The General Federation of Women’s Clubs Crusade for Morality in the Mass Media during the 1950s and 1960s

During the Progressive Era, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) advocated for the censorship of films because, they claimed, the salacious movies of the 1910s and 1920s potentially harm children. Although historians have examined the GFWC’s anti-obscenity campaign during the early twentieth century, most scholars end their narratives in the 1930s when such women’s groups’ perspectives declined in popularity. This paper challenges this declension thesis and investigates how the GFWC responded to the increasing sexualization of women’s bodies in the mass media during the 1950s and 1960s through its “Crusade for Morality in Mass Media.” While motion picture reform had long been a staple of the GFWC’s activism, the campaign for moral mass media extended its arguments for motion picture reform to magazines and comic books. This paper shows how the GFWC shifted from pro-censorship arguments based on the potential harm to children to an insistence that women could use their consumer power as an effective means to stymie the proliferation of obscene material. The GFWC reminded women that while rhetoric was powerful, where and how they spent their money was equally (if not more so) important. By the 1950s, the organization moved away from previous calls for federal censorship and favored a collaborative, democratic approach to reforming media. By being informed consumers who only supported moral media, the GFWC argued, women could more effectively reform these types of media by attacking a company’s profits.