Gender and the Personal Shaping of Public Administration in the United States: Mary Anderson and the Women's Bureau, 1920–1930

• Published date: 01 March 2012
• Date: 01 March 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02502.x
• Author: John Thomas McGuire

Mary Anderson and the Women’s Bureau, 1920–1930 265

John Thomas McGuire is lecturer in

the State University of New York system.

His research centers on women, social

movements, and public policy in the United

States from the late nineteenth century

until the 1940s. His work recently has been

published in Administration & Society,

the Journal of Policy History, and the

Journal of Urban History. Previously,

he was trial attorney for the U.S. Depart-

ment of Justice and served on the boards

of two New York State legal assistance

organizations.

E-mail: johnmcguireus@yahoo.com

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 72, Iss. 2, pp. 265–271. © 2011 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2011.02502.x.

Scholars of public administration in the United States

traditionally view the 1920s as a decade when the

administrative orthodoxy, emphasizing ef‌f‌i ciency and

organizational structure, dominated the f‌i eld.  is

viewpoint recently has been challenged by arguments that

the social justice–oriented views of women progressives

and the philosophy of pragmatism also inf‌l uenced public

administration. However, no one has examined how

women public administrators implemented exceptions to

the prevailing, masculine viewpoints of administrative

objectivity and the strict dichotomy between politics

and administration during the 1920s. Using Mary

Anderson (1872–1964), the longtime director of the U.S.

Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, as a case study,

this article examines how her experiences as a woman

worker and labor organizer inf‌l uenced her advocacy of

an alternative view of public administration, and how,

from 1920 through 1930, she established the Women’s

Bureau within the prevailing orthodoxy yet also made the

government agency a notable exception through its vigorous

support of social justice feminism, particularly during and

after the 1926 national Women’s Industrial Conference.

Like its overall cultural and social reputation,

the decade of the 1920s possesses a rather static

status in the United States’ history of public

administration.  e prevailing consensus marks the

decade as a “pause” between the dynamism of the Pro-

gressive Era and the even greater changes of the 1930s

and as a time period when the increasing emphases on

ef‌f‌i ciency, expertise, and a dichotomy between policy

decisions and their implementation, otherwise known

as the “administrative orthodoxy,” took control of

the f‌i eld (Rosenbloom 2006, 662; see also Stone and

Stone 1975; Waldo 2007).  is consensus received

further ref‌i nement through the groundbreaking work

of Alasdair Roberts (1994), who demonstrated how

support from private philanthropies and an increase in

university programs in public administration inf‌l u-

enced the orthodoxy’s institution during the 1920s.

In the past 10 years, however, scholars have argued

that this interpretation ignores the contributions of

women progressives, particularly Jane Addams, to

the evolving administrative state before World War I

(Stivers 2000, 2002) and that it overlooks the inf‌l u-

ence of pragmatism as developed by such thinkers as

William James and John Dewey.  e f‌i rst argument

has generated an increasingly rich oeuvre (see, e.g.,

Burnier 2008; Luton 2002; Schachter 2011; Scheer

2002), while the second has sparked a widespread

debate about the inf‌l uence, or lack thereof, of prag-

matism (see Shields 2003; Snider 2000). However,

no one has examined in depth how women public

administrators undertook a social justice–oriented,

or alternative, viewpoint in the 1920s, thus creating

exceptions to the prevailing masculine interpreta-

tion of public administration. Using Mary Anderson

(1872–1964), the longtime director of the U.S. De-

partment of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, as a case study,

this article argues that Anderson, whose experiences

as a woman worker and labor organizer led her to

advocate the alternative view of public administration,

established the Women’s Bureau from 1920 through

1930 within the prevailing administrative orthodoxy

through comprehensive studies of women workers in

the United States, but that she also made the bureau

a notable exception through its vigorous support of

social justice feminism, particularly during and after

the 1926 national Women’s Industrial Conference.

Mary Anderson and the Alternative View

of Public Administration

Although, as director of the Women’s Bureau from

1920 through 1944, Mary Anderson has received sub-

stantial attention from scholars on women and reform

in the early twentieth century (see, e.g., Kessler-Harris

2001, 38, 41–42), no equivalent consideration of

her career exists in the f‌i eld of public administration.

 is is partially attributable to the usual tendency to

emphasize general trends over specif‌i c individuals, but

it also stems in part from the fact that Anderson did

not relish the public eye (or apparently engage in self-

publicity). While she did not undertake a multifaceted

career, as did her friend Mary van Kleeck, or equal

the achievement of Frances Perkins, who became the

John Thomas McGuire

State University of New York

Gender and the Personal Shaping of Public Administration

in the United States: Mary Anderson and the Women’s

Bureau, 1920–1930