Who Counts as a Daughter? Post 5
What the DAR's Charter Actually Says
Who Counts as a Daughter? Bloodline, Belonging, and the Limits of Reform in the Daughters of the American Revolution · Part 5 · First published 16 October 2026
Here is the single most important finding in this series: the DAR's congressional charter has never said who may belong to the Society.
Not in 1896, not in any of the four rewrites that followed, and not today.
That matters because the charter keeps being cited as if it settled the question. In public comment threads this fall, members argued that the federal charter requires a women-only organization, or that Congress, having chartered the Society, has the final say over who belongs.¹ The text doesn't support either claim.
Everything below comes directly from the statutes.
A charter the founders went looking for
It's tempting to assume a federal charter was the standard way organizations incorporated in the 1890s. The DAR's history shows otherwise. The Society incorporated under District of Columbia law in 1891. By 1892, it had appointed a committee to seek a congressional act because a federal charter would give it a more national character than local incorporation could. Legislative delays held the effort up until 1896.²
The charter was the result of a deliberate, four-year pursuit of national standing.
What the 1896 act contains
The act of 20 February 1896, is three sections long.³
Section 1 names the incorporators and creates the corporation for "patriotic, historical, and educational purposes," to perpetuate the memory of the men and women who achieved American independence.
Section 2 lets the Society hold property up to $500,000 and "adopt a constitution and make by-laws not inconsistent with law."
Section 3 requires an annual report to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
That's all. There is no membership provision.
The eligibility rule (a woman, of a stated age, descended from a patriot) has always come from the Society's own constitution and bylaws, which Section 2 authorizes it to write. Congress didn't overlook membership. It allowed the DAR to determine its membership makeup.
The current codified charter keeps the same structure. Among the corporation's powers, it may "adopt a constitution and bylaws." Nowhere does it say who the members are.⁴
Others noticed long ago
In 1957, the legal scholar Wesley A. Sturges surveyed federal charters and sorted them by how they handled membership. Some patriotic societies' charters limited membership to designated classes. He noted that the DAR's charter was among those with no statement of membership qualifications or limitations at all.⁵
The Society said the same in July 2026. The day after the House bill was introduced, the President General wrote to members that the Society's own governance process, not federal legislation, has always set its membership criteria.⁶
Why this matters now
If the charter doesn't define membership, then a bill adding a membership definition isn't restoring anything. It would add something new, for the first time in 130 years.
That changes the debate. An appeal to the founders' intentions is a fair argument for members to make inside the Society, at its Congress, under its bylaws.
It's a different matter for Congress to write that intention into a statute that never contained it.
The text is short, and it's public. It's worth reading before anyone cites it again.
Notes
Comments on Carmen Eckard, "I had the Daughters of the American Revolution on my list of things I might write about someday . . . ," Facebook, September 2026, https://www.facebook.com/carmen.eckard.
National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Report of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890–1897, S. Doc. No. 164, 55th Cong., 3d sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899).
An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, ch. 23, 29 Stat. 8, 8–9 (1896). https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_4286.
36 U.S.C. § 153103, enacted by Pub. L. No. 105-225, 112 Stat. 1253 (1998), https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/1085/text.
Wesley A. Sturges, quoted in Henry B. Hogue, Title 36 Charters: The History and Evolution of Congressional Practices, CRS Report R47236 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2022), n33, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47236.
Hanna Jones, "Hold the Line: Tradition vs. Trans-Formation in the DAR," IW Features, August 20, 2026, https://www.iwfeatures.com/commentary/hold-the-line-tradition-vs-trans-formation-in-the-dar/, originally published in Townhall, August 15, 2026.
