Introduction

Suffragists celebrated the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women in 1920 as an extraordinary achievement. For some however, according to organizer Crystal Eastman, it was only “a beginning.” She explained, “what [women] are really after . . . is freedom.”1 Although the suffrage coalition dispersed after ratification, fueling media stories about the movement's failure, many activists understood the persistence of women's secondary status.2 They set off on several paths in pursuit of freedom. As these articles reveal, their choices were wide-ranging and sometimes, at odds with one another. Their agenda included women's voter education and political participation, an end to discrimination, greater opportunities, birth control, the equal rights amendment, and reproductive freedom, among others. Building alliances across lines of class, race and ideology proved challenging, often insurmountable. Nevertheless, during major crises such as the Great Depression, World War II and the Red Scare, activists managed to establish “pockets of quiet persistence.”3 Still, they remained split over the need for protective labor legislation and an equal rights amendment to the Constitution. Even the term feminism divided them. Organized in 1923, a determined set of advocates in Connecticut fought against great odds for unfettered access to contraception, believing that control over fertility was elemental to women's freedom. A partial victory came in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut case during the early phase of a revitalized women's movement. Griswold laid the legal foundation for reproductive freedom in Roe v. Wade and for same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Roe stood for nearly half a century. Its recent overturning underscores the still precarious nature of securing women's human rights.4 Despite differences in priorities, tactics and strategies, Connecticut women's rights activists ultimately shared common goals: women's self-determination, equal opportunity, representation, and bodily autonomy.The 1920s opened up possibilities for new initiatives, programs, and directions for women activists. The first and second articles explore the choices made by two staunch supporters of “votes for women” in Judith Gildersleeve DuPont's “Chase Going Woodhouse: A Twentieth-Century Woman” and Danelle Moon's “A Pocket of Quiet Persistence—In the Age of Feminist Doldrums?: Florence Kitchelt and the Connecticut Committee for the Equal Rights Amendment, 1943–1961.” Simultaneously professionals and activists, both Woodhouse (1890–1984) and Kitchelt (1874–1961) represent a bridge between the suffrage era and the reemergence of the women's movement. They embodied the transformations in women's lives at the state and national levels.5 But they had advantages as white, middle-class women with access to resources, networks, and mentorship. Woodhouse took a non-traditional route as a woman trained in economics, engaging in research and advocacy. She endowed women's work inside the home with value and explored changes in women's paid employment especially in the professions. She moved easily among higher education, public service, the voluntary sector, and elective and appointive office. Kitchelt became a social worker, a new profession created by women. She spent the early part of her career as a settlement house worker, then a paid recruiter for the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, and later an administrator for the Connecticut League of Nations Association. These two authors remind us that Woodhouse and Kitchelt operated in a world of ongoing hostility towards women's issues. Moreover, antisuffragists and antifeminists did not simply disappear after passage the Nineteenth Amendment.6 While activists fostered consensus around independent citizenship, jury service, and an end to discrimination against married women workers, in other areas, they disagreed and did not join forces.7These fissures among activists derived in part from differing domain assumptions. In the post-suffrage era, Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party (NWP) acted on the premise that men and women were fundamentally the same and crafted an equal rights amendment designed to abolish all laws that discriminated against women. On that basis, they opposed Protective Labor Legislation (PLL) for women, insisting that every law pertain to women and men alike.8 However, because Paul and the NWP assumed the term “feminist”—a word coined in the 1880s that entered common parlance about 1910—the fight for an equal rights amendment and feminism became interconnected.9 As Moon describes it, the dispute over PLL remained a “pitched battle between women's groups over the meaning of equality and control over public policy related to women.”10 Neither Woodhouse nor Kitchelt belonged to the NWP, nor embraced their ideas about women's similarity to men or supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) until late in their careers. DuPont declares that Woodhouse favored a kind of “marriage and career feminism,” affirming women's individualism. In Moon's estimation, Kitchelt started out as a socialist and a social feminist, concerned with a variety of reforms affecting quality of life issues. Her work with immigrant women early in her career turned her into a lifelong advocate of PLL.11 During the interwar years, both women worked outside the NWP but within women's networks and episodic coalitions.Chase Going Woodhouse, a graduate of McGill University in economics, began as an academic, teaching at University of North Carolina, Smith College, and Connecticut College.12 She sought to make “women's education more relevant to the realities of the working world,” according to DuPont.13 The Institute of Women's Professional Relations that she established became a platform and home for her research, even as she switched jobs. She conducted studies and collected data from others, challenging myths about women's education and employment. She thought that woman had much to offer. As she shared in her 1930 article, “women, like men are individuals, each to be treated as a separate entity and not merely as a member of a class, and each to be given freedom of action and equality of opportunity so that she might find her level in the . . . world.”14 Woodhouse analyzed the rising number of women like her, married mothers in the paid labor force, and defended their right to work. She wrote and spoke widely. Of all the organizations with which she was affiliated, the League of Women Voters and Democratic Women's Club were essential to her budding political career. She embraced the New Deal, supported trade unions and the minimum wage. She was elected Connecticut Secretary of State in 1940 and served two non-consecutive terms in Congress representing Connecticut's Second District. Among her many contributions, she sponsored an equal pay act for women as a way of circumventing the ERA. Smeared during the Red Scare, she was not reelected but embarked on the “third act” of her career. She assumed the directorship of the Service Bureau for Women's Organizations, engaged in children's rights and environmental issues, and served on Connecticut's Permanent Commission on the Status of Women from 1973–80, as well as in other capacities. She went on the record in support of the ERA by 1980.15 Just as the vote did sixty years earlier, the ERA emerged as the feminist agenda item around which activists could coalesce.Moon's article does not focus on how the ERA became a major aim of the women's movement, but her analysis of Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt's conversion to it charts the way towards its future acceptance. Kitchelt, a graduate of Wells College, settlement house worker and suffragist, spent many years with the Connecticut League of Nations Association (CLNA). Her egalitarian marriage and belief in gender equality contrasted sharply with the marginalization she experienced within CLNA. As an organizer, speaker, and administrator, Moon concludes, she was “not always treated as an equal.”16 Kitchelt characterized the process of changing her mind about the ERA as gradual, but women's second-class status during World War II and the legal basis of sex discrimination infuriated her. In 1943, she decided to support the amendment, concluding, “I am finally convinced it will be good for women to protect their own social and economic rights, rather than to be protected.”17 With the zeal of a convert, she signaled her new ideological position by co-founding the Connecticut Committee for the Equal Rights Amendment (CCERA). She did so rather than revive the moribund Connecticut branch of the NWP. This maneuver allowed her to retain a collegial relationship with Alice Paul and the NWP without submitting to oversight. Within a few years, this choice proved prescient because the NWP underwent a “schism” that led to the resignation of high-profile members.The CCERA's independent status enabled Kitchelt to remain in touch with both sides of the dispute. In reality, she had more in common with those who left or the “action wing” because she agreed that the NWP should increase membership, reach out to young people, and forge alliances.18 Alice Paul's refusal to entertain such steps might have impeded Kitchelt's leadership and her research suggesting that the ERA didn't necessarily eliminate all PLL. With great enthusiasm, Kitchelt deployed the skills she developed over the course of her career. She wrote editorials, spoke publicly, and recruited members of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, Business and Professional Women's Association, and Republican and Democratic Parties. She secured “150 endorsements” from local groups and “300 individuals.”19 In short, she tapped into her network and expanded support for the ERA. She was willing as chair of CCERA to try different tactics such as encouraging members of the Connecticut League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women to undertake a “study” of the ERA, instead of just proposing state laws to end wage discrimination. She sent letters to potential recruits like Chase Going Woodhouse, tailoring her arguments to the interests of her correspondents.20 Kitchelt understood how to approach a variety of people and groups, linking women's rights with human rights. In doing so, Moon argues, she “laid the foundation for future ERA activism.”21The anthology's articles move quickly to the 1960s and the next phase of the women's movement in Connecticut: the fight over birth control. The roundtable, “Reproductive Rights After Griswold: A Fifty-Year Retrospective,” was held in April 2015 and published in Fall 2015, well before the 2022 Dobbs decision that vacated the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Nonetheless, its inclusion here highlights the extent of Connecticut's involvement in these national disputes, connecting birth control to abortion rights. The origins of this case in second-wave feminism harkened back to the birth-control movement of the Progressive Era. The case began with an attempt to dismantle the 1879 state law criminalizing birth control—based on the 1873 federal Comstock Act that banned the distribution of birth control methods—and ended with the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griswold that overturned that same law and created a legal “right to privacy” for married couples. This principle then expanded into the area of abortion regulation, following to federal decisions Roe v. Wade (1973) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).The Griswold case, and thus the roundtable, is of great importance to our readers because it reveals the collective participation of activist women, doctors, and lawyers in defining the next steps of the feminist movement. Here, women activists with the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, led by Estelle Griswold, established a counseling clinic where married couples could obtain prescriptions for contraceptives. The clinic opened on November 1, 1961. Dr. C. Lee Buxton, chair of the Yale School of Medicine's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, served as volunteer doctor for the clinic. On day ten of the clinic's operation, where they had served seventy-five patients, both Griswold and Buxton were arrested, convicted, and fined. They then appealed their conviction, and the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court; the decision came down in 1965.We hear from women, such as Rosemary Stevens, who participated in the planning and execution of this challenge to the law. Scholars Reva Siegel and Linda Greenhouse commented on the legal framework of the decision. Historian Heather Munro Prescott discussed what her contemporary students think of the 1960s limits on birth control, following her history of how Yale University and other male colleges going co-ed in the late 1960s dealt with the birth-control controversy in their campus Health Centers. Prescott reminds us of the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) U.S. Supreme Court decision, subsequently protested by activist students at Boston University who in 1967 invited contraceptives salesman William R. Baird to give a lecture on campus. Over 2500 attended his lecture. Baird was arrested by the Boston Vice Squad after the lecture. His arrest and conviction were finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. The last speaker, health care provider Judy Tabar of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, based in New Haven, reflected on her organization's role in providing wide-ranging services for women.This leads us to the final article in the anthology. In “The Summit Women's Center Protest of 1989: Connecticut's Modern Clash over Women's Rights,” Donald W. Rogers brings to light the challenges faced by activists in solidifying gains for women's bodily autonomy at the end of the century. Since the 1960s, activists embraced the term feminist and fought on many fronts for equal pay, opportunity, and access to credit, an end to discrimination and violence against women, curricular change, and health care. As Rogers observes, “a vibrant women's rights movement emerged to rally public opinion, lobby state lawmakers, and defend women's rights in court.”22 In assessing this period, Ruth Rosen concluded that activists managed to carry out a peaceful revolution.23 But, women's hard-won reproductive freedoms galvanized fierce opposition. Through the lens of the court case Town of West Hartford v. Operation Rescue, et al (1992), Rogers traces a victory for the Center and feminist allies that did not reaffirm women's control over their own bodies.Within the larger women's movement, efforts to liberalize abortion laws morphed into a women's reproductive freedom campaign. Buttressed by Griswold's right to privacy argument, a series of legal maneuvers culminated in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. Roe ended the battle over restrictive laws on abortion. As Rogers points out, “Public sentiment in Connecticut shifted toward a culturally liberal view of women's reproductive liberties, leaving previously ascendant conservatives in the minority.”24 Opposition to abortion health care developed and initially co-opted “out-of-door” tactics usually associated with liberal social justice movements. Like countless clinics across the country that offered a variety of health services including abortion, Summit Women's Center West in West Hartford became the target first of peaceful protests and then violence. Summit administrators took a series of steps to ensure safety, while feminist activists formed the Connecticut Coalition for Choice and their cohorts in the National Organization for Women (NOW) demanded better FBI response. Later, they organized patient escorts and counter-demonstrations. The attacks on Summit that triggered the court case occurred on April 1 and June 17 in 1989. The second incursion into the facility by anti-abortion protesters resulted in damaged equipment, occupied space, frightened staff and patients, canceled clinic appointments, and forced closure of other businesses. Rogers finds that of the 261 protesters arrested, most came from out of state and two-thirds were men, as compared to the majority of local women who were pro-choice advocates, leaders, and constituents.25 The West Hartford Town Council reacted to the first responder costs of the violence by filing for a temporary restraining order and then an injunction. Summit was added as a plaintiff in Town of West Hartford, but NOW was rejected as a party to the suit, shifting the focus away from women's reproductive freedom.Rogers argues that Judge Peter C. Dorsey's exclusion of NOW portended a future decision untethered to women's rights. In three phases on multiple grounds over seven years, Town of West Hartford made its way through the system. In the meantime, encouraged by the Coalition for Choice and elected allies, the Connecticut State Legislature passed a new pro-choice law in 1990. Congress approved the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act two years later. Then the Supreme Court allowed the application of Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law to clinic blockades in 1994. In the spring of the following year, Judge Dorsey entered a final judgment in the Town of West Hartford case supported by RICO and persuaded by the need to maintain “civil order and property rights,” but not moved by anti-abortion protesters “illegally depriving women of their healthcare.”26 Thus, the court decision was limited in scope.In 2025, with the 2022 Dobbs decision vacating the 1973 Roe v. Wade, the women's movement is left to contemplate what next steps need to be taken to return bodily autonomy to American women.