Feminism Unfinished

1960s and beyond. The NWP’s willingness to cooperate with such allies only confirmed the beliefs of
social justice feminists that the NWP cared little about the problems of low-income women or the
economic and social inequities of laissez-faire capitalism and the so-called free market.
Neither the ERA nor the social justice feminist agenda made much headway in the 1920s, a decade of
disappointment for feminists. Some legislative advances occurred in maternal health and infant care, but
women’s lobbying power diminished over the course of the 1920s as the much-anticipated women’s
voting bloc failed to materialize.
Conservative women from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion
Auxiliary added to the growing political discord among women by attacking progressive women’s peace
and internationalist ventures as un-American. In particular, they directed their ire toward prominent social
justice feminists in the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), accusing Margaret Dreier Robins, the
group’s national president, and Mary Anderson, who had been an organizer and officer of the league
before becoming the Women’s Bureau chief, of belonging to a subversive organization and of aiding
insurrectionist labor and socialist groups at home and abroad.
The WTUL was hardly a subversive or an insurrectionist organization. Most influential in the
Progressive Era and the interwar years, it brought together working-class and elite women committed to
advancing the needs of wage-earning women through democratic trade unionism and legislative reform.
Firm believers in international law and human rights, in 1919 Robins, Anderson, and other U.S. WTUL
women had helped found the International Federation of Working Women to raise global labor standards
and ensure women’s full participation in the new international organizations encouraged by the Versailles
Treaty. They were stunned by the viciousness of the personal attacks on them and on their pursuit of labor
reform, women’s rights, and international economic cooperation.
Popular interest in organized feminism and women’s causes continued to dwindle as the decade wore
on. The myth arose and stuck that women’s political and economic rights had been won and that the only
frontiers left for women were sexual freedom and personal autonomy. To some, the feminism of previous
decades appeared unfashionably self-denying and sexually tame, and its concern for broader societal
transformation a quaint, unnecessary pastime. Many older women reformers decried a younger generation
seemingly turned inward, preoccupied with sexual pleasure and individual fulfillment.
The more public, expressive sexuality of the 1920s, however, did not necessarily mean women
enjoyed greater sexual satisfaction or personal happiness. Heterosexual activity was now deemed a
central component of a healthy self. This new ideal, based in part on the cultural diffusion of Freudian
psychology, increased the possibility of erotic pleasure for many. Yet it heightened expectations of sexual
performance and created behavioral norms that could limit as well as liberate. Being sexually inactive
was stigmatized, making the choice of remaining single or celibate difficult, and those who found
heterosexual eroticism unfulfilling were often judged as abnormal or incomplete.
Still, the culture changed slowly, and not everyone embraced the new sexual ideals of the 1920s.
Many women remained single, living alone or with their families of origin. Older patterns of homosocial
and homosexual bonding persisted, bolstered in part by gay and lesbian subcultures and by the new
emphasis on sexual experimentation, especially for women. Pauline Newman and Frieda Miller, for
example, two social justice feminists of the 1920s who remained active into the 1950s, chose
unconventional intimate lives and family arrangements. Newman and Miller served as significant
intellectual mentors to younger social justice feminists in the 1930s and 1940s, and when Frieda Miller
replaced Mary Anderson as director of the U.S. Women’s Bureau in 1944, she would use the agency to
create a national network of women labor leaders and advance the reform agenda of social justice
feminism in the postwar era.