How American women gained, lost, and are regaining their collective voice

This the second post in a series on the 100th anniversary of Jeannette Rankin’s induction into the US House of Representatives.

Passing the statue of Rep. Jeanette Rankin in the US Capitol recently, a student remarked how weird it was that a woman had served in Congress before women had the right to vote. It’s weird, but also not: Women have been far more prominent in American politics throughout history than conventional wisdom might suggest.

As we mark the centennial of Rep. Rankin’s historic swearing-in as the first female Congress member, it’s worth taking account of what non-elected women were doing in the years before and after enactment of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote on an equal basis with men.

The amendment, ratified in 1920, capped decades of intensive women’s organizing not only for equal rights but also for many other issues. However, as Nancy F. Cott reminds us, popular and scholarly skeptics began proclaiming suffrage a dud immediately after ratification. Women weren’t taking advantage of their newfound voting rights, it was said, and the movement that had won those rights had fallen apart. Women were declaring political victory and withdrawing to private life. The suffragist became the flapper.

The narrative isn’t true.

A similar narrative animates the conventional wisdom about mid-20th-century women — certainly white women. During World War II, women mobilized for the future of democracy; in the 1950s, they retreated into pleasant domesticity. Rosie the Riveter became June Cleaver.

This narrative isn’t true either — even for middle-class white women.

Working on a study of the “missing movement” for gun regulation, I became fascinated by the history of American women — a group that seemed especially suited to lead such a movement. In The Paradox of Gender Equality, I track the national-level policy engagement of US women’s groups from the late 19th century through the end of the 20th. I measure policy engagement as organizational appearances before congressional hearings. The hand-assembled data set, spanning 1878 (the first appearance by a women’s group) through 2000 (when my study ends), includes more than 10,400 appearances by some 2,100 distinct organizations across nearly 200 policy domains.

The data tells a story about political advocacy that defies most of what we think we know about women’s history.

First, far from retreating from public life in the post-suffrage and postwar decades, women and their organizations were out in force. Working through mass membership federations, to which Theda Skocpol has called our attention, women testified collectively on a wide range of issues including but not limited to foreign policy, affordable housing, children’s well-being, military readiness, public education, tax policy, and immigration. Although women’s rights were on these organizations’ agendas, their policy interests were much more encompassing. June Cleaver was in the home — but she was also in the House, testifying.

The figure below shows the history of appearances before congressional committees (and subcommittees) by women’s organizations, defined as a group that had a female signifier in its name, or whose membership was predominantly female, or which was oriented around women’s rights or well-being. The figure captures the number of appearances as a share of all hearings in every Congress from the 45th through the 106th. The growth in appearances is evident after suffrage and through the middle decades, but the rise is followed by a pronounced decline in the 1960s and again from the early 1980s onward. The only real uptick occurs in the 1970s, when the “second wave” women’s movement and Congressional allies were seeking to remove legal barriers to women’s equality.

Kristin Goss

The women’s movement notwithstanding, by the late 1990s, women’s organizations were actually less prominent on Capitol Hill in terms of hearing-adjusted appearances than they had been before women got the right to vote. And women’s groups of the late 20th century had far less presence than did their sister organizations of the June Cleaver era. I should note that the pattern for women-of-color groups is broadly similar, though the “up and down” pattern is less pronounced. With their broad policy agendas, women-of-color groups actually provide a clue to unraveling the mystery.

How might we account for these trends? Many distinct and intersecting forces drive broad social and political change, so it’s useful to think about proximate and underlying causes.

The most important proximate cause concerns the types of women’s groups that dominated the civic scene over the decades and, relatedly, the types of issues they embraced. Generally speaking, when women’s groups were at their most prominent on Capitol Hill, women’s civic universe was dominated by large, mass-membership organizations with broad policy agendas. Such groups included the League of Women Voters and its state and local affiliates (which accounted for more than 10 percent of all appearances), the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the American Association of University Women, the PTA, the National Council of Negro Women, and the National Council of Jewish Women.

These groups not only represented a sizable fraction of their target constituency but also interpreted “women’s issues” broadly — to include women’s equality but also issues of concern to women in their capacity as mothers, members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and upholders of democratic values and the national interest.

Indeed, there is a close correspondence between the breadth of women’s groups’ policy agendas and the frequency with which said groups testified on Capitol Hill. The figure below shows (in standard units) women’s group appearances as a share of all hearings plotted against the percentage of those appearances wherein the organization focused on issues other than women’s rights and well-being. The takeaway is that, not surprisingly, the more expansively women’s groups — and Congress — interpreted women’s policy authority, the more often these groups testified.

These patterns, in turn, reflect changes in the types of groups dominating women’s civic space. In the latter decades of the 20th century, the mass membership groups — those with encompassing policy agendas — were in decline. In their place arose more narrowly focused women’s groups, most of which lacked mass memberships. These groups tended to focus on women’s rights, health, status, and well-being — issues of tremendous importance to the flourishing of both women and the nation, but ones that Congress considers only sporadically. Had the multi-issue women’s organizations maintained their midcentury prominence, the dramatic drop in women’s organizational appearances observed in the latter decades of the 20th century would have amounted to a minor dip.

So why did women’s organizations’ agendas narrow? A complex and mutually reinforcing set of developments appears to explain the phenomenon. First, as scholars including Skocpol and Jeffrey M. Berry have documented, the postwar decades witnessed a proliferation in professional interest groups, many of them focused on single issues. These groups developed deep expertise and displaced multipurpose groups whose focus was broader but more fluid.

At the same time, beginning in the early 1960s, Congress and the executive branch began enacting women’s rights policies that provided both resources and interpretive incentives for women’s groups to orient themselves around gender equality. As Suzanne Mettler and Joe Soss have noted, policy feedback can powerfully drive political action among the mass public, but it can also help structure movement agendas. These two drivers — the diversification and specialization of the interest group universe and policy incentives — combined with larger social trends to redefine women’s issues as feminist issues.

Anecdotal evidence — and forthcoming work that I am conducting with graduate students at Duke — suggests that the late 20th century may not have been the end of vigorous gender-based organizing after all. In the second decade of the 21st century, a new women’s movement appears to be emerging, but it is less formally structured and harder to study. Our research suggests that this new movement looks a lot like the “woman movement” of the early 20th century in that it seeks to bring women’s voices to bear on a wide range of issues.

The new woman movement is different, however, in its insistence on viewing gender as but one facet of political identity — that is, its insistence on “intersectionality” not only as a theoretical lens for understanding individual experience, but also as a way of connecting women to other movements. The new movement is different, too, in its insistence that men be engaged.

Elected before suffrage, Jeanette Rankin seemed to be getting ahead of history. But the more we uncover about women’s political action, the more we see that they have been ahead of their history all along.

Kristin Goss is an associate professor of political science at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.