sustaining the feminist movement:generations of women donors are building lasting change

Sustaining the Feminist Movement: Generations of women donors are building lasting change

By ALISON R. BERNSTEIN

IN THE EARLY 1900S, KATHARINE DEXTER McCormick, a biology major from Chicago and one of just a handful of women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, decided to take on the university’s administration. In those days, women were required to wear hats to class—even in science laboratories. McCormick, the daughter of wealthy, progressive parents, protested that the fabrics and feathers were a fire hazard in the lab. After some debate, M.I.T. backed down, abolishing the silly, dangerous rule.

This early incident foreshadowed McCormick’s lifelong commitment to women’s equality: She became a pioneering feminist philanthropist, singlehandedly funding the research and development of the birth-control pill. And she wasn’t the only woman of her time opening her purse for women’s rights. A century ago, women of means with a political or social-improvement agenda often put their money where their mouths were. Whether their wealth came through inheritance, business success or divorce settlements, women philanthropists played important roles in shaping America’s reform movements in education, health, welfare and, especially, women’s voting rights.

At the turn of the 19th century, for example, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont was the principal benefactor of the women’s suffrage movement, while famed suffragist Susan B. Anthony put up funds from her life-insurance policy to guarantee that women could be admitted to the University of Rochester. Katharine Drexel provided education for girls of American Indian and African American backgrounds; Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage endowed the social science/social welfare reform foundation that still bears her late husband Russell Sage’s name. And highly successful businessperson Madame C. J. Walker invested in black colleges—especially one in Florida that was established by civil rights advocate Mary McLeod Bethune.

With the advent of the Second Wave of the women’s movement, mainstream philanthropy, too, paid attention to leveling the playing field for women. Major foundations such as Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller—whose white male founders had not been prominent advocates for women’s equality—were nonetheless in the vanguard of funding projects to advance the life chances of girls and women. The Rockefeller family has provided significant support to the African American women’s college Spelman; the Ford Foundation can take real credit for developing the field of women’s studies both in the U.S. and overseas; and the Carnegie Corporation, in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on advancing women’s leadership.

Even so, the 1980 report Far from Done, issued by the now-defunct organization Women and Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy, noted that only 6 percent of all foundation dollars were directed to projects aimed at specifically women and girls. While several major foundations were paying attention to “women’s issues,” the vast majority of the almost 90,000 private U.S. foundations were not.

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http://www.msmagazine.com/Fall2013/Philanthropy.asp