^2. See George Sloan, Fifth Annual Report of the Cotton Textile Institute, 21 October 1931, in George Sloan papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, box 6, folder 6. Formed in 1926, the Cotton Textile Institute reflected a trend away from the ideal of unmodified competition toward a degree of cooperation within a given industry. The cotton textile industry manifested the associational impulse early because it experienced a worldwide depression well before 1929. Running mills at night became increasingly common in the 1920s, and by 1930, 64 percent of southern mills reported using night shifts. CTI hoped the ban would first encourage a regular, full-time day shift and then discourage production over and above that regular day shift. See Galambos, Louis, Competition and Cooperation (Baltimore, 1966), 116–18Google Scholar, 143–67, Wrigh, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York, 1986), 207–13Google Scholar, and Hodges, James A., New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1933–1941 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 17–19Google Scholar. On the long-standing tension between cooperation and competition in U.S. political economy, see Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, 1966).Google Scholar

^3. Lee, Muna, “Fight Ouster of Women from Night Textile Jobs as Sex Discrimination,” New York World-Telegram, 14 March 1931, p. 18Google Scholar, and NWP minutes, 30 September and 17 October 1930, National Woman's Party Papers, 1913–1974 (Microfilming Corporation of America, 1979) (hereafter NWP), reel 115. On the NWP, see Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987).Google Scholar

^4. Kelley, Florence, “Ending Women's Night Work in Cotton,” Survey, 15 October 1931, p. 84Google Scholar (emphasis added).

^5. Kelley to Ludwell Denny, editor, 19 March 1931, published in New York World-Telegram, 21 March 1931, draft on reel 32, Records of the National Consumers' League, Library of Congress (hereafter NCL).

^6. For an introduction to the conflict between advocates of sex-based laws and the ERA, see Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism; Becker, Susan, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars (Westport, Conn., 1981)Google Scholar; and Zimmerman, Joan G., “The Jurisprudence of Equality: The Women's Minimum Wage, the First ERA, and Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1905–1923,” Journal of American History 78 (June 1991): 188–225Google Scholar. Little of the literature on the topic includes the 1930s, and virtually none of it examines the South.

^7. See Fifth Annual Report of the CTI, Sloan papers, and Galambos, Competition and Cooperation, 116–18, 143–67.

^8. This article addresses lively debates among scholars of women, gender, and policy formation, as well as scholars unconvinced of the usefulness of gender analysis for policy history. By gender analysis, I mean not only paying attention to women as well as men, but also examining the gender ideologies (and realities) that influence historical actors (male or female). For two examples, see Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, and Kessler-Harris, Alice, “Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939,” in Kerber, Linda, Kessler-Harris, , and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, eds., U.S. History as Women's History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995)Google Scholar. By contrast, for a recent study of the New Deal's origins that disregards both gender and women's activism, see Gordon, Colin, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. For more explicit skepticism of scholars' use of gender in the study of policy formation, see Polsky, Andrew J., “Welfare State History: The Limits of the New,” Journal of Policy History 7:4 (1995): 441–55Google Scholar; Edward D. Berkowitz, “Social Security or Insecurity,” Reviews in American History 24 (1996): 121–31Google Scholar; and Alchon, Guy, “Policy History and the Sublime Immodesty of the Middle-Aged Professor,” Journal of Policy History 9:3 (1997): 358–74Google Scholar. Attention to women and gender need not imply a monocausal, anachronistic, faddish, or self-indulgent explanation of historical change, as these and other critics suggest. Alchon's choice of “academic feminists” as his prime example of a lamentable lack of self-criticism among “middle-aged professors” is puzzling on several counts; more to the point here is his suggestion that gender analysis is ahistorical. Perhaps Alchon counts himself among academic feminists and thus feels the need to scold. In an intriguing earlier article, Alchon posits a connection between “social feminism” and the development of national planning capacity; see his “Mary Van Kleeck and Social-Economic Planning, Journal of Policy History 3:1 (1991): 1–23Google Scholar. For a suggestion that examining women's activism can tell us little new about state development, see Mettler, Suzanne B., “Divided Citizens: State Building, Federalism, and Gender in the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994), esp. 47–48.Google Scholar

^9. On the direct connection between CTI's night work policy and the origins and implementation of the National Recovery Administration, see Galambos, Competition and Cooperation, chaps. 8–11, and Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy. On the FLSA, see Hart, Vivien, “Minimum-Wage Policy and Constitutional Inequality: The Paradox of the FLSA of 1938,” Journal of Policy History 1:3 (1989): 319–43Google Scholar, and Fraser, Steve, Labor Will Rule (New York, 1991), chap. 14Google Scholar. Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” analyzes the vital contribution of the NCL to the drafting, passage, and administration of the NRA and FLSA.

^10. Several scholars have pointed to “maternalism” as a chief force behind wage-hour law. Whether they admire or criticize the alleged maternalists, scholars have used the term in a way that erases variations in political ideology among non-wage-earning white women. Skocpol's, ThedaProtecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) celebrates maternalism as a positive force in Progressive Era state-building. On the other hand, Alice Kessler-Harris's work is representative of a large literature that criticizes the sex-based strategy for reinforcing ideas about women's dependence and for perpetuating the occupational sex segregation that helped keep women's wages low; see, most recently, “The Paradox of Motherhood: Night Work Restrictions in the United States,” in Ulla Wikander, Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, ed., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana, Ill., 1995)Google Scholar. Like most scholars of women's labor laws, Kessler-Harris and Skocpol focus on the period up to 1923, when the Supreme Court struck down a minimum-wage law for women (Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525). This time frame cuts off the crucial transition from sex-based to sex-neutral policy in the 1930s, thereby distorting assessments of the sex-based strategy.

^11. Spindle data from Mason, Lucy Randolph, Standards for Workers in Southern Industry (New York, 1931), 45.Google Scholar

^12. See Wright, Old South, New South; Galambos, Competition and Cooperation; Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy; and Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd et al. , Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^13. On hours laws in the 1920s, see Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy, 13, and Mason, Standards. It was the largest northern textile state, Massachusetts, that limited women's weekly hours to 48; Vermont had a 56-hour law.

^14. Percentages as of 1920; Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy, 11–13, 31; Wright, Old South, New South, 139. By 1929, fifty-one mills had relocated from the Northeast to the Piedmont, according to Hall et al., Like a Family, 197. The NCL sometimes argued that wage and hour laws did not actually increase labor costs, because higher wages and shorter hours increased workers' productivity. Whether or not these laws cost them money, many employers preferred complete control and migrated to avoid regulation.

^15. The National Women's Trade Union League and other labor-affiliated groups also were key supporters of this legislation, and these groups worked closely with the NCL. The NCL was distinctive in making wage-hour legislation its sole focus, and in its legal and administrative expertise. For a recent synthesis of the litetature on the NCL, see Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” chap. 1. See also Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Two Political Cultures in the Progressive Era,” in Kerber, Kessler-Harris, and Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women's History.

^16. The league had more than one hundred state and local branches at its peak. By 1931, the NCL's membership had declined to several thousand. Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” 78–80, discusses the NCL's lack of appeal to black reformers in its early decades. I expected to find evidence of racial exclusiveness in league records, but I did not. Instead I was struck by how many of its leaders were active in black civil rights groups such as the NAACP and later the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Membership figures are from “The National Consumers' League: 1916's Record,” NCL, reel 4. On Kelley, see Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar

^17. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412. American women reformers' sex-based strategy drew on a nineteenth-century history of activism by women workers themselves, as well as on precedents in English factory regulation. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “‘The Greater Part of the Petitioners are Female’: The Reduction of Women's Working Hours in the Paid Labor Force, 1840–1917,” in Cross, Gary, ed., Worktime and Industrialization: An International History (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar. None of the minimum-wage laws were in the South, which further enhanced the region's competitive advantage, at least until the Adkins v. Children's Hospital decision (261 U.S. 525) in 1923 suspended active enforcement of all state wage laws.

^18. Felix Frankfurter opined in 1922 that Bunting (243 U.S. 426 [1917]) left the constitutionality of men's hours laws unresolved (Mason, Standards, 27–28). The NWP, on the other hand, assumed that Bunting clearly reversed the Lochner ruling. Significantly, the NCL had written a brief in defense of the Oregon hours law and arranged for Frankfurter to argue the case. Thus the NCL did back sex-neutral laws when it believed they had a chance of being sustained. As of 1931, a few states did have on their books hours laws that applied to both men and women, but these permitted long hours and were so loosely enforced that they were unlikely to provoke a challenge in the courts. The 1917 Stettkr v. O'Hara ruling (243 U.S. 629) sustained women's minimum wage, 4–4. Not until 1937 did the Supreme Court overturn Adkins by sustaining a state minimum-wage law (for women), in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (300 U.S. 379). For an overview of state labor laws and rulings up to 1932, see Brandeis, Elizabeth, “Labor Legislation,” in Commons, John, ed., History of Labor in the United States, vol. 3 (New York, 1935).Google Scholar

^19. In December 1932, Senator Hugo Black introduced the AFL-backed thirty-hourweek bill; Hunnicutt, Benjamin K., Work Without End (Philadelphia, 1988), 150Google Scholar, and see Brandeis, “Labor Legislation,” esp. 558–59. Even later in the 1930s, the AFL was not at the forefront of the fight for men's hours or minimum-wage laws, although the CIO, which emerged in 1935, was.

^20. For an interpretation that stresses these risks, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work (New York, 1982), chap. 7, and “Paradox of Motherhood.” The NCL's answer to this problem was that the relatively small numbers of women in specific occupations who were disadvantaged by such policies, such as printers or streetcar conductors, could win exemptions from the law. In placing the burden of winning exemption on the workers, this answer was a weak one.

^21. With regard to the southern “lady,” purity and submissiveness, ideals of (white) “true womanhood” throughout nineteenth-century America, took on special importance in the South, where control of white women's sexuality was vital to upholding white racial supremacy; Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Revolt Against Chivalry (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. See Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” chap. 2, for fuller discussion.

^22. For example, in 1891, an investigation of Georgia mills was denounced as an assault on the honor of millowners, “patriotic Georgians” who had come to the rescue of needy Confederate widows. See Ann Whites, Lee, “The De Graffenreid Controversy: Class, Race, and Gender in the New South,” Journal of Southern History 54 (August 1988): 449–78Google Scholar. For a similar incident in the 1920s, see Nasstrom, Kathryn, “‘More Was Expected of Us': The North Carolina League of Women Voters and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s,” North Carolina Historical Review 68 (July 1991): 307–19.Google Scholar

^23. Southern cotton textiles employed about 130,000 women in 1930, virtually all of them white. The next largest manufacturing occupation for southern women was tobacco processing, which employed about 30,000 women, black and white, in about equal numbers but under very unequal conditions. See Mason, Standards; Wright, Old South, New South; and Janiewski, Dolores, “Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor: Managerial Ideology and the Construction of Gender, Race, and Class Relations in Southern Industry,” in Baron, Ava, ed., Work Engendered (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).Google Scholar

^24. The strikes often began spontaneously, but they reflected long-building resentment over wage cuts, long hours, and, in particular, the “stretch-out” system of raising productivity by increasing the number of machines each operative had to attend; see Hall et al, Like a Family, 197–99 and 295–98; Marshall, F. Ray, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chaps. 7–8Google Scholar; Frederickson, Mary, “‘I Know Which Side I’m On’: Southern Women in the Labor Movement in the Twentieth Century,” in Milkman, Ruth, ed., Women, Work, and Protest (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Salmond, John, Gastonia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995).Google Scholar

^25. I have reconstructed the Southern Council's history from the papers of Lucy Randolph Mason in “Operation Dixie”: the C.I.O. Organizing Committee Papers, Duke University (hereafter OpDix), the Adele Clark Papers at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and the NWP Papers, as well as numerous scattered sources.

^26. In 1930, 63 percent of employed black women were in domestic work and 27 percent were in agricultural work, as opposed to 23 percent and 4 percent of white women; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Statistics of the Black Population in the United States (Washington, D.C., n.d.)Google Scholar. Most of the 2 percent of textile workers who were black were men in custodial jobs; see Janiewski, “Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor,” 86. On the ideological constructions of agriculture and domestic service as too private for regulation, see Hart, “Minimum-Wage Policy and Constitutional Inequality,” and Palmer, Phyllis, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the U.S., 1920–1945 (Philadelphia, 1989).Google Scholar

^27. For example, in 1920, a black women's caucus led by Lugenia Burns Hope of Atlanta proposed an agenda that did not include protective labor legislation; Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 85. On black women's reform activities in Atlanta, see also Jacqueline A. Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope (Athens, Ga., 1989), and Neverdon-Morton, Cynthia, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989)Google Scholar. See also Gordon, Linda, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890–1945,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 559–90.Google Scholar

^28. See below for more evidence of the Southern Council's racial liberalism. Here I disagree with Gwendolyn Mink's assessment of the women's labor standards campaigns (she does not examine the South); Mink, , The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995)Google Scholar. On southern reformers' white supremacist motives, see Kirby, Jack, Darkness at the Dawning (Philadelphia, 1972)Google Scholar. Local black groups in some cities began developing “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” campaigns in the 1930s, but not in the deep South; see Moreno, Paul, “Racial Proportionalism and the Origins of Employment Discrimination Policy, 1933–1950,” Journal of Policy History 8:4 (1996): 410–39.Google Scholar

^29. In 1929, the NCL had sent researcher Marguerite Marsh south to investigate working conditions, and Kelley claimed that Marsh's work contributed to the formation of the Southern Council. Marion Roydhouse suggests the Southern Council was conceived at a YWCA conference in July 1930, following a meeting in North Carolina of southern liberals upset by the 1929 strikes. Lucy Mason was among the fourteen women at the formative gathering of the Council on 3 October 1930; the YWCA paid her fare to Atlanta. NCL minutes, 27 March 1930, 11 February 1931, NCL reel 2; Roydhouse, “The ‘Universal Sisterhood of Women’: Women and Labor Reform in North Carolina, 1900–1932” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1980), 325Google Scholar, 355; Southern Council minutes, 3 October 1930, Clark papers, box 34.

^30. Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” explores Mason's ideas and methods as an NCL leader. See also Salmond, John, Miss Lucy of the CIO (Athens, Ga., 1988).Google Scholar

^31. I believe Galambos is incorrect in implying that the NCL and Southern Council would not have been mobilized by a general ban on night work and were attracted only because it was packaged as a “humanitarian” measure for women and children; Galambos, Competition and Cooperation, 151–62, followed by Wright, Old South, New South, 212. Significantly, labor editors applauded the measure as a step toward eliminating all night work, not as a way to discourage women's wage-earning; see Journal of Labor (Atlanta) editorials on 3 and 24 October 1930, 27 February and 27 March 1931.

^32. Mason described this need for discretion to liberal northern manufacturer Henry P. Kendall. See Mason to Kendall, 17 February and 4 April 1931, OpDix reel 62.

^33. Mason to Robert Arnold, 28 January 1931, OpDix reel 62. As Mason was urging a bill that would have covered some black women's occupations, this was not a coded argument for maintaining white supremacy by protecting white mothers and children.

^34. Mason, , The Shorter Day and Women Workers (Richmond, Va., 1922)Google Scholar. On Ames, see Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, esp. 27–28.

^35. For more on the North Carolina bill and Mason's work with the Southern Council, see Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism.”

^36. It was assumed from the outset that working-class women and professional or upper-class women would have separate organizations. The NWP's offer to Casey went out the same day that the NWP received a batch of clippings about Lucy Mason's efforts with the Southern Council. See Muna Lee to Casey, 21 February 1931, and Marion Read to Lee, same date, NWP 45.

^37. In 1922 a nationwide organizing drive had resulted in the formation of WP chapters in a few southern states, but not in Georgia. By 1930, NWP minutes and newsletters contained little reference to activities in any southern state. See Pardo, Thomas, The NWP Papers, 1913–1971: A Guide to the Microfilm Edition (Sanford, N.C., 1979)Google Scholar, and the NWP publication Equal Rights.

^38. Muna Lee (hereafter ML) to Jane Norman Smith, 26 February 1931, NWP 45. Between 1911 and 1914, Casey played prominent roles in strikes in Cleveland, Kalamazoo, and St. Louis, before returning to New York to work for women's suffrage with Harriot Stanton Blatch's Women's Political Union; Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” 160–64.

^39. The NWP used Casey's reports for a column, “A Workingwoman in Georgia,” that became a regular feature of the weekly bulletin Equal Rights. See Equal Rights, 11 April 1931 and thereafter.

^40. Casey reported that “[It doesn’t seem?] that any [mills] in this place laid off women from night work. I can't seem to find any around Atlanta.” JC to ML, 9 April 1931, NWP 45. No letters from workers are in the NWP's otherwise comprehensive correspondence files for February or March. For Lee's claims, see Lee, , “Fight Ouster,” New York World Telegram, 14 March 1931Google Scholar; also see Equal Rights, 11 April 1931.

^41. “When women are sent home, men are sent home also because those operating spindles are women and it would be a loss to run without the spindles. I asked [the manufacturers' association] if men might be trained to handle the spindles and they said Georgia men would not fit in to that work. … They said it can't be done. If there is a 40–hour law for women the mills will work on a 40-hour schedule.” JC to ML, n.d. [April 1931], NWP 45. Although some employers apparently shared the NCL's belief that only women could or would do certain mill tasks, by 1932 some mills did run all night without women or minors. Men may have been doing “women's” jobs (if so, it is unclear whether they did so at “women's” wages), or perhaps only some mill functions occurred at night. Sixth Annual Report of CTI, 19 October 1932, Sloan box 6, folder 6; for a report that one mill had shifted six women to days and put six men on at night in their places, see JC to ML, 16 April 1931, NWP 45. Galambos, Competition and Cooperation, 165, implies that the ban did not succeed in curbing production because during the Depression plenty of men were willing to work at women's wages; Wright, Old South, New South, 213, and Hall et al., Like a Family, 235, follow Galambos. However, we do not really know to what degree men did take over “women's” jobs in the mills at night (or what they were paid). Sociologist Ruth Milkman argues for the persistence of occupational sex-typing during the Depression in Milkman, Gender at Worke: The Dynamics of job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1987).Google Scholar

^42. JC to ML, n.d. [April 1931], and 6 June 1931, NWP 45.

^43. JC to ML, n.d. [April 1931], NWP 45.

^44. Equal Rights, 22 and 29 August 1931, on the Georgia Industrial Council. Only three of the women Casey signed up were textile workers; others were shopkeepers and sales clerks. One of the mill women worked three hours a day, from 9 P.M. to midnight, not a typical arrangement.

^45. See ML telegram to JC, 14 August 1931; JC to ML, 15 August; Mrs. Pearl Henry telegram and letter to ML, 17 and 18 August 1931, NWP 45. ML to JC, n.d. [June 1931], NWP 45. In comparing the efforts of the two sides to mobilize working-class women, it should be noted that workers adopting the Woman's Party position generally had employers' support, whereas workers demanding protective laws generally did not. Consumers' League leaders worried that workers could lose their jobs for openly backing labor regulation, so the NCL avoided publicizing the names of workers who cooperated with its legislative program. See Mason to Louise McLaren of the Southern Summer School, 6 March 1933, NCL reel 34.

^46. The city's most affluent women did not join the Woman's Party or the Southern Council; Casey and Lucy Mason made similar complaints about the difficulty of mobilizing in the South the elite women that northern and midwestern organizations could count on for time and money. On the Atlanta branch officers, see Equal Rights, 15 August and 22 August 1931, and JC to ML, 26 June and 28 July 1931, and undated letter misidentified as [July 1931\, all NWP 45. For Seydell's Chamber of Commerce affiliation, see Who's Who in America (1938–39), 2238, and also her papers at The Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta.

^47. On the Chamber of Commerce and the “Atlanta spirit,” see Bartley, Numan V., The Creation of Modern Georgia, 2d ed. (Athens, Ga., 1990), 124Google Scholar, and Roth, Darlene, “Matronage: Patterns in Women's Organizations, Atlanta, Georgia, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1978)Google Scholar. On anti-union efforts by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, see also Marshall, Labor in the South, 45.

^48. JC to ML, 28 and 31 July 1931, NWP 45. The millowner's subsequent refusal to let the NWP publish a photo of the bus was a disappointment, because the NWP had wanted to publicize the participation of the three “mill girls.”

^49. This policy was not without precedent. In 1922, when white southern members asked for a national policy excluding blacks, NWP leader Alice Paul compromised by promising not to recruit black women. Florence Kelley, still a leader of the NWP in 1921, “expressed chagrin that the party had ‘welshed on the Negro question.’” See Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 68–72. Not all NWP members were hostile to black civil rights; at a memorial tribute to Inez Millholland in 1924, the omission of her civil rights activities from the program triggered several resignations. On southern women's interracial organizing, see Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry.

^50. In fairness to Casey, she concluded, “I could not have refused without forfeiting something in character.” JC to ML, 23 and 27 May 1931, NWP 45. This is rare evidence of a black group expressing interest in the sex-based legislation/ERA debate. The Atlanta School of Social Work evolved at the initiative of Lugenia Burns Hope, who had founded the Neighborhood Union settlement house in 1906 and the Social Service Institute at Morehouse College in 1919. It was Forrester B. Washington, director of the training program for black social workers, who approached Casey; Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, 83–85.

^51. Cott observes that the woman's rights tradition historically has been biased toward women “who perceive themselves first and foremost as ‘woman,’ who can gloss over their class, racial, and other status identifications because those are culturally dominant and therefore relatively invisible.” Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 9. See also Boris, Eileen, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics 2:2 (Summer 1995): 160–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^52. For example, see Mason, Standards, 22, 35.

^53. Like many white interracialists, Ames assumed white reformers would direct the movement. Unlike Lucy Mason, Ames would oppose federal action against lynching, favoring state-level laws. See Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry.

^54. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 53, citing Ames to Lillian Smith, 31 December 1941.

^55. Nobody on the Southern Council was associated with the Chamber of Commerce. Southern Council women's affiliations were gleaned from many sources, including Casey's letters, and folders on the Southern Council in Adele Clark's papers. YWCA Industrial Secretaries, and to a lesser extent Methodist women, were at the forefront of local efforts for race and labor reform; see Roydhouse, “The ‘Universal Sisterhood of Women,’” and Frederickson, Mary, “Shaping a New Society: Methodist Women and Industrial Reform in the South, 1880–1940,” in Thomas, Hilah F. and Keller, Rosemary Skinner, eds., Women in New Worlds (Nashville, Tenn., 1981)Google Scholar. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, found that few Business & Professional Women's Club leaders supported the antilynching fight. On the League of Women Voters in Atlanta and Georgia, see the papers of Eleonore Raoul and Josephine Wilkins, Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta.

^56. Although some southern unionists were vehemently white supremacist, this Atlanta group seems to have been less so, perhaps because of the influence of the racially liberal Nance. Emmett Quinn was president of the Atlanta Machinists' Union and a pallbearer at the funeral of Mrs. Jerome Jones, wife of the editor of the Journal of Labor (Atlanta). A. Steve Nance was chairman of the Georgia Federation of Labor's legislative committee in the early 1930s. A widely respected figure and receptive to working with women's groups, Nance would become president of the Georgia Federation until leaving the AFL for the CIO. For union support of the Southern Council, see Georgia Federation of Labor Proceedings, 15–17 April 1931, Brunswick, Georgia, in State Labor Proceedings microfiche collection, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland; and Journal of Labor, 30 January 1931, p. 4; 13 March 1931, p. 4; 14 May 1931, pp. 1, 13.

^57. This achievement was impressive, given the council's reliance on the local LWV and YWCA, whose national organizations vigorously opposed the Woman's Party position; JC to ML, n.d. [March 1931\, 30 April 1931, and n.d. [May 1931]. On the council's disarray, see JC to ML, 18 and 26 June, and n.d. [July] 1931.

^58. JC to ML, 30 April 1931, NWP 45, for example. On southern working-class white women's modernity, see Hall, J. D., “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 354–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^59. Lee, Muna to Howard, Roy, New York World-Telegram, 23 March 1931, NWP 45.Google Scholar

^60. See Kelley, letter to editor, New York World-Telegram, 21 March 1931, NCL reel 32, and Mason, Standards for Southern Workers. Zimmerman, “Jurisprudence of Equality,” discusses the legal conflict between the NWP's “freedom of contract” orientation and the NCL's “sociological jurisprudence” in the early 1920s.

^61. JC to ML, n.d. [June 1931 #12], NWP 45. See also the “Workingwoman in Georgia” series in Equal Rights, 30 May, 13 June, and 27 June 1931, for rosy portraits of life in the mills. On the LaGrange mills, see Whitley, Donna Jean, Fuller E. Callaway and Textile Mill Development in LaGrange, 1895–1920 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, which documents millowners' virulent anti-unionism and also notes that LaGrange conditions were above average.

^62. Miss Laurence L. Thompson to Georgians, 18 July 1931. Casey later stood by Thompson's letter when a woman professor from Shorter College protested its inaccuracy; JC to ML, 8 August 1931, NWP 45.

^63. JC to ML, n.d., late June 1931, mistakenly identified as [July 1931], NWP 45.

^64. JC to ML, 20 April and 6 June 1931. Georgia was indeed strongly anti-union; even in 1939 (after both the AFL and CIO had enjoyed significant growth) only 7 percent of Georgia's nonagricultural workforce belonged to a union. This compared to 11 percent on average in the South and 22 percent outside the South; Marshall, Labor in the South, 299, 102.

^65. JC to ML, 3 August 1931, NWP 45. JC to ML, 26 June 1931, describes her telling the Georgia Federation of Labor's Nance, “I hear you will keep ‘women’ out of legislation,” to which he responded, “It isn't anything about women. It is industry.”

^66. H.B. 120, a bill to prohibit employment of women and minors between 7 P.M. and 6 A.M. in manufacturing. Introduced on 1 July by three Richmond representatives, H.B. 120 was not the Southern Council's own bill, but the council supported it. See Georgia House Journal, 1931, 298, 612.

^67. JC to ML, 16 July 1931, NWP 45.

^68. JC to ML, 12 and 16 July 1931, NWP 45. At the hearing, two representatives of the “Cotton Men” opposed H.B. 120 and SCWCI.

^69. JC to ML, n.d. [August and September 1931], NWP 45, and Georgia House Journal, 1931, 612.

^70. Equal Rights, 15 August and 7 November 1931.

^71. ML to JC, 26 September 1931, NWP 45, and see Equal Rights, 31 October 1931 and after on Casey in New England.

^72. See Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” chap. 4.

^73. Again, in seeking immediate improvements for women in major female-employing industries (where regulating women's, hours often effectively regulated men's as well), the NCL tended to discount the negative effect of sex-based policy on the opportunities of women trying to break into male-dominated occupations.

^74. Kessler-Harris, “The Paradox of Motherhood.”

^75. Sixth Annual Report of the Cotton Textile Institute, 19 October 1932, box 6, Sloan Papers, and see Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy.

^76. Thus it is incorrect to credit these sex-neutral policies to NWP initiative. See Storrs, “Civilizing Capitalism,” chaps. 3 and 5. Even after the Supreme Court upheld the sex-neutral Fair Labor Standards Act in 1941, the League maintained that in many states, political opposition to regulating men's labor standards necessitated keeping open the option of a women-only approach. The league spearheaded the opposition of labor-oriented women's groups and trade unions to the Equal Rights Amendment until the 1960s.

^77. See “Apparel Industry Group Moves to End Sweatshops” and “Accord to Combat Sweatshop Labor Faces Obstacles,” New York Times, 9 and 13 April 1997, both p.1.

^78. Wendy Sarvasy suggests that scholars' focus on NWP leader Alice Paul has obscured n important left-leaning faction of the Party; see her “Beyond the Difference vs. quality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism, Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist elfare State,” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 329–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I would argue to the contrary that scholars have not paid enough attention to the right-leaning tendencies of the interwar NWP. Most scholars have discounted accusations of reactionary behavior by the NWP as propaganda from the NCL. Although there were leftists in the NWP in the 1930s, they were not making NWP policy.