1 THE PARADOX OF WOMEN’S EQUALITY HOW AMERICAN WOMEN’S GROUPS GAINED AND LOST THEIR PUBLIC VOICE KRISTIN A. GOSS DUKE UNIVERSITY Note: This is the UNPROOFED VERSION, which means there are typos. To cite the general arguments, the citation is The Paradox of Women’s Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). Specific quotations and figures should be checked against the published version. 2 For Grant 3 Acknowledgements This book started as a simple, straightforward undertaking. It ended up becoming an all-encompassing, sometimes frustrating, but always exhilarating labor of love that consumed more years than I’d care to divulge. As the project grew and morphed from year to year, I accrued incredible debts to many kind, patient, and generous people. First, I am grateful to the following institutions for providing the funds that made this book possible: the Ford Foundation; the Duke Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Voluntarism; the Duke Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society; the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; and the Center for Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy, and Policy at George Mason University. I thank Professors Theda Skocpol, Charles Clotfelter, Joel Fleishman, and Alan Abramson for providing or connecting me with these invaluable resources. Many people contributed comments to the public presentations, book chapters, journal articles, manuscript drafts, and brainstorming sessions that eventually came together as this book. For their valuable insights I thank Maryann Barakso, Frank Baumgartner, Tony Brown, Brian Brox, Pam Constable, Donna Dees, Larry Dodd, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Joe Galaskiewicz, Elisabeth Gidengil, Cheryl Graeve, Jay Hamilton, Hahrie Han, Katie Herrold, Marie Hojnacki, Josh Horwitz, Bruce Jentleson, Cathy Jervey, Betsy Lawson, Brenda O’Neill, Rachel Seidman, Shauna Shames, Steven Rathgeb Smith, Elizabeth Stanley, Nancy Tate, Jacob Thomsen, Sue Tolleson Rinehart, and Jacob Vigdor. 4 Nearly a dozen leaders of national women’s organizations sat down with me, sometimes for hours, to help me interpret my findings and to offer their perspectives on the evolution in women’s civic place. I thank these women for spending so much time with me: Justine Andronici, Anne Bryant, Martha Burk, Alice Cohan, Kim Gandy, Marcia Greenberger, Heidi Hartmann, Pat Reuss, Eleanor Smeal, Nancy Tate, and Leslie Wolfe. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present early findings at invited talks sponsored by the University of Florida Political Science Department, the Georgetown University Library, and the Georgetown University Conference on Nonprofit Advocacy, as well as at meetings of the International Political Science Association, the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Southern Political Science Association. I thank everyone who showed up at these sessions to listen and ask thought-provoking questions that illuminated holes in my data and arguments. I also thank anonymous reviewers from three journals – Perspectives on Politics, Women & Politics, and Politics & Gender – who helped me refine my thoughts. Needless to say, I also thank the three anonymous reviewers who read the full manuscript and made it infinitely better for their thoughts. For excellent research assistance, I thank Cariza Dolores Arnedo, Kate Guthrie, Gina Ireland, and Ann McClenahan, who slogged through mounds of hearing testimony, articles, and other documents that provided the raw fodder for the story told here. I am deeply indebted to several scholars who shared data with me. Debra Minkoff compiled information on women’s organizations from a 1963 directory; her work contributed to the analysis of changes in women’s organizations’ orientations published 5 as Goss and Skocpol (2006) and discussed in Chapter 4. Robert Putnam provided me with his longitudinal data on membership in various women’s organizations. Debby Leff supplied her unpublished senior thesis, which provided unparalleled insights into how female elites defined “women’s issues” in the early 1970s. Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas provided an analysis of the gender composition of the antiwar movement. Matt Grossman compiled figures for me on the presence of women’s groups, relative to other organizations, in various policymaking venues from the mid-1990s through the mid- 2000s. It is difficult enough to find time to do one’s own work, let alone the work of colleagues. I am extremely grateful to these generous scholars. At Duke, I have been surrounded by wonderful people who make the Sanford School a great place to work, including Susan Alexander, David Arrington, Butch Bailey, Rob DiPatri, David Gastwirth, Astrid Gatling, Charity Greene, Jadrien Hill, Rita Keating, Belinda Keith, Karen Kemp, Bruce Kuniholm, Pam Ladd, Fernande Legros, Anita Lyon, Andrea Marston, Helene McAdams, Doug McClary, Patrick Morris, Ed Ocampo, Beth Osteen, Seema Parkash, Stan Paskoff, Nancy Shaw, Melissa Squires, Kate Walker, and Janet Williams. My fellow members of the League of Women Voters of Arlington – especially Dorothy Nieweg, Sue Swisher, Nancy Tate, and Ann Ross – offered many helpful insights about changes in women’s engagement. The librarians at the Foundation Center (especially Janice Rosenberg and Caroline Herbert) and at Georgetown University provided exceptional assistance when I was collecting the data. In many ways, this is a book about people who show up when it counts. I am grateful to the late Bill Bradley, Kim Porter, and Rob Thomas for doing so when it really mattered. I owe special debts of gratitude to several colleagues and collaborators. 6 Michael Heaney identified “hybridity” as the concept to employ when thinking about the emergence of new women’s organizations. Our collaboration on a 2010 article, together with superb insights from Jeff Isaac and Dara Strolovitch on that work, sharpened my thinking about how to capture the ideas underlying women’s mobilization and its evolution. My Duke colleagues Anirudh Krishna and Fritz Mayer reviewed early chapters and delivered incisive comments and moral support at our regular get-togethers. Two other colleagues, Phil Cook and Charlie Clotfelter, later helped me to reframe the introduction and offered valuable insights to make the book accessible to people who don’t study politics or gender. Seven exceedingly generous women took many, many hours not only to read the entire manuscript in its overly long initial incarnation, but also to offer pages and pages of comments that opened my eyes to new ways of looking at the evidence, to say nothing of sparing me much embarrassment. I can’t begin to thank Anne Costain, Nancy MacLean, Eileen McDonagh, Marie Morris, Kira Sanbonmatsu, Theda Skocpol, and Dara Strolovitch for their contributions. I have been immeasurably lucky to have spectacular mentors. Phil Cook, of Duke University, has served as my statistics teacher, advisor on two graduate theses, coauthor, and senior colleague. In ways too numerous to count, he has taken care of my intellectual development. Eileen McDonagh, of Northeastern University, and Theda Skocpol, of Harvard University, blazed a trail for women in political science and spent their professional lives looking out for younger colleagues, including me. Their big hearts and moral example are wondrous, and their national awards for mentoring richly deserved. 7 Dalene Stangl, of Duke, blazed a trail for women in the field of statistics. She has been my mentor, social safety net, mid-week dinner companion, and dear friend for nearly two decades. I hope I embarrass her a lot by saying how much her example and presence mean to me. I thank the editors at the University of Michigan Press for being so patient when I needed it and so efficient when the time came to shepherd this project through. I am deeply indebted to Melody Herr, as well as to the editors of the gender series, Sue Carroll and Kira Sanbonmatsu. I am lucky to have a circle of smart, funny, compassionate, accomplished, and all around fabulous female friends and relatives who have sustained me and reinforced my conviction that sisterhood still matters. My life would not be the same without Nili Abrahamsson, Kristin Amerling, Barbara Asnes, Alma Blount, Sally Caraganis, Betty Chen, Audrey Cowgill, Laura Cratin, Jessica Dorman, Carol Drayton, the late Charlotte Ellertson, the late Gabriele Ellertson, Natalie Ellertson, Maya Foo, Brenna Goss, Heather Goss, Kaela Goss, Shirley Goss, Wanda Goss, Zeta Graham, Rebecca Kramnick, Kitty DeLio LaForte, Marsha Mardock, Kiki McGrath, Ann McLaughlin, Judy Minier, Marie Morris, Becky Peters-Combs, Lisa Price, Karen Price, Shelley Price, Betty Shearer, Dalene Stangl, Karen Springer, Liz Stanley, Gretchen Tripp, Beth Watkins, Peggy White, and Betsey Wildhack. I also thank the significant others in their lives, including my brother, Dave; my uncles Jim Bulman, Doug Caraganis, Bill Goss, Richie Goss, and Jack Shearer; and my honorary dad, Walter “Buzzy” Morris. 8 I offer my deepest thanks to my parents-in-law, Bill and Imy Williams, who have always treated me like a beloved daughter and who enriched this book by offering their first-person insights into what it means to be an engaged citizen. This book was written with unending gratitude toward my parents, Doug and Georgia Goss, who gave me everything and died too soon. Finally, I thank Grant