Constructing Womanhood in Public: Progressive White Women

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Louisiana State University Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 Constructing womanhood in public: progressive white women in a New South Mary Jane Smith Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Mary Jane, "Constructing womanhood in public: progressive white women in a New South" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2626. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2626 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. CONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD IN PUBLIC: PROGRESSIVE WHITE WOMEN IN A NEW SOUTH A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Mary Jane Smith B.A., Georgia College, 1984 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1987 December 2002 Copyright 2002 Mary Jane Smith All rights reserved ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my dissertation committee: Gaines M. Foster, John W. Lowe, Leonard N. Moore, John C. Rodrigue, Karl Roider, and Adelaide Russo. I appreciate the care and thought with which each read the dissertation as evidenced by the incisive questions asked and suggestions made during the defense. I would also like to thank my family, especially my mother, Addie Mae Smith, my father, T. W. Smith, and my sisters who never lost faith that I would one day complete this project. I owe Gaines Foster a special debt of gratitude for his unwavering support and encouragement dating from the very first semester I arrived at Louisiana State University. He has been the epitome of a mentor and a friend. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ....................................... iii Abstract ................................................ v Introduction ............................................ 1 Chapter 1 The WCTU: Defending (White) Womanhood .............. 12 2 The GFWC: Defining Community And Class ............. 42 3 The NAWSA: Demanding Race And Gender Justice ....... 78 4 Temperance In Black And White ..................... 110 5 Organized (White) Womanhood: The WCTU And The GFWC..147 6 (White) Woman Suffrage: Prohibition And Politics... 180 Conclusion ............................................ 205 Bibliography .......................................... 210 Vita .................................................. 223 iv Introduction In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, southern white women began to participate actively in the national reform movements that helped characterize women’s involvement in the Progressive Era. Between 1880 and 1917, southern white women joined the ranks of and became leaders in the temperance movement, the women’s club movement, and the woman suffrage movement. With the aid of national organizers and recruiters, southern white women organized local and state chapters of the three dominate national organizations dedicated to these movements--The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Between 1883 and 1910, every southern state had a state chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and by 1913 every state had an affiliated chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.1 Having determined that they could not claim national success without the participation of southern white women, the leadership of each association was eager to recruit southern white women into its organization. Consequently, the executive leadership of the WCTU, the GFWC, and the 1Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 161; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), 194. 1 NAWSA, at strategic times, decided to focus their attention on attracting and keeping southern white women in their associations, often at the exclusion of black women and usually at the expense of concern for African American (both female and male) civil and political rights. The WCTU, under the leadership of Frances Willard, was the first national women's voluntary association to recruit large numbers of southern white women into its ranks. It was followed, in the 1890's, by the General Federation of Women's Clubs and later by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Southern white women joined each group amid enthusiastic proclamations of a new era of national reconciliation between North and South and a new era of women's activism in American society. Even as southern white women claimed a common gender and race identity which bound northern and southern white women together, they actively maintained a distinct regional identity, which necessitated special considerations within the national organizations.2 2The WCTU maintained a policy of "states’ rights" over the suffrage issue to shield southern white women from charges of advocating woman suffrage. At the insistence of southern white clubwomen, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs amended its by laws to allow for the exclusion of black women’s clubs from the national organization. The NAWSA adopted a resolution affirming the principle of "states’ rights," which allowed southern white women to exclude southern black women from membership in their state chapters. 2 In joining national reform associations, southern white women, like their non-southern counterparts, had to confront the gender ideology of the nineteenth century. Although for most women the practices of the era were at odds with the theory, the dominant rhetorical paradigm for middle class white women in the last half of the nineteenth century was the "Cult of True Womanhood" and the ideology of separate male and female spheres. The purveyors of the paradigm insisted that men and women were assigned to different spheres of activity and influence. Women were assigned dominion over the private sphere of home and family while men were assigned dominion over the public sphere of politics and business. In the South, white women were also circumscribed by the ideology of southern white womanhood. Promulgated by the white economic and cultural leaders of the plantation South, the image of the southern white lady was a key ideological factor in maintaining the white South's patriarchal order. After the disruptions of the Civil War, the image may have become even more tenacious as white women were constructed to be the repository of southern white culture and the personification of domestic purity, virtue and morality for defeated white southerners. When southern white women began to join women's voluntary associations, they felt compelled to justify their decisions to step outside the traditional boundaries of 3 home and family--as rhetorically constructed--into the public arenas of politics and reform. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was the first national women's reform organization to attract large numbers of southern white women. The WCTU was organized nationally in November 1874, shortly after the women’s crusade against saloons in the Midwest during the previous winter. Although the roots of the WCTU lay in the evangelical Protestant tradition, in the minds of many conservative white southerners, its leadership, as personified by Frances Willard during her presidency from 1879 to 1898, was tainted with the radicalism of abolitionism and woman suffrage. Southern white WCTU leaders attempted to overcome the stigma of radicalism by insisting that their temperance activities were perfectly compatible with the nineteenth century ideology of domesticity. They admitted that their fight against alcohol might take them outside their homes, but they argued that ultimately they were forced to step outside their homes to protect their homes from the evils of alcohol. This "home protection" argument maintained that alcohol threatened women and children because it undermined domestic tranquility by undermining the social and economic security of the family. The rhetoric of white women's victimization by male drunkenness underscored an ambivalence toward the traditional southern notion of white 4 male protection of white women. White ribboners believed that white males, according to the traditional notion of white male honor, were duty bound to create a moral society free from the disruptions of saloons and male drunkenness. However, southern white WCTU leaders attempted to confirm that while they appeared to be stepping outside their traditional gender roles, they were still upholding their regional and racial responsibilities as southern white women by affirming their southern identity within the national women's temperance movement. They publicly insisted that the national WCTU respect states' rights and not require southern white women to advocate any program, particularly woman suffrage, that was anathema to traditional white

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