Municipal Housekeeping
Suffragists
emerged primarily out of this group of middle-class women who had been educated
and had a family whose income could support their voluntary labor. Although a
number of clubwomen became advocates for woman’s suffrage, these elite
clubwomen were also the primary members of the highly organized antisuffrage
movement as well. While the connection to reform and suffrage is very significant,
the two ideas are entirely distinct.[1]
Women reformers had a very specific vision of gendered citizenship, which
developed largely out of existing gender norms and the new problem of
professionalizing newly educated women. Many new political avenues that
afforded women access to positions involving child welfare and regulations for
female workers emerged.[2]
Many such reformers wanted to find a place for women in politics outside of the
electoral process.
The reform efforts of Progressive
Era women have often been referred to by both historians and contemporaries as
“municipal housekeeping.” The term developed as part of the longstanding values
of the Cult of True Womanhood. Municipal housekeeping argued that the welfare
of a city directly influenced the welfare of their own homes – the private
sphere over which women had domain. In order to help preserve the health and
welfare of their own families, municipal housekeepers implored that they must
maintain the health and welfare of the wider public. Through activism like
sanitation, food safety, and poverty, women were not only affecting positive
change for their community, but also for their own homes. Margaret Flanagan
suggested that by situating city hall as a part of their own homes, women could
easily justify extending their influence into the political arena. The term,
she claimed “enabled women to become involved in every facet of urban affairs
without arousing opposition from those who believed woman’s only place was in
the home.”[3]
If women could extend
their influence into politics on behalf of reform, suffragists argued that
women required the vote as a tool for protecting their families, their homes,
and their communities. Many clubwomen wanted to actively participate in
politics to elicit their specific brands of reform. And although a number of
clubwomen, municipal housekeepers, and other reformers rejected the claims by
suffragists that women wanted and needed the vote, suffragists, themselves,
promoted this idea heavily in their own media.
[1] For an example of a new woman
antisuffragist consider Josephine Dodge, the leader of the National Association
Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), who attended Vassar College and was the
founder of Association of Day Nurseries in New York City in 1895, yet ardently
disapproved of woman’s suffrage.
[2] Women succeeded politically in child welfare policy. Well before women
won the right to vote, Julia Lathrop, a female reformer, headed the United
States Children’s Bureau (1912-1922). Historian Robyn Muncy proposes that the
success of the bureau offered a conservative, political alternative to women.
Robyn Muncy, Creating
a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) xii.
[3] Margaret Flanagan,
“Gender and Urban Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in
the Progressive Era,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (Oct.,
1990), 1048.
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