Wealthy Women, Philanthropy, Power, and the Women's Movement in late 19th-20th Century America

FAIN: FT-60452-13

Joan Marie Johnson
Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago, IL 60625-4625)

This book explores how wealthy women in late 19th-20th century America wielded their money for women to gain access to higher education, suffrage, and reproductive rights and to provide aid to working women. The first collective biography of these women to focus on their ideas about women's rights, it revises feminism's history with a new concept of sisterhood and new insights into the finance and organization of these movements, which explain the timing and extent of their success. These movements were not only led by a lone crusader or altruistic volunteers, and tensions surfaced when suffragists, birth control advocates, and other reformers acknowledged their dependence on funding from wealthy women. The book shows how they exercised power through financial largesse and reconciled such power, traditionally considered male. It explores why women, privileged in race and class, challenged sexism, offering a new approach to the history of the women's movement and philanthropy.

Associated Products

"Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement," (Article)
Title: "Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement,"
Author: Joan Marie Johnson
Abstract: The fortunes donated and estates left by wealthy women played a significant, yet controversial role in recharging the woman suffrage movement and passing the Nineteenth Amendment, a story historians have just recently begun to explore. “Following the money” traces priorities, tactics, and strategies of the movement through a focus on donors and donations and explores the resentment caused when a small number of wealthy individuals wielded the power to shape strategy and decisions. Their experience with the power of money (and its limitations) helped them understand that economic independence and political equality was crucial for all women, whether working-class wage earners, educated professionals, or inheritors of large fortunes. Their donations funded new tactics and strategies, including headquarters in New York and Washington, DC, salaries for traveling organizers, and a publicity blitz, as well as Carrie Chapman Catt’s “winning plan,” ultimately making passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment possible in 1920.
Year: 2015
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Publisher: Journal of Women's History

Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967 (Book)
Title: Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967
Author: Joan Marie Johnson
Abstract: Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. But even as these women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. Restrictions tied to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardized efforts to establish coalitions across racial and class lines.
Year: 2017
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781469634692
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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