Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
In response to New Deal legislation, veteran reformer Molly Dewson exclaimed: “I cannot believe I have lived to see this day. It's the culmination of what us girls and some of you boys have been working for for so long it's just dazzling.” Historians have subsequently confirmed Dewson's judgment that female New Dealers had been hawking their agenda for a long time before Franklin Roosevelt's administration finally bought it. Indeed, Clarke A. Chambers, Susan Ware, and J. Stanley Lemons have carefully documented the activities of a large contingent of women who inaugurated their battle for public welfare programs during the Progressive Era (1890–1920), continued their fight through the 1920s—a decade that one activist called the “tepid, torpid years”—and stood ready with their programs when the Great Depression renewed the possibility of federal welfare legislation in the 1930s. Now we need an explanation for the continuity of this female commitment to public welfare programs: Why was it that middle-class women played such a prominent part in sustaining the Progressive Era's social welfare agenda into the 1930s.
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2. Quotation is from a manuscript autobiography of Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton, cited in Chambers, Clarke A., Seedtime of Reform American Social Service and Social Action, 1918–1933 (Westport, Conn., 1963), 2.Google ScholarLemons, J. Stanley, The Woman Citizen Social Feminism in the 1920s (Chicago, 1973).Google Scholar In fact, the current trend among women's historians is to see the New Deal as, in part, the culmination of female reform activity since the Progressive Era. See Ware, Susan, Partner and I Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven, 1987)Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988), esp. 297Google Scholar; Perry, Elisabeth Israels, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (New York, 1987).Google Scholar The most recent dissenter from this view is Payne, Elizabeth Anne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League (Urbana, Ill., 1988).Google Scholar
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9. I deeply regret that publication schedules made it impossible for me to integrate into my own analysis the ideas of Ellen Fitzpatrick as revealed in her book, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York, 1990).Google Scholar This collective biography of four social scientists includes Abbott and Breckinridge and explores issues related to reform and social policy.
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22. For a much fuller treatment of these issues, see Robyn Muncy, “Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1930,” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1987, esp. chap. 1.
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28. Breckinridge to Abbott, 23 October 1907, folder 10, box 1, Abbott Papers. Sicherman, Notable American Women, 1.
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41. Quotation in Abbott to Mr. Laing, 22 May 1924, bound volume, box 19, Abbott Papers. On expectations of their students, Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy Bulletin (July 1909; 1910; 1913–14; 1914–15), no folder; The Department of Social Investigation, Special Bulletin of the Chicago School, January 1912, folder 12; CSCP Records, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, University of Chicago.
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56. Breckinridge, Suggested Form of Public Announcement of Merger, August 1920, folder 10, box 20, Abbott Papers.
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68. Abbott to Leonard White, 19 December 1929, folder 12, box 1, Abbott Papers.
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78. See Ware, Beyond Suffrage, esp. 45–86; Walsh, 264.