WOMEN IN OKLAHOMA ~ WOMEN’S CLUB MOVEMENT

In Oklahoma as elsewhere the Women’s Club Movement positively effected social change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American social mores during the colonial and early national period had consigned women to the home and to rearing children. Excluded from politics and work outside the home, women in the early 1800s found an acceptable social outlet by forming benevolent societies and church groups to assist the needy within their communities. Women gradually became more visible, outspoken, and organized as they worked to improve social problems beyond their local environments. By the 1840s Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Sojourner Truth, and other women championed the antislavery movement. In 1848 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for a constitutional amendment providing for woman’s suffrage. During the Civil War northern and southern women organized to raise money for medical supplies. Although many women’s clubs existed in the early nineteenth century, historian Karen J. Blair asserts that the term “Women’s Club Movement” more accurately refers to the literary and civic clubs that proliferated between the Civil War and World War II.