Why did the political authority of well-respected female reformers
diminish after women won the vote? In Battling Miss Bolsheviki Kirsten
Marie Delegard argues that they were undercut during the 1920s by women
conservatives who spent the first decade of female suffrage linking
these reformers to radical revolutions that were raging in other parts
of the world. In the decades leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment,
women activists had enjoyed great success as reformers, creating a
political subculture with settlement houses and women's clubs as its
cornerstones. Female volunteers piloted welfare programs as
philanthropic ventures and used their organizations to pressure state,
local, and national governments to assume responsibility for these
programs.
These female activists perceived their efforts as selfless missions
necessary for the protection of their homes, families, and children. In
seeking to fulfill their maternal responsibilities, progressive women
fundamentally altered the scope of the American state, recasting the
welfare of mothers and children as an issue for public policy. At the
same time, they carved out a new niche for women in the public sphere,
allowing female activists to become respected authorities on questions
of social welfare. Yet in the aftermath of the suffrage amendment, the
influence of women reformers plummeted and the new social order once
envisioned by progressives appeared only more remote.
Battling Miss Bolsheviki chronicles the ways women conservatives laid
siege to this world of female reform, placing once-respected reformers
beyond the pale of political respectability and forcing most women's
clubs to jettison advocacy for social welfare measures. Overlooked by
historians, these new activists turned the Daughters of the American
Revolution and the American Legion Auxiliary into vehicles for
conservative political activism. Inspired by their twin desires to
fulfill their new duties as voting citizens and prevent North American
Bolsheviks from duplicating the success their comrades had enjoyed in
Russia, they created a new political subculture for women activists. In
a compelling narrative, Delegard reveals how the antiradicalism movement
reshaped the terrain of women's politics, analyzing its enduring legacy
for all female activists for the rest of the twentieth century and
beyond.
