From Pedestal to Platform: The American Women's Club Movement, 1800-1920

The period from 1800 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 was a time of a vigorous and active women's movement. Feminism--conceived in that period as the broad effort to advance the ideologies, activities, and rights of women--took many forms, including the contributions made by those women's organizations whose members were either politically conservative or neutral on the matter of the right to vote. Many women who at first opposed the right to vote (though not rights for women) were participants in the prodigious American Women's Club Movement. The women's club, which began with a strong educational mission at a time when woman's access to higher education was limited, developed into a national institution that incited the volunteeristic spirit of American middle class women.

Clubwomen argued for many of the same principles as their more political sister, but they wished to preserve their "gendered position" and a sexual division of labor and did not believe, as the suffragists believed, that the best way to achieve full status was through legal means. Working within the bounds of bourgeois feminine propriety, the club movement provided both an ideology and an organizational vehicle that helped women claim and govern their own "social spaces."

Characterized not by unity but by diversity, the club movement organized members first locally, in clubs with varied goals and ideologies that quickly formed networks, or federations, of organizations which allowed women to mobilize quickly and nationally on timely issues without being tied to a single ideology or mission. Beginning in 1890, the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) created a vast and intricate network of clubs that within a decade had integrated women into voluntarist politics and had created a broad-based women's coalition. Not until large segments of their sphere were invaded by men and encroached on by bureaucracies of state and federal governments did clubwomen finally favor the ballot.

The General Federation swung its support to suffrage not to guarantee women greater social power through the right to vote but because that right had become necessary to protect the social programs clubwomen had worked so hard to claim as their own. Never before or since this period have women voluntarily participated in so many diverse organizations, nor have they been so capable of mobilization for "municipal housekeeping," war work, suffrage, or any other public issue.