#from ballots to breadlines

[dwellordream]

“With more household technology available, women could have found themselves with more time to spend outside the house. Moreover, the birth rate had declined. In 1800, white women had given birth to an average of 7 children each; in 1900, the average was 3.56; and in 1929, it was only 2.4. Women of all groups were having fewer children. Birth control was still controversial, and it was even illegal in many states, but middle-class women were able to get birth control devices from their private physicians, and in large cities some clinics opened to serve working-class women.

However, this still left many working-class women without birth control. And even when they could get birth control information, in an era before the Pill had been invented and when diaphragms and even condoms were not always readily available, they often found their husbands uncooperative. Yet, even though they continued to have more children than middle-class women, birth rates among the working class also declined. No sooner were there fewer children in the home, however, that experts began to agree that mothers should pay more attention to each one.

As advertisements for a laundromat in Muncie asked, “Isn’t Bobby more important than his clothes?” And one ad selling electricity declared of the “successful mother” that “she puts first things first. She does not give to sweeping the time that belongs to her children… The wise woman delegates to electricity all that electricity can do.” Women who were involved in charitable work, social and political service, and even wage work--despite the fact that most working mothers took paying jobs only out of dire need--were attacked as selfish, as taking jobs away from men who needed them to support families, and as undermining the stability of the home. It was argued that having a woman in the home would keep a child off the streets.

…In an economy built around gratification rather than thrift, women’s activism outside the home was taken as a sign of an unfulfilled life. Women did not cease, of course, to rely on other women for support and intimacy. As with politics, however, the range of tolerated behavior shrank, and what had been acceptable before the war now was questionable. Some young women even feared to share apartments with each other lest they be suspected of homosexuality. And, in the same way that new fears of radicalism split women’s political organizations in the 1920s, new fears of homosexuality made it harder for women to form women’s groups whose purpose was women’s equality and independence.

Women’s focus was not supposed to be other women. According to the advertisers and the new psychologists, their emphasis was supposed to be on how to attract men. Women could find fulfillment, the argument went, only through marriage. In the 19th century, marriage was supposed to involve self-denial and self-sacrifice by women. Now, particularly for the highly educated middle class, it was supposed to prove sexual satisfaction and self realization. Marriage was supposed to be the gateway to a fuller life, not just for women with low-paying monotonous jobs but also for college-educated women. Sexual fulfillment in marriage, not a career, was depicted as the ultimate fulfillment for women.

…Despite the increasing availability of birth control, a new focus on sexuality, and a redefined concept of housework, marriage had a hard time living up to its reputation. Not all women found marriage a way to a fuller life. Tensions rose around consumption. Raising children became more and more expensive, and working-class women continued to have less access to money and birth control. Fears of conceiving another child they could ill afford affected these women’s sexual pleasure. And expectations of a way of life that did not materialize led to disappointment.

In a 1920s study of Muncie, Indiana, when working-class women were asked what gave them the courage to go on life when they had become thoroughly discouraged, not one of the women mentioned her husband. In difficult times, husbands became not so much individuals as the focus of their wives’ problems and fears about jobs and conception. The divorce rate rose steeply. From 1870 to 1920, the number of divorces in the United States increased by a factor of 15. In 1924, one marriage in seven ended in divorce. More wives than ever before had done paid work during marriage. They knew they had options other than staying in an unsatisfactory marriage. Life was not easy for divorced women, but no longer was divorce the disgrace it had been in the previous century.”

- Sarah Jane Deutsch, “Fun, Fads, and Family.” in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940

[bustedbernie]

It’s pretty arrogant to think one can smoke their own dope and not end up turning into a fiend like ones customers, yet Bernie is an ego driven character. Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G. was most emphatic about not getting high on your own shit, but here we are, staring into the abyss, super close to having a hype monster in control of our party. Some people love the hell out of Bernie Sanders, some people are indifferent, and some people cannot stand him or his bullshit movement. I fall into category three. So, take my words with a grain of salt if it makes you feel any better. But, let me tell you something before you tune me out. Bernie has zero plans to try to win anyone over who is not already with him, and that’s a big deal.

When asked if he would make overtures to moderate Democrats should he win the nomination, Sanders said the party would have to adjust to his movement rather than the other way around.

Did he just basically say, “Bend the knee?” Um? At first, I assumed that Bernie was talking about the DNC or elected officials, I mean, he couldn’t really be saying he had no plans to reassure reluctant Moderate and Centrist Democratic VOTERS over to his side. Right? He has to know we depend on votes from people in the middle, moderate Independents, and even Conservative Dems in order to win the electoral college, doesn’t he?

“People in the Democratic Party are going to take a look at reality and in a millisecond, they’re going to make a decision: The choice is between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They may say, ‘Oh, God, I don’t like Bernie Sanders. . . . He doesn’t comb his hair nicely enough. But you know what? There is no choice. We’re going to support Bernie Sanders.’ ”

That’s what Hillary thought, are you using her playbook minus the outreach part? Sure, we may say that thing about having no choice. (I won’t.) Or, maybe we’ll say, “We already know what tragic shit Trump will do, but we have no idea what the fuck this crazy guy I never liked who combs his hair with a balloon, will try to do. Maybe we should sit this one out.”

That’s one possibility out of millions of possibilities. Voters may even say, “Wow, this guy is arrogant as fuck! He refuses to even try to reach out to us, let’s focus our energy down ballot.” The fact of the matter is, Bernie isn’t anymore owed votes than Hillary Clinton was. And after four years of the leftists decrying her campaign for not trying hard enough to win votes, this plan of “Take me or leave me, I don’t give a fuck about your vote enough to earn it,” does NOT bode well for a Sanders victory if he is the eventual nominee.

Steve Schmidt, who worked on the McCain campaign in 2008, says,

“They’d run against him as a radical who once traveled to the Soviet Union and ask, ‘Do you want to give up one of the greatest economies ever for that?’ ”

Oh, you mean his love of Breadline might actually turn voters off?

Yes, it sounds stupid. I won’t bother to show you the whole “Honeymoon in Russia in my Underpants” video right now, it’s just grosses me out. But I brought it up just so you can imagine the ads running day and night of Bernie and some sweaty, stinky, half naked men singing, and looking Filthy McNasty on every TV in America.

But, for some reason, Bernie doesn’t believe his radical past, you know, praising murderous dictators, trashing America, and asking kids how much dope they’ve done will be problematic AT ALL.

Sanders fiercely rejected that view and says Democrats must rally around his movement in order to beat Trump, rather than assume that Biden might have a better chance of winning.

Oh, really? We need to dump Biden, and rally around the guy who has zero plans to try to include us, eh? Sounds DELIGHTFUL. Sike.

“The way you defeat Donald Trump is by having the largest voter turnout in the modern history of this country* — that’s how you beat him,” Sanders said. “We think we can get 5, 10, 15 percent of the vote Trump got because an increasing number of people who voted for Trump understand now that he’s a liar and fraud” who backed conservative policies.

*Obama did that.

Who the fuck told you that voters who backed Trump don’t like Conservative policies? WTF? Oh. Yeah. I keep forgetting that Bernie is a hype fiend who gets high off of a steady supply of his own churlish, delusional, and ever-present hype. I keep thinking that Bernie must really believe he is the new Obama. Maybe it’s the crowds chanting his name, the loyalty of his movement, and the very largeness of his crowds that misinforms him.

Bernie Sanders is no Barack Obama, not even close.

Members of the media sat in the back in the dark, ignored by the Sanders crowd amid the revelry. Attendees toasted “the Bern” and spoke excitedly about the prospect of victory in February. The bitter disappointments of four years ago seemed distant.

They are going to go batshit when he loses, huh? Oh, fuck me.

Hours before midnight, Sanders took the stage and told them to believe.

Bitch, are you Tinkerbell? What the fuck?

Okay, okay, maybe it’s just me, but I think this shit is getting to him, and he has hit the point where he’s about to start crowd surfing, while his adoring fans scream, “Mysha Mysha!” like he’s Daenerys Targaryen. I’m only half joking.

This is what happens when you give free passes to some old, angry, self important and repetitive jerk.

He turns into a fucking DIVA.

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

A group of migrant cleaners - who are members of the trade union United Voices of the World (UVW) - have just won a historic victory at the Daily Mail.

After the threat of an all-out cleaners strike at the Mail’s offices in Kensington, and the prospects of large and lively protests and pickets, it is now confirmed that the cleaners’ demands have been met: as of 1st April 2018 they will all receive the London Living Wage of £10.20 per hour.

The cleaners - some of whom have been scrubbing and polishing the Mail’s offices for nearly 20 years and are outsourced to Mitie Group Plc, a FTSE 250 company - were previously paid only the national minimum wage of £7.50 per hour.

In real terms the cleaners have secured a 25% wage increase equating to nearly £500 extra per month per worker, or around £6,000 extra per year.

This victory will therefore lift the cleaners out of the poverty which, up until now, the Mail has cruelly constrained them to languish in.

The cleaners’ bravery in speaking out also captured the public imagination with nearly 100,000 people signing a petition, on Change.org, written by the cleaners under the pseudonym Juliana, in support of their demands.

This was no easy feat for the cleaners, none of whom had been in a trade union before let alone been on strike. Furthermore, on receipt of the declaration of a trade dispute from UVW and notice that the cleaners would be balloted for strike action, the contract manager for Mitie stormed in to the Mail’s offices and unlawfully threatened the cleaners telling them that if they ever went on strike they would immediately be sacked.

The cleaners’ courage to not let such desperate and unlawful threats intimidate them cannot be overstated.

Winning this wage increase is all the more impressive as just last month the Mail forced through £30,000 worth of cuts to the cleaning contract, clearly showing that before the cleaners made their demands the paper had no intention at all of investing a single penny more in their salaries.

The cleaners - all of whom are migrants predominantly from Latin America and Africa - also knew that they were standing up to an organisation that is responsible for churning out all manner of hateful bile about migrants, including the pernicious lie that migrants drive down wages.

Well, now the Daily Mail writers need look no further than their own offices to see that this claim is utterly false. It’s not migrant workers who suppress wages, it’s miserly and unscrupulous employers who take advantage of unorganised workers and keep them on the breadline. Perhaps the millionaire editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre will reflect on this before he sits down to sign off on another anti-migrant headline in an office kept clean and tidy by the very people his publication routinely denigrates.

[dwellordream]

“The Great Depression reached into every corner of the country, but it did not affect all people equally. For many middle-class women of all races, the depression required certain changes in spending patterns: buying cheaper cuts of meat, feeding the homeless men who stopped at the back door, and doing without new clothes. Some of these women continued to do community volunteer work, raising money for the unemployed. They saw the food lines, but they did not have to join them.

Among women workers, race played an important role. The fierce competition for jobs fueled racial resentments. Mexican-American and African-American women were the first to lose their jobs and the last to get relief from welfare agencies. Often, they were already living on the margin of survival. Before 1933, when the Prohibition amendment making the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages illegal was repealed, many of these women turned to bootlegging, making their own beer or liquor and selling it.

…Even relatively prosperous farm women--owners, not tenants--in general produced as much as 70 percent of what their families consumed in clothing, toys, and food. They not only gardened but raised poultry. During the depression, women increased the size of their gardens and the number of their hens. They made more butter from their dairy cows and sold it. They cut up the sacks that held large amounts of flour and sewed them into underwear. In the previous decade, they had proudly begun to participate in a culture of store-bought goods. Now they began to can food again. Government agents dragged huge canning kettles across the mountains of northern New Mexico and eastern Tennessee so that women in remote farming villages could preserve their food.

Even with all this work, rural children suffered from malnutrition, and rural women faced childbirth without a doctor or midwife because they could afford neither the medical fees nor the gasoline for transportation. The women resented their declining standards of living, particularly those from better-off farm families who owned their own farms and had, during the 1920s, aspired to participate in the new domestic technology of indoor bath-rooms, modern stoves and heating, and super cleanliness.

…In 1936, a federal appeals court overruled an earlier law that had classified birth control information as obscene and thus illegal to dispense. That decision still left state laws intact, however. The number of birth control clinics nationwide rose from 55 in 1930 to 300 by 1938, but in some states and in many rural areas women still had no access to birth control. In 1937, North Carolina became the first state to provide contraceptives with tax dollar, and six others soon followed. Ironically, North Carolina’s reasoning was not that birth control was a human right but that birth control would reduce the black population.

Despite statistics showing that black women had fewer babies than white women with similar incomes and living situations, many white southern officials in states with large black populations feared a black population explosion. In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of American responded to eager southern state governments by developing “The Negro Project,” a program to disseminate birth control information, which they carefully staffed with local black community leaders. Whatever the logic, one quarter of all women in the United States in their 20s during the depression never bore children. This was the highest rate of childlessness for any decade. Many people simply decided not to get married, and marriage rates fell.

…In the mass media women seemed to be receiving mixed messages. On the one hand, in 1930, the Ladies’ Home Journal featured a former career woman confessing, “I know now without any hesitation… that [my husband’s job] must come first.” In 1931, the popular magazine Outlook and Independent quoted the dean of Barnard College, a women’s college in New York City, telling her students that “perhaps the greatest service that you can render to the community… is to have the courage to refuse to work for gain.” And on its front page in 1935, the New York Times reported that women “suffering from masculine psychological states” and an “aversion to marriage” were being “cured” by the removal of their adrenal gland. In this atmosphere, not only were women workers under fire, but women who centered their lives on women rather than on men came under attack. Lesbianism was no longer chic. Lesbian bars almost disappeared. Homosexuality was now seen by many people as just one more threat to the family.

On the other hand, movie houses showed zany screwball comedies with more complicated lessons. Often deliciously ditsy, incompetent women were rescued by sensible, capable men. Yet, the men in these movies were frequently portrayed as bumbling or slower-witted than the women. Sometimes the men were people who needed joy and whimsy restored to their lives, not an unexpected theme for a nation in the throes of an economic depression. In other movies, however, women were by no means incompetent. The women portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford in the 1930s were often intelligent but needed men alternately to tame and to soften them.”

- Sarah Jane Deutsch, “Making Do with Disaster.” in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940

[dwellordream]

“By 1930, 40 percent of white and black working women were wives, one-third with children under age 13, but they still constituted only 11.7 percent of all wives. Several states banned married women from holding government jobs. Though the percentage of married women teachers doubled, the majority of school boards refused to hire them. Many people were worried about what it would mean to have wives work outside the home. What concerned them most was what it would mean to have white married women working outside the home.

Black women had long been forced by economic necessity to work for wages, and among agricultural worker families, 60 percent of Chicanas with children worked in the fields. Japanese immigrant women had been partners in their husbands’ businesses, domestic servants in other people’s homes, and agricultural laborers ever since their arrival in large numbers between 1907 and 1921. Married Puerto Rican women in New York City contracted with textile manufacturers to make garments, fine lace, and other goods in their homes. The press and policymakers had never worried about what those women’s work would do to their families. It was only when non-Hispanic, white native-born or even immigrant married women began to work outside the home in larger numbers that the issue became a public one.

…At the turn of century, young working women had most often lived at home or as boarders with other families. Now, between school and marriage they lived in their own apartments. They often shared these apartments with other young working women. Having their own apartments gave them a sense of autonomy, of young adulthood, of being unsupervised and unrestrained. It gave their parents a lot of worry. At the same time, young working women hardly lived in the lap of luxury. At $15 a week, their wages supported only tiny, often ill-lit apartments with sparse furnishings. For women doing dull work and living in ding, dark apartments on boring, cheap food, the phone company’s lounge and benefits gave them as close a glimpse as they might ever have of the middle-class life many wanted.

Whenever they sought more from life, to take in the new movies or go to amusement parks, or have a decent dinner, they had to find a man, who was better paid, to treat them. Young working women had started dating men to whom they had not been introduced, without supervision, almost a generation earlier. By the 1920s, this practice was widespread. Lounges, theater tickets, and lunches formed part of the new strategies by which large corporations had responded to the massive number of strikes in 1919. Many adopted something called the American Plan of corporate welfare. Instead of paying higher wages, companies provided increased benefits to workers.

…Although clerical workers and businesswomen were newly conspicuous among women workers in the 1920s, most women workers remained in the occupations that they had in previous decades: domestic service, agricultural labor, and certain manufacturing jobs. For a small subset of the middle and upper classes, work could be seen as inherently satisfying and liberating. For most working women, however, wage labor was a matter of necessity. In the 1920s, despite its reputation as an era of prosperity, 71 percent of U.S. workers earned less than the wage required to support what the government defined as the minimum acceptable standard of living for their families. As a result, in low-income families, 25 percent of all married women worked for wages.

In 1920, five times more married black women than women of any other racial or ethnic group worked outside the home. More than 50 percent of adult black women earned wages. In rural areas most performed back-breaking labor in the fields. In the cities most performed domestic service or laundering. Only 5.5 percent were able to gain employment in manufacturing, a better-paid sector, by 1930. As the total number of servants declined, black women became a larger and larger share of those remaining.”

- Sarah Jane Deutsch, “Women’s Work.” in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940

[dwellordream]

“New Deal policies focused on promoting domestic roles for women, such as sewing, cleaning, canning, and nursing. Administrators tended to see women as temporary workers who were helping out in an emergency and would return to the home after the depression. Why teach them nondomestic skills they would never use again? Operating procedures in the Works Progress Administration mandated that job preference be given to male family heads, or, if none existed, to adult male children in the household.

Only if a husband were absent or disabled and no adult sons lived at home could women receive a high priority at the agency. Even in the National Youth Administration, men received preference over women in job placement. The WPA limited the proportion of jobs it opened to women to between 12 and 16 percent.

There were other limits to the New Deal programs. Social Security excluded domestic servants and agricultural workers, and by doing so excluded from its benefits most black female and Chicana workers. In the 1930s, 90 percent of black women worked in agricultural labor or domestic service. No code, and later, no minimum wage or maximum hours law covered these workers, either. Nor was government relief evenly distributed. It went disproportionately to whites. Black women in the South and Chicanas in the Southwest found themselves ousted from work relief programs so that they would have to take poorly paid domestic work or labor in the cotton or vegetable and fruit fields.

…Other programs not particularly aimed at women could also have unexpected results. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 aimed to give Native American tribes increased autonomy by creating tribal governments built around newly written constitutions. Although the underlying sentiment of the act was a new respect for tribal cultures, the new constitutions tended to be built on white models. In tribes where women had been excluded from formal political participation, they gained new voting power, and new women leaders emerged.

On the other hand, in some other tribes, women lost economic rights and political power, as they did among the Iroquois, where women had had the power as a group to depose chiefs and influence tribal decisions. Moreover, among the Navajo, New Deal policies of reducing stock in the name of conserving overgrazed land lessened the economic power of women, who were the traditional tribal stock owners. At the same time, jobs programs favoring men made the Navajo men less dependent economically on the clan’s women and less willing to contribute their income to the extended family.

…With the tremendous anxiety over social stability, and fears for the family as the institution at the core of social order, few spoke for the women workers, and feminist individualism was rarely seen. In 1935, the New York Herald Tribune reported that the president of the national League of Women Voters, the organizational heir to the suffrage movement, was defining a “1935 new-style feminism.” This new feminism, she insisted, did not demand that women disappear into their kitchens. Instead, it required “women making good in positions of responsibility, other women backing them up, and all preparing themselves for similar service,” as they did in Roosevelt’s administration. Yet the new focus was less on personal achievement than it had been in the 1920s. Women social reformers had achieved high visibility and power with the New Deal, and those focusing instead on equal rights for women were in disarray.

The social reformers saw themselves as bettering the world for women, helping women and children fend off economic disaster, fostering the success of women in government positions, and safeguarding the welfare of working women. But in Frances Perkins’s Department of Labor, the Children’s Bureau expanded rapidly, while the Women’s Bureau remained small. That policy decision left childless women stranded and left little room for a notion of women’s rights that did not depend on their family roles. Despite its powerful women, the New Deal did not revolutionize the position of women in relation to men or the family.”

- Sarah Jane Deutsch, “Women and the New Deal.” in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940

[dwellordream]

“Women streamed into public office in the 1920s, the largest single increase in women’s officeholding to date, leveling off only after 1930. The Democrats and Republicans began to mandate equal representation of men and women on party committees. Altogether, these achievements covering peace, politics, labor, health care, and the home seemed to indicate a wide acceptance of women’s significance in the public arena.

Yet by 1924 popular magazines were running articles (written by men) with such titles as “Is Women’s Suffrage a Failure?” and “Women’s Ineffective Use of the Vote.” There were signs, even early on, that not all was going according to plan. The only woman in Congress in 1921, Alice Robertson, was an anti-suffragist. Women vastly increased their numbers in office, but the meaning of that increase must be set in a wider context. In 1924, there were 84 women legislators in 30 states. Five years later there were 200, an increase of almost 250 percent. But while there were 200 women in office, there were 10,000 men.

…To some triumphant suffragists the next logical step was an equal rights amendment, which would sweep away all remaining forms of discrimination at once. Activist Alice Paul spearheaded the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She presided over the National Women’s Party (NWP) when in November 1923, the 75th anniversary of the first women’s rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, it announced the text of the ERA: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” A month later the amendment was introduced into Congress.

To Paul, it was logical that the ERA should succeed suffrage as the focus of NWP. Like suffrage, the ERA was only part of the feminist agenda, but it would give women power, which they could then use as they pleased. Instead of becoming the new mass women’s movement, however, the NWP dwindled. It emerged from the suffrage fight in 1920 with 35,000 members. By the end of the decade, it had sunk to 1,000.

…But the divisions among women were not all caused by the women themselves. For one thing, the raids and prosecutions of the Red Scare had a chilling effect on women’s groups. Facing possible jail terms or deportation simply for associating with radical women, some women turned a cold shoulder to former friends. In an era in which organizing at all was suspect, women in the 1920s could either organize together for equality and rights and be labeled “red” and fired, or they could try to go it alone.

It was not then surprising that women in their 20s and 30s who wanted to succeed in the public world of business or politics believed the most important thing to leave behind was “sex-consciousness,” their sense of themselves as women who shared interests with other women. They abandoned any organized quest for general social reform and opted instead for individualism. “Breaking into the human race,” as they put it, and individual success in the world as it was became their goals.

…Despite antagonism toward feminist groups, the 1920s found activist women not so much absent as scattered. No longer were they the “woman movement,” as they had been in the 19th century; now they were women. They still organized, but in a multitude of smaller groups that often opposed each other. Every woman seemed to belong to at least one group, and often to several. There were church groups, parents’ associations, self-improvement clubs, and civic leagues. Many women returned to the causes that had most concerned them before the peak of the suffrage movement.

Some threw all their efforts into the peace movement. Others returned to issues such as social reform, hours and wages for women, clean city streets and water, adequate schooling and playgrounds, and safe factory conditions, for example. In the South, new interracial efforts against lynching occupied some women. In the Southwest, Hispanic women worked for bilingual education.”

- Sarah Jane Deutsch, “The Nature of ‘Liberation’: Inventing a Public Woman.” in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940

[fromatozelda]

Women and College

In the 1920s more than 40% of college students were women. College students were still the privileged few though, in 1910 only 3.8% of college aged women in the US were enrolled in college and the percentage increased to 10.5% in 1930.

Most colleges controlled the number of minority students they accepted. Jewish and black students were only accepted in small numbers in most colleges. By 1929 black women were the majority at most coed black colleges. The number of catholic colleges also rose during this period. They rose from 14 to 37 in just ten years.

Like graduates today Amelia Earhart also floundered right out of college. She considered a career in photography and social work. She worked for a while as a social worker in a poor neighborhood in Boston.

[fromatozelda]

Women, Labor Laws, and Suffrage

After World War I workers all over America began protesting over labor laws. The businesses, especially the steel industry which half of its workers were immigrants, labeled the strikers as radical revolutionaries and Communists. The steel industry was able to get thousands of immigrants deported with no proof of wrongdoing. The public watched on in silence as government agents raided union offices, the offices of dissenting political groups, and private homes. They arrested and deported thousands of people. People were held on false charges and denied lawyers. This was known as the Red Scare and it lasted from 1919-1920.

There were two arguments in favor of women's suffrage that suffragists used. Some like Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women were citizens like men and so they deserved equal rights. Others argued that women were not like men. Since men had led them into wars and under men political corruption was allowed to flourish. So it stood to reason that women would bring about peace.

In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled on Adkins v. Children's Hospital. The Supreme Court ruled that a federal minimum wage for women was an “unconstitutional infringement of liberty of contract.” In 1918 Congress passed a minimum wage for women and children in the District of Columbia. Justice Sutherland who wrote the majority opinion claimed that since women had the right to vote they were equal in the eyes of the law and needed no special privileges; even though some jobs were legally barred from them and it was legal to pay women less money (not much has changed on that part), also most states denied them equal access to borrow money and to serve on juries. William H. Taft, the 27th president of the United States, was the Chief Justice and wrote the dissenting opinion. This ruling was overturned in 1937 with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish.

After the Red Scare women were afraid of organizing like they did before suffrage in case they were labeled as a radical revolutionaries and be fired from their jobs. So many women turned their back on other women and women's organizations. They turned towards individualism. The women wanted to make it in a man's world but not to change that world so they had to try and model themselves after men.

All information found in From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women 1920-1940 by Sarah Jane Deutsch.