Ideologies of Women's Distinctiveness in Victorian and Postmodern Contexts

Abstract

Ideologies of Women's Distinctiveness in Victorian and Postmodern Contexts Anne Firor Scott. Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xii + 241 pp.; appendix. ISBN 0-252-01846-X(cl). Faith Rogow. Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. xüi + 300 pp.; appendices. ISBN 0-8173-0671-4 (pb). Kathleen B. Jones. Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women. New York: Routledge, 1993. xü + 265 pp. ISBN 0-415-90643-1 (d); 0-415-90644-X (pb). Peggy Pascoe Ever since the emergence of women's history as an academic field, the study of women's organizations has been one of its staples. Attracted by their voluminous—if often patently self-congratulatory— records, feminist scholars have looked to women's organizations to investigate everything from their strategic uses of separatism to their significance in fostering feminism, female professionalism, and the welfare state, to the relations of race, class, and gender in the institutions they established.1 In Natural Allies, Anne Firor Scott, a founder of the field, sets herself the task of synthesizing more than three decades of specialized researdi into a comprehensible story line that argues that women's associations "lay at the very heart of American sodal and political development" (p. 2). "Constrained by law and custom," Scott writes, "and denied access to most of the major institutions by which the society governed itself and created its culture, [women] used voluntary assodations to evade some of these constraints and to redefine 'woman's place' by giving the concept a public dimension" (p. 2). In the process, women not only developed their own talents but broadened the reach of democracy for everyone by forcing state and federal governments to assume unprecedented responsibiUty for social welfare. The best feature of Natural Allies is the breadth of its research. The book covers aU the usual groups—the antislavery organizations, the Civil War Sanitary Commission, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union— and more, from the Boston Fragment Society (organized in October 1812 and stiU in existence today) to the Kansas Ladies Refugee Aid Sodety. Relying on recent work by scholars of African-American women's history, © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 138 Journal of Women's History Fall Scott discusses a whole range of black women's organizations; buUding on her own research in southern history, she also explores such Uttle-known topics as Confederate women's organizations. Every group that Scott mentions contributed to the creation of pubUc poUtical roles for women.2 As she sees it, women's organizations may have described themselves in the decorous dialect of Vidorian domesticity, but their actions continuaUy pushed them beyond conventional limits. Thus benevolent women of the early repubtic learned "to estabtish an identity independent of husbands" (p. 27), whüe antebellum moral reformers and antislavery activists began "to think about their own restricted legal and social status" (p. 37) and soon "found themselves propelled into politics" (pp. 51-52). After women's involvement in the CivU War raised their sights from the local to the national level, postwar organizations such as the WCTU "stimulated the beginning of what we would now label a feminist consciousness" (p. 85) and municipal housekeepers engaged in a critique of urban-industrial society that marked "a new stage in women's activism, more radical than anything since antislavery" (p. 159). By 1910, the process had advanced so far as "to make woman suffrage inevitable" (see p. 4). Natural Allies has such a progressive tone that it is no surprise that its narrative climax comes in the Progressive period: women, Scott argues, can be said to have virtuaUy "invented" Progressivism. Admiring the multitudinous achievements of women's organizations, she urges us to consider how impossible it is to imagine the United States without the "churdies, orphan asylums, homes for the aged, juvenile courts, playgrounds , libraries, women's colleges, kindergartens, and well-baby clinics" that "we now take for granted, but which were first inaugurated by some women's assodation" (p. 178). Scott is, of course, quite right. By 1920, middle-class clubwomen...