Exercising the franchise, building the body politic: The League of Women Voters and public policy, 1945--1964

This dissertation examines the legislative agenda of the national League of Women Voters during the period of its greatest growth, 1945--1964. It emphasizes the ties between the post-World War II League of Women Voters and its Progressive forbearers that supported international cooperation to maintain world peace, free trade, and an expansion of the administrative responsibilities of the federal government. It examines the specific issues that the League supported between 1946 and 1964, emphasizing five broad subject areas and fourteen pieces of national legislation on the League public policy agenda. Work on these clusters of issues---world peace, economic issues, civil liberties, the conservation of natural resources, and urban problems---provided women political activity outside the boundaries of the domestic sphere without challenging the accepted gendered position of women in American society.; Many feminist historians are critical of the League for pursuing a gender-neutral agenda that it considered to be "in the public interest" rather than a feminist agenda that promoted female equality, but none of these historians has adequately investigated what the League did. The League has been particularly criticized for not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment until 1972. By analyzing the national organization's actions related to specific pieces of national legislation, this dissertation demonstrates how the League working through its local chapters trained women for the second wave of feminism without expressly endorsing the ERA. This dissertation argues that although the League did not directly challenge the gendered position of women, containment theory is not adequate as a category of analysis for interpreting the League's pursuit of progressive reforms. The evidence shows that although the national organization actually had only limited influence on the making of national public policy, women working through the League on local issues were transformed into feminists by the time the second wave of feminism began.