• DOI:10.1353/JOWH.2010.0307
• Corpus ID: 144171486

"To Work Together for Ends Larger than Self": The Feminist Struggles of Mary Beard and Doris Stevens in the 1930s

@article{Trigg1995ToWT,
  title={"To Work Together for Ends Larger than Self": The Feminist Struggles of Mary Beard and Doris Stevens in the 1930s},
  author={Mary K. Trigg},
  journal={Journal of Women's History},
  year={1995},
  volume={7},
  pages={52 - 85}
}

• M. Trigg
• Published 25 March 2010
• History
• Journal of Women's History

The postsuffrage years have traditionaUy been characterized as a low point in the history of American feminism. Women who had worked together to win the vote spUt into opposing camps over the Equal Rights Amendment proposed by AUce Paul's National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1923. Opponents argued that the amendment would affect the laws regulating women's wages, hours, and conditions of work, for which reformers and trade-union women had fought long and hard. Divisions of race, class, and ethnicity also hampered women's efforts to unite on the common basis of gender. During the Depression there was a widespread pubUc furor over working wives; new government regulations discriminated against married women workers. The 1940s and 1950s were particularly hostile decades for women's rights advocates; the Cold War and McCarthyism encouraged the prominence of the feminine mystique. Not until the 1960s did a large-scale feminist movement reemerge.1 Yet, as historians begin to map more fuUy the contours of American feminism in the years between 1920 and the Second Wave in the mid-1960s, it becomes increasingly clear that feminism did not die but was struggling for redefinition. A sodal movement whidi for eighty years was able to cohere—despite factional disagreements over tactics—on the one central goal of winning the vote was not able to repUcate that unity of purpose. As Nancy Cott argues in The Grounding of Modern Feminism, what historians had previously interpreted as the demise of feminism in the 1920s, was more accurately the early struggle of modem feminism. That struggle centered on a very large task: finding language, organization, and goals that would speak to and for modern women in aU their diversity.2 Historians of postsuffrage feminism disagree about the extent to which women's struggles over differing concepts of feminism and the meaning of female equaUty in the economic sphere actually damaged the movement. Susan Becker has argued that the controversy over protective legislation became "a schism that symbolized the faÃ1⁄4ure of American feminists to reach consensus on the meaning of equaUty after suffrage was won." WÃ1⁄4liam Chafe claims that by the 1930s the women's movement was so ensnared over the ERA that, "instead of moving ahead together to