Never Surrender? How Women's Groups Abandoned Their Policy Niche in U.S. Foreign Policy Debates, 1916–2000

From World War I through the 1960s, U.S. women's organizations regularly trekked to Capitol Hill to influence congressional foreign policy debates. Yet by the 1990s, these groups had largely disengaged from international affairs. Why? Using an original data set of women's group appearances before Congress from 1916 to 2000, this study documents and explains this puzzling development by exploring the mutually reinforcing linkages among women's identity, claims to issue ownership, and interest group evolution. In the case at hand, the advent of citizen and economic groups competing with women's organizations for ownership of foreign policy questions, coupled with the declining legitimacy of gender “difference” arguments and the resurgence of “sameness” arguments, led women's groups to focus on the dimensions of foreign policy affecting women's rights and status, in particular, and to abandon less explicitly gendered foreign policy issues almost entirely. As multipurpose women's associations declined in vitality, and feminist groups fueled by newly available philanthropic dollars staked claim to women's rights-and-status questions, organized womanhood surrendered much of the foreign-policy issue space over which women had long claimed political authority, and women's groups' presence on Capitol Hill waned. © 2009, The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Kristin Anne Goss Sanford School of Public Policy