Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America.
Censer, Jane Turner
Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. By Francesca Morgan
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xi plus 320pp.).
Since the emergence of women's history as a subfield,
historians have been exploring female organizational activities. In
recent years, however, scholarly attention has moved from women's
rights associations, charities, and benevolent societies to a wider
range of groups. To survey a range of women's patriotic beliefs and
activities, Francesca Morgan focuses on four different late
nineteenth-century female organizations--the National Association of
Colored Women, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of
the American Revolution, and the Woman's Relief Corps.
One of these groups, the Woman's Relief Association, arose as
an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union army veterans
association), and two others--the Daughters of the American Revolution
and the United Daughters of the Confederacy--were formed as hereditary
associations which demanded descent from a veteran as necessary for
membership. The fourth organization, the National Association of Colored
Women, was the major female African American national organization.
Among these groups only the Woman's Relief Association had a
racially integrated membership.
Morgan argues that the establishment of these organizations during
the 1880s and 1890s represented a new phase for women. With the
exception of the drive to restore Mount Vernon, earlier American
women's patriotic gestures, in Morgan's view, typically had
been linked to wars and the need to support the soldiers. All these
changed after the 1880s as these new groups arose in peacetime to argue
for women's importance in a plethora of patriotic endeavors.
To Morgan, all four organizations stand as examples of what she
calls a 'woman centered nationalism"--the belief that women
had a vital role to play in the creating and transmitting the culture of
the nation. She points out their many different achievements--from the
erection of monuments and heroic statues to the creation of house
museums to programs for school children--as emblematic of their energy
and self confidence. Part of an age that believed in female moral
superiority, these women held it their duty to teach patriotism to a
rising generation. To be sure, Morgan sees real limits to this female
assertiveness. Even though the clubwomen lauded their foremothers, they
even more loudly celebrated their forefathers, and they were most active
in areas such as education that they could call traditionally feminine
in orientation. Moreover, these women were, varying from organization to
organization, slow to ask for direct political power for themselves;
indeed the United Daughters of the Confederacy never supported the vote
for women.
Given the slightly different origins of each organization, over
which Morgan tends to gloss, it is not surprising that each group
adopted a different tack for expressing their interests. Morgan argues
that despite their conservatism, all these women challenged the views of
men, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who decried female activism
and saw little role for women other than in producing future warriors
and statesmen.
Morgan uses the various women's societies as a way to
exploring the shifting forms not only of women's patriotism but
also their nationalism and ways of thinking about the national
community. Here she tries to divine their definition of the nation from
the parts of it they highlighted in their work and writings. Thus race
looms large in her explanation because of the white women's
discriminatory views. Yet she may well overstate her case, for most of
the white activists expected racial hierarchy in daily life rather than
the exclusion she suggests as their vision for America.
Morgan also argues that World War I brought a significant shift in
values to these women. Not only did it masculinize women's
nationalism, she argues that the Daughters of the Revolution took a
distinctly rightist turn, fighting radicalism and calling for a more
secure nation. More important to the other black and white clubwomen,
their cultural authority was lessened and increasingly banished to the
home. In the postwar world, these groups were increasingly seen as
amateurs.
Morgan's research is impressive, and her juxtaposition of
these organizations highlights important differences among them. Yet
this strength in analysis also at times gives her writing a schematic
aspect as she constantly moves among the four organizations. Moreover,
because the reader never really comes to know the major leaders of these
groups, it becomes impossible to delve deeply into the reasons for the
organizations' changes. While Morgan points in part to Bolshevik
revolution and Red Scare as impelling the rightward turn of the
Daughters of the American Revolution, she also believes that more
militantly xenophobic women took the helm. Yet with little discussion of
intragroup politics, the reader may well remain puzzled about the
impetus for change in the organization. Still, Morgan has provided an
important introduction to the changing forms of women's patriotic
organizations in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Jane Turner Censer
George Mason University