At the start of the 1920s, many progressives hoped the attainment of women’s voting rights would offer new leverage to tackle poverty. They created organizations like the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a Washington-based advocacy group. The committee’s greatest accomplishment was the first federally funded health-care legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act (1921). Sheppard-Towner provided federal funds for medical clinics, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses. Though opponents warned that the act would lead to socialized medicine, Sheppard-Towner improved health care for the poor and significantly lowered infant mortality rates. It also marked the first time that Congress designated federal funds for the states to encourage them to administer a social welfare program.

In 1923, Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party, also persuaded congressional allies to consider an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. It stated simply, “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.” Advocates were hopeful; Wisconsin had passed a similar law two years earlier, and it helped women fight gender discrimination. But opponents pointed out that the ERA would threaten recent labor laws that protected women from workplace abuses. Such laws recognized women’s vulnerable place in a heavily sex-segregated labor market. Would a theoretical statement of “equality” help poor and working women more than existing protections did? This question divided women’s rights advocates. Introduced repeatedly in Congress over the next five decades but rarely making it out of committee, the ERA was debated again and again until the bitter ratification struggle of the 1970s (discussed in Chapter 29).

Horrified at the suffering caused by World War I, some women joined a growing international peace movement. While diplomats conducted negotiations at Versailles, women peace advocates from around the world convened in Zurich and called on all nations to use their resources to end hunger and promote human welfare. Treaty negotiators ignored them, but the women organized for sustained activism. In 1919, they created the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose leading American members included Jane Addams. Members of the league denounced imperialism, stressed the human suffering caused by militarism, and proposed social justice measures.

Such women faced serious opposition. The WILPF came under fierce attack during the Red Scare because it included socialist women in its ranks. And though women proved to be effective lobbyists, they had difficulty gaining access to positions inside the Republican and Democratic parties. Finding that women did not vote as a bloc, politicians in both parties began to take their votes for granted. New reforms failed to gain support, and others were rolled back. Many congressmen, for example, had supported the Sheppard-Towner Act because they feared the voting power of women, but Congress ended the program in the late 1920s.