Early 20th Century Feminism’s Long Legacy for Working Women

• In Event: Modes of Labor and Access to Citizenship: Looking beyond Judith Shklar

Abstract

White middle-class feminists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reached out to working women as they pursued suffrage, labor reform, and social policy changes. Viewing research as a means of public persuasion, some women—including Frances Kellor, Frances Perkins, and Crystal Eastman—conducted and/or published research aimed at improving life and working conditions for American labor. Activists including Margaret Dreier Robins, Florence Kelley, and Harriot Stanton Blatch (whose postures toward protective legislation differed) used organizational positions and resources to work for and with American labor, especially women.
Despite the alliances forged, working women were not comfortably part of the “women” that maternalist feminists spoke for and about. The authority of woman-centered knowledge and power claims in maternalist discourse in particular was premised on women’s position in the home, and on her experience in caring for others in the community through volunteerism and unpaid labor. The mainstream women’s movement habitually stressed the special—indeed, broader, and transformative—perspectives, values, and sense of citizenship that women as nurturers would bring to politics. The romanticized notion of home that middle-class reformers held up was far from the experience of women toiling in the needle trades or in other factory work. For those feminists who sought to expand middle-class women’s access to the workplace (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Paul, and Blatch), the manner in which some of these advocates envisioned the liberating potential of work hardly corresponded to the kind of jobs laboring women held.
Suffrage activists both needed working women and generally felt the needed to control the nurturing image of woman to maintain their authoritative voice. This had long-lasting implications for the kinds of policies white middle-class feminists advocated for those who toiled. Support for mothers’ pensions rather than for day care was one important indicator of the problem middle-class maternalist feminists had with mothers working outside the home, and with the kinds of work most of these women performed. With racially biased implementation of mothers’ pensions and racial discrimination affecting access to the day nurseries that existed, the choice of mothers’ pensions as a policy tool had major implications for working women of color.
Working-class women’s access to the public sphere for purposes of deliberation, lobbying, and reasoned discourse was still tightly constrained, despite the fact that a number were accomplished speakers with a strong sense of agency. This was also largely true for organized middle-class Black women, who sought public and private resources to improve their communities and who sought day care for working women, along with Black kindergartens in a number of cities. A number of their goals were comparable to those of their organized progressive era white female counterparts, but organized Black women generally faced a less receptive state and had to be more resourceful to provide some services that were elsewhere considered the role of the public sector.
Working-class female activists helped energize, revitalize, and strengthen the suffrage struggle, but laboring women joined for reasons that differed from their more privileged sisters. Their experiences of the state (made especially vivid during strikes) differed markedly from that of their allies. They often saw the vote as a means of protecting themselves from the state. All in all, progressive era women’s relationship with the state was highly specified by class and race.
This paper examines the implications of tensions around women’s work in dominant feminist discourses for policy innovation and understandings of citizenship from roughly 1900 to the New Deal. There were lasting legacies of choices made in the early years of the 20th century.

Author

• Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College