5

Two Steps Forward . . .

There is a gay woman named Polly
Who has a firm pal yclept Molly;
They both crack their bones,
Yet say without moans,
“This staying in bed is so jolly.”

—Virginia Bellamy, ca. 1962

 

The Long Sleep of the Postsuffrage Years

AFTER ALL THE WORK that culminated in the vote, most women in America seemed to have no more appetite for a continued struggle, and those few who did were discouraged at almost every turn. It was as though a conspiracy triggered by panic emerged in the 1920s: pundits, the media, and especially the medical profession, in which mental health workers were proliferating, seemed to be acting in concert to convince women that they should not be tricked into thinking that now they were full citizens, they also wanted full freedom and independence. Women who demanded such things in the nineteenth century had been called unsexed. Now a more virulent connection was made between those who wanted still more and normal women.

Psychologists and psychoanalysts, the post—World War I high priests of America, suddenly worried that suffrage and other changes induced by women’s rights, such as the possibility of college study and careers, had created women with dangerously strong, “masculine” personalities. As Dr. Phyllis Blanchard observed in a popular 1929 book, “masculinized” women often found satisfaction in guiding and protecting weaker women, which resulted in both the stronger and the weaker becoming “unable to adjust to the more natural relationship” of heterosexuality. (As Blanchard’s title, Dr., indicates, she herself, of course, enjoyed the hard-won privileges of higher education and a profession that an army of “masculinized” women had procured for American females.)

Sexologists’ theories on inversion, which had earlier been confined to the medical journals, were now everywhere, promulgated especially by the high priests, who spread the word of their god, Sigmund Freud. Popular writers too became Freudians. Floyd Dell, for example, a prolific author of the 1920s and 1930s, paid direct homage to Freudian theory when he opined that an important indicator of a child’s approach to maturity was “becoming more fully heterosexual” and that society would only emerge from its “welter of neuroticism” by accepting “the full and passionate love of the other sex as the normal goal of youth.” Active heterosexuality became a sine qua non of “mental hygiene,” which meant that women such as Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Anna Howard Shaw—in fact, most heroes of the suffrage cause—had been neither mature nor hygienic. Beginning in the 1920s, such women plummeted from being heroes to being negative role models.

Thus the old suffrage leaders were thrown into disrepute as lesbians, in effect. The women’s rights movement became virtually rudderless and was stalled for decades; the hard-won vote made almost no difference in the progress of women, either individually or as a class. Politicians, who initially feared the potential of a “woman’s vote,” soon understood that there would be no such thing. Even by the 1940s, more than two decades after they were enfranchised, women were not an autonomous voting force, as a survey of married female voters indicated: only one in twenty-two voted differently from her husband. Politicians were therefore no more constrained to be concerned with women’s rights than they had been before women were able to vote. Like many other suffrage women who had given years of their lives to the cause, Alice Stone Blackwell came to feel by 1929 that her efforts had been in vain. Her bitterness toward the heterosexual women whom nonheterosexuals like herself had worked to enfranchise spilled out in a letter to Carrie Catt, in which she wrote that women were “fools because God made them to match the men.”

The fight for women’s rights and independence—“feminism,” as it was now called—became passé for almost a half-century after women got the vote. In 1920, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Catt organized the League of Women Voters in order to equip women “for intelligent participation in politics and government.” At the National American Woman Suffrage Association victory convention, which became an organizing meeting for the League of Women Voters, she exhorted her audience not to appeal to the two political parties for what they wanted but rather “to get on the inside and help yourself to the things you want.” Ironically, by the 1940s the league’s leadership explicitly denied any particular concern with women and was avowedly opposed to “feminism” (which was what had brought Catt into the suffrage movement in the first place).

Two prevalent caricatures of feminism were now current: first, that feminism tried to make women into men, and second, that feminism pitted women against men in a vicious sex antagonism. Both caricatures referred to lesbians in thinly veiled terms. Therefore, how could a woman who did not want to be considered morbid, masculine, a perpetrator of antagonism—that is, a lesbian—identify herself with a struggle for women’s rights? With the exception of the brief respite of World War II, when, as in the previous war, womanpower was sorely needed and women were thus encouraged to be strong and independent (as only “masculine” lesbians supposedly were in other eras), feminism continued on its downhill slide through the 1950s. By 1956, a writer for Life magazine could describe feminism as only a dim memory in American history, “as quaint as linen dusters and high-button shoes.”

 

A Few “Escaped Nuns”

It was in good part a socially inculcated fear of gender-inappropriate behavior that kept women from significant participation in the political arena, just as that same fear had long prevented many women from demanding the vote in the nineteenth century. In 1920, Carrie Catt advised women “to get on the inside” of politics. After the herculean efforts of the battles she led, with millions of female troops behind her, perhaps she could not have envisioned that most of the troops would retreat to the safety of more traditional gender behavior. Nor could she have envisioned that traditional gender behavior would be given fresh and powerful meaning as a sign of mental health.

With only masculine models of how to “do” politics, heterosexual women, who had reason to be concerned about losing their femininity, had little desire to lake Catt’s advice. It is not surprising that the few women who served in the House of Representatives in the 1920s for the most part were not career politicians but were merely completing the terms of their deceased husbands, as were the few who served as governors in the 1920s and 1930s. After more than a decade of universal woman suffrage in America, there were barely 150 women in state legislatures throughout the country.

Those women who did attempt to get on the inside of politics through their own merits were often unmarried and living with female partners. Like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, they felt less personally threatened by the idea that their pursuits might masculinize them than heterosexual women did. Also, without the duties of wives and mothers, they could afford the vast expenditure of time and energy that political careers required. They frequently tried to bring to politics their deep feminist convictions about the importance of the advancement of women. They also continued to promote essentialist notions about how women’s “superior” moral values would improve politics and the society over which politicians had jurisdiction—much as their nineteenth-century predecessors, such as Frances Willard and Anna Shaw, had. But clearly most female voters were not interested in supporting their candidacy.

For example, Anne Martin, a firebrand who was president of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society and who led Nevada to woman suffrage in 1914, ran for the U.S. Senate on an independent ticket in both 1918 and 1920. She hoped that her candidacy would provide women with ways to be political in their own right, both as voters and as party workers. She promoted causes that were meant to improve the lot of women and children—which she had thought was a primary justification for women’s enfranchisement—as well as causes that would protect farmers and natural resources in Nevada. Her lover, Dr. Margaret Long, helped manage her election bid and accompanied her as she sought votes across the state. They ran an efficient campaign, but Nevada women did not have much more interest in a female senator than Nevada men did; in the state where she was largely responsible for the enfranchisement of women, Martin received only about 20 percent of the vote. Similarly, Ohio Supreme Court judge Florence Allen ran for the U.S. Senate in 1926, assisted in her tireless campaigning by her life partner, Susan Rebhan. But though Allen had been elected to the state supreme court in 1922 by a wide margin, she too lost her Senate bid. Voters simply could not envision a woman in such a nationally powerful body.

Yet a few women continued to run for public office in the years just after women got the vote. Marion Dickerman, for example, made a bid for the New York State Assembly in 1919, in the election just after New York women were enfranchised. Dickerman ran against a reactionary assembly speaker, Thaddeus Sweet, who had opposed all the social justice legislation supported by early women’s political groups such as the Women’s Joint Legislative Committee (founded by an unmarried bisexual, Mary Dreier). Dickerman, whose life partner was Nancy Cook, was ridiculed by Sweet supporters as an “escaped nun”—an obvious mockery of her lack of heterosexual credentials. She lost the election, receiving a little over 30 percent of the vote.

Even though women had little luck in elected office, some did manage to achieve a modicum of political power in the early years. After the suffrage victory in New York, Carrie Catt’s life partner, Mollie Hay, committed her remaining years to trying to make a place for women in politics. She first became active in the New York Republican Party. As a result of her prominent role in the successful 1917 Empire State Campaign, it was thought that she had influence over large numbers of female voters in New York (and politicians at that time still feared the potential of women voting as a block), so she was able to rise to some prominence within the party. The New York World was glowing in its portrayal of Hay at the New York Republican Convention of 1918, at which she was the first woman chair of the platform committee:

 

The reading of the platform [which included the suffrage amendment] by Miss Hay was worth the experiment of bowing to a woman boss. Five-feet-four tall, of substantial proportions, white hair and wearing a flannel skirt and a white silk waist, the first woman chairman of a party Resolutions Committee in this state conducted herself like a veteran. In the first place, she read the long instrument of the party faith so that it was not an instrument of torture, which in itself was a novelty.

 

Despite—or rather, precisely because of—her butchness, Hay slipped easily into leadership positions. Her situation illustrates a troubling contradiction: while unsexed women often continued to be feared and mocked, as in Thaddeus Sweet’s sour caricature of the “escaped nun,” nevertheless a woman of conventional femininity could not and would not strive in the political arena. Indeed, the more a woman could approximate the masculine style of “the politician,” the less jarring her presence in politics would seem. Hay, with her “substantial proportions”—a “boss,” a “veteran”—was credible, as a more feminine woman would not be.

Predictably, considering Mollie Hay’s long history in the suffrage movement, one of her primary interests within the Republican Party was women’s causes. It was largely as a result of her efforts that the New York Republican Party endorsed the constitutional amendment for woman suffrage. In 1918 she took a seat on the Republican Women’s National Executive Committee, and she became its chair the following year. From that position of power, at the 1920 Republican Convention she urged that the size of the Republican National Committee be doubled so that women could be given full recognition in all party councils. Her feminism did not hurt her advancement at this early date. She even rose to vice chairperson of the state party. Until her death, in 1928, she maintained an active role in politics, always serving women’s interests. For instance, she chaired a group that was responsible for defeating James Wadsworth, a senator who had been an unregenerate foe to woman suffrage.

In the postsuffrage decades, lesbians such as Mollie Hay were much freer than heterosexual women to forge ahead and better able to explore the political and professional provinces that had belonged exclusively to men. And yet . . . if being a lesbian meant that one was, according to the current wisdom, immature and neurotic, how many women would want to be one? Women who suspected that tendency in themselves in the years after the suffrage victory often ran to psychiatrists (if they could afford to) rather than running for public office.

 

The Ladies’ Brain Trust

Though not many women were winning elections in the decades after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women did somewhat better in receiving appointments to various high political offices. Much of their success was due to Eleanor Roosevelt and/or the lesbian circle around her. The evidence of Roosevelt’s lesbian friendships and relationships is abundant and has already been well documented by biographers, who have supported their conclusions with Roosevelt’s letters, such as those she wrote to the journalist Lorena Hickok: “Funny, everything I do my thoughts fly to you. Never are you out of my heart & just one week from now I’ll be holding you,” and “Oh! dear one, it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about & long for.”

Blanche Wiesen Cook’s major study of Eleanor Roosevelt depicts the various influences on her of lesbians, beginning with Marie Souvestre, Eleanor’s beloved teacher when she was a young girl. At a crucial period in Eleanor’s life, Mile. Souvestre “introduced an alternative [read “lesbian”] way of being—assertive, independent, and bold.” Later in her life, Eleanor recalled, “Whatever I have become since [my school years] had its seeds in those three years of contact” with Souvestre.

The lesbians with whom Eleanor Roosevelt had relationships as an adult were generally successful professional women concerned with social reform, for which they had long worked through lesbian-dominated settlement houses and groups such as the Women’s Trade Union League. Eleanor met many of these women in 1920 in a Greenwich Village community of postsuffrage feminist activists. They included Elizabeth Read, a lawyer, and her life partner, the journalist Esther Lape, as well as Nancy Cook, an officer in the Democratic Party’s Women’s Division, and her life partner, the would-be assemblywoman Marion Dickerman. These women helped restore Eleanor’s sense of ambition, which she had lost early in her marriage to FDR. Through a newfound confidence and the political interests that the women stimulated in her, she eventually became America’s first activist first lady. Perhaps her admiration for the women in this circle also made it possible for her to be receptive to a lesbian relationship with Lorena Hickok when they met a few years later.

Elizabeth Read helped Eleanor in her earliest political involvement. Just before meeting Read, Eleanor was persuaded to direct the national legislation committee of the League of Women Voters, but she felt that she was not sufficiently informed to do the job. Therefore, she asked for and was given assistance by Read, who, with her skills as a lawyer, coached the future first lady about congressional matters of interest to the league. Their lifelong friendship began. According to Hickok, who must have gotten the word from Eleanor Roosevelt herself, Read and Lape were “the first independent professional women [Eleanor] had ever known, and she was as awed as she was fascinated by them.”

Through Elizabeth Read, Eleanor became involved with a large, exciting, and politically committed lesbian circle of friends. The home of Read and Lape was for many years, even after FDR became president, Eleanor’s “sanctuary, a hiding house from the press and the rituals of First Ladyhood.” It was through Read and Lape that Eleanor met Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. Clarke Chambers observes in Seedtime of Reform that the involvement of Dickerman and Cook in reform and liberal politics had an especially “profound influence on the political education of Eleanor Roosevelt,” because these women brought her into the Women’s Trade Union League, which molded her sympathies with the working class. Through the WTUL, Eleanor also became lifelong friends with Mary Dreier, who was a WTUL leader and who introduced her to still other politically aware lesbians.

According to Lorena Hickok, Eleanor frequently suggested to FDR the appointment of women to political offices and thus “should receive a large share of credit for the number of women given important positions in her husband’s administration.” Eleanor Roosevelt was directly and indirectly responsible for numerous political firsts for women. Because of her, for example, Mary McLeod Bethune became a top official representing African-American youth in the National Youth Administration, a federal department established during the Depression to help young people find employment. As Bethune’s biographer, Elaine Smith, observes, Bethune occupied the first federal position created for an African-American woman in the history of the country. Eleanor Roosevelt also helped Bethune become effective in that post by inviting her to social functions at the White House, contacting government officials on her behalf, and arranging for her to see FDR whenever Bethune felt that such a meeting would help her endeavors.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also responsible for bringing to Washington what the columnist Drew Pearson dubbed in 1938 a powerful “Ladies’ Brain Trust.” This trust was made up of dynamic women (many of them members of her lesbian circle of friends) who brought unprecedented female political leadership to the Democratic Party. Like Bethune, they were given direct access to FDR by Eleanor Roosevelt. As Molly Dewson, the director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, later recalled, when she needed FDR’s help on a matter, Eleanor “gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup.”

Molly Dewson was the virtual head of the Ladies’ Brain Trust. She had gained her position through the intercessions of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become acquainted with her when Dewson and Polly Porter resided across the hall from Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman in a Greenwich Village cooperative made up of social feminists who lived mostly in lesbian couples. In her role as director of the Women’s Division, Dewson eventually controlled 109,000 female workers for the party throughout America. During the Depression, collaborating with Nancy Cook and Caroline O’Day (who lived with Frances Perkins, the first American woman to hold a cabinet-level position), Dewson managed to build the Women’s Division into “one of the most effective components of the newly revitalized Democratic Party, winning places for women in politics and government on an unprecedented scale . . . breakthroughs [which] gave women their own New Deal.” Though her rough-hewn style was nothing like that of the elegant Carrie Catt, their organizational brilliance was similar. She too was superb at cultivating personal contacts and leading a devoted army of women, who spread the crucial message of the New Deal all over the country.

The Ladies’ Brain Trust was responsible for some of the most innovative aspects of FDR’s New Deal. Its members brought the values they had developed earlier in the century through social action organizations such as the settlement house movement, the National Consumers’ League, and the Women’s Trade Union League into the federal arena. Dewson’s progressive politics had been influenced especially by the ideals of groups to which she had belonged twenty years earlier; through her work in those organizations, she came to believe that women had a particular sensitivity to vitally needed reform and that it was therefore essential to bring them into the administration.

Dewson had been involved with issues that were to become of central importance in New Deal philosophy. For example, while representing the National Consumers’ League, an organization that encouraged consumers to put pressure on manufacturers to treat workers fairly, she had helped win the first minimum wage law for female workers, in 1912. She had also become interested in the concept of “social insurance,” that is, social security. When FDR was still governor of New York, Dewson presented her blueprints on social security to her friends Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins. In 1935, FDR, as president, appointed Dewson to his Commission on Economic Security, where she helped devise the Social Security Act, which looked very much like the National Consumers’ League’s early ideas on social insurance. In 1937 the president invited her to serve on the Social Security Board, where she was instrumental in getting the federal government involved in unemployment insurance programs as well as old age insurance.

With Eleanor’s help, Dewson also conducted in the Democratic Party a battle similar to the one that Mollie Hay had waged in the Republican Party fifteen years earlier—and she succeeded. She had been disgusted with the various ladies’ auxiliaries she had encountered in party politics, and was convinced that women could be competent leaders if they were given the opportunity to take significant responsibility in the party organization. She thus pushed for state party rulings that would give women equal representation with men on party committees and in leadership positions at all levels, from precinct to national. She achieved a major victory at the 1936 Democratic Convention through a stunningly creative resolution which mandated that alternates to the Platform Committee must be of the opposite sex to the regular delegates. Since delegates often missed committee meetings, women were finally given a chance at significant representation, albeit by the back door. The New York Times understood the import of Dewson’s ploy, reporting that “the biggest coup in years so far as women in politics are concerned materialized at the Democratic Convention this afternoon as softly and smoothly as a Summer Zephyr.”

From the perspective of our day, after decades of virulent homophobia, it is perhaps difficult to imagine such successful lesbian leadership in an earlier generation. Did FDR really understand that Dewson and many of the other women with whom Eleanor surrounded herself were lesbians? Whether he did or not, he seemed fond of most of them, admired many of them tor their intellectual strength, and was delighted with their work for the party. Did they actively hide their lesbian identity, or did they assume that as long as it was not articulated—as long as no one used the “l” word—heterosexuals would not suspect? Dewson had a foghorn voice and wore tweedy tailored suits, sensible shoes, and no makeup. Yet much like Frances Perkins, who once said that “the way [for women] to get things done” in political circles was to “so behave, so dress and comport yourself that you remind [male politicians] subconsciously of their mothers,” Dewson may have prided herself on a certain ability to deceive. She may have been convinced that the men with whom she worked saw her as motherly (that is, not sexual) and were blind to her butch demeanor. She and Polly called themselves the Porter-Dewsons and described themselves as partners. Did she assume that only lesbians would understand that her relationship with Polly Porter, with whom she lived for fifty-two years, was a marriage?

Porter, a wealthy woman who was ten years younger than Dewson, was far more feminine than she was. As Dewson’s recent biographer, Susan Ware, points out, in many ways their relationship “mirrored a conventional heterosexual marriage.” Molly handled the money and made the financial decisions, did the heavy work around the house, and puttered with the automobiles. Polly managed the daily affairs of the household and added “‘feminine’ touches to their lives.” But role divisions did not obviate their both being active suffragists and both being chosen as Massachusetts delegates to the NAWSA convention in 1915. During the Great War they went together to France to serve as social workers for the Red Cross. The letters they wrote to each other during their brief separations indicate their mutual reliance and devotion, as in a 1917 letter in which Polly addresses Molly by her pet name, “Puisye,” from the French puissante, powerful (and “pussy”?): “Little danger that the Puisye will become unnecessary to me—I should be like a ship without sails and a pilot without a north star were she not a part of my life.”

The leading women in New Deal politics were generally part of Dewson and Porter’s circle of friends. Most of them had met earlier in their work for Progressive-era causes and the suffrage movement and remained close through the years. They helped one another to power. Perhaps Dewson’s greatest coup in promoting women’s prominence in politics was her victory in having her old friend Frances Perkins appointed to Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of labor. Dewson and Perkins met in 1922, when Perkins served on the Industrial Commission of New York and Dewson represented the National Consumers’ League on a labor issue. Dewson had no wish for a cabinet position herself, because it would have taken too much time away from her domestic life with Polly, but she did hope to see a woman in FDR’s cabinet. Frances Perkins was her first choice, because she knew that Perkins would bring to her office all the “woman’s” values of reform that Dewson thought important. As Susan Ware states, “The two women understood each other.”

As secretary of labor, Perkins in her turn brought talented women to Washington to work with her in the Labor Department, and she was deeply committed to expanding women’s political representation. She had wanted the cabinet post so that she could carry out her progressive ideals, but also, as she claimed, so that she could help other women to high office: “The overwhelming argument . . . which made me do it in the end . . . was the realization that the door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and that I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered and so establish the right of others long hence and far-distant in geography to sit in the high seats.”

Perkins was apparently “family.” She married in 1913 but seldom lived with her husband (who suffered from chronic depression and was hospitalized during many years of their marriage). She was a private person throughout her life, and she carefully expurgated a great deal of evidence of her personal relationships from the papers she left behind. Nevertheless, she is known to have had long-term intimacies with two women, first with Mary Harriman Rumsey, an official in the National Recovery Administration, and after Rumsey’s death in 1934 with Caroline O’Day.

Perkins, like Dewson, brought her progressive values into the Roosevelt administration. She too had had a formative background in the National Consumers’ League, and again like Dewson and Eleanor Roosevelt, she had done settlement house work early in her career. These women all spoke the same language of reform. Together with Dewson, Perkins played a major role in forging the Social Security Act. She drafted legislation for the Civilian Conservation Corps Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. She encouraged unionization and collective bargaining. Through her, the goals of women-led social reform groups of the early century were incorporated into Labor Department policy. Molly Dewson had hoped that if she could get FDR to appoint a woman to his cabinet, it would set a precedent that would be followed in the future and would provide a role model that would make a permanent difference in how American women viewed themselves with regard to political participation. But there was no rush by subsequent presidents to appoint women to cabinet-level positions, despite Perkins’s very creditable service as secretary of labor for twelve years, from 1933 to 1945.

That disappointment notwithstanding, Dewson was responsible for many high-level appointments of women: Nellie Tayloe Ross as director of the mint, Florence Allen as a judge on the circuit court of appeals (the highest position a woman had ever attained in the federal judiciary), Marion Glass Banister as assistant treasurer of the United States, Ruth Bryan Owen as minister to Denmark (the first woman to represent the United States abroad). Because of Dewson, women were afforded greater respect in the Democratic Party through two elections. Indeed, she had unprecedented successes in bringing women into the political arena at all levels, from the cabinet to a record-breaking number of delegates and platform committee members to the 1936 Democratic Convention. However, when she retired from the Roosevelt administration in 1938, at the age of sixty-four—she left Washington and went to live on a farm that she and Polly had purchased—no other powerful woman emerged who could or would push as hard for high-level political appointments for other women.

In 1941, when the United States entered World War II, gender issues seemed less vital, as both men and women had to contribute to the war effort. After the war, with Dewson no longer in a position to coerce politicians to be sensitive to women’s issues, the subject of women’s concerns became passé, as both Democrats and Republicans encouraged women to return to the pre-Dewson status quo.

 

A Lone Flickering Flame: The National Woman’s Party

The militants of the suffrage movement who had been such a source of contention to Anna Shaw and Carrie Catt continued to congregate around Alice Paul and Lucy Burns when the Congressional Union became the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in 1916. The NWP never placed confidence in major party politics, but the group’s chief goal during the post-enfranchisement years was the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment, which it first managed to get introduced into Congress in 1923: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” For decades the NWP was a lone voice struggling for absolute equality for women, as it attempted every year to reintroduce the amendment into Congress.

The NWP was almost the only game in town for committed feminists until the reemergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s. Most members of the NWP were leftovers from the years of the suffrage campaigns. Their number was tiny and their cause was out of fashion. They themselves were out of fashion. When American women were supposed to be happy housewives, 76 percent of NWP members were professionally employed. Forty-one percent of them had never been married, and of those who had been married, approximately 25 percent were widowed or divorced. About one third of the never-married women lived with other women.

As it had been from the start, in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement, there continued to be good reason for the fact that even when the flame of feminism was barely flickering, the leadership came from unmarried women, many of whom lived together. Rather than distracting from their feminism, their personal lives enabled and encouraged it. Even NWP women who did not have lesbian relationships, such as Rose Powell, recognized how detrimental heterosexual marriage could be to the pursuit of women’s rights in the first half of the twentieth century. Powell devoted much of her life to getting national recognition for the contributions of Susan B. Anthony. It was she, for example, who first proposed that Anthony’s birthday be celebrated as a national holiday. Having been separated from her husband after a brief marriage, Powell confided to her diary thirty years later, “If my marriage had been a happy one, I might today have a home and security, but I am convinced that I never could have been able to make the contributions I have to the woman movement, to which so much of my life has been dedicated.”

Many of the NWP leaders lived with other women who were also active in feminist politics, including Mabel Vernon and Consuelo Reyes, Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley, and Alma Lutz (the mid-century biographer of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton) and Lutz’s partner of forty-one years, the librarian Marguerite Smith. Alice Paul’s personal correspondence has been well culled by some hand, so that little about her private life is known directly from her, hut rumors of her lesbianism abounded (and continue to abound). Doris Stevens, a militant feminist who became a fanatical red-baiter during the homophobic McCarthy era and quit the National Woman’s Party, confided to her diary that she had heard tales of the “weird goings-on” at party headquarters, which suggested that Alice Paul was “a devotee of Lesbos.” Stevens, who knew well that feminism was associated with lesbianism by the 1940s, was defensive in the reactionary company she kept at that time. She even wrote to Westbrook Pegler, the right-wing columnist, whom she had befriended, thanking him “for knowing I’m not a queerie,” despite her feminist history.

 

The importance of the National Woman’s Party lies not in its concrete successes but rather in its having kept the feminist flame burning, however feebly, even at the height of the feminine mystique. Although the NWP could not expand its base of support during the dry years, it created an environment where the survivors of the early battles could pursue their feminist goals, often in couples. The social theorist Doug McAdam has pointed out that movements take their trajectory from existing networks rather than starting from scratch with individuals who just happen to run into each other and then begin to build a movement. The National Woman’s Party was just such an existing network and can be credited with preserving many of the ideas of the first women’s rights movement. Its members handed down the base on which the second movement could begin to build in the 1960s, and that led eventually, in the 1980s, to significant efforts by women to claim a voice in American politics.