationships with working w omen” in China. Plans for sending a league officer to China and bringing a Chinese student to the league’s Chicago training school were “temporarily abandoned” due to insufficient funds and the volatility of the political situation in the face of a massive general strike in Shanghai in 1925 led by mill workers in foreign-owned enterprises.23 Mary Dingman’s decision to leave Shanghai that same year and return to the YWCA London office was yet another blow to their efforts.24
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Eventually the committee settled on educational work about China in the United States—talks and pamphlets that would “show the friendliness of the American labor movement to the Chinese and help them economically and politically.” Fear of the Chinese “menace” and anxiety about China’s size and power, though muted, surfaced in these efforts. Nor did league w omen wholly avoid “orientalist” stereotypes and condescension toward p eoples in Asia. Yet the committee rejected the “yellow peril” protectionist hysteria afoot in the United States with its reductive focus on how Chinese workers threatened American living standards. Instead, league w omen stressed the culpability of foreign capitalists for China’s low labor standards.25 “I feel we in the US are particularly to blame for the child labor condition in China,” US Women’s Bureau director Mary Anderson wrote Mary Dingman. Americans “invest their money in industries in China, but they have failed in instituting standards which would have been of help to the Chinese nation.” Anderson regretted the low labor standards that Dingman’s Child Labor Commission had recommended to the British-dominated Shanghai Municipal Council, but she blamed the situation on foreign capital, not Chinese workers or Dingman’s commission.26 As the Chinese revolutionary army advanced northward toward Beijing, Robins gave sympathetic talks on “China’s struggle for indepen dence and [how] we can help.” Her lectures often began with China’s long history of civilization and its understandable objection to “the intrusion of foreigners.” Chinese workers are hardly responsible for their own exploitation, she argued; they are “under the mastery of Eu ropeans and Japanese.” Not to let the United States off the hook, she noted too how American policies of “extraterritoriality,” denial of China’s “tariff autonomy,” and exemption of foreign-owned enterprises from Chinese l abor law fueled l abor exploitation. She urged compliance with international labor standards and recognition of China’s economic and political sovereignty, approaches also advocated by the World YWCA.27 To protest US actions in China, the league added its name to a 1925 letter to President Coolidge sent by the new AFL president William Green, former Ohio state senator and mine u nion official. Green ex-
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pressed the AFL’s displeasure with “the special privileges given to foreign nations in treaty pacts” and demanded “abolition of extra-territorial rights of foreigners” as “necessary to China’s administrative integrity and sovereignty.” The league backed Green’s plea even though, in line with “Open Door” norms, he argued against special f avors in treaty pacts, rather than specifically condemning US policies in China.28 But these differences hardly mattered to the Coolidge White House: it paid little heed to the AFL or the league. Solidarity with Asian workers’ movements was Robins’ last hurrah with the league. After 1925, she and Raymond Robins withdrew to Chinsegut Hill, a multi-acre estate on the Florida peninsula not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Replete with an antebellum mansion they refurbished, the estate had been purchased by Raymond Robins’ sister. There, in her “social settlement in the woods,” Robins sent off copious letters daily on the politics of the moment, hosted prominent guests from around the world, started cooperative farms and other enterprises, and found solace in the beauty of the natural landscape. Yet as she aged, the more socially conservative, least egalitarian side of her character became more pronounced. She saw herself as a benevolent benefactress to the Black staff she hired and to the local poor. And she railed about the poor choices made by her working-class successors at the league. In her opinion, the league’s presidents, Swartz and then Schneiderman a fter 1926, had abandoned the league’s lofty vision and set off in directions she found “drab.” But her days at the helm had ended, and although disappointed, she never disowned the organization or lost hope in its potential.29 After Robins’ departure, enthusiasm for the league’s Asian efforts lessened considerably, and the committee disbanded within a few years. The shifting political landscape in China dimmed league ardor as well. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek expelled the Communists from the Kuomintang and, in 1927, violently attacked them in Beijing. Now a professed anti-Communist, Chiang consolidated his leadership of the Kuomintang and in 1928 united much of China u nder his ruling party, the Chinese Nationalist Party. The Kuomintang promised to raise living and working standards for all. But its commitment to sex equality—civil, political, and economic—remained unclear.30
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Still searching for connections with the “East,” the league sent Elisabeth Christman to Honolulu in 1928 to attend the first Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, the forerunner of the Pan-Pacific W omen’s Association (PPWA). Part of the 1920s uptick of “cultural internationalism” and the rise of regional and intercontinental w omen’s organizations outside the West, the PPWA sought peace and the “betterment of existing social conditions” by furthering cross-cultural dialogue, cooperation, and friendship among “the women of the Pacific.”31 PPWA leaders, including Jane Addams who served as president, believed the Pacific region, especially Honolulu, a place where “East” and “West” could intersect. The largely Anglo leaders—many from privileged backgrounds—worked hard to ensure cultural diversity in the organization and hoped to counter racial hierarchies in which “Anglo delegates from white settler colonies” were considered “most advanced, t hose from Japan and China less, and Pacific Islands least.”32 They were not always successful.33 No doubt the league’s decision to spend its dwindling resources to fund Christman’s voyage reflected its commitment to international ventures lauded by Jane Addams and its desire to connect with non- European labor w omen. Yet the league also participated b ecause it wanted elite-led women’s groups to hear directly from working-class women. As Schneiderman put it, league participation was “most impor tant,” b ecause “we are always in the position of having other people talk for the industrial woman rather than ourselves.”34 At the conference, Christman spent most of her time in the “Industry Section,” a smaller working group that prioritized the study and implementation of policies lifting “industrial standards in Pacific Countries.” Others in the section included Mary Anderson, who chaired the group; Bae-tsung Kyong, YWCA industrial secretary in Shanghai; and Australian Muriel Heagney. Christman thought Heagney especially impressive. Known for her advocacy of motherhood rights and her challenge to the “family basis of wages” in Australian labor circles, Heagney brought insights as well from her 1920s stint with the ILO and her time in Britain, continental Europe, and the Soviet Union. She would remain friends with Christman, Anderson, and other US league w omen and collaborate with them into the 1940s.35
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Christman’s talk to the industry section on “The Trade Union W oman” struck familiar league themes: workingwomen must organize to win access to education, “self-government” at work, and higher living standards. She spoke from her own experience about the transformative effects of a “united stand” in politics and in strikes. She had spent fourteen years at a power machine in a glove factory, she told her listeners, and remembered “vividly” her “exhilaration” when the law instituting the ten-hour day passed. “I wish I could put into language” how much “the long day” stunts w omen’s minds and bodies. The “negro w oman in industry,” she added, is “more exploited” than any other group in the United States due “largely to the race prejudice encountered” and employer opinion that “her standard of living does not require a high wage.” She closed with the US league’s “hope that the working w omen of e very country will recognize so close a bond that some day we will be united the world ‘round, and though speaking in many languages, we may share our common experiences and help solve our common problems.”36 Bae-tsung Kyong spoke next. She too wished for closer bonds, but sought first to inform her listeners about the situation in China and how the policies of the US and of Australia affected the Chinese. An “emancipation of labor” in China is needed, Bae-tsung declared. She saw “new thinking” emerging in China, with the Kuomintang “in principle in sympathy with the aims of l abor” and promising higher wages, freedom of association, no child l abor, and workers’ education. But b ecause sex equality lags, women workers need “a genuine movement headed up by their own leaders” and a “women’s u nion to work for women’s welfare.” At the same time, she reminded her listeners, China’s industrial prob lems were “problems of the world” and resulted from “racial and national discrimination” elsewhere, naming the Immigration Acts in the United States and the “White Australia Policy.”37 When Heagney weighed in, she did not defend Australia. Instead, she praised Bae-Tsung for her “splendid summing up of the effect of low standards” on “workers all over the world” and stressed the wisdom of countries cooperating “to raise the standard of life for all and minimize economic competition.”38 Compared to t hese sentiments, the recommendations that eventually emerged from the Industrial Section w ere tame. There was no analysis
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of how anti-Asian immigration policies in the United States and Australia reinforced low labor standards in China. Nor was there any condemnation of the policies of foreign capital. Instead, the group urged a joint study with the ILO of “best policies” to improve industrial standards in Pacific countries.39 Christman traveled to Honolulu for the Second Pan-Pacific W omen’s Conference in 1930, hoping once again that the organization might be a vehicle for transnational labor solidarities among w omen. She wrote of enjoying the long discussion on motherhood endowments and wage standards, subjects her Australian friends found boring since they had “already been faced” in Australia. She noted approvingly of the Industry Section resolutions backing international labor legislation and its pro- ILO stance. But the anticipated ILO study on “best practices” had been “indefinitely postponed,” she reported, and to her disappointment, most of the women in the Industry Section were “what trade unionists call ‘allies.’ ”40 The Australians agreed: the lack of participation from “girls actually employed in industry,” especially from China and Japan, was a problem, and they vowed to raise funds to bring “women from the ranks of labor” to future conferences.41 Women in the Industry Section had identified a troubling development: conference attendees were almost wholly women from universities, w omen’s clubs, and professional women’s organizations. The PPWA was diversifying culturally while becoming more homogeneous in terms of class.42 After 1930, the PPWA carried on, devoting itself largely to staging conferences.43 Anderson sent staff from the US Women’s Bureau, but no league w omen attended.44 The league lacked funds for such conferences, and it was frustrated by the lack of concrete programs involving industrial women. Other priorities beckoned. Alice Henry’s retirement in 1928 left the league with one less link to the Pacific. Ties between w omen in the United States and Australia continued, but Henry’s withdrawal was a major blow to the league’s aspirations of East–West collaboration. After Henry finished writing Women and the Labor Movement—published in 1923 as the third volume in the “Workers’ Bookshelf ” series of the Workers’ Education Bureau—the league had subsidized her travel to Europe and Australia.45 In Mel-
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bourne, she spent a year setting up an Australian Women’s Trade Union League to “develop self-reliance among w omen workers,” encourage “principles of democracy in industry,” and agitate for “equal opportunity and pay.” The organization welcomed working-class w omen—wage earners and housewives—as full members and elite w omen as nonvoting associate members. Henry, as ever, promoted cross-cultural understanding. But in Melbourne, she took it on herself to puncture myths Australians had about the United States, especially about American prosperity and lack of inequality. Very little” is known “of the real Amer ica,” she wrote. A fter Henry returned to America, she retired from “active work” with the league, and at age seventy-one moved to Santa Barbara. There, she looked out over the Pacific and toward the region she named the “Near West.” She had become an American citizen in 1923 and planned on living the rest of her life in the United States. But with her b rother ill and her funds depleted, she sailed back to Australia in 1932, returning to her birthplace after devoting some twenty-seven years to fostering America’s social democratic politics.46
Pan-American Alliances The league looked to North and South as well as East and West in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, its closest ties in the Americas w ere with Canada. Kathleen Derry had long evidenced a keen interest in US-Canadian exchange and transnational affairs. As vice president of the Women’s Federation a fter 1919, she sent regular updates on Canada’s labor situation and frequently crossed the border for US league and W omen’s Federation events. In 1920, Derry accepted a scholarship to the WTUL’s University of Chicago program for working women, where she studied with economist and future Illinois Senator Paul H. Douglas. Despite Derry’s scant education, Douglas found her work of g reat merit and encouraged her to publish it. Her investigation of the rapid adoption of minimum- wage laws in Canada, coauthored with Douglas, appeared in the Journal of Political Economy and as a Canadian government report in 1922.47 The AFL’s practice of hosting “fraternal delegates” at its conventions, a tradition the Canadians reciprocated, facilitated cross-border ties
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between l abor women in the two countries, as did the inclusion of Canadian members in US “international” unions—though the latter practice did not sit easily with many Canadian u nionists who rightly pointed to the marginality of Canadian interests in these US-dominated organ izations. Derry attended AFL conventions and offered strategies to her US sisters based on labor w omen’s experiences in Canada. In 1924, American league women spoke to the Canadian Congress of Labor on women’s leadership and encouraged more Canadian w omen to use the league’s Chicago training school. The league itself did not host a Canadian woman at its own convention until 1926—years after its “fraternal” exchanges with British, German, and French labor women—but relations between US and Canadian women remained cordial throughout the 1920s.48 League relations with w omen in Latin America w ere considerably more contentious. The fraught history between the United States and its southern neighbors made cooperation difficult. A fter 1898, the US occupied all or parts of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, while US capital expropriated natural resources and wealth across the region. AFL behavior toward Latin American l abor movements added to the complications, although at first Gompers seemed more friend than foe. A vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from its founding in 1898, Gompers had opposed territorial annexation of the Philippine Islands and urged fraternal relations with Cuba and other Caribbean nations. His experiences rolling cigars alongside Spanish-speaking workers and belonging to a u nion with mixed Anglo-Latin membership may have encouraged his interest in Caribbean labor movements. By World War I, Gompers also saw political advantages for the AFL and the United States in more robust Pan-American labor ties.49 In 1918, the AFL endorsed the Pan-American Federation of L abor (PAFL) proposed by Santiago Iglesias, president of the Puerto Rican labor federation, in part b ecause Gompers saw it as an opportunity to ally Mexico and other Latin American nations with the US war effort. Gompers, it soon became clear, believed in what David Montgomery has called “labor’s Monroe Doctrine.” In Gompers’ view, labor unions in Central
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and South America fell within a US sphere of influence, and Pan- American partnerships, u nder AFL leadership, w ere a key bulwark against, and an alternative to, European labor’s dominance in Latin America. The “world unity of l abor” might be possible but only “through two autonomous hemispheric international federations, one in the Old World and one in the New World.”50 Labor Pan-Americanism meant something different to Latin American unionists. It referred to a belief in the shared interests of the Amer icas and the possibilities of mutually beneficial relations. The Latin American founders of PAFL—Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico—sought AFL cooperation in protecting Latin American workers in the United States and opposing US intervention in the internal affairs of their nations. As part of the resurgence of Pan-Americanism after the war, some were also disillusioned with Europe and looked for closer relations among the American republics based on a common history of anti-European colonialism and a shared democratic ethos. A few leaned t oward a more Pan-Hispanic identity, others toward a wider alliance across the diverse cultures of the Americas. At PAFL’s first meeting in November 1918 in Laredo, Texas, delegates affirmed their belief in hemispheric cooperation based on mutual values of self-determination, workers’ rights, and democratic freedoms. They elected Gompers chair and, among other initiatives, appointed a committee “to investigate alleged abuse of the rights of Mexican workers by border authorities and discrimination against Mexicans in trade u nions in the United States.”51 By the second congress in July 1919, the good feeling had ebbed. A month earlier the AFL convention had endorsed broadening legislative restrictions on “coolie labor” to all foreign labor during wartime reconversion and specifically called for the exclusion of Mexican labor, even as the more moderate Constitutionalists emerged as the dominant political force in Mexico following its 1910 revolution. PAFL vice president Luis N. Morones, secretary-general of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) demanded an explanation. Gompers’ overwrought defense only made m atters worse. The unorganized foreign workman, he insisted,
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presented a “grave danger” to American standards and to America’s “common heritage.” AFL unions excluded nonwhite workers, w hether foreign born or native, Mexican delegates countered, and why “handcuff ” workers, rather than US capital? Morones called the AFL’s 1919 decision a “death blow” to the new Pan-American labor federation. He was not far from the mark, though the organization limped on until the end of the 1920s.52 It is not clear what the league thought about PAFL. Few if any women, e ither from the North or South, participated in it, and league contact was episodic at best.53 The league did not appear to correspond directly with PAFL members such as those in Puerto Rico. If they had, they might have learned about the strikes of sugar, coffee, and tobacco workers in the syndicalist u nion La Federación Libre de Trabajadores de Puerto Rico (Free Federation of Puerto Rican Workers). Led by Puerto Rican u nionist and feminist essayist Luisa Capetillo, the F ree Federation fostered a democratic, multiracial, transnational movement of cigar rollers (mostly men) and stemmers (mostly women) with nodes in New York, Tampa, Havana, and Puerto Rico.54 Most league interactions with Latin American women in the 1920s occurred not through mixed-sex trade union federations but in the international w omen’s l abor congresses and the Pan-American Union, the intergovernmental body formed in 1890 to promote commercial and scientific cooperation among the countries of the Americas. Yet the few Latin American w omen who had the time and resources to travel to the women’s labor congresses w ere mostly teachers, doctors, and writers, not industrial w omen or trade u nionists. Cuba’s Laura G. de Zayas Bazan, who served as a vice president of the W omen’s Federation, was a writer and professor in the Normal School of Havana. Argentina’s Alicia Moreau de Justo, who attended the 1919 congress, was a physician as well as an editor and activist. Poet and literary critic Julia García Games, who journeyed from Argentina to Vienna for the 1923 congress, was a socialist colleague of Moreau and former editor-in-chief of Nuestra Causa.55 These women often combined their travel to the congresses with other professional obligations. Moreau had come to Washington in 1919 for an international gathering of medical doctors. Laura G. de
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Zayas Bazan served as Cuba’s government adviser to the ILO’s annual meeting for two of her three trips to the w omen’s congresses. Her situation was unusual: only a handful of Latin American nations sent female delegates to the ILO in the 1920s.56 League women were eager to establish stronger connections with the two Argentinean women who had shown an interest in the Women’s Federation.57 When Julia García Games returned to Argentina after the 1923 congress, she found a letter from Margaret Dreier Robins inviting her to visit the United States. A few months later, Christman followed up with a second invitation, asking Games to speak at the 1924 WTUL convention. “I know that Argentina is a good many miles from New York, but perhaps the way w ill be made for you to meet with us and give us the benefit of the South American point of view. . . . We workers of the two Americas should know and understand each other very thoroughly.” Games explained that she did not have the financial resources to accept the invitation, but she expressed profuse enthusiasm for America and the work of the league: “You, my dear lady, are the daughter of a great country, a country I admire in spite of my acute Latinism, and of which I am an ardent propagandist.” She closed with wishes “that the American women may know that t here are others who understand them and celebrate with enthusiasm their efforts.” Perhaps her “acute Latinism” also made her visit to the United States less likely, but, if so, she never said.58 The WTUL fared little better with Moreau who, like Games, also shared political affinities with the league. Moreau, alongside her husband, Juan B. Justo, led the Argentine Socialist Party. The party rejected Soviet-led socialism and retained its affiliation with the social demo cratic L abour and Socialist International throughout the interwar period. For Moreau, socialism was inseparable from democracy and the inviolable human rights of every person. Moreau condemned autocracy, whether from the right or left.59 Moreau was an outspoken liberal socialist and, like Games, an admirer of the American democratic experiment.60 Nonetheless, although relations between Moreau and the league were cordial in the 1920s, collaborative projects did not emerge. Not surprisingly, league relations with politically active w omen in Mexico proved more fraught than those with Games and Moreau. US
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military incursion and economic domination provoked widespread anger in Mexico. League w omen did not fully acknowledge these realities, nor did they appear e ager to learn more about the political and social advances of their next-door neighbor. The league’s 1920 exchange with Mexico’s Elena Torres, a well-known radical educator and founder of Mexico’s feminist council, Consejo Feminista Mexicano, illustrates some of the barriers. When Torres wrote Anderson inquiring why the council did not get an invitation to the 1919 congress, Anderson explained that Mexico was not among the nations signing the League of Nations covenant. Perhaps Anderson had forgotten that the WTUL had managed to get US State Department permission to invite the Central Powers (also not signers of the League covenant in 1919) or perhaps she just preferred not to complicate the m atter. Nonetheless, she made matters worse by adding, “Had we known of the formation of the Council, we should have been most happy to send word to you.”61 It must have been disheartening for Torres to learn of the league’s ignorance of the council given its prominence in the feminist agitation leading up to Revolutionary Mexico’s 1917 constitution. The labor and social provisions of the constitution, among the most progressive of any nation, included “an eight hour law, prohibition of night work for women, double pay for overtime work, prohibition of child l abor u nder sixteen, three months rest before childbirth, with one month’s full pay before and after parturition, and equal pay for equal work,” as Torres laid out in her letter. Torres, as it turned out, had written Swartz as well in 1919, describing in detail the council’s “serious organization work among the working women of Mexico” and its concern with “industrial and social action.” Swartz was less inclined to invite the council to f uture congresses than Anderson and viewed it suspiciously. Was Consejo Feminista Mexicano a “legitimate” voice of Mexican women workers with “bona vide trade union” affiliates, she wondered to Anderson? After a long delay, Swartz wrote Torres asking for more information. Torres did not reply.62 But even if Swartz had deemed the council “legitimate” in 1920, it is unlikely Torres would have found the W omen’s Federation to her liking. In 1919 the Mexican Socialist Party had become the Mexican Commu-
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nist Party, and in 1922, Torres and Consejo Feminista Mexicano backed the affiliation of the Mexican Communist Party with the Third International. Moreover, although the council pressed for women’s suffrage and for social and economic rights for both sexes, its origins, Torres explained, lay in a “protest against” US troops in Mexico. The fight against US refusal to respect Mexican sovereignty remained a top priority, as did land reform and domestic control over Mexican industries and natural resources. The council and the league had gotten off to a bad start in 1920 and relations never recovered.63 Both league w omen and Torres, however, participated in the decidedly nonrevolutionary Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women (PAAW). Founded in Baltimore in 1922, PAAW elected Torres one of three vice presidents. PAAW roots lay in the prewar w omen’s auxiliary of the Pan-A merican Scientific Conferences of the Pan- American Union, which had been organized in 1915 by mostly middle- class professional Latin American w omen to “advance the cause of women’s rights in the Americ as.”64 The League of W omen Voters (LWV), led by founder Carrie Chapman Catt and first president Maud Park Wood, had called the 1922 Pan-American w omen’s conference to boost the auxiliary’s efforts and tie it more closely to LWV goals. Held in conjunction with the LWV’s third convention, the Pan-American conference aimed to promote “friendly relations” among the “three Americas” and advance women’s citizenship throughout the region. The US State Department and US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover supported the idea. Some two thousand w omen from twenty-t wo countries and two Canadian provinces discussed women’s political and civil rights, child welfare, sex trafficking, women’s education, and “raising standards for women in industry.”65 League women attended, including Mary Anderson, who organized a roundtable on w omen in industry with Margaret Dreier Robins speaking on international labor standards. In addition to Torres, PAAW sought to attract other Latin American feminist luminaries, most notably Paulina Luisi and Bertha Lutz. Although Uruguayan doctor and socialist Paulina Luisi did not attend the 1928 conference, PAAW appointed her honorary vice president. In 1919,
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Luisi had formed the influential women’s rights organization, the Uruguay Women’s Suffrage Alliance, and by 1922 was active internationally in the affairs of the International Alliance of W omen and the League of Nations. Women in Uruguay had already made impressive gains in social legislation and in access to education and the professions, and Uruguay would be among the first Latin American nations to enact suffrage. Luisi, however, ended up playing little or no role in the PAAW, finding Catt and other LWV feminists narrow and condescending.66 São Paulo-born, Sorbonne-educated zoologist Bertha Lutz, just emerging as “the ‘brains’ of Brazil’s suffrage movement,” took the opposite course. Lutz subscribed to a kind of “Brazilian exceptionalism,” historian Katherine Marino notes, and envisioned a Pan-Americanism “based on shared US and Brazilian hegemony.” As the daughter of a British w oman and a fluent speaker of English, French, and her native Portuguese, she had l ittle affinity for the Pan-Hispanic politics of some of the Spanish-speaking feminists like Luisi. Neither was she drawn to their socialism. For her, PAAW held g reat appeal. A few months a fter the conference, with the help of Carrie Catt, she founded the Brazilian Federation for the Advancement of W omen, Brazil’s leading w omen’s suffrage organization, and became the “most visible leader of the women’s movement in that country for nearly a half century.”67 US perspectives dominated the conference, with sessions in English, speakers from North America featured, and an agenda oriented t oward US concerns. It was hardly a Pan-Americanism of equals. The needs of labor women across the Americas also received short shrift, despite the advocacy of league members and Latin American women like Torres who had petitioned the LWV, without success, for a discussion of the problems of Mexican migrant l abor. Nor did the aims of PAAW, formulated at the 1922 conference, mention low-income women or the need for raising industrial standards. Rather, the group took as its mission women’s educational opportunity, female suffrage, married women’s rights, and the promotion of Pan-American friendship.68 Overall, PAAW practiced a kind of “imperial Pan-American feminism,” as scholars note, but its focus on political and civil rights also grew out of the shared priorities of women like Catt and Lutz who led
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it (Torres resigned in 1925).69 As a result, few league w omen saw it as a promising vehicle for advancing social or economic rights or formulating Pan-American labor feminism.70 Like Torres and Luisi, they too failed to continue in the organization. Over the next few years, disappointed and bereft of allies, league leaders did little to rekindle bonds with Latin American women.
New International Feminisms Threaten the Old The league’s nemesis, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), judged the possibilities for alliances in Latin America differently. NWP leaders moved energetically into inter-American politics in the mid-1920s, focusing their efforts on the Pan-American Union, the organization set up in 1890 to promote cooperation among the Latin American republics and the United States. NWP leaders also forged stronger alliances with British and European women who shared their agenda. League feminists girded for battle. With the ERA thwarted in the US Congress and membership in decline, NWP believed progress on securing multilateral agreements among the American nation-states on an Equal Nationality Treaty and an Equal Rights Treaty would help move their agenda domestically.71 The Equal Nationality Treaty, establishing the right of a woman to retain her own national citizenship upon marriage to a man of a different country, was the less divisive of the two. The WTUL expressed dismay that the crusade ignored the question of access to citizenship for migrants and other stateless peoples, but it reluctantly lent its name to the broad coalition pursuing independent-nationality rights for married women in the 1920s.72 The Equal Rights Treaty (ERT)—described by historian Paula Pfeffer as “the ERA in international dress”—was another m atter. It asked states to promise “that upon ratification of this Treaty, men and women shall have equal rights throughout the territory subject to their jurisdiction.” Supporters of the ERT envisioned nations signing a multistate treaty pledging w omen’s political rights, including suffrage, and the end of differential treatment of men and w omen in property, marital, and labor law. In addition, the NWP thought, w hether or not the United
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States signed it, the ERT would create pressure in the United States for the ERA.73 Other US feminists, especially the league and its allies, feared the ERT offered a backdoor route to equal rights legislation in the United States and condemned it as a threat to ILO woman-specific conventions. International w omen’s organizations had proliferated rapidly in the 1920s. The ILO and the League of Nations, both headquartered in Geneva, offered an “unprecedented opportunity structure” for the flourishing of international advocacy, and US and European-based women’s groups took advantage of it, shifting resources to Geneva. By 1925, a Joint Standing Committee of W omen’s International Organizations had coalesced to lobby for women’s rights and social reform in Geneva, with most members supporting a broad feminist agenda that included the ILO maternity convention and other woman-specific regulations. The World YWCA, the International Alliance of Women, and the International Cooperative W omen’s Guild w ere major bulwarks of this wing of international feminism in the 1920s.74 But some feminists had long opposed woman-specific regulations.75 As more nations signed on to the ILO maternity and night work conventions and modeled their national legislation on them, opponents redoubled efforts to overturn them. The NWP and its international partners— called “legal equality feminists” by historian Susan Zimmermann—led the charge. They judged woman-only ILO conventions as harmful to women and at odds with a fundamental tenet of feminism: equal legal treatment of the sexes.76 The ILO night-work convention was especially problematic, but some thought the maternity convention should be abolished as well, despite its provisions for income support and job guarantees. It treated men and women differently, they argued, and such differential treatment disadvantaged w omen in terms of market income and job opportunity. In 1926, Alice Paul traveled for six months in Europe with NWP president Alva Belmont, a wealthy Vanderbilt divorcée, daughter of an affluent southern cotton broker, and a prime financial backer of the NWP. Both women had become ever more convinced of the necessity of international activism. What they lacked, however, were powerful international
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allies. A fter the multimillion-member International Alliance of W omen voted down an NWP proposal condemning women-specific occupational health and safety regulations at its 1926 convention and denied the NWP membership—a “wafer-thin victory” for the social feminists in which the US delegation, including the league’s Mabel Leslie, figured prominently—Paul and Belmont looked elsewhere.77 They soon found a suitable partner: the Open Door Council, a predominantly British group working for “equal economic freedom, opportunity, and status for women workers” and against ILO sex-specific standards.78 As in the United States, splits in the British feminist movement often followed class fault lines. In the opinion of The Labour Woman, the British trade union women’s paper, class differences were central to the 1920s divide among British feminists over the question of “laissez- faire in industry.” The Labour Woman saw the “old feeble clamour” against market regulation, the cry of conservatives in the late nineteenth century, reviving among professional w omen in the 1920s because of the growing legitimacy of ILO conventions “which prescribe special restrictions on w omen’s labour.” Night-work prohibitions provoked the most wrath, but “die-hards” opposed the maternity convention “because it would lengthen the compulsory withdrawal from industry.”79 British l abor w omen also worried about being barred from wage work. But instead of eliminating the maternity standard, with its twelve-week paid leave provisions, job return guarantees, and mandated nursing breaks, they proposed giving w omen more control over the timing of the leave and sufficient maternity benefits to offset their time away from waged work. In 1929, the Open Door Council, with NWP encouragement, expanded its membership to other nations, accepted men into its ranks, and organized the Open Door International, which soon became a leading player in the multinational network of legal equality feminists. The Open Door International proclaimed the ILO “a menace to w omen all over the world” and issued an eleven-point Woman Workers’ Charter of Economic Rights as a direct challenge to “the anti-Feminist Labour Bureau of the League of Nations” [the ILO] with its “restrictions related to maternity” and other rules. The Open Door International marshaled
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its forces in Geneva, determined to create a new international framework for w omen’s equality.80 ILO officials were aghast at the rising clamor against the 1919 conventions. The ILO’s Martha Mundt turned for help to allies in the w omen’s movement and friends in international labor and socialist organizations. In 1926, Mundt had written Edith McDonald, the W omen’s Federation officer later hired by the Labour and Socialist International, concerned about “certain w omen extremists in E ngland and America” who are “fighting hard against any legal protection of women and this in the name of freedom and equal rights.” Mundt confessed alarm too that “so many women, especially Anglo-Saxons, are quite taken in by the Equal Rights Movement.” Perhaps the International Socialist Women’s Committee, she asked McDonald, might help counter these developments?81 She feared for what might happen in Geneva. To the surprise of many, including Alice Paul, the NWP made pro gress first in Latin America, not Geneva. The NWP’s Doris Stevens, a polarizing figure, charismatic to some and hated by others, had stationed herself in Latin America. Noted for her unorthodox sexuality, savvy public relations, willingness to bend the truth and forge opportunistic alliances, and her total devotion to the cause of w omen’s legal equality with men, she was a formidable opponent in every way. As we saw e arlier, Latin American women had sought a w omen’s auxiliary within the Pan-American Union as early as 1915 with the support of US feminists, including league women. Efforts to advance a women’s division in the Pan-American Union intensified in the 1920s and, acting independently of their northern neighbors, Latin American feminists also aired their own idea of a treaty among nations guaranteeing women’s rights.82 Although a relative latecomer to Pan-Americanism, Stevens catapulted herself into leadership of the fight for a women’s division in the Pan-American Union. A pivotal moment came in early 1928, at the sixth Pan-American Union Conference in Havana. A fter hundreds of women paraded through the streets, the majority-male delegates relented and agreed to the female plenary demand for a Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM). The Pan-American Union tasked CIM to report on “the question of the civil and political equality of
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omen in the continent” at the next official conference. Stevens became w CIM chair a few months later.83 Not everyone was pleased. Stevens’ leadership of CIM was controversial from the beginning and remained so. Some viewed Stevens as an ally in their opposition to US imperialism and as a different kind of US feminist than the condescending Anglophile Carrie Chapman Catt. They admired her militant tactics and willingness to confront the US State Department and believed that she, like them, saw clear “connections between equal rights for women and for nations.” Others remained unconvinced. US feminists, no matter what they said, were incapable of participating in partnerships in which their national interests did not dominate. Her opponents complained too about an American at the helm when feminists from Cuba and Panama deserved the credit for the Havana breakthrough. They worried their own priorities for CIM, such as advancing a more Pan-Hispanic feminism and a broader program of social reform, would be sidelined. A few, like Bertha Lutz of Brazil, disliked Stevens intensely; she believed Stevens had unfairly usurped her as the rightful leader in Pan-American affairs.84 Yet Stevens and the NWP found more common ground in the 1920s with Latin American w omen than did the league. Some Latin American activists, especially t hose in radical and peasant movements who operated largely outside of CIM, judged the Equal Rights Treaty (ERT), if they judged it at all, as largely irrelevant to the pressing economic and social problems faced by the majority of women. Other reformers, often from the elite classes, viewed the ERT favorably, seeing it as an aid to the b attle for equality with men, including w omen’s equal right to suffrage. The first Latin American state, Ecuador, would not enact women’s suffrage until 1929, and even then, only literate women gained voting rights, a policy that denied suffrage to most Indigenous, poor, and nonwhite women. But what political scientist Ann Towns describes as a “third and distinctive suffrage wave” in Latin America was beginning.85 Inside CIM, the politics of women varied widely, with some highly critical of authoritarian elite rule. But many cared more about w omen’s civil and political rights than about fostering economic egalitarianism and democratic governments. For them, the priorities of the NWP meshed
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with their own.86 Stevens and other NWP women shared the outrage of Latin American professional and elite women who were denied the opportunity and power enjoyed by men of their social group. After the Havana breakthrough in 1928, Stevens, backed by CIM, moved the ERT forward in the international arena. When diplomats assembled to sign the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, a multinational treaty celebrated by peace activists worldwide, Stevens, representing CIM, demanded consideration of the ERT. Refused, she and other legal equality feminists picketed the conference and were promptly arrested and jailed. Journalists flocked to the drama, as Stevens had hoped, and raised the profile of ERT internationally. Emboldened, Stevens laid plans to introduce the treaty at other international forums. She believed 1928 was a defining moment, the year when “international feminism was born.” From the perspective of league women and their allies, 1919 seemed the more likely date for the birth of international feminism. In 1928, they felt, the movement they had launched was u nder fierce attack. A “new kind of w omen’s internationalism” was threatening the old.87 Alarmed, WTUL w omen and their allies stepped up their campaign against the NWP and legal equality feminism. League leaders wrote to Pan-American Union officials, complaining about Stevens’ appointment to CIM.88 The League of Women Voters, a persistent critic of the NWP in the United States as well as internationally, hired WTUL legislative secretary Ethel Smith to write a refutation of the assumptions guiding the NWP.89 Smith’s 1929 pamphlet, Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women, did little to slow Doris Stevens, but it offered much to full rights feminists looking for a usable past and a sense of the righteousness of their cause. Smith labeled all sides of the “equal rights” debate “feminist” and directly countered NWP claims of leading the b attle for women’s freedom. NWP followers were actually “traditionalists,” she wrote, stuck in the individualist feminism of the past c entury. The first wave of feminism, birthed in an age of rights and republicanism, understandably strove for individual freedom and equality with men. With the industrial revolution and the rise of great social and economic inequalities, however, a second, more modern social feminism was needed that combined w omen’s rights with social reform. This was the new
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movement for freedom. Like men, women too required answers to the problems of the industrial age and to the global hierarchies of nation and peoples. The ERT, she acknowledged, might help spur women’s suffrage in Latin America and other regions, but in the end, it would do more harm than good. The “outmoded individualistic feminism” trumpeted by the NWP was out of step with the times, she argued. To secure freedom, women must recommit to the struggle for social and economic justice.90 Smith’s call came at a propitious moment. The collapse of the global economy created an unprecedented social crisis and destabilized politi cal regimes around the world. In the United States, sentiment for a new egalitarian, social democratic politics was growing. US full rights feminists seized the opportunity.
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New Deals
As director of investigation for the New York State Factory Investigating Commission in 1911, Frances Perkins showed reporters a ladder that served as the only fire escape for factory workers. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
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As economic crisis spread over the industrialized Western world in the late 1920s and fascists took power in Europe and elsewhere, US women refashioned the Democratic Party and American society. They made both more democratic and egalitarian. Veteran female reformers moved into top positions in Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. A younger, more racially diverse group of female activists reinvigorated labor and socialist movements from below. Americ a shifted left. W hether inside the government or outside, they judged an expanded state and labor movement as essential in the fight to remake capitalism and preserve democracy. The profound rethinking of American social policy in this era—the enactment of large-scale public works, social security, and worker rights—reflected the visionary agenda of full rights feminists and was beholden to their actions. The “terror of the depression” was a “stern educator” of the American p eople, Margaret Bondfield observed on her visit to the United States in 1933. The responses the country sought in the face of grave threat, however, had long been simmering. The Roosevelt administration, as historian Daniel Rodgers observes, brought “a g reat explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”1 The crises of the 1930s w ere global as well as domestic. In response, New Deal feminists sought socialized global labor markets and reengagement with international institutions like the ILO. To their surprise, some of their most vocal and consistent adversaries turned out to be other feminists like t hose in the National W oman’s Party who valorized unregulated market economies for w omen as well as men. Hostilities between social democratic New Dealers and free market feminists worsened in the 1930s, rooted in enduring economic and social inequalities among women.
6 Social Democracy, American Style
In january 1933, shortly a fter Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Demo cratic Party captured Congress and the White House, Mary Anderson defended the new president against criticism from Margaret Dreier Robins, one of the few WTUL leaders who voted Republican in 1932. Although still a bit awed by Robins, Anderson spoke her mind. True, she admitted, Roosevelt offered “new and radical” uses of government and was leaving “rugged individualism and private initiative” b ehind, but that was what the country needed. “This may be socialism,” Anderson shrugged, but “it really doesn’t make much difference to me what it is called. We have to devise another system that w ill take into consideration the good of all the citizens.” She c ouldn’t predict how the country would react, but “I imagine we w ill come to it little by little without revolution or any or the things that are so disastrous for a nation.”1 Anderson’s desire for state action and for new ways of thinking was widespread in the early 1930s. What pragmatist philosopher John Dewey called a “new liberalism” was gaining ground. Unlike e arlier “laissez- faire liberalism,” the new liberalism recognized an expanded role for the state in ensuring freedom and social progress and saw benefits in a “socialized economy.”2 Many New Dealers, including WTUL women and their allies, spoke unapologetically about using the state to promote social security, shared prosperity, and worker rights. And once in office, they unleashed a torrent of federal laws and programs aimed at doing 155
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just that. Modeled on what full rights feminists had pioneered for de cades, these laws transformed the relation between labor and capital, between the state and the market, and between the government and its citizens. Outside of government, a younger generation of women activists took to the streets, to picket lines, and to u nion halls. They flocked to labor schools and to town hall debates. In alliance with like-minded men, they reinvigorated left politics and built a mass multiracial workers’ movement dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and power. Some joined Socialist and Communist Parties, preferring a left alternative to the New Deal. But by 1936, many cast their vote for the Democratic Party, seeing it as the most v iable vehicle for preserving democracy and attaining economic and social justice. Their “New Deal from below” bolstered the more radical flank of the Democratic Party. Full rights feminists—young and old, bureaucrats and insurgents—built an American-style social democracy in the 1930s.
Remaking the Democratic Party League feminists had divided their vote among multiple political parties in the 1920s. But as the Democratic Party shifted leftward, embracing a more socially and economically progressive politics, more came to see it as their ally. A small group of women reformers had helped keep the national Democratic Party alive a fter its disastrous defeat in the 1924 presidential campaign. Determined to make the party more inclusive, counter its large pro-Klan wing, and mend ugly fissures over race, religion, immigration, and Prohibition, women like Belle Moskowitz, Emily Newell Blair, and Nellie Tayloe Ross set up a W omen’s Division in the National Democratic Committee and encouraged the creation of local Democratic women’s clubs across the country.3 In fact, much of the leftward shift in party thinking occurred at the local and state level, with New York an early adopter.4 The embrace of economic justice and social inclusion by New York Democrats in the 1920s enhanced the appeal of the Democratic Party to New York WTUL women. In addition, key leaders like Rose Schnei-
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derman and Maud O’Farrell Swartz reconsidered their political allegiances as their friendship with the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor, deepened. Before the war, Eleanor Roosevelt had joined the National Consumers’ League and volunteered at New York’s Rivington Street Settlement House, teaching immigrant girls on the Lower East Side. In 1919, she resolved to find out more about the WTUL a fter attending the Women’s L abor Congress. She signed up for the New York WTUL finance committee in 1922, and, within a year, helped raise enough money for the branch to buy its own building. She walked in picket lines with women strikers, counseled desperate mothers denied workers’ compensation after debilitating workplace injuries, and volunteered at the WTUL clubhouse, where she often read stories to c hildren in the daycare program. Schneiderman and Swartz became regular dinner guests at the Roosevelt mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Soon the social visits expanded to Hyde Park and the Roosevelt summer cottage on Canada’s Campobello Island.5 Schneiderman and Swartz, socialists and labor party activists for decades, edged slowly t oward the Demo cratic Party. As a f avor to Eleanor, Schneiderman drafted a strong pro- labor plank for the Democratic Women’s Division to present at the party’s 1924 convention—proposals it ignored. Even so, her energy and vote in 1924 went elsewhere: to local, state, and national third-party movements. Yet as the Democratic Party evolved, so did the political allegiances of Schneiderman and Swartz. Indeed, as it turned out, they helped the Democratic Party become more acceptable to full rights feminists like themselves by making sure FDR better understood working people and their u nions. Eleanor had long tutored her husband on the need for social welfare programs and l abor standards. Schneiderman and Swartz reinforced these lessons and added their own. They regaled FDR with stories meant to teach the “theory and history of the trade u nion movement,” as f uture Secretary of L abor Frances Perkins l ater told it. Swartz was especially “witty and amusing,” Perkins thought. Her “descriptions of trade u nion meetings w ere vivid, realistic, and lightened with humor.” Trade union men were not “angels” but “ordinary hard-working men.” In the tales Swartz unfolded, “she had ideals and so did they.” FDR came
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to see the union movement “in a new light,” Perkins believed. While “well disposed toward it,” he had “never understood with real detail the purpose of the movement.”6 In 1928, Schneiderman and Swartz made the shift. They joined Eleanor Roosevelt and scores of other progressive women to campaign for Al Smith, the Democratic nominee for president. It was a pivotal moment in the transformation of the party and of w omen’s politics. With Belle Moskowitz—Al Smith’s chief political adviser in New York since 1918—as the national director of publicity, the Democrats reached out to progressives in and out of the party and, relying on women’s dense civic networks, built hundreds of local “citizen committees.”7 Eleanor Roosevelt saw a yearning to end “reactionary attitudes in both parties” as she crisscrossed the country on Smith’s behalf. Her optimism was tempered though by the “depths of prejudice” she encountered against Smith, the first Catholic to run for president. The Klan’s organized brand of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy had declined precipitously by 1928, but its virulent ideologies lived on.8 Smith lost the election, but the Democratic Party kept moving leftward, both at the state and national level. After FDR stepped into the New York governorship vacated by Smith in 1928, he expanded on the initiatives of his progressive predecessor, and like Smith, he turned to the dense New York network of Democratic w omen activists to staff his administration. In one truly inspired moment, scoffing at naysayers who doubted a w oman could command the needed authority and respect, he named Frances Perkins head of the New York State Industrial Commission. Few had done more than Perkins to move economic justice and social welfare issues to the center of New York Democratic politics over the last two decades. Few would do more to turn t hose ideas into national policy.
The Education of Frances Perkins Frances Perkins’ intellectual transformation mirrored that of many in the older generation of activist women who remade the Democratic Party. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1880, Frances Perkins grew up in a
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well-to-do Republican household with a f ather in the paper goods business. She absorbed the family’s pride in its New England Revolutionary- era lineage, learned Greek and classical literature from her f ather, and attended the local Congregational Church. She also imbibed the conventional wisdoms of her day about the economy and the personal failings of the poor. At Mount Holyoke College she began to learn otherwise. At the behest of economic history professor Annah May Soule she visited nearby textile and paper mill factories and spent hours talking to young female operatives about their lives. Mesmerized by visiting lecturer Florence Kelley’s account of the National Consumers’ League efforts to end industrial abuses, she started a student chapter. Kelley’s keen intelligence, steely determination, and her insistence on “legislation for effecting reform” inspired Perkins for the rest of her life.9 After a brief, unhappy sojourn back in Worcester following her 1902 graduation from Mount Holyoke, Perkins moved to Chicago, where she volunteered at Chicago’s Hull House and taught biology and physics in nearby Lake Forest. At Hull House, she encountered what she considered “an absolutely new idea”: trade u nions as “the answer to most of the problems of poverty.” Not in the “class struggle Marxian sense,” she clarified, but in the “typical old-fashioned English trade u nion approach . . . a few people getting together . . . not letting each other down, telling the boss they won’t work unless he paid them a decent wage.” Her Hull House assignment to collect money from employers who refused to pay their workers confirmed her sense of the need for worker organ ization. She read the critical theorists of her day on labor, wealth, and poverty, absorbing Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, and the writings of University of Chicago and Wisconsin economists.10 She also sought a Christian faith more compatible with her social concerns and joined an Anglo-Catholic–leaning Episcopal Church. She remained a lifelong Episcopalian, interpreting its tenets of personal responsibility, mercy, and Christian service to others through the teachings of James Huntington, the Episcopal priest who founded the Church League of Industrial Democracy; Episcopal missionary Charles Henry Brent, author of With God in the World (1900); and Roman Catholic cleric John Ryan, whose influential book, A Living Wage (1906), made the case for just wages.11
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When offered a job as general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association, an immigrant advocacy group set up by Frances Kellor, she took it. In Philadelphia, Perkins joined the Socialist Party and learned from immigrant women at the Protective Association “how the poor got by with so little income.” She became “more and more convinced that the women were the most exploited . . . whatever the men got, they got lower—in wages, in types of work, in privileges, in opportunities of employment.”12 Perkins enrolled at the Wharton School of Economics, where she studied political economy with Simon N. Patten, the German-trained theorist of economic surplus and social progress. Although Perkins did not embrace all she heard, Patten’s theories proved foundational to her understanding of the economy and the state’s role in it.13 Patten rejected the dominant economics of pessimism and inviolable market laws. Poverty is not the result of immorality, poor character, or overproduction, he argued. It can best be abolished by changes in the environment: better jobs, higher wages, good schools, and health care. A “new morality” of “expanded consumption” could spur full employment and raise wages. Government programs based on taxation should replace charity. He lauded the growth of “industrial u nionism” and judged it a laboratory of “representative government” and “interclass democracy.” If “social workers”—a term he preferred to “charity workers”—thought in new ways and demanded a more activist government, Patton told his promising student, a “new civilization” was possible.14 Patten helped Perkins secure a fellowship at Columbia University where she completed her master’s degree in social economy (economics and sociology) in 1910, conducted surveys of industrial conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation, and, e ager to collaborate with Florence Kelley, took over as executive secretary of the New York City Consumers’ League. Any lingering uncertainty about her c areer choice vanished after she witnessed “a most horrid spectacle”: dozens of young girls, many with “their clothes afire,” jumping to their deaths as flames consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. A fter the tragedy, Perkins and New York league officer Mary Dreier, as we learned e arlier, lobbied for a dramatic overhaul of labor statutes alongside state legislators Robert F.
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Wagner and Al Smith, chairs of the Factory Investigating Commission. A fearless, clever lobbyist, Perkins won Irish Catholic Tammany Hall machine Democrats to her side—despite being a w oman, an Episcopalian, and with no votes to buy. She long remembered “Big Tim” S ullivan’s outspoken backing of her fifty-four-hour bill. “He was real,” she said. “You didn’t have to show him statistics on fatigue to make him understand that a girl’s back aches if she works too much.”15 When Al Smith, New York’s newly elected Democratic governor, appointed her to the state industrial commission in 1919, she accepted. It was not an easy decision. Perkins was recovering from a series of personal tragedies. Her 1913 marriage to Paul C. Wilson, a promising economist in the city’s Bureau of Municipal Research, had almost collapsed as Perkins, now in her mid-thirties, struggled with her husband’s infidelity, a life-threatening miscarriage, and a second pregnancy, which ended with the tragic death of her newborn son. Yet a fter the birth of a d aughter in 1916, Perkins believed her marriage was recovering. She had also settled into satisfying volunteer work overseeing a model maternal and infant care center for poor women, which she had started. Then in 1918 Wilson suffered a serious mental breakdown, and Perkins had to assume financial responsibility for their young child and an ailing husband. She hired two h ousehold employees, donned her signature black felt tricorn hat, suggestive of her revolutionary no-nonsense heritage, and took up full-time employment.16 Perkins and Smith—who had dropped out of school at twelve to work as a newsboy and fishmonger when his f ather died—shared a passionate belief in “social welfare, l abor protection, and cultural pluralism.”17 To the dismay of her staunch Republican family—and some of her friends in the Socialist Party, who had hoped for her vote in New York—Perkins registered as a Democrat. As a state labor mediator in 1919, traveling alone to communities scarred by anger and violence, she withstood bomb threats and intimidation to resolve workplace disputes. Smith lost the governorship in 1920, but a fter his reelection in 1922, Perkins returned to her post in the administration. Over the next six years, New York enacted the most progressive state labor codes in the nation. After 1928, with Roosevelt as governor and Perkins as industrial commissioner,
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New York’s reform experiments continued. “Social justice is possible in a great industrial society,” Perkins told the celebratory crowd gathered in her honor in 1929.18
New Deal Women’s Networks In 1933, as Roosevelt’s new Secretary of L abor, Perkins became the first woman to hold a US cabinet post. A formidable group of other feminists—aptly named the “New Deal w omen’s network” by historian Susan Ware—worked alongside her in the administration.19 The “old male Labor Department” was no more, the New Yorker mused, and “one by one, the cuspidors are being taken away.”20 The L abor Department filled with women who, like Perkins, had decades in the trenches of progressive reform. Clara Mortenson Beyer, among Perkins’ most trusted aides, joined the Labor Department in 1928, serving first in the US C hildren’s Bureau before becoming associate director of the new Division of Labor Statistics that Perkins created in 1934. The California- born d aughter of Danish immigrants, Beyer had an abiding interest in worker rights and wage injustice from her own childhood of poverty. After earning a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1916, she taught labor economics at Bryn Mawr, assisted the War L abor Policies Board, and tackled the public side of wage enforcement as secretary of the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Board.21 For advice on New Deal maternal and child welfare policy, Perkins relied on US C hildren’s Bureau director Grace Abbott (whom Perkins knew from prewar reform circles in Chicago) and Katharine Lenroot (who led the Children’s Bureau after 1934). Mary Anderson kept her job as Women’s Bureau Director, and Schneiderman sat on the National Recovery Administration Labor Advisory Board from 1933 to 1935, the only w oman on the board. The powerful Mary Dewson—an economist, former president of the New York Consumers’ League, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s ally in the 1930 campaign to reelect FDR as governor—headed the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, which FDR made permanent in 1932. She was instrumental in ensuring female appointments in the New Deal administration
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and the Democratic Party and served on the Social Security Advisory Committee.22 Mary McLeod Bethune joined the advisory council of the National Youth Administration soon after it was formed, and in 1936, when Roo sevelt selected her to direct its Office of Negro Affairs, she became the highest-ranking African American New Deal official. Even so, she was not fully integrated into the New Deal network of white feminist reformers. Segregation by race was still the norm in 1930s social life, alongside widespread racial discrimination and racial violence. In addition, Bethune, like the majority of African Americans, had voted for Hoover in 1932 and had kept her distance from the Democratic Party. She chaired Florida’s Republican Colored Voters League for Hoover in 1928, and in 1930 visited the White House at his invitation. Nonetheless, Bethune switched to the Democratic Party in 1933. She believed New Deal social programs had the potential to ease the immense economic suffering in Black communities and she sensed, in part through her friendship with the First Lady, that a growing portion of the Demo cratic Party stood for racial justice. Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged her husband’s choice of Bethune in 1936, but he needed little convincing. He had met with Bethune on more than one occasion and found her forceful, eloquent, and pragmatic. Once in office, Bethune turned to the First Lady for aid in opening government programs to African Americans and moving forward legislation blocked by segregationists in both parties. Bethune also counted on Perkins, Anderson, and other white egalitarians in the administration to back her plea for provisions forbidding race discrimination in pay and job opportunities in New Deal statutes.23 Yet Bethune’s main allies remained other Black Americans. In 1935, Bethune created the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) as a “unified front” dedicated to enhancing the political visibility and power of Black w omen and advancing their concerns. Starting with some twenty-eight w omen’s groups, the council expanded rapidly to become the largest and most enduring association of Black w omen in the United States. Bethune’s national network, which included Black church groups, college sororities, YWCA clubs, and other civic organizations,
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coordinated lobbying efforts across the country and attracted overflow audiences to its “citizenship training” classes.24 Bethune also took charge of the “Black Cabinet,” an informal group of high-level, mostly male African American federal officials. The Black Cabinet, in tandem with NCNW, NAACP, Urban League and other Black organizations, prioritized equal opportunity in employment (including the hiring of African Americans in government jobs). They pushed as well for legislation making lynching a federal crime, for federal guarantees of voting rights for all citizens, and for an end to legalized segregation in education, housing, and public life. Although there was little visible progress on these issues in the 1930s, African Americans cast more of their votes for the Democratic Party, judging its policies superior to those of the Republicans. In 1936, for the first time, the majority of African Americans, men and women, voted Democratic.25 Was the New Deal a moment of political power for women? Judging from the small number of women in Congress, the answer might be no. In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, Republican of Montana, had been the first woman to enter the US Congress. Few others followed. Those who did, the so-called widow contingent, took over a husband’s political appointment after he died or left office. New Jersey Democratic congresswoman Mary Theresa Norton, a strong voice for progressive reform for more than twenty-five years in the US House, was one of the few exceptions. In 1925, she became the first Democratic woman elected to Congress without being preceded by her husband. In the late 1930s, she would lead the fight in the House for the first national wage-and-hour legislation covering men, women, and children.26 But if we use measures other than the number of w omen in Congress, the New Deal was a high moment of women’s political influence. Full rights feminists held powerful posts in the federal government and in the Democratic Party. Of equal importance, the president listened to and consulted with the First Lady and with other women New Dealers, Frances Perkins first among them. Their access to the president caused some resentment. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, noticing this novel development, designated Clara Beyer, Molly Dewson, Mary Norton, and Mary LaDame (whom Perkins knew from New York state gov-
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ernment and the Russell Sage Foundation) as Perkins’ own “Ladies’ Brain Trust,” a female rival to the famous “Brains Trust” of male advisers on whom the president otherwise relied.27 But there is no denying that the ideas and programs of women New Dealers found favor. The policies full rights feminists had pursued for the last thirty years were now looked to as models.
The State Steps In In 1933, Roosevelt acted first to stave off a banking panic, end the home and farm foreclosure epidemic, and put the unemployed—one-quarter of the nation—back to work. In his first hundred days, among other bills, he signed the Glass-Steagall Act, guaranteeing bank deposits and regulating bank investment practices; the Agricultural Adjustment Act, stabilizing agricultural production and prices; and federal relief mea sures for the jobless.28 But pressure grew to fix falling wages and address inherited inequalities of wealth and power. The vast bulk of wealth generated by productivity gains and rising consumption in the 1920s had ended up in the hands of a small slice of the population, creating vast economic disparities and insecurity. In 1929, before the stock market collapse, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held some 44 percent of the nation’s wealth; their worth had quadrupled after World War I, while the rest of the nation saw modest gains at best.29 In response, over the next six years, Roosevelt enacted an unprece dented set of policies to raise wages and regulate employment conditions, redistribute power between capital and labor, and foster economic security. Many of these policies closely resembled what Perkins and other full rights feminists had sought for decades. Th ese veteran fighters were hard to resist. They brought ambitious (yet detailed and tested) programs to the table and lobbied hard for their ideas. In her first month in office, Perkins sought large-scale relief and public employment programs, which Roosevelt endorsed after much persuasion.30 But Perkins wanted more: wage-and-hour legislation, abolition of child labor, and laws furthering u nionization.31 She also wanted a comprehensive set of social insurance programs. She considered social insurance a
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“brilliant” invention and a needed “structural alternative” to the band-aid of relief. “It had all been tried in certain states and in foreign countries,” she assured the president.32 But first she sought peace with organized labor. AFL president William Green had declared organized labor would “never become reconciled” to Perkins’ appointment as Labor Secretary. She ignored the insult and in 1933 invited Green and other top male labor officials (plus league women like Schneiderman and Agnes Nestor) to consult with her in Washington. L abor men and w omen met with Perkins for two days, crowded into the uncomfortable meeting rooms of the old, crumbling Labor Department building. Labor’s desires often paralleled hers: emergency relief for the jobless, abolition of child labor, shorter hours, and workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.33 Yet when Perkins called for inserting state-set wage floors for men and women into Senator Hugo Black’s thirty-hour bill, Green balked. The AFL had long opposed state-set wage minimums for male workers, and in 1933, Green held firm. Wages for able-bodied adult men should be negotiated between labor and management, he argued, not set by politicians or experts in Washington. The policy flare-up between Perkins and organized labor in 1933 was not readily resolved—nor would it be the last one. Nonetheless, Perkins made clear her intention to involve AFL labor leaders in decision-making, and as the world changed around them, so too would they.34 In June 1933 Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the New Deal’s first legislative attempt to raise wages and discourage destructive competition. In addition to an expansive public works program, the NIRA established a National Recovery Administration charged with writing industry-specific price, wage, and hour “codes” in consultation with management and labor representatives. Among other provisions, t hese codes guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain without prejudice or penalty. The NIRA’s reliance on employers to voluntarily adopt t hese so-called blue eagle codes proved unworkable even before the Supreme Court ruled much of it unconstitutional in 1935.35 Roosevelt immediately proposed a new public works program, the Works Progress Administration, but he was at a
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loss when it came to replacing the National Recovery Administration’s controversial worker rights protections. At this point, Perkins’ old friend from New York’s prewar reform days, Robert F. Wagner, a US senator since 1926, stepped forward to offer his bold new “labor disputes bill.” Based on his less-than-happy experiences trying to settle strikes as chair of NIRA’s Mediation Board, Wagner’s bill gave government more power over employer behavior. An eloquent speaker who shared the immigrant and working-class background of many of his constituents, Wagner sold his bill as a boon to the economy, a guarantor of industrial democracy and stable worker organizations, and a route toward labor peace. “Inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital,” he argued, depressed wages and purchasing power, fueled industrial violence, and resulted in less freedom for workers. Perkins too believed firmly in the necessity of trade unions and of “equalizing bargaining power” for a robust economy and democracy. Like Wagner, she knew firsthand about employers’ fierce resistance to independent worker organization. But she had reservations about Wagner’s bill. The l abor board he envisioned would be quasi-judicial, largely outside her control, and have broad powers over employer behavior. She wondered too about w hether having the state oversee elections at individual workplaces, as Wagner proposed, was the optimum way of securing u nion recognition by employers. Nonetheless, she eventually signed on, and in July 1935, the Wagner Act, a law with historic protections for workers and equally historic constraints on employers, became public policy.36 The act’s preamble proclaimed collective bargaining a social good and declared that economic prosperity and social stability depended on workers having “full freedom of association” and “actual liberty of contract.” “Inequality of bargaining power” between workers and corporations led to industrial strife and wage depression, the Wagner Act contended. To increase purchasing power and promote peace, it affirmed the collective right of workers to organize, strike, picket, and boycott—rights long denied by court rulings, employer intimidation, and government inaction. For the first time, federal law required employers “bargain in good faith” over wages, hours, and workplace conditions with the elected
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representatives of workers. It also set up a National L abor Relations Board to prevent “unfair employer labor practices” such as employer interference with worker assembly and free speech. Employers could no longer fire pro-union workers, use company police to shut down lawful assemblies and harass peaceful picketers, or refuse to talk to the elected leaders of t hose they employed.37 Congressional passage of the Social Security Act followed in August 1935. Perkins had chaired the 1934 Committee on Economic Security, whose report to the president provided the intellectual under pinnings for the act. She drafted significant sections of the bill, along with US Children’s Bureau officials Grace Abbott and Katharine Lenroot, and was the bill’s chief advocate in the public and congressional debates over its passage.38 The Social Security Act radically remade the state’s obligations t oward its citizens. For the first time in US history, it authorized a compulsory contributory social insurance scheme guaranteeing government payments to the unemployed and the elderly. In addition, limited government monies from general tax revenues were set aside for “needy dependent children” in single-parent families, for the elderly poor and the blind, and for public health—specifically the “health of mothers and children, especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress.”39 Like Roosevelt, Perkins aspired to a comprehensive “cradle to the grave” system of social insurance against unemployment, poverty, and ill health. But the Committee on Economic Security did not recommend such a system in 1934. Most notably, health insurance fell off the agenda. Nor did it appear in the administration’s bill. Perkins made a political calculation in 1934 to prioritize economic relief and economic security for the most vulnerable. The intensity of opposition from the American Medical Association to health insurance in 1934 had taken her by surprise and she worried about jeopardizing the bill. She worried too about the constitutional and administrative feasibility of starting with everything at once. She saw the 1935 Social Security Act as a beginning, a first step t oward a more comprehensive social safety net for all. As Roosevelt himself said of Perkins in 1934, she favored not “the w hole cherry,” but taking one “bite at a time.”40
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Abbott and Lenroot had to s ettle for less as well. The changes to their initial proposals for children’s aid proved especially frustrating. When they drafted the “Aid to Dependent Children” provision of the act, they sought to take the best of the forty state mothers’ pension laws still in place to create model federal legislation. Some of these laws had expansive coverage and provided benefits to the dependent c hildren of divorced, widowed, and unmarried mothers; at least two state laws covered the children of needy single f athers. Their recommendations did not survive the Commission on Economic Security or Congress. Against their wishes, states delineated eligibility; their language of “reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health” for all recipients dis appeared; and—despite Perkins’ attempt to block it—a last-minute amendment to the act lowered cash payments to poor single-parent families. New Deal women vowed to fight for more and took some comfort in knowing they had helped win a federal commitment of cash payments for needy children and families for the first time.41 There would be further breakthroughs. But after 1935, New Deal opponents counterattacked viciously, tarring administrative officials as Communists and anti-American. High profile women in government endured multiple attacks. Women’s Bureau director Mary Anderson once again came under public scrutiny as an “alleged Communist.”42 Perkins faced a drawn-out congressional investigation and charges of impeachment. In hindsight, the attack on Perkins, which reached its apex in 1939, is not surprising. She was the only w oman in the cabinet and a persistent, unapologetic voice for social welfare measures and l abor reform, including the rights of striking West Coast longshoremen and their charismatic radical leader, Australian-born Harry Bridges. In 1934, shipping in major ports up and down the West Coast had halted, and in San Francisco, the longshore walkout had spread citywide and effectively closed down commerce. Perkins adamantly opposed US Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the other New Deal officials who urged a massive deployment of federal troops. She believed such an act risked stoking, not dampening, labor violence. She held out for a settlement mediated by the Department of Labor and convinced Roosevelt of the superiority
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of her plan. Peace was restored and further violence averted. The strike settlement her staff mediated resulted in major wins for the longshore union, including a union-run hiring hall instead of the infamous shapeup system where bosses doled out jobs based on bribes and favoritism. Industrial u nionism revived up and down the West Coast.43 Anti-labor conservatives never forgave Perkins or Bridges. First, they attacked Bridges and demanded his deportation, pointing to his lack of US citizenship and his ties to the Communist Party. But when a report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), part of the Department of L abor, found no clear evidence of Bridges’ Communist Party affiliation and no compelling reason for deportation, they turned on Perkins for upholding the judgment of her staff. In the past the immigration service had acted “improperly to get rid of certain militant and effective labor people,” she declared, and would not repeat that m istake under her watch.44 Perkins now faced the combined wrath of anti-labor and anti-immigrant forces. The latter group had been a fter her since she assumed office, furious at her dismantling of the aggressive deportation policies of the INS in 1933 and her subsequent administrative law rulings widening eligibility for visas and allowing for “discretionary relief ” to undocumented persons facing deportation. She had supported new legislation overhauling immigration laws as well, but the conservative wing of her own party repeatedly blocked such reforms.45 Conservatives, eager for revenge, saw an opening. When the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities met for the first time in August 1938, Texas Democratic congressman Martin Dies, the committee chair, declared Bridges a Communist, agreeing with AFL vice president John Frey’s testimony, and denounced Perkins for failing to enforce immigration law. When she persisted in her refusal to deport Bridges, her congressional opponents introduced a House resolution to impeach her in January 1939. Perkins mustered her courage during an overnight stay at a nearby Episcopal convent and defended her decision before the House Judiciary Committee. Immigration laws should protect this nation from a “clear and present danger to the continuance of our way of living,” she declared. No such situation existed in this case. Moreover, immigration laws must be administered to show that “Ameri-
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can institutions operate without fear or f avor, in a spirit of fair-play, and with a desire to do justice to the stranger within our gates, as well as to the native born.”46 The House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously against proceeding with impeachment charges. Nonetheless, the ordeal took its toll. Perkins was “shaken to the core” by the venom unleashed against her, the mockery of her as a foolish and naïve old woman, and the repeated lies about her Communist sympathies, Russian Jewish ancestry, and “secret liaisons” with Bridges. Few in the government spoke out publicly in her defense, even though Roosevelt, in a cabinet meeting, had sided with her decision not to deport Bridges without clear legal justification. Perkins, a loyal soldier, took the blow for the administration. Roosevelt’s transfer of the INS from the Labor Department to the Justice Department in 1940 over her opposition felt like yet another rebuke of her performance as a cabinet official. The Justice Department was a “bad place” for the INS, she had told the president. Overseeing immigration was “one of the humanitarian functions of government”; it was not about criminality.47
The Fair Labor Standards Act Another bruising fight for Perkins—this one over government regulation of wages, hours, and child labor—reached its conclusion during Roosevelt’s second term. For social democratic feminists like Perkins who had been in the trenches of workplace regulatory wars since before World War I, no reform carried more emotional weight. The situation looked bleak when Perkins proposed a new fair labor standards bill. With Republicans and business groups hostile and the Supreme Court continuing to strike down state laws regulating the workplace, some New Dealers despaired, declaring fair labor laws a political and legal impossibility. To make matters worse, the AFL expressed strong reservations about Perkins’ plan for government boards to set workplace standards industry by industry. The AFL wanted “fixed” standards spelled out in the legislation itself, not set by government appointees. Moreover, both the AFL and its rival, the rapidly growing Congress of
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Industrial Organization (CIO), sought national wage standards: they loathed the subminimum regional wage rates being sought by Southern employers. They pressed for the highest standards possible, worrying that weak government codes would be used by high road employers to justify dropping wages and lengthening hours. Yet the Supreme Court reversed course in March 1937, shortly a fter Roosevelt announced his plan to reorganize the court. In a historic turnaround the Supreme Court rejected the “liberty of contract” doctrine it had touted for decades and found Washington State’s minimum wage law constitutional. The fight for federal legislation regulating workplace labor conditions revived.48 Congresswoman Mary Norton ended up in the middle of the wrangling over federal labor standards. She w ill be forever associated with the corrupt Democratic machine of Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, who endorsed and financed her run for Congress in 1924. But once elected, she fought relentlessly for state-funded public hospitals and child nurseries and defended the rights of low-income men and women of all races and religions. Her politics sprang from a number of sources: her adherence to the moral economy and “just price” traditions of Catholicism as popularized by Father John Ryan, her experiences growing up in an Irish immigrant f amily of moderate means, and the tragic death of her infant son.49 The battle over the federal wage-and-hour law was the most difficult of her long public career. As the new chair of the House Labor Committee in June 1937, Norton inherited a mess. It took her months to get the bill out of committee and months more to corral 218 House members into signing a petition to force a hearing on the bill. Then, the House sent the bill back to committee—the first time it had turned down a major piece of legislation backed by the president. But Norton carried on. She persuaded her Republican and Democratic allies to outvote the South and establish a single national minimum wage. She won over the l abor movement, with the help of its progressive wing, and she, along with Perkins, stood firm against multiple proposals for wage differentials based on race and sex. After another six months of maneuvering and a second petition drive, the House approved a revised bill in May 1938. FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) a month later.50
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A historic victory for economic justice, the FLSA prohibited child labor nationwide and set national wage minimums and hour ceilings for men and women for the first time.51 As Norton told a celebratory National Consumers’ League dinner in 1939, the FLSA reduced unemployment by discouraging “excessive hours,” directly aided the “poorly paid,” and removed the danger of “substandard” wages pulling down “fair standards.” Powerf ul business and agricultural lobbyists had wanted “to keep the workers of the country in peonage,” but “even the hardboiled National Association of Manufacturers” will come to realize the virtues of “paying men and women a living wage,” she predicted.52 It is not clear whether the National Association of Manufacturers ever recognized the virtues of the FLSA, but low-income workers did. Minimums, set quite low in 1938, slowly inched upward. The FLSA chipped away at economic inequalities by race, class, and sex and, over time, proved crucial in stimulating economic growth and moving the country toward shared prosperity.53
A Half Loaf New Deal policies, as groundbreaking as they were, did not secure economic and social justice for all. Proposals had been constrained by conservative employers, courts, and politicians at e very turn. Even a fter legislation passed, anti-New Dealers continued their assault, determined to amend and weaken the laws or undercut them administratively.54 New Deal women knew they held half a loaf. The Wagner Act and the FLSA, for example, did not cover a majority of the workforce. Those in small retail and serv ice firms fell outside coverage, as did the “self-employed,” “managerial,” white-collar, and professional workers. Indeed, although the 1938 FLSA protected w omen and men for the first time, a signal change long sought by full rights feminists, it ended up covering a smaller slice of the female workforce than did many of the Progressive Era woman-only state laws. Those in domestic and agricultural work (the two largest occupations for African Americans and a mainstay of the Southern economy) were exempted as well.55 Racial politics and the power of the Southern bloc figured
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prominently in these decisions. Wagner, Perkins, and other New Dealers had argued against amendments excluding domestic and agricultural workers, but Southern Democrats insisted, and without their favorable vote, the bills w ere doomed. At the same time, employer desire for profit and control, fears of jeopardizing the constitutionality of the laws, and traditional gendered notions of who did “real work” also played a role.56 The b attle for social welfare was not over e ither. The 1935 Social Security Act’s offer of income support to some groups—retired wage earners, the unemployed and disabled, poor m others and c hildren—was a tremendous achievement. Four years later, reformers celebrated another advance when Congress amended the act and, in a significant expansion, provided “family benefits” to the spouse and minor c hildren of a retired worker and to the widow and minor children of a primary wage earner who died before retirement age. Although the system still disproportionately rewarded higher-earning family heads, largely white men, the new f amily benefits expanded h ousehold income for older Americans, recognized and compensated unpaid family labor, and lifted an additional group of children out of poverty.57 Yet Perkins and other progressives felt the amendment fell short. The lack of progress for poor m others ineligible for dependent or survivor benefits was especially troubling. Relief remained meager, discrimination against nonwhite and unmarried mothers continued, and by 1941, every state had a means test, a policy many applicants found humiliating and invasive. Contrary to the intentions of feminist reformers, poor mothers who received assistance u nder Title IV of the act w ere often stigmatized while other recipients, including the wives and widows who received family benefits under a different provision, were judged as deserving.58 New Deal feminists set to work extending what they believed was a first wave of reform. They geared up for future battles over labor rights, determined to expand economic democracy and collective bargaining. They drafted proposed FLSA amendments for higher minimum wages, stricter limits on long hours, and the extension of coverage to all workers. They continued their advocacy of what we might call “social security
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for all,” targeting health care insurance, improved income guarantees, and better benefits for m others. Alongside NCNW president Bethune and other civil rights leaders, they called for an end to discrimination and demanded first-class citizenship for all.59 Economic disparities by race had worsened over the course of the 1930s, even as the African American vote, still sharply curtailed, continued to move into the Democratic column. With Southern states overseeing agricultural, unemployment, and other New Deal programs, discrimination against people of color was widespread.60 Would further breakthroughs be possible? Enormous change had already happened. Certainly, more would come.
Pressure from Below America shifted leftward in the 1930s for many reasons. The economic collapse of the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire capitalism and the leadership of business and economic elites. A generation of Progressive Era women activists remade the Democratic Party, moving it toward a common-good politics that helped it win widespread allegiance. This same generation poured their energies into creative government policy making, and their achievements in federal legislation were groundbreaking. But the New Deal revolution depended as much on those outside the government as those inside. A startling groundswell of protest from below had proven impossible for those in Washington to ignore. We turn now to the younger generation of full rights feminists— women who came of age in the 1930s and who, like their elder New Deal sisters, seized the moment to propel forward a politics of economic democracy and social justice. Millions of activists, many young, took to the streets in the 1930s. They insisted on the redistribution of economic power and wealth, government guarantees of worker rights and social provision, and democracy in every sphere: in the classroom, the workplace, and the community. Walkouts in textile and other female-majority sectors flared in 1929 and showed no signs of flagging as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (Amalgamated) threw their resources into organizing. By 1933,
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millions of garment workers had signed up. The revived garment unions and a reinvigorated militant mine workers organization headed by po litical infighter and Bible-quoting labor champion, John L. Lewis, demanded the AFL reach out to the masses of exploited and low-paid workers still without unions. AFL leaders hesitated; workers did not. Citywide general strikes ripped through Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934; mass picketing and protests rocked auto, rubber, and other industries in 1936; and in 1937, sit-down strikes paralyzed the nation. A fter General Motors, the world’s largest industrial corporation, agreed to bargain with the United Auto Workers in February 1937, ending a nationwide sit-down strike, workplace militancy spread. Workers—men and w omen of all races and nationalities—demanded a voice in the decisions affecting them on the job. Many signed up with u nions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), a dynamic and politically-progressive new labor federation. It leaders w ere far less skeptical about state labor regulation, social welfare provision, and racially inclusive unionism than the conservative old guard who still held power at the AFL.61 Margaret Dreier Robins may have warmed slowly to FDR’s new statism, but she had no such reservations about the shop floor militancy of the 1930s l abor movement. Writing at age seventy to Alice Henry about the 1937 sit-downs, her syndicalist sympathies with worker control and “self-government in the shop,” as she had put it in 1911, were full throated. “What an extraordinary and thrilling time it is in which we are living . . . a time of great industrial unrest. Sit-down strikes are sweeping over the country. Men and women sit down and hold the pivotal positions. They protect all machinery and from my point of view are quite wonderful and have greatly the advantage over the old days of picketing and riots. Of course, a sit-down strike is not legal, but illegality and wrong are not always synonymous terms, are they?” The sit-downers’ claim of “property rights,” she told Henry, reminded her of workers in the “great Homestead Strike” of 1892 who spoke of “ownership to the particular spot where they have trained their hands and senses.”62 Esther Peterson and Maida Springer, two young labor organizers, were indelibly marked by America’s labor upsurge. L ater chapters tell of
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their lives abroad and the influence they had on global and national social policy. H ere it is important to emphasize how the labor and socialist movements of the 1930s shaped their politics and how the grassroots protests in which they participated w ere essential to the political and social changes of the 1930s. For Esther Eggertsen Peterson, the intellectual transformations of the 1930s w ere profound. Born in 1906 in Provo, Utah, Esther Eggertsen grew up in a middle-income Mormon f amily, her f ather the local school superintendent. Her mother was Danish born and her paternal Danish immigrant grandparents lived nearby in Pleasant Grove, the “little Denmark” of Utah. She dutifully attended Brigham Young University, majoring in physical education. A fter graduating in 1927, she faced an excruciating choice. Her fiancé offered her security and love in the Mormon family-centered world she knew well. But as she remembered it, his view of the world left her little room for independence or self- expression. Eggertsen broke off her engagement and took a job teaching dance and gym at Branch Agricultural College in Cedar City, Utah. She was tall and athletic, with a braid of thick blond hair perpetually wrapped high around her head. A popular teacher, she spoke her mind and encouraged her students to do the same. She lasted a little over a year. A fter the administration reprimanded her for organizing an “immoral” Isadora Duncan-style modern dance performance on the college lawn, she decided to “go east” to Columbia University Teachers College thousands of miles away. “I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for,” she confessed, but “I thought I’d find it in New York.” She left Utah far behind but retained the social ethics of her upbringing. “We all owe something to this world—something beyond ourselves,” she would often say.63 Once in New York, she finished her master’s degree at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1930 and frequented the many political gatherings of the day. At one, a lecture at the local YMCA sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace and social justice organization, she met her husband-to-be, Oliver Peterson, a young working-class graduate of the University of North Dakota who was assistant director of education at a Brooklyn YMCA. Oliver’s parents had
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been born in Norway, and his stepfather, also Norwegian, worked as a longshoreman in Washington state where radical u nionism flourished. Drawn by the Socialist Christian ethics of Union Theological Seminary faculty like Reinhold Niebuhr, Oliver had come to New York to study sociology and social ethics. Esther felt Oliver welcomed her strength and independence and helped her “translate that feeling of owing something to the world into a lifetime of work on progressive political issues.”64 Soon, the c ouple was part of a high-powered group of young demo cratic socialists and religiously minded social reformers—first in New York and then in Boston, where they moved after they married in 1932. In Boston, Esther taught at Winsor, an elite private school for girls, and, at Oliver’s suggestion, volunteered at night in the YWCA industrial program. When the immigrant seamstresses in her night class called a strike—dubbed the “heartbreakers’ strike” because their job was stitching hearts onto blouses—to protest being underpaid and overworked, Esther joined the picket line and visited the w omen in their homes. She was shocked: “In the slums I saw industrial home work, which I’d never seen in my life. I saw the w hole t hing: everybody had to work or they didn’t eat. I just felt, I’ve got to work with the labor movement.”65 A revived labor movement, Esther now believed, was crucial for achieving economic fairness for women. She quit her Winsor teaching job in 1936 and traveled across New E ngland organizing for the teachers and garment workers. Meanwhile, Oliver taught labor education for the New Deal’s WPA, eventually becoming a regional supervisor. In 1939, Esther took a full-time job in the education department of the Amalgamated. Led by immigrant Jewish socialists Sidney Hillman and his wife, Bessie Abramowitz, the Hull House night student who had sparked the 1910 Chicago walkouts, the Amalgamated was among the largest and most forward-thinking unions in the CIO. Esther stayed for almost a decade: the union reflected her own social democratic politics and allowed her at least a little time to care for her growing family. Her first child, a daughter, had been born in 1938; three sons followed by 1946.66 Though their paths would cross often, Panamanian-born garment leader Maida Stewart Springer took a different route to labor activism
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than Esther Peterson. Her father, a Black migrant from Barbados, moved to Panama to work on the canal project and married her m other, a Spanish-speaking Panamanian. In 1917, when Maida Stewart was seven, the family migrated to New York, settling in a vibrant Harlem brimming with cultural and political energy. As a young girl, Maida stood transfixed listening to socialist street-corner orator A. Philip Randolph speak out against race riots and lynching, and deliver his message of worker unity and the potential power of organizations like the one he led, the all-Black sleeping car porters and maids u nion. She was inspired too by her m other, who identified with the Black pride and economic self- determination messages of Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, the principal figure in the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association. Angry at the race discrimination in New York City schools, Maida’s mother sent her to New Jersey’s “Bordentown School,” a residential public-f unded high school for “colored students” nicknamed the “Tuskegee of the North” after Booker T. Washington’s famous Alabama institute. On a 400-acre farm overlooking the Delaware River, the school’s Black students, mostly from working-class families, learned vocational skills along with Latin, science, history, math, and other subjects from an illustrious Black faculty. Maida graduated in 1926.67 As an older teen, Maida worked briefly as a receptionist for Black entrepreneur Annie M. Turnbo Malone a fter being refused a job as a telephone operator, b ecause, as the NY Telephone Company interviewer asked her, “What white mother do you think would want you to sit beside her daughter?” Her marriage to Owen Springer, a childhood friend from the Barbadian immigrant community, and the birth of their son two years later interrupted any plans for further employment. But in the early 1930s, with her husband’s instrument repair business suffering, Maida drew on the dressmaking skills she had learned at Bordentown and took a job as a hand finisher in a dressmaking shop. Distressed by the grueling workplace, arbitrary management practices, and poor pay in the garment industry, she turned to Dressmakers’ Local 22 of the ILGWU, joining in 1933. She was soon caught up in the hectic overlapping worlds of New York City garment unionism, racial justice organ izing, and w omen’s reform. Maida Springer served on the executive
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board and education committee of Local 22 throughout the 1930s. Eventually she accepted a full-time union job as Local 22’s first Black business manager, responsible for settling pay and other disputes for workers of all races in sixty New York shops.68
Generational Transfers Young feminists like Peterson and Springer forged enduring personal and political ties with the older generation of w omen labor reformers and absorbed their social justice politics. Springer admired Rose Schneiderman’s leadership of the WTUL and considered ILGWU co-worker Pauline Newman a key “mentor” and one of labor’s “giants—determined, articulate, and volatile about workers’ dignity.”69 Newman and her partner Frieda Miller had been living together in New York’s Greenwich Village since 1923, raising Miller’s d aughter. By the 1930s, both w ere prominent leaders in social and l abor reform efforts. Newman, who had spent much of her childhood in New York’s garment sweatshops rather than in formal schooling, was education director of the ILGWU Health Center and an officer in the New York and national WTUL. University- of-Chicago-trained economist Miller served as chief of the New York State Division of Women in Industry, named to the post by Frances Perkins in 1929. In 1938, Governor Herbert Lehman appointed Miller as New York’s Industrial Commissioner, the top position in the state Department of L abor.70 Peterson first met Miller and Newman in 1934, with Miller fresh from a victorious campaign for a new state minimum-wage law for women and children. The statute, a model for what New Deal feminists wanted nationwide, included commercial laundries (which employed mostly Black, Italian, and Puerto Rican women) and other industries often excluded from labor statutes.71 Miller and her WTUL colleagues led other innovative state legislative drives in this era too, most notably the statewide campaign from 1937 to 1939 to secure minimum wages, hour limits, and workers’ compensation for household workers. The bills faced opposition from lawmakers and mustered only lackluster backing from the League of Women Voters, the Women’s City Club, and other white-led
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omen’s organizations. The WTUL’s first legislative victory for w household workers—workers’ compensation legislation—would not occur until 1946.72 The New York WTUL w omen whom Peterson and Springer admired fought for a multiracial u nion movement. When the largely African American and immigrant women steam pressers in Brooklyn laundries walked out in 1933, Schneiderman tried at first to get the AFL Laundry Workers Union involved. Rebuffed, she approached Hillman of the Amalgamated, who welcomed them into the union.73 In 1937, a fter a wave of strikes brought twenty thousand laundry workers under contract, the Amalgamated set up a majority-Black Laundry Workers Division and added Dollie Lowther Robinson, the African American mangle operator who had led the strike at Colonial Laundry, to its staff.74 Increasing numbers of immigrant w omen joined the ILGWU in the 1930s, with some two thousand new Puerto Rican members in Springer’s Local 22. The “great migration” of islanders from Puerto Rico to the mainland was in the f uture. But by the 1930s, many Puerto Rican w omen immigrants had found jobs in the New York needle trades, working as skilled hand embroiderers and seamstresses at home and in the “outside” labor force. P eople and garments flowed back and forth between the mainland and the island in an ever-w idening stream, with return migration picking up speed as contractors relocated jobs to Puerto Rico.75 In 1934, when the National Recovery Administration decided to rule on l abor standards for the island, Schneiderman seized the opportunity. She pressed the ILGWU to address wage and other inequities in the industry, including discriminations faced by Puerto Rican garment workers—a group with US citizenship since 1917, but without full rights.76 The lone woman on the NRA’s Labor Advisory Board, Schneiderman traveled to Puerto Rico determined to limit the ability of capital to play one group of workers off another. Despite its organizing campaigns on the island, some ILGWU officials viewed workers in Puerto Rico, especially t hose in the home, almost wholly through a protectionist trade framework: the thriving industry t here threatened labor standards on the mainland and must be constrained, even if it meant hardship for
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Puerto Ricans. Schneiderman and her colleague, ILGWU vice president Rose Pesotta, who visited Puerto Rico a few months a fter Schneiderman, brought a different vision. Both admired Puerto Rican strike leaders like Teresa Anglero who over the last three years had helped spread garment unionism island-wide. Each sought to involve Puerto Ricans in NRA code setting and to craft improved labor standards without the loss of jobs and income for Puerto Ricans.77 Pesotta—who still believed firmly in the syndicalist theories she had imbibed as a child in her radical Bundist family in the Ukraine—knew government codes would not solve the larger problem of the island’s colonial relation to the United States and the legacies of European exploitation.78 Puerto Rico “stands as a glaring example of the evils of imperialism and as evidence of the cleanup job which ought to be done on our own doorstep before we begin taking care of the whole world,” Pesotta asserted.79 After ten weeks of hearings, a tour of the island by Eleanor Roosevelt, and protests from Puerto Rican unions and political parties, the NRA set new codes for home and factory workers that began to equalize wages between the two groups. The ILGWU sent Pesotta to help with enforcement, a job she did with Anglero. But the US Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional the next year. Homework grew as did the flow of islanders back and forth to the United States in search of decent jobs. For the time being, it seemed, US capital had regained the upper hand.80 After 1935, Schneiderman turned to unionizing laundry and h otel workers in New York—what she called her “last g reat b attles.” Across the country in Ohio and Michigan, Pesotta endured arrests and physical injury in the mass sit-down strikes of rubber and automobile workers. In 1940, she returned to Los Angeles to help revitalize the majority Latina ILGWU locals she had spurred to victory in 1933.81 The Bryn Mawr Summer School, another venue for cross- generational learning among 1930s egalitarians, was as transnational and diverse as the garment unions. It was also a place where the young generation of full rights feminists discovered the transformative power of student-centered popular education. After hearing Hilda Smith speak about the school in 1934, Peterson signed up to “take charge of health education work.” Thrilled with the school’s democratic spirit and its
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allegiance to creativity, independent thinking, and social change, she returned for the next five years. As “Director of Recreation,” Peterson mingled with an extraordinary group of faculty—activists and intellectuals from labor, the university, and civic associations—and taught gym, dance, music, and theater to a diversifying student body.82 In the 1930s, the school reached out to “Negro students from the South” employed as tobacco, garment, and domestic workers. In 1936, it welcomed two students from Puerto Rico and vowed to add a “Mexican worker student” and a Russian student to its usual international cohort. “We had students from all over the world,” Peterson remembered. It was “my internationalism baptism.”83 A 1937 pageant “Who Are the Workers,” which she directed, used “artistic expression” to deepen student debate about how to define the term “worker” and “remind American workers of their relation to other countries.”84 Friendships solidified, Peterson remembered, as summer school participants of e very age, race, and region lived together for weeks at a time. When Bryn Mawr College’s conservative Board of Trustees voted to sever ties with the summer school in 1938—piqued that, among other headaches for the elite college, summer school students had encouraged maids at the college to organize, and school faculty had backed controversial strikes—the gatherings shifted to Hilda Smith’s fifty-acre family estate in upstate New York, across the Hudson River from the Roose velts’ Hyde Park home. Peterson and other young labor activists got to know Eleanor Roosevelt through the new Hudson Shore Labor School, which eventually became a year-round residential school for men and women.85 Like Peterson, Springer found the intellectual ferment of the 1930s summer schools appealing.86 But for Springer and her close friend Pauli Murray—the f uture renowned civil rights lawyer, feminist legal theorist, and African American memoirist—the celebrated weekend retreats of young New Dealers at “the Farm” proved equally transformative. “The Farm” was the seventy-acre home of Gardiner Means and Caroline Ware in Vienna, V irginia, near Washington, DC. An economic planning theorist and New Deal intellectual best known for his 1932 book (with Adolf Berle), The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Means had
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joined the New Deal as adviser to Department of Agriculture secretary Henry Wallace. Ware was a Radcliffe PhD and accomplished economic historian and writer. Before taking a job as a consumer specialist in the administration, she had taught at Vassar and the Bryn Mawr Summer Schools.87 Springer feared “thinly veiled condescension” from her hosts as Peterson drove her and Murray to Vienna one spring weekend in 1939. Instead, she found her first Saturday afternoon at the Farm a “healing day.” “I sensed her genuineness,” Springer later recalled of Ware, and resonated with her “global view of humanity.” Murray too found the Farm “a sanctuary” and liked Ware’s “quiet but firm commitment to equality.” “Spontaneous seminars developed as we sat around the fireplace, horizons were widened, and learning was as effortless as eating after-dinner cookies.” Like Springer, Murray would seek Ware’s “wise counsel” for the rest of her life.88 Murray also developed an unlikely friendship with Eleanor Roose velt. A brash and politically passionate young woman, Murray wrote to the First Lady in 1938. In her letter, she enclosed an earlier note to the president protesting his failure to back antilynching legislation and expressing her “deep perplexity” with his speech the week before at the University of North Carolina where he had honored the University as an “institution of liberal thought,” even though, as Murray pointed out, it refused to admit African Americans. In her letter to the First Lady, however, Murray struck a different tone. She praised her kindness toward one of “my closest friends and pals” and “your interest in her struggle to improve herself.” She made no mention, although she surely knew, of the very public actions Eleanor Roosevelt had taken against race segregation two weeks earlier. A member of the NAACP and the Urban League since 1934, the First Lady had infuriated segregationists by breaking Alabama’s strict Jim Crow rules while attending the 1938 Southern Conference on H uman Welfare, an interracial gathering of liberals to discuss labor, race, and other issues facing the region. Spying her friend Mary McLeod Bethune in the crowd, Eleanor sat down next to her. When the police ordered the First Lady to move, she placed her chair in the m iddle between the white and Black sections, a symbolic refusal of the racial divide. Her act grabbed newspaper headlines across
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the country. Murray’s letter received a cordial but forthright reply from the First Lady. “Great changes come slowly,” she counseled, and “sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods.” Hundreds of letters followed, filled with heated disagreements over political strategy alongside expressions of mutual admiration and personal revelations of loss and self-doubt.89 Murray had glimpsed Eleanor Roosevelt for the first time four years earlier when the First Lady toured Camp Tera, a government Civilian Conservation Corps facility for unemployed w omen, where Murray lived and worked. Hilda Smith, who had left Bryn Mawr in 1934, administered Camp Tera and twenty-eight other New Deal “She-She-She” camps. She infused them with Bryn Mawr’s ethic of self-government, social purpose, and freedom of thought. By the time Murray penned her first letter to Roosevelt in 1938, she had studied economics and trade unionism at Brookwood L abor College (a coed residential school for workers started by A. J. Muste, a radical pacifist minister); been arrested for picketing the New York Amsterdam News in support of unionization; taught for three years at a WPA Workers’ Education School at Hilda Smith’s invitation; and formulated a sophisticated political analysis that intertwined the struggles for women’s rights, racial justice, and social democracy. Like Peterson and Springer, she favored social democratic approaches to change and rejected “any form of totalitarian government be it Nazi or communist.”90 But in 1938, she still saw herself as a political independent. The New Deal, in her view, had not yet earned her politi cal loyalty. The Democratic Party had been remade—but not yet for all.
Labor and Left Comrades The culture of the 1930s left—including the CIO labor movement and the socialist left—marked this generation of young egalitarian feminists. In the progressive wing of the l abor movement they learned the power of cross-sex, multiracial worker solidarity based on shared economic injustices. At the same time, they experienced a white, male-led movement often divided over the legitimacy of the claims of women and people of color to full rights and inattentive to their specific needs. Yet
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paradoxically, when the labor movement failed to live up to its own rhe toric of justice for all, or only responded erratically, its inaction spurred those ignored to escalate their calls for change. The labor movement, warts and all, inspired women and people of color to organize collectively and, in the end, to seek their own rights. As more joined, they formed powerful caucuses and divisions within the labor movement and demanded it live up to its ideals and extend its principles of justice and equality. The garment u nions were a stronghold of organized working women’s power, as we have seen; the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which secured a national contract with the Pullman Car Com pany in 1937, was a bulwark of organized Black working-class power. But articulate and well-organized women’s and minority caucuses also emerged in the CIO auto, electrical, and packinghouse unions. After the 1930s, t hese new leaders would take over the struggle for social justice from an earlier generation and put the lessons of the 1930s to use. Young w omen activists also gravitated t oward a wide range of left- wing political parties. They participated in coalitions involving liberals, socialists, Communists, and a heterodox mix of other reformers, secular and religious. Esther and Oliver Peterson found socialism’s emphasis on a more cooperative, egalitarian society appealing, and they, like o thers, took another look at the Socialist Party, which experienced an uptick in membership, especially among the young, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1932, Oliver Peterson campaigned for Norman Thomas, the charismatic Presbyterian minister r unning for president on the Socialist Party ticket. Thomas drew some 800,000 votes, and socialists captured local and state offices, but 1932 proved the Socialist Party’s high point nationally.91 In 1936, Oliver and Esther, like the vast majority of the country, threw in their lot with the Democratic Party. After 1936, they saw themselves as part of a broad liberal left, the primary aims of which were reforming the capitalist system, preventing the rise of fascism in Europe, and preserving democratic governance.92 Others—young and old, men and w omen—turned to communism and other anticapitalist ideologies. Radicals aligned with Leon Trotsky’s revolutionary ideas helped spark the massive 1934 Minneapolis truckers’ strike and the organizing of inner city and long-haul drivers;
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anarcho-syndicalists (some veterans of the IWW) were on the frontlines of the 1930s West coast maritime struggles.93 But the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), part of the Moscow-led wing of Communism, attracted the largest following, and its ideas had considerable influence.94 Working-class writer Tillie Olsen, Guatemalan-born Cannery Workers’ leader Luisa Moreno, Mexican American labor organizer Emma Tenayuca, and United Electrical worker official Ruth Young were among the most prominent young labor feminists who identified with the Communist Party.95 The party’s fierce advocacy of economic and racial justice appealed to well-known writers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as radicals, white and nonwhite, from e very socioeconomic group. From 1928 to 1934, during its so-called Third Period, the CPUSA organized outside the mainstream l abor movement and political parties. It adopted the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern) cry for revolution, not reform, and accused other socialists as well as Roosevelt’s New Deal of being “social fascists.” Social democratic groups, like fascists, the Comintern argued, stood in the way of Communist revolution and should be opposed. At the same time, in the “Third Period,” CPUSA members and sympathizers initiated powerful grassroots movements among working people that got results. They or ganized rent strikes and blocked housing evictions; formed unemployed councils demanding jobs and government relief; and helped foment large-scale strikes over pay and work speedup in agriculture, textile, transportation, and heavy industry. In addition, the CPUSA was one of the few white-led organizations that prioritized an end to race discrimination, lynching, and unjust imprisonment of racial minorities.96 After 1934, the CPUSA changed its rhetoric and its tactics, inaugurating a “Popular Front” politics of alliances with socialists and New Dealers. The shift reflected the Comintern assessment that the Soviet Communist experiment was best protected against German aggression by a “united front” on the left and by strengthening democratic forces. Communists worked to elect New Deal Democrats to office in 1936, and they joined the CIO. CPUSA members were on the frontlines of the 1937 sit-down victories against General Motors, and many held leadership positions in the fastest-growing CIO affiliates.97 In August 1939, however, with the
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signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the “Popular Front” era abruptly ended. Many Communists stayed with the party— believing it was still the best vehicle to realize economic and social equality and that Hitler would honor his agreement. Others felt deeply betrayed and left. When the Soviets allied with the British in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, CPUSA ranks bounced back, reaching a twentieth-century peak of some 75,000 in 1943. Its influence, however, always exceeded its official membership, and the labor and civil rights institutions it helped launch in the 1930s would shape the postwar world.98
New Deal Revolutions? Revolutions are in the eye of the beholder. Feminist reformers in and out of government believed their achievements in the 1930s were substantial: a remade Democratic Party, a deluge of landmark legislation upending past policy, an inclusive progressive labor movement, and a democratic civic culture of engagement and creativity. Much had been gained and more would come. Later generations of activists and writers never tire of spinning the New Deal crystal globe, trying to assess its every glimmer and shadow. Its origins, effects, and legacy are elusive. Yet to many working-class families, the New Deal set in motion changes that felt revolutionary. As historian Jack Metzgar remarked, summing up the dramatic shifts in the lives of his working-class family as a result of New Deal policy, “If what we lived through . . . was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.”99
7 A Women’s “New Deal for the World”
The economic collapse of the 1930s intensified the global mindset and activism of New Deal feminists. Frances Perkins, Mary Anderson, and Frieda Miller—a ll dedicated, well-p ositioned government insiders—led the way. As preoccupied with domestic concerns as they were, the global context and implications of their actions were never far from their thoughts. All three had been together at the historic 1919 global labor conferences in Washington. Now, little more than a decade later, they could champion similar international policies from positions of power. I call their agenda the w omen’s “New Deal for the World.”1 First and foremost they envisioned a regulated, socially responsible world economy with economic security for all. They looked abroad for models and partners; they also turned to democratic, deliberative international institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO). The ILO loomed large in their global reform vision because of its jurisdiction over economic questions, its commitment to cooperation and regulation, and its unusual tripartite assembly of government, employer, and worker delegates. New Deal women headed the campaign for US membership in the ILO, and with their goal achieved in 1933, they joined with like-minded internationalists to promote what they deemed the core pledge of the ILO: social justice for the world’s workers. Meeting the needs of w omen lay at the heart of their New Deal for the world. They watched with alarm as the anti-regulatory politics of the 189
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National Woman’s Party (NWP) advanced in the ILO and the NWP- sponsored Equal Rights Treaty (ERT) made headway in the Pan- American Union and the League of Nations. In their view, the NWP practiced an individualistic feminism narrowly concerned with formal legal equality between the sexes; it cared little about low-income women and the larger struggle for socialized economies and social provision. To thwart the organization regionally and internationally, New Deal feminists mounted an ambitious campaign for a “Women’s Charter,” what Mary Anderson dubbed a “working w omen’s alternative” to the ERT. New Deal women celebrated notable victories for w omen’s rights in this era: a 1937 Declaration of Women’s Rights at the ILO, the 1938 Pan- American Lima Declaration of Women’s Rights, and the League of Nations’ decision to sideline the ERT and investigate the more open-ended question of “women’s status.” Yet the lukewarm response of women’s organizations to the “Women’s Charter” left New Deal feminists reeling. Was their historic reliance on a cross-class sisterhood no longer viable? Who could they count on? Who would stand with them for economic and social justice?
The Shock of Economic Collapse As the global economy plummeted, full rights feminists searched for ways forward. Mary van Kleeck, an intellectual leader of the movement since before the war, turned leftward. She condemned capitalism in all its varieties and urged the Soviet Union’s planned economy as a model. After leaving her wartime government post in 1919 to head the industrial division of the Russell Sage Foundation, van Kleeck had become a recognized international expert on industrial democracy and economic planning. She and her lifelong companion, Dutch-born Mary Fledderus, cofounded the International Industrial Relations Institute in 1925, and van Kleeck remained its associate director.2 At its 1931 World Social and Economic Congress in Amsterdam, van Kleeck called for “world economic treaties” lowering tariffs and regulating trade and for a rethinking of capitalism. Her anger at the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, which
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instituted the highest level of US tariffs in more than a century and unleashed a disastrous trade war, was no doubt still smoldering. Speaking with her characteristic assurance, van Kleeck favored “an international cooperative plan of economic and social management” coupled with state-led plans similar to what the Soviet Union launched in 1928. After all, she reasoned, unlike the United States and much of the West, the Soviet Union was experiencing industrial growth, not collapse.3 Van Kleeck’s spirited defense of the Soviet planned economy and her refusal to back Roosevelt in his bid for president strained her ties with her old reform circle. In 1932, van Kleeck returned home from a six-week tour of the USSR even more convinced of the limits of “profit-making capitalism.”4 When the Democratic Women’s Campaign Committee asked her help with election efforts, she refused. Roosevelt’s proposals were too timid, she argued, and she was thinking of voting for the Socialist Party, as she had done in the past. But the Socialist Party disappointed her as well. It resembled “too closely the Labour Party of England and the Social Democrats of Germany.” Rather than stick to principle, both European parties had shifted to the right, she thought, and had “compromised to achieve elections.”5 Her relations with Democratic w omen did not improve after FDR’s victory. Van Kleeck sent her old friend Frances Perkins a “congratulatory” note that quickly devolved into a litany of what was wrong “with the program of the Democratic Party” and ended with a condescending wish for “the logic of events” to propel the Democratic Party to more “far-reaching” action.6 Perkins ignored the slight. She urged Roosevelt to appoint van Kleeck to the National Recovery Administration’s advisory council. Perhaps to her surprise, van Kleeck accepted. She resigned after her first day. Relations became even more strained after van Kleeck expressed skepticism about the compatibility of democracy and capitalism. The idea that capitalist democracies responded to “educated public opinion” and majority vote was an “illusion,” van Kleeck proclaimed in 1934: capitalist states w ere ruled by capital.7 Mary Anderson, shocked but ever loyal to her brilliant mentor, continued to involve van Kleeck in Women’s Bureau functions and rely on her advice. Perkins kept her distance.8
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Few New Deal feminists w ere as pessimistic as van Kleeck about the future of capitalist democracies. Even so, most shared her sense of crisis and her desire for a regulated global economy and a fundamental shift toward the social. As Schneiderman declared in 1931, “to continue to develop our present individualist society offers l abor nothing.” Markets must be socialized and democratic institutions promoted.9 The stakes were high, with most of the world’s capitalist economies in turmoil and democratic regimes crumbling in rapid succession. In Europe, Hitler’s “New Order” seemed the f uture, with democracy threatened by a new kind of right-wing authoritarian populism—“not the old conservative, royalist version but a newer, more militarized and socially conscious version,” resting on racist and hypernationalist tropes. In Asia, militarists threatened Japan’s civilian rule and in 1931 seized Manchuria. In Latin America, multiple republics were replaced by military rule.10
The Double Crisis of Democracy and Capitalism As Roosevelt took office, Perkins celebrated the “New Deal’s revival of our international intercourse with the rest of the world.” In 1933, the United States established diplomatic ties for the first time with the Soviets; other new diplomatic initiatives with Latin America and other regions of the world would follow.11 But in the realm of policy exchange, New Dealers hewed closely to well-worn North Atlantic paths.12 Van Kleeck may have turned to the Soviet Union for answers, but most New Deal insiders looked elsewhere for a solution to the “double crisis of democracy and capitalism.”13 Britain and Sweden held particular allure. In 1931, Perkins convinced FDR, then governor of New York, to send her to London for six weeks to study Britain’s systems for unemployment and old-age assistance. Perkins had followed Britain’s unemployment and old-age insurance experiments closely, ever since Lloyd George’s Liberal Party initiated them in the years before World War I. In 1931, she still found much to admire. Even so, Perkins worried about US programs being too closely associated with those in Britain. As job losses mounted and the budget crisis forced cuts in unemployment benefits, the popularity of Labour
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government officials like Minister of L abour Margaret Bondfield, with whom Perkins met, was in f ree fall. Britain’s social insurance system, still ad hoc and l imited, was unraveling. Other European liberal democracies were stumbling too.14 Sweden alone appeared to have found a way through the economic storms. Its early adoption of state countercyclical spending as a form of economic stimulus and investment in public works appeared promising as unemployment fell and the Swedish economy recovered a fter an infusion of state monies.15 New Deal women admired Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (SAP) and its concept of Folkhemmet, or “People’s Home,” popularized by its leader Per Albin Hansson, who rose from an impoverished background to become Sweden’s prime minister in 1932. Hansson aimed to root out social and class prejudices and “extend democracy to the social and economic sphere.” In Sweden’s “People’s Home,” t here would be “no special favorites and no stepchildren.” The SAP’s close ties with the LO, Sweden’s large blue-collar l abor confederation, and its vocal w omen’s division also helped ensure a democratic and less patriarchal home as the model for society. Marquis W. Childs’ Sweden: The Middle Way and its account of Sweden’s progress in achieving “a middle course between the extremes of Communism and Fascism” was eagerly devoured when it first appeared in 1936.16 Although a handful of other nations, democratic and autocratic, had adopted social insurance and welfare measures decades before the United States, the ambitious reach and multidimensionality of New Deal programs positioned the United States as an innovator as well as an imitator. In some areas, such as old-age insurance, the United States moved forward during the Depression decade while o thers lagged. Nor was the United States an outlier in terms of state welfare provisions overall: in the 1930s it “straddled the m iddle.”17 Perkins could be modest about the transferability of US policy elsewhere: as she once averred, the United States has “no ready-made solution to offer the world.” In actuality, she thought US efforts to expand the social safety net—as well as its experience with regulating markets and establishing state labor standards—were forward looking and of use to others seeking social democratic alternatives.18 Intrigued by New Deal experiments, foreign
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policy makers and intellectuals streamed in. John Maynard Keynes, whose writings would soon upend economic wisdom around the world; Britain’s William Beveridge, the architect of Britain’s postwar welfare state; Sweden’s influential social thinkers, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal; and Margaret Bondfield all made the Atlantic voyage. Bondfield found America of “transcendent interest” in 1933 as Perkins, a “superb guide to the ‘Revolution,’ ” squired her about Washington. “Severely tailored in black with a touch of white,” Perkins exhibited “imperturbable calm amidst the tempest” around her, Bondfield wrote.19 Indeed, the United States was among the few democracies veering left, not right, in the 1930s. Constitutional democracy itself was on trial, it sometimes seemed, with Roosevelt’s New Deal viewed as a “testing ground” for w hether democracy could survive. Th ere was intense interest in Roosevelt’s remade Democratic Party and in the militant new US labor movements pushing the party further left.20 From Australia, Miles Franklin told Rose Schneiderman of her surprise that the political fortunes of Australia and the United States seemed to be reversing in 1934: “By the newspapers, America seems to have gone widely radical whereas we have swung back the opposite way after being leaders in social legislation for so long.” After decades of remarkable advance, Australia’s Labour Party was in disarray, and the country’s u nions w ere stagnating. Not so in the United States. Franklin signed off, dreaming of her youth in America stoking the fires of mass industrial unionism in the 1910s. “I hope you are getting roses as well as bread,” she concluded, alluding to Schneiderman’s famous 1911 plea for workers’ rights to both the cultural and the material necessities of life.21 Not everyone found the new cosmopolitan winds bracing. Economic collapse heightened AFL parochialism, at least initially, and many of its leaders remained skeptical of the benefits of an America more engaged with the world. The AFL showed little interest in New Deal women’s particular brand of internationalism, with its openness to regulated trade and immigration, and its desire for US cooperation with other nations, unions, and civil society groups. Instead, for much of the 1930s, the AFL favored high tariffs and immigration restrictions, while disparaging alliances with socialist unionists and parties abroad. Its leaders
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wanted walls not bridges. Not surprisingly, neither Perkins nor Mary Anderson received much help from the AFL as they urged greater US involvement with the ILO and stronger ties with social democratic labor movements abroad.22
Fighting for the ILO Perkins and Anderson believed fervently in the ILO. In their view, the unusual tripartite structure of ILO representation—with workers and employers at the t able alongside state representatives—was a model for future global governance. Equally important, the ILO was a crucial ally in socializing global capitalism. The ILO “leveled up labor standards in all countries” and ensured “advantages derived from low wages” w ere only “temporary,” Perkins explained in 1938. It prevented “cheap or exploited l abor as a basis of competition” by creating global minimums for wages and other conditions, just as the Fair Labor Standards Act was doing for the nation. Echoing the lessons of her Wharton School mentor Simon Patten, she knew too that it mattered little to talk of “raising standards” in a “static or shrinking world market.” Nation-states must stimulate economic growth by expanding social programs, upping production and consumption, and widening global exchange.23 For Perkins, Anderson, and many New Dealers, the ILO founding premise— “universal and lasting peace can be established only if based upon social justice”—remained as relevant as ever.24 Herbert Hoover was still president when Anderson sailed off to Geneva as head of an unofficial US delegation to the 1931 International Labor Conference (ILC). Pressure on employers to lower labor standards was accelerating, and w omen and children were often the first to suffer. Disrespect for w omen’s employment rights was widespread, fueled by those eager to solve the unemployment crisis by returning women to the home.25 The targeting of the ILO’s fragile system of sex- specific labor rights by the NWP and its international allies infuriated Anderson. She knew NWP women well and despised their tactics and theories. She felt especially protective of the ILO standards that she and other league women had fought hard to secure. As she saw it, the first
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set of ILO conventions, birthed “on American soil,” were the “joint offspring” of the 1919 Women’s Labor Congress and the 1919 ILC, which she called the “men’s congress.”26 There was much to defend in 1931. The ILO had issued some thirty international conventions and forty recommendations. Once ratified by a member state, conventions were legally binding treaties; recommendations, a fter adoption by a member state, served as nonbinding guides to policy and law. Nations often aligned their l abor policies with ILO norms even when they did not formally ratify the conventions. As a nonmember, the United States had not ratified any ILO conventions, but numerous other member states had, including the two dozen who had signed on to the 1919 Maternity Convention. Apart from state action, ILO declarations carried weight as products of global consensus arrived at by international debate and compromise. Employers incorporated ILO standards into employment contracts—sometimes voluntarily, other times in response to pressure from organized worker and community groups. ILO standards showed how world opinion could influence “the ruling classes everywhere,” Alice Henry enthused after a 1924 visit to Geneva.27 Anderson, accompanied by WTUL national secretary Elisabeth Christman, looked forward to seeing old friends in Geneva, including many from the international w omen’s l abor congresses of the early 1920s. Both she and Christman anticipated a long, drawn-out battle over the night-work convention and counted on their labor s isters outside the United States for help in defending it.28 The “Open Door and the Equal Rights people are in full fight against the legal protection of working women,” warned ILO women’s affairs liaison Martha Mundt in 1931. Their adversaries, a group ILO Director Albert Thomas called the “working women’s movement,” were gathering in defense.29 Anderson and Christman wanted night-work protections strengthened and extended to men, the majority position of the “working women’s movement.” But in the midst of a worldwide depression, they feared that reconsidering the night-work convention might result in its elimination.30 Anderson never made it to Switzerland. She ended up marooned on a French mountaintop overlooking Geneva, receiving visitors and strat-
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egizing from afar, forbidden by the US government to enter Switzerland. Hoover’s Secretary of Labor William Doak canceled her authorization, claiming she had misrepresented her ILO visit as official when it had no such status. Such an act could not be allowed, Doak declared: it would be “tantamount to attending a meeting of the Council or Assembly of the League of Nations,” an idea many in Hoover’s administration and the general public found abhorrent in 1931.31 Back home, Schneiderman railed against the NWP, blaming them for Doak’s change of heart, and offered to mount a protest. Anderson—averse to making waves that might drown her own bureau—said no. Keep the focus on the 1931 ILC and what was happening in Geneva, she advised, not what the Republican Secretary of Labor—soon to be gone—had or had not done.32 To Anderson’s relief, the 1931 ILC retained the current night-work convention and rejected amendments to set the hours of night work later and exempt supervisors and managers. Employer and worker delegates split along class lines, with employers in f avor of the amendments and workers opposed. Labor and socialist-leaning women such as Austria’s Anna Boschek, Germany’s Gertrud Hanna, and France’s Jeanne Chevenard spoke against changing the convention, as did many of the thirteen other female “worker advisors.” Boschek warned such changes would allow employers to lay off some workers and increase hours for others. Hanna lashed out at the Open Door International for supporting an employer proposal to exempt white-collar w omen, declaring “women salaried employees” needed protection from overwork “as much as industrial w omen.” Chevenard claimed French workers wanted “to do away with night work not only for women but for all workers.” Only Norway’s Betzy Kjelberg and Sweden’s Kerstin Hesselgren—both attending as government representatives—favored the amendments. Hesselgren saw “little danger to women workers” in the proposed changes, she told the assembly. Not all Swedes agreed. Karin Nilsson, a Swedish textile worker advising Sweden’s delegation, claimed “the workers of Sweden” thought night work “harmful not only to women but to men” and “a menace to family life” for both sexes.33 The 1931 skirmish over night work did not bring the controversy any closer to resolution. When Poland’s Eugenia Waśniewska—who opposed
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the night-work amendments and claimed w omen wanted more, not less, regulation—chided the ILO and called for a w omen’s advisory committee to offer expert advice, the ILO Governing Body agreed.34 But if the hope was to dampen the raging fires, the strategy backfired. Petitions, letters, and telegrams poured into the ILO about the w omen’s advisory committee—who would serve on it, what issues it would take up, and how much authority it would have.35 In the United States, New Deal w omen prevailed in the scramble for who would be chosen: the ILO appointed Anderson, Christman, van Kleeck, and other social reformers to its Correspondence Committee on Women’s Work.36 Only after protests from Paul and o thers did the ILO add a representative from the NWP.37 Tellingly, in 1934, the ILC changed course and approved night-work amendments similar to those proposed in 1931.38 Worker delegates, men and w omen, tried to block the amendments, but influential worker voices who could have helped in the fight were absent. Britain did not send Margaret Bondfield: in October 1931 she had lost her parliamentary seat and her post in the British cabinet in a backlash vote against the L abour Party.39 In Austria, Anna Boschek had been arrested and put under police surveillance. She gave her last speech in the Austrian Parliament in 1933. That same year in Germany, with Hitler sworn in as the new chancellor, the Nazis dissolved the Reichstag parliament. They imprisoned and assaulted leading socialists and trade unionists, including Gertrud Hanna, and eventually dismantled and banned the General German Trade Union Confederation. The 1933 ILC, pushed by outraged labor delegates, refused to seat the German national socialists, prompting Germany to break with both the ILO and the League of Nations. As the 1934 ILC debated night work, Hanna was living in fear in Germany, under perpetual suspicion, and reduced to taking in mending to earn a living. She held on for ten years but committed suicide in 1944.40 The night-work debates in 1931 and 1934 belie the view, popular among some scholars, of the ILO as a bulwark of protectionist antifeminist politics “effectively controlled by male-dominated trade u nion interests.”41 Rather, feminists ended up on both sides of the debate, with the majority of social democratic w omen favoring retention, and divi-
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sions by class w ere more pronounced that t hose between men and women. The labor and socialist women who defended the sex-specific conventions in the early 1930s had a feminist working women’s politics of sex and social equality. They sought a way of accommodating sex differences and lifting living standards for all.
New Deal Women Bring the United States into the ILO Shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Anderson and Perkins launched a concerted campaign for US membership in the ILO. Reopening the debate on US membership in the League of Nations was a nonstarter, they judged, but perhaps an effective case for the ILO could be made.42 They contacted Harold Butler—who had become ILO Director with the death of Albert Thomas in 1932—and Assistant Director Edward Phelan. In May, Phelan visited Perkins in Washington, and the two hatched a plan: Perkins would send Labor Department staff as “accredited non-member observers” to the June 1933 ILC, a decision not requiring congressional approval. Then, relying on the staff ’s firsthand testimonies of the ILO’s pivotal role in economic recovery, Perkins would lobby Congress, starting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Even though the State Department, not the Department of Labor, arguably had jurisdiction over international affairs, Roosevelt approved Perkins’ request to send observers to the ILC. This time Anderson made it to Geneva, and her report on the 1933 ILC hit the right notes. She stressed ILO independence from the League of Nations and its positive effects on worker lives and global economic revival. Alice Squires Cheyney, a minimum-wage expert at the ILO’s understaffed bureau in Washington and a former US Children’s Bureau agent, helped the cause by pulling together a special issue of The Annals praising the ILO. Striking the same notes as Anderson, contributors hailed the ILO for lifting wage standards globally, aiding economic recovery, and serving “as an alternative to violent revolution.” Within a year, Congress signed on. Democratic Party sponsors of the bill wrapped it in the patriotic flag of a “New Deal for every nation.”
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The ILO was the “foundation stone upon which enlightened souls of every nation are attempting to build a new deal,” California congressman Charles Colden enthused.43 On August 20, 1934, fifteen years after the ILO’s historic founding in Washington, the United States joined. The ILO welcomed the decision with relief b ecause US support, financial and otherwise, would help compensate for the loss of Germany and Japan. The USSR also joined the ILO in 1934, but its tenure was brief. After 1937, it boycotted the ILO, complaining about the ILO’s social democratic leadership and tripartite character.44 Expectations were high when the first official US delegation sailed for Geneva in May 1935. Sadly for Anderson, she was not among the delegates. On the advice of Perkins, President Roosevelt appointed Grace Abbott instead. Abbott’s earlier contributions to the 1919 ILO planning committee, the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children and her long service in the US Children’s Bureau boosted her candidacy, as did her multiple trips abroad, beginning with her solo travels in Eastern Europe before World War I.45 Still, Anderson’s experience was just as impressive. She chafed at being bypassed, although she knew she was not among the group of women closest to Perkins. Anderson’s lack of formal education and social finesse no doubt entered into the equation. A reserved w oman of few words, Anderson never fully mastered English and did not relish cocktail chatter. The cultural and class gulf between the two women mattered too. Relations between Anderson and Perkins were “polite but restrained,” Pauline Newman once observed, due largely to a “lack of kinship.”46 Roosevelt gave the delegation a rousing sendoff. He urged them to push for a worldwide eight-hour day—a key agenda item at the 1935 ILC and one favored by l abor movements globally. He admonished them “to learn” how the United States can devise “sounder national policy in the field of social legislation” and to develop “greater understanding of and sympathy about the problems” other nations face.47 Although he made no mention of the debates still roiling over sex-specific conventions, his ILO appointments put the United States squarely on the side fighting to save them. He chose Frances Perkins and other women from the New Deal circle as government delegates and as labor representatives he ap-
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pointed trade unionists such as the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky, an internationalist and WTUL ally. Apart from John G. Winant—the charismatic former Republican governor of New Hampshire who served as assistant director and then briefly as ILO director in 1939—Perkins was the most influential US voice in the 1930s ILO. She chaired multiple US delegations to Geneva and, in 1937, hosted an ILO International Textile Conference in Washington, the first of its kind.48 Frieda Miller, whom Perkins knew well from New York reform circles, ranked among the inner circle too. She shared an easy rapport with Perkins—both were educated, confident, and cosmopolitan. The two w omen, working in tandem, would become even more consequential shapers of ILO policy after the 1930s.
A Women’s “New Deal for the Americas”? What happened at the ILO on questions of women’s rights and labor protections after 1934 was intimately connected to developments in the Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM), the advisory body on women’s affairs of the Pan-American Union. NWP leader Doris Stevens, CIM chair since 1928, had been working energetically for women’s formal equality with men for years. In June 1933, when CIM convened at the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, she anticipated a dual triumph for the Equal Nationality Treaty and the Equal Rights Treaty (ERT). She was half-right. The Montevideo conference adopted the Equal Nationality Treaty, with twenty countries pledging “no distinction based on sex as regards nationality, in their legislation or in their practice.”49 The ERT met stiffer resistance. Only four countries— Cuba, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay—signed on. The majority, having decided it “unwise” to conclude such a blanket equal rights treaty, approved a substitute resolution urging nations establish “so far as peculiar circumstances w ill conveniently permit,” equality between men and women in the “exercise of civil and political rights.”50 Nonetheless, Stevens found Montevideo exhilarating. Four nations had endorsed the ERT at the 1933 conference, she enthused, and plans were afoot to introduce it in other forums, including the League of
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Nations.51 She had also survived an effort to unseat her as CIM chair led by Brazil’s formidable suffragist Bertha Lutz. Stevens is “a mentally deranged w oman,” Lutz wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, and “puts all women to shame.” Her “reign at the Pan-American Union” must be ended.52 New Deal women agreed. The “Woman’s Party point of view” has dominated in Latin America for too long, Anderson wrote Perkins.53 In their eyes, Stevens and the NWP were as conservative in foreign affairs as in domestic: they w ere elitists with l ittle interest in US social democracy or in Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policies in Latin America. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt had announced his “Good Neighbor” aspirations and his intention to promote hemispheric peace. In retrospect, the United States was hardly the good neighbor it promised to be. Yet no one knew what to predict in 1933, and Roosevelt broke with the past in meaningful ways. A few months a fter his speech, the United States withdrew its marines from Nicaragua and signed the Montevideo declaration that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs” of another. In 1934, the United States ended its eighteen- year military occupation of Haiti and repealed the Platt Amendment giving it access rights to Cuba. New Deal w omen applauded Roosevelt’s non-interventionist policies and his promises of social democracy and “higher standards of living” for all “the Americas”—what some called a “New Deal for the Americas.”54 Anderson and other New Dealers hoped Roosevelt’s new approach might help them forge stronger ties with Latin American w omen on CIM. It would not be easy. Stevens, ever the chameleon, appeared as often in socially progressive garb as in conservative. She courted left antifascist feminists like Chile’s Marta Vergara as well as women like Minerva Bernardino, who worked closely with Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic. On more than one occasion Stevens used anti-Roosevelt sentiment from both the left and from the right to her advantage, winning applause from Latin American w omen for her defiance of the US State Department. She was not above appearing as an anti-imperialist, even when she was not.55
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Anderson and o thers also knew that some Latin American w omen on CIM looked favorably on the ERT. Women’s rights advocates often linked the ERT campaign with the movement for w omen’s political and civil rights and saw it as a vehicle for securing women’s suffrage. As noted e arlier, with the vote denied to w omen in almost all Latin American nations, female suffrage remained a top priority. Not coincidentally, the four Latin American nations that signed the ERT in 1933 had strong suffrage movements, and two—Ecuador and Uruguay—had already granted partial w omen’s suffrage. Conversely, of the Latin American nations that refused to sign the ERT, some did so because they believed it committed them to women’s suffrage.56 Of equal importance, in the experience of many Latin American feminists, legal equality and “sex- specific” legislation could exist side by side. By the mid-1930s, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, and other American nations had ratified dozens of ILO standards, including the Maternity Convention, while also maintaining a commitment to “equal rights.”57 Nonetheless, a fter Montevideo, New Deal feminists slowly found more common ground with Latin American w omen. Mary Anderson was thrilled when Roosevelt appointed Frieda Miller a delegate to the ILO’s first regional inter-American conference in Santiago. Labor men and women would be attending as part of the ILO’s tri-partite system and she thought the group might be friendly to the New Deal. Anderson gave Miller a copy of Ethel Smith’s 1929 essay Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women to read as she traveled south for the January 1936 gathering. Impressed by the historical and comparative sweep of the essay, Miller deemed it “the best ammunition we have anywhere.”58 Smith’s claims resonated with her. She too believed liberal individualist feminism was outmoded and should be replaced by a modern social feminism attuned to the social and economic problems of the day. Her fight with the NWP in New York over the state minimum-wage law for women and c hildren had reinforced her antipathy to the NWP and its antiregulatory politics. She leapt at the opportunity to diminish its appeal in Latin America. She also relished the chance to learn more about social and labor policies outside the United States.
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Miller found more agreement in Santiago than she had anticipated. As the only woman at the conference with voting privileges, she chaired the committee on the work of w omen and c hildren. She watched in satisfaction as conference delegates, following the committee’s recommendation, endorsed equal wages for men and women, maternity and social insurance, and, a fter some objections from employer delegates, a higher minimum age for child labor. Miller proudly cast her vote for these long-familiar social feminist goals. “Every child has a right” to care and education, she told the New York Times.59 Nor did the expected NWP attack on ILO woman-only regulations materialize. Chile’s Marta Vergara, a friend of Stevens and CIM’s representative at the conference, seemed more an ally than an adversary. Before the conference, Stevens had asked Vergara to lobby against women- specific regulations like the 1919 ILO Maternity Convention, but Vergara refused. She supported international women’s rights and international labor standards, she explained, and saw no reason to oppose maternity provisions. After all, Chile had ratified the ILO maternity standard, along with thirty-two other international labor conventions, and Vergara believed more nations should do so, not fewer. With the challenge to ILO standards avoided, women at the conference united in support of raising labor standards in the Americas; they also insisted “American States” appoint more women ILC voting delegates and the ILO make decisions “really in accordance with women’s interests.”60 Although the conference achieved consensus on a long list of policies, Miller observed stark regional differences. Unlike Margaret Dreier Robins in Europe in 1921, however, Miller did not “flap her American Eagle wings ominously.” Rather, she tried to understand why such differences existed and what might be learned from her neighbors to the South. She listened intently as Cuban government delegate José Enrique Sandoval, chair of the committee on social insurance, described various innovative social safety net programs across the Americas. Latin American countries, she mused, unlike in the United States, evidenced “much interest in maternity provisions.” It would be “a shock to many of our timid souls” in the United States to learn how Latin American countries are “in advance of our own situation.” Perhaps with its higher
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standard of living, the United States had left maternity provisions “more safely to individual initiative,” she speculated, seeking a way of understanding US hostility to maternity insurance. (She might have added too that, among many other differences, the dominant Protestant religious groups in the United States, unlike the influential Catholic church in Latin America, did not express much support for maternity policies.) Nonetheless, she left inspired by the societal concern for maternal health and well-being she had witnessed in Santiago and vowed the United States would follow their lead.61 Months later, in Buenos Aires, things did not go as smoothly. At a People’s Peace Conference, called to coincide with the December 1936 Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, delegates favored the ERT and applauded as Stevens characterized New Dealers as “the extreme right-w ing of feminism” in the United States and equated their “protection of w omen” with fascism. No one at the conference effectively represented the New Deal position, and Stevens’ claims went unchallenged. Momentum for the ERT then spilled over into the Inter-American Conference, which Roosevelt had convened to “safeguard peace among the American Republics” and promote inter- American cooperation against fascism.62 At the Inter-A merican Conference, US voting delegate Elise F. Musser, a former Utah Democratic state senator and ally of New Deal feminists, spoke out against the ERT. She voiced her unequivocal support for w omen’s suffrage and w omen’s political rights and argued the ERT jeopardized l abor standards for working w omen. The conference, siding with Musser, rejected the ERT and instead passed a substitute resolution asking that all American nations accord “the rights and duties of citizenship” to women.63 The net result, however, was that New Deal feminists damaged their credibility with some in the Latin American feminist community. Despite Musser’s carefully parsed speech, Anderson later wrote Perkins that US opposition to the ERT in Buenos Aires was “interpreted to mean” opposition to “general suffrage for women.” The Buenos Aires debacle, she confessed to Perkins, confirms the need to bring a “positive program before the Nations that will take the place of our usual opposition to the ERT.”64 For Anderson, the lessons of the
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last few years for a women’s “New Deal in the Americas” w ere clear: Stevens had to be defeated and direct conflict over the ERT avoided.
Skirmishes at the League of Nations Meanwhile, as Stevens had predicted, the fight over w omen’s equality had heated up in the League of Nations. “Women all over the world,” Stevens proclaimed in 1934, “demand a world law that inequality for women should no longer be permitted anywhere.” “Protective laws” [referring to sex-specific labor standards like night work and maternity leave] “harm” women, she insisted, and prevent them “from exercising the same basic freedoms as men.”65 In 1934, ten Latin American delegations asked the League of Nations to examine “the entire status of women” with “partic ular attention” to the ERT. That same year, a diverse group of w omen internationalists, many from Latin America, coalesced with an equally ambitious plan for the League of Nations to consider a Convention on the Status of Women at its Sixteenth General Assembly in 1935.66 Yet t here was little unanimit y among w omen globally over what “equal status” meant. Nor was t here agreement about the ERT. The Liaison Committee of W omen’s International Organizations (the coalition of major international women’s groups set up in 1931) had not united behind the ERT.67 Key women like Sweden’s Hesselgren, who had served as a delegate to the League of Nations since 1928, favored the principle of equal rights between men and w omen but, like many, opposed a blanket equal rights treaty.68 Nonetheless, as economic depression and misogynist backlash fomented hostility to w omen’s employment, sympathy mounted for some kind of women’s rights statement. The new ILO Women’s Section head Marguerite Thibert, hardly a fan of the ERT, called hostility to w omen’s rights “an erroneous and prejudicial contagion which is spreading like an epidemic.” It was a “grave crisis” warranting action.69 As the 1935 Assembly approached, WTUL secretary Elisabeth Christman tried to weigh in. Getting her voice heard at the League of Nations proved difficult. The United States did not send official delegates to the assembly, and the WTUL did not have consultancy stand-
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ing at the League or a permanent presence in Geneva. Evelyn Fox of the World YWCA—which in 1930 had shifted its headquarters from London to Geneva to be more involved with international organizations like the League—offered assistance.70 She promised to forward a statement from the WTUL to League of Nations officers. Encouraged, Christman penned a long, impassioned attack on the ERT, zeroing in on the class and philosophical differences that animated the dispute. Equal rights legislation may help the “business and professional woman with education and acquired training,” she wrote, but it imposes “serious hardships” on w omen workers who have “no real freedom of contract.” Equal rights proponents, with their “individualistic viewpoints,” confuse “legal equality” with real equality and put “legal rights” ahead of “human rights.”71 Christman sent copies of her statement to ILO Director Harold Butler, the League of Nations, and to Fox, who incorporated much of the text into the World YWCA statement.72 Butler responded with a cordial, chatty note marked “personal.” “We do not share the views of the promoters of the ERT so far as industrial matters are concerned,” he assured her. “They have always been among our enemies, as they have been among yours, and the women’s trade union movements everywhere are of the same opinion.”73 The League’s reply was less friendly: because the WTUL was “without standing,” its statement would not be transmitted to the Assembly. Frustrated, Christman wrote Mary Craig McGeachy, the Canadian-born League official assigned to work with women’s organizations, for “help strategizing.”74 Christman spoke frankly to McGeachy, a former YWCA volunteer, about her growing sense of isolation in the international women’s movement. Former friends like the International Alliance of Women and WILPF, she feared, now stood with the NWP and the Open Door. To make m atters worse, the WTUL cannot afford to send someone to Geneva, while the NWP and the Open Door will be t here “in full strength.” Such class disparities infuriated her. She characterized her adversaries as “for the most part women who have no particular jobs, except to tell the industrial w oman what is bad for them.”75 Following McGeachy’s advice, Christman fired off a second statement to the League of Nations.
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As passionate as the first, it reiterated her arguments about how class shaped w omen’s definitions of “freedom” and “equality.” ERT proponents “misunderstand what freedom is,” Christman insisted, b ecause individual wage-earning women do not have “freedom of contract.” Without unions and fair l abor standards there is no “real freedom.” Dismantling the fair labor standards “built up over 100 years” would be disastrous. “Legal equality does not mean industrial equality.”76 Christman’s fears did not materialize in 1935. The League of Nations sidestepped the controversy over the ERT by separating the investigation of w omen’s economic status from that of w omen’s civil and political status. It directed the ILO to investigate the economic aspects of women’s status and affirmed ILO jurisdiction over “questions of employment, w hether men or w omen.” The League itself would oversee the investigation of w omen’s civil and political status, and for help, it urged w omen’s international organizations to study the question and each of its fifty-eight member states to submit reports.77 Feminists of all persuasions applauded the decision. New Deal women saw it as a victory for their side because they rightly believed that the ILO’s tripartite representation, which included labor voters, made it a more amenable venue for their point of view than the League of Nations. And they vowed to use the decision as an opportunity for a serious discussion of w omen’s rights at the ILO. Other feminists took heart too. At long last, the League of Nations Assembly had taken action on women’s rights, and its emphasis on “women’s status,” rather than the ERT per se, had helped bypass the logjam over the ERT. Women internationalists anticipated further positive steps at the League of Nations and welcomed the shift from questions of abstract l egal rights to questions of how to improve women’s lives more generally.78
A Working Women’s Charter for the World With investigations of women’s status by the ILO and League of Nations underway, New Deal feminists stepped up their international activism. Anderson believed they needed an ambitious “positive program” to present to the world; simply pointing out the problems with the ERT
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was not enough. She envisioned an international charter of working women’s rights that would serve as a basis “for common action by the women of the world.”79 Anderson moved quickly to assemble an impressive group of egalitarian w omen intellectuals and activists to draft what came to be known as the “Women’s Charter.” Acclaimed historian and feminist intellectual Mary Ritter Beard, New York civil rights lawyer Dorothy Kenyon, and Anderson’s longtime league colleagues— Christman, Schneiderman, and Miller—signed on. W omen from the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, and other groups joined them. Van Kleeck agreed to chair.80 Despite (or perhaps because of ) van Kleeck’s falling out with Perkins, van Kleeck and Anderson remained close. By 1935, like many o thers enamored with the Soviet experiment, van Kleeck had shifted her thinking about the New Deal. She viewed the Roosevelt New Deal and social democracy as bulwarks against the fascist threat, a perspective in sync with the larger zeitgeist on the Communist Left, which in the late 1930s lauded a “Popular Front” political alliance with Germany’s opponents as a way of defending the Soviet Union. The first version of the Women’s Charter surfaced in December 1936. It drew inspiration from older initiatives like the WTUL’s Working Women’s Charter that Schneiderman and Anderson had brought to Versailles in 1919 as well as from recent events like the 1936 ILO conference in Santiago attended by Miller.81 “Equality is not enough,” the Women’s Charter began; “society as a whole” must be remade. Women’s equality advances in tandem with the “movement toward higher standards of living and greater security for all. As long as conditions exist adverse to general welfare and particularly burdensome for workers, full equality for women” cannot be achieved. The charter affirmed “full po litical and civil rights” and “full opportunity for employment” for women, but also insisted on their need for “security of livelihood” and “safeguards against physically harmful conditions of employment and economic exploitation,” including “safeguarding of motherhood.” As van Kleeck explained, “Unequal measures are sometimes necessary to achieve equality.”82 The 1936 charter emerged after substantial debate. The committee replaced “equal rights” with “full rights” because as Schneiderman
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insisted, “When you ask for equality you ask merely to be as badly off as men.” That kind of equality, the committee agreed, was not their aim.83 Schneiderman, with Christman’s help, also argued for adding “the right to collective bargaining.” Initially this proposal was voted down: the group favored labor legislation and economic rights but feared alienating “middle-class groups.” Yet when a second, revised version of the charter appeared in January 1937, the “right of united action” and “freedom of association” had been added.84 More controversies surfaced when the W omen’s Charter went public a few months later. The League of Women Voters balked at the words “security of livelihood,” b ecause as Anderson fumed to van Kleeck, they “dubbed the phrase communistic.” The LWV got “snarled up” in another phrase too: “ ‘freedom of association,’ ” a right, Anderson grumbled, “to which they ought not object.”85 Journalist Thyra J. Edwards, a leading figure in the National Negro Congress and in global Popular Front radicalism, wanted the charter to ban “discrimination b ecause of sex, race, religion, creed, or political belief.” O thers expressed similar concerns, pointing to the charter’s inattention to “race” and the needs of nonwhite women. The charter committee then voted to reach out to African American women, inviting them to join the group, and pledged to set aside time for further charter revisions.86 Single-sex women’s organizations responded less positively to the Women’s Charter than did coed labor and left political groups. Of the women’s groups, the WTUL and the YWCA signed on, but to Anderson’s fury, some of the more mainstream organizations—the League of Women Voters, the W omen’s Clubs, and the National Federation of Business and Professional W omen—deserted the cause. “I suppose the best we can do with t hese w omen’s organizations,” Anderson sniffed, “is to keep them from hurting the working w omen as much as possible.”87 The NWP, of course, remained firmly opposed, insisting equality with men “is all that Feminists ask.”88 In contrast, mixed-sex u nions and left- leaning groups pledged support. The National Negro Congress added its name as a charter sponsor, as did the Communist Party. Unions in the retail, garment, and service industries were the most enthusiastic, with some setting up “women’s charter groups.”89 Only a few progres-
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sive groups hesitated. The American League against War and Fascism, for example, expressed “grave concerns” about all-female “hen movements” and worried the charter might ignite a “new mass women’s movement” that would divide and weaken worker struggles. Nonetheless, it too became a charter sponsor.90 By late 1937, a more racially and culturally diverse coalition formed to oversee the charter campaign. New members included Mary McLeod Bethune, two top officers of the Domestic Workers’ Union, and representatives of Jewish and Catholic women’s groups. The group incorporated van Kleeck’s suggestion and added “no discrimination on the basis of race” to the charter. They also proposed new language be incorporated in a new “condensed version” of the charter: “full opportunity for education, work, and leisure without discrimination because of race or sex” should be added as well as “no discrimination on account of race, religion, or political affiliation.” Finally, they approved an amendment pledging “protection of the health of parents and c hildren.” T hese changes—the incorporation of multiple forms of discrimination and the choice of parental health, not just maternal health—were notable new twists in the charter’s original aspirations.91 The rights of working m others and the fight against employment discrimination proved popular causes in the “women’s charter groups” that sprang up. The Department Store Employees Union of New York group chose “maternity insurance” and “an equal right to work” as its priorities.92 As spokeswoman for the charter, van Kleeck highlighted t hese issues too. The charter, she told the New York Times, calls for an end to “wage discrimination” and the “double day.” Maternity plans adopted by other countries “where insurance is paid for a period before and after the birth of a child” can “serve as a basis” for the United States, she insisted. There was no reason why “women’s work of whatever nature,” including the “unpaid work of housewives,” could not be given “equal weight.”93 Still, international buy-in was needed for the campaign to succeed. Early on, Anderson and van Kleeck had solicited advice from abroad, reaching out to their friends from the women’s congresses, the ILO, and other groups. But right-w ing opposition and political infighting had
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decimated the socialist and labor movements in many nations. Letters went unanswered. Some colleagues wrote back but could offer little or no assistance.94 A few expressed skepticism. Alicia Moreau de Justo confessed to being “rather stumped at the difficulty of opposing ‘equal rights’ without being misunderstood.” Her concerns proved prescient. As we saw earlier, at the 1936 Buenos Aires People’s Peace Conference that she helped organize, the New Deal women who spoke against the ERT were taken as opponent of women’s rights.95 Alice Cheyney of the ILO conveyed a similar warning, though she wrote to Evelyn Fox of the YWCA, rather than to Anderson. The charter, she thought, betrayed its “origin” in the fight to preserve protective legislation and doubted it would “strike fire as a programme for w omen throughout the world generally, where there is more need of political and civil emancipation.”96 Anderson was not deterred. Her initial efforts to find international partners for the Women’s Charter had fizzled, but she had another plan.
Taking the Women’s Charter to the ILO and the League of Nations Anderson decided to take a version of the W omen’s Charter to the ILO.97 Things did not go well at first. When Anderson sent the ILO a resolution on women workers (modeled closely on the W omen’s Charter) for the June 1937 ILC, Thibert tried to sidetrack it. (She confessed later that she feared “one of those painful incidents” with women from the NWP.) Grace Abbott, appointed as one of the two US government delegates to the 1937 ILC, hesitated as well, unsure w hether the resolution’s call for “full political and civil rights” fell within the ILO’s “domain.”98 But Anderson had no intention of separating women’s economic rights from women’s political and civil rights. Abbott relented and agreed to defend the resolution at the ILC. She did so ably. In a speech before the assembly, she stressed the impossibility of considering w omen’s “industrial rights” apart from their “civil and political rights” and explained why the ILO should pronounce on the “legal and social,” as well as the “industrial” position of w omen.99 The resolution passed unanimously. The ILO later claimed the moment a “turning
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point” in its history and the declaration a landmark reaffirmation of its 1919 dual framework in “broader and more complete terms.”100 The ILO assessment was not far from the mark. New Deal feminists had scored a major victory. Like the W omen’s Charter, the 1937 ILO Resolution combined support for w omen’s political, civil, and economic rights with calls for safeguarding motherhood and expanding protections against hazardous work to men. It affirmed the ILO’s founding goals of equality and protection for w omen while adding labor women’s aspiration of social protection for all workers. It updated the Versailles Treaty principle of men and women receiving “equal remuneration for work of equal value” as the right to “receive remuneration without discrimination because of sex” and rephrased the “principle of free association” as the right to collective bargaining.101 The resolution’s bundling of “political and civil rights” with “economic” was a direct challenge to a postwar international order that separated such rights and marginalized the latter. The Versailles Treaty had set up a dual-track structure in which the ILO addressed economic concerns and the League of Nations political and civil m atters. The 1935 General Assembly of the League of Nations had perpetuated this divide by assigning the ILO to women’s economic status while the League would handle the rest.102 The 1937 resolution rejected that bifurcation: women’s “entire status” should be examined together. The 1937 reso lution was a bold departure for the ILO and a harbinger of change to come. Although Mary Anderson could rightly claim a win for New Deal feminism at the ILO, the League of Nations largely ignored the Women’s Charter. Like her WTUL colleague Christman, she made l ittle headway at the League. Even the more sympathetic international w omen’s lobbying groups resisted signing onto the Women’s Charter. Most had coalesced around the “status of w omen” language, believing it a way of avoiding a showdown over the ERT and moving forward on w omen’s rights. The W omen’s Charter, they feared, would reignite wearying wars over the ERT and woman-specific l abor legislation. In September 1937, as the General Assembly listened intently, Sweden’s Kerstin Hesselgren, the chair of the League committee on w omen’s status, summed up its
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findings and recommendations. The report urged the League to devote more resources to the question of w omen’s status and waved the ERT debate aside by proclaiming “the status of women is not a question which at present one can hope to see settled for all countries by the adoption of a s imple and all-embracing formula.” The League responded by establishing a “committee of experts of both sexes” to oversee an ambitious worldwide investigation of the political and civil status of women. And, once again, it charged the ILO with preparing a separate report on women’s economic status.103 Still fearful of the ERT being reintroduced into the League of Nations, New Deal w omen w ere relieved when Roosevelt appointed feminist jurist Dorothy Kenyon, a tough-minded and brilliant legal strategist, to the League’s new Committee on the Legal Status of Women.104 Kenyon was sympathetic to the needs of industrial w omen and opposed the NWP’s blanket approach to ending sex discrimination. She was also a firm believer in women’s rights and optimistic about what the committee might achieve with its worldwide study.105 After the committee’s first meeting in April 1938, Kenyon predicted “startling” results from its investigation. The “confidence” of Americans in how they always lead “may not be wholly justified,” she told the New York Times. Countries can be ahead in some areas such as education and opportunity for women but lag in others such as social equality and security.106 Although pleased with Kenyon’s appointment, Anderson and van Kleeck w ere hardly in a celebratory mood. In March 1938, van Kleeck had reluctantly disbanded the W omen’s Charter coalition as energy flagged and the group dwindled. Especially painful was the defection of Mary Beard—long involved in the l abor and the w omen’s movement as a chronicler, educator, and advocate—and her very public criticism of the charter effort. As Beard explained to the press, she had been drawn to the W omen’s Charter idea b ecause she favored a “more socialized economy” and disdained the “ ‘free man’ mores” of individualistic feminists who desired nothing more than “liberty to compete on equal terms with men.”107 Beard did not support the ERA and feared “rugged feminism,” as she labeled that wing of the movement, ran the risk of “supporting, if unintentionally, ruthless laissez faire” and settling for
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“equality in disaster.” For her, that fear had only intensified amidst the economic and political crises of the 1930s. She, like others in the charter group, wanted the struggle for sex justice joined with the “demand for decency of life and labor all around.”108 But the charter group disappointed her because it tied itself too closely to “sex protection” and the “objectionable idea of [female] dependence.” Beard believed feminists of all stripes exaggerated “women’s subjection to man,” as her book Woman as Force in History (1946) would l ater elaborate. “The social welfare stance toward w omen and c hildren is just as pale as equal rights,” she had warned the charter group at one point, and in her opinion, they had not listened.109 Van Kleeck thought otherwise. She bristled at Beard’s presumption that she was the only one in the charter group who favored an end to “the economic rule of a plutocracy” and the “anti-social American labor system.”110 The majority of the committee felt the same, van Kleeck countered. And just how would plutocratic, anti-social rule end, van Kleeck wondered, without cross-class alliances and organizational power? The W omen’s Charter was a necessary step, she insisted, t oward the “plenty-for-all” agenda that both she and Beard wanted. It gave “the lead to w omen in industry” and moved “middle-class w omen more surely toward a progressive program of alliance of all women workers, whether in the home, in industry, or the professions.”111
The Women’s Charter and the 1938 Lima Declaration of W omen’s Rights The W omen’s Charter coalition may have disbanded, but New Deal feminists continued to carry forward its ideas. In December 1938, at the Eighth Conference of American States in Lima, they succeeded in aligning themselves with Latin American women in CIM and winning two victories: the ouster of Doris Stevens as chair of CIM and the adoption by the Pan-American Union of a statement on w omen’s rights that incorporated key tenets from the Women’s Charter. New Deal women were thrilled when Lima delegates rejected the ERT and instead backed a substitute declaration. The Lima Declaration of Women’s Rights called
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for w omen’s “full rights as an act of the most elemental human justice.” It combined support for w omen’s civil and political equality with “full protection and opportunity for work” and “ample protection as mothers.”112 New Deal feminists hailed it as a “great advance over the proposed ‘equal rights’ treaty” and of “utmost importance to all American women.” Perkins expressed her “hearty approval” of the declaration’s commitment to “women’s full protection in and opportunities for work” and its endorsement of “the right of women to equal treatment with men as to civil and political rights.” She proclaimed it a guide “as we go forward in each country.”113 WTUL legislative lobbyist Mary Winslow credited the passage of the 1938 Lima Declaration to the league’s “six months of hard work”; the strong backing of Mary Anderson, Molly Dewson, and other prominent New Dealers; and, significantly, the cooperation of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. To be sure, New Deal feminists had backed the Lima Declaration and helped it pass. Anderson and Dewson lobbied New Deal officials, including Hull and “Brain-Truster” Adolph Berle, urging Elise Musser’s appointment as a US voting representative and State Department opposition to the ERT and Doris Stevens. (The latter task proved easy because both Hull and Berle considered Stevens an e nemy of the New Deal and a friend of profascist dictators in Peru and the Dominican Republic.) Musser chaired the key committee on w omen in Lima and exerted a strong influence on its actions. Significantly, Anderson had drafted the w omen’s rights resolution Musser pushed forward at the conference, drawing on language and principles from the Women’s Charter.114 At the same time, the 1938 Lima Declaration’s pioneering acknowl edgment of women’s rights arose as much from traditions outside the United States as inside. It was a moment of transnational alliance among social democratic feminists in the Americas that depended on w omen in both North and South. The “insistence on action” by the conference came from Latin American nations, and the sentiments of the Lima Declaration reflected the long-standing commitment of Latin American feminists to the blending of w omen’s civil and political rights with their social rights as mothers. The declaration’s broad framing of women’s rights and its attention to worker rights reflected the politics of key
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Latin American w omen activists at the conference. Esperanza Balmaceda, the technical adviser to the Mexican delegation who sat on the committee on women with Musser, was crucial to the framing and passage of the declaration. The 1938 conference represented the first time Balmaceda and other left Latin American feminists sided with New Deal w omen against Stevens. They had come to view Stevens as an unreliable ally against Nazi fascism and a problematic, overbearing personality. In 1938, they aligned with the New Deal and its promise of intercontinental solidarity against fascism.115 The 1938 Lima Conference was pivotal in other ways as well. It made CIM an official permanent commission of the Pan-American Union, rather than a quasi-autonomous advisory body, and expanded its duties. Soon a fter, in a blow to Stevens, the US State Department named WTUL loyalist Mary Winslow to CIM, guided by advice from Anderson and others close to the administration. A close confidante of Anderson, Winslow had started her career at the Women’s Bureau in 1920. Her league activities included her current position as WTUL legislative representative, a position she had held since 1929.116 Stevens “threatened a sit-in strike, tried to involve Mrs. Roosevelt in the mess,” and has been “just as nasty as can be,” Schneiderman recounted gleefully to Bondfield in England.117 But all to no avail. The State Department stood by its decision. New Deal feminists hoped Winslow would replace Stevens as chair, but Latin American feminists preferred a non-US w oman. Argentina’s Ana Rosa Schlieper de Martínez Guerrero, a leader of Unión Argentina de Mujeres (Argentine Women’s Union) and a left antifascist, assumed the chair, and in 1939, CIM headquarters moved to Buenos Aires. Minerva Bernardino, an NWP ally and Trujillo’s choice to represent the Dominican Republic on CIM, assumed the vice chair slot.118 Stevens’ fall from CIM leadership is usually told as a moral fable, with calculating US social feminists (the bad feminists) orchestrating her ouster and foiling the advance of the NWP (the good feminists).119 Yet both sides twisted arms and played political hardball to gain influence in CIM, and both sides carried the feminist banner. And above all, Latin American w omen affected the outcome as much as did US w omen. In the end, the personal
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and political enmity between Stevens and New Deal feminists made it impossible for e ither side to compromise. The animosity rested on fundamental and abiding disagreements over the state, the nature of competitive capitalism, and what was necessary for real freedom and full equality. The seemingly upstoppable slide into another world war transformed CIM dramatically. It also substantially altered the work of the League of Nations Committee on the Status of W omen. The “startling” results Kenyon had predicted in April 1938 did not materialize. The committee published a preliminary report in January 1939, but the General Assembly never adopted the document.120 The outcome of the committee’s surveys and analysis would have to wait. The ILO issued a voluminous tome of 570 pages in 1939, The Law and W omen’s Work, but that too was set aside as war spread across the world.121 Perhaps there would be further advances in international women’s rights, perhaps not. With the world in chaos, no one could be sure.
On Hold New Deal women began the 1930s with ambitious plans for moving the world t oward greater security and fairness. They ended up having to fight hard just to defend the basic international labor and social protections they had been so key in establishing in 1919. Yet the decade was not without accomplishment on the international front. With the United States in the ILO and New Deal w omen influential within it, a potentially powerful avenue existed for raising the standards of life for the world’s many. The 1937 ILO Resolution on Women’s Rights signaled an ILO more attentive to the needs of women. Equally promising were the new alliances New Dealers were forging with Latin American women based on shared commitments to antifascism, women’s rights, and social protections. The 1938 Lima Declaration was one result of that cooperation. Even at the League of Nations, a forum not always hospitable to the concerns of working women, New Dealers deemed the new politics of “women’s status” preferable to the more abstract feminism embodied in the ERT.
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Their old adversaries, the NWP, also seemed to be losing steam they believed, at least in the international arena. In 1938, with the ERT on hold and the militant equal rights wing of international feminism divided over what to do next, Alice Paul founded and chaired a new international group, the World Woman’s Party. “The movement which began in our own country at Seneca Falls in 1848 must now be made a unified world movement,” she proclaimed. Soon a fter launching, the World Woman’s Party announced plans to oppose US congressional ratification of ILO sex-specific conventions and stage a “monster parade” in Geneva protesting ILO proposals to regulate the contractual rights of migrant women. To Mary Anderson’s delight, Alice Paul’s bid to lead a “unified world movement” in 1938 did not catch fire.122 Yet troubling patterns persisted for w omen committed to full rights feminism. Elite intergovernmental venues like the League of Nations continued to marginalize class politics, with economic issues relegated to the ILO. The emerging antifascist alliance among social democratic women in the Pan-American Union appeared fragile, with anger over US dominance in the region never far from the surface. Equally concerning, the older mainstream w omen’s organizations seemed less interested in the needs of low-income women. To be sure, the W omen’s Charter group had failed to attract members internationally for a host of reasons: key social democratic allies abroad were absorbed in their own fight for survival against fascism; o thers w ere simply exhausted and confused by what seemed like a parochial and n eedless b attle. But t hese reasons hardly explained the failure of US women’s organizations to sign on. Van Kleeck and Anderson anguished over the dissolution of the Women’s Charter group. They had sought a program foregrounding the “working class of w omen and their demands,” and had wanted to make “clear to the business and professional w omen that they are only one class.”123 They failed. Why? And what did this failure signify about the state of the middle-class women’s movement in America? For some thirty years, women workers had looked primarily to their middle-class sisters for help, and many women’s organizations—the WTUL, the YWCA, the National Consumers’ League—had prioritized the needs of low-income women and adopted class and economic justice as primary
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goals. But women’s organizations were dwindling in size and influence, and the more mainstream groups seemed less concerned with their disadvantaged sisters. Long-standing cross-cross alliances in the women’s movement were fracturing. An era had ended. Sex separatism, van Kleeck and Anderson realized, must give way to mixed-sex organizing, and working-class women must look as much to their b rothers in industry as to their s isters in civic groups. Working women themselves, organized into their own trade unions and professional associations, w ill make the new world, van Kleeck opined. She urged Anderson to set up a national advisory committee of w omen workers at the W omen’s Bureau as the “next step” in the struggle. “The women’s organizations are not primarily concerned with w omen’s work,” van Kleeck concluded in 1938. “A strong and vital women’s movement to meet the new day in the United States will arise out of the trade unions, and not out of the old-line women’s organization.”124 The new day seemed far away, however, as tragedies mounted in the Far East and Europe. The Second Sino-Japanese War raged on, despite millions dead, with Japan’s imperial territorial ambitions hardly whetted. Hitler’s armies marched across Europe, occupying Austria, Czecho slovakia, and finally Poland on September 1, 1939. A few days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. New Deal women watched in despair as the world once again descended into a vortex of violence and terror.
pa r t i v
Universal Declarations
Frieda Miller, Maida Springer, Pauline Newman, at the US Women’s Bureau, Washington, 1947. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
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Divisions over fascism, communism, and colonialism reconfigured global politics at midcentury and paradoxically spurred feminist reform. Full rights feminists in the United States—in tandem with colleagues abroad—articulated, advocated, and legislated new universal declarations of social, economic, and human rights. Dramatic breakthroughs occurred at the ILO and the United Nations, including the 1944 ILO Philadelphia Declaration, the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and historic new ILO conventions on worker rights, pay equity, and maternity. Women secured landmark concessions from a burgeoning international labor movement as well. By the late 1950s, international policies eliminating coerced labor and banning discrimination based on sex, race, color, and region moved forward as Third World nations coalesced and gained leverage in world affairs. Yet postwar advances on the international stage were not matched by legislative progress at home. As New Deal reform stalled, a younger cohort of full rights feminists, steeped in the social justice traditions of the labor and civil rights movements, looked abroad for answers. Like the older generation of activists they venerated, they sought connections with partners outside the United States, and some moved abroad to places where social democracy and freedoms w ere expanding. They found the United States had as much to learn as to teach.
8 Wartime Journeys
New deal egalitarians made human rights a priority in the late 1930s. Respecting the dignity of the individual person and the inviolable humanity of all God’s c hildren had long been part of the religious beliefs of many full rights feminists.1 But by the end of the 1930s, a broad conception of human rights—what political scientist William Felice terms “social h uman rights”—became a fundamental pillar of their politics.2 Equality would only be achieved, they contended, when all p eoples, regardless of citizenship, race, or religion, enjoyed the full range of social and economic rights. To achieve these intertwined rights, New Deal women joined the escalating campaigns of US labor and civil rights groups to rescue victims of fascism abroad and counter race and religious discrimination at home. Th ese campaigns intensified in the 1940s and profoundly affected the way Americans saw each other and the world. After the United States entered the war on the Allied side in December 1941, full rights feminism transformed further. Ties with women under fascist regimes, already frayed, ripped apart. But bonds among women in Allied nations solidified as Allied women united in a global antifascist struggle against the Axis coalition. The Allied cause, led by the “Big Five”—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, the United States, and China—eventually won the allegiance of more than fifty nations, including Latin American countries with historic antipathies t oward Allied imperial powers. Firm opponents of fascism, New Deal women accepted wartime government missions with the aim of promoting US 223
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liberal and social democratic ideals abroad. The international travels of four such w omen—Mary Winslow, Mary Cannon, Frieda Miller, and Maida Springer—reveal much about the nature of women’s transnational alliances in this era and how encounters abroad changed US feminists, personally and politically. At the war’s end, Frances Perkins and Frieda Miller took the lead in reinventing the ILO, an all-too-often-ignored site of consequential debate over w omen’s rights and social justice. Their efforts, along with those of many o thers, culminated in the ILO adoption of the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration, a pioneering charter of social and economic rights for the postwar world. It was a pivotal moment in the history of full rights feminism.
Mobilizing against Fascism In the late 1930s, the WTUL broke with its partners in the w omen’s peace movement and joined Roosevelt’s mobilization against fascism. Since 1921, the league had faithfully supported peace groups like the National Council for Prevention of War that favored international law, disarmament, and diplomacy as the best guarantors of peace. Although the WTUL often complained that peace groups did not pay enough attention to the economic causes of war, it remained in the fold.3 In 1938, however, when the National Council for Prevention of War refused to endorse Roosevelt’s proposal to lift the embargo on military aid to Europe, the league withdrew its affiliation.4 Unlike the more pacifist wing of the peace movement, the WTUL favored aid, including military aid, as a deterrent to the spread of war. Most Americans agreed, and by 1940, those insisting on US neutrality, even if vigorous antifascists, w ere increasingly on the margins of public opinion.5 In May 1940, the WTUL “pledged full support” for giving “material aid to the victims of aggression in Europe and preparing our own country to defend to the uttermost its democratic form of government.”6 Although the league still opposed “sending men to Europe,” it rescinded that objection a few months later.7 “Such a lovely day, such mad folly,” Margaret Bondfield wrote to her American friends as bombs rained down on London in
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November 1940. The “principalities and powers of darkness,” she feared, could no long be resisted.8 Were New Deal feminists in the 1940s simply hopeless nationalists wearing a false mantle of internationalism to cover their fast-beating imperialist hearts?9 I think not. WTUL w omen supported the US move toward war reluctantly and opposed using the war to gain American territorial or economic dominance. They rethought their peace politics because they hated fascism and violence and believed the peace movement’s e arlier approaches to containing t hese evils w ere no longer effective. They had endured the deaths of dear friends and heard countless tales of unimaginable suffering. They abhorred fascism’s authoritarianism, its virulent anti-Semitism and race hatred, its denial of w omen’s rights, and its relentless assaults on trade unionism and socialism. League women w ere not alone in their hatred of fascism. Garment unions like the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers w ere among America’s fiercest opponents of fascism. Their stance is not hard to explain. Eastern European Jewish socialists led both u nions. David Dubinsky, an immigrant from Russian Poland and a youthful resister to czarism (and later to Bolshevism and Stalinism), served as ILGWU president from 1932 to 1966. Sidney Hillman, the president of the Amalgamated from its founding in 1914 until he died in 1946, spent time in czarist prisons for his politics before fleeing to America. In addition, both unions had diverse memberships, racially and religiously, and WTUL women held prominent leadership posts in them.10 In 1934, Dubinsky set up the Jewish L abor Committee, a coalition of unions and community groups dedicated to rescuing Jewish socialist and trade union victims of Nazi repression and promoting religious and racial tolerance. At first, the AFL was reluctant to join. But AFL president William Green worried about keeping the ILGWU loyal to the AFL, and when Dubinsky, who still had family in Poland, defended the Jewish Labor Committee’s “triple R” policy of “rescue, relief, and resistance,” Green listened.11 In 1938, in a break with its historic support for immigration restriction, the AFL created the Labor League for Human Rights as a relief and rescue agency and became a joint sponsor of the Jewish L abor Committee’s campaign to loosen US
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State Department visa restrictions for Nazi political prisoners, Jews and non-Jews.12 The campaign had the backing of Frances Perkins. As head of the Department of L abor’s Immigration and Naturalization Service, Perkins struggled valiantly from inside the White House to find ways to bypass restrictive laws keeping political refugees from entering the United States.13 When the British offered some of their US quota slots to Jews fleeing Hitler a fter the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, Perkins urged the administration to accept the arrangement. When the State Department advised against it, Perkins countered by issuing thousands of visitor visas and extending the visas of those already here.14 Despite her maneuvers, the United States took in only a small fraction of t hose facing death and imprisonment from the Nazis. In 1940, Germany killed some hundred thousand Jews. The figure soon reached into the millions as plans to exterminate Jews and other Nazi enemies in death camps proceeded.15 Garment union efforts to promote religious and racial tolerance at home gained traction, however. In the late 1930s, the Amalgamated, along with other progressive unions, revamped its education programs and foregrounded the dangers of racial hatred and religious intolerance.16 The excesses of Germany’s virulent racial purity doctrine helped discredit scientific racism and anti-Semitism in union ranks and among Americans at large. By the time the United States entered the war, an increasing number of Americans associated race and religious discrimination with fascism and judged it as un-American and unpatriotic. During the war, the garment unions, sensing an opening, stepped up efforts to integrate workplaces and change hearts and minds. Esther Peterson and Maida Springer, two of the prominent young 1930s activists profiled e arlier, joined t hese wartime initiatives. Peterson had spoken out against the YWCA practice of separate Black and white swimming facilities when she chaired the Boston YWCA’s citizen advisory group in the early 1930s. As assistant director of education for the Amalgamated from 1939 to 1944, she teamed up with Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and Dollie Lowther Robinson from the educational department of the u nion’s majority-Black Laundry Workers’ Division. Peterson learned
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as well from Russian-born Jewish socialist and veteran radical J.B.S. Hardman, editor of the u nion’s journal, The Advance, and director of education and cultural activities. As part of the union’s Committee on War Activities, Peterson traveled through the South, setting up classes for members about the Amalgamated’s new policy of racially integrated workplaces.17 Maida Springer concentrated on race relations in a 5,000-member ILGWU manufacturing local in New York. It was a diverse local in flux, Springer recalled, with “Negroes just come up from the South,” housewives on their first factory job, “poor devils who had escaped the gas chambers of Hitler,” and European “old-timers” of e very nationality. She told them they “didn’t have to love each other,” but they did have to learn to honor and trust one other. Springer spearheaded the organizing of weekend educational institutes where members took classes and socialized in multiracial settings. ILGWU Local 22 president Charles “Sasha” Zimmerman—an ILGWU national vice president, a trustee of the National Urban League, and a leading figure in the socialist ex- Communist left and the Jewish Labor Committee—backed Springer without hesitation. When the union promoted Springer to business agent in 1948 and the garment shop o wners refused to talk with her because she was Black, Zimmerman snapped at them: “You don’t negotiate with her; you don’t negotiate with anyone.”18 Both the ILGWU and the Amalgamated stood behind Springer’s 1942 campaign for state assembly on the American Labor Party ticket, as she advocated “cracking down on l abor unions that exclude members on account of race or color”; “an end to poll taxes, anti-Semitism, and Jim Crowism”; and “uniting behind the president.”19 Some all-white unions persisted in discriminatory practices during the war, refusing, for example, to change union bylaws barring nonwhites as members. But such laggards faced harsh criticism. A. Philip Randolph, who presided over the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the only majority-Black affiliate in the AFL, condemned all-white segregated locals in no uncertain terms. Once an aspiring Shakespearean actor, Randolph was an eloquent orator, and his union was at the height of its power. With the Brotherhood and other racially progressive
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u nions behind him, Randolph insisted on good jobs for all and demanded the labor movement join him in a “moral revolution” for universal human dignity and freedom.20 Randolph believed, and the record of the Brotherhood confirmed, that unions could be powerful weapons in the battle for African American freedom and economic advance.21 Randolph’s March on Washington Movement to end lynching, job discrimination, and Jim Crow (including Jim Crow in the armed ser vices) infused the civil rights struggle with a new philosophy of mass mobilization and nonviolent direct action. In June 1941, days a fter Randolph withdrew his call for thousands of disaffected Black Americans to march in protest in Washington, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which banned employment discrimination on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” in industries with government contracts. “It was thrilling,” Maida Springer remembered. “I felt a surge of possibility and power.” Soon after, Springer and fellow activists Pauli Murray and Dollie Lowther Robinson joined a “silent march” of some five hundred down New York’s Seventh Avenue to protest lynching and race segregation. The three held aloft a huge cloth banner reading JIM CROW HAS GOT TO GO.22 Murray’s commitment to civil disobedience had deepened during the war as she studied at Howard Law School, a center of Gandhi- inspired activism. Murray joined fellow students and faculty (including Caroline Ware who taught Murray’s constitutional law class at Howard) in restaurant sit-ins and other protests. Murray considered herself a “revolutionary pacifist,” dedicated to ending segregation not by violence but by “persuasion” and “spiritual resistance.”23 Like many other civil rights activists at the time, she looked to the Indian freedom movement for inspiration and ideas. In August 1942, as Murray and others knew, the Indian National Congress, angered over Britain’s declaration of war against Germany without consulting Indian leaders, had launched a massive nonviolent civil disobedience “Quit India” campaign, demanding “complete independence” in return for support of the war effort. British authorities arrested Gandhi and thousands of other demonstrators. Gandhi remained in jail for the next two years.24 A nationwide “Double V” campaign heightened pressure for change. Sparked by a 1942 editorial in the Pittsburgh Courier, a popular African
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American newspaper, the campaign demanded the nation confront the hypocrisy of fighting fascism abroad while tolerating racism at home.25 New interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian pacifist group, catalyzed nonviolent direct-action campaigns in Chicago attacking segregation. Spanish-speaking citizens and noncitizens in Texas, California, and across the Southwest intensified their fight against job discrimination, political disenfranchisement, segregated schools, and unconstitutional deportations. They banded together in groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens, founded in 1929, and the El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress), started a decade later by Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright. The thousands of men and women of color in the armed forces and in wartime industry jobs reinforced home-front demands for first- class citizenship.26 The WTUL, for its part, urged “an aggressive campaign to eliminate hiring prejudices of all kinds, whether because of age, sex, or race,” and reiterated the need to end poll tax restrictions on voting.27 No more “double standards in a democracy,” the league proclaimed.28 When the National Council of Negro Women started a wartime coali tion of women’s groups to “build better race relations,” the WTUL, YWCA, National Council of Jewish Women, and other white-led women’s organizations signed on.29 Roosevelt did not speak specifically about ending discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or national origin in his January 1941 State of the Union “Four Freedoms” address (though he would in his 1944 “Second Bill of Rights” speech). But for many, he crystallized their aspirations for the f uture, as he called for “the supremacy of h uman rights everywhere” and a democratic nation and world premised on new social and economic guarantees. There is “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy,” he declared. “Our social economy” must be improved by expanded access to jobs, old-age and unemployment insurance, and “adequate medical care.” But preserving American democracy and security was not possible in isolation from the rest of the world. It rested on “a world founded on four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom
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from want, and freedom from fear. “The new world order” he envisioned “in America and everywhere” was the “very antithesis” of the “new order of tyranny” imposed by dictators.30 The principles Roosevelt espoused made their way into the Atlantic Charter, the statement of Allied war aims drawn up by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941. The charter specified additional goals: “no territorial changes” without the “freely expressed wishes” of the p eople affected; access, on equal terms, to trade and raw materials by all states, “great or small, victor or vanquished”; and, in a clause especially meaningful to New Deal feminists, “collaboration between all nations for improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security.”31 After 1941, with the nation at war, Roosevelt trumpeted the necessity of h uman rights and social guarantees as the “basis for security and prosperity.” Most memorably, in his January 1944 State of the Union address, delivered as a fireside chat, he laid out an “economic bill of rights” for “all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” Such rights included, among o thers, the right to work, the right to an adequate income, and the right to housing, medical care, education, and social security. His speech placed economic and social rights alongside political liberties and claimed all fundamental to the postwar social democracy he sought. True freedom was not possible without economic security and a higher standard of life, he argued; liberalism would not survive without an interventionist state. For Roosevelt, who urged Americans not to “repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolation” and “the excesses of the wild twenties,” peace depended on cooperation among nations and a “better standard of living for all individual men and w omen and children in all Nations.”32 Roosevelt’s articulated freedoms remained aspirations during the war—for the world and for Americans. In 1942, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ordered the internment of US residents of Japanese ancestry, including those with American citizenship. In an egregious violation of human and constitutional rights, the US government uprooted some hundred thousand Japanese men, w omen, and children and relocated them to barely habitable isolated detention
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centers where they lived for the next three years. Frances Perkins thought it “very wrong” and the First Lady strenuously objected, but Roosevelt listened to others. With Perkins no longer in charge of the INS and sidelined at cabinet meetings, her progressive voice on civil liberties and the treatment of so-called aliens did not prevail.33
Wartime Pan-American Journeys Roosevelt’s wartime speeches and actions were still in the future when Mary Winslow set off for Havana in 1939. But she brought with her a firm belief in Roosevelt’s promise to fight fascism and bolster social democracy around the world. Over the next few years, this belief would be tested but remain essentially intact. As we learned earlier, Winslow had a long record as a government insider. She took a job in the US Women’s Bureau as an economic analyst in 1920 after graduating from the New York School of Social Work. In 1929, she became WTUL’s legislative representative in Washington, DC, and held that post u ntil 1941. After winning the bruising fight against Doris Stevens and her supporters in 1938, Winslow had accepted Roosevelt’s appointment as the US delegate to the Pan American Union’s Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM). Fluent in Spanish and French, she hoped a trip south might mend relations within CIM and help her identify Latin American partners—on and off CIM—for future joint programs.34 Both goals proved elusive. Even so, Winslow’s trip began auspiciously. Rose Schneiderman and other US friends accompanied her to Havana for the second regional ILO inter-American conference, a gathering of labor, employer, and government representatives from some twenty nations. She felt a refreshing mutualism of purpose among ILO attendees from the North and South, much like what Frieda Miller had experienced at the first such regional ILO conference three years earlier in Santiago. Many here believe “living standards throughout the Continent” must be raised “if we are to get peace,” she wrote. Winslow, the only woman with voting rights at the conference, chaired the Committee on W omen and Juveniles. Men sat on the committee, as did other women (all advisers), such
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as Amalgamated vice president Dorothy Bellanca; Cuba’s Pilar Jorge de Tella, a long-time feminist advocate of working women and children; and Mexico’s Rosa María Otero Gama de Lombardo Toledano, wife of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the prominent Marxist founder of the region-wide Latin American Confederation of Workers in 1938.35 Winslow found listening to committee members describe progressive legislation passed outside the United States illuminating. In Cuba and Mexico, “minimum wage means living wage,” she enthused, and Cuba and Argentina have “no-dismissal-because-of marriage legislation,” which would be of “great help in the U.S.” Above all, she learned of South American nations with maternity benefits and childcare provisions far superior to those in the United States.36 Jorge de Tella and Gama de Lombardo Toledano felt Winslow failed to give sufficient attention to the job rights of pregnant women and nursing mothers in her proposals before the committee. And Winslow confessed to wanting more time spent on h ousehold “economic security,” an approach she felt gave women with young children more choice in whether to hold jobs outside the home.37 Nonetheless, she believed a “spirit of good will” prevailed on the committee as a whole, with male members “unusually understanding of women’s position and problems.”38 The Committee on Women and Juveniles produced results. It endorsed “women’s general rights,” including voting rights. In addition, it called for married women’s right to work, maternity provisions with job rights and benefits, equal pay for equal work, and higher standards for domestic and agricultural workers. The larger conference agreed with the committee’s recommendations and issued a Declaration of Havana that recognized w omen’s right to full citizenship and social protections.39 Winslow was pleased. The 1939 ILO conference had affirmed women’s rights as workers and mothers and was moving, in her view, toward a strong “American Labor Code” for the region.40 Such optimism did not last. The next summer Winslow set out on a two-month trip, with planned visits to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and Panama. Anderson had encouraged the trip, believing it an opportunity to begin implementing the policies endorsed in the Declaration of Havana.41 Winslow was hopeful too and planned a long
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visit with CIM chair, Ana Rosa Schlieper de Martínez Guerrero, at CIM’s new headquarters in Buenos Aires. What Winslow learned in her summer travels in 1940 left her shaken, with feelings she betrayed only in letters marked “confidential.” A stalwart New Dealer, Winslow never lost faith in CIM’s potential: it could be a “constructive force,” she wrote, and “bring together the w omen in many countries as a united liberal group to interpret and support international action.” She also found liberals and socialists “ready and anxious for closer cooperation with the United States” in each country she visited. Yet to her dismay, many of the men and women she met “looked with an eye of suspicion” on her calls for partnership with the United States. Suspicion came from the right and from the left. The antifascist “Popular Front” alliance, so helpful in bringing together New Deal feminists and left-leaning Latin American women in Lima in 1938, had collapsed, in part a casualty of the Nazi- Soviet Pact. Some on the right and left, she observed, sympathized with fascism: “They say Hitler can take Brazil by phone.” (Here she was referring to how Brazil’s president Getúlio Vargas, who had assumed dictatorial powers in 1937 and shut down the parliament, would respond to a friendly overture from the Führer.) She encountered what she considered “reactionary” religious conservatism among Peruvian women, as well as much disgust with “Yankee Imperialism” in Chile and across the region. The possibility of “intercontinental solidarity” with the United Sates in support of a progressive agenda, appeared slim, she concluded.42 Winslow returned to the United States in the fall, reeling from her difficulties in finding intercontinental common ground. She had little to say, however, about what the United States might do to allay the ill will she had encountered. Nor did she express concerns that the behav ior of American businessmen and government officials might be undermining the very ideals she held dear. At CIM’s November assembly in Washington she offered vague and diminished goals for her commission service: “to learn about w omen of the other American Republics” and “advise U.S. women’s groups on how they can work for closer cooperation with women of Latin America.”43 CIM as a whole seemed muted too. A fter a reception at the White House, CIM issued a bland official proclamation, urging women to
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“unite in the cause of democracy” and support the “Good Neighbor Policy.” Buried in CIM’s proclamation were specific “priorities for action”: equal civil and legal status of women, improved maternal and child welfare, and ending gender-based “wage differentials.”44 But in 1940, CIM participants seemed beholden to the national elites who appointed them and tied to the individual agendas of the nations they represented. The 1938 reorganization of CIM and the loss of autonomy that resulted had taken a toll.45 The next year, a second US W omen’s Bureau staffer, former international YWCA director Mary M. Cannon, set off for Latin America. The first chief of the new US Women’s Bureau Inter-American Division, Cannon, like Winslow, hoped a trip south would help her better fulfill her governmental duties. Mary Anderson had lobbied hard to secure State Department funds for Cannon’s 1941 trip, and despite the “chilly climate between the State Department and the Women’s Bureau,” she got enough money for a six-month tour. In return, the State Department expected Cannon, a trained economist, to observe working conditions among Latin America’s wage-earning women and consult with government officials in Latin America about labor legislation and women’s programs. Anderson added another charge: explore possibilities for cross-b order cooperation among labor women and their organ izations.46 With her multiple responsibilities in mind, Cannon planned visits to government offices, industrial workplaces, and labor and women’s groups in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. She too would return with a sober assessment of the possibilities of “intercontinental solidarity,” despite the growing antifascist sentiment in Latin Americ a after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Cannon however responded to the “realities” she observed in Latin America in quite a different way than did Winslow. Once in Argentina, her base of operations, Cannon sent back formal reports approved by the US Embassy, but she also mailed weekly “confidential” letters to Anderson who shared them with a staff eager for Cannon’s insider perspective. Like Winslow, Cannon met resistance from her southern neighbors, with some Latin American labor officials refusing to host her. But Cannon proved a better emissary than Win-
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slow. She spoke fluent Spanish and Portuguese, had spent much of the 1930s living in Buenos Aires directing the YWCA’s international program t here, and had a healthy skepticism toward America’s Good Neighbor diplomacy. She was heartened by Roosevelt’s rejection of military intervention and “sincerely believed that closer cultural and economic ties could benefit Latin America.” Yet she worried about State Department paternalism t oward Latin American nations and its belief that the United States offered the best available model for Latin American development. Lurking behind America’s friendly diplomatic face, she saw desire for control over Latin American resources and economic development.47 Her reservations grew as she traveled, observed, listened, and learned. Cannon stayed longest in Argentina, with frequent visits to CIM’s office in Buenos Aires. Her relationship with CIM chair Ana Rosa Schlieper de Martínez Guerrero prospered, as did her friendship with Argentina’s grand dame of socialist feminism, Alicia Moreau de Justo. Schlieper “knew the L abor Movement from the inside out, so I can learn a lot from her,” Cannon wrote. Cannon thought Moreau equally impressive. Moreau, as we learned earlier, admired America’s demo cratic, egalitarian ideals. She remembered the 1919 women’s congress fondly and sent affectionate greetings to Mary Anderson.48 In Moreau’s opinion, the allegiance of Argentineans to democratic socialism and women’s rights had not wavered since 1919. The Argentinean women’s suffrage campaign came close to victory in 1932, and the international socialist feminist magazine Moreau cofounded in 1933, Vida Femenina (Feminine Life), was thriving.49 Moreau sat on the executive board of Partido Socialista, Argentina’s Socialist Party, and she invited Cannon to speak at its headquarters, Casa del Pueblo (People’s House). Cannon readily accepted, reminding her “confidential” letter readers in the United States that the “Socialist Party in Buenos Aires is a serious, respected” group and has done “grand” work in securing social legislation. “They are staunch friends and supporters of the Democracies in the present crisis.”50 Argentina’s socialist and trade union movement opposes the advance of fascism across Europe and has declared its “sympathy with the ‘democracies.’ ”51
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In other Argentinean circles, however, Cannon encountered “more talk of pro-Nazism that I had ever imagined could be possible.”52 Even among those opposed to fascism and sympathetic to democracy, she found deep distrust of US motives. Many suspect the “frenzied interest in inter- American solidarity” emanating from the United States “may be part of ‘Yanqui’ Imperialism,” she reported. Th ere is a general retreat to isolationism driven by “anti-British, anti-Yanqui, and anti-Pan-Americanism.” In short, many here like “neither imperialism or capitalism.”53 The more Cannon listened, the more critical she became of US foreign policy and of American capital. When US State Department special envoy to Latin America, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., visited, she complained of his simple-m inded repetition of “Roos evelt’s line of propaganda for hemisphere mutual protection against dictator states.” In her view, more was needed. The people here, she confided to Anderson, are sympathetic to Roosevelt but “afraid of U.S. interests . . . Western farmers and cattlemen” taking over “as much of the commerce and industry of Argentina as they can get.”54 There is “a very real fear among some p eople that the U.S. is entering into a policy of economic and commercial imperialism” in Latin American countries. “We and these countries should have some reassurance about foreign, or rather U.S., capital,” she declared—revealing by her inadvertent use of the word “foreign” her close identity with t hose around her. US capital “should abide by and not try to dodge or change existing laws covering labor and social security.” Further, “it should not expect exorbitant profits at the expense of the people.”55 Cannon’s second Latin American trip—a seven-month journey through Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Ecuador in 1942 and 1943—confirmed her growing ambivalence about her government assignment.56 Cannon believed she could do little in Latin America to bolster antifascist sentiment—a goal she shared with the State Department—by touting Pan-American partnerships. Nor could she build cross-border labor women’s alliances and raise labor standards in the Americas by preaching to Latin American women about America’s good will and its model labor legislation. What she could do, she realized, and do well, was teach those in the United States about Latin America. Americans knew little
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about Latin American working w omen or the region’s social welfare advances. Such knowledge might encourage US social welfare initiatives and help Americans move beyond stereotypes and disrespect in their relations with their southern neighbors.57 Cannon followed through on her decision when she returned home. She spoke to w omen’s groups across the United States about what she had discovered and published multiple reports on Latin America. In the midst of war, she dared Americans to learn from o thers, rather than simply hail the virtues of their own nation.58 “In some Latin American countries the position of women workers is actually better than it is here,” she insisted to one group in 1944. As evidence she pointed to the prevalence of maternity leaves with job guarantees and laws forbidding pay discrimination. That revelation, the New York Times decided, was surprising enough to be “news.”59 To Cannon’s relief, her travels had kept her blessedly marginal to the turmoil in CIM. Vice Chair Minerva Bernardino, the Dominican Republic appointee, and CIM Chair Schlieper had exchanged angry public accusations in early 1943. Mary Winslow, still the US representative on CIM, had fanned the flames. New Deal feminists had never liked or trusted Bernardino. They rejected her brand of feminism and scorned what they perceived as her willingness to ally herself with Trujillo’s autocratic regime. Bernardino’s ties with Doris Stevens and the NWP began in Montevideo in 1933 and held firm when Bernardino moved to the United States in 1935. A year after a 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitian and Dominican laborers on the Dominican border, she and Stevens had taken a widely publicized trip together to the Dominican Republic to advise Trujillo on suffrage rights for women and gain his endorsement of the ERT. Trujillo welcomed them, eager to burnish his international reputation. After the visit, with Trujillo’s patronage, Bernardino’s career continued its rise. When the constitution promulgated by the Trujillo regime in 1942 extended citizenship rights to women, including the right to vote, Bernardino praised his support of w omen’s rights.60 But New Deal feminists wondered, Who was using whom? In their view, Bernardino had built an international c areer as a feminist advocating empty declarations
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of rights and equality while the vast majority of her fellow countrywomen and men lived in fear and poverty u nder a ruthless dictator. That Bernardino and Stevens considered the support of a dictator like Trujillo a victory for w omen seemed clearly to reveal the shallowness of their hopes and the selfishness of their ambitions.61 Winslow insisted Bernardino refrain from speaking out in the name of CIM without consulting others on the commission. She was especially incensed at Bernardino’s very public support of the ERA, under consideration in both houses of Congress in 1943.62 Bernardino ignored her. In April 1943, Winslow complained to Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles about Bernardino and asked for his help in having Bernardino “withdrawn by her government.” It is “an intolerable situation,” and “I am certain a good majority of the members of the Commission agree with me.” No doubt, Winslow thought Welles would be sympathetic b ecause his diplomatic involvement with Latin American affairs included considerable time in the Dominican Republic. (Welles had even written a two-volume history of the Dominican Republic in 1928 critical of US foreign policy.)63 Winslow’s attempt to oust Bernardino failed. She got little support from Welles: he was soon to retire, and his sympathies with Argentina may well have been exhausted by Argentina’s refusal to join the Allies. Schlieper could not help e ither. “Things are not well for w omen here,” Schlieper wrote in November 1943 after the military had seized Argentina’s civilian government. The new regime has “disbanded” the Argentine Union of Women and “nationalized” socialist and labor organ izations, replacing elected leaders with state-appointed administrators.64 Winslow’s health declined, and in March 1944 she left CIM, writing a final report largely devoted to attacking Bernardino and the “dangers of the so-called ERA.”65 When CIM reassembled in April 1944, Schlieper was gone, and Bernardino had taken over as chair. Cannon, the new US delegate, sat in the corner taking notes as CIM secretary. Cannon’s relationship with Bernardino was not easy, but she worked constructively with CIM, aided by her sophisticated understanding of Latin American women’s concerns for safeguards against US domination.66 Cannon admired what
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CIM had accomplished—even in its early days with Stevens as chair. CIM helped secure the 1934 endorsement of the Equal Nationality Treaty, “undoubtedly hastened” women’s suffrage in Latin America, and prepared w omen for leadership in international affairs, she wrote in September 1945.67 The galvanizing actions of CIM women, including Bernardino, a few months e arlier at the 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference may have been on her mind when she offered her assessment of CIM’s leadership in international affairs. Cannon’s cordial alliance with Latin American w omen on CIM was not necessarily typical of Pan-American women’s relations. Tensions had hardly subsided by the end of the war. Latin American women were still uncomfortable with what Francesca Miller calls the “missionary attitudes” of many US feminists.68 Most also remained skeptical of partnering with their overbearing northern neighbor, even if, like Schlieper and Moreau, they were sympathetic to social democracy and to the antifascist cause. For their part, New Deal feminists were disappointed in the less than egalitarian leanings of some CIM w omen and continued to judge the Bernardinos of the world harshly—though their own country did not always extend its democratic values southward. And some continued to insist South American women oppose the ERT for reasons that often made little sense in the Latin American and Caribbean context. Yet with or without the help of US women, as Cannon acknowledged in 1945, feminism was moving forward in Latin America, and CIM had contributed to that momentum.
London Engagements The wartime London journeys of Frieda Miller and Maida Springer shaped their political philosophies for the rest of their lives. Miller’s interactions with prominent English politicians and intellectuals in 1943 and 1944 informed the policies she advocated when she returned to direct the US Women’s Bureau. Springer immersed herself in a different but equally vibrant intellectual milieu in London and Manchester. She arrived in 1945 at a pivotal moment in the history of Pan-Africanism and forged lasting friendships with Black men and w omen who would lead
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independence movements ending colonial rule across large swaths of the world. She left England determined to devote her life to the global struggle for Black freedom. When the New York governorship fell to Republican Thomas Dewey in 1943, Frieda Miller resigned her post as the state’s Industrial Commissioner and sailed for London. John G. Winant, the popular US ambassador to the United Kingdom, had tapped her as his l abor attaché. With her daughter now twenty years old, Miller must have felt freer to leave New York, though she left b ehind an increasingly lonely and at times distraught Pauline Newman, her partner since 1918. The London job, however, had much to offer. Miller knew and respected Winant, a progressive Republican, from his New Deal service as chair of the Social Security Board and his activities with the ILO, which had culminated in his ILO directorship in 1939.69 She also welcomed the opportunity to learn more about Britain’s social welfare policies. Despite London’s wartime discomforts, Miller found life there exhilarating. Outgoing, verbal, and well educated, she enjoyed chitchatting with dignitaries at cocktail parties and felt confident in her knowledge of economics and social policy and her ability to defend her positions. Aided by friends old and new, she glided seamlessly into Britain’s reform circles.70 She reestablished ties with Margaret Bondfield, now living in partial retirement at her “smallish” cottage in Kent, dependent on a farmer’s wife, “her Gwen,” who visited daily to do h ousehold chores.71 She had the advantage of working for Winant, a fair but distracted boss who left her free to tailor her job to suit her interests while providing her entrée to some of the most important intellectual figures in British political life. Miller was in constant motion, giving talks on “American Social Security Plans” to the Royal Statistical Society, Fabian Clubs, and labor groups, and flitting from one political affair to another.72 A sophisticated thinker whose intellectual pedigree included graduate study at the University of Chicago with institutional economist and l abor theorist Robert Hoxie, Miller was already familiar with Britain’s far-sighted l abor and social legislation.73 In London, she became an expert. In June 1943, she attended the British Labour Party Conference and marveled at the civil, informed debates over w hether to endorse liberal
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economist William Beveridge’s 1942 government report urging a national insurance scheme with universal health care, family allowances, and basic income support. Miller could not know the full significance of the debates: that with Clement Attlee’s surprise L abour victory in 1945, the Beveridge Report—and the British Labour Party’s interpretations of it—would guide the creation of Britain’s postwar welfare state. Nonetheless, she was enthralled.74 The debates over “British colonial policy and policy in India” at the Labor Party Conference w ere not as civil.75 Miller did not reveal her opinions on the matter or w hether she thought it possible for the Labour Party to reach consensus, given its unruly mix of allegiances to self-determination, socialist internationalism, and British imperialism.76 The Labour Party Conference did not resolve the specific question of policy in India. Instead, by a small majority, it affirmed the party’s more general executive committee report on British policy in the “Pacific and African colonies” completed a few months e arlier. The party report criticized British colonial administration for its harsh and unfair policies, including “the colour bar” and other situations where the “native is given a different subordinate status, civil and social, from that of the European.” Yet immediate dismantlement of the colonial system was not yet possible. Instead, the party report favored gradual progress toward self-government and new and more humane imperial policies, including “education of the Native in self-government, economic development of territories, access of Natives to the land,” no forced labor, and the right to organize trade u nions. These policies reflected a party committed to equity and self-government but unable to move beyond assumptions of white European superiority and paternalistic responsibility.77 After the L abour Party conference, Miller sought out Churchill’s Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin (the founding general secretary of Britain’s powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union), attended lectures by Beveridge, and set up appointments with a long list of other prominent British government officials.78 Things did not always go well when talk turned to gender politics. The British Treasury official assigned to costing out the Beveridge proposals “flatly says the most desirable solution” to budget anxieties “is to deny married women any rights” to unemployment
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benefits, she wrote in disbelief to Winant. His justifications infuriated her. Women’s “real contributions” to the economy were too difficult to calculate, he had told her, and besides, why hire a married w oman after the war “if she has to go home and get her husband’s lunch?” Miller vehemently disagreed. “It is not necessary so to arrange t hings,” she told the flustered official. After all, the wartime restaurant industry could continue lunchtime services.79 Miller’s testy exchange with the Treasury official displayed her strong desire to lessen the burden of w omen’s double responsibility for market and f amily work—what New Deal feminists called the “double day.” After her return to the United States, she made ending the “double day” central to her political advocacy. Job rights for women were necessary, she would always insist, but w omen’s full citizenship—civil, industrial, and social—required rethinking how household labor was organized.80 She drew liberally on what she learned in wartime England. With or without Winant’s approval, she spent long hours studying Britain’s household services industry and meeting with high-ranking Ministry of Labour officials like Mary Smieton who was responsible for raising “minimum standards for domestic serv ice.” Britain’s “valiant efforts” rehabilitating the “woman-employing industries” fascinated Miller, and she wanted to know more about how “interest in such situations can be aroused in the United States.”81 Miller sent multiple chatty memos to Winant, but she never finished the official “report” she owed him. In the summer of 1944 she resigned, rather abruptly, to accept the directorship of the US Women’s Bureau, and by August she was back in the States.82 Miller told Winant she planned on returning to London to “finish her report,” but she never did. In January 1945, she offered an offhand apology: “Much more than I realized before I came back [to the United States], I wish I had here a completed and fully documented record.” Still, “what I did bring back, chiefly in my head, has been useful so often and in so many connections.” Clearly her “experiences and activities in London,” as she put it, benefited her immensely, allowing her to speak with specificity and authority about US postwar social welfare from a comparative a ngle.83 But how much Winant benefited is unclear. He never chided her though.
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He had bigger problems dogging him: a marriage in shambles and a political career careening downward. In November 1947 he committed suicide.84 African American trade u nionist Maida Springer encountered a dif ferent London than did Miller. She arrived in early 1945, with the end of the war and its outcome now assured. As one of four w omen chosen by US labor for a wartime tour hosted by Britain’s Trades Union Council, Ministry of Information, and Ministry of L abour, Springer, like Miller, met with prominent British labor and government figures. She visited with Ernest Bevin and with Attlee, who within a few months would become prime minister. She even gained an audience with Queen Elizabeth. She also spent time with British trade u nion w omen from the ILGWU’s sister union, the General Tailors and Garment Workers, and long hours with Dame Anne Loughlin, the u nion’s unflappable national officer, who acted as Springer’s official host. Through her, Springer met the top l abor officials in Britain.85 But it was Springer’s immersion in London’s thriving Black community of émigré Pan-Africanist intellectuals and activists that proved most transformative. These men and w omen, Springer later wrote, “had a vision of the future”: they “were looking to the day” when their lands would “not be colonial dependencies.” The war brought together thousands of Black men in the colonies “to fight for freedom and democracy”— an act in their own country that would have gotten them jailed—and “turned the equation upside down.”86 In 1945 London, talk of Black freedom was surging. Asked by Jamaican feminist poet and BBC radio host Una Marson to speak on her show, “Caribbean Voices,” Springer accepted, ably navigating her first international broadcast. Trinidadian Pan-Africanist and socialist George Padmore was listening, and within days Springer and he dined together in Manchester. Educated at Fisk and Howard, Padmore had joined the Communist Party in 1928. A year later he moved to Moscow to head the Negro Division of the Profintern (the Communist International’s umbrella network of labor unions) and edit its journal, Negro Worker. Disgusted by the party’s sidelining of his anticolonial and antiracist columns, he broke with Stalin in 1933 and settled in London.
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He became an unabashed socialist anti-Communist and, to Springer’s delight, an “acid-tongued writer and empire basher.” By the late 1930s, his essays appeared frequently in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and NAACP’s magazine, the Crisis. Padmore introduced Springer to his colleague and childhood friend, Guyanese-born T. Ras Makonnen, who, after stints as a YMCA officer in Texas and a student at the Danish Royal Agricultural College, was studying history in Manchester.87 Soon she met others in Padmore’s circle, most notably Jomo Kenyatta, the East African anticolonialist who in 1963, after years in prison, would take the helm of an independent Kenya. She missed meeting Gold Coast independence leader and influential Pan-Africanist Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, studying then at the London School of Economics. Their paths crossed a decade later, shortly before he became Ghana’s first prime minister.88 Springer had found an intellectual and political home. It was a familiar world to her, with elements, though reworked, of her mother’s Garveyite Pan-Africanism. Like the Jamaican-born Garvey, Padmore saw a global kinship among “Africans and p eoples of African descent” and had no patience for white imperialism or paternalism. The British and Eu ropean empires in Africa, as in Asia, must be demolished, replaced by self-governing, democratic, sovereign new nations. Imperialism, Padmore proclaimed in 1945, was “as g reat a menace as Fascism.” Padmore also shared Springer’s commitment to a socialized economy with strong self-governing trade unions as vehicles for worker voice and power.89 Springer did not attend the historic October 1945 Pan-A frican Congress—she had sailed back to New York before it opened—but through Padmore and Makonnen she met many of those who planned it. When labor delegates from fifty-three countries—including a large “colonial coloured delegation” from Africa, the Caribbean, Cyprus, and elsewhere—converged in London to discuss the creation of a new global labor federation in February 1945, Padmore seized the opportunity and invited Black participants to Manchester. Many accepted, and at Padmore’s urging, they issued a call for a fifth Pan-African Congress in October. (As discussed e arlier, the fourth congress, largely organized by African American women, had met in New York in 1927.) Because
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many in Padmore’s circle were trade unionists, they scheduled the congress in Paris to coincide with the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions, the new global labor federation aiming to unite u nions of all political persuasions in all regions of the world.90 The Manchester Pan-African Congress signaled a new era for Pan- Africanism. Although W.E.B. Du Bois was elected president of the Pan- African Congress, he was not typical of its leadership. In contrast to earlier, more elite-led efforts, labor men and their organizations w ere at the center of the Manchester gathering. Eighteen colonial trade u nion organizations were represented, and other labor representatives attended as well, including, from the United States, Henry Lee Moon, an African American journalist involved with the CIO’s Political Action Committee. A “trade union-based Pan-Africanism” had arisen. Power had shifted as well from America and Europe to Africa and the Carib bean. The Manchester Congress rejected any semblance of paternalism and a dopted a bold postwar agenda: abolish race discrimination, end colonial rule, and promote the “self-determination of African peoples all over the world.” The assertions of the Manchester Congress—and similar proclamations pressed by colonial delegates at the World Federation of Trade Unions—pushed white-led trade u nion confederations and labour parties in Britain and elsewhere t oward support for colonial independence.91 On more than one occasion, Springer described her 1945 British sojourn and her encounter with anticolonialism and Pan-Africanism as life-altering moments.92 Yet Springer almost turned down the mission, despite the honor it represented. Her appointment to the mission by ILGWU President Dubinsky had caused “much eyebrow raising and even consternation,” she later wrote. Dubinsky stood by his decision, declaring her “one of our very able people” and touting her “political savvy.”93 Randolph added his endorsement of Springer, and she had left New York thrilled by the huge luncheon sendoff and the throng of well- wishers. But the racist indignities she experienced in Washington, as she and her three white traveling companions conferred with Department of State officials and others, hurt. That week was filled with “shame and pain,” she later wrote.94 Taxis would not stop for her, and arriving at
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meetings on time was proving impossible. Discrimination haunted her from cheap coffee shops to the grand Statler Hotel, where the white delegates were staying. The awkwardness and coolness she sensed from those around her weighed on her as well. She lost heart, she confessed many years l ater to her biographer, Yevette Richards, and almost quit. Fortuitously, as it turned out, she was housed at the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Finding Springer in low spirits at the end of an exhausting day, Mary McLeod Bethune intervened. She used her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt to solve the taxi problem by assigning Springer a chauffeured limousine, a benefit then extended to Springer’s white trade union companions. Then she gently lectured Springer. “Daughter,” she counseled, t here are more important t hings than “your good feelings. . . . No matter how justified you are in your anguish, you have a responsibility, given the opportunity, to bring back and share with us what you have learned.” Those words stuck, Springer said, and never left her. After “that dear lady got through talking to me . . . I crawled back to my room” and “had a deep conversation with myself. It was a very great lesson for me in terms of what you do to achieve things you want” and “what you make of your resentment.”95 When Springer returned to the States in April 1945, she received an accolade that must have been gratifying: a dinner organized by Frances Perkins honoring her and the other emissaries at the Statler Hotel. Then a second, equally satisfying, invitation arrived. The NCNW had named her to its “1945 Honor Roll,” along with her dear friend Pauli Murray and former actress Helen Gahagan Douglas, elected in 1944 as California’s first Democratic congresswoman.96 Yet Springer had come home to a nation in mourning. Roosevelt had died as she crossed the ocean and the nation was adjusting to its new leader, Harry S. Truman. In a few weeks, thousands would gather in San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations. Their actions would alter the postwar world. But to grasp more fully the nature of the struggles at the early UN and the central role occupied by New Deal feminists in its landmark declarations, we turn first to the wartime ILO and the efforts of New Deal w omen and their allies to keep the ILO
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alive. Frances Perkins and Frieda Miller believed the ILO had the potential to move the postwar world toward greater social and economic justice, and they organized to sustain and transform it.
The Long Road to the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration In 1940, ILO staff had fled to Paris, one step ahead of advancing German troops. Eventually the ILO found sanctuary in Montreal at McGill University. With ILO allegiance to the Allied cause firm and its headquarters nearby, US involvement in ILO affairs grew, as did the influence of New Deal women. The 1941 ILO Conference, held for ten days in New York at Columbia University, offered a foretaste of what was to come. Despite full-scale war in Europe, thirty-three neutral nations, allied combatants, and all the exiled governments of Nazi-occupied countries sent representatives. Perkins headed the large US delegation to the conference, was elected as the ILO’s first woman president, and presided over the conference. The United States appointed three other women to its twenty- one-person delegation: Frieda Miller; Clara Beyer, Perkins’ trusted Department of Labor adviser; and Amalgamated vice president Dorothy Bellanca. Perkins and Miller w ere the only w omen at the conference with voting privileges, and only a handful of nations sent women as advisers.97 Of those who did, Australia’s Muriel Heagney proved a crucial ally. She had collaborated with Mary Anderson and league secretary Elisabeth Christman in the interwar Pan-Pacific Women’s Association and shared their passion for trade unions, equal pay, and societal supports for mothers and children. By the late 1930s, Heagney was chairing a New South Wales equal pay council of some thirty u nions, women’s groups, and political parties pushing for equity in federal Arbitration Court awards, a concern of hers since World War I. While in America, Heagney renewed ties with Anderson and Christman; met with Schneiderman, Mary Dreier, and other New York league leaders; and set aside time to dine with the Amalgamated’s Esther Peterson, a fellow equal pay enthusiast. She and other women at the 1941 conference made sure equal pay was discussed in 1941 and put on the agenda for action in
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1944.98 The USSR had passed equal pay legislation in 1918, but only three countries—Cuba, Columbia, and Venezuela—had followed its lead.99 In her presidential address to the 1941 conference, Perkins urged the ILO to live up to its 1919 social justice mission by expanding its scope. She had attended the ILO founding meeting in 1919 and recalled it fondly. “Born in the aspirations and experience of organized wage workers of all nations,” the 1919 ILO was animated by the belief that “real peace could only be established on the basis of social justice.” She insisted the idea of “social justice, as we called it,” was new at the time and unified those present. Now, twenty-two years later, the ILO must invent “new means” to achieve these “old ends.” For Perkins, that meant d oing more than formulating minimum l abor standards. The ILO must shape world economic policy and take steps to foster regulated trade between nations, full employment, and state-level investment in social welfare. Otherwise, “laissez faire might choke us again,” she warned, bringing with it depression and war.100 Acting Director Edward Phelan gave the closing speech. As a young Irish-born British civil servant assigned to the British Labour delegation to the 1919 Peace Conference, he had coauthored the original ILO constitution, including its lofty preamble, and in 1920, he became the first ILO official appointed by Albert Thomas. In his proposed ILO “Social Mandate,” he called, as had Perkins, for an expanded ILO role in postwar economic and social planning as the best means to guarantee basic income, housing, and other h uman rights around the world.101 On the final day of the conference, as participants surrounded Roosevelt in the White House, the US president applauded their aspirations. In 1919, the ILO had been a “wild dream,” Roosevelt recalled, remembering his days in the Wilson administration as the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy who had volunteered to help host the ILO inaugural gathering. “Who ever heard of Governments getting together to raise the standard of living on an international plane?” And “wilder still was the idea that the people directly affected—workers and the employers” should participate in such decisions. Echoing Perkins, he urged the ILO to pursue new tactics while remaining true to its historic mission of justice for the world’s workers.102
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fter the 1941 conference, Frieda Miller vowed to make sure the ILO A paid more attention to w omen. In April 1943, seventy w omen gathered at the ILO’s Montreal headquarters for a series of planning meetings, cohosted by the Canadian Minister of L abour and the New York State Department of Labor. Women-in-exile from Czechoslovakia, Free France, Poland, and the Ukraine attended, as did women from Britain, Scandinavia, the United States, and Canada. Perkins, Bondfield, and Schneiderman offered plenary speeches. A few months later, in London, Miller sat in on the ILO Governing Body as it planned the 1944 ILC. Although often the only w oman there, she was not shy about directing the conversation along lines she favored. When US representative Car ter Goodrich could not attend, Miller occasionally replaced him as chair. Miller, like Perkins, wanted a redesigned ILO that, in her words, set “industrial and social standards” with the interests of women as well as men in mind.103 In April 1944, the ILO held its first official assembly since 1939. Some four hundred people from forty-one nations made their way to Philadelphia. Fourteen w omen participated as delegates and advisers, with five from the United States, including Perkins and Miller. Two of Britain’s l abor advisers were women and well known to New Deal feminists: Dame Anne Loughlin, in 1944 the top woman in the British Trades Union Congress, and Florence Hancock, the National W oman Officer of Bevin’s powerful Transport and General Workers Union. Bertha Lutz from Brazil, Paula Alegría Garza of Mexico, and Cora Casselman, an MP from Alberta and one of two women in the Canadian House of Commons, also attended, as did women from Norway, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.104 With Allied victory increasingly assured in 1944, Perkins and Phelan seized the moment and pressed for a redesigned postwar ILO. Its historic focus on wage earners must be expanded to include “those who do not work for wages,” Perkins boldly asserted in her opening address. She envisioned an ILO that set social as well as labor standards and involved itself in national and international economic planning. “Freedom from want everywhere” required nation-states to guarantee basic income, social minimums, and the right to a job, she believed. It also
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meant an end to discrimination in every sphere.105 Acting Director Phelan voiced similar sentiments: the ILO, he urged, must move beyond protection and ask member states to foster employment opportunities, social security, and basic h uman rights. Phelan is often credited as the principal architect of the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration. He embraced whole-heartedly its foundational premises of world peace through social justice and its inclusive, deliberative processes. And in 1944, he pressed doggedly for the ILO to both honor its past and reinvent itself.106 But the influence of Perkins is unmistakable—in 1941 and in 1944. Urged onward by Perkins and Phelan, conference delegates produced a highly significant two-part charter consisting of an international bill of “social and economic rights for the common man” and a set of government policies for making such rights real. Roosevelt hailed it as a “landmark in world thinking” and told Phelan it summed up “the aspirations of an epoch,” including his own New Deal hopes for fundamental human rights, state guarantees, and international cooperation.107 The charter opened with a broad and ambitious statement of h uman rights known as the Philadelphia Declaration, which contemporary French jurist and philosopher Alain Supiot has judged the “very first International Declaration of Universal Rights.” Its articulation of fundamental human rights inspired similar phrases a dopted four years later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.108 The ILO chose “labour is not a commodity”—the same phrase Gompers had tried and failed to include in the Versailles Treaty—as the Philadelphia Declaration’s first and “fundamental principle,” thereby asserting the primacy of worker h uman rights over the supposed laws of commercial or market transactions. Other core beliefs followed from that fundamental premise: “freedom of expression and of association”; “poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere”; the “right to collective bargaining”; and the importance of including civil society or nongovernmental groups in deciding state policies for “the common welfare.” Anticipating later human rights statements by the United Nations, the Philadelphia Declaration promised an ILO that recognized that “all human beings, irrespective of race, creed, or sex, have the right to pur-
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sue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity.” Here, as elsewhere, the declaration asserted an expansive sense of h uman need and foregrounded the right of each person to self-development and freedom from discrimination. The “princi ples in this Declaration,” the final section reiterated, “are fully applicable to all peoples everywhere.” Incorporated into an amended 1945 ILO constitution, its principles would be among those all ILO member states must accept.109 In the second part of the charter, the conference enumerated a preferred set of governmental policies that, in the assessment of future ILO Director-General David Morse, effectively replaced the “earlier concept of protecting” waged workers with a “ more affirmative ideal of social security” for all.110 This list, as with the Declaration itself, bore the imprint of w omen internationalists. Perkins, the only w oman at the 1944 conference with voting power, chaired two key committees: one on the “future status” of the ILO and a second on the peace treaty. In addition, Britain’s outspoken Dame Loughlin and three other women sat the Committee on Social Security, which underscored the ILO’s new positive mandate of encouraging individual state provision of basic income, housing, health, and welfare.111 Brazil’s preeminent suffragist Bertha Lutz sat on a fourth crucial body, the Committee on Dependent Territories. An influential figure in Pan-American affairs (and as we saw in e arlier chapters an ally of New Deal feminists in the 1930s), Lutz had significant stature in international feminist circles.112 In her speech to the conference, she called for a world of “interdependent nations,” rather than one divided into “dependent territories” and the colonial powers “responsible” for them. Her remarks reflected her own ideas and those of her fellow committee members, a group that included Nigerian and French West Indies “native advisors” to the worker groups of Britain and France and Mexico’s radical labor leader Vincente Lombardo Toledano (his wife, left feminist Rosa María Otero Gama de Lombardo Toledano, had partnered with New Deal feminists at the 1939 ILO regional inter-American conference in Havana).113
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Much to the satisfaction of Lutz, the Philadelphia delegates endorsed her committee’s new “minimum standards” for “dependent territories,” including “prohibition of colour and religious bars and other discriminatory practices,” and they recommended “all policies” be “primarily directed to the well-being and development of the p eoples of such territories.”114 Opposition from colonial governments and employers prevented a stronger statement against colonial rule, but in Frieda Miller’s view, it was “a significant stride forward.” Black internationalist radical Thyra J. Edwards, writing for the NAACP’s official magazine, Crisis, was impressed as well. The ILO, despite its faults, was developing a “far- reaching program aimed at freeing colonial peoples from discrimination and winning for them the right of self-government.” She reserved her criticism for the United States, which she faulted for not having people of color among its representatives at the ILO, and the USSR, which in her view should have sent representatives to this crucial conference, especially because it claimed such expertise in the minority question.115 Women had organized to ensure the 1944 conference did not sideline the problem of sex discrimination. They won significant victories. The Declaration, as mentioned earlier, included support for “human rights irrespective of race, creed, or sex.” Other sections of the charter endorsed a postwar economy with “complete equality of opportunity” and “wage rates on the basis of job content, without regard to sex.” The conference called for “minimum living wages,” “wage policies to ensure a just share of the fruits of progress to all,” a higher status for female- majority industries and occupations, and improved social and health services for all.116 The conference adopted women’s rights provisions because of combined pressure from w omen inside and outside the United States. Before the 1944 ILC started, Perkins had asked Mary Anderson to prepare possible US proposals on w omen, which she did, sharing her thoughts on equal pay with Marguerite Thibert of the ILO and o thers in her network and calling for an end to the “double wage standard” in the American Economic Review. Anderson did not make it to Philadelphia, but she believed her proposals, including her “phraseology,” laid the basis for the ILO adoption of “equal pay, equal opportunities for work, and the
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whole thing.”117 In reality, she shared that honor with o thers. Paula Alegría Garza, chief of the Mexican Women and Children’s Bureau and an adviser to Mexico’s worker group, sat on the Committee of Employment and captured headlines with her impassioned speech about protecting women’s economic opportunities as the world transitioned to a peace economy.118 Women delegates also caucused during the month long conference and organized two formal “sittings”: the first on “the problem of wages” and the second on upgrading household work. The first proved especially productive, Miller wrote, with attention to “methods for constituting a ‘fair wage’ ” and how “women’s pay” can be raised to “correspond to the value of their work.”119 Dame Anne Loughlin offered keen insights, drawing on her years of equal pay agitation in Britain and in the Women’s Committee of the International Federation of Trade Unions. She and other British l abor women would soon be immersed in the consequential two-year debate over wage fairness in the Royal Commission on Equal Pay, which met from 1944 to 1946.120 After the conference ended, many of the w omen attended a two-day meeting called by Marguerite Thibert, head of the ILO’s W omen’s Section, and chaired by Canada’s Cora Casselman, where they launched an ambitious feminist program and laid plans to diversify the ILO Women’s Committee a fter the war.121 Yet securing a world without discrimination and raising the standard of life for all w ere not universal ambitions in 1944. Nor did most power brokers share the vision laid out by Perkins and Phelan of the ILO as a major player in structuring the global economy. As the Philadelphia conference wound down, the men and women who supported its aims of full and universal human rights worried about decisions underway at Bretton Woods where forty-four Allied nations and their advisers w ere meeting to devise a multinational framework for the global financial order. In Philadelphia, ILO leaders had proclaimed “full employment, social security, and a rising standard of living” postwar goals for the world and believed them achievable only if international institutions like the ILO had power “to counteract the adverse effects of international economic competition on working people.”122 But Bretton Woods did not specify tight labor markets and rising worker purchasing power as
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prime goals in international economic policy. Nor did it designate a clear role for the ILO. Instead, Bretton Woods established two new institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (what became the World Bank)—w ith sway over international monetary and financial transactions. Some Bretton Woods delegates envisioned the new institutions being guided by values New Deal feminists could embrace. Half of the Bretton Woods delegates came from poorer regions, with some nineteen Latin American countries in this group. Many among this group, as well as economic advisers from outside Latin America, including British and US officials, pushed for institutions based on the 1941 Atlantic Charter principles of “social security” and “freedom from want.” Goals of economic growth and upping return on capital investment and economic growth were hardly sufficient, they argued. The IMF and the World Bank should act to raise living standards and promote state-led economic development. They also proposed a future International Trade Organization to facilitate multinational agreements aimed at reducing tariffs, preventing destructive competition among nations, and regulating standards for goods crossing national borders. But who would lead these institutions and what values would guide them in the f uture were unclear.123 Nor was it settled whether the United States would sustain the Bretton Woods shift toward multilateralism and away from “ostrich isolationism” (as Roose velt had put it earlier in the year).124 New Deal feminists were right to be troubled.
9 Intertwined Freedoms
In 1945, women’s presence on the world stage was palpable. In 1919, WTUL president Margaret Dreier Robins had pronounced the Versailles Treaty a “man-made peace” and boldly insisted on w omen’s rights to participate in international affairs and shape the postwar world. A quarter-century l ater, as the world once again tried to heal from war and find a way forward, much had changed for women. More women sat at the decision-making t ables and more exercised citizenship rights. By 1945, w omen voted in over half of the world’s nations; they occupied positions of political authority; and their organized influence as workers, mothers, and citizens was on the upswing. New Deal feminists wanted a fairer, more secure postwar world with greater real freedom for all. Their aspirations, at least partially, were fulfilled. Questions of sex equality became subjects of global controversy in 1945 as representatives of some fifty Allied nations gathered in San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations.1 Yet l ittle consensus existed about how best to advance women’s interests. Feminists disagreed over the wisdom of the “equal rights” language proposed for the United Nations Charter. They also parted ways over whether a separate Commission on the Status of Women should exist at the United Nations and what its priorities should be. New Deal w omen weighed in on these matters, taking controversial positions on sex equality and how to achieve it. But New Deal feminists fought for more than sex equality in the aftermath of the war. Societal wellbeing rested on a more cooperative 255
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world with guarantees of adequate living standards and human rights protections for all. At the United Nations and the ILO, they pursued a broad agenda of intertwined civil, political, economic, and social rights or—drawing on the wartime language of President Roosevelt and the Atlantic Charter—what they called “freedoms.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s achievements at the United Nations, especially as chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, are justifiably famous, as is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the commission produced. Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the few w omen of color at the 1945 UN conference, raised her voice for the rights of colonial peoples and the freedom of p eople of color everywhere. Dorothy Kenyon, from 1946 to 1950 the US representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, sought to add women’s freedom, what she termed a “fifth freedom,” to Roosevelt’s “four freedoms.” German socialist émigré Toni Sender, the AFL’s full-time consultant at the UN Economic and Social Council from 1947 to 1949, stirred up global controversy as she agitated for an international bill of worker freedoms centered on the collective right to strike, organize, and bargain. Frieda Miller, building on the promises of the 1944 ILO Philadelphia Declaration, pushed forward intertwined rights at the postwar ILO. Her priorities for the postwar world included higher living standards, fair pay between the sexes, the rights of mothers and household workers, and an end to economic discrimination on the basis of marital status, race, sex, and religion. New Deal feminists also struggled to realize the “five freedoms” in their own nation. What they encountered shocked and dismayed them. Their efforts to expand New Deal social democracy in the late 1940s faced a revitalized conservative movement adroit at stoking fears of communism and “big government” in the name of a very different “freedom” agenda.
Feminist versus Feminist at the 1945 UN Conference Although w omen had considerable influence at the 1945 UN conference in San Francisco, crucial decisions about the structure of the new organ ization had been made before the conference opened. At Dumbarton
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Oaks, in August and September 1944, senior officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China—all men—outlined “a world security organization.” They adopted features from earlier proposals, including those discussed by Roosevelt and Stalin in Tehran in November 1943, and laid plans for a large international conference to amplify their basic framework. The following February, at the 1945 Yalta Conference, the United States, USSR, and Britain met without China and affirmed the general guidelines articulated at Dumbarton Oaks. The United Nations, like its pre decessor the League of Nations, would have a General Assembly of member states, but the most powerf ul nations would exercise veto power over decisions as permanent members of a Security Council.2 Politically active w omen in the League of Women Voters and other organizations followed t hese developments and w ere outraged by women’s marginalization. Others felt disenfranchised as well. ILO leaders had not been involved in the Dumbarton Oaks conversations, and their desire for an ILO-like tripartite organization in which civil society groups had voting rights was given little credence. Civil rights groups protested their exclusion and demanded attention to questions of in equality among nations and peoples. Some, like the Latin American republics, held their own conference, the Inter-American Conference at Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, to formulate principles and structures for the postwar world. All w ere determined to have their say in San Francisco.3 In April 1945 hundreds of delegates from fifty Allied nations, representing three-quarters of the world’s peoples, gathered in San Francisco for nine weeks to complete the drafting of the United Nations Charter.4 Only four w omen held high enough positions to be one of their nation’s signatories on the charter: Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), V irginia Gildersleeve (United States), and Wu Yi- Fang (China). But nations appointed women as delegates, assistant delegates, advisers, and civil society consultants, with eight women con sultants named by the United States.5 Thousands of reporters, experts, staff, and observers of all sorts, men and w omen, added to the extraordinary affair, unfolding even as the war raged on. Germany surrendered
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a week after the conference started. The Pacific conflict careened to a horrific nuclear finale in August, months after the delegates left. New Deal w omen at the San Francisco conference, the story often goes, opposed women’s rights and squared off against a global feminist chorus, led by Latin American women.6 To be sure, some balked at adding the phrase “the equal rights of men and w omen” to the preamble of the UN Charter and they objected to a separate Commission on the Status of Women. It is also true that Latin American w omen, working alongside other feminists such as Australia’s delegate Jessie Street, the chairperson of the Australian Women’s Charter Conference, w ere the prime movers for many of the w omen’s rights initiatives at the conference.7 Latin American feminists in San Francisco drew on two decades of activism in grassroots social movements and in intergovernment organizations like CIM. Their powerful alliance included, among others, Bertha Lutz, whose Brazilian delegation first proposed a w omen’s commission; Dominican delegate and CIM chair Minerva Bernardino; and Mexican adviser Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón, the suffragist, playwright, and future diplomat who served as CIM vice chair.8 Latin American women secured backing from their own nations—a formidable bloc of votes in a gathering of only Allied powers. They enjoyed support from voting delegates and advisers of other nations; from international w omen’s organizations ranging from the million-member International Alliance of W omen to the tiny but tenacious World Woman’s Party; and from key conference officials such as Afrikaner leader Jan Smuts, the South African prime minister and supporter of settler colonialism who drafted the charter preamble.9 Thirty-five nations, for example, backed Brazil’s call for a women’s commission; the United States did not.10 Nevertheless, the opposition of New Deal women to certain proposals backed by other feminists did not mean they pursued “anti-feminist” goals at the 1945 conference. Consider the b attle over charter language. US full rights feminists w ere reluctant to add the phrase “equal rights of men and w omen” not b ecause they opposed w omen’s rights but b ecause of their long-standing opposition to the ERA and to an equal rights feminism that insisted on identical legal treatment of men and women.11
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In addition, from the perspective of many New Deal women, the addition of “equal rights” to the preamble was not only potentially limiting but also unnecessary. The preamble already had language affirming the “dignity and worth of the human person,” a guarantee that Barnard College dean V irginia Gildersleeve, the US delegate, believed included women.12 New Deal feminists sought other ways of advancing women’s interests in 1945. In particular, they prioritized affirmations of universal human rights and guarantees of social and economic security similar to what Roosevelt had articulated in his 1941 and 1944 speeches and the ILO had enshrined in its 1944 Philadelphia Declaration. Their efforts, amidst those of many others, paid off. Article 1 of the UN Charter pledged “respect for h uman rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without discrimination as to race, sex, language, or religion”—goals long sought by full rights feminists in the United States as well as by women in Latin America and around the world. Virginia Gildersleeve, whose internationalism dated back to the World War I era, took pride in helping insert a pledge into Article 55 that the UN “shall promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress.” She and other New Dealers were also part of the push for establishing the Commission on Human Rights. These were signal victories for feminists and egalitarians worldwide.13 The intensity of the desire for human rights by New Deal women and others in 1945 should not be underestimated. For some like Dorothy Kenyon, it swirled upward from the depths of war depravity. The UN “stress upon human rights, the value of human lives and of human personality” was a “direct outgrowth of the war,” a war that “violated the basic unwritten law of decent peoples,” she declared.14 In the war’s last year, one atrocity followed another: the Dresden fire bombing, the walking dead of Auschwitz and Dachau, and the unimaginable civilian suffering from nuclear explosion, fire, and fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But even before 1945, Kenyon spoke eloquently about how war transformed the priorities of reformers and strengthened belief in “the right of the individual human being to call his soul his own.” “The terrible forces let loose against the Jews,” she told an audience in 1943,
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“taught us the essential dignity and humanity of man.” She continued: “a worldwide bill of rights is the t hing above all o thers that liberals would like to see come to pass.” Still, Kenyon never abandoned her commitment to w omen’s rights. When the first part of the long-awaited report from the League of Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women arrived in New York in 1943, she hailed women’s rights as the “fifth freedom for which we must fight.”15 Like the divide over UN Charter language, the struggle over the Commission on the Status of W omen pitted feminist against feminist.16 It was a fight among feminists, and it replayed the long-standing and perennial division in the w omen’s movement over w hether to pursue strategies of separatism or integration. Neither strategy was without its downside. One side, led by Bertha Lutz and Jessie Street, with the enthusiastic backing of the NWP’s World W oman’s Party, took up the cause of a separate w omen’s commission with gusto. The other side, which included New Deal w omen, opposed “separating women’s issues from general h uman rights.” International Alliance of W omen speakers called the proposed commission on w omen “old fashioned” and “unnecessary”; Indian feminist and independence leader Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, a prominent figure at the UN conference, found it “wrong to speak of the rights of women apart from the rights of human beings as a whole.”17 No doubt, New Deal feminists, like w omen from other nations, had nationalist and chauvinist blinders. But their opposition to a separate w omen’s commission did not spring from an opportunistic “desire to promote the aims and image” of the US government as some contend.18 They, like others, feared that a separate women’s commission might sideline women’s needs and negatively affect the work of the Human Rights Commission.19 In the battle over the w omen’s commission, feminists divided over strategy, not over whether women deserved equality. In the end, feminists of all sorts secured significant victories at the early United Nations. They won guarantees of w omen’s rights and human rights in the 1945 UN Charter. By June 1946, the UN had approved a powerful Commission on Human Rights and an autonomous Commission on the Status of Women.20 These victories stimulated
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omen’s global activism and legitimized w w omen’s claims to full humanity and citizenship.
Freedom for All Peoples and Nations The experiences of Mary McLeod Bethune during and a fter the 1945 UN conference reveal one stream of full rights feminism and suggest how deeply the UN affected the postwar anticolonial struggles of non- Western women and w omen of color. U nder the presidency of Bethune, the National Council of Negro W omen (NCNW) had carried on the internationalist efforts of e arlier US Black w omen’s organizations like the National Association of Colored W omen and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. NCNW’s International Relations Committee maintained ties with the Pan-African movement, and in 1940, when the International Council of Women of the Darker Races disbanded, NCNW announced plans for “new relations with women of the East,” especially with women in the influential All-India Women’s Conference.21 During the war, Bethune had insisted the US Secretary of War desegregate the wartime women’s advisory council. She also used her prominent government position to protest race discrimination in the military, including the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and in wartime employment. Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed, desegregating training centers in Des Moines and elsewhere. But Bethune’s activism triggered attacks. Congressman Dies charged her and other government employees of “operating a Communist front organization in Washington” and her FBI file thickened. Bethune ignored t hese smears, and as the 1945 UN conference approached, she presented the White House with a long list of African American women—including herself—qualified to represent the United States in San Francisco.22 The United States, however, did not appoint a person of color to its San Francisco delegation. Indeed, when the State Department circulated the list of the forty-two civic organizations with official consul tants, the NCNW was not on it. Nor had any African American w oman been named to represent any of the listed organizations, which included
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five w omen’s groups. Bethune and others, most notably former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, objected. The State Department relented, at least partially. Although Bethune asked to speak for the NCNW, the State Department assigned her to the NAACP, already represented by W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White.23 As Bethune looked out at the huge crowd gathered in San Francisco’s Opera House in 1945, she realized she was not just the only African American woman in an official capacity but also one of the few w omen of color from any nation. She was struck too by those “conspicuously absent”: the vast colonial populations in Indonesia, Burma, and Africa “whose f uture status was vitally tied up with that of all racial minorities the world over.” Nonetheless, she, like many others, viewed the “four ornamental pillars, gilded and festooned with olive green garlands” on the Opera House stage “as symbols of the ‘Four Freedoms.’ ” She vowed to help realize those freedoms for everyone.24 At the conference, Bethune advanced an explicitly anticolonial politics. She wanted the “full integration of colonial p eoples into the rights of the four freedoms” and “human rights for all people everywhere.”25 With Du Bois and White, she issued “a strong racial equality plank,” consisting of an “international bill of rights and the required machinery to implement it.” NAACP delegates lobbied Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, chair of the US delegation, urging recognition of the “full equality of races, white and colored alike, throughout the world.” They objected to the political subordination of peoples in the proposed UN mandate system and demanded the United States live up to its Atlantic Charter promises of self-determination and democracy.26 The “new and better one world” that Bethune sought guaranteed democratic rights and security to African Americans and their brothers and sisters in the colonies. “America itself must do a great deal of house-cleaning in its treatment of the Negro h ere within its own borders,” she declared, before it can preach “democratic ideals of h uman rights” to the world. For African Americans, the conference had “but one meaning: how far democratic practices s hall be stretched to embrace the rights of their brothers in the colonies as well as the American Negro’s own security at home.”27
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Bethune worked closely with the many other NCNW women who attended the conference. Especially important were physician and NCNW treasurer Dorothy Ferebee, who served as Bethune’s aide and alternate, and former YWCA national staff member Sue Bailey Thurman, who chaired NCNW’s International Relations Committee and served as the founding editor of NCNW’s journal, Aframerican Woman’s Journal. Thurman had developed deep affinities with Asian indepen dence movements a fter she and her husband, the celebrated Howard University theologian Howard Thurman, met Gandhi and toured India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) for several months on a 1935–36 “pilgrimage of friendship” mission sponsored by student Christian groups.28 More recently, she had set up a NCNW “intercultural contact and study seminar” in Cuba presenting the “contribution of Cuban Negroes to the cultural and economic life of their country” and was planning similar endeavors “with Spanish-speaking Americans and with Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, China, and other countries of the Orient.”29 Bethune spent time too with Black male delegates from Ethiopia, Liberia, and Haiti, though she regretted no African nation had sent women. She formed a lasting friendship with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the famed Indian independence fighter and the younger sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s f uture prime minister. Pandit had not come as part of India’s official delegation but attended as a “colonial observer.” At Gandhi’s urging, she had traveled to San Francisco to champion Indian self-rule and, as she saw it, to speak for India and all “those countries, which like India, cannot speak for themselves.” Elected in 1937 as a local government official, Pandit had been arrested and imprisoned multiple times by the British for civil disobedience. She and millions of other Indian freedom fighters, she wrote in 1945, believed in “the right to govern their own country.”30 Her last arrest, in 1943, occurred while she was president of the All-India Women’s Conference, the leading organ ization in the struggle for women’s equality in India. After San Francisco, Bethune and Pandit continued their collaboration, a friendship enabled by a shared politics of feminist anticolonialism, solidarity among p eoples of color, and by Pandit’s frequent visits
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to the United States. A fter India gained its freedom in August 1947, Pandit chaired the nation’s delegation to the UN for the next fifteen years, served as ambassador to the United States from 1949 to 1951, and in 1953 became the first w oman president of the UN General Assembly. Pandit and Bethune both believed in a more equal, democratic world; they bonded too over their mutual embrace of nonviolent direct action and the need for an inclusive movement of all colored p eoples against racial injustice.31 In June 1945, when the UN Charter was signed, Bethune and other anticolonialists rightly complained that it failed to guarantee racial equality and self-determination for colonial peoples. Bethune was frustrated too by the decisions made when the UN Assembly met for the first time in January 1946. Once again, only a few w omen had voting rights—Eleanor Roosevelt (US), Ellen Wilkinson (UK), Evdokia Uralova (USSR), Jean McKenzie (New Zealand), and Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic)—and the US delegation did not include a woman of color.32 Women attendees signed an “Open Letter to the Women of the World,” encouraging women’s activism in this rare moment when the “need for united effort had broken down barriers of race, creed, and sex.”33 Bethune certainly believed in the need for women’s activism, but she hardly saw the “barriers of race” collapsing. She and NCNW pressed forward. In early 1946, NCNW won consultancy status at the UN, making it the only Black-led w omen’s organ ization among the many NGOs vying for influence. In its application, NCNW promised to use its broad network of 800,000 members to raise the “economic and social standards of not only the Negroes in America but darker races everywhere.”34 Yet to Bethune’s dismay, few other women’s NGOs shared the priorities and fierce anticolonial politics of NCNW. Many of the oldest and largest transnational women’s groups had diversified in membership in the interwar era, but in 1946, their thinking and leadership remained Eurocentric.35 Slowly, however, the situation began to change. The International Alliance of W omen, for example, added affiliates in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East after the war and, over the next decade, voted non-Western
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omen into positions of leadership.36 The World YWCA, under the w leadership of American Ruth Woodsmall, put more resources into its programs in the Caribbean, the Middle East, and West Africa. At the same time, national and regional women’s organizations outside the West gained members and influence. Racial, religious, and cultural prejudices had not disappeared, but the leadership and energy of the w omen’s movement was shifting away from Europe and the West.37 The rise of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) reinforced the postwar tilt of international feminism away from the West. Organized in Paris in December 1945, with some eight hundred women from forty nations in attendance, WIDF quickly became one of the largest and most influential international women’s groups. In 1945, it pledged to achieve democracy, “a lasting peace,” and “equal status, pay, and opportunity for women of all countries.” Its vows to eliminate racial discrimination and defend national independence movements won adherents around the world. Led by left feminists Eugénie Cotton of France, Nina Popova of the USSR, and Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) of Spain, WIDF was critical of Western (particularly American) imperialism and of the economic injustices of capitalism; many in its leadership sympathized with Soviet-led Communism.38 In 1945, the membership of WIDF was still quite diverse politically. The Czech contingent to Paris included both anti-Communist and pro- Soviet feminists. Likewise, the US delegation drew women from across the left-liberal political spectrum, including University of Chicago- trained social welfare administrator and former YWCA program director Vivian Carter Mason, who would step into the presidency of the National Council of Negro Women in 1953. Mason also belonged to WIDF’s US affiliate, the Congress of American Women, which in 1946 claimed a heterodox group of supporters: University of Chicago economist Sophonisba Breckinridge; Communist Party leader and former IWW firebrand Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; and conservationist Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, wife of former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Gifford Pinchot.39 The left-liberal mix of the Congress of American Women in 1946 would not last.
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Dorothy Kenyon and the Fifth Freedom In June 1946, at its first meeting, the UN Economic and Social Council elevated the subcommission on women to full commission status, responding to concerted pressure from Denmark’s Bodil Begtrup, the subcommission’s chair, and international w omen’s groups such as the World Woman’s Party.40 President Truman named Dorothy Kenyon the US representative to the new Commission on the Status of W omen (CSW) in November.41 She was a logical choice. She had served on the earlier League of Nations CSW and was an unflagging proponent of its work. In 1941, with the Geneva office of the League in disarray and the report on the status of women unfinished, she managed to have a complete set of committee documents and the partial report sent to her law office in New York for safekeeping. She spent fruitless months in search of a US publisher for the report. At the same time, she joined wartime efforts to create a new “United Nations” and promote w omen’s interests in it.42 Kenyon’s other credentials as an attorney, internationalist, and social justice activist w ere just as impressive. A privileged Smith College graduate with degrees in economics and history, Kenyon’s life changed dramatically a fter spending a year in prerevolutionary Mexico, where she observed poverty and social injustice up close. She put the debutante balls b ehind her and entered law school at New York University, earning her degree in 1917. Her friendships with WTUL women solidified in 1919 when she moved to Washington, DC, to take a research job in a law firm preparing legal and economic studies for the Paris Peace Conference. For the next two decades, she practiced law in New York, setting up a law firm with another female l awyer, Dorothy Straus, in 1930 and serving as a municipal judge in 1939. The National Consumers’ League and the League of W omen Voters, among other w omen’s groups, captured her reform energies, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, where in 1940 she created and chaired its Committee on Discrimination against Women in Employment. Although impatient with the ongoing trench warfare between the US Women’s Bureau and the National W oman’s Party, she was good friends with Frieda Miller and
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other full-rights feminists. And in the 1940s, she held to her e arlier belief that, at least in the United States, the best route to women’s legal equality was not a federal constitutional amendment like the ERA. Rather, she advocated using the law to remedy specific areas of sex discrimination based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.43 Later, Kenyon would work together with Pauli Murray and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to further develop this approach to women’s rights.44 Kenyon’s remarks, titled “One World, One P eople,” at the December 1946 reception honoring her CSW appointment, reveal an internationalist committed to world governance, universal h uman rights, and the rule of international law. She lived up to her deserved reputation for unapologetic bluntness and a willingness to confront controversy. She described the prickly fight over the CSW at length, starting with a full- throated defense of t hose who saw “dangers in segregation” and “questioned the notion of a separate Commission.” They did so, she maintained, “because they thought of women so wholly as people and did not like to see their problems segregated in any shape or form.” Women’s problems take “special forms.” But they “are also part and parcel of the larger problems of humanity . . . human rights, freedom from slavery, freedom from want. You cannot segregate w omen. We are everywhere.”45 Yet Kenyon understood why some w omen wanted a separate CSW and “feared women would be lost sight of in a general consideration.” Trying to build broad support for the CSW, she declared it a “compromise of t hose two conflicting viewpoints,” which, she believed, was a fortuitous outcome that positioned it well for the future.46 Rising hostilities between the United States and the USSR thwarted her hopes for the CSW. The wartime antifascist alliance between the two great powers unraveled quickly at war’s end, leaving the rivals vying for dominance across Europe and the world. The August 1945 Potsdam Conference of the “Big Three” had been far from amicable, with Truman and Stalin disagreeing over German reparations and other matters. Relations did not improve. The basis for joint governance in Germany proved elusive. The Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, and civil war raged in Greece, pitting Communist insurgents against a
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regime backed by Britain and the United States. In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey and proclaimed a doctrine of “containment” to thwart expanding Soviet power. Soon after, Truman’s adviser Bernard Baruch termed the new US -USSR relationship a “Cold War,” and columnist Walter Lippman popul arized the phrase in a series of articles attacking the premises of the new “Cold War” foreign policy.47 Much of what remained of “Popular Front” co alition politics shattered by the end of 1947, a foretaste of the b itter splits within the CIO and the Democratic Party in 1948 over Truman’s multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan, the massive US aid program to rebuild Europe and bolster support for Western-style democracy.48 Cold War enmity suffused the first CSW session, held for three weeks in February 1947 at Lake Success, New York. The “situation was poisonous from the start,” one US observer wrote. Kenyon, who valued brevity and wit, found the USSR delegate insufferable, given to grandstanding and long, dull speeches. In all likelihood, the dislike was mutual. Discussions devolved into prolonged standoffs between, on the one side, America and its allies (such as Britain’s Mary Sutherland, the highest woman official in the Labour Party) and, on the other, the USSR and its allies. Debate over who would chair the fifteen-member committee consumed the first meeting, with the USSR and its allies pitted against “the US-UK-China slate.” Only the Indian feminist, Begum Hamid Ali, refused to take sides, “caught between sympathy with the US and antipathy for the UK.”49 A call by Australia’s Jessie Street for a renunciation of ILO woman-only protections and equal rights for men and women also polarized the group. Ali once again found neither side to her liking. She tired of the bickering over the ILO but found it insufficient “merely to establish rights ‘equal’ to men’s since there are countries where men enjoy negligible rights. The idea is rather to guarantee real rights.”50 The situation was unfortunate, especially since common ground existed. Jessie Street had praised the Soviet Union effusively after her visit there in 1938, a position Kenyon disagreed with profoundly. They also diverged on ILO policy and the proper relation between the ILO and the CSW. But both she and Kenyon saw themselves as fighters for women’s rights and human rights. The “intention of our Committee,”
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Street wrote Bodil Begtrup, the Danish diplomat who ended up chairing the CSW in 1947, was always to gain “recognition of the rights of women as human rights.”51 Kenyon, Street, and Begtrup believed fervently in the political equality of women and in the urgency of that question in a world where millions of w omen could not vote or hold political office. They shared too a sense that sex-specific l egal protections w ere mostly unnecessary, with the exception, as Begtrup explained, of “certain circumstances like childbirth.” What “we want for motherhood,” she elaborated, should be stated as “ ‘the rights of motherhood’ rather than ‘protection,’ which always gives a sense of inferiority.”52 Yet Cold War antagonism in the CSW had the upper hand. In 1948, it spilled out into the public arena, with Kenyon a voluble and frequently quoted media figure. The situation turned especially ugly following Truman’s launch of the Marshall Plan.53 Kenyon complained privately to her high-ranking friends in the Democratic Party of “particularly violent” attacks on the United States and Britain by the Russian delegates in the UN and voiced her desire for “more ammunition” to wield as “counterpropaganda in favor of democracy.” “We simply can not have them step all over us at the UN,” she told Britain’s Margery Corbett Ashby, former Liberal Party candidate and longtime president of the International Alliance of Women.54 After one such attack in December 1948 by Soviet delegates at the UN, who claimed USSR women enjoyed equal rights while US w omen lived in slavery, Kenyon fired back. In her view, USSR women endured “an equality of slavery” and were no more “in the driver’s seat” than “in this country.” The New York Times gleefully amplified her sharp words but downplayed her equally ardent wish for feminist cooperation across the Cold War divide: “If women are to achieve recognition as equal citizens the world over,” she insisted, “we had better admit our difficulties and team up to help each other meet them.”55 It was a desire lost in the Cold War fog and heeded by neither side. The third CSW meeting in 1949 descended into “endless rounds of ideologically charged volleys.” Ugly barbs about Jim Crow in the United States and Gulag slave labor in the USSR hung in the air and made
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cooperative problem solving difficult.56 At one point, the commission managed modest progress on equal pay. It agreed on the “rate for the job” as a sound approach to women’s wage equity and noted with approval the ILO’s affirmation of this language. But matters soon devolved into whether the ILO or the CSW should take the lead on equal pay. The United States and its allies preferred the ILO; the USSR, which remained highly critical of the ILO, favored the CSW.57 Kenyon’s energetic UN battles with the Soviets did not satisfy the right. Nor did it win her the Democratic Party support she wanted for the CSW. There are “conservative men in this country” who do not realize “how much could be gained” by supporting the CSW and “opening new doors to w omen,” she told India Edwards, an influential officer of the Democratic Party Women’s Division.58 “There are people, even in our own State Department who would rather see us [the CSW] fail than succeed,” she confessed to Sweden’s Hesselgren, an ally from League of Nations skirmishes.59 Kenyon had cause to worry about “conservative men” in her own country. But it was her they attacked, not the CSW.60 In January 1950, Truman decided not to reappoint Kenyon to the CSW. Perhaps he was listening to naysayers who objected to her out spoken feminism and, in a blatantly false narrative, accused her of siding with the pro-Russian faction at the UN. Two months later, on the first day of Senate investigations into political disloyalty and espionage under the 1949 revised Smith Act, Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy unveiled Kenyon as “case number one” on his hit list of Communist subversives. When Kenyon heard of McCarthy’s allegations, she responded with her usual combativeness: McCarthy was an “unmitigated liar” and a “low-down worm.” She demanded equal time before the congressional committee, and with the world watching, she exposed the “fantastic” nature of his allegations. She was and had never been a Communist, she asserted, but she proudly defended her lifetime of joining progressive organizations dedicated to making the world a better place. The Senate cleared her of all charges. Kenyon survived with her dignity intact, but as she later reflected, her “whole life changed in those few hours” and she became a “permanent ‘figure of controversy.’ ” She lost many of her l egal clients and was plagued by money problems
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for the rest of her life. She never held another political appointment. April 1945 in San Francisco and its shared optimism about the forward momentum of freedoms and human rights seemed far away indeed.61 The first years of CSW deliberations had been disappointing, as Ken yon’s experiences reveal. Yet during t hese same years individual women on the CSW made notable contributions to w omen’s equality debates at the Commission on Human Rights (as I detail later in this chapter) and the CSW brought needed attention to equal pay and to women’s political and economic rights.62 At the same time, the CSW was not, as some historians have suggested, the only “crucial link” between global feminism’s long “first wave” before World War II and its “dramatic resurfacing” in the 1970s.63 In the decades a fter the war, there were multiple international sites for advancing women’s rights, and struggles outside the CSW helped seed f uture feminisms as much or more than what happened inside the CSW. Controversies over social and economic rights in the postwar ILO, for example, proved consequential for w omen, as did clashes over worker rights and h uman rights at the UN Economic and Social Council and the UN Commission on Human Rights.64
Lifting Social Standards for All at the ILO The 1945 UN Charter made no reference to the ILO and representatives from the organization reported being “coldly received” in San Francisco because of “pressures for a clean sweep” of institutions connected to the League of Nations.65 When the International L abor Conference (ILC) met in Paris in October, delegates huddled in worried discussions about the f uture of the ILO and its place in the unfolding UN system. They also considered other issues of consequence, including how to ensure full employment, minimum standards for colonial labor, and international norms for the welfare of children.66 At President Truman’s request, Frances Perkins had resigned as Secretary of Labor in July, but she agreed to serve as a government delegate to the meeting. US Children’s Bureau director Katharine Lenroot, seventy-one-year-old Congresswoman Mary Norton, and other prominent New Dealers
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accompanied her.67 Frieda Miller could not attend, but she would have agreed with much of what her fellow New Dealers said. In her address to the 1945 ILC, Perkins reiterated the vision of the postwar ILO she had laid out in 1941 and 1944. The ILO must find new ways of “sustaining high levels of employment and elevating the standard of living everywhere in the world.” At the same time, the organ ization must not overlook the “place of w omen in industrial life.” A “general policy of a rate of wage for the job, regardless of sex” should be a priority, she concluded.68 Lenroot spoke on behalf of the ILO Committee on C hildren, which she cochaired with Sweden’s Alva Myrdal, whose writings on the state and f amily life w ere well known outside of Sweden. Lenroot confessed the US had a long way to go to meet the international standards endorsed by the committee. She had been “greatly impressed” by “provisions made for working children in other countries” and asked delegates to refrain from using the phrase “more advanced countries” when referring to wealthier nations like the United States. “Other countries considered more backward” are sometimes “far ahead.” She vowed to make the United States expand its child welfare programs when she returned.69 Mary Norton did not speak in plenary session, but she too listened intently and vowed to change US policy. Although the war had officially ended in Europe, retaliatory killings, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement of populations continued. She heard it all. “No experience in my whole life ever made a deeper impression on me,” she reported. “Day after day we sat shivering in unheated buildings,” listening to “tales of privation, suffering and savage cruelty that made us sick at heart.”70 When she got back, Norton promised to make sure the United States assisted “displaced persons” and gave “refuge” to the thousands of “orphans and homeless c hildren of Europe.” “Our restrictive immigration laws” must be changed.71 Although not in Paris, Miller was busy on ILO projects. She had taken a lead role in redrafting the ILO constitution and was enormously relieved when the UN agreed in May 1946 to set up the ILO as its first specialized agency. The ILO was the only Versailles Treaty institution to survive the war, and its arrangement with the UN served as a blue-
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print for other specialized agencies. With constitution writing behind her, Miller moved ahead with plans, made with the ILO’s Marguerite Thibert, to convene an international committee of women experts before the 1946 ILC.72 Miller proposed that the committee build on the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration and seek guaranteed annual earnings and living wages, fair compensation for w omen, “serv ices in and for the home,” and an end to employment discrimination based on age, marital status, sex, and race.73 Hesselgren had a similarly ambitious list of proposals for committee discussion. The “possibilities of better conditions [for w omen] are greater than ever before,” she wrote Thibert from Sweden, and “comparing experiences from diff erent countries” on pay, maternity care, and short-hour days is “of greatest importance for the future.”74 In July 1946, w omen from India, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Canada arrived in Montreal for five days of intense debate. With Hesselgren chairing, a consensus coalesced around “rate for the job” (defined as “remuneration according to job content not sex”); raising “the level of low-standard occupations, specifically domestic service”; and the right of married w omen to “choose w hether or not to work outside the home.”75 Although not all the items suggested by Miller made it onto the final list, many did. She was especially pleased with the inclusion of the “rate for the job” language. The 1944 ILC had recommended “rate for the job” and Perkins had reiterated its importance in Paris. But l abor feminists had been searching for a way to move beyond “equal pay” language since World War I or e arlier.76 Mary Anderson and Elizabeth Christman had put it this way in 1938: “we would not like to say ‘equal pay for equal work’ b ecause then it is up to w omen to show that they do the same work as men and employers change the work so that men and women are not doing the same thing.”77 The priorities women set in Montreal slowly gained ILO support. When the 1946 ILC opened, the United States, responding to Miller’s energetic prodding, introduced a resolution on women’s work calling for “wage rates based on job content, without regard to sex”; higher wages in female-majority jobs; and studies on industrial homework and the status of domestic workers. The resolution reaffirmed the ILO’s dual
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approach to women’s equality: it mixed sex-specific legislation and “safeguards for motherhood and health” with promises to promote “complete equality of opportunity for men and w omen on the basis of individual merit, skill, and experience.” The resolution passed, seconded by Sharita Mukherjee, assistant secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress. In another notable development, the assembly approved Mukherjee’s proposal to amend the Convention on Social Policy in Non-Metropolitan Territories and add the word “sex” to the clause forbidding discrimination on grounds of race and color.78 After 1946, momentum on women’s equality continued, and in the 1950s, as we explore in the next chapter, the ILO took concrete action on women’s pay, maternity rights, and discrimination, with Miller and another American, Mildred Fairchild, at the center of t hese initiatives.79
Worker Rights as H uman Rights The UN Economic and Social Council, the main forum for international economic and social policy at the United Nations, oversaw multiple ad hoc and permanent bodies, including the Commission on the Status of Women and the Human Rights Commission. It recommended actions to specialized agencies like the ILO and consulted with international w omen’s organizations, trade unions, and other relevant NGOs. A number of NGOs—including w omen’s organizations like the National Council of Negro Women, the International Alliance of Women, and, eventually the W omen’s International Democratic Federation— gained consultancy status a fter 1945, giving them the right to observe Economic and Social Council meetings and speak before commissions. But only a few held “Group A” consultancy status, a privileged category that allowed them to submit items and speak at both council and commission meetings. Two labor organizations, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the AFL, were among this select group.80 Organized labor had wanted more than “Group A” consultancy status: many in labor’s ranks believed organized labor deserved equal standing with government representatives at the United Nations, including voting rights at the UN Assembly. These claims relied on the
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ILO precedent of tripartite international governance with three parties (workers, employers, and government) sharing power and voting privileges. Trade u nions also saw themselves as different from other civil society organizations: as workplace-based institutions with millions of members, they were more broadly representative of the population and had a different l egal standing and relation to the state. There was some truth to these assertions.81 Yet the WFTU also believed it should be the exclusive representative of organized labor at the United Nations, a contention the AFL furiously denied.82 Founded in October 1945, the WFTU brought together a multiracial group of men and w omen representing some 67 million workers from labor organizations in fifty-six countries. The revival of trade u nions and labor-backed political parties in Europe boosted its numbers after 1945 as did the affiliation of new unions in former colonies as decolonization proceeded. The WFTU’s predecessor, the International Federation of Trade Unions, had been almost exclusively comprised of non-Communist European affiliates; the WFTU was more diverse, geographically and ideologically. A fter a quarter-century of rivalry between the “Red International” and the “Amsterdam International,” Communist and non-Communist u nions had joined forces in the WFTU and its three most powerf ul affiliates—the Soviet trade unions, the British Trade Unions Council, and the American CIO— jockeyed continuously for leadership.83 The AFL refused to join the new l abor international and complained of WFTU sympathies with Communism and the Soviet Union. When the WFTU gained consultancy status at the UN, the AFL demanded the same.84 The UN agreed, setting the stage for intense rivalry between the AFL and the WFTU. In late 1946, the ILGWU’s Dubinsky persuaded AFL president Green to take the highly unusual step of spending money for a full-time AFL representative at the United Nations and, in perhaps an even more unusual move, the AFL named a woman, German Jewish émigré Toni Sender, a former socialist member of the German Reichstag, to the position.85 Sender possessed impeccable credentials and performed her job with fierce devotion. Nonetheless, she never gained the respect she deserved from the AFL hierarchy.86
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Almost sixty years old when she took the post at the UN, Sender had been in the m iddle of European political upheavals since her 1905 arrest at age seventeen for demonstrating against unjust voting laws in Frankfort. Shocking her well-to-do Orthodox Jewish family, she then signed up with the office workers’ u nion and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany. Soon after, she left Frankfurt for Paris, and under the tutelage of French Socialist Party founder and anti-militarist Jean Jaurés, she gravitated t oward a more syndicalist socialism. A fter Jaurés’ tragic 1914 assassination by a French nationalist, Sender devoted much of her time to antiwar agitation. She co-organized the famous Berne 1915 antiwar w omen’s congress with Clara Zetkin (Sender’s friend and comrade in the Socialist Women’s International Secretariat) and she wrote for the SPD w omen’s magazine Die Gleichheit (Equality). The SPD expelled Sender in 1917 because of her antiwar agitation. But in 1920 after the establishment of the Weimer Republic, she became the youngest of the forty women elected to the Reichstag. Sender initially ran as a member of the left-wing Independent Social Democratic Party. But unlike Zetkin who had founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919 and stayed with it, Sender rejoined the majority SPD and represented it in the Reichstag from 1922 to 1933. She was active as well in the w omen’s committee of the LSI, the socialist group aligned with the interwar International Federation of Trade Unions. A popular orator and unrelenting defender of women’s rights, workers’ councils, and constitutional democracy, she risked her life on more than one occasion. She fearlessly denounced the Nazis from the floor of the Reichstag and from jerrybuilt speaker platforms overlooking mass outdoor protest rallies.87 In 1933, with arrest inevitable, she escaped to Czechoslovakia and then Belgium. Ultimately, she made her way to the United States, a country she remembered fondly from lengthy lecture tours in 1926 and 1930. In America, Sender vowed to start a “new chapter of my life” and leave her past behind. She wrote her memoirs, Toni Sender: The Autobiography of a German Rebel (1939), changed her name from Tony to Toni as advised by her publisher, Vanguard Press, and applied for US citizenship.88 But her diaries reveal persistent loneliness and despair over
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world affairs and her own personal life. She never established another long-term intimate relationship after the 1926 death of her partner, Frankfort socialist and Metalworker leader Robert Dissmann. She felt cut off from her past and her European socialist comrades. Political work, especially sharing her knowledge of Europe and Eu ropean socialisms with Americans, sustained her. For Sender, adult education was “not a luxury” but a “regular ingredient of democracy,” and she joined the American Labor Education Service teaching staff in New York, befriending Hilda Smith and another former administrator of the Bryn Mawr Summer School, Eleanor Coit. She lectured on European politics, democracy, and “Steps Toward World Order” at universities, union halls, summer YWCA camps, and General Federation of Women’s Club teas. When the United States entered World War II, she used her fluency in German, Dutch, English, and French to aid wartime espionage in the Office of Strategic Services and provide relief to victims of Nazi forced labor schemes and concentration camps as part of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She found time for graduate classes at the New School in New York and at American University in Washington, DC, supplementing her earlier economics training at the University of Berlin.89 The AFL job at the UN suited Sender. In it, she continued as a champion of economic and human rights, a defender of political freedom and democracy, and, as the Cold War escalated, a fighter against what she saw as another totalitarian foe: the Soviet Union. The fierce anti- Communist socialist politics of Dubinsky and others in the AFL aligned well with her view of the world. She rejected the Soviet Union’s claim to be a “socialist system:” in her view it had “many features in common with fascism.” Yet it was equally wrong to characterize many Western nations, including the United States, as “purely capitalist,” she maintained. Their systems were “mixed economies” in which “government interference in the economic sphere” was “used and accepted.” She rejected a world in which the Soviet system stood for “socialism” and the “capital ist system” was reduced to a negative caricature of laissez-faire markets free of state regulation.90 At the same time, the “ ‘American economic miracle’ did not, at close sight, seem in e very respect so miraculous.
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Abundance and security were not universal.” America was “far from perfect,” and it too needed reforming. “Political democracy,” Sender judged, “is in actual danger unless accompanied by the establishment of social justice.”91 Before Sender arrived for her first day of work at the UN, Dubinsky and AFL vice president Matthew Woll had circulated a draft International Bill of Trade Union Rights to Economic and Social Council members and met with Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the Human Rights Commission, to gain her approval. The bill asserted workers’ rights to freedom of association and workplace democracy as fundamental human rights. The WFTU also submitted a l abor rights bill to the Council.92 Roosevelt’s reaction was restrained—she generally avoided taking sides in disputes between various trade unions—but sympathetic. She praised the AFL for “taking an active interest in the achievement of human rights throughout the world” and believed the bill would help secure “the right of people to economic as well as political freedom.”93 Once on the job, Sender tenaciously defended the AFL bill before the Council and the Human Rights Commission. The bill, she stressed, advanced such fundamental economic and social rights as the right to organize and work in conditions of freedom and dignity.94 Like much else at the early UN, worker rights got ensnared in the Cold War net. Dubinsky accused the WFTU of being “too soft” on Communism and he called on the UN to denounce “slave labor” in the Soviet Union, which, he charged, Soviet leaders used to “punish political opponents and rob them of basic human rights.” The WFTU took umbrage at the attack. B attle lines hardened when the Council urged ILO action on workers’ rights and asked for an ILO report, a decision the AFL defended and the WFTU opposed. The split was predictable. The WFTU distrusted the ILO, and, like the USSR, preferred the UN to the ILO as a forum for debate. (The USSR exercised considerable power at the UN but had not belonged to the ILO since 1940). For its part, the AFL often had voting delegates at the ILO, where, since 1934, the United States had taken a leading role. Sensing a threat to its authority, the ILO acted quickly and put “freedom of association” on its June 1947 ILC agenda. With Cold War grandstanding largely absent and ILO officials and
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worker delegates unified in support, the 1947 ILC passed a strong statement on worker “freedom of association” and recommended the UN do the same.95 Sender hailed the ILO’s endorsement of “freedom of association” but saw it as falling short of what the AFL wanted. She exhorted the ILO and the UN to move to a “second stage of action” and endorse a range of fundamental workers’ rights. Foremost among these were items from the AFL’s bill: the “right to strike,” the “right to collective bargaining,” and “protections against slave labor.” Yet Sender added an item not on the AFL list: “workers’ right to move” inside of nations and across national boundaries.96 Sender’s public statements on worker mobility provoked a rebuke from the AFL. “It seems you have not looked up AFL policies on immigration,” AFL research director Florence Thorne scolded. “This is one of the problems on which t here is the greatest division in the labor movement. At the present time, the majority would not look with f avor on changing our national law.” This was neither the first nor the last testy letter Sender would receive from AFL officials reprimanding her for wayward opinions.97 Meanwhile, at its 1948 meeting in San Francisco, the ILO moved ahead on workers’ rights. In a significant and controversial decision, it enacted Convention 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize), fulfilling earlier affirmations of “freedom of association” in the ILO 1919 constitution and the 1944 Philadelphia Declaration. Rose Schneiderman, now sixty-six, sat in the assembly as a worker adviser to the US delegation. She cheered with the UK’s Florence Hancock and other socialist and l abor men and w omen as the ILO declared the right of association “one of the fundamental h uman freedoms.”98 It was a victory both Schneiderman and Hancock cherished. Each had spent decades fearing employer retaliation for their advocacy of u nions and worker collective action. Like French labor leader Jouhaux who summarized the “workers’ view” of the proposal to the assembly, they knew of the “gaps” and “defects” in Convention 87 but saw it as a “first recognition” of a collective human right to worker organization.99 The 1948 ILC elected US government representative David A. Morse as ILO Director-General, a decision many predicted would lead to further
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advances in worker rights. The Rutgers University and Harvard Law- educated son of Jewish immigrants, Morse held prominent New Deal labor posts with the National Labor Relations Board and the Allied Military Government in Italy and Germany before Truman picked him as Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1946. Morse chaired the committee that drafted Convention 87 and was a firm backer of trade u nionism, higher international labor standards, and economic aid and technical assistance to war-torn nations and the so-called developing world.100 A year later, with Morse as Director-General, workers secured another victory at the ILO. The 1949 ILC approved Convention 98 (The Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining), which made explicit that “freedom of association” meant the right to organize and form indepen dent trade unions. Convention 98 called for “adequate protections against acts of anti-union discrimination” and for nations to enact mea sures ensuring the right to organize and bargain.101 The ILO had taken the “second step” called for by Toni Sender, Rose Schneiderman, and other labor feminists. Other significant ILO and UN Economic and Social Council decisions on economic and social rights would follow in the 1950s, with Toni Sender once again on center stage.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights The UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of H uman Rights (UDHR) in December 1948 was the fullest postwar affirmation of the intertwined freedoms owed “all members of the human family.”102 Eleanor Roosevelt was indispensable to its passage and New Deal feminists believed it a stunning advance. The UDHR joined traditional po litical and civil freedoms with new social and economic rights and extended this expanded set of “equal and inalienable” rights to all.103 It articulated the social right to housing, medical care, education; a “standard of living adequate for health and well-being;” and other social welfare provisions. It also gave a profound boost to “economic h uman rights,” the phrase Eleanor Roosevelt used to describe worker and l abor rights.104 These economic human rights included, among other items, the right to “just and favorable remuneration,” “equal pay for equal
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work,” and the right “to form and join trade u nions.” The UDHR reiterated the UN charter’s promise of the “equal rights of men and w omen” but also declared “motherhood and childhood entitled to special care and assistance.”105 Human rights were individual in that they resided in the individual person, a departure from the “minority” or “group rights” approach of the League of Nations. At the same time, individual h uman rights w ere realized collectively, through the action of government, communities, and employers.106 Eleanor Roosevelt, nominated chair of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) at its first meeting in April 1946, weathered multiple challenges to her vision of full and intertwined human rights. Some came from the US government. The US State Department favored a more limited concept of human rights, and Truman wanted Roosevelt to scale back her endorsement of social and economic rights. She held firm, even threatening to resign. Truman relented, and Roosevelt seized the advantage, speaking often in favor of social and economic rights. The United States “favored the inclusion of economic and social rights in the Declaration,” she declared before the HRC, “for no personal liberty could exist without economic security and independence.” The Truman administration urged a more US and Western-centered vision of human rights and worried about the United States losing control of the unruly HRC process. Roosevelt insisted that a universal rights document required a global, collaborative process for its pronouncements to have legitimacy and moral force. Acting on t hese beliefs, she selected a drafting committee with representation from the USSR, Egypt, Iran, Chile, France, India, Canada, China, Lebanon, and other nations.107 The drafting process was grueling. It lasted almost two years, with some eighty sessions filled with endless debate over the wording of every article. Canadian legal scholar and McGill professor John Humphrey, head of the UN Office of H uman Rights, pieced together the first draft, a document judged in retrospect as “an amalgam of competing or converging universalisms—imperial and anticolonial, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western.’ ” The eighteen-member drafting committee tore it apart, with the United States and the USSR often at loggerheads. Other UN units, NGO consultants, and interested parties of all sorts weighted in as well.
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In the end, when the UN General Assembly finally considered the UDHR in December 1948, no nation voted against it and only eight abstained: the Soviet Union, five of its allies, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. The UDHR was a remarkable achievement, especially given the tensions within the US delegation, the profound differences of culture and opinion among those who participated in the drafting process, and the Cold War politics hovering over it all.108 The UDHR owes much to Roosevelt. At the same time, it reflected the ideas and actions of countless other figures and drew on intellectual currents long in motion.109 Other UN feminists, for instance, had to lobby aggressively to make the language of the document more explic itly inclusive of women. Commission on the Status of W omen (CSW) leaders Bodil Begtrup (Denmark), Amalia C. de Castillo Ledón (Mexico), and Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic) attended HRC sessions and, on more than one occasion, objected to the frequent use of “men” in the proposed drafts. Instead of “men” or “brothers,” they proposed substituting “all human beings,” “everyone,” and other phrases clarifying the document’s applicability to w omen. They and o thers insisted as well on adding the phrase in the UN Charter, “equal rights of men and w omen,” to the document. Their amendments had crucial backing from the only other woman on the HRC with Roosevelt: All India Women’s Conference president Hansa Jivraj Mehta, a key figure in the prewar Indian Women’s Charter of Rights and Duties and in the fight for the UN CSW.110 Roosevelt initially resisted the gender-neutral language, telling the HRC at one point that “men” meant all h uman beings. “I have always considered myself a feminist,” she added, “but I really have no objection to the use of the word [men].” But the changes CSW leaders sought won approval.111 Similarly, the economic and social provisions of the UDHR sprang from multiple sources. The Soviet Union and other Communist nations made such rights a priority, but as Mary Ann Glendon concludes in her meticulous analysis, “Contrary to popular opinion, countries within the Soviet sphere of influence w ere neither alone nor the most vigorous in pushing for the inclusion of social and economic rights.” Pressure often came as well from UN representatives—many from Latin America and
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Western Europe—inspired by socialist, social democratic, and Catholic social thought and from progressive and labor-backed constituencies around the world.112 The workers’ rights bills of the AFL and the WFTU, for example, informed the labor provisions of the UDHR, and Articles 22–25 mirrored the language of the ILO 1944 Philadelphia Declaration.113 It is true the United States often objected to the social and economic rights language proposed by the USSR and its allies. The battle, however, in the HRC centered on how such rights would be guaranteed, rather than whether to include such provisions in the UDHR. The Soviet bloc sought state guarantees exclusively. The United States, the UK, and other liberal democracies proposed language allowing a role for collective bargaining and the market as well as the state. Developing nations too resisted guarantees of state provision, fearing the insufficiency of state resources in poor countries. Compromise language, most commonly proposed by developing nations, included the phrase in Article 22 providing social security provision “in accordance with the organ ization and resources of each State.”114 The spirit of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” also infused the UDHR, and at various junctures Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in to defend controversial economic and social provisions.115 When objections arose to the explicit mention of trade u nions in the document, she declared, “The US delegation considered the right to form and join trade u nions an essential element of freedom.” These rights needed “specific mention,” she continued, because “trade unions had met with much opposition” and the “struggle for recognition was, in fact, still continuing.”116 Scholars often point to how the UDHR disappointed—a “funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes” in Samuel Moyn’s words.117 It was a declaration of principles and not a legally binding covenant. The largest nations like the United States routinely ignored the UDHR or used “human rights” rhetoric to cover decidedly less humanitarian objectives. The world continued on its trajectory of violence and rising inequality.118 Yet the c ounters to t hese criticisms are compelling. The idea of fundamental and universal human rights inspired grassroots movements worldwide and boosted their efforts to counter violence,
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insecurity, and inequality. And although the United States failed to incorporate many of the UDHR economic and social rights into its own domestic policies, other nations did. The h uman rights revolution of the 1940s took off slowly, but the norms articulated in the UDHR ultimately gained great traction and legitimacy. Its “moral force,” as Roosevelt had hoped, mattered. Some, especially a fter the 1970s, trumpeted a stripped- down version of individualized rights compatible with the rise of neoliberal market fundamentalism, but there has always been a counter chorus pushing forward the original UDHR vision of intertwined freedoms, with its example as important today as it ever was.119
“Reaction Is in the Saddle Again” New Deal feminists made less progress in realizing their postwar agenda in the United States than they did in the ILO or the UN. The United States moved right in the late 1940s, while other nations moved left. In the war’s aftermath, Europe rediscovered “democracy’s quiet virtues” and embraced state social provision.120 The shift toward social democracy in Great Britain was especially dramatic, with a landslide victory for the Labour Party in 1945 ushering in a national health service and near-universal social insurance benefits the next year.121 Margaret Bondfield was not far off when she reminded her US audience in 1949 of how “you w ere years ahead of us” in some ways in the 1930s, but with “our social security measures uniform for the whole country” that has changed.122 Latin American republics also pioneered social provisions—most notably maternity benefits, a political demand that enjoyed support from conservative Catholics as well as liberal and left feminists. Of course, the United States looked less like a social welfare laggard when compared to Canada, Australia, and other nations that moved incrementally toward social provision in the 1940s and did not enact universal health coverage and comprehensive insurance provisions until decades later.123 Even so, as Bondfield sensed, the United States was losing its leadership in social welfare provision, an assessment later commentators have only reinforced.124 The move t oward social democracy in Europe and elsewhere sprang from multiple sources: the revulsion against fascism and t hose who
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backed it, the desire for healing in the aftermath of wartime death and devastation, the new legitimacy of a central managerial state. Even so, what is sometimes missed is that in many nations women led the postwar campaigns for social welfare provision, family support, and greater equity. Newly emboldened and newly enfranchised, w omen stepped up their political activism and remade society. They had held their families and communities together during the war, often without the help of men, and their sense of their own capabilities had grown. More women voted than ever before around the world, and with the male population decimated by war in many regions, women were the political majority. The “feminization of politics” led to a “feminization of democracy.” Molly Tambor documented this phenomenon in the postwar Italian republic, but newly empowered women organized to create social democracy on every continent.125 To take but one example outside Europe, Ichikawa Fusae and other Japanese women who had sustained the early twentieth-century fight for democracy and women’s rights into the 1930s regrouped during the US occupation of Japan. Granted the right to vote in 1945, Japanese women gained seats in the Diet in 1946, and major political parties soon adopted equal pay and other reforms. Working alongside a few sympathetic US w omen, Japanese w omen secured articles in the 1947 constitution promising “no discrimination because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin” and laws enacted from the standpoint of “individual dignity” and the “essential equality of the sexes.” In addition, the 1947 Japanese Labor Standards Act included enhanced rights for pregnant women and new mothers that were inspired by and extended the ILO standards Tanaka Taka and other full rights feminists had sought in 1919.126 In the United States, women mobilized as well, but the context differed markedly. Laissez-faire economic philosophies had been less discredited in the United States than in Europe, and with Europe poor and the United States rich, the old “exceptionalist viewpoint” resurfaced, with some Americans wondering what if anything could they learn from others. Nor was the postwar era marked by a rise in American women’s political power. The stay-at-home-mom ideal took hold, even though
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most women did not return to full-time domesticity. Instead, the majority combined motherhood with paid work in the booming serv ice economy—a reality ignored by policy makers. US women faced a postwar society profoundly ambivalent about female authority, whether in the private or public sphere, and fearful of w omen’s economic indepen dence and state social provision. In postwar America, conservative forces expanded their reach, intellectually and politically, and in contrast to what happened in many Latin American and European countries, Catholics and other religious conservatives joined with business conservatives to counter state support for families and the poor.127 Yet at war’s end, New Deal feminists believed progress was possible. Much would depend, however, on putting together a new kind of movement—one less dependent on single-sex women’s groups, the historic mainstay of US full rights feminism. The national WTUL, on a downward trajectory for years, permanently closed its doors in 1950. Other key progressive women’s organizations—the National Consumer’s League, the YWCA, and the League of Women Voters (LWV)— struggled on, with the LWV being one of the few to increase its membership.128 Even so, younger politically-minded w omen looked more to mixed-sex organizations—especially trade u nions and civil rights groups—as the principal vehicles for their aspirations. Mary van Kleeck had recognized these new movement realities in the late 1930s as she contemplated the collapse of the Women’s Charter coalition, and she advised Mary Anderson to rethink her alliances and reach out to women in the progressive wing of the labor movement. Frieda Miller acted on van Kleeck’s advice soon after taking over as Women’s Bureau director. In 1945 and 1946, she organized two ambitious national conferences for union women, out of which emerged a concrete and comprehensive blueprint for reform. In addition, she set up a W omen’s Bureau Labor Advisory Committee to serve as a policy think tank and a legislative arm for full rights feminists a fter 1945. The committee consisted of a racially diverse group of fifteen top w omen labor leaders, drawn mainly from the CIO. The million-member United Auto Workers sent two leading women officers: Caroline Davis, a former Indiana drill press operator and local u nion president, and Lillian
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Hatcher, a wartime aircraft riveter and the u nion’s first African American woman staff representative. By 1948, Davis and Hatcher were directing the dynamic, politically progressive w omen’s division of the u nion. Joining them were other younger women who, like them, had been part of the 1930s u nion upsurge: Vassar-trained economist and worker educator Katherine Pollak Ellickson of the CIO Research Department; Woolworth’s 1937 sit-down strike leader and H otel and Restaurant Union official Myra Wolfgang; former laundry worker and Amalgamated official Dollie Lowther Robinson; and Utah-born labor organizer Esther Peterson, who in 1945 had become the Amalgamated’s first legislative lobbyist in Washington, DC. Miller sprinkled a few elder stateswomen like her partner Pauline Newman into the mix as well. In addition to the L abor Advisory Committee, Miller reached out to church and civic groups and to all-female organizations, old and new. But the balance had shifted: women from mixed-sex labor institutions predominated in the W omen’s Bureau network and provided most of the politi cal muscle and intellectual guidance. This labor-led coalition, with Miller at the helm, became the principal voice of US social democratic feminism after the war.129 Equal pay was an immediate priority—with the “right to equal pay” one of the “ ‘Four Freedoms’ for W omen Workers” required in a postwar world. Mirroring the worldwide flurry of equal pay campaigns, the Women’s Bureau coalition intensified its drive for equal pay laws in every state; by 1945, the first federal “equal pay for comparable work” bills had been introduced into both h ouses of Congress.130 The bureau designed its model equal pay bill to circumvent some of the familiar hazards with equal pay legislation. It recommended expanding coverage beyond women who worked in jobs identical to t hose held by men and prohibiting employers from “equalizing” wages downward. New York, Washington, and four other states enacted equal pay laws before the war ended; a half-dozen more followed by the end of the decade. Not all of these state laws lived up to the bureau’s blueprint, but it was a start.131 In contrast, federal equal pay legislation stalled. In her 1945 congressional testimony promoting the federal bill, Miller reminded her listeners of the attention other nations were giving to equal pay and asked the
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United States to conform to the international standards it endorsed for others. Just last year in Philadelphia, the ILO endorsed “wage rates based on job content, without regard to sex,” she noted, and currently “the British Government, through its Royal Commission on Equal Pay, is exploring the whole question.”132 Yet US politicians were disinclined to legislate wage equity between the sexes, preferring to leave it up to employers. And they appeared relatively unconcerned with Americ a’s international reputation as a laggard or a hypocrite on gender issues. To make m atters worse, although progressive CIO u nions lobbied for equal pay legislation, AFL top leaders remained ambivalent, preferring the collective bargaining route to government wage setting. Just as frustrating, women’s groups active in the Women’s Bureau coalition lent a hand, but the “equal rights” wing of American feminism kept its distance.133 Miller was furious over the postwar indifference of NWP to equal pay and its continuing condemnation of state l abor laws for w omen and children. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, she pointed out, covered both sexes, but the majority of women, including almost all women service and retail workers, continued to depend solely on state laws for wage floors and hour ceilings.134 A handful of NWP leaders, most notably Connecticut’s Florence Kitchelt, believed the ERA compatible with labor legislation for w omen and c hildren and pushed Alice Paul to end her categorical opposition to such laws. Paul refused. “Discrimination in favor” of either sex is objectionable, she wrote Kitchelt; “identical laws and regulations for men and w omen are necessary to ensure equality of status for men and women.”135 In 1947, Paul also rebuffed a rebel NWP faction led by Doris Stevens seeking a more multi-issue NWP. Stevens, irate, denounced Paul as dictatorial. That rupture, replete with accusations and counter-accusations of Communist infiltration, left the NWP an isolated group of a few hundred Paul loyalists, willing to make opportunistic alliances with the right or left if such arrangements advanced the ERA. For her part, Doris Stevens resigned from the NWP in 1948, gave her “full support to McCarthy,” and became an outspoken and “virulent opponent of Communism.”136 Meanwhile, full rights feminists had devised new federal legislation that they hoped would stir a national debate over “the political, civic,
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economic, and social status of w omen.” In 1947, Democratic congresswomen Mary Norton of New Jersey and Helen Gahagan Douglas of California introduced the Women’s Status bill, inspired in part by the status language a dopted by the United Nations. The bill called for a domestic “President’s Commission on the Status of Women,” which would study “not just the l egal status but the general status” of w omen and “eliminate unfair discrimination based on sex.” Beneficial state laws for w omen should be retained and expanded to cover men, egalitarian feminists argued, while harmful laws—such as t hose barring w omen’s entry into certain occupations—should be struck down. Esther Peterson and some of the other younger labor feminists on the W omen’s Bureau Labor Advisory Committee were particularly strong advocates for the bill. But such a broad-gauged, pragmatic approach to sex equality had always been a cardinal tenet of the movement.137 In 1948, at congressional hearings over competing women’s rights bills—the ERA and the Women’s Status bill—old animosities flared, with insults flying. NWP leaders called W omen’s Status bill backers “communists,” union “lackeys,” and professional “do-gooders.” Pauline Newman dished it back, charging proponents of “this so-called ERA” with being “selfish careerists” who were “numerically insignificant, industrially inexperienced, economically unsound, and intellectually confused.” Unsurprisingly, with women’s rights advocates divided into hostile camps, neither bill advanced. An opportunity for women’s rights legislation would not arise again until the 1960s.138 Full rights feminists fared just as poorly when they sought social welfare legislation. In 1945, New Dealers reintroduced a “social security for all” bill with provisions for job creation, universal health and disability insurance, expanded fair labor standards, and income guarantees including “unified public assistance given without regard to residence or citizenship.”139 Full rights feminists lobbied particularly hard for the right of men and w omen to a job and a secure income. Mary Anderson, writing in the American Economic Review, quoted President Roosevelt’s promise of a “right to a useful and remunerative job” to e very American and insisted “full employment means w omen as well as men.” The CIO’s Katherine Pollak Ellickson praised the 1945 bill’s inclusion of “full
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employment,” which she defined as “jobs for all.” Yet “real employment security,” she added, meant not just ending “compulsory idleness” but also assuring an adequate income through “guaranteed annual wage plans” and other mechanisms.140 After observing Britain’s innovative wartime approaches to household services, Miller had announced plans in 1944 for an American “home aide” program similar to Britain’s “home help services.”141 Such services would help the growing number of women who experienced the “double day” of f amily and job, she told the New York Times, and put domestic labor on a “level equal to the visiting nursing serv ice.”142 Miller’s home aide program did not make it into the 1945 bill but other provisions related to motherhood and family work did. Miller and others lobbied hard for the bill’s thirty weeks of paid maternity leave and its language continuing federal subsidies for the nation’s first and only national child care program, a wartime legislative concession to wage- earning mothers extracted by Congresswoman Mary Norton.143 The 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the G.I. Bill of Rights) had raised expectations that the 1945 bill might pass. The G.I. Bill, an unpre cedented and far-reaching set of social benefits, expanded unemployment benefits and provided educational grants, low-cost mortgages, and business loans to millions of returning veterans. Yet Southern Demo crats had supported the G.I. Bill only a fter they secured local control over access to benefits, a provision that resulted in many nonwhite and gay veterans being denied assistance. A year later, some of the same Democrats crossed the aisle and formed an “unholy alliance,” in The New Republic’s memorable phrase, with Republicans to block the 1945 bill.144 Prospects for reform worsened in 1946 when the GOP recaptured majorities in both h ouses of Congress for the first time since 1928 and progressive Republicans like Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin lost to reactionaries like Joseph McCarthy. As other industrialized nations moved t oward what Roosevelt had envisioned in the 1930s—a “cradle to grave” social security system—the United States called a halt. The conservative pushback on labor rights was just as aggressive. Union ranks had skyrocketed during wartime, and in November 1945 the largest strike wave in US history erupted. All told, some seven mil-
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lion workers walked out by the end of 1946, shutting down production across the country as they joined massive picket lines and citywide demonstrations. L abor won decisive victories at the bargaining t able: higher wages, job security, fairer treatment, and new workplace benefits like paid vacations. But the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors, thwarted labor’s hope for fuller industrial democracy when it refused Walter Reuther’s novel demand for union participation in pricing and investment decisions. Business was reasserting its “right to manage.”145 In June 1947, in a signal political defeat for labor, the new conservative majority in Congress overrode Truman’s veto and enacted the Taft- Hartley amendments to the 1935 Wagner Act. Taft-Hartley eviscerated labor’s right to strike, picket, organize, and bargain. It banned sit-down strikes and secondary boycotts, made foremen and other “managers” ineligible for union membership, lessened penalties on employer “unfair practices,” and required u nion officials to sign affidavits swearing they were not communists by affiliation or belief. Although key Southern Democrats had eventually voted in favor of the Wagner Act in 1935, the ten-year rise of a multiracial, egalitarian CIO and its 1946 “Operation Dixie” organizing drive in the South’s growing manufacturing sector, now filled them with dread. Progressive CIO u nionism, they believed, threatened Jim Crow and the entire hierarchical Southern order. Southern Democrats defected from the New Deal coalition on labor issues in 1947 and never looked back. Employers used Taft-Hartley to contain labor’s organizing efforts, especially in the South. Union sympathizers lost their jobs and local officials routinely ignored worker freedoms of speech and assembly and jailed peaceful protesters. Anti-union forces dusted off old tropes and stoked public fears by equating unionism with race mixing, Communism, and an assault on the sacred right of employers to unilateral decision-making at the workplace.146 US labor managed to maintain its foothold outside the South and it continued to raise wages and working conditions for millions of American workers. But labor’s plans to remake the South politically, create a truly nationwide movement, and spread u nionism to white collar and other nonindustrial jobs collapsed. “Reaction is in the s addle again,” a disheartened Pauline Newman wrote Margaret Bondfield in July 1947.
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“Congress is d oing its utmost to reduce America’s greatness by shirking responsibility and serving the few rather than the many.”147 Full rights feminists kept up the pressure. “We are in the fight to stay,” Elisabeth Christman vowed. The WTUL’s domestic legislative agenda in 1947 included labor rights, government-subsidized child care, paid maternity benefits, national health care, poll tax repeal, and other progressive measures. In February 1948, when Miller testified in Washington, she reminded her audience of ILO standards and of legislative pro gress in other nations. She detailed newly enacted labor and social insurance laws in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe, noting with envy the maternity provisions elsewhere. She spoke with authority, drawing on research from W omen’s Bureau staffers like Mary Cannon, labor u nion research departments, and her own expanding global policy network.148 Her supporters jammed the small congressional committee room, many no doubt taking a break from the massive three-day Women’s Bureau Conference on “The American Woman and Her Changing Role.” The conference had featured addresses by President Truman and Secretary of L abor Lewis Schwellenbach, Perkins’ successor, as well as panelists such as Maida Springer and Dorothy Kenyon. Many urged the United States to shoulder its “international responsibilities as a great power” and “build World Labor Standards.”149 But the conservative majority in Congress held firm. They seemed disinterested in social security advances outside the United States and found the US shift from global leader to global outlier in labor rights a welcome relief. Only the civil rights movement showed signs of progress. In 1947, Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights issued a path-breaking report, To Secure These Rights, demanding the elimination of discrimination “based on race, color, creed, or national origin” in all aspects of American life, including housing, voting, employment, and paths to citizenship. At the 1948 Democratic Party convention, with pressure mounting from civil rights, labor organizations, and church groups, the party adopted a platform incorporating the Committee on Civil Rights’ recommendations and pledging to “eradicate all racial, religious, and economic discrimination.” A week later, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the military and banning racial discrimination in federal employment. 150
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No doubt, the Cold War context contributed to civil rights gains as historian Mary Dudziak notes: US liberals, the story goes, feared being embarrassed in front of the world by Soviet accusations of US hypocrisy in denying its own citizens the freedoms it extolled to the world.151 Yet other developments mattered as well: the growing power of African Americans and of a racially inclusive CIO within the Democratic Party, the outrage of African Americans vilified in a country they had risked their lives to defend, the shift in public opinion in the face of Allied condemnation of fascist theories of race, and the ringing global affirmations of h uman rights and equality for “colored” peoples in the UN and in independence movements across Asia and Africa. As Pauli Murray later wrote, “the worldwide revulsion against the racist policies of Nazi Germany,” the erosion of “long-held dogmas of innate racial characteristics,” the “renewed consciousness of human rights” in the international arena, and Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights—all t hese “gave impetus to the movement to end discrimination” in the United States.152 Still, in 1948, the legislative pillars upholding the racial order remained in place. Truman’s domestic program of a “Fair Deal,” announced in January 1949, pledged change in race relations, social security, and worker rights. But his 1948 reelection victory had been narrow, and Cold War affairs preoccupied him. Full rights feminists continued to agitate for social and h uman rights, and in 1949, they organized along with millions of o thers to repeal Taft-Hartley—what labor dubbed the “Slave Labor Bill.”153 For the time being, however, conservatives had held the line. Only a fter prolonged struggles around the world would the United States reconsider its limited vision of freedom for Americans.
10 Cold War Advances
Cold war hostilities reached fever pitch in the 1950s. The Soviet detonation of a nuclear bomb in August 1949 and Mao Zedong’s victory in China a few months later stoked already inflamed Western fears of communist power. The Korean War, including US military engagement in Korea from 1950 to 1953, militarized Truman’s global containment policy and cemented mutual enmity between West and East.1 The world, some thought, had separated into two warring camps: a Communist “Eastern or Soviet bloc” and a capitalist “Western or NATO bloc.”2 At home, a second “red scare” gripped the nation. Led by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, a resurgent right smeared political opponents as Communists and disloyal Americans, destroying lives and c areers. Dorothy Kenyon, as recounted e arlier, was among the first targets in 1950. But false allegations poured forth against hundreds more, many in top New Deal posts.3 Republicans captured the White House in 1952 and held it for the rest of the decade. Although many Americans turned inward in the 1950s and distrust of world bodies like the United Nations spread, full rights feminists, especially t hose with ties to international labor organizations, continued globetrotting. Their efforts helped produce surprising and consequential advances in international policy. With Frieda Miller and her American colleague Mildred Fairchild taking the lead, the ILO enacted two equality conventions judged as among the most significant in its history: the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention, the first international standard on equal pay between men and w omen; and an aug294
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mented 1952 Maternity Convention with better protections for pregnant women, mothers, and h ousehold employees. The new conventions precipitated fundamental shifts in legislation and employer practice around the world and spurred new grassroots campaigns for economic justice and social rights. Utah-born activist Esther Peterson, who lived in Sweden and Belgium for much of the 1950s, put her energies into reinvigorating international labor feminism and transforming the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the multimillion- member social democratic global l abor organization. She codirected the first ICFTU Women’s Summer School, helped establish an official ICFTU Women’s Committee, and battled the ICFTU over democratic pedagogy, women’s rights, and Cold War politics.4 At times, opposition to Communist regimes unified social demo cratic Western women in the 1950s, just as antifascism had bound together w omen from Allied nations e arlier. Indeed, having an enemy “other,” capitalist or communist, solidified ties among w omen within each of the superpower blocs in the 1950s and helped each side advance its competing feminism.5 Yet Cold War rivalries also clearly constrained women’s cooperation across the blocs and limited their internationalist visions. Feminists on both sides of the Iron Curtain wore ideological blinders and demonized and stereot yped those on the other side. Women in the East and West expressed regret over Cold War antagonisms and some took exception to the aggressive actions of their governments, but a trans-bloc feminist alliance targeting injustices in both Communist and capitalist nations never crystallized. In any event, feminists in the so-called First World and Second World were not the only ones organizing in the 1950s. Nor were East-West Cold War rivalries the only geopolitical demarcations of consequence.6 In 1952, French demographer Alfred Sauvy spoke of a “Third World” apart from the two rival blocs, and the term, though contested and ambiguous, gained popularity.7 As former colonies—including Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, and India—gained independence in 1945 and later, Third World power grew. In 1955, leaders of twenty-nine Asian and African nations representing over half the world’s population convened in Bandung, Indonesia. Calling for worldwide decolonization and an
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end to racism, the Bandung Conference helped solidify a formidable bloc of nations—almost all newly independent—allied with neither superpower. A fter Bandung, Third World delegations to the ILO found supporters from both sides of the Cold War aisle as the East and the West vied for their f avor. In 1957, the ILO enacted Convention 105 ending forced labor and, in 1958, Convention 111 banning employment discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction, or social origin.”8 These changes universalized labor standards and worker rights, delegitimized multiple forms of exploitation and discrimination, and enshrined the goal of substantive rather than formal equality as part of global social policy. The ICFTU rethought its racial and anticolonial practices in the late 1950s as well, with Maida Springer deeply engaged in furthering that process. Her educational and organizing efforts in Africa did not always sit well with her bosses in the AFL or the ICFTU. Tension arose too with her African partners as her friends in the African indepen dence movement assumed top government positions in newly established nations. Nonetheless, b ecause of the principled 1950s activism of women like Maida Springer the ICFTU became a more inclusive and democratic organization and the struggle against global inequalities progressed.
Labor’s Cold War Men and Women US labor women watched from afar as Cold War disputes ripped apart the massive World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in the late 1940s. The USSR, British, and US affiliates found compromise over the Marshall Plan impossible. In December 1949, the British and the Americans withdrew from the WFTU, as did the majority of other affiliates, and formed the ICFTU. The new ICFTU brought together nearly forty- eight million workers in fifty-one countries and fifty-nine trade u nion centers, almost all with socialist and social democratic political leanings. British, American, and Western European trade u nions dominated, but the organization was truly international, with affiliates from all continents. A diminished but equally formidable WFTU persisted as well,
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led by the Soviet Union and its allies. Hostility between the ICFTU and the WFTU continued for the rest of the century.9 With the birth of the ICFTU, US labor feminists hoped to end their marginalization in the international labor movement. The 1925 demise of the International Federation of Working W omen had limited their opportunities for interwar involvement with European-based trade union and socialist internationals. They had not engaged with the 1940s WFTU either: the AFL never affiliated with it, and the CIO sent only male officers to its functions. But the AFL and the CIO both sought leadership in the ICFTU, and US women w ere hopeful that labor officials would include more w omen in international affairs. A fter all, almost three million US women belonged to unions, one-fifth of the nation’s fifteen million unionized workers.10 Yet Esther Peterson ended up as the only w oman in the twenty-one- person US delegation to the ICFTU founding congress.11 To make matters worse, her appointment might never have happened had she not been in Sweden and taken the initiative. In 1948, Peterson quit her job as the Washington lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and moved to Stockholm, where her husband Oliver held a US Foreign Service post as a labor attaché. When Peterson heard about the upcoming ICFTU congress in London, she wrote former colleague and friend Jacob Potosky, now president of the Amalgamated and chair of the CIO International Affairs Committee, asking for delegate credentials. Potosky initially refused, saying he d idn’t know anyone who needed “help.” But when a US delegate dropped out a day before the event, he tele grammed Peterson, telling her Jim Carey, CIO vice president, had “designated” her “an assistant to the delegation.”12 Peterson was already in Europe, Potosky and Carey must have reasoned; they also believed her sympathetic to the organization’s social democratic aims. The CIO leaders perceived Peterson’s social democratic inclinations correctly, but they failed to notice her allegiance to feminism. In London, Peterson roomed with Sweden’s top female unionist Sigrid Ekendahl, and, as Peterson remembered, they struggled to overcome the language barrier and talked late into the night about w omen’s inequality at work and in the labor movement. Peterson also befriended Anne
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Loughlin and Florence Hancock, the leading British unionists.13 As the convention dragged on, Peterson and her new friends began imagining a revitalized women’s committee inside the ICFTU, intent on radically remaking the organizations. Peterson was crucial to the beginnings of the ICFTU women’s committee and to its early achievements. Peterson and her husband lived in Europe from 1948 to 1957, first in Stockholm and then in Brussels, the headquarters of the ICFTU. Their Scandinavian roots—Danish for Esther and Norwegian for Oliver— eased the transition.14 Oliver spoke Norwegian as a child, and he picked up Swedish quickly, albeit with a Norwegian accent, the Swedes said. A “wonderful nucleus” of six Swedish labor women whom Esther and Oliver knew from Bryn Mawr also helped them “get started.” Soon the Petersons found housing and schools for their c hildren and hired household help.15 The Petersons befriended top social democratic officials in the government and in the Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO), the powerful Swedish Trade Union Confederation for blue-collar workers. Their circle took in LO president Axel Strand, whom Esther first met in the United States in 1949 when she returned for a month, her two-year-old in tow, to lobby for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. When the US INS refused Strand entry at LaGuardia Airport because he was on their “red list,” Peterson had interceded on his behalf and then hosted him in Washington. The Petersons w ere close as well to the dynamite young metalworker leader Arne Geijer, f uture head of the LO and the ICFTU; and to Esther’s 1949 roommate, Sigrid Ekendahl, who became her lifelong and “dearest friend.”16 Esther watched with awe as Ekendahl, chair of the flourishing LO Women’s Council, orchestrated its successful drive for state-funded childcare in the 1950s. A skilled negotiator and political powerhouse, Ekendahl had served on Stockholm’s City Council for three years before being elected to the Swedish Parliament in 1941. During her seven years in Parliament, Ekendahl and others in the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) hailed the adoption of state family allowances for c hildren and other major social welfare advances.17 The Peterson’s Stockholm home filled with an endless stream of visitors: socialists and trade union leaders, government officials,
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exchange students, family, friends, and friends of friends. When asked his opinion of the US labor attaché, LO president Strand replied, “Well, r eally, Americ a has two L abor Attachés here; the second is Esther.”18 The Petersons had formed their social democratic New Deal sympathies in the 1930s, and they retained them the rest of their lives. They refused to join the US Communist Party in the 1930s and condemned Stalinism at the time; a fter the war, their critique of the Soviet system intensified. They considered Soviet Communism brutal and totalitarian, a perception reinforced by their years in Sweden and Belgium.19 Like their friends, Victor Reuther, the CIO’s chief European affairs officer in the 1950s, and his famous brother, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, the Petersons opposed Soviet influence in Europe and sought to advance social democracy, democratic unionism, and higher standards of living at home and abroad. The Petersons (and many other noncommunist leftists in the CIO circle) rejected the rigid bipolar orthodoxies held by the anti-Communist “true believers” in the AFL. They criticized the US State Department’s support of autocratic anti-Communist regimes and the repeated US violation of the sovereignty of other nations. Like the Reuthers, the Petersons defended the nonaligned neutralism of newly independent nations and leaned t oward détente with the Soviets. They opposed US military buildup and economic protectionism and instead favored cooperation among nations, regulated trade, and global economic growth.20 Esther did not record her impressions of the ICFTU founding congress at the time, but in her 1995 memoir, Restless, she offered a version consistent with her lifelong political affinities. A “power struggle between the communists and the social democrats” provoked the WFTU split, and she proudly cast her lot with the “social democrats.” In her view, the ICFTU rejected “the false theory that workers must sacrifice political and spiritual freedom to obtain economic security and social justice.” It opposed, as did she, “the tyranny of Communist, Fascist, Falangist [Franco’s regime in Spain], and any other form of totalitarianism, as well as the domination and exploitation of concentrated economic power in the hands of cartels and monopolies.” She eagerly
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backed the ICFTU adoption of the “Bread, Peace, and Freedom” proposals submitted by Walter Reuther and the congress he chaired.21 Some scholars see social democratic women like Esther Peterson as anti-Communist “Cold Warriors” subservient to directives from the US government.22 Such a portrait is reductive and misleading. While opposition to Soviet-style Communism was a core tenet of the politics of postwar full rights feminists like Peterson—and of Frieda Miller, Maida Springer, and others—they were neither dupes of the US government nor always supportive of its actions. Peterson rejected Cold War orthodoxies and was an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism. She and other social democratic New Dealers pressed for expanded social welfare and worker power and refused a deregulatory agenda. Their activism provoked opposition from Democratic and Republican administrations, as we s hall see.
Equal Pay Debates How to define “equal pay” and craft pay policies benefiting the majority of women and men was far from settled in the 1950s. Narrow interpretations of equal pay, which applied only when men and women did the same or identical work, meant few w omen qualified for higher wages. Equally troubling, wage equalization could result in w omen losing jobs, men’s wages being lowered, and women receiving the same inadequate low pay as men. These problems were especially glaring in less industrialized regions where substandard wage rates and informal work outside the waged economy w ere the norm.23 In 1949, a fter thirty years of prodding, the ILO announced plans for a two-year “double discussion” of equal pay. It would tackle the subject first at its 1950 ILC and vote on it the next year. The stage was set for an international debate over wage justice and how to achieve it.24 Frieda Miller and her principal ILO collaborator, Mildred Fairchild, the head of the ILO Women’s Division from 1947 to 1953, played a crucial role in shaping the debate. Mildred Fairchild’s connections with Miller and other New Deal w omen stretched back decades. A fter getting her PhD in social economy at Bryn Mawr College in 1929, Fairchild
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joined the faculty and then directed the college’s graduate department of Social Economy and Social Research from 1936 to 1946. No doubt she knew Miller from the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women, where both taught in the 1930s, and from joint legislative and organizing endeavors. Fairchild, however, was better disposed toward Soviet Russia than most in the New Deal circle, with the possible exception of Mary van Kleeck. Fairchild had traveled to the Soviet Union with her Bryn Mawr faculty mentor, Susan Kingsbury, and their 1936 publication, Factory, Family, and Women in Soviet Russia, established them as experts on Soviet policy t oward w omen. Fairchild had been impressed with the Soviet government’s commitment to sex equality and to social supports for motherhood. Miller was not as enamored with Soviet practices, but she valued Fairchild’s expertise and her passion for w omen’s rights and social equality. The two found common ground politically and, working in tandem, had a substantial impact on the ILO.25 In 1949, Miller and Fairchild drafted a report to inform the upcoming equal pay discussions. Echoing Article 427 of the Versailles Treaty, it called for “equal remuneration for work of equal value for men and women.” This language, they believed, resonated with ILO tradition and, like the phrase “rate for the job,” which they also managed to tuck into the report, allowed for a broad definition of equal pay. The report also reflected a strongly held view of theirs: equal pay alone w ill not solve the problem of low and unequal wages. Other reforms were needed: living wage minimums; trade union organizing; societal mea sures reducing the “economic handicaps of parenthood” such as “collective laundries,” day nurseries, and free schooling; and wage subsidies to “heads of families or persons responsible for dependents.” “Family allowance schemes” were already in place in twenty-six nations around the world, the report noted, including in the USSR, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Europe.26 But even this careful approach to equal pay had its dangers. The phrase “rate for the job,” for example, was controversial and meant dif ferent things to different people. For Miller, “rate for the job” meant removing “sex bias in wage setting” by conducting an “objective reevaluation of all jobs” and assigning pay rates based on job content rather
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than the sex of the worker. Such an “objective reevaluation,” she believed, would boost women’s pay whether or not they held jobs similar to t hose held by men.27 Yet in practice, setting an “objective” rate for the job was hardly a straightforward or democratic process. Rather, it often involved an extensive job analysis done by experts, measuring the “skill” or “effort” or “responsibility” of each job classification. By basing wages on individual characteristics or “human capital,” job analysis undermined older “living wage” arguments linking wage justice and human need. In addition, job analysis challenged collective bargaining wage- setting strategies premised on the organized power of workers as a group and the need to lift wages for all workers. In the end, it could devolve into technical hairsplitting, resolvable only by experts, with workers disempowered and employers retaining control.28 Hoping to straighten out some of the confusion swirling around equal pay before the 1950 ILC, Fairchild convened a meeting of women experts in Geneva. She relied on Miller for advice in constituting the group and formulating its agenda. Miller and Pauline Newman participated, as did Alva Myrdal, the prominent Swedish welfare state architect who was in transit from a high-ranking UN position in New York to a job in Paris as UNESCO’s director of Social Sciences. Government officials from Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands came. India sent Dr. Maitreyee Bose, a social reformer, future member of India’s Parliament, and a leader of India’s National Trades Union Congress (formed a few months before India attained independence in 1947).29 The group left crucial issues unresolved. Key terminology was not clarified. Nor had the meeting offered ways of reconciling “rate for the job” with collective bargaining or avoiding employer manipulation of wage-setting schemes. ILO member states raised some of these same knotty problems when asked for their input before the ILC. The Swedes objected to the “rate for the job” idea, associating it with popular job evaluation schemes in the United States that bypassed collective bargaining and linked pay to “job content.” The Indian government worried that “less developed countries” might find it impossible to set up the elaborate “necessary machinery for evaluating job content.” Still others fretted about the “diversity of definitions” for “equal remuneration” and “equal value.”30
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Predictably, the equal pay discussion at the 1950 ILC did not go smoothly. Four US women, including Miller, sat on the large and unwieldy Committee on Equal Remuneration. They were joined by Sweden’s Sigrid Ekendahl, Britain’s Florence Hancock, and ten other women, almost all from Western European nations. When Miller presented the committee’s recommendations to the assembly, employer delegates pushed back. But their chief concern, perhaps to the surprise of the committee, was not about the murkiness of language or the costs to employers of job evaluation schemes. Rather, the men who spoke doubted whether women as a sex deserved higher pay. The unequal capacities of the sexes and the higher costs of female labor justified lower pay for w omen, they claimed. US employer adviser Lena E. Ebeling disagreed and announced her support for the principle of equal pay. Yet she opposed an equal pay convention because voluntary approaches were sufficient. According to Ebeling, US employers had already implemented equal pay because they rewarded “human effort without regard to sex” when of “identical effectiveness.” Ebeling’s narrow definition of “equal pay” was not what full rights feminists like Miller supported. It applied to only a few women and left unanswered the question of who determined “identical effectiveness” and whether employers paid living or just wages to all.31 Equal pay advocates spent the next year gathering supporters and revising their proposals. The phrase “without discrimination on the basis of sex” replaced “rate for the job.” This substitution had the advantage of associating gender wage justice with other antidiscrimination and human rights struggles, rather than with employer evaluation schemes. In response to trade union objections, “collective agreements” were named a recognized approach to wage setting, and “job analysis” became optional.32 Equal pay advocates turned out in force in 1951 to fight for the Equal Remuneration Convention (C100). Sweden’s Ekendahl, India’s Bose, and other forceful speakers sat on the Committee on Equal Remuneration. Miller chaired the small group in charge of drafting the convention. When she presented the committee’s final conclusions to the assembly, she smartly opened her speech by linking equal pay to the ILO
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premise that poverty or low wages anywhere undermined prosperity everywhere. “All workers are in jeopardy,” she pointed out, as long as women receive “substandard wages.” Equal pay meant maintaining the “standard of living of all.”33 The misguided belief in “the iron law of wages” held by some ILO delegates must be discarded. The b attle was not over how to divide a fixed sum: more wages for w omen did not mean less for men. Equal pay raised wages overall and boosted economic growth. Opponents once again questioned the justice of paying men and women equally, given the presumed biological and social differences between the sexes. Sweden’s Bergenström found women workers less productive, less skilled, and more costly than men and not deserving of men’s pay. Australia’s Fowler reminded the audience that his nation rejected equal pay b ecause its “family or social wage” system “recognizes and legislates for the male as the most important factor in Australian society.”34 Britain’s Hancock and India’s Bose mounted spirited rebuttals. Equal pay, Bose summed up, was a m atter of “simple justice” long overdue.35 The vote on C100 split along predictable lines, with workers in favor and employers opposed. Although many government delegates abstained, enough voted yes—including the United States and the large bloc of Latin American nations with equal pay provisions already in their constitutions—to secure a majority. The Polish government, backed by the Czech, also voiced strong support and voted yes. Even more delegates joined the unanimous worker bloc in passing a supplemental recommendation on equal remuneration.36 Full rights feminists justifiably claimed a victory in 1951. The ILO language of “equal remuneration for equal value” and “no discrimination on the basis of sex” was broad in conception. Of equal import, C100 allowed a choice of which wage-setting mechanism to use—law, collective bargaining, or other “recognized machinery”—or all three. Some argued this language sidestepped the sticky question of w hether to set wages based on individual output, bargaining power, or human need and objected to the paragraphs in the standards encouraging, “where appropriate,” the “objective appraisal of jobs on basis of work
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performed.”37 But the validation of wage-setting mechanisms other than legislation was a first for the ILO. Miller had called for “imaginative rethinking” of wage-setting practices at the 1951 ILC, and the assembly agreed.38 Yet equal pay advocates like Miller had wanted more. Ratifying nations w ere not u nder a “strict obligation” to enact new legislation or change their practices; they merely promised to encourage the principle of equal remuneration in wage-setting mechanisms.39 In addition, although C100 defined “equal remuneration” as “rates of remuneration established without discrimination based on sex,” no consensus had emerged on what that meant.40 Were sex-based pay differentials based on perceived sex differences in capacity, quantity of output, or social responsibilities legitimate? After the enactment of C100, l abor and w omen’s movements around the world—as well as legislative bodies and courts—took up the challenge of realizing “equal remuneration for equal value.” ICFTU feminists made C100 a central plank of their growing women’s committee. Toni Sender, representing the ICFTU at the UN, reintroduced it at the Commission on the Status of W omen, stressing the need for more than “equality of salary” in countries “on a subsistence level” where “such equality” would only mean “miserable pay.” In 1957, the European Economic Communities’ founding Treaty of Rome committed members to the principle, and by the end of the decade, thirty nations around the world had ratified C100.41 Yet as full rights feminists feared, the most carefully considered equal pay standard could not guarantee wage justice for women. There was no substitute for changing the relations of power. Multiple problems dogged the equal pay campaigns that sprang up in the 1950s. Some w omen rightly feared they would lose their jobs should “equal pay” be enacted.42 But even in situations where w omen kept their jobs, the benefits of wage equalization w ere not always evident.43 Employers retained power over wage setting, and they often used the job analysis genie—now out of the box as an acceptable way to determine “value”—to undercut women’s demands for higher wages. Large-scale reevaluation of jobs proved expensive and exhausting for
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under-resourced grassroots movements, and employers generated obfuscating statistics to justify poverty wages. Employers argued too that “equal remuneration for work of equal value” was perfectly compatible with theories of “efficient utilization” of “human capital” and of pay setting based on individual “productivity.”44 A murky flawed concept— the measurement of which was basically tautological—“productivity” assumed individual rather than group effort and proved wholly i nadequate at capturing the value of t hose—largely women (and often women of color)—who tended the minds, bodies, and emotions of others. Few escaped the “new gospel of productivity” in the 1950s.45 It leapt over the Iron Curtain and seeped into discourse around the world.46 Even Mildred Fairchild fell into the trap when asked about equal pay. Drawing on language in the equal remuneration standards that stressed raising w omen’s “productive efficiency,” she urged more “training and education if the principle of equal pay is to have any meaning.” A fter all, “it is no good saying that women can have the same pay for the same work if they are incapable of d oing the same work as men.”47 Fairchild’s response neglected the cultural undervaluation of w omen’s skills and the ways employers used notions of female inferiority to justify paying women less. The dense haze of neoclassical economics, with its reverence for “human capital” and “productivity” and its disdain for what could not be measured in pounds and inches, had obscured the older feminist insight that “sex bias” affected how “value” was determined and wages were set.
Maida Springer’s Controversial Swedish Tour One of the most troubling dilemmas for advocates of wage justice was whether to pursue equal wages between men and w omen or tackle poverty and class-based inequalities more generally. Many feminists argued for the necessity of both strategies, but choices over which to prioritize still loomed. Tensions flared in both wealthy countries and in less industrialized regions. Maida Springer found herself caught in such a dispute during her 1951 visit with Esther Peterson in Sweden.
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Sweden had a tradition of worker cohesion—often called “solidarity bargaining”—that created widespread skepticism about equalizing wages solely along sex lines. Solidarity bargaining happened in the context of voluntary collective bargaining between l abor and management. Many viewed collective bargaining as a more democratic and flexible approach to wage setting than state legislation or employer-determined wages and saw solidarity bargaining as a form of collective bargaining capable of achieving both sex and class equalization.48 Solidarity bargaining redistributed wealth from the top to the bottom by giving greater raises to those at the bottom. It thus benefited women disproportionately, the Swedish trade u nion movement often argued, b ecause most low earners w ere female. It also avoided pitting men against women. O thers, however, worried solidarity bargaining paid insufficient attention to differences among workers, and blamed labor organ izations, including the LO, for the continuing gender wage gap in Sweden. Springer’s visit to Sweden began well enough. She had grants from the American Labor Education Service and the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study workers’ education programs in Sweden and Denmark. She considered both Petersons to be “wonderful, intimate, warm family friends,” and as a longtime admirer of Swedish social democracy she was e ager to visit Stockholm. Her problems started a fter she and Esther returned from Geneva, where they had gone to observe the 1951 ILC equal pay debates. During a luncheon in her honor, Springer fielded questions from reporters curious to hear her reactions to the recent condemnation of gender wage inequities in the Swedish workplace by prominent Swedish w omen. She recounted how American union women organized to raise their low wages, thinking she had sidestepped a potential quagmire. The next day she learned otherwise as she toured a large LO-organized factory, with “icicles hanging from everywhere,” no one looking her in the eye, and Sigrid Ekendahl refusing to meet with her. News reports had twisted her remarks to make it seem as if she “pitied” the underpaid Swedish women workers, and the labor movement was incensed.49 After all, what insight could an American offer about wage justice to a Swede? Among the industrialized nations, Sweden was
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one of the most equal societies; the United States, although flush with wealth, lagged behind. Esther sprang into action. She had heard Springer’s comments at the luncheon and felt the media spin was unfair. She pleaded with Ekendahl and the LO leadership to see the incident in a different light and, in a show of support for Springer, invited a large group of labor friends to her h ouse. Her interventions had the desired effect, and friendlier feelings slowly reemerged. Springer confessed to being “terribly humiliated . . . nearly ill” over the incident, but her admiration for Sweden’s social democracy and its commitment to worker education was unshaken.50 It is not clear how race shaped the chain of events: no one ever mentioned it. But class differences among Swedish w omen certainly aggravated tensions. Swedish professional women were underpaid compared to their male counterparts, and many saw attacking sex-based wage differentials as the priority. Some believed the LO, a dominant force in the SAP, was putting too much emphasis on reducing class inequities and not pushing hard enough to end sex discrimination. Ekendahl thought otherwise. She defended the LO’s solidarity approach to wage justice and spoke up in the union’s defense. Peterson, for her part, refrained from criticizing the LO, but she too had her reservations. A few months before Springer arrived, a Swedish joint labor–management commission on equal pay had released its findings. The commission deemed sex-based wage differentials “unreasonable in principle,” but it found such differentials at times “a practical necessity justified on the grounds that the average value of w omen’s work is lower.” Ekendahl, who sat on the committee, judged the report a step forward b ecause employers had acknowledged the principle of equal remuneration. Esther (and Oliver), however, wanted her to issue a minority opinion. Otherw ise, they argued, it appeared as if she accepted employer rationales for paying w omen less. Ekendahl told the Petersons she had “serious problems” with the reasoning of employers and some of her LO male colleagues, but the LO deserved her loyalty. When the organization championed overall wage compression in collective bargaining, which it had done since the 1930s, women’s interests
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ere advanced. In addition, the LO had just released a new “solidaristic w wage policy” acknowledging the need “for some kind of equal pay for equal work principle.”51 There was more than one route to wage justice, Ekendahl argued, and u nions were crucial allies in the fight.52 The Petersons relented and did not press Ekendahl further on the matter. This would not be the last time Sigrid and Esther differed on strategy, but their friendship endured, nurtured always by their mutual commitment to democracy and universal equality.
Domestic Work For Frieda Miller, equality for w omen was impossible without valuing household labor, paid and unpaid. In the 1950s, she pushed the issue forward at the ILO, relying on her years of experience in New York fighting for domestic worker laws and on what she had learned in her travels abroad. She turned first to her British colleagues for help. After the war, she had invited them to a conference on h ousehold employment in Washington to share strategies for achieving “self-respecting standards for all.” The Brits returned the f avor, inviting Miller and US Women’s Bureau staff to London. Research reports and tales of political maneuverings on the issue flowed back and forth for years. Miller sent over new Women’s Bureau publications and shared the small but satisfying win in New York bringing household employees into the state workers’ compensation system. Dorothy Elliott and other friends in London kept Miller abreast of developments with the National Institute for Houseworkers, funded through the National Health Service Act.53 In 1948 the Institute opened a public employment center for household workers on a limited basis. Relying on input from employers and the National Union of Domestic Workers, it offered training, licensing, and jobs; set labor standards; and advocated for recognition of f amily work as a “skilled craft.”54 Miller’s search for innovative models of household services eventually led to Sweden. Knowing Esther Peterson had moved to Stockholm, Miller asked her for a short report on Swedish approaches to domestic work. Peterson readily agreed. When she had given one of her first
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Swedish parties as a diplomat’s wife, she had been surprised to learn that the assistants she hired were entitled to overtime pay. She resolved to learn more. “I have been clipping and assembling materials on the Swedish experience in regard to domestic workers and should be delighted to go on with it formally,” she replied to Miller. “Heavy f amily demands and embassy matters” delayed the project, Peterson later wrote, but she pursued it for the next two years.55 She ended up shipping off a 200-page manuscript titled “Justice in the Kitchen.” The Women’s Bureau shaved it down to half its size, changed the title, and published it as Toward Standards for the Household Worker: Experiences in Sweden. Peterson complained that the Women’s Bureau “turned it into governmentese and threw out most of my anecdotes and cartoons.” Even so, Peterson’s enthusiasm for what she perceived as an alternative way of looking at w omen’s h ousehold work, paid and unpaid, emerged forcefully both in her manuscript and the final published report.56 Peterson spoke from direct experience with the Swedish Social Home Help Program. Launched in 1944, the state-subsidized program provided trained and licensed “mother substitutes” to h ouseholds when the mother was ill or otherwise unavailable. When Peterson wrenched her knee and found it impossible to care for her f amily, a Swedish “mother substitute” had appeared. Peterson also wrote admiringly of the Swedish Domestic Workers Act and its regulation of hours, wages, lodging, food, and other conditions of domestic employment.57 Peterson must have been pleased when Kerstin Hesselgren congratulated her on the study. Hesselgren was an authority on Swedish h ousehold regulation from her wartime service as deputy chair of the Riksdag Committee on Legislation, and Peterson was eager to know her opinion. “I enjoyed every bit of it,” Hesselgren declared. “It is a marvel to me how you have been able to find all t hose details in so short a time and in a foreign language. It really is a standard work.”58 Armed with her knowledge of successful experiments in Britain, Sweden, and other countries, Miller was ready when the ILO convened a tripartite advisory group of experts on domestic work.59 In July 1951, men and women from eight countries gathered for five days in Geneva.60
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“We appointed Miller chair,” recalled Dorothy Elliott, and “we settled quickly on our purpose: how to lift standards in the largest and most important occupation in the world.” The British detailed their postwar progress in vocational training, certification, and placement; the Swedes spoke about legislative standards and their “unique training scheme that included workers and h ousew ives together.” Two French u nionists brought a 1937 contract bargained by household workers, the first in France they claimed. Argentina and Mexico told how their nations guaranteed the rights of all workers, including domestic workers, in their constitutions and in “general industrial legislation.” Mr. Das of India’s National Trade Union Congress, Elliott wrote, “had continually to speak for the under-developed countries,” confronting “us with their different realities.” A unanimous report emerged, a testament to the group’s shared commitment to securing international action.61 Domestic workers deserved the “equivalent social rights and advantages of other workers,” the committee declared, and called on the ILO to enact bold and specific international standards to achieve that end.62 “Life servitude contracts” must be abolished and replaced with employment contracts containing “clear rights and obligations.” Domestic workers should have paid holidays, set hours, privacy, and suitable accommodations; they also had a right to social security and other state benefits. The committee urged the development of national state-run home-aid serv ices modeled on visiting nursing serv ices.63 Miller hounded Edward Persons, chief of the US Office of International Labor Affairs, hoping he could move the ILO forward. But the ILO ignored the committee and decided against submitting a domestic worker standard in 1952. Still, the conversation had been joined. A transnational network of full rights feminists had brought attention to the conditions of domestic workers and made a compelling case for how international standards could make a difference.64 As the ILO globalized in the 1950s, adding nations in which informal and household work predominated, the issue refused to disappear. In 1965, citing earlier studies like the 1951 inquiry, the ILO passed a resolution on the “urgent need” for minimum living standards for domestic workers compatible with “self-respect and
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human dignity.”65 Three decades would pass, however, before the first ILO convention on homework would be approved.
Strengthening the Maternity Convention Full rights feminists had more success amending the 1919 Maternity Convention. The postwar pressure for change came primarily from labor women, with Miller and Fairchild helping orchestrate the effort. In 1948, at the behest of Fairchild and her network of ILO w omen advisers, the ILO had investigated maternity policies around the world. Its report drew liberally on material prepared by the US W omen’s Bureau— material ironically ignored in the United States. In the 1940s, the Women’s Bureau had conducted careful surveys of maternity policies in other nations, recommended standards of maternity care for US employers, drafted model federal and state legislation, and produced in- depth studies of union-negotiated maternity benefits.66 In response to the pressure, the ILO considered maternity amendments at the 1952 ILC. Miller urged US delegates to take the lead on the maternity question and used the Cold War context to underscore her message. “As you know, the Iron Curtain countries have recognized the importance of this question,” she wrote. If the issue is sidestepped now, such an “action may well be taken up as one more propaganda item against the ILO and the United States.”67 To Miller’s delight, the Women’s Bureau was asked to prepare a “position paper” for the US ILO delegation. At the 1952 meeting—with Frances Perkins serving as an alternate government delegate and Miller and Clara Beyer, Bureau of L abor Standards associate director, as government advisers—the US delegation ended up channeling many of the positions the W omen’s Bureau had advocated.68 Miller also sat on the ILC’s 51-member Committee on Maternity along with Sigrid Ekendahl and Britain’s Florence Hancock, who shared the vice chair position with an employer from Italy. The revised convention (C103) fell short of what they wanted, but it was an improvement. It set a minimum rate of maternity cash benefits; expanded coverage to w omen in non-industrial and agricultural occupations,
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“including women wage earners working at home”; and specified no distinction of “age, nationality, race, or creed, w hether married or unmarried.”69 But for Miller and Fairchild it was a painful reminder of the ongoing political paralysis on the question at home. Other nations looked to the ILO instruments as norms and amended their laws accordingly. By 1952, eighteen nations, including many in Latin Americ a, had ratified the 1919 Maternity Convention; o thers had integrated elements of it into their general statutes. That number would grow steadily after the adoption of the amended convention. The United States, however, refused to ratify either convention. It also failed to enact federal or state maternity legislation reflecting the very principles it endorsed at the ILO. As a result, only a small slice of US mothers had maternity protections, and these came from their employer, not the state. ILO women insisted the state or a social insurance system provide maternity support, not employers, for good reason. Employer-based maternity schemes increased the likelihood of discrimination against women because of perceptions that female employees cost more; such schemes also fueled resentment from those not receiving comparable benefits. But above all, the most far seeing reformers argued, children were a public good and all parents deserved social support. An employer-based system, available to a few, made no sense. The Maternity Convention was the last project on which Miller and Fairchild collaborated. By the end of 1953, both Miller and Fairchild had resigned from their jobs. Fairchild had reached the ILO retirement age of sixty, but she, like Miller, also faced the threat of recurring FBI “loyalty” investigations. Although neither HUAC nor McCarthy’s Senate committee called Fairchild to testify, she was vulnerable. She denied ever having belonged to the Congress of American Women, the US affiliate of the Soviet-identified Women’s International Democratic Federation, but she stood by her favorable assessment of USSR motherhood policies and the gender revolution initiated by the Bolsheviks. Fairchild pulled back from international affairs. She returned to the United States and devoted herself to the National Child L abor Committee. As its chair by the late 1950s, she shifted the committee’s attention
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to the stark exploitation of migrant children and their families in the United States.70 Miller also tired of the constant FBI harassment, which in her case stretched back to 1949, and with a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the White House, her reappointment as US Women’s Bureau director appeared unlikely.71 Her friends and allies much regretted her decision to resign. Margaret Bondfield expressed a sense of personal loss and a concern, echoed by o thers, that Miller’s replacement, Alice Koller Leopold, former B. Altman Department Store personnel director, businesswoman, and Connecticut state Republican legislator, would place less priority on low-income women and international labor standards than had Miller. Bondfield’s fears materialized. Leopold only participated in ILO affairs sporadically, and although she championed women’s equality, she advocated a quite different version of feminism than her prede cessor. She disbanded Miller’s labor advisory committee and reached out to the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce for counsel. For the first time since the founding of the Women’s Bureau in 1920, economic opportunities for business and professional women took precedence over labor standards and worker rights.72 The Women’s Bureau was not alone in its political reorientation. During the next eight years of Republican ascendancy, US involvement in UN and ILO affairs came under attack. Senator Bricker’s proposed constitutional amendment hobbling US ratification of international treaties gained momentum, and charges of UN “tyranny” filled the airwaves. In 1953, President Eisenhower vowed retreat on UN m atters, especially in regard to international treaties affecting US domestic m atters such as human rights and labor conventions.73 Hostility to international treaty making had the upper hand. The UN debated consequential issues of rights and discrimination for the rest of the decade, but the most prominent New Deal w omen were gone. Mary McLeod Bethune limited her engagement with UN affairs after she left the NCNW presidency in 1949. She spent the last years of her life on the road, carrying her message of “a world of fellowship and justice” to audiences in the United States and abroad. In 1952
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she attended the inauguration of Liberia’s new president and fulfilled her lifelong dream to “tread the soil of Africa from which my forebears came.” She also welcomed international friends like Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to her Florida home and to Bethune-Cookman College. In 1951, Pandit spoke to a rising civil rights generation on freedom strug gles worldwide and on Prime Minister Nehru’s democratic socialist vision for Third World development, which included investment in education and social serv ices, respect for religious difference, l egal rights for women, and an end to caste and other invidious discriminations. Shortly before her death in 1955, Bethune penned her famous “My Last Will and Testament” for Ebony magazine and admonished those carrying on the struggle to be “interracial, interreligious, and international.”74 Eleanor Roosevelt’s absence from the UN a fter 1952 was keenly felt. She offered her resignation to Eisenhower a fter his election, and “to her disappointment,” he accepted.75 No doubt there were Democrats and Republicans who had tired of her robust criticism of postwar US policy, including, as biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook concludes, her opposition “to the Truman Doctrine, unilateral intervention, substitution of military aid for economic aid, and growing US militarism and neocolo nialism.” But Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also anticipated conflict with her over economic rights and the necessity of intertwined freedoms. In 1952, she had reluctantly acquiesced to the US proposal separating rights into two distinct covenants: one on political and civil rights and a second on economic and social rights. But she and other New Deal women wanted the two human rights covenants enacted as a package, or, as Frieda Miller phrased it, a “concurrent presen tation of independent but equal covenants.”76 The UN General Assembly had approved the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, a milestone for women, in December 1952. But with Eleanor Roosevelt gone and Republicans in power, action on the international h uman rights covenants did not follow. Instead, the US administration voiced serious reservations, especially t oward instruments guaranteeing worker rights to organize collectively and the right to jobs, health care, education, housing, and an adequate standard of living.77 Full rights feminists
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felt shame and frustration as the Soviet Union repeatedly introduced economic and social rights declarations in the UN after 1953 and the United States just as repeatedly rose in opposition. The presence of New Deal w omen waned at the ILO as well. The 1952 ILC was the last one Frances Perkins attended. That same year, she stepped down from the US Civil Service Commission, her last government position, and moved to Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School where she lectured on New Deal reform and international affairs, invited Walter Reuther and other controversial speakers to campus, and by all accounts was a much beloved, revelatory presence. Indeed, from 1953 to 1960, no US woman held voting credentials at ILC assemblies, and with the retirement of Fairchild, few American-born staffers remained in Geneva.78 Ana Figueroa, a highly regarded Chilean suffragist, teacher, and diplomat, took over as the top ILO women’s officer, leaving her post as the first w oman on the UN Security Council.79 Miller accepted short-term consultancies at the ILO once she finally gained her employment clearance from the State Department’s International Organization Employee Loyalty Board in 1955. But she, like other New Deal veterans, no longer held positions of power.80 With the older cohort of New Deal feminists lacking influential government positions at home and abroad, it fell to a younger cohort of activists like Esther Peterson and Maida Springer to continue the fight for democratic equality. This they did, working largely through international labor networks associated with the ICFTU, as the next section tells. Still, Miller, Fairchild, and o thers could take pride in what the ILO summed up in 1953 as its new “equality in practice” for women.81 These achievements would undergird further equality advances in the late 1950s as Third World men and women gained more leverage in international affairs.
Working Women of the First World Unite When Esther and Oliver Peterson relocated to Brussels in 1952, they too faced harassment from US government loyalty investigations. The State Department had reopened Oliver’s 1949 case and demanded he return
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to Washington to answer charges of Communist sympathies. Esther confided in Frieda Miller her fears of Oliver losing his job and the “hurt we suffered,” but otherw ise she kept her travails to herself. Although Esther wrote frequent and heartfelt letters to her mother, it took years before she told her m other about the charges of disloyalty perpetually swirling around Oliver and her dread of “such awful things as many have had to go through.” But in 1952, as she waited for the State Department clearance that finally came in July 1953, she put her feelings aside and threw herself into European labor politics and family life.82 With ICFTU headquarters nearby, she volunteered her time, assisted Oliver with his ICFTU activities, and reached out to the women unionists she knew. The ICFTU had vowed to “eliminate throughout the world every kind of discrimination or domination based on race, colour, creed, or sex” at its first congress, but had taken little or no action.83 Peterson and her ICFTU circle of full rights feminists sought to change that state of affairs. Women, like Peterson, in their thirties and forties predominated in the group, but some had ties back to 1919, to the International Federation of Working W omen, and to its successor, the Women’s Committee in the International Federation of Trade Unions.84 Many also knew each other from the ILO, the Socialist International (which formally reconstituted in 1951), and European labor affairs.85 In 1953, ICFTU feminists scored their first victory when they convinced the ICFTU to cosponsor a two-week residential summer school for w omen workers with the UN Economic and Social Council. Held in the Compiègne forest outside of Paris at the beautiful Château La Brévière, a site UNESCO set up as the International Center for Workers’ Education, the summer school attracted fifty-three w omen labor leaders from twenty-five countries. Over half the w omen w ere from Western Europe, with the largest group from the Federal Republic of Germany. But w omen came also from Africa (Nigeria, French Cameroon, Tunisia, French Guinea, and Madagascar); from the Americas (Mexico, Barbados, Canada, and the United States); from South Asia (India and Pakistan), and from Southern Europe, including Turkey.86 Gathered in “the beautiful salons of the stately old mansion, with comfortable furnished bedrooms, excellent French cuisine, and a countryside
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rich with roses,” it was a setting “none of us who attended w ill soon forget,” Canadian white-collar organizer Eileen Tallman wrote. For Tallman, as for many of the other women that summer, the experience was transformative. A 1930s backer of Canada’s new social democratic po litical party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Tallman had just spent four years orchestrating Canada’s “most significant effort” to date to unionize retail workers and was busy establishing an Office Workers’ Department in the Steelworkers Union. But in June 1953, she jumped at the chance to represent the Canadian Congress of Labor at the school and strategize with other labor women about global unionism and social reform.87 The summer school was controversial from the moment it was proposed, and it remained so long after it concluded. There was the controversy over whether it should happen; then there was controversy over how it should be organized. Peterson cochaired the school with ICFTU assistant general secretary Hans Gottfurcht, a German trade union leader who had escaped the Nazis in 1938. Their relationship was tense. Peterson fought to model the school on the Bryn Mawr Summer Schools of the 1930s. For her, that meant using a participatory bottomup democratic style of workers’ education. Meeting in small groups or ganized by language, students would identify the most pressing prob lems they faced, work steadily to find collective solutions to t hese problems, and present their group proposals to the entire school for further refinement. By starting with their own experiences and adding those of others, students would “see the whole world and where they fit into it.” Although Bryn Mawr methods had been inspired in part by European folk schools, including t hose in Scandinavia, Austria, and Germany, Gottfurcht would have none of it.88 He insisted on the format used in e arlier ICFTU schools: lectures by experts and formal country- by-country reports from students.89 Peterson called it the “dictatorial lecture way.” Peterson and Gottfurcht ended up dividing the baby in half: the first week was organized along lines favored by Peterson; the second week conformed more to Gottfurcht’s plan.90 While a disjointed mess pedagogically, the school proved a rousing success socially and politically. A large and talented staff coordinated
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events, led workshops, and diffused tense situations. Sigrid Ekendahl participated, opening up a rich vein of complaint a fter she described “how men and women share household chores in the workers’ apartment in Stockholm.” Toni Sender, who still represented the ICFTU at the United Nations, traveled from New York to facilitate sessions on “women in international affairs.” Other principal figures included Irmgard Hornig from the W omen’s Department of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), Denise Caminade of the ICFTU staff in Brussels, and Dame Anne Loughlin from Britain. Painful wartime memories of German occupation surfaced for some, with the women from the Netherlands threatening to leave over what they considered the overbearing behavior of the Germans. Religious differences and colonial politics provoked fraught conversations too, with much left unsaid and unresolved.91 Yet in the final days of the school, the students agreed on a visionary set of “opinions and recommendations,” all faithfully transcribed by school staff. They proclaimed their opposition to hierarchical relations between men and w omen in the home, the u nion, and on the job. Women’s ability “to play their part as individuals in society” was “in direct proportion to the achievement of democracy in the home or the sharing of responsibilities” between men and w omen, they insisted. The union’s “traditional wage-hour approach” was insufficient. The ICFTU must acknowledge w omen’s “double role as homemaker and wage- earner” and prioritize “community child care and h ousekeeping facilities.” It must enable women’s access to union leadership and fund “exchanges of unionists between advanced and under-developed countries” to “consolidate the international labor movement.”92 The school ignited a fire that refused to go out. The labor w omen’s network—its bonds strengthened by two weeks together in the forest château and inspired by the bold vision of the students—pressed for further gains. Bittersweet tales of heightened expectations dashed by union inaction filled the letters flowing among summer school participants.93 A dozen w omen met at the ICFTU’s Third World Congress in Stockholm, including Peterson (who had come from Brussels to assist the US delegation), Ekendahl, and Austria’s Wilhelmine Moik (the future
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chair of the ICFTU Women’s Committee). They gathered again at the 1955 ICFTU World Congress in Vienna. By 1955, the demands of the women’s network included stepped-up ICFTU action on equal pay, family leave, and childcare; a permanent and well-resourced ICFTU “women’s committee”; more resources for organizing w omen along the lines specified at the summer school; and more female ICFTU officers.94 The ICFTU did not meet these demands. It agreed, however, to set up a “preparatory committee” in February 1956 with Peterson and others on it. And in a surprising turnaround, in April, the ICFTU established a “permanent consultative committee” on w omen and a dopted a seven-point resolution aimed at “emancipating the working w omen of the world.” It also appointed Ekendahl to represent the ICFTU at the UN’s Commission on the Status of W omen session in Geneva, authorized a May women’s conference in Heidelberg, and announced plans for a pamphlet on w omen’s equality under capitalism and communism. All, the ICFTU trumpeted, would happen before the WFTU’s First World Congress of Working Women convened in June in Budapest.95 For the most part, the w omen welcomed t hese decisions. Still, some chafed at the ICFTU resolution that spoke of “the care of young children” as the “first responsibility” of m others and the need for “sufficient wages for the husband and father.” Others found the appointment of “Brother J. Matthews” to preside over the May ICFTU w omen’s conference patronizing.96 Kerstin Hesselgren’s “congratulatory” note to ICFTU leaders captured the ambivalent mood. She praised the actions of the ICFTU but asked its leaders to remember the “dreams,” as yet unfulfilled, she and others had in 1919 “of a future where women would be organized into trade unions” and where men and women would work beside each other to solve w omen’s “special problems and the problems of all workers.”97 What sparked the ICFTU’s change of course? No doubt, the organ ization felt rising pressure from feminists inside and outside its ranks, and no doubt, some leaders wanted more enlightened policies toward women. At the same time, its actions, timed to predate the WFTU’s First World Conference of Women Workers, suggest Cold War rivalries mattered. The ICFTU felt heat from anti-Communist hardliners in its
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ranks—notably the large, vocal AFL faction—who wanted action to counter any propaganda advantage the WFTU might accrue from its 1956 w omen’s conference. Although others in the ICFTU hoped for more normalized relations with the East and more cooperation with communist-leaning unions seeking independence from the Soviets, they too worried women would find the WFTU more appealing in 1956 as it adopted a less orthodox “new look” Communism in line with Khrushchev’s break from Stalin. In February 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had condemned Stalin’s brutal and repressive rule in a “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Many p eople around the world, disillusioned, quit the Communist Party, but for some, expectations rose about the arc of Soviet Communism as “liberalization” and “de-Stalinization” commenced. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956 dashed these hopes, resulting in further defections from Communism.98 Amidst t hese upheavals, the ICFTU broke with its historic resistance to women’s programs. Peterson doubted the sincerity of the ICFTU change of heart. The ICFTU just announced “a positive program” for women, she wrote Frieda Miller in April, but “between us,” it is more interested in calling “the bluff ” of the WFTU than in changing its gender policies. Because the ICFTU “has actually done so little for women,” she continued, it must rely on an “anti-communist slant” to appeal to the potential women readers of its proposed pamphlet.99 Peterson was speaking from experience. In February she had accepted the ICFTU’s invitation to write its pamphlet on w omen’s equality and had endured multiple clashes with its leaders over how best to appeal to women. She had been reluctant at first to take on the assignment. She anticipated clashes over content, and the hectic timetable seemed daunting, given her obligations as an attaché wife and m other of four. But, she decided, if she could convince the ICFTU to commit itself to new w omen’s programs in the published pamphlet, it would be worth it. Besides, as she told Pauline Newman, she was no fan of the WFTU and was e ager “to answer the East’s phony charges against us relative to ‘equality’ of the sexes.”100 Hanging over it all was the threat of yet another State Department investigation of Oliver.101
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“Women! It’s Your Fight Too!” From February to May 1956, Peterson worked feverishly on the ICFTU pamphlet, sending out requests for information and producing multiple drafts. In June, the ICFTU issued “Women! It’s Your Fight Too!” based on her drafts—but listing itself as the author, not Peterson. She never complained about the omission, and it may have been a relief because the difference between her early drafts and what the ICFTU published was stark.102 “Today the pamphlet I have been working on comes off the press,” she wrote her mother. “I am really disappointed in it for they have taken out parts that I think are strong arguments and have rehashed it till I forget that they are my words!” She added tongue in cheek, “Well, the experts know better than I.”103 Peterson’s original draft was indeed mangled beyond recognition. In it, she devoted pages to the history of women’s efforts to change the international trade union movement, starting with the “women pioneers” of 1919 and the interwar experiments and ending with the Women’s Summer School and the ICFTU W omen’s Committee. She wanted to establish that the Budapest WFTU Conference was not the first world conference of w omen workers, as the WFTU claimed. Nor was it the first time w omen workers sought economic and social rights and an end to sex discrimination. The ICFTU editors condensed the history of feminist organizing within the labor movement and blunted Peterson’s criticisms of past ICFTU policy. They also pared back her discussion of the changes Summer School students wanted in ICFTU policy and toned down her prose, flattening it emotionally.104 Peterson had envisioned a section titled “Trade Union Women Speak,” with “quotations from students from India, Madagascar, Tunisia,” and other nations on “the big issues.” As she began to write, that section blossomed. She filled page a fter page with global w omen’s voices seeking new priorities from the ICFTU. In the published pamphlet, it all disappeared.105 Equally disturbing, the ICFTU w omen’s equality platform in the final version was far less ambitious than what she had submitted. Gone were her phrases committing the ICFTU to w omen’s inclusion in u nion
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decision-making and to separate structures for women “until such time as real integration is achieved.” Instead, the ICFTU affirmed integrated union structures. The final version also eliminated the planks detailing women’s equal right to employment, to higher wages in female- dominated jobs, and to income and other social supports for pregnancy and childcare. In their place, the ICFTU asserted the male breadwinner’s priority to a “living wage” and the organization’s support for “special protections for w omen” such as night work and other sex-specific standards that labor feminists had long argued should be extended to men. The revised version concluded with a wish for a world where women could fulfill their desires to return to their primary tasks in the home.106 Peterson was shocked and doubly frustrated. It was not enough to attack the WFTU and point out the flaws in the Communist system. The ICFTU had to admit its own shortcomings and confront the prob lems of women in Western capitalism, she believed. Her opening paragraph, missing in the final version, had been one effort in that direction. “The double responsibility of working w omen for home and job” is a problem “throughout the entire world,” she wrote. “In economically advanced as well as in economically retarded countries, there is much to be done to give the woman of today her full rights and dignities as an individual.”107 Peterson thought the final version exaggerated the economic benefits of capitalism and underplayed the economic advances of the Communist system. “I’m afraid that we are losing the battle against communism by always being negative” about its lack of material progress, she wrote her mother. “Actually, they are making progress in a material way very rapidly and might surpass us.” To Peterson, the most important differences between the two systems w ere political, not economic. “If we attack them on the lack of freedom and on the basic democratic rights of man,” she told her mother, “there we are strong.”108 At bottom, the violence and political repression of the Soviet system appalled Peterson, not its commitment to raising the standard of life for all. Still, Peterson and the ICFTU shared some fundamental assumptions about life u nder Soviet rule. Both dismissed Soviet claims that
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omen w w ere f ree and equal to men u nder Communism. A system that forced women, like men, into difficult physical labor against their wills was practicing a kind of deformed equality, Peterson argued, echoing the views of many ICFTU Women’s Committee members.109 A society where “death and imprisonment awaited t hose who dared defy the government and exercise their rights,” she declared, could not be characterized as f ree. Peterson ignored US interventions—most notably in 1953 in Iran and 1954 in Guatemala—and proclaimed the “Free World” in favor of democratic self-determination and political freedom.110 Peterson’s experiences living in Europe had intensified her condemnation of the Soviet system. A steady stream of anti-Stalinist socialist and trade union visitors to Stockholm and Brussels kept her informed about the ongoing persecution of dissidents in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. European friends shared personal accounts of imprisonment, forced l abor, and other shocking stories with her, including the hanging deaths of w omen trade unionists in the East German uprising of June 1953.111 She learned from her European travels and political activities as well. In 1955 alone, she participated in the ICFTU World Congress, the inaugural meeting of the International Council of Social Democratic Women (the reformulated socialist women’s international committee), and spoke at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Conference in Innsbruck, Austria.112 She remembered in graphic detail traveling in Soviet-occupied Salzburg, Austria, in May 1955, three months before Russian troops withdrew and Austria regained sovereignty as an independent neutral nation.113 In the summer of 1956, she watched in horror as a hundred Polish protesters lost their lives in Poznań, the first of a series of uprisings against Soviet rule in the wake of Khrushchev’s speech. A few months later, when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to crush the new reformist government, she wrote despairingly to her mother about the human capacity for evil. “The news of the world has me so choked that I can hardly write.” Such “brutality of man to man makes me wonder” about “essential goodness as a dominant force in society. Where oh where is it!”114 Soviet-identified Cold War feminists held starkly different perspectives on world events than did Peterson and her social democratic circle.
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Yet ironically, the Cold War views of 1950s feminists on both sides could mirror each other in rhetorical style and substance. Both drummed on about the imperialism of the other, while neither offered sufficient commentary on the aggressive actions of their own region or nation.115 The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), for example, expressed an unrelenting hostility to Western capitalism and “praise for all things Soviet” in 1949, and its hardline stance spilled over into the 1950s.116 At its 1949 meeting in Moscow, it had no qualms lauding Stalin as an “indefatigable champion of peace” and a consistent defender of “democracy and the independence of the p eoples” while lashing out at the West, especially “American warmongers” and “American imperialists” who had “plans of world domination.” The “thunderous ovation in honor of Comrade Stalin lasted for several minutes,” the Soviet Woman reported.117 A similar black-and-white view of the world, with all evil residing in capit alist nations, pervaded WIDF meetings in 1951 East Berlin (where WIDF had relocated its headquarters) and in 1952 Budapest. Only in the Soviet Union, the P eople’s Republic of China, and other Soviet-style socialist countries did women “enjoy full rights.” WIDF proudly held aloft the banner of anticolonialism, antiracism, disarmament, and respect for national sovereignty—all values it saw lacking in the US-led West.118 At times, as the decade wore on, WIDF and other Soviet-identified organizations like the WFTU used more moderate rhetoric.119 In June 1956, WFTU feminists sounded much like their ICFTU adversaries—especially in terms of gender policy.120 At the Budapest First World Conference of Women Workers, five hundred delegates from forty-four countries—including many WIDF members—united for “a better life, peace among nations,” enactment of the ILO equal remuneration convention, increasing women’s union activism, and ending “all forms of discrimination.”121 Conference goers heard from Chile’s Ana Figueroa, chief of the ILO Women and Young Workers’ Division, who applauded “their endorsement of ILO principles,” which, as Figueroa enumerated, included solving w omen’s “special problems” of “maternity and family responsibilities” and “raising the productive efficiency of women” to enable equal pay and opportunity.122
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The Budapest gathering did not explicitly endorse Figueroa’s “productivity” goal, although Fordist and productivist assumptions about economic growth guided many labor policy makers, women and men, on both sides of the East–West divide. But it did adopt resolutions reflecting Figueroa’s other priorities. On the last day, delegates charged the ILO with hosting a joint WFTU and ICFTU conference on worldwide ratification of the equal remuneration convention. G reat “gains had been won in socialist countries,” attendees declared, including the “effective application of equal pay for equal work,” but much remained to be done in the rest of the world.123 The joint conference did not materialize. Despite a shared w omen’s rights agenda, feminists in the East and West found the geopolitical gulf separating them too wide to cross. Meanwhile, inside the ICFTU, feminists maneuvered for maximum resources for their new committee. In fall 1956, Peterson and Ekendahl pushed the ICFTU to set up a Woman’s Department and hire Frieda Miller to direct it. Gottfurcht demurred: the ICFTU could not afford a “high enough” salary, the “question of age may come in,” he condescendingly added, and there were no funds for the clerical staff Miller desired.124 With Miller unwilling to press for the job, Peterson shifted gears and enlisted AFL-CIO friends to lobby the ICFTU for a new pamphlet, “Women Speak to W omen.” In it, “the remaining living women who attended the 1919 Conference of Women Workers” [the 1919 W omen’s L abor Congress in Washington] would tell of their efforts “to advance the emancipation of women as opposed to the feudalistic patterns of male conduct,” and the newly nominated members of the ICFTU Women’s Committee would unfold “A Charter of Freedom for Women Workers” for the future. Peterson proposed the ICFTU hire her to write it. By all indications, she planned on replacing the first, ill- conceived pamphlet with a new one. Her requests went nowhere.125 When the ICFTU Women’s Committee held its first official meeting in Brussels in May 1957, the twelve representatives—all European women nominated by ICFTU officers—vowed a “worldwide campaign” to “overcome indifference to women’s problems” in industrial and “underdeveloped” countries. They sought equal pay, recognition of women’s “right to employment,” and women’s access to trade union
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leadership. This last item seemed of grave importance b ecause only one woman held voting rights at the 1957 ICFTU conference in Tunis, a shocking decline in female representation since 1949. Nonetheless, the committee’s first priority was expanding and diversifying its ranks. Carmen Maria Araiza from the Mexican Trade Union Federation and Maniben Kara, India’s longtime labor activist and railway union president, sat on the committee as “corresponding members,” but largely because of the cost, neither had traveled to Brussels in May. The Women’s Committee demanded ICFTU affiliates nominate non-European women as full committee members and fund their travel expenses; they also wanted the ranks of “corresponding members” to expand. A fter all, the ICFTU itself had diversified by the mid-1950s, with 56 million members in 110 affiliates from 78 countries. The Women’s Committee wanted to reflect that diversity.126 The ILO had become more global too. By the end of the 1950s, the number of ILO member states reached more than a hundred, almost doubling in one decade. New Central and Eastern European states joined when the Soviet Union reaffiliated in 1953, adding to t hose already in the ILO such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.127 The addition of newly independent nations in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa undermined the long-standing dominance of Western colonial powers.128 The ILO set up new regional offices in Asia and Africa and diversified its Governing Body, adding the Soviet Union and other non- Western nations.129
Maida Springer’s Anticolonial Internationalism None of this upheaval in the ICFTU or the ILO came as a surprise to Maida Springer. Although not a member of the ICFTU W omen’s Committee, she engaged steadily with the ICFTU and with anticolonial politics throughout the 1950s. After her 1951 travels investigating worker education in Sweden and Denmark, she had an Urban League Fellowship that enabled her to study at Ruskin L abor College in Oxford, England, for eight months. While t here, Springer renewed friendships from 1945, met with “many of the men developing strategies for
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an independent Africa and Caribbean,” and thought deeply about “how to remove the tremendous disadvantages of a colonial system.”130 She savored the irony of studying anticolonial movements at Oxford’s Cecil Rhodes house and thrilled as Asian and African students debated on “equal footing” with Europeans. Long visits in London with Dorothy and George Padmore, with whom she had corresponded since 1945, rounded out her education. Back in New York in 1952, Springer told the Urban League what she had learned: “Asians and Africans are unwilling to accept less than equal recognition and partnership in world affairs. The peace of the world may well be in jeopardy u ntil t hese former subject people are accorded their just and equal station.”131 In 1955, Springer, recently divorced, made her first trip to Africa. She would devote the rest of her life to furthering African independence. In Accra, her 1955 destination, she represented the AFL at the ICFTU’s first international seminar for African affiliates. She never forgot the experience of seeing the Algerian trade unionists enter, men who came “directly from prison to the conference.” Although the only woman in attendance and one of five from outside Africa, she gained the group’s respect. Her experience, after all, was impressive, and she spoke with authority. She had solved shop-floor problems, mastered theoretical texts, and led l abor and civil rights struggles for suffrage, decent wages, and social recognition; she had traveled widely and could speak from her own life about racial injustice and the global color line. A fter the conference, aided by a letter of introduction from Padmore, Springer met with Nkrumah. Within two years he would be prime minister of an independent Ghana and George Padmore his first government adviser on African affairs.132 The ICFTU seminar happened only months a fter Third World leaders at the historic Bandung Conference called for worldwide decolonization and solidarity among the “darker nations.” In Bandung, Indonesian president Achmed Sukarno presided over a group that included prominent leaders from recently decolonized and revolutionary nations such as Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Premier Zhou Enlai of the P eople’s Republic of China, and Gamal Nasser, the president of Egypt, as well as leaders of not-yet-victorious national liberation move-
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ments like Hadj-Ahmed Messali of Algeria. Conference leaders sought more South–South cooperation, including with China whose premier spoke persuasively about economic development, Asian–African solidarity, and territorial sovereignty. Some observers believed the Bandung group evidenced greater hostility to the West (especially the French and British) than to the East and doubted its neutrality. Others disagreed, pointing to pro-Western delegates like Carlos Romulo of the Philippines and to the Bandung Declaration itself, which drew on UN Charter language and condemned “all colonial and neo-colonial aggressions,” thus implicitly criticizing the USSR as well as American and European imperial power. In truth, much of the confusion over how to categorize the politics of Bandung sprang from the refusal of many of those who participated to view the world solely through the Cold War East–West lens.133 Springer returned to Ghana in 1957 and spent much of the next two years in Africa. She represented the recently-merged AFL-CIO at the First African Regional Trade Union Conference in January 1957 and, a few months later, attended Ghana’s independence ceremony, seated alongside A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King. She received other invitations from African labor u nion leaders and future statesmen in pre-independence Kenya and Tanganyika. Kenyan Federation of Labor general secretary Tom Mboya, who had stayed with Springer and her mother in Brooklyn in 1956 and become a family friend, asked her to help the federation set up a Kenyan education and cultural center, Solidarity House. In Nairobi, she witnessed the first election of native leaders to Kenya’s Legislative Council, a reform offered by Britain after it crushed the Mau Mau movement.134 Springer also spent three months in Tanganyika, then a trust territory under the UN mandate system, hosted by Julius Nyerere, president of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the principal political vehicle for the liberation struggle. She advised TANU on its education programs, working with Bibi Titi Mohamed, leader of TANU’s Muslim women (and the f uture Tanzania minister for w omen and social affairs), and with Nyerere, whom she admired as a “great scholar, the first university graduate in the country,” and an ally of the Tanganyika Federation
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of Labor led by Tashidi Kawawa. Both Nyerere and Kawawa would later serve as prime ministers in a newly independent nation. Springer had more of a problem with the white British ruling classes in Tanganyika. When the local branch of the International Council of Women—an organization Springer knew from belonging to its US affiliate, the National Council of Negro Women—invited her to speak, she accepted. But the wife of Tanganyikan governor Sir Edward Francis Twining, of the Twining tea fortune, refused to let the event go forward. Springer blamed the cancellation on British hostility to her anticolonial politics compounded by discomfort over her color.135 Springer did not see eye to eye with the doctrinaire AFL-CIO Cold War ideologues whose militant anti-Communist stance dominated US labor in the late 1950s. Nor did she agree with t hose in the ICFTU who took a paternalist, go-slow approach to self-determination in Africa.136 Nonetheless, she welcomed the investment the AFL-CIO and the ICFTU made in African worker education. She believed it would help make possible democratic trade unions and states in Africa. Like Peterson, Springer practiced a Bryn Mawr-inflected worker education dedicated to democratic pedagogy for “community and civic leadership.” As she told one group of labor educators, “We learn as much from them, as we believe they gain from us.” As “mutual learners,” participating “on the basis of equality,” we can “hasten the universal raising of living standards.” In her classes, Springer did not present the United States as a model for African development or for African trade u nionism. Rather, she brought her own knowledge of American racism and sexism into the exchange, as well as her assessment, honed by travel and study abroad, of the limits of mid-century American-style capitalism and collective bargaining. She aimed to “share the best” of what she knew about US labor traditions with those in the “newer movements” of Asia and Africa and let them decide for themselves what parts of those traditions were of use.137 Springer often felt most at home discussing anticolonial politics. The African independence movement in which she participated shared her affinity with Garvey and with tactics of nonviolent direct action, noncooperation, and civil disobedience. Nkrumah and other African anti-
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colonialists employed what Nkrumah called “positive action,” modeled in part on Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha principles, and Ghana had won its independence from Britain with l ittle bloodshed. Springer also resonated with Nkrumah’s desire for a consolidated Pan-African federation that could achieve regional economic power and shift the world toward an egalitarian post-imperialist order—though most ICFTU labor leaders rejected Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism, fearing it would foster a separate federation of African labor unions.138 When Nkrumah hosted the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra, Springer attended. She approved the conference refusal to back the armed struggle against French colonial rule in Algeria and identified with the anticolonialism encapsulated in the conference slogan, “Hands Off Africa,” with its call for African unity, economic autonomy, and investment in education and civil society. As she told an African Historical Society banquet in New York after the Accra conference, the “colonial powers” discourage “democracy, education, and industrial enterprise” and must be held responsible for the “depressed state” of Black Africans. If Africa rejects communism, she told the audience, it will not be “because of Western democracy but in spite of it.”139 Springer knew firsthand of the “incipient anti-Western feeling of rising African independence movements,” and she sympathized with those sentiments. In Africa, she sought “cooperative projects to counterbalance” the “worst aspects” of Western democracy, which she deemed the “daily experience of African colonials.” Still, she remained firmly opposed to Soviet-style Communism as the way forward for Africa and hoped it would find “infertile ground in Africa.”140
Decolonizing the ILO Springer did not participate in the ILO debates over forced labor and antidiscrimination in the late 1950s. But she agreed with worker and Third World delegates when they insisted the ILO make good on its 1944 Philadelphia Declaration promise and repudiate the racial double standards that had applied to the colonies and “non-metropolitan territories” since 1919.141 Springer knew of the e arlier AFL and ICFTU
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insistence on a UN investigation into forced labor and watched intently as the issue finally came before the ILO for a vote in 1957. The debate over forced labor at the ILO came a fter years of b itter Cold War invective over the issue at the UN. Toni Sender had decried “slave labor” in the Soviet bloc and demanded UN action since 1947. She relied on shocking firsthand testimonies from former socialist comrades in Europe and displayed huge multicolored maps identifying hundreds of forced Gulag l abor camps dotting the Soviet countryside—all published in an AFL 1951 report, Slave L abor in the Soviet World. Spurred on by her still-fresh memories of the h uman rights abuses of the Nazi state and her view of the Soviets as “red fascists,” she pursued the issue relentlessly. She wanted to unmask the Soviet “pose as a ‘workers’ republic’ ” and reveal the harsh realities of the Soviet system. The Soviets countered with equally vituperative denunciations of America and the Western powers. The United States, they claimed, perpetuated forced labor by denying worker rights and failing to address race discrimination and poverty. The UN Economic and Social Council launched a two-year investigation of forced l abor and in 1953 released a report that validated Sender’s claims about the Gulag and called for abolition of forced labor worldwide. But eventually the w hole m atter ended up at the ILO.142 The ILO had a forced l abor convention from 1930 that banned some, but not all, forms of coerced l abor. Acting on advice from the AFL, the United States proposed a second instrument prohibiting state use of forced labor for economic development and for punishment of politi cal dissent. Such a statement, the United States calculated, would, among other t hings, call attention to the violent and exploitative nature of the Soviet regime and gain US advantage in the propaganda war. Colonial powers wavered. Afraid of exposing their own exploitative labor practices in dependent territories, they preferred to avoid the w hole question.143 As the US -backed proposal on forced labor moved forward, an alliance of Third World nations and worker delegates coalesced to rewrite it. They added bans on coerced labor as “a means of racial, social, national or religious discrimination,” as a punishment for striking, and as
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provoked by social and economic inequality. European colonial powers objected as did some Americans, but they had been outmaneuvered.144 It looked like the convention, as revised, was headed t oward approval and that the Soviets had won. But in an embarrassing miscalculation, the Soviets asked for further changes: they wanted forced labor banned only in colonial dependencies and fewer restrictions on the use of forced labor for political purposes. Their bid failed. Neither the majority of delegates from Third World countries nor those from the Workers’ Group voted in favor—most believed forced labor in the Soviet Union a serious problem, and anger still lingered over the Soviet decision four months earlier to send tanks into Hungary.145 The US -initiated Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, as revised by Third World and worker delegates, passed.146 The United States and the USSR voted on the same side, in part to curry favor with the rest of the world. The 1957 vote, as one scholar observes, “emerged in the Cold War context” but transcended “Cold War parameters.”147 A similar coalition of workers and Third World nations led the fight for the 1958 antidiscrimination standards. In 1956, the ILO succumbed to pressure and agreed to a “double discussion” of employment discrimination. The Soviet bloc immediately offered support. At the 1957 ILC, advocates for an antidiscrimination convention spoke passionately about “discrimination as an evil,” an affront to dignity and h uman rights, and a question of utmost “moral gravity.”148 Worker delegates, men and women, were especially eloquent about the inclusion of sex, as well as race, discrimination. At a key moment, Canadian Jewish Labor Committee activist Kalmen Kaplansky, the international affairs director of the new Canadian Labour Congress, asked pointedly, “How could the ILC exclude from the grounds of discrimination the question of sex? Would it not be contrary to the very principles of the Declaration of Philadelphia? Would it not be contrary to the very principles of the UDHR?”149 Other delegates, however, including the employer and government representatives from the United States, favored an anti- discrimination recommendation, not a convention. The opposition to a convention among the US delegates disappointed and infuriated many in America and across the world, including ILO Director-General David
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Morse. US W omen’s Bureau director Alice Leopold, who attended the 1957 ILC, kept out of the fray. It fell to other w omen at the ILO— newcomers from the Philippines, the USSR, and Eastern Europe, working in tandem with more seasoned w omen from the UK, Germany, and Norway—to defend the convention, including its provision on sex discrimination.150 As the 1958 ILC vote on antidiscrimination standards neared, the momentum for approval of proposals for both a convention and a recommendation seemed unstoppable. Third World and worker delegates at the ILC spoke at length in f avor of the convention, with US worker adviser Isidore Nagler of the ILGWU in agreement. Discrimination against any worker—“Negro or White, Jew or Gentile, immigrant or native- born”—is “morally unjust and economically indefensible,” he declared. The USSR government delegate jumped up next to back both instruments and attack the US system of racial injustice, quoting Sweden’s Gunnar Myrdal, Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, and o thers. The tide had turned. Both standards passed, with only twenty-four delegates, all employers, opposing the convention. Once again, the United States and USSR voted on the same side, with US worker and government delegates, including US Secretary of State James P. Mitchell, joining the majority.151 It was a stunning step forward for Third World nations and for equality worldwide. The 1958 Discrimination Convention (No 111) prohibited discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin.” It barred employment practices “impairing equality of opportunity or treatment” and required that states promote “the acceptance and observation” of these new equality policies, a significant affirmative use of the state.152 The accompanying Recommendation (No 111) specified no discrimination in training, hiring, promotion, job security, and pay, and it directed member states to “foster public understanding and acceptance of principles of non- discrimination.” In a particularly striking and influential passage, it enshrined the principle of substantive equality and rejected a formal equality based on sameness, a longtime goal of full rights feminists.153 By recognizing multiple forms of discrimination, substantive equality,
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and special protections for men as well as w omen, the 1958 international standards against discrimination changed the course of equality policy worldwide.154 Most consider the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention and the 1958 Anti-Discrimination Convention the ILO’s most significant equality instruments. That the ILO passed t hese and other progressive ILO standards in the 1950s during what historian Daniel Maul labels a “de cade of inertia” for the United Nations makes the advances even more remarkable.155 The activism of full rights feminists at the ILO certainly played a role, including the contributions of Frieda Miller and Mildred Fairchild in the early 1950s. The rise of a unified nonaligned Third World bloc mattered too. But the ILO, unlike the UN, included l abor delegates from around the world who stood for human rights and the equality of all p eoples. Labor men could be infuriatingly reluctant to acknowledge the realities and needs of women as ICFTU feminists experienced, but in the 1950s ILO they proved to be allies.
pa r t v
Redreamings
Pauli Murray and Esther Peterson at All-Women Conference, National Council of Women of the United States, NY, October 11, 1962. Pauli Murray Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
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In the 1960s, a substantial policy transfer from the global to the national occurred as American full rights feminists brought back insights from their travels and exerted collective pressure for legislative change at the federal level. Such signal US achievements as the 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of W omen and the 1963 Equal Pay Act borrowed from social policies outside the United States. The 1960s civil rights movement drew inspiration from abroad as well and advanced in tandem with the global redrawing of the color line. Yet the influence of US women in international institutions waned over the course of the 1960s, even as they tried to fashion strategies for a more just global order at the UN, the ILO and the ICFTU. In the late 1960s, the New Deal generation of activists passed the feminist baton to others. And by the 1970s, a mass w omen’s movement arose worldwide, uprooting patriarchal practices long thought eternal. Two contentious, massive women’s conferences—the 1975 United Nations World Women’s Conference in Mexico City and the 1977 Houston Women’s Conference in the United States—capture the tensions among women in this era and the shift of feminist energies to the global south. US women did not lead the rising global feminist movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Feminists around the world often organized in opposition to American military, economic, and cultural domination and to a corporate neo-liberal politics associated with the United States. Still, many American activists learned from and found inspiration in the female-led movements for democracy, economic justice, and human rights flourishing outside the United States at c entury’s end. T hese movements renewed full rights feminism worldwide. In the United States, a new cohort of social democratic feminists, including many women of color and immigrant women, confronted those hawking a narrow neoliberal feminism for the few. Like their foremothers a c entury ago, they were bent on preserving democratic equality and sitting once again at the common table.
11 The Pivotal Sixties
Given the “rapid, dramatic, and awesome force” of recent “domestic and world events,” Maida Springer told a crowd of American u nionists in June 1960, it “may well be the end of an era” and the beginning of a “painful period of political, economic, social, and emotional adjustment at home and abroad.” The Sharpeville massacre of sixty-nine unarmed Black South Africans w ill not stop the march to freedom in Africa, she declared. Nor will African Americans end the “boycotts and sit-in demonstrations in public eating places, libraries, beaches, and everywhere the badge of color demeans us” u ntil a new day of racial justice arrives in America. The defenders of colonialism and the global color line are in retreat. Springer’s 1960 speech predicting dramatic upheavals in “domestic and world events” proved prescient. The US civil rights movement intensified as CORE, together with SNCC, a new Black-led interracial direct-action organization, launched freedom rides across the South aimed at dismantling Jim Crow. Elsewhere, movements for national independence and liberation continued apace. In sub-Saharan Africa, seventeen former colonial territories moved to independent statehood in 1960 alone.1 Faced with rising demands for racial and economic equality around the globe, the UN kicked off its “Decade of Development” in 1961, promising not to leave “half the globe” in poverty. The ILO and the ICFTU, both thriving international organizations in the 1960s, also re oriented their policies.2 “Development dreams” varied dramatically and UN deliberations reflected the lack of consensus over what emerging 339
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market economies needed and how greater equity among nations could be achieved. In the United States, the dictums of “modernization” thinkers like Walt Rostow framed much of the conversation. Truman had expanded US aid beyond Europe after 1948, believing it a route to US security and global economic growth. The “aid war” in the international arena between the US and the Soviets heated up in the late 1950s, with Third world interests in the Soviet path to modernity fostered by Soviet anticolonial rhetoric and generous loans of money, machines, and technical advisers. In the Kennedy administration, with Rostow as special assistant in the State Department, development became a mantra.3 His model of economic development, labeled a “non-communist manifesto,” encouraged capital investment in “underdeveloped” regions, full “utilization of human resources” in market employment, and export-led trade. Such a strategy, some believed, would lessen poverty, thwart communism in poor nations, and bolster US hegemony and security. Critics objected, asking whether these policies alleviated poverty or improved societal well-being or changed political attitudes. But Rostow modernizers had the upper hand.4 Esther Peterson, Frieda Miller, and Maida Springer had significant reservations about the dominant US development strategies of the 1960s. As a top Democratic official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Peterson pushed from inside the White House for more “mutual assistance” programs and more attention to the realities of women’s dual role as homemakers and breadwinners. She also tried, with mixed results, to change the AFL-CIO’s relation to the rest of the world and end its indifference to w omen. Miller raised similar concerns as she crisscrossed the globe, spending months in Asia and the Middle East in her new ILO consultancy position advising on w omen’s programs. Springer persevered as the AFL-CIO’s International Representative in Africa, where from 1960 to 1966 she sought to change development assistance programs as they unfolded on the ground. All three worried about seeing America as a model for the world. They rejected top-down approaches to international development, whether led by foundations or government, and sought to incorporate principles of mutual learning and democratic decision-making into policy. At bottom, they wanted
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an alternative vision of development—one that put people first and took social and economic justice seriously.5 But full rights feminists were also busy at home. Peterson’s ideas of what government could do had been profoundly affected by her years in Europe. Once she had a position of federal power in the 1960s, she acted on t hose ideas, reaching out for help to colleagues and friends, including, among others, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, and Caroline Ware. Breakthroughs followed as labor and civil rights organizations mobilized and joined with government to fight for legislative change. Yet keenly aware of the partial nature of 1960s advances—and the possibility of reversals—Peterson and her allies worried about next steps and about a revolution still unfinished. The next steps were hardly what they anticipated. By the end of the sixties, the New Deal coalition was unraveling, and a new feminism erupted that eclipsed their leadership and reframed the struggle for democratic equality.
“Full Equality of Rights” In June 1957, Esther and Oliver Peterson sailed home from Europe. They anticipated a brief stay with f amily as they prepared for Oliver’s next Foreign Service assignment. But within a month Oliver was diagnosed with cancer. The Petersons reversed course, settling in Washington. Esther soon found a job with the labor movement, becoming the first female Legislative Representative for the Industrial Union Department, the progressive Reuther-led wing of the fifteen-million-member AFL-CIO. Oliver had a more difficult time: he underwent two surgeries and endured new questions about his “loyalty” before receiving the go- ahead for a State Department job with the Bureau of African Affairs in 1958.6 Despite their harassment by US government agencies, the Petersons remained firm believers in the possibilities of America and of social democracy. As a lobbyist in Washington, Peterson rekindled her friendship with John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts. She endorsed Kennedy’s presidential bid early and fought hard for his
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election. She assembled a national 300-member “Committee of Labor Women for Kennedy and Johnson,” toured the country on Kennedy’s behalf, and, as Election Day approached, “manned” the labor desk for the Democratic National Committee. Shortly after Kennedy’s narrow victory, a call came from the White House: “Esther, what do you want?” Peterson hesitated, leaning t oward a UN appointment, but given Oliver’s fragile health she settled on a post closer to home: US Women’s Bureau director. Within a year Kennedy promoted her to Assistant Secretary for Labor Standards in the US Department of Labor, making Peterson the highest-ranking woman in his administration. The Washington Post, curious about the “Lady Executive’s Taste,” initially paid more attention to the “Swedish Modern” décor in her handsome paneled office on “Mahogany Row,” with its bright colors of blue, green, and orange, than to her policy positions.7 But her relegation to the society pages was short-lived. Peterson acted first on w omen’s reform. With the backing of Secretary of L abor Arthur Goldberg, whom she knew from his days as legal counsel to the Steelworkers and the CIO, Peterson and her feminist network convinced President Kennedy to sign Executive Order 10980. With language taken from Peterson, the order established a President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) charged with identifying policies for the “full realization of w omen’s basic rights.” The commission idea, inspired by the 1946 United Nations Commission on the Status of W omen and the 1947 President’s Commission on Civil Rights, had appeared in the W omen’s Status Bill proposals of the late 1940s and early 1950s. With Democrats back in power, the idea became reality.8 Peterson tapped Eleanor Roosevelt as commission chair, a largely honorary position. Peterson occupied the most influential commission post: executive vice chair. She convinced an old and trusted friend, CIO’s Assistant Director of Social Security Katherine Pollak Ellickson, a former 1930s labor organizer with a degree in economics, to move to Washington and take on the day-to-day coordination of the commission’s ambitious activities. Ellickson worked side by side with former laundry union official Dollie Lowther Robinson, whom Peterson recruited in 1961 as a “special assistant” and assigned full-time to the com-
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mission. Peterson knew Robinson from their prewar days together in the Amalgamated, and she had followed Robinson’s subsequent journey from law school to the New York State Department of Labor. Drawing on a list submitted by Peterson, President Kennedy appointed twenty-six powerful public figures—eleven men and fifteen women—to the commission. The group included sympathetic cabinet officers, senators, Congress members, college presidents, corporate executives, and three close Peterson allies: Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro W omen; International Union of Electrical Workers’ vice president Mary Callahan; and Caroline Ware, who in 1961 gave up teaching social work and history at Howard University for a UN position as technical adviser on community development and cultural affairs. Others from Peterson’s inner circle sat on the seven subcommittees advising the commission: Amalgamated founder and officer Bessie Hillman; Mississippi-born labor and civil rights activist Addie Wyatt, the first Black w oman national officer of the Packinghouse Workers Union; Caroline Davis, still at the helm of the W omen’s Department of the Auto Workers; and Pauli Murray, who accepted Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistent call for PCSW service despite facing heavy demands in 1961 as the first African American in Yale University’s doctorate in law program.9 To frame the commission’s first discussions, Ware prepared a background document, “Women Today, Trends and Issues.” Fresh from a coauthored UNESCO world history project, which involved consultancies worldwide, Ware did not shy away from reminding her readers of what other nations had accomplished or of how positive advances occurred through global connections and exchange. Her sophisticated analysis undercut any pretense of America’s world leadership on w omen’s status.10 On October 11, 1963, a fter two years of deliberation, Peterson presented Kennedy with the commission’s completed report, American Women. The date, Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday, was chosen to honor the former First Lady who died before the commission concluded its work. American Women stirred immediate controversy. Like the other 1963 feminist salvo, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the report
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ignited a national debate over women’s second-class citizenship and, eventually, a new mass women’s movement. In its first year, American Women sold sixty-four thousand copies, highly unusual for a government document. Surprised at the outcry the report generated, governors across the country formed state and local commissions on the status of w omen. By 1966, forty-eight states had such commissions, involving thousands of participants from all walks of life. The commissions created a government-endorsed national network of energized women intent on eliminating societal barriers to women’s equality and turning the report’s recommendations into law.11 American Women endorsed w omen’s rights and broad social reform. It insisted on “full equality of rights” for all women and an end to the “special discriminations” faced by mothers and women of color. All women had a right to good jobs and “security of basic income.” To accomplish these goals, it favored “equal pay for comparable work” legislation, higher minimum wages for all workers, the extension of New Deal labor statutes and social security measures to t hose left out, and stronger collective bargaining laws. At the same time, it recognized the value of w omen’s f amily work by recommending paid maternity leave, universal childcare services for women “whether they were working outside the home or not,” and substantive changes in Social Security expanding widow’s benefits and allowing housewives to build up equity as if they were earning wages. It privileged neither employment nor f amily as the right choice for w omen but sought policies in which all w omen had more options for when and where they worked.12 In a move that infuriated the National W oman’s Party, American Women recommended the ERA “need not now be sought.”13 Instead, the commissioners embraced Pauli Murray’s 1962 contention that women’s equality of rights could be better advanced through “case-by- case” legal action based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such an approach had been successful in defending the rights of African Americans in Brown v. Board of Education and Mexican Americans in Hernandez v. Texas, Murray argued, and it could be similarly deployed to end unreasonable classifications based on sex. At the same time, Murray predicted, the Fourteen Amendment
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strategy would not invalidate maternity legislation or labor standard laws compensating for “women’s unequal bargaining power” relative to men. Murray wanted an expansive approach to equality that benefited the majority. In a world beset by multiple injustices—the world she had experienced—the fight for women’s rights, she believed, must be joined to “human rights for all.”14 Peterson was thrilled. “I feel in my bones that you are making history,” she told Murray right after her PCSW presentation.15
From the Global to the Local and Back Again Peterson’s long sojourn in Sweden s haped PCSW proposals on care work and the f amily in concrete ways. In the 1953 report she had prepared for the US Women’s Bureau on household labor, she had declared the “positive programs” undertaken by the Swedish government “fruitful lines of development” for the United States to follow. Sweden’s “social home aide” program she judged especially worthy of emulation. By 1960 the Social Home Help Programme had some 3,700 hemvårdarinna or “home helps” available to assist “any family, regardless of income.”16 “In-home medical and social services are extremely important,” Peterson l ater told an interviewer. “I learned that lesson years ago when I was living in Sweden. We care about the dollar in this country not the person, and I think that just inexcusable.”17 The Swedish Domestic Workers Act, debated and amended while Peterson lived in Stockholm, had earned her admiration as well. The act regulated working conditions in the home, encouraged employers to adopt model h ousehold contracts specifying the mutual obligations of employee and employer, and set up government mediation services to resolve disputes. It made “definite, matters that before were vague and hence sources of tension,” Peterson thought, and gave “the h ousewives and the workers” a better “basis for understanding.” As she saw it, the law treated work in the home as equal to “employment in industry and commerce” and held “workers in the home entitled to the same protection against exploitation” as other workers.18 Sweden’s “recognition of the social and economic value of ‘women’s work’ ” was “refreshing,”
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she later wrote, and “in stark contrast to our attitudes in the United States.”19 In the 1960s, when Peterson could influence policy—not just study it—she made sure the PCSW paid attention to f amily work, and she drew directly from policies in Sweden. “Re-organization of ordinary home maintenance service was long overdue,” American Women boldly declared in 1963. Taking a page from Sweden’s home aide program, the report recommended the US government make “skilled homemakers” available in times of “family emergency or stress.” Such “homemaker services,” the report held, were “necessary for the care of children and as a resource for the elderly and the infirm.” The PCSW recommended other programs to aid beleaguered h ousew ives as well, including expanded state-funded childcare, tax deductions for childcare expenses, and vocational training for housewives transitioning to market work. In addition, American Women called for household employees to have the same legislative protections as other workers. As the PCSW reminded its readers, domestic workers remained low paid and stigmatized, “without means and opportunity to maintain their own homes.” Some had gained Social Security coverage in 1950, but they still lacked the wage- and-hour protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act.20 Peterson sent American Women to dozens of her Swedish friends, expressing gratitude for their contributions. “Here is our report on the Status of Women,” she wrote Arne Geijer, LO president and the top officer in the ICFTU, in 1963. “My experience with Sweden and a great deal that I learned there is tucked-in in many places.”21 Geijer had visited the United States in October 1962 and talked with PCSW commissioners, for which Peterson had thanked him effusively at the time. She was grateful to other Swedish friends for hosting the steady stream of US officials she had sent to Sweden during the commission’s deliberations. Senator Maurine Neuberger, who sat on the commission’s Committee on Social Insurance and Taxation, came back an enthusiast of Sweden’s childcare and maternity programs a fter one such tour. Peterson also organized trips for Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg and his wife Dorothy. Both came back converts to state investment in caregiving.22 In July 1961, before the PCSW was even announced, Peterson had
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visited Sweden to pave the way for t hese tours. On her return, she wrote Sigrid Ekendahl, acknowledging Sigrid’s abiding impact on her thinking. “Your influence here is great!” she declared. “The wonderful memory of my days with you . . . keep crossing my mind and come out in various ways—in reports, speeches, and programming.”23 Significantly, Peterson did not mention the furious debate in Sweden at the time over the equal sharing of caregiving and housework between the sexes. A twenty-nine-year-old aspiring writer and Liberal Party member, Eva Moberg, had ignited a firestorm in 1961 when she declared women’s full development and “right to be human” rested on men doing half the h ousehold labor. A government commission on women, set up by Social Democratic Prime Minister Tage Erlander, followed in 1962, with the nation searching for a new consensus on gender equality and family life. Despite Peterson’s concern for “justice in the kitchen,” American Women did not consider these developments or how government policy might promote men’s responsibility for h ousework. And Peterson herself, as we s hall see, did not confront her own skepticism about men taking on housework until after she and Ekendahl tussled over the issue at the ILO a few years later.24 Sweden was not the only global influence on the PCSW. Referencing the 1952 ILO Maternity Convention that Frieda Miller and Mildred Fairchild had helped enshrine as the global norm, commissioners endorsed a minimum of twelve weeks of paid maternity benefits and job- protected leave, as well as other guarantees for m others. Data from “Women in the World Today,” an international series of government studies initiated by Peterson, bolstered the PCSW call for massive investment in childcare and early childhood education. The hefty government analysis of maternity and infant care provisions in ninety-two countries placed Latin America alongside Scandinavia as models to emulate.25 In a fascinating “double movement” of knowledge “going back and forth,” the success of the PCSW added pressure on the UN to call for national commissions on women’s status around the world.26 US women had looked to the UN for inspiration; now the UN returned the favor. In 1963, the UN Economic and Social Council noted the value of
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national commissions, citing the US experience, and over the next few years, countries took up the challenge. By January 1968, when the UN secretary-general asked for official reports from member states, commissions on w omen’s status w ere underway in Afghanistan, China (Taiwan), Denmark, Germany, the UK, Canada, Japan, Sweden, and other nations. A 1973 study of the global upsurge of w omen’s commissions no doubt overstated the influence of the “American experience” when it argued that most of the commissions worldwide had been inspired by the United States. After all, ideas are elusive creatures that can arise si multaneously in multiple locations without outside stimulus. But in 1963, as in 1919, American women were among the global instigators of progressive policies toward women.27
The 1963 Equal Pay Act The US campaign for federal equal pay legislation progressed in the early 1960s as well, pushed forward in part by a rising global chorus. Although Miller and Fairchild had helped secure the 1951 Equal Remuneration Convention (C100) at the ILO, the United States had not legislated at home what it had backed as a global standard. Yet other nations did so, and in the late 1950s equal pay legislation surged worldwide.28 Full rights feminists w ere e ager to add the United States to the list. If other nations stepped up, why not the United States? To call attention to what other ILO member states w ere doing on equal pay, Peterson commissioned a US W omen’s Bureau report on equal pay in the “Women in the World” series. Timed for release in early 1963, the report stressed the global forward movement on equal pay and urged the United States not to fall behind.29 Peterson wanted a broad equal pay law that raised pay for all women. In 1945, when Frieda Miller and others in the Women’s Bureau coalition had proposed the first federal equal pay bill, they relied on “equal pay for comparable work” language to signal the bill’s expansive scope. In the early 1960s they insisted on the same language. Yet in the 1962 congressional debate over the bill, the “equal pay for comparable work” language met opposition from business-minded Republicans and l egal
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equality feminists. When the Equal Pay Act finally passed in June 1963, the law’s drawbacks w ere obvious to Peterson and her allies. Republican congresswoman Katharine St. George’s 1962 amendment changing “the key clause” in the act “from ‘comparable work’ to ‘equal work’ ” weakened the law considerably, Peterson lamented. The act was a partial victory, she declared: some women would benefit—those with jobs “substantially similar” to jobs held by men—but the vast majority of w omen would not.30 The United States was not yet a global outlier on equal pay when it enacted federal legislation in 1963. It joined a group of thirty or so other nations with equal pay laws, and significantly, it was the first major cap italist nation to do so. The UK, Canada, Japan, and most Western Euro pean nations would not pass equal pay laws u ntil the 1970s. Yet to the dismay of full rights feminists, the United States, unlike other nations, did not strengthen its initial law. After the 1960s, as other nations voted in equal pay legislation and still others replaced their initial “equal pay” laws with improved “equal pay for work of equal value” statutes modeled on C100, the United States increasingly diverged from global patterns. As of 2020, the United States has yet to broaden its original 1963 legislation in any substantial way. Nor has it ratified C100.31 Peterson and her allies anticipated a different future. They believed a new and better equal pay law would emerge and they vowed to carry on the struggle for wage justice.
Civil Rights and Great Society Breakthroughs In the summer of 1963, however, major changes in race relations seemed at last possible, and progressives, including full rights feminists, focused their energies on civil rights. In 1961, Esther Peterson and Dollie Lowther Robinson had set up a national women’s committee to press for comprehensive civil rights legislation. The YWCA, the League of Women Voters, and a range of other white-led women’s church and civic groups signed up.32 Co-led by NCNW president Dorothy Height and Howard University’s Patricia Roberts Harris, the committee thrived. In July 1963, following the shocking TV footage of water cannons, billy
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clubs, and snarling dogs unleashed on youthful civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, the committee drew three hundred women to the White House to strategize about civil rights. Height had recently returned from the South where she had registered Black voters as part of the interracial teams assembled by SNCC. She brought a steely commitment to completing the task ahead.33 Height was a familiar figure in reform circles and by the 1960s among the most prominent female civil rights leaders. Her activist c areer stretched back to 1930s New York City. A fter earning a master’s degree in psychology from New York University in 1932, she directed the YWCA Harlem branch and, l ater, the YWCA Center for Racial Justice. While hosting a visit by the First Lady to Harlem in the late 1930s, she met Mary McLeod Bethune and became part of the “Bethune circle” soon after. As YWCA director, she also joined New York WTUL women to press for fair labor standards for household employees in the 1930s. Such campaigns held special meaning for Height. When she was four, her m other, unable to find work as a nurse a fter the f amily moved to Pennsylvania, took a job as a maid. Height never forgot her m other’s indignities and the long hours her mother spent away from home.34 Height brought a sophisticated global consciousness—rooted in Christian internationalism’s embrace of a “human family” and an affinity with w omen of the “darker races”—to her activism. She felt a “strong bond with women in the developing world” when she attended World YWCA Conferences for Christian Youth, and she acted on those feelings after World War II. She traveled throughout India in 1952 as a visiting professor at the Delhi School of Social Work and later taught classes in Liberia. After becoming NCNW president in 1957, she studied the “training needs of w omen’s organizations” in Sierra Leone for several months, taking side trips to Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea. In 1962, Height joined Roy Wilkins (then executive secretary of the NAACP), Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, and other male civil rights leaders to create the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, which sought “to raise the international status” of the new African states, “liberate the remaining colonial territories,” and convince US officials to back UN sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid policies.35
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In August 1963, Dorothy Height sat on the speakers’ podium of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, looking out on the 200,000 marchers gathering near the Lincoln Memorial. Yet Height did not speak to the crowd that day. Indeed, no woman gave a major speech. There w ere also no w omen or w omen’s organizations represented in the march’s official “big ten” organizing committee. Height joined the civil rights delegation scheduled to meet with President Kennedy a fter the event, but only after w omen complained to Bayard Rustin and other organizers about the planned all-male group. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of Black women protested that day, accompanied by men and women of all races, ages, and religions. The tide could not be contained.36 On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” The original House bill did not ban employment discrimination based on sex, and full rights feminists initially opposed the addition of “sex” to the list of protected categories, afraid it would doom its passage. Pro-segregationist congressman Howard K. Smith introduced the “sex amendment” at the behest of the National Woman’s Party. As the NWP explained, the bill in its current form did not give protection against discrimination to a “White Woman, a Woman of the Christian Religion, or a W oman of US Origin.”37 Many civil rights supporters, including Peterson, believed the Smith amendment an attempt to defeat the bill. As Peterson put it, “I for one was not willing to risk advancing the rights of all women at the expense of the redress due black men and women.”38 Peterson and others also feared the sex amendment would invalidate the woman-only state labor laws still in existence in some forty states—a significant concern since in 1964 the majority of women lacked coverage under the federal Fair L abor Standards Act and worked without u nion contracts. Some thought it might jeopardize other sex-specific differences in treatment such as maternity benefits or job guarantees for women leaving employment due to pregnancy or childbirth. In the end, the House passed the sex amendment, with many supporters of the original civil rights bill voting against it and staunch segregationists voting in favor. But once the amended bill successfully cleared the House hurdle and
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moved to the Senate, Peterson and other full rights feminists lobbied hard for its enactment. Peterson continued to worry about the effect of the sex amendment on state labor laws, but when the civil rights bill finally passed, she hailed it as a stunning victory, long overdue.39 Great Society legislative wins transformed America. The 1964 War on Poverty and the 1965 health care package—Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for low-income adults and their children—moved the United States closer to fulfilling New Deal promises of economic and social security for all. In the wake of brutal police assaults on peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed, extending suffrage to the many people of color disenfranchised by racially discriminatory state and local restrictions.40 A few months later, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act abolished the national-origins formula in place since the 1920s and opened the United States to emigrants from Asia and Africa. Hart-Celler lessened some of the discriminatory aspects of previous US immigration policy and enabled millions of formerly excluded p eoples to become American citizens. At the same time, it tightened the 1952 ban on the entry of homosexuals and for the first time set caps on p eople coming to the United States from the Western Hemisphere. The latter provision eventually enabled a new regime of undocumented emigrants from South Americ a denied access to citizenship and basic h uman rights.41 In 1966, Congress raised the federal minimum wage and expanded the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover the majority of workers for the first time, including the majority of women. For many full rights feminists, winning the 1966 fight to strengthen the FLSA was among their sweetest victories. Millions of service, retail, and state and local government employees gained protections as did farm workers (though farm workers won only wage coverage). Domestic workers, however, remained without protections of any kind. An alliance of l abor, civil rights, and poor people’s organizations vowed to continue the struggle. The growth of the United Farm Workers, sparked by a 1965 strike among mostly Mexican and Filipino grape pickers in California, helped advance farm worker rights after 1966. The National Committee on House hold Employment, organized in February 1965 with Frieda Miller as chair and Dorothy Height as vice chair, made crucial contributions to
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the struggle for domestic worker rights. The committee quickly expanded to twenty-three organizations, and by the end of the 1960s, under the leadership of African American feminist Edith Sloan, it had morphed into a national grassroots mass movement of household workers and their advocates.42
No American Model for the World International organizations like the ILO remained a key site of activism for full rights feminists in the 1960s. Frieda Miller’s paid ILO consultancy began in the late 1950s as she traveled in Asia and the M iddle East studying the “conditions of work for w omen.” She had always been reluctant to pass judgment on the choices of other nations and cautious about offering a US solution to the problems she encountered. On her ILO trips to South America in the 1930s, as we have seen, she had expressed curiosity, not criticism, about the different priorities of feminists there and remarked on how much US w omen reformers had to learn from the social legislation of their southern neighbors. At times she felt she had little to teach t hose she visited. More often than not, her thoughts turned to what she might say to those at home about US parochialism.43 Her openness to other cultures deepened as she aged and as she lived in Asia and the M iddle East for extended periods. Assigned to study women’s work in the “Far East” for her first overseas ILO consultancy in 1955, she lived for three months in Japan and spent another three months touring India, Ceylon, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Burma, and Thailand. In 1960, she left again for an extended overseas journey d oing fieldwork for a report on women’s “changing social and economic conditions” in the M iddle East. She settled in Istanbul for six months, working out of the ILO field office t here, and took side trips to Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and the United Arab Republic. In 1961, she embarked on a third six-month ILO-funded trip to study child labor and young workers in India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries.44 In her many speeches, interviews, and reports on these visits, Miller pointed to why policy makers must listen to how women workers defined their own needs, allow them to puzzle out their own solutions,
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and understand them in the context of their lives outside of waged work. The ILO’s economic development projects should attend to women’s “full human rights” and recognize how the political and social status of women intertwined with the economic, she counseled. “The more standing a woman has in her f amily and community as a person and a citizen in the eyes of the law, the more freely can she participate in the economy of her country.”45 Eager to “bring back ideas for possible future ILO programs,” she visited classrooms where students “participated in the design” of the education and where w omen discussed what they “recognized as their common interests.”46 The majority of women worldwide shared a “basic interest in peace and a life of human dignity and opportunity for all,” she believed. But each culture must work in its “own ways” for the goals women share.47 The ILO should foreground the mutual benefit of international exchange, Miller insisted, rather than focus on what the West might teach the East. “One country has much to learn from another’s experience and much to give from its own experience.”48 If only it were possible, she told one interviewer, to “exchange half the p eople of the East with half the people of the West,” so that each might see how the other lived. Both East and West, she felt sure, “would benefit immeasurably.”49 She often used the example of what US unionists could learn from “Eastern Unions,” especially the Indian Textile Labour Association, the union formed in 1920 by Mahatma Gandhi and Anasuya Sarabhai, the radicalized daughter of a mill owner. The textile association cooperated with both the “Communist Trade Union International as well as the ICFTU,” she noted approvingly, and did “extraordinary work in health care and welfare activities.” The “absence of a line of demarcation between the economic and political functions” of worker organizations in Asia, Miller added, was a source of strength for them and could be so in the United States.50
From Expert Advice to Mutual Assistance Esther Peterson did not hold a paid position with the ILO, but as Assistant US Secretary for L abor Standards, she was well positioned to influence its deliberations and affect the actions of t hose around her in
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the administration. And like Miller she too expressed criticism of dominant US approaches to international development. Peterson had little sympathy for development initiatives—whether state sponsored or private—that ignored issues of economic inequality or made them worse. She found the undemocratic character of foreign aid objectionable and worried about the potentially pernicious effects of capitalist development on low-income workers and w omen with family responsibilities.51 For advice, Peterson turned to f amily and friends. She confessed her reservations about US foreign policy to Oliver who agreed, adding concerns based on what he had observed from his perch at the Bureau of African Affairs and, when his health allowed, his periodic trips to Africa.52 She kept abreast of Springer’s troubles in Africa as the AFL-CIO representative and, like Springer, spent time at the Ware-Means farm relishing the freewheeling talk of alternative models of community development, popular education, and anticolonial politics. Ware had spent considerable time abroad, helping create worker-run cooperatives and community organizations in Latin Americ a and traveling as an UNESCO consultant. Peterson found Ware’s expertise and counsel invaluable.53 Peterson’s European friends influenced her too. As Ekendahl and others in Peterson’s labor and social democratic circles developed closer ties with Third World women, so did she.54 A firm believer in the ILO, Peterson gave its activities priority once she settled into her job at the L abor Department. She saw the ILO as a promising forum for lessening inequality and world poverty. Divergent views on economic development—both between and within nations— could be aired at the ILO, and through democratic debate, ways forward found. In her view, the organization had several advantages over other international bodies. Its tripartite structure gave organized workers a voice and a vote in policy setting not available in other international institutions. In addition, by the 1960s a majority of its member states were from “underdeveloped” regions of the world and labor and women’s NGOs actively contributed in its consultation process. Yet US politicians remained skittish about the ILO. The attacks on the UN and its agencies by conservatives in the 1950s had left scars.
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Politicians feared political fallout from backing international labor standards and Congress refused to consider or ratify UN and ILO conventions, claiming the decision rested with state not federal government. Moreover, not all Democratic officials in the US State Department shared Peterson’s enthusiasm for the ILO. They were especially wary of the more progressive aspects of ILO development policy, which, a fter 1962, at the behest of Third World member states, included “social pro gress,” promotion of worker organization, social security guarantees, and shared decision-making as principal aims. They also worried about the agitation of Third World constituents for land reform, income distribution, control over multinational corporations, and different terms of trade and investment, with some following the lead of Argentinean dependency theorist Raúl Prebisch. David A. Morse, the American who led the ILO throughout the 1960s, tried to win over the State Department (and the country) to the value of ILO programs and the need for social progress. But when Morse (and the ILO) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969, he garnered more acclaim abroad than in the United States.55 In 1961, Peterson got herself named as a government adviser to the International Labor Conference (ILC)—one of the few women in the large thirty-five-member US group. She also maneuvered an appointment to the Committee on Technical Cooperation, set up to rethink ILO technical assistance programs and develop proposals for how “undeveloped countries” could “move from poverty to plenty.”56 A few weeks before she left for Geneva, the ILO Governing Body appointed her to its Panel of Consultants on the Problems of W omen Workers. Mexico’s Paula Alegría Garza, the only w oman at the Governing Body meeting, surely looked on approvingly. A leading Mexican diplomat and feminist, she had grabbed headlines for her advocacy of w omen’s job rights during wartime demobilization at the historic 1944 Philadelphia ILC, worked with Frances Perkins, Miller, and other US feminists to broaden the ILO’s mission, and saw Peterson as a new ally in the fight to have w omen’s needs taken seriously in development programs.57 Peterson and Alegría Garza w ere not the only w omen who wanted to reorient ILO policy. In 1960, Chilean Ana Figueroa became the ILO’s
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first woman Assistant Director-General. She had overseen the ILO’s technical assistance programs in Latin America in the 1950s and judged women’s rights a m atter of urgent concern. American Elizabeth Johnstone, who replaced Figueroa as head of the ILO’s renamed (and diminished) unit on w omen and youth, felt a similar urgency.58 The ILO often proclaimed “women’s full participation as essential to development” but such premises had yet to be translated into actual practices that met women’s needs.59 Women’s rights resolutions from outside Geneva boosted the efforts of ILO staff like Figueroa and Johnstone. Women at the first ILO African Regional Conference in 1960 urged “early consideration” of women’s problems and “special attention” to training opportunities for girls. A few months later, the Afro-A sian Women’s Conference in Cairo spelled out the “economic rights” of women in agriculture, industry, trade, and housework. Feminists in the ICFTU kept pressure on the ILO as did a range of women’s international NGOs.60 Peterson’s experiences at the 1961 ILC reinforced her sense of the ILO as a place for productive debate over development. The Committee on Technical Cooperation, on which she sat, included over a hundred members, the majority from poorer nations.61 Outspoken Venezuelan writer and diplomat Alfredo Tarre Murzi, chair of the committee, led off plenary discussion with a damning catalog of the problems of prior development initiatives, including overreliance on the “market economy,” cultural arrogance and disdain for “respected spiritual traditions,” and exploitation of p eople and resources for a profit. It all added up to “a way of maintaining colonial domination.” In his view, the ILO should prioritize social progress.62 After Murzi and others finished their criticisms, Peterson rose to speak. She did not elaborate on the unequal relations of trade and economic investment shaping development outcomes, as had Murzi. Nor did she repeat her pointed remarks e arlier in the committee meeting about how “achieving social justice with economic development” was impossible “without land and tax reform.” But in her few minutes before the huge crowd, she offered a bold vision of international development that reinforced much of what Murzi had expressed. She began with a
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“complete endorsement” of the recommendations of the Committee on Technical Cooperation and of the “UN idea of assessing 1% of the combined economic wealth of the developed world and setting it aside for technical assistance.” She stressed the right of developing nations to control their future and encouraged mutual assistance as a new norm in development programs. “Developing countries wanted aid for self- help,” she believed, “but never at the price of losing their sovereignty and independence.” For emphasis, she quoted the words of a fellow delegate: “We would rather have freedom in poverty than slavery in economic development.” Then in her own words she added, “The old ‘giver’ concept of technical assistance is gone. We all are receivers and we all have much to learn from o thers.” Or, as she reiterated a fter her speech, “No one country has the answer: we must draw from all.”63 Peterson concluded her address to the 1961 ILO assembly on a note she would sound often once back in the United States: w omen must not just be included in development; they must have more control over it. Her justifications for inclusion rested in part on popular, albeit contested, economic assumptions of the day linking growth, prosperity, and productivity. Without w omen’s participation, she explained, “No underdeveloped country can attain the productivity upon which its own development depends.” But she also insisted that “including women” without giving them political rights and bargaining power was a r ecipe for the wrong kind of development: one that sustained rather than dismantled hierarchies.64 Once back in the states, Peterson launched a lonely campaign in the White House to get the ILO to take w omen’s issues more seriously. She wrote Labor Secretary Goldberg about how “disturbed” she was by the lack of a “more active women’s program” at the ILO and insisted he “discuss this with Dave” [David Morse]. To Morse, she spoke just as bluntly of a “situation I consider serious” and “the imperative need for the ILO to develop a broad, continuing program on the employment of women.” Her own conviction about the crisis had grown during the 1961 ILC, she explained to him, when “delegates from other countries, including from newly-developed countries, brought home to me the urgency” of the situation. She especially regretted the ILO decision to
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delay convening a panel on women’s employment. It “forces us” to get underway a “full-f ledged” w omen’s program, she added in a clever choice of words, which implicitly held ILO officials responsible for the public actions the unnamed “us” would take.65 Peterson also asked her government colleague, George Weaver, who sat on the ILO Governing Body, to “make an appeal for revival of a woman’s program.”66 To convince him, she repeated economic arguments about the “effective utilization of w oman power” and reminded him of how taking global leadership on women’s rights would win the United States and the ILO friends abroad. “No other problem of concern to the ILO,” she stressed, “is of such universal importance.”67 Peterson’s White House lobbying, along with the cumulative pressure of Alegría Garza and ILO staffers Figueroa and Johnstone, had an effect. In November 1962, the Governing Body, a fter considering a background paper prepared by Johnstone, acted favorably on a Workers’ Group proposal backed by Weaver and Morse for a “double discussion” of women’s problems at the 1964 and 1965 ILCs. The Governing Body also added women from Burma, Nigeria, Tunisia, and other countries to the ILO panel of women consultants to make it “fully representative” and better able to address the “urgent” problems of women in recently independent countries.68
The “Problem” of Women with Family Responsibilities As Johnstone prepared new ILO materials on women for the 1964 ILC, Peterson stayed in close contact. She was pleased their “thoughts” w ere “running along the same lines about the need to do more” for women in less-developed regions of the world, especially “for African girls and women.” She found their ideas about the “problem” of women and the family compatible too.69 The ICFTU Women’s Committee, which included members from India, Haiti, Indonesia, and Tanganyika, backed Johnstone’s call for the rights of women in developing and industrialized countries to training, education, and employment. But it expressed reservations about the section on women with family responsibilities. Part-t ime work was not a solution to the job–family conflict, the
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committee noted, b ecause h ouseholds needed more, not less income. That section should be deleted.70 Sigrid Ekendahl, now serving once again in the Swedish Parliament, objected to the section on women and the family for different reasons. She worried the document’s failure to see men as “parents” and as responsible for the household might contribute “toward preserving the traditional distinctions between men and women’s work and functions.” She offered an alternative feminist vision of men and w omen sharing responsibilities for social reproduction. “Placing parents side by side in regard to care of the c hildren,” she believed, would be an arrangement “of value to the father, the mother, and her children.” Yet she realized the “great difficulties” in “realizing this principle” at the present moment and conceded to Peterson and o thers that perhaps “for now” it might be best to just “talk about women.”71 International women’s NGOs weighed in as well, with many pushing for less state regulation of women’s employment, more individual freedom, and more opportunities for full-time employment. The British Branch of the Open Door International (ODI), like Ekendahl, also thought the report “overlooked” the “partnership of parents,” but it parted ways with her by rejecting the “idea of fixed minimum leave” for maternity, which led, it claimed, to “forced unemployment.” In the ODI’s libertarian worldview, pregnant women and mothers should negotiate their own employment contracts, without the constraint of state or union regulations. Women should have the same freedoms “as any other worker.”72 With these controversies unresolved, some eighty-eight women, an unusually large female contingent, made their way to Geneva for the 1964 ILC.73 Enthusiasm for ILO action on “women’s problems” was palpable. The United States sent Peterson as one of its two government voting delegates; Maida Springer came as a labor adviser. Springer was the first w oman appointed to the US Workers’ Group since Rose Schneiderman in 1948 and the first woman of color ever to represent the United States at the ILO. Peterson and Springer sat on the Committee on W omen Workers, along with dozens of other w omen from across the world. “Mrs. Dackey of Togo,” a social worker, chaired the group; Rosa Weber of the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions acted as vice chair.74
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Peterson later wrote to US government colleagues about the “cordial working relations” in the women’s committee and her friendly interactions with Riassa (Ray) Smirnova from the USSR. To her relief, only the Cuban worker gave a speech of “pure propaganda,” and the “Soviet bloc, as a bloc” was less “in evidence” than in previous years. “At times,” she added, “the different bloc countries even voted against each other.” She characterized her approach in the committee as “low-key” and aimed at identifying “mutual concerns with sufficient flexibility to cover the widely varying experiences of w omen.” Many in the group had heard about the US Commission on the Status of W omen from her January 1964 article in the ILO’s International Labor Review, and she believed it “made a favorable impression” because “it pointed out things which remain to be done” in the United States. In Peterson’s assessment, US relations with other nations would improve if the country’s representatives were more modest about Ameri ca’s accomplishments and more forthcoming about its shortcomings.75 When the Committee on Women Workers presented its findings to the twelve hundred assembled delegates and advisers at the 1964 ILC, there w ere few public objections, even from the more libertarian NGO groups.76 Many of the committee’s assumptions related to women’s employment and women in development—the existence of discrimination against employed women, the need to raise women’s income and standard of life, the importance of opening up training and employment opportunities to w omen around the world—were widely shared among the delegates. During the discussion, Dackey expressed “great satisfaction” with the committee’s resolution on “the economic and social advancement of women in developing countries,” which foregrounded the need to raise the status of w omen in agriculture; provide social security coverage, education and training for girls and w omen; and enforce nondiscrimination in employment. Springer spoke about recent “breakthroughs” in racial antidiscrimination policies around the world and emphasized the continuing, serious obstacles to w omen’s job rights. The ILO’s own training center in Turin, she pointedly noted, has “no provision for the training of women.” Still, she was optimistic. “Race and sex discrimination move together,” she explained. Movements to abolish one form of discrimination open up the possibilities of equality for all.77
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But little consensus emerged in the assembly on how to solve the “prob lem” of “the employment of women with families.” Peterson rose to offer her views. She affirmed the “contribution of all people, men and women” to economic growth, including married w omen and m others. She supported ending discrimination against women “responsible for dependents” and lessening the burdens of h ousework by providing childcare and reducing work hours for all. Then she waded into more sensitive w aters. “Some countries,” she acknowledged—no doubt referring to Sweden—are striving toward shared responsibilities in the h ousehold, but for “women workers in the world as a whole,” this was not possible at the moment. She offered what she saw as a more practical solution to the double day: upgrading and expanding “part-time” jobs. Holding onto full-time jobs reflected “old ways of thinking.” She did not name those guilty of such “old ways of thinking.” But she may have been alluding to the fear among many trade unionists that part-time workers (often women) undermined the wages and working standards of full-time workers (often men).78 At the same time, she had her own “old ways of thinking,” which she characterized de cades l ater as not questioning “the idea that mothers played one role in the home—that of nurturer—which fathers could not undertake.”79 In preparation for the 1965 vote, a large female-led Committee on Women Workers crafted language for a new ILO standard on the “employment of w omen with f amily responsibilities.” Mary Dublin Keyserling, who had replaced Peterson as W omen’s Bureau director in 1965, represented the US. (Peterson had her hands full in Washington: she had retained her position as Assistant Secretary of L abor and, in addition, accepted a post as President Johnson’s Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs.)80 Other new committee members included Ekendahl and Maria Weber, leader in the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and chair of the ICFTU Women’s Committee. Peterson’s earlier plea for better part-time options did not make it into the proposed recommendation. Over the protests of Mary Dublin Keyserling, the Committee on Women Workers bowed to the powerful Workers’ Group and cut “part-time” work from its endorsements.81 To the relief of the w omen delegates and observers who poured into the 1965 ILC assembly, the amended “Employment (Women with
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amily Responsibilities) Recommendation, 1965” (R123) passed with F votes to spare. In some ways, its passage was unremarkable. A fter all, its call to remove barriers to the labor force participation of w omen resonated with the values of most ILO men and w omen. As the organization had affirmed the year before, when each worker had “full opportunity” to “freely choose” his or her employment, the economy expanded and living standards rose.82 Yet R123 also contained forward-looking and controversial provisions, which its advocates had defended with vigor. It extended the “right to work without discrimination” to women with family responsibilities and, in so d oing, identified a new form of sex discrimination based on family responsibilities. As one supporter told the 1965 assembly, opening a “path to real equality” for working mothers required fully accommodating multiple years of h ousehold and care work, not just childbirth and infant care. Or, as Peterson frequently argued, lessening discrimination for w omen in the home meant lightening household duties, offering “home-aid services,” shortening market hours, and providing training for housewives returning to market work. But R123 broke with the past in yet another way: it challenged the sexual division of labor in the home. Addressing the concerns of Ekendahl and others, the preamble underscored the family responsibilities of men and foresaw f uture adjustments in f amily life, via “continuous social adaptation.”83 As Ekendahl reminded the 1965 ILC, the Swedish trade union movement believes the “responsibility for c hildren and family is, in general, the same for men as for women.” Another Swede seconded her position before the ILO assembly, claiming the “parenthesis” in R123 around the words “Women with Family Responsibilities” signaled its eventual amendment and expansion to men as well as to women. “Equality in employment market,” she added, requires “equality in the family.” French trade unionist Simone Troisbros backed her up and asked for a future discussion of “family responsibilities being shared by men” and of w omen’s right to “more free time as human beings, for their culture, expression of their personalities, and time for trade union and political life.”84 Overall, in 1964 and 1965 the ILO added significant new dimensions to its 1950s “equality conventions.” The rights of women in developing
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countries w ere affirmed and the broad conflict between f amily and market work, among the central contradictions stirred by the rise of waged work, had been engaged. For their part, US w omen acted as both a spur and a brake to these developments. They pushed to foreground the rights of Third World w omen. They also helped advance the conversation on sex discrimination by insisting that discriminations against women responsible for family work be recognized and lessened. Yet the momentum was with the Ekendahls of the world. Some of the proposals prepared by Johnstone (and backed by Peterson) failed to gain traction. Peterson’s reluctance to challenge the sexual division of labor in the home and her embrace of part-time market work for w omen would soon seem backward and even antifeminist.85 Nonetheless, the ILO did not find the solution to the “problem” of family responsibilities in 1965. Nor did it do so in the 1980s when, as we shall see, the ILO replaced R123 with a new standard: Workers with Family Responsibilities, 1981 (N156). The “crisis of care” and who does the work of social reproduction has yet to be solved. It remains at the heart of the unfinished feminist project.86 And ironically, proposals for better part-time jobs and shorter hours for all workers have returned as part of the solution to a more equitable world.
A Lagging AFL-CIO Peterson was as invested in furthering the rights of w omen in the ICFTU as in the ILO. The AFL-CIO, however, took little interest in the ICFTU W omen’s Committee, an attitude Peterson found exasperating given the urgency of the global problems women faced and the potential of the W omen’s Committee to contribute solutions. By its eighth meeting in 1963, the committee was a diverse global group of w omen from twenty-seven countries, with Ekendahl, an experienced and persuasive political in-fighter, as its chair. After attending official ICFTU events in Vienna, committee leaders strategized at a seminar hosted by the German DGB, a strong backer of the group. Building on ideas bubbling up from labor women’s regional conferences in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, the committee drafted an action plan for global
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working women’s rights and mapped out a strategy for securing ICFTU buy-in.87 Two years later, the group celebrated when the ICFTU passed a “Charter of Rights of Working W omen” at its Eighth World Congress. The ICFTU, Ekendahl proclaimed, was no longer “blind and deaf ” to women, a sixth of its sixty million members. The 1965 charter affirmed women’s “fundamental rights as workers,” including their right “to contribute to the economic development of their country,” and committed the ICFTU to the ILO 1951 and 1958 equality conventions. “We want equal pay,” Ekendahl told the ICFTU Congress, and “we want it remembered that the principles of C111 [the antidiscrimination standard] apply also to w omen.” At the last minute, the congress also added recommendations on “women with f amily responsibilities” from R123, which had just passed a few weeks e arlier. The demand for copies of the “Charter of Rights of Working W omen” was immediate, with the ICFTU publishing it in twenty languages and distributing 400,000 copies worldwide.88 The AFL-CIO largely ignored Peterson’s repeated entreaties to back the ICFTU W omen’s Committee. She spoke directly with AFL-CIO president George Meany and secretary-treasurer William Schnitzler, who sat on the US Commission on the Status of Women, about the committee. She even asked Ekendahl if their mutual friend Arne Geijer, ICFTU president, could intercede with US labor leaders.89 Unlike many trade union centers worldwide, the AFL-CIO lacked its own women’s division and had no w omen on its executive board, a situation that left Peterson with few inside levers to pull. AFL-CIO feminists, fed up, had succeeded in 1961 in convincing the Industrial Union Department, the Reuther-led wing of the AFL-CIO, to sponsor a conference on “the problems of working women,” and some 175 women union leaders, angry at the labor movement’s neglect of sex discrimination and women’s “double day,” descended on Washington, DC, for the three-day affair. When Agnes Meyer, noted journalist, civil rights activist, and wife of Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, called for a “modern liberalism” and a “women’s labor movement” to wake up the “masculine world” of US trade u nionism, the audience erupted into
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cheers, prompting one beleaguered male attendee to mutter, “Take to the hills, men. The dam has busted.”90 But his warning was premature, at least for the eighteen-million-member AFL-CIO. The water was rising, but the dam had not given way. Although Meany finally named former retail clerk unionist Ann O’Leary Sutter to the ICFTU committee, US labor women remained notably absent from its deliberations. The AFL-CIO refused Sutter sufficient travel funds and did l ittle to accommodate her other responsibilities, which included two c hildren and a real estate business. Sutter served five years as the AFL-CIO appointee but attended one meeting.91 Europeans held the top posts in the women’s committee—after Ekendahl stepped down, DGB executive board member Maria Weber had taken over as chair—but Third World w omen occupied leadership positions and took g reat interest in committee activities. In 1968, at the committee’s “third world conference on working w omen’s problems,” held in Dusseldorf, one-third of the w omen were from Third World nations. The keynote speeches given by African, Latin American, and European women trade unionists made their way across the Atlantic to the United States, though not by any official route: the AFL-CIO did not send representatives, and Peterson’s plans to go fell apart.92 Nonetheless, Peterson soon knew of the group’s bold call for trade unions to fight for women’s right to contraceptives and for a world where “every citizen” could “freely choose the moment when they w ill be psychologically, physically and materially prepared to have children.” The conference reiterated the position taken by Ekendahl in the 1965 ILO debates on family responsibility: “parenthood concerns men just as much as women, and parents must share responsibilities in the care and education of children.”93
Springer’s Return to a Changed Africa Maida Springer’s relation to the AFL-CIO in the 1960s left her as frustrated as Peterson and, in the end, quite disheartened. Her problems had more to do with the continuing rigidity of the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy than its disinterest in w omen, though that bothered her too. In
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1960, Springer accepted an AFL-CIO post as International Representative for Africa, working with (and supervised by) Jay Lovestone and others in the hardline anti-Communist circle in charge of the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department. Springer was still recovering from a nine-month illness, brought on by exhaustion and stress in 1959. But as she confessed to her garment workers’ colleague Charles Zimmerman, “I had to return” to Africa, “if not for them, then for me. I needed to restore my faith in democracy.” Dorothy Padmore, writing from Accra where she remained after her husband’s death in September 1959, warned Springer that working for the AFL-CIO in postcolonial Africa might sorely test such a faith, but Springer was not deterred. Padmore knew of Springer’s illness, what she termed her friend’s “half-dead” period, and she wanted Springer to find a path t oward “re-living.” But democracy was no guarantee that postcolonial Africa would enjoy a bright future. “Imperialists are realizing,” she wrote Springer, “that political independence in Africa does not curtail their economic supremacy on the Continent”; rather, it “increases” their control. Springer would find Padmore’s alarm over economic neocolonialism shared by o thers in Africa.94 Springer stayed in Africa for the next six years. She relished seeing old friends, many who had survived years of prison and persecution, now sitting triumphant in the seats of government. She attended one independence celebration after another, beginning with Nigeria’s in 1960. When Nyerere became Tanganyika’s first prime minister a year later, Springer traveled to Dar es Salaam as his guest for the ceremony. Later she attended Kenya’s 1963 independence ceremony and then Gambia’s in 1965. In K enya, she was overjoyed to celebrate with her family friend and political ally Tom Mboya, the first Minister of Economic Planning and Development and responsible for social security and economic growth. Even so, she faced serious obstacles in her work. Bickering between the AFL-CIO and the ICFTU over who should be the face of Western labor in Africa plagued her efforts, as did tensions within the Western labor movement over how to respond to Communism in Africa. Meany had proclaimed a world of “no neutrals” in 1956, calling “Nehru and
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Tito” allies of the Communists, and throughout the 1960s, the AFL- CIO opposed any contact or cooperation with Communist-led trade unions. The Reuther faction objected, as did many ICFTU leaders. In 1962, the AFL-CIO established an anti-Communist arm in the Western hemisphere, the American Institute for F ree Labor Development. A year later, with Lovestone heading the International Affairs Department, the AFL-CIO set up the African American Labor Institute, directly encroaching on ICFTU work in Africa. Relationships between Meany and the ICFTU, hardly cordial, deteriorated further.95 At the 1965 ICFTU World Congress, Meany denounced the organization for not stopping the British trade u nion mission to Yugoslavia and for its eagerness for other “East–West” exchanges. In return, at a well-attended news conference, the president of Germany’s DGB rebuked Meany for his “dogmatic and rigid” Cold War anti-Communism. Foreign policy divisions continued to roil the ICFTU and the AFL-CIO, precipitating the 1968 withdrawal of the United Auto Workers, still led by Reuther, from the AFL-CIO. In 1969, the AFL-CIO severed ties with the ICFTU.96 Just as troubling for Springer were the calls circulating among African trade u nionists to end joint programs with Americans and cut ties with the ICFTU. In May 1961, the All Africa Trade Union Federation held its founding conference and demanded members “reject all foreign interference” and disaffiliate from the ICFTU. Ghana had withdrawn from the ICFTU in 1959; a dozen other African trade u nions followed, including, in 1964, Tanganyika, a country Springer knew well. A few African trade u nions continued bilateral programs with Western-led unions after ending ICFTU membership, but relations were strained. Springer faced a high level of distrust in anticolonial circles, aggravated by US return to “gunboat diplomacy” in Latin America (signaled dramatically by the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965) and the escalation of the Vietnam War, a decision the AFL-CIO supported.97 Jim Crow policies in the United States also won few Black African friends for Springer. Black Africans w ere likely to be treated better in “Red China” than in America, Springer reported to the AFL- CIO when she first took the job. In Peking, they w ere not “humiliated
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at hotels and other places of public accommodation as they are in the United States.”98 Springer’s commitment to w omen’s leadership caused further prob lems. Even if she proceeded with caution, which was her wont, she found herself crossing forbidden lines. Springer’s insistence that all voices be heard in classroom discussions and her rejection of sexual double standards w ere not common practices among her colleagues, American or African. A fter the ICFTU L abour College in Kampala, Uganda, admitted women in the 1960s, complaints of harassment and humiliation surfaced. The problem persisted, unresolved, u ntil the Ugandan government, taking advantage of the situation to distance itself from the ICFTU and move t oward the Ghana-inspired All African Trade Union Federation, closed the school in 1968. Trade unionist Agnes Adenowo, who attended the school, may have had her experience in Kampala in mind when she told the 1968 Dusseldorf ICFTU w omen’s conference that men are “the main obstacle” to women’s advancement in the developing world. “An educational effort directed t oward men” is necessary.99 Despite her travails, Springer had hope for her projects in Kenya. She brokered an initial partnership between the German’s DGB housing corporation, the AFL-CIO, and the Kenyan government to build low- income housing near Nairobi. But the housing project fell through, and her old friend Mboya seemed increasingly aloof, no doubt troubled by the charges of American influence constantly directed at him. She scaled back her ambitions and at the request of the K enyan labor movement agreed to help them set up an “Institute of Tailoring.” Such a union- sponsored program, she thought, would foster worker ties to the u nion, raise skill levels and bargaining power, and lead to higher wages. Operating under similar assumptions, she spent five months in Nigeria creating a school for taxi and truck drivers.100 Yet Springer found her democratic values tested by the almost impossible task of postcolonial nation-building. The leaders of newly indepen dent African nations, once fierce advocates of h uman rights, nonviolent tactics, and independent trade unions, were setting those commitments aside in the name of nation-building, economic development, and, it
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sometimes seemed, personal enrichment. But unlike her close friend Pauli Murray who became a fierce critic of Nkrumah a fter a few months teaching at the Ghana School of Law in 1960, Springer thought it best to hold her tongue about Nkrumah’s suppression of labor strikes and politi cal dissent, believing it a “transition.” The “transition” never came. Nkrumah’s own military removed him from power and sent him into exile. Shortly a fter, in 1966, Springer returned home to the United States. She felt enormous sadness as one-party states arose across Africa and worker rights w ere sacrificed in the name of nation building. Springer had wanted both: democratic governments and democratic workplaces.101
The Torch Passes At the end of the 1960s a new cohort of activists challenged the leadership and priorities of social democratic feminists like Peterson, Springer, and Miller. Many of the new feminists had come of age in an era of rising prosperity not economic crisis. And some, though not all, identified with the more militant, reimagined politics that had been gaining force for much of the decade. The conflagrations of 1968 captured much of what was changing. In 1968, movements around the world led by students and other youth demanded a reconsideration of the substance and style of prevailing politics. Young radicals challenged core premises of capitalist and Communist orthodoxy. They condemned Cold War rigidities, the absurdity of the arms race, and the imperialist hubris of both superpowers; they questioned Fordism, top-down management, the work ethic, consumerism, the growth imperative, and other widely held beliefs.102 The violence of the confrontations was often shocking. US students occupied the suites of college administrators and barricaded themselves in classrooms, demanding an end to American aggression in Vietnam, a redress of racial injustices, and an overhaul of the basic rules and values of the university and the country. In the People’s Republic of China, teenage “Red Guards” turned on their elders, parading them through the streets, taunting them as cowards and reactionaries, and, at times, ending their lives. In Mexico City, government forces killed dozens,
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perhaps hundreds, of students and civilians protesting government priorities at a peaceful demonstration in Tlatelolco Plaza. Invading Soviet tanks, called out by a neoStalinist regime overseen by Leonid Brezhnev, overwhelmed thousands of Prague protesters and ended Alexander Dubček’s liberal reforms. Yet the eruptions of 1968 had been brewing for a long time. In the United States, a vibrant “New Left” had announced itself years e arlier. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, issued at the first national convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, offered an eclectic embrace of participatory democracy; antiwar, anti-imperialist, and anti-bureaucratic sentiments; and sympathy for homegrown democratic socialist movements around the world. Disaffection with liberal anti-Communism and the Democratic Party grew as the Vietnam War escalated, the Southern segregationist wing of the Democratic Party retained influence, and race inequities held firm. Interracial civil rights alliances, already frayed by Malcolm X’s eloquent calls for Black self-determination and self-defense, unraveled further as SNCC, u nder the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, embraced “Black Power” and a more separatist path. As G reat Society reforms lagged, poor Black communities exploded in rage while National Guardsmen and police officers gunned down men, women, and children fleeing for their lives in their own neighborhoods. The AFL-CIO’s defense of Johnson’s foreign policy and George Meany’s mocking comments about protesters and youth culture widened the chasm between the New Left and the labor movement and confirmed the futility of a labor-led coalition.103 Meanwhile, inside the Democratic Party, social democratic New Dealers worried about party elites moving away from “building the economy from below,” as Roosevelt had put it in his 1932 “Forgotten Man” speech.104 Mary Dublin Keyserling (Peterson’s replacement at the Women’s Bureau in 1965) and her husband, Leon Keyserling, an economic adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, found this intellectual shift among Democrats highly troubling. Both had distinguished records as New Deal insiders. Leon had been a principal architect of the 1935 Wagner Act and the 1946 Full Employment Act. As chair of Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers, he had been a reliable advocate of “demand-side”
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economic policies aimed at job creation, expanding worker purchasing power, and redistributing wealth downward. Later, he urged President Kennedy to reconsider his 1962 tax cuts for the wealthy “on grounds of equity” and tried to convince him that despite the trickle-down neo- Keynesian orthodoxy then emerging, giving money to the wealthy did not spur economic growth and prosperity.105 Kennedy stayed the course. So did President Johnson a fter Keyserling attacked his G reat Society antipoverty programs. The poor needed good high-paying jobs, not just job training and affirmative action, Keyserling warned. At the behest of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, Keyserling drafted a different antipoverty plan of job and basic income guarantees, higher wages, fair prices, better housing, and universal health care. Floated in 1966 as the Freedom Budget, the plan met criticism from across the political spectrum. Some on the left, although in agreement with its overall redistributive thrust, deemed it a continuation of the AFL-CIO’s “guns and butter credo” combining military and social spending. O thers in the center and on the right had simply lost faith or interest in bottom-up, redistributive politics and in shifting wealth and resources from the elite to the working classes. They worried instead about inflation and constraints on productivity. A new fiscal conservatism—what Keyserling later termed “scarcity economics”—was gaining ground. Increasingly it mixed with Milton Friedman’s new celebratory mantra of “free market” capitalism into a popular toxic brew.106 Mary Dublin Keyserling faced a similar pushback to her ideas and policies after she took over the Women’s Bureau. The child of Russian Jewish immigrants who prospered in New York City, Mary Dublin graduated from Barnard in 1930. On a college summer fellowship at the Geneva School of International Studies she sat in on economic classes with John Maynard Keynes. Inspired, she studied economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University before dropping out of graduate school to put her theoretical understandings into practice. In 1938, as the twenty-eight-year-old executive director of the National Consumers’ League, she fought hard for the Fair L abor Standards Act. After a wartime interlude in the Office of Civilian Defense, she signed on as an international economic analyst in the Commerce
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Department, where she made the case for reduced tariffs, more trade, and increased foreign aid through the Marshall Plan. Her social demo cratic politics brought her to the attention of conservatives as early as 1940, and they hounded her about alleged Communist sympathies even after she resigned her government job in 1953. But in the 1960s she returned to Washington. As Women’s Bureau director she prioritized the needs of poor and low-income w omen. She lobbied for expanded social benefits, full employment, and more high-paying jobs for all, believing that raising overall h ousehold income gave poor w omen more choices. She also insisted Johnson’s poverty programs set aside job training funds for women and specify w omen’s right to employment. She won a partial victory when her lobbying and those of her allies resulted in the establishment of the W omen’s Job Corps. But in 1965 and a fter, a political consensus for addressing the deep inequities of class, race, and sex that perpetuated poverty did not exist.107 A telling moment in the overthrow of New Deal-style feminism came at the third annual meeting of the state commissions on the status of women in June 1966. A different kind of feminism, less tied to the Democratic Party and to class-based policies, declared itself. Many at the meeting opposed Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. They also felt frustrated with the administration’s lack of attention to w omen’s jobs and training programs and its foot-dragging on w omen’s rights. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), charged with enforcing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was not doing its job. As the women debated what to do, Mary Keyserling, chairing the meeting, tried to keep order. She shared their anger about women’s exclusion from War on Poverty programs and acknowledged the legitimacy of the various complaints about the EEOC. Indeed, she and Peterson had called repeatedly for the EEOC to give sex discrimination “the seriousness it merits.” But she cautioned against a public attack on the Demo cratic administration. Moreover, the EEOC should proceed carefully in enforcing Title VII, lest the many woman-only state laws be lost in the rush to open up opportunities. She, like Peterson, favored revising the laws upward and extending to men protections against overwork and other problems. The crowd was not swayed.108
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Betty Friedan wanted action, as did other influential women like Kay Clarenbach, chair of Wisconsin’s Commission on the Status of W omen, and Pauli Murray, whose recent article with Catherine Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law,” reiterated her 1962 Fourteenth Amendment legal strategy and defended Title VII enforcement. At lunch, as speakers droned on and Peterson and Keyserling worried about what to do, the dissidents finalized their plan, hatched the night before in Friedan’s hotel room. They would create “an NAACP for women,” a concept United Auto Worker official Dorothy Haener remembered first hearing from Dollie Lowther Robinson at a Milwaukee conference e arlier in the year. The new organization, they agreed, would be devoted to women’s rights much the same way as the NAACP pursued rights for African Americans. A few months later, some fifty founders—activists from the June meeting plus others—established the National Organization for Women (NOW) and elected Friedan as president.109 NOW’s October 1966 “Statement of Purpose,” drafted by Friedan and rewritten by Pauli Murray, articulated an inclusive vision of equality and human rights for all. For Friedan’s tepid pledge that NOW support “equal rights for all groups,” Murray had substituted NOW’s dedication to “the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings”—and deserving, she might well have added, of the full rights of human beings. She continued, “We realize that women’s problems are linked to many broader questions of social justice” and “their solution w ill require concerted action by many groups.” In 1966, Murray had just finished a short book, Human Rights, USA, 1948 to 1966. She included women’s rights and NOW in her story of h uman rights struggles and quoted approvingly from NOW’s 1966 statement, drawing the reader’s attention to the human rights and social justice passages she must have suggested.110 Yet at its November 1967 meeting, NOW’s priorities evolved, leaving Murray “deeply disillusioned.” As NWP stalwarts signed up, NOW turned its attention to the ERA. Murray had never warmed to the ERA, as her 1962 testimony before the PCSW revealed, but neither was she a fierce opponent. Rather, she feared the ERA would distract from other concerns, especially the fight against poverty and racial justice, and replace the F ourteenth Amendment equality strategy she had pioneered.
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When the ERA came up for a vote, she offered an alternative “human rights amendment” and asked for more time to circulate and discuss the various proposals. She lost the vote, and NOW endorsed the original ERA. Murray left feeling “like a stranger in her own h ousehold.” She declined to run for NOW board of directors and feared NOW was becoming an organization committed “almost solely to ‘women’s rights’ without strong bonds with other movements t oward human rights.”111 Over the next few years, NOW called for abortion rights, a national network of state-funded childcare centers, and other changes. But much of its passion went into enforcement and expansion of equal opportunity laws. It proudly proclaimed itself the “new voice” of American women “who work outside the home,” who “wish no special privileges or protections,” and who have “no interests in serving tea at ‘ladies auxiliaries.’ ” It filed lawsuits against the EEOC and picketed the NYT to protest job ads listed by sex. By 1969, federal and state courts overturned weight restrictions, hour limits, and other woman-only provisions, citing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Certainly, there was much to celebrate as sex-based employment barriers fell. At the same time, few, if any, of the standards w ere equalized upward, a situation bemoaned by Murray, as well as by Caroline Ware, Peterson, and others.112 NOW’s successes in enforcing Title VII shared headlines with the theatrical antics and bold proclamations of a youth-led “women’s liberation” movement. Breaking with their New Deal foremothers, young w omen, many of whom were veterans of the civil rights and antiwar movements, tackled male dominance in every sphere, even as they sought radical changes in capitalism and government. Their politics occurred as often in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the streets as in the Democratic Party, the labor unions, or the courts. “Women’s liberation” consciousness-raising groups sprang up everywhere, attracting a diverse set of participants, although white, college-educated women predominated. 113 At the same time, alternative feminisms bubbled up from low-income women and w omen of color. The League of Mexican-American W omen opened its doors in 1966, set up by w omen active in the antidiscrimination efforts of the Mexican-American Political Association and the Community Serv ice Organization. That same year welfare m others
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banded together in the National Welfare Rights Organization to demand guaranteed income, respect, and quality low-income housing. In 1968, SNCC activist Frances Beal, who had lived in Paris from 1959 to 1966 and resonated deeply with the Algerian struggle against French colonialism, helped start SNCC’s Black Liberation Committee, which morphed into the Third World Women’s Alliance. Her influential 1969 essay, “A Black W omen’s Manifesto,” lashed out at the Black Power movement for its misogyny and the white w omen’s movement for its equal opportunity priorities. It called on Black women “to combat the capitalist racist exploitation of black people” and back the “liberation of oppressed peoples around the world.”114 New feminisms of all kinds had burst forth. Many of these groups prospered and converged in the 1970s, upending norms and policies long thought unassailable. The earlier generation of New Deal women activists divided in their response to the new feminist sensibilities. Some embraced NOW early on: Caroline Davis and Dorothy Haener of the Auto Workers w ere NOW founders and among its first leaders. They left NOW when it endorsed the ERA in 1967, but like many others, they returned to the fold within a few years. O thers like Pauli Murray evidenced early enthusiasm but soured on NOW. After 1967 she threw herself into teaching American Studies at Brandeis University and spoke out often about the need for an interracial w omen’s movement attentive to multiple inequalities. Still others started off skeptical and then turned hostile. AFL-CIO staffer Anne Draper, for example, a union stalwart who had taken a lead role in the equal pay campaigns, railed against “middle-class ‘women’s rights’ types” who express “hostility and condescension toward u nions,” yet know nothing about what unions do or what they stand for.115 Just as infuriating was what she saw as the new movement’s disdain for housework and its all-too-frequent narrowing of feminism to helping college-educated w omen move up the c areer ladder. As Friedan had dismissively declared in 1968, “If you agree that women are h uman beings who should be realizing their potential, then no girl child born today should responsibly be brought up to be a housew ife.” Draper was not alone in her negative reaction to such
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attitudes, even though she and o thers had mistaken a part of the movement for the whole.116 Peterson, Miller, and Springer occupied a kind of middle ground in how they viewed the new movement; like Murray, they judged it as both an advance and a retreat. Peterson applauded the new feminism’s attention to a “wide range” of issues. It reminded her of the “broad movement” she had joined as a young w oman in the 1930s. She had wearied too of the repetitive feminist clashes over “equal rights” versus “protectionism.” “I believe we should direct our efforts t oward replacing discriminatory state laws with good l abor standards that w ill protect both men and women,” Peterson wrote Michigan congresswoman Martha Griffiths in 1971, explaining why she had decided to drop her opposition to the ERA. At the same time, Peterson feared the “bread and butter equality” needed for low-income women to enjoy their full rights was being ignored by some in the movement. She warned those with privileges not to abandon t hose without. “Women who have found changes in the laws to be to their advantage” must make “every effort to assist those who still may be exploited.”117 After 1965, Peterson distanced herself from what to her was an ever more frustrating debate over Title VII, the ERA, and state protective laws. She combined her duties as Assistant Secretary of Labor with defending the interests of h ousewives and low-income families as Johnson’s Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs. Despite the uptick in consumer activism across the country, it was at times a brutal battle. Her natural allies, the AFL-CIO’s w omen’s auxiliaries—historically dedicated to the gospel of “collective buying” and consumer purchasing power—were losing members and out of fashion among new feminists.118 The advertising industry, furious at Peterson’s “truth-in- advertising” campaign, fought back, as did other corporate interests incensed over her 1966 defense of housewives who organized boycotts to protest grocery store price gouging. In May 1967, Johnson replaced Peterson with a more business-friendly, less vocal appointee. She hung on in the Department of L abor for another year, leaving a fter Republican Richard Nixon’s presidential victory. She accepted a position as vice president of consumer programs at Giant Foods supermarket chain,
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where she had been promised a f ree hand in their grocery stores for her “truth-in-labeling” campaign.119 Her days in the White House, she wrongly assumed, were over. Frieda Miller kept her distance from the ERA debates as well. For much of the 1960s, in addition to her ILO consultancy, she had reported on UN activities for the International Alliance of W omen, still one of the largest w omen’s rights NGOs. Although pleased that the UN finally took action on long-debated equality and h uman rights instruments, she was disheartened by the actions of the United States at the UN. Neither she nor other New Deal feminists could combat the strident voices of US conservatives who judged UN international covenants as violations of US sovereignty and who took special umbrage at UN guarantees of economic and social rights.120 Miller retired from her UN job in 1967. Ill and in her late seventies, she considered her options. Her relationship with Pauline Newman was in shambles, wrecked by Miller’s long absences abroad and her desire for other primary attachments. In the 1950s, Newman had grown bitter and depressed by it all and felt their partnership had ended. “I wonder how long it w ill be before I w ill see you, and where and when I w ill meet you,” she wrote in a forlorn moment, adding in the margin, “if and when we decide on that.” After she learned of Miller’s affair with an Indian man in 1958, she was even more blunt about her “disappointments and disillusionments”: “My heart is still broken and once broken cannot be mended.”121 Nonetheless, with Miller’s health in decline, Newman made her peace with the past. The two lived together again, with Newman caring for an aging Miller. Miller died in 1973. Springer had been farthest removed from the feminist b attles in the United States. When she returned home in 1966, her thoughts centered still on the tragedies unfolding in Africa. She found consolation in a new job as an ILGWU regional organizer in the South. At one factory, she or ganized a successful four-month strike to drop the seniority rules blocking racial integration. She savored time with her f amily too, including with her new husband James Kemp, an outgoing, boisterous Chicago labor leader who juggled civil rights and AFL politics as one of the few Black local u nion presidents in the fast-growing Service Employees Interna-
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tional Union. But even those supports failed her in the summer of 1969 when she learned of the murder of Tom Mboya. Adding to her sorrow, a few months l ater Jomo Kenyatta effectively ended multiparty democracy in Kenya. The political revolutions in Africa had not followed the nonviolent, democratic path Springer had envisioned.122 In the 1970s, as the new feminism gathered strength globally, she made w omen’s leadership and women’s rights her priority.
12 Sisters and Resisters
A women’s rebellion of undeniably broad character ricocheted around the world in the 1970s. Long-settled questions of sexuality, the sexual division of l abor, and what it meant to be female or male w ere now open to fierce debate. Young radical w omen, fed up with their elders and the hypocrisies of capitalism and Communism, lashed out at established governments and political parties. Yet women of every sort rose up, destabilizing patriarchal norms and practices. In the United States, the new feminism made substantial gains in some areas: equal treatment in civil law, greater sexual freedom and reproductive rights, and lowered sex-based barriers to education and jobs. But progress lagged in other arenas: class and race disparities widened, and social supports for motherhood and family work were minimal. Some women—the 30 percent with college degrees—benefited more than o thers. This pattern of uneven advance among w omen would characterize the 1980s and 1990s as well, as a virulent form of hypercompetitive capitalism and market fundamentalism took root in the United States and across the world. Yet counter movements persisted. While some US feminists prioritized ending sex-based disadvantages and found that goal sufficient, o thers adopted broad reform agendas and sought to dismantle multiple structures of inequality. These new full rights feminists would grow in number and power by the end of the century. The United Nations shaped late twentieth-century feminism in fundamental ways. The First UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City in 1975 to celebrate International Women’s Year, energized 380
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circuits of feminist activism across much of the world and proved life changing for many of the w omen who attended. A fter Mexico City, the UN launched its Decade for Women (1976–85) and called on member states to hold their own w omen’s conference. The United States, like many other nations, complied, and US feminists organized the historic 1977 Houston W omen’s Conference. Thousands of feminists from all walks of life descended on Houston, bent on mapping out a unified strategy for future progress and reinvigorating the drive for ratification of the ERA. The conference and its aftermath did not go as planned. By the early 1980s, the ERA drive stalled and US feminism as a national movement splintered. Feminist brushfires continued to burn, however, as a younger, more multiracial cohort of activists and thinkers came of age. Elsewhere, w omen’s activism, especially in the Global South, r ose dramatically. The global “geography of feminist energies” shifted.1 In the 1980s and 1990s, Third World feminists moved into position of global leadership in the UN and in international labor organizations like the ILO and the ICFTU, where they foregrounded human rights and economic justice. At the same time, transnational feminist NGOs multiplied, and new grassroots w omen’s groups sprang up in the Global South with innovative approaches to raising living standards and securing dignity and rights for the marginalized.2 The powers arrayed against the new feminist activists were formidable, including, all too often, US government and corporate leaders. As American society continued its rightward tilt, women’s movements outside the United States saw themselves as much in opposition to America as in partnership. US feminists often found themselves on the margins of global sisterhood, even as they struggled to join it.
New Feminist Internationalisms at Home In the 1960s and 1970s a younger cohort of New Left feminists reinvigorated and redefined America’s “global sisterhood” tradition. Many sought broad transformations similar to those espoused by e arlier generations of egalitarian feminists, including racial and economic equality,
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peace, and equality among nations and regions.3 But furious over the Vietnam War and aggressive US anti-communism around the world, they often judged America’s “liberal internationalist” tradition a mere cover for American hegemony. US complicity in the 1973 coup in Chile—in which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president, was killed and replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a brutal autocrat—seemed yet another egregious confirmation of Americ a’s flawed global leadership and the hollowness of its rhetoric of human rights, freedom, and democracy.4 The anti-imperialist internationalism of their left-wing and communist foremothers inspired New Left feminists more than the social democratic internationalism of New Dealers.5 Many rejected the premises undergirding New Deal globalism and reached out to Third World liberation movements. They looked to revolutionary theorists such as Argentinean Ernesto “Che” Guevara or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, rather than to Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi.6 Influential Black spokeswomen like Angela Davis, for example, called on her sisters to support Third World movements fighting American imperialism, racism, and global capitalism. The forces dominating the Third World w ere of a piece with t hose oppressing p eople of color in the United States. “I felt drawn,” as she l ater explained, “to a “triple jeopardy analysis of racism, sexism, and imperialism.”7 Born in 1944 into a politicized middle-class f amily, Davis was deeply influenced by the violence and apartheid in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where her neighborhood was the frequent target of white supremacist bombings. Davis escaped to New York’s Greenwich Village to complete high school, sponsored by the American Friends Serv ice Committee. A fter a sojourn at the Sorbonne and a B.A. with highest honors from Brandeis University, she spent two years in Europe at universities in East and West Germany before pursuing graduate study with Frankfurt School philosopher and critical Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego. Davis joined SNCC in the 1960s, but critical of its male chauvinism, she gravitated toward the all-Black branch of the Communist Party USA, perhaps inspired by her m other who had organized nationally for the
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Communist-inspired Southern Negro Youth Congress. Davis was fired from her first teaching post at the University of California, Los Angeles, for her Communist Party affiliation before giving her inaugural lecture. Arrested in 1970 for her alleged role as an accomplice to a foiled attempt to free George Jackson and two other African American men from prison, she was acquitted of all charges after spending sixteen months in jail while a global “Free Angela” campaign worked for her release.8 Other 1970s feminist leaders took quite different routes to their global consciousness and identity with the oppressed. Gloria Steinem, the 1972 cofounder of Ms. magazine and a principal spokesperson for “women’s liberation” in this era, spent two life-changing years in India in 1957 and 1958. What she learned there became the core of her political philosophy and made its way into mainstream American feminism. Steinem came to the movement later than many of its leaders. She reported having her “click” moment while covering an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine in 1969. As a svelte, blonde New York City journalist who had spent time as a Playboy “bunny” for a story she wrote, she became the media darling of “women’s lib.” The political sensibilities Steinem brought to her feminism long predated her 1969 awakening. She grew up caring for a “sometimes- incapacitated” mother in a Toledo, Ohio, household teetering on the edge of financial collapse. Her father, a Jewish antiques dealer always on the move, had divorced her m other when Steinem was ten. She remembered the excitement of traveling with him across the country, spending hours talking to strangers; she heard stories, too, of her f ather’s suffragist grandmother who had sailed across the Atlantic for the 1908 Amsterdam meeting of the International Congress of Women. Steinem took to the road like her father. She headed east to Smith College, spending a year in Europe before graduating in 1956. Fearful of marriage, as she spun the story, she chose to go to India, aided by a modest grant from Smith College’s Chester Bowles scholarship fund. She was also pregnant and traveled first to London where she found a sympathetic doctor who helped her obtain an abortion. Once in India, Steinem spent two months living in Miranda House, the w omen’s college at the University of Delhi, where she met Nehru’s
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d aughter, Indira Gandhi, later India’s first female prime minister, and Devaki Jain, a feminist economist and Gandhian, who remained her lifelong friend. Steinem a dopted Indian dress and crisscrossed the country on train, riding in crowded third-class woman-only cars, which for her became rolling seminars in cross-cultural relations. India “introduced me to the way most people live in the world,” she later wrote. In Kerala, she visited an ashram run by Vinoba Bhave, a spiritual teacher, ascetic, and the founder of the “land gift” or Bhoodan Movement inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. Since 1951, the movement had reclaimed millions of acres of uncultivated land for the rural poor through peaceful protest and petition. Inspired, the twenty-three-year old Steinem joined a caravan of grassroots organizers as one of the few Americans. Each person carried only a change of clothes, a cup, and a comb. For weeks, the caravan walked from village to village, holding “talking circles” and urging the poor to believe in themselves and organize. The groups were “magical,” Steinem recalled. “Anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.” Almost every meeting ended with a sense of collective power and vows for political action.9 What Steinem learned in India stayed with her. Back in the United States, she thought of herself as a Gandhian humanist and an internationalist. In the 1960s, she embraced the farmworker cause and its tactics of nonviolent direct action, boycotts, and moral suasion. She worked side by side with teacher and Mexican American civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, who led the multiracial United Farm Workers.10 Steinem wrote long articles for New York Magazine on their effort, as well as on the Black Panthers and Ho Chi Minh. A fter her 1969 “click moment,” she also drew on her experiences in India to understand how to build a movement for w omen’s emancipation. She became a fierce advocate of “consciousness-raising groups” or “women’s talking circles.”11 Like India, the female mind had been colonized, Steinem explained; women had to reject the message of the colonizers and learn love of self. Like other oppressed peoples, women needed spaces apart for reflection and confidence building, and they too must unify “for a common dream of independence.”12 Steinem’s deepest hope was for
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“white, serious, well-educated girls,” newly conscious of their “second classness,” to make common cause with “poor women of all colors.” An alliance of “middle-class and radical-intellectual w omen” with the female poor in the United States and abroad would be “the final revolutionary link.”13
High Tide at Home On August 26, 1970, Steinem joined thousands of o thers in the W omen’s Strike for Equality march, one of the largest demonstrations for women’s rights in US history. The official goals of the march included abortion rights, childcare, and equal opportunity in jobs and education, reflecting NOW’s agenda in 1970 of equality for US w omen. But scrawled placards conveyed the diverse concerns and spirit of the movement: “Lesbians Unite”; “Housewives are Unpaid Slaves”; “I’m Drowning in the Typing Pool”; “End Human Sacrifice: Don’t Get Married”; “The Women of Vietnam Are Our Sisters.” Peace and antiwar placards were frequent, often trailing behind huge banners proclaiming “Women Strike for Peace—and Equality.”14 Much to the frustration of t hose in the street, three long years would pass before US troops, defeated, withdrew from Vietnam, ending a war in which sixty thousand Americans died alongside more than two million Vietnamese, including large numbers of w omen and children. Dressed in white in honor of the fifty year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, NOW president Betty Friedan, alongside Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, led the sea of women down Fifth Avenue. The Brooklyn-born d aughter of West Indian immigrant parents, Chisholm had distinguished herself as a childhood educator and state assemblywoman before her successful run for US Congress in 1968. As the first Black woman in the US Congress and a f uture candidate for the 1972 Democratic Party nomination for US president, Chisholm liked to describe herself as “Unbossed and Unbought.” A civil rights and civil liberties lawyer from the Bronx, “Battling Bella” had cofounded W omen Strike for Peace, the pioneering disarmament and antiwar group, in 1961. She would win her own seat in
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the House in an upset victory in 1971 and become one of the first Jewish congresswomen. She campaigned on the slogan, “This w oman’s place is in the house—the House of Representatives.”15 That same year, Friedan, Chisholm, and Abzug—along with Steinem; Fannie Lou Hamer, the fearless voting rights activist and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party vice chair; Millie Jeffrey of the Auto Workers; and Florynce Kennedy, l awyer and future organizer of the National Black Feminist Organization—joined forces to found the National W omen’s Political Caucus.16 The caucus and its leaders would be crucial combatants in the legislative struggles to come. At Pauli Murray’s insistence, NOW’s 1966 founding “Statement of Purpose” had given considerable attention to global issues, as well as to human rights and social justice. The “new movement t oward true equality for all women in America . . . is part of the worldwide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders,” the first sentence had read.17 But in 1970, NOW prioritized domestic concerns, as did much of the mainstream w omen’s movement.18 With women’s power on the upswing in both the Democratic and Republican Parties and a powerful grassroots upsurge changing hearts and minds, progress was swift. In 1972, the ERA sailed past Congress and state ratifications began to roll in. Congress strengthened the enforcement capacities of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and signed off on Title IX, endorsing gender equity in sports education. Other victories followed. In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. A year later, buoyed by a broad coalition of labor, w omen’s, and civil rights groups, Chisholm and Hawaii’s Patsy Takemoto Mink, an Asian Pacific Islander elected to Congress in 1965, led a successful campaign to extend Fair Labor Standards Act coverage to domestic workers. Chisholm, Mink, and others pushed as well for a comprehensive nationwide system of childcare centers. But despite strong bipartisan congressional support, when the bill reached President Nixon in 1971, he issued a surprise veto, claiming the legislation fostered “communal approaches to childrearing over against family-centered approaches.”19 But that defeat seemed like a fluke. Certainly, many assumed, other victories, including the ratification of the ERA, w ere soon to come. The movement’s pri-
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mary energies remained domestic at the start of the 1970s, but Murray’s 1966 notion of linking the local and the global looked to some a prescient, promising strategy as global consciousness ticked upward in the 1970s and the UN declared women’s rights a worldwide priority.20
“Something about Women” In 1973, eighty-one-year-old New Deal feminist Clara Beyer, still toiling away as a government bureaucrat in Washington, had a simple idea with far-reaching consequences: Why not add “something about w omen” to the US Foreign Assistance Act? Beyer was dead serious, and as a seasoned veteran of internationalism and an employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), she was well placed to make a difference. She had been at the 1919 Washington ILO conference and, working alongside Mary Anderson, Frances Perkins, and Frieda Miller at the US Department of L abor, had advocated for domestic and international labor standards and social provisions since the 1920s. Her suggestion—embodied in an amendment sponsored by Illinois Republican senator Charles Percy, a women’s rights supporter who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—became law in December 1973.21 The Percy Amendment had a dramatic impact on US foreign-aid programs. All projects w ere now required to “integrate w omen into the national economies of foreign countries.” Such integration, the amendment stated, would improve w omen’s status and “assist in total development efforts.”22 Its premise captured the side of American feminism most acceptable in the 1970s: belief in how moving w omen into market work benefited both them and the economy. Other strands of US feminism—those that put social needs ahead of profit and growth or valued family work over market work—did not find their way into US law. Third World nations and o thers called for “people-centered development” and attention to the “social and economic goals” of development in the 1970s, but such voices did not prevail in the United States.23 Meanwhile, feminists worldwide hoped to take advantage of the growing consensus about w omen’s central role in market development to secure more resources for women at the United Nations. Danish
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economist Ester Boserup’s influential 1970 study, Women’s Role in Economic Development, had spotlighted the crucial economic contributions of women in poor and rural regions, and outrage over UN neglect of women in formulating global population policy was mounting. In 1972, the Romanian delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women requested the UN designate 1975 as “International W omen’s Year” (IWY) and investigate questions of discrimination against women and women’s role in development. The Women’s International Democratic Federation, which had regained UN consultancy status in 1967 a fter a thirteen-year absence, encouraged the idea. Helvi Sipilä from Finland, the first female UN Assistant Secretary-General, seconded the motion. The Soviet bloc backed the IWY proposal, as did most Third World nations, now the majority of delegates. Over the objections of US representatives, all Nixon appointees, the General Assembly approved.24 At the advice of Henry Kissinger, however, the Nixon administration shifted gears and began to see advocacy of human rights and women’s rights as a way of advancing the nation’s prestige at the UN and in world affairs. As plans for IWY stalled, snarled by Cold War maneuvering, Republican Patricia Hutar, US representative to the Commission on the Status of W omen (CSW), called for a world conference on w omen officially sponsored by the UN as part of IWY events. Now it was the Soviets’ turn to object. They had already scheduled a world w omen’s congress in East Berlin in 1975 and did not want a second competing conference. In the end, the CSW endorsed the US proposal, judging an UN-sponsored women’s conference as a possible occasion for progress on w omen’s rights, including the passage of the long-anticipated UN convention banning discrimination against w omen, a goal Hutar also strongly backed. The General Assembly, with the United States voting with the majority, agreed with the CSW.25
Mexico City and “World Consciousness-R aising” On June 19, 1975, the UN’s First World Conference on Women convened in Mexico City. The conference was eye-opening for many of the US w omen who participated. Some, basking in the glow of “sisterhood”
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at home, had simply assumed a global female unanimity over what constituted women’s equality.26 Instead, they found themselves embroiled in clashes over what it meant to be emancipated and how to define women’s interests. The conference also “showcased the intense debates under way about how best to combat . . . racial discrimination, economic marginality, and geo-political inequalities.” American w omen listened as delegates contended US policy made life worse, not better, for w omen outside the United States and urged a “New International Economic Order” premised on restructured trade and debt arrangements and a redistribution of the world’s wealth and resources. For a new generation of US feminists, Mexico City reinforced what their full rights foremothers had long known: sex equality, pure and s imple, did not always mesh with the more complex formulations of equality held by the majority of the world’s women.27 One hundred and thirty national governments sent some twelve hundred delegates, three-quarters of them w omen, to the official meeting of the conference. Hutar cochaired the thirty-seven-member Ford- appointed US delegation, among the largest sent by any nation. (Republican vice president Gerald Ford had moved into the presidency in August 1974 after Nixon’s resignation). Across town, thousands of others attended an NGO Tribune, a parallel assembly open to anyone who registered. Both forums were fractious and chaotic, with little initial unanimity on common goals.28 Yet at the end of weeks of exhausting debate, the official conference endorsed two major documents: the “World Plan of Action” and the “Declaration of Mexico.” The World Plan of Action condemned discrimination against w omen in no uncertain terms and set specific targets for nations to pursue in promoting equality between men and women. Yet in the minds of its left critics, it gave the nod to capitalist economies, tolerated an internationalism dominated by large nations, and, at times, envisioned a kind of triumphal march of women toward market work and a predefined, one-size- fits-all liberation. The Declaration of Mexico differed in emphasis. It called on men and women to eliminate “colonialism, neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid, and racial discrimination in all its forms.” It also recognized the negative impact of a “profoundly unjust
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world economic system” on the “vast majority” of the world’s women and offered a more heterogeneous vision of female progress. The United States supported the World Plan of Action but not the Declaration of Mexico. Nonetheless, the UN General Assembly adopted both documents and inaugurated a “UN Decade for Women: Equality, Development, and Peace” to further the aspirations of the 1975 conference, with a second world meeting set for 1980.29 For US women, some of the most productive encounters happened in the freewheeling NGO Tribune. W omen outnumbered men ten to one at the gathering, and American women were in the minority. Of the six thousand registered participants, thirteen hundred came from the United States and the rest from eighty other nations. The largest group, some two thousand, came from Mexico.30 The United States had exceptional global power in 1975, and, along with the USSR, dominated the world—yet neither superpower dominated the Tribune. For many US women, it was an intense, unusual, and even humbling experience. “I had never really talked to Third World women before about how they felt about things,” gushed US delegate Ruth Bacon, the appointed liaison between the official conference and the Tribune. Bacon sent a long, chatty, and surprisingly frank account of her experiences to Secretary of State Kissinger in a “report” she hoped would become part of the official government record. The “contact with diversity,” she confided, had a “long and lasting impact.” Other American w omen felt the same, she claimed, and spoke “of exchanging ideas, many times congenial but sometimes shocking, with women from everywhere.” The US delegation was “woefully uninformed,” she told Kissinger. They had not been prepared for the “anti-American tone” at the Tribune and the constant blaming of the United States for “most of the world’s ills.” Nor did they fully understand it. But Mexico City, she proudly pronounced, furthered “the work of world consciousness-raising.”31 NCNW president Dorothy Height agreed. The conference “helped women understand their differences.” There was a “strong anti- capitalism, anti-imperialism thrust,” she wrote in her memoir many years l ater, “and Western w omen were forced to recognize the disparity between their lives and the experience of w omen in less developed
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countries. While American w omen, for instance, w ere talking about advancing in their c areers, w omen from the developing world talked about how to create activities that could simply produce a little income or food.”32 The “world consciousness-raising” at the Tribune happened in part because of decisions made by Mildred E. Persinger and her twelve- member New York planning committee. A World YWCA leader and former Presidential Commission on the Status of W omen member, Persinger was steeped in the YWCA philosophy of democratic pedagogy, inclusion, and equality among nations and p eoples. She wanted a diverse, open, and participant-driven Tribune, and she fought to make that happen. She and Marcia Bravo, the committee’s staff person, recruited Third World women and speakers, organized panels with multiple perspectives on controversial issues, and encouraged participants to propose their own sessions.33 There was plenty of unstructured time for happenings, singing, dancing, ad hoc meetings, and “speak out sessions.” A diverse group of two thousand w omen endorsed revisions to the proposals being considered by the official UN conference. Latin American women hammered out their own declarations; “US and other labor union women” issued a “call for action” directed at removing discrimination in women’s “economic, political, and social lives.”34 Maida Springer and Dorothy Height participated in the Tribune as NCNW representatives. In 1970, a fter years of coaxing by Height, Springer had accepted an NCNW vice presidency. Her goals remained consistent with those of her past: fostering Black freedom and women’s rights through collective organization, democratic education, and transnational exchange.35 Building on Bethune’s “global vision” of “making common cause with all women of color,” NCNW had organized a major initiative “bringing women from developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean together with women from rural communities in the United States.” The monthlong program, funded by a generous grant from the USAID, included seminars in Mexico City, a tour of NCNW-funded projects in Mississippi, and a celebration in honor of Bethune’s one-hundredth birthday at Bethune-Cookman College. Height planned to use the events to activate a worldwide network of
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omen of color, develop “twinning” projects (transnational endeavors w where the parties committed to “help and learn from each other”), and create a NCNW International Division. The Mexico City seminar included Black women leaders from outside the United States—lawyers, economists, legislators, community leaders, and YWCA officials—and US women like prominent welfare rights advocate Ruby Duncan. The group agreed on the need for local women to develop and control their own aid projects and the advisability of combining “self-help activities” with government action.36 After Mexico City, Height, Springer, and other seminar participants traveled to rural Mississippi where, guided by Fannie Lou Hamer, they toured the NCNW cooperative pig farm, day care center, and retail marketing “self-help” projects Hamer had inspired a decade e arlier. The thriving farm cooperative loaned pigs to rural w omen who raised the animals in partnership with the state university’s agricultural extension, kept the litter, and distributed the financial (and nutritional) benefits to coop members. The idea of mutual aid and credit was not new to Third World w omen; Hamer’s theories of how economic self-sufficiency undergirded political power also felt familiar. But the shocking poverty and racism they encountered surprised and horrified them. One visiting dignitary, Madame Siga Sene, vice president of the Economic and Social Council of Senegal, was wrongly accused of shoplifting at a local store and briefly arrested. The ideas about America held by the international visitors were never the same.37 NCNW learned from these exchanges too. At a follow-up meeting in 1976 of NCNW and African delegates from Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, all countries where NCNW had started “pilot projects,” NCNW shifted its priorities. It vowed to boost the economic indepen dence of African women, exert pressure on the US government to sever ties with white supremacist regimes in South Africa, and support the Black independence struggles of Africa. To further t hese goals, NCNW affiliated with the Black Leadership Conference on Southern Africa, which called for “full independence for the Black p eoples of Namibia, Tanzania, and South Africa.” Later, Height helped create the lobbying group TransAfrica. As historian Rebecca Tuuri finds, “far from simply
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toeing the line of economic modernization and expansion of American capitalism” in their international work, NCNW responded to the concerns African women articulated.38 For Springer, the Mexico City gathering of women from around the world propelled her back into international work. In July 1977, she traveled to Nairobi as one of the coordinators of a “first of its kind” Pan- African Conference on the Role of Trade Union W omen. The conference opened with a discussion of the equality claims at the center of the UN Decade for W omen, followed by participatory workshops on the pros and cons of “cooperatives and credit” and of “women’s committees in trade u nions.” Concluding resolutions called for provision of credit to women, state-funded day care, “women’s departments” in labor bodies to coordinate transnational educational programs “in accordance with the UN Plan of Action,” and a review of ILO conventions to eliminate “unnecessary provisions” and “ensure their effective implementation.”39 Conference attendees talked optimistically about female leadership, the power of global sisterhood, and the “similarity” of trade union women’s problems internationally. No country had solved the problems women faced, Springer insisted—a point she later reinforced by taking a visiting delegation of African women “to hear US women complain about what’s wrong in the United States.”40 After Nairobi, Springer accepted consultancies with the ICFTU and the AFL-CIO in South Africa, Indonesia, and Turkey. She had trouble in South Africa b ecause the AFL-CIO viewed the African National Congress as too open to Communist partners and as a result had not backed its campaign against apartheid. But in Asia, “new ground” for Springer, she had more success, especially when she limited her focus to the problems faced by w omen in trade u nions. Her three-year Asian- American Free L abor Institute project in Turkey with Teksif, the Turkish Clothing Workers’ Union affiliated with ICFTU, involved multiple exchanges between US and Turkish union women and, in 1980, the creation of a women’s division in the Turkish Confederation of L abor.41 Springer was not the only prominent US trade union woman at the 1975 Mexico City conference. But the small delegation of trade unionists from the United States was especially striking when compared to the
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sizable numbers of l abor w omen from other nations. The AFL-CIO had paid little attention to the UN conference, in part b ecause it still lacked a women’s division in 1975 and had no women on its executive board. The Coalition of L abor Union Women, a national caucus of unionists dedicated to women’s equality, had organized in 1974, but it was just beginning to gain traction within the AFL-CIO. In Mexico City, it fell to other US feminists—women not in the AFL-CIO—to forge ties with labor women from the global South.42 Ela Bhatt, for example, the head of the Self-Employed W omen’s Association (SEWA), India’s largest women’s labor organization, left Mexico City with fond memories not of US u nionists but of Gloria Steinem and of helpful American businesswomen. A lawyer raised in a Brahmin family active in the independence struggle, Bhatt had created SEWA in 1972 from the w omen’s wing of the Indian Textile L abour Association, the “Eastern Union” so admired by Frieda Miller when she had traveled to India in 1955.43 SEWA, an all-female organization representing mainly rural self-employed women producers and sellers, helped w omen organize into u nions and cooperatives to better negotiate with employers, landlords, and government officials. It also offered them educational and financial assistance as entrepreneurs and inde pendent contractors. In Mexico City, Bhatt connected with Gloria Steinem, whose interest in India and in Gandhian social movements had not abated since her formative years in India. Ties between SEWA and US feminists grew a fter 1975. Decades passed, however, before US trade unions embraced SEWA and its new-style approach to empowering workers.44
On to Houston Mexico City and the UN Decade for Women galvanized women’s movements around the world and, on the whole, spurred feminist reform and awareness. In the United States, feminism jolted forward as well—but so did t hose who opposed it. Although American feminism was on a collision course with US conservatism before 1975, bipartisan government support for the UN Decade for Women—what conservatives
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called “federally-funded feminism”—infuriated the radical right.45 A conservative women’s movement had shown its potential in 1964 when Republican clubwomen, organized in the National Federation of Republican Women, challenged their more moderate Republican sisters and backed Barry Goldwater as their candidate for president. Goldwater gained the nomination but lost the election in a landslide. Nonetheless, the so-called New Right gained strength. By the 1970s, its principal spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly—whose self-published 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo, helped nail down Goldwater’s nomination—had built a powerful grassroots female counterinsurgency hostile to abortion, gay and lesbian rights, w omen’s careerism, and to what she hyped as feminist foreign policy: nuclear disarmament, ceding US national sovereignty to the UN, and aiding Communist revolutions around the world.46 When US feminists returned from Mexico City, eager to hold their own national conference in Houston as part of the UN Decade for Women, she and her backers were ready for battle. The 1977 Houston conference generated considerable grassroots enthusiasm from w omen across the country and won approval from the top female figures in the political establishment, including former First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford, as well as Rosalynn Carter, wife of then-president Jimmy Carter. With two thousand elected delegates and some sixteen thousand observers at the official 1977 conference, it was the largest federally supported meeting of women in American history. Yet it revealed deep divisions among US women. The spirited calls for reproductive rights, sexual freedom, civil and h uman rights, government support for childcare, and passage of the ERA from the majority at the official gathering were met by volleys of “no way” from conservative delegates (one-fifth of t hose elected) and their “pro- family” supporters meeting down the street. The counterdemonstrators, some adherents of a resurgent fundamentalist Christianity, united around the slogan “Stop Taking Our Privileges” or “STOP ERA.” For many, the ERA now symbolized what was at stake. But b attles over the UN, America’s role in the world, and “big government” w ere as b itter as those over women’s rights and sexuality. In the minds of some conservative w omen, Mexico City spawned Houston, and its aim was to bolster
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a pro-Communist foreign policy and the UN agenda of “ ‘one-world’ totalitarian supra-government.”47 President Carter had given his blessing to Houston (though he would not attend). He also approved of the push at the UN for a convention on women’s rights.48 But a fter he received the official report from Houston, with its bold twenty-six-plank “National Plan of Action,” he backed away from pursuing implementation.49 In 1978, he was in the midst of bruising legislative b attles and had l ittle appetite for another. Corporate political power had solidified over the 1970s, and in 1978, conservative business and anti-regulation groups waged what Auto Workers’ chief Doug Fraser called a “one-sided class war.” In two stunning victories, they turned back labor law reform and a consumer rights bill long in the making.50 Carter had persuaded Esther Peterson to return to government in 1977 specifically to push the consumer rights bill over the top. She pulled out all the stops, assembling a broad coalition of traditional Democratic allies and relying on the nation’s foremost public interest crusader, Ralph Nader, to generate pressure from below. But more than a hundred House Democrats defected as right-wing ads attacked “big government” and corporate lobbying intensified. Peterson was furious. She took some solace in Carter’s subsequent executive order creating a Consumer Affairs Council. But with Oliver’s health deteriorating, she stepped back for the moment. When the time was right, she vowed, she would return to the fray.51 Despite Carter’s lackluster response to the Houston Plan of Action, the Democratic Party maintained its commitment to the ERA, abortion rights, and other mainstream feminist goals. But the days of bipartisan political support for such issues had ended. In 1980, the Republican Party dropped its forty-year endorsement of the ERA from its platform. The revitalized corporate right joined forces with Phyllis Schlafly conservatism to forge a powerful new Republican politics. Its mantras of gender and sex traditionalism, economic libertarianism and state rights, and hostility to government social programs, multilateralism and international institutions helped elect Ronald Reagan president. A significant “gender voting gap” emerged in 1980, with women leaning Demo
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crat and men, especially white men of all classes, leaning Republican. African Americans had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since the mid-1960s. Now white w omen followed their lead. New political party battle lines had been drawn, with the Democratic Party the standard- bearer of racial and gender reform, and the Republicans deepening their drive to win the South and the white working class.52
American Feminism at Century’s End By the early 1980s the vigor of the new feminism in politics was subsiding. The ERA failed to win the necessary thirty-eight state ratifications by the extended deadline of 1982, and when reintroduced into Congress in 1983, it lost. NOW continued onward, but its agenda had narrowed, its ranks thinned, and its national presence receded.53 Full rights feminism had not disappeared, however. Such activism, especially among low-income women and w omen of color, persisted, though at the time few noticed.54 Often misperceived as not “feminist” because many women joined coed groups and did not prioritize women’s equal rights with men, this “hidden feminism” would only grow in the 1990s and beyond.55 Even as US politics lurched rightward in the 1980s, certain aspects of feminism, at least rhetorically, became cultural norms. The idea of women’s individual “empowerment” and fulfillment through paid work found widespread acceptance. Corporate America a dopted a conservative version of assimilationist feminism. Structures of inequality remained intact, but employers proclaimed allegiance to equal opportunity, diversity, and equal treatment of men and women. Managerial and professional jobs opened to educated w omen as the sex barriers to entry lowered. The movement for gay and lesbian rights gained traction too, despite intense opposition, and sexual mores in the workplace changed, albeit slowly, as the EEOC and the courts interpreted sexual harassment as prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.56 Yet militant conservatives, men and w omen, chipped away at women’s reproductive rights, and workers suffered painful losses of income and self-esteem as corporate power soared, largely unconstrained
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by government. In search of cheaper l abor and more control, companies broke union contracts in the 1980s and, assisted by sympathetic courts, politicians, and National Guard troops, defeated well-organized and desperate strikers fighting for their livelihoods and their communities. Blue-collar unions were especially hard hit in the 1980s and 1990s: large progressive unions in the packinghouse, garment, auto, steel, and mining industries declined precipitously.57 Service and public sector unions, now majority female and nonwhite, fared better. Boosted by new state labor laws and inspired by the civil rights and w omen’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, millions of blue- and white-collar government workers had unionized. In the 1980s, many of these unions conducted successful pay equity campaigns in states and local municipalities across the country and pressed legislatively for childcare, family leave, part-time equity, and other reforms. Unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) also added thousands of immigrant and minority workers in janitorial, home care, and other low-paying service jobs to their ranks. In 1997, state-funded home health aides, a group composed largely of women of color who assist the elderly and disabled in their homes, voted for SEIU, despite opposition from all quarters. It was the largest single u nion victory since the Flint auto sit-downers won their contract in 1937. Other caregivers— childcare providers, nannies, and housekeepers—organized as well.58 But u nion gains in the serv ice economy were not enough to stem rising economic inequality. Job insecurity, anxiety, and ill health spread among low-and middle-income Americans. Median hourly wages fell for the majority of men after the mid-1970s, and as men’s wages dropped, the gender wage gap—or the wage inequity between w omen and men—improved modestly. But women faced longer hours at home and on the job, as the numbers of female-headed h ouseholds soared, w omen took on primary breadwinner responsibilities in two-parent households, and social services shrank. Wealth and well-being gaps among women, as well as those among men, widened. Some women—often those already privileged and without dependents—moved up the occupational ladder; o thers stayed poor, toggling between multiple jobs and saddled with sole responsibility for family caregiving. One woman’s liberation
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rested on another’s exploitation, as high-flying career w omen turned to immigrant and women of color to take up the slack at home.59 Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Parties took action to remedy the eroding living standards of the majority of Americans. The Republicans had led the assault on regulation and social welfare in the 1970s and 1980s, spreading the gospel of free-market libertarianism and small government. As their power grew, so did their hubris and unwillingness to compromise. The Democratic Party had fought back without success, crippled by its inability to offer a coherent alternative vision. By 1993, when the Democrats returned to power, they too had been remade in the neoliberal image. The so-called New Democrats had taken charge. The solutions of the 1930s are “relics of the past,” Charles Peters claimed in an influential 1982 “neoliberal manifesto” for his fellow Democratic dissidents. “We are liberals . . . but we no longer automatically favor unions and big government,” Peters explained. Indeed, it was every boat on its own upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial bottom. During the eight-year Clinton presidency, the bare-bones welfare system became even more punitive and restrictive, the private prison system exploded, and private sector unionism continued its free fall. According to the New Democrats, competitive markets and greater access to education would encourage the kind of economic growth necessary to solve the problems plaguing the country. They were wrong. Economic in equality and precariousness accelerated at a dizzying pace.60 As the quality of life for many Americans fell, America’s global power rose. US military and nuclear capacity dwarfed its rivals, and US- dominated global institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and, a fter 1994, the 123-member World Trade Organ ization (formerly GATT)—regulated world finance and trade. Those with capital, especially the US financial and corporate elite, gained unprecedented influence. Global economic competition increased in the 1990s, spurred by the entry of Russia, China, and other new capital ist economies into the fray and by free trade agreements like the 1995 North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Governments across the world—under pressure from mounting debt, inflation, and sluggish economies—turned to
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foreign investment, export-led development, and large-scale commercial agriculture. Many nations privatized state-owned enterprises and cut public and social spending. Latin American and other Global South nations, whether social democratic, socialist, or conservative, found it difficult to forge an alternative to neoliberal development. By the end of the 1990s, a corporate-dominated American-style capitalism, dedicated to unregulated markets and small government, had spread worldwide.61 The w omen’s movements of the late twentieth c entury, including US feminism, w ere shaped by t hese realities. Feminism operated in a world dominated by US capital and its values and shaped by powerful global corporations wary of governmental or u nion constraints. Feminists worldwide found it difficult, if not impossible, to reverse growing economic inequality, insecurity, and social strife. Yet these yawning injustices spurred some US feminists to rebuild bonds with activists around the world—often relying on gatherings at the UN, the ILO, and the ICFTU—and to create new movements in the United States fighting for democracy and equality for all.
Feminist Insiders at the UN At the UN, feminist leadership and energy in the 1980s and 1990s came primarily from the Global South. After Mexico City, the UN authorized a second world w omen’s conference in Copenhagen in 1980 and a third in Nairobi in 1985. Trends evident in Mexico City—the rising legitimacy of Third World feminist perspectives and the shift of leadership and dynamism to the Global South—continued in Copenhagen. But Nairobi was a tipping point—the moment in which Third World w omen carrying forward an egalitarian, full rights feminism moved into leadership at the United Nations. The gathering in Nairobi was larger and more diverse than its prede cessors. Delegates from 157 nations and 163 NGOs attended the official conference. The NGO Forum attracted an additional twelve to fifteen thousand people, with many from Kenya and other African countries. Mixed-sex social justice NGOs, often affiliated with loose “transna-
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tional advocacy networks” involving North–South and South–South alliances, were numerous at both venues. NGOs had shifted in location, membership, and priorities toward the Global South, energized by regional gatherings in Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere.62 Global South women were represented at all levels of the UN bureaucracy and occupied key conference planning roles. Dame Nita Barrow, f uture governor-general of her home country Barbados and former president of the World YWCA and the World Council of Churches, coordinated the NGO Forum. She took over from the US women, also World YWCA leaders, who oversaw the 1975 and 1980 Forums. Like her predecessors, Barrow brought a commitment to democracy and inclusion, as well as an insistence that poverty and global inequality w ere central to the feminist project.63 Maida Springer, in Nairobi for the conference, beamed in approval as a Caribbean woman of color gaveled the NGO Forum to begin. In 1984, she and Pauli Murray had traveled the country together, stopping for a national pre-Nairobi strategy conference in Wisconsin before returning to Pittsburgh where they now shared a two-family h ouse. Murray never made it to Nairobi: she died of cancer a few weeks before the 1985 conference opened, with Springer at her side. Springer, in mourning, traveled alone to Africa. She returned again in 1990, and in 2002, at age ninety-two, she visited Africa for the last time. She came to raise funds for K enya’s agricultural u nion, the nation’s largest, and to support its fight for a child’s right to education.64 In Nairobi, a critical mass of global women saw issues of male domination and sexuality as intertwined with other forms of exploitation, and they validated multiple forms of feminism. We share “common roots of w omen’s oppression and inequality,” Dame Barrow declared, but given that “one w oman’s liberation is another’s destruction, consensus is not possible.” Yet understanding is achievable, as is cooperation, she insisted, as long as women’s issues are defined in the broadest terms and different priorities respected.65 Nairobi delegates even found a way to resolve some of the bitter geopolitical controversies that had plagued earlier UN w omen’s conferences. The breakthrough occurred despite the opposition of the staunchly conservative US delegation headed by
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Maureen Reagan, d aughter of President Ronald Reagan. A fter days of tense exchange over the perennial proposal equating Zionism with racism, delegates approved K enya’s substitute language condemning “all forms of racism and racial discrimination.” Even so, Israel, Australia, and the US delegation voted against it. The United States ended up endorsing the overall conference statement, but it isolated itself from the world community by casting the sole vote against paragraphs in favor of re distribution of the world’s wealth, “international economic relations on a just and democratic basis,” and sanctions aimed at ending South Africa’s apartheid system.66 Esther Peterson was not at Nairobi, but she too was battling US conservatives at the UN in 1985. In 1980, Peterson had agreed to represent the world’s foremost consumer federation, the International Organ ization of Consumers Unions (IOCU), at the UN. She held the position for over a decade, stepping down as she turned eighty-five. She reveled in taking her Carter era fight against the antiregulatory corporate lobbyists into the global arena. This time, however, she fought against the US government, as well as those in alliance with it. Peterson was proud to work for the international organization set up in 1960 by economist Colston Warne, her old friend from Bryn Mawr Summer School days. By the 1980s, the IOCU had member organizations in a hundred countries and a president, Anwar Fazal, from the Global South. It stood for the rights of the world’s consumers to basic sustenance and environmental health, as well as to other rights such as product safety and consumer redress and information. At the UN, with Peterson as its point woman, the IOCU mobilized for a set of “Universal Guidelines for Consumer Protection” and a “Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations.” Both aimed to prevent multinational corporations in the Global North from dumping dangerous and inferior foods, medicines, and other goods in poor countries and to encourage the fair treatment of workers and consumers by global capitalists. In pursuit of t hese objectives, Peterson went nose to nose with Alan Keyes, Reagan’s UN representative, and Washington University business professor Murray Weidenbaum, who chaired Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers in the early 1980s. Both asserted the right of US
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pharmaceuticals and other Western multinationals to sell dangerous products abroad that they could not legally sell at home. Weidenbaum caricatured the United Nations as a “global Nanny” and claimed it had no jurisdiction over economic matters. Peterson was usually restrained in criticizing the behavior of her opponents. But in this instance, she recounted, with some sadness, the United States conducted itself reprehensibly. It used “unethical” and “underhanded tactics” and refused to even discuss possible compromises. Yet Peterson managed a partial victory: in 1985 the UN Assembly recommended a pared-down version of the IOCU’s Guidelines for Consumer Protection. Peterson’s more ambitious efforts to prevent dumping and regulate global capital failed, however. Much to her chagrin, in the 1990s her proposals got sidelined at the UN. And when action shifted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, the IOCU, under new leadership, backed away from its earlier expansive vision and settled on trying for a seat at the WTO table, a b attle it lost.67
Human Rights Redux In 1995, US women made their way to Beijing, China, for the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women. The official Summit and NGO Forum drew tens of thousands of delegates and activists, with close to eight thousand coming from the United States, including a large official Clinton-appointed delegation and an NGO group headed by Bella Abzug. Financial support from the Ford Foundation and other US donors enabled an unusually diverse group of American women to participate. Black women and others historically on the periphery of power held positions of influence. The clash of ideas eventually produced the “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action,” a comprehensive, bold blueprint for advancing women’s equality and wellbeing.68 In a plenary address heard by millions, First Lady Hillary Clinton proclaimed “women’s rights are h uman rights.” The phrase came to be associated with the First Lady but it did not spring full-blown from her brow. Earlier generations of feminists made similar arguments, with the Universal Declaration of H uman Rights most famously affirming the “dignity and
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worth of the human person” and the right to “life, liberty and security of person.”69 “Women’s rights are human rights” also reemerged as a worldwide slogan because of a younger cohort of dedicated w omen activists, including US feminist Charlotte Bunch. Charlotte Bunch’s global vision of inclusivity and h uman rights drew on her early experiences in the Methodist church, the ecumenical University Christian Movement, and international YWCA programs. Her religious heritage led her to see others around the world as equals and spurred her to contribute to global betterment. In the early 1960s, as a student at Duke University active in the campus YWCA, she participated in pray-ins protesting racial segregation and picket lines against the US war in Vietnam. A fter college, she coordinated national antiwar mobilizations, organized radical separatist women’s groups, and helped launch the gay rights movement in Washington, DC. As a committed anti-imperialist, she traveled to North Vietnam to bolster the efforts of Vietnamese w omen to end the war. L ater, inspired by what she learned at the UN conferences in Copenhagen and Nairobi, she began piecing together a transnational feminist network against sex trafficking and sexual violence. By 1990, she held a tenured professorship in women’s studies at Rutgers University and had founded, with the backing of women’s historian and Douglass College dean Mary S. Hartman, a Center for Women’s Global Leadership.70 Leading up to Beijing, the center organized relentlessly to make gender-based violence part of the UN’s human rights agenda. Bunch had heard the phrase “Women’s Rights Are H uman Rights” from Gabriela, a transnational Filipino women’s alliance. And activists in Latin America and the Caribbean had already made the struggle against vio lence a priority when they gathered in 1981 at the first feminist encuentro and declared an “International Day against Violence against Women.” But Bunch had the financial and institutional resources to spread the idea globally. The center’s multiyear worldwide campaign for w omen’s human rights culminated in a dramatic daylong speak-out at the 1993 UN Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. The conference affirmed “the human rights of women and of the girl-child” as “an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights.” It found
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“gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment and exploitation incompatible with the dignity and worth of the h uman person” and pledged their elimination. In Beijing, the idea of “women’s rights as human rights” took an even firmer hold and became a rallying cry for women’s movements globally.71 But w ere feminists remaking an organization that no longer mattered? At century’s end, its critics charged, the UN often seemed helpless in the face of mounting h uman tragedies. To take but one glaring problem, violence against women and girls continued as a horrific and widespread accompaniment to foreign conquest and genocidal civil wars. Nonetheless, despite its limitations, the UN made a concrete and positive difference in the lives of many. Its covenants, including those promoting w omen’s rights and h uman rights, bolstered grassroots movements for human dignity and shaped legislation and corporate policy worldwide. It served as a crucial site for the rise of alternative perspectives on global development; it enabled social justice activists from the same nation to find each other and build national as well as transnational connections. In the United States and elsewhere, it fostered a feminist politics more attentive to global inequalities and US empire.72
ILO “Dual Strategy” Feminism Persists Critics expressed similar doubts about the efficacy of the ILO in the late twentieth c entury as the forces pushing for labor market liberalization gained strength. Yet the ILO still exerted considerable sway in the world. Its role as a global moral authority legitimizing the adoption of progressive labor policies, laws, and practices by states, employers, and unions remained in place, as did its power to connect and inspire activists. And as women’s presence within the organization grew, the ILO incorporated new feminist precepts into its standards and organizational practices, helping change behaviors worldwide.73 In the forefront of these efforts were Global South women like Mexico City conference coordinator Aida González Martinez who led Mexico’s ILO delegation for many years and chaired the ILO Governing Body in the early 1980s,
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and ILO deputy director-general Mary Chinery-Hesse of Ghana whose portfolio from 1989 to 1999 included ILO implementation of the Beijing Platform of Action. Gender equality became a priority for the ILO in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1981, the ILO enacted what Sweden’s Sigrid Ekendahl and other trade union w omen had demanded decades e arlier: a convention prescribing “equal opportunity and equal treatment for men and w omen with family responsibilities.” The 1981 “Workers with F amily Responsibilities Convention” replaced the weak and more limited 1965 recommendation on women with family responsibilities; it shifted attention to men’s be havior and to how responsibilities for f amily labor, including care of others, could be equalized between men and w omen.74 In the 1990s, the ILO took steps to integrate gender perspectives into the design, implementation, and outcome of all its programs. In a significant reframing of priorities, the ILO named C100 (equal remuneration) and C111 (nondiscrimination) among its “core” or fundamental labor standards in 1998. With the election of Chilean diplomat Juan Somavía as ILO director-general in 1999, the ILO set up a Bureau for Gender Equality.75 Still, even with these substantial changes, the ILO held fast to its historic “dual strategy” of equality and protection for w omen. Night- work and other woman-only protections remained on the books, and the ILO strengthened protections for pregnant women and mothers, passing Convention 183 in 2000, the first update of maternity standards since 1952. Indeed, the ILO’s “dual strategy” of equality and protection approach gained fresh legitimacy from the expansive global feminism led by Third World w omen. The ILO’s hybrid gender strategy found further validation as Western feminist theorists began to question “gender blind” policies. Women’s bodies and social circumstances should not be ignored in devising legislation, feminist intellectuals argued; nor should a “male standard” be enshrined as universal.76 US women did not take leading roles in the ILO as the organization developed t hese policies. The United States had rejoined the ILO in 1980 a fter walking out in 1975, but it sent few w omen as delegates to organizational gatherings during the Republican administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush.77 Certainly there were numerous quali-
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fied women the US government could have appointed as government, employer, or worker delegates. But the AFL-CIO was also responsible for the all-male US worker delegations. The massive u nion federation only added its first woman to its thirty-five-member executive board in 1980. Joyce Miller, a prominent childcare advocate, garment union leader, and first president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, remained the token woman on the executive board until the mid-1990s.78 In the 1980s, as in the past, the AFL-CIO concentrated its energies at the ILO on advancing Cold War concerns. In particular, it lavished money and manpower on anti-Communist movements in Eastern Eu rope. In 1980, Polish activist Anna Walentynowicz’s firing at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk had touched off a massive strike with demands for free speech, pay hikes, and recognition of Solidarność (Solidarity), an independent union, as the voice of the workers. Within two years, Solidarność had ten million members. The AFL-CIO made backing Solidarność a priority and lobbied heavily for the ILO and the US State Department to do the same. Its actions w ere not necessarily determining—many actors propelled the situation forward—but the AFL-CIO provided resources to Solidarność at critical early moments. In 1989, a Solidarity-led coalition triumphed in parliamentary elections, ushering in a non-Communist Poland.79 With the subsequent unraveling of Soviet rule across Eastern Europe and the fall of the USSR in 1991, the US labor movement slowly re oriented its Cold War foreign policy. It also took steps to include more women in top leadership. The pivot in both instances came in 1995 when a reform slate of officers was elected, including John J. Sweeney, former head of SEIU, as president, and Linda Chavez-Thompson, a Mexican American labor organizer from Texas, as the federation’s first female executive vice president. Once in office, Sweeney expanded the AFL- CIO executive board, adding more w omen and people of color, and established a w omen’s department u nder the direction of clerical orga nizer and SEIU 925 head Karen Nussbaum. He named former flight attendant union president Barbara Shailor, an outspoken political progressive, to direct the AFL-CIO’s International Department, still mired in the rigid anti-Communism of the Meany-Lovestone era. Shailor had
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served as the international director for the Machinists Union and set up the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador. With Sweeney’s backing, she transformed the AFL-CIO’s International Department and created a post–Cold War American Center for International Labor Solidarity (dubbed the Solidarity Center). A Washington-based NGO with major funding from the AFL-CIO, the new center promoted democratic unionism and worker rights in alliance with local labor partners in fifty-five countries.80
The ICFTU Joyce Miller joined the ICFTU Women’s Committee in 1982, the first US representative in two decades. Even so, US women remained marginal to the organization’s affairs, just as they did in the ILO.81 The AFL- CIO reaffiliated with the ICFTU in 1981 a fter a twelve-year absence, but the homecoming was not always cordial. AFL-CIO leaders in the 1980s still distrusted the social democratic ICFTU and disapproved of its willingness to cooperate with Communists.82 Moreover, European and US labor movements faced different domestic challenges: many European labor movements enjoyed the backing of social democratic states; the AFL-CIO battled a hostile state and a capitalist class with exceptional power. AFL-CIO membership fell, while ICFTU ranks held steady and then expanded. New u nions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa affiliated, and in the post–Cold War 1990s, the ICFTU absorbed trade u nion centers in Russia and the former Soviet bloc.83 A profound reconfiguration in gender dynamics in the organization was also underway. Majority-female public sector and service unions were among the fastest-growing and most powerful affiliates, especially in the wealthier nations. But w omen streamed into industrial and other unions in every region of the world. By the end of the century, 40 percent of ICFTU members were w omen. In many national unions, women had reached parity; that is, their proportion in the u nion equaled their proportion in the l abor force. Although the “pyramid of exclusion” in u nion leadership persisted, with fewer women the higher up the pyramid one climbed, w omen won top posts in the ICFTU, propelled by pressure
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from a well-organized, active W omen’s Committee and shifting sexual demographics. As women’s power grew, the ICFTU adopted core feminist tenets into its mission. It set up an Equality Department in 1992. Four years later it named “gender equality” one of five priority areas. Following the lead of affiliates in Latin America and elsewhere, it stipulated “set aside” seats for w omen on executive boards and targets of 20–30 percent w omen in all decision-making bodies. With five reserved seats for the ICFTU Women’s Committee on the executive board, women leaders were no longer isolated.84 One male official scoffed, “Women should be holding wooden spoons, not trade union positions,” but he was outmaneuvered and outnumbered.85 Yet despite the ICFTU’s diversifying ranks and its turn t oward feminism, its potential remained unfulfilled. Its absolute numbers grew, but it represented a shrinking proportion of the world’s workers. It simply could not expand fast enough to offset population growth and the relentless rise of a waged proletariat.86 Its power diminished too as technology and globalization transformed relations between labor and capital, conservative political leaders undermined unions, and social democracies succumbed to pressure to privatize and deregulate. In a world ruled by corporate capitalism and governed by the cold logic of American-style market fundamentalism, the ICFTU needed new po litical allies and new global economic strategies. It also needed to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of trade unionism and rethink its approaches to organizing and representing informal and precarious workers.
Renewal from Below The global working w omen’s movement that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s helped renew an aging trade u nionism. It also energized full rights feminism worldwide. The traditional labor movement, including the AFL-CIO, did not always recognize these new-style labor movements as allies, in part because many challenged the traditional labor u nion model premised on adversarial combat between waged workers and employers. There were also tensions over what issues should be given
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priority and which strategies worked best to raise living standards for the majority and make societies fairer and more inclusive. India’s Self-Employed W omen’s Association (SEWA) became the largest of the new u nions and was among the most innovative. Already thriving before its principal leader Ela Bhatt traveled to Mexico City in 1975, SEWA blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s. A fter it severed ties with the Textile L abour Association in 1981 and became a wholly indepen dent w omen’s union, it spread rapidly from its base in Gujarat to twelve states in India and to other countries, and its membership ballooned to over a million. The Textile L abour Association “had very l ittle room for new ideas and a dwindling ability to face new challenges,” Ela Bhatt later explained. “It had become a top-down organization where the leaders had stopped listening to each other and, more important, to the members.” SEWA wanted to be a different kind of union. It achieved that ambition and modeled for the world a new way of empowering workers.87 SEWA made unorthodox choices about who to organize and how. It targeted nonwaged workers (self-employed vendors and small producers), and it adopted tactics other than collective bargaining. It encouraged home-based and rural cooperatives; set up banks and credit unions; organized mutual aid groups for housing, childcare, and health care; convinced landowners to allow SEWA members to grow crops and live on unoccupied land; and devoted considerable energy to politics and education. To some traditional u nionists, this was heresy: u nions took in waged workers and signed contracts with employers. To them, SEWA was not a union at all. SEWA leaders countered, arguing that all who worked should be part of the labor movement and that advancing the collective power of workers required a range of tactics. But not all trade u nion leaders were convinced, and SEWA’s approaches remained controversial into the twenty-first century.88 In the United States, SEWA gained legitimacy among feminist internationalists more quickly than among trade u nionists. Indian political economist Devaki Jain, a friend of both Gloria Steinem and Ela Bhatt, facilitated connections between US feminists and SEWA. Her essays on Indian w omen, democracy, and development favorably assessed SEWA
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and raised SEWA’s profile in the international w omen’s community. In 1984, Jain contributed a laudatory account of SEWA to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Global. Although some judged SEWA’s “self-reliance” strategy and its encouragement of ownership and cooperative enterprise as proto-capitalist entrepreneurialism, Jain defended the organization. Influenced by Gandhi, among o thers, Jain believed in the need for individual empowerment among India’s female poor and in the radical potential of new forms of solidarity among unwaged workers. What most proponents of “micro-credit” missed was what SEWA most valued: nothing would change without marginalized workers organizing to exert economic and political power. Of course, they needed loans, but, as they knew, loans alone would change little.89 SEWA believed its collective power derived from individual self- esteem, democratic practice, and a shared identity as “work s isters,” regardless of religion, caste, or class. All “work sisters” deserved human rights and dignity, and all learned together at SEWA’s Educational Acad emy. Against great odds, including rising Hindu-Muslim tensions and the opposition of unions, employers, landowners, and the state, SEWA succeeded in building solidarities across difference and improving the lives of many. When Hillary Clinton visited SEWA headquarters in 1995, she left “inspired” and “overwhelmed” by what she encountered. As her visit ended, she recalled how the crowd of seated w omen “in a stunning flash of moving colour . . . sprang to their feet and began singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ in Gujarati. They and Ela [Bhatt] w ere living affirmation of women’s rights.”90 What she did not seem to appreciate was that SEWA was also the living affirmation of worker power. SEWA relied on cooperative self-help among low-income women to achieve collective advance. Their approach was a far cry from the microenterprise model envisioned by Muhammad Yunus and others close to the Clintons.91 SEWA gained widespread media attention in the 1990s, in part because of Clinton’s visit, and became the best known of the new female-led l abor organizations. But t here were many o thers, all of them carrying on the full rights feminist tradition. Some, like SEWA, began inside traditional unions and broke off in search of more autonomy and the ability to pursue different priorities and new ways of organizing.
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thers began as part of the w O omen’s movement, often supported financially by feminist NGOs. Some later formed alliances with organized labor; some did not. A steady stream of NGO donor money flowed from north to south in the 1980s and 1990s and, at times, from south to south and from urban to rural. Feminist NGOs provided poor w omen with literacy and popular education classes, employment and legal assistance, health services, and other programs. They helped poor w omen organize as much as did traditional unions.92 New associations of women workers flourished in the sprawling “export zone,” factory complexes built on the exploitation of cheap female labor and corporate tax breaks from nations looking to attract investment and stave off debt collectors. As the demand for household, care, and sex workers boomed, women in these sectors organized. The new women’s unions sought traditional “bread and butter” demands: living wages, more control over working conditions, and respect for the work they performed. But they also pursued other concerns. Like SEWA members, many worked in the informal sector and lacked “employee” status and social benefits. They wanted official recognition as workers and as citizens deserving the same rights and protections as others. At the same time, they often cared deeply about improving the quality of the interpersonal interactions they had at work with t hose who employed and supervised them or with the customers, clients, and patients they served.93 Stopping the sexual violence and harassment they experienced was of prime importance. Beginning in the early 1990s, the rapes and murders of hundreds of young women employed in the largely American-owned maquiladora plants lining the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States grabbed headlines. Although a particularly gruesome example of the vio lence women faced at home, on the job, and in public places, the problem was pervasive, and justice rarely obtained. Only a small number of the perpetrators were ever caught or convicted.94 Two cases—the South African farmworkers and the sex workers of Buenos Aires—illustrate the range of concerns expressed by some of the most marginalized groups of women globally and the unusual tactics they adopted to tackle their problems in the 1980s and 1990s. The South African w omen who founded Sikula Sonke (We Grow Together),
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a female-led u nion of Western Cape farm workers, confronted “slave- like” conditions in the field and domestic violence at home, fueled by the employer policy of compensating workers with liquor made from the grapes they harvested. The farmwomen first came together as a group when they attended literacy classes and domestic violence workshops run by a European-funded NGO, Women on Farms, in the 1980s. Within a decade, women from 200 commercial farms had set up their own member-based l abor organization, independent of NGO funding, and had secured rights to r unning w ater, protections against eviction from company housing, toilets in the field, day care, and other concessions from the wine and fruit farm owners for whom they worked. Initially, the union accepted women workers and “non-workers”; eventually it accepted men. To deter violence, however, male members who abused women at work or home forfeited their right to u nion represen tation. Before joining, men signed a pledge not to engage in violence or sexual harassment and to act to stop such behavior in others.95 Like Sikula Sonke, the Female Sex Workers’ Association of Argentina (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina or AMMAR) initially organized separately from men and the u nion movement. Part of an upsurge of sex worker organizing in the 1980s and 1990s, which included groups in India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ecuador, and elsewhere, AMMAR concerned itself with problems of social ostracism, stigma, and the frequent violence women encountered from police and clients. AMMAR gained the backing of local l abor organizations in the 1990s, and in 2001, it became an official member of the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), an unusual umbrella trade union federation across ten cities in Argentina. CTA formed as an alternative to the historic Confederación General de Trabajo, dominant since Perón took power in the 1940s; it welcomed independent contractors, the unemployed, and others excluded from the more orthodox labor movement. Being part of CTA, with its identity as a workers’ group, gave the w omen cultural and social legitimacy; having male allies and collective power helped them meet other goals as well, including an end to police harassment and arrest, access to health care and welfare benefits, and decriminalization of sex work (for consenting adults over eighteen).96
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Many of the female-led labor movements of the late twentieth century continued into the twenty-first c entury and even expanded. Nonetheless, the challenges they faced as the new century dawned were formidable indeed. Western-led globalization and rising corporate privilege left wreckage in its wake. Patriarchal power persisted, and the great chasms of wealth and well-being within and between nations remained. As with working women’s movements in the past, progress depended on allies. The fate of twenty-f irst-century movements for the many rested on choices made at all levels of society and among all peoples.
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Of the Many, By the Many, For the Many
Members of Domestic Workers United at a 2008 protest in New York. New York Daily News, 28 June 2008. Courtesy of the photographer, Christie M. Farriella.
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Given the crises bearing down on the world in the early twenty-first century, despair is never far away. Yet we can take heart from the activists who carried the struggle for democracy and justice from the twentieth century into the next. They chose hope over despair and by so doing improved the lives of many. A hundred years ago full rights feminists reoriented society from the “individual” to the “social.” The intellectual revolution they led made profound turnarounds in politics possible. Progress depends on such rethinking and renewal. We must once again embrace the “social” and once again sit at the “common t able.” In what follows I foreground aspects of the early twenty- first century women’s movement I find heartening—namely its refusal of despair, its creativity, and its continuing affirmation of the social. I conclude by reflecting on what the story told in For the Many suggests for the future. By the start of the new millennium, what Nancy Fraser calls “neoliberal feminism” had sunk deep roots in the United States. Decoupled from a project of political-economic transformation, this stripped-down feminism bolstered the hypercompetitive, individualistic, and hierarchical world of unregulated capitalism, asking only that w omen sit at the corporate t able and partake of the power and wealth at the top. Rather than challenge economic inequality and profit maximization, elite w omen like Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg pedaled “lean-in” assimilationist feminism for the few.1 Other tendencies seemed worrisome as well. The “professionalization, or NGOization, of feminist movements,” Sonia E. Alvarez declared, meant a less democratic feminism. As states and international organizations relied on NGO professionals, grassroots voices got lost.2 Moreover, as “gender mainstreaming” took hold, feminist “outsiders” became government “femocrats,” to use Hester Eisenstein’s term, and a limited kind of “state feminism” flourished.3 Some worried that an expert-bureaucratic model rather than a participative-democratic model had become the principal reform strategy.4 Others contended that the “women’s rights are h uman rights” framework paid insufficient attention to the structural forces perpetuating poverty, class inequality, and rising statelessness. Rather than undermine the neoliberal order,
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feminists had been co-opted by it.5 Truly, t here was much to lament and many to blame. The unfinished feminist agenda felt overwhelming. Yet counterforces had not disappeared. Creative thinkers and activists in international organizations and at the grassroots in the United States and around the world refused to give up on democracy and full equality. They rejected the lean-in gospel and viewed me-first corporate feminism, with its disdain for the many, as the problem, not the solution. Over the last two decades, sometimes invisible, often unheralded, these resisters picked up the thread of full rights feminism in the early twenty-first century and brought it into the present.
New Century Internationalisms In the first decades of the new century, feminist internationalists at the UN moved economic justice and substantive equality concerns to the center of their politics. A recognition took hold that despite Beijing and the rise of a rights-based framework, women’s lives remained “mired in multiple inequalities,” as Manisha Desai put it in 2005. In her view, transnational feminists needed to embrace “intersectional analysis and democratic practice” and join with other movements dedicated to real equality and economic redistribution.6 A coalition of 300 women’s, human rights, and social justice groups took up the challenge and united to shift the UN agenda t oward making “rights real for w omen through substantive equality.” The coalition’s goals moved forward in 2010 when the UN created a single entity, UNWomen, with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet as executive director. In its 2015 report assessing UN w omen’s programs twenty years a fter Beijing, UNWomen foregrounded the “economic and social dimensions of gender equality” as its priority.7 Other feminist internationalists challenged the neoliberal orthodoxies of profit-maximizing globalization through the World Social Forum, an alternative to the World Economic Forum. Attendance at the World Social Forum (WSF) peaked in 2005 as 155,000 p eople descended on Porto Alegre, Brazil, and regional social forums met in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. WSF efforts to foster sustained dialogue among
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civil society groups and create a “movement of movements” floundered on its inability to craft workable democratic structures. Even so, it demonstrated the appeal of a big tent global effort prioritizing economic justice and sustainability. This strand of activism remains very much alive.8 Naomi Klein’s 2019 eloquent call for a new “economy of care and repair,” moving gender and climate justice to the fore, continues the WSF spirit, as do the appeals of Kenyan Green Belt founder Wangari Maathai and Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, for “women to lead the way in tackling development and climate together.”9 Still others looked to the international l abor movement. Though declared dead and buried countless times, organized l abor innovated and even expanded in the twenty-first c entury, buoyed by the rising demands of the marginalized—often women and people of color—for respect and just compensation for their work. For the first time since 1919, t hose seeking to expand unionism and further worker solidarity across borders no longer faced an international l abor movement divided along Cold War lines. In 2006, the social democratic ICFTU merged with affiliates from a much-diminished Communist WFTU to form a new 166 million-member federation, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Within four years ITUC membership stood at 175 million; by 2019 it had expanded to 207 million u nionists in 163 countries and territories. A single powerful global l abor federation now joined nearly all the major u nion centers in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Asia/Pacific.10 At its founding, the ITUC became the largest international organ ization of working w omen in the world. It was also one of the most diverse, a place where w omen of all races, classes, religions, and cultures interacted. In 2010, 40 percent of the ITUC was female—some 70 million women—and women outnumbered men in some of the most influential ITUC affiliates. Change followed at all levels: the delegate mix at ITUC World Congresses shifted; the ITUC Executive Bureau feminized, becoming one-third female by 2010; and women took the reins of top leadership. In 2010, Sharan Burrow, former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, captured the ITUC’s highest office, general secretary. She was reelected in 2014 and 2018.11
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Grassroots Innovators Female-led unions and associations, many affiliated with the new ITUC, held their own in the early twenty-first century. Increasingly, their unorthodox forms of organizing came to be seen as legitimate and effective. In 2018, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) claimed 1.5 million members, making it the largest u nion in India and one of the largest labor bodies in the world. It sustained its power by never losing sight of the centrality of democratic education in realizing each person’s potential and in fostering solidarity.12 Other twenty-first century women’s unions, especially t hose representing workers in marginalized occupations, devised similarly creative and democratic routes to influence. To take but one example, in 2013, garment sweatshop workers in Bangladesh pulled off a stunning feat of innovative l abor organizing. It took decades of preparation. In 1997, w omen operatives launched the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF), a female-majority and female-led u nion, with help from the Solidarity Center and other groups. BIGUF opened its own schools and took up a range of w omen’s issues neglected by traditional u nions, including day care and breast-feeding breaks at work. By 2013, one-quarter of Bangladesh’s four million garment workers—90 percent of whom were female—had organized, and BIGUF was leading nationwide strikes demanding factory safety and living wages. In April 2013, a fter more than a thousand garment workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza building outside Dhaka, the strikes escalated, with tens of thousands in the streets. A month l ater, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Association signed the 2013 Fire and Safety Accord, a game-changing l abor agreement; other signatories included four Bangladeshi national u nions, two international u nion federations, and 120 global brands and retailers. A legally binding contract, the accord improved conditions for thousands of workers, men and women. Feminist NGOs, anti-sweat shop consumer activists, and allies in the ITUC and in the ILO had all pushed for the agreement, but the pressure exerted by Bangladeshi workers, the majority female, proved indispensable.13
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US u nions and NGOs did not offer as much support to t hese new unions as other wealthy countries like Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands. But groups like the Solidarity Center and women like Ai-Jen Poo, Hilda Solis, and Barbara Shailor, to name a few, made notable contributions. Ai-Jen Poo and Hilda Solis intervened effectively to promote labor organizing and fair treatment for domestic workers worldwide; Barbara Shailor used trade negotiations to protect worker rights and raise living standards. Born in the United States to Taiwanese immigrant parents, Ai-Jen Poo turned to care worker organizing soon after graduating from Columbia University. In 2000, she cofounded Domestic Workers United (DWU) to raise living standards for New York’s 200,000 nannies, housekeepers, and elder care workers, a group 90 percent foreign born and almost wholly female. Over the next decade, DWU won a statewide Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first such bill in the nation, and helped found the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The US organization also joined with its counterparts in other countries to set up the International Domestic Workers’ Network, an advocacy group for the estimated 67 million domestic workers worldwide. In its first global campaign, the network targeted the ILO and lobbied for passage of a new convention, Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Ai-Jen Poo represented the US labor movement at the 2011 ILC, a coup for domestic worker organizations. She pushed vigorously for enactment of the convention, drawing on stories of how the landmark New York law she had helped pass made a difference in the lives of caregivers and care recipients.14 Hilda Solis, US Secretary of Labor, backed her up. Solis was also the daughter of immigrants. Her Mexican-born father, an activist in the Teamsters Union, had been disabled by a workplace injury; her Nicaraguan m other worked as a nanny and at a Mattel toy assembly plant after coming to the United States. The first in her f amily to attend college, Solis rose from local to state and then to national po litical office in California, winning election in 2000 to Congress. In 2009, when President Obama appointed her US Secretary of Labor, she became the first Latina in the cabinet. She admired Ai-Jen Poo and the other “luchadoras” who fought for l abor rights and upheld the value of
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care, or of “serving one another.” In Geneva, she spoke with conviction about the necessity for domestic worker rights, remembering her mother’s experience, and made sure the US government cast its votes in favor of the proposed convention.15 Domestic workers and their allies celebrated in 2011 as the “Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention” (C189) passed. The convention (and accompanying recommendation) recognized domestic workers as deserving of respect and just treatment like other workers, and called on states to guarantee minimum wages, freedom of association, paid leaves, written employment contracts, and other rights. By 2019, twenty-nine nations had approved C189 and the International Domestic Workers Network had morphed into a global union with half a million members in forty-seven countries.16 Although the US has so far failed to ratify C189, nine US states have passed laws granting domestic workers overtime pay, sick leave, and protections against sexual and racial harassment. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, still led by Poo, has also introduced a National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights into Congress.17 Although less well known than either Poo or Solis, Barbara Shailor’s advocacy of worker rights and international labor standards as a US State Department official during Obama’s presidency had far-reaching consequences. After years as the international director of the AFL-CIO and first head of the Solidarity Center, Shailor served as Special Representative for International L abor Affairs in the Obama State Department. At her insistence, in 2013 the administration suspended its preferential trade benefits with Bangladesh u ntil the government s topped its arrests of garment u nion activists in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster.18 Shailor turned to using trade to raise labor standards with full recognition of the controversies surrounding her strategy. In the 1990s, as an insider at the AFL-CIO and the ICFTU, she had witnessed firsthand the bitter divisions in the labor movement over attaching social clauses, or labor side agreements, to multinational trade treaties. Th ose, like Shailor, who favored “social clauses” believed such clauses—as well as fair trade and democratically regulated global economies—benefited workers in nations signatory to the agreement. “Globalization is h ere to
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stay,” Shailor declared; labor must “demand regulation of the global capital market” and invest in organizing workers abroad. O thers remained skeptical, arguing that social clauses legitimized bad trade treaties and did little to stem job loss in First World countries or slow the global “race to the bottom” as multinational capital moved across borders in search of cheap labor. The solution, in their opinion, was less trade, less globalization, and government restraints on capital flight.19 The b attle is ongoing, but partly in response to criticism, advocates of “social clauses” moved from stipulating wage standards in trade treaties to securing human rights standards. Nations could honor freedom of association, freedom of speech, the right to nondiscrimination, and other human rights, they reasonably argued, without raising wages or eliminating jobs. Indeed, companies who had to rely on denying h uman rights to compete should not be operating. Framing “worker rights as human rights” had popular appeal, and it resonated with grassroots social movements that used the slogan to press for better local and state labor laws.20 Labor internationalists also took up the idea of “social floors,” or state guarantees of minimum income, health, and education. “Social floors” were necessary, feminist economist Naila Kabeer argued in 2004, because the “social clause” strategy left untouched the vast numbers of poor women in economic sectors not affected by international trade. A fter the 2008 economic crisis, the UN initiated a global “right to social security campaign.” The ILO, responding to worker and women’s groups, reinforced this effort in 2012 by adopting the “Social Protection Floor Recommendation” (R 202).21
The Fight for the F uture Full rights feminism in the new century thus refuses to be defeated. The struggle for democracy and equality continues—in international arenas and in domestic politics; in institutions like the UN, the ILO, and the ITUC; in trade negotiations and in the halls of Congress; in neighborhoods, workplaces, and homes across the world. And in 2020, as I write, the fight for democratic equality hardly appears to have peaked. Indeed, a powerful convergence of top-down and bottom-up social democratic
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activism is occurring in the United States that bodes well for a better future.22 A new generation is once again remaking the Democratic Party and demanding it speak for the many. An unprecedented number of progressive w omen won congressional seats in 2018, with younger women of color, unapologetic about using the state to achieve full rights for all, chalking up major upsets. The gender voting gap was wider than ever before, with 23 percent more women voting Democratic than men. A whopping 92 percent of Black women voted Democratic, followed by 72 percent of Asian women and 70 percent of Latinx women.23 Just as significantly, a new generation turned to grassroots political activism with a vengeance. They crowded into town halls and streamed into the streets. Buffeted by a series of crises—military conflicts around the world, the 2008 financial collapse, the unraveling of immigration reform—and angry at persistent racial and gender injustices, the millennial generation holds more left-leaning world views than their Boomer parents. As Ruth Milkman documents, the Millennials spearheaded social movements after 2008 that combined hard-hitting criticisms of free-market capitalism with an intersectional full rights politics. Women were at the forefront of these movements. A disproportionate number were Black and Latinx, and many identified as LGBTQ. A fter 2016, t hese movements regrouped and massive protests erupted, targeting the multiple injustices of our times. A “feminism for the 99%” had found its voice. US upheavals—from the 2017 Women’s March, Dreamer protests, and #MeToo speak-outs to the 2020 surge of Black Lives Matter—reverberated around the world and prompted sympathetic actions. At the same time, US activists followed the lead of their counter parts abroad and took action on climate change, health care guarantees, and wealth inequality.24 What would the full rights feminists of the twentieth c entury say to those of the twenty-first? What advice might they give about how to strengthen the fight for the many? Let me offer what I see as six of their most important insights. First, the w omen profiled in For the Many would ask that we remember their successes and not give up the fight. In moments of ascendant authoritarianism and plutocratic rule, it is difficult to remember that a
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different world ever existed or to imagine that another world is possible. Yet full rights feminists in the United States and elsewhere were not practicing a marginal politics. Nor were the challenges they faced and the tragedies they endured any less daunting. In the first part of the twentieth century, they successfully mounted a majoritarian counter to an elite US politics of concentrated wealth, power, and prestige. They imagined a different future and the social democratic politics they helped create had an impressive run. They transformed the nation in the 1930s and they continued chipping away at the structures of inequality and injustice in the decades a fter, opening the way for the rising movements of the new c entury. Second, they would ask we not forget that the dominant wing of twentieth-century feminism valued the “social.” Full rights feminists organized cross-class and inclusive movements to raise the “standard of life” for all. They rejected the idea that elites knew best or could surmise what “others” wanted. They paid close attention to democratic institution building at all levels—local, national, and global—and sought decision-making processes for workplaces, communities, and nations that involved ordinary people. They poured energy into educational programs aimed to ensure non-elite women had the self-esteem, confidence, and breadth of knowledge to take charge. Third, previous generations of full rights feminists saw global engagement as a necessity. It remains so. The world is at risk, and we have no option but to organize with others to save it and ourselves. In their view, peace and social stability at home rested on global economic justice and universal h uman rights and was best achieved through international cooperation, regulated economies, and international norms of intertwined rights and freedoms for all. They resisted the siren call of US exceptionalism and recognized that Americans, like o thers, lived in an interconnected and interdependent world. There was no way forward except through negotiation and exchange with p eople from different nations, religions, and cultures. A so-called realist foreign policy resting on military might and “America First” was unrealistic and doomed to failure. Fourth, they knew egalitarian internationalism depended on collective power locally. International insiders could not make progress without
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organized outsiders. Although characterized as naïve by their opponents, full rights feminists consistently acknowledged the centrality of power. Calls for worker rights and advocacy of bottom-up collective power were not afterthoughts but priorities. Sociologist Gay Seidman labels this perspective “trans-nationalism from below.” International labor and human rights standards, she contends, can never be effective without strong democratic movements in every nation.25 The rights to free speech, assembly, and direct action are feminist issues, because no democratic movement can flourish without such freedoms. Hierarchical systems may have room for a few w omen at the top. But for the many to have power, recognition, and prosperity, the many must organize. Fifth, full rights feminists teach us that democratic states are a necessary counterbalance to the power of capital. Without such a countervailing force, capital dominates economically and politically. Moreover, progressive international institutions depend on the flourishing of social democratic nation states. Such states, as problematic as they are, are more responsive to the p eople than multinational corporations or institutions removed from the political fray such as the IMF or the World Bank. They are also preferable to a world run by dictators or a world without rules—what US feminist Jo Freeman once labeled “the tyranny of structurelessness.”26 Because the quest for global consciousness and international cooperation must be linked to democratic state building, it will always be a struggle on multiple fronts and many levels. And finally, as they knew, there is no way to avoid “politics.” It is how we reconcile the differences among us. Differences need not be transcended nor should conflict disappear. Compromise and empathy and tolerance are what allow us to live together and thrive. Each of us is an Other. Th ere is no place to hide, no utopia to be found. We only have each other.
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Books, like social movements, rarely have a clear beginning. But when I emerged from my college dorm one morning in spring 1969 en route to a Philosophy 101 lecture on Kant—or perhaps Kierkegaard?—and encountered New York’s W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) hexing Smith College for its patriarchal ways, a new world beckoned. I didn’t join the New York WITCH contingent, though I too tried using guerilla theatre to shame Smith College for never having a female president and for hiring philosophy professors who told us not to worry about really understanding Kant or Kierke gaard. We (the attentive girl knitters and scribblers) only needed to know enough for cocktail chatter. One WITCH, however, became a dear friend, taught me about faraway places and unsettling radical political theorists, and amazed me with her poetic sound bites, bass guitar playing, and huge halo of unruly hair. Florika Remetier d idn’t live long enough. And only while writing this book did I stumble on her hidden story of migration and trauma. In 2017, in Oberstaad, Germany, at a seminar on women and trade unions in Europe, I fell into conversation with a Romanian graduate student. She knew the Romanian spelling of Florika’s name and within seconds she handed me her cell phone with a haunting 1952 photograph of a lonely five-year-old Florika, taken in a US Displaced Persons Camp near Bremen, Germany. After four years of moving from camp to camp, Florika and her f amily would be sailing for Los Angeles, the March 1952 US Army’s Weekly Information Bulletin announced. The smitten reporter hailed Florika as a “tiny Romanian violin prodigy” e ager to bring her music to America. Thank you, dear friend, for making the journey and for the gifts you brought. Their traces are everywhere in this book. 427
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Near my office at Rutgers University in New Brunswick is what I came to call the “city of w omen,” a remarkable cluster of women’s institutes, centers, and programs. I had the good fortune to be embedded in that community in the 1990s and 2000s. It was a vibrant, contentious, diverse world, and it also took me far afield from my Atlanta roots. I thank Harriet Davidson, chair of the W omen and Gender Studies Department, for her administrative magic, which enabled me to accept the directorship of the Institute for Research on W omen from 2001 to 2004 and host global visitors, researchers, and activists from every field of study and every continent. As part of the Institute for Women’s Leadership team during those years, I spent memorable Jersey shore retreats with Mary S. Hartman, Ruth Mandel, and Charlotte Bunch. I was in awe of them then and still am. I thank Joanna Regulska for facilitating my 2007 summer scholar-in-residency at the Centre for W omen’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen, where I investigated US- Scandinavia transatlantic connections and benefited from the expert hosting of Ellen Mortensen, director of SKOK. Other intellectual homes offered sustenance too in t hose years. The editors of International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) invited me to join the editorial board in 1995, and for two decades I learned from l abor scholars of Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the M iddle East, and the United States. I treasure the time I spent with ILWCH founder and Yale historian David Montgomery, a visionary globalist who never gave up on worker solidarity. I would not have survived my four years as ILWCH senior editor from 2006 to 2010 without the generosity of Carolyn Brown, Kate Brown, Jeff Cowie, Andrea Estepa, Geoff Field, Josh Freeman, Michael Hanagan, Vicky Hattam, Jennifer Klein, Allison Miller, Mae Ngai, Peter Nekola, Donald Quataert, Marcel van der Linden, and Peter Winn. I owe ILWCH editors Molly Nolan, Judy Stein, and Prasannan Parthasarathi extra thanks for their comments on my work-in-progress. In L abor Studies, my home department at Rutgers, Sue Schurman’s presidency of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA)—and her leadership, with another colleague, Adrienne Eaton, of a Solidarity Center global research project—allowed
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me to journey to Brazil, South Africa, and Peru. I sat transfixed as union activists from around the world told of the violence they faced from authoritarian regimes and employers and their fearless, innovative responses. Thanks to Sue and Adrienne and to the Solidarity Center for funding my research on twenty-first-century global labor movements, much of which appears in For the Many. Lisa McGowan, the then senior program officer at the Solidarity Center, shared her expertise on gender and women’s labor leadership with me at key moments. I thank Sahra Ryklief, general secretary of IFWEA, for her advice and for connecting me with Sikula Sonke and other Global South labor groups. The path to 2020 was not without detours. One of the most rewarding of these was the three years I spent trying to piece together the dramatic story of Tanaka Taka, narrated in the early chapters of For the Many. While I was a Warren Center fellow at Harvard in 2008, Lisa McGirr and Sven Beckert encouraged my initial trip to Japan. I later followed Tanaka’s trail to Stanford University, to the California YWCA Asilomar Camp overlooking the Pacific, and to the ILO Archives in Geneva. For help with the next steps—digging into the Japanese sources and understanding the context of what I had found—I relied on the generosity of experts in Japanese history and culture. Dr. Martin Heijdra, Chinese and East Asian Studies bibliographer, Princeton University, provided indispensable assistance with locating Japanese-language sources. I am indebted to Yurika Tamura for her translation of the Japa nese texts into English and to Yoshiko Uzawa for encouraging me when I visited Japan and for sending me primary sources. O thers, including Laura Hein, Valerie Matsumoto, Jill Jensen, Barbara Molony, Sheldon Garon, and Nelson Lichtenstein, caught missteps and offered constructive interventions. I was lucky enough to receive research leaves and fellowships along the way. My heartfelt thanks to the Warren Center in American History, Harvard University; to Lisa McGirr and Dan Carpenter, who codirected the 2007–8 seminar on social movements and politics; and to all the other Warren Center Scholars that year. What a delightful and astute group. I spent 2010–11 as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a perfect environment for those daunting first drafts. I appreciated
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our weekly seminars, the congenial lunchtime conversation, and knowing I was doing my best to continue the study of social problems begun by Mary van Kleeck at Russell Sage before World War I. A painting of our mutual benefactor, Mrs. Russell Sage, smiled down on me as I climbed the stairs most mornings to my spacious office. An American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2015–16 cleared space for other chapters to emerge. The seven months I spent at Stockholm University as the 2016 Kerstin Hesselgren International Fellow, funded by the Swedish Research Council, brought me closer to a book. There is no better place to write than Stockholm in August. The light and air w ere as I imagined, and I had long stretches of uninterrupted time. The fall was just as productive. I benefited enormously from my connection to the Department of Economic History and to its chair, Yvonne Svanström, who navigated the fellowship process and, as my host, took great care to connect me with like-minded researchers and make me feel at home. Thank you Jenni Vuorenmaa for your patience with all the paperwork! Klara Arnberg, Karin Carlsson, Silke Neunsinger, Maria Sjöberg, Fia Sundevall, and Ulla Wikander w ere especially generous with their time and advice. My ties (and adventures) with many of my Swedish colleagues predated my 2016 sojourn and happily continue. In 2019, I received a sabbatical year from Rutgers University to complete the writing of For the Many. I thank the History Department and the L abor Studies and Employment Relations Department for their financial support and organizational flexibility. I count myself lucky to be part of these two vibrant departments and to spend time in seminars and other settings with such an extraordinary group of gifted historians and labor relations scholars. I also thank Eugene McElroy for his expert bibliographic help and Laura Walkoviak, Patty Deitsch, and Judy Lugo at the Rutgers Labor Center for attention to my endless copy requests and all e lse. I owe an immense debt to my friends and colleagues who read the big, unwieldy essays and chapters as they emerged. I appreciate the time you took to offer guidance. I ask forbearance where we did not always agree. Thank you Jeremy Adelman, Didier Aubert, Ava Baron, Eileen Boris, Karin Carlsson, Dorothea Browder, Tony Fels, Mary Margaret Fonow,
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Suzanne Franzway, Jennifer Guglielmo, June Hannam, Nancy Hewitt, Dorothea Hoehtker, Deborah Kaple, Michael Kazin, Jim Kloppenberg, Lisa Levenstein, Katherine Marino, Joanne Meyerow itz, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Silke Neunsinger, Molly Nolan, Yevette Richards Jordan, Joan Sangster, Mona Siegel, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Fia Sundevall, Katherine Turk, Lara Vapnek, Susan Ware, Judy Wu, and Susan Zimmermann. I thank also the anonymous Princeton University Press reviewers. The book is much better for your attention to it. So, too, does it benefit from those who aided me in the research pro cess. A number of gifted doctoral students and postdoctoral visitors contributed their research acuity: Shauni Armstead, Julia Bowes, Ian Gavigan, Kate Hardy, Anna Harewood, Rachel Pierce, Julia A. Smith, and Amy Zanoni. In addition to my trusted Japanese translators, I turned to my colleagues and friends Karin Carlsson, Silke Neunsinger, and Fia Sundevall for Swedish translations; Joel Rainey and Pascale Voilley for French; Eloisa Betti for Italian; and Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Susan Zimmermann for German. I found Renée Berthon, Remo Becci, and Laura Freeman at the ILO always very responsive to my archival requests. I thank the ILO’s Emmanuel Reynaud for invitations to Nantes and support of my research. The ILO-sponsored conferences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the multiple ILO workshops organized by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehkter, and Susan Zimmermann proved exceptionally fruitful and high-spirited. I thank Marcel van der Linden for his advice when I visited Amsterdam and for his wise counsel about global labor more generally. I appreciated the opportunity to present parts of the book to many different audiences. I gave talks at Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, University of Michigan, New York University, Brown, Bucknell, Binghamton, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and other US universities, as well as seminars and lectures in Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, G reat Britain, Iceland, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Peru. I especially valued my visiting scholar lecture at the University of Connecticut in March 2018, where Nina Dayton arranged my stay. Equally satisfying was the month I spent in Sydney, Australia, at Macquarie University. I learned much from Lucy Taksa, my
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energetic host, and from Marilyn Lake who shared her vast knowledge of global history as well as her favorite restaurants and Australian l abor history sites. I appreciate the patience and flexibility the Princeton University Press editors showed when it became clear that the book had flown off in an unanticipated direction and that it might not return for many seasons. Sven Beckert, Brigitta van Rheinberg, and Amanda Perry nudged the project along initially. Eric Crahan and Jeremi Suri brought it closer to the goal line and helped me clarify my arguments. Priya Nelson, Thalia Leaf, and Angela Piliouras expertly guided me through the final revisions and the publication process. Kathleen Karcher secured photo permissions with dispatch and care. A small group of trusted companions not too far away kept me sane. I thank Ava Baron, Hilary Brown, Azi Ellowitch, Ruth Milkman, and Deborah Gray White for sage advice, perspective, and occasional drinks. A neighborhood pod—Miguel Centeno, Deborah Kaple, Frank Ordiway, Suzanne Johnstone, and Alan Frey—lifted my spirits in the time of Covid. The Socialist Ladies Secretariat—Laurie Nussdorfer, Ginny Diamond, and Corinne Rafferty—are never far from my thoughts. Ava Marron, my daughter, continues to amaze. She speaks her mind and has not lost heart. She cares about the women in this book and is carrying on their fight. Finally, thank you, Michael Merrill, my dearest companion in all things. You cheerfully shared the burdens of our many travels to distant archives and libraries. You praised, encouraged, and objected as you read and reread various drafts—always offering the more elegant phrase, the more nuanced context, the bolder claim. Your faith in me, and in what can be learned from the past, made the book possible. Princeton, New Jersey November 2020
Text Permissions I thank Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the ILO for granting permission to adapt material from earlier published essays.
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Material in chapter 1 is adapted from Dorothy Sue Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. L abor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919,” Journal of American History 100: 4 (March 2014): 1052–85, with permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 2 uses excerpted material from Dorothy Sue Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders: 1919 and Its Legacies,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards, and Gender Equity, 1919 to Pre sent, ed. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, 27–49 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), with permission of the ILO. Copyright © 2018 International L abour Organization. Material from chapters 2 and 4 draws on Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Who Speaks for Workers? Japan and the 1919 ILO Debates over Rights and Global L abor Standards,” ILWCH 87 (Spring 2015): 213–34, with permission from Cambridge University Press. Material from chapter 3 originally appeared in Dorothy Sue Cobble, “International Women’s Trade Unionism and Education,” in Michael Merrill and Susan J. Schurman, eds. Global Workers’ Education, Special Issue, International L abor and Working-Class History 90 (Fall 2016): 153–63, reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.
a bbr e v i at ions
ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund AFL American Federation of Labor
AFL- C IO American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization AFMHS Arvonne S. Fraser Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA AH Alice Henry AHNLA Alice Henry Papers, NLA
AHR American Historical Review
AIFLD American Institute for Free Labor Development ALSL Alice K. Leopold Papers, SL ANWTUL Agnes Nestor Papers, Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders (microfilm edition) ARAB Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek (Swedish Labor Movement Archives and Library, Huddinge, Sweden ARABLO Landsorganisationen i Sverige [LO of Sweden] Collection, ARAB ARABSE Sigrid Ekendahl Papers, ARAB ASWCRUL Affiliated Schools for Workers Collection, Special Collection and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA b Box 435
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BRNLA Bessie Rischbieth Papers and Objects, NLA CB Clara Mortenson Beyer CBSL Clara Mortenson Beyer Papers, SL CCC Carrie Chapman Catt CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women CGT Confédération générale du travail CGTU Confédération générale du travail unitaire Ch(s) chapter(s) CIM Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres CIO Congress of Industrial Organization CPUSA Communist Party USA CROM Confederación Regional Abrera Mexicana CSW Commission on the Status of Women CUOHROC Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA CW Caroline Farrar Ware CWFDRL Caroline F. Ware Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York, USA CWYU Caroline F. Ware Papers, Yale Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA DAMPU David A. Morse Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA DE Dorothy Elliott DETUC Dorothy Elliott Papers, Trades Union Congress Library Collection, London Metropolitan University, London, UK DGB Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund DK Dorothy Kenyon
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DKSSA Dorothy Kenyon Papers, SSA DSSL Doris Stevens Papers, SL EAL East Asia Library and Gest Collection, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA EB Elisabeth Burger EBSL Elisabeth Burger Papers, SL EC Elisabeth Christman EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EHSLNSW Eleanor Hinder Papers, SLNSW EP Esther Peterson EPSL Papers of Esther Peterson, SL ER Eleanor Roosevelt ERGW Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, online, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA ERI Equal Rights International ERT Equal Rights Treaty ETNAC Eileen Tallman Sufrin Fonds, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada f File or Folder FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt FLSA Fair Labor Standards Act FM Frieda S. Miller FMSL Papers of Frieda S. Miller, SL FMSL[ad] Additions to the Papers of Frieda S. Miller, SL FP Frances Perkins FPCU Frances Perkins Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA
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FPFDRL Frances Perkins Papers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York, USA GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GTLMU Papers of Gertrude Tuckwell, Trades Union Congress Library Collections, London Metropolitan University, London, UK HRC Human Rights Commission HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee IACW Inter-American Commission of Women
IALL International Association of Labour Legislation
IAW International Alliance of Women ICFTU International Confederation of Free Trade Unions ICFTUIISH International Confederation of Free Trade Unions/ International Trade Union Confederation Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands ICW International Council of Women ICWW International Congress of Working Women IFTU International Federation of Trade Unions IFWW International Federation of Working Women IFWWSL Records of the International Federation of Working Women, SL ILC International Labour Conference [Proceedings of the ILC available at http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo /P/09616] ILGWU International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union ILO International Labour Organization ILOA International Labour Organization Archives, Geneva, Switzerland ILOAAT Albert Thomas Cabinet, ILOA
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ILOAHB Harold Butler Cabinet, ILOA ILOAJW John Winant Cabinet, ILOA ILOAPF Prewar Files, ILOA ILOAWF Women’s Files, Central Archives, ILOA ILR International L abour Review ILWCH International L abor and Working-Class History
INS Immigration and Naturalization Service
IRSH International Review of Social History ITUC International Trade Union Confederation JAH Journal of American History. JB Jeanne Bouvier JBBHVP Fonds Jeanne Bouvier, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France JLC Jewish Labor Committee JSNLA Papers of Jessie Street Papers, NLA
JWH Journal of W omen’s History.
KH Kerstin Hesselgren KHNLS Kerstin Hesselgren Papers, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden
LH Labor History
LL Life and L abor, 1911–1921
LLB Life and Labor Bulletin, 1922–1950
LN League of Nations LOR Leonora O’Reilly LORWTUL Leonora O’Reilly, Papers of the W omen’s Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders (microfilm edition). LSI Labour and Socialist International LWV League of Women Voters
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MA Mary Anderson MASL Mary Anderson Papers, SL MADSL Mary Agnes Dingman Papers, SL MB Margaret Grace Bondfield MBTUC Margaret Grace Bondfield Collection, Trades Union Congress Library, London Metropolitan University, London, UK MBVC Margaret Grace Bondfield Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA MD Mary E. Dreier MDR Margaret Dreier Robins MDRWTUL Margaret Dreier Robins Papers, Papers of the W omen’s Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders (microfilm edition) MDSL Mary E. Dreier Papers, SL MF Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin MFSLNSW Papers of Miles Franklin, SLNSW MHSLV Muriel Heagney Papers, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
MLR Monthly L abor Review
MMB Mary McLeod Bethune MMBARC Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA MNRUL Mary T. Norton Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, NJ, USA MRB Mary Ritter Beard MS Maida Springer
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MSKARC Maida Springer Kemp Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA MSKSL Papers of Maida Springer Kemp, SL MVK Mary van Kleeck MVKSSA Mary van Kleeck Papers, SSA MWSL Mary N. Winslow Papers, SL NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NACW National Association of Colored Women
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, USA
NAW Notable American Women
NAWSA National American Woman Suffrage Association NCL National Consumers’ League NCNW National Council of Negro Women NCNWNA National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Records, NARA NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia NLRA National Labor Relations Act NOW National Organization for Women NOWSL Records of the National Organization for Women, SL NWP National Woman’s Party NWPLC National Woman’s Party Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA NWTULLC National Women’s Trade Union League of America Records, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA (microfilm, 25 reels). NYA National Youth Administration
NYT New York Times
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NYWTUL New York W omen’s Trade Union League Papers, Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and its Principal Leaders (microfilm edition) N YWTULTA New York Women’s Trade Union League Papers, The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York, New York, USA ODI Open Door International PAAW Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women PAFL Pan-American Federation of Labor PCSW President’s Commission on the Status of Women PN Pauline Newman PNSL Pauline Newman Papers, SL
PPWA Pan-Pacific Women’s Association
Pt(s) part(s)
RDWL Ross Davies Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, UK
RR Raymond Robins RRWSHS Raymond Robins Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, USA RS Rose Schneiderman RSPTA Rose Schneiderman Photographic Collection, TA RSTA Rose Schneiderman Papers, TA
SAP Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti
SE Sigrid Ekendahl SEWA Self-Employed Women’s Association SL Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA SLNSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
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SPD Sozialdemorkratische Partei Deutschlands SPSU Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA SSA Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA TA Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner L abor Archives, New York University, New York, New York, USA TS Tony (Toni) Sender TSWSHS Toni Sender Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, USA TUC Trades Union Congress UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization US United States USDL United States Department of Labor USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics USWB United States Women’s Bureau v volume WBGRNA Women’s Bureau, International Division, General Records, 1919–1952, Record Group 86, NARA WBIWFNA W omen’s Bureau, International Division, International Work File, 1945–1956, Record Group 86, NARA WBW William Bauchop Wilson WC Women’s Charter WFTU World Federation of Trade Unions
WHR Women’s History Review
WIDF Women’s International Democratic Federation
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WIDFTA Women’s International Democratic Federation, TA WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom WJCC Women’s Joint Congressional Committee WLC Women’s Labor Congress WPA Works Progress Administration WSMI Women and Social Movements International—1840 to Present, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, Alexander Street Press, online database WTUL Women’s Trade Union League WW Woodrow Wilson YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association YWCASSA YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, SSA
no t e s
Prologue 1. Zadie Smith, “On Optimism and Despair,” New York Review of Books, http://nybooks.com /articles/2016/12/22/on-optimism-and-despair. 2. For a helpful introduction to the history of social democratic thought and its variations over time and place, see James T. Kloppenberg and John Gee, “Social and Economic Democracy,” in A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age, ed. Eugenio Biagini and Gary Gerstle (London, forthcoming). 3. “Liberalism,” for example, is sometimes reduced to its nineteenth-century conservative individualistic variant or conflated with neoliberalism, tendencies I reject h ere. On the multistranded discourse of liberalism, see Helena Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2018); James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (NY, 1998); Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998); and Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, 2006). Similarly, socialism comes in many varieties and is not synonymous with Marxism or with a belief in “state socialism.” See, among o thers, Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth C entury (NY, 2006); Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln, 2015); and Gary Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism (New Haven, 2019). 4. William L. O’Neill popularized the term “social feminism” in Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (Chicago, 1969). The “social feminist” coalition brought together a broad cross section of women, including some who held more conservative political views than t hose espoused by full rights feminists. For elaboration on the conflict between social feminists and the National Woman’s Party, see, among others, J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, 1973); Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987); Susan Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (Westport, 1981); Amy E. Butler, Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA Debate, 1921–1929 (Albany, 2002); Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Boulder, 2013), ch. 9; and Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Social Rights and Workplace Justice in Modern America (Princeton, 2004). 5. Rauchway, Blessed among Nations: How the World Made America (NY, 2006). I am indebted to Thomas Bender and other pioneering American historians of the 1990s who insisted US history cannot be understood as exceptional or isolated from global forces. See, among 445
446 n o t e s t o p r o l o g u e o thers, Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002) and Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (NY, 2006). The explosion of writing on international organizations, networks, and cross-border exchange proved equally inspiring. Classic early interventions include Leila Rupp, Worlds of W omen: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, 1997); Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, 1998); and Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, 2002). For a sampling of the immense range and richness of more recent work, consult Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Rama, and Helmut Reimitz, eds., Cultures in Motion (Princeton, 2014); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (NY, 2017); Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow, ed. Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History (NY, 2017); Kristen Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist W omen’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, 2019); Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black W omen and Internationalism (Urbana, 2019); Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2009 (NY, 2019); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019); Mona Siegel, Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for W omen’s Rights after the First World War (NY, 2020); and Lisa Levenstein, They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties (NY, 2020). Despite this global turn, synthetic accounts of twentieth-century US feminism still concentrate on domestic developments and rely on nation-centered explanatory frameworks. In contrast, For the Many emphasizes US women’s international engagements and sees global forces as crucial shapers of US women’s history. 6. For national and global inequalities of income and wealth, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2014) and Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, 2016). 7. How social democratic feminists defined and practiced democracy will be further elaborated in the text. Suffice it to say at the onset that although “democracy” can be cynically deployed to cloak illiberal practices, not all who sought it for themselves or others did so disingenuously. Nor did all those who espoused “democracy” see it as a singular “American” construct or a superior belief that justified its imposition on o thers. 8. On the racial, cultural, and imperial prejudices of US and Western w omen internationalists, see, among o thers, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994); Chandra Mohanty, Feminisms without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, 2003); Christine Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned: Race, Class, and Internationalism in the American and British W omen’s Movements, 1880– 1970s (London, 2004); and Laura Briggs, “Gender and U.S. Imperialism in U.S. W omen’s History,” in The Practice of Women’s History, ed. S. Jay Kleinberg et al. (New Brunswick, 2007). The uses and limits of the imperial frame for US history are detailed in Patricia Schechter, “Feminist Historiography, Anti-imperialism, and the De-Colonial,” in Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti- Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism, ed. Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton (Ithaca, 2015), 153–66, and in Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” AHR 116 (December 2011), 1348–91.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 447 9. In For the Many I am concerned to explore how transnational encounters shaped US omen, as well as how they affected others. Given the multiple vectors of power along lines of w class, race, nationality, and other differences, one cannot always assume “American” w omen held the upper hand in cross-border relationships. On the inadequacy of frameworks assuming the “unidirectional exercise of power,” see “Introduction,” in Competing Kingdoms: W omen, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, ed. Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo (Durham, 2010), 1–16.
Chapter 1: Sitting at the “Common Table” 1. For the sake of simplicity, I use the acronym WTUL to refer to the national organization and its local branches. I also refer to the WTUL as the “league.” If I am speaking of the national WTUL headquarters or an individual WTUL branch only, I will so indicate. 2. I use the term “elite” as a shorthand way of referring to a diverse group of w omen—middle class and professional, upper class and leisured—not in the working classes. 3. Allen F. Davis, “The Women’s Trade Union League: Origins and Organization,” LH 5 (Winter 1964), 3–17; Robin Miller Jacoby, The British and American W omen’s Trade Union Leagues, 1890–1925: A Case Study of Feminism and Class (NY, 1994); Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia, 1980); Kathleen Nutter, The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 (NY, 2000); Kristen Gwinn, Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism (Urbana, 2010), 70–74; and Louise W Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (NY, 2010), 131–32. 4. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (NY, 2002), 249; Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (NY, 1902), 8–9; Addams, “A Modern Lear,” Survey 29 (2 Nov 1912), 131–37; Wendy Sarvasy, “A Global ‘Common Table’: Jane Addams’s Theory of Demo cratic Cosmopolitanism and World Social Citizenship,” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, ed. Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski (Urbana, 2009), 183–202. 5. Knight, Jane Addams, 132. 6. For examples, Nancy Schrom Dye, “Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in New York W omen’s Trade Union League, 1903–1914,” Feminist Studies 2, 2/3 (1975): 24–38; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a L ittle Fire: W omen and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 89–91. 7. WTUL “First Platform, 1907,” in Mary Winslow, “Notes for a Speech, NYWTUL, April 10, 1939,” b 1, f 2c, MWSL; Margaret Dreier Robins, “Self-Government in the Workshop: The Demand of the WTUL,” LL April 1912, 108–10. Rose Schneiderman, “Twenty-Five Years with the WTUL,” LLB, May 1929, 1–3. Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 8–9. 8. For quotes: “A Contract with the People: Platform of the Progressive Party a dopted at its First National Convention,” Chicago, 7 Aug 1912. See also Knight, Jane Addams, 172–74; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (NY, 1967), 195–208; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998), 251. Although Addams and others backed a civil rights plank in the Progressive Party, their views did not prevail.
448 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 9. On US traditions of social democracy, see James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (NY, 1986) and Rod gers, Atlantic Crossings. On the AFL, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Pure and Simple Radicalism: Putting the Progressive Era AFL in Its Time,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 10 (Winter 2013), 61–87, 111–16; Catherine Collomp, “Immigrants, Labor Markets, and the State, A Comparative Approach: France and the United States, 1880–1930,” JAH 86 ( June 1999), 41–66. 10. Melinda Plastas, A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics and the Women’s Peace Movement (Syracuse, 2011), 8–12; Megan Threlkeld, Pan American W omen: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia, 2014), 15–47. 11. On varieties of “internationalism,” see Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (NY, 1992), 48–57; Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, 2003). On the limits of mainstream US liberal internationalism, see Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic C entury: Europe and America, 1890– 2010 (NY, 2012), ch. 2; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (NY, 2007), 28–30. I depict the endeavors of league women as “international” in keeping with the language of the era. Because many of their international activities—the networks they forged and the transborder exchanges in which they engaged—would now be called “transnational,” I employ this term as well. For the continuing debate over the meaning of “transnational,” see C. A. Bayly et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” AHR 111 (Dec. 2006), 1440–64; Kiran Klaus Patel, “An Emperor without Clothes? The Debate about Transnational History Twenty-five Years On,” Histoire@Politique 26, mai-août 2015, www.histoire-politique.fr. I also call the league’s efforts “international” with the awareness that initiatives across countries and continents begun by women outside North America or Europe can also be seen as “international.” For elaboration, see Shobna Nijhawan, “International Feminism from an Asian Center: The All-Asian Women’s Conference (Lahore, 1931) as a Transnational Feminist Moment.” JWH 29 (Fall 2017), 12–36. 12. “Biographical and Personal Material,” r 12, MDRWTUL and Edward James, “Introduction,” MDRWTUL; Mary E. Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins: Her Life, Letters, and Work (NY, 1950); Allen F. Davis, “Margaret Dreier Robins,” NAW 3, ed. Edward T. James and Janet Wilson James (Cambridge, 1971), 179–81; Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, L abor and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (Urbana, 1988); “MDR,” LLB, Oct 1926; Elizabeth Payne Moore, “Mary Elisabeth Dreier,” in NAW: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, 1980), 204–6. 13. On O’Reilly, see Mary Bularzik, “Bonds of Belonging: Leonora O’Reilly and Social Reform,” LH 24 ( Jan 1983), 63–83; Charles Shively, “Leonora O’Reilly,” NAW 2, 652–53; Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women & Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana, 2009), chs. 3, 5; “The Working Women’s Society,” NYT, 10 Nov 1889; and Mary Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins: Her Life, Letters and Work, 21. 14. Quote: George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 (Princeton, 1989), 62. On RR, see Neil V. Salzman, Reform and Revolution: The Life and Times of Raymond Robins (Kent, OH, 1991), pts. 1, 2; William Appleman Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947 (NY, 1952); and William Appleman Williams, Raymond Robins and Russian- American Relations, 1917–1938 (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1950).
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 449 15. “From Our Western Window,” The Congregationalist and Christian World, 26 Aug 1915. 16. Elizabeth McKillen, Making the World Safe for Workers: L abor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism (Urbana, IL, 2013), 100–4; James, “Introduction”; Suellen Hoy, “Sidelined: The Chicago Women’s Trade Union League in the Interwar Years,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 15 (Dec 2018), 13–15, 17. 17. On Breckinridge and Abbott, see Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, 1988), 33–54; Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana, 1983). 18. Agnes Nestor, Woman’s Labor Leader: Autobiography of Agnes Nestor (Rockford, 1954); Clarke Chambers, “Agnes Nestor,” NAW 2, 615–16; Hoy, “Sidelined,” 17–22; Robin Miller Jacoby, “Elisabeth Christman,” NAW: The Modern Period, 148–49. On Abramowitz, see Karen Pastorello, “ ‘ The Transfigured Few’: Jane Addams, Bessie Abramowitz Hillman, and Immigrant W omen Workers in Chicago, 1905–15,” in Jane Addams, ed. Fischer et al., 98–118. 19. Mary Anderson, Woman at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson as Told to Mary N. Winslow (Minneapolis, 1951), chs. 1–9; Interview with Mary Anderson by Esther Peterson, Tape 1, Side 1, SL; Lily Lykes Rowe, “Mary Anderson: How an Immigrant Girl Rose to High Federal Office,” Ladies Home Journal, Aug 1920, 61–62 and other biographical sketches in f 92, MASL; LL, Aug 1918, 158; LL, Sept 1919, 221. On Anderson’s league organizing, see MDR to Frank Morrison, 4 Feb 1916; Report, NWTUL Sec to Exec Bd, 4–5 Nov 1916; Report, Steghagen to Exec Bd, 31 Jan 1918 (all on r 2, f 1916 and f 1918, NWTULLC). 20. Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League Training School for W omen Organizers, 1914–1926,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers’ Education for Women, 1914–1984, ed. Joyce L. Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson (Philadelphia, 1984), 5–21; LLB, May 1925. Anderson quote from Payne, Reform, L abor, and Feminism, 82. 21. Margaret introduced Mary to Kellor. In 1904 Margaret chaired the New York Women’s Municipal League’s legislative committee, and she and Kellor lobbied together for the first state law curbing employment agency abuses. Frances Kellor, Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment (NY, 1904). On Dreier and Kellor, see Moore, “Mary Elisabeth Dreier,” in NAW: The Modern Period, 204–6; Correspondence between Dreier and Kellor, f 77, MDSL; Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (NY, 1990), esp. 17–20, 130–65; Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—A History (NY, 1999), 138–50; Lucille O’Connell, “Frances Kellor,” in NAW: Modern Period, 393–95; and Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2011), 96–105. 22. Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire; Richard Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, The Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (Philadelphia, 2005); Report of the New York Factory Investigating Commission, 1912, vol. 1, 20; Rose Schneiderman with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (NY, 1967), 97–103; George Martin, Madam Secretary Frances Perkins: A Biography of America’s First Woman Cabinet Member (Boston, 1976), 84–90. 23. Documents in f 45 and f 67, MDSL and in r 13–16, NYWTULTA; Faderman, To Believe in Women, 138–50; Shively, “Leonora O’Reilly,” 652–53. 24. Vapnek, Breadwinners, ch. 5. The child O’Reilly adopted died tragically in 1911.
450 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 25. Schneiderman, All for One, chs. 2–6, 8; Annelise Orleck, “Rose Schneiderman,” Jewish omen: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 20 March 2009, Jewish Women’s Archive, W http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schneiderman-rose; Gary Endelman, Solidarity Forever: Rose Schneiderman and the W omen’s Trade Union League (NY, 1982); Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (NY, 1962), 144–145. 26. Orleck, Common Sense, chs. 2, 3; Wage-Earner Suffrage League Pamphlet, Miss Rose Schneiderman, Cap-Maker, Replies to New York Senator on Delicacy and Charm of Women (NY, 1912), 1–4. Male voters in New York approved full voting rights for w omen in 1917, the first eastern state to do so. Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, 2017). 27. “Mrs. Maud Swartz, Labor Aide, Is Dead,” NYT, 23 Feb 1937; LLB, Oct 1922; David Brody, “Maud O’Farrell Swartz,” NAW 3, 413–15. 28. Florence Kelley, “Aims and Principles of the Consumers’ League,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (Nov 1899), 289–304, quotes 289–90, 297, 300–301. I thank Kathryn Kish Sklar for this reference and for our many conversations about the NCL. 29. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, 1995); Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869–1931 (Urbana, 2009); Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 2000); Cecila Tichi, Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (Chapel Hill, 2009), esp. 123–63; Nancy Woloch, A Class by Itself: Protective Laws for W omen Workers, 1890s–1990s (Princeton, 2015), chs. 1–4. On how precedents from Australia and New Zealand “added momentum” to the US struggle for legislated wages, see Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange S haped American Reform (Cambridge, 2019), ch 7, quote 219. 30. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Economic Justice for All: Some Jersey Roots,” New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (Summer 2016), 1–19; Linda Gordon, “Child Welfare: A Brief History,” accessed March 11, 2019, http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu; Ada J. Davis, “The Evolution of the Institution of Mothers’ Pensions in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 35 ( Jan 1930), 573–87. 31. On the YWCA and its evolution, see Richard Roberts, Florence Simms: A Biography (NY, 1926); Mary Frederickson, “Citizens for Democracy: The Industrial Programs of the YWCA,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity, ed. Kornbluh and Frederickson, 75–96; Dorothea Browder, “A ‘Christian Solution of the L abor Situation’: How Working W omen Reshaped the YWCA’s Religious Mission and Politics,” JWH 19 (Summer 2007), 85–110; Dorothea Browder, “Working out their Economic Problems Together: World War I, Working W omen, and Civil Rights in the YWCA,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (April 2015), 243–65; Amanda Izzo, Liberal Christianity and Women’s Global Activism: The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters (New Brunswick, 2018). 32. Transcript, Industrial Conference, 1 Oct 1918, 16–17, Miss Ernestine Friedmann speaking, b 501, f 13, YWCASSA; Browder, “A ‘Christian Solution,’ ” 90–94. 33. LLB, Oct 1928, 3. 34. Browder, “Working Out,” 243–65.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 451 35. For insightful discussions of t hese issues, see Browder, “ ‘Christian Solution of the L abor Situation,” and Frederickson, “Citizens for Democracy,” 79. 36. The National Association of Colored W omen changed its name to the National Association of Colored W omen’s Clubs in 1904. I use the e arlier name of the organization throughout the text. 37. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black W omen in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (NY, 1999), 21–55; Rupp, Worlds of W omen, 15 and Karen Offen, “Overcoming Hierarchies through Internationalism: May Wright Sewall’s Engagement with the International Council of Women (1888–1904),” in Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present, ed. Francisca de Haan et al. (London, 2013), 15–27. 38. On Terrell and NACW internationalism, see Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC, 1940); Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880–1940,” Journal of African American History 89, 3 (2004), 203–22; Lisa G. Materson, “African American Women’s Global Journeys and the Construction of a Cross-Ethnic Racial Identity,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 ( Jan.–Feb. 2009), 35–42. On the NACW, White, Too Heavy a Load, chs. 1–3. 39. Hoy, “Sidelined,” 22; “A Fair Deal for the Colored Folks,” LL, Nov 1918, 240; Mary Roberts Smith, “The Negro W oman as an Industrial F actor,” LL, Jan 1918, 7–8. On the league’s failed relationship with African American women, see Ula Yvette Taylor, “From White Kitchens to White Factories: The Impact of World War I on African-American Working Women in Chicago,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 14, 3 ( Jan 1985). 40. “S. M. Franklin’s Report, Sept 27, 1909,” in NWTUL Convention Proceedings, Sept 27–Oct 2, 1909, 1,11, r 19, NWTULLC. For a sampling of LL articles, see Claire Gerard, “Trade Unionism among Men and W omen in France,” LL, Oct 1913, 292–96; Gertrud Hanna, “Organization of Women Workers in Germany,” LL, May 1914; and Ernestine Friedmann, “China’s Woman behind the Machine,” LL, Oct 1920, 255–58. 41. On Henry, see “Alice Henry,” LL, July 1921, 193–223; “A Tribute to Alice Henry,” LLB, April 1943; Nettie Palmer, ed., Memoirs of Alice Henry (Melbourne, 1944); Diane Kirkby, “Henry, Alice (1857–1943),” Australian Dictionary of Biography 19 (Melbourne, 1983); and Diane Kirkby, The Power of Pen and Voice: Alice Henry’s Life as an Australian-American Labour Reformer (NY, 1991). On Australia’s Labor Party, see Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (Sydney, 2011). For the Fabian debate over imperialism prompted by the Second Boer War, see Fred D. Schneider, “Fabians and the Utilitarian Idea of Empire,” Review of Politics 35 (Oct 1973), 501–22. 42. Kirkby, “Henry.” Quote: Frederick Kershner, “Alice Henry,” NAW 2, 183–84. 43. Jill Roe, “Franklin, Stella Maria Sarah Miles (1879–1954),” Australian Dictionary of Biography 8 (1981); Franklin’s Pocket Diaries, 1909–16, r 2153, MFSLNSW; Alice Henry and Miles Franklin Correspondence 114–15, MFSLNSW. Franklin later became one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and a leading defender of the Australian literary tradition. 44. Miles Franklin, “Jane Addams of Hull House: Some Personal Recollections of a Great American,” n.d., Doc #812, MFSLNSW. On Australian legislation, see Lake, Progressive New World, 13, 126–135, 176–178.
452 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 45. Franklin also found Robins exasperating, describing her later as humorless, overbearing, and blind to her own class privilege. Mary Dreier and Miles Franklin Correspondence v 12, MF, SLNSW; and Franklin to MDR, 23 Jan 1910, 27 Jan 1910, b 48, f 13, RRWSHS. 46. Gladys Boone, The W omen’s Trade Union Leagues in G reat Britain and the United States of America (NY, 1942), chs. 2–4; Jacoby, British and American Women’s Trade Union Leagues, 9–17; Davis, “The W omen’s Trade Union League: Origins and Organization,” 3–17; William O’Neill, The Woman Movement: Feminism in the United States and England (London, 1969), 63–69; Cathy Hunt, The National Federation of Women Workers, 1906–1921 (NY, 2014), 23–42; June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (NY, 2002). 47. In The Woman Movement, O’Neill scolds the US league for not following the British path of setting up a separate trade u nion division, which, he argues, would have expanded US. women’s unionism significantly. It is unclear, however, whether the AFL would have affiliated a federation of women’s unions and w hether such a federation would have thrived. 48. “Mary and Margaret,” LL, May 1919, 111–12. Macarthur visited in 1907 and 1909. Bondfield stayed for five months in 1910. See unidentified newspaper clippings, 5 May 1907 and 29 June 1909, f 321, GTLMU; Margaret Bondfield, A Life’s Work (London, 1948), 90–123. 49. Quote from Coventry Sentinel, no date, [c. 1910–1911], f 6.8, MBVC. See also File F, “Press Clippings,” RDWL; Norbert C. Soldon, Women in British Trade Unions, 1874–1976 (Totowa, 1978); “Mary and Margaret,” LL, May 1919, 111–12. The British L abour Party, founded in 1900, grew out of the British Independent L abour Party and the Trades Union Congress. 50. Marguerite Moers Marshall, “My Impressions of the W omen’s International L abor Congress,” LL, Jan 1920; Bondfield, Life’s Work, 53–54. 51. Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, ch. 4; Hunt, National Federation of Women Workers, 23–42, quote 37; Mary Agnes Hamilton, Mary Macarthur: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1925); Paula Bartley, Labour Women in Power: Cabinet Ministers in the Twentieth Century (Stratford- upon-Avon, UK, 2019), chs. 2, 3. 52. Ross Davies, a British journalist, suspected the love triangle a fter conducting interviews in the 1970s for an unpublished biography of Bondfield [“Margaret Bondfield: A Biography,” no pagination, f H, RDWL]. Letters between Bondfield and Anderson in Bondfield’s papers at Vassar College, which Davies had not discovered, hint at a romantic relationship. In one letter, for example, Anderson speaks longingly of seeing Bondfield again and compares her to the most beautiful, freshest of flowers. Anderson to Bondfield, 9 Aug 1903, f 1.2, MBVC. 53. Davies, “Margaret Bondfield,” n.p. 54. Bondfield, Life’s Work. Quotes from Bondfield, “First Draft,” typed fragment for a talk, n.d., f 1.2, MBVC. 55. AFL membership peaked in 1920 at two million workers, making it a sizable national organization. Nonetheless, the AFL represented a smaller proportion of the labor force than did British or German unions. Cobble, “Pure and Simple Radicalism”; R. H. Tawney, The British Labor Movement (New Haven, CT, 1925); Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Hans-Gerhard Husung, eds., The Development of Trade Unionism in G reat Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (London, 1985). 56. Mary McDowell, “Some Observations on Working Women in Germany,” LL, May 1912; Hanna, “Organization of Working Women in Germany.” On Hanna, see Kirsten Scheiwe and
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 453 Lucia Artner, “International Networking in the Interwar Years: Gertrud Hanna, Alice Salomon and Erna Magnus,” in Women’s ILO, ed. Eileen Boris et al., 75–85; Richard Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945 (Brighton, 1987), 121–56; Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (NY, 1978); Deborah Stienstra, Women’s Movements and International Organizations (NY, 1994), 50–51. On the label “bourgeois feminist,” see Marilyn Boxer, “Rethinking the Social Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’ ” AHR 112 (Feb 2007), 131–58. 57. For examples, see Gerard, “Trade Unionism among Men and W omen;” Mary McDowell, “International Sisterhood of Union Women,” LL, Jan 1912. 58. NWTUL Convention Proceedings, 1914, 113, r 21, NWTULLC; LOR, “Report on the International Congress of W omen at the Hague,” NWTUL Convention Proceedings, 1915, r-21, NWTULLC. Vapnek [Breadwinners, 157] notes LOR paid her own way to the Congress. On the 1915 Hague Congress and WILPF, see Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1965 (London, 1965); Linda K. Schott, Reconstructing Women’s Thoughts: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom before World War II (Palo Alto, 1997); Harriet Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, 1993); Plastas, Band of Noble Women. 59. Jane Addams, “Women and Internationalism,” in Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague (NY, 1915, reprint 2003), 107–15, esp. 112–13. See also Addams, “The Woman and the State,” 2 Feb 1911; Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929: With a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (NY, 1930). 60. Addams, Balch, and Hamilton, Women at The Hague, 39–49. For Hague principles, see Karen Garner, Women and Gender in International History (London, 2018), Table 3.2, 54. Vapnek, Breadwinners, 157–158. 61. LOR, “International Congress of W omen at The Hague,” LL, July 1915, 116–17; LOR, “Peace: International Congress of Women,” 6, r-11, LORWTUL; LOR to her mother, April 14, 1915, r 102, LORSL. 62. LL, June 1915, 112–13; Irmtraut Karlsson, The First Hundred Years (Berlin, 2007). 63. On MDR’s sympathy for Germany, Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 173–74. On wartime developments, MDR to MD, April 26, 1917, r 24, MDRWTUL; “Trade Union Woman Heads Federal Bureau,” LL, Sept 1919, 221–22; Jacoby, “Elisabeth Christman,”149. On van Kleeck, see Eleanor Midman Lewis, “Mary Abby van Kleeck,” NAW: Modern Period, 707–9. 64. Elisabeth Christman, “The IFWW,” [1923], r 14, NWTULLC; Alice Geubel de la Ruelle, “French Women and the Minimum Wage,” LL, Aug 1917; Alice Henry, Women and the Labor Movement (NY, 1927), 212–13. 65. MDR to EB, 16 Aug 1918, f-1918, r 2, NWTULLC; Minutes of EB Meeting, 9–11 Sept 1918, r 2, NWTULLC; Report, Sec-Treas. to EB, 10 Feb 1919. The league’s demands paralleled those reached in October 1918 by twenty-five trade u nion w omen leaders at the “government’s first conference of trade u nion women,” a gathering organized by van Kleeck and Anderson. A fter establishing themselves as a “permanent advisory committee” to the US Department of L abor, the w omen called for, among other items, full suffrage rights, appointment of w omen on all government boards, and a living wage sufficient for “support of a w oman with dependents, just
454 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 as for a man with dependents.” “Government Calls First Conference of Trade Union W omen,” LL, Nov 1918, 239–40. 66. Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, 2002), 6–7. For context, see Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (NY, 1998), ch. 2; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (NY, 2002); Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Palo Alto, 2000); Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley, 1991); Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The G reat War, Americ a and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (NY, 2014); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014) 67. Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, chs. 1, 6. 68. Cablegram, MDR to President Wilson, 31 Jan 1919, f 1919, r 2, NWTULLC; MA to President Wilson, 28 Feb 1919, f 1919, r 2, NWTULLC; President Wilson to MA, 1 March 1919, f 1919, r 2, NWTULLC; John Mitchell to “To Whom It May Concern,” 11 March 1919, b 1, f 6, RSTA. Mary Anderson, Woman at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson as told to Mary N. Winslow (Minneapolis, 1951), 116–18. 69. Schneiderman to MDR, 10 March 1919, b 1, f 6, RSTA; “Will Urge World L abor Standard,” New York Sun, 7 March 1919, 3. 70. “Report of Special Commission to the Peace Conference Meeting in Paris by Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman,” NWTUL Convention Proceedings 2–7 June 1919, 74–77, r 21, NWTULLC; Schneiderman, All for One, 130–39; Anderson, Woman at Work, 116–24. 71. Alice Maude Allen, Sophy Sanger: A Pioneer in Internationalism (Glasgow, 1958). The US branch of the IALL, formed in 1905 by progressive economists such as John R. Commons and Richard Ely, focused initially on industrial health and workers’ compensation. It later promoted, among other concerns, legislation against child labor and social insurance statutes covering illness, disability, unemployment, and old age. See Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 251–58. On the IALL as a crucial forerunner of the ILO, see Daniel Maul, The International L abour Organization: 100 Years of Global Social Policy (Berlin and Geneva, 2019), 17–20. 72. “International Socialism and World Peace: Resolutions of the Berne Conference, February 1919,” (London, 1919); Bondfield, Life’s Work, 162–70; Lorwin, Labor and Internationalism, 188–90; Geert van Goethem, The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions, 1913–1945 (Burlington, 2006), 134–36; Bondfield, “Women and the L abor World,” NWTUL Convention Proceedings, 2–7 June 1919, r 21, NWTULLC; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 20–22. 73. Martin Francis, “Labour and Gender,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Tanner, et. al., 193– 202; Hunt, National Federation of Women Workers, 40–41; “Says No to Mrs. Belmont,” NYT, 8 Oct 1909; NWTUL, Proceedings, 1919, 29. 74. Britain’s “Representation of the People Act, 1918” tripled the electorate. It abolished property qualifications for male suffrage, enfranchised all men over age twenty-one, and opened suffrage to propertied women over age thirty. 75. Lewis L. Lorwin, The International Labor Movement (NY, 1953), 66–67; Pat Thane, “Women in the British L abour Party and the Construction of State Welfare, 1906–1939,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 455 Sonya Michel (NY, 1993), 343–77; Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, 31–56. Quote from Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women: W omen in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1994), 19. 76. The International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centers, set up in 1903, adopted the name International Federation of Trade Unions in 1913. On the AFL’s involvement before and after 1913, see Lorwin, International, 32–41. 77. Quote from Lorwin, Labor, 185–88; Lorwin, International, 42–85, 180–82; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and L abor: An Autobiography (NY, 1925), 474–87, 509–10; Van Goethem, Amsterdam International, 13–76. 78. On the Labor Commission, see James T. Shotwell, The Origins of the International Labor Organization, 2 vols. (NY, 1934); James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (NY, 1937); and Daniel P. Moynihan, “The Washington Conference of the International L abor Organ ization,” LH 3 (Autumn 1962), 307–34. 79. “Minutes of Proceedings No. 27–March 18, 1919,” in Shotwell, Origins, vol. 2, 273–91; Part XIII, Treaty of Versailles, Article 427, 332–45. 80. Articles 395 and 389 of the 1919 ILO Constitution in ILO, Official Bulletin 1919–1920, 1, ch. VI. 81. Anderson and Schneiderman, “Report of Special Commission to the Peace Conference Meeting in Paris.” Anderson, Woman at Work, 116–24. See also “World Conference of Working Women,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 June 1919, f 322, GTLMU. 82. Anderson, Woman at Work, 122–24. 83. On Duchêne, see Emmanuelle Carle, “Women, Anti-Fascism and Peace in Interwar France: Gabrielle Duchêne’s Itinerary,” French History 18 (Sept 2004), 291–314, and Lorraine Coons, “Gabrielle Duchêne: Feminist, Pacifist, Reluctant Bourgeois,” Peace and Change 24 (April 1999), 121–47. On Bouvier, see Jeanne Bouvier, Mes Memoires ou 59 annees d’activite industrielle, sociale et intellectuelle d’une ouvriere 1876–1935 (Paris, 1983); JBBHVP; Lorraine Coons, “Neglected Sisters of the Women’s Movement: The Perception and Experience of Working M others in the Parisian Garment Industry, 1860–1915,” JWH 5 (Fall 1993): 54–59; and Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, ch. 6. I thank Pascale Voilley and Joel Rainey for translating Bouvier’s writings. For L abor Commission testimony, see “Minutes of Proceedings No. 27– March 18, 1919.” 84. Anderson, Woman at Work, 123. Bouvier, “Dear American Colleagues,” April 1919, Boîte 21, JBBHVP; Comité Féminin Francais du Travail, Charte International du Travail (Paris, 1919), 3–6, 17–23. https://archive.org/stream/charteinternatio00comi#page/4/mode/2up, accessed 8 June 2014. On the Berne Socialist and L abor Congress, see Van Goethem, Amsterdam International, 20–22. 85. Bondfield, Life’s Work, 171–72; Manchester Guardian, Oct 1916. 86. Schneiderman to Newman, 4 May 1919, f 78, PNSL; Schneiderman, All for One, 135–37; War Work Bulletin, 7 Feb 1919, War Work Council, National Board, YWCA, 1919, b 501, f 14, YWCASSA; The Bulletin, NY State Industrial Commission Monthly (1919), vol. 3–6, 138. 87. Bondfield, Life’s Work, 172–73; Anderson and Schneiderman, “Report of Special Commission to the Peace Conference Meeting in Paris”; “Address of Rose Schneiderman,” NWTUL Convention Proceedings, 2–7 June 1919, r 22, NWTULLC.
456 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 88. Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Prince ton, 2003), 268–76. 89. Quote: Louis S. Reed, The Labor Philosophy of Samuel Gompers (NY, 1930), 167. See also Moynihan, “Washington”; van Goethem, Amsterdam International, ch. 4; Harold Jacobson, “The USSR and the ILO,” International Organization 14 (1960), 402–28; Reiner Reiner Tosstorff, “The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International L abor Organ ization,” IRSH 50 (2005), 399–433; Markku Ruotsila, “The Great Charter for the Liberty of the Workingman: L abour, Liberals and the Creation of the ILO,” Labour History Review 67 (April 2002), 29–47. 90. Elizabeth McKillen, “Beyond Gompers: The American Federation of Labor, the Creation of the ILO, and U.S. Labor Dissent,” in ILO Histories: Essays on the International L abour Organization and Its Impact on the World During the Twentieth Century, ed. Jasmien Van Daele et al. (Bern, 2010), 41–66; Elizabeth McKillen, Making the World Safe for Workers: L abor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism (Urbana, 2013). 91. The general principles in Article 427, Part XIII, Treaty of Versailles, included “the labor of a h uman being should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce,” a weakened version of the AFL proposal, “labor is not a commodity.” The AFL desire for language prohibiting involuntary servitude was not included. Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, 493–99; Reed, Labor Philosophy, 158–60; “Address Delivered by President Samuel Gompers of the AFL on the Labor Clauses of the Peace Treaty,” 11 Feb 1921, Academy of Music, Philadelphia in CAT 7–399, 1921–1927, ILOAAT. 92. Gompers, “Why the Peace Treaty Should be Ratified,” Washington, DC, 1919. 93. Treaty of Versailles, Part XIII, Article 427; Maud Swartz, “In Convention with the AFL,” LL, Aug 1919, 204; “Labor to Debate League of Nations,” Hudson Observer, Hoboken, New Jersey, 20 June 1919. Bondfield addressed the 1919 AFL convention as the fraternal delegate from the British TUC. She had been invited in 1918 as well, but the United States had denied her a passport. 94. Like her husband, who spent 1917–1918 in Russia involved in diplomatic maneuvers as head of the Red Cross Commission, MDR believed that rather than intervene militarily, the US should offer economic assistance and establish diplomatic ties. See Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 52–57, 60 and Salzman, Reform and Revolution, 173–315. Quotes from MDR to “Miss Dietrichson,” 24 Aug 1920, b 49, f 1, additions, RRWSHS. 95. For the immigration debate, see NWTUL Convention Proceedings, Sept 27–Oct 2, 1909, r 19 and r 20, NWTULLC. For Schneiderman quote, see r 19, frame 5. 96. NWTUL Proceedings, 1919, r 22, NWTULLC. The reasons for Anderson’s actions are unclear. She may have feared alienating the AFL and losing its support for the congress. She also tended to be more cautious and politically conservative than Schneiderman. 97. Anderson’s betrayal wounded Schneiderman. “I came away from the convention sick at heart and hurt to the bone at the treatment I received at your hands,” she wrote Anderson. RS to MA, 1 Aug 1919, b 1, f 6, RSTA. There is no record of a reply from Anderson in her papers or those of Schneiderman. 98. Endelman, Solidarity Forever, 83–85; “L abor Leader Attacks League,” NYT, 18 July 1919, 15.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 457 99. “The Call,” f 2, IFWWSL. For a list of invited nations as of mid-August, see “Call World Congress of W omen Workers,” NYT, 18 Aug 1919. Bondfield helped draft the call. She had spent most of the summer in the United States giving talks on British politics. 100. Abbott traveled extensively in Europe in 1911 and 1918. In 1911, she spent months in Central Europe researching the homelands of Chicago immigrant groups. In 1918, she traveled with US Children’s Bureau chief Julia Lathrop. “Introduction” and “Biographical Timeline,” in John Sorensen with Judith Sealander, eds., The Grace Abbott Reader (Lincoln, 2008), ix–x xi, xxvii–x xxv. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice, 112–18. 101. Browder, “ ‘Christian Solution of the Labor Situation.’ ” 102. Mary Anderson to Joseph Patrick Tumulty, 28 Aug 1919, Arthur Link, ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson 63 (Princeton, 1990), 58–59 [hereafter PWW]. On W. B. Wilson, see “W. B. Wilson Dies; Leader of Labor,” NYT, 26 May 1934. 103. Memo, Shotwell to WW, 16 July 1919, PWW, v. 62, 96. 104. WBW to WW, 4 Aug 1919, PWW, v. 62, 132–33; WBW to WW, 5 Sept 1919, PWW, v. 63, 56–57. 105. WBW to WW, 5 Sept1919, PWW, v. 63, 56–57. 106. Elizabeth Merrill Bass to WW, 15 Aug 1919, PWW, v. 62, 314–15; WW to WBW, 21 Aug 1919, PWW, v. 62, 436. On Bass, see Madeleine Swanstrom, “Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth Merrill Bass,” NAWSA Data Base, Women and Social Movements, https://d ocuments .alexanderstreet.com/d/1009638247 107. WW to Mrs. Bass, 21 Aug 1919, PWW, v. 62, 437. 108. WBW to WW, 5 Sept 1919, PWW, vols. 63, 56–57; “Trade Union Woman Heads Federal Bureau,” LL, Sept 1919, 221–22.
Chapter 2: A Higher “Standard of Life” for the World 1. For elaboration, Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington, 1999); Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (NY, 2000); Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Ellington, Sklar, and Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms; Rupp, Worlds of Women; Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (NY, 2014), 19–65, 82–91; Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia, 1981); Sklar, Schuler, and Strasser, eds. Social Justice Feminists; Pernilla Jonsson, Silke Neunsinger, and Joan Sangster, eds., Crossing Boundaries: W omen’s Organizing in Europe and the Americ as, 1880–1940s (Uppsala, 2007). 2. Quote: Cablegram, MDR to President Woodrow Wilson, 31 Jan 1919, NWTULLC. 3. For simplicity, at times I use “labor women” to describe the mixed-class group of w omen who advocated on behalf of women workers. 4. First quote from Alice Henry, Women and the Labor Movement, 217. Henry was expressing an assumption widely shared by league women. MDR, “Address of Welcome,” 28 Oct 1919, f ICWW 1918–19, r 13, NWTULLC. For van Kleeck and Addams, First Congress, Reports, pt. 1, f 3, IFWWSL. The following account of the congress is drawn from Dorothy Sue Cobble, “U.S.
458 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 abor Women’s Internationalism in the World War I Era,” Revue Francaise D’Etudes Americaines L 122 (Dec 2009), 44–58; Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World,” 1065–70. See also Geert van Goethem, “An International Experiment of W omen Workers: The International Federation of Working W omen, 1919–1924,” Revue Belge De Philologie Et D’Histoire 84, 4 (2006), 1029–31; Ulla Wikander, “Demands on the ILO by Internationally Organized Women in 1919,” 67–89; Lara Vapnek, “The 1919 International Congress of Working Women: Transnational Debates on the ‘Woman Worker,’ ” JWH 26 (Spring 2014), 160–84. 5. As mentioned earlier, the WTUL invited some forty-four nations, a large proportion of the fifty or so recognized states at the time. Like the League of Nations, the internationalism of the WLC was nation-based. As Nitza Berkovitch observes, the League of Nation’s restriction to “sovereign states” excluded the “colonized world” with the “exception of India, for which a special provision was made.” See Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations (Baltimore, 1999), 59. The League of Nation’s forty-two founding members included European, Latin American, and Caribbean states, as well as the Republic of China, India, the Empire of Japan, Liberia, Persia, and Siam. In a controversial move, the League of Nations (and the ILO) also gave Britain’s “self-governing dominions” (Australia, Canada, and South Africa) each a vote as “independent states.” “Upholds Treaty Labor Provisions,” NYT, 22 Sept 1919, 3. As Mark Mazower (“Glimpsing the Future,” Financial Times, 17/18 Nov 2018) observes, the League of Nations was an “ambiguous” entity, reflecting both the rise of international governance and the rise of nationalism and the nation-state. See also Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015), for an assessment of League aims and effects. 6. Voting delegations came from Argentina, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, India, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and the United States. Visitors and guests arrived from Cuba, Denmark, Japan, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, and Switzerland. “Women of 12 Lands in L abor Congress,” NYT, 29 Oct 1919; “First International Congress of Working Women,” n.d., f ICWW 1918–1919, r 13, NWTULLC. 7. “Call World Congress of W omen Workers,” NYT, 18 Aug 1919. Invitees closely matched the list of the forty-two League of Nations founders, which included many Latin American nations, only a few Middle Eastern, and one African: Liberia. 8. MDR to Vernon and Mamie, 30 Sept 1919, b 48, f 13, RRWSHS. China refused to sign the treaty because it granted Japan the Shandong Peninsula. 9. “With the First International Congress of Working W omen,” LL, Dec 1919, 308–10; Nestor, Women’s Labor Leader, 184; Stephen H. Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878–1923 (Urbana, 1990); Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 14–15; Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 123, 127, 144–46. 10. “Bios,” f 1, FMSL; Sophonisba Breckinridge to “To the Editor,” n.d., f 1, FMSL; Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 14–15. Breckinridge uses the term “political economy” to describe Miller’s field of study and suggests that the death of Miller’s adviser, Robert Hoxie, prevented her from finishing her PhD dissertation. 11. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt and H uman Rights: The B attle for Peace and Planetary Decency,” Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders, ed. Edward P. Crapol (NY, 1987), quote 93; Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, I: 1884–1933
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 459 (NY, 1992), 258–59. As Cook notes, ER’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity in 1918 also propelled her toward public activism and women’s politics. On Wilson’s two failed 1919 labor conferences, see Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s G reat War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American L abor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 191–94. ER quote: Brigid O’Farrell, She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker (Ithaca, 2010), 14. 12. George Martin, Madam Secretary Frances Perkins: A Biography of Americ a’s First Woman Cabinet Member (Boston, 1976), 141–45. For Perkins’ recollections of 1919, 1941 ILC Proceedings, 7–8. 13. Frederickson, “Citizens for Democracy,” 80–81; Browder, “ ‘Christian Solution;’ ” “National Industrial Conference Washington DC, 20–22 Oct 1919: A Handbook for Delegates,” prepared by Ruth Chivvis and Lucy R Somerville, issued by Industrial Committee, War Work Council, National Board, YWCA, 1919, b 501, f 14, YWCASSA. For Simms quote: The Bulletin, NY State Industrial Commission Monthly (1919), vols. 3–6, 138. 14. “Memorial to the NWTUL from Representative Negro Women of the United States in Behalf of Negro Women Laborers of the United States,” 4 Nov 1919, Proceedings of the First Convention of ICWW, pt. 8, 35–38, IFWWSL. On the league’s relation to African American women in 1919, see “In Convention with the National W omen’s Trade Union League,” LL, July 1919, 159–63. On Haynes, see Iris Carlton-LaNey, “Elizabeth Ross Haynes: An African American Reformer of Womanist Consciousness, 1908–1940,” Social Work 42 (Nov 1997), 573–83. Following the YWCA policy of segregated clubs, the 1919 YWCA Industrial Conference did not include African American women either. See Browder, “Working Out.” 15. Clarence G. Contee, “Du Bois, the NAACP and the Pan-African Congress of 1919,” Journal of Negro History 57, 1 ( Jan 1972), 13–28; Sarah Claire Dunstain, “Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment,” Callaloo 39 (Winter 2016), 23–150. On Hunt, see Adele Logan Alexander, Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin (Charlottesville, 2010). For other black internationalist perspectives in 1919, see McKillen, Making the World Safe, 219–224; Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018), ch 1; and Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 2011). 16. On Hunton and Terrell, see Plastas, Band of Noble W omen, 3–5, 34–57; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, ch. 2; Elisabetta Vezzosi, “The International Strategy of African American W omen at the Columbian Exposition and Its Legacy: Pan-Africanism, Decolonization and Human Rights,” 76–83, www.openstats, accessed 11 Jan 2018; and Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880–1940,” Journal of African American History 89 (Summer 2004), 212–13 for WILPF quote. See also Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (Brooklyn, 1920). 17. Annarita Buttafuocco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy: The Role of the Italian Women’s Movement in the Creation of the Cassa Nazionale di Maternità,” in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (NY, 1991), 178–95; and L. Casartelli-Cabrini, “Rassegna del movimento
460 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 femminile Italiano”[Review of the Women’s Movement], Almanacco della Donna Italiana [Italian W omen’s Almanac] (1920), 133–53. I thank Eloisa Betti for locating the journal in the Rimini Library, University of Bologna, and translating Casartelli-Cabrini’s article from Italian to English. 18. On Sundquist, see Bondfield to Miss Spencer, 16 Feb 1920, f 6.10, MBVC. On Hesselgren, see KHNLS; Lene Buchert, “Kerstin Hesselgren,” Prospects (UNESCO, International Bureau of Education) 34, 1 (March 2004), 127–36; and Ruth Hamrin-Thorell, “Kerstin Hesselgren, Dictionary of Swedish National Biography, https://sok.riksarkivet.se. 19. Margaret Bondfield, “Gossip from across the Atlantic,” Woman Worker, Feb 1920, 4–5; Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czecho slovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh, 2006); Vapnek, “1919 International Congress,” 167; van Goethem, “An International Experiment,” 1034, n37. 20. Alice Henry, Women and the L abor Movement (NY, 1923), 215; LL, Oct 1921, 225; “Betzy Kjelsberg,” Arkivverket Riksarkivet Og Statsarkivene, Oslo, Norway (accessed 3 June 2014). 21. The lack of voting representation from Latin America and the Caribbean is notable. The league invited more than a dozen nations from t hese regions, but only two sent representatives. The reasons for this situation are explored in chapter 5. 22. On Derry, see Nancy M. Forestell and Maureen Moynagh, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Volume II, Canada—National and Transnational Contexts (Toronto, 2014), 268; and Robin Miller Jacoby, “The W omen’s Trade Union League Training School for W omen Organizers, 1914–1926,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers’ Education for Women, 1914–1984, ed. Joyce Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson (Philadelphia, 1984), 13–15. 23. A fter the congress ended, Moreau de Justo (she married Socialist Party leader Juan de Justo in 1922) organized the Socialist Committee for Women’s Suffrage and devoted much of her time to the Argentine Socialist Party and the fight for democracy and female suffrage. On Moreau, see Claudia Montero, “Feminist Journals in Latin America, 1920–40,” Identity, Nation, Discourse (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), ed. Claire Taylor, 17–37; Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, 1991), 102; Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, 1995), 43, 269; “Alicia Moreau de Justo Dies,” NYT, 14 May 1986. For an insightful discussion of the Western European “racial logics” undergirding the philosophy of Moreau and her close friend, Paulina Luisi of Uruguay, see Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of An International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019), 22–23. All Spanish translations are those of the author. 24. Parvati Athavale, My Story: The Autobiography of a Hindu Widow, trans., Rev. Justin E. Abbott (1930: rept. New Delhi, 1986), quotes 4; Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, 2013). 25. Athavale, My Story, quotes 83. Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (Delhi, 2007), 338–68. On Lala Lajpat Rai, see Sudarshan Kapur, Raising up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston, 1992), 10–23; and Rama Chandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914–1948 (NY, 2018), 126, 283–84, 292. 26. Athavale, My Story, quote 126. For more on O’Reilly’s anti-imperialist politics and her support of Irish independence, Elizabeth McKillen, “The Irish Sinn Féin Movement and Radical Labor and Feminist Dissent in America, 1916–1921,” Labor 16 (Sept 2019), 25–33.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 461 27. Athavale, My Story, 117. Since no w omen had traveled from Ireland to the WLC, Athavale most likely is referring to O’Reilly. 28. I have found no documents pertaining to the decision. 29. Narayan Malhar Joshi, 1879–1955,” The Hindu, 31 May 1955. 30. First Congress Reports, pt. 9, f 3, IFWWSL. “Indian W omen and L abor,” Young India II, 12 (Dec 1919), 270–71. 31. Athavale, My Story, 116–19. “Indian Women and Labor,” 270–71. 32. For biographical information on Tanaka Taka, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Who Speaks for Workers? Japan and the 1919 ILO Debates over Rights and Global Labor Standards,” ILWCH 87 (Spring 2015), 221–22; Sharon H. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan and His Teachers, 1905–1960 (Berkeley, 1987), 118–30. In accordance with Japanese custom, family names precede personal names except where the person is authoring an English-language text. 33. Tanaka Taka, “Bankokufujinroudout aikai ni syussekishite [On Attending the International Congress of Working Women]” Fujingaho (March 1920), 2–5. I am grateful to Christopher Mayo, Princeton University, and Yurika Tamura, Rutgers University, for translations from Japa nese to English. 34. For an example of the “civilizationist” rhetoric among league w omen, see Henry, Women and the American Labor Movement, 219. 35. Pamphlet, “Resolutions Adopted by First International Congress of Working Women,” Washington, DC, Oct 28–Nov 6, 1919,” f 2, IFWWSL; Henry, Women and the Labor Movement, 217, 219. Henry’s astonishment was due in part to her underestimation of the Polish w omen. The proposal was “not at all what would have been expected from such simple women,” she wrote. 36. Each nation would send six, not four delegates, with two each representing government, labor, and employers. Women would be guaranteed three of the six votes, with each of the groups appointing one man and one woman. 37. For the Women’s Congress’ stance on hour laws for both sexes, First Congress: Reports, pt. 4, 1–83, esp. 27 and pt. 5, 1–55. In the debate over hour laws, US delegate Agnes Nestor spoke forcefully about how “we [in the league] stand for it not only for women but for men.” 38. “Mary Macarthur,” NYT, 11 May 1919. League of Nations, International Labour Conference, 1919, First Annual Meeting, October 29, 1919–November 19, 1919 (Washington, DC, 1920), 171. 39. First Congress: Reports, pt. 6, 21–36, pt. 7, 1–33, pt. 8, 1–2, pt. 9, 4–26, F 3, IFWWSL. Cobble, “U.S. Labour W omen’s Internationalism,” 49–50. 40. The proposal a dopted by the WLC resembled the International Trade Union Resolution on Immigration passed in 1918 passed by European u nions. 41. First Congress: Reports, pt. 11, 31–35, pt. 13, 17–39, esp. 37–38, f 3, IFWWSL. The AFL’s 1919 declaration undercut the promises of Pan-American mutualism and immigrant rights issuing from the fledgling Pan American Federation of Labor, organized on 13 Nov 1918, by labor delegates from the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Columbia. AFL: History, Encyclopedia, Reference Book, vol. 1, 1924, 447–48; Lewis Lorwin, Labor and Internationalism (NY, 1929), 275–305. 42. For the debate over night work, First Congress: Reports, pt. 9, 25–45; pt. 10, 1–44; and pt. 11, 1–30, f-3, IFWWS.
462 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 43. “Program of the 1919 ICWW,” [1919], pamphlet, f 80, MASL. First Congress: Reports, pt. 12, 37–54, pt. 13, 8–25, esp. 23–25, f-3, IFWWSL. 44. MB, “Report of the International W omen’s and L abour Conferences,” The Woman Worker, Feb 1920, 1–2; Bondfield to “My Dear Colleagues,” 3 July 1919, f 6.8, MBVC. 45. Bouvier, Mes Memoires, 123–28; Bondfield, “Gossip from across the Atlantic,” 4–5. 46. Hesselgren, “Anteckningar från resan till Amerika hösten 1919,” [Notes from the Journey to America, 1919], esp. 33, 60–63, f-61, KHNLS. I thank Karin Carlsson for translating Hesselgren’s diaries into English. 47. KH to EP, 27 April 1956, f 382, EPSL. 48. On t hese divisions, see “Resolution against the so-called Moscow Trade Union International,” Nov 1920, f 2, MBTUC; Lorwin, International, 45–162; van Goethem, Amsterdam International, 77–110, 229–58; Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, eds., International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943 (Manchester, 1998). 49. Quotes from back cover, “Handbook of the First International Congress of Working Women,” f 6.10, MBVC; First Congress: Report, pt. 12, 41, f 3, IFWWSL. 50. For an introduction to the vast literature on the ILO, see Daniel Maul, The ILO: 100 Years of Global Social Policy (Berlin and Geneva, 2019); Van Daele et al., eds., ILO Histories; and Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux, eds. Globalizing Social Rights: The International L abour Organ ization and Beyond (Basingstoke and Geneva, 2013). 51. For the ILC delegate numbers and gender breakdown, see League of Nations, ILC 1919, 5–10. 52. “Labour Conference Has Opened,” Asahi Shimbun, 6 Nov 1919, EAL. 53. League of Nations, ILC 1919, 33, 50; Maud Swartz to Harold Butler, 4 Nov 1919 and 5 Nov 1919, D600/467/0, ILOAPF. 54. There is no full list of the w omen who attended the WLC, but fourteen of the twenty- three ILC w omen advisers are e ither recorded as speaking at the WLC or appear in other documents indicating their presence at the WLC. It is likely o thers from the WLC attended the ILC as well. For a fuller account of the relation between the two conferences, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders: 1919 and Its Legacies,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global L abour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, ed. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden, 2018), 27–49. 55. “Newsletter from the office of the First ICWW,” [c] 1919, f Intl Congress, 1918–1919, r 13, NWTULLC. The more radical resolutions of the WLC spring in part from it being a “labor” congress rather than a tripartite affair like the ILO. 56. League of Nations, ILC 1919, entire; H.J.W. Hetherington, International Labour Legislation (London, 1920), 59–96; “With the First International Congress of Working Women,” LL, Dec 1919, 3; Christman, “International Federation of Working W omen,” a talk before the League of Women Voters, f 1923–27 IFWW, r 14, NWTULLC. 57. Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014), 80–85, quote 81. W hether and how ILO standards matter in changing behavior and policy has been much debated. For a recent assessment, with rejoinders, Marcel van der Linden, “The ILO, 1919–2019: An Appraisal,” Labor 16 (May 2019), 11–76. As elaborated throughout this book, I find the effects of the ILO considerable and, on balance, positive.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 463 58. Cobble, “Other ILO Founders,” 39–41; Bondfield, “Gossip from across the Atlantic.” 59. On Bouvier, Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, ch. 6. Quote from Hesselgren, “Washington Konferensen 1919” [Washington Conference 1919], f 61, KHNLS. See also H. B. Butler, “The Washington Conference, 1919,” in Labour as an International Problem, ed. E. John Solano (London, 1920), 229–30. 60. Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (C3), http://www.ilo.org. 61. For additional details, see Cobble, “Other ILO Founders,” 39–41; Susan Zimmermann, “The ILO and the International Argument on Maternity and Family Policies in the Interwar Period,” paper, International Federation of Research in Women’s History Conference, Sheffield, England, 29 Aug–1 Sept 2013; Wikander, “Demands on the ILO,” 81–87. 62. “Tanaka daikien [Great Flame Tanaka],” Asahi Shimbun, 20 Nov 1919, 2, EAL. All translations from the Japanese into English are by Yurika Tamura, except where noted otherwise. 63. “Mrs. Tanaka to be Woman Advisor,” Japan Times and Mail, 27 Sept 1919, EAL. For elaboration, see Cobble, “Who Speaks?” 213–34. 64. In 1909, Tanaka accompanied her great-uncle Shibusawa Eiichi, Japan’s most prominent entrepreneur and business statesman, on a three-month trade and friendship mission to the United States and decided to stay. After perfecting her English in a California high school, she enrolled at Stanford University, earning a BA in English in 1917. On a weekend retreat at Asilomar, the YWCA w omen’s camp by the Pacific Ocean, she dedicated her life to industrial and social reform after listening to an American evangelist. In 1918, she moved to Chicago, where she studied applied sociology and social work at the University of Chicago and absorbed the lessons of Hull House. In her MA thesis she offered a social psychological analysis of the forces subordinating Japanese women, which, she argued, included the late Meiji norms of female self-sacrifice, reticence, and obedience. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 221–22; Nolte, Liberalism, 118– 30. See also The 1917 Quad, “Cosmopolitan Club” photo, 295, SPSU. 65. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 217–21. For context and elaboration, see Diane Simpson, “Women in Japan’s Struggle for Labor Reform,” in World of Women’s Trade Unionism, ed. Soldon, 199–218; Stephen S. Large, The Rise of L abor in Japan: The Yūaikai, 1912–1919 (Tokyo, 1972); Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, pt. 1; Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937 (Cambridge, 1997); Iwao F. Ayusawa, A History of Labor in Modern Japan (Honolulu, 1966). 66. Many in Japan favored “special exemptions” b ecause they viewed the proposed ILO conventions as “Western standards” that if applied to Japan would lessen its competitive advantage. Others felt “special exemptions” smacked of racial discrimination and argued Japan should not be treated as a less developed nation. Still o thers, like Tanaka and many Japanese labor leaders, believed endorsing the proposed ILO labor conventions would raise the living standards of Japanese workers. For elaboration, Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 213–17, 224–25. See also Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations (Honolulu, 2008); Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London, 1998); and Susan Zimmermann, “Special Circumstances in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-Metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years,” in ILO Histories, 221–50. 67. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 213–16. Quotes from A. M. Young, The Socialist and L abor Movement in Japan (Kobe, 1921, repr. Washington, DC, 1979), 93 and “The International Labor
464 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 Conference,” Japan Weekly Chronicle, 27 Nov 1919, 831–33, EAL. For further details, see Allen, Sophy Sanger, 152; Hesselgren, “Washington Conference 1919.” 68. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 214–16. Quotes from “Japan and the Labor Question,” Japan Weekly Chronicle, 27 Nov 1919, 797–98, 831, EAL; “Tanaka daikien [Great Flame Tanaka],” 2, EAL. 69. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 223–24; Anderson, Woman at Work, 128–29. 70. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 225–30. 71. Anderson, Woman at Work, 124. On the limits of the 1911 Factory Law in Japan, Simpson, “Women in Japan’s Struggle.”
Chapter 3: A “Parliament of Working Women” 1. Miriam Shepherd, “Report of Secretary to Executive Committee, ICWW, Jan 1, 1921 to August 31, 1921,” 2–3, f ICWW 1920–1921, r 13, NWTULLC. See also Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919,” JAH 100 (March 2014), 1070–71, n42. 2. Miriam Shepherd to Mrs. Gilmore, n.d., f ICWW 1920–1921, r 13, NWTULLC. 3. ICWW Bulletins, 7 July 1920 and 25 Nov 1920, f ICWW 1920–1921; “Report to all ICWW Parties,” [c 1920–1921], f 4, IFWWSL. 4. ICWW Bulletin, 7 July 1920, 3 and 25 Nov 1920, 1. On Hanna, see LL, July 1921, 11, 7; Scheiwe and Artner, “International Networking in the Interwar Years,” 76–77; Evans, Comrades and Sisters, 121–56. 5. For quote, see Shepherd, “Report of Secretary to Executive Committee, ICWW, January 1, 1921 to August 31, 1921,” 8. Günter Bischof, “Anna Boschek,” in Women in Austria: Contemporary Austria Studies, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Erika Thurner, vol. 6 (New Brunswick, 1998), 63–74; Gabriella Hauch, “Sisters and Comrades, Women’s Movements, and the ‘Austrian Revolution,’ ” in Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists 1918–1923, ed. Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe (Leiden, 2011), 221–44; Jill Lewis, “Anna Boschek,” in Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, ed. A.T. Lane, vol. 1 (Westport, CT, 1995), 121–22. For membership figures, see Ingrun Lafleur, “Five Socialist W omen: Traditionalist Conflicts and Socialist Visions in Austria, 1893–1934,” in Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, ed. Marilyn Boxer and Jean Quataert (NY, 1978), 222. 6. Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (Bloomington, 1973), 273; Quote: Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (London, 1985, repr. Chicago, 2008), 80; Lorwin, International L abor Movement, 65–71. 7. Quote: AFL Executive Council to Jan Oudegeest, 5 March 1921, in The Samuel Gompers Papers, vol. 11, 1918–21 (Urbana, 2009), 436–37. See also Lorwin, International, 38–41, 58–60; Lewis Lorwin, Labor and Internationalism (NY, 1929), 191–94; Geert van Goethem, The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions, 1913–1945 (Ashgate, 2006), 17–29, appendix 1 for membership figures; Louis S. Reed, The Labor Philosophy of Samuel Gompers (NY, 1930), 167–69. 8. MDR and her husband, as discussed e arlier, w ere persistent critics of Wilson’s policy toward Soviet Russia. For elaboration, see Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 52–57, 60; and Salzman, Reform and Revolution, pt. 3, 4.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 465 9. Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, 1984); Nolan, Transatlantic Century, chs. 2, 3. 10. “Report of Secretary to Executive Committee, ICWW, Jan 1, 1921 to August 31, 1921,” 5–8. 11. Jacoby, “Elisabeth Christman,” 149. 12. MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 12 Oct 1921, f 1921, r 2, NWTUL, LC. On divisions among French unionists, see Laura Levine Frader, Breadwinners and Citizens: Gender in the Making of the French Social Model (Durham, 2008), 44–46; Lieberman, Labor Movements, 202–14. 13. Bouvier, Mes mémoirs, 132–33; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 234–36; MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 12 Oct 1921. 14. Marilyn Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’ ” AHR 112 (Feb2007), 131–58; Sklar, Schüler, and Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany, 1–75. 15. Quotes from MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 30 Sept 1921, f 1921, r 2, NWTULLC. See also MDR to Dearest Elizabeth, 12 Oct 1921. 16. MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 30 Sept 1921. 17. MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 30 Sept 1921. 18. Henry, Women and the L abor Movement, 57–105, 202–11. Reports to the WTUL Executive Board, 26 Aug 1921, 22 Sept 1921, f 1921, r 2, NWTULLC. 19. MDR to Dearest Elisabeth, 12 Oct 1921. 20. Hanna was in Geneva at the same time as the conference, attending the 1921 ILC as a worker adviser to the German delegation. Robins lunched with Hanna the day a fter the w omen’s congress ended and left convinced t here would be f uture meetings. “She is fine and lovable—at least so it seems to me,” Robins wrote Christman. MDR to Dearest Elizabeth, n.d. [c. 25 Oct 1921], f 1921, r 2, NWTULLC. On Hanna’s ILC attendance, 1921 ILC Proceedings, 272–77. 21. “Second Congress: Report,” f 6, IFWWSL; “Delegates to the Second International Congress of Working W omen,” Oct 17–24, 1921, Geneva, Switzerland, f IFWW 1920–1921, r 13, NWTULLC; MDR to Dearest Elizabeth, 26 Oct 1921, f 1921, r 2, NWTULLC; Henry, Women and the Labor Movement, 222–23. 22. “Address to the Delegates by Mrs. Raymond Robins,” ICWW Meeting, Geneva, 17 Oct 1921, f 5, IFWWSL. 23. “Resolution on Disarmament: Unanimously adopted by the delegates to the Second ICWW, Geneva, Oct 1921,” f ICWW 1920–1921, r 13, NWTULLC. 24. “Working Women Pronounce on World Questions,” The Labour Woman, 1 Dec 1921, 188, and other materials, f 5 and f 6, IFWWSL; Henry, Women and the Labor Movement, 226–28. 25. “Second Congress: Report,” 24 Oct 1921, 8–18, quotes 8, 10, 15, f 6, IFWWSL; Jessie Haver Butler, “Second Intl Cong of Working Women: Summary of Proceedings, Oct 17 to 25, 1921,” 2–3, f ICWW 1920–1921, r 13, NWTULSL. The question of w hether the workers of a particular country, such as Cuba, benefit from raised l abor standards was not easily answered in 1921. That remains true. Contemporary researchers find the effects of international labor standards vary widely depending on industry, the labor standard being assessed, and the length of time mea sured. Tellingly, as we have seen, some of the most contentious disputes over raising standards occurred not between the West and the “rest,” but within single nations. See also Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 213–217.
466 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 26. On Zung, a graduate of Smith College, see China Review 3 (1922), 36. On Shin, described as “a welfare worker of Hong Kong,” see American Child 5, 9 (1922), 3. On Dingman, see “Biographical Material,” b 1, f 1, MADSL; “Mary A. Dingman, Social Worker, 85,” NYT, 22 March 1961; and Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–1985 (Manchester, 2010), 48–50. 27. “Second Congress: Report,” 24 Oct 1921, 19–24, quotes 19, 24. 28. Henry, Women and the L abor Movement, 223. 29. Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World,” 1073–44, n53–55. 30. MDR to Christman, n.d. [c. 25 Oct 1921]; Butler, “Second Intl Cong of Working Women: Summary of Proceedings, Oct 17 to 25, 1921,” 1. 31. MDR to Christman, n.d. [c. 25 Oct 1921]. 32. She objected, as did Arthur Henderson, secretary of the British Labour Party, to the principles the British Communist Party a dopted at its founding 1920 convention. It repudiated “the reformist view that a social revolution can be achieved by the ordinary methods of Parliamentary Democracy” and regarded “Parliamentary and electoral action generally as providing a means of propaganda and agitation towards the revolution.” Bondfield, My Life, 239–40. 33. Pamela Graves, Labour Women: W omen in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1994), 77; Bartley, Labour W omen in Power, 21–22. For context, see Jose Harris, “Labour’s Political and Social Thought,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo (NY, 2000), esp. 13–19; Gary Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism (New Haven, 2019), ch 2. 34. For Balabanoff ’s account of the British trade u nion visit, see Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (NY, 1938; repr. Bloomington, 1973), 240–42. Although denounced as a “social fascist” and “Menshevik,” Balabanoff aligned with the Bolsheviks until 1921 when she severed “all relations with the Comintern” and fled to Stockholm. [277]. 35. Quotes from Margaret Bondfield, “Diary of the trade u nion delegation to Russia, 19 May 1920 to 15 June 1920,” f 1, MBTUC; Bondfield, A Life’s Work, 240. See also Bondfield to Rios, 1 March 1921, f 2.30, MBVC; June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London, 2002), 177, n42. 36. For the ILO’s initial support of the new “federation of w omen’s trade u nions,” see S. Sanger, Note, 29 Nov 1920, D600/467, ILOAPF. 37. Side notes on “Minute Sheet,” Butler to Thomas, 27 Sept 1921, D600/467, ILOAPF. 38. Miriam Shepherd to Harold Butler, 26 Oct 1921; Butler to Shepherd, 16 Dec 1921, both in D600/467, ILOAPF. 39. 1921 ILC Proceedings, XXXVII–LXI; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 265. 40. “Notes on the Development of the IFWW,” 1921, f 5, MBTUC. For quotes: Beverley Kingston, “Phillips, Marion (1881–1932),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, 1988, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/phillips-marion-8036. Phillips l ater became the first Australian woman elected to the British House of Commons. 41. MDR to Christman, 26 Oct 1921. 42. MDR to Christman, n.d. [c. 25 Oct 1921]. 43. “Minutes, 2 January 1922, IFWW,” f 5, MBTUC; Phillips to MDR, 8 Jan 1922, f 1922, r 2, NWTULLC; MDR to Christman, 25 Jan 1922, r 2, NWTULLC.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 467 44. “Minutes, IFTU International Trade Union Congress, Rome, April 1922,” f 1922, r 2, NWTULLC; “Minutes April 20–26, 1922,” f 5, MBTUC. IFTU attitudes are further revealed in IFTU, “Report on the 1921 Congress,” f 5, IFWWSL. The IFTU report mischaracterizes the women’s congress. It wrongly congratulates the congress for recognizing that the “only real demarcation” is between workers and bosses and for repudiating the “old error of the bourgeois w omen’s movement, namely that the rights of women must be wrested from men.” Hanna was not just speaking for herself. On the “overwhelming consensus” against separate unions for women in the German labor movement, see Jean H. Quataert, “Women’s Work and Worth: The Persistence of Stereo type Attitudes in the German Free Trade Unions, 1890–1929,” in The World of Women’s Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical Essays, ed. Norbert C. Soldon (Westport, 1985), 96. 45. Minutes, June 1922, IFWW, f 5, MBTUC; WTUL Board Minutes, 14–15 Jan 1923, quoting letter from Phillips, n.d., f 1923 Jan–June, r 3, NWTULLC. Minutes, Aug 1923, IFWW, f 5, MBTUC. 46. Graves, Labour Women, 24–25; Pat Thane, “The Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–45,” in British Feminism in the Nineteenth C entury, ed. Harold L. Smith (Amherst, 1990), 124–43; June Hannam, “Women and Labour Politics,” in The Foundations of the British Labour Party: Identities, Culture and Perspectives, 1900–1939, ed. Matthew Worley (Ashgate, 2009), 171–92. 47. Dorothy Elliot, “Women in Search of Justice,” unpublished memoir, f E, RDWL; “Press Clippings,” f F, RDWL; Hunt, National Federation, 106–13. 48. WTUL Board Minutes, 14–15 Jan 1923, f 1923 Jan–June, r 3, NWTULLC. 49. Minutes, Meeting of the IFWW Secretariat, 19 March 1923, London, r 3, NWTULLC. 50. “IFWW Agenda, 20 July 1923,” f 5, MBTUC; Minutes of Meeting of Secretariat and President, IFWW, 20 July 1923, f 5, MBTUC. 51. “IFWW, Biennial Congress at Schönbrunn C astle, Near Vienna, Austria, 14 to 18 Aug 1923,” f 7, IFWWSL; Proceedings of the Third Congress, Folder 3rd Intl Cong, r 25, NWTULLC. On Mundt, see “Martha Mundt,” Personnel Files, ILOA. 52. “Address of the President to the Third Congress, IFWW,” f 7, IFWWSL. 53. IFWW, “Working Women in Many Countries: Report of Congress held in Vienna, August 1923,” f 1923 July–Dec, r 3, NWTULLC; “Report of the Delegates to the first Biennial Congress of the IFWW, August 14 to 18, 1923,” f 5, MBTUC; “Resolution Submitted by the American Delegation and Passed at the ICWW at Vienna, 16 August 1923,” f 80, MASL. Quotes from “Family Allowances in Payment of Wages,” f ICWW 1924 Jan–April, r 3, NWTULLC. On the position of the British Labour Party on family allowances, Francis, “Labour and Gender,” 203. 54. Christman to “Co-workers,” 22 Aug 1923, f ICWW 1923–1927, r 14, NWTUL, LC. 55. “Statement Made by Dr. Marion Phillips on the Proposals Submitted by the British Members of the Secretariat to the Congress of Vienna,” n.d., f ICWW 1924 Jan–A pril, r 3, NWTULLC. 56. Robins later claimed she “refused to stand for reelection as President” [Robins to “My dear Mr. x,” 5 April 1924, f 83, MASL]. I have found no record of such a refusal. On Burniaux, see van Goethem, Amsterdam International, 167, n19; and Dorothea Mary Northcroft, Women at Work in the League of Nations (Knightley, 1926), 29. Burniaux attended the 1919 and 1921 women’s congresses and was an adviser to Belgium’s 1919 ILC delegation.
468 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 57. “International Federation of Working Women, Final Report, August 1923 to December 1925,” f 5, MBTUC; IFWW, “Women Workers and International Labour Legislation,” n.d. [c. July 1923], f 80, MASL; McDonald to Thomas, 21 Oct 1923, D600/467/1, Prewar Files, ILOA. 58. MDR to Anderson, 19 Dec 1922, f 67, MASL. 59. Quote from MDR to Anderson, 28 Jan 1924, f 67, MASL. On Bondfield’s rise in British politics, see Bartley, Labour W omen in Power, 36–39. 60. Quotes from Anderson, Woman at Work, 131; Anderson to Swartz, 24 March 1924, f 82, MASL See also Swartz to Anderson, 21 Dec 1923, f 81, MASL. 61. “Memorandum from the IFWW to the IFTU,” n.d. [c. early 1924], f IFWW 1924 Jan– April, r 3, NWTULLC; McDonald to Swartz, 29 April 1924, r 3, NWTULLC; MDR to AH, 19 March 1924, MF v 116, SLNSW. 62. MDR to Mary Dreier, 21 Feb 1924, b 49, f 1, RRWSHS. 63. Anderson to Robins, 16 Feb 1924, 1 April 1924; Anderson to Christman, 16 April 1924, all in f 67, MASL; Minutes, executive session, 20 June 1924, NWTUL Convention Proceedings, 16–21 June 1924, 266, r 23, NWTULLC. 64. IFWW, “Report of the International Conference of Women Trade Unionists, Vienna, May 31, 1924 by the IFTU,” f IFWW 1924 May–Dec, r 3, NWTULLC; “IFWW, Final Report, Aug. 1923 to Dec. 1925,” f 5, MBTUC. 65. McDonald to Swartz, 7 June 1924 and 8 June 1924, f 82, MASL; Christman to McDonald, 12 July 1924, f IFCC 1924 May–Dec, r 3, NWTULLC; “Report on 1924 Convention,” f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC. 66. When the small IFTU W omen’s Committee met for the first time, Sassenbach reminded the group of their “advisory status” and limited mission, which he characterized as strengthening trade unions and considering matters special to “the mental and physical constitution of w omen.” The w omen ignored his instructions. In their free-wheeling two-day discussion, they chastised “their male colleagues” for failing to recognize “the value and importance” of w omen’s work, for believing “the proper sphere of woman’s work is the home,” and for discouraging their wives and d aughters from organizing. They also requested more w omen speakers at IFTU general assemblies and separate w omen’s conferences. Minutes of the International Committee of Trade Union W omen, Nov 3–4, 1925, f 1926 Jan–April, r 4, NWTULLC. On the IFTU Women’s Committee/Women’s International after 1925, see Susan Zimmermann, “Framing Working W omen’s Rights Internationally,” in The Internationalisation of the L abour Question: Ideological Antagonism, Workers’ Movements and the ILO since 1919, ed. Stefano Bellucci and Holger Weiss (London, 2020), 95–117; Susan Zimmermann, Frauenpolitik und Männergewerkschaft. Internationale Geschlechterpolitik, IGB-Gewerkschafterinnen und die Arbeiter und Frauenbewegungen der Zwischenkriegszeit [Women’s Politics and Men’s Trade Unions: International Gender Politics, Female IFTU Unionists and the Labor and Women’s Movements of the Interwar Period] (Vienna, forthcoming). I thank Susan Zimmermann for translations from German to English. 67. For more detail, see Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World,” 1080. 68. [Smith and Christman], “International Federation of Working Women,” LLB, Nov 1923. For an earlier version of the article that clarifies its authorship, see “Report on Vienna Congress,” f 81, MASL.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 469 69. Robin Miller Jacoby’s studies remain influential. Although her finely grained investigations are attentive to the constrained choices labor w omen faced, Jacoby adopts a “sex” versus “class,” or US versus Europe, framework. See Jacoby, “Feminism and Class Consciousness in the British and American W omen’s Trade Union Leagues, 1890–1925,” in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana, 1976), 137–60; and Jacoby, The British and American Women’s Trade Union Leagues, 1890–1925 (Brooklyn, NY, 1994), 149–87. 70. On the disagreements among European labor w omen over whether women should or ganize separately, see van Goethem, Amsterdam International, 158–61; Bouvier, Mes Mémoires, 144–46; Graves, Labour Women, chs. 4–6, conclusion; Mary Walker, “Labour Women and Internationalism,” in Women in the Labour Movement: The British Experience, ed. Lucy Middleton (London, 1977), 84–93; and Hannam, “Women and L abour Politics,” 171–92. As Hannam notes, “the whole question of separate space for women within the trade union movement and in the Labour Party was a very controversial one in Britain. The W omen’s Cooperative Guild, an organization with relatively more independence than the L abour Party women’s sections, also advocated for the needs of working women.” Email, June Hannam to author, 10 Oct 2019. 71. MDR to AH, 10 July 1939, vol. 116, MF, SLNSW. 72. Zimmermann uses this phrase in “Framing Working Women’s Rights Internationally.” 73. Although US league w omen w ere not involved, other US social feminists—labor ally Alice Hamilton, the industrial health and safety pioneer, and US C hildren’s Bureau chief Grace Abbott—did make notable contributions to the League of Nations in this era. For details, Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton (Boston, 1943), 299–317; Lela B. Costin, Two S isters of Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana, 1983), 90–97 and Nancy Cott, “American W omen Acting Globally: Collections at the Schlesinger Library,” WSMI, 1–19. 74. For evidence of lasting ties, see correspondence between MB and MA, 1925–1940, f 2; MB and RS, 1931–1950, f 31; MB and PN, 1921–1950, f 26; MB and FM, 1944–1947, f 27; MB and EC, 1939–1948, f 8, all in MBVC. On the Stone Turners’ Union, see EC to MB, 11 Oct 41, f 8, MBVC. 75. Thane, “Labour and Welfare,” in Labour’s First Century, 89–95. 76. For examples, f 7, 28, 30–31, MASL. Hesselgren hosted a visit by Anderson and Mary van Kleeck to Sweden in the 1920s. See “American Women in Social Work on a Visit to Sweden,” n.d., b 23, f 1, MVKSC. 77. ILO, Bureau of Gender Equality, “Women’s Empowerment: 90 Years of ILO Action!” Geneva, Switzerland, 2009; Carol Lubin and Anne Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The International Labor Organization and Women (Durham, 1990), chs. 1, 2. 78. On Hesselgren, Ruth Hamrin-Thorell, “Kerstin Hesselgren,” https://sok .riksarkivet.se /sbl/artikel/12947, accessed 30 Sept 2016; Renée Frangeur, “Kerstin Hesselgren,” www.skbl.se/sv /artikel/KerstinHesselgren, accessed 20 Dec 2018. On Swedish social democracy in the 1920s, see Offen, European Feminisms, 329–30; Ann-Sofie Ohlander, “The Invisible Child? The Struggle over Social Democratic F amily Policy,” in Creating Social Democracy: A C entury of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden, ed. Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molink, and Klas Åmark (University Park, 1992), 213–36; Gøsta Esping-Anderson, “The Making of a Social Democratic Welfare
470 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 State,” in Creating Social Democracy, 35–66; Gunnel Karlsson, Från broderskap till systerskap: Det socialdemokratiska kvinnoförbundets kamp för inflytande och makt i SAP (From Brotherhood to Sisterhood: The Swedish Social Democratic Women’s Federation’s Struggle for Power in the Social Democratic Party), PhD diss., Department of History, University of Gothenburg, 1996. 79. Mary Dingman to JB, 5 Oct 1927, Boite 17, JBBHVP; Bouvier, Mes Mémoires, 139, 144–49, 259; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 235–36, 299, n66. 80. Laura Benedetti, The Tigress in the Snow, quote 48–49; Buttafuocco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy,” 178–95. For an insider account of the rise of the Blackshirts, see Balabanoff, My Life, 279–80, 302–8. Echoing Casartelli-Cabrini, Balabanoff judged Fascism “a victory of the dagger and the bomb. Fascism as an idea never triumphed” (279). 81. Casartelli-Cabrini quote from EC to Exec Board, 8 Oct 1924, f IFWW 1924 May–Dec, r 3, NWTULLC. 82. In addition to Robins and Swartz, Pauline Newman remained deeply interested in Germany, especially a fter her visit in 1923. For an evocative account of the dire poverty and suffering she witnessed on her visit, see Newman, “In Nuremberg,” LLB, June 1924, 2. 83. Gertrud Hanna, “Women in the German Trade Union Movement,” International Labour Review 8 (1923), 21–27; Hanna, “The German Exhibition of Home Industries and Its Lessons,” International Labour Review 12 (1925), 523–29; Schiewe and Artner, “International Networking in the Interwar Years,” 75–96; Zimmermann, “Framing Working Women’s Rights Internationally.” 84. Julius Braunthal, History of the International: vol. 2, 1914–1943, trans. John Clark (NY, 1967), 332–35; McDonald to Mundt, 30 July 1925, 17 Sept 1925, 20 Nov 1925, D600/467/3, Prewar Files, ILOA; Kemmis [McDonald’s married name] to Mundt, 20 Nov 1926, D600/467/3, Prewar Files, ILOA; Neunsinger, “Creating the International Spirit of Socialist W omen,” in Crossing Boundaries, 117–56, membership data, Table 1, 141. The LSI w omen’s committee held only a few conferences before it too became inactive. Walker, “Labour Women and Internationalism.” 85. Marilyn Boxer, “International Socialism, Women, and Feminism: A History of Opportunity and Opposition,” in WSMI; Hannam and Hunt, Socialist Women, 179–80.
Chapter 4: Social Justice under Siege 1. For a riveting account, see Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (NY, 1945). 2. Louis F. Post, The Deportation Delirium of 1920 (Chicago, 1923). On how Post intervened to prevent deportations, see Adam Hochschild, “When Americ a Tried to Deport its Radicals,” New Yorker, 11 Nov 2019. 3. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, ed. Joseph McCartin (NY, 1969; repr. Urbana, 2000), chs. 14–18. 4. James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (NY, 1967, repr. New Brunswick, NJ, 1984), esp. 239; Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement (NY, 2005), 17. 5. Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, 333–40. 6. Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (NY, 2020); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 471 Modern America (NY, 2004), ch. 1; Janice Fine and Daniel J. Tichenor, “A Movement Wrestling: American Labor’s Enduring Struggle with Immigration 1866–2007,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (April 2009), 84–113. 7. Grace Abbott, The Immigrant and the Community (NY, 1917); Grace Abbott, “The Immigrant as a Problem in Community Planning,” Publications of the American Sociological Society 12 (1916), 166–73; LLB, Nov 1926, 4. The 1790 Naturalization Act l imited eligibility for naturalized citizenship to “free white persons,” which excluded large segments of the population, including nonwhite p eoples and indentured servants. The 1870 Naturalization Act amended the e arlier law to include “persons of African Descent” as eligible for naturalized citizenship. L egal wrangling over whether darker-skinned people not of African descent w ere “white,” and hence eligible for American citizenship, continued. 8. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL’s Direct Affiliate Strategy,” Industrial Relations 36 ( July 1997), 278–301; Cobble, “Pure and Simple Radicalism.” 9. Letter, Ethel Smith to Samuel Gompers, 26 Aug 1921; Report, “To Member of the Executive Board of the WTUL,” 26 Aug 1921; and “Report to the Executive Board,” 22 Sept 1921, all in f 1921, r 2, NWTULLC. 10. David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Urbana, 1965); Irving Bernstein, Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920–1933 (Baltimore, 1960), chs. 2, 4, esp. 211–12. 11. Weinstein, Decline of Socialism, 249–57. Quotes from Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (NY, 1957), 393. 12. “Chicago Congress Form L abor Party,” NYT, 23 Nov 1919; “Speaks for L abor Parties,” NYT, 7 Dec 1919; “Woman for Senator Is Named by L abor,” NYT, 31 May 1920; Schneiderman, All for One, 146–47; Mary Beard, The American Labor Movement: A Short History (NY, 1931), 165–71. 13. Ethel Smith, “A Trade Union W oman Afoot in Europe,” LLB, Dec 1922, 1–2; Schneiderman, All for One, 129, 148. On Smith’s background and her league activism in the 1920s, see Amy E. Butler, Two Paths to Equality: Alice Paul and Ethel M. Smith in the ERA Debate, 1921–1929 (Albany, NY, 2002). 14. After backing Wilson in 1916, Addams voted for Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs in 1920 and Progressive Party candidate Robert LaFollette in 1924. Jean B. Elshtain, ed., The Jane Addams Reader (NY, 2002). 15. For quotes: MDR to Miss Dietrichson, 24 Aug 1920, b 49, f 1, RRWSHS. See also Edward James, introduction to MDR papers, microfilm, SL. On Hoover, Bruno Cabanes, The G reat War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014), 189–247 and Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919– 1933 (Ithaca, 1984), 39–55. 16. J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, 1973), ch. 2. The League of W omen Voters was originally called the National League of W omen Voters. It changed its name to the League of W omen Voters in 1946. I refer to it as the League of Women Voters throughout the text. 17. Originally called the International W omen’s Suffrage Alliance, the organization changed its name in 1926 to the International Alliance of W omen for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, reflecting its broadened postwar agenda. In 1946, the name was shortened to International Alliance of W omen. I refer to the group throughout the text as the International Alliance of
472 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 omen. On its history, see Rupp, Worlds of Women; Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s TransW national Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars (London, 2015); Arnold Whittick, Woman into Citizen (Santa Barbara, 1979); and Mineke Bosch with Annemarie Kloosterman, eds. Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus, 1990). 18. Harriet Alonso, The Women’s Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921–1942 (Knoxville, 1989); Knight, Jane Addams, 238–45; Threlkeld, Pan American Women, 123–28. On the “Law Not War” demonstrations, see NYT, 16 July 1923; LLB, Aug 1923. On the league and the National Committee, see Report, “Findings of the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War,” 18–24 Jan 1925, f 1925, r 3, WTULLC; LLB, Dec 1926; LLB, March 1928. The “outlawry of war” movement culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, with sixty-two signatory nations pledging to reject war as a means of settling disputes. It is often dismissed as naïve. For a more positive assessment, see Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (NY, 2017). 19. Jan Doolittle Wilson, The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920–1930 (Urbana, 2007), chs. 1–3; Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–1946 (Urbana, 1997), chs 3, 4. 20. Learning about the growing number of other nations that provided cash benefits and medical care to m others and newborns in 1919 also emboldened their efforts. For examples, see “National Industrial Conference Washington, D.C., Oct 20–22, 1919: A Handbook for Delegates,” 16–21, f 14, b 501, YWCASSA. 21. Linda Gordon, “Child Welfare: A Brief History,” http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu, accessed 11 March 2019. 22. Wilson, Women’s Joint, chs. 4–6. See also Davis, Spearheads for Reform. 23. Wilson, Women’s Joint, 170, 175–76. 24. WILDF also took unusual efforts to foster racial egalitarianism. See Plastas, Band of Noble Women. 25. For quotes: Browder, “ ‘Christian Solution,’ ” 86; Harry Stewart, “Where the ‘Y’ Stands Now,” Good Housekeeping ( June 1920), 49–50. See also “National Industrial Conference Washington D.C., Oct 20–22, 1919: A Handbook for Delegates,” 23–25; Frederickson, “Citizens for Democracy,” 83–86. 26. Browder, “Working Out.” 27. The other six league planks in 1922 were “organization of workers into trade unions; an 8-hour day and 44-hour week; an American standard of living; full citizenship for w omen; outlawry of war; and affiliation of working women of all countries.” LLB, Oct 1922, opposite front cover. Compare, for example, with LL, March 1921, opposite front cover. 28. LLB, May 1923, July 1924, March 1925, Dec 1925; WTUL convention resolution on organ izing “colored women workers,” f 1925, r 3, WTULLC; Francille Rusan Wilson, “Elizabeth Ross Haynes,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Brooklyn, 1993), 548–49; “Mrs. G. E. Haynes, Active in YWCA,” NYT, 27 Oct 1953; Carlton-LaNey, “Elizabeth Ross Haynes,” 576. 29. Jacoby, “Women’s Trade Union League School,” 12–16; 1922 National Convention Proceedings, r 22, WTULLC.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 473 30. May, Unprotected Labor, 118–19. 31. Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (NY, 2020), 170–74, quote 171; White, Too Heavy, 148–54; Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune,” in Black Women in America, 113–27; Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune,” NAW: Modern Period, 76–77, quote 77; Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia, 2003), ch 1–3; Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, Jim Crow Capital: W omen and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2018), ch. 4; Sharon Harley, “Nannie Helen Burroughs: The ‘Black Goddess of Liberty,’ ” Journal of Negro History 81 (Winter–Fall 1996), 62–71; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Nannie Helen Burroughs,” Black Women in America, 201–5. 32. Rita R. Heller, Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938 (PhD diss., Department of History, Rutgers University, 1986), esp. ch. 2. Rita Heller, “Blue Collars and Bluestockings: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for W omen Workers, 1921– 1938,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity, 107–45; Hilda W. Smith, Women Workers at the Bryn Mawr Summer School (NY, 1929), 17–19. Schneiderman (One for All, 144) recalls 1922 as the date the summer school integrated, but documents place it later. 33. Smith, Women Workers, 17–19. Quotes, 17, 19. 34. Hilda Smith to WEB Du Bois, 10 Feb 1928, Alfred Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/exhibits/show/the-summer -school-for-women-wo/leisure-and-play-the-workers, accessed 16 Feb 2019. 35. Quotes from M. Carey Thomas “Foreword,” vii–xi. Smith, Women Workers, 1–5; Heller, “Blue Collars,” 111–12. 36. MDR to JB, 8 April 1921, Boite 23, JBBHVP. See also Hilda W. Smith, Opening Vistas in Workers’ Education: An Autobiography of Hilda Worthington Smith (Washington, DC, 1978), 113–55; Schneiderman, All for One, 140–42. 37. Marius Hansome, World Workers’ Educational Movements: Their Social Significance (NY, 1931); Michael Merrill and Susan J. Schurman, “Toward a General Theory and Global History of Workers’ Education,” ILWCH 90 (Fall 2016), 5–11. 38. Heller, “Blue Collars,” 107–45. Quotes: Heller, Women of Summer, 51; “Interview with Orlie Pell, Hilda Smith, and Eleanor Coit,” (1974), School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. 39. “Summer School for Women Workers in Industry at Bryn Mawr College,” June–Aug 1923, b 2, f 12, ASWCRUL; Hilda Smith, “The Bryn Mawr Summer School, 1929,” b 2, f 13, ASWCRUL; Smith, Women Workers, 222–23; Smith, Opening Vistas, 161–64. 40. Bernstein, Lean Years; Smith, Women Workers, 245–46; Kornbluh and Frederickson, eds., Sisterhood and Solidarity, chs. 5–7. 41. Quote from Alfred Greenfield Digital Center for the History of W omen’s Education, http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu/exhibits/show/the-summer-school-for-women-wo/leisure -and-play-the-workers, accessed 16 Feb 2019. 42. For elaboration, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 120–29; and Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Philadelphia, 2013), 142–51. 43. On obstacles to voting, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (NY, revised edition 2009). On the NWP, see Plastas, Band of
474 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 Noble Women, 50–51; Cott, Grounding, 123; Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (NY, 1987), 153–59. 44. Report [signed by Ethel Smith], “Conference on so-called “equal rights” amendment proposed by NWP,” 4 Dec 1921 r 2, NWTULLC; Leila J. Rupp, “The Women’s Community in the National W oman’s Party, 1945 to the 1960s,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985), 717–18; Cott, Grounding, 120–29, 324–25, f13. Florence Kelley, Crystal Eastman, and o thers left the NWP once it dedicated itself solely to legal equality between the sexes. For Kelley’s reasoning, see Selected Letters of Florence Kelly, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer (Urbana, 2009), 273. 45. Full rights feminists typically described the legislation they sought as “fair labor standards” laws. Their opponents, however, often characterized such laws as “protective.” Similarly, league women and their allies espoused a “living wage,” an “adequate minimum wage,” or an adequate “standard of living.” The term “family wage” is not one they favored. For elaboration, see Cobble, The Other W omen’s Movement, intro, ch. 4. 46. On the class background of NWP w omen, see Leila J. Rupp, “The W omen’s Community in the NWP, 1945 to the 1960s,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985), 715–40. 47. Rupp and Taylor, Survival, esp. 35–37. For the first Paul quote and other biographical information, see Susan Ware, “The book I c ouldn’t write: Alice Paul and the Challenge of Feminist Biography,” JWH 24 (Summer 2012), 13–46. Educational background from Kristina L. Myers, Program Director, Alice Paul Institute, June 7, 2018, email to author. For 1972 quote from Paul, see Alice Paul Institute exhibit, “Alice Paul: In Pursuit of Ordinary Equality,” 31 May 2018, Mount Laurel, New Jersey. 48. Woloch, A Class by Herself, 112–20. 49. LLB, Feb 1923; b 85, f 5, MVKSC. 50. Silas Bent, “The Women’s War,” NYT, 14 Jan 1923, 4, 15. 51. WTUL Convention Call, June 1921, r 1, NWTULLC; LLB, March 1921. The league push for “actual equality of liberty” paralleled the AFL campaign for “actual liberty of contract,” an effort to replace what the AFL saw as the false freedom of “liberty of contract” with real or “actual liberty of contract.” See Dorothy Sue Cobble, “The Intellectual Origins of an Institutional Revolution,” ABA Journal of L abor and Employment Law 26 (Winter 2011): 201–12. 52. Mary Anderson, “Should There be Labor Laws for Women? . . . Yes, Says Mary Anderson,” Good Housekeeping (Sept 1925), 52. 53. Payne, Reform, L abor, and Feminism, 144–45; LLB, May 1923. 54. NWP, “Michigan Laws Discriminate against Women,” Washington, DC, 1922. 55. LLB, Feb 1926, 1. 56. LLB, June 1926, 1–3, Dec 1928, March 1929. John Thomas McGuire, “Gender and the Personal Shaping of Public Administration in the United States: Mary Anderson and the Women’s Bureau, 1920–1930,” Public Administration Review 72 (March/April 2012), 265–71. 57. For elaboration, see John Thomas McGuire, “From Socialism to Social Justice Feminism: Rose Schneiderman and the Quest for Urban Equity, 1911–1933,” Journal of Urban History 35 (Nov 2009), 1005, 41n. 58. LLB, May 1925. 59. Lemon, The W oman Citizen, 209–27; Wilson, Women’s Joint, ch. 8; Kirsten Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (Philadel-
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 475 phia, 2012), 45–51, ch. 6; Carrie Chapman Catt, “Poison Propaganda,” The W oman Citizen, 31 May 1924, 14, 32–33; Dearborn Independent, 15 and 22 March 1924. 60. Florence Kelley to Jane Addams, 20 July 1927, in Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, ed. Sklar and Palmer, 404–12; Addams, Second Twenty Years at Hull House, 180–82. 61. LLB, May 1925; Wilson, Women’s Joint, 133–47.
Chapter 5: Pan-Internationalisms 1. Quote from Robin Winks, “Imperialism,” in C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (NY, 1968), 262–63. For an overview of Americ a’s territorial empire after 1898, see Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (NY, 2019). 2. Marie Sandell, among o thers, details the rise of new transnational w omen’s organizations outside the West in the interwar era and the growing interest of North American and European international w omen’s organizations in reaching out to new groups of w omen. See Sandell, Women’s Transnational Activism, esp. 1–18, chs, 2, 7; and Sandell, “Regional versus International: Women’s Activism and Organisational Spaces in the Interwar Period,” International History Review 33 (Dec 2011), 607–25. 3. On the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018), 11–13, ch 1. See also Louis L. Snyder, Macro-Nationalism: A History of the Pan-Movements (Westport, 1984). 4. Quotes from White, In Defense, 135; Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally;” 212–13. See also Materson, “Global Journeys,” 35–42; Elisabetta Vezzosi, “The International Strategy of African American W omen at the Columbian Exposition and Its Legacy: Pan-Africanism, Decolonization and H uman Rights,” in Moving Bodies, Displaying Nations: National Cultures, Race and Gender in World Expositions, ed. G. Abbatista (Trieste, 2014), 76–83. 5. Rupp, Worlds of W omen, 73–75; Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune,” 119; Rackham Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune (Garden City, 1964), 169. 6. Plastas, Band of Noble Women, 53–55; Vezzosi, “International Strategy,” 80–81. NCL head Florence Kelley attended the 1921 Pan-African Congress, but it appears the league did not send representatives to either the 1919 or 1921 congresses. See Plastas, Band of Noble Women, 74–76. 7. Plastas, Band of Noble W omen, xi, 25–26, chs. 1, 2; Joyce Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975 (Carbondale, IL, 2004), 116–18. Mercedes Randall, ed. Beyond Nationalism: The Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch (NY, 1972), intro. For comparative context, see Sandell, Women’s Transnational Activism, ch. 3. 8. LLB, June 1924, 3. 9. On Ting, see “Miss Ting Shu Ching,” Chinese Recorder (Dec 1936), 578–79; Karen Garner, Precious Fire: Maud Russell and the Chinese Revolution (Amherst, MA, 2003), 70–71; Carol Lee Hamrin with Stacy Bieler, eds., Salt & Light, Vol 1: Lives of Faith that S haped Modern China (Eugene, 2009), ch. 5. Ting visited the United States in 1919 and may have attended the YWCA Industrial Conference and the Women’s Labor Congress. On Fox, see Isabella Jackson, Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge, 2018), 211.
476 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 10. On Chinese w omen’s twentieth-century activism, see Louise P. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, 2008), chs. 1–2. 11. “Address of Miss Ting,” 1924 NWTU Conv Proc, 254, r 23, NWTULLC. 12. “Address of Mrs. Evelyn Fox,” 1924 NWTU Conv Proc, 255–58, r 23, NWTULLC. 13. In Capital (vol. 1 [1967], 461–42), Marx uses the phrase “invisible threads” to describe connections between factory operatives and industrial homeworkers in the nineteenth-century British putting-out system. W hether conscious or not, Fox globalized this division of labor and updated the term to apply to relations between consumers in the West and producers in the East. 14. Resolution No. 18, NWTU Conv Proc, 267, r 23, NWTULLC. 15. For elaboration on the rise in East Asia of anticolonial nationalism, Communism, and early forms of Pan-Asianism, see Evan N. Dawley and Tosh Minohara, eds. Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment in East Asia (Lanham, 2020). 16. Resolution No. 18, NWTU Conv Proc, 267, r 23, NWTULLC; Minutes, EB, NWTUL, 11–13 Sept 1925, f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC; Report on Oriental Committee, f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC; Mrs. Raymond Robins, “China Today,” LLB, November 1925, 1–5. 17. Report on the Oriental Committee, f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC; LLB, May 1924. On Kato Taka, see The Sun (NY), March 26, 1924, 25; Moynagh and Forestell, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms, 344–46; Anna Rice, A History of the World’s Young W omen’s Christian Association (NY, 1947), 232. 18. Anderson, Woman at Work, 125–33. 19. Cobble, “Who Speaks,” 225–30; quote from Tanaka, Tōyō [Blossoming Season], 261–62; Simpson, “Women in Japan’s Struggle for L abor Reform,” 207–217; Orii Miyake and Hiroko Tomida, “Shin Fujin Kyōkai (The Association of New W omen) and the W omen Who Aimed to Change Society,” in Women in Japanese History, ed. Hiroko Tomida and Gordon Daniels (Kent, 2005), 232–57. 20. Athavale, My Story, 116–32, quotes 118, 122–23, 36. O’Reilly died of heart failure in 1927 at the age of fifty-seven. “Obituary,” NYT, 4 April 1927. 21. LL, March 1921, 93–94; LLB, May 1926, 3; LLB, July 1927, 4; LLB, Dec 1927, 4. Quote: LLB, April 1927, 3. 22. Quote: Mrinalini Sinha, “Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late-Colonial India,” Feminist Studies 26 (Autumn 2000), 633–34. On the AIWC and the rise of Asian feminism in this era, see also, among o thers, Sandell, Women’s Transnational Activism, 176–87; Nijhawan, “International Feminism from an Asian Center,” 12–36; Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference, 1927–1990 (New Delhi, 1990). 23. LLB, June 1924, 3. Quotes from Minutes, Exec Bd, NWTUL, 11–13 September 1925, f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC; Minutes, Exec Bd, NWTUL, 22–23 Jan 1926, f 1926, r 4, NWTUL, LC. On the 1925 Shanghai protests, see Garner, Precious Fire, 70–73 and Hung-Ting Ku, “Urban Mass Movement: The May Thirtieth Movement in Shanghai,” Modern Asian Studies 13, 2 (1979), 197–216. 24. Garner, Precious Fire, 56–57; Garner, Shaping a Global W omen’s Agenda, 48–50. 25. Minutes, Exec Bd, NWTUL, 11–13 Sept 1925, f 1925, r 3, NWTULLC; Minutes, Exec Bd, NWTUL, 22–23 Jan 1926, f 1926, r 4, NWTULLC.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 477 26. MA to Mary Dingman, 2 Feb 1925, r 1, MASL. Standards in British firms w ere equally abysmal, with Dingman reporting a “victory” when “one of the largest British firms in China announced it would not employ boys under 10 or girls under 12.” Mary Dingman to Mary van Kleeck, 17 Aug1923, b 24, f 13, MVKSSA. 27. Mrs. Raymond Robins, “China T oday,” LLB, Nov 1925, 1–5; Karen Garner, “Redefining Institutionalism: The Y Challenge to Extraterritoriality, 1925–1930,” in Foreigners in Republic China, ed. Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown (NY, 2013), 72–92. 28. Letter, William Green to the President, 10 July 1925 and Minutes, Exec Bd, NWTUL, 11–13 Sept 1925, both in f 1925, r 3 NWTULLC. 29. Payne, Reform, L abor, and Feminism, 155–59, quotes on 155, 158. MDR to Mieze (Mary Dreier), 24 Jan 1923 and 13 November 1923, b 49, f 1, RRWSHS; MDR to AH, 19 March 1924 and 4 June 1929, v 116, MFSLNSW. 30. Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, chs. 5, 6; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, esp. 196– 97; Mona Siegel, “Feminism, Pacifism, and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars,” Gender and History 28 (Nov 2016), 641–59. 31. On “cultural internationalism,” see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD, 1997), 2. Quote: Women of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 9–22 Aug 1930, Honolulu, 395. On the PPWA more generally, see Angela Woollacott, “Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s and 1930s,” Gender and History 10 (Nov 1998), 425–48; Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan- Pacific (Honolulu, 2009); R. Yasutake, “The First Wave of International W omen’s Movements from a Japanese Perspective: Western Outreach and Japanese Women Activists during the Interwar Years,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 ( Jan–Feb 2009), 13–20; and Sandell, “Regional versus International.” 32. For quote: Fiona Paisley, “A Geneva in the Pacific: Reflecting on the First Three Decades of the Pan-Pacific and South East Asia W omen’s Association,” WSMI. Correspondence between Jane Addams and Eleanor Hinder, “Pan-Pacific Conference 1928–1929 Correspondence,” b 770/2/5 and b 770/4/2-4, EHSLNSW. 33. Women of the Pacific: Proceedings of the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (Honolulu, Pan-Pacific Union, 9–19 Aug1928), b 16, f PPWA Proc, BRNLA. 34. For quote: EB Minutes, 3–5 Oct 1927, f 1928, r 4, NWTULLC. See also Christman to EB, 25 May 1928; Sarah Green to Christman, 13 June 1928; and Christman to EB, 11 July 1928, all in f 1928, r 4 NWTULLC 35. Women of the Pacific, 66–70, quote 5. On Heagney, see Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St. Leonards NSW, 1999), 97–103, quote, 100; Muriel A. Heagney, “Labor Activist for over Fifty Years,” LaTrobe Journal 15 (April 1975), b 1145/1, MHSLV; J. Bremner, “Heagney, Muriel Agnes,” Australian Dictionary of Biography 9 (1983), online. 36. Women of the Pacific, 68–70, 104–9. 37. Women of the Pacific, 72–76. For elaboration on Australia’s policies, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008). 38. Women of the Pacific, 100–103.
478 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 39. Women of the Pacific, 90–109; LLB, Oct 1928. For the debate among Australian reformers over race and labor standards and for how British anti-imperialism spurred solidarity between Australian and Chinese trade u nionists, see Marilyn Lake, “The ILO, Australia and the Asia- Pacific Region: New Solidarities or Internationalism in the National Interest?” in The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim, West Meets East, ed. Jill Jensen and Nelson Lichtenstein (Basingstoke, 2016), 33–54. 40. LLB, May 1931; Women of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Third Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Honolulu, 8–22 August 1934 (1935), 27–28. 41. LLB, May 1931; Report of Australian Delegation: Second Pan-Pacific W omen’s Conference, August 1930, Honolulu (Melbourne, 1930), in f Proc 1930, b 18, 6/393-398, BRNLA. 42. For list of delegates, see Women of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, 9–22 August 1930, Honolulu, 390–94. 43. Woollacott, “Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms.” 44. Women of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Third Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Honolulu, 8–22 August 1934 (1935), v, x. 45. Alice Henry, Women and the Labor Movement (NY, Worker’s Education Bureau of Amer ica, 1923, repr. NY, MacMillan, 1927); Kirkby, “Henry.” 46. Alice Henry, “Impressions,” LLB, Sept 1925, 3; Kirkby, “Henry,” 47. Forestell and Moynagh, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms, 268; Jacoby, “Women’s Trade Union League Training School,” 13–15; Kathleen Derry and Paul H. Douglas, “The Minimum Wage in Canada,” Journal of Political Economy 30 (April 1922), 155–88. 48. LLB, Nov 1924, 4; LLB, July 1926, 1; LLB, July 1927; LLB, April 1928, 2; 4. 49. On Gompers and Pan-Americanism, see McKillen, Making the World Safe for Workers, 37–44. 50. David Montgomery, “Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 ( Jan 2008), 7–42. Quote: “Relations with the AFL,” no author, n.d. XR 61/3/1, ILOAHB. 51. Report of the Proceedings of the Second Pan-American Federation of Labor, New York, 7–10 July 1919, 1–12. Quote: AFL: History, Encyclopedia, Reference Book v 1 (1924), 447–48. 52. Report of the Proceedings of the Second Pan-American Federation of Labor, 13–14, 52–57, 65–66, quotes 13, 54; Hudson Observer, 20 June 1919. For a c ounter to Gompers’ assertions about the economic effects of European immigration to the United States in this era, see Isaac Hourwich, The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States (NY, 1912). 53. The first woman delegate to the PAFL attended its third meeting in 1921 in Mexico City, where opposition to US interventions in Mexico and Santo Domingo w ere agenda items. ICWW Bulletin, 25 October 1920; LLB, March 1921. 54. Nancy Hewitt, “Luisa Capetillo: Feminist of the Working Class,” in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki Ruiz and V irginia Sánchez Korrol (NY, 2005), 120–34; Nancy Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: W omen’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s (Urbana, 2001), 1–7, 214–23. 55. LL, Nov 1923. On Zayas Bazan, see K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban W oman’s Movement for L egal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, 1991), ch. 5 and K. Lynn Stoner, Latinas of the Americas: A Source Book (NY, 1989). On Julia García Games, see Liliana
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 479 Vela, “Feminismo y socialism,” in El pensamiento alternative en la Argentina del siglo XX: identidad, utopia, integración (1900–1930), ed. Hugo E. Biagini and Arturo A. Roig (Buenos Aires, 2004), 503–5. 56. Zayas Bazan, for example, was the only woman appointed to the 1919 ILC by a Latin American nation. In addition, eleven of the sixteen countries chastised by the 1919 ILC workers’ caucus for not sending labor delegates w ere from Latin America. ILC, Proc., 1919, 220–21. 57. In 1923, Robins and Swartz also took action to rectify the inadequacy of the outreach to Latin American w omen by the British leaders of the W omen’s Federation. They wrote to the Pan-American L abor Federation, national labor centers in South America, and to the Pan- American Union, begging for help in reaching “the small groups of organized w omen in South America.” LLB, Nov 1922, 3. For other league efforts to recruit Latin American delegates, f ICWW, So American Countries, 1921–1924, r 14, NWTULLC. 58. Christman to Games, 23 April 1924; Games to MDR, 27 Feb 1924; Games to MDR, 5 March 1924; all in f ICWW, So American Countries, 1921–1924, r 14, NWTULLC. 59. Adriana María Valobra, “Recorridos, tensiones y desplazamientos en el ideario de Alicia Moreau,” Revista Nomadías 15 ( July 2012), 139–69. For a sense of the wide-ranging sweep of Moreau’s intellectual interests and her appreciation of the WTUL and other US social demo cratic efforts, see Alicia Moreau de Justo, La Mujer En La Democracia (Women in Democracy) (Buenos Aires, 1945), esp. 56–61, 141–142, 252. 60. Carlos Rodríquez Braun, “Early Liberal Socialism in Latin America: Juan B. Justo and the Argentine Socialist Party,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 67 (Oct 2008), 567–604. For comparisons of Argentinean feminist traditions with t hose in other countries, see Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940; Christine Ehrick, “Madrinas and Missionaries: Uruguay and the Pan-American Women’s Movement,” Gender and History 10 (Nov 1998), 406–24; and Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Ameri cas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019). 61. Torres to Anderson, 6 Dec 1919, r 17, NYWTUL. For quote, Anderson to Torres, Jan 8, 1920, r 17, NYWTUL. 62. Swartz to Anderson, n.d. and Swartz to Torres, 29 Jan 1920, r 17, NYWTUL. 63. On Elena Torres Cuéllar, see Megan Threlkeld, Pan American W omen: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (Philadelphia, 2014), 29–31, 44–45; quote 44. See also Francesca Miller, Latin American W omen and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, NH, 1991), 58, 74–77. On the “primacy” of class politics in Mexico, see Ehrick, “Madrinas and Missionaries,” 414–15. 64. See http://www.oas.org/en/cim/; Miller, Latin American W omen, 83–84. 65. Bulletin of the Pan-American Union 54 ( Jan–June 1922), 35–37; Women’s City Club Bulletin (1922), 2–4; Miller, Latin American W omen, 84–85; Threlkeld, Pan American Women, ch. 2. 66. On Uruguay and Luisi, see Ehrick, “Madrinas and Missionaries,” 406–9; Marino, Feminism for the Americas, esp. 14–26, 39. Luisi, like her friend Moreau, opposed US intervention in Latin America and favored democratic socialist politics, Marino argues, but both were “steeped in Western, European-looking racial logics” (23). 67. Marino, Feminism, 27–29, quotes 26, 28. See also Daniela Moraes Traldi, “A Transnational History of Brazilian Feminism, 1922–1945: Bertha Lutz and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance,” (MA thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014–15), ch. 1.
480 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 68. Marino, Feminism, 24–39; Threlkeld, Pan-American Women, ch. 2, esp. 70–72; Megan Threlkeld, “The Pan American Conference of W omen, 1922: Successful Suffragists Turn to International Relations,” Diplomatic History 31 (Nov 2007), 819–25. 69. Quote: Marino, Feminism, 34. 70. LLB, December 1923. 71. On declining NWP political clout in the United States, see Lunardini, Alice Paul, 142, 152–56. 72. In the United States, the equal-nationality crusade resulted in the 1922 Cable Act, which overturned the 1907 Expatriation Act requiring married w omen to take their husbands’ citizenship. Under the poorly written 1922 Cable Act, however, w omen who married “aliens ineligible for US citizenship,” primarily Asian men, often lost their citizenship. WTUL objections to the 1922 Cable Act are detailed in LLB, Dec 1922 and LLB, May 1924. An amendment to the Cable Act in 1931, which the WTUL backed, eliminated the race-based provision. For elaboration on the debates over nationality and independent citizenship for women and the unusual, though still partial, cooperation on this issue among US feminists in the 1920s, see Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley, 1998). By the 1930s, with the Equal Nationality Treaty and the ERT introduced together by the NWP, the alliance among feminists frayed. See Bredbenner, Nationality, ch. 6; Carol Miller, “ ‘Geneva—The Key to Equality’: Interwar Feminists and the League of Nations,” Women’s History Review 3 ( June 1994), 219–45. 73. Paula Pfeffer, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World W oman’s Parties,” The Historian 59 (Fall 1996), 39–57, quote 43–44. 74. Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (NY, 2013), ch. 2, quote 92; Susan Zimmermann, “Liaison Committee of International W omen’s Organizations and the Changing Landscape of Women’s Internationalism, 1920s to 1945,” WSMI. 75. At the 1920 International Alliance of Women Congress, Bouvier defended the ILO night- work convention against challenges from Dutch and British feminists. Circular letter, Bouvier to delegates, 7 July 1920, b 23, JBBHVP. For prewar examples of the divide, see Ulla Wikander, “Some ‘Kept the Flag of Feminist Demands Waving’: Debates at International Congresses on Protecting Women Workers,” in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920, ed. Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis (Urbana, 1995), 29–62. 76. Susan Zimmermann, “Equality of W omen’s Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging during the Interwar Period,” International History Review 41, 1 (2019) 1, 200–27. 77. Belmont, like Paul, spent time in Britain before the war and had g reat admiration for the militant British suffrage tradition. On the 1926 split, see LLB, June 1926, 3; Becker, Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, 166–68; Rupp, Worlds of W omen, 141–42. Quote is from email, Susan Zimmermann to author, 3 Feb 2020. 78. Deborah Stienstra, W omen’s Movements and International Organizations (NY, 1994), 66–72, quote 66. 79. Quotes from Barbara Drake, “Middle-class Women and Industrial Legislation: New Bills and Old Bogies,” The Labour Woman, Aug 1924, 2–3, reprinted in LLB, Dec 1924, 2–3. On class divisions among British feminists, see Graves, Labour Women, ch. 4.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 481 80. Davies, NGOs, 98; Open Door International, Report of Conference, 15/16 June 1929 (London, 1929), 6; Becker, Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, 171; Zimmermann, “Equality of Women’s Economic Status?” 207–8. 81. Mundt to “Mrs Kemmis [McDonald’s married name], 9 October 1926, D600/473/3/ IFWW/ Conference of Women Trade Unionists, ILOAPF. 82. For the proposals by Bertha Lutz for an international treaty for w omen’s rights “before the IACW existed” and by Panamanian Clara González and Cuban feminist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro in 1926, see Marino, Feminism, ch. 2, 99. 83. “Finding Aid” and Series V, Inter-American Commission of W omen, DSSL; Folder 28, MASL; Miller, Latin American Women, 95–96; “The Sixth International Conference of the American States, Havana, Cuba, Jan 16–Feb 20, 1928,” Bulletin of the Pan American Union, April 1928, f IACW, b 8, WBGRNA; W omen’s Bureau, USDL, “Summary of Pan American Conferences concerning Status of Women,” USDL, Washington, DC, Aug 1938, 2–3. 84. Marino, Feminism, 53–74, quote 63. For US and Latin American differences on CIM priorities, see Threlkeld, “Pan American Conference,” 801–28. 85. Ann E. Towns, Women and States: Norms and Hierarchies in International Society (Cambridge, 2010), 104–115, quote 104. 86. Threlkeld, Pan American Women, 191; Ehrick, “Madrinas”; Marino, Feminism, chs. 1–4. 87. Quotes from Threlkeld, Pan American Women, 144. 88. EC to MA, 12 May 1928; Christman to L.S. Rowe, 26 May 1928; Rowe to Christman, 28 May 1928, all in b 8, f IACW, WBGRNA. 89. On LWV opposition, Belle Sherwin to EC, 28 May 1928, b 8, f IACW, WBGRNA. 90. Ethel A. Smith, Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women (Washington, Committee on the Legal Status of Women, National League of Women Voters, 1929), 7–12, 84–88, 133–38.
Part III: New Deals 1. Bondfield, A Life’s Work, 323; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 416.
Chapter 6: Social Democracy, American Style 1. Quote: MA to MDR, 16 Jan 1933, f 71, MASL. As late as 1936, Robins and her husband w ere reluctant to vote for Roosevelt. Their pro-temperance politics, penchant for “neighborly” rather than “impersonal” state solutions, and ties to the Hoovers kept them in the Republican camp. See MDR to AH, 15 Sept 1930; 5 Nov 1931; 29 Sept 1932; 22 April 1934, v 116, MFSLNSW; Mary Dreier to Miles Franklin, 16 Oct 1936, v 14, MFSLNSW. 2. “Laissez-faire liberalism,” Dewey wrote, celebrated “the separate and competing economic action of individuals” as the means t oward freedom and social good. The “new liberalism” turned those assumptions upside down: “individual development” and social progress rested on a “socialized economy.” Quotes: Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (NY, 1935), 88, 90. 3. Kristi Anderson, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (Chicago, 1996); Elisabeth I. Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (NY, 1992); Elisabeth I. Perry, A fter the Vote: Feminist Politics in
482 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 LaGuardia’s New York (NY, 2019), 43–46. On the Klan and Democratic Party politics in 1924, see Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (NY, 2018), 166–70. 4. New York league w omen leaned Democratic before their WTUL s isters did elsewhere. For the league’s divided political loyalties in 1928, see Christman to MDR, 13 Oct 1928, b 49, f 1, RRWSHS. 5. O’Farrell, She Was One, 4–6, 16–21; Schneiderman, All for One, 176–82. 6. O’Farrell, She Was One, 21–29. Quotes: Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (NY, 1946), 30–32, 46. 7. A former Progressive Party activist and Settlement House volunteer, Moskowitz helped Smith get elected in 1918 by targeting newly enfranchised New York State women voters. The only woman on the national Democratic Party’s executive committee in 1928, she was also one of the few Jewish members. On Moskowitz, see Elisabeth I. Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (NY, 1992); and Elisabeth I. Perry, After the Vote: Feminist Politics in LaGuardia’s New York (NY, 2019), 43–46. 8. Allida Black, Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (NY, 1996), 10–18. On the Klan’s anti-Catholicism and its decline after 1926, see Gordon, Second Coming, esp. 2–5, 191–98. 9. Kirstin Downey, The Woman b ehind the New Deal (NY, 2009), 5–21; “Course Records, 1898–1902,” b 2,5, FPMHC; Martin, Madam Secretary, chs. 5, 6; Quotes from Russell Lord, “Madam Secretary,” New Yorker, 2 Sept1933, 18; Frances Perkins, “My Recollections of Florence Kelley,” Social Science Review 28 (March 1954), 12–19. 10. Perkins, Reminiscences, pt. 1, 1–18, quotes 10, 11, 13. 11. Domm Mitchell, “Frances Perkins and the Spiritual Foundation of the New Deal,” in A Promise to All Generations, ed. Christopher Breiseth and Kirstin Downey (New Castle, ME, 2011), 43–58; Charles Hoffacker, “Frances Perkins at the Dutch Treat Club,” http:// francesperkinscenter.org/3382-2/, accessed 27 Feb 2020. 12. Martin, Secretary, ch. 7, 163–64; Perkins, Reminiscences, pt. 1, 18–36, quotes 20, 30. 13. Martin, Secretary, 72, 493–94. Perkins was skeptical, for example, of the overall conservatism of the Wharton School and rejected Patten’s “serious support of the protective tariff.” Perkins, Reminiscences, pt. 1, 65. 14. On Patten, see Trey Popp, “Prophet of Prosperity,” Pennsylvania Gazette (Nov–Dec 2017), 48–58. Quotes: Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (NY, 1915), 105, 108, 118, 215. 15. Martin, Secretary, chs. 7, 8; Downey, Woman, chs. 3–5; Perkins quotes from https:// exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/perkins/triangle-fire; Lord, “Madam Secretary,” 18. 16. Downey, Woman, 65–79; Martin, Secretary, ch. 11; Lord, “Madam Secretary,” 19. 17. Robert Chiles, The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal (Ithaca, 2018), 32. 18. Downey, Woman, 37–53, 75–105; Perkins, Roosevelt, 100–18; Perkins, “Reminiscences,” pt. 1, 58; Perry, After the Vote, 44–46. On Perkins’ mediation of the 1919 Rome Copper Workers’ Strike, see Martin, Madame, 151–62. For quote: Frances Perkins, “Address at Testimonial Luncheon,” typed copy, b-44, “Speeches, 1929–1930,” FPCU.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 483 19. Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: W omen and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 1–18. Like Ware, I consider this 1930s group of New Deal w omen “feminists” because they sought to advance women’s interests as a sex in tandem with other social reforms. Although New Deal egalitarians shied away from the “feminist” label because of its association with the National Woman’s Party, they were often quite articulate about the alternative feminist vision they embraced. When eulogizing Jane Addams in 1935, for example, Mary Anderson spoke of her as “not one of those feminists who are for women alone. Her heart and brilliant mind recognized that as long as one group could be exploited society as a whole must suffer.” Or, to take a second illustrative example: in 1936, Perkins described herself as part of the “so-called feminist movement,” which was, in her view, the “movement of w omen to participate in serv ice to society through politics, through economic security, through social organization.” For elaboration and quotes, see Ware, Beyond, 16–17. 20. Lord, “Madam Secretary,” 23. 21. On Beyer, “Biography,” Additional Papers, ca. 1900–1991, CMBSL; “Clara Beyer, 98, Dies; Key New Deal Official,” NYT, 28 Sept 1990; Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton, 2021), ch. 3. 22. On Abbott and Lenroot, see Lindenmeyer, Right to Childhood, chs. 5–8. On Dewson, see Ware, Beyond, ch. 4; Susan Ware, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism and New Deal Politics (New Haven, 1987). See Ware, Beyond, ch. 2, for more on the personal and political characteristics shared by the 1930s “generation” of activists. 23. Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia, 2003), ch. 4, esp. 124, 139–44; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (NY, 1981), 60–62; Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt (NY, 2020), 46–48, 174–198; Eileen Boris and Michael Honey, “Gender, Race, and the Policies of the L abor Department,” MLR (Feb 1988), 28–30. 24. White, In Defense, 142–49; Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune, 164–205. Politically active Black w omen in the 1930s worked in a dizzying array of organizations. A group led by Addie Hunton, for example, pushed WILPF to prioritize the federal antilynching bill and other racial justice issues in the 1930s. See Joyce Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975 (Carbondale, 2004), 80–81, 117–32. 25. Watts, Black Cabinet, 219–27; Sitkoff, New Deal, 57–62; Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, 1983). 26. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Women and Politics, 1920–1970,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History, ed. Michael Kazin (Princeton, 2010), 901–6. 27. “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” San Bernardino Daily Sun, 17 Jan 1938; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (NY, 2005), 119–24. 28. William T. Leuchtenberg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, 1963), ch. 3; Kennedy, Freedom, ch. 5; Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (NY, 2009). 29. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the US, 1913–2002,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, 1 (2004), 1–41.
484 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 30. Cohen, Nothing to Fear, 203–27. 31. Scholars tend to overemphasize the “maternal” and social welfare side of Perkins and ignore her allegiance to worker organization. Perkins favored both a strong state and a strong labor movement. In her view, unions w ere a necessary counterweight to capital and essential for raising the “self-respect” of workers and “increasing their capacity to participate in e very aspect of American life, including the political, educational, cultural, and social aspects.” Quote: Perkins, Reminiscences, pt. 1, 57–58. Nonetheless, Perkins often prioritized enacting legislation over organizing u nions because legislation affected more people, especially women and other lower-income groups. For elaboration, see Winifred Wandersee, “ ‘I’d rather pass a law than organize a u nion’: Frances Perkins and the Reformist Approach to Organized Labor,” Labor History 34, 1 (1993), 16–32. 32. Quotes: Martin, Secretary, 176; Perkins, Roosevelt, 151–52. 33. Green quote: Martin, Secretary, 3. On labor conference proposals, see Frances Perkins, “Report to the President on Ten Years’ Achievements in Labor and Social Improvements, Dec 31, 1943,” 3, FPFDRL; Wandersee, “ ‘I’d rather pass,” 16. 34. Some in organized labor never acclimated to having a woman director of the Department of Labor. Differences over reform priorities reinforced gender tensions. In addition, t here were ongoing disputes over whether workers’ compensation and other insurance programs repaid workers sufficiently for their losses. For Perkins’ account, see Perkins, “Reminiscences,” pt. 1, 57–60, 71–75. For insight into why organized l abor objected to compulsory insurance schemes, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 241–66, esp. 257. 35. Leuchtenberg, Franklin Roosevelt, ch. 3, 144–45, 150–51. 36. The literature on the origins and effects of the Wagner Act is voluminous. For a range of perspectives, see Leon Keyserling, “The Wagner Act: Its Origin and Current Significance,” 29 George Washington Law Review (1960–61), 199, 230; David Plotke, “The Wagner Act, Again: Politics and Labor, 1935–1937,” Studies in American Political Development 105 (1989); Mark Barenberg, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,” 106 Harvard Law Review (1993), 1379, 1409; Cobble, “Wagner Act,” 201–12. On Perkins and the Wagner Act, see Wandersee, “I’d rather pass,” 18–32. 37. On the 1935 act and its use of “actual” or “effective liberty” as an alternative to the conservative doctrine of “liberty of contract,” see Cobble, “Wagner Act,” 201–12. Robert M. La Follette Jr. chaired the Wagner Act-authorized Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, which investigated unfair practices from 1936 to 1941 and found ample evidence of company violations of constitutional rights and physical intimidation of workers that needed to be stopped. For details, see Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The LaFollette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, 1966). 38. For more on the role of Perkins in enacting the Social Security Act, see Downey, Woman, ch. 24; Martin, Secretary, ch. 26. For the larger context, see Edwin E. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act (1936; Madison, 1962); Edward D. Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991), ch. 2; and Rodgers, Atlantic Crossing, 428–46. 39. For text of the Social Security Act, see www.ssa.gov/history, accessed 7 Jan 2018. 40. Perkins, “Report to the President,” 35–40; Perkins, Roosevelt, 282–85; Colin Gordon, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2003), 16–21; quotes from Martin, Secretary, 351–52.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 485 41. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, ch 9; Ada J. Davis, “The Evolution of the Institution of others’ Pensions in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 35, 4 ( Jan 1930), 573–587; M Linda Gordon and Felice Batlan, “Legal History of the Aid to Dependent Children Program,” retrieved March 11, 2019; http://socialwelfare.library.veu.edu; Downey, Woman, 243. 42. For example: “Labor Dept Aide Alleged Communist,” Daily Oklahoman, 18 Aug 1938. 43. Martin, Secretary, 315–22; Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: American Worker, 1933–41 (Boston, 1970), 259–98. 44. The full story is recounted most recently in Robert W. Cherny, Harry Bridges and the Pacific Coast Longshore Workers (Urbana, forthcoming), ch. 12; Perkins, “Reminiscence,” pt. 6, 449. 45. For Perkins’ b attle against t hose favoring immigration restriction, see Mae Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration, Restriction, and Deportation Policy in the US, 1921–1965,” historycooperative.org, accessed 28 Feb 2020; Naomi Pasachoff, Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal (NY, 1999), 80–82. 46. Charles E. Wyzanski’s personal draft of Perkins’ statement in response to impeachment challenge, 27 Jan 1939, as quoted in Downey, Woman, 281. 47. Downey, Woman, 276–82; Cherny, Bridges, ch 12; final quote: Martin, Secretary, 442. 48. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Economic Justice for All: Some Jersey Roots,” New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2 (Summer 2016), 1–19. On the rise of business opposition in this era, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (NY, 2009). 49. “Biographical Material,” b 1, f 1–6, MNRUL; David L. Porter, Mary Norton of New Jersey: Congressional Trailblazer (Madison, NJ, 2013). 50. “Biographical Material,” b 1, f 1–6, MNRUL; Cobble, “Economic Justice,” 8–10; Boris and Honey, “Gender, Race, and the Policies of the Labor Department,” 28–30. . 51. For the contributions of other New Deal women to the FLSA, see Ware, Beyond, ch. 5. 52. Mary T. Norton, “The Defense of the Federal Wages and Hours Law from Attack,” 2, 12, Address at National Consumers’ League Annual Meeting, 8 Dec 1939, NY, b 5, f 3, MNRUL. 53. The national minimums of the FLSA w ere a substantial improvement over the 1933 NIRA codes, which by allowing standards to vary by industry had reinforced historic patterns of race, class, and sex-based discrimination. At the same time, Perkins and o thers insisted in 1933 that NIRA codes make minimums the same for e ither sex within industries and occupations, and some three-quarters of NIRA codes did so, as reported by the US Women’s Bureau. See USWB Memo, 1945, b 11, f ILO 1945, WBGRNA. For an analysis of the effects of minimum-wage laws, see Heather Boushey, “Understanding How Raising the Federal Minimum Wage Affects In equality and Economic Growth,” 12 March 2014, https://equitablegrowth.org/understanding -the-minimum-wage-and-income-inequality-and-economic-growth/. 54. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (NY, 2013), 133–71; Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108, 2 (Summer 1993), 283–306. New Deal statutes weathered years of legal challenges. Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act in the spring of 1937, the Fair Labor Standards Act remained in question until 1941.
486 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 55. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Making Postindustrial Unionism Possible,” in Restoring the Promise of American L abor Law, ed. Sheldon Friedman et al. (Ithaca, 1994), 285–302; Cobble, “Economic Justice,” 10–13; Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 110–13. 56. On the debates over legislative coverage in the three laws, Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (NY, 2005), chs. 2, 3. The Social Security Act, against Perkins’ wishes, also exempted domestic and agricultural workers. Downey, Woman, 241. 57. For the full text of the 1939 law, see https://www.ssa.gov/history/1939amends.html, accessed 30 March 2020. Edward D. Berkowitz, “Family Benefits in Social Security: A historical commentary,” in Social Security and the F amily: Addressing Unmet Needs in an Underfunded System, ed. Melissa M. Favreault, Fran J. Sammartino, and Eugene Steuerle (Washington DC, 2002), 19–46; Cobble, “Economic Justice,” 10–13. 58. Ware, Beyond, ch. 5; Perkins, “Report to the President,” 35–37; Linda Gordon and Felice Batlan, “Legal History of the Aid to Dependent C hildren Program,” http://socialwelfare.library .vcu.edu, accessed 11 March 2019. Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, esp. ch. 9. The literature on the biases and inequities of the 1930s social security system is extensive. See, among others, Katznelson, Affirmative Action, 2; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Designing W omen and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939,” in U.S. History as W omen’s History, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, 1995), 87–106; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2009); and Mary Poole, Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). 59. LLB, Dec 1931, March 1934, and Oct 1939; WTUL to “Sir,” 15 July 1940, f 33, MASL; Mary- Elizabeth B. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital: W omen and Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2018), ch 4. 60. Katzenlson, Affirmative Action, 1–3; Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, 2016), 3–5; Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton, 2012), ch. 8. 61. For a concise introductory guide to 1930s l abor, see Elizabeth Faue, Rethinking the American Labor Movement (London, 2017), ch. 3. 62. MDR to AH, 21 April 1937, Correspondence, v 116, MFSLNSW. For a historical study of Homestead consonant with Robins’ views, see Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1882: Politics, Culture, Steel (Pittsburgh, 1992). 63. Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson”; Quotes from Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 34; Esther Peterson with Winifred Conkling, Restless: The Memoirs of Labor and Consumer Activist Esther Peterson (Washington, DC, 1995), 13–15; Esther Peterson, “The World beyond the Valley,” Sunstone 15 (Nov 1991), 21. 64. Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson”; “Oliver Peterson, Retired Labor Attache, Dies,” Washington Post, 11 May 1979; quotes from Peterson, “The World beyond the Valley,” 22. 65. Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson”; Barbara Williams, Breakthrough Women in Politics (NY, 1979), 131–52. Jewell Fenzi, Hope Meyers, and Esther Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 16 Dec 1992, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplo-
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 487 matic Studies and Training, Foreign Service Spouse Series, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Peterson, “The World beyond the Valley,” 22. 66. Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson”; “Oliver Peterson, 75, Expert in Labor Affairs,” NYT, 11 May 1979. 67. Yevette Richards, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh, 2000), 20–21; Yevette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer: A Personal History of Labor, Race, and International Relations (Pittsburgh, 2004), 40–41; Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 43–45; Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (NY, 2017), 107–8. On the Bordentown School, see William Smither, “Bordentown School (1886–1955),” 10 Aug 2015, blackpast.org, accessed 17 Feb 2020; PBS documentary, “A Place out of Time,” 2010. Maida Stewart Springer married again in 1965 and used the name Maida Springer-Kemp. I refer to her throughout the text as Maida Springer, following the practice of her biographer, Yevette Richards. 68. Richards, Conversations, esp. 47–49, 65–56, 331; Richards, Maida, 31–36, 43–44; Elizabeth Balanoff, “Interview with Maida Springer Kemp,” in The Black Women Oral History Project, ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (New Providence, NJ, 1991), 12–32; “Biography,” MSKSL; “Biographical Files,” MSKARC. 69. Balanoff, “Interview with Maida Springer Kemp,” 26. 70. After the 1923 W omen’s Congress, Miller and Newman traveled together in Europe, and Miller, pregnant from an affair in 1922 with a married man, Charles Kutz, gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, in Naples, Italy. Miller and Newman said Elisabeth had been a dopted, a fiction they maintained throughout their lives. See Miller’s 1923 Diary and other documents in Series III, 25.5–31.12, EBSL; Orleck, Common Sense, 144–45. 71. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 26–30; A-37, FMSL; “Frieda S. Miller, L abor Official for the State and Nation, Dead,” NYT, 22 July 1973; Robert Ingalls, “New York and the Minimum- Wage Movement, 1933–1937,” Labor History 15, 2 (1974), 179–98. 72. On the household worker bills, see Vanessa H. May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2011), 137–45. May argues that the WTUL stood out among white-led progressive w omen’s organizations of the era for its passionate advocacy of labor legislation for domestic workers and its stress on the value and skill of household labor (118–20). For examples of the WTUL’s wartime efforts, see LLB, Jan 1940; LLB, June 1942. 73. Schneiderman, All for One, 215–18. See also Stephen H. Norwood, “Organizing the Neglected Worker: The Women’s Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950,” Labor History 50, 2 (2009): 163–85. 74. Bette Craig, “Interview with Dolly Lowther Robinson,” 1976, Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change Oral History Project, University of Michigan; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 106–7. The WTUL failed to devote comparable resources to organizing domestics in the 1930s, although as historian Vanessa May argues in Unprotected (120), they remained “ideologically committed to the idea of unionization for domestics.” 75. Quote: Lorrin Thomas and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights (NY, 2019), 8; Altagracia Ortiz, “Puerto Rican W omen in the Garment Industry of New York City, 1920–1960,” in Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in US L abor Struggles, 1833–1960, ed. Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson (Albany, 1990), 105–26.
488 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 76. The Jones-Shaforth Act of 1917 granted second-class US citizenship to Puerto Ricans living on the island. They could not vote in US presidential elections nor did they have a voting representative in the US Congress. Although often treated as alien residents, Puerto Ricans on the mainland had the same formal constitutional rights afforded other US citizens, including voting rights. Thomas and Santiago, Rethinking, 2. On the wages and job discrimination faced by Puerto Rican workers in the garment industry, see Ortiz, “Puerto Rican Women,” 105–12. 77. Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters (NY, 1944), chs. 10–12; Schneiderman, All for One, 203–8. 78. For Pesotta’s childhood, see Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany, 1993), ch. 1. 79. Quote: Pesotta, Bread, 134. 80. For a careful account of the controversies surrounding the NRA hearings in Puerto Rico, see Eileen Boris, “Needlewomen under the New Deal in Puerto Rico, 1920–1945,” in Puerto Rican Women and Work, ed. Altagracia Ortiz (Philadelphia, 1996), 33–54. 81. Quote: Schneiderman, All for One, 210; Pesotta, Bread, esp. 19, 22–23, 30; John H. M. Laslett, “Gender, Class, or Ethno-Cultural Struggle? The Problematic Relationship between Rose Pesotta and the Los Angeles ILGWU,” California History 72 (Spring 1993), 20–39; Leeder, Gentle General, chs, 4, 5. 82. Bryn Mawr Faculty and Staff, 1934; Faculty Meeting, May 1934; and Academic Experience of 1935 Faculty, all in b 9, f 21, ASWCRUL. Heller, Women of Summer, 150, 184; 83. Bryn Mawr Summer School, June 1937, b 9, f 28, ASWCRUL; Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors of Bryn Mawr, 7 May 1938, b 10, f 5, ASWCRUL; “Ties that Bind,” 1938, b 10, f 8, ASWCRUL Peterson quotes: Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 2. 84. Typescript, “Who Are the Workers?” 1937, b 9, f 19, ASWCRUL; Report of the Director, 1937, b 10, f 15, ASWCRUL. 85. Heller, “Blue Collars,” 122–38; Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Esther Peterson,” 3. 86. Balanoff, “Maida Springer Kemp,” 26. 87. Means also took a prominent role on the National Resources Committee, the forerunner of the National Resources Planning Board. See Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, 1966), 172–77. On Ware, see Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, 2013), esp. 15; Grace V. Leslie, “United for a Better World: Internationalism in the U.S. W omen’s Movement, 1939–1964,” (PhD diss., History Department, Yale University, 2011), esp. 30–64; and Eleanor Capper, “Caroline Ware, Consumer Activism, and American Democracy during the New Deal, 1933–1945,” Cultural and Social History 9 (2012), 85–101. 88. Quotes from Springer: MS, “Dr. Caroline F. Ware—A Majority of One, A Friend of All Reasons, for All Seasons,” 1981, 2–5, f-4, MSKSL. From Murray: Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (NY, 1987, repr. 2018), 256–58. See also Anne Firor Scott, ed., Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White (Chapel Hill, 2006); and Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship (NY, 2016), 84–112, esp.108. 89. Bell-Scott, Firebrand, esp. xiii–xix, 3–8, 21–34 (reproduced on 27–30 are Pauli Murray to President Roosevelt, 6 Dec 1938; Pauli Murray to Mrs. Roosevelt, 6 Dec 1938; Eleanor Roosevelt to Miss Murray, 19 Dec 1938).
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 489 90. Bell-Scott, Firebrand, 3–-8, 37–38, final quote 47; Murray, Song, chs, 9–11; Smith, Opening Vistas, 230–35; Joyce L. Kornbluh, “The She-She-She Camps: An Experiment in Living and Learning, 1934–1937,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity, ed. Kornbluh and Frederickson, 254–83. On Brookwood, see “Academic Freedom in L abor College,” NYT, 2 April 1921; LLB, Feb 1924 and May 1924. 91. On the Petersons, see Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 19. Voting data from James N. Gregory and Rebecca Flores, “Socialist Party Votes by County and State,” Mapping American Social Movements through the 20th Century, https://depts.washington.edu/moves /SP_map-votes.shtml, accessed June 2019. On the Socialist Party more generally, see Frank Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930s (Bloomington, 1974); Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of Americ a (Lincoln, 2015), chs. 10–13; and John Nichols, The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of An American Tradition . . . Socialism (NY, 2011), ch. 4. By the end of the 1930s, socialist candidates remained viable in only a few cities, most notably Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Reading, Pennsylvania. For elaboration, see Bruce M. Stave, ed. Socialism and the Cities (Port Washington, 1975); Ian Gavigan, “Read All Over: The Labor Advocate Newspaper and Socialist Power in Pennsylvania, 1927–1936,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (forthcoming). 92. From 1939 to 1943, the Petersons registered with the American L abor Party, the New York-based political party founded in 1936 by Sidney Hillman and o thers. New York rules allowed for third parties to register voters and endorse candidates run by other parties. The American Labor Party fought for Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 and endorsed Republican Fiorello La Guardia for New York City mayor in 1937. On Hillman and the American L abor Party, see Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of America L abor (NY, 1991). 93. Bryan D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (NY, 2014); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, 1990). 94. For a lively overview, see Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (NY, 2011), 164–76. 95. For more details, see Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 29–30, 69–70; Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 20, 33; Panthea Reid, Tillie Olsen: One W oman, Many Riddles (New Brunswick, 2010); Vicki Ruiz, “Una Mujer Sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Activism,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (Feb 2004), 1–20. 96. Kazin, American Dreamers, 193–96. For examples of various campaigns involving the CPUSA, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor P eople’s Movements: Why They Succeed, Why They Fail (NY, 1977), ch. 2; Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement (NY, 1993); Bernstein, Turbulent Years, esp. chs. 4, 6; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990). 97. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996). For an introduction to the contentious literature on Communists and the CIO, see Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zietlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge, 2003); and James N. Gregory, “Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity,” Labor 17 (May 2020), 22–28.
490 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 98. Kazin, American Dreamers, 169–76, membership data on 172; Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, 1982), 216–38. 99. Quote: Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia, 2000), 39. For an illuminating introduction to how the New Deal confounds interpreters, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 409–12.
Chapter 7: A Women’s “New Deal for the World” 1. Phrase from Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, 2005). 2. Under the leadership of van Kleeck and Fledderus, the IRI promoted scientific “world research” on economic planning and workplace management. For more on the IRI and van Kleeck’s “technocratic” proclivities, see Patrick Selmi and Richard Hunter, “Beyond the Rank and File Movement: Mary van Kleeck and Social Work Radicalism in the G reat Depression, 1931–1942,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 28 ( June 2001), 78–85. 3. MVK, “Social Economic Planning in the USSR,” preface to report prepared for the 1931 World Social Economic Congress, 30 Oct 1931, b 34, f 9, MVKSSA; Selmi and Hunter, “Rank and File,” 79–80. On the Soviet economy, Mazower, Dark Continent, 115–25. Months earlier she had sounded the same notes at a WTUL-convened Bryn Mawr College conference, where she spoke on the need for “purchasing power in all countries.” MVK speech, “The New Significance of Standards of Living,” f 16, b 1, MASL. 4. MVK, “Notes on Six Weeks in the Soviet Union,” 25 July 25 to 4 Sept 1932, b 29, f 541, MVKSSA; Guy Alchon, “Mary van Kleeck and Social-Economic Planning,” Journal of Policy History 3, 3 (1991), 1–23. Like many Western visitors at the time, van Kleeck came away with a partial view of the Soviet economic miracle. She made no mention, for instance, of the 1932–33 famine in which millions died. 5. MVK to “Mrs Sidney Newborg,” 21 Oct 1932, b 28, f 19, MVKSSA. 6. MVK to Perkins, 7 March 1933, b 27, f 55, MVKSSA. 7. Gordon, Pitied, 209–10, 236–38. MVK, “Our Illusions Regarding Government,” 1934, quoted in Selmi and Hunter, “Rank and File,” 84–85. In 1936, van Kleeck shifted gears and returned to ballot box politics, joining the American Labor Party. 8. See, for example: Perkins to MVK, 7 July 1943; MVK to Perkins, 8 July 1943; and Perkins to MVK, 13 July 1943, b 27, f 55, MVKSSA. 9. Schneiderman, “Labor’s Stake in Economic Planning,” LLB, Nov 1931, 2. 10. Mazower, Dark Continent, ch. 3, for the appeal of Germany’s authoritarian model and its threat to liberalism and socialism. Quotes from ix–x and 100. Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, 2016), 45–120; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (London, 1994), ch. 4. 11. Quote: Perkins, Roosevelt, 174. 12. For the continuing vibrancy of the North Atlantic circuit, Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, ch. 10; William Leuchtenburg, “The G reat Depression,” in C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (NY, 1968), 296–314. For the lack of interest in non-European
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 491 models, see Patel, New Deal, ch. 4. As Patel notes, New Dealers continued to be fascinated with Germany’s welfare experiments, but non-European states, regardless of their innovations, w ere generally “off the radar” (116). 13. Quote: Patel, New Deal, 114. 14. “Miss Perkins Hails Britain’s Insurance,” NYT, 7 Nov 1931; Thane, “Labour and Welfare,” 90–100; Stefan Berger, “Labour in Comparative Perspective,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo (Cambridge, 2000), 309–40. 15. For a discussion of how the “Stockholm School of Economics” anticipated the arguments of John Maynard Keynes about the need for federal stimulus, see Timothy Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy through the Welfare State to Socialism (NY, 1990), ch. 7; Nolan, Transatlantic Century, ch. 4, esp. 126–28; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, esp. 411–12; Patel, New Deal, 90–93. 16. On Per Albin Hansson and the “people’s home,” Tilton, Political Theory, ch 6, quote 128. Second quote from Karin Carlsson, “Public Care Work in Private Contexts: A Historical Perspective on the Swedish Welfare State,” in Global Care Work: Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies, ed. Lise Widding Isaksen (Lund, 2010), 201; Gunnel Karlsson, “Fran broderskap till systerskap: Det socialdemokratiska kvinnoforbundets kamp for inflytande och makt I SAP” (From Brotherhood to Sisterhood: The Swedish Social Democratic W omen’s Federation’s Struggle for Power in the Social Democratic Party), (PhD diss., Department of History, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 1996); Marquis W. Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (New Haven, 1936), quote xi. 17. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, ch. 10, esp. 435–42; Patel, New Deal, 2–9, quote 3. 18. Frances Perkins, “Address before the Tripartite Conference on Textile,” Washington, 2 April 1937, b 10, f ILO 1937, WBGRNA. 19. Patel, New Deal, 2–9; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, esp. 410–12, 420–30; Bondfield, A Life’s Work, 320–24, quotes 320,3 21. 20. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (NY, 2013), esp. 3–12, quote 9. 21. MF to RS, 13 Nov 1934, vol. 15, MFSLNSW. For Schneiderman’s use of the “bread and roses” phrase, see Orleck, Common Sense, 7. For a somewhat different version of the story, see “Bread and Roses,” LLB, Oct 1930, 1. On Australia, see Bradley Bowden, “The Rise and Decline of Australian Unionism: A History of Industrial L abour from the 1820s to 2010,” Labour History 100 (May 2011), 59–64; Leighton James, Raymond Markey, and Ray Markey, “Class and Labour: The British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party Compared,” Labour History 90 (May 2006), 23–41. 22. On AFL leaders’ indifference to the ILO, see Leifur Magnusson, ILO Washington office representative, to Albert Thomas, 16 Feb 1932 and 18 Feb 1932; Magnusson to Harold Butler, 31 May 1932 and 8 May 1933, XC 61/1/2, ILOAHB. 23. Frances Perkins, “Address before the Tripartite Conference on Textile;” “Miss Perkins Finds No U.S. Labor War,” NYT, 13 June 1938. 24. Preamble, ILO Constitution, https://www.ilo.org. On Perkins and the ILO, see Martin, Secretary, 420–30; Perkins, “Report to the President on Ten Years,” 1943, 6, FPFDRL. 25. On the threat to married women’s job rights, see Marguerite Thibert, “The Economic Depression and the Employment of Women,” International L abour Review 27, 4 & 5 (1933), 443–70, 620–30.
492 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 26. Mary Anderson, “The ILC,” LLB, May 1931, 2; MDR to AH, 6 May 1931, vol. 116, MF, SLNSW; MA to Martha Mundt, 23 March 1931, D600-C-200-61 1924–1931, ILOAPF. 27. Alice Cheyney, “The International Labor Organization and the Cause of Peace,” 1932, b 9, f ILO 1932, WBGRNA; Alice Henry, “International in the Making,” LLB, Nov 1924, 2–3. 28. LLB, July 1931, 2–3; Report of Sec-Treas and Leg Rep, NWTUL Convention, 4–9 May 1936, f 1936/1937, r 7, NWTULLC. 29. Mundt to Christman, 27 April 1931, D600-C-200-61 1924–1933, Intl Labour Conf, ILOAPF. For an overview, see Mary E. Daly, “Fanaticism and Excess or the Defense of Just C auses: The ILO and Women’s Protective Legislation in the Interwar Years,” in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State, and Society, ed. Mary O’Down and Sabine Wichert (Belfast, 1995), 215–27. 30. LLB, May 1931, 2. 31. NYT, 26 May 1931, as quoted in Gary B. Ostrower, “The American Decision to Join the International Labor Organization,” Labor History 16, 4 (1975), 495–504. See also Telegram, 20 May 1931, Doak to MA, f 16, MASL; Jaci Eisenberg, “American w omen and U.S. accession to the International Labour Organization,” 49th Parallel 33 (Winter 2014), 25–54. 32. MA to MVK, 27 May 1931; RS to Doak, 1 June 1931; MA to Mary Winslow, 22 Aug 1931, all in f 16, MASL. 33. 1931 ILC Proceedings, 195–97, 325–334, 346–47, 357–58. 34. 1931 ILC Proceedings, 328, 474. For more on the origins of the ILO women’s advisory group, Zimmermann, “Framing Working Women’s Rights Internationally.” 35. For examples, “Women’s Questions,” WN 1001/01, Jan 1932 to May 1932 and WN 1001/01/61 Feb–March 1932, ILOAPF. 36. Leifur Magnusson, ILO Washington office staffer, also weighed in against appointing anyone from the NWP. The NWP, he wrote Thomas, was “frankly hostile to l abor legislation on behalf of women.” Although a “minority group,” its “political tactics” were “without parallel in persistence, technique, and a sort of Mephistophelian ingenuity.” Magnusson to Thomas, 17 March 1932; Magnusson to Thomas, 25 April 1932 in XC 61/1/2 ILO Correspondent in Washington, DC, ILOAHB. 37. F 1932–1933, r 6, NWTULLC; “Women’s Question: Correspondence,” WN 1001/01 1932, ILOAPF. For elaboration, see Thébaud, “Difficult Inroads,” 50–74. 38. Hesselgren, who chaired the night work committee, helped formulate what she considered a less objectionable set of proposals (fewer white-collar women were exempted, for example), but the difference was slight. 39. 1934 ILC Proceedings, list of participants. For Bondfield’s analysis of what went wrong in the Second Labour government, A Life’s Work, 287–316. 40. On Boschek, see Bischof, “Anna Boschek,” 63–74; Lewis, “Anna Boschek,” 121–22; “Nazis Killed Socialists,” NYT, 29 July 1933, 5; Reiner Tosstorff, Worker Resistance against Nazi Germany at the ILC 1933 (Geneva, 2013); Scheiwe and Artner, “International Networking in the Interwar Years,” 85. 41. Offen, European Feminisms, 350. Moreover, trade unionists could not win a vote at the ILO without support from government or employer delegates. Since each nation was allowed one worker delegate in its allotment of four voters and many nations did not send a worker delegate at all, worker delegates represented at most one-quarter of the total conference votes.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 493 42. Perkins, Roosevelt, 340. 43. ILO, Edward Phelan and the ILO: The Life and Views of an International Social Actor (Geneva, 2009), 227–58. Quotes from Eisenberg, “American women and U.S. Accession”; Leon Fink, “A Sea of Difference: The ILO and the Search for Common Standards, 1919–45,” in ILO From Geneva to the Pacific Rim: West Meets East, ed. Jill Jensen and Nelson Lichtenstein (NY, 2016), 23. 44. Harold K. Jacobson, “The USSR and the ILO,” International Organization 14 (Summer 1960), 402–3. 45. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice, 91–97. 46. On Anderson’s disappointment with her relationship to Perkins, see, among others, MA to Mary Winslow, 7 July 1944, f 52, MASL; MA to MVK, 27 Jan 1944, f 51, MASL. Newman as quoted in Martin, Secretary, 295. 47. FDR, “Greetings to the US Delegation to the 19th ILC,” 17 May 1935,” in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, CA. https://w ww .presidency.ucsb.edu/, accessed 28 March 2020. 48. “Textile Conference Hailed by ILO Chief,” NYT, 2 May 1937; Carol Lubin Riegelman, “Book Outline on the History of the ILO,” RE 2-0-482, Records and Communication, ILOA. 49. The United States abstained from voting, infuriating Alice Paul who was taken by surprise because the United States had backed a similar proposal in 1930 at the League of Nations Codification Conference at The Hague. Nonetheless, with Roosevelt’s approval, the Senate ratified the Equal Nationality Treaty in May 1934, an action applauded by New Deal and NWP feminists. Jaci Eisenberg, “The Status of Women: A Bridge from the League of Nations to the United Nations,” JIOS 4 (2013), 10–12; Paula F. Pfeffer, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World Woman’s Parties,” The Historian (1996): 39–57; Bredbenner, Nationality of Her Own, 233–43. For the debate among international women’s organizations over married women’s nationality at the 1930 Hague conference, see Zimmermann, Frauenpolitik und Männergewerkschaft, forthcoming. 50. “Resolution on Civil and Political Rights of Women,” Approved 16 Dec 1933, b 8, f IACW, WBGRNA. 51. Women’s Bureau, USDL, “Summary of Pan American Conferences concerning Status of Women,” USDL, Washington, DC, Aug 1938, 3–6; Marino, Feminism, ch. 4; Miller, “ ‘Geneva.’ ” 52. Bertha Lutz to CCC, 15 July 1936, b 8, f Inter-American Peace Conference, WBGRNA. On Lutz and suffrage, see Traldi, “Transnational History of Brazilian Feminism,” chs. 1, 2. 53. MA to FP, 13 Sept 1935, b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. 54. Quote from Judith Sealander, “In the Shadow of Good Neighbor Diplomacy: The Women’s Bureau and Latin America,” Prologue (Winter 1979), 236–50. 55. Marino, Feminism, chs. 5 and 6. Marino argues that Latin American women soured on Stevens a fter 1928 as “later interactions” revealed “her strategic rather than genuine anti- imperialism” (59). See also Marino, “Marta Vergara,” 642–60. 56. Ann Towns, “The Inter-American Commission of W omen and W omen’s Suffrage, 1920– 1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42 (2010), 779–807; Ellen DuBois, “Women’s Movements,” in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed., Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke, 2009), 1118–19.
494 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 57. The different legal and constitutional traditions of nations affected attitudes as well. In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, labor standards legislation covered both sexes. In contrast, although the US Supreme Court upheld the Fair L abor Standards Act in 1941, woman-only state laws protected millions of w omen left out of the FLSA. US full rights feminists believed the US courts would use a kind of “either-or” framework and choose to invalidate woman-only social legislation if the ERA passed. 58. FM to MA, 30 Nov 1935, b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. 59. Warren Irvin, “Labor Conference of the American States, Santiago, Chile, 1936,” Monthly Labor Review (March 1936), 690–92; Jill Jensen, “From Geneva to the Americas: The International Labor Organization and Inter-American Social Security Standards, 1936–1948,” ILWCH 80 (Fall 2011), 224–25. Quote: “Child Labor Curb Urged in Santiago,” NYT, 14 Jan 1936. 60. Marino, Feminism, 130–34. Quote: Women’s Bureau, USDL, “Summary of Pan American Conferences concerning Status of Women,” USDL, Washington, DC, Aug 1938, 6a. 61. “Report to Secretary of Labor on the First Pan-American L abor Conference of the ILO,” Santiago, Chile, 2–14 1936, b 8, f 172, FMSL. 62. Marino, Feminism, 134–41, quote 137; FDR to Agustin Justo, President of Argentine Republic, 30 Jan 1936, quoted in “The Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace,” World Affairs 99, 4 (Dec 1936), 199. 63. W omen’s Bureau, USDL, “Summary of Pan American Conferences,” 7–11. See also documents in b 8, f IACW 1936, WBGRNA. 64. MA to FP, 13 May 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. 65. Press Release, 7 May 1934, Series II, b 241, NWPLC, as quoted in Threlkeld, Pan American Women, 183. 66. Miller, “ ‘Geneva;” Marilyn Lake, “From Self-Determination via Protection to Equality via Non-Discrimination: Defining W omen’s Rights at the League of Nations and the United Nations,” in Women’s Rights and H uman Rights: International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (NY, 2001), 254–71; U.S. W omen’s Bureau Memo, “Provisions in Covenant of the League of Nations and Activities of the League of Nations Relative to the Status of Women, 1931–1937,” b 12, f ILO 1946, WBGRNA. For the “cresting” of the transnational women’s movement in the 1920s and 1930s and the “critical role” of the League of Nations, see Leila Rupp, “Transnational W omen’s Movements,” in European History Online (EGO) published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz 16 June 2011, http://ieg -ego.eu /en /t hreads /t ransnational -m ovements -and -o rganisations /i nternational -social -movements/leila-j-rupp-transnational-womens-movements accessed 6 Aug 2020. 67. The Liaison Committee built on and expanded the earlier Joint Standing Committee. The IAW, ICW, YWCA, WILPF, and other major groups belonged to the Liaison Committee. For overviews, Davies, NGO, 105–20; Miller, “Geneva;” Zimmermann, “Liaison Committees.” On the wide range of opinion in 1935, see Grace Abbott, “Women Delegates and the Subject of the Work of W omen at the 19th Session of the ILO, June 4–25, 1935,” b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. 68. Hesselgren served in the League of Nations from 1928 to 1938, one of the longest stints of any woman. At times, as in 1932, she was one of the few women with full voting rights. U.S. Women’s Bureau Memo, “Provisions in Covenant of the League of Nations and Activities of
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 495 the League of Nations Relative to the Status of Women, 1931–1937,” b 12, f ILO 1946; Miscellaneous documents in b 9, f ILO/League, WBGRNA; Sandell, Women’s Transnational Activism, 171, 245. 69. M. Thibert to MA, 19 Oct 1934, b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. Hired by the ILO in 1926, Thibert became the principal ILO liaison to w omen’s organizations a fter Martha Mundt’s retirement in February 1932. She then led the ILO Women’s Section, established in late 1933. On Thibert, see Thébaud, “Difficult Inroads,” 50–74. 70. Karen Garner, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” Journal of World History 15 ( June 2004), 193–94. 71. Fox to EC, 13 April 1935; EC to Fox, 14 June 1935; NWTUL to Assembly, LN, 4 June 1935, all in f 1935, r 6, WTULLC. 72. NWTUL to Assembly, LN, 4 June 1935, f 1935, r 6, NWTULLC; “Statement, World YWCA to the League of Nations on the Whole Status of Women, 1935,” July 1935, b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. 73. Harold Butler to EC, 4 July 1935, f 1935, r 6, NWTULLC. 74. EC to McGeachy, 24 July 1935, f 1935, r 6, NWTUL, LC. McGeachy was active in student Christian groups at the University of Toronto and taught Hamilton, Ontario, mill girls through the YWCA. Mary Kinnear, Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation (Toronto, 2004), 60–65. 75. EC to McGeachy, 24 July 1935, f 1935, r 6, NWTULLC. 76. NWTUL to Assembly, LN, Sept 1935, b 9, f ILO 1935, WBGRNA. 77. On the League’s 1935 decision, see Zimmermann, “Equality of W omen’s Economic Status?” 8–12, quote 12; Kinnear, Woman of the World, 64–66; Miller, “ ‘Geneva’ ”; Lake, “From Self-Determination.” 78. See the League’s description of how international women’s groups broadened their agenda: Information Section, League of Nations, “The Status of W omen,” 24 April 1936, b 10, f ILO 1936, WBGRNA. 79. Quotes: MA to FP, 13 May 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. “Minutes of Meeting,” 5 Aug 1936, b 23, f WC, f WC, WBGRNA. 80. “Minutes of Meeting,” 5 Aug 1936, b 23, f WC, WBGRNA; MA to Abbott, 29 April 1937, b 10, f ILO 1937, WBGRNA. 81. Mary Winslow to MA, 8 Aug 1936, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. 82. “The W omen’s Charter: What and Why,” Issued December 1936 by the Joint Conference Group in the United States for the W omen’s Charter, enclosed in letter Anderson to Kerstin Hesselgren, 7 Jan 1937, f KB-Handskriftsenheten, KHNLS. Mary van Kleeck, “The W oman’s Charter: A Program for Unity,” 3, b 24, f WC Conf. 30 Jan 1937, WBGRNA; “Minutes Oct 7, 1936,” b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. 83. “Minutes, Sept 9, 1936” and “Minutes Oct 7 1936,” b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. 84. “Minutes, Sept 9, 1936”; “Minutes, Oct 7 1936”; Woman’s Charter, issued December 1936, revised Jan 30, 1937, all b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. 85. MA to MVK, May 19, 1937 and MA to Lucy R. Mason, 15 May 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. See also Anderson to Marguerite Wells, President NLWV, 19 May 1937 and Wells to MA, 20 May 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. In her letter, which she asked not to be put in Anderson’s
496 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 files, Wells insisted the “horrific word” [communism] was “never uttered either before the Board or Council . . . suspicious people have launched the epithet you refer.” 86. Denise Lynn, “The Women’s Charter: American Communists and the Equal Rights Amendment Debate,” WHR (April 2014), 9–11. “Statements from Leading W omen on the Charter,” The Woman Today, Feb 1937, 7, 26–27, b 63, f 1, MVKSSA. “Minutes, March 29, 1937,” and Mary Winslow to Dr. May, 12 April 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. On Edwards, Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia, 2011); Eric McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black W omen, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, 2011), esp. 105–8. 87. MA to MVK, 19 May 1937, b 24, f WC, Exec C, WBGRNA Th ese same groups were also among the first to reconsider their opposition to the ERA in the United States. The National Federation of Business and Professional W omen, for example, endorsed the ERA in 1937. See Rebecca DeWolf, “The ERA and the Rise of Emancipationism,” Frontiers 38, 2 (2017), 47–80. 88. Edith Hooker, “Beware of the ‘Women’s Charter,’ ” Equal Rights, 15 Jan 1937. 89. MVK to EC, 20 Dec 1937 and “Minutes of Meeting, Jan 17, 1938,” b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. 90. Lynn, “Women’s Charter;” “Resolution adopted by Women’s Charter Group,” 17 Dec 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. Quotes from Dorothy McConnell, Sec, American League against War and Fascism to Anderson, 28 Jan 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. 91. “Provisional W omen’s Charter Group,” 17 Jan 1938 and MVK to DK, 21 Feb 1938, b 24, F WC, WBGRNA. 92. “Minutes of Meeting, Jan 17, 1938,” b 24, F WC, WBGRNA. 93. “Housewife Status Put on New Plain,” NYT, 23 Jan 1938. 94. For examples, Anderson to Australia’s Bessie Rischbieth, 27 Feb 1937 and other correspondence in b 24, f WC, WBGRNA; Anderson to Hesselgren, 7 Jan 1937, f KB Handskirftsenheten, KHNLS; MVK to G. Duchêne, 11 Jan 1938, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. 95. Mary Winslow (writing for Moreau) to MA, 20 Oct 1936, b 8, f Inter-Amer Peace Conf, WBGRNA. 96. Alice Cheyney to Mrs. Fox, 20 Nov 1936, b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. 97. Alice Cheyney’s advice to Mary Anderson that “economic matters go to the ILO” may have also resonated. Alice Cheyney to MA, n.d., b 23, f WC, 7 Oct 1936, WBGRNA. 98. Thibert to MA, n.d., and MA to Rachel Nyswander, 23 July 1937, b 10, f ILO 1937, WBGRNA; Abbott to MA, 5 May 1937, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. 99. 1937 ILC Proceedings, 463–65, 785. 100. ILO, “The ILO and Women,” Geneva, 1959, 7. 101. “Resolution submitted to the ILC by Edward McGrady and Grace Abbott, government delegates of US,” adopted by unanimous vote, 21 June 1937. F 1936–1937, r 7, NWTULLC. 102. For elaboration on the marginalization of class politics within the larger discourse of women’s rights and the bifurcated international system, see Zimmermann, “Equality of Women’s Economic Status?” 103. Miller, “ ‘Geneva;’ ” Offen, European Feminisms, 358–59. Quote from K. Hesselgren, “Report Submitted by the First Committee to the Assembly of the League of Nations, 1937,” Appendix A in Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, International Documents on the Status of W omen: US Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 217 (Washington, DC, 1947), 43–49, quote 47.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 7 497 104. “Press Release,” WTUL, 6 Jan 1938, b 7, f 1938, NWTULLC; “Dorothy Kenyon Departs,” NYT, 27 March 1938. The committee included three men and four women, with Great Britain, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Hungary, and the United States represented. In addition, the IAW, ICW, ERI, ODI, the World Woman’s Party (established by Alice Paul in 1938), and other groups participated as observers. 105. On Kenyon, see Kate Weigand and Daniel Horow itz, “Dorothy Kenyon: Feminist Organizing, 1919–1963,” JWH 14 (Summer 2002), 126–31; Susan Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven, 1998), esp. 58–61; “Judge Dorothy Kenyon Is Dead: Champion of Social Reform, 83,” NYT, 14 Feb 1972. 106. Quotes: Anne Petersen, “League of Nation’s Worldwide Study of Women’s Status Hailed,” NYT, 15 May 1938, 85. See also U.S. W omen’s Bureau Memo, “Provisions in Covenant of the League of Nations and Activities of the League of Nations Relative to the Status of W omen, 1931–1937.” 107. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “ ‘Sponsor’ Spurns Charter for Women,” New York World Telegram, 7 Jan 1937, 34. 108. MRB quotes in Nancy Cott, ed., Mary Ritter Beard: A W oman Making History through Her Letters (New Haven, 1991), 43–44. 109. “Minutes of Sept 9, 1936 Meeting,” b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. On Beard’s intellectual evolution, see Cott, Mary Ritter Beard, 1–63. Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History (NY, 1946), esp. preface. 110. Cott, Mary Ritter Beard, 43–44. 111. MVK to Gertrude Duby, 11 Jan 1938; “Minutes of March 5, 1938 Meeting,” b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. Beard’s “plenty-for-all” quote from Cott, Mary Ritter Beard, 44. 112. Mary N. Winslow, “The Story of the Lima Conference,” April 1939, f 1939, r 7, NWTULLC; “Lima Declaration of Women’s Rights,” b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. 113. EC to Hull, 13 Jan 1939 and Winslow, “Story of the Lima Conference,” f 1939, r 7, NWTULLC; FP to Mary Winslow, n.d., b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. Historians have rightly hailed the 1938 Lima Declaration as a pivotal and pioneering international declaration of women’s rights. It should be pointed out, however, that developments in other intergovernmental forums such as the ILO paralleled those in the Pan-American Union. The 1937 ILO Declaration on W omen’s Rights discussed in this chapter is one example. The search for “firsts” is fraught with pitfalls because it is impossible to know every case. 114. Quote from Winslow, “Story of the Lima Conference.” On the campaign against Stevens, see, for example, Mary Dewson to Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State, 9 March 1938, and other correspondence in b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. 115. Elisabeth S. Enochs, “Women at Lima Won Solidarity,” 8 Jan 1938, quote 50, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. In Katherine Marino’s assessment, left feminists like Balmaceda and Chile’s Vergara practiced a distinctive “Popular Front Pan-American feminism,” which nestled social concerns and women’s equal rights within a broad antifascist and anti-imperialist inter- American politics. Marino, Feminism, chs. 5, 6, esp. 162–65. 116. Threlkeld, Pan American Women, 194–97; Miller, Latin American W omen, 108. On Winslow’s background, see f 1938, r 7, NWTULLC; “Mary Nelson Winslow,” March 1939, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA; MVK to “Editor” NYT, 24 Feb. 1939. Winslow and Anderson collaborated on Anderson’s autobiography, Woman at Work.
498 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 117. RS to MB, 28 Feb 1939, f 31, MBVC. 118. For elaboration, see Marino, Feminism, 159–63, 173–75. 119. For example, see Pfeffer, “A ‘Whisper in the Assembly of Nations’ ”; Becker, Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment; Becker, “International Feminism Between the Wars: The National Woman’s Party versus the League of Women Voters,” in Decades of Discontent: The W omen’s Movement, 1920–1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan Jenson (Boston, 1987), 223–42. 120. Dorothy Kenyon, “History of Committee on Legal Status of Women appointed by the League of Nations in 1938,” 12 Sept 1945, b 14, f LN, WBGRNA. See also Eisenberg, “Status of Women,” 13–17. 121. Offen, European Feminisms, 358–59. 122. Paul quoted in: “Official Action Creates World Woman’s Party,” Equal Rights, 1 Dec 1938. MA to Alice Cheyney, 8 Dec 1938, b 11, f ILO 1939, WBGRNA. See also Pfeffer, “Eleanor Roo sevelt and the National and World W oman’s Parties;” Clippings and correspondence, WN 12/01/8 World Woman’s Party, ILOAPF. 123. “Minutes Oct 7, 1936,” b 23, f WC, WBGRNA. 124. Quotes from MVK to MA 15 April 1938, b 24, f WC, WBGRNA. See also MVK to EC, 6 July 1938, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA; MA to MVK, 3 Jan 1940, f 31, MASL.
Chapter 8: Wartime Journeys 1. On how religious concepts fueled the rise of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, Christian uman Rights (Philadelphia, 2015) and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: H H uman Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010), ch. 2. 2. William F. Felice, The Global New Deal: Economic and Social H uman Rights in World Politics (Lanham, 2003). 3. For example, a fter attending the 1936 Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, WTUL leader Maud Swartz observed that as a “working-class organization, we are convinced the c auses of war are economic.” LLB, Oct 1939. For more on the league’s peace activities, see r 6, f 1935 and r 7, f 1936–1937, NWTULLC. 4. Margaret F. Stone, “Peace and International Relations Committee Report;” WTUL Exec Bd Minutes, June 9–11, 1938, r 7, f 1938, NWTULLC. 5. On divisions within and among women’s peace groups, see Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a W omen’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and W omen’s Rights (Syracuse, 1993), ch. 5. The majority of WILPF members, for example, still favored a “pro-neutrality” position in 1939. A fter 1941, WILPF stressed mediation and aided conscientious objectors. The marginalization of antifascist non-interventionists like Charles and Mary Beard is recounted in Cott, Mary Ritter Beard, 19. 6. “Statement of Policy in Field of International Relations,” 23 May 1940,” r 8, f 1940, NWTULLC; LLB, Oct 1941. 7. Margaret Stone to Agnes Nestor, 23 June 1940, r 8, f 1940, NWTULLC. 8. Bondfield to Christman, 9 Nov 1940, b 2, f 8, MBVC; Bondfield to Anderson, 5 Aug 1940, f 9, NWTULLC. 9. For criticisms along these lines, see Helen Laville, Cold War W omen: The International Activities of American Women’s Organizations (Manchester, 2002).
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 499 10. For elaboration, see Robert D. Parmet, The Master of Seventh Avenue: David Dubinsky and the American Labor Movement (NY, 2005); Fraser, Labor Will Rule. 11. Although the AFL boycotted German goods a fter 1933 and created a fund to aid victims of fascism, it did not warm initially to JLC goals of liberalizing immigration and prioritizing policies of nondiscrimination. 12. Parmet, Master, esp. 98–100; Rachel Feinmark, “Look for the Union Labor: The American Federation of Labor and the Jewish L abor Committee’s Partnership for Economic Justice and International H uman Rights” (PhD diss., Department of History, University of Chicago, 2014). 13. The first major liberalization of the Immigration Act of 1924 would not occur until 1943 when restrictions on immigration from China, America’s wartime ally, were loosened. 14. Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 194. 15. Mazower, Dark Continent, 166–81. In January 1944, Roosevelt created a War Refugee Board for the rescue and relief of those persecuted by the Nazis, and the United States took in tens of thousands of European Jews and other refugees. Commentators, then and now, criticized his actions as “too little, too late.” 16. On ILGWU multiculturalism, see Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (NY, 2011). On the racially progressive CIO unions of this era, see, among others, Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill, 1990); and Roger Horowitz, ‘Negro and White, Unite and Fight’: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (Urbana, 1997). 17. Dorothy Sue Cobble and Julia Bowes, “Esther Peterson,” American National Biography Online, April 2014, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01361.html, accessed 7 Aug 2020. Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 107; Barbara Williams, Breakthrough W omen in Politics (NY, 1979), 131–52. 18. Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 21–26; Yevette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer: A Personal History of Labor, Race, and International Relations (Pittsburgh, 2004), esp. 331. 19. Leaflet, Vote American L abor Party, Series I, MS Candidacy, Digital Materials, MSKSL. 20. David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Urbana, 2014); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001). Under the leadership of Helena Wilson and Rosina Tucker, the Ladies’ Auxiliary made sure the Brotherhood attended to the concerns of Black women. For details, see Melanie Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998) and White, Too Heavy a Load, 160–64. 21. Still, not all unions agreed. Randolph spent his life struggling against discrimination in the labor movement, especially in the AFL building trades and transportation unions. For an introduction, see Andrew Kersten and Clarence Lang, eds., Reframing Randolph: Debating A. Philip Randolph’s Legacies to Labor and Black Freedom (NY 2014). 22. Springer Interview, Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change Oral History Project, University of Michigan, 141–42; Richards, Conversations, 124; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 107. 23. Bell-Scott, Firebrand, 86, for quotes 162–64, 182. 24. For context, see Sudarshan Kapur, Raising up A Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston, 1992), esp. 106–20; Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared
500 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 Struggle For Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, 2012); Sarah Azaransky, The Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement (NY, 2017). 25. Katznelson, Fear Itself, 218 26. Kapur, Raising, 118–20; Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin, 2009); Vick L. Ruiz, “Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,” in Latina L abor Legacies, ed. Ruiz and Korroll, 180–84; Richard Griswold del Castillo, ed. World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights (Austin, 2008), esp. 74–95. 27. LLB, Jan 1940; June 1941, 3–4; Nov 1941; Oct 1942. 28. LLB, Oct 1942. 29. Grave V. Leslie, “ ’United, We Build a Free World’; The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” in To Turn the Whole World Over: Black W omen and Internationalism, ed. Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill (Urbana, 2019), 192–218, esp. 200. 30. FDR, “Message to Congress,” 1941, reading copy, 1–22, quotes from 18–22, www.fdrlibrary .org/four-freedoms, accessed 7 Aug 2020. 31. For quotes and the drafting process, see Borgwardt, New Deal for the World, 23–28. 32. FDR, “Radio Address of the President,” 11 Jan 1944, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu /documents/state-the-union-message-congress, accessed 7 Aug 2020. 33. Martin, Madame Secretary, 442–43. As James Kloppenberg argues: although Roosevelt did not live up to his proclaimed ideals, he did not deploy them cynically. See Kloppenberg, “FDR, Visionary,” Reviews in American History 34 (2006), 504–20 and Kloppenberg, Virtues, esp. 33–43, 100–23. 34. “Mary Nelson Winslow,” March 1939, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA; MVK to “Editor” NYT, 24 Feb 1939. Winslow and Anderson collaborated on Anderson’s autobiography, Woman at Work. 35. “Remarks of Mary Winslow at NWTUL luncheon, December 14, 1939,” b 1, f 2g, MWSL. Lombardo Toledano’s organization had close ties with the CIO. Dustin Walcher, “Reforming Latin American Labor: The AFL-CIO and Latin America’s Cold War,” in American Labor’s Global Ambassadors: The International History of the AFL-CIO during the Cold War, ed. Robert Anthony Waters Jr. and Geert Van Goethem (NY, 2013), 131. 36. Mary V. Robinson to MA, 22 Nov 1939, b 11, f ILO 1939, WBGRNA; “Remarks of Mary Winslow at NWTUL luncheon, December 14, 1939,” b 1, f 2g, MWSL. 37. For a fuller discussion of committee opinions, see Marino, Feminism, 184. 38. Winslow to MA, Aug 1, 1939, b 11, f ILO 1939, WBGRNA. 39. Committee Resolutions, b 13, f 2, WBGRNA; “Rept of Committee on W omen and Juveniles, Havana, Nov–Dec 1939,” b 1, f 2p, MWSL; Untitled 2-page NWTUL document, n.d., b 1, f 2g, MWSL; LLB, Dec 1939. 40. Winslow to MA, 14 Aug 1938, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA; Winslow to MA, 1 Aug 1939, b 11, f ILO 1939, WBGRNA. 41. Memo, MA to Hugh Hanna, Bureau of L abor Statistics, 2 May 1940, b 13, f 2, WBGRNA. 42. Confidential Memo, MW to unidentified, 10 Aug 1940, b 1, f 2r, MWSL. For a more upbeat public statement, see “South American Notes on Pan-American solidarity,” LLB, Oct 1940. 43. “Report of MW, Delegate of U.S.,” b 1, f 2q, MWSL.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 501 44. LLB, Jan 1941, 2. 45. For more on CIM’s agenda after 1939, see Marino, Feminism, ch. 7. 46. WB Proposal, 8 July 1940 and Sumner Welles to FP, 1 July 1940, b 13, f 1, WBGRNA; Judith Sealander, “In the Shadow of Good Neighbor Diplomacy: The Women’s Bureau and Latin America,” Prologue (Winter 1979), 236–50, quote 245. 47. Sealander, “Shadow,” quote 240–41; Marino, Feminism, 184–86. 48. Cannon to MA, 20 April 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA;Cannon to MA, 9 May 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA; Schlieper to MA, 4 Sept 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 49. Alicia Moreau de Justo, La Mujer en la Democracia (Buenos Aires, 1945); Gladys López, Alicia Moreau de Justo: Pionera Del Feminisma Y La Igualdad (Buenos Aires, 2009); Claudia Montero, “Feminist Journals in Latin America, 1920–1940,” in Identity, Nation, Discourse: Latin American Women Writers, ed. Claire Taylor (Cambridge, 2009), 24–25. 50. Cannon to MA, 25 Aug 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. For more on Cannon and Moreau, consult Cannon to Bertha Nienburg, 21 July 1941 and Cannon to MA, 2 Sept 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 51. Cannon to MA, 3 June 1941 (with notes attached), b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 52. For quote: Cannon to MA, 27 April 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. See also Cannon to MA, 20 April 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA 53. Cannon to MA, 3 June 1941 and Cannon to MA, 28 April 1941, b 13, f 3, WGBRNA. 54. Cannon to MA, 3 June 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 55. Cannon to Bertha Nienburg, 28 June 1941, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 56. Miscellaneous materials, b 13, f 1–5, WBGRNA. Despite the distractions of yet another FBI investigation into her “communist” leanings, Anderson sought resources for Cannon. The FBI interviewed Anderson in April 1942 and peppered her with questions about her political affiliations and w hether she belonged to the “Communist Party.” It is unclear whether the investigation undercut Anderson’s credibility within the Washington bureaucracy, but the personal toll was considerable. After 1943, however, the US State Department resisted her requests for more funds, and Anderson fought simply to save Cannon’s job. Transcript of FBI interview with MA, 29 April 1942, f 40, MASL; Sealander, “Shadow,” 242–43. 57. “Latin America-Cannon letters and Reports,” b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 58. Mary M. Cannon, “Women’s Organizations in Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru,” Bulletin of the Pan-American Union, Nov 1943 (illustrated with photos by Ernesto Galarza), b 13, f 4, WBGRNA. For other of Cannon’s published essays, see b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. 59. “Latin American W omen Called Better off than Many in Industrial Pursuits H ere,” NYT, 16 March 1944. Nienburg to Cannon, 4 Jan 1943, b 13, f 3, WBGRNA. The State Department chastised Cannon for earlier remarks to the NYT, but she ignored the rebuke. 60. Barbara Crossette, “Minerva Bernardino, 91, Dominican Feminist,” NYT, 4 Sept 1998; Marino, Feminism for the Americas, 156; Jonathan Hartlyn, “Dominican Republic: Historical Setting,” Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies (Washington, DC, 2001), 40. Constitución de la República Dominicana 1942, Article 9, https://www.consultoria.gov.do/Services /Constitutions. accessed 3 Aug 2020. 61. On the “mutual exploitation” of Bernardino and Trujillo, see Ann Towns, “The Inter- American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage, 1920–1945,” Journal of Latin American
502 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 Studies 42 (2010), 801. For a scathing indictment of Bernardino, see Elizabeth S. Manley, “Poner Un Grano de Avena: Gender and Women’s Political Participation” (PhD diss., History Department, Tulane University, 2008). 62. In 1943, with the ERA in play in Congress, Alice Paul redrafted the proposed amendment using language paralleling the Nineteenth Amendment. Once again, she refused to add language allowing for advantageous differential treatment of women. The old version of the ERA read, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and e very place subject to its jurisdiction.” The new version read: “Equality of rights u nder the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.” On the wartime battles over the ERA, see Rupp and Taylor, Survival, 24–28; Kathryn Kish Sklar and Danielle Moon, “How Did Florence Kitchelt Bring Together Social Feminists and Equal Rights Feminists to Reconfigure the Campaign for the ERA in the 1940s and 1950s,” WSMI. 63. MW to Sumner Welles, 23 April 1943 with attached memo, b 1, f 3a, MWSL. Benjamin Sumner Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard: The Dominican Republic, 1844–1924 (NY, 1928). 64. Schlieper to Cannon, 29 Nov 1943, b 13, f 4, WBGRNA. After military rule in Argentina from 1943 to 1946, the authoritarian populist Juan Perón gained power. He instituted a range of social reforms, including women’s suffrage in 1947. 65. Cordell Hull to MW, 8 April 1944, b 1, f 3a, MWSL and “Report to the IACW” by Mary Winslow, April 1944, b 1, f 3g, MWSL. In 1944, Nelson Rockefeller hired Winslow as an adviser on Women’s Affairs. 66. “Fourth Meeting of the IACW,” Report by Mary Cannon, Secretary, June 1944, b 13, f 4, WBGRNA; Marino, Feminism, 190. 67. Mary Cannon, “The IACW,” Sept 1945, b 8, f IACW, WBGRNA. As Cannon knew, a growing number of Latin American countries expanded women’s voting rights leading up to and during the war. Towns, “Inter-American Commission,” 800, 806–7. 68. Francesca Miller, “Feminisms and Transnationalisms,” Gender and History 10 (Nov 1998), 571. 69. The official memos of her eighteen months are in f 41–128, FMSL. For her personal letters, f 7. On her resignation, see MA to Miles Franklin, 8 April 1943, MF corr., v 22, MFSLNSW. 70. Eleanor Hinder to FM, 7 May 1943, f 62, FMSL. 71. See letters in f 93, FMSL. Miller met Bondfield in Kent and in London, where “we sat before a little gas fire in her room,” Miller wrote, “I with my wraps on, and talked all evening.” Quotes from letters, FM to “Dear Folks,” 7 Aug 1943 and 5 Dec 1943, f 7, FMSL. 72. For examples, see f 100 and f 7, FMSL. 73. On Miller’s background, see f 1, FMSL. On the eve of her departure for London, Miller reminded US audiences that “the assurance of a living wage” is in line with “principles in operation in G reat Britain,” as well as in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Press Release, “Court of Appeals Sustains Guaranteed Wage Principle,” 3 Dec 1942, f 139, FMSL. 74. Memo, FM to Ambassador, 21 June 1943, f 42, FMSL. 75. Memo, FM to Ambassador, 21 June 1943, f 42, FMSL. 76. For the divisions within the British Labour Party over colonial rule and the evolution of its thinking, see Stephen Howe, “Labour and International Affairs,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Tanner et al., 119–28.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 503 77. For example, the report judged that the dismantling of colonial structures would take time and require education because the “colonies were inhabited by backward p eoples of primitive culture” who were “not yet able to stand by themselves.” Labour Party, The Colonies: The Labour Party’s Post-War Policy for the African and Pacific Colonies [A Report Issued by the National Executive Committee] (London, March 1943), 2, 7, 11–12. 78. Memo, FM to Ambassador, 22 July 1943, f 42, FMSL. For context, see Alastair J. Reid, “Labour and the Trade Unions,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Tanner et al., 221–47. 79. Quotes from Memo, FM to Ambassador 14 Aug 1943, f 43, FMSL. See also Memo, FM to Ambassador, 26 Aug 1943, f 42; Letter, FM to “Dear Folks,” 22 Aug 1943, f 7; Memo, FM to Ambassador, 14 Sept 1943 and 3 Nov 1943, f 42, FMSL. 80. H ere I use T. H. Marshall’s categories of “civil, industrial, and social,” enumerated in Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). Despite frequent associations of Marshall with “economic citizenship,” he does not use that term. 81. On Smieton, see “Dame Mary Smieton,” The Telegraph, 31 Jan 2005; “Miss Mary Smieton, Ministry of L abour and National Service, Discussion, 11 August 1943,” f 67, FM, SL. Quotes from FM to Thibert, 24 Feb 1944, f 86, FMSL. Schneiderman and Bondfield had exchanged various “domestic worker charters” and legislative proposals in the 1930s, paving the way for Miller’s wartime meetings. See RS to MB, 28 Feb 1939; MB to RS, 14 March 1939, RS to MB, 21 Feb 1945, all in f 31, MBVC. 82. “Mary Anderson to Quit U.S. Post; Office May Go to Frieda Miller,” NYT, 13 June 1944; “Miss Miller Hits Equal Rights Plan,” NYT, 18 Aug 1944. 83. FS to Winant, 20 June 1944 and 30 Jan 1945, f 155, FMSL. 84. On Winant in London, see Lunne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour (NY, 2010). 85. F 10, MSKSL; Richards, Maida Springer, 77–80; Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 32–29. Loughlin took her first full-time union job at age twenty-one, after six years as a clothing factory operative, and soon distinguished herself as a strike leader and u nion negotiator. Loughlin was elected chair of the six-million-member British Trades Union Congress in 1942, the second woman after Bondfield to be so honored. On Loughlin, see LLB, April 1944, 1; and Sheila Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions: An Outline History of Women in the British Trade Union Movement (London, 1977), 221–23, 233. 86. Richards, Conversations, 147–48, 158. 87. Richards, Conversations, 147–48; Richards, Maida Springer, 85–88, quote 86. On Padmore and Makonnen, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, 1997), 11–16; Robin D. G. Kelley, “ ‘But a Local Phase of a World Prob lem,’ Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” JAH 86 (Dec 1999): 1069–71; Margaret Stevens, Red Internationalism and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico, and the West Indies, 1919–1939 (London, 2017), 15, 60–61, 162–65, 172. 88. Richards, Conversations, 134–36. 89. George Padmore, “Foreword,” in The Voice of Coloured Labour: Speeches and Reports of Colonial Delegates to the WFTU Congress, ed. George Padmore (Manchester, 1945, repr. 1970), https://www.marxists.org/archive/padmore/1945/labour-congress/index.htm. 90. Richards, Maida Springer, 87–88; Padmore, “Foreword.”
504 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 91. For comparisons, see Clarence G. Contee, “The ‘Status’ of the Pan-African Association of 1921: A Document,” African Historical Studies 3, 2 (1970), 409–17; Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 45–54; Padmore, “Foreword” and “Conference Decisions,” in Padmore, ed., Voice. 92. For example, see Richards, Maida Springer, 87. 93. Letter of Introduction from David Dubinsky, 8 Jan 1945, f 10, MSKSL; Maida Springer Kemp, “Dr. Caroline F. Ware—A Majority of One, A Friend of All Reasons, for All Seasons,” 1981, 3, f 4, MSKSL. 94. Quote: MSK, “Dr. Caroline F. Ware,” 3. 95. Richards, Maida Springer, 78–83, quotes, 82. 96. FP to MS, 11 April 1944 and Invitation, NCNW to MS, n.d., in f 5, MSKSL. 97. 1941 ILC Proceedings, list of delegates; Ethel M. Johnson, “Women and the ILO,” 21 June 1946, b 12, f ILO-1945, WBGRNA. 98. In MHSLV: “Muriel Heagney—Labor Activist for Over Fifty Years,” LaTrobe Journal 15 (April 1975); Muriel Heagney, “Rough notes regarding delegation to ILO Conf in NY in 1941,” b 1146/1(b); Muriel Heagney, “Labor Activist for Over Fifty Years,” n.d., b 1145/1; and Muriel Heagney, “Wages for Wives,” 15 June 1944, b 1170/3a. See also “Women’s News,” unidentified clipping v 115, MFSLNSW; AH to MF, 30 Dec 1941 and other correspondence, v 115, MFSLNSW; Lubin and Riegelman, Social Justice, 60–63. 99. Berkovitch, Motherhood to Citizenship, equal pay global data on 179–80. 100. 1941 ILC Proceedings, 7–8, 11–12. 101. Ethel Johnson, “The ILO and the Future,” Radio Talk, 20 Dec 1941, 81–84, MVKSSA. 102. 1941 ILC Proceedings, 156. 103. Lubin and Riegelman, Social Justice, 63–65. On Miller’s desire for “two sets of standards— industrial and social,” see Miller’s remarks from the April 7 1943 NYT symposium, “What Kind of World Do We Want,” as quoted in Litoff and Smith, eds., What Kind of World? 96. 104. 1944 ILC Proceedings, xv–x xxii; Jacobson, “USSR and the ILO,” 402; FM, “Women and the ILO Conference,” b 11, f ILO 1944, WBGRNA; “Women to Advise ILO Declarations,” NYT, 13 April 1944. 105. 1944 ILC Proceedings, 22–26; “Australia Insists ILO Set Pace on World Planning,” Evening Bulletin, Philadelphia, 24 April 1944. 106. ILO, Edward Phelan and the ILO: The Life and Views of an International Social Actor (Geneva, 2009); E. J. Phelan, “Contribution of the ILO to Peace,” ILR 59 ( June 1949), 607–32. 107. Roosevelt, “Address to the 1944 ILC,” 17 May 1944, online speeches; Phelan, “Contribution of the ILO,” 612. 108. Alain Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice vs. the Total Market (London, 2012), 1; Daniel Roger Maul, “The International Labour Organization and the Globalization of H uman Rights, 1944–1970,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (NY, 2011), 301. 109. Quotes from Declaration of Philadelphia, a dopted 10 May 1944, in 1944 ILC Proceedings, 621–23. See also Phelan, “Contribution of the ILO,” 611. 110. 1944 ILC Proceedings, 521–621. Quote from David A. Morse, The Origin and Evolution of the ILO and its Role in the World Community (Ithaca, 1969), 29.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 8 505 111. 1944 ILC Proceedings, xxxi–x xxii; FM, Report on the 1944 ILC, no title, n.d., 10, f 183, FMSL. 112. Lutz sat on the executive board of the IAW. Traldi, “Transnational History,” ch. 3. 113. Thyra J. Edwards, “ILO and Postwar Planning for African Colonies,” Crisis 51 ( July 1944), 220. What Lutz advocated in Philadelphia seems at odds with ideas she espoused in other circumstances. Marino (Feminism, 39) notes her support in the 1920s for a “continental empire led by the United States and Brazil that would replace the Roman and British Empires.” 114. 1944 ILC Proceedings, 237, 585–602. 115. FM, “Women and the ILO,” b 11, f ILO 1944, WBGRNA; Edwards, “ILO and Postwar Planning for African Colonies,” 218–20, 233. Gregg Andrews, Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia, 2011). 116. 1944 ILC Proceedings, 605, 615; LLB, April 1944, 203; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice, 65–66. 117. Anderson believed that when she met with ILO assistant director Pierre Waelbroeck before the 1944 ILC, she convinced him to add the phrase “wage rates based on job content without regard to sex,” to the ILO’s proposed draft of recommendations on women workers. See MA, “War History of W omen’s Bureau,” n.d. f 93, MASL; “Statement dictated by MA for the War History of W omen’s Bureau,” b 11/12, f ILO 1945, WBGRNA; MA to Thibert, 5 June 1944, b 11, f ILO 1944, WBGRNA. Mary Anderson, “The Postwar Role of American Women,” American Economic Review 43 (March 1944), 237–44. President Roosevelt praised Anderson’s contributions to the equal pay and equal opportunity language of the Declaration in a retirement note he sent. FDR to MA, 29 June 1944, f 52, MASL. 118. “ILO Stresses Right of Women to Work,” NYT, 6 April 1944. 119. Agenda, “Meeting on Women’s Work,” n.d., b 81, f 3, MVKSSA; FM, “The ILO Looks Toward Peace,” enclosed in letter from Sylvia Beyer to Elisabeth Christman, 25 May 1944, f 212, FMSL. 120. “Royal Commission on Equal Pay, 1944–46,” Report presented to Parliament Oct 1946 (London, 1946), 90–105. For discussions of “equal pay” in the interwar IFTU Women’s Committee, see Zimmermann, “Framing Working Women’s Rights.” 121. During the war years, the ILO committee added new corresponding members, including seven women from India. Memo from Thibert to ILC Women Delegates, WN 1001/03, 04/4405/44, ILOAPF; and Memo from Thibert to Women’s Corresponding Committee, WN 1001/02, 15/1944-15/1945, ILOAPF. 122. Quotes from 1944 ILC Proceedings, ix, and Morse, Origin and Evolution, 57. See also FM, “Report on the 1944 ILC,” and Carter Goodrich, “Intl L abor Conference of 1944,” b 11, f ILO 1944, WBGRNA. 123. On the progressive values of Bretton Woods delegates, see Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar World (Ithaca, 2014); and Eric Helleiner, “Back to the Future? The Social Protection Floor of Bretton Woods,” Global Social Policy 14, 3 (2014), 298–318. For how the Bretton Woods system disappointed conservatives, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, 2018), 119–20. In 1947, a Republican-controlled US Congress rejected the proposed International Trade Organization. That same year, however, twenty-three nations
506 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 signed a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) lowering tariffs among the signatories. GATT remained the principal vehicle for managing trade until the World Trade Organ ization was set up in 1995. 124. For 1944–45 as the “high tide of multilateralism,” see Borgwardt, New Deal, 122.
Chapter 9: Intertwined Freedoms 1. Glenda Sluga, “National Sovereignty and Female Equality: Gender, Peacemaking and the New World O rders of 1919 and 1945,” in Pacifists/Pacifism: Peace and Conflict Research as Gender Research, ed. Karen Hagemann, Jennifer Davy, and Ute Kätzel (Essen, 2005), 169–83. 2. Ann Cottrell, “Women Absent at Four-Power Peace Sessions,” NY Herald-Tribune, 21 Aug 1944; Margaret F. Stone, “The Outlook for International Peace and Security,” LLB, Nov 1944; Ruth Russell, The History of the UN Charter (Washington, DC, 1958), 568–69; Robert Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill, 1990). 3. Sklar and Moon, “Florence Kitchelt,” WSMI. For the divisions among women over the United Nations, see Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith, eds, What Kind of World Do We Want? American W omen Plan for Peace (Wilmington, 2000), 1–36. Morse, Origin and Evolution, 30–32; Grace V. Leslie, “ ‘United, We Build a Free World’; The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” in To Turn the Whole World Over, ed. Blain and Gill, 197–200; Marino, Feminism, 191–97. 4. For some, the birth of the United Nations signaled the triumphant renewal of internationalism, democracy, and human rights. For o thers, it enshrined nationalism, preserved imperial power, and denied self-determination to the majority of the world’s p eople. The literature on the United Nations is vast, and controversies over its nature and effect show no sign of resolution. For how understandings of the UN have shifted over time, see Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History 19 (Sept 2008), 251–74. How imperial ideology and power shaped the UN is captured in Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2008). 5. “Women Delegates and Advisors at UN Conference on International Organization,” SF, June 1945, b 21, f Intl UN 1946, WBGRNA; Francine D’Amico, “Women Workers in the United Nations: From Margin to Mainstream?” in Gender Politics in Global Governance, ed. Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prügl (NY, 1999), 19–21; Jo E. Butterfield and Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt: Negotiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements, ed. Mary K. Trigg and Alison R. Bernstein (New Brunswick, 2016), 6. 6. For example: Paula Pfeffer, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World Woman’s Parties,” The Historian 59 (Fall 1996), 39–57; Helen Laville, “A New Era of International W omen’s Rights? American Women’s Associations and the Establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women,” JWH 20 (Winter 2008), 34–56; Ellen DuBois and Lauren Derby, “The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan American and United Nations women’s rights activist,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 ( Jan–Feb 2009), 48. For an assessment emphasizing
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 507 the strategic divide among feminists, see Lisa Baldez, Defying Convention: U.S. Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights (NY, 2014), 38–46. 7. On Street, see Jessie Street, “Women’s Status in the UN,” 1945 Radio Address for the SF Women’s Radio League, online; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St. Leonards NWS, 1999), esp. 191–97, 204–6. A succinct account is offered in Deborah Stienstra, Women’s Movements and International Organizations (NY, 1994), 77–85. 8. Quote: “UNCSW, 1946–1956, report prepared by Dr. Louis Longarzo, UN Consultant,” 16 July 1956, f 1971b, ICFTUIISH; Margaret E. Galey, “Forerunners in Women’s Quest for Partnership,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Anne Winslow (Westport, 1995), 6–7; “Memo: The Brazilian Delegation Recommending Establishing Commission on Women in U.N.,” June 1945, b 14, f LN, WBGRNA. Marino, Feminism, ch. 8, offers the fullest account of how Latin American feminists, building on earlier traditions, advanced a rights agenda in 1945. 9. “Women’s Stake and Status in World Affairs,” May 1946, b 21, f Intl UN 1946, WBGRNA; Mary K. Meyer, “Negotiating International Norms: The Inter-American Commission of Women and the Convention on Violence Against W omen,” in Gender Politics, ed. Meyer and Prügl, 58–64. On Jan Smuts, see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 18. Mazower considers him an “imperial internationalist” who espoused lofty ideals while acting to bolster imperial and racist o rders. 10. “Rept of Conf on L/N and Special Interests of W omen,” 19 Sept 1945, b 22, f UNESCO- CSW, 1945, WBGRNA; Pfeffer, “Eleanor Roosevelt.” As Marino recounts in Feminism, Bernardino and Ledón had attended the Inter-American Chapultepec Conference a few months earlier and secured backing from Latin American nations for women’s rights proposals similar to what they championed in San Francisco (192–97). 11. As Eleanor Roosevelt explained, “equality did not mean identical treatment for men and women.” There were certain cases—for example maternity benefits—in which differential treatment was essential. ER as quoted in Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (NY, 2001), 112. 12. Charter of the United Nations and Statue of the International Court of Law (San Francisco, 1945), Preamble; Allida Black, “Are W omen Human? The UN and the Struggle to Recognize Women’s Rights as H uman Rights,” in The H uman Rights Revolution: An International History, ed. Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock (NY, 2012), 133–55; Arvonne S. Fraser, “Becoming Human: Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (Nov 1999), 887; Virginia Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (1954), esp. 317, 330–31, 346–47. 13. Charter of the United Nations, Article 1 and 55; Rosalind Rosenberg, “Virginia Gildersleeve: Opening the Gates,” Columbia Blogs, Columbia University, 2006, http://blogs.cuit .columbia.edu accessed 13 Aug 2020. 14. DK, “Women Are Human Beings,” May 1947, b 21, f 11, DKSSA. 15. DK, “An International Bill of Rights,” 30 Oct1943, b 20, f 6, DKSSA; DK, “The Fifth Freedom,” Speech at NYT Women’s Conference, 7 April 1943, b 20, f 5, DKSSA. 16. Karen Offen characterizes the CSW debate as between “humanists” and “feminists.” See Offen, “Women’s Rights or Human Rights? International Feminism between the Wars,” in Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw,
508 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (NY, 2001), 243–53. In her article “New Era?” Laville relies on a dichotomous framework of two non-overlapping groups: “feminists” and “maternalists”; the latter term is used prejoratively to denote women clinging to notions of sex and gender essentialism. 17. First quotes from Rupp, Worlds, 223–34. For Pandit, see UN Weekly Bulletin, 1946, 23, as quoted in Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 83. 18. Quote from Laville, “New Era?” 35–37, 52. 19. “Rept of Conf on UN and Special Interests of W omen,” 19 Sept 1945, b 22, f UNESCO- CSW 1945, WBGRNA. 20. Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 79–85. 21. Materson, “Global Journeys,” 40–41; “The NCNW of the USA, Inc. A Resume,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal 1, 1 (Spring 1940), 3 as quoted in Leslie, “ ‘United, We Build a F ree World,’ ”194. 22. Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia, 2003), 181–87; Elaine M. Smith, “Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955),” in Black W omen in Amer ica, ed. Hine, Brown, and Terborg-Penn, 113–27, esp. 113; Leslie, “United, We Build a F ree World,” 195–97. Quote from Edward Ryan, “Rep Dies Names Government Employees He Links to Communist Front Organizations,” Washington Post, 25 Sept 1942, 5. 23. Leslie, “ ‘United, We Build a Free World,’ ” 200–1. See also Plummer, Rising Wind, 125–33 and Julie A. Gallagher, “The National Council of Negro W omen, Human Rights, and the Cold War,” in Breaking the Wave: Women, their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945–1985, ed. Kathleen Laughlin and Jacqueline Castledine (NY, 2011), 84–85. 24. Mary McLeod Bethune, “San Francisco Conference,” in Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World: Essays and Selected Documents, ed. Audrey T. McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith (Bloomington, 1999), 249–53, quotes on 250. See similar observations by Sue Bailey Thurman, “Behind the Scenes at San Francisco,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal ( June 1945), 4–5. 25. Bethune to “Dear Friends,” 10 May 1945, b 34, f 997, NCNWNA. 26. Thurman, “Behind the Scenes,” 4–5. Sue Bailey Thurman, “Crusading Lady,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal ( June 1945), 7, 23–25. 27. Bethune to “Dear Friends,” 10 May 1945, b 34, f 997, NCNWNA. 28. On Thurman and the trip to South Asia, see Leslie, “United for a Better World,” 36–43; Kapur, Raising, 81–93; and Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, 112–16. 29. “One Point of View,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal ( June 1945), 1–2; Thurman, “Crusading Lady,” 7, 23. 30. On Pandit, see Kapur, Raising, 127–30, quote 127. Second quote from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, “Freedom for India,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal ( June 1945), 3, 23. 31. In addition, Pandit was India’s Ambassador to the USSR from 1947 to 1949. For more on Pandit, see Anne Guthrie, Madame Ambassador: The Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (NY, 1962); Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, esp. 167–72; Priya Ravichandran, “Women Architects of the Indian Republic,” online. For more on the friendship between Bethune and Pandit, see Shaun Armstead, “Searching for Global Peace and Freedom: Mary McLeod Bethune and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and their Visions for a New World Order after World War II,” workshop paper, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, New Brunswick, 19 Feb 2019.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 509 32. ER, “My Day, 30 January 1946,” ERGW; Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and after, 1939–1962 (NY, 2016), 548–49; Galey, “Women Find a Place,” 11–12; Crossette, “Minerva Bernardino.” 33. “Open Letter,” b 21, f Intl UN 1946, WBGRNA. 34. Leslie, “ ‘United, We Build a Free World,’ ” 207. 35. On wartime shifts in US and British groups, Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned, ch. 7. 36. By 1955, the IAW had executive board members from Turkey, Africa, Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan. See Laurel Casinader to FM, 23 Feb 1955, f 248, FMSL; “International Alliance of Women, 1904–2004,” International Woman Suffrage News, Centenary Edition, https:// womenalliance.org/w p-content/u ploads/2018/10/I AW-Centenary-Edition-1904-2004 -webversion.pdf, accessed 12 Aug 2020. 37. Karen Garner, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The World YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” JWH 15 ( June 2004), 193–94, 203; Marino, Feminism, epilogue; Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 86–89; Carolyn M. Stephenson, “Women’s International Nongovernmental Organizations at the United Nations,” in Women, ed. Winslow, 136. 38. Quote from “Rept by Jessie Street on WIDF Founding Conference,” b 11, f 22, JSNLA. See also Francisca de Haan, “The W omen’s International Democratic Federation: History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991,” paper presentation, International Federation of Women’s History Conference, Vancouver, Canada, August 2018; Francisca de Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones: Rethinking Transnational Feminism and International Politics,” JWH 25 (Winter 2013), 174–89; Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational W omen’s Organisations: The case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” WHR 19 (Sept 2010), 547–73; Rupp, “Transnational W omen’s Movement,” Transnational Movements and Organizations, EGO: European History Online, accessed Sept 13, 2013. 39. Melissa Feinberg, “Battling for Peace: The Transformation of the W omen’s Movement in Cold War Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe,” in Women and Gender in Postwar Europe: From Cold War to European Union, ed. Joanne Regulska and Bonnie G. Smith (NY, 2012), 22–25; WIDF memo, “Progressive W omen of Chicago,” c. 1946, b 107, WIDFTA; Vivian Carter Mason, “Report of Meeting in Paris of the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Aframerican Woman’s Journal (March 1946), 3–4, 17–18; Leslie, “ ‘United, We Build a F ree World,’ ” 206–7. Although Bethune and Mason fell out over Mason’s affiliation with WIDF and her visit to Moscow in October 1946, the rupture was “short-lived.” Mason was active in the NCNW again by 1948 and became its third president in 1957. The Cold War political divisions within the NCNW in this era are most fully narrated in Gallagher, “National Council of Negro W omen,” 80–98. 40. Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 81–84; Lunardini, Alice Paul, 163–64. New Deal feminists also favored a commission with a more limited role, in part to preserve the jurisdiction of the ILO and the authority of the HRC. Some also favored having men on the CSW. For details: “Rept on Conference between Reps of Natl Women’s Orgs and members of Dept of State,” 29 March 1946 and “Rept of Sub-Commission on SW,” 13 May 1946, both in b 22, f UNESCO- CSW-1946, WBGRNA. See also Memo, [Rachel C.] Nason to WB Staff, 30 April 1946, b 21, f Intl UN 1946, WBGRNA and Memo, Nason to WB Staff, 15 May 1946, b 15, f UN-CSW, WBGRNA.
510 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 41. On WTUL lobbying for Kenyon, see EC to Helen Sater, 6 May 1946, b 15, f UN-CSW, WBGRNA. Schneiderman supported Kenyon’s appointment but felt “there ought to be trade union women” on the CSW. RS to EC, 10 June 1946, r 13, NYWTUL. 42. On Kenyon as the principal figure linking the two women’s commissions, see Jaci Eisenberg, “The Status of W omen: A Bridge from the League of Nations to the United Nations,” JIOS 4, 2 (2013), 14–16. For a more general elaboration on the continuities between the League and the UN, see Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2013), chs. 2, 3; Glenda Sluga, “Women, Feminisms, and Twentieth-Century Internationalisms,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge, 2017), 61–84. 43. On Kenyon, see Weigand and Horowitz, “Dorothy Kenyon,” 126–31; Hartmann, Other Feminists, ch. 3, esp. 57–61; “Judge Dorothy Kenyon Is Dead: Champion of Social Reform, 83,” NYT, 14 Feb 1972. On Kenyon’s friendship with Miller, see letters between FM and DK in b 58, f 14, DKSSA. 44. Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, 2011); Jane Sherron de Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (NY, 2018), 129–34, 233. 45. DK, “One World, One P eople,” remarks 12 Dec 1946, b 22, f UNESCO-CSW-1946, WBGRNA. 46. DK, “Women are Human Beings,” May 1947, b 20, f 11, DKSSA. 47. On developments in Germany and Eastern Europe, see Mazower, Dark Continent, 244– 45, ch. 8, and Ben Stell, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (NY, 2018). On the term “Cold War,” see Ernest R. May, “The Cold War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (NY, 1997), 331–34. 48. Stell, Marshall Plan. The CPUSA ended its “Popular Front” phrase in 1946 and returned to a more sectarian approach. Earl Browder, CPUSA general secretary from 1930 to 1945, favored the continuation of coalition politics, but he was stripped of his power and expelled from the CPUSA in 1946. See Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, 1998), 99–106. 49. DK, “Confidential Memo for File, 30 Dec 1947,” b 53, f 3, DKSSA; CSW, First Session, Summary Record of First Meeting, 10 Feb 1947, and CSW, First Session, Summary Record of Third Meeting, 11 Feb 1947, b 14, f E/HR/ST, WBGRNA. Baldez, Defying Convention, 48–50. Quotes from Rachel C. Nason to FM, 6 March 1947, b 22, f UNESCO-C SW-1947, WBGRNA. 50. Eileen Boris, “Equality’s Cold War: The ILO and the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 1946–1970s,” in Women’s ILO, ed. Boris et al., 104; Ali quotes from “UN Women Balk at ‘Equal’ Rights with Men, Saying These are Sometimes Not Enough,” NYT, 12 Feb 1947. 51. Jessie Street, “The Position of Women in the USSR as I Found It in 1938,” b 11, f 18, JSNLA; Jessie Street to Bodil Begtrup, 7 April 1947, b 17, f 1, JSNLA. On how Street and other Soviet visitors in 1938 would not necessarily have known about the Great Purge trials and executions at the time, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (NY, 2012), esp. 303–10. 52. Begtrup to CSW members, n.d. [c. 1947] and Begtrup to Street, 18 May 1947, both in b 17, f 1, JSNLA. For Kenyon’s views, see DK, “Meaning of Equality,” 21 Feb 1950, b 21, f 5, DKSSA
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 511 and DK, “Background Report on CSW,” b 12, f 1948, WBGRNA. See also Lake, “From Self- Determination via Protection,” 266–68. 53. The collapse of parliamentary democracy in Czechoslovakia and the country’s move into the Soviet orbit was another triggering event. See Feinberg, “Battling for Peace,” 16–33. 54. DK to Mrs. India Edwards, 22 Nov 1948, b 58, f 8, DKSSA; DK to Ashby, July 9, 1948, b 58, f 4, DKSSA. 55. “Dorothy Kenyon Says Women’s ‘Equality’ with Men in Russia Is One of Slavery,” NYT, 16 Dec 1948. 56. Quote: Baldez, Defying Convention, 149; Jan Lambertz, “Democracy Could Go No Further: Europe and women in the early United Nations,” in Women and Gender in Postwar Europe, ed. Regulska and Smith, 44. 57. Kenyon, “Background Report on CSW,” b 12, f 1948, WBGRNA; U.S. Women’s Bureau, “New Measures to Advance Women’s Status Proposed,” 3, 6 May 1948, b 22, f “UNESCO- CSW-1948,” WBGRNA; Boris, “Equality’s Cold War,” 97–120. 58. DK to Mrs. India Edwards, 22 Nov 1948, b 58, f 8, DKSSA. On Edwards, see Joan Cook, “India Edwards Dies; Advocate of W omen in Politics Was 94,” NYT, 17 Jan 1990. Edwards was proposed as a Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1952. 59. Brev till KH från Dorothy Kenyon, 29 June 1948, L 55: 1–8, KHNLS. 60. For examples of other New Deal women caught in the McCarthy maw, see Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, 2013). 61. “Newspaper Clippings,” NYT, 12 Dec 1949, 11 Jan 1950 and 9 March 1950, r 1, DKSSA. Kenyon quotes are from Philippa Strum: “Dorothy Kenyon: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s First Case ( June 11, 2015),” History Weekly, 2015, SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2 736473. Truman also received complaints about Kenyon from ERA supporters in the Federation of Business and Professional Women. See Baldez, Defying Convention, 52. 62. In “Status of W omen,” Eisenberg pronounces the early commission a “success” (16). More sober assessments of its early years can be found in Baldez, Defying Convention, 46–56; Boris, “Cold War Inequality”; and Lambertz, “Democracy Could Go No Further.” 63. DuBois and Derby make the “crucial link” argument in “Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino,” 48. This narrative arc, which includes a global feminist “missing wave” in the mid- twentieth century, replicates the problems of the wave narrative in US women’s history. See Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 1–10; Nancy Hewitt, “Intro,” in No Permanent Waves, ed. Hewitt, 1–12. 64. Jill Jensen makes a similar point in “The Fight over Representation and Rights: Defending Gendered Rights through the UN Economic and Social Council, 1948–1950,” Global Social Policy 14 (Aug 2014), 163–88. 65. Morse, Origin and Evolution, 30–31. 66. Ernest S. Hediger, “The ILO and the UN,” Foreign Policy Reports 23, 6 (June 1946), 70–79. 67. Martin, Madame Secretary, 462–65; 1945 ILC Proceedings, xiii. 68. 1945 ILC Proceedings, 136–37. 69. On Myrdal, see Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (Bloomington, 2008), ch. 6; Alva Myrdal, “A Programme for F amily Security in Sweden,” ILR 39, 6 ( June 1939), 723–63; Tilton, Political Theory, esp. ch. 7; 1945 ILC Proceedings, quotes 234, 252–53.
512 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 70. Norton, unpublished Autobiography, 227, 230, b 6, f 19, MNRUL. On the “brutal peace” from 1944 to 1948 in Europe, see Mazower, Dark Continent, 215–25. 71. Norton, “The War Is Not Over: Report from Paris, France, October 1945 ILO Conf.,” 6, b 5, f 5, MNRUL. 72. FM to Thibert, 30 Dec 1945, WN 1001/04, 01/1945 to 04/1946, ILOAPF. 73. FM to Thibert, 9 May 1946, with enclosed document, “Problems Involving W omen Workers,” WN 1001/04, 04/1946 to 03/1948, ILOAPF. 74. KH to Thibert, 8 May 1946, WN 1001/04, 04/1946 to 03/1948, ILOAPF. 75. FM, “Report of Conference,” b 12, f ILO 1946, WBGRNA. 76. Examples abound. As early as 1918, Mary Macarthur pronounced the “principle of equal pay for equal work essentially meaningless b ecause of risk that employers would interpret equal as identical, whereas ‘it hardly ever is.’ ” As quoted in Hunt, The National Federation of W omen Workers, 103. For elaboration on British labor w omen’s search for how to formulate “equal pay,” see Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions, 244–58; Anne Loughlin, “Message to the National Women’s Trade Union League,” LLB 51 (April 1944), 2; “Royal Commission on Equal Pay, 1944–46,” Report presented to Parliament October 1946 (London, 1946), 90–105. For the United States, see Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, ch. 4. For an introduction to the global history of equal pay debates, see Silke Neunsinger, “The Unobtainable Magic of Numbers: Equal Remuneration, the ILO and the International Trade Union Movement, 1950s–1980s,” in Women’s ILO, ed. Boris et al., 121–48. A Google Ngram search shows the phrase “rate for the job” dating back at least to the pre–World War I era and its frequency skyrocketing in the late 1930s and 1940s. The US Women’s Bureau claimed in 1945 that “the principle of rate for the job, regardless of workers’ sex” had been “advocated officially by government agencies” since before World War I. USWB Memo, 1945, b 11, f ILO 1945, WBGRNA. 77. Christman and MA to J. L. Lewis, 22 Aug 1938, b 10, f ILO 1938, WBGRNA. 78. 1946 ILC Proceedings, 235–40, 591; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice, 76–77. 79. LLB, July 1948; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice, 77–79. 80. Hediger, “ILO and the UN,” 70–79; Quenby Olmsted Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy: The Rise and Fall of the Early Cold War Alliance between the American Federation of Labor and the Central Intelligence Agency (Oxford, 2011), 97–100. 81. Sender, “NGOs,” n.d. [c.1955–56], b 5, f TS articles, TSWSHS; Lorwin, International Labor Movement, 224–28. According to Davies (NGOs, 130–32), government policy makers and diplomats believed “private national organizations” exerted undue influence at the League of Nations and acted to “expressly limit” the power of NGOs at the United Nations. 82. Janice R. Bellace, “The ILO and the Right to Strike,” ILR 153 (March 2014), 29–70; Lorwin, International Labor Movement, 224–28, 235–36. 83. Carew, “Conflict Within the ICFTU,” 147–49; “WFTU History,” http://www.wftucentral .org/history/, accessed 13 Aug 2020. The Russian u nions had twenty-seven million members and the British, French, and US (CIO) had roughly six million each, according to O.K.D. Ringwood and E. S. Hedinger, “The Paris International Trade Union Conference,” Foreign Policy Reports 23, 6 ( June 1946), 79–80. 84. The AFL justified its claim to “Group A” status by pointing to its large membership of seven million and its inclusion of affiliates in Canada and the Caribbean. Figures from “Union
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 513 Membership, 1897–1945, Series D. 218–222,” Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945, A Supplement, Pt. 1, 72. 85. William Green to TS, 8 Jan 1947, b 1, r 2, TSWSHS. 86. In 1955, after nine years with the AFL, Sender wrote of her “disappointment” in not “being considered as one of the trusted assistants” and of being invited to the AFL convention only twice. TS to Woll, 4 April 1955, b 3, f 1954–1955, TSWSHS. 87. Toni Sender, Toni Sender: The Autobiography of a German Rebel (NY, 1939) and in TSWSHS: b 6, f Bio Info; b 7, f Clippings; and b 1, r 1. See also Richard Critchfield, “Toni Sender: Feminist, Socialist, Internationalist,” History of European Ideas 15 (Aug 1992), 701–6; Richard J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945 (NY, 1987), 121–56; William Smaldone, Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929–1933 (Lanham, 2009), 164–77; David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca, 1975), 465–66; Neusinger, “Creating the International Spirit of Socialist W omen,” 117; and “Toni Sender, 75, Socialist Leader,” NYT, 27 June 1964. 88. Quote from Sender, Toni Sender, 319. On name change, see J. Henle, President, Vanguard Press to “Miss Tony Sender,”16 Dec 1938, b 1, r 1; for February 1941 citizenship application, b 1, r 2; on Sender’s acceptance as a naturalized US citizen in April 1943, b 1, r 1. All are in TSWSHS. 89. Misc. materials, b 6, f Bio Info, TSWSHS; Diaries, 1937–1940 in b 15, TSWSHS; Christl Wickert, “Exile or Emigration: Social Democratic Women Members of the Reichstag in the United States,” in Between Sorrow and Strength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period, ed. Sibylle Quack (Washington, DC, 1995), 329–38; Morgan, Socialist Left, 178, 465–66; Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (Annapolis, 1998), 76–78. 90. Quotes from TS to Bruce Barton, 11 July 1959, b 3, f 1958–1959, TSWSHS. On the circle of AFL men—Dubinsky, Jay Lovestone, Matthew Woll, George Meany, Irving Brown, and others—who created the F ree Trade Union Committee to fight fascism and Soviet Communism in 1944 and worked closely with it in the postwar decades, see, among others, Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy, 21–69; Anthony Carew, American L abour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970 (Edmonton, 2018). 91. Sender, Toni Sender, quotes 252, 317. “Far from perfect” quote from Toni Sender, “Labor’s Stake in Foreign Policy Decisions,” 15 Oct1948, b 5, f TS articles, TSWSHS. 92. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of H uman Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia, 1999), 169–70, 361–62, n19; Janice R. Bellace, “The ILO and the Right to Strike,” 40–44. 93. ER, “My Day,” 24 Jan 1947, ERGW. 94. “Statement by Miss Sender (AFL), 6 Feb 1947,” b 5, f TS articles, TSWSHS. See also Helen Grieff to FM, 24 Nov 1947, b 21, f Intl UN 1947, WBGRNA. 95. Dubinsky, as quoted in Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy, 102. Jacobson, “USSR and the ILO,” 417–18. Harold Dunning, “The Origins of Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and the Right to Organize,” ILR 137, 2 (1998), 149–67; Bellace, “ILO and the Right to Strike,” 40–44; 1947 ILC Proceedings, 561–78. 96. TS quoted in “Freedom of Association Step Praised; ILO Urged to Adopt Other Basic Rights,” AFL Weekly News Service Supplement, 15 Aug 1947, 1, b 1, r 2, TSWSHS.
514 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 97. Thorne to TS, 7 May 1947, 9 May 1947, 5 May 1948, b 1, r 2, TSWSHS. See also Jay Lovestone to TS, 24 June 1948 and 29 June 1948, b 1, r 2, TSWSHS. 98. 1948 ILC Proceedings, xix, 473–88, quote 484. To the chagrin of labor delegates and others, employers insisted that Convention 87 include an employer “right of association.” 99. 1948 ILC Proceedings, quotes 229–30. On Hancock, see June Hannam, “Dame Florence May Hancock,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( Jan 2011), online; Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions, esp. ch. 14. 100. On Morse’s background, see “Collection Creator Biography,” David Morse Papers, Princeton University. On his reform goals in this period, see David A. Morse, “Address to the 14th National Conference on Labor Legislation,” 1947, b 12, f ILO 1947, WBGRNA. On Morse’s limited conceptions of h uman rights and his complex motivations, see Maul, “ILO and the Globalization of Human Rights,” 308–9. 101. ILO Convention 98, Articles 3, 4, quote from Article 1, www.ilo.org. Convention 98, some hoped, would offset weaknesses in Convention 87 such as its guarantee of association rights to employers. For an argument that the ILO’s pre-1948 understanding of “freedom of association” included the “right to engage in industrial action,” the right to organize unions, and the right to collective bargaining, see Bellace, “ILO and the Right to Strike,” 29–70. 102. Preamble, 1948 UDHR, https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. 103. Or as Article 2, UDHR specified, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.” 104. Article 25, UDHR and ER, “My Day,” 24 Jan 1947, ERGW. 105. Article 23, Preamble, and Article 25, UDHR. 106. UDHR, especially Preamble, Articles 22–25; Paul Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia, 2003), ch. 7. 107. ER as quoted in Glendon, World, 115. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights: The Battle for Peace and Planetary Decency,” Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders, ed. Edward P. Crapol (NY, 1987), 113–15; Butterfield and Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt,” 1–15; Cook, ER, War Years and After, 559–63. 108. Amrith and Sluga, “New Histories,” quote 256; Glendon, World, esp. 115–17, 156; Morsink, UDHR, 1–35. 109. Among others, see Moyn, Christian H uman Rights; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010), chs. 1, 2; Lauren, Evolution, chs. 1–4; Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of H uman Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47 ( June 2004), 379–98; Lynn Hunt, Inventing H uman Rights: A History (NY, 2007); Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: H uman Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia, 2009), ch, 1; Marino, Feminism, esp. chs. 5–7; Kathryn Sikkink, “Latin America’s Protagonist Role in Human Rights,” SUR 22 v 12, 22 (2015); Rebecca Adami, Women and the Universal Declaration of H uman Rights (NY, 2018). 110. For more on the contributions of Hansa Mehta and of Begum Shaista Ikramullah, the delegate from Pakistan, in drafting the Declaration, see Adami, Women and the UDHR, esp. 1–7. See also Morsink, UDHR, 116–29; Ravichandran, Women Architects of the Indian Revolution, online; and Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 82–83. 111. Cook, ER, War Years and After, 557–59. ER quote from Glendon, World, 68.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 515 112. Glendon, World, esp. 155–60, 185–89, quote on 185. 113. Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 301–20, quote 313. 114. Glendon, World, esp. 42–43, 115–17, 155–60, 185–89; quote UDHR, Article 22. 115. Eleanor Roosevelt cast the lone vote against the final version of Article 23. Yet her hesitation did not stem from opposition to economic and social rights. Rather, she objected to the idea of wages based on any other principle but “work done” and believed the social guarantee of an adequate standard of living in Article 22 a superior way of addressing family need. For elaboration, Glendon, World, 159–60. 116. Morsink, UDHR, 157–90, quote 173. 117. Moyn, Last Utopia, 2. 118. Among o thers, Mazower, “Strange Triumph of Human Rights” and Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, 2018). 119. Quataert, Advocating Dignity; Morsink, UDHR, ix–xiv; Gay Seidman, “Workers’ Rights, Human Rights, and Solidarity across Borders,” ILWCH 80 (Fall 2011), 169–75. 120. Mazower, Dark Continent, xi, 208. 121. On Britain, see Pat Thane, “Labour and Welfare,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Tanner et al., esp. 99–103 and Alastair J. Reid,” Labour and the Trade Unions,” in Labour’s First Century, 221–47. France, Mexico, and Sweden, among o thers, also pioneered advanced systems. Thane’s account reveals not only the significant advances in 1945–46 Britain toward a “real safety-net” but also its “redistributive” failures and its “minimal conception of public welfare supplemented by private effort” (101). Such accounts are a caution against exaggerating the differences between US and British welfare systems. 122. Quote from MB speech, “The World We Want,” WTUL conference, St. Louis, MO, 27 April 1949, r 13, f GB, NWTULLC. 123. For example, Canada’s single-payer health care system emerged incrementally and did not cover the entire country until 1971. In Australia, universal health coverage was a subject of vigorous debate into the 1980s. Quoctrung Bui and Sarah Kliff, “Strikes and Attack Ads: The Hard Roads to Universal Health Care,” NYT, 10 March 2020. For elaboration on how and why postwar provisions for family caregiving in the United States differed from other regions, see Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 122–39. 124. For an astute analysis of the failure of the United States to implement universal public programs of social provision, see Kloppenberg, Virtues, 100–123. See also Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, chs. 10, 11. 125. Molly Tambor, The Lost Wave: W omen and Democracy in Postwar Italy (NY, 2014), quote 7. On Latin America and the millions of Latin American w omen voting for the first time a fter the war, see Towns, “Inter-American Commission of Women,” 800, 806–7. 126. The literature on the US occupation of Japan is large, with l ittle agreement on the aims of the US officials in charge or the effects of the policies put in place. For an insightful account of how women’s rights provisions flowed from the desires of Japanese women whose activism dated back decades, see Jessica Pena, “Japanese Women’s Fight for Equal Rights: Feminism and the US Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952” (MA thesis, City College of New York, 2015). For more on the transnational social reform networks between Japanese and American w omen in this era, see Michiko Takeuchi, “At the Crossroads of Equality versus Protection: American Occupationnaire
516 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 omen and Socialist Feminism in US Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” Frontiers 38, 2 (2017), 114–47. W Quotes from Article 14 and 24, Japanese Constitution, Jan 1948. 127. On the rise of exceptionalist thinking, Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, ch. 11. On the rise of US conservatism, among o thers, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (NY, 2009) and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing F ree Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, 2012). On the changes in US women’s lives in this era and the lack of conservative religious support for family provision, see Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, chs. 3–5. 128. LLB, June 1950. On the postwar LWV, see Susan Ware, “American Women in the 1950s: Nonpartisan Politics and Women’s Politicization,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louis A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (NY, 1990), 281–99. 129. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 51–53. 130. WTUL, “ ‘Four Freedoms’ for W omen Workers,” (Washington, DC, 1946) in b 1171/1(b), MHSLV. The other three postwar freedoms for women workers were “the Right to Work, the Right to Uniform Security, and the Right to L egal Safeguards.” “EP Drive in Nation Planned,” NYT, 17 Oct 1944; Mary Cannon, “Rept of US Delegate to Fifth Assembly, IACW,” 2 Dec 1946, b 8, f IACW, WBGRNA. The global history of equal pay does not follow the geographical patterns of w omen’s suffrage legislation. Mexico was first in 1917 and by World War II more Latin American states had equal pay provisions than European. ILC, “Equal Remuneration,” Report V (1) (1949). 131. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, ch. 4, esp. 105–6. 132. “Statement of FM before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in support of S.1178, the ‘Women’s Equal Pay Act of 1945,” 29 Oct 1945, f 168, FMSL. For Miller’s continuing requests for information about the Royal Commission on Equal Pay, see FM to Ethel Johnson, 13 March 1945 and 11 Sept 1945, f 157, FMSL. 133. For the reticence of the AFL to support equal pay and its preference for wage setting by collective bargaining rather than statute, see Florence Thorne to TS, 5 May 1948, b 1, r 2, TSWSHS. On the NWP failure to lobby for equal pay, see Rupp and Taylor, Survival, 136–44, 174–76 and Esther Peterson, “The Kennedy Commission,” in Women in Washington: Advocates for Public Policy, ed. Irene Tinker (Beverly Hills, 1983), 23. 134. In 1944, minimum wage laws for w omen existed in twenty-six states, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia; forty-three states had maximum-hour laws for women. Th ese laws covered women left out of the federal legislation, often set higher wage standards, and provided additional protections against overwork, injury, and ill health. LLB, Oct 1944. 135. Sklar and Moon, “Florence Kitchelt,” WSMI; Alice Paul to Florence L. C. Kitchelt, 30 July 1945, r 87, NWPLC. 136. Rupp, “Women’s Community,” 736–38; Rupp and Taylor, Survival, 25–31, 136–44, quote 137, 153–65; Trigg, Feminism, 179–81; DeWolf, “ERA,” 58–80. 137. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 62–68, quotes 64. 138. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 65–66, quotes 66. 139. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, ch, 5 and LLB, Jan 1945. First quote: Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 141. Second quote from LLB, March 1944.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 9 517 140. Katherine Pollak Ellickson, “Labor’s Demand for Real Employment Security,” Yale Law Journal 55 (1945), 253–63, quotes 253, 260–61. Mary Anderson, “The Postwar Role of American Women,” American Economic Review 43, 1 (March 1944), 237–44. 141. In 1944, unionist Florence Hancock and liberal social activist Violet Markham, both wartime advisers on w omen’s work, had urged Minister of L abour Ernest Bevin to expand Britain’s “home help services”—set up initially in 1918 to assist pregnant w omen and m others— to additional households who had ill, elderly, disabled, or other members in need of care. They also laid out the benefits of a national public institute dedicated to raising standards for domestic workers. For details, see Dorothy M. Elliott, “The Status of Domestic Work in the United Kingdom: With Special Reference to the National Institute of Houseworkers,” ILR 63 (Feb 1951), 125–48; Dorothy Elliot, Women in Search of Justice, 58–75, unpublished manuscript, c. 1969, DETUC. 142. “Plan Higher Level for Domestic Workers,” NYT, 10 Nov 1944. See also Frieda S. Miller, “How Can We Lure Martha Back to the Kitchen,” NYT, 11 Aug 1946 and Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite (NY, 2015), 61–64. 143. FM, “Memo to the Ambassador,” 24 July 1943, f 42, FMSL; David L. Porter, Mary Norton of New Jersey: Congressional Trailblazer (Madison, 2013), 143; “Speeches,” b 5, f 4,5, MNRUL; Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 133–34. 144. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial In equality in Twentieth-Century America (NY, 2005), ch. 5; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Americ a (Princeton, 2009), 137–52; “Unholy Alliance,” The New Republic, 8 May 1944. 145. Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes (NY, 2018), ch. 7; Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, revised and expanded (Princeton, 2002), ch. 3; Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982). 146. Katznelson, Affirmative Action, ch. 3; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, 1994), 108–34; Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation D ixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia, 1989). 147. PN to MB, 22 July 1947, b 2, f 26, MBVC. 148. EC to MB, 27 June 1949, b 2, f 8, MBVC; LLB, June 1947 and Nov1947; “Statement of Frieda S. Miller in Favor of S. 784 to Provide Maternity Leave to Federal Employees Before the Civil Service Committee,” 18 Feb 1948, f 168, FMSL. For a sense of Miller’s extensive web of global exchange in this era, see the work of the Inter-American Division of the W omen’s Bureau documented in b 8, f IACW-1946, WBGRNA; LLB, Jan1947; and r 13, f IACW 1948–50, WTULLC. See also FSM to Mary Smieton, Ministry of Labor, 10 April 1946, b 7, f 154, FMSL; 1948 U.S. Women’s Bureau Statement, b 12, f ILO 1948, WBGRNA; LLB, June 1949. 149. Some 250 delegates representing unions, civic and women’s organizations, and state departments of labor attended. Press Release, 10 Feb 1948, f 169, FMSL. 150. To Secure Th ese Rights: The Report of President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, edited with an introduction by Steven F. Lawson (NY, 2004), 167–85. 151. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Prince ton, 2000).
518 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 152. Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, 2016), chs. 3, 4; Pauli Murray, Human Rights U.S.A., 1948–1966 (Cincinnati, 1967), 16–19, 47–50. 153. For examples: Materials, r 13, f health insurance 1949–50, NWTULLC; FM Statement in support of certain amendments to the Social Security Act (HR 2893), f 168, FMSL; Senator Elbert Thomas to Esther Peterson, 1 Sept 1949 and Senator Claude Pepper to Esther Peterson, 13 Sept 1949, f 3446, EPSL.
Chapter 10: Cold War Advances 1. On the misinterpretations and fears fueling the Korean conflict, see Samuel F. Wells Jr., Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (NY, 2020), esp. 1–7. 2. The United States, Canada, Britain, and nine European nations created the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 as a military alliance against the Soviet threat. I use the “bloc” language, despite its drawbacks, because I have not found an alternative with equal stylistic simplicity. I am not suggesting that the politics within each “bloc” were homogeneous. Nor do I see the two “blocs” as ideologically non-overlapping. Both valorized economic growth and modernization, for example. 3. On Hoover and McCarthyism, see Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (NY, 1998). On the political assaults on left feminists, see Storrs, Second Red Scare. On US public culture more generally, see John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2000). 4. The official name of the w omen’s committee was the joint Consultative Committee on Working Women’s Questions of the International Trade Secretariats and the ICFTU. I refer to it throughout as the ICFTU Women’s Committee. 5. For the flourishing of international women’s organizations within each Cold War bloc, see Davies, NGOs, 17, 124–41. 6. On the need to think beyond Cold War superpower politics and see the world as multipolar rather than bipolar, see, among others, Iriye, Global Community, ch. 3; Matthew Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War of Independence,” AHR 105 ( June 2000), 739–69. 7. Alfred Sauvy, “Trois Mondes, Une Planète,” L’Observateur 118, 14 Aug 1952, 14. For elaboration on the term “Third World,” see Marcin Wojciech Solarz, “ ‘Third World’: The 60th Anniversary of a Concept that Changed History,” Third World Quarterly 33, 9 (2012), 1561–73. Nations like Japan do not fit neatly into this tripartite division. Latin American states that a fter 1948 belonged to the Organization of American States (the successor of the Pan-American Union) and had treaties with the United States for mutual defense also occupy an ambiguous and distinctive position. The “Third World” bloc, like the other blocs, was not homogeneous. For a dissection of varieties of “Third World feminisms” in the 1950s, see Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, 2 (Winter 2016), 305–31. 8. Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111), article 1, paragraph 1. https://www.ilo.org.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 519 9. The ICFTU remained a secular organization. Despite protests from the Americans, Christian unions were barred. For membership, see John P. Windmuller, “Cohesion and Disunity in the ICFTU: The 1965 Amsterdam Congress,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 19 (April 1966), Table 1, 355. See also Anthony Carew, American L abour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970 (Edmonton, 2018), chs. 1, 2; Anthony Carew, “Conflict within the ICFTU: Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950s,” International Review of Social History 41 (Aug 1996), 147–81; Lorwin, International Labor Movement, pts. 6, 7; Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939–1949 (Urbana, 2000); Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times: A Biography (NY, 1981), 138–40; and Adolph Sturmthal, Left of Center: European L abor since World War II (Urbana, 1983). 10. The AFL’s Green resisted joining the ICFTU, but internationalists within the AFL such as Dubinsky, Matthew Woll, and George Meany prevailed. See Robinson, George Meany, 138–39. For the growth and feminization of US unions in the 1940s, see Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 16–18. 11. “Anti-Communist Workers of the World Unite,” Life 27, 12 Dec 1949, 54–55. 12. Jacob Potofsky to EP, 8 Nov 1949 and 21 Nov 1949, f 3446, EPSL. 13. Eight of the 261 delegates at the convention were female. “Anti-Communist Workers of the World Unite,” 54–55; Sigrid Ekendahl, “Women and Trade Unionism,” n.d. [1957], Series A, b 2, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1957, ARABLO; Peterson, Restless, 81; “Free World Labour Conference,” London, Nov 28–Dec 9, 1949, f 3446, EPSL. 14. Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson.” 15. Quotes from Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 7; Peterson, Restless, 70–80. 16. Correspondence between Oliver Peterson and Axel Strand, Series B, Internationell Korrespondens Länder, b 32, f “USA 1949,” ARABLO; Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 11–12, quote 12; “Swedish and Italian Labor Groups Arrive for US Industrial Study,” NYT, 12 March 1949. On w omen and the LO, see Gunnar V. Quist, “Women and the Swedish Federation of L abor, 1898–1973,” in The World of Women’s Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical Essays, ed. Norbert C. Soldon (Westport, 1985), 153–63. 17. Ekendahl worked as a coffee shop waitress for twelve years and an officer of the H otel and Restaurant Union before serving in the Stockholm City Council and the Swedish Parliament. She returned to Parliament in 1957 and served u ntil 1968. See “Biographical Files,” ARAB, and Linda Briskin, “Unions and Women’s Organizing in Canada and Sweden,” in Women’s Organizing in Canada and Sweden, ed. Linda Briskin and Mona Eliasson (Montreal, 1999), 147–84, esp. 177, fn40. In 1953, Ekendahl took a three-month “study trip” to the United States, arranged by Mary Cannon. Ekendahl to Cannon, 13 Dec 1965, b 1, f Corres 1964–1967, ARABSE. 18. Alice Hanson Cook, A Lifetime of Labor: The Autobiography of Alice H. Cook (NY, 1998), 125–36. “Labor Ambassadors,” Folket I Bild (The P eople in Pictures) magazine, no author, no date, c. 1951, f 366, EPSL. 19. Letters exchanged between EP and her mother [Mrs. L. E. Eggertsen], 1948–1957, copies in author’s possession. I thank Iver Peterson and Lars Peterson for sharing copies of these letters with me.
520 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 20. On the Reuthers, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (NY, 1995), 327–45, and Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the United Auto Workers: A Memoir (Boston, 1976), esp. chs. 24–27. Lichtenstein described Victor as a “tireless foe of colonialism” and perpetually at “loggerheads” with Meany’s Cold War attitudes (332). See also Carew, “Conflict within the ICFTU,” 147–49. On the friendship between the Reuthers and the Petersons, see, for example, Oliver Peterson to Thorbjörn Carlsson, 29 May 1953, b-36, correspondence E9A, ARABLO. See also Walther W. Ruch, “Trillion for Peace Urged by Reuther,” NYT, 19 July 1950. 21. Peterson, Restless, 81–82; Eric Kocher, “Second Congress of the ICFTU at Milan, July 1951,” MLR 73 (Sept 1951), 265–69; Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man, 355. 22. Laville, Cold War Women. Historian Francisca de Haan argues that Communist women in the Soviet bloc should not be judged as necessarily tools of the Soviet state. The political agency she grants Soviet w omen applies equally to w omen in the United States and elsewhere. See Francisca De Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991,” WSMI (2012). 23. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, ch.4. Neunsinger, “Unobtainable Magic,” 121–48. 24. The ILO acted in response to calls for action from the UN, specifically the Commission on the Status of Women, and to pressure from women inside the ILO. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice, 93–95; Jill Jenson, “US New Deal Social Policy Experts and the ILO,” in Globalizing Social Rights: The International L abour Organization and Beyond, ed. Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux (Geneva, 2013), 176–77. 25. Heller, “Blue-Collars and Blue Stockings,” 122–38; “Mildred Woodbury, Teacher and Labor Economist, Dies,” NYT, 12 Feb 1975; Ruth L. Fairbanks, “A Pregnancy Test: W omen Workers and the Hybrid American Welfare State, 1940–1953” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana, 2015), 175–203. 26. ILC, “Equal Remuneration,” Report V (1) (1949), 111–18. 27. For elaboration, see Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, ch. 4. 28. Some of the problems with job analysis are discussed by Margaret Hallock, Jean Ross, and Ronnie Steinberg in Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership, ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble (Ithaca, 1993), 27–42, 49–61. 29. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 94. On Myrdal, see Hirdman, Alva Myrdal, 273–301; and Glenda Sluga, “The Human Story of Development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1919– 1955,” in International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, ed. Marc Frey, Sönke Kendel, and Corinna R. Ungar, 46–74. On Bose, see Samita Sen, Women and L abour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge 1999), 229–30. 30. ILC, “Equal Remuneration,” Report V (1) (1949), 17, 37–-51; ILC, “Equal Remuneration,” Report V (2) (1950), 61, 63. 31. 1950 ILC Proceedings, XLII–III, 334–46, 502–18. 32. ILO News Service, 10 July 1950, in b2, f-1950, TSWSHS; ILC, 34th Session, 1951, Report VII (1), Equal Remuneration for Men and Women for Work of Equal Value (Geneva, 1950), 1–57 and Report VII (2), Equal Remuneration for Men and W omen For Work of Equal Value (Geneva, 1951), 14–15. 33. “Report of the Committee on Item V,” 18 July 1950, b 9, f 185, FMSL; 1951 ILC Proceedings, 333–45.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 521 34. 1951 ILC Proceedings, 333–36, 659–61. For background on equal pay debates in Australia in this era, see MHSLV and Lake, Getting Equal, 180–81, 211–13. 35. 1951 ILC Proceedings, 337–55. Hancock had advocated equal pay in 1912 when she led her first strike; thirty years l ater she and her British trade u nion s isters offered a powerful dissent to the limited rulings of Britain’s Royal Commission on Equal Pay. See “Royal Commission on Equal Pay,” 187–97. 36. 1951 ILC Proceedings, 447–49. For a voting analysis attentive to differences among nations and regions, see Eileen Boris, “The Making of ILO Convention #100: Whose Equality?” Nordic Labour History Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, 30 Nov 2016. 37. Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), Article 3; Equal Remuneration Recommendation, 1951 (No. 90), Paragraph 5. 38. Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), Article 2; Neunsinger, “Unobtainable Magic,” 132–33; 1951 ILC Proceedings, 333. 39. Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), Preamble; Wilfred C. Jenks, Human Rights and International L abour Standards (NY, 1960), 92; Jenson, “US New Deal Social Policy Experts,” 176–78. 40. Equal Remuneration Convention, 1951 (No. 100), Article 1. 41. “Report of Meetings of the CSW held at UN Headquarters, May 16 to April 3, 1953,” and “Statement Made by Miss Toni Sender, ICFTU,” both attached to letter, Sender to Oldenbroek, 22 May 1953, Folder 1971b, ICFTUIISH; ILO, “The ILO and W omen,” (ILO, 1959), 17–18. Sender became the ICFTU representative in 1950 after the AFL gave up its consultancy in favor of the ICFTU. Miller hoped for a similar uptick of interest in the United States on equal pay, but she was disappointed. See “Outline of talk by FSM at Lucy Stone League Dinner, Nov 21, 1951,” f 273, FMSL. 42. Miller reported as much from Colombo, Ceylon, where she had gone in 1955 to speak at an IAW Congress. Letter, FM to PN, 27 Oct 1955, with attached “Report on the Conference of the IAW,” by FM, b 1, f 8, FMSL. 43. Neunsinger (“Unobtainable Magic,” 131) notes that legislative and court definitions of “equal pay” narrowed over time in terms of what work was deemed “equal” and which groups were protected. 44. Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 400. 45. Quote: Mazower, Dark Continent, 295. 46. Similarly, although associated with the United States, job analysis was a global practice. The Royal Commission on Equal Pay (90) named the USSR and the United States as the two leading adopters of job analysis. 47. Equal Remuneration Recommendation, 1951 (No. 90), Article 6; “Code on Equal Pay for Women Hailed,” NYT, 22 May 1953. See also her stress on raising the “productive efficiency of women,” in Mildred Fairchild, “Rept of ILO Current Activities and Plans,” n.d. b 12, f ILO 1955, WBGRNA. 48. Charles A. Myers, Industrial Relations in Sweden: Some Comparisons with American Experience (Cambridge, MA, 1951); Ramana Ramaswamy, “Wage Bargaining Institutions, Adaptability, and Structural Change: The Swedish Experience,” Journal of Economic Issues 26, 4 (1992), 1041–61; Lars Svensson, “Explaining Equalization: Political Institutions, Market Forces, and Reduction of the Gender Gap in Sweden, 1920–95,” Social Science History 27, 3 (2003), 371–95.
522 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 49. Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer, 153–54; Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 45; Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 53–54; Richards, Maida Springer, 95–96; MS, “Talk to the Urban League,” Feb 15, 1954, b 1, f 2, MSKSL. 50. Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 51–54. 51. “Women in Swedish Industries, 1951–1953” (A Summary of February 1951 Swedish Committee Report), with comments and side notes from Marshall Green, Second Secretary; Ware Adams, First Secretary, US Embassy; and Oliver Peterson), b 10, f 211, FMSL. For the LO’s interwar “solidaristic wage policy,” its 1951 shift, and its “growing egalitarian emphasis in negotiations in the 1950s,” see Tilton, Political Theory, ch. 9, esp. 200–7, quote 200. Nonetheless, national contracts substantially reducing sex-based wage schemes among blue-collar workers would not be negotiated until 1960, with the policy gradually being implemented over the decade. Quist, “Women and the Swedish Federation of Labor,” 153–63. 52. As Ekendahl explained to a UN CSW meeting in 1956, “to talk about equal pay for equal work is not sufficient if we are unable to organize women workers into free trade u nions.” “Report of Sigrid Ekendahl to the ICFTU on the 10th Conf of the CSW held in Geneva, March 12– 29, 1956,” f 1971c, ICFTUIISH. 53. FM to Mary Smieton, 10 April 1946, b 7, f 154; FM to Dorothy Elliott, 9 March 1948 and 28 May 1948, f 166; Elliott to FM, 23 April 1948, 29 July 1948, 15 Oct 1948, f 166; MF to Ethel Wood, 22 June 1948 and 25 Aug 1948, f 160. All in FMSL. 54. Memo from British Information Services, 28 March 1945, f 160, FMSL; Elliott, “Status of Domestic Work in the United Kingdom,” 125–48; Elliot, Women in Search of Justice, 58–75. On the limited reach of the National Institute of Houseworkers, see Francis, “Labor and Gender,” in Labour’s First Century, ed. Tanner et al., 205–6. 55. EP to FM, 14 Oct 1949, f 3446, EPSL; EP to FM, 10 Oct 1952, f 370, EPSL. 56. For various drafts of “Justice in the Kitchen,” see folders 370–373, EPSL. Toward Standards for the Household Worker: Experience in Sweden (Washington, DC, 1953), f 369, EPSL. 57. Toward Standards for the Household Worker, 2, 4, 7–8, 44–58; Peterson, Restless, 79–80; Brita Akerman Johansson, “Domestic Workers in Sweden,” ILR 67 (1953), 361–66. Amended and strengthened in 1947, 1950, and 1953, the 1944 Swedish Domestic Workers Act was widely discussed during Peterson’s time in Sweden. For a scholarly, less rosy perspective on the Social Home Help Programme (1944–64) and the Swedish Domestic Workers Act, see Karin Carlsson, Den tillfälliga husmodern: Hemvårdarinnekåren i Sverige 1940–1960 (Lund, 2013); Karin Carlsson, “Public Care Work in Private Contexts,” in Global Care Work: Gender and Migration in Nordic Societies, ed. Lise Isaksen (Lund, 2010), 199–222. Carlsson notes the “relative weakness” of the 1944 law and the home help program’s failure to question traditional assumptions about who should provide care and under what arrangements. 58. Letter, KH to EP, 6 Oct 1953, f 361, EPSL. 59. In 1948, the ILO Governing Body considered putting the “whole question” of domestic work on a future ILC agenda but did not take action. Amidst mounting concerns over strains in family life as mothers and married women took on jobs outside the home, the UN Economic and Social Council asked the ILO to study “the economic value of w omen’s work in the home” and the status of household employment in 1949.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 523 60. Frieda Miller, “ILO Meeting of Experts on Employment of Domestic Workers,” 1951, f 187, FMSL; Asha D’Souza, “Moving towards Decent Work for Domestic Workers: An Overview of the ILO’s Work,” Report for the Bureau of Gender Equality (Geneva, 2010), 42–44. 61. Elliott, Women in Search of Justice, 94–111; Elliott, “The Status of Domestic Work in the United Kingdom,” 125; and Memo, “Draft, Domestic workers, July 31, 1951, for ILR article?” f 273, FMSL. 62. D’Souza, “Moving towards Decent Work,” 44. 63. Frieda Miller, “ILO Meeting of Experts on Employment of Domestic Workers,” 1951, f 187, FMSL. 64. The ILR, for example, published a series of articles on domestic work as part of the inquiry. See Elliott, “Status of Domestic Work in the United Kingdom”; Johansson, “Domestic Workers in Sweden”; and Frieda Miller, “Household Employment in the United States,” ILR 66 (Oct 1952), 318–37. 65. 1951 ILC Proceedings, 693–94; D’Souza, “Moving towards Decent Work,” 42–44. 66. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 127–30; “Statement of Frieda S. Miller in F avor of S. 784 to Provide Maternity Leave to Federal Employees before the Civil Service Committee,” 18 Feb 1948, f 168, FMSL; Jennie Mohr, “Maternity Benefits under Union-Contract Health Insurance Plans,” Women’s Bureau Bulletin 214 (Washington, DC, 1947); Eileen Boris, “ ‘No Right to Layettes or Nursing Time’: Maternity Leave and the Question of U.S. Exceptionalism,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (NY, 2011), 171– 93; Fairbanks, “A Pregnancy Test,” 175–211. 67. As quoted in Fairbanks, “A Pregnancy Test,” 185. 68. Memo, FM to Clara Beyer, 27 March 1952, f 186, FMSL; 1952 ILC Proceedings, xxviii. As discussed earlier, Beyer was a longtime employee of the USDL and a trusted aide to Perkins in the 1930s and the early 1940s. 69. 1952 ILC Proceedings, 327–44, 348–58; Maternity Protection Convention (Revised), 1952 (No. 103), quotes from Articles 1 and 2. 70. Fairbanks, “Pregnancy Test,” 194–98; “Mildred Woodbury, Teacher and Labor Economist, Dies,” NYT, 12 Feb 1975; New Generation: A Publication of the National Child Labor Committee 57, 1 (Winter 1975), 2–3. 71. On Miller’s multiple investigations, see Storrs, Red Scare, 228–29. 72. Bondfield worried too that Miller’s departure signaled the “breaking of the tradition of non-partisanship” at the US Women’s Bureau: a fter all, Mary Anderson had served u nder both Democratic and Republican administration. MB to FM, 29 Nov 1953, and other letters, f 167, FMSL; “Biographical Sketch of Alice Leopold,” USDL, 11 Dec 1953, f 1, ALSL; Elinore Herrick, “Women Look at Women’s Bureau,” New York Herald Tribune, 14 Feb 1954, f 2, ALSL. 73. On the Bricker Amendment, see Baldez, Defying Convention, 52–53. 74. Martin, Madame Secretary, 476–81. Liberia quote from Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics during the Age of Roosevelt (NY, 2020), 433; other quotes: Mary McLeod Bethune, “Last W ill and Testament,” available at https://www.cookman .edu/about_bcu/history/lastwill_testament.html. For elaboration, see Elaine M. Smith, “ ‘Last Will and Testament’: A Legacy for Race Vindication,” Journal of Negro History 81 (Winter– Autumn 1996), 105–22. On Pandit’s visit, see Ashley Robertson, Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State (Charleston, 2015), 43–45.
524 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 75. Cook, “Eleanor Roosevelt,” 14–15. 76. Cook, “ER and H uman Rights,” 113–15, quote 115. Memo, FM to Edward Persons, “U.S. Position on Draft International Covenant on H uman Rights and Measures of Implementation,” 28 Feb 1952, b 66, f 6-2-3-1, Office of the Director, Record Group 86, National Archives, Washington, DC, document courtesy of Eileen Boris. 77. Cook, “ER and Human Rights,” 113–14; Boris, “Equality’s Cold War,” 100. 78. Based on author’s calculations from delegate lists in ILC Proceedings from 1953–59. US women did participate in less prominent nonvoting positions: Frieda Miller and Caroline Davis of the Auto Workers, for example, participated in the 1959 ILO Panel of Consultants, and American-born Elizabeth Johnstone, who in the 1960s would coordinate w omen and c hildren’s affairs for the ILO, worked in the ILO Geneva office. 79. “Ana Figueroa,” ILO Personnel Files, ILOA. On Johnstone, see Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 51–52, 81. 80. Fairbanks, “Pregnancy Test,” 194–98. 81. Pamphlet, “ILO and Women,” Geneva, ILO, 1953, 12, f 388, EPSL. 82. Storrs, Second Red Scare, 229–32; EP to FM, 21 Dec 1952, with enclosed letter, EP to SE, 20 Dec 1952, f 257, FMSL; EP to “Mother dear,” 1 Jan 1956 and 22 Feb 1956, author files. Esther’s 1956 letters about the “whole mess” came after another investigation of Oliver in 1955. 83. ICFTU, Fifty Years, 37–38; “Historical Background,” ICFTUIISH; Rebecca Gumbrell- McCormick, “ICFTU and the World Economy: A Historical Perspective,” Labour and Globalization: Results and Prospects, ed. Ronaldo Munck (Liverpool, 2004), 34–51. 84. On the ICFTU Women’s Committee, see Yevette Richards, “Marred by Dissimulation: The AFL-CIO, the Women’s Committee, and Transnational Labor Relations,” in American Labor’s Global Ambassadors, ed. W aters and van Goethem, 39–56; Yevette Richards, “Transnational Links and Constraints: W omen’s Work, the ILO and the ICFTU in Africa, 1950s–1980s,” in Women’s ILO, ed. Boris et al., 149–75; Neunsinger, “Unobtainable Magic.” 85. Ekendahl, for example, served on the ILO Governing Body from 1952 to 1959. C. W. Jencks to SE, 13 Nov 1957, Series A, b 1, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1952–1957, ARABLO. On women organizing within the Socialist International after World War II, see Irmtraut Karlsson, First Hundred Years (Berlin, 2007), 31–40; Mary Walker, “Labour Women and Internationalism,” in Women in the Labour Movement: The British Experience, ed. Lucy Middleton (London, 1977), 84–93. 86. “52 W omen from 25 Countries,” CIO News, European Edition 2, 4–5 ( July–Aug 1953); Summary Report, “ICFTU International Summer School for Women,” Series A, b 1, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1953, ARABLO. 87. Eileen Tallman, “ICFTU Intl School for W omen Trade Unionists: A Report,” The Canadian Unionist (Oct 1953), 394–97, quote 394; William List, “Eileen Tallman to Attend Trade Union Conference,” b 31, f 8, ETNAC. On Tallman, Julia Smith, “The First Canadian Bank Strike: Labour Relations and White-Collar Union Organizing during the Second World War,” The Canadian Historical Review 99 (Dec 2018), 623–46, quote 645; Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950 (Toronto, 1989), 203–4; June Callwood, “She’s Organ izing Eaton’s,” MacLean’s, 1 Oct 1950. 88. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “International W omen’s Trade Unionism and Education,” ILWCH 90 (Fall 2016), 153–64. For quote: “Memories of a Movement,” in Sisterhood and Solidarity, ed.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 525 Kornbluh and Frederickson, 335. On Bryn Mawr dean Susan Kingsbury’s visit to German and Austrian folk schools in 1921, see Smith, Women Workers, 60–61. 89. For examples, f 1330, ICFTUIISH. 90. Peterson, Restless, 87–88; Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Peterson,” 21–23, quote 21. 91. “Draft Memo,” n.d., f 378, EPSL; TS to Miss Greiff, 28 June 1953, b 2, f 1952–1953, TSWSHS. For the cultural and racialized hierarchies prevailing among some participants, see Tallman’s account of her discussion group, which included French-speaking women from Europe, Mexico, French Guinea, French Cameroon, Tunisia, and Madagascar, in Tallman, “ICFTU Intl School,” 395–96. 92. Folders 374–379, EPSL. Quotes from “Transcript of ICFTU W omen’s School, 22 June 1953,” f 375, EPSL and Tallman, “ICFTU Intl School,” 396–97. 93. For examples, Tallman to EP, 3 July 1954 and 14 Oct 1954, f 382, EPSL. 94. Memo, FM to “The Secretary,” 31 Aug 1953, f 189, FMSL; John P. Windmuller, “The Stockholm Conference of the ICFTU,” Industrial and L abor Relations Review 7 (April 1954), 434–43; EP to “Mother Dear,” n.d. postmarked June 1955, author files, and EP’s 1955 Family Xmas letter, n.d., series A, b-1, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1956, ARABLO. 95. “Preparatory Committee, 14 February 1956,” and “Resolution on Women Workers,” ICFTU Sub-Committee, 9–11 April 1956, f 389, EPSL; EP to PN, 28 Feb 1956, f 155, PNSL. For Ekendahl’s appointment, see Hans Gottfurcht to SE, 1 March 1956, f-1971c, ICFTUIISH. At the CSW, Ekendahl argued for equity for women workers and spoke of the demands that arose from the 1953 ICFTU Summer School. See ICFTU Information Bulletin vol. VII, April 1956, 48, f 388, EPSL. 96. “Preparatory Committee, 14 February 1956,” f 389, EPSL; EP to PN, 28 Feb 1956, f 155, PNSL. 97. KH to JH Oldenbroek, ICFTU, 16 April 1956, f 1971c, ICFTUIISH. 98. On factions within the ICFTU, see Carew, “Conflict within the ICFTU,” 156–60; Richards, “Marred.” On Khrushchev’s 1956 speech and its aftermath, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (NY, 2003), ch. 11; John Rettie, “The Secret Speech that Changed World History,” The Observer, 25 Feb 2006. In the United States, Communist Party membership shrank from twenty thousand in 1956 to three thousand in 1958. Harvey Klehr, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History (NY, 2010), 70. On the declining sympathy for the Soviets in the British Labour Party after 1956, see Howe, “Labour and International Affairs,” 135–38. 99. EP to FM, 11 April 1956, f 260, FMSL. 100. EP to PN, 28 Feb 1956, f 155, PNSL. 101. According to Storrs, Red Scare, 282, Oliver was reinvestigated and cleared in October 1955. EP to “Mother Dear,” 1 Jan 1956 and 22 Feb 1956, author files. 102. Peterson’s outline and various drafts of the pamphlet are in folders 383–386. The published pamphlet “Women! It’s Your Fight, Too!” (Brussels, Belgium: ICFTU, June 1956), is in folder 387. Correspondence and other related material are in folders 382 and 3447, EP, SL. 103. EP to “Mother Dear,” 30 May 1956, author’s files. 104. Folders 382, 385, 387, EPSL.
526 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 105. Folders 383–387, EPSL. 106. Folders 386 and 387, EPSL. 107. Folders 382 and 387, EPSL. 108. EP to “Mother Dear,” 30 May 1956, author files. There is much truth in Peterson’s formulation. Both systems embraced economic growth and Fordist modernization, and both had achieved spectacular growth rates. On the rising living standards and life expectancy in the 1950s Eastern bloc, see Mazower, Dark Continent, 277–80. 109. “Agenda Item 3: Action against Communist Propaganda,” in ICFTU Preparatory Committee, 14 Feb 1956, Series A, b 1, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1956, ARABLO. 110. Drafts, folders 383–384, EPSL. 111. On the Gulag, a system of imprisonment and forced labor that resulted in the loss of millions of lives, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, 2011). The Gulag slowly receded after 1953. On the 1953 East German uprising, see Christian F. Ostermann and Malcolm Byrne, ed. Uprising in East Berlin, 1953: The Cold War and the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval b ehind the Iron Curtain (Budapest, 2001). 112. Peterson also attended the 1956 “Socialist International Women’s Conference” in Amsterdam. EP to “Mother Dear,” 28 Feb 1955 and 14 May 1956, author files. 113. EP to “Mother Dear,” 16 May 1955 and Esther and Oliver Peterson to family, n.d., postmarked 23 July 1955, author files. 114. On Poland and Hungary, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (NY, 2005), 312–23. On Peterson’s observations while in Austria, see EP to “Mother Dear,” 16 May 1955 and EP to “Mother Dear,” 7 Nov 1956, author files. Storrs (Red Scare, 231) suggests Peterson’s “anticommunism was sincere” but that when Oliver was under investigation in 1952 and 1955, “she tried to disarm their conservative attackers” by working with the ICFTU. That may be true, though I have found no evidence that the primary motivation of her ICFTU work was defensive. Peterson’s 1930s social democratic commitments remained essentially intact in the postwar era, and her work with the ICFTU was an expression of that worldview. 115. W omen in both the United States and the USSR lived in heavily militarized, imperialistic nations whose lack of respect for human rights and the territorial sovereignty of other countries caused harm and destabilized the world in the 1950s. For elaboration, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2007). 116. Quote from Leslie, “United for a Better World,” 287. WIDF membership became less politically diverse in the 1950s. After Truman’s Justice Department declared the Congress of American Women, the US affiliate of WIDF, a subversive organization in 1948, the Congress virtually disappeared. WIDF affiliates in other Western nations declined too as WIDF aligned more closely with the Soviet bloc. On the Congress of American W omen, see Jackie Castledine, Cold War Progressives: W omen’s Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom (Urbana, 2012). On WIDF more generally, see de Haan, “The W omen’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991”; and de Haan, “Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones,” 179–89. For sympathetic accounts of WIDF in the 1950s focusing on its anticolonialism and antiracism, see Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and De-Colonisation struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965, Women’s History Review 25, 6 (2016), 925–44; and Vera Mackie,
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 527 “From Hiroshima to Lausanne: The World Congress of M others and the Hahaoya Taikai in the 1950s,” Women’s History Review 25, 4, (2016), 671–93. 117. “Session of the Council of WIDF,” Moscow, 17–22 Nov 1949, b 107, f 1, WIDFTA. 118. “Third Session of the Council of WIDF,” Berlin, 1–6 Feb 1951; Thirteenth Session, Executive Committee, WIDF, Bucharest, 18–22 July 1952, Rumania,” b 107, f 1, WIDFTA; Feinberg, “Battling for Peace,” 22–25. WIDF lost its UN consultative status in 1954 due to objections from the United States and other Western nations, another reflection of Cold War tension. 119. For examples, WIDF, 10th Anniversary of WIDF (Berlin, 1955). See also “World Congress of Women,” 3–10 June 1953 and “World Congress of Mothers,” 7–10 July 1955, b 11, f 22 (1), JSNLA; Feinberg, “Battling for Peace,” 29–30. 120. For a few brief months in 1956, a fter Khrushchev’s speech and before Poznań in late June, there was hope for what Eisenhower called a “new spirit of conciliation and cooperation.” For Eisenhower’s thinking and his disagreements with his more hardline Secretary of State, see Jennifer Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (Cambridge, 2013), 148–51. 121. “First World Conference of Working Women,” Budapest, June 14–17, 1956, supplement to Soviet Women 8, 1956, b 112, WIDFTA; Elinor Kahn Statement, f 1971d, ICFTUIISH. For similar sentiments on gender from WIDF, see “Declaration on the Rights of W omen,” Resolution adopted 10 June 1953, Copenhagen, reproduced in WIDF, As One! For Equality, for Happiness, for Peace (Berlin, 1953). 122. “First World Conference of Women Workers,” World Trade Union Movement, July 1956, b 11, f 22 (1), JSNLA; Speech, Madame Figueroa, “Greetings from ILO,” b 12, f 22 (2), JSNLA. 123. On modernization tenets shared by East and West, including the centrality of manufacturing productivity and growth, see Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton, 2019), chs. 1, 3. “General Resolution, First World Conference of Working W omen,” Budapest, June 14–17, 1956, 3 and “Memorandum of the World Conference of Working W omen to the Director-General of the ILO,” supplement to Soviet Women 8, 1956, both in b 112, WIDFTA. 124. Ekendahl to Gottfurcht, 22 Oct 1956; Gottfurcht to Ekendahl, 26 Oct 1956; Gottfurcht to Peterson, 23 Nov 1956, with enclosed letter Miller to Peterson, 12 Nov 1956; Miller to Peterson, 29 Dec 1956, Series A, b 1, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1956, ARABLO. 125. Memo, “New Pamphlet on Women,” Richard Deverall to Gottfurcht (cc to EP and others), 12.7.1956, b 2, f Kvinnorådet FFI 1957, ARABLO. 126. Gottfurcht to “Dear Friend,” 5 April 1957, “First Session, Joint ICFTU-ITS Consultative Committee on Women Workers’ Questions,” 28–29 May 1957; Sigrid Ekendahl speech, “The ICFTU,” n.d. [1957]; and Sigrid Ekendahl, “Women and Trade Unionism: W omen in International Trade Union Work,” n.d. [1957], Series A, b 2, f Kvinnorådet FFI, 1957, ARABLO. Richards, “Marred by Dissimulation,” 39–56. 127. Although the Soviet Union rejoined the ILO, it remained skeptical of the ILO’s social democratic premises and tripartite structure. Harold Jacobson, “The USSR and the ILO,” International Organization 14 (Summer 1960), 402–28 and Harold Jacobson, “Labor, UN, & Cold War,” International Organization 11 (Winter 1957), 55–67. 128. Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 314–16.
528 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 129. The postwar ILO diversified in terms of religion as well. In 1955, for example, economics professor Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, w idow of Pakistan’s first prime minister and founding president of the All Pakistan Women’s Association, became the first Muslim woman on the ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations. She retained that post until 1978. ILO, Women’s Empowerment (Geneva, 2009). 130. Quotes from Springer, “Dr. Caroline F. Ware,” 1981, b 1, f 4, MSKSL and MS, “Urban League Fellowship—Oxford England 1952–1953,” 5, 15 Feb 1954, b 1, f 2, MSKSL. 131. Quotes from Springer, “Report to the Urban League on 1951–1952 Study Abroad,” 20, b 1, f 2, MSKSL. See also Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 42, and Richards, Maida Springer, 95–99. 132. For quotes, Springer, “Symposium on National Training Needs in Critical Areas: Africa,” April 7–8, 1962, b 1, f 4, MSKSL; Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 55–56. Richards, Maida Springer, 100–1, 113–17. 133. The term “darker nations” is from Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (NY, 2007). Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland, NY, 1956), with an introduction by Gunnar Myrdal. https://www.cvce .eu /en /obj /t he _participants _at _t he _bandung _conference _18 _to _2 4 _april _1955 -en -a42a4db7-aa3f-4345-8e24-5005f81e93fa.html for participants and Declaration text; “Main Speech by Premier Zhou Enlai,” April 19, 1955 (Peking, 1955), 9–20, at http://digitalarchive .wilsoncenter.org/document/121623; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens, 2010), 45–68. 134. Richards, Maida Springer, 100–28 and documents in folders 17–21, 26–28, MSKSL. For an introduction to Mboya and trade u nions in pre-independence Kenya, see Ioan Davies, African Trade Unions (Middlesex, UK, 1966), 76–79, 99–101, 167–69. 135. Quote from Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 59. See also b 2, folders 31–34, MSKSL; Richards, Maida Springer, 136–38, 176–98; Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer, 184–87. I am grateful to Yevette Richards for clarification on these points. 136. The literature on AFL anti-Communism and AFL-CIO internationalism in this era is extensive. On the Lovestoneite sway over AFL-CIO policy and the testy relation between the AFL-CIO and the ICFTU, consult the essays by Mathilde von Bülow and John C. Stoner in American Labor’s Global Ambassadors, ed. Waters and van Goethem (NY, 2013) and Carew, American L abour’s Cold War Abroad. On the paternalist traditions within the ICFTU, including those of the British TUC, see Davies, African Trade Unions, 188–218. 137. Springer, “Symposium on National Training Needs,” 9; Richards, Conversations, 323; Springer, “Urban League Fellowship,” 5, 7. 138. On satyagraha, see Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings, ed. Judith Brown (NY, 2008), 315–35. For elaboration on Nkrumah’s vision, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019), esp. intro, ch. 4. On the ICFTU fears, see Yevette Richards, “African and African-American Labor Leaders in the Struggle over International Labor Affiliation,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 31, 2 (1998), 301–34. 139. Quote from “Remarks by Maida Springer,” African Historical Society Dinner, Carnegie Endowment Center, New York, April 18, 1959, b 1, f 2, MSKSL.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 10 529 140. Memo, MS to Zimmerman, 15 March 1959, b 1, f 10, MSKSL. 141. Susan Zimmermann, “ ‘Special Circumstances’ in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-Metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years,” in ILO Histories, ed. Van Daele et al., 221–50; Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development, and Decolonization: The International Labour Organ ization, 1940–1970 (NY, 2012) and Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 301–20. 142. Sender quotes from Chester Manly, “UN Body May Duck Slave Labor Inquiry,” Chicago Tribune, 17 March 1947, 18, and TS to Roger Baldwin, 2 Dec 1949, b 2, f 1949, TSWSHS. See also “Non-Governmental Organization,” n.d. [c.1956] and other articles by TS, b 5, TSWSHS; Eighth Session, ECOSOC, Summary Record, 15 Feb 1949, b 16, f-“ECOSOC, 8th Session,” WBGRNA; Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy, 100–16; Carol Riegelman Lubin, “The Issues Faced by the ILC” (NY, 1956), http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/historical, accessed 12 Aug 2020. 143. Maul, Human Rights, 202–11; Sandrine Kott, “The Forced L abor Issue between H uman and Social Rights, 1947–1957,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights 3 (Winter 2012), 321–35. 144. The quoted phrase ended up as Article 1 in the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105). Colonial powers lacked the votes to defeat the amendments and the United States had been backed into a corner. US worker delegates could hardly oppose a provision protecting the right to strike, a bedrock AFL principle since the 1880s. Moreover, although the targeting of racial discrimination and economic inequality appeared directed at the United States, rejecting these amendments would undermine any hoped-for US alliance with Third World nations against the Soviet bloc. For further analysis, see Kott, “Forced L abor Issue,” 321–35. 145. Maul, Human Rights, 209–11. 146. The US government and worker representatives voted in the affirmative; the US employer delegate abstained. 1957 ILC Proceedings, 444–46. 147. Kott, “Forced Labour Issue,” 330. 148. 1957 ILC Proceedings, 17–19, 438–40, 454–68. 149. 1957 ILC Proceedings, 414. On Kaplansky, see Kalmen Kaplansky fonds, National Archives of Canada. 150. Maul, Human Rights, 197–202; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice, 97–98, appendix 1; 1957 ILC Proceedings, 17–19; 1958 ILC Proceedings, xlix. 151. 1958 ILC Proceedings, xxv, 401–10, 421–25, 479–84, 709, quote 404. 152. Discrimination Convention, 1958, (No. 111), Preamble, Article 1, 3, 6. 153. The passage read as follows: persons who “require special protection or assistance” because of “sex, age, disablement, family responsibilities, or social or cultural status” should not be “adversely affected” by the “application of the policy of nondiscrimination.” Recommendation, 1958, (No. 111), II (2b) (4a) (6). 154. For elaboration, ILO and the Quest for Social Justice, ed. Rodgers et al., 44–54 and Colleen Sheppard, “Mapping Anti-Discrimination Law onto Inequality at Work,” ILR 151, 1–2 (2012), 1–19. 155. On the 1950s ILO shift t oward “equality” and the significance of t hese instruments in that shift, see Rodgers, et. al, ILO and the Quest for Social Justice, 53–54; Nitza Bercovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: W omen’s Rights and International Organization (Baltimore, 1999), ch. 4;
530 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (NY, 2019), ch. 2. Quote from Maul, Human Rights, 310. Gender scholars affirm his assessment: Baldez (Defying Convention, 33, 53–56) concludes the UN achieved far less for women in the 1950s than feminists had hoped; Stienstra (Women’s Movements, 44) finds international women’s movements “took little action within the UN” in the 1950s and 1960s. Tellingly, the UN did not adopt the Convention on the Elimination of Race Discrimination until 1965 and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women until 1979.
Chapter 11: The Pivotal Sixties 1. MS Speech, “International Union of Electrical Workers’ Convention, District 4, June 1, 1960,” f 3, MSKSL. 2. The ILO, for example, had a hundred-plus member states, with the majority outside the industrialized West. ICFTU membership stood at fifty-six million workers in 137 national labor organizations. Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 314–16; Windmuller, “Cohesion and Disunity,” Table 1, 355. 3. For quote, see Jeremy Adelman, “Development Dreams,” in The Development C entury, ed. Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela (Cambridge, 2018), 326–38. On the US and Soviet turn to aid, see Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton, 2019), chs. 2–4, quote 42. Lorenzini cautions against judging the United States as either a “generous patron or a malevolent, hegemony-seeking, neo-colonial imperial power” (7). 4. Rostow’s book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960), stipulated the five stages of “modernization” through which all societies should move to achieve economic growth and prosperity. See also Lorenzini, Global Development, chs. 4–5. 5. Alva Myrdal’s development vision shares key tenets with the perspectives of US social democratic feminists. See Sluga, “Human Story of Development,” 46–74. 6. Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 16–19, 25; Storrs, Second Red Scare, 229–35; Cobble and Bowes, “Esther Peterson.” 7. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 151–54; Marie Smith, “Labor Goes Swedish Modern,” Washington Post, 22 Aug 1962. 8. Quote from Preamble, Executive Order 10980, 12 Dec 1961. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Labor Feminists and the PCSW,” in No Permanent Waves, ed. Hewitt, 154–56. 9. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 31–33, 39–41; Cobble, “Labor Feminists,” 156–58. 10. Caroline Farrar Ware, “Women Today: Trends and Issues; A Background Memorandum Prepared at The Request of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women” (Washington, DC, 1962). Caroline Ware, K. M. Panikkar, and J. M. Romein, The Twentieth Century, History of Mankind Cultural and Scientific Development, vol. VI (London, 1966). Although the volume did not appear until 1966, Ware and her coauthors completed the research and a first draft by 1960. For more on Ware’s UNESCO volume, see Leslie, “ ‘United for a Better World,’ ” 398–410, 421. 11. Cobble, “Labor Feminists,” 144–45. 12. Cobble, “More than Sex Equality,” 49–51; Cobble, “Labor Feminists,” 158–61. PCSW recommendations met harsh criticisms when released and remain controversial today. For a
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 531 fuller discussion of the PCSW and the assumptions guiding it, see Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, esp. chs. 5, 6. For elaboration on the PCSW’s special consultation on “minority women,” see Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 261–65, 308 and Mayeri, Reasoning from Race, ch. 1. Rosenberg notes how by 1966 Dorothy Height had changed her thinking about the roots of Black poverty and thoroughly rejected the idea that matriarchal Black f amily structures w ere a source of the problem. 13. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 168. 14. Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 241–61, quote 235; Mayeri, Reasoning from Race, 17–20. 15. As quoted in Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 257–58. 16. Toward Standards for the Household Worker, 2–11, 27–29. Carlsson, “Public Care Work,” 199–201. 17. For quotes: Val J. Halamandaris, “A Tribute to Esther Peterson: Champion of the Underprivileged,” Caring Magazine 3 ( June/July 1990), 30–42. Peterson may have had an overly optimistic picture of Sweden’s social programs. As Carlsson [“Public Care Work,” 199–220] notes, the demand for home caregivers exceeded the supply, leaving some families without assistance. In addition, the Swedish Domestic Workers Act was “relatively weak” compared to other l abor legislation in Sweden and its coverage was not universal. 18. Toward Standards for the Household Worker, 35–60, quotes 17, 48. 19. Peterson, Restless, 79–80. 20. “President’s Commission on the Status of Women,” American Women: Report of the President’s Commission (Washington, DC, 1963), 18–26, 35–37, 111–27, quotes 22, 71; Cobble, “Labor Feminists,” 158–61. For additional examples of policy transfer, see Byron Z. Rom-Jensen, “Enthusiastic Proselytizers: Translating the Swedish Gender Equality Policy Model in Cold War US, 1961–1963,” Contemporary European History, forthcoming. Rom-Jensen rightly notes the partial, syncretic nature of the policy exchange. With some 80 percent of the workforce unionized, Sweden resolved standard of living questions, for example, more by collective bargaining than by l abor legislation. For an overview of Swedish social policy in this era, see Tilton, Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy, chs. 8, 9. 21. Peterson to Arne Geijer, 22 Oct 1963, f 633, EPSL. For other letters in a similar vein, f 630–632, EPSL. 22. For further details, see Rom-Jensen, “Enthusiastic Proselytizers.” 23. EP to Sigrid Ekendahl, 12 July 1961, f 630, EPSL. 24. Jane Sherron de Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (NY, 2018), 85–90, Moberg quote 89; Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (Bloomington, 2008), 357–62. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who spent 1961 and 1962 in Sweden, spoke often of how Eva Moberg’s ideas s haped her understandings of gender justice. See, for example, “A Conversation with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 25 (2013), 3–24. 25. Maternity Protection and Benefits in 92 Countries: Women in the World Today, International Report #6 (Washington, DC, 1963). 26. Quotes from Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. Society and Circulation: Mobile P eople and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia (London, 2000), 2–3. 27. Martin Gruberg, “Official Commissions on the Status of Women: A Worldwide Movement,” International Review of Education 19, 1 (1973), 140–47.
532 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 28. Berkovitch, Motherhood to Citizenship, 116–17; global data on 179–80. 29. Equal Pay in Member Nations of the ILO: W omen in the World Today, International Report #4 (Washington, DC, May 1963). The NWP considered the Equal Pay Act “less important and a distraction from the real issue, the ERA,” Rupp and Taylor conclude. See Survival in the Doldrums, 174–76, quote 175. 30. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 162–68. Quote in Peterson, “Kennedy Commission,” 23. 31. Berkovitch, Motherhood to Citizenship, 116–20, 179–80. 32. On the YWCA’s progressive racial politics in the postwar era, see Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, 1992). On the struggles over racism and racial integration within some of the other white- led w omen’s organizations affiliated with the Committee on Civil Rights, see Helen Laville, “ ‘ Women of Conscience’ or ‘Women of Conviction’?: The National W omen’s Committee on Civil Rights,” Journal of American Studies 43, 2 (Aug 2009), 277–95; Kelly E. Liles, “Pearls and Politics: White Clubwomen’s Activism in the Postwar South,” University of Southern Mississippi History Honors Thesis, Spring 2016, aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/397, accessed 14 Aug 2020. 33. “Cope Women’s Auxiliary Bulletin 7,” 15 July 1963, f 1160, EPSL; Height, Open Wide the Gates, 157–62. Harris became the first Black woman in the cabinet in 1977 when she accepted President Carter’s appointment as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 34. Margalit Fox, “Dorothy Height, Largely Unsung Giant of the Civil Rights Era, Dies at 98,” NYT, 20 April 2010; Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates (NY, 2003); May, Unprotected Labor, 137–45; Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston, 2015), 62–64. 35. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 97, 219–33, quotes 25, 219, 227, 231, 62–63; Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, 2018), 183–87. 36. Height, Open Wide the Gates, 143–46; William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (NY, 2013), ch. 5; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 266–73. 37. For elaboration, see Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 174–77; Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums, 176–79; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 274–81, quote 255. 38. Peterson, “Kennedy Commission,” quote 31. 39. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 174–77; Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 25; Mayeri, Reasoning from Race, 20–23; Peterson, “Kennedy Commission,” 23–26, 31–33. 40. Barriers to voting remained, however. In 1975, for example, an amendment to the Voting Rights Act prohibited “language barriers” and enfranchised another large group of Americans. On G reat Society reforms, see Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (NY, 2015) and Edward D. Berkowitz, America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore, 1991), chs. 4–7. 41. On Hart-Celler, see Mae Ngai, “The Civil Rights Origins of Illegal Immigration,” ILWCH 78 (Fall 2010), 93–99; Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (NY, 2020), ch. 9, epilogue; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2009), 214–18, n13.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 533 42. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 177–79, 198–201; Marc Linder, “Farm Workers and the FLSA: Racial Discrimination in the New Deal,” Texas Law Review 65 (1987) 1335; Alícia Chávez, “Dolores Huerta and the UFW,” Latina Legacies, 240–54; Michael W. McCann, Union By Law: Filipino American Labor Activists: Rights, Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism (Chicago, 2020), 211–212; Nadasen, Household Workers, 61–65. 43. “Conditions of Work for Women in Southeast Asia Region, 1955–1956,” f-190, SL. For Miller’s various ILO appointments, see f 170 and f 218, FMSL. “Report to Secretary of Labor on the First Pan-American Labor Conference of the ILO,” Santiago, Chile, 2–14 Jan 1936, b 8, f 172, FMSL. 44. Richard Wright to FM, 14 June 1960, f 218, FMSL; “Press Statements, 1955–1960,” f 219, FMSL; Photos, Pakistan 1956–1961, f 299, FMSL. 45. Miller, “Report to the Governments of Ceylon, India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand on Conditions of W omen’s Work in Seven Asian Countries,” ILO, Geneva, 1958, f 190, FMSL. 46. Miller, “Women of the World Share Basic Interests,” and Interview with FSM, “ ‘One- Woman Mission’ to Seven Lands,’ ” no author, n.d., f 219, FMSL. 47. Miller, “Women of the World Share.” 48. Miller, “Report to the Governments.” 49. Interview with FSM, “ ‘One-Woman Mission.’ ” 50. FM speech, “Welfare Programmes of Trade Unions in South-East Asia and the Pacific Region,” 21 May 1956, f 274, FMSL. 51. See Maul, “ILO and Globalization of Human Rights,” 315–16, for how the emphasis on development and economic growth ended up justifying suppression of worker rights and human rights in the 1960s. 52. Oliver Peterson ended his fourteen-year career in the State Department in 1962. After 1962, he taught at American University’s School of International Affairs and took over briefly as acting director of its program for overseas and international l abor studies. “Oliver Peterson, 75; Expert in Labor Affairs,” NYT, 11 May 1979; “Oliver Peterson, Retired Labor Attache, Dies,” Washington Post, 11 May 1979. 53. Leslie, “United for a Better World,’ ” 174–75, 389–90, 409–10; MS, “Dr Caroline F. Ware—A Majority of One,” 1981, f 4, MSKSL. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, 2015), rightly reminds us that locally oriented participatory “community development” schemes, even t hose conceived as alternatives to large-scale modernization, could have deleterious effects and did l ittle to lessen global poverty. Like the US “War on Poverty,” such initiatives often ignored power relations, had real limits on “self-determination,” and failed to tackle questions of structural inequality. Caroline Ware and others like her were aware of many of these pitfalls; they sought community programs that challenged inequalities of power, income, and resources. They believed cross-cultural exchange, difficult as it might be, was indispensable to a better world. 54. Fenzi, Meyers, and Peterson, “Interview with Esther Peterson,” 31. 55. Quote from ILO Convention on Social Security, 1962. See also Social Policy (Basic Aims and Standards), 1962 (No. 117); Lorenzini, Global Development, 90, 97–103; Daniel Roger Maul, “The ‘Morse Years’: The ILO 1948–1970,” in ILO Histories, ed. Van Daele et al., 365–40.
534 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 56. 1961 ILC Proceedings, XLII–XLIII; f 1217, EPSL. 57. ILO, GB Minutes, 149th Session, June 1961, 90–91. 58. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 103. 59. Morse, Origin and Evolution of the ILO, 60. 60. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for W omen, 100; ILO, First African Regional Conference, 1960, Report of the Director-General, Report 1 (Geneva, 1960), 34, 86–88; Armstrong, “Before Bandung,” 305–31. 61. 1961 ILC Proceedings, LXVI–LXVIII. It had few women, however. 62. 1961 ILC Proceedings, 561–63. 63. 1961 ILC Proceedings, 566–67; “Untitled Speech by EP,” n.d. [c. 1961], 6, f 1217, EPSL. 64. 1961 ILC Proceedings, 566–67. 65. Memo, EP to the Secretary, 18 Oct 1961 and letter, EP to Morse, 18 Oct 1961, f 1219, EPSL. 66. EP to Weaver, 14 Feb 1962 and EP to Johnstone, 21 Feb 1962, f 1219, EPSL. 67. EP to Weaver, 21 Sept 1962, f 1219, EPSL. 68. ILO, GB Minutes, 153rd Session, Nov 1962, 14–19, 72–73, 137. 69. EP to Johnstone, 14 Dec 1962, f 1219, EPSL. 70. Materials in f 1224, EPSL and f 1536 and 1537, ICFTUIISH. 71. Ekendahl, “Comments on ‘Women Workers in a Changing World,’ ” 11 Sept 1963, f 1224, EPSL. 72. “Comments on answers given by US to Questionnaire on subject of working w omen,” no author, n.d., f 1220, EPSL; Memo, “ ‘ Women Workers in a Changing World,’ ” Liaison Bureau, f 1224, EPSL. 73. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, appendix 1 for comparative figures. 74. 1964 ILC Proceedings, LXXIV–LXXV. On the lack of US women as worker delegates, see lists of participants, ILC Proceedings, 1948–64. EP to Weaver, n.d. [c.1964], f 1220, EPSL. 75. Informal Report, “Committee on Women Workers ILC, 1964,” 8 Aug 1964, f 1220, EPSL; EP, “Status of Women in the United States,” ILR 89 ( Jan 1964), 447–60. 76. 1964 ILC Proceedings, 458–73, 820–22. 77. 1964 ILC Proceedings, 457, 459, 470. 78. 1964 ILC Proceedings, 461–62. 79. Peterson, “The Kennedy Commission,” 24. 80. 1965 ILC Proceedings, XVII–LXIX, 372–88. 81. For Keyserling’s remarks, 1965 ILC Proceedings, 380–81. 82. Employment Policy Convention, 1964 (No. 122). C122 also called for “fair sharing of national incomes,” “diversification of the economy,” and other measures to address “underdevelopment” and unemployment. 83. Recommendation (Women with F amily Responsibilities), 1965 (No. 123), preamble and text; 1965 ILC Proceedings, 374–80; “ILO and Women,” 1966, 23–24. 84. 1965 ILC Proceedings, quotes 383, 385–86, 381–82. 85. Peterson changed her mind about men’s roles in f amily work in the 1970s. See Peterson, “Kennedy Commission,” 32–33. 86. Sarah Leonard and Nancy Fraser, “Capitalism’s Crisis of Care,” Dissent (Fall 2016).
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 535 87. ICFTU Fifty Years, 1999, 37–38; f 1534–1540, ICFTUIISH; Richards, “Labor’s Gender Misstep,” 435; Richards, “Marred by Dissimulation.” The W omen’s Committee diversified more quickly than the ICFTU as a whole. See Windmuller, “Cohesion and Disunity,” Table 2, 355. 88. Files 1950–1957, b-1, series: W omen’s Committee of the ICFTU, ARABLO; f 1: Corres. 1964–1967, b 2, ARABSE. “Charter of Rights of Working Women,” print files, ARAB; Richards, “Labor’s Gender Misstep,” 415, 432–35. 89. Ekendahl to EP, 10 July 1962; EP to Ekendahl, 20 July 1962, f 632, EPSL. 90. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 155–59; Harry P. Cohany, “Membership of American Trade Unions, 1960,” MLR (Dec 1961), 1299–1308. 91. Richards, “Marred by Dissimulation,” 40–44. 92. Press Release, “Third World Conference on W omen Workers’ Problems, 30 Sept–4 Oct 1968,” f 1233, EPSL; f 1701–1702, ICFTUIISH. 93. Resolution on Social and F amily Policy, “Third World Conference on W omen Workers’ Problems, 30 Sept–4 Oct 1968,” f 1233, EPSL. 94. On Lovestone, see Glenn Fowler, “Jay Lovestone, Communist Leader Who Turned against Party, Dies,” NYT, 9 March 1990; Hughes, In the Interest of Democracy, 21–54. Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer, 151; Padmore to Springer, 4 Jan 1960, f 17, MSKSL. 95. AIFLD continued the 1940s and 1950s aggressive anti-Communism of the AFL Free Trade Union Committee. Carew, American Labour’s Cold War Abroad, esp. chs. 4–6; Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times (NY, 1981), 126–32; W aters and van Goethem, eds. American Labor’s Global Ambassadors, 1–6. 96. Windmuller, “Cohesion and Disunity,” 353, 360–62; John P. Windmuller, “Foreign Affairs and the AFL-CIO Merger,” ILR 9 (April 1956), 419–32; John P. Windmuller, “The Foreign Policy Conflict in American L abor,” Political Science Quarterly 82 ( June 1967), 205–34; Carew, American Labour’s Cold War Abroad, ch. 6. 97. Windmuller, “Cohesion and Disunity,” 349–67; Windmuller, “Foreign Policy Conflict”; Richards, Maida Springer, 198–261; Richards, Conversations, 208–16; Richards, “African and African-American Labor Leaders,” 324–34. 98. MS speech, “African Unions and the International Labor Movement,” n.d. [c. 1964], f 4, MSKSL. Memo, MS to Michael Ross, 12 July 1960, f 3, MSKSL. 99. Richards, “Labor’s Gender Misstep,” 437–40. Quote 415. 100. Richards, Maida Springer, 233–41, 257–58; Richards, Conversations, 198–205, 248–50; MS, “Vocational Training in Kenya,” 10 June 1963, f 4, MSKSL. 101. Richards, Conversations, 209, 224–27; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 227–34. 102. Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (NY, 1996); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, 2003), esp. ch. 5. 103. For a succinct overview of the US 1960s left, see Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (NY, 2015), chs. 3, 4. On the divergent and evolving strategies of the 1960s Black freedom movement, see Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (NY, 2020). On Meany, see Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, 1994).
536 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 11 104. FDR, “The Forgotten Man,” radio speech, 7 April 1932. http://www.fdrlibrary.marist .edu/archives/collections/utterancesfdr.html, accessed 14 Aug 2020. 105. Leslie Wayne, “Leon Keyserling, Economic Aide to Truman Dies,” NYT, 11 Aug 1987; Steven Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (NY, 1987), 210; quote from Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens, 1984), 52–53. See also Leon Keyserling, Taxes and the Public Interest (Washington, DC, 1963). 106. Leon Keyserling, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (Washington, DC, 1966); William Forbath, “Civil Rights and Economic Citizenship,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law 2, 4 (2000), 697–718. See also Leon Keyserling, Progress or Poverty: US at the Crossroads (Washington, DC, 1964); Edmund F. Wehrle, “Guns, Butter, Leon Keyserling, the AFL-CIO, and the Fate of Full-Employment Economics,” The Historian 64 (Winter 2004), 730–48, quotes 743, 747. On “free-market” capitalism and deregulation, see Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962). 107. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 54–55. Storrs, Second Red Scare, 107–46; Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2010), 41–48; Kevin L. Yuill, “The 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights,” Historical Journal 41 (March 1998): 259–82. 108. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 182–85; first quote: Esther Peterson, “Discrimination Faced by Women Workers,” NYT, 3 Sept 1965, 26; second quote: Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 301–3. 109. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 182–85; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 286–97; Pauli Murray and Mary O. Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” George Washington Law Review 34 (Dec 1965), 232–56; https://now.org/about/history/honoring-our -founders-pioneers/, accessed 14 Aug 2020. 110. Friedan quote from Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 300. Others from “The National Organization of W omen’s 1966 Statement of Purpose,” a dopted 29 Oct 1966, https://now.org/about/history /statement-of-purpose/, accessed July 17, 2019. Pauli Murray, Human Rights U.S.A., 1948–1966 (Cincinnati, 1967), esp. 1, 6–9, 60–61. 111. Mayeri, Reasoning from Race, 34–37; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 308–9, quotes 309. 112. Quote from Kathryn Clarenbach and Betty Friedan to Willard Wirtz, 9 April 1967, f 1075, EPSL. Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” NYT, 10 March 1968, 24–25, 50. 113. For an introduction to the vitality and variety of the new feminism in the late 1960s, see Lear, “Second Feminist Wave;” Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis, 2019); Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven, 1998); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, 2005); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in Americ a’s Second Wave (NY, 2004); Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 69–145; Stephanie Gilmore, ed. Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana, 2008); Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves, chs. 2–4, 8–11, 14. 114. Marisela R. Chávez, “We Have a Long, Beautiful History”: Chicana Feminist Trajectories and Legacies,” in No Permanent Waves, ed. Hewitt, 77–97; Lisa Levenstein, A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, 2009); Premilla Nadasen, Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement (NY, 2012);
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 537 Frances M. Beale, “A Black Women’s Manifesto: Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” 1969, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/196.html. A revised version appeared in Toni Cade Bambara, ed. The Black Woman: An Anthology (NY, 1970), 90–100, and in Robin Morgan, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful (NY, 1970), 340–52. On Beale, see Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 72, 96; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 331. 115. Cobble, Other W omen’s Movement, 185–95; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, ch, 14; Anne Draper to EP, 24 Nov 1970, f 1659 (“20th Century Fund Task Force on Working Women”), EPSL. 116. As quoted in Lear, “Second Feminist Wave,” 24–25, 50. For how some strands of the new feminism channeled the culture’s disdain for housework and mothering, see Emily E.L.B. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (NY, 2017), ch. 5; Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago, 2010), ch. 5. For a study of how feminists fought for the needs of caregivers and for work–family reform from 1963 to 1978, see Kirsten Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (Cambridge, 2018). 117. For quotes: Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 191,196. 118. “Consumer Gets a U.S. Champion,” NYT, 6 Jan 1964; Peterson, “Kennedy Commission,” 31–32; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 367–69; quote from Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 24. 119. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry, 67–79; Halamandaris “Tribute to Esther Peterson”; Carma Wadley, “Esther Eggertsen Peterson: ‘The Most Dangerous Thing since Genghis Khan,’ ” in Worth Their Salt, Too: More Notable but Often Unnoted Women of Utah, ed. Colleen Whitley (Logan, 2000), 179–90. 120. Frieda Miller, “The UN Program of the IAW”; Frieda Miller, “Report on the 20th Session of the CSW, February 13–March 6, 1967,” 11 March 1967, 1, 2; and other documents in f 247, FMSL. For more on Miller’s UN work, see Leslie, “ ‘United for a Better World,’ ” 358–60. 121. For quotes, PN to FSM, 5 Aug 1955, f 1, FMSL[ad]; PN to FSM, 20 June 1959, f 2, FMSL[ad]. 122. Richards, Maida Springer, 262–74.
Chapter 12: Sisters and Resisters 1. Nancy Fraser, “Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation,” Constellations 12, 3 (2005), 295–307, quote 295. 2. The term “Global South,” first used by postcolonial scholars in the late 1960s, is deployed here as a shorthand way of referring to the less wealthy regions of the world. I use it interchangeably with “Third World.” 3. For an introduction, see Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, ch. 2. 4. Brick and Phelps, Radicals in America, chs. 4, 5, esp. 192. 5. For an overview, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, 2013). 6. Wu, Radicals, 8–9; Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London, 2002); Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, 2006); Holland Cotter, “When the Young Lords Were Outlaws in New York,” NYT, 23 July 2015.
538 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 7. “Troubling Explanatory Frameworks: Feminist Praxis Across Generations,” an interview with Angela Davis by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in Feminist Freedom Warriors, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda E. Carty (NY, 2018), 35–49, quote 39. Davis was but one of many Black radical feminists who traveled abroad in the 1970s and absorbed lessons from thinkers and movements outside the United States. For other examples, see Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American W omen Activists in the Cold War (NY, 2011), ch. 5; Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical W omen in the Black Freedom Struggle (NY, 2009). 8. Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (NY, 1974); Jennifer Schuessler, “A New Home for Angela Davis’s Papers (And Her ‘Wanted’ Poster),” NYT, 13 Feb 2018 “Interview with Angela Davis by Terry Rockefeller and Louis Massiah,” 24 May 1989, http://digital.wustl.edu/e /eii/eiiweb/dav5427.0115.036marc_record_interviewer_process.html, accessed 14 Aug 2020. 9. Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road (NY, 2015), xvii–68, quotes 10, xxii, 36. Carolyn Heil brun, Education of a W oman: Life of Gloria Steinem (NY, 1995), 67–83; Patricia Cronin Marcello, Gloria Steinem: A Biography (Westport, 2004), 51–62. 10. On Huerta, see Alícia Chávez, “Dolores Huerta and the UFW,” Latina Legacies, 240–54; Margaret Rose, “Dolores Huerta: The United Farm Workers Union,” in The Human Tradition in American L abor History, ed. Eric Arnesen (Wilmington, 2004), 211–29; Mario T. Garcia, ed., A Dolores Huerta Reader (Albuquerque, 2008). 11. Marcello, Gloria Steinem, 97–100; Heilbrun, Education of a W oman, ch, 6; Steinem, My Life on the Road, quote 36. 12. Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (Boston, 1992), 53. 13. Gloria Steinem, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” New York Magazine, April 4, 1969. 14. Cobble, “Women and Politics,” 901–6; Sascha Cohen, “The Day W omen Went on Strike,” Time Magazine, Aug 26, 2015. On the march in Chicago, see Katherine Turk, “Out of the Revolution, into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism,” JAH 97 (Sept 2010), 407. 15. Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change. (NY, 2013); Joshua Guild, “To Make That Someday Come: Shirley Chisholm’s Radical Politics of Possibility,” in Want to Start a Revolution? ed. Gore et al., 248–70; Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics (NY, 2017), 122–23; Leandra Zarnow, Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug (Cambridge, MA, 2019). In the 1960s, the WSP’s trenchant criticisms of American imperialism and militarism won it admiration from middle-aged (formerly) apolitical housewives, as well as younger, more seasoned militants in the New Left. Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago, 1993); Andrea Estepa, “Taking the White Gloves Off: W omen Strike for Peace and the Transformation of Women’s Activist Identities in the US, 1961–1980” (PhD diss., History Department, Rutgers University, 2012). 16. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hammer (Urbana, 1999); Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 37–39; Steven Greenhouse, “Mildred Jeffrey, 93, Activist for Women, Labor, and Liberties,” NYT, 5 April 2004; Florynce Kennedy, Color Me Flo, My Hard Life and Good Times (Englewood Cliffs, 1976).
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 539 17. “The National Organization of W omen’s 1966 Statement of Purpose,” a dopted Oct 29, 1966, https://now.org/about/history/statement-of-purpose/, accessed July 17, 2019. 18. For NOW priorities through Friedan’s eyes, see Friedan, “Our Revolution Is Unique: President’s Report to NOW, 1968,” in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the W omen’s Movement (Cambridge, 1998), 141–44. NOW internationalism, though on the backburner, did not wholly disappear. Patricia Burnett, a former Michigan beauty queen, portrait painter, and president of the Detroit NOW chapter from 1969 to 1972, headed up NOW’s international efforts when she sat on the NOW executive board from 1971 to 1975. As Katherine Turk notes [email, Turk to Cobble, 10/26/1919], NOW hosted an “international feminist planning conference” in 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and “convened a few dozen overseas chapters.” Burnett later embarked on a world tour, which included a visit to the Soviet Union. For elaboration, see Patricia Hill Burnett Papers, Bentley Library, University of Michigan; Patricia Hill Burnett, True Colors: An Artist’s Journey from Beauty Queen to Feminism (Troy, 1995); and XIII Task Forces/Committees, NOWSL. 19. Annelise Orleck, Rethinking American W omen’s Activism (NY, 2014), 77–104; Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, ch. 7; Spruill, Divided We Stand, 25–32; Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present (Boston, 2009), 285–90; Quote from Jack Rosenthal, “President Vetoes Child Care Plan as Irresponsible,” NYT, 19 Dec 1971. On Mink, see Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Asian American Feminisms and Legislative Activism: Patsy Takemoto Mink in the US Congress,” in Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (NY, 2020), 304–20. 20. On the rise of global consciousness, see Iriye, Global Community, chs. 5, 6; Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, 2010); Suleiman Osman, “Global America: The Politics of Scale in the 1970s,” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams (Chicago, 2019), 241–60. 21. On Beyer and the Percy Amendment, see Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton, 2021), ch. 6; Joanne Meyerowitz, “Active during the New Deal Era, One Labor Economist Advocated for ‘Women in Development’ into the 1970s,” Radcliffe Magazine, accessed 3 July 2017. 22. Meyerowitz, War on Global Poverty; Section 113, Percy Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973. 23. Margaret Synder, “The Politics of W omen and Development,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Anne Winslow (Westport, 1995), 96; Maul, “ILO and the Globalization of Human Rights,” 317–19; Lorenzini, Global Development, chs. 7–9. 24. Baldez, Defying Convention, 63–98, and Hilkka Pietilä, Engendering the Global Agenda: The Story of W omen and the UN (NY, 2002), 31–32. On Boserup’s influence, see Snyder, “Politics of Women and Development,” 97–99. 25. Baldez, Defying Convention, 63–77; Carolyn M. Stephenson, “Women’s International Nongovernmental Organizations at the United Nations,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Winslow, 135–38. 26. Robin Morgan’s classic anthologies capture the sisterhood dreams. See Sisterhood Is Powerful (NY, 1970) and her follow-up, Sisterhood Is Global (1984).
540 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 27. Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (NY, 2017), 4, 101. For Betty Friedan’s account of 1975 and how w omen in Mexico City united “to insist w omen’s equality c ouldn’t wait on a ‘New Economic Order,” ’ consult It Changed My Life (NY, 1985), 343–62, quote 344. 28. Judy Klemesrud, “International Women’s Year World Conference Opening in Mexico,” NYT, 19 June 1975, 56. In International Women’s Year, Olcott provides the fullest account of the divisions in Mexico City. See also Kristen Ghodsee, “Revisiting the United Nations decade for women: Brief reflections on feminism, capitalism and Cold War politics in the early years of the international women’s movement,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33 (2019), 3–12; Shaun Armstead, “Feminized Battlegrounds: Internationalisms at the 1975 UN’s World Conferences for International Women’s Year in Mexico City” (BA thesis, History Department, Auburn University, 2015). 29. Olcott, International W omen’s Year, esp. 1–17, 87–103; Pietilä, Engendering the Global Agenda, 34–35; Judith Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The UN Decade for Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of World History 13 (Spring 2002), 139–66. Quotes from UN, Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 19 June–July 1975 (NY, 1976) 30. For elaboration, see Olcott, International Women’s Year, 68–225. 31. Letter and Report, Ruth Bacon to Mr. Secretary, 24 July 1975, declassified, as amended, 18 Dec 2008, Foreign Relations of the US, 1969–1976, v 1, E-14, pt. 1, Documents of the UN, 1973–1976. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve14p1/d185, accessed July 19, 2019. On Bacon and the US delegation, see Spruill, Divided We Stand, 51–55. 32. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 236. 33. Karen Garner, Shaping a Global W omen’s Agenda: W omen’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–1985 (Manchester, 2010), 152–53, 187–90, 193–230. Olcott, International Women’s Year, esp. 63–67. 34. Stephenson, “Women’s International Nongovernmental Organizations at the United Nations,” 141–43; V irginia R. Allan, Margaret E. Galey, and Mildred E. Persinger, “World Conference of International W omen’s Year,” in Women, Politics, and the United Nations, ed. Winslow, 29–44; Letter and Report, Ruth Bacon to Mr. Secretary, 24 July 1975, declassified, as amended, 18 Dec 2008; “Report, IWY Tribune—1975,” b 29, f-“Tribune, 1975,” AFMHS. 35. Balanoff, “Interview with MS,” 82–85; MS, “Remarks, National Consumer League Annual Dinner, April 1976,” f 4, MSKSL. 36. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 234–36, 244, quotes 234, 236, 244. Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 189–92, final quote 189; “NCNW International Seminar, June 18–July 13, 1975,” f 14, MSKSL. 37. Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 193–95; Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 236–39. 38. Richards, Conversations, 279–82; Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, 239–44; Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 193–202, quote 196. The International Advisory Board for the project, chaired by Springer, worried about how to ensure that NCNW was not “subject to the dictates of the State Department.” See “Memo for Members, Intl Advisory Board, from W.M. Oliver,” reporting on Initial Meeting, 19 Jan 1976, f 14, MSKSL. 39. Richards, Maida Springer, 274–77; Newspaper clippings, conference agenda, and recommendations in f 29, MSKSL; Balanoff, “Interview with Maida Springer,” 80.
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 541 40. Richards, Conversations, quotes 316–17. 41. Folders 39 (South Africa), 40–41 (Indonesia) and 42 (Turkey), MSKSL; Richards, Conversations, 283, 317–18; Richards, Maida Springer, 255–57. Quote from MS, “Dr. Caroline Ware,” 1981, f 4, MSKSL. 42. NCO-IWY, “Background on the National W omen’s Conference and the IWY Commission,” n.d., c. 1975; “Statement of Edith Van Horn,” in What W omen Want: From the Official Report to the President, the Congress, and the People of the United States, ed. Caroline Bird (NY,1979), 40; Cobble, Other Women’s Movement, 201–6; Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 113–18. 43. For an introduction, see Ela R. Bhatt, We are Poor but So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India (NY, 2006) and Kalima Rose, When Women Are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India (London, 1992). FM speech, “Welfare Programmes of Trade Unions in South-East Asia and the Pacific Region,” 21 May 1956, f 274, FMSL. 44. Renana Jhabvala, “Self-Employed Women’s Association: Organizing W omen by Struggle and Development,” in Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organization among Poor Women in the Third World, ed. Sheila Rowbotham and Swasti Mitter (London, 1994), 114–38; Renana Jhabvala, Sapna Desai, and Jignasa Dave, Empowering Women in an Insecure World: Joining SEWA Makes a Difference. Gujarat, India, 2010), http://w ww.inclusivecities.org/pdfs /SEWA%20Book.pdf, accessed 29 Jan 2012. 45. On the explosive growth of w omen’s NGOs after 1975, see Davies, NGOs, 146. On the “polarizing” effects of Houston and the lead-up to it, see Spruill, Divided We Stand, 1–13, quote 2. The phrase “federally funded feminism” is from the book jacket. 46. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate M atters: A History of Sexuality in Amer ica (Chicago, 2012), chs. 14, 15; Robert O. Self, All in the Family (NY, 2012), ch. 11, esp. 291–97. As Margot Canaday notes, in the early 1970s, multiple states and localities had passed laws and ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the National Gay Task Force had its sights set on a federal gay rights bill. Th ese advances unnerved the New Right. Canaday, Straight State, conclusion. On the anti-internationalism and Cold War politics of the right in the 1970s, see Erin Kempker, Big S ister: Feminism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy in the Heartland (Urbana, 2018); and Jennifer Mittelstadt, “Women and the Global Agenda of the American Right,” paper presented at the Women’s Writing Group, New York Historical Society, New York, 3 March 2018. 47. Spruill, Divided We Stand, chs. 10, 11; Kempker, Big Sister, quote 3. 48. In a Cold War flip-flop, Pat Hutar and Arvonne Fraser, led a bipartisan Ford-appointed US delegation to Geneva in 1976 to help draft a UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against W omen (CEDAW), and the new Carter administration backed it. The Soviets, however, objected to many of its provisions. With the support of the nonaligned nations, it was enacted in 1981. The United States has not yet ratified CEDAW. Baldez, Defying Convention, 81–90. 49. When Bella Abzug, who chaired Carter’s National Advisory Committee for W omen, complained, Carter fired her. Spruill, Divided We Stand, 42–51, 114–21, 262–77; Zarnow, Battling Bella, 288–95. On the National Plan of Action, see What W omen Want, ed. Bird, 83–177. 50. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned its Back on the Middle Class (NY, 2011), ch. 4; Matthew Hilton, Prosperity
542 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization (Ithaca, 2009), 170–75. Quote from Helen Dewar, “UAW Chief Fraser Pulls out of Labor-Management Group,” Washington Post, 20 July 1978. 51. Hilton, Prosperity for All, 125, 168–75; Peterson, Restless, ch. 9. 52. Spruill, Divided We Stand, epilogue; Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Don’t Blame the Worker,” Dissent 59 (Winter 2012), 35–39; Susan J. Carroll, “Voting Choices: The Politics of the Gender Gap,” in Gender and Elections: Shaping the F uture of American Politics (Cambridge, 2010), 117–43; Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior (Princeton, 2020). 53. Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, ch. 2. Stansell, Feminist Promise, chs. 9, 10. On the narrowing of NOW’s agenda by the 1980s, see Turk, “Out of the Revolution”; Lisa Levenstein, “ ‘Don’t Agonize, Organize!’: The Displaced Homemakers Campaign and the Contested Goals of Postwar Feminism,” JAH 100 (March 2014), 1114–38; Mayeri, Reasoning from Race, 7. On the isolation and decline of the NWP, see Rupp and Taylor, Survival, 181–86. 54. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “A ‘Tiger by the Toenail’: The 1970s Origins of the New Working- Class Majority,” Labor 2, 3 (Fall 2005), 103–14. On the flourishing of women of color feminisms in the 1980s, see Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28 (Summer 2002), 337–60. See also Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (NY, 1997); Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (NY, 2013); Ruth Milkman, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Cambridge, 2020), ch. 5. 55. On the hidden feminisms of the 1990s, Lisa Levenstein, They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties (NY, 2020). 56. Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, chs. 2, 3. Paula England, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” Gender and Society 24 2 (2010), 149–66; Katherine Turk, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia, 2016); Linda Hirshman, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (NY, 2015), 262–31. 57. On the use of National Guard troops, see Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Ithaca, 1995); Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, 2003); and Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, chs. 4–6. 58. Dorothy Sue Cobble, ed. The Sex of Class: How Women Transformed American Labor (Ithaca, 2007), 1–12; Dorothy Sue Cobble, “More Intimate Unions,” in Intimate L abors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford, 2010), 280–95; Ruth Milkman, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the F uture of the U.S. L abor Movement (NY, 2006); Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (NY, 2012). 59. Cobble, ed. Sex of Class, 1–12; Leslie McCall, “Increasing Class Disparities among Women and the Politics of Gender Equity,” in Sex of Class, 15–34. 60. Charles Peters, “A Neo-Liberal Manifesto, The Name May be Awkward, but the Plan Is One that Can Beat Reagan,” Washington Post, 5 Sept 1982, C1, C5; Lily Geismer, “Agents of
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 543 Change: Microenterprise, Welfare Reform, the Clintons, and Liberal Forms of Neoliberalism,” JAH 107 ( June 2020), 107–31. 61. Miguel Centeno and Joseph Cohen, Global Capitalism: A Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, 2010); Miguel Centeno and Joseph Cohen, “The Arc of Neoliberalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (April 2012), 5.1–5.24; Jeffry A. Frieden, “From the American Century to Globalization,” in The Short American Century: A Postmortem, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich (Cambridge, 2012), 132–57. 62. Stienstra, Women’s Movements, 109–13, 130–34; Davies, NGOs, 146–48; Kathryn Sikkink and Jackie Smith, “Infrastructures for Change: Transnational Organizations, 1953–1993,” in Restructuring World Politics: The Power of Transnational Agency and Norms, ed. Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink (Minneapolis, 2002), 24–44. On the rise of “social justice development NGOs,” see Paul Adler, “Creating ‘The NGO International’: The Rise of Advocacy for Alternative Development, 1974–1994,” in The Development C entury, ed. Macekura and Manela, 305–25. 63. Karen Garner, “World Y Leaders and the UN Decade for W omen,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 9 (Nov 2007), 220. 64. Brigid O’Farrell and Joyce Kornbluh, “We Did Change Some Attitudes: Maida Springer- Kemp and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 23 (Spring–Summer 1995), 62–65; Richards, Maida Springer, xv; Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 384–85; Richards, Conversations, 325–28. 65. As quoted in Garner, “World Y Leaders,” 226; Zinsser, “From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi”; Aili Mari Tripp, “The Evolution of Transnational Feminisms: Consensus, Conflict, and New Dynamics,” in Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, ed. Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp (NY, 2006), 51–78. 66. Quote from UN, “Report of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for W omen, Nairobi, 15–26 July 1985” (NY, 1986). 67. Peterson, Restless, ch. 10, quotes 174,181; Hilton, Prosperity for All, esp. 102–12, 130–37, 175–82, 221–33; Murray L. Weidenbaum, “Is the U.N. Becoming a Global Nanny: The Case of Consumer Protection Guidelines,” Contemporary Issues Series 6, June 1, 1983, Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy, Washington University, St. Louis, MO.; Josh Martin, “A Blueprint for Consumer Protection,” Multinational Monitor 6, July 15, 1985. 68. Lisa Levenstein, “A Social Movement for a Global Age: US Feminists and the Beijing Women’s Conference of 1995,” JAH 105 (Sept 2018), 336–65; Amrita Basu, “Introduction,” in Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms, ed. Amrita Basu (Boulder, 2017), 8–10; Hillary Clinton, “Power Shortage,” The Atlantic, Oct 2020, 17–21. 69. Preamble and Article 3, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. 70. Charlotte Bunch, Talk at the Religion and the Feminist Movement Conference, Harvard Divinity School, Nov 3, 2002; Mary K. Trigg and Stina Soderling, “Charlotte Bunch: Leading from the Margins as a Global Activist for Women’s Rights,” Junctures in Women’s Leadership, ed. Trigg and Bernstein, 140–43; Levenstein, They D idn’t See Us Coming, 99–110. 71. Levenstein, “A Social Movement for a Global Age,” 336–65; Levenstein, They Didn’t See Us Coming, 99–109, 114–17; Trigg and Soderling, “Charlotte Bunch,” 143–50. 72. On the pivotal role of the UN in the 1990s in uniting US women activists, especially t hose with progressive social justice agendas, see Levenstein, They Didn’t See Us Coming, ch. 6.
544 n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 73. For a recent positive appraisal of the ILO and its effect on Latin American l abor policy, see Juan Manuel Palacio, “The ILO and Latin America: The Hidden Transcript of the Good Old Lady,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16 (May 2019), 55–63. 74. Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, 105. 75. ILO, Women’s Empowerment: 90 Years of ILO Action! (Geneva, 2009); Shauna Olney, “The ILO, Gender Equality, and Trade Unions,” in Making Globalization Work for W omen: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow (Albany, 2011), 159–68, 161; Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow, Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances between W omen and L abor (Urbana, 2011), 105–6. 76. For example: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (NY, 1990); Cynthia Daniels, “Competing Gender Paradigms: Fetal Rights and the Case of Johnson Controls,” Policy Studies Review 10 (Winter 1991/1992), 51–68; Joan C. Williams, Unbending Gender: Why F amily and Work Conflict and What to Do about It (NY, 2000). 77. The break between the United States and the ILO came a fter ILC delegates voted in 1975 to admit the Palestine Liberation Organization over the objections of the United States. The United States rejoined in part b ecause of ILO support for anti-Communist movements like Solidarity and ILO condemnation of USSR treatment of political dissidents. For elaboration, see Edward C. Lorenz, Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S. International L abor Standards Policy (Notre Dame, 2001), 203–8; Robinson, George Meany and His Times, 394–402. 78. Dorothy Sue Cobble and Monica Bielski Michal, “ ‘On the Edge of Equality’: Working Women and the U.S. Labour Movement” in Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions: International Perspectives, ed. Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith (London, 2002), 234–37. 79. Kristi Long, We All Fought for Freedom: W omen in Poland’s Solidarity Movement (Boulder, 1996); Eric Chenoweth, “AFL-CIO Support for Solidarity: Moral, Political, Financial,” in American Labor’s Global Ambassadors, ed. W aters Jr. and Van Goethem, 103–22; Joanna Regulska and Magdalena Grabowska, “Post-1989 Women’s Activism in Poland,” in Women and Gender in Postwar Europe, ed. Joanna Regulska and Bonnie G. Smith (London, 2012), 215. 80. Cobble and Bielski Michal, “ ‘On the Edge of Equality,’ ” 232–37; Cobble, Sex of Class, 1–12; Karen Nussbaum, “Working Women’s Insurgent Consciousness,” in Sex of Class, 159–76. The new AFL-CIO Women’s Department backed pay equity, family leave, and other significant political campaigns, but it had few resources and was short-lived. “Barbara Shailor Borosage, Labor Activist for Unions and in Government, Dies at 72,” Washington Post, 8 Aug 2019; Simon Rodberg, “The CIO without the CIA,” American Prospect, 19 Dec 2001. 81. Richards, “Marred by Dissimulation,” 39–55. 82. Robinson, George Meany, 259–61, 393–402; Paul Garver, “Beyond the Cold War: New Directions for Labor Internationalism,” Labor Research Review 1, 13 (1989), 61–71. 83. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements: Toward a Global Perspective,” Commissioned Report, American Center for International Labor Solidarity, Washington, DC, 2012, 16–18. 84. Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements,” 9–16; Linda Briskin, “Trade Unions, Collective Agency, and the Struggle for Women’s Equality: Expanding the Political Empower-
n o t e s t o c h a p t e r 12 545 ment Measure,” in Making Globalization Work for W omen, ed. Moghadam, Franzway, and Fonow, 228–29; ICFTU, “Great Expectations . . . Mixed Results: Unions for Women, Women for Unions,” Feb 2005, 28, http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/Great_expectations_Mixed _Results.pdf, accessed 7 Aug 2020. The Swedish u nions are an interesting exception to the “reserve seat” or “quota movement”: they argued for voluntary change. See Jennifer Curtin, “Engendering Union Democracy: Comparing Sweden and Australia,” in The Future of Unionism: International Perspectives on Emerging Union Structures, ed. Magnus Sverke (Aldershot, 1997), 195–210. 85. Yasna Petrovic, “Women Save the Union.” South-East Europe Review for L abour and Social Affairs 3(2) (2000), 117—30, quote 127. 86. Ronaldo Munck, Globalization and Labour: The New ‘Great Transformation’ (London 2002), 1–23. 87. Cobble, “Gender Equality and L abor Movements,” 19–21; Bhatt, We Are Poor, 14. Loretta De Luca et al., Learning from Catalysts of Rural Transformation (Geneva, 2013), ch. 7. 88. Rose, Where Women are Leaders; Jhabvala, “Self-Employed W omen’s Association,” 114– 38; Leah Vosko, “Representing Informal Economy Workers: Emerging Global Strategies and Their Lessons for North American Unions,” in Sex of Class, ed. Cobble, 272–92; Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Betting on New Forms of Worker Organization,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americ as 7 (Fall 2010), 17–23; Martha Chen, Chris Bonner, and Françoise Carré, “Organizing Informal Workers: Benefits, Challenges, Successes,” Background Paper, Human Development Report Office, 2015, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/chen_hdr_2015 _final.pdf, accessed 7 Aug 2020. 89. Devaki Jain, “A Condition across Caste and Class,” in Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (NY, 1984), 305–10; Devaki Jain, Women’s Quest for Power: Five Indian Case Studies (Sahibabad, 1980). 90. On “work s isters” and building solidarities through education, see Bhatt, We are Poor, esp. 20–21 and Namrata Bali, “Naam, Kaam, Gaam: Educating Women for Self-Employment, Cooperation, and Struggle,” ILWCH 90 (Fall 2016), 164–75. For quotes: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, Book of Gutsy W omen: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resistance (NY, 2019), 390–91. 91. On Yunus and his relation to the Clintons, see Geismer, “Agents of Change.” 92. Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements,” 23–25. 93. Cobble, “Gender Equality and L abor Movements,” 23–28. For how serv ice and care workers had similar concerns, see Cobble, “More Intimate Unions,” 280–95. 94. Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements,” 23–25. 95. Cobble, “Gender Equality and L abor Movements,” 26–27; Interview with Sara Claasen, Cape Town, South Africa, 3 Dec 2011; Sara Claasen, “Sikhula Sonke,” Talk Given at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations Twenty-First Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, 1 Dec 2011. 96. Kate Hardy, “Incorporating Sex Workers into the Argentine Labor Movement,” ILWCH 77 (Spring 2010), 89–108; Gabriela Di Marco, “Gendered Economic Rights and Trade Unionism: The Case of Argentina,” in Making Globalization Work for Women, ed. Moghadam, Franzway, and Fonow, 93–122.
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Epilogue 1. Nancy Fraser, “Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation,” Constellations 12, 3 (2005), 299. Millions viewed Sheryl Sandberg’s 2010 Ted Talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.” Her bestseller, Lean In: W omen, Work, and the Will to Lead (NY, 2013), spawned countless college, community, and workplace “lean-in” groups. For critical perspectives on the “lean-in” phenomenon, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic ( July–Aug 2012); bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean-in,” Oct 28, 2013, https://thefeministwire. com/ 2013/ 10/17973/; Sarah Jaffe, “Trickle-Down Feminism,” Dissent (Winter 2013); Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry, “What ‘Lean-in’ Leaves Out,” Chronicle of Higher Education: Chronicle Review, 22 Sept 2014. 2. NGO priorities all too often followed the lead of wealthy donors or reflected the presumptions of urban, educated elite women who exerted undue influence by virtue of greater expertise, resources, or self-confidence. For elaboration, see Sonia E. Alvarez, “The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom,’ ” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (Sept 1999), 181–209 and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, “Toward a Culturally Situated Women’s Rights Agenda: Reflections from Mexico,” in Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms, ed. Amrita Basu (Boulder, 2010), 315–42. Alvarez offered a more positive assessment of NGOs in 2009 than she did in 1999. See Sonia Alvarez, “Beyond NGO-ization? Reflections from Latin America,” Development 52 ( June 2009), 175–84. 3. Sylvia Walby, “Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice,” (Fall 2005), 321–43; Hester Eisenstein, Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (Philadelphia, 1996); and Cecilia M. B. Sardenberg and Ana Alice Alcantara Costa, “Contemporary Feminisms in Brazil: Achievements, Shortcomings, and Challenges,” in Women’s Movements, ed. Basu, 255–84. 4. Judith Squires, The New Politics of Gender (NY, 2007), 151. 5. Amrita Basu, “Introduction,” in Women’s Movements, ed. Basu, 23–25; Davies, NGOs, 148–50. 6. Manisha Desai, “Transnationalism: The Face of Feminist Politics Post-Beijing,” International Social Science Journal 57 (2005), 319–30. 7. International Network for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights et al., “Call,” issued March 2011 by the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign; Center for Women’s Global Leadership, “Call for UN W omen to Design its Policy and Program on Women’s Economic Empowerment from an Economic, Cultural and Social Rights Framework,” 2011, http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu, accessed 20 Oct, 2011; Shahra Razavi and Laura Turquet, “Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights,” Global Social Policy 16, 1 (2016), 86–108. 8. Davies, NGOs, 148–50; Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow, Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances Between Women and Labor (Urbana, 2011), 125–38. For contestations at World Social Forum gatherings, see Janet M. Conway, Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and its ‘Others’ (London, 2013). For an assessment of the legacy of the WSF, Robert Savio, “Farewell to the World Social Forum? Opening Reflections for a GTI Forum,” Great Transition Initiative (Oct 2019), https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/wsf-savio, accessed 25 Oct 2020. For studies of other feminist groups pursuing economic justice worldwide, see Val-
n o t e s t o e p i l o g u e 547 entine Moghadam, Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement (Lanham, 2013). 9. Naomi Klein, “Labor of Loss: Climate Change and the Emerging Economy of Care and Repair,” Institute for Women’s Leadership 2018–2019 Distinguished Lecture Series, Rutgers University, April 4, 2019. Wangari Maathai and Mary Robinson, “Women Can Lead the Way in Tackling Development and Climate Challenges Together,” www.Huff Post.com, accessed 20 Sept 2010; Justine Calma, “Mary Robinson, International Climate Badass, on Why Green Solutions Require a Feminist Lens,” Grist, March 15, 2019. 10. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Worker Mutualism in an Age of Entrepreneurial Capitalism,” Labour and Industry: A Journal of Social and Economic Relations at Work 26 (Summer 2016), 179–89; Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick, “The International Trade Union Confederation: From Two (or More?) Identities to One,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 51, 2 (2013), 240–63. For recent membership figures, see https://www.ituc-csi.org/. 11. Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements,” 9–12, 16–19, 31–32, 43–44. Some unions are diversifying more quickly than o thers, creating a “sharply bifurcated pattern of gender demographics” among national and local unions, as Ruth Milkman points out in “Two Worlds of Unionism: Women and the New Labor Movement,” in The Sex of Class, ed. Cobble, 63–80. For examples, Valentine Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow, eds., Making Globalization Work for W omen: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership (Albany, 2011). 12. “Advancing Cooperation among Working W omen in the Informal Economy: The SEWA Way,” ILO Summary Report, Geneva, March 2018; Namrata Bali, “Informal Workers Organ izing,” IFWEA workshop, 30 Nov 2011, Cape Town, South Africa; De Luca et al., eds., Learning from Catalysts of Rural Transformation, 135; and Cobble, “Gender Equality and L abor Movements,” 19–21. 13. Cobble, “Gender Equality and Labor Movements,” 21–23; Shahidur Rahman, “Bangladesh: Women and Labour Activism,” in Women and L abour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism, ed. Kaye Broadbent and Michele Ford (London, 2008), 84–99; Nelson Lichtenstein, “Two Cheers for Vertical Integration: Corporate Governance in a World of Global Supply Chains,” paper, American Political History Seminar, Princeton University, 6 Feb 2014; Mark Anner, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi, “Towards Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root C auses of L abor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks.” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 35, 1 (2013–14), 1–43. 14. Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, 200–3. International Domestic Workers’ Network, IDWN News, Oct 2011. www.domesticworkerrights.org, accessed Jan 31, 2012; Jennifer N. Fish, Domestic Workers of the World Unite: A Global Movement for Dignity and H uman Rights (NY, 2017), chs. 2–4, esp. 58–62. “US Domestic Workers Find Their Voice,” World of Work 68 (April 2010), 11–13; Ai-Jen Poo, “A Twenty-First Century Organizing Model: Lessons From the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign,” New Labor Forum 20, 1 (Winter 2011), 50–55. 15. Steven Greenhouse, “As L abor Secretary, Finding Influence in Her Past,” NYT, 6 July 2009; Solis quotes from “Remarks by Hilda L. Solis, Secretary of L abor, National Domestic Worker Alliance Inaugural Care Congress,” 12 July 2010, Washington, DC, http://dol.gov.
548 n o t e s t o e p i l o g u e 16. Fish, Domestic Workers of the World Unite, ch. 7; Uruguay, South Africa, the Philippines, and other countries with powerful domestic worker organizations w ere among the first to ratify. After a hard-fought campaign, Brazil signed as well, providing labor protections to seven million domestic workers, the largest number in any nation. Ratifications available at www.ilo.org, accessed 16 July 2019. 17. Ai-Jen Poo, “They Look after Your Children: They Deserve Basic Rights,” NYT, 14 July 2019. 18. US employers, in contrast, took little or no action in response to the Bangladesh situation. No US retailers signed the 2013 Accord. 19. Another group of critics, often in less industrialized nations, attacked social clauses for having a quite different economic effect: they saw them as protectionist measures designed to keep jobs in the First World by raising wages in less developed nations. Quote from Barbara Shailor and G. Kourpias, “Developing and Enforcing International Labour Standards,” in A New Labour Movement for the New Century, ed. Greg Mantsios (NY, 1998), 279. See also Barbara Shailor, “A New Internationalism,” in Not Your Father’s Union Movement: Inside the AFL-CIO, ed. Jo-Ann Mort (London, 1998), 145–55; Levenstein, They Didn’t See Us Coming, ch. 8; Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Global Labour (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018), 136–38 and Rebecca Gumbrell- McCormick, “The ICFTU and the World Economy: A Historical Perspective,” in Labour and Globalisation: Results and Prospects, ed. Ronaldo Munck (Liverpool, 2004), 44–46. 20. Ron Blackwell, “Building a Member-Based International Program,” in New Labor Movement, ed. Mantsios, 320–28; Lance Compa, “Trade Unions and Human Rights,” in Bringing Human Rights Home: A History of H uman Rights in the US, ed. Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albisa, and Martha F. Davis (Westport, 2008), 209–53. 21. Naila Kabeer, “Globalization, L abor Standards, and W omen’s Rights: Dilemmas of Collective (In)Action in an Interdependent World,” Feminist Economics 10 (March 2004), 3–35. On the variety and spread of “social protection floors” globally, see ILO, Social Protection Floors, vols. 1 and 2 (Geneva, 2016). 22. The uptick of political activism in the early twenty-first century has its roots in the 1980s and 1990s and is intertwined closely with the rising feminisms of w omen of color and LGBTQ- identified w omen. For elaboration, see Cobble, Gordon, and Henry, Feminism Unfinished, ch. 3; Levenstein, They D idn’t See Us Coming; Ruth Milkman, “A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest,” American Sociological Review 82 (Feb 2017), 1–31. 23. For data on women elected officials, see https://cawp.rutgers.edu. With white w omen evenly divided between the Democrats and the Republicans in 2018, clearly race, ethnicity, and a host of other f actors mattered in how p eople voted. At the same time, the “gender voting gap” among white men and white women yawned wide. Janie Velencia, “The 2018 Gender Gap Was Huge,” 9 Nov 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-2018-gender-gap-was -huge/; Alec Tyson, “The 2018 Midterm Vote: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” 8 Nov 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/08/the-2018-midterm-vote-divisions -by-race-gender-education/; Danyelle Solomon and Connor Maxwell, “Women of Color: A Collective Powerhouse in the U.S. Electorate,” 19 Nov 2019; https://www.americanprogress .org/i ssues/race/reports/2019/11/19/477309/women-color-collective-powerhouse-u-s -electorate/
n o t e s t o e p i l o g u e 549 24. Milkman, “A New Political Generation,” 1–31; Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (London 2019); “Worldwide, People Rally in Support of Women’s March on Washington,” Washington Post, 21 Jan 2017; Alix Langone, “#MeToo and Time’s Up Founders Explain the Difference between the Two Movements and How Th ey’re Also Alike,” Time, 22 March 2018; Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century (Oakland, 2018); Annelise Orleck, We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising against Poverty Wages (Boston, 2018); Emma Marris, “Why Young Climate Activists Have Captured the World’s Attention,” Nature 573 (18 Sept 2019), 471–72; Amanda Taub, “Mom’s Power in U.S. Protests Echo a Global Tradition,” NYT, 25 July 2020. 25. Gay Seidman, Beyond the Boycott: L abor Rights, H uman Rights, and Transnational Activism (NY, 2009), ch. 6. 26. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972– 73): 151–65.
I n de x
Pages in italics indicate photograph or illustration. Abbott, Edith, 21 Abbott, Grace, 48, 69, 104, 109, 162, 168–69, 200, 212, 457n100, 469n73 Abzug, Bella, 385–86, 403, 541n49 Addams, Jane, 16–18, 21, 24, 36, 46, 52, 102–3, 107–8, 118, 134, 447n8, 471n14, 483n19 Adenowo, Agnes, 369 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 120 Advance, The, 227 Aframerican Woman’s Journal, 263 African American Labor Institute, 368 African Americans, 24, 30, 112, 164, 181, 339. See also Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; civil rights; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); National Association of Colored Women (NACW); National Council of Negro Women (NCNW); racism and discrimination agriculture and agricultural workers, 56, 85–86, 119, 173–75, 232, 352, 361, 486n56 Alegría Garza, Paula, 249, 253, 356, 359 Ali, Begum Hamid, 268 All-African Peoples’ Conference (1958), 331 All Africa Trade Union Federation, 369 Allende, Salvador, 382 All India Trade Union Congress, 59–60, 131, 263, 274 All India Women’s Conference, 131, 260, 263–4 Alvarez, Sonia E., 416
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (Amalgamated), 22, 175, 178, 181, 225–27, 232, 247, 287, 297 American Anti-Imperialist League, 138 American Center for International Labor Solidarity, 408 American Economic Review, 252, 289 American Federation of Labor (AFL): Bill of Rights (1919), 46; Canada, delegates to, 137–38; and China, 133; exploited and lowpaid workers, 176; and fair labor standards, 171; “federal labor u nions,” 84, 104–5; Free Trade Union Committee, 513n90; Great Depression policies, 194–95; and IFTU, 77, 81; and ILO, 46; International Bill of Trade Union Rights, 278–79, 283; Labor League for Human Rights, 225–26; and Latin America, 138–40; Laundry Workers Union of, 181; membership, 452n55; policies, 41, 104–5, 166, 461n41, 499n11; and Sender, 256, 513n86; UN consultancy status, 274, 512n84; and WTUL, 18, 33, 103–4 American Federation of L abor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO), 376, 409, 528n136; all-male US delegations, 407; anti-Communism of, 330, 367–68, 393, 407–8; guns and butter credo, 372; and ICFTU, 369, 408; and ICFTU Women’s Committee, 364–66; International Department, 408; and J. Miller, 407; and New Left, 371; and Peterson, 340–41, 377; Shailor 551
552 i n de x American Federation of Labor (continued) at Solidarity Center, 421; and Springer, 329, 355, 366–67; Women’s Department, 544n80; women’s role in, 394 American Institute for Free L abor Development (AIFLD), 368, 535n95 American Labor Party, 227, 489n92, 490n7 American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa, 350 American Women (PCSW report), 343–44, 346 Anarchism, 88, 182. See also syndicalism Anderson, Mary, 208; and Addams, 483n19; and AFL, 195; background of, 22; and Bethune, 163; and Bondfield, 98, 452n52; and China, 132; Communist charge, 169; conservative target, 102, 123; defense of FDR, 155; diversity work, 111–12; and ERA, 121–22; and ERT, 203, 205; European contacts, 99; FBI investigation, 501n56; in France, not ILC (1931), 195–97; French labor statement, 44; and French labor women, 43; full employment, 289; and IFTU, 94; at ILC (1919), 387; and ILO, 13, 45, 195, 198–200, 252–53, 496n97, 505n117; and Latin America, 142, 234; and Lima Declaration, 216–17; mixed sex organizations, 286; and NWP, 202; at Pan-American women’s conference (1922), 143; at Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (1928), 134; and Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences, 136; rate for the job, 273; and Schneiderman, 47, 456nn96–97; on SC minimum wage ruling, 120; in Sweden, 469n76; and Tanaka Taka, 73, 130; and van Kleeck, 191; and Wilson, 42; and Winslow, 232, 497n116; and WLC, 54, 74; Woman in Industry Service, 37; and Women’s Bureau, 50, 162, 523n72; and Women’s Charter, 190; and WTUL, 19, 22, 39–40, 42–43, 453n65; and YWCA Industrial Department, 55. See also Women’s Charter (WC)
Anderson, Will, 34 Anglero, Teresa, 182 Annals, The, 199 anticolonialism, 36, 46, 59–60, 106, 125–26, 131, 182, 236–37, 247–55, 261–65, 315, 327–31, 339, 350. See also, among other entries, Bethune; India; Pan-Africanism; Springer; Third World anticommunism, 103, 291, 382; and AFL, 80, 320–21; and AFL-CIO, 330, 367–68, 407; left varieties of 277–78, 296–300, 371; and McCarthyism, 270, 294, 299–300; and NWP, 288–89. See also anti-radicalism; Cold War; conservatism anti-discrimination, 225–29, 292–93, 334–35, 361. See also antiracism; civil rights; human rights antiracism, 16, 29–30, 55–56, 110–14, 163–64. See also anti-discrimination; civil rights; human rights anti-radicalism, 45, 47, 49–50, 66, 102–3, 122–23, 169–71. See also anticommunism; conservatism antiwar activism, 36, 40, 103, 108, 229, 370–71, 385, 404 Araiza, Carmen Maria, 327 Argentina, 58, 125, 140–41, 203, 232, 234–36, 238, 311, 502n64; Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), 413; Female Sex Workers’ Association (AMMAR), 413; Unión Argentina de Mujeres (Argentine Women’s Union), 217 Argentine Socialist Party, 141, 235, 460n23 Ashby, Margery Corbett, 269 Ashwood, Amy, 125 Athavale, Parvatibai, 58–61, 78, 130–31, 461n27 Atlantic Charter, 230, 254, 256, 262 Attlee, Clement, 243 Australia, 31–32, 78, 89, 135–36, 194, 268, 284, 515n123; Australian Women’s Charter Conference, 258; Labour Party, 31, 194 Austria, 85, 100, 324
i n de x Bachelet, Michelle, 417 Bacon, Ruth, 390 Bae-tsung Kyong, 134–35 Balabanoff, Angelica, 88, 466n34 Balch, Emily Greene, 15, 127 Balmaceda, Esperanza, 217, 497n115 Bandung Conference, 296, 328–29 Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF), 419, 421, 548n18 Barbados, 179, 317 Barnes, George N., 40, 42 Barrow, Nita, 401 Baruch, Bernard, 268 Bass, Elizabeth Merrill, 50 Beal, Frances, 376 Beard, Mary Ritter, 209, 214–15 Begtrup, Bodil, 266, 269, 282 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 403–6 Bellanca, Dorothy, 232, 247 Belmont, Alva, 146–47, 480n77 Berle, Adolph, 216 Bernardino, Minerva, 202, 217, 237–39, 257–58, 264, 282, 507n10 Berne Agreement (1906), 40, 63 Berne Conference (1919), 40–41, 43–44 Berne Conference of Socialist and Labour Women (1915), 36, 88, 276 Bethune, Mary McLeod, background of, 112–13; and “Black Cabinet,” 164; Communist charges, 261–62; at Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, 75; and Eleanor Roosevelt, 184; and Height, 350; and ICWDR, 126; “My Last Will and Testament,” 315; and NCNW, 175, 391–92; Office of Negro Affairs, 163; and Pandit, 264; and Republican Party, 163; and Springer, 246; travel to Africa, 315; and UN, 314; at UN founding, 256, 262–64; on Women’s Charter, 211 Beveridge, William, 194, 241 Bevin, Ernest, 241, 243
553 Beyer, Clara Mortenson, 162, 164, 247, 312, 387, 523n68 Bhatt, Ela, 394, 410 Bhave, Vinoba, 384 “Black W omen’s Manifesto, A” (Beal), 376 Blair, Emily Newell, 156 Bondfield, Margaret, 13, 89, 99, 154, 224, 452n48, 523n72; and AFL, 44, 456n93; and Anderson, 452n52; background of, 33–34, 240; at Berne Conference, 36; and British Communist Party, 466n32; British labor leader, 33; domestic worker charter, 503n81; European antipathy to Moscow, 88; and IFWW, 92–93; and ILC, 70, 457n99; and ILO, 249; and Miller, 314; Minister of L abour, 98, 193, 198; Parliamentary role, 94, 98; personal, 40; post WWII social democracy, 284; and Robins, 94; and Schneiderman, 45; suffrage speaker, 41; travel to America, 194; travel to Russia, 88; and WLC, 57–58, 64–65, 67; women’s group mergers, 91; and WTUL, 44–45, 98, 129 Boschek, Anna, 79, 84, 100, 197–98, 304 Bose, Maitreyee, 302–3 Boserup, Ester, 388 Bouillot, Georgette, 43, 57, 82 Bouvier, Jeanne: background of, 43; and Bryn Mawr Summer School, 115; and Eleanor Roosevelt, 55; and IFTU, 93; and IFWW, 90; and ILC, 70, 86, 89, 109; views of, 82, 88, 97, 99, 480n75; and WLC, 57, 65–66 Branting, Hjalmar, 99 Bravo, Marcia, 391 Brazil, 125, 144, 233, 258, 505n113, 548n16; Brazilian Federation for the Advancement of Women, 144 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 21, 265 Brent, Charles Henry, 159 Bretton Woods, 253–54, 505n123 Brezhnev, Leonid, 371 Bricker, John W., 314 Bridges, Harry, 169–71
554 i n de x Britain: Beveridge Report, 241; Britain’s Royal Commission on Equal Pay, 288, 521n35, 521n46; “home help services,” 290, 517n141; national health insurance, 284, 515n121; National Health Service Act, 309; post WWII social democracy, 284–85; Representation of the P eople Act, 1918, 454n74; visas for Nazi victims, 226; welfare state, 192 British Communist Party, 88, 466n32 British Fabian socialists, 31 British Independent Labour Party, 33, 452n49 British Labour Party, 34, 88, 91, 99, 106, 192–93, 240–41, 284, 452n49 British Trades Union Congress, 32–33, 44 British WTUL, 32–34, 70 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 113, 186, 227, 499n20 Browder, Earl, 510n48 Brown v. Board of Education, 344 Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 9, 113, 115–17, 182–84, 277, 301, 318, 330, 473n32 Bunch, Charlotte, 404 Burniaux, Hélène, 93–94, 101 Burroughs, Nannie H., 56, 112, 120 Burrow, Sharan, 418 Butler, Harold, 68, 89, 199, 207 Callahan, Mary, 343 Caminade, Denise, 319 Canada, 31, 58, 80, 137–38, 273, 284, 318, 515n123 Cannon, Mary, 224, 234–39, 501n56, 502n67 Capetillo, Luisa, 140 Carey, Jim, 297 Carmichael, Stokely, 371 Carter, Jimmy, 396 Carter, Rosalynn, 395 Casartelli-Cabrini, Laura, 57, 65, 69–70, 85–86, 93, 99–100, 129 Casselman, Cora, 249, 253 Castillo Ledón, Amalia González Caballero de, 258
Catt, Carrie Chapman, 108–9, 119, 143–44, 149 Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 404 Charte Internationale du Travail (International Charter of Work). See Berne Conference (1919) Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 407 Chevenard, Jeanne, 90, 95, 101, 129, 197 Cheyney, Alice Squires, 199, 212 Chiang Kai-shek, 133 Chicago Federation of Labor, 20–21 Chicago Stockyards Labor Council, 112 Child, Marquis W., 193 child labor, 17, 38, 48, 69, 109–10, 121, 132, 171, 173, 204, 272, 477n26 Chile, 92, 234, 382 China, 53, 65, 84, 86–7, 92, 108, 125, 128–35, 223, 370, 458n8, 477n26 Chinery-Hesse, Mary, 406 Chinese Communist Party, 129 Chisholm, Shirley, 385–86 Choice Not An Echo, A (Schlafly), 395 Christian socialism, 37, 88, 106 Christman, Elisabeth: and Bondfield, 98; on ERT, 206–8; German speaking, 34; and IFWW, 88; and ILC (1931), 196; and ILO, 198; International Glove Workers’ Union and, 21; on National War L abor Board, 37; at Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (1928), 134–35; at Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (1930), 136; rate for the job, 273; on second ICWW, 84; on Women’s Charter, 209–10; and WTUL, 82, 129, 141, 292 Civilian Conservation Corps, Camp Tera, 185 civil rights: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 351; national women’s committee, 349–50. See also anti-discrimination; antiracism; legislation, US; racism and discrimination Clarenbach, Kay, 374 Class: consciousness of, 96–98, 116; inequalities 7–8, 398; tensions among women, 16, 71–74, 83, 119, 219–30. See also feminism,
i n de x full rights; feminism, social democratic; strikes; Working Women’s Charters Clinton, Hillary, 403, 411 Coalition of Labor Union Women, 394 Coit, Eleanor, 277 Colden, Charles, 200 Cold War, 267–70, 293–97, 320–333, 340, 370, 526n115, 527n120 Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM), 148–50, 201–3, 215, 217, 231, 233–35, 237–39. Commission on International L abour Legislation (1919), 39, 42–43 Communism (Soviet-led), 66–67, 79–80, 299, 407; disaffection with, 88, 243, 299, 321, 407. See also Cold War; Third International; USSR Communist Party USA (CPUSA), 106, 156, 186–88, 299, 382–83, 510n48, 525n98 Communist Women’s International Secretariat, 101 Conference for Progressive Political Action, 107 Conference of American States, Lima (1938), 215, 217 Congress of American Women, 265, 313, 526n116 Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), 172, 176, 186, 291, 293, 297. See also American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) Congress of Racial Equality, 229 conservatism, 5, 27, 76, 102, 110, 121–23, 170, 172–73; 284–86, 290–92, 372, 378, 395–403 Consumer Affairs Council, 396 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 315 Cotton, Eugénie, 265 Crisis (NAACP magazine), 252 Cuba, 53, 84, 86, 124, 138, 148–49, 201–2, 231–32 Czechoslovakia, 52, 57–58, 84, 106, 265, 327, 511n53; Syndicate of Working Women, 58
555 Davis, Angela, 382–83 Davis, Caroline, 286–87, 343, 376, 524n78 Davis, John W., 107 Dearborn Independent, 123 Debs, Eugene V., 103 Democratic Party, 3–4, 10, 108, 121, 123, 156–57, 162, 164, 175, 187, 194, 292, 371, 396, 399; Southern Democrats, 174, 290–91, 371 Department Store Employees Union of New York, 211 Derry, Kathleen, 58, 78, 129, 137–38 Desai, Manisha, 417 Deux Époques, Deux Hommes (Bouvier), 99 Development and modernization debates, 340–41, 354–58, 387–8 Dewey, John, 116, 155, 481n2 Dewey, Thomas E., 240 Dewson, Mary (Molly), 162, 164, 216 Die Gleichheit (Equality), 276 Dies, Martin, 170, 261 Dingman, Mary, 86, 128, 131–32, 477n26 Dissmann, Robert, 277 Doak, William, 197 Dobrzanska, Sophie, 58 domestic work, 180–81, 309–312, 345, 352–53, 420, 487n72, 487n74, 503n81, 522n57, 548n16 Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, 420 Domestic Workers United (DWU), 415, 420 Dominican Republic, 202, 237–38, 368 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 246, 289 Douglas, Paul H., 137 Draper, Anne, 376 Dreier, Mary, 19–20, 22–24, 34, 44, 55, 160, 449n21 Drury, Victor S., 20, 24 Dubček, Alexander, 371 Dubinsky, David, 201, 225, 245, 275, 277–78 Du Bois, W.E.B., 24, 56, 59, 114, 145, 245, 262 Duchêne, Gabrielle, 37, 43, 82, 90 Dudziak, Mary, 293 Dulles, John Foster, 315 Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944), 256–57 Duncan, Ruby, 392
556 i n de x Ebeling, Lena E., 303 Ebony, 315 Ecuador, 149, 201, 203 Edström, Sigfrid, 70 education, 9, 116–17. See also Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers Edwards, India, 270, 511n58 Edwards, Thyra J., 210, 252 Egypt, 65, 108 Eisenstein, Hester, 416 Ekendahl, Sigrid, 297–98, 303, 307–9, 312, 319–20, 326, 347, 355, 360, 362–65, 406, 519n17, 524n85, 525n95 Ellickson, Katherine Pollak, 287, 289, 342 Elliott, Dorothy, 309, 311 employment agency abuses, 449n21 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 373, 375, 397 Equal Nationality Treaty, 145, 201, 239, 480n72, 493n49 equal pay, 17, 111, 172, 248, 273–73, 287, 300–309, 348–49, 512n76, 516n130, 521nn42–43, 521n46 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 118, 288; battle over, 5, 102, 118–122, 145; Beard’s view, 214–15; Congressional hearings, 289; at Houston Women’s Conference, 381; F. Miller’s view, 266–67; and NOW, 374–75, 386–87; PCSW statement on, 344; ratification failure, 397; support for, 238, 377. See also Equal Rights Treaty (ERT); National Woman’s Party Equal Rights Treaty (ERT), 145–46, 149–51, 190, 201, 203, 205–8, 213–16, 218–19, 237, 239, 480n72 Erlander, Tage, 347 Factory, F amily, and W omen in Soviet Russia (Fairchild, Kingsbury), 301 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 236 Fairchild, Mildred, 294, 300–302, 306, 312–14, 316, 335, 347–48 fair labor standards, 18, 40, 103, 117, 119, 171, 289, 350, 474n45
family responsibilities, 309, 325, 344, 346, 359–64, 366, 386; “double day,” 242, 290; recognition of, 309; Social Security Act, 169–174; WTUL and, 63. See also domestic work; International Labor Organization (ILO); maternity rights and benefits; President’s Commission on the Status of Women, 1961 (PCSW) Farmer-Labor Party, 106 Fascism, 8, 100, 224–26, 233 Fazal, Anwar, 402 Federal Council of Churches, 28 Felice, William, 223 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 343 feminism, full rights: definition of, 3; “double day,” 242, 290, 362, 365; and economic inequality, 7–8; and education, 9; future of, 422–25; hidden feminism of, 397; and human rights, 8–9; individual to social, 416; men and, 4; and social feminism, 4, 108–10, 150. See also, among others, International Federation of Working Women (IFWW); International Labor Organization (ILO); New Deal; President’s Commission on the Status of Women, 1961 (PCSW); Women’s Labor Congress, 1919 (WLC); Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL); Women’s Charter (WC) feminism, imperial, 9–10, 144 feminism, labor. See ICFTU Women’s Committee; International Federation of Working Women (IFWW); Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA); Women’s Bureau (US); Women’s Labor Congress, 1919 (WLC); Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL); Working Women’s Charters feminism, neoliberal, 416–17 feminism, Pan-Hispanic, 149 feminism, social democratic: American women and, 2–3, 446n7; definition of, 445n4; education and, 9; fair l abor standards, 171; history of, 6; new generation of, 370, 373, 424; night-work debate, 198;
i n de x and Perkins, 483n19; transnational connections, 10, 14–15, 52, 98, 216, 219, 447n9 feminists, Cold War, 295, 300 feminists, legal equality, 76, 117, 146–47, 474n44 Ferebee, Dorothy, 263 Fierro de Bright, Josefina, 229 Figueroa, Ana, 316, 325–26, 356–57, 359 Fimmen, Edo, 83 First African Regional Trade Union Conference, 329 First World Conference of Women Workers, WFTU (1956), 320, 325–26 Fitzpatrick, John, 20, 84 Fledderus, Mary, 190, 490n2 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 265 forced labor, 241, 296, 331–33, 529n144 Ford, Betty, 395 Ford, Henry, 123 Fox, Evelyn, 128–29, 207, 212, 476n13 France, 35, 37, 43, 57, 82, 84, 92, 99, 106, 223; Comité Féminin Français du Travail (French Women’s Labor Committee), 43–44; Confédération générale du travail (CGT), 43, 82, 85, 91 Franklin, Miles (Stella Maria Sarah), 31–32, 35, 44, 194, 451n43, 452n45 Fraser, Doug, 396 Fraser, Nancy, 416 Free Federation of Puerto Rican Workers, 140 Freeman, Jo, 425 Frey, John, 170 Friedan, Betty, 343, 374, 376, 385–86 Friedman, Milton, 372 Friedmann, Ernestine, 28, 48, 113 Games, Julia García, 140–41 Gandhi, Indira, 384 Gandhi, Mahatma, 59–60, 228, 263, 354, 382, 384 Garvey, Marcus, 125, 179, 330 Geijer, Arne, 298, 346, 365 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 399, 505n123
557 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 30 George, Henry, 159 German Trade Union Federation (DGB), 34 Germany, 19, 21, 34–38, 46, 78–81, 83–85, 90, 96, 100, 106, 198, 220, 257, 319; Independent Social Democratic Party, 276; KPD, 276; SPD, 34, 276 Ghana, 328–9, 350, 370 Gildersleeve, Virginia, 257, 259 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 267 Glendon, Mary Ann, 282 Global South, 381, 400–402, 405, 537n2 Goins, Irene, 111–12 Goldberg, Arthur, 342, 346, 358 Goldberg, Dorothy, 346 Goldwater, Barry, 395 Gompers, Samuel, 41, 45–46, 80, 95, 138–39, 250 Good Housekeeping, 110, 121 Goodrich, Carter, 249 Gottfurcht, Hans, 318, 326 Green, William, 132–33, 166, 225, 275, 519n10 Griffiths, Martha, 377 Guatemala, 139, 324 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 382 Guyana, 244 Haener, Dorothy, 374, 376 Hague, Frank, 172 Hague Women’s Peace Conference (1915), 35–36 Haiti, 126–27, 138, 202, 263, 359 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 386, 392 Hancock, Florence, 249, 279, 298, 303–4, 312, 517n141, 521n35 Hanna, Gertrud, 34–35, 79, 83–84, 90, 95, 100–101, 197–98, 465n20, 467n44 Hansson, Per Albin, 193 Hardman, J.B.S., 227 Harris, Patricia Roberts, 349 Hartman, Mary S., 404 Hatcher, Lillian, 287 Haynes, Elizabeth Ross, 56, 111 Heagney, Muriel, 134–35, 247
558 i n de x Height, Dorothy, 341, 343, 349–52, 390–92, 531n12 Henry, Alice, 31–32, 35, 52, 62, 94, 97, 136–37, 196 Hernandez v. Texas, 344 Hesselgren, Kerstin: and Anderson, 99; domestic workers, 310; on ERT, 206; her view of Americans in 1919, 66; and Hilda “Jane” Smith, 117; and ICFTU, 320; and ILO, 273; and League of Nations, 213, 494n68; on night-work convention, 197, 492n38; and UN CSW, 270; at WLC, 57 Hillman, Bessie Abramowitz, 21, 178, 226, 343 Hillman, Sidney, 178, 225, 489n92 Hitler, Adolph, 192, 198 Ho Chi Minh, 382, 384 Holland, James, 47 Honduras, 138 Hoover, Herbert, 107, 143 Hoover, J. Edgar, 103, 294 household labor. See domestic work House Special Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 170, 313 Houston Women’s Conference (1977), 338, 381, 395–96 Hoxie, Robert, 240 Hudson Shore Labor School, 183 Huerta, Dolores, 384 Hull, Cordell, 169, 216 Hull House, 9, 21, 32, 48, 159, 178 human rights, 8–9, 46, 223, 252, 259–61, 278–84, 422–25. Human Rights, USA, 1948 to 1966 (Murray), 374 Humphrey, John, 281 Hunt, Ida Gibbs, 56 Huntington, James, 159 Hunton, Addie, 56–57, 118, 126–27 Hutar, Patricia, 388–89 Ibárruri, Dolores, 265 Ichikawa Fusae, 285 Iglesias, Santiago, 138
Immigrant and the Community, The (Abbott), 104 immigrant rights, 18, 24, 64, 104, 170, 226, 272, 352, 359, 383–84, 394, 461n41, 471n7, 499n15 India, 31, 53, 58–61, 65, 108, 127, 131, 228, 241, 273, 311, 383–84, 503n77; Indian Women’s Charter of Rights and Duties, 282. See also All India Trade Union Congress; All Indian Women’s Conference; Self- Employed W omen’s Association (SEWA); Textile Labour Association Indonesia, 328–29, 393 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 103 Inter-Allied Women’s Conference, 39, 42 Inter-American Chapultepec Conference, 507n10 Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace (1936), 205 International Alliance of Women (IAW): and Ashby, 269; and Catt, 109; on ERT, 207, 494n67, 497n104; on Maternity Convention, 146; and Miller, 378; name change, 471n17; on Nightwork Convention, 480n75; and NWP, 147; and UN, 258, 260, 264, 274; and UN role, 509n36 International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL), 40, 454n71 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU): and AFL, 519n10; and Africa, 368–69; “Bread, Peace, and Freedom,” 300; “A Charter of Freedom for Women Workers,” 326; Charter of Rights of Working Women, 365; and communism, 321; diversity of, 327; Equality Department, 409; equal remuneration support, 305; family policy, 364–65; gender dynamics of, 408–9; global focus, 338–39, 530n2; and Peterson, 298, 317; secular organization, 519n9; and Third World, 296; and WFTU, 418; Woman’s Department, 326; “Women! It’s Your Fight Too,” 322; Women’s Committee, 295, 320, 322, 324, 326–27, 359, 362, 364–65, 408–9, 468n66, 518n4; “ Women Speak to W omen” pamphlet, 326
i n de x International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), meetings: Dusseldorf conference (1968), 366, 369; founding congress, 297, 299, 519n13; International Seminar for African affiliates, 328; residential summer school for women, 317–20, 525n95; and Third World, 319; Tunis Conference (1957), 324; Vienna meeting (1963), 364; World Congress (1955), 320, 324; World Congress (1965), 365, 368 International Congress of Working Women (ICWW), First (1919), 13, 52–67. See also Women’s Labor Congress, 1919 (WLC) International Congress of Working Women (Interim Organization): Asian participation, 78; leadership of, 79–83. International Congress of Working Women, Second (1921), 81; on agricultural workers, 85–86; attendees at, 84–85; on Chinese women workers, 86–87; IFTU role, 83; resolutions on disarmament and unemployment, 85–86 International Cooperative Women’s Guild, 146 International Council of Social Democratic Women, 324 International Council of Women, 30, 126 International Council of W omen of the Darker Races (ICWDR), 126, 261 International Day against Violence against Women, 404 International Domestic Workers Network, 420–21 International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU): and AFL, 41, 97; Eurocentric bias, 80–81; German influence, 81, 90; and ICWW, 85, 87; and IFWW, 89–91; leadership of, 78–79; and League of Nations, 45; name change, 455n76; report on women, 467n44; and Soviet Union, 80; Women’s Committee, 95, 98, 100–101, 317, 468n66; women’s role, 83, 93; and WTUL, 94 International Federation of Working W omen (IFWW): constitution of, 87, 89;
559 dissolution of, 95, 297; as forerunner of ICFTU Women’s Committee, 317; and IFTU, 89–90, 95; and ILO, 89; membership question, 87–88; officers of (1921), 89; third congress Vienna (1923), 92–93; underlying principle, 88 International Homework Office, French Division, 43 International Industrial Relations Institute, 190, 490n2 International L abor Conferences (ILC): 1919, 42, 67–74, 89, 109, 387, 465n25, 479n56; 1921, attendees, 89;1931 and 1934, night work amendments, 195, 197–98; 1934, German delegates, 198; 1937, Women’s Rights Declaration, 212–13, 218–19, 497n113; 1938, Committee on Women and Juveniles, 231–32; 1940, New York, 247–48; 1944, Philadelphia, 249–53, 273; 1945, Paris, 271–72; 1946, Montreal, 273–74; 1947, freedom of association, 278–79; 1948, San Francisco, 279, 514n98; 1950, 1951 equal pay, 300–306; 1957 antidiscrimination standards, 333; 1961 Technical Cooperation Committee, 356–58; 1964 Women Workers Committee, 361, 524n78; 1964 Workers’ Group proposal, 358, 360; 1965 Employment Recommendation, 362–63; 1965 Workers’ Group proposal, 358 International Labor Organization (ILO): African Regional Conference (1960), 357; antidiscrimination standards, 333–34, 365; Committee on Children, 272; Committee on Women Workers, 360–64, 534n82; Constitution, 42; Correspondence Committee on Women’s Work, 198; delegate rules, 492n41; and developing countries, 358; domestic worker committee, 309–11, 522n59; efficacy of, 405; equal pay debate, 300–305, 326, 348, 520n24; family policies, 347, 364, 366; forced labor, 331–32; freedom of association, 278–80, 514n101; gender influence, 406; globalization of, 327, 338–39, 528n129, 530n2; and Global
560 i n de x International Labor Organization (ILO) (continued) South, 381; and Gompers, 46; and IFWW, 89, 93; Japan’s “special exemptions,” 463n66; labor division over, 45; living wage, 42, 505n117; maternity policies, 69–71, 312–13, 359–64; and Miller, 203, 316, 353; and Morse, 279–80; and New Dealers, 154, 195, 314, 316; and NWP, 492n36; and Perkins, 201; sex-specific standards, 147–48, 200; and social justice, 189, 248–50; Social Protection Floor Recommendation, 422; Third World delegations, 296; tripartite international governance, 45, 189, 275; and UN, 199–200, 257, 271–73; and US, 50, 66, 98, 406; US w omen’s push for US membership in, 195–96, 199–201; Women’s Charter, 212–13; women’s role in, 42–43, 134, 141, 146, 273–74, 357, 359, 408; women voting delegates, 99–100, 204; and WTUL, 76; and WWII, 247. See also Equal Rights Treaty (ERT) International Labor Organization (ILO), conventions: Abolition of Forced Labor Convention (C105), 296, 333, 529n144; Anti-Discrimination Convention (C111) (1958), 334; Convention on Social Policy in Non-Metropolitan Territories (C082), 274; Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention (C189), 420–21, 548n16; Equal Remuneration Convention (C100), 42, 46, 213, 294, 301–6, 308, 325–26, 335, 348–49, 521n46, 522n52; Maternity Convention, (C003) 1919, 69–71, 74, 76, 109, 146, 196, 204–5, 313; Maternity Convention (C103) (1952), 295, 312–313, 347; Night Work (Women) Convention (C004)(1919), 69, 71, 76, 146, 480n75; Night Work (Women) Convention (C041) 197–98; Women with Family Responsibilities Convention (R123) (1965), 362–64; Workers with Family Responsibilities Convention (C156) (1981), 364, 406
international l abor standards, 49, 51–52, 62, 87, 89, 132, 143, 280, 314, 356, 387, 421–22 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 26, 47, 112, 175, 179–82, 186, 225, 227 International Organization of Consumers Unions (IOCU), 402–3 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), 418–19 International Trade Union Resolution on Immigration, 461n40 Ireland, independence movement, 36, 60 Italy, 57, 84, 92, 96, 99–100, 285; Cassa Nazionale di Maternita, 57; Federation of Textile Workers, 57 Jackson, George, 383 Jain, Devaki, 384, 410–11 Jamaica, 125, 243–44 Japan, 31, 61, 65, 71–74, 92, 108, 130, 220, 285, 463n66, 518n7 Jaurés, Jean, 58, 276 Jeffrey, Millie, 386 Jewish Labor Committee ( JLC), 225, 227 Johnson, Lady Bird, 395 Johnson, Lyndon B., 351, 372–73, 377 Johnstone, Elizabeth, 357, 359, 364, 524n78 Joint Standing Committee of Women’s International Organizations, 146 Jorge de Tella, Pilar, 232 Joshi, Narayan Malhar, 60 Jouhaux, Léon, 42, 82, 85, 99, 279 Justo, Juan B., 141 Kabeer, Naila, 422 Kamada Eikichi, 72 Kaplansky, Kalmen, 333 Kara, Maniben, 327 Kato Taka, 130 Kawawa, Tashidi, 330 Kelley, Florence, 24, 26–27, 102, 110, 118, 120, 123, 159, 474n44, 475n6 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 150, 472n18
i n de x Kellor, Frances, 23–24, 160, 449n21 Kemp, James, 378 Kennedy, Florynce, 386 Kennedy, John F., 341–43, 351, 372 Kenya, 329, 367, 369, 379, 400–1 Kenyatta, Jomo, 244, 379 Kenyon, Dorothy, 209, 214, 218, 256, 259–60, 266–71, 292, 294 Keyes, Alan, 402 Keynes, John Maynard, 194, 372 Keyserling, Leon, 371–72 Keyserling, Mary Dublin, 362, 371–73 Khrushchev, Nikita, 321, 324, 527n120 Kingsbury, Susan, 116, 301 Kissinger, Henry, 388, 390 Kitchelt, Florence, 288 Kjelsberg, Betzy, 58, 89, 99, 197 Klein, Naomi, 418 Knights of Labor, 15, 19 Kropotkin, Peter, 88 Ku Klux Klan, 9, 103, 108, 114, 156, 158 Labour and Socialist International (LSI), 101, 141, 276, 470n84 Labour Woman, The, 147 LaDame, Mary, 164 LaFollette, Robert M. Jr., 290, 484n37 LaFollette, Robert M. Sr., 107 Landová-Štychová, Luisa, 57 Latin America, 127, 134, 138–39, 148–49, 202–5, 231–32, 236, 258, 284, 494n57, 516n130. See also Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM); Lima Declaration of Women’s Rights Law and Women’s Work, The (ILO), 218 League of Mexican-American Women, 375 League of Nations, 39, 45–46, 146, 206–208, 213–14, 218, 260, 458n5, 458n7, 469n73. See also Equal Rights Treaty (ERT) League of United Latin American Citizens, 229 League of Women Voters (LWV), 108, 143–44, 150, 471n16
561 Ledón, Amalia González Caballero de Castillo, 258, 282, 507n10 Legien, Carl, 81 legislation, US: Agricultural Adjustment Act, 165; Aid to Dependent C hildren, 169; Cable Act (1922), 480n72; Civil Rights Act (1964), 351–52; Civil Rights Act (1964), Title VII, 373–75, 377, 386, 397; Equal Pay Act (1963), 338, 348–49, 532n29; Espionage and Sedition Acts, 103; Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), 172–73, 195, 288, 346, 351–52, 372, 386, 485nn53–54, 494n57; Fair Labor Standards amendments, 174–75; Fair Labor Standards Amendments (1966), 352; Full Employment Act (1946), 371; Glass-Steagall Act, 165; Hart-Celler Act (1965), 352; Immigration Act of 1924, 104, 135, 499n13; Jones-Shaforth Act (1917), 488n76; Keating-Owen Act (1916), 110; Medicare, Medicaid (1965), 352; National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), 166–67, 485n53; nationwide childcare centers, 386; Naturalization Act (1790), 471n7; Percy Amendment, 387; Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the G.I. Bill), 290; Sheppard- Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, 109, 118–19, 123; Smith Act (1949), 270; Smoot-Hawley Act, 190–91; Social Security Act (1935), 168, 174, 485n54, 486n56; TaftHartley amendments (1947), 291, 293, 298; US Foreign Assistance Act, 387; Voting Rights Act (1965), 352, 532n40; Wagner Act (1935), 167–68, 173, 291, 371, 485n54 Lehman, Herbert, 180 Lenin, Vladimir, 88 Lenroot, Katharine, 162, 168–69, 271–72 Leopold, Alice Koller, 314, 334 Leslie, Mabel, 147 Lewis, John L., 176 Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organizations, 206 Liberia, 126, 263, 315
562 i n de x Life and Labor (journal), 31–32, 34, 36 Life and Labor Bulletin, 96, 131 Lima Declaration of Women’s Rights, 190, 215–18, 497n113 Lippmann, Walter, 16, 268 Living Wage, A (Ryan), 159 living wages, 17, 27, 273, 302, 323 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 232, 251, 500n35 Loughlin, Anne, 243, 249, 251, 253, 298, 319, 503n85 Lovestone, Jay, 367–68 Luisi, Paulina, 143–45, 479n66 Lutz, Bertha, 143–44, 149, 202, 249, 251–52, 257–58, 260, 505n113 Macarthur, Mary, 33–34, 40–41, 44–45, 57, 63, 70, 109, 452n48, 512n76 MacDonald, Ramsay, 94, 98 Magnusson, Leifur, 492n36 Majerová, Marie Stivinova, 58, 70 Makonnen, T. Ras, 244 Malcolm X, 371 male chauvinism, 4, 67–69, 74, 82–84, 303–4, 365–66, 369, 376, 409 Malone, Annie M. Turnbo, 179 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 351 March on Washington Movement, 228 Marcuse, Herbert, 382 Marino, Katherine, 144 Marson, Una, 243 Martinez, Aida González, 405 Marx, Karl, 88, 476n13 Mason, Vivian Carter, 265, 509n39 maternity rights and benefits, 28, 63, 69–71, 92, 109, 118, 146–47, 174, 204–5, 211, 269, 312 Maul, Daniel, 335 Mboya, Tom, 329, 367, 369, 379 McCarthy, Joseph, 270, 290, 294, 313 McDonald, Edith, 93, 101, 148 McGeachy, Mary Craig, 207, 495n74 McKenzie, Jean, 264 Means, Gardiner, 183–84, 488n87
Meany, George, 365–68, 371 Mehta, Hansa Jivraj, 282 Messenger, The, 113 Metzgar, Jack, 188 Mexican-American Political Association, 375 Mexico, 104, 129, 139–40, 142–44, 232, 317, 370, 390, 412; Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, 139 Meyer, Agnes, 365 Meyer, Eugene, 365 Milkman, Ruth, 423 Miller, Francesca, 239 Miller, Frieda: background of, 54, 180; and Bondfield, 98, 502n71; concurrent presen tation of UN covenants, 315; Congressional testimony, 292; “double day,” 290; equal pay debate, 288, 300–305, 521n41; and ERA, 378; FBI harassment, 314; household labor, 253, 309–11, 352; and ICFTU, 326; and ILO, 201, 203–5, 231, 247, 249, 252, 256, 272, 294, 316, 335, 340, 353–54, 387, 524n78; in India, 394; and Kenyon, 266–67; Maternity Convention amendment, 312, 347–48; rate for the job, 273, 301–2; and US maternity policies, 313; in wartime London, 240–42; and WLC, 54; at Women’s Bureau, 221, 242, 286–87; and Women’s Charter, 209; and WTUL, 180 Miller, Joyce, 407–8 Mink, Patsy Takemoto, 386 Mitchell, James P., 334 Moberg, Eva, 347 Modern Corporation and Private Property, The (Means), 183 Mohamed, Bibi Titi, 329 Moik, Wilhelmine, 319 Montgomery, David, 138 Moon, Henry Lee, 245 Moreau de Justo, Alicia, 58, 78, 140–41, 212, 235, 460n23 Moreno, Luisa, 187, 229 Morgan, Anne, 23 Morgan, Robin, 411
i n de x Morones, Luis N., 139–40 Morse, David A., 251, 279–80, 334, 356, 358–59 Moskowitz, Belle, 156, 158, 482n7 Moyn, Samuel, 283 Ms. magazine, 383 Mukherjee, Sharita, 274 Muller v. Oregon, 27 Mundt, Martha, 92, 148, 196 Murray, Pauli, 183–85, 228, 246, 267, 293, 337, 343–45, 370, 373–77, 386 Musser, Elise F., 205, 216–17 Mutō Sanji, 72–73 My Brilliant Career (Franklin), 32 Myrdal, Alva, 194, 272, 302, 530n5 Myrdal, Gunnar, 194, 334 Nader, Ralph, 396 Nagler, Isidore, 334 Nasser, Gamal, 328 National American Women’s Suffrage Association, 119 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 16, 24, 59, 125, 164, 262 National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 29–30, 56, 110, 112–13, 125–26, 451n36 National Association of Manufacturers, 121, 173 National Association of Wage Earners, 112–13 National Child Labor Committee, 313 National Committee on Household Employment, 352 National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, 108–9 National Consumers’ League (NCL), 26–27, 108, 110, 157, 159, 173, 219, 266, 372 National Council for Prevention of War, 224 National Council of Negro W omen (NCNW), 163–64, 175, 229, 246, 261–65, 314, 349–50, 390–93; International Advisory Board, 540n38; International Relations Committee, 261, 263
563 National Domestic Workers Alliance, 420–21 National Federation of Republican Women, 395 National Federation of Women Workers, 32–33, 91 National Institute for Houseworkers, 309 National League for the Protection of Colored Women, 24 National Organization for Women (NOW), 374–76, 385–86, 397, 539n18 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 166–67, 181–82, 191 National Recovery Administration, Labor Advisory Board, 162 National Union of General Workers, 91 National Union of Shop Assistants, 33 National War Labor Board, 37, 105 National Welfare Rights Organization, 376 National Woman’s Party (NWP): on equal pay, 288; on Equal Pay Act (1963), 532n29; and full rights feminism, 4, 120, 190; and ILO, 195, 204; and Latin America, 145, 149–50; on minimum wage, 203; and NOW, 374; origins of, 119; pro-business, 121–22, 154; racism of, 118, 351; sex amendment to Civil Rights Act, 351; Supreme Court minimum wage ruling, 120; and voting rights, 118; Women’s Charter, 210; Women’s Status bill, 289. See also Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); Equal Rights Treaty (ERT) Negro Worker, 243 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 263, 315, 328 Nestor, Agnes, 19, 21, 37, 54, 106, 112, 120, 129 Neuberger, Maurine, 346 New Deal, during FDR’s presidency (see chapters 6–8); post-World War II New Deal order (see chapters 9–11); women’s role in 1930s New Deal, 162, 164–65. See also Democratic Party; legislation, US New Deal feminists, 154, 255–56, 259–60, 286, 512n76 New Left, 371
564 i n de x Newman, Pauline, 13, 54, 98, 180, 200, 221, 240, 287, 289, 291, 302, 321, 378, 470n82, 487n70 New Republic, The, 290 New York Amsterdam News, 185 New York Consumers’ League, 23, 162 New Yorker, 162 New York Magazine, 383–84 New York State Factory Investigating Commission, 24, 153, 161 New York Times, 120, 204, 237, 269, 375 New York Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, 24 New York Working Women’s Society, 19–20 Nicaragua, 138 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 178 Nigeria, 317, 350, 359 night-work debate, 62–64, 69, 71–73, 76, 121, 130, 147, 197–98, 492n38 Nilsson, Karin, 197 Nixon, Richard, 386 Nkrumah, Kwame, 244, 328, 330–31, 370 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 399 North American Treaty Organization (NATO), 294, 518n2 Norton, Mary Theresa, 164, 172–73, 271–72, 289–90 Norway, 58, 84, 99 Nussbaum, Karen, 407 Nyerere, Julius, 329–30, 367 NY full voting rights, legislation, US, 450n26 O’Connor, Julia, 54 Ogata Setsu, 72 Olsen, Tillie, 187 O’Neill, William, 445n4, 452n47 Open Door International (ODI), 147, 196–97, 207, 360 O’Reilly, Leonora, 1, 15, 19–20, 23–24, 35–37, 54, 59–60, 130–31, 449n24, 461n27, 476n20 Organization of American States (OAS), 518n7 O’Sullivan, Mary Kenney, 15 Oudegeest, Jan, 85
Out of Work (Kellor), 23 Owen, Robert, 88 Padmore, Dorothy, 328, 367 Padmore, George, 243–45, 328 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 103, 107 Palmer raids, 102 Pan-African Congresses, 56–57, 125–27, 244–45, 475n6 Pan-Africanism, 125–27, 197, 239, 243–45, 331, 475n6 Panama, 138, 149, 179 Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women (PAAW), 143–44 Pan American Federation of Labor (PAFL), 138–40, 461n41, 478n53, 478n57 Pan-American Union, 140, 145, 148–50, 190, 201–2, 215, 217, 219, 479n57, 497n113. See also Comisíon Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM) Pandit, Vijaya Lakshmi, 260, 263–64, 315, 508n31 Panhispanism, 139, 144 Pankhurst, Christabel, 119 Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA), 134–36 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 38–39, 41–42 See also Treaty of Versailles Park, Maud Wood, 108, 143 Patten, Simon N., 160, 195 Paul, Alice, 118–20, 146–48, 198, 219, 288, 493n49, 502n62 Pearson, Drew, 164 People’s Peace Conference, Buenos Aires (1936), 205, 212 Percy, Charles, 387 Perkins, Frances: and AFL, 166, 195; and Anderson, 200; background of and social philosophy, 158–61; and Bethune, 163; Congressional investigations of, 169; conservatives and, 170; Democratic Party, 161; feminism of, 483n19; and ILC (1919), 312, 387; and ILO, 195, 199–201,
i n de x 224, 247–53, 271–72, 316; impeachment battle, 170–71; Japanese American internments, 231; “Ladies Brain Trust,” 165; Lima Declaration, 216; to London, 192; marriage and c hildren, 161; and Miller, 180; NIRA codes, 485n53; at NYC Consumers’ League, 23, 160; on NY State Industrial Commission, 55, 158, 161–62; progressive policies, 165–69, 171–75; rate for the job, 273; Secretary of Labor, 162; and Socialist Party, 160; social safety net, 193; Social Security Act, 168; and Springer, 246; US Civil Service Commission, 316; and van Kleeck, 191; visas for Nazi victims, 226; wage and hour law fight, 172; Wagner Act, 167; and WLC, 55 Perón, Juan, 502n64 Persinger, Mildred E., 391 Persons, Edward, 311 Pesotta, Rose, 182 Peters, Charles, 399 Peterson, Esther, 309–10, 337; and AFL-CIO, 340–41, 365; and Amalgamated, 247; American Labor Party, 489n92; Assistant Secretary for Labor Standards, 342; background of, 177–78; at Bryn Mawr Summer School, 182–83; civil rights, 349; Committee of Labor Women for Kennedy and Johnson, 342; and consumer rights, 396; critic of racial hatred, 226; and EEOC, 373; effect of 1930s labor movement, 176; equal pay debate, 308–9; on ERA and Title VII, 377; family responsibilities, 360, 362–64; and Frieda Miller, 180; and ICFTU, 295, 297–98, 319–24, 326, 364, 526n114; ICFTU summer school, 318; ILC (1961), 356–58; and ILC (1964), 359, 361; and ILO, 354, 358; international views, 355; IOCU representative at UN, 402–3; in Kennedy and Johnson administrations, 340; loyalty investigations of, 316–17; New Deal feminist, 299–300; and New York WTUL,
565 181; and NOW, 375; and PCSW, 342–43; race relations programs, 227; and Socialist Party, 186; on Soviet system, 324, 526n108; and Springer, 307; Sweden residence, 306, 345–47, 531n17; Title VII, 351–52; Women’s Bureau, 342, 348; at Women’s Bureau Labor Advisory Committee, 287; and W omen’s Status bill, 289 Peterson, Oliver, 177–78, 186, 297–98, 316–17, 321, 341, 396, 526n114, 533n52 Pfeffer, Paula, 145 Phelan, Edward, 199, 248–50, 253 Philadelphia Declaration (1944), 222, 224, 250–51, 256, 259, 273, 279, 283, 331, 333–34 Phillips, Marion, 89–91, 93–94, 101, 466n40 Pinchot, Cornelia Bryce, 265 Pinochet, Augusto, 382 Pittsburgh Courier, 228 Poland, 84, 52, 58, 62, 64, 197–98, 324, 327 Poo, Ai-Jen, 420–21 Popova, Nina, 265 Popp, Adelheid, 79, 101 Post, Louis F., 103 Potosky, Jacob, 297 Prebisch, Raúl, 356 pregnancy and maternity protections, 69–70, 109, 118–19, 130, 472n20. See also International Labor Organization (ILO), conventions President’s Commission on the Status of Women, 1961 (PCSW), 338, 342–48, 361, 374, 530n12 Profintern, 80–81, 88, 243 Progressive Party (1912 and 1924), 17, 106–7, 447n8 Puerto Rico, 124, 138–40, 180–82, 488n76 Raana Liaquat Ali Khan, 528n129 racism and discrimination: and AFL, 104–5; black poverty, 531n12; civil rights gains, 292–93; court cases as model for w omen’s rights, 344; Japanese American internments, 230–31; and NY WTUL, 24; Paris
566 i n de x racism and discrimination (continued) Peace Conference, 55–56; Social Darwinism, 7, 116–17; Southern Democrats and, 175; and Springer, 179, 245–46, 378; UN resolution on Zionism, 402; voting rights, 118, 532n40; White Australia Policy, 135; and white women’s organizations, 30, 55–56, 110–112, 163, 351; WWII and all-white unions, 227; WWII military, 261; and YWCA, 29. See also anti-discrimination; antiracism; civil rights; conservatism; Ku Klux Klan Rai, Lala Lajpat, 59 Randolph, A. Philip, 113, 179, 227–28, 245, 350, 372, 499n21 Rankin, Jeannette, 109, 164 Rauchway, Eric, 6 Read, Lucy Maxwell, 123 Reagan, Maureen, 402 Reagan, Ronald, 396 Republican Party, 106–7, 164, 171, 290, 294, 314, 348, 386, 395–96, 399, 406 Restless (Peterson), 299 Reuther, Victor, 299, 520n20 Reuther, Walter, 291, 299–300, 368 Richards, Yevette, 246 Robins, Margaret Dreier: and AFL, 95, 105; and Alice Henry, 31; and Anderson, 50; background of, 20; branded a radical, 49; and Bryn Mawr Summer School, 115; and China, 131–32; critic of FDR, 155; critic of Wilson’s policies, 464n8; disloyalty charge, 122; and Eleanor Roosevelt, 46, 55, 128, 456n94; and FDR, 452n45, 481n1; German speaking, 34; and Hanna, 465n20; Hull House, 21; and ICWW, 78, 81–83, 85, 88–90, 92; and IFTU, 83–84, 93–94, 467n56; and ILC, 68, 86; and ILO, 46; International Congress of Working Women, 13; labor’s sectarian battles, 96–97; League of Nations and Versailles Treaty, 46; minimum wage ruling, 120; NY Women’s Municipal League, 449n21; and PALF,
479n57; at Pan-American women’s conference (1922), 143; Republican vote, 107–8; in retirement, 133; sympathy with striking workers, 176; and Tanaka Taka, 73, 130; and WLC, 52–53, 56, 63–65, 67, 74; and World War I, 39, 255; and WTUL, 17, 19, 26, 47, 141 Robins, Raymond, 20, 133 Robinson, Dollie Lowther, 181, 226, 228, 287, 342–43, 349, 374, 418 Rodgers, Daniel T., 154 Roe v. Wade, 386 Roosevelt, Eleanor: and AFL, 278; and Al Smith campaign, 158; and Bethune, 163, 184; Camp Tera tour, 185; European journey after WWI, 54; and Human Rights Commission, 256, 280–84, 315, 415n115; Japanese American internments, 231; and Murray, 184; and New Deal, 164; new feminism (1960’s), 341; and New York governor’s race (1930), 162; PCSW chair, 342–43; Puerto Rico garment workers’ treatment, 182; against racism, 184–85; San Francisco UN Conference, 262; and UN Charter language, 507n11; UN voting rights, 264; and WLC, 54; and WTUL, 54–55, 157 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: and Anderson, 505n117; Argentina and, 236; and Bethune, 163; court packing, 172; “cradle to grave” social insurance, 168, 290; economic bill of rights (1944), 229–30; Equal Nationality Treaty, 493n49; “Forgotten Man” speech, 371; Four Freedoms, 229, 256, 259, 283, 287, 502n73; on full employment, 289; Good Neighbor policy, 202, 205, 234; and ILO, 100, 248, 250; Japanese American internments, 230–31, 500n33; and New York Democratic women, 158; New York governor, 161; and Perkins, 169, 171; understanding trade unions, 157–58; War Refugee Board, 499n15; WPA legislation, 166 Roosevelt, Theodore, 17, 125
i n de x Ross, Nellie Tayloe, 156 Rostow, Walt, 340, 530n4 Ruskin, John, 88 Russell Sage Foundation, 37, 52, 160 Russia, 46, 53, 80, 88, 107 Rustin, Bayard, 351, 372 Ryan, John, 159, 172 Sacco, Nicola, 103 Sandberg, Sheryl, 416, 546n1 Sandoval, José Enrique, 204 Sanger, Sophy, 40, 70 Sarabhai, Anasuya, 354 Sassenbach, Johannes, 92, 468n66 Sauvy, Alfred, 295 Schlafly, Phyllis, 395–96 Schlieper de Martinez Guerrero, Ana Rosa, 217, 233, 235, 237–38 Schneiderman, Rose: and AFL, 181, 280; and Al Smith campaign, 158; and Anderson, 47, 456nn96–97; background of, 19, 24–25; and Bondfield, 98; branded a radical, 49, 102, 122; “bread and roses” concept, 117; and Bryn Mawr Summer School, 113; domestic worker charters, 503n81; on economic cause of war, 109; Farm-Labor Party, 106; French labor, 43–44; to Havana, 231; human rights views, 57, 46–47; and ILC, 13; and ILGWU, 47; and ILO, 249, 279, 360; and Kenyon, 510n41; labor organizer, 25–26, 41; and New Deal, 194; and NRA L abor Advisory Board, 162; and NWP, 197; and PPWA, 134; Puerto Rico garment workers’ treatment, 182; Robins view of, 133; and Roosevelts, 156–57; and socialism, 192, 490n12; Socialist Party and, 25, 107; and Springer, 180; and Versailles Treaty, 39–40, 42–43; visit with President Wilson, 42. See also International Federation of Working Women (IFWW); Women’s Charter (WC); W omen’s L abor Congress, 1919 (WLC); Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL); Working Women’s Charter
567 Schnitzler, William, 365 Schwellenbach, Lewis, 292 Seidman, Gay, 425 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 394, 410–12, 419 Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, 484n37 Sender, Toni (Tony), 256, 275–80, 305, 319, 332, 521n41 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), 398 Seventh Pan-American Conference (Montevideo, 1933), 201–3 Sex worker organizing, 412–413 sexual violence, 403–5, 412–13 Shailor, Barbara, 407, 420–22 Shaw, George Bernard, 31 Shaw, Tom, 91, 94 Shepherd, Miriam, 78–79, 81 Shin Fujin Kyōkai (Association of New Women), 130 Shin Tak-Hing, 86, 130–31 Shotwell, James, 49 Sierra Leone, 126, 350 Simms, Florence, 28–29, 44, 55 Sipilä, Helvi, 388 Sisterhood is Global (Morgan), 411 Slave L abor in the Soviet World (AFL), 332 Sloan, Edith, 353 Smieton, Mary, 242 Smirnova, Riassa (Ray), 361 Smith, Al, 23, 55, 158, 161, 482n7 Smith, Constance, 70 Smith, Ethel, 96, 106, 118, 120–21, 150–51, 203 Smith, Hilda “Jane,” 114, 116–17, 182, 185, 277 Smith, Howard K., 351 Smith, Zadie, 2 Smuts, Jan, 258 Social Darwinism, 7, 15 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), 34, 276 Social Democratic Women’s Association, 99 social floors, 422 Social Gospel Christianity, 20, 23, 28–30
568 i n de x socialism, 3, 107, 122–23, 141, 186, 276, 315, 324, 371, 460n23 Socialist Party (US), 3, 17, 24–25, 103, 106, 160–61, 186, 191 Solis, Hilda, 420–21 Somavía, Juan, 406 Soule, Annah May, 159 South Africa, 392–393, 402; Sikula Sonke (We Grow Together), 412–13 Southern Negro Youth Congress, 382–83 Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress, 229 Springer, Maida Stewart, 176, 224, 226–28, 239, 245–46, 327–331, 368–69, 393, 487n67; and AFL-CIO, 330, 340, 355, 366–67; and Africa, 306, 328–29, 367, 369, 379; anticolonial internationalism of, 327–28, 330–31, 339; anti-Communism of, 300; background of, 178–80; at the Farm, 183–84; and ICFTU, 296; and ILC, 360–61; and ILGWU, 378; and London’s Black community, 243–45; at Nairobi World Conference on Women, 401; and NCNW, 540n38; and New York WTUL, 181; and NOW, 377; Pan-African Conference on the Role of Trade Union Women, 392; on Sharpeville massacre, 530n155; in Tanganyika, 330; and Third World countries, 328; travel to Sweden, 307–8; at UN First World Conference on Women, 391; at UN Third World Conference on Women, 400; Women’s Bureau (US), 221, 292 Springer, Owen, 179 Sri Lanka, 263, 353 Stalin, Joseph, 243, 257, 267, 321, 325 Starr, Ellen Gates, 21 Steinem, Gloria, 383–86, 394, 410 Stettinius, Edward, 262 Stevens, Doris, 148–50, 201–2, 205–6, 215–18, 237–39, 288, 493n55 St. George, Katharine, 349 Stimson, Henry, 261 Strand, Axel, 298–99 Straus, Dorothy, 266
Street, Jessie, 258, 260, 268–69 strikes and labor actions: Bombay textile workers, 131; care workers, 398; Chicago Harvester, 22; farmworkers, 352; garment workers, 19, 21–23, 25; general strikes (1930s), 175–78; heartbreakers’ strike, 178; laundry workers, 181; longshoremen, 169–70; Minneapolis truckers, 186; post WWII strike wave, 291; public sector strikes, 398; Puerto Rico sugar workers, 140; service worker strikes, 398; Shanghai general strike, 131; Steel Strike, 105; telephone operators, 54 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 339, 350, 371, 376, 382 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 371 Sukarno, Achmed, 328 Sullivan, “Big Tim,” 161 Sundquist, Alma, 57 Sun Yat-sen, 133 Supiot, Alain, 250 Sutter, Ann O’Leary, 366 Swartz, Maud O’Farrell, 19, 24, 26, 34, 97, 133, 142, 145, 157–58, 470n82; and AFL, 95; at Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, 498n3; Farm-Labor Party, 106; and Hanna, 84; and ICWW, 83; and IFTU, 93–94; and IFWW, 89, 93; and PALF, 479n57; and WLC, 54; and WTUL, 26, 91 Sweden, 57, 92, 99, 192–94, 197, 298, 306–10, 522n51, 531n20, 545n84; Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO), 193, 298, 308–9, 522n51; Swedish Domestic Workers Act, 310, 345, 522n57, 531n17; Swedish Social Home Help Program, 310, 345 Sweden: The Middle Way (Childs), 193 Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), 99, 193, 298, 308 Sweeney, John J., 407–8 syndicalism, 35, 43, 101, 103, 176, 182 Tallman, Eileen, 318 Tambor, Molly, 285 Tanaka Taka, 13, 61, 71–74, 78, 130, 285, 463n64
i n de x Tanganyika, 329, 359, 367–68 Tarre Murzi, Alfredo, 357 Tenayuca, Emma, 187 Terrell, Mary Church, 30, 56–57, 118, 126–27 Textile Labour Association of India, 354, 394, 410 Thibert, Marguerite, 206, 212, 252–53, 273, 495n69 Third International, 79–80, 101, 143. See also Communism; Profintern; USSR Third World, 295–96, 316, 328, 331, 335, 359, 363–64, 366, 369–70, 381, 390–91, 518n7. See also Bandung Conference; Global South; International Labor Organization (ILO) Third World Women’s Alliance, 376 Thomas, Albert, 85, 89, 196, 199, 248 Thomas, M. Carey, 113–15 Thomas, Norman, 186 Thorne, Florence, 279 Thurman, Howard, 263 Thurman, Sue Bailey, 263 Ting Shu Ching, 128, 475n9 Toledano, Rosa María Otero Gama de Lombardo, 232 Toledano, Vicente Lombardo, 232 Toni Sender (Sender), 276 Torres, Elena, 142–45 To Secure These Rights (US Committee on Civil Rights), 292 Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women (Smith), 150, 203 Toward Standards for the Household Worker (US Women’s Bureau), 310, 345, 522n56, 522n57 Towns, Ann E., 149 Treaty of Versailles, 38–39, 41–42, 46, 128, 213, 255, 456n91, 458n8 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 23, 25, 160 Trinidad, 140, 243 Troisbros, Simone, 363 Trujillo, Rafael, 202, 237–38 Truman, Harry S., 266–68, 270–71, 280–81, 291–92, 340
569 Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (1947), 292–93, 342 Tucker, Rosina, 499n20 Turkey, 317, 353, 393 Tuuri, Rebecca, 392 Twining, Edward Francis, 330 Uganda, 143–44, 201, 203, 234 Unione Agricola Femminile, 86 Union Labor Advocate, 31 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 191, 200, 223, 248, 257, 268–69, 277, 301, 321, 323–25, 332–33, 520n22 United Auto Workers, 176, 286–87, 299, 368 United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union, 25 United Nations, 405, 506n4; Charter of, 257–59; Commission on the Status of Women, 255–58, 260, 266–71, 282, 305, 342, 388, 507n16, 509n40, 511n53, 511n63, 520n24, 521n41, 522n52, 525n95; Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, 396, 541n48; Convention on the Political Rights of Women, 315; Decade for Women (1976–85), 381, 390; “Decade of Development,” 339; Declaration of Mexico (1975), 389–90; Economic and Social Council, 256, 266, 271, 274, 278, 280, 317, 332, 347–48, 522n59; economic and social rights, 315–16; First World Conference on Women (1975), 338, 380, 388–394; Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), 403–5; founding conferences, 255–58, 262; Human Rights Commission, 256, 259–61, 271, 274, 278, 280–84, 403; “International W omen’s Year,” 388; “right to social security campaign,” 422, 548n19; Second World Conference on Women (1980), 400; Third World Conference on Women (1985), 400–2; UNWomen, 417; Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993), 404–5; World Plan of Action (1975), 389–90
570 i n de x United States, 124–25, 285–86, 313–16, 352, 356, 371, 398, 533n53; Freedom Budget, 372; global power of, 399; imperialism of, 124–25, 128–29, 132, 138–39, 143, 182, 234–37 Universal Declaration of H uman Rights (UDHR), 222, 250, 256, 280–84, 333, 403, 514n103, 515n115 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 125, 179 University of Chicago, 21–22, 54, 71, 137, 159, 180, 240 Uralova, Evdokia, 264 Urban League Fellowship, 327 Uruguay, 143–4, 203 Uruguay W omen’s Suffrage Alliance, 144 US Chamber of Commerce, 121 US C hildren’s Bureau, 28, 162, 168–69; International Conference on Standards of Child Welfare, 48 US Constitution: Child Labor Amendment, 110; Fourteenth Amendment, 102, 120, 172, 174, 267, 344–45, 374; Nineteenth Amendment, 4, 108, 117–18, 385, 502n62. See also Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) US Department of Labor, 49, 56, 111, 162, 166, 169–71, 199, 226, 342, 453n65 US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 170–71, 226 US National Recovery Administration, 162, 166–67, 181, 191 US State Department, 261–62, 270, 317, 407, 533n52; and Anderson, 501n56; anti- Communism of, 299; and Cannon, 501n59; Cannon trip to Latin America, 234–35; and Doris Stevens, 149, 202, 217; and ERT, 216; and ILO, 356; international development policies, 340; international labor standards, 421; International Organ ization Employee Loyalty Board, 316; Pan-American Conference (1922), 143; Peterson, Oliver, 316–17, 321, 341; on
UDHR, 281; UN founding and, 261–62; visas for Nazi victims, 226; and WTUL, 49, 53, 142 US Supreme Court, 27, 104, 110, 120, 172, 182 US Works Progress Administration, 166 van Kleeck, Mary, 37, 52, 111, 116, 120, 190–92, 198, 209, 286, 453n65, 490n2, 490n4, 490n7 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 103 Veblen, Thorstein, 159 Vietnam War, 371, 380 Vergara, Marta, 202, 204, 497n115 Vida Femenina (Feminine Life), 235 Vineyard Shore School, 114 Waelbroeck, Pierre, 505n117 Wagner, Robert F., 23, 161, 167, 174 Walentynowicz, Anna, 407 Wallace, Henry, 184 Walling, William English, 15 Ware, Caroline, 183–84, 228, 341, 343, 355, 375, 533n53 Ware, Susan, 162 Warne, Colston, 402 Washington Post, 342 Waśniewska, Eugenia, 197–98 Weaver, George, 359 Webb, Sidney, 31 Weber, Maria, 362, 366 Weber, Rosa, 360 Weeks, John D., 123 Weidenbaum, Murray, 402–3 Welles, Sumner, 238 Wells, Marguerite, 495n85 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 24 White, Walter, 262 Wilkins, Roy, 350 Wilkinson, Ellen, 264 Wilson, Helena, 499n20 Wilson, Paul C., 161 Wilson, William B., 49–50 Wilson, Woodrow, 37–39, 42, 46, 49–50, 55, 107–8, 125, 464n8, 471n14
i n de x Winant, John G., 201, 240, 242–43 Winslow, Mary, 216–17, 224, 231–33, 237–38, 497n116, 502n65 With God in the World (Brent), 159 Wolfgang, Myra, 287 Woll, Matthew, 278 Woman as Force in History (Beard), 215 Woman Movement, The (O’Neill), 452n47 Women and the L abor Movement (Henry), 136 “Women in the World” (USDL series), 347–48 Women on Farms, 413 Women’s Bureau (US): American Woman and Her Changing Role Conference (1948), 292; and Anderson, 50, 122, 132, 162, 169; domestic work, 309; ERA opposition, 122; equal pay report, 348; Industrial Conference (1926), 121–22; Inter-American Division, 234; Labor Advisory Committee, 286–87; and Leopold, 314; and Mary Keyserling, 372–73; and maternity policies, 312; and F. Miller, 239, 242, 266; nonpartisanship of, 523n72; and E. Peterson, 342; rate for the job, 512n76; social democratic feminism, 287; state equal pay laws priority, 287–88; and van Kleeck, 191, 220; and Winslow, 231 Women’s Charter (WC), 190, 208–16, 219, 258, 282, 286, 496n87. See also Working Women’s Charters Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), 265, 325–26, 388, 509n39, 526n116, 527n118 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 36, 44, 57, 85, 108, 123, 127, 483n24, 498n5 Women’s Job Corps, 373 Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), 109–10, 123 Women’s L abor Congress, 1919 (WLC), 51–69, 74, 326, 458nn5–7, 460n21, 461nn35–36, 461n40, 462nn54–55. See also International Congress of Working Women (1919) Women’s Labour League (British), 34, 91
571 omen’s liberation movement, 375, 383 w Women’s Role in Economic Development (Boserup), 388 Women’s Strike for Equality, 385 Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), 447n1; and AFL, 94–95, 474n51; Argentine relations, 141; Austrian and German relations, 100; Black membership, 30; Bondfield and Macarthur at, 44; and 1912 Cable Act, 480n72; Canadian ties, 137–38; and China, 132–33; and communism, 278; constitution of, 16; conventions, 45–47, 127; and Democratic Party, 156; diversity policies, 104–5, 110–12, 132; domestic agenda, 292; and domestic workers, 487n72, 487n74; educational program, 22; elite white Protestants in, 16; European ties, 99, 106–7; founding and founders, 15–16; and ILC, 196; immigration policy, 104; internationalism of, 18, 30–31, 35, 47, 79, 98, 124, 448n11, 458n5, 475n2; and Kenyon, 266; and Latin America, 138, 140–41, 145; leadership of, 17, 24, 26, 54, 81; low income women priority, 219; Mexican relations, 142–43; and NWP, 117–18, 122, 150; NY minimum wage campaign, 180; Oriental Committee, 128; platform of, 16–17, 472n27; political party identifications, 17–18; post WWI goals, 102–3; post WWI positions, 81; and PPWA, 134–35; race relations, 229; and Schneiderman, 47; and Soviet Union, 81; third IFWW proposal (1923), 91–92; treatment by male l abor leaders, 84; US national office closes (1950), 286; and Wilson administration, 49; and WJCC, 109; on Women’s Charter, 209–10; women congress proposal (1919), 47; World War I and, 35, 37–38; and WWII, 224–25, 498n5; and YWCA, 28–29. See also British WTUL; Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); Equal Rights Treaty (ERT); International L abor Organization (ILO); Paris Peace Conference
572 i n de x omen’s Trade Union League, Chicago, 20 W Women’s Trade Union League, Philadelphia, 54 Women’s Trade Union League, NY, 23–25, 157, 180–81, 350, 482n4 Women Strike for Peace (WSP), 385, 538n15 Woodsmall, Ruth, 265 Woodward, C. Vann, 334 Working-class women: barriers to internationalism, 53–54; WTUL leadership in, 16, 50 Working Women’s Charters, 38–39, 42–44, 51–52, 62–64, 365. See also Women’s Charter (WC) World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), 68 World Federation of Trade Unions, 245, 274–75, 278, 320 World Social Forum, 417–18 World Trade Organization, 403 World War I, 6, 10, 29–30, 35, 37–42. See also Treaty of Versailles World War II, 220, 223–25, 227, 230–31, 233
World Woman’s Party, 219, 258, 260, 266, 497n104 World YWCA, 28, 85–86, 128, 130, 132, 146, 207, 265, 391, 401 Wu Yi-Fang, 257 Wyatt, Addie, 343 Young, Ruth, 187 Young India (journal), 59–60 Young W omen’s Christian Association (YWCA), 26, 28–29, 55, 110–11, 128–29, 264, 349–50. See also World YWCA Young W omen’s Christian Association, Industrial Department, 29, 48–49, 55, 108, 111, 113 Yunus, Muhammad, 411 Zayas Bazan, Laura G. de, 86, 89, 140–41, 479n56 Zetkin, Clara, 34, 101, 276 Zimmerman, Charles “Sasha,” 227, 367 Zimmermann, Susan, 146 Zung Wei-Tsung, 86–87, 131
a no t e on t h e t y pe This book has been composed in Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe.