Excerpt from The General Federation of Women's Clubs: Eighth Biennial Convention, May 30 to June 7, 1906, St. Paul, Minn.; Official Report Ladies, I was sent here by the Directors of the Commercial Club to welcome you, the representatives of the General Federation of Women.s Clubs, on behalf of the Commercial Club of St. Paul. The Commercial Club is an organization of professional and business men of about 1 150 members. They have extended you delegates the courtesy of the Club, 5y formal letter. They told me to say to you that they hope you will like St. Paul, that they hope you will like the residents of St. Paul; that they hope you will enjoy every moment of the time that you stay here. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country.

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