"Even in the remotest parts of the state": Downstate "Woman's Committee" Activities on the Illinois Home Front during World War I

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003/2004 by Boynton, Virginia R

During World War I, women throughout Illinois actively supported the nation's war effort. In many cases, women's activities were closely tied to the nation's effort to win the war. In Fayette County, for example, the south central Illinois county's women's "war garden club" preserved almost ten thousand cans of homegrown fruits and vegetables, while in McLean County women instructed more than a thousand central Illinois women in food conservation techniques over the course of eleven weeks at the community "war kitchen" they established. At other times the connection to the wartime emergency was more tenuous, as was the case with the Pike County women who weighed and measured fifteen hundred west central Illinois preschoolers in one summer, and the Elgin women who mounted a successful campaign to force their local school board to offer night classes for almost two hundred of the northeastern Illinois community's working women who had not completed high school.

In all these instances, and countless others around the state, women's support for the war effort was organized through their communities' units of the Illinois Woman's Committee (IWC), the statewide organization jointly created by the state and national governments to mobilize and coordinate women's war-related volunteer activities on the home front. Despite some tensions between these local Woman's Committee units and the IWC's Chicago-based state leadership over organizational and financial matters, hundreds of thousands of women living downstate joined their city, town, or township Woman's Committees. They participated in a variety of local activities designed to help their nation win its war, which included disseminating information from the government about the war effort, increasing food production, and conserving food. In addition, they used the opportunities that the wartime emergency provided to improve life in their local communities, by helping immigrants better adjust to life in the United States, enlarging women's occupational options, and improving the health of local children. Overall, the state produced exceptionally active local Woman's Committees; in several program areas, Illinois surpassed the other forty-seven states in the size and reach of its statewide Woman's Committee organization.

The Illinois Woman's Committee was created as a standing committee of the State Council of Defense (SCD), the fifteen-member board appointed by the governor to organize Illinois's war effort; the IWC was also Illinois's State Division of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, created by the President to coordinate the nation's war effort.1 From the moment of its origin, the state leadership of the IWC was dominated by Chicago women, who created the organization and continued to shape its program throughout the war. Only seventeen percent of the IWC's state leaders lived downstate. Chicago was home not only to IWC state headquarters but also to virtually the entire IWC Executive Committee as well as its Advisory Committee, which included the presidents of all statewide women's organizations.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, when IWC Director Harriet Vittum returned from a 1917 trip through Illinois on behalf of the organization, she reported that "the extreme southern end of the State feels isolated and somewhat neglected by Chicago."3

Jessie Spafford, state president of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs (IFWC), supervised the IWC's efforts to organize local Woman's Committees. As was common among state Woman's Committees throughout the nation during World War I, the women's club movement figured prominently in the backgrounds of state and local Illinois Woman's Committee leaders; most belonged to clubs organized through the IFWC, and most state-level Woman's Committee department heads had led similar departments in the IFWC before the war temporarily diverted their efforts to the IWC.4 With, as Spafford noted in her final report, "the heartiest cooperation from club women all over the State," the IWC's Organization Department included the IFWC's twenty-five congressional district presidents as well as the presidents of the Illinois Parent-Teachers Association, the Illinois Federation of Church Women, and the Women's Auxiliary of the Illinois Farmers' Institute; seventeen of its thirty-one members represented downstate areas. This group appointed a Woman's Committee chairman for each county "for the duration of the war"; according to Spafford, "the right women were obtained for the county chairmanship through suggestions made by club women who were acquainted with women possessing organizing ability" in that county. This county leader linked state headquarters in Chicago to her county's local Woman's Committees, whose officers were elected by the women in that city, town, or township.5 Local leaders were most often the leading club women in their communities, although the IWC insisted that "the work of the Woman's Committee shall not be left to any one club or organization, but shall be carried on by all women's organizations and the unorganized women of the community co-ordinated into a local" Woman's Committee.6