The Boundaries of Democratic Reform: Social Justice Feminism and Race in the South, 1931-1939

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REFORMS OFTEN BECOME SHAPED NOT ONLY BY SOCIETAL CONSTRAINTS but also by personal predispositions. Over the past thirty years, scholars have written a great deal on the growth of white women's activism in the South during the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking studies range from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's 1979 volume on Jessie Daniel Ames, a white reformer in Texas, to analyses of urban women's reform efforts such as Pamela Tyler's Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes (1996). Susan Ware and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman have examined, respectively, the expansion of women's activities in the national Democratic Party during the 1930s and the corresponding activities of party women in North Carolina. No one, however, has extensively studied the contributions of southern white women to the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 1930s. (1)

This article is a case study analyzing the work of four such women: Harriet Elliott, Gladys Avery Tillett, May Thompson Evans, and Virginia Foster Durr. During the 1930s three of them, Elliott, Tillett, and Evans, extended to national Democratic politics the racial boundaries white southern activists had long placed around their reform agenda. Jacquelyn Hall and William A. Link have concluded that although early-twentieth-century southern white reformers sought to improve social conditions through state regulation of child labor, education, and prison reform, they resisted considering the contentious area of race. As Link notes, the efforts of the region's Progressive-era reformers became an erratic mixture of "embrac[ing] uplift and progress, yet believ[ing] in a hierarchy of race." This blend of beliefs continued into the 1920s and 1930s among southern white women reformers. (2)

As a result of their political activities for the national Democratic Party, Elliott, Tillett, and Evans were key members of a movement called social justice feminism, whose original goal was passage of women's labor legislation as an "entering wedge" for the state protection of all workers. The movement then tried after 1933 to increase women's political power in the national Democratic Party. Working closely with Mary "Molly" Williams Dewson, who became the first full-time director of the Women's Division in October 1933, Elliott traveled throughout the United States and provided detailed analyses of the newly established Reporter Plan, which aimed to educate thousands of Democratic women about the New Deal. She then brought into the organization two young but experienced protegees from her home state of North Carolina. Tillett became the director of the group's Speakers' Bureau during the 1936 campaign, and Evans acted as the assistant director of the Women's Division from 1937 through 1941, sparking its efforts through her extensive speaking schedule and organizational abilities. In January 1941 Tillett advanced to the Women's Division directorship, the first southerner to hold the position. (3)

But although Elliott, Tillett, and Evans supported the general goals of social justice feminism, such as the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act and especially the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), their continuation of southern white reformers' skirting of racial issues contributed to the movement's biggest failure in the 1930s: the refusal to include women of color. This failure encompassed not only the Women's Division's equivocal reactions to the landmark 1938 founding of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) and to proposed federal legislation to abolish poll taxes, but also the national leadership's overall indifference to African American women. Of the four women considered in this article, only Virginia Foster Durr confronted southern whites' racist practices, and she did so only by working outside the national Democratic Party establishment.

In 1978 the almost eighty-year-old Evans recalled her years in the Women's Division. She stated that Eleanor Roosevelt believed in women's labor legislation "because she knew that some needed legislation for all workers could be achieved faster by securing it first for women, then extending it to men." Evans was correct in identifying Roosevelt as a crucial supporter of gender-specific legislation, but social justice feminism began earlier as a reaction to the dramatic transformations of the late nineteenth century, which not only created an industrialized, urbanized United States but also produced abusive working conditions and unfit living conditions. Some reformers, particularly middle-class, college-educated women, responded to these transformations with what historian Robert H. Wiebe has called a "search for order," through which they aimed to restore social and political cohesion. One of the terms used by these women reformers was social justice, which appealed to a middle class already wary of Marxism. (4)

Florence Kelley was a significant advocate of this new Progressive movement for social justice. Born in 1859, Kelley became interested in socialism as a student at Cornell University in the 1880s. In 1891 she moved to Chicago, becoming a key member of Jane Addams's recently established Hull House. After serving as Illinois's factory inspector from 1893 through 1897, Kelley moved into national prominence as general secretary of the National Consumers' League (NCL) in 1899. She shortly thereafter founded social justice feminism. By 1918 the movement could celebrate some significant victories, from the decision in Muller v. Oregon (1908), in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of legislation on women's hours of work, to the passage of fifty-six labor laws by the New York state legislature. In the early 1920s, however, a resurgent conservatism impeded further legislative efforts by social justice feminists in New York and led to the Supreme Court's rejection of minimum wage legislation for women in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923). While the movement regained some momentum in the late 1920s, social justice feminism's true revitalization occurred only after Franklin D. Roosevelt's first presidential inauguration in March 1933. (5)

Molly Dewson was the major catalyst of social justice feminism's last, most crucial stage. A longtime social activist who entered political organizing only in the mid-1920s, Dewson worked alongside Eleanor Roosevelt in the summer of 1932 in the Women's Division of the Democratic National Campaign Committee, which dissolved after the election. The spring and summer of 1933 found Roosevelt and Dewson securing key federal positions for women in the new administration; however, the duo soon focused anew on the Women's Division after they received complaints from Democratic women about being excluded from local party activities. According to historian Susan Ware, "Eleanor Roosevelt convinced the president and [DNC chair James A.] Farley to make the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee a full-time operation," and in October 1933 Dewson agreed to be the group's director. She successfully lobbied for a permanent budget, established speaker and publicity bureaus, and promoted the 50-50 plan, by which each state and local Democratic organization would have a chair and vice-chair of different genders. Dewson also made the Women's Division a primary advocate of social justice by working closely with officials of the National Recovery Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The most important goal of the Women's Division, however, was implementation of the Reporter Plan. Introduced by Dewson at a joint press conference with Eleanor Roosevelt in January 1934, the plan advocated training thousands of party women throughout the United States as so-called reporters, or local experts, on the New Deal. Through her efforts to implement this idea, Dewson initiated the expansion of social justice feminism into the South. (6)

Although the movement eventually brought southern white women into the national Democratic hierarchy, social justice feminism exerted little influence in the region until after 1930. This delay initially appears surprising, since industrialism dramatically entered the region after 1880. Manufacturers moved into the South in rapidly increasing numbers, attracted by the lack of state regulation and low business costs. By the late 1920s the textile industry was the largest industrial employer in the former Confederacy, including 130,000 women workers concentrated mostly in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. But burgeoning industrialism did not in turn create benign working conditions, particularly for women workers. In 1929 southern female industrial workers faced a maximum workweek of fifty-five to sixty hours, in contrast to the maximum workweeks of forty-eight to fifty-six hours mandated in New England. Labor conditions declined even further with the institution of the stretch-out, which put additional pressure for productivity on textile employees. Not surprisingly, unrest soon followed, typified by a dramatic, if ill-fated, series of strikes in North Carolina and Virginia in 1929. (7)

Even though these conditions apparently presented an opportunity for social justice feminism, three factors prevented the movement's extension into the South from 1910 through 1930. First, the southern labor movement remained weak, particularly among women workers. In the South, no strong working-class women leaders, such as Rose Schneiderman of New York, or prominent organizations, such as the Women's Trade Union League, provided ready bases of support. Second, the opposition of powerful textile interests and their state legislative allies prevented the enactment of effective labor legislation. Although Texas did pass a minimum-wage law in 1919, for example, the legislators repealed the statute just two years later. Even by the early 1930s none of the southern states possessed effective industrial enforcement or minimum-wage laws, while legislation on working hours went mostly unenforced. (8) Finally, and most important, southern white women reformers continued to be divided over what constituted labor reform. Their central issues remained temperance and public education reform, with only the promotion of child labor laws providing a tenuous connection with their northern counterparts. This division can be clearly seen in the differing agendas of two women's progressive coalitions formed after World War I. The Women's Joint Legislative Conference in New York, a coalition of middle- and working-class women, focused primarily on labor legislation. But Texas's Joint Legislative Council, formed in the early 1920s through the efforts of such organizations as the League of Women Voters (LWV) and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, sought stronger enforcement of Prohibition, legislative passage of an emergency school appropriation, and funding of a study on state prisons. Only Jessie Daniel Ames, as the head of the Texas LWV, became a major proponent of labor legislation. The complexities of race and gender further complicated the issue of labor reform in the South. As Ames later recalled, minimum-wage laws eventually lost support when opponents "suggested that 'nigger wenches' would be getting the same wages as 'pure white girls.'" In addition, most people in the region saw textile manufacturers not only as positive progenitors of the New South but also as benevolent protectors of their women employees. As labor activist Lucy Randolph Mason perceptively, if bitterly, commented at the time, "Domination of the Negro has made it easy to repeat the pattern for organized labor." (9)

The crucial turning point in social justice feminism's expansion was the 1930 formation of the Southern Council for Women and Children in Industry (SCWCI). The failure of the 1929 textile strikes prompted northern women reformers to reassess their southern strategy. They concluded that if manufacturers continued to move into the South, effective enforcement of labor standards in northern states, as well as hopes for the future passage of a federal labor agenda, would be …