MARCH 18, 2010 ISSUE
Women’s History Month
Volunteering Stitched By Women Into Fabric Of Nation
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony. Stanton first called for votes for women in 1848. The Constitutional Amendment giving women the vote is called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. 
Betsy Ross showing her flag to General Washington, George Ross and Robert Morris in 1776. 
Sojourner Truth, whose speech in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio demonstrated that arguments against votes for women were ridiculous. The version of the speech by conference organizer, Frances Dana Parker Gage, published in 1863, has become the standard. In 2009, the Daniel Boone Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution donated 5,010 hours to volunteering—from genealogical research to sending gifts to troops abroad.
The Hunger and Health Coalition owes much of its success to volunteers, as does the Watauga Humane Society, the Appalachian Women’s Fund and countless other local organizations.
So volunteerism is stitched into the fabric of national life at the local level. But it is also stitched in literally.
Betsy Ross of Philadelphia is credited with sewing the first United States flag after George Washington and others visited her in May 1776. Her sewing abilities won her a place in the nation’s history, according to the Betsy Ross website.
Some authorities claim Ross couldn’t have done it, because, among other things, there is no Continental Congress record of payment for a flag. But excellent evidence on the Ross website points to the story’s probability—and it doesn’t include the point that usually revolutionaries weren’t paid for their work and neither, regularly, are women. Often, they volunteer.
Women originally made, and later saved for posterity, the Smithsonian flag, Old Glory. It came from a Captain William Driver who apparently exclaimed, “Old Glory!” on receiving the gift of the sturdy, hand-sewn flag from his mother and some young ladies of his home town of Salem, Mass. The 10-foot by 17-foot flag flew on the whaler Charles Doggett during Driver’s round-the-world voyage of 1831 to 1832.
When the Civil War broke out and Tennessee seceded in 1861, Driver, who lived in Nashville, feared for Old Glory. His neighbor, a young woman named Bailey, came to the rescue by sewing it inside a quilt.
There is no story of this women being paid either.
Ignored Part of the Economy
A majority of the nation’s volunteers are women. According to a recent survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.8 percent of Americans in the over age 16, non-institutional population volunteer. Of these 63,361,000, 42 percent were men and 58 percent were women.
This volunteerism does not include the significant additional work that women have done throughout history, either voluntarily or involuntarily—giving birth and caring.
All this women’s work, whether officially considered volunteer or not, does not appear in calculations on the size of the national economy, even though it supports the economy.
The most recent (2008) national valuation of one hour of volunteer work, according to independentsector.org, was $20.25. The value of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s local contribution in 2009 at that 2008 figure was $101,452.50.
American women have volunteered for a huge variety of community tasks throughout the nation’s history, according to authors Susan J. Ellis and Catherine H. Campbell in By The People: A History of Americans as Volunteers.
If it were possible to put a dollar value on these countless unaccounted-for hours by women throughout the nation’s history, a very different picture of women’s contribution to the economy would emerge.
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