Schenken Suzanne O’Dea. From Suffrage to the Senate: An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics (2 Volumes)

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the conversations used Greek mythology to explore the power of human

will, sources of creative energy, and development of the arts. The conver-

sations lasted for five years, influencing a nucleus of thinkers who became

leaders in the later feminist and abolitionist movements.

Editor of The Dial, a Transcendentalist literary and philosophical

journal, from 1840 to 1842, she traveled to the Great Lakes, a trip that be-

came the basis for her book Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), and then

wrote for the New York Tribune. In Europe as the Tribune’s foreign corre-

spondent, she wrote thirty-three dispatches on the plight of oppressed

people and reported on the 1848 revolution in Italy. During her stay in

Italy, Fuller married Giovanni Ossoli and had a son. On the family’s return

to the United States in 1850, the ship foundered and all three of them

drowned.

See also Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Suffrage

References Matthews, Women’s Struggle for Equality (1997); Spender, ed.,

Feminist Theorists (1983); von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse (1994).

Fulmer, Willa Lybrand (1884–1968)

Democrat Willa Fulmer of South Carolina served in the U.S. House of

Representatives from 7 November 1944 to 3 January 1945. Following the

death of her husband, Congressman Hampton Pitts Fulmer, Willa Fulmer

won the special election to fill the vacancy. Congress adjourned a month

after Willa Fulmer took office. She did not receive any committee assign-

ments, nor did she seek another term.

Born in Wagener, South Carolina, Willa Fulmer attended Greenville

Female Seminary before marrying Hampton Fulmer.

See also Congress, Women in

References Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in

Congress, 1917–1990 (1991).

Furse, Elizabeth (b. 1936)

Democrat Elizabeth Furse of Oregon served in the U.S. House of Repre-

sentatives from 3 January 1993 to 3 January 1999. Furse did not seek a

fourth term because she believes in term limits. Cofounder and director

of the Oregon Peace Institute in 1985, Furse’s motivation to run for Con-

gress was her opposition to the Gulf War. Although she had not been

elected to any other office, her years of community activism provided her

with a strong network of allies for her candidacy. Furse served on the

House Armed Services Committee and worked to cut the defense budget

because, she said, the “budget includes every exotic weapon you could

possibly think of,” but the nation’s real enemies are “decaying schools,

Furse, Elizabeth 285

neglected children, violent streets, too few jobs, disgraceful housing.” She

passed an amendment that cut the ballistic missile defense program by

$150 million and attempted to end funding for the C-17 cargo plane.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Furse grew up in South Africa and became a

U.S. citizen in 1972. She received her bachelor’s degree from Evergreen

State College in 1974. A community organizer in Watts in the 1960s, she

was director of the Restoration Program for Native American Tribes and

lobbied Congress from 1980 to 1986 to pass legislation restoring legal sta-

tus to three Oregon tribes. In 1982, she managed the successful Oregon

ballot measure for a nuclear freeze.

See also Congress, Women in

References Congressional Quarterly, Politics in America 1996 (1995);

www.house.gov/furse/efbio2.htm.

Futrell, Mary Alice Franklin Hatwood (b. 1940)

As president of the National Education Association from 1983 to 1989,

Mary Futrell was one of the most powerful African American women in

the United States and head of the largest employees’ union in the country.

Futrell’s vision for education included partnerships between business and

schools and programs to reduce high school dropout rates. She also sought

policies to improve and expand Head Start programs, provide child care

programs for young families, develop effective drug prevention programs

in the schools, ensure adequate resources for schools, and expand the use

of computers in teaching. She became president at a time when education

was under intense scrutiny and teachers were being criticized for the qual-

ity of their work. Futrell countered: “Teachers are easy prey. We’re easy

people to blame. If we should be blamed for anything, it should be for not

standing up to protest against all the burdens that society puts on us.”

Born in Alta Vista, Virginia, Futrell earned her bachelor’s degree from

Virginia State College in 1962, her master’s degree in 1968, and her doc-

torate in education in 1992, the two graduate degrees from George Wash-

ington University. She also studied at the University of Virginia from 1978

to 1979 and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from

1979 to 1980. A high school teacher in Alexandria, Virginia, from 1963 to

1980, Futrell was president of the Virginia Education Association from

1976 to 1978, secretary-treasurer of the National Education Association

from 1980 to 1983, and president of the organization from 1983 to 1989.

Futrell became dean of the Graduate School of Education and Hu-

man Development at George Washington University in 1995.

References New York Times, 3 July 1983.

286 Futrell, Mary Alice Franklin Hatwood

Gage, Matilda Joslyn (1826–1898)

During the 1800s, Matilda Gage helped develop women’s consciousness of

their contributions to society through her research and writing. The au-

thor of Woman as Inventor (1870), Gage illustrated women’s contribu-

tions to the invention or development of embroidery, bread, the cotton

gin, pillow lace, and medical science. In Woman, Church, and State (1893),

she indicted organized religion for its teachings of women’s inferiority

and their responsibility for introducing sin into human affairs. Gage also

collaborated with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on Dec-

laration of the Rights of Women (1876) and History of Woman Suffrage, a

multivolume work published from 1881 to 1922. Underlying her work

was the belief that the social, political, and economic frameworks created

by men needed reconstruction.

Born in Cicero, New York, Gage obtained her education at the Clin-

ton Liberal Institute in New York. She made her first public speech on

women’s rights at the Third National Women’s Rights Convention in

Syracuse in 1852. She argued that women did not need to prove their

worth to be eligible to vote because they had demonstrated it in the arts,

sciences, government, and literature. On another occasion, she described

women as political slaves. A member of the first advisory council of the

National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), Gage wrote for the orga-

nization’s newspaper, The Revolution. She also held several offices in the

New York State Woman Suffrage Association and organized education

campaigns under its auspices.

287

Gage founded and was president of the Woman’s National Liberal

Union in 1890, an organization that criticized social mores and advocated

the clear separation of church and state.

See also Abolitionist Movement, Women in the; Anthony, Susan Brownell;

National Woman Suffrage Association; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Suffrage;

Temperance Movement, Women in the

References Spender, ed., Feminist Theorists (1983); Whitman, ed., American

Reformers (1985).

Gasque Van Exem, Elizabeth Mills Hawley (1886–1989)

Democrat Elizabeth Gasque of South Carolina served in the U.S. House of

Representatives from 13 September 1938 to 3 January 1939. Following the

death of her husband, Congressman Allard Gasque, Elizabeth Gasque won

a special election to fill the vacancy. She was not sworn in because Con-

gress did not reconvene that session. She did not run for reelection.

Born on Rice Creek Plantation, Richland County, South Carolina,

Elizabeth Gasque attended South Carolina Coeducational Institute and

received a degree in expression from Greenville Female College in 1907.

See also Congress, Women in

References Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in

Congress, 1917–1990 (1991).

Geduldig v. Aiello (1974)

In Geduldig v. Aiello, an employed woman argued that California’s dis-

ability insurance program discriminated against women because it did

not cover pregnancy. The insurance program was managed by the state for

private employees who contributed 1 percent of their income to it. The

U.S. Supreme Court decided that the plan did not violate the Fourteenth

Amendment’s equal protection clause, explaining: “There is no risk from

which men are protected and women are not. Likewise, there is no risk

from which women are protected and men are not.”

Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which

required employers to include pregnancy and related disabilities in their

insurance programs.

See also California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra; Fourteenth

Amendment; General Electric v. Gilbert; Nashville Gas Co. v. Satty; Pregnancy

Discrimination Act of 1978

References Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974).

288 Gasque Van Exem, Elizabeth Mills Hawley

Gender Gap

The gender gap measures the difference between the proportion of

women who vote for a candidate or support an issue and the proportion

of men who vote the same or support the same issue. Despite suffragists’

hopes that women would become a voting bloc, the first hints of that

phenomenon did not appear until 1952, thirty-two years after women

gained voting rights. In 1952, women voted for successful Republican

presidential nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower in greater percentages than

men did. Women’s hopes that he could end the Korean War, which had

begun in 1950, contributed to their support for Eisenhower. Almost an-

other thirty years passed before political observers recognized another

appearance of the gender gap. Since 1980, women have tended to vote for

Democrats, and men have been more likely to vote for Republicans. Since

the 1980 presidential race between Democrat Jimmy Carter and Repub-

lican Ronald Reagan, the proportion of women voting for Democratic

presidential candidates has grown. In 1996, Democratic presidential can-

didate Bill Clinton was elected, with 11 percent more women than men

voting for him.

The gender gap also appears in senatorial races. For example, in Cal-

ifornia Democratic candidate Barbara Boxer’s 1992 race for the U.S. Sen-

ate, 57 percent of the women voted for her and 43 percent for her Repub-

lican opponent, whereas 43 percent of the men voted for Boxer and 51

percent of the men voted for her opponent. Women’s votes provided the

winning margin in dozens of Democratic candidates’ congressional and

senatorial races in the 1980s and 1990s. The pattern continues even when

the Republican candidate is a woman. In Maine’s 1996 Senate race, Re-

publican Susan Collins won with 43 percent of women’s votes and 56 per-

cent of men’s votes. Her Democratic opponent lost with 48 percent of

women’s votes and 39 percent of men’s votes.

See also Democratic Party, Women in the; Republican Party, Women in the

References Center for the American Woman and Politics, Eagleton Institute,

Rutgers University; www.feminist.org.

General Electric v. Gilbert (1976)

In General Electric v. Gilbert, decided in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court

found that excluding pregnancy from a disability plan does not violate Ti-

tle VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. General Electric provided a disabil-

ity plan that paid benefits to employees for nonoccupational sickness and

accidents but excluded pregnancy from the covered disabilities. In its de-

cision, the Court explained: “Pregnancy-related disabilities constitute an

additional risk, unique to women, and the failure to compensate them for

General Electric v. Gilbert 289

this risk does not destroy the presumed parity of the benefits, accruing to

men and women alike” (emphasis in original).

Congress responded to the decision by passing the Pregnancy Dis-

crimination Act of 1978. The measure requires employers to treat preg-

nancy the same as other temporary disabilities.

See also California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra; Civil Rights Act of 1964,

Title VII; Employment Discrimination; Geduldig v. Aiello; Nashville Gas Co. v.

Satty; Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978

References General Electric v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125 (1976).

General Federation of Women’s Clubs

Founded in 1890, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) is the

oldest nonpartisan, nondenominational women’s volunteer organization

in the world and, until 1900, was the largest women’s organization in the

country. It has 6,500 affiliated clubs with more than 1 million members.

GFWC has its roots in Sorosis, a woman’s literary club organized by

journalist Jane Cunningham Croly in 1868. After the all-male New York

Press Club denied Croly and other women admittance to an 1868 banquet

honoring Charles Dickens, Croly formed Sorosis for women only. Sorosis

is a Greek word meaning an aggregation: a sweet flavor of many fruits.

Sorosis’s founders thought that they were starting a new movement

but learned that other independent women’s clubs had formed across the

country. In 1889, Croly convened a national conference that brought to-

gether delegates from sixty-one women’s clubs. A constitution and an or-

ganizational plan were developed and approved the next year. At the first

GFWC conference, the group adopted the motto “Unity in Diversity.”

Self-improvement and development were the early focuses of

women’s clubs, with the agenda expanded to include arts, conservation,

education, home life, international affairs, and public affairs. As women’s

clubs grew in popularity across the country, groups of African American

women formed and sought membership in the GFWC. Initially, the

GFWC refused to admit clubs dominated by black women, who re-

sponded by forming their own federations, including the Colored

Women’s League and the National Federation of Afro-American Women,

which merged into the National Association of Colored Women. Some

African American women, however, belonged to local women’s clubs that

were affiliated with GFWC. When two of these women, Josephine St.

Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, sought to address GFWC’s na-

tional convention in 1900, GFWC leaders refused the request and a con-

troversy ensued. Some GFWC member clubs threatened to leave the or-

ganization if Ruffin and Terrell were not permitted to speak and others

threatened to leave if they were. GFWC resolved the problem at its 1902

290 General Federation of Women’s Clubs

convention by declaring that each state affiliate could determine which

clubs could belong to it, and that all clubs that belonged to a state affiliate

also belonged to the GFWC.

GFWC established a national model for juvenile courts, and worked

to establish the first Forest Reserve in the county in 1899. GFWC also

helped pass the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, and worked for the eight-

hour day, the first child labor law, the child labor amendment, the woman

suffrage amendment, and independent citizenship for women. Opposed

to the Equal Rights Amendment in 1922, GFWC changed its position in

1940 and became a supporter of the ERA. Through its network of grass-

roots volunteers, GFWC continues to work for a range of issues, including

protecting children from abuse and promoting adoption, implementing

tax credits for purchasing health insurance, requiring clothing labels that

identify articles made without abusive and exploitative child labor, pass-

ing equal pay legislation, requiring child safety locks on handguns, and in-

creasing child literacy.

See also Cable Acts; Child Labor Amendment; Colored Women’s League; Croly,

Jane Cunningham; Equal Rights Amendment; National Association of Colored

Women; Pay Equity; Protective Legislation; Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre;

Suffrage; Terrell, Mary Eliza Church; Women’s Joint Congressional Committee

References Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (1973);

www.gfwc.org.

Gibbs, Florence Reville (1890–1964)

Democrat Florence Gibbs of Georgia served in the U.S. House of Repre-

sentatives from 1 October 1940 to 3 January 1941. Following the death of

her husband, Congressman Willis Gibbs, she won the special election to

fill the vacancy. She did not run for reelection.

Born in Thomson, Georgia, Florence Gibbs graduated from Brenau

College.

See also Congress, Women in

References Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in

Congress, 1917–1990 (1991).

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935)

Humanist and feminist intellectual Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued for

women’s economic independence as the route to their equality with men.

Her most influential work, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic

Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, published

in 1898, examined the economic relationship between men and women.

She concluded that a woman’s survival depended upon her ability to attract

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 291

and keep a husband, making her relation-

ship with her husband into an economic

relationship. Claiming that the sexual di-

vision of labor stifled and limited women

and condemning households as prisons,

Gilman asserted that women held the role

of servant, even though the work they did

was essential to human life.

Gilman believed that each person

should be allowed to develop her or his po-

tential and that women should be permit-

ted to pursue the paid employment for

which they were best qualified. Her vision

included central kitchens that employed

cooks to prepare meals for several families

and child care centers that provided super-

vision and education for children from in-

fancy to school age. She also proposed em-

ploying expert housekeepers for cleaning. With household and family

chores assumed by paid workers, women whose talents lent themselves to

other endeavors would become free to pursue them for wages. By provid-

ing her own economic sustenance, a woman could be equal to her husband.

Gilman’s theories emerged at least in part from her own experiences.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she finished private school when she was

sixteen and began searching for ways to become economically independent.

She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and took correspondence

classes. Despite her intention to remain single, she married in 1884 and had

a daughter in 1885. Two years later, she found work writing a local news-

paper column and selling greeting cards, but those jobs did not last long.

Plagued with depression and unable to care for her home, husband,

and daughter, she consulted doctors who recommended enforced rest, pas-

sivity, and acceptance of male dominance. She and her husband separated

in 1888, and Gilman and her daughter moved to California. She wrote po-

etry and fiction and, in 1890, began a lecture series on the need for

women’s economic independence, the importance of collective enterprise,

and community effort as the only possibility for solving some problems.

Gilman and her husband divorced in 1894, but he remained one of

her closest friends. When he remarried, Gilman sent their daughter to live

with him and his new wife, freeing herself from domestic responsibilities.

Gilman moved into Chicago’s Hull House in 1895 and continued to lec-

ture. In 1900, Gilman married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman.

She wrote Concerning Children, published in 1900, and The Home: Its

292 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Charlotte Perkins

Gilman argued

for economic

independence

and freedom from

domestic servitude

for women, ca. 1900

(Library of Congress)

Work and Influence, published in 1903. She was popular on the lecture cir-

cuit until 1915, but her ideas lost their appeal as war began in Europe and

other national and international events contributed to changing the cli-

mate of opinion.

See also Congressional Union; National American Woman Suffrage

Association; National Woman’s Party; Suffrage

References Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins

Gilman (1991).

Ginsburg, Ruth Joan Bader (b. 1933)

On 10 August 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

became the nation’s 107th justice and sec-

ond woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

After earning her law degree at Columbia

University Law School in 1959, Ginsburg

applied to U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix

Frankfurter to serve as his law clerk, but

Frankfurter refused her because she was a

woman. Instead, she clerked for a justice in

the U.S. District Court in New York from

1959 to 1961. The second woman on the

Rutgers University Law School’s faculty

when she joined it in 1963, she accepted

several sex discrimination cases referred to

her by the American Civil Liberties Union

(ACLU). Despite Frankfurter’s refusal to

hire her because of her sex, as well as com-

parable experiences in law school, Ginsburg had not categorized such inci-

dents as sex discrimination. As she worked on the cases referred to her by the

ACLU, however, she concluded that gender distinctions affected every aspect

of life. She explained: “Once I became involved, I found the legal work fas-

cinating and had high hopes for significant change in the next decade.”

In the 1970s, Ginsburg headed the Women’s Rights Project of the

American Civil Liberties Union, argued six sex discrimination cases be-

fore the U.S. Supreme Court, and won five of them. The cases these deci-

sions overturned included an Idaho law that gave precedence to men over

women in serving as the administrator of an estate (Reed v. Reed, 1971),

an Oklahoma law that specified different legal drinking ages for women

and men (Craig v. Boren, 1976), and a Missouri law that made jury duty

optional for women but not for men. She successfully argued that military

benefits for husbands of military personnel must be granted on the same

basis as those for wives of military personnel (Frontiero v. Richardson,

Ginsburg, Ruth Joan Bader 293

Appointed in 1993,

Supreme Court

Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg was only

the second woman to

serve on the U.S.

Supreme Court

(Courtesy: U.S.

Supreme Court)

1973). Two years later she persuaded the Court that a Social Security pro-

gram providing benefits to widows with minor children based upon the

deceased husband’s contributions should be extended to widowers with

minor children (Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 1975). Sworn in as a member of

the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980, she wrote

more than 300 opinions in the next thirteen years.

Although she supports reproductive rights, Ginsburg believes that Roe

v. Wade “went too far in the changes it ordered.” During her confirmation

hearings for the Supreme Court, Ginsburg said: “[Abortion] is something

central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision she must make for

herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being

treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ginsburg received her bachelor’s degree

from Cornell University in 1954 and attended Harvard Law School from

1956 to 1958 before transferring to Columbia University Law School.

See also Abortion; American Civil Liberties Union; Craig v. Boren; Frontiero v.

Richardson; Reed v. Reed; Roe v. Wade; Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld

References Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 103rd Congress, 1st Session...1993

(1994); H. W. Wilson, Current Biography Yearbook, 1994 (1994);

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/justices.bio.html.

Glass Ceiling Commission

Created as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Glass Ceiling Com-

mission had twenty-one members appointed by the president and Con-

gress. The commission focused on barriers and opportunities in three ar-

eas: selection of candidates for management and decisionmaking

positions, skill development programs, and compensation and reward

systems. Chaired by the secretary of labor, the commission completed its

work in 1996. It defined “glass ceiling” as “artificial barriers based on atti-

tudinal or organizational biases that prevent qualified women and mi-

norities from advancing upward into management-level positions.”