When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker organized the Council of National Defense, a group of civilian businessmen in essential industries, labor leaders, and transportation experts, to coordinate for wartime needs. President Wilson and Secretary Baker also created the Woman’s Committee as a semiautonomous branch of the Council of National Defense to represent and coordinate the nation’s women to organize and maintain the home-front for the duration of the war. Under federal mandate, the Woman’s Committee defined “home-front defense” as the protection of the American family, most notably the nation’s women and children, from the social disruptions of World War I. The Woman’s Committee established coalitions with Progressive Era women’s clubs to assist the U.S. Food Administration with wartime food and nutritional needs, coordinated a massive child-savings campaign with the federal Children’s Bureau, and conducted sociological research to support demands from working-class women. The Woman’s Committee’s goals supported the war effort and expanded women’s domestic political power through social welfare activism. The American involvement in the war, however, steered women reformers into relationships with each other that remained loosely-defined during the war and ultimately created a false sense of political solidarity among women’s groups and federal agencies partnered with the Woman’s Committee. The war presented over 10 million American women with opportunities to become involved in local, state, and national politics through social welfare activism on behalf of children and women in their local communities and states. The social welfare activism of American women who joined in the Woman’s Committee’s wartime programs helped shape women’s political power in the early 1920s. Once the crisis of the war ended, the coalitions the Woman’s Committee helped foster splintered into warring camps that divided over the course of women’s post-war politics.
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