Funding Feminism

Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870–1967

Joan Marie Johnson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469634708
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street "Merchant Prince" William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune. Motivated by their own experiences with sexism, and focusing on women's need for economic independence, these benefactors sought to expand women's access to higher education, promote suffrage, and champion reproductive rights, as well as to provide assistance to working-class women. In a time when women still wielded limited political power, philanthropy was perhaps the most potent tool they had. But even as these wealthy women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. As Johnson argues, restrictions tied to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardized efforts to establish coalitions across racial and class lines. As the struggle for full economic and political power and self-determination for women continues today, this history reveals how generous women helped shape the movement. And Johnson shows us that tensions over wealth and power that persist in the modern movement have deep historical roots.

CHAPTER ONE

Following the Money

Funding Woman Suffrage

Calling it “the vital power of all movements—the wood and water of the engine,” the “ammunition of war,” and a “war chest,” suffragists captured the importance of money in their battle to win the right to vote for women.1 As National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) treasurer Harriet Upton urgently appealed to the 1909 convention: “The most important question before this convention is that of money.”2 Suffragists were unable to change public sentiment or to lobby legislatures without funds for travel, staff, print, or parades. The movement depended not just on the grassroots activism of millions of suffragists or the visionary leadership of association officers but also on the fortunes donated and estates left by a handful of very wealthy women.3 At crucial moments they sustained the western state campaigns, underwrote newspapers, and paid salaries. This and the next chapter on woman suffrage argue that the movement, which by 1900 was stalled and unable to pass in any new states, emerged from the doldrums due to the infusion of money given by wealthy women, and that these donations shaped the trajectory, priorities, strategies, and ultimately the success of the movement. These women gave thousands and thousands of dollars to win the vote for women because they cared deeply about women’s rights.

By recapturing the important role of wealthy women, this chapter provides new insights into feminist beliefs undergirding the suffrage cause. Some single, widowed, and divorced women had the economic means and the independence to direct their money toward the suffrage movement. Each woman embraced the campaign for her own reasons, but collectively their speeches and writings indicate common themes: the need for political equality for educated and working women honed from a desire for financial independence, and belief in the equality of the sexes.4

Despite their class and race privilege (all of the large donors were white), these women experienced sexism and, in particular, struggled to assert their economic independence. Therefore, most stressed the need for equality, rather than calling for the vote on maternalist grounds (that is, that mothers needed the vote to protect children and clean up government). Even when some suffragists began to use maternalism as an expedient argument in the twentieth century, the equality argument—also referred to as natural rights or justice—still persisted.5 The ideology of monied women draws attention back to the quest for political equality and financial independence they sought in the movement.

These chapters also wrestle with the difficulties caused by wealthy women who had the ability to dominate a movement that challenged men’s political dominance. When funding came from a small number of affluent women, officers and staff sometimes felt pressured to shape their agendas to please donors. Therefore, resentment shaped the stories told in memoirs and in the History of Woman Suffrage, written by participants in the movement, who marginalized the role of wealthy women. Historians followed suit, not focusing on rich women despite their powerful impact on the movement.6

Several historians have recently begun to write wealthy women back into the history of woman suffrage and to analyze the crucial role that their activism and funding played. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fretted over funding in the 1860s; forty years later, Anthony was still fund-raising just before her death in 1906, and Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch set out to recruit wealthy New York women into the movement.7 Building on these works, I focus on donors and their impact in the last fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. I turn the spotlight on a group of women, including some of Blatch’s recruits, who gave large amounts of money to NAWSA or the Congressional Union (CU). By following the money, I argue that woman suffrage passed when it did not only as a result of new leadership but also because of the significant influx of women’s enormous donations and the officers, salaries, tactics, and strategies they underwrote. Wealthy women, through both their financial contributions and their ideas about feminism, had a significant impact on the movement.

NEW TACTICS AND STRATEGIES in the 1910s were extremely expensive. NAWSA’s annual budget increased from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. State campaigns grew exponentially as well, with New York raising an incredible $682,500 (approximately $12.5 million in 2016) for its successful 1917 referendum campaign for the right of women to vote.8

With so much money needed, suffragists eventually realized that raising sizable amounts of money with only the small gifts of large numbers of women was not feasible; the movement instead came to depend on a small number of women to write large checks. A list of CU contributors shows that out of hundreds of donors, fewer than sixty gave $1,000 (approximately $20,000 in 2016) or more from its founding in 1913 through 1920. The vast majority gave between $1 and $50. Yet major supporters who gave at least $1,000 were disproportionately crucial to the financial success of the organization: approximately sixty people represent nearly 60 percent of the CU’s funding. Two women, Alva Belmont (who gave $76,502, or over $1.7 million in 2016) and Mary Burnham (who gave $38,170, or $867,500 in 2016), together contributed 20 percent of the total amount, $561,800, collected.9 The other large contributors donated in total approximately $213,000. The 1917 New York State effort was similar: only eighty-eight donors contributed more than half the money raised.10

Moreover, suffragists depended on other women, not men, to make large contributions. Women dominated the CU’s major donor list of thirty-eight women, ten couples, and seven single men. Though suffragist Matilda Gage had said in 1880, “Who would be free must contribute towards that freedom,” it was several decades before women finally began to use their financial clout to win the vote for women.11 Men simply did not give enough money to the movement; it would take significant gifts from women to make change happen for women.

Women’s giving reflected changes in American philanthropy, which by 1900 was moving from “charity,” to ease the suffering of those in need, to “scientific philanthropy,” which was designed to foster large-scale social change by challenging the causes of suffering rather than ameliorating conditions.12 Similarly, women began to give large amounts to make change for women in society, not simply to assist poor women but rather to broaden women’s opportunities and rights, including political equality. Though few women had the financial wherewithal and independence to give thousands of dollars to the suffrage movement, a small but significant group of mostly widows and single women with inherited fortunes did contribute large sums.

This chapter establishes who those donors were and why they gave. Perhaps the most striking commonality among the women discussed in detail in this and the next chapter is that only two were happily married during their time of activism and philanthropy to the movement, Mary Putnam Jacobi and Vira Whitehouse; two others, Pauline Shaw and Olivia Sage, had their husbands die in the midst of their support for woman suffrage, and their major financial contributions came when they were widows. Dorothy Straight began giving before her marriage and continued to have her husband’s support; the money, however, was her own inheritance. Though married, Katharine McCormick was independent, as her husband was mentally ill and confined in a home in another state. Others were unhappily married: Katherine Mackay left her husband for another man, and Helen Reid’s husband was an alcoholic. Mary Garrett and Carey Thomas were a lesbian couple; Emily Howland and Mary Burnham were single; and Josephine Lowell, Louisine Havemeyer, Phoebe Hearst, Jane Stanford, Alva Belmont, and Mrs. Frank Leslie were all widows (the latter two also had previous marriages that ended in divorce). Financial independence, it will be clear, freed them to give.

Less significance can be tied to their education, as these suffragists had varied amounts. A few had college and even graduate degrees, like Carey Thomas, who had a PhD; Katharine McCormick, a biology degree from MIT; Helen Reid, a bachelor’s degree from Barnard; and Mary Jacobi, an MD. Alva Belmont and Louisine Havemeyer attended boarding school in France, and Phoebe Hearst and Jane Stanford attended a local academy. Others had little to no formal education, like Mary Garrett, Pauline Shaw, Dorothy Straight, Mrs. Frank Leslie, and Katherine Mackay.

After recalling Stanton and Anthony’s desperation over funding in the 1860s, the chapter charts suffrage leaders’ deliberate recruitment of wealthy women into the movement, beginning in the 1890s. Stanton, Anthony, and other leaders needed money, and they purposely began to look for women who could provide the necessary funds. They also hoped that when society women opened their homes to suffrage meetings or, more significantly, participated in public rallies or parades, suffrage would become fashionable. These women could draw their friends into the movement as well as command newspaper coverage. Focusing on the strategy behind recruiting donors opens up a broader understanding of the logistics of the movement as a political campaign.

The women they recruited had strong ideas about why women needed the right to vote. The chapter’s examination of the “feminism” of wealthy suffragists refocuses the spotlight on the justice strand of suffragism as they called for economic independence and equality. Wealthy women’s experience with the power of money (and its limitations) helped them understand that economic independence and political equality were crucial for all women, whether working-class wage earners, educated professionals, or inheritors of large fortunes. They lamented male control over their finances, and thought economic independence would free them to live as full citizens. The ideology of equality and independence espoused by most of these affluent women marked them as feminists, even if they did not use that term. They saw the vote as a tool leading to greater opportunity in employment and civil society, and as a symbol of respect that recognized women’s equal intelligence and capabilities.

As these monied women considered their own lack of power due to their gender, they began to identify more with other women. While they themselves would benefit from the right to vote, they also believed that other women would gain from political equality. Thus their concern for themselves was linked to their concern for others.13 Philanthropy has been motivated by a desire to do good in civil society as well as by more self-centered reasons, including gaining status, displaying conspicuous consumption, and strengthening class structure. In the case of suffrage, when the movement became fashionable, society women gained cachet from their involvement, yet the most significant donors to the movement gave because they were dedicated to the cause. Many were activists as well as financial contributors, who gave much more to the campaign than their celebrity social status or their money: they gave of their time by speaking and marching, and were even willing to be arrested and defy disapproval from others to promote suffrage. They did so because they fervently wanted to change women’s position in society by gaining political equality with men.

Despite their assertive, sometimes daring behavior when it came to women’s rights, these white women were not willing to challenge the racial order that oppressed African Americans. Despite the long connection between abolition and women’s rights in the nineteenth century, the movement, and NAWSA, had little room for African Americans, especially after white southern women became more active in the early twentieth century. Alva Belmont is a notable exception among the philanthropists funding the movement, as she met with and helped organize African American women in New York City, funding a branch of her organization in Harlem.14

In chapter 2, the focus moves from the donors to the donations, looking at how these new large contributions shaped the success of the movement by tracing their use. At the same time, however, some wealthy women demanded a say in how their money was spent, making it impossible to separate the money from its source. Chapter 2 therefore also contends that the largesse of the rich came with a price. By insisting on influencing where headquarters were located, who held office, and what officers should be prioritized, wealthy donors drove out long-time loyal suffragists incapable of the same munificence.

THE WOMAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT is usually regarded as taking off after the world’s first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, although both men and women had previously petitioned states for the right of women to vote.15 At Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton unveiled a Declaration of Sentiments, which contested women’s inequ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Following the Money: Funding Woman Suffrage
• Chapter Two: Unequal Women Working for Women’s Equality: Power and Resentment in the Woman Suffrage Movement
• Chapter Three: Dictating with Dollars: Funding Equality for Working-Class Women
• Chapter Four: An Education for Women Equal to That of Men: Funding Colleges for Women
• Chapter Five: Using Mammon for Righteousness: Funding Coeducation through Coercive Philanthropy
• Chapter Six: Margaret Sanger’s Network of Feminists: Funding the Birth Control Movement
• Chapter Seven: Feminism and Science: Funding Research for the Pill
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index