Congress of American Women

CONGRESS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. The short-lived organization known as the Congress of American Women (CAW) was founded in 1946 as the US branch of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a postwar antifascist alliance of 81 million women in forty-one countries dedicated to women’s equality, security and opportunity for children, and peace for all. The founders and leaders of CAW were a group of prominent American women, black and white, of left-liberal to Communist political orientations. Among them were Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, a suffrage leader and wife of a former governor of Pennsylvania; the aviator Jacqueline Cochran, a director of Eastern Airlines; Communist Party leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones; the actress Faye Emerson Roosevelt; anthropologist Gene Weltfish, author with Ruth Benedict of The Races of Man; black leaders Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Thelma Dale, and Vivian Carter Mason; and Muriel Draper, chairperson of the women’s division of the Soviet-American Friendship Council.

In 1949, CAW claimed 250,000 members and branches in the major industrial cities. On the grassroots level, in neighborhood clubs, CAW organized black and white women around civil rights issues, against lynching, for lowering the cost of living, and against the Taft-Hartley Act. More than any feminist organizations before or since, CAW incorporated black women in its leadership and made racial equality an important plank in its program. The foreign-policy platform of CAW, like other American Popular Front organizations of its time, was dedicated to the fight against fascism, friendship with the Soviet Union, and international peace. What was distinct about CAW, however, what that in its program, rhetoric, and tactics, it combined a simultaneous demand for women’s rights, world peace, and economic and social justice at home.

CAW supported the principle of equal pay for equal work, called for free public child-care centers, low-cost carry-home dinners and low-cost in-plant feeding for industrial workers, and large-scale kitchens and dining halls in every public housing project. The CAW Commission on the Status of Women supported an Equal Rights Amendment, but not in the form proposed by the National Women’s Party, charging that it would wipe out protective legislation “built up over the past fifty years.” With a sense of women’s history rare for its time, the preamble to the CAW constitution invoked the memory of such historic women as Anne Hutchinson, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the Lowell mill girls. A CAW pamphlet proclaimed, “In the past the fight for women’s rights was part of the fight against slavery and economic exploitation; today it is also part of the fight for peace and security everywhere.”

As the Cold War escalated, the issue of world peace became the central focus of CAW. Its active opposition to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and the frequent visits by its leading members to WIDF conferences in Communist countries provoked an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Ironically HUAC singled out for attack Susan B. Anthony II and Nora Stanton Barney, granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active members, and charged CAW with exploiting the legitimate women’s rights movement for Communist gain. “There is even an Elizabeth Cady Stanton branch of CAW in the Bronx,” HUAC complained in its report. CAW withstood the HUAC attack, but it could not survive the 1950 order by the Justice Department to register its officers and its board as foreign agents. At that point CAW voted, reluctantly, to sever its ties to WIDF. But there was no way of continuing the organization without a legal battle, which the officers and the Communist Party decided would be too expensive, too draining, and probably futile in the political climate of the day. In late 1950 CAW voted to disband, and with it went the connection between the suffrage generation, the Old Left, and women’s peace activism.

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