In the following pages attention is drawn to a bewildering number of organizations, from which it is hoped that something of the development of women's interest during the recent past can be learned. It must be admitted that relative quantitative data in this field are difficult to obtain. ‘Women are joined together by a common purpose to secure some object that seems to them of great social importance; they are bound by common occupational interests; they belong to lodges and benefit societies.’ They express, as men do, an explicable pride in ancestry; (they seek now to obtain by organization many of the satisfactions that were, in the earlier times, well nigh exclusively characteristic of family life.) Costly club houses provide shelter and living conditions that are comfortable and private—where a woman may have “a room of her own,” where she may exercise hospitality without the burden of preparation. (A woman may, however, belong to several clubs, several of which may be united to federated organizations, and exact figures are therefore difficult,if not impossible, to secure.) It is true that the number of memberships might be estimated, but the number of members, hardly. While nothing like an exact measurement of effort or of achievement is claimed, a statement with reference to the successive activities will, it is hoped, give an idea of the extent and variety of effort devoted to these organizations, and show after what kinds of satisfactions women strive, when, like the apostles, “being set free, they go unto their own.”

Although it is hoped that no significant organization has been overlooked, the following study does not pretend to offer a census of all women's organizations in the United States. Necessarily, 01812the inquiry has been limited to those which deserve, on the basis of the distribution of their membership or the purposes of their existence, to be called national. And some consideration has had to be given to the accessibility of essential data.

Particular attention has been given to an examination of the club movement in the United States as it is reflected in the history of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Women from all parts of the country and with all sorts of interests have been joined together in the Federation as they probably have been united in no other association. It antedates most of the specialized groups, yet it as survived their appearance and still holds a prominent place in the organization life of women in the United States. (Changes in its composition, in its program and policies should therefore give an indication of certain changes in the thought and interests of women of whom the Federation is representative.)

(The sources of information utilized in the preparation of this study have been many and varied. Publications, reports, and proceedings of the various organizations have been examined.) The information they yielded has been generously supplemented and clarified by correspondence and interviews. At best, however, (the source material is not such as to make possible, even, if it were desirable, an elaborate statistical analysis. It is no uncommon thing to discover in the same volume of a convention proceeding different statement as to size and distribution of the membership.) It is not always easy, either, to separate the enthusiastic interpretation of a committee report from the data upon which it was based. Aspirations and achievements are sometimes inextricably mingled. An effort has, of course, been made to choose wisely and to report accurately those developments in women's organizations which will indicate the general trend. Detailed discussion of legislation supported or opposed by the organization is discussed in the action on women and government.

It has seemed best to present the first part of this report in roughly chronological order. It records the appearance of various new organizations and reports the apparent developments within the club movement in some detail for each decade, and yet the limits of the decades cannot be too closely adhered to. In the later section—covering the post-war period, the period of special interest but also of special difficulty—a summary of the developments within other organizations is attempted, and a few special 01913topics are discussed that seem to throw light on the path of development. The period covered by this discussion must be apparently a long one. The decade of special interest, 1920 to 1930, can be understood only in the light of a much longer development. The segment of the circle is from one with a longer radius than characterizes some series of events. The nineties, and a forecast of the new century, is perhaps as good a starting point as any, with the organization of the General Federation of Women's Clubs as the apparent occasion.

In 1900, the Women's Convention, auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, was organized by the colored women affiliated with the largest denominational group of Negroes in the United States.

The organization in 1903 of the National Woman's Trade Union League of America was evidence of a new grouping within the labor movement. It was no novel thing for women in various trades to organize. (There had been sporadic organizations since 1825, and women had been admitted on an equal footing with men to membership in the Knights of Labor, an organization which began as a secret society among the garment workers of Philadelphia in 1869, and grew until its membership reached 600,000 in the middle eighties, only to disappear in 1890. The American Federation of Labor which had been organized in 1818 had prospered, but the organization of the women in industry did not play a large part in its activities.)

It was, however, with the cordial approval of the leaders of the Federation that the National Woman's Trade Union League was organized at the convention of the American Federation of Labor in 1903. From the first is included in its membership and among its officers not only women representatives of Trade Unions but women of leisure interested in its purposes, who were known as “Allies.” The first objective of the League was stated to be:To assist in the organization of women wage earners into trade unions and thereby to help them secure conditions necessary for healthful and efficient work and to obtain a just retain for such work.

In 1904, at the meeting of the American Institute of Homeopathy, the Women's Homeopathic Fraternity was organized for purely social purposes. It was the first national organization of women in the profession of medicine.

The American Home Economics Association appeared in 1908, with 700 charter members:03428To bring together those concerned in developing the art of right living by the application of systematized knowledge to the problems of the home and the community.

The Trade Unionists, the women making of Home Economics a profession, and women physicians of homeopathic medicine—these are the groups having a common occupational interest which were organized in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile the movement toward federation and centralization was increasing. In 1906 a union of the Women's and Young Women's Christian Associations was effected under the name of the Young Women's Christian Association of the United States of America, and a national board was elected.

Two years later, in November, 1908, the Council of Women for Home Missions was organized by uniting two Interdenominational Committees for Home Mission Conferences and a Home Mission text book society. Women's Home Mission Boards had been organized since 1877 to direct the missionary activities of women in the churches. Before that time the work which they carried on had been under the direction of Boards of men. The Constitution adopted by the new council stated:

The object of the Council shall be able unify the efforts of the National Women's Home Mission Boards, Societies and Committees by Consultation and by cooperation in action.

Nine constituent boards were members at the time of organization, and although the work of the Board in providing textbooks and pamphlets and promoting fellowships between and among denominations falls more naturally into an examination of trends in organized religion, it is not insignificant that the organization of the work of church women throughout the country responded to the apparently inevitable compulsion to federate and centralize. A similar organization was effected by the federation of the Woman's Boards of Foreign Missions. The work of the local missionary societies was not greatly altered by the change, nor was their object affected at all.

Although new organizations had appeared and administrative methods in old ones were changed, it is in the club movement that the changing interests of the ordinary women may be traced.

The decade naturally divides itself into two periods, that before the United States entered the World War, and the years after April 6, 1917.

In 1912 a new national movement for young women emerged to culminate later in the Association of Junior Leagues of America. The first Junior League had been formed in New York in 1901—its purpose being to organize the city's debutantes in active civic work. By 1912, six more Junior Leagues existed. They were in Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon, and a conference of their representatives was held in New York. The membership of the Junior Leagues was confined to girls of leisure, those whose families represented, for the most part, the wealth and social leadership of their communities.

In 1912, the two existing nursing organizations formed a third—The National Organization for Public Health Nursing. Both lay and professional members were welcomed to membership.

A new occupational development, as well as a recognition of a social need, was discernible in the organization, at the annual conference of Charities and Corrections in 1915, of the International Association of Policewomen. At that time, at least thirty cities employed women in their police departments. Although no women had had the title of “policewomen” until 1910, women had been associated with the police departments of various cities for a long time. The Women's Christian Temperance Union had advocated their employment as far back as the seventies and eighties when its efforts had secured the appointment of police matrons in fifteen American cities. Later other women's organizations sponsored their employment and in 1915 there appeared to be a sufficient number to organize an association for the cooperative development of their program.

In the same year at a meeting in November of the American Medical Association, the Medical Women's National Association was organized in Chicago.

In 1916, the Federation of Teachers was organized from a local teacher's union in Chicago and affiliated with The American Federation of Labor. It was not exclusively a woman's movement, although a woman organized the federation, but the fact that public school teaching is so largely feminine makes its appearance worthy of mention as an achievement of women. It was the first national organization in the United States in which teachers were united, for it was not until 1918 that class-room teachers were recognized as part of the National Education Association, which had been organized in Philadelphia in 1857. Before 1918, the membership of the Association was largely composed of administrative leaders, college presidents, professors, and principals. Women did not bulk large in those positions, and only found a place in the organization when class-room teachers were admitted to its activities.

In 1916, out of a series of separate but related conferences the National Association of Deans of Women was organized, now a section of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association. Its history goes back to November, 1903, when, on the invitation of the Deans of Women at the University of Chicago and of Northwestern University, eighteen Deans of women met in the first conference of Deans of Women of which there is record. The problems which they met to discuss were the natural concerns of their profession—the living conditions, the social life, and the organization of student activities, especially as those activities affected women students. Six resolutions were adopted, one of gratitude to the women who called the meeting and one welcoming the assistance of the Young Women's Christian Association in its work with students. Intercollegiate athletic contests for women students were disapproved, the principle of student government was advocated. One resolution considered the housing of women students away from their own homes and approved:(1) Dormitories, preferably small; (2) cottages, belonging to and controlled by the institution; (3) approved lodging and boarding houses belonging to private individuals.

Of the social life of women students this first conferenceResolved, that social life should be regulated and that the tests of good health and high scholarship should be applied in extreme cases of social dissipation. In the opinion of this conference, the public have exaggerated impressions in regard to the amount of social dissipation 04236existing in coeducational institutions. The facts brought out in the reports of deans from such institutions point to the conclusion that the proportion of women students who give too much time to social affairs is very small.

This meeting was the first of a series of similar conferences at which old and new topics were considered. A conference of Deans and Advisers in State Universities was held at least biennially from 1905, and informal conferences of Deans of Women were held in connection with the meeting in 1909 of the Religious Education Association in Chicago and with meetings of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. A conference of Deans of Women of Private Institutions occurred in Chicago in 1909; and finally the National Association of Deans of Women was formed. Its annual meetings now are held in connection with the meetings of the National Education Association and its membership in 1930 was 1,064. Its programs deal with the varied problems of women students, their adjustment to life on the campus and their preparation for life outside. The creation of the new post of Adviser or Dean of Girls in High Schools is due in large measure to the work of the Association.

In 1914, a militant left wing seceded from the National American Woman Suffrage Association and founded the Congressional Union, which two years later adopted a new name, The National Woman's Party, for the purpose of applying to the effort to secure the ballot the methods developed by the “suffragette” group in England.

Soon after the outbreak of the war in 1914, the Women's Peace Party was organized in Washington, and in January, 1915, 3,000 people attended a convention at which a program for peace was adopted. In the spring of the same year an international conference of women was held at The Hague and in January, 1916, The Women's Peace Party became the United States Section of the Women's International Committee for Permanent Peace which was organized then. Its stated object is:

To promote that peace between nations, races and classes, which is based on justice and good will, to outlaw war, to substitute law for war, and to cooperate with women of all countries in carrying out the policies formulated at International Congresses of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

The new name was chosen at a meeting in Switzerland in 1919. The membership of the Women's International League for Peace 04337and Freedom in the United States is not large, although its slow growth has been steady. In 1930 it had approximately 10,000 members. It has supported every effort toward peace, and has opposed all attempts to increase national defense, to glorify war, to embark on imperialistic national policies, or to discriminate against pacifist citizens. Two smaller peace societies for women were organized later—one the Women's Peace Society and the other, the Women's Peace Union.

So far, membership in organizations has been largely from domestic women; married women whose club activities provided an escape from household and family cares or from professions; women who were, at it were, furthering the interest of their profession—the nurses, physicians.

In the period after April 5, 1917, notice should be taken at once of the organization of the first of a group of five “service clubs for business women.” That is, for the first time gainfully employed women were providing their spare time with opportunities for relaxation and for association with other similarly occupied women. Following the example of the Rotary, Kiwanis and similar clubs for men which had developed business and professional classifications as a basis for membership, the first Altrusa Club was organized1 for women in Nashville, Tennessee, and added four others within the year. To quote the Altrusa Handbook:To be eligible for active membership in an Altrusa Club, a woman must be actively engaged in an occupation in which she holds a responsible position of executive character; or she must be the owner of her own business, or be practicing a profession.

Good fellowship and friendship among women from various occupational groups is the primary object of membership in Altrusa; nevertheless the national association voted in 1924 to encourage each club to adopt vocational guidance as its general service activity. In carrying out this recommendation Altrusa clubs have cooperated with school groups, sponsored lectures, conducted surveys, maintained scholarships for vocational training, and assisted in placement. Books on the subject have been donated to schools and public libraries. In the recent past the Altrusa clubs have cooperated with the Institute of Women's Professional Relations, to which reference is made below, in connection with the development of professional interests among the 04438women,1 in surveying the field of dentistry as a professional opportunity for women.

There were in January, 1931, 109 Altrusa clubs in 34 states, with a total membership of 3,000 women.

Quota, International, was the second such club to appear. The Christmas party at which the Kiwanis Club of Buffalo, New York, entertained its “ladies” in 1918, seems to have been the immediate cause of its organization. Five business and professional women were guests, women “keen of insight and broad of vision” according to the brochure issued by the headquarters. They planned the organization of Quota, and in 1919 Quota, international, obtained a charter.

The plans and standards and rate of growth of Quota are similar to those of Altrusa. In 1930 there were 30 Quota clubs with a total membership of 3,000. Service to girls is the essential activity of the Quota clubs with the suggestions to local groups that they work by(1) Aiding existing organizations; (2) organizing or aiding girl's clubs and homes; (3) providing scholarships for girls; (4) doing personal or “big sister” work, with individual girls.

The third, Zonta Club, was organized in 1919, with a similar plan of organization and work, and in June, 1930, it reported 108 clubs with 3,200 members.

The Soroptimists were organized shortly afterward, in the autumn of 1921. Like the Altrusa clubs, this group was organized by a man—a professional organizer. Unlike the other three clubs, it was inaugurated on the western coast—in San Francisco. There were 8 members of the first club at the time of its organization. In 1930, 62 clubs were reported with a total membership of approximately 3,200.

The ideals of the organization are embodied in the five objects which are listed:

CIVIC.—To encourage meritorious civic movements and to urge cooperation for the betterment of local conditions.

MORAL.—To encourage the practice of the Golden Rule, and to foster high ethical standards in business and professional life.

SOCIAL.—To promote the spirit of service and true friendship among our members.

PERSONAL.—To develop efficiency and the success to be derived therefrom; to foster the interchange of ideas and business methods as a means of increasing the efficiency and usefulness of SOROPTIMISM; to recognize the worthiness of all legitimate occupation of each Soroptimist as affording her an opportunity to serve society.

The fifth of these clubs is Pilot, International. It flourishes in the South.

And then the business and professional women took on a similarity to the groups organized within a definite calling.

In 1919, at St. Louis, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs was organized by a group of less than 200 women representing 105 existing clubs.

In the meantime, while these new groupings within the constantly increasing ranks of wage-earning women were indicating the changing position of women in the United States, the older organizations continued to expand, so that the history of the General Federation in its third decade should now be briefly reviewed.

In 1912, the Federation of Women's Clubs, according to some statements in its record, passed the million mark in its membership, although the lower estimate of 800,000 which appears in the same Convention Proceedings is probably more nearly correct.

The leaders in the club movement were aware of the distance which lay between the resolutions adopted by the delegates at the Convention and the actual activities of the clubs at home. In her address to the Convention in 1912, the president deplored the fact that little had been done to carry out the resolutions adopted in 1910. No one could claim that the Hague Conference, industrial accidents, or clean journalism had been greatly affected during the biennium by the attitude of clubs.

Nevertheless, resolutions were adopted at this Biennial with even greater facility than usual. Twenty different questions, ranging from forest fire prevention to sex education and Bible reading were involved in as many resolutions. And although the delegates voted “either to purify or to eliminate” the Comic Supplement, a resolution favoring woman suffrage was ruled out of order. A majority of the resolutions affected questions political, although the word was still dreaded. Discussion of their significance will, therefore, fall more appropriately in a later section of this report dealing with the subject of women's participation in politics.

Reports from the states deal with an extraordinary diversity of subject matter. Some clubs put wire waste baskets to collect refuse on street corners. Others trained the speaking voice.

A new subject was introduced in the next Biennial which met in Chicago in 1914 when for the first time the Federation clubs endorsed equal suffrage for women. A confusing array of subjects—sex education, fire prevention, health campaigns—were offered again for the attention of the delegates, and the Convention heard addresses by authorities, sang songs, and listened to reports. There was much protest against current styles of dress, indignation because of “slit skirts, transparent gowns and ridiculously narrow skirts” and distress because of immodest dancing.

No examination of Biennial records, of magazines flies, or of state conventions can give a complete picture of the work being carried on all over the country; but it is safe to say that the interest in the award of scholarships was general—more than twenty states were then granting them to promising students. Traveling libraries and travelling art exhibits were numerous, and the Federation joined in the wave of public effort to reduce the deaths from tuberculosis and to eradicate the social diseases. There were numerous resolutions about the White Slave Traffic, one state Federation reporting that its clubs had been advised to put placards in railroad stations to warn arriving girls of the perils of the city.

A few states still boasted of exclusive clubs, and described the brilliance of their members’ papers—but most of them added “civic” and legislative activities, and in several reports the sad habit of passing resolutions and then forgetting them was deplored.

The beautification of the Lincoln Highway assumed prominence in 1916 along with censorship of moving picture shows, and “Americanization” seems to have been the keynote of the convention which was held in New York City with 2,144 delegates registered and 15,000 women in attendance.

By the time the 1918 Convention came the activities of women had been diverted to war needs. Two million women was the estimate of the membership appearing in the reports at the time. The familiar committee reports were heard at the Biennial and it was natural that interest in conservation of foods should make the Home Economics committee the most outstanding. “Children's Year,” when it was proposed, was heralded, and the talk 04741of standardized dress for women found congenial atmosphere in a world of uniforms.

Nearly forty resolutions were adopted at this convention and the General Federation of Women's Clubs faced the fourth decade of its life with the habit of endorsement heavy upon it.

Unquestionably the resolutions were taken seriously by the leaders and indicate their conception of club women's interests. Material for study was prepared, speeches were made, articles were written in relation to the subject matter advanced. However, it is impossible to estimate the extent to which local clubs attempted to carry out the resolutions, but that club activities meant much in the lives of many women cannot be doubted.

During the period from the close of the war until the present time, the end of the second, the whole of the third, the beginning of the fourth decades, women's organizations have continue to multiply, the variety in purpose is greater than ever, the tendency toward cooperation or toward the development of interrelationships has perhaps been strengthened, the international interest has been expressed; but with all such movement of expression has gone, too, the provision for individual satisfaction or for purely social intercourse. The patriotic motive, the religious or sectarian bond, the scientific interest, the professional alliance, the altruistic impulse—all are conspicuous in the purposes of the organizations; at the same time, great sums of money are assembled for the provision of comfortable living quarters and of accommodations for bridge or other pastimes, having only the individual's satisfaction in mind. As has been said above, it is difficult to convey in brief statement the variety of these activities and the multiplicity of these organizations. If the purpose were to study the relative effectiveness of different forms of organization, a very different method of presentation might be employed. The purpose is not, however, to discuss methods of organization. It is certainly not possible to measure results of one or of the other form of association; nor is that the interesting problem. The interesting question is not what kind of organizations are formed, but what is the meaning to women of the organizations and how women express themselves through these activities.

The war had a disturbing effect upon women's organizations in at least two ways. It gave occasion for the development of new organizations based on the patriotic motive, and, through the mobilization of the youth of the land, widened the range of interest of the women. In the following pages the story of the national organizations, to which reference has already been made, will be continued and some account will be taken of the new ones that 04943have come into existence. It is hoped that from these threads of activity may be discerned a line of development in women's relationship to the post-war generation.

There seem to be twenty-three organizations to which reference must be made, besides what might be termed four movements: (1) the development of adult education among rural women under the Department of Agriculture, (2) the further organization of Negro women, (3) the Pan Hellenic movement among sororities, and (4) the club house movement. Besides these movements, some reference should also be made to certain sets of problems such as that of international relationships and the question of budgets and sources of support. It is hoped that out of this kaleidescopic variety may come a discernible picture of women's effort to bridge the gap between their segregated and isolated status of the past and their possible future participation in the fullness of community experience.

The war meant great dislocation in family life, in industry, in government. What it meant for women in their organizations can be only suggested, not fully told. And, as one writes or reads, there should be kept in mind the multiplicity of interest involved in any one organization. who can measure for example the significance of belonging to the Gold Star Mothers?

Perhaps the associations connected immediately with the war or its consequences may be mentioned first.

During the years since the war, new organizations have appeared and old ones have developed.

The Service Star Legion and th American Legion Auxiliary.—The war, of course, brought new alignments and caused unfamiliar groups of women to come into the field of organized activity. In the fall of 1917 the War Mothers of America was organized in Indiana and held its convention in Evansville, the home of Lance Corporal James B. Gresham, who was the first American boy to die in the service. After the Armistice, interest lagged, but the Baltimore branch, acting on a previous agreement to entertain the 1919 Convention, called similar organizations known to have been organized to work for the soldiers to meet with the War Mothers of America and proposed that all should be merged in one large association. Eleven organizations answered—Pershing's Own came from Kansas, delegates from The Sunset Trail were sent from Oregon, the Daughters of Democracy were represented, Sammies’ Mothers Clubs, the Daughters of the Nation, and a half dozen 05044others. The Service Star Legion was adopted as the name of the new group and 50,000 women were enrolled as members with the objectives of their organization stated in the following seven declarations:

1. To serve God, Country and Humanity.

Some of the original War Mother's group refused to admit other women relatives. These withdrew and organized and took the slightly changed name American War Mothers.

In the same year the establishment of a women's auxiliary of the American Legion was promoted, and when the second national convention of the Legion was held in Cleveland in 1920, 1,342 local units of this auxiliary organization were reported. In 1921 the organization of the American Legion Auxiliary was completed and the first national convention called.

Inevitably membership in the independent Service Star Legion diminished. From 50,000 in 1919, it fell to 10,000 in 1925 and, although membership figures for succeeding years are not available, it is unlikely that it has shown any considerable growth. Under its general principles, it has undertaken to maintain an educational loan fund for the members of families of World War veterans, to give relief to needy veterans and to inaugurate or support various movements to commemorate the victims of the war. In addition, the Service Star Legion has supported proposals designed to provide peaceful methods for the settlement of international disputes.

The Legion Auxiliary in the meantime has grown from the 131,000 reported in 3,653 units in 1921 to 300,549 members divided among 6,635 units in 1928—a gain in seven years of approximately 129 per cent. By December, 1931, a total of 412,063 members were enrolled. The Auxiliary assists the Legion itself in all its activities and undertakes special responsibilities toward rehabilitation and child welfare in relation to disabled veterans and their children, and the children of men who died in the service. Like the Legion, the Auxiliary is prepared to oppose 05145any movement for a reduction of ornaments. A sentence from the address of the National President at the 1930 Convention in Boston is typical of the attitude which finds expression in formal addresses and in committee reports. She said:The Auxiliary's efforts in this field have been devoted primarily to combatting sentimental pacifism among the women and counter-acting the activities of the radical pacifists among the women and the students of the country.

The National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution.—The American Legion Auxiliary has worked in increasing harmony with the Daughters of the American Revolution which, since the First Congress in February, 1892, has grown until on June 1, 1932, it was composed of 2,463 chapters with a total membership of 169,626. In 1920 its membership had totaled 107,723. Ten years earlier it was 79,713.

The objective of the founders ws expressed in three paragraphs:

To perpetuate the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved American independence, by the acquisition and protection of historical spots, and the erection of monuments; by the encouragement of historical research in relation to the Revolution and the publication of its results; by the preservation of documents and relies, and of the records of the individual services of Revolutionary soldiers and patriots, and by the promotion of celebrations of all patriotic anniversaries.

To carry out the injunction of Washington in his farewell address to the American people, “to promote, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” thus developing an enlightened public opinion, and affording to young and old such advantages as shall develop in them the largest capacity for performing the duties of American citizens.

To cherish, maintain, and extend the institutions of American freedom, to foster true patriotism and love of country, and to aid in securing for mankind all the blessings of liberty.

Certainly the objectives of the first statement of the founders have been honored and the country is greatly indebted to this volunteer body of women who have rescued historic sites, engaged in geneological research, beautified cemeteries, and erected commemorative monuments.

Scholarships have been generously awarded by the Daughters over $138,000 was expended through the Student Loan Funds in 1929 and more than 500 young men and women were assisted through college. An Industrial School for Girls is maintained in 05246South Carolina, and contributions are made to fifteen other institutions, the majority of them among the mountaineers of the South, as a further effort to carry out the objective in the second statement.

It is in heeding the admonition of the founders that the organization has expressed itself on public questions and that these daughters of rebels have allied themselves with the militaristic theory of national defense, and with what was there recognized as the Tory, rather than the revolutionary, attitude toward political theories.

At its annual Congress in Washington in 1930 forty resolutions were adopted. Of these, besides eight expressions of courtesy, eleven were related to fiscal or organization management questions. One urged the adoption of the “Star Spangled Banner” as the National Anthem of the United States, another recommended the designation of April third as America's Creed Day. The establishment of a National Park on King's Mountain was approved, the creation of a Colonial National Monument on the sites of Jamestown and Yorktown in Virginia was endorse, and the assistance of the organization to the George Washington Bicentennial Commission was pledged. Participation in the York-town celebration was projected in a Resolution. The erection of a Community House for midshipmen at Annapolis was approved and the invitation extended by the American Legion that the Daughters “have a salon” in its new building in Paris was accepted.

One resolution expressed a general policy and all the others related to public questions in which every citizen may properly have some concern. The policy resolution was this:

WHEREAS, it has always been a settled policy of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, to avoid controversial subjects of a religious of political nature, as being outside of its province; and

WHEREAS, a restatement of this policy would prevent misunderstanding in the future as to the Society's attitude.

RESOLVED, That this 39th Continental Congress re-affirm the resolutions of the National Board of Management passed June 4, 1913, and April 18, 1914, which declare that all controversial or dividing topics such as religion, politics, and prohibition should be excluded from its deliberations.

The subject matter of the following Resolutions was then evidently regarded by the Congress of the Daughters as non-controversial. In regard to immigration the Congress resolved:05347That we urge upon Congress the extension of the policy of restriction upon immigration to all geographic and political areas beyond the boundaries of Continental United States not specifically regulated by the Immigration Act of 1924; the enactment of legislation providing for the registration of aliens for the protection of all lawful entrants and the elimination of subversive and undesirable elements from our country; and the enactment of more strict legislation, supported by adequate appropriations, to effect the deportation of aliens who have surreptitiously entered the country, or who have succeeded in evading our laws designed to exclude the dangerously criminal and insane.

It endorsed the resolution of the Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense, which determined to expose and combat so-called subversive influences in schools and colleges, and

WHEREAS, The schools and colleges are considered a fertile field for the dissemination of socialist and communist theories, often so subtly presented that the students fail to recognize their sigificance; and

WHEREAS, The press in many states have carried news stories describing forums that have been organized within educational institutions, to break down patriotism, to weaken the spirit of national loyalty, and to interfere with military training and other phases of national defense,

it approved requiring teachers to take the oath of allegiance as a further barrier “against the entrance of anti-American organizations into the schools.” It declared its opposition to the recognition of Russia and to entangling alliances “which could operate to limit our full liberty in international affairs.” It endorsed the objects and purposes of the Reserve Officers Training Corps organization, and approved “just and necessary compensation for the commissioners and enlisted personnel of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Geodetic Survey and Public Health Service.” Adequate National Defense was urged in the following statement:

WHEREAS, The right of National self-defense is incorporated in the Constitution of the United States and confirmed by the laws of reason; and

WHEREAS, Organizations of doubtful intention are conducting propaganda to weaken the defenses of our country in the face of an armed world.

RESOLVED, That the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution reaffirm their traditional adherence to the principle that the institutions, liberty and property of the United States must be properly defended against all possible aggression from within or without; and

RESOLVED, That we urge the enforcement of the terms of the National Defense Act and the support of the Government and people of all 05448organizations and programs for the proper training of our young men for national service in the event of need; we specifically urge the support of our naval and military establishments, of the National Guard, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the Citizens’ Military Training Camps; and

RESOLVED, That we urge the Congress of the United States to make proper legislative and financial provision for the maintenance of a competent National Defense in all its branches.

And subversive organizations were opposed in the following Resolutions:

WHEREAS, Full information as to affairs affecting their government is a moral right of the people of the United States; and

WHEREAS, Certain influences inimical to the safety of the United States have been conducting a heavily financed propaganda in support of their aims; and

WHEREAS, These inimical influences use every possible effort to keep their operations secret from the public; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That we strongly urge the unmasking of all subversive organizations of foreign or local nature by rigorous investigations conducted under competent governmental authority and that steps be taken to disrupt such organizations, deport the aliens participating therein and properly punish those of American citizenship who have lent their support to this form of disloyalty.

While there has been some protest in the membership against these activities of the leaders and some disagreement with the view of the society, the organization has evidently been fairly unanimous as to the principles enunciated.

A good many women who take slight interest in its public policies, undoubtedly become members of the organization in order to establish a family record. Those who do become active, attend congresses, and hold offices, seem to be harmonious in their attitude toward public questions. In 1929, an election year in the organization, there were 4,118 voting delegates and their alternates registered at the Congress. In 1930 the delegates and alternates numbered 3,628. The Headquarters in Washington, with a beautiful auditorium, a spacious library, and a museum, is valued at three million dollars.

Women's Overseas Service League.—As organizations of World War veterans multiplied, it was natural that the women who had served overseas should unite. In 1921, various groups of overseas women united in one national organization under the name, Women's Overseas Service League. Of the 22,000 women who served overseas with the government or with welfare 05549agencies, about 2,600 are now enrolled in the Overseas League, which is organized in 56 units.

The League has inaugurated a fund for the care of needy disabled overseas women, particularly those who are not eligible for government aid. At the same time it advocates an extension of government responsibility to include care for all disabled women who served overseas with the government. It engages in welfare work not only for disabled overseas women, but for all veterans, for men and women now in the Service, and in some instances for the children of veterans.

These are mentioned as activities of the organization which enunciates its purpose in the following terms:To keep alive the spirit that prompted overseas service, to maintain the ties of comradeship both of that service, and to assist and further any patriotic work; to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state and nation; to work for the welfare of the army and navy; to assist, in any way in our power, men and women who served and were wounded or incapacitated in the World War; to foster and promote friendship and understanding between America and the Allies in the World War.

The National Council of Catholic Women.—The National Council of Catholic Women appeared in 1920. It is an affiliation of(1) National organization of Catholic women enjoying ecclesiastical approval; (2) Diocene Councils, organized according to the plan and wish of the Ordinary; (3) State and local organizations of Catholic women; and (4) Individual Catholic women interested in work for the general welfare of the church.

In October, 1930, 1,700 local societies were affiliated and 50 Diocesan organizations in addition to the following National members: The Alumnae Association, National Catholic School of Social Service; The Alumnae Association, Trinity College; The Alumnae Auxiliary Association, Catholic Summer School of America; The Catholic Daughters of America; The Catholic Ladies of Columbia; The Christ Child Society; The Daughters of Isabella; The First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union: The International Federation of Catholic Alumnae; The Ladies Auxiliary, Ancient Order of Hibernians; The Ladies Catholic Benevolent Association; The National Alliance of Bohemian Catholics; The National Catholic Women's Union; The Supreme Ladies Auxiliary, Knights of St. John; The Theta Phi Alpha Fraternity; 05650and The Women's Catholic Order of Foresters; and these state organizations: The Catholic Daughters of America, Illinois State Court; The Catholic Daughters of America, Pennsylvania State Court; The Catholic Ladies Aid Society, California; The Sociedade Portugeuza Rainha Santa Isabel, California (Portugese Society of Queen St. Elizabeth); The a'Kempis Club of New Jersey; Young Ladies Grand Institute, California.

The Council is an official part of the program of the Catholic Church in the United States. It was organized at the call of the Chairman of the Department of Lay Organizations of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, an organization composed of the Archbishops and Bishops of the United States. Two hundred Catholic women, sent from their Dioceses by their Bishops, or representing various groups and organizations, met in Washington in March of 1920 and the Council was begun.

To quote its own outline, the purposes are:

To provide a channel of communication and otherwise aid in bringing into the currents of national life the messages from the Departments and Bureaus of the Council:

(a) Acquainting catholic women throughout the country with national legislation of vital interest to them and securing united action, when necessary, e.g., defense of Catholic education and parental rights;

To maintain a vigilant oversight of forces that endanger national well-being or threaten the fundamental Christian foundations of our country; to be a channel of communication to the Departments and Bureaus of the Council with reference to destructive trends and tendencies in Catholic lay life;

To maintain representation at all meetings of a national or international character when vital principles are at stake or where matters of national well-being which should be our concern are under discussion.

To provide national conventions for conference on common problems and through adequate publicity given to these deliberations to place the catholic attitude on questions of the hour before the general public.

To maintain National Headquarters—a reliable bureau of authentic information, cooperating with all other departments of the Council.

To maintain a trained staff to aid correspondence the initiation or development of local projects undertaken by diocesan councils or other affiliated organizations.

To maintain the National Catholic School of Social Service to educate a corps of experts in social service technique who will be exponents of Christian principles and Catholic spiritual culture for the solution of social problems.

To assist, through affiliation with the International Union of Catholic Women's Leagues, in world-wide protection for the home and defense of catholic principles of social action.

The General Federation of Woman's Clubs of the Present.—The third decade of the century showed no new development or startling changes in the club movement. Some of the older clubs advanced to new heights of membership. At the 1922 Biennial 13 clubs were reported having a membership of more than 1,000, with one, the Friday morning club of Los Angeles, having more than 2,000. No estimate of the entire membership of the General Federation is given.

The Program of the Federation is as diversified as ever, and the state reports disclose the same variety and inequality in progress. There is a slight decrease in the number of resolutions passed as compared with the two most recent Biennials. Perhaps the action of the 1926 Biennial, which resolved that “in the future the General Federation should guard its resolutions more carefully,” is responsible for the apparent for the apparent change.

At the 1924 Biennial one chairman commented that “the clubs were returning to the literary program.” In a good many communities they had, of course, never gone very far away. In 1922, the Headquarters Report included, as an evidence of the activities of the organization, an analysis by subject of the many requests for information which had been received at the Headquarters from the separate clubs. It is interesting to examine.

While nearly 50 inquiries were in the field of art, only 15 were related to civic interests—and “civic Pride” is one topic included in that modest total. Citizenship questions number only 14—and this included an inquiry about the “Proper Form for the Flag Salute”! The Social and Industrial Problems of Women 05852gave rise to 49 inquiries—but the women of Russia and the Dangers of the Women Vote each counted in this total. Interest in Community and Social Service brought forth 22 questions; Conservation, 16; Home Economics, 10; while there were only 4 inquiries relating to International questions. Literature, however, had a list of approximately 100 inquiries.

In spite of the gallant effort during more than twenty years to keep the subject alive, interest in Civil Service reform has in this decade lagged at a new low level. Active anti-tuberculosis work and the campaign against venereal disease were much diminished. The motion picture committee, however, was active, and interest in Indian affairs assumed some prominence. The billboard nuisance had become an object of hostility.

It would be easy to be scornful of an assembly ready, as the Federation was in 1926, to favor, in Resolution 18, a pending federal measure directed against the contract system of prison labor and swiftly then to pass to number 19 which opposed the habit of weight reducing without a physician's advice. In 1924, 35 Resolutions of some importance were adopted. They range from statements expressing support of the practical proposal that prohibition agents should be placed under Civil Service, that the United States personnel classification board should be abolished, and that the first eligible postmaster should be selected for appointment, to a general resolution which registered the members’ aversion to obscene literature.

The fact that the Federation is a federation should, however, never be forgotten. A small literary, art, music or purely social club may join the other clubs of the state in a state federation, and through the state federation is counted a member of the General Federation. The interest of its members in Conservation and indian Affairs may be slight, their sympathy for a Federal Department of Education or prison labor reform may be incomplete, although these are subjects advanced by enthusiastic chairmen, and presented at the conventions to the Committee on Resolutions as subjects upon which delegates to the conventions will vote.

At the Biennial conventions the opportunity is given to hear addresses and discussions, reports of plans proposed and work accomplished. The number of delegates is limited and expediency must sometimes direct their choice. Often they are not the most capable in deliberation, nor the most penetrating in their comments 05953and reports. And even in an era of small hats and short hair the average convention hall leaves something to be desired when several thousand women gather to hear and to try to be heard. The Biennial meetings are then an inadequate instrumentality for the education of individual club women in the significance of the program of the General Federation, and this service should not be expected of them.

In the last decade a new type of cooperation has appeared within the Federation, namely the cooperation of the clubs with commercial interests. It can be noted in connection with the work of the music committee, with publishing houses, with household equipment companies in the furnishing of club houses and in the Better Homes movement. It was most conspicuously apparent in an ambitious Home Equipment survey which was conducted by the Federation and financed by the National Electric Light Association. Unhappily the source of the fund was revealed at a time when the private utility companies were disclosed as the organizers of a far reaching campaign to influence public opinion in their own behalf. Although the accuracy and usefulness of the data which had been assembled were not affected by the revelation, the reaction in many quarters was so unfavorable that the Home Equipment Survey has failed to be as important a contribution to knowledge of the subject of home-making as had been anticipated.

The Congress of Parents and Teachers.—From its modest beginning in 1897, the National Congress of Mothers has grown until in 1930 it was one of the largest organizations of women in the United States. In 1908 the rapid development of Parent-Teacher Associations prompted a change in the name, and it became the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Associations. In 1924 it became the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, in order that the men who were participating in the work of the Congress might not be obscured.

In 1931, 1,511,203 members of Parent-Teachers Associations were enrolled in 22,000 units in 49 state branches in the National Congress and united in the program of parent education and child welfare which has grown up around the public school system of this country. The first data available on national membership are for the year 1912. Then 31,672 members were enrolled. In 1917 the figure was 98,844. The rapid increase continued. In 1920 there were 278,721 members, and in 1928 the million mark was 06054passed. Colorado led in 1930 in the proportion of members to its population—using United States Census Bureau estimates for computation, 5.11 per cent of the estimated population of the state were then enrolled. The largest actual membership in 1931 was in California, with Illinois, Ohio, New York, Texas and Michigan making up the top sextette, if bōth memberships and units were taken into account.

The activity of local Parent-Teacher Associations centers around the school and the usefulness and growth of the organization are affected by the good will or hostility of the school administration. Its program must be adjusted and its value tempered by the requirements of expediency. State reports in the Convention Proceedings show evidence of much activity in relation to the school plant. Playgrounds are established and improved. Pictures, pianos and radios are donated. Libraries are maintained all over the country through the activities of Parent-Teacher Associations. Thrift banking schemes have been adopted as a result of their initiative. They support school bands. County and school nurses have been secured and some are paid by Parent-Teachers funds. Pre-school clinics feature some reports. Student loan funds are reported from at least 20 states. One state reported over 2,000 grade school pupils assisted in 1928. Local work appears to vary in type and excellence just as the activities of the clubs have been unequal. It has, however, the unifying center. It is organized around the school.

The national leaders have offered programs of parent education at the conventions, with educators, psychologists and sociologists leading the discussions, and courses in Parent-Teacher work are conducted in cooperation with educational institutions. An annual national project is called the Summer Round-up. The United States Commissioner has approved it, and the American Medical Association, the National Education Association, the American Child Heàlth Association and the American Red Cross cooperate in the effort to correct defects of childhood by a widespread campaign of physical examination followed by treatment. In 1928, 48 states participated in the campaign. In 1930, 55, 526 children were examined.

The American Association of University Women.—The 66 women alumnae of Vassar, Smith, Oberlin, Wellesley, Boston University, Cornell, the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan who met in 1882 at the second meeting of the newly organized 06155Association of Collegiate Alumnae in Boston, agreed that the object of this association should be to unite alumnae of those institutions for practical educational work.

In 1884, the first branch was established in Washington, D.C. In 1889, the Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae was united with the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, and in 1893 there were 16 branches existing. In 1921, the Southern Association of College Women was merged with the Association of Collegiate Alumnae and the American Association of University Women was adopted as the name of the organization. In 1923-1924, there were approximately 18,400 members organized in 500 branches. In 1931, there were approximately 551 branches and 36,818 members.

The program of alumnae education which the Association has always sponsored has expanded until now it includes the study of pre-school, elementary and adolescent, as well as collegiate and university, education, the expression of interest in international relations, and the publication of a journal of high quality. In 1931, when the semi-centennial of its organization was celebrated, it was estimated that there were groups in 523 branches studying the educational questions and 232 devoting attention to international affairs.

The Association attempts, by means of an accredited list, to raise standards in colleges and universities attended by women, and from the beginning has encouraged the educational progress’ of young women by awarding scholarships, fellowships, and loan funds for high school, normal school, college, and university courses. In 1925, 86 branches were participating in this form of Association activity by contributing approximately $50,000 a year for the purpose.

The Association is not unique among organizations in maintaining scholarships. Many organizations do that. A more distinctive project has been the granting of fellowships to women whose capacity and interests lead them to seek advanced degrees and scholarly attainments. The first fellowship was awarded by the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1890. In 1900, 3 fellowships were granted; in 1925, 11; and in 1930, 14. Now a fund of over $158,000 is devoted to this purpose and a campaign for a $1,000,000 endowment for fellowships, both national and international, is in progress. A history of the Association, written by one of its founders and another of its past presidents, relates 06256the story of its connection with the development of educational opportunity for women in the United States.1

The Young Women's Christian Association.—In the years since the work of the Young Women's Christian Association was begun it has expanded and developed and, although its constitution has been reworded, it has largely held to the objective which was first, the aid of self-supporting young women. From the beginning boarding homes have been maintained, to be used as residences, lunch rooms, and centers of recreation for wage-earning girls. In 1930 511,640 guests were housed in 300 Association residences. Educational work of various kinds was undertaken by the first Association in New York and Boston, with vocational guidance and placement following as a natural corollary. In 1980, over 400,000 women and girls enrolled as participants in health education courses offered by the Association all over the country; more than 100,000 were interested in its general education classes. Only a few more than 30,000 participated in religious education. The same development has taken place in the employment employment service. Two hundred and two association and 46 branches reported on employment in 1930. More than 140,000 women and girls had been placed in business, household and industrial jobs; more than 23,000 were placed in business, and a few under 10,000 in industry, and over 81,000 found household employment. The nature of the employment of the rest is not described.

This diversification of interest early developed a distinguishing feature of the Young Women's Christian Association—the fact that much of its work has been carried on by a paid staff, and that for more than forty years the advancement of its program has offered a professional opportunity for women. There were so many association secretaries in 1889 that they met to discuss their professional problems at the organization conference. Special training courses have been developed for their preparation and in 1930 the work of the local Associations was directed by a professional staff of 3,473 members.

The history is interesting. The first worker with younger girls was employed in 1887; twelve years later the number of “Junior Department” secretaries had grown to ten. In 1909, the 06357problems of the adolescent girl were the subject of a conference program and today more than 230,000 younger girls form the largest group having membership in the Association.

There are today approximately 1,145 Young Women's Christian Associations in the country, although 180 are unaffiliated with the national organization. Including those independent groups, 265 are located in cities, 142 in towns, 47 in rural districts, and the largest number, 691, are established in colleges and universities.

As membership in the Young Women's Christian Association has grown, the basis for affiliation has been modified. In 1906 when the Associations of the country merged, the basis of membership in the Association was affiliation in any Protestant Evangelical Church. For twenty years this was unchanged, until, in 1926, at its convention in Milwaukee an alternate plan was adopted. Now any Association may admit to membership “any woman or girl properly introduced or giving satisfactory references as to character... “ “Any woman or girl over eighteen” may become an elector in the Association, provided she declares that she desires to enter the Christian fellowship of the Association and will loyally endeavor to uphold the purpose in her own life and through her membership in the Association.

An effort has been made in recent years to supplement the work of the City Association by the development of a Town and a Rural Communities Department. Concern for the welfare of Indian women and girls has resulted in the organization of an Indian division. There is a Department of Immigration and Foreign Communities. There are 63 colored branches of City Associations with about 28,00 women and girls listed as members.

In 1905, 60,427 women were enrolled in the Young Women's Christian Association. IN 1907 185,502 were reported. The membership in 1920 was 500,000 and in 1930 it stood at 603,876. It should be remembered that this figure includes Girl Reserves, students, groups of business women whom the Association serves, and its paid staff. Only approximately 55,000 women serve as volunteers on boards and committees and as advisers throughout the country—inheriting the responsibility undertaken by the first Women's Christian Association more than sixty years ago.

From the first building owned and displayed at the first conference at Hartford in 1871, the valuation of Association real 06458estate has grown until in 1929 it amounted to $71,749,902, and includes Boarding Homes, Administration Offices, Community Centers, and Summer Camps.

The Girls Friendly Society.—The Girls Friendly Society has grown since its organization until in 1931 it had a membership of 46,000 in 1,181 communities. Although girls of any creed may be members, the adult leaders—called “Associates”—still must be communicants of the Protestant Episcopal Church. It provides lodges or residence clubs in 11 cities for girls with small salaries. It maintains 27 Holiday Houses, where members may spend their vacations. Through membership in its branches, girls are given the opportunity for recreation and study, and every year a new missionary object is selected for support, and study of its needs by the branches is advanced to bind the membership together in a common benevolence. In 1928, for example, the Girls Friendly Society gave $6,000 to the Woman's Wing of St. Mark's Hospital at Cape Palmas, in Liberia, as its missionary project.

The growth of the Girls Friendly Society has been uneven, and its membership in 1930 was smaller than it had been five years earlier. However, it still enlists the support of women of the Episcopal Church, and contributes to the lives of thousands of working girls.

The National Woman's Christian Temperance Union.—Although the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union has joined with other organizations in supporting local, state and federal movements which might well fall within the scope of an organization having “for God and Home and Every Land” as its motto, and has carried forward independent projects of reform, it is nevertheless the record of the Union in behalf of temperance, in support of prohibition and its enforcement, which differentiates it from all other organizations of women. It has grown steadily and in 1930 it reported approximately 600,000 members. It has waged campaigns against patent medicines containing alcohol, against the sale of cigarettes, and in opposition to obscene literature. In state and local branches, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union is zealous in the field of moral reform.

The National Council of Jewish Women.—The National Council of Jewish Women included in 1930 over 50,000 members in its sections. It has set up buildings and institutions representing a value of more than $1,250,000. Neighborhood center are 06559maintained, Girls Homes, Y. W. H. A.s, Vacation Camps and Council Houses.

The Sections have provided for Jewish women the opportunity for social intercourse and for study and recreation together, which is characteristic of the general club movement. However, service to the underprivileged and unadjusted members of the race bulks large in its reports of work accomplished. In some communities various aspects of its work for social welfare and relief have been recognized by subsidies from Community Funds or from the treasuries of Jewish social agencies.

Aid to Jewish immigrants is generously supported, organized on a world-wide plan of cooperation, of which the Immigrant Aid Service maintained at Ellis Island and other ports of entry is one link, and the program of education for citizenship and employment in local communities another.

In 1921, the Council sent a Reconstruction Unit of Social Workers to Europe to reconstruct Jewish agencies and Jewish communities disorganized during and after the war, and in 1923 it summoned a World Conference of Jewish Women's Organizations in Vienna to consider the problem of Jewish refugees.

Religious schools have been organized in communities lacking facilities for Jewish education, and calendars of Holy days have been distributed to educational institutions in an effort to eliminate important school activities on Jewish Holy days. Scholarships are maintained by sections generally.

American Home Economics Association.—In September, 1930, The American Home Economics Association reported a membership of slightly more than 10,000. The work of the Association is as varied as the professional field to which it is related.

It has conducted research and investigations; it publishes a journal; it awards scholarships and fellowships; and, by cooperating with other research and commercial agencies, has endeavored to raise the standards of the profession it represents and to contribute to the knowledge of the whole field of Home Economics which ranged from textiles and nutrition of child development and parental education.

Three National Organizations of Nurses.—In 1930, there were three national nursing organizations cooperating to advance the interests and increase the service of the profession.

The National League of Nursing Education is the oldest, for it will be recalled that as the American Society of Superintendents 06660of Training Schools for Nurses it was organized by eighteen superintendents in 1893. Its program dealt with the problems of nursing education, the courses and the practices offered and denied in that field of training. Until 1912, the membership was restricted to superintendents of training schools, but in that year it was enlarged to include instructors, supervising and head nurses, and public health nurses who were engaged in teaching work. State Leagues were forming by 1912 and a new plan of organization brought them in changed the name to the one now used.

The function of the League is unchanged. It has strictly limited its field to problems connected with the education of nurses. Methods of teaching have been considered and necessary improvements have been advocated. Conditions under which student nurses receive their education have been examined, uniform curricula have been advocated in order that a reasonable minimum of instruction might be assured every graduate nurse. The extension of education in nursing to colleges and universities, with professional training and work for a Bachelor's Degree advancing together, has been urged by the League. Indeed, one of its first projects was securing, in 1899, the establishment of a school for the preparation of those who would teach or administer nursing training. The course was given in connection with Teachers College of Columbia. In 1931 there were 1,802 schools of nursing in the United States with which the League cooperated, giving continuously generous counsel and aid. There were in that year 82,989 students registered.1

The second organization, called the Nurses Associated Alumnae, was founded by the first in 1896. Now, as the American Nurses Association, it is the official organization of registered nurses in the United States, with 76,000 registered nurses enrolled. In 1929, there were 52 state Associations, one in each of the 48 states, one in Hawaii, one in Porto Rico, one in the District of Columbia, and an alumnae association of the Freedman's Hospital (colored).

In 1910 the Association inaugurated an educational fund, now administered jointly with the National League for Nursing Education and the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. It has provided scholarships and fellowships for graduate 06761nurses desiring the opportunity for further study and has loaned money to graduate nurses taking advanced courses in nursing education or in public health work. In May, 1929, the Loan Fund amounted to $5,500 and the Scholarship and Fellowship Fund totaled $34,000.

In 1911, a relief fund for needy nurses was inaugurated. The report of May. 1929, showed 189 beneficiaries carried on that date. The principle of the Fund on that date was $146,404.31. Since that time it has been decided that the administration of relief on a national basis is unsound and that some other plan for the administration of the project should be devised.

In 1921, as a memorial to the American nurses who died in the World War, the organization presented a new school building to L'École Florence Nightingale connected with la maison de la Santé de Bordeaux. A total of $81,000 had been donated in 1929.

With seven other national health organizations, the Association engaged in 1926 in financing a five-year program of the Committee on Grading of Nursing Schools.

The present period of general unemployment has concentrated attention upon a problem of the nursing profession which has been the concern of the Association for a long time; that is, the chronic condition of unemployment in the private duty field due not only to the free lance character of the work, but to the faulty distribution of service. A study was undertaken which will include a survey of nurse registries and graduate nurse services. Legislative protection, consideration of various plans of financial safeguards for nurses and the responsibility of interpreting the nurse to the public—these are questions for which the Association assumes leadership.

In 1912, the two existing organizations formed a third, the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, for the “stimulation and standardization of public health nursing and the furtherance of cooperation between those interested in public health nursing measures.” In this organization the emphasis is on the cause of Public Health Nursing, rather than on the nurses as a professional group. Lay persons were admitted to its membership which in 1931 reached 4,500 individuals, and 285 local groups. On all problems of Public Health Nursing the National Organization for Public Health Nursing is prepared to give information, advice and consultation to local groups. A 06862technical staff of ten, seven of whom are nurses, serve the board and committees.

All three nursing group work together in close cooperation and harmony, holding biennial meetings together, having joint committees and headquarters. Their growth represents the constantly more exacting standards of the profession. Their work dramatizes the progress which has been made since 1828 when the first student of nursing were introduced at the Philadelphia Dispensary.

The National Woman's Trade Union League of America.—The National Woman's Trade Union League has reported 27 local branches established from its founding in 1903 to 1929. It has given aid to women on strike, assisted in the organization of new Trade Unions and has constantly attempted to shelter and protect women in industry within and outside its membership by organization, legislation and education. For more than ten years the League maintained a Training School for Active Workers in the Labor Movement and awarded scholarships to 44 Trade Union girls. This pioneer educational program for working girls ended in 1926, but the idea has developed until now 5 colleges have opened their door to summer schools for working girls.

The American Federation of Teachers.—The Federation of Teachers has grown until its membership approaches 40,000 now, and in the National Education Association 175,000 classroom teachers represent the profession of which women make up the major part.

Organizations for Women in Medicine.—The Woman's Homeopathic Fraternity, formed in 1904, and the Medical Woman's National Association, organized in 1915, have been joined by the Osteopathic Medical Women's Association.

It was a purely social relationship which, until the war, bound together the first group, the women in Homeopathic Medicine. Then they joined in a national effort to establish a hospital unit, a project which was almost concluded when the Armistice was signed. There are less than 500 members of the Fraternity, but a scholarship fund is maintained for the education of young women in the profession. The fund has been available for more than a decade, 9 of the scholarship students are already practicing, and several are in college at the present time. In October, 1930, the membership of the Medical Woman's National 06963Association, which requires membership in the American Medical Association for eligibility, was just over 600

The Osteopathic Women's National Association.—In 1914 women in the practice of osteopathic medicine recognized the need of some organization through which their common interests could be advanced, and presented the necessity to the Board of Trustees of the American Osteopathic Association. The Trustees responded by creating a Bureau of Public Health, with a Women's Department, which later became a Women's Bureau of Public Health.

For six years this Bureau functioned as an auxiliary, and under a national chairman and a committee appointed by the Trustees of the A.O.A. it organized unit in each state.

It was the desire to cooperate and affiliate with other national women's groups which prompted the translation of the Bureau into the Osteopathic Women's Association, effected in 1920.

Its objects are:

To promote the welfare of women and children; to cooperate with other women's organizations; to stimulate state and local organizations and to secure combined action by our women.

Scholarships have been established by the Association, clinics are maintained, lectures on health subjects are given. The consideration of common professional problems and mutual friendliness bind its membership, which is now over 300.

The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs.—The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, to which reference will be made in the discussion of Women's Earnings, is only a little more than ten years old; but in 1931 state Federations existed in 46 states, and there were approximately 1,100 local clubs, which were eligible for membership because 75 per cent of al their members were actively engaged in business or in a profession. About 56,000 individual members were enrolled. It is fitting that during the first ten years of its existence the Federation should be able to report the development of 500 local educational funds through which it endeavor to realize it slogan, “at least a high school education for every business girl.” Approximately, too, it has directed surveys of vocational guidance facilities in local communities and in cooperation with the University of Michigan 07064has fostered and published the results of an occupational survey of its membership which is a genuine contribution to data concerning the business woman's problems. It publishes a monthly journal, The Independent Woman, which has advocated increased recognition of the interests of business women, such as, for example, larger income tax exemption for single persons under the federal law.

The proceedings of its conventions show a considerable amount of time given to discussion of emblems, of dues, and of administrative relationships. Those time-consuming topics are characteristics of the first year perhaps, and at the same time the National Committees in Health, on Education, on International Relations and Research have reported ambitious plans undertaken and accomplished. They have fostered campaigns to interest business women in positive health, to meet and join with employed women of other countries, and to face the special problems of women's employment.1 And in general the 1,100 local clubs have provided a means of recreation and relaxation for thousands of business girls to whom other women's organizations have been alien.

Curiously enough, the clubs federated in this group do not maintain many club houses. In April, 1929, there were only 17 club houses maintained by local clubs and just 126 clubs with rooms. The membership is composed of women who might seem to have particular use for the services of downtown club houses. The explanation given by an official is that business women have no time to give to the volunteer management involved in the operation of a downtown club house by a club supported by the dues of wage-earning women. Apparently the club house movement for some time must be sponsored by women of wealth and leisure. The business or professional women of large incomes join with them. For the smaller income group the facilities of the semi-philanthropic organizations are available for recreation. For meetings of business clubs hotels are commonly used, and it is a matter of pride to many to have their insignia in the hotel lobby along side of the organizations of business men who gather weekly to lunch and make motions and sing. In September, 1930, under the leadership of the American Association, an International Association was organized in Geneva.

The Association of Junior Leagues.—In 1930, there were 109 Junior Leagues in the United States, one in Hawaii, three in Canada and one in Mexico. In all, 22,000 young women are affiliated with the Association “of the Junior Leagues of America, Inc.,” which was formed in 1921 by the 30 Leagues then in existence. A headquarters office in maintained in New York City with an Executive Secretary in charge, and a secretary in the field. The members of local Junior Leagues volunteer their services to various welfare agencies, or maintain their own projects. Hospital libraries and occupational therapy departments are financed and maintained, milk stations, day nurseries and clinics are supported. Baby shelters and hospitals are operated. Settlement and community houses are assisted. Little “civic” activity appears in the summaries of work undertaken by the Leagues, but the donation of considerable money and much time by young women of leisure to the benevolent agencies of their communities is recorded.

The Junior League has invaded smaller cities each year and has probably diverted some girls who might otherwise have found regular occupation by lending social distinction to the role of the benevolent volunteer.

The National Consumer's League.—Mention has been made of the substantial part played by women in the National Consumer's League, which was formed by the Federation in 1899 of Leagues in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Illinois; and which attempted to arouse the conscience of the buying public to guarantee adequate protection to industrial workers. A woman founded the movement and, although the national presidents have always been men, one woman, Florence Kelley, was general secretary from the beginning until the winter of 1932, and the work all over the country has been carried forward largely through women's efforts. Two years after it was organized the National Consumer's League numbered 30 branches in 11 states. Three years later there were 64 branches in 20 states. But the League was not destined to grow great in size. In October, 1930, only 17 branches of varying size were reported, and in addition approximately 41,000 individual members were directly affiliated with the National League.

It was largely through the efforts of the Consumers’ League that the General Federation of Women's Clubs advocated a high standard of legislation for women and children in industry 07266in the first years of its existence. The League has financed investigations and published reports which have directed the attention of other groups to the abuses of home labor and of contract labor, and has urged them to demand decent standards. It is possible that the adoption of those standards by other women's organizations may have frustrated the Consumers’ League's own growth. It was also through the efforts of this organization that the attention of the U. S. Supreme Court was directed to a new type of evidence and a new approach to the question of legislative control over industry.1

The National League of Women Voters.—When the National League of Women Voters took the place of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1920, it was not expected, even by its initiators, to be a long-lived organization. It was recognized, however, that women as first voters needed to be informed about the exercise of their new duties and privileges. After ten years the hope of dissolution proves to have been as optimistic as Mrs. Croly's notion that the cultural activities of women's clubs would soon be out-dated. The League has undertaken a longtime job of non-partisan political education. All its work is intended to see women in their character as citizens.

Leaders in the League of Women Voters like to refer to it as an agency of adult education, “to promote the participation of women in government.” It has sponsored citizenship schools, ballot marking classes, and institutes of political education in cooperation with educational agencies and independently. It has produced popular but authoritative pamphlets on subjects related to the field of government which have been widely commended. With great earnestness it has supported a program of federal and state legislation. Its conventions are comparatively small, limited in representation to match the size of the United States Congress. Social features are reduced to a minimum and the programs are crowded with the presentation of the subject matter of the League's program of work and its discussion. All of these conditions tend to make the League a very business-like, orderly, hard-working group.

From the beginning, the League has emphasized the importance of its paid, as well as the value of volunteer, service. This is in sharp contrast to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which has taken pride in the fact that it has advanced through 07367service which is almost entirely volunteer. The League maintains a general national office in Washington, D. C., with three other national activities—the Radio Committee, the Department of International Cooperation to Prevent War, and the Treasurer's Office, housed in New York.

There were in 1930, 17 members of the national staff occupying positions of executive responsibility, 5 of them in the field, and a clerical force which averaged about 20 members. Twenty-seven state Leagues had headquarters. Of that number 22 states employed executives. In all, there were 55 positions divided among them. In addition, 41 local leagues had headquarters, with staff members totaling 30. These figures do not include stenographers or clerical assistance employed in state or local leagues. They reveal that more than 100 young women, almost without exception college graduates and in most cases with some special interest in politics and government, are finding a professional opportunity in advancing the League's program from some one of the 72 headquarters.

Unquestionably the League has contributed greatly to the political education of its members. It has encouraged the use of study groups, round tables, forums and discussion classes to promote the examination of public questions. The League does not do welfare or relief work, but it supports movements for welfare through government. It has remained non-partisan in policy, and, although in some communities it has incurred the displeasure of local party leaders, in general it is recognized to have an all-partisan membership. Campaigns for city charters have been initiated by city Leagues. Reorganized state governments have been demanded by state Leagues and much admirable state legislation has been enacted as a result of its insistence. As in every other organization, there is some variation in the quality of work undertaken by local groups and naturally there is a great difference in the attitude toward the study of political questions and active participation in controversial issues. There is a gap between the program of work adopted at the national and state conventions and the activities of some local groups. However, the fact that the regional directors—volunteer members of the National Board in charge of a group of states—travel extensively in their territories, assisted by paid secretarial help almost constantly in the field, and that national officers and members of the national headquarters staff are sent on frequent trips, does 07468tend to standardize the methods and to minimize inequalities. The League seems to be fairly homogeneous throughout the country.

Perhaps it is because of its record of causes espoused, of serious work undertaken, that the League has not grown more rapidly. It is impossible to cite accurate figures of membership, as the National League is composed of state Leagues and has no complete record of individual membership. The League is now organized in 45 states, the District of Columbia and Hawaii. In only two states does the estimated membership exceed 10,000, and it is probable that the total number of individual members falls below the 100,000 mark for the whole country.

In the opinion of many who have been associated with the League from the beginning, it is smaller in membership now than it was the year of its organization, even when generous allowance is made for the improved methods of membership record keeping which the National League has encouraged the states to adopt. In the early years the enthusiasm of victory and the excitement of a novel organization brought numbers of women into its memberships with no very definite idea of responsibility. The fact that the League is a hard-working organization has discouraged the casual “joiner”; that it has eliminated social features rather generally has disappointed some women; the fact that it occasionally espouses unpopular causes has served to alienate still others. Those who remain are pretty well tried, and in influence and accomplishments within its chosen field the record of the League is not undistinguished.

While the large majority of leaders and officers in the club movement have been married women, in the League it has been the reverse. Its officers and committee chairman are apt to be professional women experts in the field they undertake to supervise, or unmarried women of leisure and independence. The League has had only two presidents, one a widow with no children, the other unmarried. Both have given full-time service with the regularity that is usually considered professional.

The National Woman's Party.—The National Woman's Party is a non-partisan organization of women in the United States that has as its objective, “to secure for women complete equality with men under the law and in all human relationships.”

Some of the innumerable laws that have in the past differentiated between men and women are still found in every state. 07569Among the most important ones are eligibility to public office including jury service, admission to public employment, e.g., teaching and civil service, marriage, divorce, property rights of married women, support of family, domicil, guardianship, inheritance from children, earnings of children, sex offenses, illegitimate parentage, maternal and infant hygiene, mother's aid, prohibited occupations, public health regulations, and regulation of terms and conditions of employment.

The National League of Women Voters, as successor to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, has advocated a step-by-step procedure in the removal of injustices to women. The National Woman's Party has proposed a new amendment to the federal constitution which as a blanket provision would give me and women equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction and would give Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislature.

The arguments given for working for a national equal rights amendment are that it is more inclusive than state legislation, that it is more permanent than state legislation, and that it is a more dignified way to establish equal rights than is state legislation. The tactical advantages in campaigning for a national amendment over campaigning for state legislation are that it obviates the costly and difficult state referendums which frequently occur in state legislation; it unites the resources of women and makes these resources more effective than when divided among 48 state campaigns; it takes the issue of equal rights into the national political arena, and it “forces the politicians to take a position on the principle of equal rights and prevents their dodging the issue as in the case of state legislation.” The amendment, advocated since 1921, has been introduced at each session of the Congress and has been subject of hearings before the Judiciary Committees of both houses, recent ones being in February, 1929, and in January, 1931, and January, 1932.

Representatives from the National Women's Party and from the Inter-American Commission of Women representing 21 republics of the Western Hemisphere, took part in a series of conferences at Geneva in September, 1930, which resulted in the Organization of Equal Rights International to work for the complete equality of women throughout the world.

The work of the national headquarters of the Woman's Party can be illustrated by their organization and broadcasting through 07670the press of a nation-wide protest against the discharge of married women and of women from night work, the demand that more women be called for jury service in the District of Columbia, the intensification of a nation-wide press campaign against industrial discrimination, conducting hearings on the Cable Nationality bills, arranging for deputations to the President and asking him to withstand industrial inequality and to uphold the Equal Rights Amendment, hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment before the Senate Judiciary Committee, remonstrances by deputation and by organized telegraphic protest to governors against legislation alleged to be discriminatory, an organized protest against the Department of Labor's sending to Geneva a representative who, it was believed, would uphold the no-night-work convention—a protest followed by a public announcement on the part of the Secretary of the recall of the representative.

A recent achievements is convincing the chairman and secretary of the U.S. Civil Service Commission that the ancient Rule 7, under which appointing officers could specify the sex of a prospective member of the staff, should be abrogated. On October 8, 1932, these officials requested the President to revise the rules so as to place women on an equal footing with men. Over the dissent of the third member of the Commission, the President complied with the request on December 23, 1932. This does not deprive the appointing authority of the power to exercise a choice, but a reason must be given when the candidate who is lower on the eligibility list is chosen.1

The Woman on the Farm.—In spite of the great increase in membership of women's organizations and the wide diversity of their interests, one large group of women has been largely missed. The farm women of the country have been very lightly represented in the organized activities with which the women of towns and villages have been so preoccupied.

The club movement had made scant headway in the open country, although a club of farm women claims to be the first woman's club organized in the United States. It was organized in May, 1857, at Sandy Springs, Maryland, and it still exists under its original name of The Mutual Improvement Association. Its constitution sets out so well the methods and indicates the 07771sense of necessary discipline so clearly that a few sections are quoted. It provided:that our number be limited to fifteen persons who shall meet at the home of each, in rotation, on the last fifth day of each month. . . . taking the names in alphabetical order. The hour of meeting being 3 p.m. from the 4th to the 9th month inclusive, and 2 p.m. during the rest of the year, in order to allow sufficient time for business before supper, which it is recommended should be simple and early.

The plan of the group was described in another paragraph of the Constitution:That we shall offer for the benefit of the Association such information as we may have obtained, by experience or otherwise, in any way calculated to elevate the minds, increase the happiness, lighten the labor or add to the comfort of one another, our families or neighbors;...

And further:That each member be called on by name for some communication; when she may either ask for information on any subject she thinks it desirable to discuss or give information of the right nature which she has acquired, or call attention to some passage or book she has read not familiar to the rest, and all shall be expected to give attention to the subject under consideration.

But clubs like this were few. Generally, the farm women's participation in organized activities came in relation to general farm movements, the rise of the Granges,through Farmer's Institutes, or Farmer's Clubs which included the entire family.

The Grange deserves special mention for the position which its women members have always occupied. From 1867, when the Grange was organized, women were admitted to membership on a basis equal with men. And indeed, in order to secure a charter for a subordinate Grange, the application of at least 13 persons was required, not less than 4 of whom must be women. It is probable that all times the majority of Masters, and of other major officers in the Grange, have been men. Nevertheless women have been elected, too, in considerable numbers. So much so that in the beginning Grange leaders were accustomed to a certain amount or urban ridicule because of their capitulation to “petticoat government.” The 1930 roster of major state officers—master-lecture, treasurer and secretary—shows 26 unmistakably feminine names in a list of 128. Only a fifth, to be sure, but probably as good an average and as favorable to women as any other organization of men and women could show.

The Farmer's Institutes as an agency of adult education developed in the first half of the nineteenth century. The programs, at which a variety of farm problems were presented, generally included one woman speaker. Her contribution was usually inspirational and typical of her subjects were “The Beauty of Unselfishness” and “Little Deeds of Kindness.”1

Women regularly attended the Institutes, however, and in 1898 the farm women of Illinois formed an auxiliary to the county Farmer's Institutes known as the Domestic Science Association, modeled on a plan of organization which had flourished for some time in Ontario. Twenty counties were organized the first year and by 1906, 55 of the 102 counties in Illinois were doing active work. The clubs met once or twice a month and studied subjects such as the value and cost of food, hygiene and sanitation, the care and diet of the growing child. By 1904, at a meeting of the American Association of Farmer's Institute Workers, organized work for women was of sufficient importance to be given a special place in the reports. Other states followed the example of Illinois and in Indiana, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska separate organizations for women were formed. In 1912, 720 Women's Institutes were held in 8 states with a total attendance of 78,776 women reported.

In 1913, a report of the Secretary of Agriculture stated, “According to the testimony of many who are thoroughly familiar with conditions, the needs of the farm women have been largely overlooked by existing agricultural agencies.” A year later the passage of the Federal Act,2 which appropriated federal money for Extension work in Home Economics and Agriculture in the states, accelerated the work among farm women which had already been begun. Although the federal law was not enacted with the object of providing an organization for farm women, its administration has given farm women an opportunity to work and to study together, which is not unlike the city woman's club. Organized groups of women in cities sprang from wars, from the World's Fair, or from an obvious occupational or social need. The majority of farm women clubs are unique in that they were stimulated to organize by an Act of Congress, and they are2 Generally known as the Smith-Lever Act, U. S. Statutes of large 38: 372, Sixty-third Congress, Second Session, Chap. 79.07973perhaps fortunate in that from the beginning they have had professional leadership.

This is not the place for a discussion of the federal act, its administration or the general accomplishments under it. It is only necessary to say that funds authorized by it have provided for an educational program with farmers and their wives which has been carried on by county agents, specialists in the problems of agriculture and home demonstration agents, skilled in the work of Home Economics.

The work varies by communities and by states and there have been from the beginning differences in the plans for the South and the North. In the South the project undertaken by the group is planned to vary with the seasonal needs. In the North one project will probably be developed throughout the year—clothing, recreation, gardening, home beautification or whatever the subject may be. Although a school or a community center may provide the meeting place, very often it is a farm home. Around the work and the transaction of necessary business, a club life of work and recreation has developed which duplicates that of some of the most desirable of the clubs of towns and cities. The meetings have a definite objective, and to some extent trained leadership. They are free, therefore, from some of the alleged weaknesses of the general club movement.

In 1915, 368 county agencies reported that they had enrolled 6,871 women and organized 250 rural community clubs in 15 southern states. The war emphasized work in food production projects, and in July, 1917, agricultural agents were in 1,436 of the 3,001 counties in the United States and Home Demonstration agents had increased to 1,715. They have worked through existing organizations like the Granges and farmers’ clubs, and particularly through the Farm Bureau Federation since its organization in 1920, while some groups have been specially organized to learn in extension classes modern methods of canning, of home beautification, or child care. According to the report of the Department of Agriculture, there were, in 1922, 210,560 farm women enrolled in extension work. In 1930 the number had grown to 646,340.

In 1928, increased funds became available under what was known as the Capper-Ketcham Act,1 and during the years 1928 and 1929, state and local funds were increased by $1,500,000.1 U. S. Statutes at Large 47: 1151.08074On June 30, 1930, there were 1,352 County Home Demonstration Agents and the farm women were said to be participating in increased numbers as local leaders.1

A particular activity in Ohio should be noted as an example of a distinctive development within a state. There, in 1911, as a part of the extension program of a magazine for farmers, the Ohio Farmer, the organization of farm women's clubs was begun—“To study and work on farm home making problems. also to consider closer social contact with neighboring farm women.” In 1913 there were 42 of these clubs in 26 counties and their Federation was concluded. Later this Federation of Farm Women's Clubs itself federated with the Ohio Federation of Women's Clubs. In 1925, there were 145 clubs in 38 counties in Ohio, with a total membership of 3,124 members. At the beginning of 1933, the Ohio Farmer reports 160 Clubs, with about 3,600 members in 40 different counties, with some counties still to be heard from.

The organization of the Farm Bureau Federation in 1920 gave another channel for farm women's activities through its Home and Community Service, in which the women of the Farm Bureau were enrolled. In two states—Illinois and New York—the Home Bureau for women is separately organized and financed independently of the Farm Bureau. More generally, however, it is affiliated.

There are entertainment and social features connected with the Grange, with the monthly meetings of the Farm Bureaus, and the recreational aspects of the Home Demonstration groups have developed. Pageants, plays and musical programs seem to be common.

For several years, The Farmer's Wife, a magazine with a circulation approaching a million, and one of the few magazines appealing directly to farm women, has conducted an elaborate inquiry into the interests and practices of farm women and has awarded an honor—that of being designated a Master Farm Home Maker—on the basis of its findings.

One of the questions on which the decision may rest concerns the organizations to which the candidate belongs. A cursory examination of a small number of these questionnaires showed them to be so interesting that the questionnaires, or Work Sheets, 08175of 1,499 women in 23 states1 were examined, and the replies to a few questions tabulated. The women replying represent a selected group, and are not perhaps typical of the million farm women in the country. They were in touch with the Home Demonstration Agents, and were proposed for honorary notice by their neighbors. They are, it may be supposed, the more progressive women of the communities represented.

Only 145, or .09 per cent, of these women had failed to finish the eighth grade. Twelve hundred and forty had completed the common school learning. Two hundred and sixty-four, or almost 18 per cent, had attended high school, although they had not completed the full course. A large number, 449, just short of 30 per cent, were graduated from high school, and some of these persisted further. One hundred and sixty-four,2 or just under 11 per cent, attended normal school, although they did not graduate, while 214, more than 14 per cent, spent some time at college or in a university. Sixty-eight had been graduated from a college or university and 20 had completed the normal course, That is, over 5 per cent had completed a college or professional curriculum, besides 45 who had attended business college, 36 who had been matriculated in a seminary, and 302 who had enrolled in extension or home study courses.

Certainly all of them could have been considered eligible to participate in the organized activities which tempt the leisure time of women today. Yet only 395 stated that they employed their leisure time in club and community work. The word “leisure” must have had a connotation of idle sociability for in a later section of the inquiry, in a section devoted to “Community Work,” 698, only a little less than half of the total number of women, testified that they engaged in Community Club work.

The next largest number, 493, replied that their organization activities were confined to the Ladies Aid. An equal number went to Sunday School. Four hundred and forty-eight belonged to Home Demonstration Clubs. In the order of their numerical importance their interests are exhibited in the following tabular statement:08276

Community club698

It is not practicable to ascertain with any degree of accuracy the activities of each organization by the names. Membership in certain national organizations is included in the total classified as “Library and Study Clubs.” Exactly 100 of the 426 mentioned their membership in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Twenty-eight belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution, and it is of interest to record that 57 women were members of Red Cross Chapters. Membership in fraternal orders is included among the total number active in “Social Clubs.” One hundred and three of the 419 were members of the Eastern Star. Nine had been initiated into the Royal Neighbors and 2 were Rebekahs.

As the result of a series of interviews with individuals working with farm groups, it seems probable that many of the Community Clubs are the kind in which the whole family participates—a type of organization for recreation and self-improvement much more common in the country than in the city. Under this heading, membership in a Grange was mentioned sixty-four times. Farmers’ Institutes, Farm Women's Councils, Farmers’ Clubs, Rural Clubs, County Councils—the names of the organizations are similar, and it is probable that the activities are much the same.

For the rest, it is the church, with its Ladies Aid and Missionary Societies, the school with its related Parent-Teachers Association, and the home, leading to Home Demonstration Clubs and Home Bureau units, which appear to claim the major interest of these farm women.

A letter from a woman1 identified with work among farm women of Ohio is of interest in this connection.

I would say (she wrote) that their primary interests outside their homes are connected with the church. They are ardent members of the Missionary Society and W.C.T.U. In many cases they belong to farm women's clubs of a civic or literary nature....

Some of the most interesting clubs I have run across have been farmers’ clubs attended by both men and women and often by the entire family. Meetings are held once a month, lasting all day, and include a royal good meal. Subjects under discussion are connected with both rural economies and civic life.

The evidence of slight interest in the League of Women Voters✓ supports the admission of that organization itself, which recognizes the difficulty of enlisting farm women in its membership—a difficulty related of course to the problems of extension and finance. Only 5 women listed regular partisan political activity—2 were members of political clubs of some nature. But before concluding that there is scant concern for government and politics on the part of women in the country, it should be noted that 1,284 of the group stated that they voted regularly. Eighty-two responded that they sometimes cast their ballot. Fifteen left the question unanswered. Only 94 confessed that they were habitual non-voters. And further it is possible that, in the Town and Community Associations, the Community Clubs, many of the local civic activities characteristic of Leagues of Women Voters may be carried on.

In the total engaging in the work of Town and Community Associations, 24 members of school boards are found, and 20 others participating in “School Improvement” Associations. Twenty-one women were members of cemetary associations. Eleven were found on Fair Associations or Boards. One served on a library and another on a township board. All these involve some relationship to political agencies.

Organizations of Colored Women Today.—The National Association of Colored Women has grown since its organization of 1896 until today there are 50,000 members, and state federations in 42 states. For 34 years, under a confusingly elaborate committee organization, the Association had endeavored “To 08478show proof of improvement in the race along moral, mental and material lines.”

In the variety of its interests, the Colored Women's organization has mirrored the diversity of the federated clubs. In 1930, however, the Association abandoned 38 of those Departments, and accepted as its responsibility only the activities relating to the 2 remaining. They are (1) Mother, Home, and Child; and (2) the Negro Women in Industry. the reason advanced for the constriction is that other national organizations, equipped to do the selected job with greater efficiency than the General Association, have appeared in the past few years, specializing in some particular aspect of Negro welfare.

Under the two Departments remaining the activities proposed are outlined by the president of the Association1 as follows:

Through (1) Mother and Child, we would create better environment for Colored children; would carry on a program of adult education for mothers and fathers; and encourage Negroes to love home, and to create homes (we do not mean mansions, but places in which children may be born and have the proper cultural background).

Through department (2) Women in Industry, we propose to organize Colored Women of this country to the end that they may know their strength, gain power, and be active to the opportunities afforded in the fields of labor, commercial art, and other industrial pursuits.

It is possible that the simplification is largely a desirable administrative improvement and that little of the work actually undertaken will be abandoned. Only the multiplicity of aspirations will be affected. Nevertheless, the decision to analyze its resources and to survey other groups occupying the same field might well be faced by other national associations whose committee organization has only a slender relationship to the work of the local units, and none at all to the adaptability of the organization to the tasks involved.

The Association has a National Headquarters in Washington, D. C., and in addition owns the Frederick Douglass home which it is its intention to preserve and keep as a national shrine. There is evidence in the publications of the Association that this memorial undertaking has been such a drain on the financial resources of the group that other work has been neglected.

The organization in 1900 of the Women's Convention, auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, was the second national 08579organization of colored women to appear. In 1930, over 2,000 women attended the annual Convention of the Auxiliary in Chicago. The increase from an income of $15 in 1900 to $50,000 raised in 1920, measures the growth of the organization which has depended largely upon the energetic idealism of its secretary 1 In 1907, the Women's Auxiliary sponsored the organization of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D. C. It was opened in 1909—the only vocational school for Negro girls in the North and the only one in the country directed and supported by Negroes. In addition a series of pamphlets issued by the Auxiliary for the use of local missionary societies gives very spirited instructions and suggestions for the conduct of meetings and work.

In April of 1923 the College Alumnae Club of Washington invited other Negro college women to come together to consider the advisability of forming a national organization of Negro college women. A temporary national Association of College Women was formed at this time, with its aims outline as follows:

I. a. To unite in one organization all of our college women for mutual benefit, and for united effort in benefiting our several communities.

In 1924, a permanent organization was formed, and now almost 300 colored college women are members of the 9 branches which exist in Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Delaware State, Petersburgh, Virginia, Raleigh, N. C., St. Louis, and Talladega, Alabama.

At that time 300 local associations in 4 states2 made up its membership of approximately 2,000. In 1929, 16 states3 with an2 Delaware, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.3 Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Louisiana. The states having the largest membership are Delaware, West Virginia and Arkansas.08680approximate membership of 1,000 associations and 18,000 members were enrolled.

The National Congress of Parents and Teachers acts in an advisory capacity to the colored group. Indeed, the call for organization was signed by the president of the National Congress, the chairman of the Committee on Extension of Parent-Teacher Associations among Colored People, and by the president of the Georgia Colored Parent-Teacher Association, who is now president of the National Association (colored).

The program of work and the objectives of the colored Parent-Teacher Association are, in so far as is practical, identical with those of the older organization.

With the cordial cooperation of the Congress of Parents and Teachers, but independent, a National Colored Parent-Teacher Association was formed in 1926.

Negro college women had organized sororities as early as 1908 when Alpha Kappa was launched. Zeta Phi Beta is another national group and there are numerous local Greek letter societies. Unlike the sororities for white students, the Negro groups are not necessarily confined to the quadrangle. A chapter in Boston, for example, may have as its members women attending colleges anywhere in New England. In Chicago, the members may be in any one of several nearby institutions.

No summary of Negro women's organizations would be complete without mention of their generous participation in secret lodges. A number of lodges listed in the “Negro Year Book” have names which show that “Brothers and Sisters” are joined together in large numbers, although no accurate statistical information is readily available. And then there are the large auxiliaries to the secret societies which are exclusively male. There is an auxiliary to the Elks, a Household of Ruth to supplement the Odd Fellow and an Order of the Eastern Star to grace the Masons. It should remembered that the Negro orders are not connected with the white of similar names, nor are the auxiliaries related.

The Sorority System in Colleges and Universities.—Reference has already been made to the appearance of sororities in their pioneering days, when higher education for women, was itself a 08781novelty, and their union into independent social groups even more so. The statistical material available is incomplete.1

A good many of the early chapters established did not survive the difficult first years, sometimes because of anti-sorority legislation, sometimes because of the fluctuating student population or other generally adverse conditions under which women students worked. Nevertheless the growth of the sorority system has been persistent. Barely 20 chapters established between 1870 and 1880 are reported2 to have had an unbroken existence. Between 1880 and 1890, 63 chapters were established, the next decade saw 60 charters awarded, 200 were founded between 1900 and 1910, and in the following decade 400 more were inaugurated.

In 1907, there were 25 national sororities for women students, of which 17 were academic, 8 professional. There was a college membership of 8,200 and a total membership of 47,200.

In 1927, there were 44 sororities—26 of them academic and 18 professional. A college membership of 32,500 distributed in 150 institutions was reported that year and a total membership of approximately 210,000 distributed among 1,300 active and alumnae chapters. A further examination would be necessary to reveal whether the increase in members only keeps pace with the enlarged enrollment in the colleges or whether a greater democracy is evident in the selection of a larger proportion of women students.

Larger chapters are inevitable if the expensive chapter houses are to be maintained. In 1905, only 7 chapters were reported3 as owning their own chapter houses—the first one erected by Alpha Phi at Syracuse in 1889 was valued at $10,000—while 35 chapters rented places of residence. In 1927,4 a total of 385 houses, are listed as being owned, with a total valuation of $10,602,500.

Obviously there must be considerable business connected with the acquisition and management of such substantial property interests. A closer relationship between the active and alumnae organization is one consequence and today many of the more than 200,000 sorority women find their leisure time activities 08882after graduation directed toward the management of sorority affairs. A few sororities have undertaken some form of welfare work as a responsibility, such as the support of a specific charity or school; almost all of them provide scholarships for their deserving members or for outsiders. But primarily the sororities exist for the mutual pleasure of their members. The social life for the women students in many colleges is organized around them. And the alumnae organizations are most concerned with the success, the growth, and the welfare of the neighboring college chapters. The alumnae assist in meeting financial problems, in conducting household affairs, in upholding standards of decorous conduct and scholarship. They act as advisors and friends. They give and they raise money.

The Club House Movement.—If there is any phase of the club movement which stands out with especial vividness in the modern development it is the increasing number of club houses. Not that club houses for women are a novelty. At the second Biennial of the General Federation, held in 1894 in Philadelphia, club houses were reported in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Indianapolis, Lansing and Milwaukee. Since that time there has been a steady increase until now approximately 1,200 club houses are reported by the General Federation. In value these club houses range from $300 to $3,000,000. The facts may be unrelated but it is of interest to report that the $300 club house serves its community as library and rest center, while the $1,000,000 plants are maintained to serve their members.

The small club houses—and there are many ranging in cost from $50,000 to $100,000—seem often to be planned as community assets, with the men of the community contributing counsel as well as making gifts of money. A number of such buildings house the public libraries of their towns, some provide the only auditorium available. With low dues—one club whose membership dues are $2 built a $15,000 club house—they must depend on the money-raising activities of their members for supplementary income and upon their volunteer efforts instead of professional service in the club maintenance and management.

The larger clubs—like the city clubs—a group of which Chicago's was a pioneer—offer the advantage of hotel comfort to resident members and transient guests.

The most costly club houses—both in the plant equipment and in dues to the members—are the athletic clubs, which flourish with 08983such conspicuous success in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. They offer an infinite variety in their service to their members. Comfortable bedrooms, luxurious libraries, good living rooms, all kinds of athletic equipment, reducing machines, Turkish baths and beauty parlors.

The Los Angeles Women's Athletic Club is valued at $1,500,000, the Chicago Women's Athletic Club at $1,000,000, and the Illinois Woman's Athletic Club in Chicago at $3,750,000. The entrance fee to the San Francisco Club is $500, and the dues are $50 annually. The Club's payroll is $10,000 a month. And while the dues are high for a woman's club, these are modest compared with the fees required to affiliate with an athletic club for men offering similar advantages.

Country clubs for women are luxurious new developments of the club movement. The National Women's Country Club near Washington, D. C., has in its membership a number of wealthy and prominent women from all over the country. The Mount Vernon Country Club of Detroit has a membership of women of leisure. The Woman's National Golf and Tennis Club flourishes at Glen Head, Long Island.

The club house of the National Woman's Democratic Club in Washington and that of the Woman's National Republican Club in New York may be said to represent the social interests of party women. The headquarters of the American Association of University Women and the General Federation of Women's Clubs are each housed in national club houses in Washington which have some facilities for transient guests.

Two of the most pretentious club houses—luxurious hotels for women in New York—are Pan Hellenic House and the Club-house of the American Woman's Association. The first was built by the fraternity college women and is valued at $1,600,000. The latter is an $8,000,000 venture. The Junior League of New York is equipped for the work and recreation of its 2,000 members in its club house which cost $1,250,000.

Women's club houses provide a place for conference and meeting for the groups which in size have long outgrown the hospitality of their members. To many members they offer a residence and a place of recreation. They are a visible sign of the trend to entertain away from home. For small lunch parties, for teas or bridge, dinner or dancing, clubs all over the country have supplemented the hospitality of the homes of their members.

A brilliant English novelist, Virginia Woolf, has accounted for the relative paucity of women's, as compared with men's, productiveness whether in science, literature, or the other arts, by the lack of a “room of her own.” It may not be far fetched to relate that earlier lack to the rapid increase in the number of these costly buildings, making provision for accommodations intended for women's activities not related to family life and rendering possible individual experience unrelated to domestic responsibilities or obligations.

The National Council of Women and Some Other Cooperative Relationships of Women.—As soon as there were national organizations, there were cooperative relationships between and among the members who met in committees, sat in conferences and joined each other in councils. The formation of the Pan Hellenic Association has been mentioned. More pretentious and earlier came to organization in 1888 of the National Council of Women of the United States. In 1891, it was incorporated and affiliated with the International Council of Women. Then its membership included the following associations:

The National Woman Suffrage Association

As organizations multiplied the Council grew. In 1928 there were 38 organizations on its roster, but a year later the number had dropped to 21. In the early years of this century there are proud references to the Council in the records of other organizations. Then it was said to represent 6,000,000 women. In 1930, however, its influence had been almost extinguished. Most of the large groups having strong national organizations had withdrawn. Apparently the cycle of the Council had been run. However, the Council is the organization into whose keeping the representation of women's interests at Chicago's second World's Fair is entrusted. How enduring will be any strength newly 09185acquired in connection with that undertaking only time can tell.

Later, as interest in legislation arose, women's organizations united to form legislative councils in the states. These, and the formation of the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee in Washington in 1920, will be discussed in a later section. During the War, the Council of National Defense had a Woman's Division under which a variety of women's organizations enlisted for the war period. Two later conferences are important as they record the adherence in common sympathy of two opposing groups of organizations.

In 1923, a proposal was advanced to unite in conference all the national women's organizations which professed to support some program for the peaceful settlement of international disputes, the substitution of law for war. The first meeting was held in 1925, and this Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, in which eleven organizations participate, has convened in Washington every succeeding year.

The member organizations are:

The National League of Women Voters

The conferences’ three-day program have included addresses by experts in international law, in economics, and in military organization. Discussions have been encouraged, and the conferences have served as educational institutes upon which the delegates and constituent organizations have drawn heavily in the continued study and support of their programs in international relations. The “Peace Societies” are not included in membership, and the Conference has not been permitted to become an agency to promote any particular system for the promotions of peace although it has endorsed such proposals as the Kellogg Pact, and has advocated international tribunals and conferences.

Distrust of the purpose of the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War prompted the organization of a hostile conference. It is called the Women's Patriotic Conference on National Defense, and customarily meets in Washington immediately following the other. It is sponsored jointly by the American Legion Auxiliary and the D.A.R. and 40 organizations unite to oppose efforts to reduce armaments, to support increased provisions for national defense, and generally to resist what they call subversive influences.

With the exception of the two major organizations upon whose leadership the Conference depends, the member groups are small. Some of them are local clubs, and almost all of them are composed of women who identify themselves in their relationship to the veteran of some war. The entire membership is as follows:

American Gold Star Mothers

International Relationships.—Coöperation at home has been followed by cooperation abroad, and most of the large organizations maintain some relationship with women's groups of similar aims in other countries.

In their names, the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom and the International Policewomen's Association, proclaim that the boundaries of nationality do not limit their interests. The name “General” Federation of Women's Clubs was chosen instead of “National,” in order that clubs around the globe might join. For a long time the position of “Foreign Correspondent” was an established one and the Biennial conventions earned of clubs in foreign lands, entertained their delegates and extended greetings.

In 1883, the National Women's Christian Temperance Union founded the World's Christian Temperance Union through the efforts of Frances E. Willard, who was elected its first president, and 8 round-the-world missionaries were sent out by the W.C.T.U. Now women of 50 nations participate in the general crusade which includes in its program the abolition to traffic in drugs as well as alcoholic liquors.

The National League of Women Voters is the branch in this country of the International Alliance of Women for Equal Suffrage and Citizenship. As a result of the Pan American Conference of Women, which the League of Women Voters sponsored in Baltimore in 1922, the Pan American Association for the Advancement of Women was organized, with the League the member for the United States. In 1925, the Association met in Washington and changed its name to the Inter-American Union of Women. Its aims were stated to be:

1. The promotion of the education of women and the encouragement of higher standards.

The National Council of Catholic Women is a member of the International Union of Catholic women's Leagues. In 1923, the Jewish Women of the World were called in conference in Vienna by the National Council of the United States. There are Councils of Jewish Women in nine European countries today due to its influence.

Earlier, in 1919, the National Women's Trade Union League of America had voted in its convention that it should call an International Congress of Working Women. As a result of that decision there convened in Washington, in October, 1918, the First International Congress of Working Women with 12 countries represented. A second meeting was convened in Geneva in 1921—this time called the International Federation of Working Women. A change in the organization which took place at this conference illustrates the difference in the attitude toward organizations of women workers in Europe and in the United States. Delegates from European countries proposed that instead of continuing as an autonomous independent organization of women the Federation should become a department of the existing International Federation of Trade Unions.

The emphasis among Europe women in industry was on workers as a class, while the League in the United States recognized the need for a woman movement within the Labor movement. The National Woman's Trade Union League of America, therefore, withdrew from memberships, although a friendly relationship still exists.

The American Nurses Association is part of the International Council of Nurses, and the American Association of University Women is affiliated with the International Federation of University Women. Membership in the Fidac Auxiliary—affiliated with the international association of men who served in the allied armies—is maintained by the American Legion Auxiliary.

Quota Club is Quota International. Zonta boasts branches in Europe and Australia. The Soroptomists are international in scope of membership. The Federation of Business and Professional Women's clubs had organized Continental trips for women which it has called Good-Will-Trips, and in 1930, in Geneva, consummated the organization of a formal International Association. The Association of Junior Leagues of America, Inc., already has a league in Mexico affiliated, and has made provision in its plans and constitution for the admission of Leagues in Europe.

The International Federation of Home and Schools was formed at the invitation of the Congress of Parents and Teachers of the United States and the sister group in Canada. In 1929, there were Parent-Teacher Associations in 32 countries and national associations projected in 8 other countries as a result of the International program.

In 1919, the Medical Women's International Association was organized in New York City. Congresses have been held in Geneva, London and Paris, and now there are 22 member organizations.

Usually memberships in an International group means representation at International Conferences. It means the exchange of Bulletins and magazines, connection through correspondence and the entertainment of foreign guests. For the organization leaders at least it means that women of different nations take counsel together. In the end it seems that this widening of organization limitations must be a sound contribution to the cause of international good will.

Budgets and Support.—Only a few national organizations of women are self-supporting. Most of them depend for revenue not only on the dues and the heroic money-raising efforts of their members, but upon the donations of their friends. In some groups this is accomplished by having a sliding scale of membership, and members whose major participation is financial are made “contributing” or “life” members as the case may be.

The Y.W.C.A. is well established as a community service organization and has been able to raise much of its money by public appeals. In some communities the chests subsidize it; in others, special campaigns are waged.

The Council of Jewish Women spends nationally and through its sections about $500,000 annually, and owns property over 09690$1,250,000 in value. It is subsidized by community funds in some cases and generally makes appeals for contributions for its work to men and wealthy women not in its active membership.

In the years since its organization, the American Association of University Women has expanded its annual budget from $35 a year to approximately $94,000. Dues and contributions from branches are supplemented by Foundation subsidies to finance its program which includes the support of research and fellowships and makes a special appeal to certain research endowment funds.

Some of the money administered by the Home Economics Association was granted by one of the great Foundations. A total of $105,000 has been donated for the establishment of the Washington Child Research Center, and other grants for special research projects total about $35,000. Aside from these monies the budget for the organization for 1929-1930 was $53,900, raised largely within the Association.

The Nursing Organizations have enjoyed subsidies for research, too, and of the $110,000 which the National Organization of Public Health Nurses spends annually, membership dues and payment for services are a part, while contributions from interested persons are solicited and received.

The National Woman's Trade Union League of America has an annual budget of approximately $23,000. In 1928-1929 more than $17,000 of that total was received from individual donations.

The Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom raises approximately $25,000 to spend annually in the United States and sends $6,000 to the Geneva office as its share of the International expense. The membership fee is only $2.00, and the balance must be secured from individual gifts.

The annual income estimated by the 1930 Convention of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs was $69,212.20. The Federation, according to a statement of the secretary, has never received any large gifts, and is supported almost wholly by the dues and contributions of its own members.

The Congress of Parents and Teachers likewise reports that the $95,000 in its estimated budget for 1929-1930 was raised from the dues of its members.

The 1930 Convention of the American Legion Auxiliary reported disbursement of $80,616.13 for the fiscal year.

The National League of Women Voters has an annual budget of about $130,000. It is raised by contributions in the nature of “quotas” from state Leagues which are generously supplemented by contributions from men and women who are in sympathy with its program of political education for women. In 1929-1930 the League conducted, through its state Leagues, a campaign for an endowment fund of $100,000.

The success of the League's plan, which incidentally memorialized women's services to the cause of citizenship, parallels a similar campaign inaugurated by the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1910 and successfully completed a few years later in honor of outstanding club leaders. In 1930 the Federation treasurer reported an income for the biennium of $14,122.55 from the memorial endowment. The balance from the war service fund has provided an additional biennial income of over $11,000 for Federation activities since the war.

In addition to these special funds and other smaller ones, the General Receipts which were reported by the Federation in 1930 for the two-year period ending March 31 of that year amounted to $236,025.17.

It should be remembered that the National Budget of most organizations does not include a record of expenditures for state or local work. It is only a small part of the money which is spent by women's organizations to carry out their programs in the United States today.

✓If an attempt is made to review the salient features of this account, it will be noted there came first federation, then cooperation, then specialization. These seem to be changing emphases in women's organizations. The new groups which appear and the older ones which grow are more restricted in the field they cover than the clubs united in the General Federation. Women who work are inclined to ally themselves with other of their profession or with other groups of women in the business world. Women of leisure with education and technical training are likely to join with others to promote some special program. It seems unlikely that the General Federation is growing now at as rapid a pace as in former years. Its very size and its proud diversity militate against such growth.

It has seemed impracticable, as has been pointed out, to give any adequate numerical comparison with former year because the membership figures have always been estimates and are far from exact.1 The difficulty in estimating the actual number of women in the Federation, for example, is due to the fact that the organization is composed of clubs, not women. A single woman may belong to several federated clubs; an estimate of repeaters seemed hardly worth while. The leaders of the Federation believe the organization is growing. Careful observes sometimes disagree on the basis of experience in certain communities. As a cause they cite the fact that with an increase of general educational opportunity the literary programs are no longer attractive to so many women, and with a similar increase in recreational facilities in movies, in athletics, in bridge clubs, the social features no longer seem necessary. And the clubs are no longer exclusively the

1 The Eastern Star reported 1,687,674 members at its last convention.

The Congress of Parents and Teachers reports that the million mark was passed in 1928

The General Federation estimate is “over two million.”

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union reported approximately 600,000.

These seem to be the largest national organizations of women.

It would probably be impossible to give to the clubs too much credit for their pioneering contributions to these now generally accepted public responsibilities. The American Library Association is reported to credit women's clubs with the responsibility for initiating 75 per cent of the public libraries now in existence in the United States.

But if, today, other organizations seem more skillful tools for professionally-minded women to use, the clubs still offer the “resting place” they sought to be forty years ago. The club house has a place in woman's life today and so far it is the general federated club which offers it most reasonably and most generously. Young women will join clubs with club houses whose services they enjoy. No other aspect of the club movement seems so well designed to attract the young woman of 1933.

One interest and one activity appears to be shared by almost every organization whose records have been examined. They all maintain scholarships. The P.E.O. Sisterhood and the Eastern Star share this activity with the D.A.R., the Congress of Parents and Teachers and almost every group which has been mentioned. Education is the thread of similarity which runs through all the groups—reminiscent of the Federation motto, “United in Diversity.”

The facts with reference to women's organizations and their political activities are obviously external. There is revealed an uncalculable amount of energy going father in uncharted directions. Whither and to what result, who can say? The comment of a brilliant observer from another environment may throw light on the subject, especially of the probable significance of the club movement and of the possible utilization of the middle years by women who have been equipped to enter the labor market but have allowed the experience of their family life to terminate their wage earnings. She wrote:The channel through which so much of the American woman's social activity flows—the Woman's Club—seemed to me to be of immense importance politically because its routine is planned to be compatible with the domestic arrangements of married women. It has recently 10094become obvious that the reason women have not produced nearly so many of the great as men have is, not that what we regard as the characteristically masculine activities demand different powers from those demanded by the characteristically feminine activities of wifehood or motherhood, but that they demand the same. For now that the raising of the marriage age and the lowering of the birth rate allow women to follow at any rate the initial stages of an artistic and scientific occupation, we find that the women who show most promise are usually those who are most sexually attractive. To take a conspicuous instance, there are probably no more beautiful women in England than our finest woman pianist and ‘cellist of the younger generation. In fact, the women who would make the best artists, scientists, or politicians are the very ones who are more inevitably called to another career which is usually incompatible with any other. In the past this coincidence of sexual and creative powers meant utter frustration of feminine talent, since these were the very women who were most certainly doomed to marry young and be bound to such an unremitting toil of childbearing, childrearing, and housework that when their children were grown up they were in most cases too tried to do anything but rest.

Nowadays the physical conditions of life are so much improved that it is no more natural for a woman to be exhausted at the age of forty-five, after having been a wife and mother, than it is for a man to be exhausted at that age after having practiced as a lawyer or doctor. We must resign ourselves to the fact that, in spite of this improvement, it will be very difficult for such a women to return to the practice of an art or a science. She will have forgotten its technic, and since domestic life calls (above all things) for a chameleon adaptability of mind that can shift from object to object as emergency dictates, she will have impaired her power of concentration. But there are other careers, and in particular there is the political career. This is the ideal field for the middle-aged woman who has acquired a sense of values by many years spent in the cultivation of human relationships, if only she has meanwhile kept in touch with affairs. That is an immensely difficult condition; and the woman's club seems to be the best device yet framed for fulfilling it.

The development of this device in the United States may be due to the fact that in one important respect it has better material to work on than it would have in England. American women do not dislike men as much as Englishwomen do. English women probably love men more for, owing to the more sedative airs of Great Britain, they are apt to sit still and feel, while the exhilarated American runs about and receive new impressions. But they do not like men....

But the number of serenely energetic American Women between forty-five and sixty-five far surpasses the number in England who manage to preserve the integrity of their nervous system....

My incredulity concerning the masculine aptitude for these matters was enormously increased when I visited the United States and saw how American men, compelled by the need of their country for economic exploitation to take less interest in politics than the European, overshoot the mark and take none at all; and my suspicion that women have 10195more aptitude for the work—based on observation of the way the emancipated Englishwoman takes to politics, at the first opportunity, as a duck takes to water—was as enormously increased when I saw how an otherwise politically barren land blossoms forth from coast to coast in Leagues Woman Voters. Indeed, it is almost beside the point to discuss whether the women of the United States have a special aptitude for the work, since they are the only people who seem to be✓✓ ready to do it. And there are the vast carcasses of Russia and China—sprawling helplessly over the map, magnificiently endowed with population and natural wealth but insufficiently innervated by governmental systems—to prove what happens to a country that is not a political entity.1

The Census of 1900 attracted the attention of students to the steady increase in the number of women who were gainfully employed, and raised the question whether or not great changes were taking place in the amount and character of the work of women, so that they were both invading men's fields of employment and affecting the home disastrously. There was wide discussion in the press, and the period was also characterized by scientific discussions in which it was shown that in the major industrial occupations women were not displacing men, and were as a whole probably doing no more work than they had always done. They were, however, in may cases offering their labor outside the home and collecting their own earnings, where, before, either they had rendered unpaid services in the home or their husbands or fathers had owned ad collected their earnings.

It was even then clear that the occupations of women in connection with family life had been of fundamental importance in the production of the commodities or services available and likewise in the determination of the ways in which those commodities and services should be enjoyed. There were, to be sure, always women for whom the home did not make satisfactory provision;2 and, it is interesting to note that, except in the matter of inheritance under the law of primogeniture, the common law made no distinction between the unmarried adult woman and the man. For the married woman, on the other hand, the difference in legal capacity was very great. So far as her activities were concerned, however, her occupations were largely connected with the domestic organization, as wife, mother, daughter, or sister, or as hired assistant in the performances of tasks of a domestic character. When, however, the factory system developed and products hitherto produced in the home were manufactured elsewhere,2 Lina Eckenstein, Women under Monasticism (Cambridge University Press, 1896).104100women and children were employed under the new conditions. This process of women following, not the flag, but the job, is still continuing, with resulting changes of attitude on the part of both men and women, and confusion on the part of both as to what effects of the change on important social institutions are to be anticipated.

Interest in these questions led, during that early decade of this century, to the investigation by the United States Bureau of Labor,1 to which reference has been made, which brought out the facts with reference to the dependence of great numbers of families on the wage-paid labor of women and girls as well as of men and boys, which destroyed the myth of the pin-money girl, emphasized the bargaining disadvantage as compared with the employer under which women and girls sought employment, and made obvious the relative inequality between men and women as wage bargainers. From that time, the inequality of women as compared to men with respect to occupational opportunity has been reorganized as one of the chief disadvantages under which they have suffered, and has resulted in an effort to widen the range of their employment and to mitigate the results of their relative weakness. Especially it has been recognized that these features of their employment retard and impede effective organization among them.2

The results of this bargaining weakness manifested themselves in excessively long hours, in frequent employment at night which rendered enormously difficult the maintenance of home standards or of sound family life, in lack of Saturday half holidays or Sunday rest, in conditions of work less than decent or morally safe, and in wage scales inferior to those of men workers even where skill or professional equipment might characterize their work.

From the recognition of these features of women's employment developed efforts, some educational, like trade education and vocational guidance, to remove the pressure of competition at the lowest level; some social, like the mothers’ pensions, to remove 105101the non-industrial person from the working group; some legislative, apparently protective in character but really an item in the program of emancipation, taking the form of efforts (1) to secure legislative regulation of conditions of work; (2) to secure a statutory minimum wage for women since trade unionism seemed unable to accomplish this in the case of women; (3) and to formulate standards by which employment might be judged. This last effort was restricted largely to public employment.

This new occupational and domestic position, together with the granting of suffrage, has been giving women a wider share in the life of the community. It is not the purpose of this study to discuss that share in its entirely. The participation of women in family relationship and family life is not presented here; but, in the following pages, an attempt is made to discover and to discuss some of the activities of women outside the home and the direction taken by those activities. The selection of material is not simple, nor is the order in which the data should be presented perfectly obvious. It has seemed best to review the recent figures with reference to women's employment. The subject of their voluntary association in clubs and organizations of various kinds has preceded and their relation to government since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment seems to follow the discussion of their employment. These three groups of data it is hoped may indicate the direction in which the activities and their influence are tending.

With reference to their employment, a few preliminary remarks will make clearer the later discussion.

Although it is not intended here to devote any considerable space to the changes that have been brought about in the law of the family group, which by 1900 had been substantially revolutionized with reference to reciprocal rights and duties both of husband and wife1 and of parent and child,2 there are several aspects of the subject, in its relation to the employment of women, on which it is worth while to comment. Under the older family organization, the services of both the wife and the daughter or their wages if they were gainfully employed, belonged1 A Survey of the Legal Status of Women in the Forty-eight States (National League of Women Voters, 532 Seventeenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.).2 Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, Delinquent Child and the Home (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1912), Appendix III, p 247.106102to the husband and father. Whether work was done within or outside the home, the goods, services or earnings accrued to the composite family income,1 to which attention has been given during these recent years by students of family life, of the labor problem, and of the problem of poverty.2 Services rendered in the home by the wife or minor children were unpaid, without other compensation than provision of support, which, being a poorly enforced obligation, gave excuse for characterizing marriage as a sweated trade.3

By the beginning of the twentieth century nearly all the states had enacted laws giving to married women the right to collect and control their earnings as well as to manage their property and to be held responsible for their contracts or their actions of a tortious character.4 On the other hand, the right of the legitimate mother to share with the father in the custody of her child's person and in the direction of her child's life was somewhat later in being recognized, and the change in the attitude of the law and of the courts in recognizing that the determining question is neither the right of the father nor the right of the mother, but the well-being of the child, belongs to the second and third decade of the century. With the enactment of the so-called Juvenile Court legislation, beginning in Illinois in 1899 and followed by 19305 in forty-six of the other forty-seven states, the doctrine enunciated in 1827 by the great Lord Chancellor Eldon, that when the Court of Chancery could obtain jurisdiction, and when the court could both learn what was the need of the child whose interests were neglected by the father, and meet that need,4 Recent Social Trends in the United States, Chap. XIII.5 U.S. Children's Bureau, Legal Chart No. 17. Analysis and Tabular Summary of State Laws relating to Jurisdiction in Children's Cases, ect.107103there was no question of power,1 was made a principle of decision on which the courts could rest determinations in cases of individual children. During these decades the right of the mother to be made guardian was granted in many states,2 but in the case of the mother, as of the father, the question will be decided in the light of the child's interest.

In 1930, there remained certain questions of the married woman's rights to enter into partnership without her husband's consent, 3 or without some public record 4but these limitations, like those upon a husband or wife testifying when the other was interested, rest upon other considerations than those of the wife's legal incapacity.

With reference to the legislation to be enacted, there are differences of opinion among the organized groups of women, due to the fact the value of the wife's participation in the family life has been formulated. In the states in which the so-called Community Property5 System prevails, the idea of equality between husband and wife is applied except in management; in the other states, the differences of opinion as to the ways in which the interest of the wife and widow can best be protected prevent such uniformity of legislative policy from characterizing the efforts in the various states as was true of the effort to secured to her the control of her own property.

In this connection, reference may be made to the anomalous position of the unmarried mother, whose claim to her child being that of possession, while not quite that of the legitimate father, was better than the claim of anyone else. With the increased emphasis on the protection of the child's interest, the legislated program increasingly lays enforceable duties on the fathers of children whether born within or without wedlock.6

The legislative program for the emancipation of the married woman is then well nigh complete. However, the fact that, in108104general, the husband's domicil determines the wife's, affects the mobility and hence the opportunities of the married woman who would earn; but the problem is one of very great complexity about which it is extremely difficult to obtain definite information, so that often the result of attempting to work out these conflicts of interest can be discovered only by examining the records of the divorce courts.

While no evidence is given to the effect that women are capable of doing the various tasks which they have chosen, notice may be taken of the theory of different physiological structure, mentioned above, which at an earlier date seemed to justify the exclusion of women from higher academic opportunities. It was generally thought that nature, in making special provision for child bearing, caused women to breath costically while men breathed abdominally, and that this “deep-seated structural difference affecting every organ, every cell in the body—making a difference throughout the entire structure, the brain included,”1 rendered it forever impossible for men and women to be treated alike in the things of the mind. From the point of view of those who would exclude, the sequence proceeded from the incapacity of childhood, to the incapacity of adolescence, to the incapacity of child bearing and child caring, and through the incapacity of the menopause to the incapacity of senility. It was complete. But the theory was abandoned before the beginning of the century and it may be assumed that such evidence would now be superfluous.

However, it may perhaps be profitable to recall the fact that for much of the work for which a long period of training was formerly necessary—craftsmanship—the machine or the altered organization has reduced the period of preparation. During the war, for example, women would learn, in a few weeks, processes, which would enable them to replace the men called to the front, for which the period of training previously required by the trade union was longer than the whole period of the war. In other words, the requirements for apprenticeship and other previous preparation had often for their purpose not only the maintenance of high standards of work but also the limitation of the supply of workers, the reduction of the competitive pressure, and often the exclusion of a less dignified or less respected group of 109105workers—women, Negroes, aliens, and other possibly ignoble groups.

In some cases, the exclusion was secured by developing ideas of superiority. The “legal mind,” for example, was a masculine mind of peculiar quality and the exclusion of women was based on mere economy and on consideration for the feelings of women to prevent their inevitable humiliation and embarrassment. It is also true that the duties of various public offices, e.g., jailor, sheriff, member of the House of Representatives, governor, United States senator, were characterized by features of public honor, and were supposed to require certain characteristics of personal vigor, courage, ability to command respect. It has, however, been found appropriate to fill positions in each of these categories by persons whose qualifications have consisted in having been married to a person holding such an office and being widowed. More than once in most of the offices named, the widow has replaced the deceased husband, and has successfully continued to hold the prisoners in safe-keeping, to direct the protective or law-enforcing agencies of the country, to take her place among the representatives in Congress or to direct the governmental activities of a sovereign commonwealth. In fact, the artificial glamour by which many occupations have been surrounded has not infrequently been competitive, and those seeking the “opportunity,” as in the clever verse of Charlotte Perkins Stetson, are learning to walk “right through the obstacle as though it were not there.” It should be easy to understand these developments. To the feminists perhaps it seems a survival of the attitude so satisfying to the author of Paradise Lost.1 On

1 “Though bothNot equal, as their sex not equal seemed:For contemplation he and valour formed,For softness she and sweet attractive grace;He for God only, she for God in him.”(Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 295-99)“To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorned:‘My author and disposer, what thou bidd'stUnargued I obey; so God ordains:God is thy law, thou mine: to know no moreIs woman's happiest knowledge, and her praise.’”(Ibid., Book IV, lines 634-38)

The student of women's vocational struggle is also reminded of the attitude of the English craftsmen toward the capacity of widows to carry on. Economic Journal, 5: 209, at 225 (1895), E. Dixon, Craftswomen in the Livre des Metiers.

Attention should also be called to the effect of widening the competition and thus raising the marginal level. The worker on the lower margin who is displaced may suffer, but the community gains unless the rate of displacement is too swift. This does not accept mere and disastrous cheapness as an element in efficiency. To the extent to which any group of workers offer only cheapness, or chiefly cheapness, they threaten the entire structure. The question must, however, be raised: Are there obstacles deterring the workers’ progress against which cheapness alone will prevail?

For sources, reliance is placed so far as practicable on the publications of the Census Bureau, especially the Census of Occupations1 and of Manufactures, on publication of other official authorities, such as the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States Woman's Bureau, or of State Departments of Labor.

As has been said, the problem was competently stated during the decade 1900-1910, when the figures for 1870-1880, 1890, and 1900 were discussed. At that time it was pointed out that the employment of women, while one problem so far as the effect of limited occupational opportunity is concerned, assumes many aspects, each of which must be distinguished from the others if the true development is to be understood. There is, first, the question of the place of the woman known until 1930 as the “gainfully employed” woman, in relation to the no-gainfully employed woman, who, however, as a wife or daughter, has been held to the performance of domestic duties, since the husband or father was entitled to companionship and services. What proportion of women are gainfully employed, what proportion of the gainfully employed are women, what is the range of their employment, are the first questions to which the following discussion will be devoted.

It should be noted that the entrance of women into the world of gainful occupation causes an increase in the supply of labor, 111107and clearly in connection with any addition to the labor supply many questions arise. The interests of those already in the working group cannot be ignored. With the growing number of women offering their labor power, there are in fact two main questions. First: Is the pressure of poverty, the disorganized state of industry, the low scale of men's industrial or agricultural earnings, forcing women, mothers of small children, to remain breadwinners when the technical resources of industry and commerce could provide conditions under which they could more successfully perform their marital and maternal duties? A second question is whether or not in a world in which the productive forces are so developed as to make possible a shorter day, a shorter week, and a fuller life, the access of women to the satisfactions of life must either require celibacy or continue to be vicarious, or indirect through a husband, or whether the contact of a woman, married or single, may be immediate and her participation in productive life and in domestic life be individual and direct

It is not to be forgotten that there are men whose inherited wealth enables them to live without the necessity of offering their services in the labor market, but from Table 1 it can be seen that in the United States the proportion of men who are not gainfully occupied is, for the adult groups, small, slightly increasing with the decrease in employment demands and the increase in wealth, with the reduced demand for boy labor and the increased regulation of boy labor, but very small and not affected by the domestic status of the man. With the women the situation is different. The question is not merely, Is she gainfully occupied? but, Is she gainfully occupied or married? so that the proportion not gainfully occupied, while decreasing, is still, for each age period, the great body of the female population.

As has been already pointed out, this does not mean that women have not always worked; it means that their position in the wage market is treated as anomalous, and their employment for wages is often discussed as though husbands and fathers had been commonly out of their own efforts not only willing but able to provide for their wives and daughters. There is something 113109amusing in the discussion. For just as, when the bridegroom uttered the solemn words, “with all my worldly goods I thee endow,” he was about to become the legal owner of the wife's personal goods and entitled to the income from her real estate, so when husbands and fathers discuss the support of the women of the family they fail to recall the fact that the services of the wife, marital and domestic, and of the daughters have belonged to them. There was, to be sure, in the case of the wife, the reciprocal duty of providing necessaries; in the case of the daughter, there was probably no duty to her, but only an obligation to the community that she should not become a charge on the poor rates. With the development, then, of the factory system and the individualization of the demand for women's labor, came the question of women's bargaining capacity, of women's scales of pay, of widening opportunity and of rendering immediate the participation of women in the community's activities.

The situation in the family group of women who are not gainfully occupied but depend wholly upon the husband's support or upon invested wealth is not to be discussed here; but something of the occupational opportunity open to those women who wish or need to enter it, is of great interest in the attempt to understand the place of women in current American life.

First, it must be kept in min that by “women” in this discussion are meant not merely those of mature years, or those who have reached their legal majority, be that eighteen years, as in some states, or twenty-one years of age, as in others; but anyone sixteen, or possibly ten, years old or older. And, from the point of view of industrial protection or lack of protection, the sixteen-year-old workers are truly women, for the child labor laws of the separate states furnish no protection beyond that age, although until she reaches her majority unless she has been imancipated by her father's act or by her own marriage, a girl's earnings belong to her father.

How many women workers? This is a question with a triple implication. How many, compared with the number of other decades? How many, compared with the female population? How many, compared with the employed men?

There were, when the Census of 1930 was taken, 10,752,116 of them.1 They have steadily increased in number since 1870,1 This is the number of those ten years and over. Released cited, p. 3. See Table 1.114110when the first census was taken separating women from men and when there were 1,836,288. They have not only increased absolutely, but they have increased when compared with the female population, and they have increased when compared with the gainfully employed men.

It should be kept in mind that the period under consideration is one characterized by the development of business, the expansion of the distributive processes, the increasing application of the principles of subdivision of tasks and of interrelation of functions, and by an enormous increase in the productivity of industrial processes. It may not be surprising then that, as the Census shows, the proportion of men gainfully employed as compared with the total male population was less in 1930 than in 1920. The proportion of women gainfully employed, on the other hand, increased so that while in 1920, 21.1 per cent of those ten years old or over, and 24 per cent of those sixteen years and over, were gainfully occupied, in 1930 the percentages were 22 and 25.3 per cent. Or, looking over the whole period, 148 in 1,000 women and girls sixteen years and over were gainfully employed in 1870; in 1930 there were 253, or an increase of 105 in a thousand in sixty years. This increase in the proportion of women and girls who enter the labor market assumes greater significance when it is compared with the smaller increase in the female population sixteen years of age and over.1

In noting the difference between the development in the case of men and of women, it should be kept in mind that if a man is not gainfully occupied the other possible categories in which he may be found are “in school,” “in institutions,” or “not accounted for,” whereas in the case of the women there is the additional category of “housewives.” From Table 2 it appears that in the case of men there is a decline in the proportion gainfully occupied, in the number at school and in the number not accounted for. In the case of the women there is an increase in the proportion gainfully occupied, the number at school, and a slight increase in the number unaccounted for, but a decrease in the proportion of the female population who are housewives not gainfully occupied.

Attention will be called to the increased number of housewives who are gainfully occupied, and the increased number of

gainfully occupied women who are housewives, but those combinations of tasks are not presented here.1

The domination of the selling motive over the desire to produce utilities obviously lacking in the life of the community was brilliantly set out during the early years of the century.1 That vendability rather than serviceability determined the organization has been accepted as a defect of the present order. The wastes and ineffectualities of the supply of goods and the lack of adjustment between needs and goods is made clear in a recent survey.2 When reference is made therefore to women in business, it is opportunities for employment that are in mind and not the part they play in determining consumption. Attention has been called, too,3 to the very great concentration of women in a relatively small number of occupations in this field of activity that has so increased in its demand for the labor of women and girls. Of the almost 300,000 women classified under Transportation and Communication, 94 per cent are telephone operators, and this is an increase of almost a third, 32 per cent, since 1920. Among almost 1,000,000 women and girls in trade—973,000 according to the corrected figures, 962,680 in the published figures of the Census—more than four-fifths were in 1930 salespersons and clerks in stores or retail dealers. In the almost 2,000,000 who make up the clerical group, as shown in Tables 24, 25, 26, 27 over a third, 706,553, were clerks, and almost a fourth, 482,711, were bookkeepers and cashiers.4 In both cases, there was a marked increase as compared with 1920. In the case of the store clerks and retail dealers there was a slight increase as compared with the total group, while in the case of the different “clerical” occupations the increase was marked. In the case of salesmen and saleswomen however this is not true. Where in 1920, 30.6 per cent1 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904).2 Recent Social Trends in the United States, Chap. XVII, Robert S. Lynd, “Consumption.”3 Ibid., Chap. XIV.4 These figures are from the Census Release of June 28, 1932, Occupation Statistics.172168of the salespersons were women, in 1930, they were only 27.1 per cent of the group. Something that should also be noted is the fact that a relatively smaller number, 11.4 per cent, of those engaged in all trade occupations, as compared with 11.8, were retail dealers, and a relatively larger number, 58.2 per cent in 1930, as compared with 54.4 in 1920, were salespersons.

There are two questions: (1) the reallocation of jobs; (2) the relative numbers of women as compared with men. A marked percentage increase is found in the number of window dressers, from one in 1,000 of those engaged in trade, to 6 in 1,000 and, as compared with men, the proportion changed from 82 in 1,000 of those engaged in window dressing to 309 in 1,000; but the numbers are small and the occupation is again one concerned with multiplying sales. No one can examine these figures without being impressed with the extent to which the great selling expansion has drawn on the activities of women and girls to perform services that have something of an adolescent character. They are not machine tenders, as many of the women and girls are in the factories and laundries; they are parts of a great organization, passing on goods possibly toward the satisfaction of a natural want, frequently toward a transaction for which high power salesmanship must take all the credit.

However, large numbers of women and girls find their livelihood in these occupations and the nature of the organization and development has very greatly interest from the point of view of current social progress. Attention may therefore be briefly devoted to the facts concerning the conditions under which so many women have been seeking and finding their jobs. Telephone operating and the clerical group of occupations take on a special interest.

Before discussing them, however, notice may be taken of a few occupations in which the numbers of women are yet small, but the fact that any have found a foothold in them gives promise of wider opportunity. Under Transportation and Communication there were listed 46 radio operators, which renders of interest the following facts. Under the federal radio act of 19271 all licensed radio stations must be operated by licensed radio operators. The qualifications for a license depend upon the class of station to be operated and the class of licensed operator such station must1 U. S. Statutes at Large, Sixty-ninth Congress, Second Session, Ch. 169, Vol. 44, Part I, p. 1162.173169employ. There are ten classes of licenses at the present time. During the early years of radio there were only three, but the additional classes have become necessary because of the development of new radio services such as broadcasting, police radio, aviation, and radiotelephone.1 In 1930 there was a total number of 16,796 operators of all classes licensed and in 1931 there were 20,703. An amateur radio station may be operated only by the holder of an amateur operator license.2 In 1930 there were 18,402 licenses issued for amateur radio stations,3 and approximately 148 amateur stations were owned by women.

It is also interesting to notice that there are classified in the group of aviators, 66 women4 and 7 laborers in air transportation and 5 proprietors or managers in air transportation not otherwise specified are women.

Mention was made above, too, of certain factory occupations in which women were engaged during the war. There were other non-factory occupations for women which came into prominence during the war. Women were substituted for men on the rapid transit lines, and in driving taxis. Women were employed before the war and are still employed as ticket agents, but women street car conductors and women taxi drivers are now rarely seen. Whether or not the dismissal of women street car conductors after the war, especially in New York State, was because of the ten-hour-day and night-work legislation, has been a matter of wide discussion.

With these preliminary considerations in mind, an attempt will be made to set out the facts about the two groups of whom mention has been made.

Attention need hardly be called to the double aspect, generally discussed, of the problem of women's wages and earnings, namely (1) that they have been and are low when measured by the demands of health, decency and comfort, and (2) that different scales of pay usually exist for so-called women's and men's jobs, and different scales often exist for individual men and women when the occupational equipment is alike and the quality and volume of work substantially identical. That wages were and are low need hardly be urged. The rates were low, the earnings low. The question is, Are they rising or falling, and are the gapes between men's wages and women's wages growing narrower or wider? A Census study of factory wages furnishes much information on the subject within the range of its data, and those data can be supplemented by the Studies of the National Industrial Conference Board.1

The wage rates fixed for women's work have been, and are often now, low. This refers rather to 1929 than to 1932 when many are not earning at all. Moreover, through lost time, underemployment or underemployability, while women lose possibly relatively less than men lose, there is a great and a grave difference between the nominal and the actual earnings of women.2

Already before the beginning of the century the discrepancy between the earnings of women and girls and the recognized cost of living had been made the basis for slanderous implications that certain types of employment, e.g., department store work, generally necessitated the supplementing of women's respectable earnings by disreputable conduct. These implications were vigorously rebutted,1 and it was pointed out that the wages were rather “meager wages of righteousness” than adequate wages of sin; but the figures have only to be quoted to substantiate the statement, and the second decade brought the widespread testimony as to the relative normal earnings of those who were drawn into the toils of organized vice.

The low rates at which women worked were accounted for by their youth, their lack of technical preparation, the narrow range of their opportunity, the difficulties of organizing them to which reference has been made elsewhere, and the transient attitude resulting from the prospect of matrimony, which was supposed, since household management had not been professionalized, to introduce them to an experience of lessened effort.

The Census figures apply only to wages and earnings in manufacturing occupations which, as has been shown, are offering no greater and, as a matter of fact, probably fewer opportunities to women that at an earlier date. In the occupations for which the Census assembled data,2 the women's nominal full time earnings, as estimated by the Census, increased steadily by decades, from $314 in 1899, to $353 in 1904, to $391 in 1909, to $430 in 1914, to $858 in 1921, and $925 in 1923. The real full time earnings likewise increased except between 1909 and 1914, when they fell from $449 to $430. The increase in the actual earnings, too, failed in the period between 1919, when the figure was $726, and 1921, when the average fell to $627. In the same period, the actual real earnings slipped twice, once between 1909 and 1914, from $390 to $344, and between 1919 and 1921, from $406 to $356. In addition to this fact of halting advance, attention should be likewise directed to the difference between the earnings of men and women. Similar failures to advance are noted, but always, as the Census puts it, there is a “wide margin” by which the earnings of women (and children) fall short of the earnings2 Brissenden, op. cit., p. 65.221217of men.”1 The extent of this disparity varies greatly in the different industries. The Census points out,2 for example, that in 1919 the per capita earnings of men in the glass industry were three times the per capita earnings of women in that industry, i.e., $1,420 as compared with $464, whereas in the electrical machinery, apparatus and supplies, the earnings of men, per

capita, were not quite twice those of women, $1,007 as compared with $545; and in cotton the women earned $816 to the men's $1,043. Evidently there are questions of relative degrees of skill, as well as differences of sex; but lack of opportunity to acquire skill is a “function of difference of sex,” as the mathematicians might say.

It is not possible here to state all the reservations and cautions with which the Census presents the figures; what the author is willing to have the reader understand is that there was a pre-war 222218period of low earnings when, as he puts it, the “style for averages for men's earnings was between $500 and $600, and of women's earnings from 60 to 75 per cent of that amount; and a later period of higher earnings, when there could hardly be said to have been a style, because of the great variation among industries; but if there was any, it would have been between about $1,000 and $1,300. And always, however the estimates were made, or whatever the unit, the women's wages or earnings are lower than those of men.1

The differences between the earlier and the later period are much more marked in the hourly rates, as shown in Table 38, in which there were increases, than in annual earnings, on which seasonal employment or unemployment laid its devastating hands. For the normal hourly earnings in selected industries, the increases ran from 10.3 cents for all industries in 1899 to 34.1 in 19.21. The highest rate in 1899 was the rate 13.81 cents for boots ad shoes. The lowest, for 1921, was 22.36 in minerals and soda waters, while the highest was 50.59 in women's clothing.

When the question of purchasing capacity is asked, the progress is not quite so smooth. This can be seen in Tables 39 and 40. 223219That is, there are increases in 1919 and 1921 and 1923 as compared with 1899, but there remain great differences between the real earnings of men and of women, and wide divergences in these differences; so that the influence of other factors must be kept in mind if the shifting occupational position of women is to be eventually understood. Factors of sex operate in an atmosphere likewise affected by activities of racial loyalty and prejudice1 and of competition among and between national groups.

What can be said is that, while during the period from 1899 to 1914 there was no appreciable gain in purchasing power, between 1914 and 1927 there was a gain corresponding to 131 as compared with 99, and the rates of pay, if not the real wages and earnings, increased by something like threefold.2

To come nearer the present (1932), it is possible to refer to the reports3 of the National Industrial Conference Board which publishes figures for average hourly earnings for (1) male common3 Wages in the United States, 1914-1927; Wages in the United States, 1931.224220and unskilled, (2) male skilled workers, and (3) women, in twenty-four manufacturing industries, the data being obtained from 1,440 plants employing an average of 634,000 workers1 and covering the period 1914-1930, compared with 1923 as a base. That authority estimates that the average weekly earnings of female wage earners increased by 1.9 per cent between 1927 and 1929.2 According to these estimates, hourly earnings for all wage earners combined averaged the same in 1930 as in 1929 and were higher than at any time since 1920. There was, however, a decline during the last quarter of 1930 as compared with the first three-quarters of that year. Hourly earnings of the individual labor group showed a slight reduction in 1930 as compared with 1929, this decline being less for the female labor (.4 cents) than for either the unskilled (.8 cents) or for the semi-skilled and skilled male workers (0.6 cents). In 1930, the hourly earnings for female labor were near the 1923 level, being only 0.8 per cent above, when the two male groups were 5.8 per cent and 6.3 per cent higher than in 1923.

If a comparison be made by industries of the earnings of all wage earners in separate industries in the fourth quarter of 1930, five industries—silk, wool, northern cotton, and boots and shoes—show declines from 2.4 per cent to 9.9 per cent. In the other nineteen industries, the average hourly earnings in the last quarter of 1930 were higher than in 1923. For women, the minimum average hourly earnings were in leather tanning and finishing (32.7 cents), while the highest were in news and magazine printing (44.3 cents). The weekly earnings, however, of course went down. The decline in 1930 over 1929, which manifested itself every quarter, amounted to 9.4 per cent. In the fourth quarter of 1930, average weekly earnings were still higher than the level during the depression of 1921. This relative reduction in 1930 as compared with 1929 was slightly less characteristic of the women's weekly earnings than of either group of men workers; and while the earnings of the other two declined steadily, women's earnings rose slightly during the last quarter of the year. There were seven industries in which weekly earnings were higher than in 1923. In all others they were markedly lower. They ranged 225221from $13.37 in leather tanning to $19.44 in mat packing.1 As to average hourly real earnings, these were higher for all groups in 1930 as compared with 1929.2 They were at this time, however, 3.7 per cent lower than in 1923.

As to working hours, the women's working time showed a decline of 2.2 hours between the first and the fourth quarter of 1930. In the last quarter of that year, too (1930), the employment index approached that of 1921 and was 22.1 per cent below that of 1923. As for 1928, it may be noted that average annual hourly earnings increased in all industries except northern cotton, foundries, wool, silk, rubber, paper products, panel and varnish, meat packing, and paint and varnish.3

In 1931, hourly earnings averaged 4.1 per cent less than in 1929 and 1930. In the last quarter of 1931, average hourly earnings were still 12.1 per cent higher than after the 1920-1921 depression had run its course. During the two years, 1930-1931, the relative reductions in the average hourly earnings of women were larger than in those of male labor. The decline between the last quarters of 1930 and of 1931 amounted to 7.3 per cent for female labor, as compared with 6.3 per cent for skilled and 6.1 per cent for unskilled male labor. The declines between 1929 and 1931 were for female labor, 10.1 per cent; for skilled male labor, 8.4 per cent; for unskilled male labor, 9.2 per cent; while the percentage decline was greater for woman, the actual money reduction was less for them, being 4.0 cents for women between 1929 and 1931, 4.5 cents for unskilled and 5.6 cents for skilled labor.

In the same way, average weekly earnings declined, the decline being greater than in 1920-1921, and actual average weekly earnings fell to lower levels than 1921. The decline in earnings, too, has been greater than the decline in the cost of living, though not to the lowest point of the 1920-1921 depression. In the matter of hours of work, the women had less reduction than either group of men.4

What can be said as to the outlook? That possibly growing out of wider discussion of the cost of living, out of the rationalization of men's claims, out of the lip-service paid the principle of the equal wag, the influence of the community attitude on both 226222employer and employee looks toward both a closer approximation of earnings to needs, and wider application of the principle of the wage for the job.

Yet the author of the Census study thought in 1927 that it was1probably true, unfortunately, that in manufacturing industry generally there is not evident any consistent long-time trend toward the closing up of the gap between actual and full-time earnings by elimination of the causes for the existence of that gap, namely, unemployment and irregular employment. It is evident ... however, that in some of the industries represented, there has been appreciable improvement in this respect. Such improvement appears to have taken place in the printing and publishing industry (book and job), and in the paper and wood pulp industry. Unhappily, however, other industries such as chemicals, cotton manufactures, and woolen goods, show a tendency toward a greater loss in purchasing power attributable to lost time.

What these figures mean is revealed to a certain extend in studies of industrial and other occupations in a number of selected areas. The conditions prevailing during the first half of the decade are described, for example, in a study covering groups of workers in the women-employing industries in thirteen states. Data were assembled in regard to 100,967 white and 3,141 Negro women in 1,472 plants.2 Of these, 79,162 white women and 3,141 Negro women were in manufacturing industries, the others in stores and laundries. Although this inquiry was made two decades after the Woman and Child Wage Earners investigation referred to above, the figures are not strikingly different. As before, there were differences in different sections of the country. In Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, half the women earned less than $8.35. In New Jersey, Ohio and Rhode Island the median was $19.13. The earnings were still universally low in the cotton industry and, with one exception,3 in the hosiery and knit goods industries, while, if the earnings were higher, it was in manufacture of electrical appliances or rubber, or, less so, in metals, shoes, or tobacco.

Attention has been called to the shifting of the age groups between 1900 and 1930, and to the fact that it is among the older workers that increases in number are taking place. In this 227223study, earnings and age were reported for 39,141 women in manufacturing in eleven states. In each of these,the group of younger women was relatively numerous, from one half to almost two-thirds being in the group under twenty-five. The highest earnings were, however, in six states, found in the group between thirty and forty years of age; in four states in the group between twenty-five and thirty.1

As among the occupations, the earnings (median) were highest in general mercantile establishments, at least this is true in nine of the thirteen states, and the earnings in laundries were between those in manufacturing and those in five-and-ten cent stores, which were the lowest, at least in eleven states.

As to national and racial affiliations, the median earnings of native born workers were above those of foreign born in general mercantile establishments and laundries, while below in manufacturing establishments or in five-and-ten cent stores. The earnings of the Negro workers were lowest of all. In nine states the median earnings of Negro women workers were from $4.89 to $8.92. As far as yearly earnings were concerned, the median earnings of the Negro women ranged from $263 to $563 in manufacturing, and from $306 to $550 in laundries. Earnings for a year were obtained for a considerable number of those who had been employed for the preceding year and had had forty-four weeks of work in that year. In all but two of the states the highest median earnings were in the general mercantile establishments, the lowest in the five and-ten cent stores.2

If the earnings are compared with the estimated cost of living it is found that large numbers of women earned less than the amounts designated as necessary for health and decency. The Women's Bureau estimated a general level of $18.38 weekly as necessary for 1920, $15.98 for 1921; $15.54 for 1922; $15.88 for 1923; $15.82 for 1924;$16.31 for 1925; $15.71 for 1928; and concluded that more than half the women in manufacturing in six states earned less than such a minimum and that in 1928, the minimum would be above the median for full time workers in manufacturing in all, but four of the states surveyed.

A study of women's wages from a wider range in 1919 reviewed the development up to that time, pointed out the reasons for the segregation of women from men's jobs, calling attention to 228224the changes apparently brought about by the war, and emphasizing the dangers inherent in the cheapness of women's work.1 At that time the minimum wage laws that had been enacted in seventeen jurisdictions were generally in force, and the effects of that legislation were being studied both by those who had advocated the enactment of the laws and by the United States Bureau of Labor. The war had seemed to give a new impetus to women's organization into unions, the movement for vocational guidance and vocational education had gained some momentum. The writer looked to these three lines of effort as offering hope of improvement, although she was inclined to limit the application of the minimum wage legislation to minors, trusting to the development of the trade union or to industry through better selection, for the improvement in the situation of adult women. This was probably because the constitutional limitations on the regulation of men's wages were foreseen as perils to the regulation of women's wages, although an extension of the argument based on a relation between low income and health had already been suggested by the data concerning infant mortality and low income; and the acceptance of that view could and was expected by distinguished students of the police power to find acceptance on the part of the United States Supreme Court. It was four years later that the United States Supreme Court held the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Act unconstitutional,2 so that that method of dealing with the subject has been generally thought of as for the time inapplicable.3

The war had exercised a catastrophic influence on the occupational situation. Men were drained off to the service, immigration stopped, the Negro became available for industrial employment in northern communities and women took men's places in innumerable establishments, and when this substitution of women for men took place, there was a tendency to fix the wage scale at points more nearly approaching the rates at which men had been paid, which were of course higher than women's rates had ever been. In April and May, 1918, for example, an inquiry was made on the employment of women in metal-working establishments,1 by which it was learned that out of 127 establishments from which information was sought, 53 paid wages equal to men's wages, 29 paid piece rates equal to men's time rates, 24 paid less, and from 21 no information was obtained. The figures seem to indicate that the principle of an equal wage for equal work was more extensively adopted among employers in industries where the use of women was a comparatively new thing than where their employment was of long standing.

Through the decisions and awards of the War Labor Policies Board2 and the Railroad Administration,3 the principle that pay should be based on the nature and complexity of the work and2 Established April 8, 1918.3 General Order No. 27 issued by the office of the Director General U.S. Railroad Administration, Mr. McAdoo, on May 25, 1918, provided for equal pay for equal work. The article providing this reads as follows: “When women are employed, their working conditions must be healthful and fitted to their needs. The laws enacted for the government of their employment must be observed and their pay, when they do the same class of work as men, shall be the same as that of men.” Official Bulletin, May 29, 1918, p.15.230226not on sex1 and the phrase “equal pay for equal work” gained wide publicity, received general verbal acquiescence and, under the pressure of immediate demand, affected the rates of pay of many women workers.

When the war ws ended, however, and account was taken of its general results, they were found to be on the whole meager from the point of view either of widened occupational opportunity for women or of increased rates of pay.2 Women were often either still excluded or still paid at inadequate rates.

For wages and earnings in the fields of clerical and business employment, attention may again be directed to the researches of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs3 which are interesting. The median earnings of a group of 14,073 women engaged in the occupations classed as Clerical, Trade, Transportation, Communication, Professional, Public not elsewhere classified, and Executives in Manufacturing, were $1,548, while the average was higher by $114, or $1,668. The lower quartile was at $1,213, the upper quartile at $2,004. In other words, one in four earned less than $1,213, and one in four more than $2,004; while one earned between $1,213 and $1,548, and one between $1,548 and $2,004.

It is also true that the urban centers offer a wider range of opportunity for women, especially in the field of finance, sales, and publicity. In this group, the findings with reference to the relative earnings of single and of married workers are interesting. Among these groups, the earnings of single women tend to exceed those of married women of the same age and experience. In fact, single women earn consistently not only more than married women but more than widows and women divorced or separated from their husbands.4

The important point is that the difference between low and high, while of very great significance to the worker, is a slender difference, and the earnings of the higher paid group are still very modest. It is true, however, that those women who are independently engaged earn considerably more than those employed on a salary basis. Their earnings were $503 above those of salaried workers and one in three of them earns $3,000 a year or more, while among the salaried workers only one in twenty earns that amount.1 A few spectacular exceptions are 174 who earns $5,000 or more. Of these, 83 earn between $5,000 and $6,000, 32 earn between $6,000 and $7,000; 16 between $7,000 and $8,000; 18 between $8,000 and $9,000 thousand; and 25 over $9,000.

There are wide differences in the range of earnings in these different groups. Median earnings vary from $68.2 for 23 telephone operators to $3,088 for 55 physicians in private practice. Of course, too, there are great differences in the proportions of workers in the different groups who earn $5,000 or more. Only 2.6 per cent of the clerical workers, 4 per cent of the teachers and 7 per cent of the whole group earn that much; while 13.7 per cent of the welfare group, 14 per cent of the health group, 18 per cent in the legal and protective group and 21.6 per cent of the personnel group earn $3,000 or more. The two points to be kept in mind are that some are earning in the higher levels, but that on the whole the rewards are low and where the content of the pay envelope or the amount of the salary check constitutes most of the reward, if not all the return for the labor expended, the picture is not a very cheerful one. This is, of course, not true of those occupations like teaching, welfare work, librarianship or other occupations giving opportunity for the use of one's intelligence and opening up constantly more interesting fields of endeavor.

A few of the conclusions drawn by the investigators are of such special interest in this connection as to justify quotation at length. (1) The earnings increase with experience for about the first twenty years of work, remain fairly constant for the next ten years and then decline; (2) they increase with age up to fifty, vary but little between fifty and sixty, and then decline; (3) they tend to increase with the years of general education, so that women with a college degree earn more than those without; (4) earnings, living expenses and savings increase with the size of the community 232228in which the women are working, the proportion of earnings which goes with living expenses and savings remaining about the same, regardless of the size of the community; (5) the charge of occupational instability often brought against women is thought untenable; and (6) for most women, earnings in their chief occupation are the only source of income.1

The facts with reference to 1,025 women holding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,2 for a group of 844 university or college women,3 have been discussed elsewhere. The figures with reference to the earnings of 3,521 women who had been land-grant college students have recently been made available.4 The median for all is $1,655; for those teaching, $1,640; for those in other positions, $1,677. The lower quartile, the figure below which the earnings of one-fourth of those reporting were found, showed earnings were $1,280; the upper quartile, $2,089. Of the 3,521 women, 5.1 per cent received $3,000 or over. These figures are slightly higher than those of the business and professional women, whose lower quartile was $1,213 instead of $1,280; whose median was $1,548 instead of $1,655, and whose upper quartile was $2,007. Among that group, however, 6.7 per cent instead of 5.1 per cent earned $3,000 or more. The figures differ slightly if they are separated into occupational groups. The teachers, for example, earned a median of $1,640, or $15.00 less than the group median; their lower quartile was $1,291, the upper $1,985. There were only 3.6 per cent earning $3,000 or more. Those women who earned $5,000 or more were from the older group. They had matriculated between 1889 and 1902, and had held administrative as well as teaching positions. The salaries in this group were, in fact, somewhat higher than those of the teachers in the business and professional women's group, whose median salary was $1,557, with the lower quartile at $1,253, and the upper quartile at $1,965.

In all these groups, length of experience told in the salary, and both in the business and professional and in the land-grant college groups, those who earned larger sums had changed their positions more frequently than those who earned the smaller sums. The capacity that register in higher earnings seems to obtain those higher earnings rather by finding opportunities in connection with different institutions that through promotion in the same institution.

There are several features that distinguish the problem of unemployment of women from that of men. First, the different wage scale is always tempting the employer in time of pressure to substitute cheaper women for dearer men workers. This may account in part for the fact that, in the reports of various earlier official commissions1 on unemployment, the subject of women was given relatively little consideration.

Often the line between gainful employment and domestic duty is not very clear to the girl or woman; or she hopes to obscure it to the outside world and, when at home, she is just a woman and neither employed nor unemployed. There is sometimes a way out, that is, rather into matrimony, and she takes up marital, when before she performed filial, obligations. And, there is always the street!2 At any rate the “homeless woman” has not in the United States presented a problem comparable with that of the “homeless man.” In older countries, the lodging house for vagrant homeless women has been found necessary; in the United States, it has rather been the boarding home for the girl who worked for wages too low to meet the costs of life of a “woman adrift.”

The figures presented by the Census for earnings3 showed, in fact, a slight advantage for women and children in respect to purchasing power lost because of failure to work full time. The discrepancy between full time and actual employment is greater with men than with women or children. These differences vary3 Brissenden, op. cit., pp. 7, 15.238234with the industry and the location. Periods of lost time or interruptions in work are of course very different in different industries, and very different possibly in the same industry in different localities. And, with the exception of a few industries, such as printing and publishing, and the paper and wood pulp industries, there was, as has been pointed out above, no sign of any consistent long time trend toward reducing the difference between possible full time earnings and actual earnings by stabilizing the industry and doing away with the causes of interruption and underemployment.1

Of course, there are many facts which suggest that women workers have suffered. In 1921, for example, many women-employing industries, such as the textile industries, clothing, hosiery, underwear, and boots and shoes,2 were hard hit, and reduced their working staffs. The industries that employ large numbers of women, like clothing and the canning industry, are highly seasonal. The actual effect of unemployment, however, on women is still to be understood. Nor can such effects as are generally recognized be set out here when the purpose is to try to discover whether occupational life is offering relatively greater or less security than at earlier times. It is perhaps safe to say that it is offering a degree of security slightly nearer than before to that offered the man, because of the larger of older, of native born, and of married women who are found to be gainfully occupied.

To return to the Census, it may be noted that the fact that the census data now supply information on unemployed women as constituting a problem, is itself perhaps likewise evidence of their belonging in the occupational world, consciously sharing its vicissitudes as workers.

It should be kept in mind that when the unemployment Census was taken there were two groups of persons about whom information was sought: those in Class A, who were persons out of work, able to work, and looking for work; and those in Class B, who, having a job, were laid off without pay, excluding of course the sick and the voluntarily idle.

Of the 10,788,794 women and girls over ten years of age reporting a gainful occupation, 370,000, or 3.4 of one per cent, were, on the day of the enumeration, out of a job, looking for work and 239235able to work, while 131,178, or 1.2 per cent, were laid off without pay.1 From the Census figures the duration of the unemployment can be learned by age groups, and it can also be seen how, except for the younger persons, the percentage remains about the same for the different groups, while the amount of employment remains surprisingly constant. Again the Census fails to indicate special disabilities for the older women.

It is interesting to note the occupations in which the proportions run high and also the areas in which the percentages are large.2 As to occupations, the large numbers of women out of work are in manufacturing and mechanical occupations where 9.7 per cent were out of work, of which number the Textile industry provides 23,355. In Trade, 55,712, or 3.2 per cent, were out of work; in the professional group, 33,043; among the Domestic and Personal Service, 122,178, or 3.9 per cent.

As to the states in which the percentage rose above the percentage for the whole country, 3.4 per cent, in California it was 4.0; in Colorado, 3.8; in Connecticut, 3.3; in Delaware, of the night workers, 6.2; in Florida, 5.6; Idaho, 3.5; Illinois, 4.4; Maryland, 4.0; Massachusetts, 4.3; Missouri, 3.4; New Jersey, 4.3; New York, 3.9 Ohio, 3.6; Oregon, 5.1; Pennsylvania, 3.4; Rhode Island, 5.6; Washington, 4.4 per cent.

As to the occupations in which the percentages were high, there were 17,727, or 4.3 per cent, of Class A, and 13,686, or 3.3 per cent, of Class B in clothing; in cotton mills, 7,886, or 4.0 per cent of Class A, and 10,069, or 6.3 per cent, of Class B; 1,133, or 3.1 per cent, in paper and allied industries; 2,436, or 5.6 per cent in silk and 3,457, or 4.0 per cent, in woolen and worsted mills; 1,951, telegraph or telephone operatives, or 1.4 per cent of the total employed group. In Trade there were 44,363, or 3.6 per cent of Class A in wholesale or retail trade, and 9,576, or 0.8 per cent, of Class B. In public Service there were 1,458, or 1.2 per cent of Class A, and 414, or 0.3 per cent, of Class B. In the Professional group, there were 33,043, or 1.9 per cent of Class A, and 9,867 or 0.6 per cent, of Class B. Of the women in Domestic and Personal Service the numbers were 26,324, or 4 per cent, of Class A, and 4,458, or 0.7 per cent, of Class B, in hotels, restaurants, and boarding houses; while 6,993, or 3.4 per cent of 240236Class A, and 1,698, or 0.8 per cent of Class B were from laundries.1

As to family relationship, the Census shows, of the entire group of unemployed women, that is Class A, 9.8 per cent were heads of families, 69.6 per cent were related to a member of the family, 20.6 per cent were lodgers. Of those laid off, 9.4 per cent were heads of families, 77.9 per cent related to a member of the family, 12.7 per cent lodgers.2 There are very different figures from those for men where 47.7 per cent or almost half of the unemployed were heads of families, 34.2 per cent were related, and 18.2 were lodgers, or in the case of those laid off, 59.1 per cent, 28.4 per cent, and 12.5 per cent. However, if the number of heads of families and of those related are added, the numbers of persons usually contributing to the family income are not so different in the case of women as compared with men.

It was pointed out above that the percentage of professional women was small; however, the number that might be classified as business women was considerable.

The limited character of the Census data gives significance to special studies of gainfully occupied women and there is available an extremely interesting study of the effect of the depression on the members of the American Woman's Association in cooperation with the President's Organization for Unemployment Relief. This Association is composed of professional and business women living, almost all of them, in New York City, or within a fifty-mile radius of the city, and employed there. Questionnaires were sent to 4,800 members between April 1, 1929, and February 1, 1930, with reference to their being laid off, having their earnings reduced by cuts in salary, or reduced bonus, or loss of patronage if they were independent workers.3 The women from whom data were obtained were persons employed in one of the business or professional groups, or holding administrative positions in connection with an occupation classified as “domestic or personal” or “manufacturing and mechanical.” In Table 41 are found the percentage distribution of members of these organizations and of the business and professional women to whom reference3 The Trained Woman and the Economic Crisis. A study made by the American Woman's Association in cooperation with the President's Emergency Committee for Employment (1931).241237was made above. The largest number represents the clerical workers; and, secondly, the teachers. In these groups the nurses are a smaller contingent than those connected with selling activities, and librarians in the one case and influential executives in the other.

The first point of interest is the number of “independent” workers. It is not possible, by examining the Census category, to separate all the independent workers. Attention has been called to the increase in the group known as managers and officials in connection with manufacturing and mechanical occupations, but they may or may not be managing their own business.

Of the two groups about whom special information is available among the Business and Professional Women, to whom extended 242238reference was made above, 6.9 per cent were “on their own,” while of the members of the American Woman's Association, 11.6 per cent were managing their own business or carrying on their own professional practice. For the members of the American Woman's Association the earnings are on a higher level than those of the Business and Professional Women. The median earning rate for the American Woman's Association was $3,030, while that for the Business and Professional Women was $1,675. The lower quartile of the American Woman's Association was $2,195, while for the Business and Professional Women it was only $1,315; the upper quartile in the one case, $3,890, and in the other, $2,170. The largest group in one case, the modal group, earned between $2,000 and $2,500, while in the other case, the largest single class earned between $1,085 and $1,625.1 The American Woman's Association were a more select group, even more mature and with better educational equipment than the Business and Professional Women. The statement of their findings is of such significance and is so ably formulated, that it might well be quoted at length. It is to be hoped that similar bodies of fact may in the coming decade make clearer the significance to women of the loss or reduction in employment and earnings. The most important findings may be summarized as follows:

Extent of Unemployment: The proportion of unemployment in the total salaried group is only 6.5 per cent (as of February 1, 1931).

Earnings Reduction versus Unemployment: More than a quarter of the total group had their earnings fall between November, 1929, and February, 1931. Of the independent workers, with their own business or professional practice, more than half reported a loss in earnings through loss of patronage. Salary cuts were slightly more widespread than unemployment and bore most heavily upon the same workers as sufficient from unemployment—those at the bottom of the earnings scale (making less than $3,000) and those at the top (making more than $7,000).

Duration of Unemployment: The typical (median) length of unemployment was eight months. Of every ten unemployment women, four were unable to find a tide-over job, three found employment lasting three months or less, and three secured longer employment. Ninety-six per cent of the unemployed group found the irregular earnings from such jobs insufficient to maintain the customary standard of living. Sixty-five per cent were not able to earn sufficient for necessities. Practically 243239the entire group found it necessary to draw on savings or other resources.

Resources of the Unemployed: In tiding over the unemployment period the majority of woman were forced to draw on savings (67.8 per cent). Others sold securities, borrowed against insurance policies or, in 30.0 per cent of the cases, from friends or relatives. Only 1.1 per cent were protected by any form of social unemployment insurance.

Age of the Unemployed: There was relatively more unemployment among women under 35 than among the more mature workers. In fact, the proportion of unemployed decreased in each successive age group up to 45 years after which it showed an increase.1

There are also available2 the results of an inquiry made by the Industrial Assembly of the Y. W. C. A. in the first half of 1932 at the request of a number of the wage-earning members of the Association. A questionnaire sent out brought in 603 replies from many types of industry and from varied parts of the state. All who sent in schedules were asked to tell the amount of their last pay.

The 603 who sent in the histories of their pay envelopes for the last year are a fairly representative sample of the industrial membership. Of the 603, the largest single group (177) were household employees; 80 were textile workers, 71 were garment workers, 36 in the electrical industry, 32 in stores, 28 in the food industries, 23 in shoe factories, and smaller numbers in the metal trades, in rubber factories, in hotels and restaurants, laundries, printing establishments and many miscellaneous trades....

The median rate for all included is $11.13 (half earning less and half earning more), and that for the largest single occupation group, the household employees, is $10.54. The latter amount does not include room and board so that it shows a rate actually somewhat higher than for the total group. The following table gives the wages paid to these 603 women during the early months of 1932:

Up to $58%

... There has been a drop in the cost of living since the depression began, and between December, 1931, and December, 1930, a decline of 244240about 9.2 per cent. At the same time the wage of this group had declined from a median of $14.83 for that received a year back to a median of $11.13, a drop of 24.9 per cent. This means, of course, that there was a real drop in the standard of living during the last year.

Of 584 women reporting wages for both 1930 and 1931, 35 had an increase in earnings and 107 were earning the same. The remaining 442, almost three-fourths, reported reductions ranging from $1 to $15 or more, the median being just under $5. The lowering of earnings by 10 per cent—for this group an average of about $1.50—would have more than equalled the reduction during the year in cost of living, yet the median loss in earnings, instead of $1.50 was $4.93.

The catastrophe, when it came, had not been wholly unforeseen, for as has been pointed out, no nation lives unto itself alone. And with the situation so unhappy in other countries, the International Labour Office at Geneva had undertaken to assemble facts with reference to the situation among intellectual workers. In the United States, therefore, the Institute of Women's Professional Relations cooperated with the International Labour Office in such a study of unemployment among intellectual workers with special reference to the situation in the United States.1 The results of this study dealt largely with teachers, but contained information with reference to women in other professions as well. This showed an over-supply of teachers, meaning more teachers than could be placed under the prevailing conditions of pay and rank; not more than would than would be needed if the purpose of the educational organization were to enlighten all young persons needing or seeking an education. For it must be recalled that the total demand is not one comprehensive demand, but the sum of a multiplicity of local demands varying greatly in resources and in understanding of the problem. For example, one excess was found in the unplaced college graduates in California who wanted to teach academic subjects, especially English and History, in high schools. It was pointed out that while those teachers could not find positions, the need of teachers with experience in the elementary schools who could serve on faculties in the normal or teacher training schools was far from met. Lack of experience is in many cases a factor in over-supply, but that merely means that the supply is not composed of adequately equipped candidates: in physical education the supply1 Chase Going Woodhouse, “The Demand for College Trained Women in the United States, A Study of the Employment Situation,” Journal of the American Association of University Women, XXIV, 61.245241was inadequate, in the scientific and mathematical lines in which men still enjoy special prestige, the demand for women was low.

Among the graduates of the other professional schools, the experience was varied. Of 76 professional schools and independent agencies, 9 reported a surplus, 19 a light surplus, 41 said that they had met no difficulty; 5 said they had found a shortage rather than a surplus, and 2 had no data to give. Nine out of 14 library schools reported no difficulty in placing their graduates. Teachers of public school music and art teachers seemed to be finding employment; and secretarial jobs seemed available, though public accounting was found to be closed to women, and salaries as high as $45.00 a week in the secretarial field seemed available only as the result of promotion, never as a beginning salary. Women were not desired in statistical divisions of financial organizations, though jobs in department stores for women willing to begin at the bottom in the hope of promotion were not difficult to find. In advertising there were opportunities for the ostensibly journalistic aspirant rather than for the person concerned for the more strictly selling organization.

The situation has, of course, changed greatly for the worse since that study was made. The Schools are almost universally facing a crisis justifying a special White House Conference, and persons equipped to teach are unable to find employment; the American Library Association, in January of 1932, called attention to the serious amount of unemployment among experienced Librarians and the number of new graduates of Library schools who were not finding employment. It was later recommended that in the library schools the size of classes be reduced by more rigid scrutiny of applicants, both as to scholarship and personality.1

Reference has been made to the fact that at earlier times of depression, the question of women has been relatively ignored. It is not meant that there were not innumerable women needing aid but there was at no earlier time so widespread a program of relief. It is, therefore, interesting to note in a community in which the relief program has been put on a sound basis of service the way in which what might be called work relief has been given unemployed women. In New York State, more than 3,000 women were given employment between November, 1931, and 246242August, 1932.1 The types of work included clerical and professional positions, such as stenographic, typing, bookkeeping, nursing, teaching. They were also employed in manufacturing, cleaning, altering and repairing clothing; they used their specialized knowledge to study food prices, catalogued in public libraries, made surveys, gave instruction to bedridden children. They were in many parts of the state: 500 in New York City, 700 in Binghampton, 278 in Troy, 216 in Buffalo, 114 in Utica, 100 in Schenectady, 100 in Nassau Country, and 100 in Westchester Country. Later reports may show similar work being done in other jurisdictions.

The question may be raised as to whether or not there could have been discovered trends toward unemployment. What may be noted is the degree to which the planlessness of productive activity renders the choice and tenure of employment accidental and precarious. The factors are, however, evidently such that if women become gainfully occupied persons, their employment, once obtained, is possibly less insecure than that of men.

In the preceding pages, attention has been directed to two great general aspects of women's life and of their activities in other than family relationships.

In the following pages, an attempt is made to examine and set out the general course of development, especially since 1920, taken by women's activities in relation to the single problem of government.

In 1920, women were granted the right to vote throughout the United States and one era in the movement toward equality between the sexes was closed. Women have now, 1932, voted in their fourth presidential election. They have already participated in local, state and national campaigns, been candidates for office and assumed responsibility in high official positions. Can the direction in which they are going be ascertained and pointed out?

First in interest, if not in order of performance, is the question of voting. Having secured the right, dot they exercise that right? If not universally, do they exercise it with increasing or decreasing interest? With increasing or declining effectiveness?

It must be recalled that since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, men and women use the same ballots and that it is therefore a matter of practice in the various states, if records are kept in such a way as to distinguish the women from the men. It should also be recalled that the problem of the non-voters, whether men or women, has been one cause of grave concern to✓ students of our political development.2

The admission of women to the electorate is not the only change in the suffrage during the period under consideration. Between 1900 and 1930, changes were made in four states in the property qualifications of voters and in nine states in the matter of ability to read and write. In spite, then, of the addition of women, the percentage of the electorate participating is estimated 249246as having dropped from 79 per cent in 1900 to 53 per cent in 1920. This is in general explained by the southern one-party system, to general indifference, and in part to the newness of the women's ballot.1

Although the autumn elections of 1920 were the first in which women all over the country joined, it should not be forgotten that some form of suffrage for women existed in twenty-nine states before the federal constitution was amended.

The situation in 1920 has been summarized by historians who were party to the movement as follows:The total number of fully enfranchised women was now over seven and a quarter million in fifteen states. And so successful had been the work for presidential suffrage that these seven and a quarter million fully fledged voting women were flanked by eight million more who could vote for President in twelve other states—thirteen, if Vermont, where the legislative grant of Presidential suffrage was in question, be included. Moreover, Texas, another one party state, had followed the lead of Arkansas and granted primary suffrage to women.2

The women of Wyoming had voted since 1869, and in dealing justly with the record of the past it should be said that Wyoming was not the ultimate pioneer in granting suffrage to women. Two days before the independence of the colonies was declared the tax-paying women of New Jersey were given the vote by the Constitution of July, 2, 1776. In 1797 legislative enactments confirmed them in the right.3

A century was nearly over before women voted again in the United States, and a second century was almost at its halfway mark before the women of the whole country voted.

The vanishing voter then, who was revealed in 1920, caused widespread concern. The National League of Women Voters, the lineal descendant of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, was the first of a number of organizations to enlist jointly or independently in a pursuit. A crusade was inaugurated to “get out the vote” before the next quadrennial election. The League's special concern was the woman voter, and effort was 250247particularly directed to the problem of arousing he interest and stimulating her participation before the habit of indifference should be deeply graven on her political character. A variety of devices were used, and immense energy was expended. But✓ when the polls were closed after the national election of 1924, the preference of just a little more than half the eligible voters had been recorded. The estimated percentage for that year was a little more than 51 per cent.

In New Hampshire, for example, the proportion voting of those on the so-called “check lists” were estimated by the Secretary of State as declining from 68.9 per cent in 1921, to

55.2 per cent in 1931. These were, however, the figures for the non-presidential years. In those years the proportion remained as high as in 1920. The figures in Table 42 were supplied by the Secretary.

These figures are obviously not classified by sex, since the sex of voters is not indicated on the ballot.

There is no way by which an accurate share of the credit or blame for voting or non-voting can be given to women as against men. The responsibility for government by a minority cannot be✓ fixed. It remains a question. No one knows exactly how many of the voters at any general election are women. Only a few studies have been made. Of as great interest perhaps as any attempt to set out the subject are those which were stimulated by the National League of Women Voters, and conducted by state and 251248local leagues in the period from 1926 to 1929. Although those inquiries were conducted by amateurs, they were under skilled direction. In the limited areas surveyed the information was assembled by an examination of the official poll lists and by house-to-house canvassing. The reports from one state where the work appears to have been admirably conducted may be quoted.1

In Minnesota the voting record of twelve districts was traced back through a four-year period with as many as eight elections. Seven districts were in first class cities, two were in a city of about 4,000 people, and three were in villages of about 1,000 population. A total population of more than 13,000, of whom 56 per cent were of voting age, was covered.

The surveys showed that the voting records of men in the selected districts were better than those of women. So far as occupational groups were studied the poorest voting record was field by women in domestic service. Of both sexes it appeared to be true that married people had a better voting record than the unmarried and that permanence of residence and property ownership coincided with regular voting habits. It is of general interest to note that the range of percentage was all the way from 30 per cent in a transient city rooming house district to 94 per cent in one of the villages.

The rise in 1928, when 61.04 per cent of the eligible voters cast their ballots, might seem to indicate that the initiation of women had taken place. Only time and the percentages of the future can tell whether the explanation is adequate. The estimated percentage for 1928 still falls short of any low mark before the spiritless sag of 1920 was reached. Certainly in 1928, as in 1926, there were special reasons why interest in the contest was acute. In contrast with 70.5 per cent in 1916, the 61.04 per cent in 1928 seems low.

The question is not only do women vote less universally than men, but as the years pass, are they voting in larger or in smaller proportions than they have voted before or than the men vote? Voting is, of course, the ultimate expression of interest, of responsibility, and of choice. Registration is one step, an essential step, in the direction of that exercise, and figures with reference to 252249registration therefore are not irrelevant, and the figures with reference to the registration of men and women are available for several jurisdictions. In Chicago, as shown in Table 43, it appears that, between 1914 and 1932, there has been a fairly steady increase in the proportion which women have made of the registered group.1 Whereas, in 1914, out of 100 registered persons, 68 were men, in 1931, only 58 were men. What the number was of either sex eligible to register, cannot be told.

In Louisiana, in the same way, as can be seen from Table 44, between 1920 and 1930, registered women rose from 18 to 30 per cent of the registered voters, while among white voters the increase was from 14 to 34 per cent of the registered citizens.

The figures for a more recent period have been graciously supplied from some jurisdictions. In Arizona, for example, the figures indicate a higher percentage increase among the women voters than among the men.

A study of voting in the November election of 1930 was made by the Registrar of Los Angeles, California. It appears that 853,676 citizens registered and were eligible to vote. Of these, 253250439,062, or a few more than half, were men, and 414,614, or a few less than half, were women. On election day, only 500,801 of those registered presented themselves to vote. Of these, 227,744 were women. They were 45.5 per cent of those who voted; and the women who voted were 55 per cent of those women who registered. The men who voted were 54.5 per cent of the voters and 68 per cent of those who had registered. In twenty-three of the incorporated cities in the county outside of Los Angeles City more women than men registered, but in only six of those did a larger number of women actually vote.

So far as registration is concerned, the records of men and women in the county outside Los Angeles City were almost alike. The number of men who registered was 188,475, and of women, 188,466. On election day, however, 177,672, or 94 per cent of the registered men, voted and only 103,329, or 54.8 per cent of the registered women, voted. In Los Angeles City, 250,587 men registered, and only 155,385, or 62 per cent of those registered, voted. The number of women registered was 226,148, of whom only 55 per cent came to the polls on election day. Women were 47 per cent of those registering and only 44 per cent of those voting.

On the other hand, on May 2, 1932, in St. Paul, at the city election, of 106,283 registered voters, of whom 61,898 were men 254251and 44,385 were women, 75 per cent of the men and 79.57 per cent of the women voted; at the Presidential election in 1928, 71 per cent of the registered men voted, and 75 per cent of the registered women.1

In Pennsylvania, too, the figures are available by sex for a few years, and are shown in Table 45. In 1925, for example, 41.8 per cent of the registrants were women, 1,368,395 women out of a total of 3,244,965, while in 1931, they were 44 per cent, or 1,715,292 out of a total of 3,859,985. That is, the percentage increase of women registering was 21, of men 13 per cent. In Rhode 255252Island, as shown in Table 46, of the 199,956 registrants in 1920, 38.93 per cent were women. In 1922, the percentage was 40.16; in 1924, 44.12; in 1926, women were only 42.79 per cent of those voting; in 1928 they were 45.16 per cent; in 1930, 45.37 per cent. That is, at no time have they been half of those who registered, but there has been an increase in the number of women during the decade of 43,680, or a percentage increase of 56, while the increase in the number of men voting has been 24,161 or less than 20 per cent. The numbers are smaller in the years that are not presidential for both men and women.

In Vermont, as shown in Table 47, women registrants increased from 44 to 47 per cent of those registering. Again 1928 was the high water level, both in the total and in the percentage women make of the total.

Besides figures of this kind, it is possible to obtain opinions on the subject, and in asking for such statistics as are available the secretary of state was asked, as was the National Committee woman of each major party in each state, to give an opinion as to whether or not women's interest in government and politics was increasing.

Of the secretaries of state, 39 replied. Of these, 30 reported that no figures were available. Some, however, express quite definite views which may be quoted, and nine gave some figures or referred to sources from which figures might be obtained. The Secretary of State for Arizona, for example, writes, “From what we hear around the State, there will be a larger number of women 256253candidates for the legislature and for state and county officers than ever before.”1 From Florida, the Secretary writes, “My opinion is that there is a slightly increasing interest of the women in voting and government affairs.”1

From Indiana, the Secretary writes, “It is the opinion of the writer that the men and women are equally divided.”2 In Iowa, on the basis of a questionnaire sent out in 1929 to the Committee women, the vice-chairman of the Republican State Committee thought that women were very nearly half the voters.

From Minnesota, the Secretary2 writes that he thinks the economic situation has stimulated an increasing interest on the part of both men and women. Similar opinions testifying to a general increase in interest is expressed in letters from Utah,1 Washington,1 and Wisconsin.1 There are several women holding the office of Secretary of State.3 One of them writes:

We do not have any compiled figures judging the relative interest of men and women in governmental affairs in this State.

However, from personal observation, I can state that the growing interest of women in politics throughout the State is very noticeable. More women run for public office every year, and more are receiving appointments to public and semi-public office. I am sorry that there are no figures published to substantiate such statements.

An interesting statement comes from Hawaii showing that in 1920, 65.4 per cent of the registered men voted and 43.8 per cent of the women, while in 1930, 63.4 per cent of the registered men and 57.8 per cent of the registered women voted. The increases of the different population elements are interestingly varied, as can be seen from the following tables:The percentage of male registered voters is consistently larger than the percentage of female registered voters except for the American, British, Germans and others in 1930. There is a small decrease in the percentage of the male registered voters in 1930 but a fairly large increase in the female registered voters in the same year.

For the most part there has been an increase in the percentages for each race every two years and there has been a varying increase in the totals without exception.

In Porto Rico, women have for the first time gained the right to vote, and 120,000 women have registered, together with 108,000 new men registrants. However, there were already 266,000 men on the lists. The superintendent of elections comments, 258255“It will be several years before we can judge of the women's interest.”

The question is not merely how many women vote, but how they vote. There, however, the reply must be less definite than the question of numbers. Before 1920, questions like this could be answered in such jurisdictions as Illinois where different voting capacity led to the use of different ballots for men and women.

The effect of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment has been likened not inaptly to the demobilization of the defense forces after a war. Such demobilization is followed, naturally, first by a great letting-down of moral energy and force, and second by the development of a diversification of aims and interests among and between those who have been united in the attack upon a common enemy. It is unnecessary to point out into what a confused and difficult situation the women were thrown by the ratification of the Amendment. How they had✓ voted was a question which had already aroused interest, and in 1914 and 1915, data were supplied by the National Municipal Review with reference to the effects of women's votes in the Chicago elections of those years.1 In 1919, a study was made of an election in Portland, Oregon, and on the basis of certain assumptions and of certain statistical calculations, it was concluded that, on the whole, women were conservative voters.2

In 1924, again, the statistician attacked the question, and although it was clear that since women's ballots were not separated from men's ballots definite conclusions could not be drawn, the impression was definitely made that women's use of the vote had been “ineffective,” while it was admitted that with time and practice, they might overcome this ineffectiveness.3

In 1928, it seemed to be accepted that, whereas before 1920 they may not have “known what they wanted,”4 they had “arrived in politics.”5 One student estimated that 18,000,0004 M. Adams, “Did They Know What They Wanted?” Outlook, XLVII, 528-30.5 E. F. Barnard, “Madame Arrives in Politics.” North American, 226 (1928), 551-56.259256women may have voted in 1928 and commented that, “Having at length developed effective organizations and having got their names at last on the poll books, the women of American may reasonably be depended upon in future presidential campaigns to do their part in election.”1

There will undoubtedly be many interpretations of the part played by women in the campaign of 1932, but the results of that campaign will, of course, be fully known only after a considerable period of time. In the meantime, by reference to the registration figures in a number of states, and by consultation with public officials, men and women alike in many jurisdiction, some impressions may be gained of the course of women's experience and participation as voters during the years since the ratification of the amendment.

An interesting editorial comment to that effect concludes with the words:No one will ever know exactly what part the women played in the final result, since voting machines tell no tales on them. But it is fairly certain that they are playing an increasingly important rdcl018;le in national elections. The rise in the popular vote from 29,000,000 in 1924 to 37,000,000 in 1928 undoubtedly reflected their increasing participation. One expert, Simon Michelet, estimates that women cast 30 per cent of the total vote in 1920, 35 per cent in 1924 and 45 per cent in 1928.2

Other aspects of women's participation in political activity offer perhaps more rewarding data than those testifying to their use of the ballot. There is libbying. For to women long denied the right to express their political convictions directly through their ballots, lobbying seemed to become a natural channel for exercising influence.

It began with anti-slavery. To the National Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1833, is given the honor of being not only the first organized woman's society, but also “the effort of women to affect a political question.”1 Women held meetings, they addressed petitions to Congress. In 1837, John Quincy Adams introduced their anti-slavery petition in the House of Representatives as a part of his campaign to establish the right of petition for all, a right which had been hitherto believed to belong only to electors.

The cause of temperance followed. After 1865, the fight for equal suffrage with men was continuously advanced. In the nineties the reports of women's meetings show that a variety of social welfare measures were being advocated at state capitols and in council chambers. Ever since, and in increasing numbers, women have lobbied for causes they thought good.

As a matter of history, the first woman lobbyist to enjoy more than local influence advocated a particular reform not related to those other three causes which women so early espoused. She was Dorothea Lynde Dix and it was the care of the indigent insane which in the forties and fifties excited her continuous solicitude and drove her in her devoted championship from state to state and finally to the Congress in Washington.2

Clara Barton was another pioneer lobbyist. The adherence of the United States to the treaty of 1864 by which the Red Cross was recognized as an international agency of mercy was 261258the objective sought by Clara Barton during seven long years.1

In the meantime the suffrage lobby grew and the records of suffrage associations show how faithfully the women struggled with state legislature, with constitutional conventions, attended and organized political meetings, and in Washington year after year tried to secure congressional action. The reports of less agitating groups of other women reveal that they, perhaps too fearful to ask for the vote as yet, were willing to lobby for the welfare measures which are still thought of as their special concern.

In 1900, the General Federation of Women's Clubs resolved at its Biennial meeting to work for legislation for women and children so that “every state will equal the best already enacted,” and a paragraph in the Proceedings of the 1904 Biennial reads, “The Legislative Committee of the General Federation recommends the formation of legislative committees in every department club, the duty of which shall be to keep the clubs informed as to bills pending in municipal, state, and national legislatures. There are many questions, which for special reasons, are of paramount interest to women. Marriage and divorce, child protection, child labor, pure food, forestry and libraries, are subjects which the clubs are asked to follow.” Lobbying at Washington was reported too. In 1905, the Industrial Committee worked “to secure the passage of a bill through Congress for an appropriation to enable a bureau of experts to investigate industrial conditions of American working women.”

Lobbying was thus a well recognized form of activity for public spirited women long before the franchise was granted. As early as 1906 the reports of women's organizations contain reference to Legislative Councils in which the constantly increasing number of women's organized groups united to advocate their common interests. An admirable speech on lobbying appears in the record of the 1904 Biennial of the General Federation. And ten years later, in 1914, and again in 1916, there were conferences at which the technique of lobbying was discussed apart from the subject matter of the measures to be advanced. In 1914, the Minnesota Federation testified to its intention to have in the future a paid legislative worker at the Capitol.

In 1920 then, when they finally achieved the ballot, women had lobbied for over fifty years and in growing numbers. Child labor laws had been passed, educational facilities had been improved, and women had been liberated from outworn laws governing family relationships and protected against newly recognized industrial hazards—all due in considerable measure to the efforts of women lobbying in state capitols from coast to coast and in Washington.

After 1920, the right to vote stimulated the activities of women as lobbyists. They remembered, perhaps, the testimony of Idaho women1 after state suffrage was won by constitutional amendment,”. ... The innovation has brought in its train a disposition to give greater consideration to women's clubs and the work they undertake,” and of California, whose delegates to the 1914 Biennial stated that they had perceived a more sympathetic and favorable attitude toward their interests after they became voters. The women of Oregon had written in a similar vein. It was to be expected then that with women voting all over the country the measure of their influence at the national Capitol and the record of their accomplishments would be sharply increased.

A Woman's Joint Congressional Committee was organized in Washington; its purpose was to serve as a clearing house for the federal legislative activities of member organizations, and its plan of organization was similar to the Legislative Councils which had flourished in the states for over a decade. Ten national organizations2 were charter members. They were: The American Association of University Women, The American Home Economics Association, The General Federation of Women's Clubs, The National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Associations, The National Consumers’ League, The National Council of Jewish Women, The National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, The National League of Women Voters, National Women's Christian Temperance Union, and National Women's Trade Union League.

Two more organizations joined in the year of its existence, namely, The Girl's Friendly Society of America and the 263260National Board of Young Women's Christian Association. In 1922 The National Council of Women and The Service Star Legion came in.

In 1923, the membership had increased to seventeen.1 The Woman's Joint Congressional Committee has functioned without interruption. Although the Committee itself has neither supported nor opposed any legislation, its member organizations working together on common measures have come to be recognize as the “Women's Lobby on Capitol Hill,” which was in hostile irony, perhaps, described as the “most highly organized and powerful lobby ever seen in Washington.”2 Not every national organization of women belongs, of course, but an examination of its membership and its progress since 1920 gives perhaps as good an indication as any of the trend of women's interests in lobbying. In 1923 the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the National Committee for a Department of Education joined. In 1924 the American Nurses Association, the Council of Women for Home Missions, the Medical Women's National Association and the National Association of Colored Women joined. In 1925 the Medical Women of the Institute of Homeopathy, the Women's Homeopathic Medical Fraternity, and in 1931, the American Dietetic Association joined. In 1927 the National Women's Christian Temperance Union withdrew, as did the General Federation, the National Association of Colored Women and the National Council of Women in 1928.

Two federal legislative victories rewarded women's efforts during their first two years of lobbying as voters. The Maternity and Infancy Law,3 which enabled the federal government and the states to cooperate in the preservation of the lives of mothers and babies, was enacted in 1921, and the Nationality of Women Act, which granted married women a citizenship status independent of their husbands, became a law September 22, 1922.43 42 U.S. Statutes of Large, p. 224, Sixty-seventh Congress, First Session, Ch. 135. U. S. Children's Bureau Publication No. 203, reviews the history of that Act. See also White House Conference Publications. See also, Modern Social Trends, Frank, Chapter on Childhood and Youth.4 42 U.S. Statutes at Large, p. 1021, Sixty-seventh Congress, Second Session, Ch. 411; 46 U.S. Statutes at Large, p. 854, Seventy-first Congress, Second Session, Ch. 885; ibid., p. 1511, Seventy-first Congress, Third Session, Ch. 442. See The American Journal of International Law 36: 700, Earnest J. Hover, “Citizenship of Women in the United States.” See Equal Rights, XVIII, 315, “Nationality of Women.”264261These were women's measures, proposed and advanced through their initiative and energy and designed to affect their lives directly. They were major achievements and seemed to assume the more generous consideration for women's interests in government which was to be expected in the future.

The prevention of child labor, as has been pointed out, had been one of the first causes which women embraced to advance through legislation. State laws were unequal and two federal laws designed to correct the evil had been declared unconstitutional.1 In 1924, therefore, every organization in the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee united with groups outside and, with the approval of the President and of influential leaders of both Houses, advocated an amendment to the Federal Constitution which would enable the Congress to legislate on the subject of child labor.

In April of 1924, the legislative achievements of women since 1920 were summarized as including in addition to the Maternity and Infancy Act and the Nationality of Women Act:

Appropriations for the U.S. Children's Bureau carried in the Appropriation Acts for the Acts for the years 1922, 1923, and 1924.

An Act to extend the Federal aid provisions of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act to Hawaii. (March 10, 1924)2

An Act to provide for the classification of civilian positions within the District of Columbia and in the field services, carrying the proviso that in determining the rate of compensation for equal work irrespective of sex shall be followed. (March 4, 1923)3

An Act to regulate interstate and foreign commerce in livestock, livestock products, dairy products, poultry products and eggs and for other purposes. (August 15, 1921.)4

An Act to prohibit the shipment of filled milk in interstate and foreign commerce. (March 4, 1923.)5

An Act to establish a commission to be known as the United States Coal Commission for the purpose of securing information in connection 265262with questions relative to interstate commerce in coal. (September 22, 1922.)1

An Act to amend the Coal Commission Act (September 22, 1911)2 for the purpose of strengthening the original act. (March 4, 1923.)3

The proposed Child Labor Amendment4 and the bill to provide an institution for federal women prisoners5 were both passed by the Congress shortly after this summary had been made.

The adoption of the child labor amendment by the necessary two-thirds majority of both Houses and its submission to the states for ratification was heralded as the third major legislative victory for enfranchised women, and there was much rejoicing. Women seemed to be marching steadily toward the realization of a more influential participation in the law making process

In June of 1924 the National Party Conventions met. The plank on Child Labor which the Republican convention adopted, read:We commend congress for having recognized this possibility in its prompt adoption of the recommendation of President Coolidge for a constitutional amendment authorizing congress to legislate on the subject of child labor, and we urge the prompt consideration of that amendment by the legislatures of the various states.

It commended the Congress for the adoption of the proposed amendment and urged its prompt consideration by the states. The Democratic platform recited boastful history:Without the votes of Democratic members of the Congress the proposed Child Labor amendment would not have been submitted for ratification.In spite, however, of the ardent solicitation of women who appeared before the Resolutions Committee of both major parties, and the earnest persuasion of women supposed to have influence is party councils neither platform contained a positive statement in favor of the new amendment. Only the Progressive Conference, meeting after the two parties had acted, adopted a candid plank urging ratification of the women's major measure.

In January, 1925, forty-two state legislatures were in session. Arkansas6 had ratified at a special session in 1924, and only6 Annual Report of the Chief of the Children's Bureau, 1924, p. 8.266263three, those of Arizona, California, and Wisconsin, took similar action in 1925.1 When the session had all adjourned, overwhelming defeat had overtaken this most cherished and most conspicuous of women's measures. While Montana2 ratified in 1927, it was clear that the winter of discontent in politics had come for women, and when the year 1932 came to an end only Colorado3 had acted.

For the purpose of this study it is unnecessary to analyze or even outline the bewildering campaign by which an immensely popular measure became the most despised. Unquestionably neither the women's organizations nor the representatives of organized labor upon whose efforts the campaigns for ratification usually rested were adequately prepared for its defense. Women particularly, and there were women champions in states where labor's force was small, had depended upon the general public approval of their cause and were innocent with the false sense of security which their earlier triumphs had fostered. To recite and interpret statistics, to explain administrative practices, to expound constitutional law, above all to meet misleading, deliberately fabricated, insinuations as to the domestic consequences of the amendment, those were tasks essential for the amendment's advocates to master. If they were too difficult who could quite wonder?

The records of meetings of women's organizations in 1925 and afterward reveal lively debate on the subject, ending in most cases with a reaffirmation of their support. Their steady faithfulness to this cause has not yet been rewarded by favorable legislative action. Since 1925, four state legislatures, as has been pointed out, have reconsidered their first rejection. In the meantime, although there has been some improvement in state standards, there is still the inequality that had called for action on a national scale. The modest standards of the first federal child labor law which was enacted in 19164 are not yet realized by state action, and thirty years after the adoption of the resolution of the General Federation that club women should work so4 The law was in effect for nine months—from September 1, 1917 to June, 1918. See United States Children's Bureau Publication No. 79. The Administration of the First Federal Child Labor Law. See also White House Conference Publications on Child Laborand on Vocational Guidance.267264that every state should “Equal the best” is still a goal toward which it is necessary to strive.

The fate of the child labor amendment was disheartening to women, and equally encouraging to those who distrusted an increase in the influence of women as voters. Today, as women's organizations survey the past twelve years, they must reflect that so far as federal legislation is concerned the cause of Child Welfare, which they had so long ago espoused, has advanced little, if any, since 1921.

In that year the Maternity and Infancy Act was passed, with a five-year limit on the appropriation which it authorized to match the funds which states accepting the benefits of the Act would make available. On January 22, 1927, the termination date of the federal appropriation was advanced two years. But in spite of the devoted and persistent efforts of every large national organization of women, the federal program for Maternity and Infancy Hygiene was allowed to lapse seven years after it was inaugurated.

The character of the measures which seemed the women's undoing should be briefly explained. Apparently, they were not radical measures; they set out no dream of a Utopian commonwealth. They seemed harmless. And they were, in fact, highly conservative, if one thinks of the values on which the enduring life of the community must draw. The lives of mothers and infants is the life of the nation, and the protection of the childhood against early exhaustion is likewise essential to a vigorous and competent citizenship. It seemed as though the women were just doing on a larger platform what women had been always supposed to do—care for women in childbirth, welcome the new-born and nurture the children. But there is an essential conflict between the purpose of making the United States everywhere a fit and safe place in which mothers may confidently anticipate the coming of their children, in which infants can safely enter on life, in which children can pass into adolescence, and that of securing marketable products whose sale will bring a profit to the producer. It is in a future not yet attained in which Scripture will be fulfilled and the guiding hand of the child's leadership brings the community to the place where the lamb of general welfare and the lion of competitive gain find their interests reconciled and “lie down together.”

This does not mean that there have been no successes to reward the efforts of women lobbying in Washington these past ten years. They have been less conspicuous than the failures, but it is fair to record that sub-committees of the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee have supported and secured amendments to the Cable Act removing almost all of the disabilities of married women which remained in respect to their citizenship after the original act was secured. They have championed adequate appropriations for the work of bureaus of special interest to women, they have been interested in child welfare measures passed for the District of Columbia. Two measures in the field of international relations—one the proposal that the United States should adhere to the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the other the Kellogg Multilateral Treaty—were supported by active sub-committees and received favorable Senate action. Neither of these, however, could be said to be women's measures.

It should be explained that the measures whose advocacy prompts the organization of a sub-committee is only a partial list of the legislative activity of those same organizations. A sub-committee of the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee is formed whenever a certain number of member organizations unite to support or oppose a given measure. In the beginning only three interested organizations were required. At one time the number be was raised to seven. For several years now it has remained stationary at five. Obviously, therefore, there are measures supported by member groups in respect to which there are not a sufficient number of other organizations interested to make possible the organization of a sub-committee. Some of these should be mentioned. The National Council of Jewish Women, for example, has opposed any plan of calendar simplification which would change the Sabbath Day; and, like the National Board of the Y.W.C.A., has concerned itself with various legislative proposals affecting the welfare of immigrants and immigration problems. The General Federation of Women's Clubs has been concerned with legislation affecting the care of American Indians and supported a prison labor bill, which was adopted. The League of Women Voters supported the Norris plan for government operation of Muscle Shoals, and the so-called “Lame Duck” amendment to the Constitution which was finally submitted in 1931-1932 and was ratified within a record breaking period. The National Association of Business 269266and Professional Women's Clubs recently favored an increase in the income tax exemption allowed for single persons. And no summary can omit the constant vigilance of the National Women's Christian Temperance Union in behalf of the legislation falling in its special field. Nor can the success of the women's organizations for so-called prohibition reform be ignored. The recent swift change of public opinion, as at least registered in the 1932 platforms of the two parties, owes much of its momentum to the effective organization of the women to secure the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Unquestionably, the sphere of women's interest in government has widened. That the list of their accomplishments has not been lengthened correspondingly is likewise evident. What is true of federal legislation is also true of the states.

It was to the 1904 Biennial of the General Federation of Women's Clubs that Idaho reported, “Candidates for the legislature will be asked for their position on these bills in advance of election, and if they take adverse stands they will never pass the stage of being candidates if women's votes are numerous enough.”

In 1924, the reports of state legislation enacted with the support of the League and other women's organization enacted with the adoption of the suffrage amendment were summarized. The record was complete for only three years as the legislative sessions of 1924, less than twelve in number, were at the time not yet adjourned. The years included two sessions in thirty-six states, three sessions in six states and one session in six states. The summary follows:

Four hundred and twenty bills approved by the League had become laws since 1920, and, in the states, as in the national Congress, child welfare held first place, with the removal of the legal discrimination against women second.

In 1930, at the ten-year anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters, the president of the League recapitulated the state legislative achievements which the League claimed alone or shared with other organizations. In 1930, the sum of state laws concerning the legal status of women included 130 enactments in 32 states, the District of Columbia and Hawaii during the ten-year period. Of the total, it is of interest to note that the largest number—24 measures in 12 states—related to property rights of married women. Equal guardianship measures had totaled 21 enactments in 17 states, and office-holding and voting rights came next with 20 enactments in 13 states.

In the effort toward Efficiency in Government, 76 state legislative victories had been won, and 60 measures which had been opposed had been defeated. The enactments included election law reforms in 16 states, with Permanent Registration a feature in 4 states, and measures for improved state administration in 11.

Sixty-one child welfare measures had been enacted with League support; 22 of them in 16 states were laws to limit working hours, and 39 measures in 23 states were enacted for the protection of dependent, delinquent, neglected and handicapped children. The Education Committee boasted compulsory education laws in 9 states and 60 additional laws for the improvement of school administration and finance in 27 states. Seventy-five measures are credited to the Social Hygiene Committees in the various states, and 25 victories are classified as relating to the work of the Committee on Women in Industry. The legislative achievements of the Committee on Living Costs in the States are not listed.

In 1930, then, looking backward a decade, the League of Women Voters pointed to a total of 436 laws enacted with its support. Presented as the record of 1924 was shown, the ten-year summary is as shown in Table 51.

It is true that in 1924 already 420 laws had been claimed as victories, and in 1930 only 436 were counted as in that category; it would, however, be misleading to contend by the obvious subtraction that only 16 victorious measures had been supported by state Leagues of Women Voters since 1923, and that the 271268enactment of over 400 had been secured in the three years before that date.

The leaders of the state Leagues of Women Voters have had almost ten years’ training in collection and classifying reports. The figures of 1930 are more accurately reported and analyzed than those of 1923. Unquestionably the first-census was swollen with enthusiasm. Probably slight amendments to existing laws were listed as separate bills. Perhaps administrative rulings and routine appropriations were included. The contrast in numbers must not be taken too somberly.

Nevertheless, although allowance is made for better reporting and more precise classification, there is still a startling drop. And women leaders in almost every state admit it. The demands ✓of women voters were not receiving great consideration at the hands of legislators in the various states.

The reasons generally advanced are varied. One is entirely political. It is said that the woman vote was dreaded by the politicians who had delayed its coming as long as they were able. So for a brief time they were willing to make concessions, to tease with promises, to placate with welfare legislation. The sorry sequel to this theory is that with acquaintance, the threat of the ✓✓woman vote diminished. The party bosses found that things were much the same after all. They grew thrifty with their gifts, took courage to deny, and about 1925 the down-hill road for women's bills began, in Washington and in the states.

The minds and habits of those who control political machinery are not open for objective inspection. The theory can be accepted or rejected. There seems a certain quality of simple truth about it.

Social advances by legislation have been few these past years. The women's measures were the first to suffer. Not because their advocates are women but because measures designed to protect the underprivileged, to remedy inequalities, to prevent distress are among the first to be sacrificed when economy programs are inaugurated. Those measures suffer in days of spiritual depression and economic misery. The failure of such legislation is, however, accepted by women as their failure, its continued advocacy as their responsibility. Even the most cursory examination of the standards adopted by women's organizations demonstrates that year after year they endorse better education laws, improved child labor standards, a shorter work week for women, adequate institutional care for delinquents. Their programs are monotonous with the weight of unfinished business. Who can say what would happen if large groups of men demanded consideration of the same measures? That is another question. But perhaps until there is some such group to act as a control, and men in great numbers unite to support measures of social welfare, and without money, and with complete integrity fail or succeed, it is too soon to say that women have failed in this aspect of their political life.

A very real question is whether great numbers of women can survive in political activity the period of discouragement into which they have been plunged. For there is some evidence that genuine and widespread interest has slackened.

Although the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union withdrew from the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, both of them continue to advocate programs of legislation, so that their absence from the Joint Committee need not be taken to mean a lessened interest in legislative work.

The National League of Women Voters still belongs and the American Association of University Women. The American Home Economics Association is a member, and the full list includes the American Federation of Teachers; the American Nurses Association; the Council of Women for Home Missions; the Girls Friendly Society of the U.S.A.; the Medical National Association; the National Association of Business and Professional 273270Women; the National Board of the Y.W.C.A.; the National Committee for a Department of Education; the National Congress of Parents and Teachers; the National Consumers’ League; the National Council of Jewish Women; the National Education Association; the National Woman's Trade Union League; the Service Star Legion, Inc., and the Women's Homeopathic Medical Fraternity.

Nine legislative subcommittees functioned in 1931 to support legislation related to: The World Court, maternity and infancy hygiene, a department of education, independent citizenship, adequate appropriation for the Children's Bureau, adequate appropriation for the Woman's Bureau, reclassification in the Civil Service, unemployment legislation, opposition to the so-called Equal Rights Amendment.

Legislative councils in the states continue. There were in 1931 at least eighteen states where women's organizations cooperated in support of desired legislation. 1

In general the methods of women lobbyists have been above reproach. They have performed a genuine service in informing legislators and constituents alike. A few of them at Washington and in the states are celebrated for the skill with which they pilot legislation. They are expert in the subjects they advocate, and familiar with legislative procedure, they know the human beings whose votes control their measures’ destinies. To these leaders in women's organizations lobbying has brought some influence and rich rewards in the sense of achievement. For the majority of women who have participated it has provided an unrivaled school of political education. Its graduates are in elective and appointive office. They sit in party committees. It is safe to guess that they vote more regularly than their non-lobbying sisters. They care immensely about the election. To them it means the roll call later on.

For lobbying has changed somewhat since the days of Dorothea Dix. She inevitably succeeded in arousing public opinion by direct appeals to the press. But when the legislatures were in 274271session she concentrated her effort on the task of “leading the leaders.” “Personally she never cared to appear in public. It was thoroughly distasteful to her to do so. She made no addresses, she gathered no meetings. To come to close quarters of eye, conscience, and heart with impressionable and influential minds, to deliver her burden as from the Lord to them, and let it work on their sensibility and reason—this was her invariable method.” 1 Lobbying today does not stop with that. It goes back and is inextricably mingled with the whole election process.

The organizations advocate programs of legislation, address questionnaires to candidate before the primary as well as before the general election; and publish records. Lobbying includes interviews with candidates and their managers individually and in deputations. It flowers in such unexpected beauties as luncheons for departing legislators.

At state capitols and in Washington it involves interviews with senators and representatives. Lobbying today means preparing printed material, informing constituents, soliciting letters and telegrams from constituents back home, arranging hearings, releasing supporting publicity. Remember that back in 1896 the club women of the District of Columbia were lobbying, “and every Senator will know before the measure comes up who wants it passed, and why.”

Lobbying means appearing before political party conventions, writing letters and interviewing the delegates beforehand. With painful regularity the suffragists sought a woman suffrage plank. In 1920, with the suffrage amendment pending for ratification as the conventions met, women widened their demands. In 1924, 1928, and 1932, and at state conventions, women have appeared to urge their parties to assume responsibility for the interests they represent. They have not found exceeding hospitality for their claims, although the noble ambiguity of party platforms prevents any useful comparison and makes a critic seem to churlish.

And in 1927, when the Pan-American Conference met in Havana, delegates of the National Woman's Party were there to advocate the adoption of an Equal Rights Treaty. When the Conference for the Codification of International Law met at the✓ Hague in 1930 representative of the National League of Women voters attended as well as spokesmen of the National Woman's 275272Party. The interest of both groups was focused on the question of the nationality of married women, a problem affected by the passage of the Cable Act in the United States.

In outline then, this is the story of women as lobbyists. Since the days of anti-slavery agitation women leaders with energy, devotion and intelligence have accepted lobbying as an inevitable responsibility in their seal for the advancement of causes. In general social welfare legislation has been their field and throughout the country mothers’ pension laws exist, child labor standards have been improved, educational opportunities have been advanced because of the activities of the Woman's Lobby.

✓Since suffrage their interests have widened. But after the first few years of victor their achievements have diminished. To what extent with that diminishing there has come a slackening of interest is impossible to measure. It is true that fewer organizations are members of the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee in Washington than there were in 1925; it is reported that Legislative Council have been abandoned in a few states, and competent observors report some lessening of active interest in the work; whether it means lessened interest or a pause during which new methods may perhaps be developed, no one can say at the moment. The outward appearances are ambiguous to say the least.

Outside the Joint Congressional Committee, but always active, the Woman's Party has urged the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, has secured the enactment of their blanket statute in several states,1 and has opposed before numerous state legislative committees the enactment of protective legislation for women that does not apply to men.2

So far no investigation of lobbying has disclosed the representatives of women's organizations failing in integrity, or seeking selfish ends. Almost without exception legislators accord them credit for honor and sincerity. A few have been distinguished leaders. Almost every state holds some woman lobbyists in reverence. For example, the story of Miss Dix and her devotion to the indigent insane is unmatched, and Clara Barton is a name to honor. But one need not go so far back. For years Mrs. Andreas Ueland of Minneapolis lobbied in the Minnesota capitol for woman suffrage. When that was won she continued to advance the varied program of public welfare measures which the League of Women Voters advocated. When she was tragically killed by an automobile in the winter of 1927 on her way home from the capitol after a discouraging day of work, the whole state mourned. Formal resolutions were passed by both houses of the legislature. An official delegation attended her funeral. Later the House Chamber was the scene of a public memorial service which was infinitely moving. The Governor was there, the presiding officers of House and Senate. Men with whom she had pleaded the cause of the child laborer, the working woman, the dependent and infirm, came to do her honor. A year afterward, in 1928, a tablet was unveiled in the rotunda of the State Capitol of Minnesota to which it had been admitted by special legislative act in memory of Mrs. Andreas Ueland inscribed with the words:May her memory save us from all pettiness, all unworthy ambitions, all narrowness of vision, all mean and sordid aims.

Her claim to honor was the influence she had exerted in behalf of woman's suffrage and social welfare measures.

The legacy to government of woman lobbyists like these is not substance to be measured.1