Women's Organizations
Encyclopedia of American Social History, Volume 3, ©1993
Nancy G. Isenberg

  

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Social reform has always played a major role in American history, and women contributed to this activity by building a vast array of voluntary organizations. During the nineteenth century, female reformers laid the groundwork for various organizations as they entered the public sphere, formed single-sex institutions, and gained the power to provide women with social and cultural resources. Initially these voluntary societies emerged as extensions of local charities and churches. As women changed their relationship to the state, these organizations set new goals. Even as "voluntary," associations, most organizations expanded their formal connections to government on municipal, state, and federal levels. Because of their persistent role as welfare agencies, women's organizations necessarily confronted a wide range of social problems; as class, ethnic, gender, and racial dimensions of the larger society changed, these groups modified how they defined their constituencies, reform practices, and policies. Women's organizations have always provided services to the community, but in significant ways these institutions also transformed the role and status of women in the American polity.

Women's Societies, 1800-1837 

When women first organized benevolent societies after the revolutionary war, they were guided by a philosophy drawn from the eighteenth century. "Society" meant "polite intercourse" and "friendly visits" among the English well-to-do classes; it defined a special enclave that protected elites from the contamination of the world--or, the temptations of "the flesh, and the devil" (Spacks, p. 1). By adapting this view to a republican nation, reformers argued that societies could serve a civic and moral function in the public sphere. "Carnal talk," idleness, and fleshy indulgences could be mitigated through benevolent assistance and moral supervision. At the same time, the "love of society" instilled citizens with a sense of duty, trust, and discipline, all the essential virtues necessary for a young Christian republic.

In their most basic form, the early societies represented an extension of the moral functions of the church. In 1818, when the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society organized in Salem, Massachusetts, its constitution made moral guidance a paramount concern, resolving "to be charitably watchful over each other, to advise, caution and admonish" (Scott, p. 14). In addition to rigid rules of moral discipline, societies also encouraged self-control as another useful virtue for their female constituency. Economic duties also defined the link between the church and most local women's societies. Disestablishment made most congregations dependent upon the proceedings of these organizations to maintain church facilities. Cent, mite, and sewing circles all engaged in raising money for various church projects. In Virginia, both black and white societies retained strong ties to particular churches and their biblical heritage, identifying themselves as the "Dorcas Society" and the "Good Samaritan Sisters" (Lebsock, pp. 216-217, 223).

Female charitable societies directed most of their finances toward subsidizing the welfare needs of women in the community: They not only knitted for the poor but they also solicited money and goods to organize Sunday schools, orphanages, workrooms, and asylum houses for training young girls as domestic servants. Programs often addressed the specific economic needs of women; for example, Mary Webb of Boston worked to establish a Fragment Society (1812) to clothe poor women and children, a Fatherless and Widows Society for indigent widows and abandoned women, and a Children's Friends' Society (1833) for caring for the babies of working women. In a practical way, these societies filled a gap in the available community services, especially when towns and cities reduced aid to the poor. These institutions also offered an alternative to the almshouses that benevolent workers felt represented the worst aspects of the "world."

One of the earliest societies in New York City was the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children organized in 1797 by Isabella Graham (1742-1814) and her daughter, Joanna Bethune (1770-1860). This mother and daughter team laid the foundation for a series of organizations, such as the Orphan Asylum, which was incorporated in 1807 and given state funding as early as 1811. Following the War of 1812, they also established a House of Industry for women, and later they organized the Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath Schools. Through her family and class connections, Bethune secured patronage from city officials. Through incorporation, these societies granted female directors legal powers not usually afforded women; they could own property, invest, sue, and manage institutions without the direct supervision of men. Most societies adopted standard business practices, assigning "managers" to visit people and "providential committees" to allocate goods and money (Scott, p. 14).

Benevolent women never actually claimed rights to political powers. Instead, they claimed the duty to protect women, especially such "respectable women" as widows, orphans, and deserving daughters of the middling classes. Much of the early charity work was aimed at widows, a group that symbolized the precarious nature of married women's economic dependency on men. Implicitly, then, benevolent women realized that the "protection" of women could not be left in the hands of men alone. Prodigal husbands or greedy fathers could destroy a family, leaving even virtuous women destitute. Benevolent women valued and protected women and they learned to utilize the available community resources for moral and material purposes.

Women's Societies, 1837-1860 

During the 1830s women shifted the scope and purpose of their organizations from local benevolence to collective campaigns for the moral regeneration of the nation. In response to the message of evangelical religion, female reformers replaced the older philosophy of guardianship with a new focus on transforming human behavior and attitudes. Conversion became the goal of most antebellum societies; members were called upon to spread the gospel of reform while they battled "sin" in all segments of society. Through the distribution of tracts and petitions, female reformers shaped "moral opinion" in a more visible and public way than their benevolent predecessors. At the same time, the eradication of sin called for more radical measures: the passage of more stringent laws, the holding of public events such as rallies and fairs, and the aggressive condemnation of a new enemy--immoral and unrepentant men.

What made this new generation of reformers "militant" was their explicit attack on male authority. When the New York Female Moral Reform Society formed in 1834, the organizers sought to eliminate prostitution through old and new measures: they would protect and "reclaim" their "fallen sisters" and they would "create a public sentiment" against the sexual double standard. Moral reformers called for the public humiliation of men who seduced "innocent" female victims, advocating criminal prosecution or exclusion from the company of "all virtuous female society" (Smith-Rosenberg, p. 201).

This new zeal reflected changes in the class composition of female reformers. Unlike the benevolent matrons with ties to elite members of the government, these moral reformers came from the artisan and middling ranks of society. Such class tensions emerged in their literature, which often portrayed the villains as powerful and influential men and their victims as women from poor but respectable families. Hostility toward aristocratic privileges emerged as a theme of other reforms, like temperance, in part because it reflected the social upheaval wrought by economic dislocation. One catalyst for the Daughters of Temperance was the depression of 1839-1843 that left many families destitute. For women, intemperate behavior came to symbolize male seduction, which changed "a kind and affectionate father" into a "terror" who abused his wife and children and left them impoverished (Tyrell, p. 139).

Like moral reform and temperance, the slavery issue aroused female reformers' sense of moral outrage, and, as in other causes, the unrepentant male slave-owner, driven by avarice, lust, and selfishness, was cast as the principal villain. Called to pray, write, and speak against this national sin, antislavery women aimed to battle slavery through education. By spreading the gospel of reform, they would reach the hearts and minds of American women. Indeed, they believed that the power of women's sympathies for the "oppressed female slave" could move the entire nation toward emancipation.

If salvation from sin was the end, then education provided the means for saving the American masses. Consequently, education loomed large as another major concern of antebellum female reformers.

Teaching became a sacred vocation, and women as well as men were needed for this redemptive work. In 1837, Mary Lyon (1797-1849) established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary on principles that differed from the previous female academies. Lyon's fund-raising strategies reflected her evangelical roots; she went door-to-door distributing circulars and recruiting pledges for her school. Lyon also believed that not only the state but also the "Christian public" should finance her institution. That same public should supply students and converts from the "daughters of the church." By making Mount Holyoke a "school for Christ," Lyon also felt its goal was to "cultivate the missionary spirit among its pupils" (Sklar, pp. 198-199). As a result, her graduates would spread the gospel of moral reform while building new schools and forming a national network of female reformers.

The antebellum period, then, saw the rise of women's public activism as the basis for their organizations. Female reformers combined the evangelical quest for moral perfectionism with the democratic ethos of nation building. Whereas women shared many of the same techniques as their male peers, especially in their use of the media, they also surpassed men in such endeavors as raising money through fairs and collecting subscriptions. Antislavery women transformed the meaning of collecting petitions by organizing the first national political campaign that included the signatures of both men and women. Women not only contributed their "works" to these various reform causes, but their "words" in identifying how gender constructed power relations. Within this new climate, middle- and working-class women claimed reform as their arena for public service and political change.

Women's Associations, 1860-1890 

Women's War Relief

The Civil War brought a new generation of women reformers into the field of benevolent work. These women were less concerned with moral reform than with coordinating a quasi-military organization for the relief of soldiers. In the North, the Woman's Central Association of Relief (WCAR) in New York organized in 1861; it recruited women of the urban elite with professional and business rather than evangelical aspirations. Unlike their antebellum counterparts, this new cohort of women sought a "partnership" with the government and they established close working relations with men involved in the United States Sanitary Commission.

Confederate women, like Union supporters, organized a variety of local sewing circles (Thimble Brigades in the South), Soldier's Friends Associations, and societies for relief. In 1862, Georgia women founded the Ladies Gunboat Association to collect funds for dwindling military supplies. In the North, civilian aid assumed a rigid and hierarchical structure. Local societies sewed, canned goods, and prepared packages; the regional offices collected the supplies and sent them to railroad stations; and the central office distributed the items to agents and hospitals on the front. In 1863, the WCAR adopted the Boston Plan for Sectional Divisions, which called for associate managers to serve as intermediaries between the national and local branches. Managers kept the central office abreast of "the state of affairs in her neighborhood" (Ginzberg, p. 152). Success depended on the distribution of information as well as supplies, which required managers to keep detailed records and to maintain constant correspondence with their Washington supervisors. Such efficiency assumed a corporate model; good business management characterized women's war work.

After the war, northern women sought formal access to state governments through appointments to the charity boards. In 1872, Louisa Lee Schuyler (1837-1926) organized the State Charities Aid Association, which recruited city professionals and elites, promoted expert supervision of charity services, employed associate managers and visiting committees, and kept detailed records of recipients and resources. Clearly, the climate had changed in the postwar era, yielding both positive and negative results. Although these women paved the way for a more bureaucratic charity system, they also advocated a rather narrow vision of moral reform. Middle-class leaders of the New York Charities Association and state boards had little sympathy with alternative methods of reform, such as the Catholic Sisters organizations, which vied with Protestant groups for limited state resources. By imitating men so well, charity reformers often placed efficiency above the particular welfare needs of women, a strategy that aided the vast growth of the corporate state in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Women's Missions and the Christian Temperance Union

The missionary zeal of evangelical reform had not died by the postwar years. In 1861, Sarah Doremus (1802-1877) a leader in the Dutch Reformed Church, organized an ecumenical Woman's Union Missionary Society, which survived the war and laid the groundwork for the various denominational societies. Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist women all formed foreign missions between 1869 and 1871. Combining local meetings with a national newspaper, the mission societies resembled their antebellum models. What had changed was a new sense of American exceptionalism and expansion that mission women both embraced and critiqued. Although they advocated the spread of Christianity in distant lands, they noted the harsh consequences of imperialism unmediated by women's religious influence. Mission women evoked a woman's point of view when evaluating foreign cultures; they focused on the troubling similarities between male authority afar and at home. Yet they did not escape their own cultural heritage, producing a literary and political message that combined exoticism with feminine empathy for their "heathen sisters."

The very same organizational techniques and gospel message would emerge in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), one of the most influential religious and political movements of the nineteenth century. Although temperance was not new, the WCTU made the campaign a woman's enterprise. Organized in 1873-1874, the initial crusaders adopted a militant style; they visited hotels and saloons, praying and singing, while asking the owners to stop selling alcoholic beverages. What began as revival quickly changed into a well-coordinated national campaign that drew women from different regions and denominations. The WCTU adopted the women's mission pattern for mobilizing a large, but locally based, network of female laborers. Early programs gained grass-roots support by signing pledges and calling for members to hold mass meetings. At an early stage, however, the WCTU functioned as both a "praying society" and an "activist organization" (Bordin, p. 13). It retained a stable and professional corps of national leaders and adopted a broad-based policy of "Do Everything" that gave autonomy to local unions. Like the mission movement, the WCTU relied on an extensive communication network and published its own newspaper, the Union Signal, whose circulation grew to 14,000 by 1884.

Frances Willard (1837-1898), serving as president of the national movement from 1879 until her death, gained prominence as a traveling ambassador and lecturer. In advance of most local union members, Willard combined the goals of temperance and suffrage under the rubric of "Home Protection." By praying and working for legislation, Willard argued that temperance women could preserve the tranquillity of the home. By adopting the theme of "maternal love," Willard assigned to women a special destiny as the divinely chosen guardians of human morality. Ultimately, the WCTU attempted to transform the state and civil society according to their vision of maternal virtue. To protect the home, women had to instill certain feminine ideals into the very fabric of all local, state, and national institutions.

Young Women's Christian Association

Another kind of home mission work emerged in the cities during the nineteenth century. The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) started as a prayer society and blossomed into clubs, boardinghouses, and classes for working women. In 1858, the New York Ladies' Christian Association held prayer meetings in a Manhattan skirt factory and soon established a residence for twenty-one young women. Similar organizations formed in other cities, as founders embarked on city missionary work that aimed to provide "the influence and protection of a Christian home" for single laboring women (Scott, p. 104). Grace Hoadley Dodge (1856-1914), one of the leaders of the movement, established the 38th St. Working Girls' Society in 1884; by the following year, clubs in other cities joined forces to form the Working Girls' Association of Clubs. During the next ten years, nineteen clubs existed in New York City alone.

At first the clubs provided inexpensive housing for working women, but the goals of the association expanded to include cheap amusements, libraries, and gymnastic facilities. The YWCA sharply distinguished itself from charity facilities that provided welfare for the poor and instead it advocated self-support and self-improvement among working women. Instruction in vocational training was combined in most working girls' clubs with more traditional classes in home economics.

Although the organizers of the YWCA sought to cross class barriers, they did not always succeed. A gulf existed between working women and their middle-class benefactors, especially by the 1890s when factory women attempted to push the clubs toward labor activism. Too much supervision over working women's behavior also became a point of contention. Even the domestic ideology offered by YWCA leaders had little appeal for working women, in part because it suited middle-class and non-working-class households. And despite their appeals to diversity, the YWCA focused on American-born workers and rarely extended its services to foreign-born women. As a result, the YWCA may not have achieved all of its goals, but it did create an organization that recognized working women as actors and not simply as passive recipients of charity assistance.

Women's Club Movement

Working girls' clubs differed from the more prominent branch of the Club movement that began with the New England Women's Club and Sorosis in 1868. Through the initiative of Jane Croly (1829-1901), Sorosis aimed to provide an all-women environment that encouraged "self-culture" among its membership. A place for educated women "hungry for the society of women," Sorosis established four committees on literature, art, drama, and music. Although Croly believed that women shared a special appreciation for "culture for culture's sake," she believed that club women should study culture's effects upon the welfare of women. At first, Sorosis functioned as an elite "think tank," recruiting the most talented professional women from the city. As a "kind of freemasonry among women," Croly hoped to establish a neutral gathering place for different reformers, making the club a forum for unity and discussion (Blair, pp. 20, 23, 25, 28, 31).

Sorosis meant "aggregation," and the New York club attracted women already involved in other reform activities. The New England Women's Club (NEWC) was active from its inception in political causes, nor did the group limit its membership to women alone. Ednah Dow Cheney (1824-1904), one of the founders, had been active in a variety of campaigns before the club's formation: she started the Boston School of Design (1851); served as secretary and president of the New England Hospital for Women and Children (1862); and she organized a teacher's program for the Freedmen's Bureau from 1867 to 1875. Perhaps the major advance of the NEWC was the organization of the Women's Education and Industrial Union in 1877, under the direction of Dr. Harriet Clisby. "Industriousness," not merely self-culture, served as their motto. They produced several reform experiments, including a women's store, lunchroom, health clinic, job registry, and legal assistance service (Blair, p. 80).

From the beginning, Croly sought to nationalize and centralize the club movement, calling a Woman's Parliament in 1869, forming the Woman's Congress and Association for the Advancement for Women in 1873, and organizing the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1890. At the same time, black middle-class women organized the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, the first national organization of black club women, which combined two older groups: the National Federation of Afro-American Women (organized under the aegis of the New Era Club of Boston) and the National League of Colored Women. Although Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) was the guiding force of the Boston black women's club, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) would inherit the leadership of the national organization. Like Sorosis, the NACW served as an informational clearinghouse of ideas from the "talented tenth" of the black community. The NACW also shared the domestic philosophy of the WCTU and the white women's club movement. Terrell advocated specific reforms that recognized the economic needs of black working women. Kindergartens, day nurseries, and mother's clubs became the principle items of their agenda. Their demand for "Homes, more homes, better homes, purer homes" reflected a specific urgency not found in the white women's club movement (Jones, p. 26). It indicated that black club women had to contend with racism as a force that permeated all aspects of the black community.

Through the end of the nineteenth century, clubs served a variety of purposes for their members. On the local level, women used the clubs for cultural activities, such as reading and study groups. Class status, religion, and even professional affiliation separated the membership of clubs in most communities and cities. Within each region or municipality, the clubs assumed a wider role in supporting community projects, such as the funding of memorials, playgrounds, and libraries. Black club women often focused their efforts on establishing health facilities, including hospitals and health clinics. Yet the clubs also served a third and decidedly political function: they provided a female training ground in "civics" for future political activists. By the 1890s, most clubs had joined forces with other organizations for the promotion of legislative and political reforms. Like the WCTU, club members claimed that society was an extension of the home and women had a special vocation for "Home Protection" and "Municipal Housekeeping."

Women's Associations, 1889-1930 

Settlement Houses

While the clubs gained national prominence in the 1890s, another reform experiment emerged on the urban landscape, the Settlement House. The best-known settlement was Hull-House, organized by Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940) in 1889, which was modeled on Toynbee Hall, a settlement formed by male university students in East London. By creating a distinctive "colony" of female reformers, the settlement house served both "objective" and "subjective needs," in the words of Addams: it offered social services to the urban poor, mainly the foreign-born population, while it created a unique retreat for educated women with professional aspirations (Rousmaniere, p. 47). Most settlements duplicated the unique female culture offered in the women's seminaries and colleges. As a female community, Hull-House provided its members with an alternative to a more traditional family life. Equally important, as a separate female institution, the settlement offered women a supportive base within the larger community of Progressive reformers. Here women could establish networks with male activists, business leaders, and government officials without losing their influence as female activists.

Initially, the settlements resembled the urban clubs, offering literary and cultural activities. Soon the settlement became a more complex kind of reform agency that provided services for working women, day care for their children, rooms for social and political gatherings, and a training ground for educated women interested in the scientific study of urban problems. By 1910, Hull-House had expanded into a vast array of buildings filling an entire city block. Soliciting funds was part of Addams's duties as an administrator, and she served as a link between the settlement's workers and its financial backers. Similarly, but for different ends, the settlement mediated between the urban population and city institutions. It worked to bring needed services into the community while protecting the neighborhood from the encroachment of the ward bosses. Addams believed that Hull-House, as a model social democracy, integrated the political, economic, and cultural life of the city. In a unique way, the settlements placed a premium on human solidarity and diversity, recognizing that together the residents and reformers created a multicultural experiment in political democracy.

Women's Leagues

Interest in the problems facing working women led reformers in new directions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Middle-class women recognized their prominent role as consumers and they mobilized their concerns into a new organization that would improve working conditions for women and children. Under the guidance of Maud Nathan (1862-1946) and Josephine Lowell (1843-1905) the Consumers' League was formed in 1890 in New York City. Its primary goal was to convince consumers to patronize those department stores that adhered to the "Standards of a Fair House," a guideline published by the League that promulgated fair wages, hours, and safe working conditions. As a pressure group, the League created a "White list" that identified those stores that met the League's standards. In 1899, the National Consumers' League was organized and spawned the formation of branch groups across the United States and abroad.

The National Consumers' League was not always successful in gaining the support of the labor unions. In 1904, the use of product labels triggered a clash with the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union. Yet another organization, the New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), made a more concerted effort to work with unions. Organized in 1903, the WTUL promoted the advantages of unions for female workers, supported the formation of several women's trade unions, and worked to convince male labor organizers to support their efforts. What made the WTUL different from other middle-class organizations was its commitment to unionization. Its other unique feature was the prominence of working-class women in leadership positions. By 1907, as the initial constitution had stipulated, three of the five board officers were working-class activists. One key member of the board was Leonora O'Reilly (1870-1927), a settlement worker and an early labor organizer for the Knights of Labor. The WTUL did not achieve a perfect alliance between working- and middle-class members. Nor did the leadership secure a harmonious relationship with male unionists. But the WTUL did gain publicity for a large number of strikes, such as the New York garment strike of 1909-1910. Similar to other women's organizations, the WTUL generated public opinion, offering a "radically" different perspective from "the accepted opinions and ideals of men" (Dye, p. 285).

Similarly, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), formed from the membership of the Woman's Peace Party in 1915, followed this tradition and extended its influence into the arena of world politics and foreign policy. One of its principal organizers was Jane Addams, whose devotion to peace and international tolerance had its roots in her theories of social democracy. In 1899, Addams began lecturing against American imperialism, and in 1907 she published her lectures as Newer Ideals of Peace. Addams sought to change the meaning of heroism from a masculine and destructive principle to one based on harmony and justice, a shift she claimed was "the moral equivalent of war" (Degen, p. 20). The League symbolized the integral relationship between women's values and political action, demonstrating the view shared by most nineteenth-century reformers that women's influence could transform the world. The WILPF assumed that if women held more influence in the state, both domestic and foreign policy would change. Ultimately, the goal of the WILPF was to replace military conflicts with arbitration. Although this call for peace had little sway at the time, Addams's philosophy would reappear in later organizations and platforms, such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

Alumnae Associations and Black Sororities

The women's college associations and black women's sororities represented the last major advance in middle-class women's organizations during this period. Regional college associations first appeared in the Northeast and West in the 1880s, and eventually spread to the South in 1903. A national alliance organized in 1921 when the American Association of University Women formed. Both regional and national associations worked for educational legislation, to promote state teachers' pensions, uniform school attendance, and child labor laws. Conscious of their status as women and professionals, the college association advocated equal wages for women, calling for a "living wage" for college-educated employees (Talbot and Rosenberry, p. 229). One of its founders, Marion Talbot (1858-1948), represented a new generation of modern professional women. Rejecting the conventional assumptions about women's nature, Talbot believed that women could not lay claim to any unique moral capacities. Rather than segregating the sexes, Talbot believed in coeducation and equal opportunities for women. Based on their educational experiences, the college association members hoped to create a new identity for professional women.

White and black sororities sought to supplement the college curriculum by educating women for their future roles as citizens. As a training ground for civic leadership, sororities advocated social responsibility and self-government. The first white sororities appeared in the late nineteenth century, and they established scholarship programs, funds for the creative arts, and social welfare projects. Typically, the female Greek societies followed the pattern of male fraternities: they built chapter houses, secured an endowment fund, published an official magazine, and organized alumnae chapters in major cities. In 1902, Alpha Phi summoned the Intersorority Conference that subsequently reorganized as the National Panhellenic Conference (Baird, p. 393).

Black women's sororities combined professionalism with their continued support for "racial uplift" and political activism against racism. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, founded in 1908 at Howard University, provided funding and trained personnel for the campaign against lynching in 1934, followed by a summer school for rural teachers and a nutrition clinic in 1940. The Black Public Health Movement gained much of its support from sororities, since many of the public health nurses used this organization as a communication and recruitment network.

These professional associations defined the trends in women's organizations. In the coming decades, women active in the leagues, clubs, and professions paved the way for both white and black women to play a significant role in state and even federal government during the New Deal era. Certain traditions continued as women's organizations focused on civic education, business policies, social welfare, issues of foreign relations, and the status of women. As middle-class women moved to the suburbs following World War II, local, municipal, and educational issues again became the preserve of women's reform efforts. Both environmentalism and antinuclear war sentiments drew on earlier peace efforts and conservation campaigns as well as the intellectual contributions of academic women like biologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964; author of Silent Spring, 1962).

A new wave of women's organization-building reemerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Sparked by the civil rights movement, female members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) participated in the foundation of Economic and Research Action Projects (ERAP) in order to build ties to the "urban poverty sector" (Sealander and Smith, p. 332). Organizing around two women's issues--welfare and schools--female activists helped mobilize Mothers for Adequate Welfare (MAW) and Citizens for Adequate Welfare (CUFAW), both of which contributed to the success of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) (Evans, pp. 142-143). Welfare mothers demonstrated a new militancy as active members of these groups; between 1967 and 1969, they staged sit-ins, demonstrations, and regular disruptions at welfare offices.

Middle-class women later applied the same techniques in protesting sexual discrimination against white-collar workers. By 1977, the National Women's Employment Project (NWEP) linked together a network of urban organizations that investigated businesses, produced case studies, and publicized violations of antidiscrimination laws (Sealander and Smith, pp. 325-327). Initially, the NWEP gained support from the federal government. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, for example, supported the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act. Public-pressure groups were needed to enforce the new federal legislation. One such group was the National Organization for Women (NOW), which mobilized in 1966 "to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now" (Woloch, p. 513). Although NOW focused on securing women's civil rights, it endorsed the broader grass-roots activities for women's liberation. In addition to establishing consciousness-raising groups, feminists turned to the federal government to fund a variety of women's centers. Often providing "a smorgasbord of services," centers like the one started in Dayton, Ohio, provided self-help classes, advocacy and referral services, political and personal counseling, a day-care cooperative, and a meeting place for a rape task force and a lesbian organization, Sappho's Army (Sealander and Smith, pp. 325-327).

Building on well-established traditions of women's organization-building, feminists also increased their dependence on federal funding, often curtailing the growth of a viable grass-roots base of community support. While the Dayton women's center used federal Model City monies, it relied less on dues and local funding from churches and other private institutions. Resistance to the tradition of women's "volunteerism" surfaced in NOW; in the 1970s, it challenged the pattern as "an extension of unpaid housework and women's traditional roles in the home" (Gittell and Shtob, p. 577). This philosophy, coupled with the decline in federal resources, eclipsed some of the more ambitious programs and goals of the women's movement. Even with these setbacks, women demonstrated their commitment toward building organizations, such as abortion clinics, rape-counseling centers, and abused-women's shelters, thus continuing the tradition of mobilizing women to solve women's welfare, economic, and political problems.

Bibliography 

General Works

Blair, Karen J. The History of American Women's Voluntary Organizations, 1810-1960 (1989).

James, Edward T., Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds. Notable American Women, 1607-1950. 3 vols. (1971).

Scott, Anne Firor. Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (1991).

Trattner, Walter I., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Social Welfare in America (1986).

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience (1984).

Antebellum Societies, 1800-1860

Boylan, Anne M. "Women and Politics in the Era Before Seneca Falls." Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 363-382.

Hewitt, Nancy A. Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (1984).

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (1987; repr. 1990).

Lebsock, Suzanne. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (1984).

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "The Founding of Mount Holyoke College." In Women of America: A History, edited by Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (1979).

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America." In A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, edited by Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (1979).

Spacks, Patricia M. "The Talents of Ready Utterance: Eighteenth-Century Female Gossip." In Women and Society in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Ian P. H. Duffy (1983).

Tyrrell, Ian R. "Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860." Civil War History 28, no. 2 (1982): 128-152.

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Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978).

Wellman, Judith. "Women and Radical Reform in Antebellum Upstate New York: A Profile of Grassroots Female Abolitionists." In Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women, edited by Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy (1980).

Women's Associations

Blair, Karen J. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (1980).

Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (1981).

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. "The Ethnological Mirror: Evangelical Women and Their Heathen Sisters, 1870-1910." In Women and the Structure of Society, edited by Barbara J. Harris and JoAnn D. McNamara (1984).

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