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Feminism and Bureaucracy: The Minimum Wage Experiment in the District of Columbia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Vivien Hart
Vivien Hart
Affiliation:
Vivien Hart is Reader in American Studies at the University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BNI 9QN, England.
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Extract

Bureaucrats, female or male, have never been popular, a fact which may, in part, explain neglect of their role by the growing band of students of women and politics. Theories of bureaucracy predict that this will be the least promising of settings for the empowerment of women. Max Weber's classic account depicts bureaucratic activity as a routinized and sterile process of technical determinations and rules of procedure. Some feminists argue that such modes of action epitomize the masculine. Each model portrays a rational, depersonalized, technocratic sphere of activity, hierarchical in structure, rule-bound both in what is done and how. In addition, the state itself has sometimes been presented as wholly oppressive to women, adding public power to private power to create a comprehensive system of male domination.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , April 1992 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 A remark made to the author, 1984. Beyer, who died at the age of 98 in 1990, inspired this paper and is fondly acknowledged. This is a revision of my paper “Watch What We Do: Women Administrators and the Implementation of Minimum Wage Policy,” presented at the Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Douglass College, June 1990. I am particularly grateful to the panel: Eileen Boris, Catherine East, Phyllis Palmer.

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9 For example, the implementation of comparable worth laws, described by Evans, Sara and Nelson, Barbara, raises identical questions of the “simultaneous necessity and difficulty of using technocratic means to achieve a just and democratic social transformation.” Wage justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. 164.Google Scholar

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26 Adkins v. Children's Hospital of Washington, D.C., 261 U.S. 525 (1923).

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30 Beyer's, memories confirm this, “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 10–11Google Scholar. The D.C. budget was held at $5,000 annually, regardless of rising costs from inflation and of widening coverage. In states where some serious attempt at implementation was made, only California and Massachusetts received regular increases. See Gordon, , The Development, 327.Google Scholar

31 Beyer became a key figure in the Labor Department during the formative years of the federal minimum wage and was still advocating and defending minimum wage policy in her nineties. She also served in the Children's Bureau, 1928–34, as Associate Director of the Bureau of Labor Standards, Department of Labor, 1934–1958, and in the International Cooperation Administration until her retirement in 1972.

32 “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 6.Google Scholar Clara Mortenson married Otto Beyer in 1920, remaining at the Minimum Wage Board until 21 September 1921 when she moved to New York. I refer to her as Beyer throughout.

33 “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 7.Google Scholar Brandeis went to Europe for the summer of 1920, with her father, Justice Brandeis, and the Frankfurters. She wrote regularly to Beyer, forgoing her salary, querying developments, reporting on thes British minimum wage, gossiping about shipboard life and being stunned by Beyer's marriage. Her letters give detail and atmosphere of their collaboration. Brandeis, Elizabeth to Beyer, Clara Mortenson, 16 06–22 07 1920, Raushenbush Collection.Google Scholar

34 McFeely, , Lady Inspectors, 42.Google Scholar

35 Minimum Wage Board, Washington, D.C., First Annual Report, 1918 (Washington, D.C.: mimeo, 31 12 1918), 3.Google Scholar

36 Second Annual Report of the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia, for the Year Ending December 31, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1920), 6.Google Scholar See also Kessler-Harris, , A Woman's Wage, ch. 1.Google Scholar

37 Second Annual Report, 6.Google Scholar

38 Second Annual Report, 6.Google Scholar Only Oregon was faster in implementing an industry rate, with nine months from law to order. Action took between two and three years in California and Massachusetts and a record five years and five months in Arkansas.

39 Second Annual Report, 6.Google Scholar Theoretically, the female workforce included a further 40,000 clerical workers, but most were employees of the federal government and outside this law.

40 Mortenson, , “The Minimum Wage at Work,” 299.Google Scholar

41 “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 31.Google Scholar

42 Mortenson, , “The Minimum Wage at Work,” 298.Google Scholar

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44 See Harley, Sharon, “For the Good of Family and Race: Gender, Work, and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880–1930,” Signs, 15 (1990), 336–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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46 See Beyer, , “Reflections on My Personal Life,”Google Scholar typescript notes excerpted from reports submitted to the Schlesinger Library, for her involvement in racial politics in northern Virginia; Beyer could also have called on Commissioner Brownlow, who supported the black community, for example establishing a black platoon in the Fire Department and condemning the instigation of racial violence in 1919 by white agents provocateurs; see Green, Constance M., The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 187, 192.Google Scholar

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48 Green, , Secret City, chs. 8 and 9, charts major changes for the worse in race relations in the District in the early twentieth century.Google Scholar

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50 Fifth Annual Report of the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia for the Year Ending December 31, 1922 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1923), 12.Google Scholar

51 Fourth Annual Report, 21.Google Scholar

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53 Third Annual Report, 29.Google Scholar

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56 Murray, , “The Work Got Done,” 215–16.Google Scholar Beyer describes the regular sexual harassment in “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 11.Google Scholar

57 Fourth Annual Report, 2.Google ScholarFifth Annual Report, 12.Google Scholar There is evidence from other states of employers using legal challenges to distract and delay enforcement rather than, as Mildred Gordon disapprovingly noted, making proper “efforts to aid in making the law work effectively by using the means provided in itself for securing redress of grievances.” Gordon, , The Development, 81, 84.Google Scholar

58 West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937); Annual Report of the Minimum Wage Board of the District of Columbia for the Period June 10, 1937 to December 31, 1937 [no imprint].

59 A much fuller discussion of this measure of the Board's success is contained in my book ms. in preparation, Bound By Our Constitution: Women, Workers and Minimum Wage Lays, ch. 6.

60 Perry, Elisabeth I., Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. xii and 150–60Google Scholar; Cott, , Grounding of Modern Feminism, ch. 7, esp. 231Google Scholar. See also Hart, Vivien, “Behind Every Successful Man?” journal of American Studies, 23 (1989), 91–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGerr, Michael, “Political Style and Women's Power, 1830–1930,” journal of American History, 77 (1990), 864–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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62 On Beyer's reputation, see, for example, Frankfurter, Felix to Cohen, Ben, 5 06 1923Google Scholar: “I suggest also that you get hold of Clara Mortenson Beyer … Get her practical experience in the actual ascertainment of the awards … we will have a powerful recruit for our point of view.” Frankfurter Papers, Library of Congress.

63 Murray, , “The Work Got Done,” 215.Google Scholar

64 “Conversation Between Beyer and Hart,” 41, 44Google Scholar; Perry, , Moskovitz, 158.Google Scholar

65 On this transitional period, see Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 245–96.Google Scholar My “conviction bureaucrats” may be contrasted with the individualistic male “heroic bureaucrats” studied in Lewis, Eugene, Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).Google Scholar See esp. 228–29: “What is it about these men and these organizations which makes it possible for them to twist and turn the confines of the law, custom, role, and received value in order that their will be done?”

66 See Cook, Blanche Wiesen, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” Chrysalis (1977), 43–61Google Scholar; Freedman, Estelle, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies, 5 (1979), 512–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs, 10 (1985), 658–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67 See Gelb, Joyce and Palley, Marian Lief, Women and Public Policies (rev. edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 78–79Google Scholar, on the implementation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 by the Federal Reserve Board; Gelb, Joyce, Feminism and Politics: A Comparative Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 220–21Google Scholar and passim, on equal rights legislation in the USA compared with Britain; Jo Freeman on agencies with and without the support of networks, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: Longman, 1975), 188–92, esp. 192Google Scholar; Ryan, Lyndall, “Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy, 1972–1983,” in Playing the State, ed. Watson, , 71–84Google Scholar; and the “variety and flexibility” between British departments and over time portrayed in Davidson, R. and Lowe, R., “Bureaucracy and Innovation in British Welfare Policy, 1870–1945,” in The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1950–1950, ed. Mommsen, W. J. (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 263–93.Google Scholar

68 Gelb, , Feminism and Politics, 221.Google Scholar

69 McFeely, Mary, Lady Inspectors, ch. 18, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Florence Kelley and the Decline in Power of Women's Political Culture in the 1920's,” Paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, St. Louis, 1989, discuss the collapse of Progressive era women's networks in the 1920s and the simultaneous changes of style and organization in women's policy activism. The causal relationship remains unclear.Google Scholar

70 I owe the question of the automatic association of marginalization with ineffectiveness to Elisabeth Perry. See also Watson, , “The State of Play,” in Playing the State, ed. Watson, 10–11.Google Scholar