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Women's Reform Organizations and Wartime Mobilization in World War I-Era Los Angeles1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2011

Lynn Dumenil
Lynn Dumenil*
Affiliation:
Occidental College
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

During World War I, the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense served as an intermediary between the federal government and women's voluntary associations. This study of white middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen in Los Angeles, California reveals ways in which local women pursued twin goals of aiding the war effort while pursuing their own, pre-existing agendas. Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women's suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 213 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2011

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Footnotes

1

This research was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the John Randolph Haynes Foundation. I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their insightful comments: Norman S. Cohen, Ellen Carol DuBois, Susan A. Glenn, Elliott J. Gorn, Daniel Horowitz, Elaine Tyler May, Devra Weber, Occidental College History Department Colloquium members, and anonymous reviewers for this journal. A conference paper on this topic appeared as “Women, Maternalism, and World War I Mobilization” in Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies, ed. Ari Helo (Helsinki, 2008).

References

2 Blair, Emily Newell, The Woman's Committee United States Council of National Defense: An Interpretative Report (Washington, 1920), 35Google Scholar.

3 The role of voluntarism in World War I mobilization among other combatants appears in Darrow, Margaret H., French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (New York, 2000), 52–97Google Scholar; Grayzel, Susan R., Women and the First World War (New York, 2002), 27–50Google Scholar; Grayzel, , Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, 1999), 190–225Google Scholar; Higonnet, Margaret Randolph et al. , Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, 1987)Google Scholar; Horne, John, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the importance of voluntary associations in the United States during the war, begin with Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Breen, William J., Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917–1919 (Westport, CT, 1984)Google Scholar offers a valuable chapter on women's mobilization through the Council of National Defense; but more substantial is Penelope Brownell, “The Women's Committees of the First World War: Women in Government, 1917–1919” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2002); Jensen, Kimberly, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana, 2008)Google Scholar addresses a wide variety of women's mobilization activities outside of the Council of National Defense; Zeiger, Susan, In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919 (Ithaca, NY, 1999)Google Scholar examines U.S. women who served abroad. On voluntarism, see also Cuff, Robert D., “The Cooperative Impulse and War: The Origins of the Council of National Defense and Advisory Commission” in Building the Organizational Society, ed. Israel, Jerry (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; and Kennedy, David, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. Other general studies of America and World War I include Schaffer, Ronald, America in the Great War: The Rise of the Welfare State (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; and Zieger, Robert H., America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

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5 The files for Los Angeles's men's and women's councils of defense have been lost. However, the Seaver Center for Western History Research has a collection of correspondence and materials that includes reports made at the end of the war on the activities of various groups in the city, such as the WCND, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Red Cross. In addition, federal archives of the WCND, the Food Administration, and the Children's Bureau, among others, offer material specific to Los Angeles. The best documented women's organizations in Los Angeles are the YWCA (Urban Archives collection, University Library, California State University at Northridge, [hereafter Cal State Northridge]), and the Friday Morning Club (Huntington Library). The Huntington Library and the Special Collections Library at the University of California, Los Angeles have the papers of several key women activists. The Los Angeles Times also provided extensive coverage of women's activities during the war.

6 For women's volunteer efforts and class in Great Britain, Summers, Anne, “Public Functions, Private Premises: Female Professional Identity and the Domestic Service Paradigm in Britain, c. 1850–1930” in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, ed. Melman, Billie (London, 1998), 353–76Google Scholar. On the Civil War, see Scott, Anne Firor, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana, 1991), 58–77Google Scholar; and Attie, Jeanie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar. On women, World War I, and voluntarism, see Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 83–116.

7 For a comprehensive discussion of Los Angeles clubwomen in this period, Anastasia J. Christman, “The Best Laid Plans: Women's Clubs and City Planning in Los Angeles, 1890–1930” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2000), 41–89. On California club women as city boosters, rather than maternalist reformers, Simpson, Lee M. A., Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880–1940 (Stanford, 2004)Google Scholar.

8 On women, war, and suffrage, Lemons, J. Stanley, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, 1973), 5–10Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987), 59–60Google Scholar; DuBois, Ellen Carol, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997), 204–10Google Scholar; Steinson, Barbara J., American Women's Activism in World War I (New York, 1982), 251–349Google Scholar; and Graham, Sara Hunter, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996), 100–02Google Scholar.

9 On the difficulties facing the Woman's Committee, Council of National Defense, see Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, 115–36; and Steinson, American Women's Activism, 307–28. For an excellent firsthand account of the Woman's Committee, see Blair, The Woman's Committee.

10 Blair, The Woman's Committee, 33, 52, 55. The WCND was not the only vehicle for women to express their claims to citizenship in the context of war; see Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva; and Morgan, Francesca, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill, 2005), 101–26Google Scholar.

11 On women, reform, and the state, Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana, 1994), 3–11Google Scholar; Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991), 97–103Google Scholar; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, ed., Mothers of a New World: Maternalistic Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

12 The foreign-born poulation statistics are for 1910. Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850–1990,” Table 22, United States Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab22.html (accessed Oct. 29, 2009). A local study conducted during the war years put the foreign-born population at 25 percent, listing 55,000 Northern European, 49,250 Southern European, 35,000 Mexican, 2,000 Chinese, and 7,500 Japanese immigrants. These figures are clearly for a geographic area greater than the City of Los Angeles itself, but the report did not specify whether it referred to the metropolitan region or some other area. Young Women's Christian Association, “International Institute for Immigrant Girls,” (Los Angeles, n.d.), box 1, World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center.

13 No study specifically on Los Angeles in World War I yet exists. For general studies, Spalding, William A., History and Reminiscences, Los Angeles City and County, California, vol. 1 (Los Angeles, 1931), 383–400Google Scholar; McWilliams, Carey, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York, 1946)Google Scholar; Rolle, Andrew and Verge, Arthur, California: A History, 6th ed. (Wheeling, IL, 2003) 243Google Scholar; Perry, Louis B. and Perry, Richard S., A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911–1941 (Berkeley, 1963), 106–62Google Scholar; and Starr, Kevin, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

14 On the strength of the WCND in California, see Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, 137; and Blair, The Woman's Committee, 108. For the relationship between organized club women and war mobilization, Brownell, “The Women's Committees of the First World War,” 24–25, 44, 46. Also, West, Elizabeth Cassidy, “‘Yours for Home and Country’: The War Work of the South Carolina Woman's Committee,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 59 (2001): 59–68Google Scholar; and Boynton, Virginia R., “‘First in importance’: The Illinois Woman's Committee during World War I,” Journal of Illinois History 6 (Winter, 2003): 177–94Google Scholar.

15 Album 3, pp. 2, 7, 62, 109, 112, 148, 154, 157–58; and album 4, pp. 4, 23, Friday Morning Club Collection, Huntington Library. News clippings dated Mar. 21, Apr. 18, and June 1915, Ebell Club Scrapbook, Ebell Club Archives, Los Angeles.

16 War Activities of the Woman's Committee Los Angeles City Unit of the Council of National Defense (Los Angeles, 1919)Google Scholar, 4, 20, Reports of State and Local Councils, Field Division, Records of the Council of National Defense, folder 15-E2, box 956, Record Group [RG] 62, National Archives, College Park, MD; “Women's War Service Army,” typescript in box 2, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center.

17 Annual Report of the War Activities of the Woman's Committee of the Los Angeles City Unit of the Council of Defense (Los Angeles, 1918?), p. 3Google Scholar, Special Collections, University of California Los Angeles. Little is available on the war work of Catholic women's groups. See Catholic Women's Club Bulletin “United War-Work Number,” 1 (Nov. 1918). Scattered material on Jewish women's war work may be found in the local Jewish newspaper, for example, B'nai B'rith Messenger, May 3, Oct. 4, 1918.

18 Scant references appear on black women's war work in the city's African American newspaper, the California Eagle. On racial and ethnic barriers in white women's clubs, Raftery, Judith, “Los Angeles Clubwomen and Progressive Reform” in California Progressivism Revisited, eds. Deverell, William and Sitton, Tom (Berkeley, 1994), 144–74Google Scholar; Davis, Clark, “An Era and Generation of Civic Engagement: The Friday Morning Club in Los Angeles, 1891–1931,” Southern California Quarterly 84 (Summer, 2002): 135–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Mexicans in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, Deverell, William, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley, 2004)Google Scholar; Monroy, Douglas, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar; and Sanchez, George, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

19 Los Angeles YWCA Board of Managers Minutes, Sept.-Oct. 1918, file 5, box 5, Young Women's Christian Association of Los Angeles Collection, 1894–1979, Cal State Northridge (hereafter YWCA of Los Angeles). Instead of establishing an African American branch, the national headquarters sent out a trained black leader to work with a group who had organized a club. “Report of the Young Women's Christian Association in California for the Year 1917–1918,” p. 5, State Council of Defense, box 4, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center. The national WCND offered no encouragement for organizing African American women into branches, leaving the matter to the individual states; Brownell, “The Women's Committees,” 92.

20 Blair, The Woman's Committee, 25. On Los Angeles's Progressive Era women's clubs, Raftery, “Los Angeles Clubwomen”; Christman, “The Best Laid Plans”; and Davis, “An Era and Generation of Civil Engagement.” On African American women's mobilization at the national level, Morgan, Francesca, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill, 2005), 117–25Google Scholar.

21 News clipping, The Examiner, Apr. 27, 1918, album 5, p. 14, Friday Morning Club Collection, Huntington Library; B'nai B'rith Messenger, Oct. 11, 1918.

22 On the dynamics of leadership in voluntary associations, see Dumenil, Lynn, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 148.

23 The Club Woman, State Council of Defense Number [n.d.], p. 11, box 22, John Randolph Haynes Collection, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. Friday Morning Club Collection: album 5, p. 80, also album 6, p. 6, and news clippings, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 22, 1917, album 4, p. 226, and Apr. 10, 1918, album, p. 6. News clipping: Los Angeles Examiner, Mar. 31, 1918, box 105, Clara Baker Burdette Collection, Huntington Library. On the suffrage campaign and California clubwomen, see Gullett, Gayle, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, 2000)Google Scholar.

24 Los Angeles Times, Mar. 13, 1917. Los Angeles women were active in California's General Federation of Women's Club's Women's Legislative Council, founded in 1912, designed to promote what historian Sherry Katz called a “gender-specific political agenda.” Sherry Jean Katz, “Dual Commitments: Feminism, Socialism, and Women's Political Activism in California, 1890–1920” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 493. Also, Raftery, “Los Angeles Clubwomen and Progressive Reform”; and Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 150–81, 189–91, 202–05. On the YWCA's Americanization work, Wild, Mark, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 2005), 71Google Scholar.

25 California Women's Committee of the Councils of National and State Defense, “Department of Maintenance of Existing Social Agencies,” (Los Angeles, n.d.), pamphlet in Woman's Committee Central Correspondence, “California,” box 484, RG 62. Also, typescript proceedings, national Woman's Committee conference, “Department of Maintenance of Existing Social Service Agencies,” May 1918, Woman's Committee Central Correspondence, “Conference File,” box 53, RG 62. Brownell, “The Women's Committees,” 34.

26 “Report by Frances Noel, member of Social Insurance Commission of the State of California,” May 2, 1917, no. 21, box 23, Haynes Collection.

27 On war and the continuation of reform, Hirschfeld, Charles, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” Mid-America 45 (July 1963): 139–56Google Scholar; Davis, Allen F., “Welfare Reform and World War I,” American Quarterly 19 (Fall 1967): 516–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trattner, Walter I., “Progressivism and World War I: A Reappraisal,” Mid-America 44 (July 1962): 131–45Google Scholar; McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2003), 279–313Google Scholar; Thompson, John A., Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 “The Department of Americanization,” State Council of Defense, box 18, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center; “Report of the Women's State Council of Defense of California, from June 1, 1917 to January 1, 1919,” p. 42, Reports of State and Local Councils, Field Division, folder 15-E2, box 956, RG 62. The most comprehensive pre-war Americanization program was the YWCA's, which according to historian Mark Wild, created an International Institute “which hired five full-time and seven part-time secretaries who spoke a total of twenty-two languages. In addition to running English classes, the secretaries ran a clearinghouse that informed immigrants of employment opportunities, naturalization procedures, educational requirements for children, health care opportunities, and ethnic organizations in their neighborhoods.” Mark Wild, Street Meeting, 71.

29 “The Department of Americanization,” State Council of Defense, box 18, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center.

30 Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 14–15. For a contrasting view that emphasizes conservative women's nationalism, Brown, “Women's Committees in the First World War,” 134–35. For more on California women and Americanization, Van Nuys, Frank, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Lawrence, KS, 2002), 33–69Google Scholar; and Gullett, Gayle, “Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California, 1915–1920,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (Feb. 1995): 71–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 National Child Welfare Association, “Publicity Posters and Exhibition Panels are Essential to the Success of Your Children's Year Campaign,” box 2, World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center.

32 Peixotto, Jessica B., “The Children's Year and the Woman's Committee,” Annals of the American Academy 79 (Sept. 1918): 260CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another contemporary description of Children's Year, Rude, Anna E., “The Children's Year Campaign,” American Journal of Public Health 9 (May 1919): 346–51CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For historical accounts, Lindenmeyer, Kriste, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–46 (Urbana, 1997), 71–75Google Scholar; and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 97–103. On the European context, Huss, Marie-Monique, “Pronatalism and the Popular Ideology of the Child in Wartime France: The Evidence of the Picture Postcard” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, eds. Wall, Richard and Winter, Jay (Cambridge, 1988), 329–69Google Scholar.

33 “County Council of Defense for Los Angeles County Sept. 27, 1918,” doc 1363 H, box 83, Correspondence, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County Archives; Los Angeles Times, Sept. 1, 1918; “Report of the Women's Committee of the State Council of Defense of California, from June 1, 1917 to January 1, 1919,” p. 107, folder 15-E2, box 956, RG 62.

34 “Children's Year Program, California Women's Committee of Councils of National and State Defense: Better Children for California,” [n.d.], box 1, World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center; “County Council of Defense for Los Angeles County Sept. 27, 1918,” doc 1363 H, box 83, Correspondence, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County Archives.

35 Westbrook, Robert B., “Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Political Obligation in World War II” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, eds. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (Chicago, 1993), 198Google Scholar. Westbrook draws on Walzer, Michael, “The Obligation to Die for the State,” in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 77–98Google Scholar. See also Lipsitz, George, “Dilemmas of Beset Nationhood: Patriotism, the Family, and Economic Change in the 1970s and 1980s” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. Bodnar, John E. (Princeton, 1996), 251–72Google Scholar. For the importance of the family metaphor in British propaganda, Gullace, Nicoletta F., “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War,” American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 714–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For World War I posters, Rawls, Walton, “Wake Up, America!” World War I and the American Poster (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Shover, Michele J., “Roles and Images of Women in World War I Propaganda,” Politics and Society 5 (Dec. 1975): 469–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 For other examples of women countering masculine definitions of citizenship during wartime, Kerber, Linda, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1998), 221–302Google Scholar; and Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 36–59. Jensen discusses women who organized home defense groups and literally took up arms in defense of their communities. I find only one instance of similar activities in the Los Angeles area, when in 1917, Santa Monica women created a Home Guard organization, with the aim of learning to shoot, “to protect the homes of our neighbors and ourselves.” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 25, 1917.

37 My focus here is not the impact of these notions of “patriotic motherhood” on women's ability to challenge the gender order, although I would agree with scholars who argue that even as war seemingly opened up opportunities for women, the continued importance of the theme of motherhood narrowly channeled their efforts. See Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers, 1–17; and Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L. R. Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” in Behind the Lines, 31–50.

38 For a brief account of the YWCA, Scott, Ann Firor, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana, 1991), 104–10Google Scholar; Robertson, Nancy Marie, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana, 2007), 45–70Google Scholar, examines the YWCA during World War I. In addition to describing the organization's war activities, Robertson analyzes the way in which the war emergency enabled black women to circumvent local resistance to African American YWCA branches in many regions. Apparently African American women in Los Angeles were not successful in establishing a YWCA branch during World War I.

39 War Work Bulletin: Sept. 10, 1918, box 4, World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center.

40 Los Angeles YWCA Board of Managers Minutes, Dec. 13, 1917, file 4, box 5, YWCA of Los Angeles.

41 Los Angeles YWCA, “Carry On,” p. 2, box 11, World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center.

42 Confidential Visit Report, “Report Prepared for Pacific Coast Field Committee of the YWCA in accordance with part of general investigation outline approved by the Industrial Department, National Board of the YWCA,” 1918–1919, reel 163, Microfilm Records, Local Association Files, YWCA of the U.S.A. Records, 1860–2002.

43 “Survey of Girls' Needs in San Pedro,” reel 165, Microfilm Records, Local Association Files, YWCA of the U.S.A. Records.

44 Rosenberg, Emily, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (Urbana, 1991), 104–10Google Scholar. For a general discussion of the campaign against prostitution, Brandt, Allan M., No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York, 1985), 52–95Google Scholar; Pivar, David J., “Cleansing the Nation: The War on Prostitution, 1917–1921,” Prologue 90 (Spring 1980): 29–41Google Scholar; Bristow, Nancy, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; and Odem, Mary, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 121–27Google Scholar.

45 Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 71. On the YWCA activity, Los Angeles Tribune, Oct. 12, 1917, news clipping in YWCA News Clippings, 1915–17, folder 14, box 16, YWCA of Los Angeles; “What the War Work Council of the Young Women's Christian Association Is Doing,” (n.d), World War I Manuscript Collection, Seaver Center; Los Angeles Times, Aug. 3, 1917.

46 “Report of the Young Women's Christian Association in California for the year 1917–1918,” p. 5, State Council of Defense, box 4, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center.

47 News clipping from The Examiner, Sept. 2, 1917, folder 51, box 31, YWCA of Los Angeles.

48 “Report of the Young Women's Christian Association in California for the year 1917–1918,” 4. On YWCA activities generally, War Work Bulletin, e, g. Special Number Sept. 10, 1918, also Aug. 30, 1918 box 4, World War I Manuscript Collection.

49 On the background of women pacifists in Los Angeles, see Katz, Dual Commitments, 493–98. On the national WCTU, Brown, “The Women's Committees of the First World War,” 132–33.

50 Garbutt, Mary Alderman, Victories of Four Decades: A History of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Southern California, 1893–1924 (Los Angeles, 1924), 46, 105, 142Google Scholar. Also Los Angeles Times, Dec. 20, 1917.

51 “Brief Record of the War Service of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Southern California” (1919?), p. 2, typescript in box 5, World War I Manuscript Collection.

52 Ibid., p. 4; Garbutt, Victories of Four Decades, 142.

53 Zeiger, Susan, “She Didn't Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the Culture of the First World War,” Feminist Studies 22 (Spring 1996): 6–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 36–59, details ways in which women medical professionals, as well as women organized to bear arms in “home defense” groups, organized for the war effort and in gendered ways that sought to expand women's claims to citizenship and suffrage.

55 Pickett, Sarah Elizabeth, The American National Red Cross (New York, 1924), 14Google Scholar.

56 Dulles, Foster Rhea, The American Red Cross: A History (New York, 1950), 151Google Scholar; American Red Cross, The Work of the American Red Cross: Report by the War Council (1919), 13Google Scholar.

57 American Red Cross, The Work of the American Red Cross, 171. For a brief discussion of the Red Cross during World War I, Dorothy and Schneider, Carl J., Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (New York, 1991), 54–62Google Scholar.

58 News clipping, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 16, 1917, in album 4, p. 227, Friday Morning Club Collection. For the variety of Red Cross groups, Workman, Mary, “Brownson House: A Centre of Americanization,” The Tidings (Dec. 1918)Google Scholar; “History of Japanese War Work in Los Angeles 1917–1918,” p. 3, typescript in box 11, War History Committee Records, Seaver Center; Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1917; California Eagle, Sept. 22, Nov. 3, 1917; “War History Report of the Jewish Women's Red Cross Auxiliary and Los Angeles Council of Jewish Women,” typescript in box 12, War History Committee Records; B'nai B'rith Messenger, May 17, 1918. For a general account of the war work of the Los Angeles Red Cross, see “History Los Angeles Chapter American Red Cross,” p. 6, typescript in State Council of Defense, box 11, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center.

59 Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1918.

60 DuBois, Ellen Carol and Dumenil, Lynn, Through Women's Eyes: An American History with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2008), 490–97Google Scholar.

61 “Our Women Over There,” Independent, Apr. 27, 1918, 165; Baltimore American, Jan. 16, 1918; and “Uniforms Which the American Women Have Adopted for their War Work,” Touchstone 4 (1918): 63–69Google Scholar. On women and military uniforms in World War I, see Vining, Margaret and Hacker, Barton C., “From Camp Follower to Lady in Uniform: Women, Social Class and Military Institutions before 1920,” Contemporary European History 10 (Nov. 2001): 353–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For the dilemma of female citizenship in the context of the masculine rhetoric of war, see Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, 221–302.

62 Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980), 178–87Google Scholar.

63 Macdonald, Anne L., No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting (New York, 1988), 215Google Scholar. The comment was made by a Katherine Anthony, a member of the Women's Peace Party, who argued that volunteer knitting was misplaced patriotism that usurped jobs from working women. Steinson, American Women's Activism, 262.

64 Virginia Hunt, “Pasadena Chapter Woman's Section of the Navy League of the United States from May 5th, 1917 to October 5, 1917,” file 20, box 15, Myron Hunt Collection, Huntington Library.

65 Pasadena Chapter Woman's Section of the Navy League of the United States, “Report of Meeting of Board of Directors of the Army and Navy League,” Oct. 3, 1918, typescript, file 34, box 15, Myron Hunt Collection.

66 Virginia Hunt to Woodrow Wilson via California Senator Phelan, Nov. 14, 1917, box 15, Myron Hunt Collection. On the controversy with Daniels, see Steinson, American Women's Activism, 332–39.

67 Dulles, The American Red Cross, 145, 165, 67.

68 Los Angeles Times, Sept. 29, 1917.

69 Ibid., Oct. 13, 1918.

70 Ibid., June 20, 1917.

71 The finding aid in the National Archive for the Food Administration is 300 typed pages. Division of Classification, National Archives, comp., Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1920, Pt. 1, The Headquarters Organization, PI 3 (1943).

72 Alice H. Wood, Executive Secretary, Woman's Committee, CND, to “State Chairmen,” (June 15, 1917), State Council of Defense, box 13, Women's Committee Records, Seaver Center. See also Annual Report of the War Activities of the Woman's Committee of the Los Angeles City Unit of the Council of Defense, p. 5.

73 Annual Report of the War Activities, p. 7. See also Breen, Uncle Sam at Home, 122–23; and Los Angeles Public Library, “Report on War Work—Industrial Department,” box 7, War History Committee Records, Seaver Center.

74 Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1, 1917; Annual Report of the War Activities, 6.

75 Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1918; Capozzola, Christopher, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88 (Mar. 2002): 1354–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the fine line between voluntarism and coercion.

76 Blair, The Woman's Committee, 59.