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The 1950s, Women, Civic Engagement,and Political Change
Unformatted Document Text:  3 women of color forget their fear of being called political!” exclaimed a member of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), the oldest, and at one time largest, civic association of African American women in the nation. Moving beyond their traditional focus on community activities, African American clubwomen of the 1950s began experimenting with political tactics familiar to modern day interest groups, hiring a lobbyist, creating a public relations program, adopting business management principles, and endorsing protest. Clubwomen in the primarily white-led General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) made similar pronouncements about the need to modernize the organizational identity that inspired club organizing. “The day of the sewing circle is past,” argued GFWC president in 1948. “The time has come when we should discard the outmoded idea that we are a non-political organization,” another leader claimed, “because we are not.” These and other groups—such as the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (AAUW)—participated in a broad transformation in postwar organizational life by adopting, in varying degrees, new organizational strategies—collecting statistical data, for example, appointing observers to the United Nations, coalescing across international borders, maintaining roll-call voting records at a national headquarters, or filing amicus curiae briefs with the Supreme Court. It was in the postwar years, the Woman’s Home Companion noted in 1955, that women’s organizations “learned how to plan, study, convene, vote and get what they want.” 1 This account of transformation is strangely at odds with two primary views that continue to dominate scholarly understanding of the mid-20 th century. The first sees the period as the 1 “Women’s Clubs and Public Affairs,” editorial, National Notes, c. 1950, p. 24; “Clubwomen Back Alliance of West,” The New York Times, Saturday, October 16, 1948, 18:1; “A Look at the 1960-62 Calendar,” GFWC Archives, Program Records (Record Group 7), Katie Ozbirn, 1960-1962, emphasis in original; Hazel Holly, “Women’s Organizations Have Parties Plus,” The Woman’s Home Companion (April 1955): 26.

Authors: Mathews-Gardner, Lanethea.
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women of color forget their fear of being called political!” exclaimed a member of the National
Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), the oldest, and at one time largest, civic
association of African American women in the nation. Moving beyond their traditional focus on
community activities, African American clubwomen of the 1950s began experimenting with
political tactics familiar to modern day interest groups, hiring a lobbyist, creating a public
relations program, adopting business management principles, and endorsing protest. Clubwomen
in the primarily white-led General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) made similar
pronouncements about the need to modernize the organizational identity that inspired club
organizing. “The day of the sewing circle is past,” argued GFWC president in 1948. “The time
has come when we should discard the outmoded idea that we are a non-political organization,”
another leader claimed, “because we are not.” These and other groups—such as the American
Association of University Women (AAUW), the National Federation of Business and
Professional Women’s Clubs (BPW), and the Young Women’s Christian Association
(AAUW)—participated in a broad transformation in postwar organizational life by adopting, in
varying degrees, new organizational strategies—collecting statistical data, for example,
appointing observers to the United Nations, coalescing across international borders, maintaining
roll-call voting records at a national headquarters, or filing amicus curiae briefs with the
Supreme Court. It was in the postwar years, the Woman’s Home Companion noted in 1955, that
women’s organizations “learned how to plan, study, convene, vote and get what they want.”
1
This account of transformation is strangely at odds with two primary views that continue
to dominate scholarly understanding of the mid-20
th
century. The first sees the period as the
1
“Women’s Clubs and Public Affairs,” editorial, National Notes, c. 1950, p. 24; “Clubwomen Back Alliance of
West,” The New York Times, Saturday, October 16, 1948, 18:1; “A Look at the 1960-62 Calendar,” GFWC
Archives, Program Records (Record Group 7), Katie Ozbirn, 1960-1962, emphasis in original; Hazel Holly,
“Women’s Organizations Have Parties Plus,” The Woman’s Home Companion (April 1955): 26.


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