Who Counts As A Daughter? Are Women Leaving the DAR?
Who Counts as a Daughter? · Inside the Society · First published 9 November 2026
Since 2023, one claim has run through coverage of the campaign to restrict DAR membership: that women are leaving. In March 2024, a Federalist headline said women were fleeing the Society.¹ In February 2025, the same outlet reported, citing internal records, that 6,469 women had departed between July 2023 and October 2024, and called it an exodus.² An earlier account had put resignations at about 200.³
On October 30, 2026, three days before the Martha Laird Chapter went to court, the Society published its own membership figures.⁴ It lets us test the claim, at least in part. Here is what they show, and what they cannot.
What the Society's figures show
The Society's post reports, for each of the past five years, how many members it gained and lost. I've added the net change, which is simple subtraction.⁵
Year | Members acquired | Members lost | Net change |
2021 | 12,916 | 12,567 | +349 |
2022 | 12,463 | 13,781 | −1,318 |
2023 | 14,992 | 14,917 | +75 |
2024 | 13,704 | 14,850 | −1,146 |
2025 | 14,670 | 14,424 | +246 |
Five-year total | 68,745 | 70,539 | −1,794 |
Three things stand out. First, membership has been close to flat. Over five years the Society lost 1,794 more members than it gained, an average of 359 a year, or less than two-tenths of one percent of its roughly 190,000 members. Second, the two losing years look alike. The 2024 loss came after the 2023 guidance on transgender members, but the 2022 loss, nearly the same size, came before it. Third, 2025 was a growing year. If the policy had set off an exodus, I would expect 2024 to stand apart from 2022, and 2025 to fall further. Neither happened.
The same figures put the February 2025 number in context. The Society counted about 14,900 members lost in 2023 and 14,850 in 2024. At that pace, ordinary losses over the fifteen months the Federalist examined would come to roughly 19,000. The 6,469 departures it reported are about a third of that. If the figure counts all departures, it is lower than normal turnover, not higher. If it counts only resignations, it means little without resignation counts from earlier years, which neither the Society nor the article has published.
The 2026 figures, through October, point the same way. The Society reports more than 12,000 new member applications, including 1,720 in June, the third-highest month in its history; 2,126 reinstatements, close to last year's total of 2,313; and 20,336 prospective member interest forms, up 53 percent from the same period last year.⁴
What the figures cannot show
Numbers like these settle less than either side might like.
They give no reasons. "Members lost" combines deaths, lapsed dues, and resignations, and the Society's post itself names all three. Departures over the policy could sit inside those totals and we have no way of knowing.
The churn is large. Roughly 14,000 to 15,000 women join or leave each year, about one member in thirteen. Any chapter officer who has reconciled a membership roster knows how much ordinary turnover there is. A few hundred departures, or even a couple of thousand spread over two years, could be absorbed in that turnover without much net change.
Applications are not members. As anyone who has shepherded an application through the Registrar General's office knows, an application starts the membership process and is not the end of one. The Society has also not yet published its 2026 loss figure, so this year's net change is unknown.
Other forces were at work. June 2026 was the month of the Continental Congress vote, but it was also the run-up to the 250th anniversary of independence, a natural draw for a lineage society. A fee waiver promoted around that anniversary helped reinstatements, which the Society has since extended.⁶
The source has a stake. These are the Society's own unaudited figures, published in the middle of a dispute in which its leadership has every reason to show stability. That is not a reason to dismiss them. It is a reason to label them as the Society's figures, and to say what would check them.
What we can say
Taken together, the record supports a narrower conclusion than either side's talking points. Claims of a mass exodus find no support in the Society's numbers: the losing years look alike before and after 2023, 2025 grew, and interest in joining is rising. But the numbers cannot prove that no one left over the policy, or tell us who left, or from where.
What would settle it? Departure reasons, which the Society does not publish because not everyone tells their chapter why they resign or stop paying dues. Resignations count for the years before 2023, which would give the 6,469 figure a baseline. Or chapter-level data showing whether losses cluster in the places most engaged in the campaign. Until one of those appears, the honest summary is modest: no exodus is visible in the numbers, and no proof that no one left.
Notes
Jordan Boyd, "Women Flee Daughters of the American Revolution After It Admits Men," The Federalist, 11 March 2024, https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/11/women-flee-daughters-of-the-american-revolution-after-it-admits-men/.
Jordan Boyd, "Daughters of the American Revolution Doubles Down on Letting Men Infiltrate Its Ranks Against Members' Wishes," The Federalist, 10 February 2025, https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/10/daughters-of-the-american-revolution-doubles-down-on-letting-men-infiltrate-its-ranks-against-members-wishes/.
Ashley McClure, "Men Are Quietly Erasing America's True Daughters of the Revolution," The Federalist, 6 February 2024, https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/06/men-are-quietly-erasing-americas-true-daughters-of-the-revolution/. [Confirm the figure before posting.]
Jessica Chase, "Membership Momentum: A Look at DAR's Growth in 2026," Today's DAR (blog), National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 30 October 2026, https://blog.dar.org/2026/10/30/membership-momentum-look-dars-growth-2026; PDF captured 2 November 2026, 4:57 p.m. EST, in the author's files.
Net change and five-year totals calculated by the author from the annual figures in note 4.
Marguerite Fritsch, "Reinstatement Fee Waiver Extended Through the End of the Storage Administration," Today's DAR, 21 July 2026, https://blog.dar.org/2026/07/21/reinstatement-fee-waiver-extended-through-end-storage-administration; see also Marguerite Fritsch, "Reinstatement Campaign," DAR community blog, 27 May 2026, https://community.dar.org/blogs/marguerite-fritsch/2026/05/27/reinstatement-campiagn.
