Daughters of the Declaration

September 26, 2011
Arguing that individual citizens’ initiatives in the voluntary not-for-profit sector have contributed as much as business entrepreneurs to America’s greatness, the authors trace the work of female civic leaders, or “social entrepreneurs,” from the Revolutionary War through the 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. American philanthropy expert Gaudiani (Generosity Unbound) and husband Burnett, a retired academic and business administrator, begin with the story of Esther Reed, the wife of a Pennsylvania governor, who published a 1778 broadsheet setting out a bold plan for national women’s fund-raising organizations that raised tens of millions in today’s dollars for the Revolutionary War effort. In 1793, a freed slave and foster mother to 48 black and white children, Catherine Ferguson used the income from baking wedding cakes to fund the nation’s first “Sabbath school,” a secular school on Sundays for child laborers that was replicated across New York City. More widely known is the case of Frances Willard, national president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who fought a battle that changed public attitudes on alcohol abuse and its social consequences. Although the examples of strong women who were agents of change for their fellow citizens are edifying and inspirational, this social history is geared toward specialists in public policy, philanthropy, and women’s studies and will have limited appeal to lay readers.

September 15, 2011

A look at how, by inventing philanthropic institutions, American women have played a crucial role shaping the American economy since the first days of the Revolution.

Gaudiani (Generosity Unbound: How American Philanthropy Can Strengthen the Economy and Expand the Middle Class, 2010, etc.) and her husband and business partner Burnett, educators and economic consultants to philanthropic organizations, consider the not-for-profit social sector to be a uniquely American third sector of the economy "that mobilizes citizen idealism and responsibility [and] provides a marketplace where buyers and sellers of ideas to improve the nation (and the world) can meet to do business." The authors demonstrate that in each of the wars in U.S. history, beginning with the Revolutionary War, women have played a major role in organizing financial support for soldiers--e.g., going door to door in Philadelphia, Esther Reed raised $7,000 to purchase new uniforms for Washington's soldiers and inspired women throughout the colonies to do likewise. Charity work provided the vehicle for enterprising women of that day whose other activities were severely restricted. Reed's activities, write the authors, began a tradition of female civic leadership and led to the creation of social entrepreneurship. The Russell Sage Foundation, established by Margaret Olivia Sage in 1907 and still active today, became the nation's first think-tank, and it began with the mandate of looking at the impact of social welfare on workers' lives and issued a number of groundbreaking studies on the need for workplace safety and public-health measures. In 1803, the first Widows' Society, headed by Isabella Graham, received $15,000 from the New York State legislature to support its work. Although the book ends with the role of women such as Francis Perkins and Mary McLeod Bethune in the New Deal, its implications for today are clear.

An interesting sidelight on the transformation of laissez-faire capitalism and the shaping of markets toward more ethical behavior.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2011
Many grade-schoolers read just about every volume in a public library bookcase devoted to biographies: (oversimplified) lives of presidents, explorers, and inventors, plus the occasional woman (Barton, Nightingale) or person of color (Carver, Washington). Although Daughters may resemble that sort of biographical potpourri, the authorsformer Connecticut College president and American philanthropy scholar Gaudiani and her husband, Burnett, a university and corporate administratorhave a broader purpose in examining the work of generations of American women activists, including Mother Elizabeth Seton, Catherine Ferguson, Lillian Wald, Frances Willard, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Frances Perkins. Their subjects are, the authors urge, social entrepreneurs who brought to the issues they championed the same optimism, idealism, and determinationand the same strategic planning, tactical flexibility, and operational creativitythat for-profit entrepreneurs applied to their fledgling industries. In the process, Gaudiani and Burnett maintain, these women developed a vibrant social profit sector, which continues to demand that American society reconsider, in each generation, whether it is living up to the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)