19
for black veterans, anti-lynching legislation, and fair employment practices among members of
the NACWC and WDCS. On these and other matters, members campaigned, lobbied, protested,
formed committees, educated, and conducted letter writing campaigns. If women’s associations
achieved limited gains in the mid-20
th
century it was not due to a lack of energy or organized
effort. Instead, clubwomen and churchwomen faced a series of obstacles that largely prevented
them from linking local civic activities to political development in the mid-20
th
century.
National political institutions did little to advance clubwomen’s and churchwomen’s
policy goals after World War II and this made the internal mobilization of members more of a
struggle. Neither the Truman nor Eisenhower administrations made domestic reform a priority,
for example, while a divided Congress left new departures in social policy to states and
localities.
37
“Many of the issues we have stood for have not been implemented as we have
hoped,” noted a disappointed member of the WDCS in 1946.
38
“You know we are being
criticized because we are not quickly passing the legislation coming before our Congress,”
agreed the GFWC Second Vice President in 1947. At their postwar conventions, African
American clubwomen likewise complained about the “many unkind things which have been said
in the halls of Congress” by politicians who made more promises then they kept—in response,
they vowed to campaign against the Senate filibuster, which had repeatedly killed civil rights
bills. “Put in Congress the men who will be just to us!” Mary Church Terrell advised NACWC
clubwomen.
39
Members of the WDCS were similarly disappointed in the lack of progress on
civil rights legislation. Three years after the creation of Truman’s Commission on Civil Rights,
The Methodist Woman declared “the legislative score is zero.” The only “bright spots” in the area
37
James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, DC: The
Brookings Institution, 1968); see also Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in
Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
38
Mrs. E.R. Bartlee, “On Becoming a World Citizen,” The Methodist Woman 8 (September 1946): 21-2.
Convention