Volume 3, Winter 1999
Conference Keynote Essay

My remarks changed as I wrote them. I started to write a paper about the importance of religion to Protestant women reformers in the Progressive era, and how questions about religion in their lives can help us see beyond the narrow confines of the "maternalism" paradigm that historians currently use to define Protestant women's activism in the Progressive era.

Focusing on the stream of social justice activism that (in my opinion) cannot be accounted for by the "maternalist" paradigm, I set out to show how and why that activism was nurtured by religious sources.

Before long, however, my discontent with the "maternalist" paradigm and my fascination with the evidence of religion's pervasive influence led me in a different direction. I found myself addressing an even larger question, and one that I thought was even more appropriate for our gathering tonight: "What do historians lose when they ignore religion as a force in Protestant women's activism in the Progressive era?"

This bias against religion is very much present in the field of U.S. women's history. The omission seems especially visible in the field of my own current research-women's social activism in the Progressive era. After describing the "maternalist" paradigm that historians have constructed to explain that era, I want to explore some of the benefits of studying religious themes even in the most secular-minded women of that era.

"Maternalism" first appeared in a 1990 article by Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, entitled "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920," published in the American Historical Review. There Koven and Michel wrote: "We apply the term to ideologies that exalted women's capacity to mother and extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance, and morality."

My objections to the "maternalism" paradigm are twofold. First, maternalism allows historians to recognize the "morality" contained within Protestant women's reform energies without recognizing the religious roots and religious power of that morality. Second, maternalism permits historians to characterize many of women's reform efforts as an extension of white, Protestant, middle-class domesticity, without exploring these reformers' critiques of class-based exploitation and oppression.

Koven and Michel, like many other historians of women reformers in the Progressive era, view women's agency during the Progressive era primarily in terms of the benefits that accrued to the middle-class women themselves. Koven and Michel wrote: "Maternalism always operated on two levels: it extolled the private virtues of domesticity while simultaneously legitimating women's public relationships to politics and the state, to community, workplace, and marketplace." Koven and Michel do not deny the ways that (in their words) "maternalist ideologies often challenged the constructed boundaries between public and private, women and men, state and civil society." But because women's causal agency is shaped by a class-bound notion of domesticity, the effects of their agency are far from transformative. What the concept of "maternalism" needs, then, is exactly what it lacks-the ability to explain how Protestant women's social activism gained the moral authority that allowed it to become a central feature of American public culture during the decades before woman suffrage became the law of the land.

What do historians miss when they dismiss religion in this way? Although we might compile a very long list, I want to limit my discussion to three kinds of losses in scholarship about Protestant women reformers in the Progressive era: first, they miss the importance of religion as a means by which women reformers-and their constituencies-legitimated their challenges to the status quo; second, they miss the power of religious discourse to define political agendas, especially those associated with "social justice" for working people; third, they miss the power of religious coalitions to forge effective political alliances across Protestant, Catholic and Jewish lines.

Let's begin by looking at the importance of religion as a way of posing alternatives to (in Jane Addams's case) middle class alienation and (in Florence Kelley's case) laissez-faire capitalism. Historians of the social gospel and historians of women have tended to agree that Jane Addams was a secular figure, and by extension they view associates in the vanguard of women's reform as secular. I have to agree that (like Addams) Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop and their closest colleagues in the "women's dominion of reform" did not affiliate with religious institutions. Elsewhere I have argued that these women were recruited into the settlement movement from political rather than religious families, especially when compared to their male equivalents in the settlement movement who overwhelmingly were ministers and the sons of ministers. But this does not mean that they did not draw on religious traditions when they needed them.

Addams was no stranger to religious discourse. We are all familiar with her 1892 essay, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," which catapulted her to a position of spiritual leadership within the settlement movement. In the years between 1889 when she launched Hull House, and 1892, when she wrote that essay, she described her motivation as a new form of Christianity that was expanding the sacred to include the commonplace.

In her words: "I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ's message. They resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which belong to the religious consciousness, whatever that may be, that it is a thing to be proclaimed and instituted apart from the social life of the community. They insist that it shall seek a simple and natural expression in the social organism itself. The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself."

In 1889 Jane Addams sought to save her soul from the damnation of a meaningless life. By 1892 she could articulate that motivation in terms capable of appealing to others. She attached to her work the transformative meaning and power of religion, of Christlike behavior. "I believe that this turning, this renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in Chicago, if you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service, in terms of action, the spirit of Christ."

After the catharsis of this essay, Addams relied less heavily on religious discourse. It had accomplished the heavy lifting of her life transition from Cedarville to Chicago's Nineteenth ward. In Florence Kelley we find a similar pattern. During the moment of her conversion to socialism, Kelley also invoked religious values. Describing the meeting in Zurich where she was converted to socialism, she later wrote: "This might well have been a Quaker meeting. Here was the Golden Rule! Here was Grandaunt Sarah!" When historians ignore religion they miss this crucial assistance that it gave to nineteenth-century Protestant women who challenged the status quo in their lives and in their society.

Let's look at that process early in Florence Kelley's career. She first began speaking before working-class audiences in the spring of 1892 in Chicago at mass rallies held to denounce sweatshop labor in the garment industry. These rallies were sponsored by organized labor, but their tone resembled a religious revival. According to newspaper reports, hundreds of "laboring folk" attended such a meeting in April- men "with Easter halos brushed onto their boots," and bright flowers in their buttonholes; women "in smart dresses" and "Easter bonnets."

All the speakers on the podium spoke the same moral language-labor organizers, socialist attorneys, public-health physicians, and (Kelley's vocation) social investigators. Their language derived from notions of moral economy generated before the industrial revolution and was rooted in religious notions of social justice and human dignity.

In her personal correspondence Kelley drew important distinctions between these "Social Gospel" clerical opinions and her own more focused problem solving. For example, she wrote her friend and ally, Henry Demarest Lloyd, in June of 1892: "Don't you think it's just as well to let . . . the preachers preach, and then when their energies begin to flag, return to the charge ourselves, and make the proper authorities do some practical thing about it?"

Yet the division of labor between herself and the preachers was not so great that she could let them do all the moral work and herself become a mere technocrat. For one thing, she saw herself as a shaper of ministerial opinion. In this same letter to Lloyd, she wrote, "One Monday Morning I told 64 Congregational ministers about our neighbours of the cloak trade." One felt "woe begone" when she insisted that one of his prize parishioners served as "a prop of the [sweating] system."

Living at Hull House in the midst of a working-class neighborhood, Florence Kelley helped Jane Addams construct a beloved community that resembled a religious order. Kelley called her room there a "cell." Addams called her "Sister Kelley." Soon after her arrival, having fled with her three children from an abusive husband, Kelley wrote her mother, ". . . in the few weeks of my stay here I have won for the children and myself many and dear friends whose generous hospitality astonishes me. . . . It is understood that I am to resume the maiden name, and that the children are to have it." Thus this community had the power to transform those who entered it.

In many ways the work of the Hull House residents in Chicago's Nineteenth Ward resembled missionary work abroad. They were sometimes treated like nuns by their Catholic neighbors. When an Italian workingman paid Addams's streetcar fare one day, and she asked the conductor if he knew to whom she was indebted, he roughly replied, "I cannot tell one dago from another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would do it for you as quick as they would for the sisters." In her own culture as an unmarried woman Addams could never have enjoyed the respect that Italians accorded to nuns, but she found that respect on the streets of her new neighborhood.

In their work Addams and Kelley relied on religious metaphors and discourse, if not on religious guidance. For example, they both used the term "righteous" to describe their goals. In Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams wrote:

"That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of a city can seem remote to its purpose only to those who fail to realize that so far as the present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for social righteousness but for social order, a settlement is committed to an effort to understand and, as far as possible, to alleviate it."

Writing a decade earlier in 1901, Florence Kelley admonished members of the National Consumers' League to join the league's "white label campaign" and limit their purchases to goods that were "righteously made." In 1893 during the Pullman Strike, when Kelley was trying to raise money to post bond for imprisoned Eugene Debs, she finally got funds from men she characterized as "arch publicans and sinners" associated with the Democratic party.

Addams and Kelley spoke and thought in these religious metaphors because this discourse was part of the store of cultural knowledge that they brought with them from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, from their childhood religious education into their secular adulthoods. It was part of their contemporary culture. They transformed it, but they still lived inside it.

In addition to linking them with working-class people, this language also connected them to the wider constituency of middle-class Protestant women in churches and women's organizations. Such links were especially visible in Florence Kelley's work, since, as executive director of the National Consumers' League she kept a record of her speaking engagements and printed them in her annual report. In the decade between 1900 and 1910 Florence Kelley spent large amounts of time on the road organizing local branches of the National Consumers' League. For every day spent in her New York City office, she spent a day traveling. She spoke everywhere-in schools, parlors, trade union halls, and churches, and well as before women's clubs and other organizations. She often called her work "preaching" even when she was not speaking from a pulpit.

In addition to shaping some of the most progressive cross-class legislation of the Progressive era, religious discourse was also important as a means of forging ties across confessional lines. Intuitively we might think that the opposite was true-that the use of Protestant discourse would create intolerance toward other faiths. But among these Protestant women reform leaders, appreciation of their own religious heritage made them value other religious traditions.

Let's look at two brief examples of that process. The first is Jane Addams's sensitivity to and respect for the religious rituals of her neighbors. In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams attributed the origin of the settlement's Labor Museum, an entity that earned her John Dewey's life-long respect, to a seder in a neighborhood home.

"A yearning to recover for the household arts something of their early sanctity and meaning, arose strongly within me one evening when I was attending a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious significance of woman's daily activity was still retained. The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had been prepared according to traditional knowledge and with constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the responsibility to make all ready according to mosaic instructions that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly set forth by her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious significance in the ceremony, my mind was filled with shifting pictures of woman's labor with which travel makes one familiar: the Indian women grinding grain outside of their huts as they sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of white-clad Moorish women whom I had once seen waiting their turn at a well in Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream and beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones; the milking, the gardening, the marketing in thousands of hamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and affection at the basis of all family life."

In this example and many others that we might mention, religion for Addams was a way of life that was integrated into each group's construction of what it meant to be human. Her relationship with her own religious heritage was not unproblematic, but through it she connected with others that she encountered.

Another example of cross-confessional cooperation was the one Florence Kelley forged with Father John Ryan in advancing the minimum wage campaign for women between 1912 and 1920. Priest-economist Ryan was the author of A Living Wage, which in 1906 adapted Pope Leo XIII's 1891 edict, Rerum Novarum, into terms that could be understood within American political culture. Ryan defined the family living wage as one sufficient to provide the worker and his family with a "decent livelihood." More than bare subsistence, a decent livelihood was "that amount of the necessities and comforts of life that is in keeping with the dignity of a human being . . . that minimum of conditions which the average person of a given age or sex must enjoy in order to live as a human being should live." Six years later Kelley recruited Ryan for a campaign launched by the National Consumers' League for the passage of state minimum wage laws for women. Together they were enormously successful, achieving the passage of such laws in fifteen states during the decade following 1912, when the first statute was enacted in Massachusetts and raising the wages of young working women to a level capable of supporting them independently of their parents' households. In this effort Kelly also worked closely with Father Edwin O'Hara, who for many years administered Oregon's Minimum Wage Commission, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, who served as vice president of the Maryland consumers' league, and Bishop Regis Canevin of Pittsburgh.

Kelley enjoyed being mistaken for Irish, although the second "e" in her name announced her Scotch-Irish Protestant origins to all who knew that code. But her alliance with Catholic clergymen paled beside her deep personal friendship with Lillian Wald. Of German Jewish decent, Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1893. Wald's Settlement was funded by Jews (principally Jacob Schiff) for Jews. (When she erected a Christmas tree one winter, Wald almost lost her funding.) Kelley lived with Wald for the most productive quarter century of her life between 1899 and 1923. Together they launched a long list of important reform efforts, including the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 and, also that year, the creation of the U.S. Children's Bureau. "Sister Kelley is to return soon, and my heart goes pit a pat," Wald once wrote to Jane Addams.

The ties that Florence Kelley wove among Protestant, Catholic and Jew were to a considerable extent the ties of a politically savvy secular materialist. But if we only see her energy in these terms, we miss the moral and spiritual force that galvanized so many souls to support her and other reform efforts. "Righteousness" rooted in many different religious traditions lent moral authority to women's progressive campaigns on behalf of the working poor.

It seems to me that we can say that these two apparently quite secular figures of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley were part of what we might call the Social Gospel project of the Progressive era. That project was not one thing, but a multifaceted, constantly changing enterprise that they made up as they went along. Protestant religious traditions provided a ballast that sustained their innovations-a sheet anchor that helped them steer through the broad sea of diverse contemporary religious traditions. Without its aid they might never have gotten started, and surely would not have enjoyed the success for which we recognize them today.

Return to Women in Twentieth-Century Protestantism Homepage