The Political Development of Female Civic Engagement in Postwar America

Abstract

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.