Updated 8/25/04
The 1950s, Women, Civic Engagement, and Political Change
A. Lanethea Mathews-Gardner
Department of Political Science
Muhlenberg College
2400 Chew Street
Allentown, PA 18104
## email not listed ##
Paper prepared for delivery at the 100
th
Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 1-5, 2004.
* Draft * Comments Welcome *
In 1939, a group of Methodist churchwomen formed the Woman’s Division of Christian
Service (WDCS), joining a membership of more than one million local members through the
unification of six women’s missionary societies that had existed since the 1800s. Upon their
creation, the WDCS publicly declared that they were “Methodist Women United For Action,”
and they quickly saw a dramatic increase in their membership, peaking in the mid-1950s with
1,840,000 local churchwomen. Like women’s voluntary associations throughout American
history, the Woman’s Division constituted an autonomous sphere for women’s work outside the
reach of male authority, and provided the skills and resources for women to enter the public
sphere. In form and purpose the WDCS was civic in 1939: its membership was broad,
widespread, and active; it was decentralized in structure, linking local churchwomen to state and
national settings through autonomous “federated” chapters; and its primary mission was one
focused on creating and sustaining good citizenship through the education of public opinion and
missionary enterprise. Born of Progressive era reform traditions, members of the WDCS
believed in locally rooted action that embraced citizenship, but not politics per se. They
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