A History of the United States Women's Bureau 1917-1930

This chapter provides historical analysis of the United States Women's Bureau focusing on its role in women's rights, immigration, and economic advancement in the United States from 1917-1930. The decade of the 1920s dawned on August 18, 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote in every state. But there was another, less known victory that had already occurred on June 5, 1920, one that was pivotal in the trajectory of the next phase of the women's rights movement throughout the 1920s: House Resolution 13229.

Women’s Movement and Women Workers, Post-1945

Working women and their issues played a central role in the women’s movement in the decades following World War II. Feminists lobbied, litigated, and engaged in direct action for workplace fairness. Working women, especially those in unions, joined feminist organizations and established their own organizations as well. There were fault lines within the women’s movement over the issues, strategies, and level of commitment to the causes of working women. In the first two decades after 1945, the unionists and liberal reformers who constituted the so-called Women’s Bureau Coalition (named after the U.S. Women’s Bureau) opposed the mostly affluent and conservative members of the National Woman’s Party for their support of the Equal Rights Amendment, supporting instead protective laws and policies that treated women differently from men in the workplace. With the arrival of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, “labor feminists” clashed with the middle-class professional women at the helm of newly formed feminist organizations. As support for gender equality transformed employment practices, some labor feminists sought to retain (or extend to men) selected protective measures introduced in the early 20th century to shield women workers from the worst aspects of wage labor. In the face of harsh economic conditions in the 1970s, labor feminists again opposed other feminists for their efforts to modify the union practice of “last hired, first fired” as a way of retaining affirmative-action hiring gains. In recent decades feminists have focused on equity measures such as comparable worth and pregnancy leave as means of addressing the unique challenges women face. In addition they have expanded their concern to lesbian and transgender workers, and, increasingly, to the needs of immigrant workers who make up an increasingly percentage of the working population.

From Economic Security to Equality: Frieda Miller, Esther Peterson, and the Revival of the Alternative View of Public Administration, 1945-1964

This article examines how Frieda Miller and Esther Peterson, two influential directors of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau after World War II, revived and continued the alternative view of public administration through a combination of primary and secondary sources. Miller, who served as director from 1944 through 1953, reestablished a social justice–centered view of public administration through the creation of a special advisory committee and the institution of a new agenda that stressed equality over economic security. Peterson, who served from 1961 through 1964, quickly moved the Women’s Bureau into a political network with women’s labor leaders and the John F. Kennedy presidential administration, helping to create the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) and to enact a federal Equal Pay Act.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of single-sex protective laws. The longevity of protective laws rests in part on reformers' bifocal defense. The goal of such laws, their proponents claimed, was to compensate for women's disadvantages in the labor market and to serve as the linchpin of a larger plan to achieve wage-and-hour standards for all employees. This double-planked rationale—though contradictory—proved versatile and enduring; it suited constituents with varied priorities. Protective laws' longevity also rested on effective social feminist organization and, after 1920, on the federal Women's Bureau. In retrospect, single-sex protective laws were an unwieldy means to achieve egalitarian ends—or what women reformers of the 1920s called “industrial equality.” However, critics charged that the laws failed to redress disadvantage and even compounded it. Protection's supporters also confronted developments they could not anticipate and shifts in attitude they could not foresee.

Gender Research as Labor Activism: The Women's Bureau in the New Era

On June 5, 1920, Congress established the Women's Bureau, charging it to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” Support for the bureau was such that the House passed the bill by a vote of 255 to 10, and the Senate passed it without a recorded vote, though theMonthly Labor Reviewnoted that “there was some opposition.” During a decade when policymakers celebrated the fruits of economic abundance garnered with only the lightest touch from the state, bureau leaders and investigators saw gender research as a form of labor activism that would advance the cause of all workers. The bureau provided a unique site for discourse and deliberation concerning labor standards that did not exist in any other branch of the federal government. No other organization in the federal government thought harder about how policies could be constructed to protect workers, irrespective of gender, from the continued harsh reality of employment in American industry. Along the way, advocates of protective legislation for women sought not only to protect the particular interests of women workers, but also to drive a wedge through a post-Adkinsunderstanding of the “right to contract” and to expand the number of issues that should be seen as affected with a public interest.