'Home and country': Women, nation, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890-1939

Organized in 1890, and claiming over 150,000 members by the 1920s, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a national organization of elite white women descended from Revolutionary soldiers. In my dissertation, I use the DAR to examine female nationalism and patriotism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Through their widespread historic-preservation projects and involvement in progressive reform, DAR women intended that their patriotism (allegiance to what the nation could become) unify the country as never before and save corporate capitalism from its own excesses. Daughters sought to establish national unity also through their pioneering Americanization projects, in which they combatted the cultural fragmentation and leftist radicalism they associated with immigration. Starting in the 1920s, Daughters identified progressive women reformers as vectors of radicalism, and their patriotism focused on the nation as it stood. The DAR's rightward turn situates the First World War and the Russian Revolution alongside women's attainment of voting rights (1920) as transforming events in American women's political history.;Constituting themselves as the subjects, not the objects of nationalism, these elite white women instructed others (women and men) on how to be Americans, citizens, and patriots. Daughters were able to transmute nationalism and patriotism--ideologies usually rendering women as symbols and mothers--into justifications for female political authority because of their race and high social status (both represented by ancestry). DAR nationalism was both civic, in that DAR women defined Americanness as a set of behaviors which almost anyone (including non-European immigrants and Native Americans) could adopt, and ethnic, in that Daughters made themselves arbiters of what was American on the basis of race and descent. Daughters' promotion of North-South reconciliation mandated the exclusion of African Americans from the nation they imagined. Through it all, DAR women strove to Americanize themselves.;In the course of making my arguments, I draw on DAR and personal collections at state historical societies and university libraries nationwide, as well as on a wide range of DAR publications. Most of these archival and printed materials have not previously appeared in any academic history.