Foundations of Feminism: How Philanthropic Patrons Shaped Gender Politics

Abstract

Objectives. Although recent research has documented the contributions of philanthropic foundations as “patrons” of the major identity movements, scholars know very little about the specific ways foundations have influenced these movements' development and impact. This study examines the role of foundations in shaping the U.S. women's movement of the 1960s–1980s, in particular the role that foundations played in deciding which of its claimsmakers—and by extension, its claims—would be sustained.
Methods. The study is based on an original data set of nearly 6,500 foundation grants to women's groups, or for women's causes, from 1970 to 1990. It examines shifts in the types of groups that received foundation grants and in the female interests that these groups represented.
Results. Philanthropic patrons were central to transforming women from servants of society into claimants against the state. Likewise, foundations played a critical role in segmenting U.S. womanhood into politically relevant subgroups (civic stewards, battered women, lesbians, etc.) with ever narrower policy claims.
Conclusions. By legitimizing identity subgroups and their policy agendas, foundations played an important role in the development of special interest politics in the second half of the 20th century. In this way, professional grantmakers have constituted a critical yet overlooked force behind the construction of U.S. hyperpluralism, in the process diminishing the capacity of gender to unite women in common cause.

Full text

Foundations of Feminism: How
Philanthropic Patrons Shaped
Gender Politics
n
Kristin A. Goss, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University
Objectives. Although recent research has documented the contributions of phil-
anthropic foundations as ‘‘patrons’’ of the major identity movements, scholars
know very little about the specific ways foundations have influenced these move-
ments’ development and impact. This study examines the role of foundations in
shaping the U.S. women’s movement of the 1960s–1980s, in particular the role that
foundations played in deciding which of its claimsmakers—and by extension, its
claims—would be sustained. Methods. The study is based on an original data set
of nearly 6,500 foundation grants to women’s groups, or for women’s causes, from
1970 to 1990. It examines shifts in the types of groups that received foundation
grants and in the female interests that these groups represented. Results. Philan-
thropic patrons were central to transforming women from servants of society into
claimants against the state. Likewise, foundations played a critical role in segment-
ing U.S. womanhood into politically relevant subgroups (civic stewards, battered
women, lesbians, etc.) with ever narrower policy claims. Conclusions. By legiti-
mizing identity subgroups and their policy agendas, foundations played an impor-
tant role in the development of special interest politics in the second half of the 20th
century. In this way, professional grantmakers have constituted a critical yet over-
looked force behind the construction of U.S. hyperpluralism, in the process di-
minishing the capacity of gender to unite women in common cause.
Since the 1960s, U.S. politics has revolved less around class interests and
more around religious, racial, gender, and other cultural identities (Frank,
2004; Kaufmann, 2002; Brown and Carmines, 1995; Rae, 1992; Lieske,
1991). Commentators and other purveyors of conventional wisdom portray
group identity as the inevitable and inescapable byproduct of shared values
and experiences. Thus, African Americans are bound to see the world
differently from whites; gun owners are bound to see the world differently
from gun opponents; evangelicals are bound to see the world differently
n
Direct correspondence to Kristin A. Goss, Sanford 234, Box 90245, Duke University,
Durham, NC 27708 hkgoss@duke.edui. This research was conducted under a grant from
the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund (2003-NSRF-07 and 07B). I am
grateful to Alan Abramson and NSRF for their support of this project, to Ann McClenahan
and Cariza Dolores Arnedo for research assistance, to Janice Rosenberg and Caroline Herbert
of the Foundation Center for help with the archives, to an anonymous reviewer, and to Grant
Williams and Theda Skocpol for insightful comments on an earlier draft. I am willing to
share all data and coding information with those wishing to replicate this study.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 88, Number 5, December 2007
r2007 by the Southwestern Social Science Association

from secular humanists; and women are bound to see the world differently
from men. Although the worldviews of these groups no doubt differ in
fundamental ways, the group identities that structure those worldviews were
not preordained. Rather, in large part they were socially constructed through
voluntary processes of collective action.
Scores of studies have examined how collective movements emerge. At the
center of most models are at least two variables: the movement’s ability to
mobilize resources and its ability to devise a collective action frame that
will turn passive sympathizers into active participants. Even as scholars have
demonstrated how resources and frames matter, they have been less attuned
to how the two influence one another. That is, scholars know little
about how resource providers influence the collective identities that fuel
movements. This oversight is puzzling insofar as studies have documented
the considerable leverage that donors have over priorities and goals of
voluntary organizations in the service sector (Dowie, 2006; Froehlich, 1999;
Gronbjerg, 1992, 1993).
This study examines the role that one important type of resource pro-
vider—philanthropic foundations—has played in the development of the
collective action frames that enabled one of the 20th century’s most influ-
ential movements—the U.S. women’s movement—to occur. American
philanthropic foundations—which number more than 66,000, control more
than $475 billion in assets, and give out $30 billion in grants each year
1
—
are critical yet understudied players in U.S. politics. Recent scholarship has
shown that foundation ‘‘patrons’’ help solve the collective action problem by
creating and financing social movement organizations and organizations
working for public goods (Walker, 1991). In so doing, foundations provide
elite validation to novel and sometimes controversial ideas and policy pro-
posals.
Foundations played a central role in the women’s movement. Although
they did not catalyze feminism—and, in fact, were slow to come on board—
foundations did play a central role in deciding which of its claimsmakers—
and by extension, its claims—would be sustained. In doing so, foundations
played a critical role in segmenting U.S. women into separate politically
relevant identities: working women, battered women, and so forth. Foun-
dations’ role has been indirect but decisive. Rather than creating the wom-
en’s movement, foundations encouraged and legitimized the various
identities that the movement embraced. This grant-making agenda had
two larger implications for women and U.S. politics more generally. The
first is that philanthropic patrons were central to transforming women from
servants of society into rights-bearing claimants against the state. The second
is that the fragmentation of women’s identity into identities, enabled and
1
Foundation Center, ‘‘Number of Grantmaking Foundations, Assets, Total Giving, and
Gifts Received, 1975-2003.’’ Available at hhttp://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/statistics/
pdf/02_found_growth/04_03.pdfi.
Foundations of Feminism 1175

validated by philanthropic gatekeepers, contributed to the fragmentation of
public policy making and to the rise of special interest politics in the United
States.
The study is based on an analysis of an original data set of nearly 6,500
foundation grants to women’s groups, or for women’s causes, from 1970 to
1990. The data provide a window into how resource providers privilege
certain types of organizations and priorities at different points in time, in
effect shaping the face of the movement and its strategies. The study unfolds
as follows. The next section provides a brief overview of what we know
about foundations’ role in the women’s movement and presents this study’s
research questions. I then describe the data and methods used to answer the
questions. Then, I tackle the two major questions in turn: (1) What role did
foundations play in the women’s movement? and (2) What role did foun-
dations play in constructing gender politics? I then conclude with an ar-
gument for a more systematic examination of the hidden role of foundations
in contemporary politics.
Foundations and the Women’s Movement: An Overview
Philanthropic foundations have provided crucial operating support to the
major movements of the second half of the 20th century, the golden era of
identity movements ( Jenkins and Halcli, 1999; Jenkins, 1998; Walker,
1991). And yet, besides the general observation that foundations have sup-
ported movement organizations, scholars know very little about specific
ways that foundations have made a difference in movements’ origins, strat-
egies, or impact. This study brings organized philanthropy into the fore of
identity politics.
With respect to the women’s movement, studies have focused more on the
patronage support provided by government and traditional women’s vol-
untary associations (Costain, 1992; Klein, 1984) than by philanthropic
foundations. The key resource providers were publicly financed commis-
sions on the status of women at the state and national levels, as well as
traditional mass membership organizations, such as the National Federation
of Business and Professional Women and the American Association of
University Women, which deployed their membership dues and volunteer
labor toward feminist causes. In light of these prominent contributions,
scholars may have surmised that philanthropic foundations did not matter
much. As a feminist activist argued at the dawn of the movement’s second
decade, donors ‘‘have been unwilling to contribute to those groups that are
avowedly feminist in purpose, that were organized by women, that are run
by women, and that have as their major goal the elimination of sex dis-
crimination in all areas of American life’’ (Tully, 1977:1383).
The contributions of government and associational resources notwith-
standing, organized philanthropy’s role in the women’s movement was far
1176 Social Science Quarterly

more important than most scholars or activists have appreciated to date. In
their study of activist foundations’ contributions to social movements, Craig
Jenkins and Abigail Halcli (1999) found that by 1980 the women’s move-
ment received more money than any other movement—16 percent of all
movement grants, compared to less than 1 percent in 1970. By 1990,
women’s interests still received a respectable 12 percent of movement phi-
lanthropy, putting them in third place behind environmentalism and urban
communities in terms of social-change philanthropy ( Jenkins and Halcli,
1999). As the timing of these grants suggests, foundations did not ‘‘create’’
the women’s movement, which had begun in the 1960s. Instead, founda-
tions professionalized grassroots ‘‘indigenous’’ groups and thereby ‘‘chan-
neled’’ disparate protest actions into more formally institutionalized
methods of political participation ( Jenkins and Halcli, 1999:243).
One implication of the channeling thesis is that by professionalizing
movements, foundations increased movements’ capacity to mobilize people
and institutions over the long term and consequently helped movements to
achieve their ultimate social and political goals ( Jenkins, 1998:212–13).
Another implication is that foundations may be as important in helping
advocates implement legislative and court victories as in securing those vic-
tories in the first place. In the case of the women’s movement, Jenkins and
Halcli’s research found that philanthropy helped to professionalize the
movement by creating and supporting staff-run legal advocacy organizations
and abortion providers, thereby making available ‘‘legal and technical re-
sources to secure legal changes and ensure their enforcement’’ ( Jenkins and
Halcli, 1999:250–51).
This study does not take issue with the findings of Jenkins and Halcli;
indeed, my far larger and more representative sample of foundations val-
idates their conclusions. Instead, this study goes further by exploring broader
questions about philanthropy’s role in the transformation of women’s place
in the U.S. polity. Specifically, the study explores the following question:
What role, if any, did foundations play in the construction of gender pol-
itics, that is, public ideas about gender identities and gender roles?
To preview the findings, this study finds that foundations’ role was far
deeper and more encompassing than the ‘‘channeling’’ function that Jenkins
has identified. Organized philanthropy did not merely professionalize feminist
activism, but it also helped reorient women’s issue priorities and in turn
legitimized new gender identities and gender roles. Thus, foundations’ major
contribution was not simply to affect strategic or organizational forms; it was
also to promote and legitimize certain public ideas and norms over others.
This study aims both to shed new light on the immediate case—the
women’s movement—and to generate a series of hypotheses about the role
that foundations play in facilitating, or constraining, sociopolitical change. It
is hoped that this study’s conclusions with respect to women’s movement
patronage will be evaluated in other cases to generate empirically robust
theories of foundation impact.
Foundations of Feminism 1177

Data and Methods
Jenkins and Halcli focus on a limited universe of activist foundations’
grants to feminist organizations; this study focuses on a more expansive
sample of both foundations and grants. With three exceptions, the database
represents every grant (1) given to a U.S. women’s organization (e.g., fem-
inist groups, female-led volunteer organizations, orders of religious women,
nursing associations), or for women’s purposes (e.g., fellowships for female
scientists, enforcement of equal opportunity laws) (2) at five-year
intervals between 1970 and 1990 (3) that was recorded in the Foundation
Center’s annual editions of the Foundation Grants Index, for a total of
6,493 grants.
2
The data set includes the following information: donor foundation; grant
amount; grant recipient; and (in most cases) grant purpose. From the sub-
stantive content of grant purpose, often in conjunction with subjective
knowledge of the grant-receiving organization, two additional variables were
created: WOMEN’S IDENTITY, which captures the main beneficiary/ies of the
grant, and FEMINIST ORIENTATION, which essentially records whether the grant
should be considered patronage for the women’s movement. These variables
allow for an analysis of how foundation patronage influenced ideas about
women’s roles and the roles themselves. The WOMEN’S IDENTITY variable took
on one of 20 values, including women as stewards of the community; poor,
homeless, or unemployed women; and women in nontraditional employ-
ment. The FEMINIST ORIENTATION variable took on two values: 1 if the grant
sought to enhance women’s rights, provide new recognition or status to
women’s unique problems or contributions, or encourage women’s partic-
ipation in nontraditional fields of endeavor, and 0 if the grant sought to
perpetuate traditional gender roles in the economy, society, and politics.
The data set records women-related grants from 899 foundations. The
nearly 6,500 grants catalogued in the data set went for a wide array of causes,
from women’s health and education, to abortion rights and enforcement of
anti-discrimination laws, to charitable projects run by orders of nuns, to
battered women’s shelters and programs for female drug users. All told, the
data set contains grants totaling $324 million in current dollars, or $850
million in inflation-adjusted (1990) dollars.
Did Foundations Help Construct Gender Politics?
Studies of foundations’ role in society tend to focus on whether organized
philanthropy reinforces existing economic arrangements, in effect allowing
2
Typically, there is a one- to two-year lag between when a grant is made and the edition of
the Index in which it appears. Thus, this project uses the 1970–1971 Index to capture grants
made in 1969–1970; the 1976 Index to capture grants made in 1975, and so forth. Grants to
women’s colleges, college scholarship programs, and non-U.S. organizations were omitted.
1178 Social Science Quarterly

elites to continue oppressing underprivileged groups while appearing to help
them. At the heart of this leftist critique of philanthropy is an assumption
that philanthropy is a tool of political power, and that political power
revolves around the perpetuation of class stratification (Arnove, 1980; Roe-
lofs, 2003). It is ironic that scholarly works on foundation impact focus on
class when it has been abundantly clear for at least 25 years that the principal
political cleavage in the United States centers on cultural values and iden-
tity—the now familiar ‘‘red state versus blue state’’ division. Gender roles
are at the heart of this political-cultural divide (Mansbridge, 1986; Luker,
1984), and the data suggest that foundations have played an important role
in sustaining the very organizations that aim to reorder gender roles and the
laws and norms that structured them. It seems appropriate, then, to ask not
what role did foundations play in reinforcing the class identities that in-
fluenced the politics of the early to mid-20th century but, rather, what role
have foundations played in creating the gender and cultural identities that
have been so important to the ‘‘postmaterialist’’ politics of the late 20th and
early 21st centuries.
A related debate about foundations’ influence is also relevant here. Even as
foundations are often accused of being fundamentally conservative in re-
inforcing class arrangements—after all, foundations are almost by definition
instruments of the wealthy—they are also, paradoxically, widely viewed as
being disruptive of the status quo. Whether this disruptive function is good
or bad depends on one’s political perspective. Those on the right see foun-
dation disruption as a bad thing, sowing discord among social groups,
manufacturing group-based grievances, and creating dependency on the
state (Wooster, 2002; MacDonald, 2005). Those on the left, on the other
hand, see foundation influence in the creation of identity politics as both
healthy and progressive, empowering disadvantaged groups to break the
shackles of their oppression, challenging dominant groups to relinquish
control, and allowing both groups to create a more humane, principled
social order (Jones, 2004; Ostrander, 1995).
The women’s movement allows one to assess these competing theories of
foundation impact: foundations as tools of the political status quo, on the
one hand, and of political disruption, on the other. These theories beg the
question of organized philanthropy’s role in U.S. pluralism. Does philan-
thropy encourage a robust group-based politics, or quash it? Does philan-
thropy encourage democratic deliberation, as the founders wanted, or
empower discordant minority factions, as the founders feared? Have foun-
dations contributed to the fragmentation of U.S. society by encouraging
identity politics, or have foundations contributed to the unification of
the United States by bringing previously marginalized groups into social,
political, and economic life?
These are all big questions, and the data cannot answer any of them
definitively. But the data can provide suggestive evidence. The first con-
clusion to be drawn is that foundation patrons did not ‘‘create’’ women as an
Foundations of Feminism 1179

identity group. Political and social elites of both genders did that by con-
structing the ‘‘doctrine of spheres’’ in which women were to be caretakers of
home and hearth. As Theda Skocpol (1992), Ruth Bordin (1990), and
others have shown, women’s associations quickly expanded this care-taking
role to the community and the nation by pushing significant policy reforms
such as prohibition and mothers’ pensions.
Foundations did not create a female identity, but in the modern era they
did play a key role in the social construction of female identities. Specifically,
foundations made a strategic decision to increase their impact by supporting
specialized grant-seeking groups. That decision in turn provided a strong
incentive for those groups to establish a policy niche that would enable them
to catch the eye of professional funders. Through this interactive process,
foundations enabled identity diversification and segmentation, in which
women no longer considered themselves members of the community of
women writ large, but rather as members of one or more female subcom-
munities: poor women, minority women, lesbians, abused women, tradi-
tional women, nontraditional women, mothers, pregnant or potentially
pregnant women, victims of gender discrimination, feminist activists, and
so forth. In sum, foundations tacitly validated, and in many cases overtly
encouraged, the segmentation of female identities by providing financial
support to nonprofit organizations that saw U.S. women not as a unified
whole but rather, at best, as a loose confederation of particularistic interests.
There are two ways to illustrate these arguments. The first way is to
examine the grant reports promulgated by the bellwether foundation for
women’s concerns. The second way is to examine how foundation grants
shifted toward certain female identities, and possibly away from others,
during the 1970–1990 period.
Grant Reports: The Ford Foundation
In all but one year sampled, the New-York-based Ford Foundation gave
more money to women’s groups than did any other foundation. (In the
exceptional year, 1992, Ford was No. 2.) Ford’s influence in this area is well
recognized, and its early leadership in the realm of women’s rights no doubt
encouraged other philanthropies to follow suit. For many years, and argu-
ably today, Ford was the New York Times of foundations, the industry
standard bearer from which other institutions took their cue. For these
reasons, Ford’s grant-making reports during the 1970s and 1980s provide
an important insight into the role organized philanthropy has played in
creating identity politics.
In 1972, Ford’s president, McGeorge Bundy, appointed a ‘‘small, inter-
divisional Task Force on Women to investigate grant-making possibilities in
the area of women’s rights and opportunities’’ (Created Equal:14). The task
force concluded that improving women’s economic status was key to
1180 Social Science Quarterly

improving women’s well-being, so the board of trustees recommended that
the foundation support ‘‘a program starting with a concern for women’s
economic role but reaching out to many of the ramifications that develop
from that’’ (Created Equal:14). Ford’s 1971–1972 annual report was the first
such report to identify women’s programs as a separate category, entitled
‘‘The Status of Women’’ (Ford Foundation, 1972:17). In that year, grants
went toward groups seeking to encourage women’s participation and equal-
ity in the labor force. Specifically, the foundation supported groups seeking
to expand women’s access to daycare, to improve women’s status in certain
professions, to organize household workers, and to investigate the dearth of
women in union leadership positions. The following year, the foundation
began a grant-making effort to encourage the development of women’s
studies as a discipline, while continuing work on facilitating women’s em-
ployment and equality in the workplace (Ford Foundation, 1973:14–16,
36). In the second half of the 1970s, the focus of women’s grant making
shifted to monitoring sex discrimination in employment and in social and
educational provision, as well as protecting the rights and status of low-
income and minority women and teenaged mothers. The foundation con-
tinued to support programs for women across the board and women
in higher education specifically (Ford Foundation, 1975:7, 23, 1976:4–6,
21–22, 1978:7–8, 16–17, 1979:43).
In the early 1980s, Ford made strategic decisions to increase dramatically
the attention it was paying to women’s interests. The foundation underwent
a major grant-making reorganization in 1980 in which it divided its pro-
gram interests into six ‘‘themes’’: urban poverty and the disadvantaged, rural
poverty and resources, human rights and social justice, education, interna-
tional political and economic issues, and governance and public policy (Ford
Foundation, 1980:vii). Simultaneously, the foundation began ‘‘integrating
women’s programs and concern for women’s issues into all of the Foun-
dation’s work.’’ Instead of having a separate program on ‘‘women’s status,’’
the foundation would actively consider the ‘‘women’s angle’’ in all six of its
field-specific areas of concern (Created Equal:30). Low-income women
would be a particular interest (Ford Foundation, 1980:vii). With this en-
hanced attention to women across the programmatic board came a special,
short-term doubling of the amount spent on women’s causes around the
world, to $19.3 million (Created Equal:29). The foundation also created a
Women’s Program Group that reported regularly to Ford’s president and
governing board (Created Equal:29).
The foundation’s strategic decision to emphasize the role of women in
each of its six program areas encouraged grant-seeking organizations to
define their field-specific efforts—in poverty, human rights, public policy,
and so forth—in terms of their impact on, or inclusion of, women. In
essence, Ford provided an economic incentive to nonprofit organizations to
create a female constituency within their general area of interest. Thus, in
the 1980s, Ford grants began supporting ever narrower groups of women:
Foundations of Feminism 1181

pregnant workers, ‘‘pink-collar’’ laborers, women engaged in third-world
development, welfare recipients preparing for employment, battered wom-
en, female members of the armed forces, rural women, ‘‘high-risk mothers,’’
older women, refugee and immigrant women, female government employ-
ees, scholars of black women’s studies, female film directors and playwrights,
women in need of abortion services, feminist scientists, poor urban women
in Peru, Jordanian women, back female clergy members, feminist scholars
in Mexico and South America, and black women with health problems
(Ford Foundation, 1980:16, 29, 1982:2–3, 1983:41, 49, 1984:xi, 40–42,
1985:43, 1986:39, 1987:37, 58; Created Equal:31). The grant-making
strategy of Ford, and the other major foundations that followed, encouraged
the identification and development of a wide array of female interests and
constituencies. Many of these identities may well have been ‘‘discovered’’ in
the absence of external funding and validation, but at the very least orga-
nized philanthropy provided a powerful top-down incentive for organiza-
tional entrepreneurs to go in search of that discovery.
Which Female Identities Gained or Lost in the 1970–1990 Period?
The period that this study covers was marked by a dramatic transforma-
tion in gender roles and expectations, and foundations—well beyond
Ford—played a vital role in legitimizing both.
In 1970, the U.S. women’s movement had been gaining ground for nearly
a decade, and public opinion in the late 1960s had shifted fairly dramatically
toward gender equality (Costain, 1992:119; Mansbridge, 1986:24–25). But
the women’s movement’s goals certainly had not gained widespread accep-
tance in practice. As Jane Mansbridge notes, in the 1970s ‘‘Americans were
highly ambivalent about the appropriate role for women,’’ demonstrating
high levels of support for equality in the abstract but considerably less
support when faced with the real-life tradeoffs that such equality might
entail (Mansbridge, 1986:22–23). Thus, during the period under study,
gender relations—and attitudes about gender relations—were in flux.
The data suggest that foundations played an important role in supporting
and institutionalizing civil-society groups that were defining a wide array of
new gender roles for women. Figure 1 documents the growth in grant
making for feminist causes. These included groups advocating for female
victims of violence; women in nontraditional employment, educational, and
leadership roles; women as subjects of historical merit; victims of discrim-
ination; lesbians; women’s self-help; women’s health research and services;
abortion and family planning; and women’s status more generally.
As Figure 1 shows, the women’s movement touched off rapid growth in
such grants throughout the 1970s. By 1980, fully 53 percent of all grants for
women’s causes went toward enhancing women’s rights and status, up from
32 percent in 1970. If grants to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates are
1182 Social Science Quarterly

excluded, the growth in feminist funding is even more pronounced—from
11 percent of all grants in 1970 to 48 percent in 1980. In terms of grant
dollars, feminist causes reached 49 percent of all female-related grants in
1975 and slipped slightly to 46 percent in 1980.
Figure 2 documents a shift in foundation grant making for four women’s
labor roles. The figure shows a pronounced growth in philanthropic support
for general-purpose feminist activists and for advocates of females in non-
traditional employment roles, particularly from the mid-1970s onward.
These nontraditional roles included female employees in historically male
occupations and homemakers returning to college in midlife.
Although the trend lines are not monotonic (owing in part to the abun-
dance of Planned Parenthood grants that factored into the 1970 total), the
pattern is clear. Support for women in feminist-activist and other nontra-
ditional roles, measured in the number of grants given, increased dramat-
ically, while support for women in traditionally female volunteer roles (e.g.,
Girl Scout leaders) and traditionally female paid jobs (e.g., nursing) de-
clined.
That said, foundation support for women in traditional roles in fact did
continue during and after the feminist movement; traditional women were
not ‘‘dropped’’ from the foundation rolls. This observation is particularly
true when considering total dollars that foundations gave (as opposed to the
number of grants). The data suggest that in 1990, fully 40 percent of all
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
1990198519801970 1975
Feminist % of all women's grants
grants)
Feminist
Grants(%
of all
Feminist
Grants(%
of all
dollars)
S : Foundation Center Grants Index
FIGURE 1
Grants for Feminist Causes
Foundations of Feminism 1183

foundation dollars went either to women volunteers or women in traditional
jobs, including religious orders—making ‘‘traditional women’’ the single
biggest recipient of foundations’ women-oriented dollars. Incidentally, that
fraction was unchanged relative to 1975. By contrast, just one-tenth of
foundations’ women-oriented dollars went to support women in nontradi-
tional roles in 1990.
So the data suggest that traditional women continued to receive foun-
dation support, even as foundations also began supporting the incorporation
of women into nontraditional employment roles. This finding is important
because it provides evidence that traditional groups were still in the hunt for
foundation dollars; foundations’ choice to support specialized identity
groups was indeed a choice, rather than a default response to a shifting
universe of grantseekers.
3
Besides supporting women’s move into historically
male occupational roles, foundations also supported women in other sorts
of feminist roles: as subjects of academic study (i.e., women’s studies) and
historical recognition; as victims of job discrimination; and as general fem-
inist policy activists. Table 1 illustrates the growth in support for feminism
and sustained support for traditional women’s roles.
In a sense, Table 1 illustrates the rise of the women’s liberation move-
ment, which reconceived of women as rights-bearing claimants against the
state, rather than as stewards of the community. That said, one interesting
pattern in the data is that foundation support for feminism appears strongest
0
10
20
30
40
50
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990
% of all women's grants
Volunteer/
Steward
Nontraditional
Worker/Leader
Feminist
Activist
Traditional
Worker
S : Foundation Center Grants Index
FIGURE 2
Female Identities Supported by Foundations, 1970–1990
3
I thank an anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this question.
1184 Social Science Quarterly

TABLE 1
Foundation Support for Nontraditional and Traditional Gender Roles
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
Traditional Roles
Volunteer or steward 15 6 25 13 20 18 18 14 15 10
Civic activist 4 5 1 2 2 1 2 2 1 1
Worker in historically
female occupation
35 25 19 29 11 21 15 21 16 26
Religious women 4 2 5 4 2 4 2 3 4 4
Nontraditional Roles
Worker in historically male
occupation
2 2 17 22 18 16 12 8 18 11
Research or historical subject 1 o145342523
Discrimination victim o1o1 7 16 5 10 3 3 2 3
Feminist activist o1o121212221
Foundations of Feminism 1185

in the 1975–1980 period. Even as economic studies continue to show a
wage gap between male and female professionals, the data suggest a sig-
nificant drop after 1980 in foundation support for anti-discrimination work
and for the incorporation of women into historically male roles. For ex-
ample, the fraction of foundation dollars going to help victims of discrim-
ination in 1990 was less than one-fifth the fraction in 1975. The next section
partially accounts for this curious finding.
Which Female Identities Were Fostered in the 1970-1990 Period?
If one thinks of philanthropic patronage as legitimizing identity groups,
then the evidence suggests that a handful of new female identities were
fostered from the mid-1970s onward. This study has already considered the
growth in support for feminist identities: nontraditional workers, discrim-
ination victims, feminist activists, and subjects of celebratory ‘‘women’s’’
research and historical recognition. But this is only half the story. As the
1970s and 1980s progressed, the data show new subgroups of women
gaining increased legitimization from organized philanthropy. One salient
example is victims of rape, domestic violence, and pornography.
4
The 1970–
1971 Index records not a single grant to an organization working in the field
of female victimization. By 1975, however, 2 percent of women-oriented
grants went to violence victims, and by 1985, that figure was 16 percent. A
similar pattern emerges with respect to lesbians. No grants appeared in the
1970–1971, 1976, or 1982 editions of the Index; but by the 1985 edition,
lesbian groups had begun to receive modest sums. Anti-feminist activists also
make an appearance as an identity group for the first time in 1985.
Besides these newly created identity groups, foundations dramatically in-
creased their support for subgroups of women who were disadvantaged in
some other way. The infusion of dollars to organizations working with these
populations helped to transform a collection of disaggregated individuals
who happened to share a misfortune into socially constructed identity
groups defined by their gender-based plight. Thus, women who were poor
became ‘‘single mothers’’ trapped in the ‘‘feminization of poverty.’’ Women
who are assaulted by their boyfriend or husband became ‘‘battered women’’
for whom a proliferation of safe houses emerged in the 1980s, often at the
behest of feminists who constructed shelters as feminist collectives with
nonhierarchical management structures. Table 2 documents the fragmen-
tation of the traditional women’s identity group into subgroups with
particularistic claims based on disadvantage.
4
I do not take a position on whether pornography constitutes the victimization of women.
I include pornography in the ‘‘victims’’ category because many feminists believe that it does.
That said, there were so few grants to anti-pornography efforts that their exclusion from this
category would not affect the overall findings.
1186 Social Science Quarterly

TABLE 2
Foundations and the Rise of Female Identity Groups
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
%
Grants
%
Dollars
Poor/homeless 1.5 o1 2 1 5 6 102110 9
Minority/immigrant 3 4 5 5 4 3 5 6 5 4
Substance abuser/prostitute o1o1o1o111 1 1 32
Victim of violence 0 0 2 1 11 5 16 6 10 5
Prisoner/offender 1 o1 3 121 2 1 11
Foundations of Feminism 1187

The argument that foundations help to legitimize particularistic claims
does not in any way disparage the worthiness of those claims or the or-
ganizations that addressed them. Rather, the data simply reinforce the em-
pirical point that the act of grouping people by gender and predicament has
important political implications in a pluralist democracy. It legitimizes par-
ticularistic identity-based claims, which may have the unintended conse-
quence of discouraging more inclusive solidarity based on gender. The
disintegration of an inclusive gender-based solidarity may, in turn, inhibit
women’s ability to work together in encompassing associations to press
important policy matters (Goss and Skocpol, 2006; Skocpol, 2003).
What accounts for the proliferation of particularistic female identities? An
interactive process between foundations and grant-seeking organizations
appears to explain the phenomenon. Foundations’ penchant for funding
identity-based subgroups is driven by the strategic calculation, particularly
by large professionally staffed funds, that specializing within broad program
areas will maximize the probability of impact. For their part, nonprofit
groups carve out identity niches so as to differentiate themselves from one
another and thereby attract donor support. As Karen Paget has noted, ‘‘a
‘market niche’ mentality has come to dominate many organizations and
funders alike,’’ leading ‘‘the world of citizen organizations . . . to mirror the
dominant tendency in America’s political culture of fragmentation and
specialization’’ (Paget, 1990). In the case of the women’s movement, the
decision to specialize for notice and impact may have had the unintended
consequence of fragmenting and diluting the clout of the constituency that
the foundation seeks to empower.
Conclusion
More than simply giving money to nonprofit organizations, foundations
play an important legitimizing role in U.S. society. They legitimize ideas,
turning private notions into public claims. In a related vein, foundations
legitimize the identity groups that are making these claims. In this sense,
then, foundations play an important role in structuring public agendas.
In the case of the U.S. women’s movement, foundations funded the social
construction of subgroup identities within the female population, thereby
enabling the fragmentation of women’s interests. To clarify what that
means, a thought experiment is in order. If one were to examine the 1970–
1971 Foundation Grants Index to deduce the various roles that U.S. women
played in that time period, one would conclude that women were, first,
employees in service and ‘‘helping’’ professions; second, bearers of children;
and third, civic volunteers and stewards of the community.
5
In short,
5
For this thought experiment, I include all ‘‘identity’’ categories that received at least 5
percent of foundation grants in the given year (1970 or 1990).
1188 Social Science Quarterly

women were other-oriented. Examining the 1992 Index, one would see
women as a far less homogeneous group. One would conclude that women
were, in order, workers in historically male fields, workers in historically
female (service) professions, civic volunteers, bearers of children, poor or
homeless people, victims of rape and domestic violence, recipients of social
services, and minorities or immigrants. Women were also defined as older
people, lesbians, substance abusers, feminist and anti-feminist activists, and
discrimination victims.
What are the implications of dividing the universe of women into distinct
identity subgroups? One obvious implication is that historically marginali-
zed constituencies of women receive both validation and assistance. Once
women are categorized into worthy subpopulations, it is less likely that their
needs will be neglected. On the other hand, the hyperpluralism of the late
20th-century women’s movement may have diminished the capacity of
gender to unite women in common cause. Where in another day poor
women and gay women might have worked together on progressive social
causes not as poor women and gay women, but as women, in the diversified
identity group universe such unity becomes more of a challenge. Certainly,
contemporary women’s groups work together on important public issues,
but when groups fragment, emphasizing identity differences and competing
for money and attention, coalition building is challenging.
Studies that entail quantitative analysis of large data sets have certain
limitations, and this study is no exception. One limitation was that resource
constraints precluded the construction of a data set containing all women’s
grants since 1970. Such a data set would have allowed a more definitive
presentation of funding trends. Perhaps a more serious limitation is that the
data do not allow us to answer definitively an important counterfactual
question: Would women’s groups have differentiated themselves anyway in a
world without foundation support? That is, did foundations cause the ob-
served proliferation of female identities? Anecdotal evidence suggests that,
indeed, ‘‘product differentiation’’ is a logical adaptation to the competitive
market for philanthropic dollars. It is possible, however, that women’s
groups might have chosen on their own to develop identity niches, in the
absence of funding considerations, simply because they perceived gains to be
had from program specialization. In point of fact, foundations’ willingness
to make money available for women’s programs probably both responded—
and contributed—to the segmentation of women’s identities. As a retro-
spective on Ford Foundation grant making noted in 1986:
In addition to dramatically increasing the budget—a public statement in
itself—the Foundation published and distributed several documents that
articulated its assessment of needs and goals. Such measures not only helped
legitimize the work of other groups concerned with women’s issues, but also
stimulated proposals from groups that might not otherwise have sought
foundation support. (Created Equal:53)
Foundations of Feminism 1189

Unstated, but undoubtedly true, is a third possibility: that existing groups
‘‘discovered’’ a women’s component to their work in order to receive fund-
ing from prestige-bearing foundations.
These and other limitations aside, this study reaches an important con-
clusion. Organized philanthropy does more than merely professionalize
social movement organizations. It also helps, at the very least, to legitimize
the identity groups that define what the movement and U.S. politics
more generally are all about. Foundation patrons are the hidden hand
shaping U.S. pluralism, a force that social science overlooks at its intellectual
peril.
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