Documenting the rise and fall of a feminist reform powerhouse, The Women's Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism is the first comprehensive history of the umbrella organization founded in 1920 by former suffrage leaders in order to coordinate organized women's reform. Encompassing nearly every major national women's organization of its time, including the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, and the National Consumers' League, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) evolved into a powerful lobbying force for the legislative agendas of more than twelve million women. As such, the WJCC was recognized by critics and supporters alike as ''the most powerful lobby in Washington.'' Through a close examination of the WJCC's most consequential and contentious campaigns, Jan Doolittle Wilson demonstrates organized women's strategies, rhetoric, and initial success in generating congressional and grassroots support for their far-reaching, progressive reforms. The committee's early achievements spurred a business-led retaliation that challenged and ultimately limited the programs these women envisioned. By using the WJCC as a lens through which to analyze women's political culture during the 1920s, the book also sheds new light on the initially successful ways women lobbied for social legislation, the limitations of that process for pursuing class-based reforms, and the enormous difficulties faced by women trying to expand public responsibility for social welfare in the years following the nineteenth amendment's passage.''A important addition to our understanding of how 'alliances and divisions among women coexisted and were continually renegotiated, contested, and reconstructed through changing historical and social circumstances'. We see the strength of political connections through the WJCC and the failings of that strength when society turned against any group with a hint of Communist or social leaning,''--Journal of American History ''Wilson's account of the forces arrayed to counter progressive women's organizations constitutes a deeply satisfying rebuttal to recent 'rational choice' models of electoral and organizational politics after women won the vote.

Recommended.''--Choice''Focusing on the robust social justice agenda of the suffrage movement that lived on in the Women's Joint Congressional Committee in the 1920s, Wilson's pathbreaking book shows us how aggressive attacks from opponents like the National Association of Manufacturers scuttled that agenda and shifted American political culture substantially to the right. A compelling and important story.''--Kathryn Kish Sklar, author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900.