Catholic Women’s Union

The Catholic Women’s Union (CWU), established in 1916, modeled itself closely on the Katholischer deutscher Frauenbund (KDF, or Catholic German Women’s Organization) as a result of the organization’s almost exclusively German American membership and its emphasis on ethnic issues.

The CWU remained under the jurisdiction of the male German Catholic Central-Verein (CV), whose St. Louisbased national headquarters it shared. By the early 1920s the Catholic Women’s Union, along with many other women’s groups, had affiliated with the National Council of Catholic Women, based in Washington, D.C., as part of the larger trend toward centralizing lay groups. The CWU followed an ethnically based model of Catholic activism, drawing heavily from German reform influences. It emphasized a maternalist ideal to assist working women and the poor and opened its membership to working women, although both the membership and leadership of the CWU tended to be middle class. Though socially conservative on many issues, the CWU occasionally challenged both the authority and indifference of the clergy and hierarchy. By engaging in social reform programs, middle-class women, many of whom were mothers, sought to extend their maternalism to the poor or working classes and to channel their leisure time and material wealth into more acceptable ends. They could, moreover, increase the visibility of Catholic women in voluntary work without entering the more controversial arena of suffrage activism and other women’s rights issues.

Although the orientation and goals of Catholic women’s groups remained removed from traditional politics, they often became active on issues pertaining to modernity, social morality, and the family. In the early twentieth century, several groups took stances against a number of issues, including birth control measures, suffrage, the Child Labor Amendment, divorce, and immoral entertainment and dress.

Women justified their involvement in these groups on the basis of defending their home and moral beliefs, as earlier generations of middle-class Protestant women had justified their involvement in temperance and in other issues.

German American Catholic women in the early twentieth century organized their reform efforts around the principle of home protection, and they chose St. Elizabeth of Thuringia as their patron saint. St. Elizabeth, who lived in the early thirteenth century, was the daughter of a king. After her early marriage, she devoted herself to charitable pursuits, including work with lepers and the poor, as well as relief efforts for flood and famine victims. She died a widow at age twenty-four, after having established a Franciscan Hospital in Marburg, and became widely known as the “Patroness of the Poor.” By adopting her as its symbol, CWU leaders sought to emphasize the selflessness of their programs, their compassion toward the poor, the universality of charity among females, and the common ethnic bond between St. Elizabeth and the members of their organization.

The CWU emerged in 1916 to complement the existing male CV. Key lay leaders and members of the hierarchy, including Milwaukee archbishop Sebastian Messmer and Chicago archbishop James Quigley, supported the creation of a woman’s group. But the initiative also encountered resistance from some within the CV, who believed that women should not have a public role. In the coming years, CWU members found that they needed to defend their work to those male clergy, bishops, or laity who were hostile or indifferent to their organization. By 1925, the CWU had 50,000 members in branches in nineteen states and a national budget of $45,461. Although the most active groups were concentrated in Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, and Missouri, the CWU also formed branches in Arkansas, New Jersey, Connecticut, and several other states where the German American population was proportionately small.

Although the domestic ideology of CWU members seems inspired by the middle-class Protestant separate spheres ideology of mid-nineteenth-century America, their views on Catholic social reform drew extensively from central European influences.

Because the German ethnic identity was a strong focus in both the male and female Vereines (clubs), these women appropriated models of social action that existed in Europe, as well as responding to secular, Protestant, and Catholic trends within the United States. In fact, many bourgeois women in late nineteenth-century Germany articulated a similar view of “social motherhood” that emphasized the responsibility that middle- and upper-class women held for poorer women in their communities.

Despite their emphasis on domesticity, members of the CWU simultaneously acknowledged that many mothers had no choice but to remain in the workforce. They advocated the expansion of day care facilities for children, such as those of the St. Elizabeth Settlement in St. Louis, and promoted the establishment of a mother’s pension program. Although, like Pope Leo XIII, they condemned socialism, the CWU and Central Verein also proved quite critical of modern capitalism and its effects on the working class and poor. Much of the rhetoric in the CWU emphasized the unique prerogative that women, as mothers and wives, held for extending their influence throughout society, except in ways that involved traditional political activities. German Catholic women believed that as females they were uniquely able to influence society while remaining within the domestic sphere. This domestic sphere was not limited, however, to the private home.

Unlike other Catholic women’s groups in the United States, German American women readily acknowledged the existence of class differences within society; although other Catholic lay groups implicitly recognized divisions between its members and those they sought to assist, they did not refer to them in class terms. Many of the initiatives undertaken by the CWU in the early twentieth century were patterned on those of Catholic women’s organizations in Germany, particularly the KDF, which was established in 1903. Members of the KDF and CWU forged relationships between their two groups, shared many of the same views on social issues, and launched similar charitable efforts.

The CWU viewed German organization members as part of a larger transatlantic movement, and several KDF members visited CWU leagues throughout the United States. One difference between the leaders of the German organization and the American one was the more modest economic position of those in the United States. For example, the leadership of the Wisconsin German Catholic League, a CWU affiliate, was comprised mostly of wives and daughters of businessmen.

The CWU’s major work involved the development of a traveler’s aid network. The programs targeted rural German Catholic women who had left their homes for work in cities such as Milwaukee and Chicago; these reformers sought to create a network of affiliated traveler’s aid societies. This particular emphasis of the CWU also proved similar to that of Catholic women’s organizations in Germany. There, women’s groups claimed to have benefited 2 million working women and had launched a network to protect young women at railroad stations and ports, like others developed for Catholic immigrants in the United States and elsewhere.

Anti-German sentiment permeated American society during World War I, leading the New York branch of the CV to suspend its conventions in 1917 and 1918. Yet the CWU did not discuss the issue of divided loyalties in their publications. The Wisconsin branch of the CWU referred only obliquely to the issue in its statewide publication, when it announced that it had changed its name from DRK Frauenbund von Wisconsin!GRC Women’s League to the less ethnic-sounding Catholic Women’s League of Wisconsin. It also reported on the success of liberty bond drives, underscoring the CWU’s loyalty to the United States.

As part of its objection to modern social influences, the CWU actively opposed birth control laws and the Child Labor Amendment and had its members write letters to their political representatives to express their views on those topics. The CWU

and CV advocated the creation of mother’s pension programs, health insurance, and other maternal assistance programs.

The programs that they advocated would have had a far greater impact than the Sheppard- Towner Act (1921), which provided federal matching funds to states for the provision of prenatal and infant care, child care clinics, and visiting nurses. Yet CWU members in Wisconsin sent at least one petition opposing the Sheppard-Towner bill to a Wisconsin congressman, arguing that the bill would allow the federal government to take away power from local and state agencies. The fear that it would remove the social stigma against unmarried motherhood might have influenced their decision. CWU members also viewed the Child Labor Amendment as a potential infringement of parental authority and distributed pamphlets urging Catholics to oppose it.

Another major controversy arose among CWU leaders in the early 1920s, with the emergence of the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) and National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW), the national lay groups sponsored by the hierarchy after World War I. The CWU members viewed those organizations suspiciously as a threat to the identity, agenda, and vitality of their own group. Although ultimately the CWU affiliated with both the NCWC and NCCW, CWU members voiced their resentment that the NCCW sought to engage in work pioneered by the CWU. Ultimately, in the wake of anti-German sentiment resulting from World War I and the creation of the NCCW in 1920, the CWU moved away from its strong ethnic identification and toward greater uniformity with other Catholic women. In 1924, the CWU replaced as its patron saint St. Elizabeth, an ethnic as well as religious symbol, with Saint Mary, Our Lady of Good Counsel, a universal Catholic saint.

Deirdre M. Moloney

Catholic Women’s Union

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