Women's Activist Organizing in US History

A University of Illinois Press Anthology

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• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780252086410
  9780252044342
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252053337
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

Women in the United States organized around their own sense of a distinct set of needs, skills, and concerns. And just as significant as women's acting on their own behalf was the fact that race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity shaped their strategies and methods. This authoritative anthology presents some of the powerful work and ideas about activism published in the acclaimed series Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Assembled to commemorate the series' thirty-fifth anniversary, the collection looks at two hundred years of labor, activist, legal, political, and community organizing by women against racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and inequality. The authors confront how the multiple identities of an organization's members presented challenging dilemmas and share the histories of how women created change by working against inequitable social and structural systems.

Insightful and provocative, Women's Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Contributors: Daina Ramey Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Tiffany M. Gill, Nancy A. Hewitt, Treva B. Lindsey, Anne Firor Scott, Charissa J. Threat, Anne M. Valk, Lara Vapnek, and Deborah Gray White

From
Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History,
by Anne Firor Scott (1992)

CHAPTER 1

TO CAST OUR MITE ON THE ALTAR OF BENEVOLENCE

Women Begin to Organize (Excerpt)

ANNE FIROR SCOTT

Benevolence: Disposition to do good, desire to promote the happiness of others, generosity, charitable feeling.

—Oxford English Dictionary

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as the song had it, the world turned upside down. The whole complex of events and experiences encompassed in the Revolution and the formation of the Constitution created a sense of ferment, of new opportunities, but also of fear that the new experiment might fail if citizens were not up to the challenge. Women sensed new possibilities. John Adams was more prescient than he knew when he joked, in response to Abigail’s exhortation that he and his colleagues should “remember the ladies” when they wrote a new constitution, “We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent … But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. …”¹

By the 1790s, as President Washington, departing from office, was advising his fellow citizens to cherish virtue, education, and the new federal government, and Judith Sergeant Murray was announcing that young women were about to “form a new era in our history,” the first female benevolent societies began to appear.² They were the first step toward what Linda Kerber has called “a synthesis … that would facilitate women’s entry into politics without denying women’s commitment to domesticity.”³ Their self-imposed task was to fill at least part of the gap as the numbers of people in need increased and local government aid did not.⁴

While economic development had brought a rapid increase in the number of poor people, it also increased the number of business and professional men and skilled artisans who could support their families without relying on the full-time economic production of wives and daughters; such women were in the vanguard of benevolent organization. In 1800 even very prosperous families still relied on women for plenty of productive work, but as some goods once made at home began to be available in the market there was a margin of time that could be devoted to the kinds of collective enterprises hitherto the domain of men.⁵

There were precedents. Men had created voluntary associations for many years and women had occasionally made their own experiments, though none had lasted long.⁶ In Boston in 1778, for example, young Hannah Mather had organized a “woman’s lodge” for the purpose of “improving the mind, that by Strength and Wisdom, we might beautifully adorn the female character, …” but it disappeared when members married and began to have children.⁷ During the Revolution some women (probably more than were recorded) banded together to raise money, provide amenities to the soldiers, and support the movement for independence. These groups dissolved when the war was over, but memory of their accomplishments lingered.⁸

Women were also accustomed to the idea of benevolence; it meant a quality that good Christians were expected to exhibit, especially those whom God had favored with health, wealth, and standing in the community. Taking care of the less fortunate was not only a Christian duty, it might also insure one a place in heaven, and certainly enhanced the reputation of one’s family. Individual women had engaged in charity as far back as the record ran; now they proposed to join together for greater effectiveness.

The women set out to provide help for people in trouble: poor people, particularly those recognized as “worthy,” and especially women and children. The desire to do good was a powerful motivation, but it was not the only one. From the beginning, benevolent women—still under the influence of the challenges of the revolutionary age—were intent on their own spiritual and intellectual improvement An increasing number of women were acquiring some education and developing a desire for more. While young women would soon begin flocking to female seminaries, their mothers and married sisters tried to make benevolent societies educational institutions for themselves.⁹ Here and there a female “reading circle” or a literary society appeared—groups, usually of young, single women, intended entirely for self-education—but for the most part adult women seemed to feel more at ease seeking to improve themselves in a context of carrying out significant community responsibilities. Murray’s “new era in female history” was underway.

While development took place at different times in different places, over the first two decades of the nineteenth century most settled parts of the United States experienced rapid growth and increased interaction with the rest of the country. Voluntary associations of all kinds proliferated, to supplement the old institutional structures of family, church, and local government.¹⁰

The first “female societies” appeared in coastal cities from Savannah to Boston, but within two decades women in towns and villages all over the country, usually led by wives and daughters of the most visible and respected families, had begun to follow suit. In the rapidly growing cities poverty was increasingly visible, but in many prosperous towns and villages it was not yet a pressing problem; something more than simple need attracted women to collective activity. Though the swift rise of the benevolent society is often described as a response to the Second Great Awakening, the impulse to organize was not limited to places where the revival spirit had struck. Many women felt, however vaguely, that in the new age now coming into being a new kind of participation in community life was expected of them.

Societies took various forms and various names. In Philadelphia there was a Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances; in New York one group, inclined to specificity, called itself the Female Association for the Relief of the Sick Poor, and for the Education of Such Female Children as Do Not Belong To, or Are Not Provided For, by Any Religious Society; the Female Benevolent Society of St. Thomas and the Daughters of Africa were only two of many groups of free black women; in Savannah, Boston, and Petersburg, Virginia, white women combined to establish and administer asylums for female orphans, and in Baltimore to create a charity school for girls. Mite societies, cent societies, missionary societies, mutual aid, charitable and sewing societies were all variations on the same central idea. Whatever they called themselves, their essential activities were similar. Missionary societies began by raising money to send young men to preach in foreign parts or in the West, but very shortly many of them were engaging in local charity as well. Sunday school societies set out to provide a modicum of education for laboring children, but soon found that clothing and shoes were a necessary prerequisite to learning. Charitable societies distributed Bibles and preached temperance. Some groups were affiliated with a particular church, others were ecumenical, based on neighborhoods, kinship, or class.¹¹ Protestant groups were most numerous, but Catholic and Jewish women set up their own associations.

No matter where they were, who the members were, or what they called themselves, organizational forms were remarkably similar. Written constitutions were universal: every society established rules about meetings, the uses of money, and qualifications for potential recipients of charity.¹²

Free black women in New England and Pennsylvania were among the first to organize. Their motivation was in many ways quite different from that of their white contemporaries. Limited on all sides by prejudice and poverty, they began to establish societies for mutual aid and self-education. Despite the meagerness of their resources, they undertook to help one another and those even less fortunate. In 1809, for example, when the men in the African Benevolent Society of Newport, Rhode Island, though welcoming women’s labor, would not permit them to vote or hold office, the women set up a separate association. In 1818 the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society of Salem (Massachusetts) drew up a forthright constitution which could be distinguished from those of its white neighbors in Boston or Cambridge by its plain speaking and its focus on mutual aid and self-help. Article 4, for example: “We promise not to ridicule or divulge the supposed or apparent infirmities of any fellow member, but to keep secret all things relating to the Society, the discovery of which might tend to do hurt to the Society or any individual.” Or article 5: “We resolve to be charitably watchful over each other, to advise, caution and admonish where we may judge there is occasion, and that it may be useful; and we promise not to resent, but kindly and thankfully receive such friendly advice or reproof from any one of our members.”

The society announced that it was formed for the benefit of sick and destitute members, and that if any member committed a “scandalous sin, or walk unruly, and after proper reproof continue manifestly impenitent, she shall be excluded from us, until she give evidence of her repentance.”¹³

These strenuous requirements for self-monitoring and self-improvement reflected black women’s conviction that the behavior of one affected the image of all. For them, mutual aid was to be psychological as well as material.

While they read and talked, women knitted, sewed, or made palm-leaf hats to supply the needs of the poor, either directly or by selling their handiwork for cash. They solicited money and goods from sympathetic men and used the money to organize schools, orphans’ homes, homes for elderly women, soup kitchens, and employment services. For the most part members ran these institutions themselves, or hired needy women of their own social group to do so. “Managers” were assigned to visit people who needed help, and “prudential committees” allocated goods and money between meetings. A few societies experimented with work relief.¹⁴

White women’s societies nearly always made a distinction between the “worthy” and the “unworthy” poor. The first group was made up of what might be called the working poor: people they considered respectable and self-respecting but who had met with unemployment or illness or the common misfortune of having too many children. Once-prosperous widows who had fallen on hard times or were too old to work were viewed with special sympathy. On the other hand, people who seemed unembarrassed by their poverty, who loved rum, or were thought to be ingenious beggars who were able to take advantage of their benefactors, were deemed unworthy.¹⁵ Foreigners were often viewed with suspicion. In cities like Boston and New York, women worried lest they mistakenly help professional beggars or people who would sell their gifts to buy liquor. In small towns where most people knew each other, identifying people was easier. Occasionally some maverick member would raise the issue: Do we really know what “worthiness” is and who possesses it? But usually the concept was taken for granted and required no justification. Black women, by contrast, made few such distinctions; from their perspective virtually all African Americans who needed help were worthy of it.

Benevolent women brought their domestic habits into the public arena. Not only did they sew and knit for the poor just as they did for their own families, they also behaved as good mothers were supposed to: rewarding virtue, attempting to cure bad habits, and concentrating special attention upon children and old women, precisely as they did in their homes. They visited people in need, and liked to believe that warm relationships were established. Deaths of long-term clients were noted in the same words as those of longtime members.

Depending very much upon the capability of local leaders, societies varied in effectiveness and degree of sophistication. For example, one of the earliest—the New York Widows’ Society as it came to be called—was a well-run and wide-ranging operation from the start. Isabella Graham, the founder, a highly educated, self-confident Scottish woman, had considerable experience as a teacher, and had herself been a self-supporting widow. An intensely religious person who was never happier than when writing on theological issues, she was also an astute politician who gained support for her enterprise from powerful men in the government of New York.

The Widows’ Society was a prolific creator of long-lasting welfare institutions: schools, orphanages, workrooms for indigent women, for example.¹⁶ The intensity of members’ commitment might be measured by the fact that so many risked their lives by remaining in the city to provide aid to their clients during successive epidemics of yellow fever.¹⁷

A generation later Sarah Josepha Hale offered similarly creative leadership to the Boston Seaman’s Aid Society. Graham and Hale were well-known women; many others, never heard of beyond the boundaries of their own communities, demonstrated administrative skills and imagination in the pursuit of their goals. When no natural leaders emerged, societies formed in an initial burst of enthusiasm often dwindled and died. Thousands, however, survived, in old communities and new ones, in cities and country towns—anywhere there were women. In the frontier settlements charitable societies appeared almost as swiftly as town government. Simple as these early collective efforts may seem on the surface, when they are viewed as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Difference that Difference Makes
• 1 “To Cast Our Mite on the Altar of Benevolence: Women Begin to Organize” (Excerpt)
• 2 “‘There Sho’ Was a Sight of Us’: Enslaved Family and Community Rituals”
• 3 “The Daily Labor of Our Own Hands”
• 4 “Latin Women from Exiles to Immigrants”
• 5 “Performing and Politicizing ‘Ladyhood’: Black Washington Women and New Negro Suffrage Activism”
• 6 “‘It Was the Women Who Made the Union’: Organizing the Brotherhood”
• 7 “Nurse or Soldier? White Male Nurses and World War II” (Excerpt)
• 8 “‘Black Beauticians Were Very Important’: Southern Beauty Activists and the Modern Black Freedom Struggle”
• 9 “Organizing for Reproductive Control”
• 10 “Things Fall Apart; the LGBT Center Holds” (Excerpt)
• List of Original Publications
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover