Book description
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.
Kirsten Marie Delegard is an independent researcher and historian
based in Minneapolis.
