Fallout

New York City women civic activists avidly followed the Seabury investigations’ hearings and revelations. They passed resolutions demanding reform and traveled to Albany to confront legislators and urge Governor Roosevelt to take action. When the investigations’ focus turned from the women’s court to city governance, women were on the front lines of discussions of the city’s future and then helped bring a reform administration into power under the leadership of independent Republican Fiorello La Guardia. Women were thus engaged in not only the specifics of the corruption Samuel Seabury exposed but also the consequences of that exposure for New York City’s future.

Precedents

The American woman suffrage movement inspired women to take actions unprecedented for their sex, such as marching in parades and picketing the White House. In addition, suffragists also engaged in new kinds of political action designed to persuade legislators—at the time all male—to remove from state constitutions the word “male” or “men” as descriptors of voters. New York City suffragists pioneered in such political work. They not only turned the tide in New York State but also provided a model that suffragists elsewhere followed. This chapter covers the contributions to this process made by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of New York; the settlement, labor, consumer, and municipal reform movements; and individual suffragists such as Harriot Stanton Blatch, Rosalie Gardiner Jones, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriet Burton Laidlaw, and Mary Garrett Hay.

Sustaining Feminist Progressivism

During the 1920s and 1930s, New York City’s civic women activists expended the most energy and passion over three campaigns: winning state acceptance of federal funds for improving the health of mothers and babies (the Sheppard-Towner Act), legalizing women’s jury service, and passing laws to protect women wage earners. Using the tactics and networks they had developed during the suffrage movement and working through both partisan and nonpartisan voluntary associations, they led other public policy campaigns, such as legalizing the dissemination of birth control information, repealing national prohibition, and modernizing state government. The stories of these campaigns demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of New York City women’s efforts to sustain feminist progressive reform after enfranchisement.

Preface

This book is about the women who went to my grandmother’s funeral. On January 2, 1933, Belle Lindner Israels Moskowitz, adviser and political strategist to former New York State governor Alfred E. Smith, died unexpectedly of an embolism. Her funeral at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan attracted some three thousand mourners. Among them were dozens of prominent men, many of them members of New York’s political and reform elites. Dozens of prominent women were there too. Newspapers listed some of them: Eleanor Roosevelt, Democratic Party activist and wife of President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt; Frances Perkins, New York State commissioner of labor, soon-to-be US secretary of labor, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet; Pauline Morton Sabin, a Republican and founder of the National Organization of Women for Prohibition Reform, a key player in winning repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment; popular novelist, screenwriter, and civic activist Fannie Hurst; Jane Hoey, head of the New York City Welfare Council and later a bureau head in the Social Security Administration; and attorney Anna Moscowitz Kross, soon to be one of Manhattan’s first women magistrates and twenty years later the city’s commissioner of corrections....

The Women of the Administration

Many of the city’s women civic and political activists supported La Guardia during his many electoral campaigns. The women he appointed to his administration brought into his government the feminist and social justice ideals they had been espousing since the suffrage and progressive reform movements: an end to sex discrimination, an expansion of measures to benefit human welfare, and the achievement of pay equity and more career opportunities for women. They believed that they would carry out the mayor’s modernizing agendas as well as, if not better than, the men he had appointed as commissioners. This chapter highlights five women who made singular contributions to the success of the La Guardia administration: Rebecca Rankin, Eunice Hunton Carter, Jane Bolin, Elinore Herrick, and Anna Rosenberg.

Scandal in the Courts

In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an investigation first into New York City’s lower court system and then into its entire government. The investigation, known by the name of its head, retired judge Samuel Seabury, had a dramatic impact on the city’s politics and its powerful Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall. Because the investigation began with an inquiry into the entrapment of women for alleged sex crimes and their subsequent treatment in the city’s women’s court, it attracted great interest from the city’s women civic activists. These women played significant roles in encouraging and later broadening the Seabury investigation and in making decisions about its consequences.

The Election of 1937 and Beyond

The 1936 New York City charter reform introduced proportional representation (PR) as the voting method for electing the city council, the legislative body that replaced the old board of aldermen. Two local women politicians gained prominence in this period. One was Genevieve B. Earle, the first woman elected to that body in 1937. She served a total of twelve years on the council and, as minority leader, worked to modernize county government to make it more economical. The other was Anna M. Kross, a city magistrate who in 1938 ran for the state supreme court, a race she lost but which inspired other women attorneys to reach for higher political goals. The repeal of PR in 1947 limited New York City women’s political futures as city legislators.

Legacy

In the post–La Guardia era, New York City women politicians experienced some successes but also many frustrations. The “glass ceiling” prevailed: many seemed on their way to higher and more prominent posts, only to be thwarted in the end. Although their quest for power in the early postsuffrage era remained unfulfilled, their story was not all disappointment. Contrary to the stereotypes about woman suffrage—that too few women voted to make a difference, that women voted just as their husbands did, or that women failed to win political office (as if it was their fault)—New York women voters gradually increased their numbers, voted independently from men, and often chose sides with women’s policy agendas in mind. Despite enduring biases against them, hundreds entered partisan political arenas, drawing strength, example, and tactics from their suffrage-era networks and forming strategic coalitions across racial, class, and ideological lines to achieve specific goals.

Negotiating Partisanship

After New York women won the vote in 1917, many joined political party clubs and some ran for office. In the 1920s, only a few won seats in the state legislature, and only one served more than one term. A few women won other posts—register of New York County and alderwoman—and a few others won appointive government and judicial posts. Local and state political party committees elected women as officers. These small victories encouraged other women to keep trying. The obstacles to women’s political success in the first decade after suffrage remained high, however. Some suffragists were ambivalent toward partisanship and discouraged women from being active party members; party men remained prejudiced against women politicians and government officials. In the 1920s African American women and Socialists had no electoral success at all.

Profile

Shortly before his inauguration as mayor in January 1934, Fiorello La Guardia asked Pearl Bernstein, a young woman then working for the New York City League of Women Voters, to come see him. She had voted for him but never met him before. Wasting no time, he asked her straight out: “How would you like to be Secretary of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment and Director of the Budget?” This was a new position he hoped would rationalize the board’s chaotic budget procedures. “What they did,” Bernstein recalled later, “was to put some figures together and then every week they would add or subtract or multiply or divide—and nobody knew in the middle of the year how much had been spent.” The mayor chaired the board, but the borough presidents also submitted budgetary proposals, “and so it was a very unsatisfactory situation.” The League of Women Voters, where Bernstein had worked for the previous seven years monitoring municipal affairs, had advocated the city’s adoption of an executive budget prepared solely by the mayor. In the end she persuaded La Guardia to separate the two jobs he offered her, and because she knew nothing about accounting or budgets, she took the post of secretary. In January, the new board of estimate confirmed her appointment....