1920s – 1950s

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment represented a tremendous success for the women who had devoted so much time and energy to the movement, but it was also a turning point for women’s activism. Women had been ardent supporters of the other great reform movements of the nineteenth century—abolition, temperance, labor organization—but many of the most outspoken and tireless activists had focused their efforts on women’s political equality. The suffrage victory, though celebrated, left a void in women’s associational lives. Some women retired from reform work after 1920, but many sought other outlets for their time and talents. Campaigns for world peace, education reform, and temperance legislation captured the focus of some former suffrage activists, but electoral politics remained an important arena for many who had struggled so long for their political rights. Six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters as a means of transferring women’s political energy from the suffrage campaign to a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to educating female voters and encouraging them to use their newfound political power to help shape public policy. The League sponsored citizenship schools for new voters, organized “Get Out the Vote” campaigns, and encouraged its members to study and act on legislative proposals. 

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Women also took advantage of their new political rights to run for office, on the local and the national level. The first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representative was Jeannette Rankin, elected in 1917 from Montana, a state which had granted women the right to vote in 1914. After 1920 and during the next four decades, women served in the House in small but steady numbers; prior to 1960, the number of female House members was never greater than 3.4% of the total. The number of women Senators was even smaller, with only one woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, winning a full-term election to the Senate prior to 1978. Though their numbers were small, these early female lawmakers helped break down barriers for women and made significant legislative contributions. 

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Not all women benefited equally in the decades following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Jim Crow laws prevented many African American women from voting in the South. Working-class women also continued to suffer discrimination in the workplace. Women’s rights activists sought to alleviate women’s workplace oppression by pushing for the enactment of protective legislation which, for example, limited women’s work hours and assignments. These laws provided some safeguards for working women, but they also restricted their employment opportunities. 

The history of Iowa women voters during this period largely mirrors that of the nation. The League of Women Voters of Iowa, like the national league, was founded in 1919, at the final convention of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association. In its early years, the Iowa League concentrated on voter education and engagement. National and international developments influenced local League activity in the first few decades after its founding. The Great Depression, followed by the Second World War, focused political activists’ attention away from local issues and onto the national political stage. After the war, some Iowa women turned their attention to issues of racial discrimination. From 1947-49, Edna Griffin organized a grassroots campaign that led to the desegregation of Katz drug stores in Des Moines.  

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 Like women in other parts of the United States, women in Iowa ran successfully for public office after 1920. For example, Carolyn Pendray was the first woman elected to the Iowa legislature and served in the House from 1929-33 and in the Senate from 1933-37. Pendray objected to lobbyists’ influence over lawmakers and campaigned to diminish their ability to sway legislators’ votes; she succeeded in persuading lawmakers to install a rope barrier that kept lobbyists at the back of the chamber so they could no longer sit or stand next to senators’ desks as they cast votes. In addition, Pendray cosponsored a bill permitting a wife to hold certain property of her own, exempt from seizure for debt, allowing women to claim a right which had previously been reserved solely for male heads of households.  

Another early officeholder was Ola Babcock Miller, who was elected Iowa Secretary of State in 1932 and held the job until 1937, the first woman to serve in that position. While in office in 1935, she started the Iowa Highway Patrol in an effort to reduce the highway accident rate.  

The small number of women elected to the state legislature in the first half of the twentieth century included Gladys Nelson, who served in the House from 1951-57. In 1953, Nelson became the first woman legislator to become associated with a bill as a primary advocate. On behalf of housewives who wanted lower prices and greater convenience, she led the campaign to remove the tax on oleomargarine and legalize the sale of colored oleomargarine. As a means of protecting the state’s dairy industry, legislation passed in 1931 put in place a five-cent-per-pound tax on margarine and prohibited the sale of oleo with yellow fool coloring mixed in; consumers had to mix together small packets of coloring and the untreated white margarine to achieve the familiar color of butter, a task which busy homemakers resented. Nelson managed the bill to eliminate the tax and the color ban on the House floor and despite opposition from the powerful Farm Bureau lobby, succeeded in winning the bill’s passage. In addition, Nelson made the first effort to legislate women’s pay equity when she introduced in 1953 a bill for equal pay for equal work, but the legislature refused to act on it. 

As was true nationally, the absolute number of women serving in the House, Senate, and other statewide offices was small, but their presence served to embody women’s political equality, and their legislative and public policy achievements advanced the interests of their male and female constituents. 

Sources and Further Reading