WOMEN’S ACTIVITIES AND PROPAGANDA
Women in contemporary America have achieved a legal equality with men.
This does not mean that their activities are identical with those of
men. Women in the mass still have special interests and activities in
addition to their economic pursuits and vocational interests.
Women’s most obvious influence is exerted when they are organized and
armed with the weapon of propaganda. So organized and armed they have
made their influence felt on city councils, state legislatures, and
national congresses, upon executives, upon political campaigns and upon
public opinion generally, both local and national.
In politics, the American women to-day occupy a much more important
position, from the standpoint of their influence, in their organized
groups than from the standpoint of the leadership they have acquired
in actual political positions or in actual office holding. The
professional woman politician has had, up to the present, not much
influence, nor do women generally regard her as being the most
important element in question. Ma Ferguson, after all, was simply a
woman in the home, a catspaw for a deposed husband; Nellie Ross, the
former Governor of Wyoming, is from all accounts hardly a leader of
statesmanship or public opinion.
If the suffrage campaign did nothing more, it showed the possibilities
of propaganda to achieve certain ends. This propaganda to-day is
being utilized by women to achieve their programs in Washington and
in the states. In Washington they are organized as the Legislative
Committee of Fourteen Women’s Organizations, including the League of
Women Voters, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, etc. These
organizations map out a legislative program and then use the modern
technique of propaganda to make this legislative program actually
pass into the law of the land. Their accomplishments in the field
are various. They can justifiably take the credit for much welfare
legislation. The eight-hour day for women is theirs. Undoubtedly
prohibition and its enforcement are theirs, if they can be considered
an accomplishment. So is the Shepard-Towner Bill which stipulates
support by the central government of maternity welfare in the state
governments. This bill would not have passed had it not been for the
political prescience and sagacity of women like Mrs. Vanderlip and Mrs.
Mitchell.
The Federal measures endorsed at the first convention of the National
League of Women Voters typify social welfare activities of women’s
organizations. These covered such broad interests as child welfare,
education, the home and high prices, women in gainful occupations,
public health and morals, independent citizenship for married women,
and others.
To propagandize these principles, the National League of Women Voters
has published all types of literature, such as bulletins, calendars,
election information, has held a correspondence course on government
and conducted demonstration classes and citizenship schools.
Possibly the effectiveness of women’s organizations in American
politics to-day is due to two things: first, the training of a
professional class of executive secretaries or legislative secretaries
during the suffrage campaigns, where every device known to the
propagandist had to be used to regiment a recalcitrant majority;
secondly, the routing over into peace-time activities of the many
prominent women who were in the suffrage campaigns and who also devoted
themselves to the important drives and mass influence movements during
the war. Such women as Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, Alice Ames Winter, Mrs.
Henry Moskowitz, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Mrs. John Blair, Mrs. O. H. P.
Belmont, Doris Stevens, Alice Paul come to mind.
If I have seemed to concentrate on the accomplishments of women in
politics, it is because they afford a particularly striking example
of intelligent use of the new propaganda to secure attention and
acceptance of minority ideas. It is perhaps curiously appropriate
that the latest recruits to the political arena should recognize and
make use of the newest weapons of persuasion to offset any lack of
experience with what is somewhat euphemistically termed practical
politics. As an example of this new technique: Some years ago, the
Consumers’ Committee of Women, fighting the “American valuation”
tariff, rented an empty store on Fifty-seventh Street in New York and
set up an exhibit of merchandise tagging each item with the current
price and the price it would cost if the tariff went through. Hundreds
of visitors to this shop rallied to the cause of the committee.
But there are also non-political fields in which women can make and
have made their influence felt for social ends, and in which they have
utilized the principle of group leadership in attaining the desired
objectives.
In the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, there are 13,000 clubs.
Broadly classified, they include civic and city clubs, mothers’ and
homemakers’ clubs, cultural clubs devoted to art, music or literature,
business and professional women’s clubs, and general women’s clubs,
which may embrace either civic or community phases, or combine some of
the other activities listed.
The woman’s club is generally effective on behalf of health education;
in furthering appreciation of the fine arts; in sponsoring legislation
that affects the welfare of women and children; in playground
development and park improvement; in raising standards of social or
political morality; in homemaking and home economics, education and the
like. In these fields, the woman’s club concerns itself with efforts
that are not ordinarily covered by existing agencies, and often both
initiates and helps to further movements for the good of the community.
A club interested principally in homemaking and the practical arts can
sponsor a cooking school for young brides and others. An example of the
keen interest of women in this field of education is the cooking school
recently conducted by the New York _Herald Tribune_, which held its
classes in Carnegie Hall, seating almost 3,000 persons. For the several
days of the cooking school, the hall was filled to capacity, rivaling
the drawing power of a McCormack or a Paderewski, and refuting most
dramatically the idea that women in large cities are not interested in
housewifery.
A movement for the serving of milk in public schools, or the
establishment of a baby health station at the department of health will
be an effort close to the heart of a club devoted to the interest of
mothers and child welfare.
A music club can broaden its sphere and be of service to the community
by coöperating with the local radio station in arranging better musical
programs. Fighting bad music can be as militant a campaign and marshal
as varied resources as any political battle.
An art club can be active in securing loan exhibitions for its city. It
can also arrange travelling exhibits of the art work of its members or
show the art work of schools or universities.
A literary club may step out of its charmed circle of lectures and
literary lions and take a definite part in the educational life of the
community. It can sponsor, for instance, a competition in the public
schools for the best essay on the history of the city, or on the life
of its most famous son.
Over and above the particular object for which the woman’s club may
have been constituted, it commonly stands ready to initiate or help
any movement which has for its object a distinct public good in the
community. More important, it constitutes an organized channel through
which women can make themselves felt as a definite part of public
opinion.
Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement
men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those
objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for
women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political
and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power
to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired
freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to
live in.