An extremely brief history of the National Woman's Party
By OllieBase @ 2025-03-05T17:11 (+41)
| This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. |
Commenting and feedback guidelines: I'm posting this to get it out there. I'd love to see comments that take the ideas forward, but criticism of my argument won't be as useful at this time. |
Back in September, I was looking up examples of movements who experience "winters" which are then revived. [1]
I found a wonderful 1989 paper [2]covering the post-war activities of the National Woman's Party (NWP). The author argues that the NWP basically kept the feminism movement afloat between suffrage and civil rights victories, and that it played an important role as an "abeyance structure".
I have no formal background in sociology or feminism, but I liked this paper and thought it worth sharing.
Here are a few quotes; some heartwarming, some inspiring and some frankly eery analogies with EA.
From 1945 to the 1960s, women's rights activists confronted an inhospitable political and social environment.
...
The media denounced feminism, discredited women who continued to advocate equality, and thus thwarted the mobilization of discontented women (Rupp 1982). The most influential attack came from Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham's popular and widely quoted book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), which denounced feminists as severe neurotics responsible for the problems of American society. In the face of such criticism, only the NWP continued to claim the term "feminist."
In summary, as the political and cultural wave that had once carried feminism forward receded, members of the NWP paid for their lifelong commitment with a degree of alienation, marginality, and isolation.
By the end of World War II, the NWP had lost most of its members and was not attracting new ones. Compared to its 60,000 members in the last years of the suffrage campaign, the NWP had about 4000 "general" members by 1945 and only 1400 by 1952. More revealing, it listed 627 "active" members in 1947 and 200 by 1952. Although the NWP also lost members as a result of an internal conflict over whether to expand membership in 1947 and again in 1953, the leadership preferred to keep the organization a small elite vanguard. As one member put it, "no mass appeal will ever bring into the Party that type of woman who can best carry forward our particular aims. We are an 'elect body' with a single point of agreement”
On at least two occasions serious conflict erupted over the lack of democratic procedures in the Party. It focused specifically on Alice Paul's autocratic leadership style and on the refusal of the national leadership to allow state branches to expand membership. A letter, circulated in 1947, contained charges typical of those directed against Paul: "You have made it clear that you consider yourself and the small group around you an elite with superabundant intellect and talents, and consider us, in contrast, the commonfolk."
Activism by NWP members played a crucial role in two key events: the establishment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women, convened by President Kennedy in 1961, and the inclusion of sex in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in employment. Second, many women who participated in the struggle for women's rights in the 1940s and 1950s became active in the resurgent women's movement, especially the liberal branch. NWP members were among the founders and charter members of NOW. Of the 10 individuals who signed NOW's original Statement of Purpose, 4 were members of the NWP (Friedan 1976).
For the 1960s women's movement, the NWP, because of its ties to suffrage, became an important symbol of the long history of women's oppression and resistance. As a result of its historical significance and prime location, Belmont House (the NWP base) was used throughout the 1970s for celebrations of women's movement history, as a temporary residence for scholars and students engaged in feminist research, and as a place for ERA lobbyists to meet. Moreover, Alice Paul, who earlier had sparked so many conflicts, became the quintessential symbol of feminist commitment.