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

• Author: John Thomas McGuire
• DOI: 10.1177/0275074017740969
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074017740969

American Review of Public Administration

2018, Vol. 48(8) 795 –807

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0275074017740969

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Article

In the 1930s, public administrators increasingly focused on the

idea, first enunciated by Woodrow Wilson in the late 19 cen-

tury that administrative policies remain apart from any possi-

bly corrupting political influences (Wilson, 1887; see also

Goodnow, 1900; Van Riper, 1983). In the next 20 years, this

concept, eventually known as the “public administration

orthodoxy,”1 dominated a system centered on hierarchal struc-

tures and autonomous authority (see, for example, Adams,

1992; Fry & Raadschelders, 2013, Introduction, pp. 3-4;

Luton, 1999, 2003, pp. 171-172; Roberts, 1994; Stillman,

2005, 2015; Waldo, 1984, 1987; Willoughby, 1927 see also

White, 1926, 1948, 1951, 1955, 1958).

The prevailing orthodoxy’s emphases on efficiency and

objectivity, however, did not receive unanimous consent

from the United States’s public administration community.

Some practitioners also considered the ramifications of the

Second Industrial Revolution. From 1880 through 1920, the

industrial transformation transformed the United States into

an industrialized, urbanized nation with centralized commu-

nication and transportation systems (Dubofsky, 1994;

Wiebe, 1967). Yet with these dynamic changes came the

coarsening of working conditions, the proliferation of dis-

eases, and the widening of class divisions. Urban reformers

who wanted to ameliorate these conditions formed what

became known as progressivism (Dawley, 1991; McGerr,

2005). Out of this nascent reformism, moreover, developed

a movement called social justice feminism, which in turn

created a more social justice–centered, or alternative, view

of public administration.

The alternative view of public administration, a term used

to encompass the social justice–centered view of public

administration of the United States, did not constitute a revo-

lutionary break with the existing system. The initiators of the

alternative view, such as Mary van Kleeck and Mary

Anderson, acted as public administrators during the United

States’s participation in World War I, a time when efficiency

and organizational ability assumed primary importance.

Instead, the focus of the alternative view of public administra-

tion first centered on the institution of considerations of social

and economic equity, then gender equality into the pragmatic

public administration framework. As the late scholar Peter

Self (1972/1977) once stated, this constituted another confir-

mation of the classic challenge of a governmental system in a

democracy: the balancing of democratic needs, particularly

fairness and equity, with those of effectiveness and economy.

In addition, the advocates of the alternative view of public

administration did not pursue gender-specific aims, such as

the additional hiring of women in governmental

740969ARPXXX10.1177/0275074017740969The American Review of Public AdministrationMcGuire

research-article2017

1Siena College, Loudonville, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

John Thomas McGuire, Lecturer, History Department, Siena College, 515

Loudon Road, Loudonville, NY 12211, USA.

Email: jmcguire@siena.edu

From Economic Security to Equality:

Frieda Miller, Esther Peterson, and the

Revival of the Alternative View of Public

Administration, 1945-1964

John Thomas McGuire1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

social justice feminism, alternative view of public administration, women and public administration, United States, post–

World War II public administration, United States, equal pay, Frieda Miller, Esther Peterson