| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Women's Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of Maternalism, 1920–30. By Jan Doolittle Wilson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xii, 245 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03167-0.)

The reformer Florence Kelley wrote to her fellow maternalist and friend, Alice Hamilton, about Kelley's interactions with the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) in October 1922: "What especially endears me to [WJCC] is its effective espousal of the principle that there must be cooperation between Congress and the states; that progress without is hopping on one leg instead of walking on two" (p. 72). After the WJCC was established in 1920, Kelley and other maternalists came to depend on its political legs. Jan Doolittle Wilson chronicles the lobbying energy of the WJCC, which helped persuade congressional power brokers to fund maternal and infant health projects, to eliminate child labor, and to support women's economic independence. The wjcc united well-known arms of female reform—such as the Women's Trade Union League, National Consumers League, Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and League of Women Voters—to propel maternalist agendas into the political landscape; yet the combined forces of antisuffragists, employer associations, and states' rights advocates led to the organization disbanding after only ten years.

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