Who Counts as a Daughter? Post 6
A Century of Charter Rewrites, and What Never Changed
Who Counts as a Daughter? Bloodline, Belonging, and the Limits of Reform in the Daughters of the American Revolution · Part 6 · First published 20 October 2026
A charter that is never amended might be silent on membership by accident. The DAR's charter has been amended four times, and each time Congress rewrote the section that gives the Society authority over its own rules. Read in sequence, those acts are the strongest evidence that the charter's silence on membership is a choice. Everything here is documented from the Statutes at Large and the U.S. Code.
Four rewrites, one constant
Each amendment replaced Section 2 of the 1896 act. Each was about property.
Year | What changed |
1896 | Original act caps the Society's property at $500,000¹ |
1915 | Cap doubled to $1 million² |
1926 | Cap raised to $5 million³ |
1951 | Cap raised to $10 million⁴ |
1976 | Cap removed; the Society may hold whatever property its lawful purposes require⁵ |
And each time, Congress re-enacted the clause authorizing the Society to "adopt a constitution and make bylaws not inconsistent with law."¹ ⁵ Over eighty years, Congress four times reconsidered what the DAR could own. Four times it left membership untouched, and four times it reaffirmed the Society's authority to decide that question itself.
1998: carried forward unchanged
In 1998, Congress recodified all of Title 36 "without substantive change." The DAR's charter became chapter 1531, seven short sections covering its organization, purposes, powers, name and emblems, office, Smithsonian deposits, and annual report. None concerns membership. ⁶ Across five enactments and a recodification spanning 102 years, the charter has never contained a membership provision.
Congress knew how to write one
Here's the comparison that makes that omission meaningful. In the chapter just before the DAR's sits the charter of another hereditary society, the National Society, Daughters of the American Colonists. Its charter does have a membership section. It says eligibility is as provided in the society's constitution and bylaws, and it adds that membership terms may not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. ⁶
So, Congress knew how to write membership language into a women's lineage society's charter, and it did. For the DAR, it never has.
A detail no one has mentioned
Title 36 ordinarily reserves to Congress the right to amend or repeal the charters in it. Section 10102(b) then lists the chapters that reservation doesn't cover, and chapter 1531, the DAR's, is on the list. ⁶ The Senate's version of the 1998 bill carried the same exception.⁷
What does that mean? Less than you might think, so I need to explain this carefully. It doesn't mean Congress can't amend the charter; any Congress can amend a public law it passed. Whether the exception has legal consequences for the pending bills is a question for lawyers, and I'm not offering a legal opinion. It does show how the charter has been treated over time: as the Society's own instrument, not a set of conditions Congress holds over it. In three years of public argument, and in the bills' own materials, I haven't seen it mentioned.
What this means for the bills
The bills now in Congress would add a membership section to the DAR's charter for the first time. Their sponsors present that as protecting the Society's founding principles. The charter's history points elsewhere. Every time Congress chartered or revisited the DAR, it left the definition of membership where the founders put it: with the members.
Notes
An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, ch. 23, 29 Stat. 8, 8–9 (1896).
An Act to Amend Section Two of an Act Entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," ch. 89, 38 Stat. 955 (1915).
An Act to Amend Section 2 of the Act Entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," ch. 11, 44 Stat. 4 (1926).
An Act to Amend Section 2 of the Act Entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," Pub. L. No. 82-93, ch. 255, 65 Stat. 130 (1951).
An Act to Amend Section 2 of the Act Entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution," Pub. L. No. 94-443, 90 Stat. 1475 (1976), https://www.congress.gov/94/statute/STATUTE-90/STATUTE-90-Pg1475.pdf.
Pub. L. No. 105-225, 112 Stat. 1253, 1422–23 (1998), https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/1085/text, codified at 36 U.S.C. §§ 10102, chaps. 1529 and 1531.
S. 2264, 105th Cong. (1998).
