Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870–1967
How did wealthy women use philanthropy to advance the rights of all women — and what were the costs of that generosity? Joan Marie Johnson’s history reveals the complex, sometimes troubling, relationship between money and feminist progress, with lessons that resonate strongly today.
In Funding Feminism, Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women’s history: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy.
This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street magnate William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune.
Motivated by their own experiences of sexism, and focusing on women’s need for economic independence, these benefactors sought to expand women’s access to higher education, promote suffrage, and champion reproductive rights, as well as to provide assistance to working-class women. In a time when women still wielded limited political power, philanthropy was perhaps the most potent tool they had.
However, even as these wealthy women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. The strings attached to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardised efforts to build coalitions across racial and class lines. As the struggle for women’s economic and political power continues today, Johnson’s history reveals how generous women helped shape the movement. It also shows that tensions over wealth and power that persist in the modern movement have deep historical roots.
For anyone working in fundraising, grantmaking, or donor relations, Funding Feminism offers a rare and thought-provoking perspective on the power dynamics that have always existed between those who give and those who receive, and the ways in which philanthropic generosity can both empower and constrain the causes it supports.
About Joan Marie Johnson
Joan Marie Johnson is a historian and Director for Faculty in the Office of the Provost at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from UCLA in women’s and Southern history, and taught history at Northeastern Illinois University for twelve years. She was co-founder and co-director of the Newberry Seminar on Women and Gender at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is the author of several books on American women’s history, race, social reform, and philanthropy, including Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges and Southern Ladies, New Women.
Reviews
“This compelling work of original and much-needed research will be of interest not only to those who study the history of feminist activism but to those with an interest in the power that private money wields in social justice circles.”
Library Journal
“A riveting new vantage point on the fight for women’s rights in the twentieth century. The scope of Johnson’s book is as generous as the narrative is nuanced and compelling.”
Reviews in American History
“Johnson makes a careful and persuasive case that a cluster of wives and daughters of major railroad, real estate, manufacturing, banking, and mining magnates used their inheritances to create opportunities for their ‘sisters’ in a sexist world.”
American Historical Review
“Johnson’s book is a strong reminder of the progress that women have made in the past 150 years, and I believe it will fuel awareness about the need for more women to give major gifts for gender equality today.”
Kiersten Marek, Philanthropy Women
“Highly readable and relevant for anyone interested in women’s history, philanthropy, and social justice.”
Indiana Magazine of History
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