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Critical journey

National Forum, Summer 1997 by Perry, Elisabeth Israels

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This is not to say that she "put on" a motherly image for the benefit of men. To her own mind, she was a professional: knowledgeable, experienced, and skilled, with much to offer anyone willing to take her advice. But she accepted motherliness as an integral part of her own sense of what it meant to be a woman. This gender sensibility permeated her activities, including the way she wrote publicity for Smith. Smith's personality and style appealed to her "mother heart," so much so that in 1928 she came to believe that a publicity plan that highlighted his warmth and humanity would win over the American electorate.

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Understanding Moskowitz as a woman also improved my understanding of her entire generation of female social reformers. Like most of her friends, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, Moskowitz avidly supported women's causes, especially the entry of more women into the professions and political offices. But, even though these were feminist causes, she seldom if ever called herself a "feminist." Like most of her friends in social reform, she also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. She went further, in 1926 stating publicly that, while women's intuitions were superior to men's, women could never be the intellectual equals of men. In holding such views she was not alone, however. In expressing them in the 1920s, she may even have enhanced her political effectiveness.

In 1976, when I gave my first paper on her at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History, I did not yet have this perspective on Moskowitz. The commentator on the paper took me to task for writing about someone who was not a "feminist" and suggested I would contribute more to the field by writing a collective biography of nonelite women. Later that same day, at a colleague's suggestion, I asked a historian working on the topic of prostitution if she had ever come across any material on Moskowitz, who had been involved in Progressive-era antiprostitution campaigns. The historian made it clear that she had no interest in my work. I left the conference depressed and angry. When I had first "found" women's history, I had thought I was joining a united crusade for the rediscovery of women's past and thus the reinterpretation of the entire human experience. But some feminist scholars were grinding political axes that put others of us on the defensive. In my view, these feminists were doing as much harm to the history of women by leaving certain "politically incorrect" women out as the misogynists had done by leaving women out altogether.

Over the following years, the politics of women's history and women's liberation became clearer to me and I was able to place this experience into perspective. By the mid-1970s, Notable American Women had been out for some time. Many historians thought the "compensatory" task of the first stage of women's history had been finished. In addition, the new social history of the sixties was rising in popularity, making the study of the inarticulate seem more challenging. To make matters worse for biographers of some notable women, the Equal Rights Amendment was failing. This made women who had opposed the amendment in the past or who had defended protective legislation for women ipso facto "nonfeminists." Despite their many accomplishments on behalf of and with women, antiegalitarians became "the enemy," at least to some.

Critical journey

National Forum, Summer 1997 by Perry, Elisabeth Israels

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