Changing Women's Roles in Political Volunteerism and Reform of the City

Abstract

Any description of women's political role in nineteenthand twentiethcentury America must begin with one major premise: in national and municipal electoral political organizations, the role of women has been marginal. Male politicians have dominated parties and machines in American cities, as the urban middle classes and financial and commercial elites charted the direction of urban growth-sometimes in conflict with each other, sometimes in unison. During that growth, cities developed different modes of urbanization in order to assimilate and control the poor and working-class populations that were their base. Unfortunately, the specificity of what role women did play in the politics of cities has been lost to us in two ways. Historians of the Progressive era, the high-water mark of women's urban reform activity, have tended to collapse women's contributions into the general category of urban reformers. Next, feminist historians have tended to focus on the suffragists' struggle for the acquisition of formal legal and political rights. In this essay, we wish to change that emphasis. Although excluded from the centers of urban power, women led urban reform movements. We are interested in describing and analyzing who participated in these movements, under what circumstances, and the strategies, tactics, and substantive issues they chose. Women who could not participate directly in the political life of the city historically used the voluntary association as a channel for their interests and energies. Probably the earliest important role played by women in urban voluntary associations was as the dedicated army of urban-morality foot soldiers1 fighting urban vice in the 1820s and