The Postwar Black Women's Club Movement: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and American Political Development, 1940–1960

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of race, gender, and American political development in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the NACW was one of the last remaining autonomous Black organizations that could truly be called “civic.” Membership was decentralized, active, and widespread among female citizens who might not otherwise be engaged in public affairs. Political change and subsequent developments in African American and women's organizations in the mid-twentiethh century encouraged NACW leaders to begin considering new approaches to organizing Black womanhood. The collective identity that defined NACW clubwomen's public activism as local, nonpolitical, and nonpartisan eventually gave way to more deliberately nationalized, partisan, and political forms. This article argues that NACW clubwomen worked in solidarity and shared common goals with other African American and civil rights organizations, but faced a transformation unique to women's clubs, one that involved questions not only about who would participate in public life, but also about how and through what kinds of organizations. The struggles of the NACW to integrate the collective identities that defined their race and their gender, on the one hand, with forms, and, on the other hand with strategies of organization are particularly useful for thinking and theorizing about contemporary forms of intersectionality.