www.columbia.edu/~rr91/3567_lectures/forgotten%20women.htm 
The "Forgotten Women" of the Great Depression
2-24-03
I. The Backlash Against Working Women

II. Making Do 
III. The Maternalist Response - relief, social welfare, labor laws, anti-lynching law
IV. New Deal Women's Network 
A. Eleanor Roosevelt 
1) women reporters
2) drawing attention to the "forgotten women"
B. Molly W. Dewson: Women’s Division of the National Democratic Party 
1) From "Minimum Wage" to "More Women" Dewson
2) Rainbow Fliers & Reporter Plan
C. Ellen Woodward: Federal Emergency Relief Administration
D. Frances Perkins: Secretary of Labor
Videotape: "You May Call Her Madam Secretary" 
E. Grace Abbott: Head of the Children’s Bureau
F. Mary McLeod Bethune: National Youth Administration
I. Backlash
A. From New Woman to Forgotten Man -- Stock Market Crash - deals blow to women's rights - few want to hear about the aspirations of the "New Woman" when male breadwinners were losing their jobs. By winter of 1932-33, 
-- 1000 homes foreclosed each day, -- local governments could not make relief payments, 
-- 38 states had closed their banks, 
-- factories stood idle, 
-- breadlines stretched for blocks outside Red Cross kitchens, 
-- city hospitals reported increase in death from starvation, 
-- unemployment stood at 25%, pay cuts threw another 25% into poverty 
1) 1932 - Federal Economy Act - bars government from hiring more than one family member - aimed at married women
2) Half states propose laws to bar hiring ANY married woman - 82% of Gallup Poll respondents opposed hiring wives if husbands have jobs. Many married women teachers lose jobs - so do wives in banking, insurance, utilities - But note that opportunity expands in department stores and other pink collar work. The lower the wages, the less the prejudice against working wives. 
3) Occupational segregation and economic structure offers a measure of protection: men's sector of the economy suffers more than women's sector. Long-term growth in consumer sector, more women working at end of 30s than at the beginning, more married women working at the end than at the beginning. 
a) Race Matters - prejudice against blacks and Asians keep them disproportionately in agricultural jobs -- but even among women in these groups, workforce participation grows. 
b) Mexicans sent back to Mexico
II. Making Do - return to older housekeeping skills (canning, sewing, etc), falling back on extended families, decline in rate of marriage, decline in birthrate (1.5 million condoms a day being produced/ abortions more common), decline in divorce rate (but rise in rate of desertion).
III. Maternalist Vision 
One, small offsetting benefit of the economic crisis was that it made criticism of the American industrial system acceptable once again, and women reformers who had long worked on behalf of social welfare finally found a broad audience for their ideas. Just as important, the election of 1932 catapulted a prominent member of the social reform wing of the woman's movement into the White House and gave women reformers a visibility that they had never before enjoyed. These women, like their less privileged sisters, were later forgotten. But they deserve attention for the contribution they made to the evolution of modern politics and government 
What I want to consider today and on Wednesday is the work of these women in building the modern state in America. What did they seek to accomplish? What did they, in fact accomplish, and why? 
In part because the labor movement in America had, before the 1930s, been so weak, issues of social welfare had largely been the province of middle-class women of all races and ethnicities -- members of Women's Clubs, Social Workers, and Church Groups. In the late nineteenth century their efforts to help the poor had been largely confined to private charitable efforts and to the building of settlement houses in the slums. 
After 1910, however, they helped pass a series of laws in states around the country that provided for pensions for widowed mothers, protective labor laws for women and children, and compensation to worker's hurt or killed in accidents. Moreover, they made modest progress at the federal level, in 1912 with the creation of the Children's Bureau and in 1920 with the Women's Bureau (as part of the Department of Labor) and in 1921 with passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, which forced the federal government to fund public health clinics for women and children around the country. 
During the 1920s, as women's political power waned, some of these programs -- especially Sheppard-Towner -- were cut back. And after the onset of the Depression, all of these programs ran out of money. The question was -- what to do to care for the quarter of the workforce thrown out of work by the Depression, and the additional quarter who were thrown into poverty as the economy entered a long-term, steep decline. 
The women who came out of the social work tradition had a pretty clear vision of what they wanted to accomplish. They wanted four things: 
A) Relief for Women, as well as men: The Depression was the era of the "Forgotten Man." Women tended to be ignored. 
1) Female Journalists: To protect the jobs of female journalists, Eleanor Roosevelt instituted a policy of holding weekly press conferences that would be open ONLY to female reporters. 
2) Unemployed Women: Eleanor Roosevelt then called a White House Conference in 1933 to look specifically at the problems of unemployed women. This conference led to special camps for women – called derisively "She-She-She" camps after the Civilian Conservation Corps programs set up for young men. One of these was the racially integrated Jane Addams camp set up in Bear Mountain State Park.
B) A social welfare system, directed by the Labor Department, which – working through the Children's Bureau -- would base aid on the needs of the children of the country. Theirs was a frankly maternalist view -- one that owed much to the influence of the Swedish feminist Ellen Key. This maternalist view held that the future of society depended on the health and welfare of its children, that children benefited from the fulltime care of their mothers when they were young, and that, therefore, the state should provide income support to all families with children who did not have enough income to sustain a decent standard of living. Such a family might comprise a widowed mother and her dependent children, a deserted mother and her dependent children, or a father and mother with dependent children -- the only requirement for aid would be inadequate income. 
This child-centered approach to welfare was gaining wide support in Europe, between the wars, even in a conservative country like France. In large part this support was due to concerns over depopulation brought on by the devastating losses of World War I. In France employers began paying income supplements to mothers and children of their male workers, to be sure that the money got to their intended recipients. But in the US, where immigration had swollen the working class population during the early twentieth century and where casualties during World War I had been, by comparison, slight, this concern with mothers and children was much less pressing. This relative lack of concern in the U.S. makes the achievements of female reformers in the 1930s all the more remarkable. 
C) Labor Standards: minimum wage, maximum hours, child labor prohibition – enforced by the Labor Department, with help of Women’s Bureau. 
D) Federal Lynching Law: Inspired by Ida B. Wells Barnet - effort at inter-racial cooperation among women to use power of the federal government against violations of local criminal law - an important challenge to traditional understanding of states rights, federalism.

IV. Women's Network: [MD b.‘74; MMB b.’75; GA b.’78; FP b.’80; ER b.’84] 
A. Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962] the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, worked at a settlement house in New York City and in the Consumers' League before marrying in 1905. Between 1906 and 1916 she bore five children and settled into the role of a dutiful, upper-class wife of a promising reform Democrat. 
But when she discovered during World War I that her husband was in love with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she sought to bury her unhappiness in the social welfare work that had brought her satisfaction before her marriage. 
Then, in 1921, she faced a second trauma. A year after rising to the top of the Democratic party and running ( unsuccessfully) for Vice-President, Franklin was stricken by polio. FDR's affair and his polio transformed the Roosevelts' relationship from a traditional marriage into a political partnership. 
Joining the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, and the Women's Division of the Democratic Party, Eleanor established her independence and at the same time became indispensable to her husband. By 1928, when F.D.R. became governor of New York, Eleanor Roosevelt was not only an old hand at politics, she had also made her mark as an important women's advocate. Four years later, when F.D.R. reached the presidency, she was ready to play a national role. 
Because of her clear stand on social issues, blacks, women, and young leftists usually came to Eleanor rather than Franklin with their requests. If she supported what they wanted, she would get them a hearing with the president. Most close presidential advisors regarded Eleanor as a dangerous idealist, and thought it their duty, as one put it, "to get the pants off of Eleanor and onto Franklin." But the worsening economic crisis allowed Eleanor to play a critical role in transforming her husband into a more active reformer than either he or his male advisors initially thought wise.
[The parallels between the Roosevelts and the Clintons drew a great deal of attention in the 1990s. And the similarities were, indeed, striking. Bill resembled Franklin in his glad-handing, libidinous political charm, and his difficulty in saying no to anyone he liked. Hillary resembled Eleanor in her moralism, her empathy for the poor, and her faith in the state and its power to overcome social inequity. 
But there were also important differences between the 1930s presidency and the 1990s presidency. FDR presided over a far more powerful Democratic Party than did WJC. Roosevelt's party was made up of a series of groups that were in some ways fundamentally incompatible: working-class Catholics and agrarian Protestants; urban blacks and southern rednecks. But the crisis of the depression and Roosevelt's genius as a politician kept these groups together. After he died, his successors found it increasingly difficult to do so. With the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement even that great politico Lyndon Johnson ultimately failed. Franklin's Democratic Party died in the 1960s. But Eleanor's grew. 
The party that the Clintons tried to lead, was the party that Eleanor bequeathed to them -- a party with faith in the power of the modern state to do good, but a party without the political clout to give that faith reality. 
To understand our current political condition, therefore, it is essential to understand its roots in the career of Eleanor Roosevelt. ER relied heavily on the assistance of a wide network of women professionals and reformers whom she had come to know during the 1920s. Like Eleanor they belonged to that wing of the woman's movement that supported protective labor legislation and abhorred the ERA. 
B. Dewson: [1874-1962] Eleanor's closest colleague was Molly W. Dewson, head of the Democratic Party Women's Division. A former social worker, parole officer, dairy farmer, and suffragist, Dewson became Florence Kelley's chief assistant in the National Consumers' League in the 1920s. 
1. Minimum Wage Dewson -- Heading up the League's drive for state minimum-wage laws for women and children, Dewson's initials were said to stand for Minimum Wage Dewson. By the end of the decade, however, a series of setbacks in the courts persuaded her that the best way to expend her energies was through strengthening women's activities within the Democratic Party. By the time Franklin Roosevelt reached the White House, she had proven so valuable an organizer that she became Director of the Women's Division of the National Democratic Party.
2. More Women Dewson -- In Dewson's view the "men's organizations did not know what to do about the foot-loose voters - the 20 percent that decide elections." She worked to make Democratic women that 20 percent. And she succeeded. 
Her punchy, one-page Rainbow Fliers, which summarized Democratic positions, replaced the leaden pamphlets of the past and became a staple of party campaigns. 
In 1934 she developed the Reporter Plan in which women were recruited at the grass-roots level to investigate and then sell New Deal programs to their neighbors. 
At the 1936 Democratic convention she produced 219 women delegates, compared to 60 at the Republican convention. Moreover, Dewson pushed through a rule on the Platform Committee that every member (all of whom were men) had to have an alternate of the opposite sex. Because male members missed so many meetings, women alternates played an increasingly more visible role on the committee as it set Democratic policy.
Dewson's success impressed FDR early on and put her in a good position to recommend political appointments. Her initials were now said to stand for More Women Dewson. Dewson placed more than 100 women in New Deal positions. 

C. Ellen Woodward - Federal Emergency Relief Administration - She-She-She Camps and jobs for unemployed women -- 

D. Frances Perkins: [1880-1965] Dewson's most important appointment was Frances Perkins, a former Hull House resident with a B.A. from Mt. Holyoke in 1902 and an M.A. in sociology and economics from Columbia University in 1910. 
Married to economist Paul Wilson and the mother of one daughter, she kept her own name, as she pursued a career in social reform. While still a young woman she worked as a legislative lobbyist for the Consumers' League and investigated the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist fire – which in 1911 had claimed 146 women garment workers on the Lower East Side. 
In her subsequent career she held a series of professional positions in which she worked to improve workers' health, safety, and working conditions. In 1928 F.D.R. appointed her New York State's Industrial Commissioner, and in 1932 Dewson and Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the president to make her Secretary of Labor, the first cabinet office ever held by a woman.

E. Grace Abbott [1878-1939] of the Children’s Bureau, who with her sister Edith Abbott [1876-1957], a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, was one of the foremost authorities on social welfare in the country.

F. Mary McLeod Bethune [1875-1955] – member of the unofficial black cabinet. ER secures her a position as head of Negro affairs of the National Youth Administration; a friend of ER since 1927; a leader in desegregation of a few federal departments [Department of Interior under Ickes] and in failed campaign for anti-lynching law. Important symbolically. ER embraced her publicly whenever she visited the White House, thereby announcing the desegregation of the White House; ER places chair in isle between black and white sections of audience at the 1938 Birmingham, Alabama meeting of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare - in defiance of Bull Connor's effort to maintain segregated seating.