Working-Class Women and the Progressive Era Development of Public Administration: The Case of Margaret Bondfield

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997231172150
• Author: Hindy Lauer Schachter
• Date: 01 August 2023
• Subject Matter: Perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997231172150

Administration & Society

2023, Vol. 55(7) 1457 –1473

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997231172150

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Perspectives

Working-Class Women

and the Progressive

Era Development of

Public Administration:

The Case of Margaret

Bondfield

Hindy Lauer Schachter1

Abstract

Using a case study of British trade union organizer Margaret Bondfield, this

article begins the task of adding a working class perspective to accounts

of women’s participation in Progressive era urban reform and expansion

of public policy while also showing how international networks of support

among trade union women undergirded American reform efforts. The

narrative expands the consideration of intersectionality and positionality in

analyzing women’s role in developing public administration.

Keywords

women and public administration, progressive era, class, Margaret Bondfield

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries feminist scholars critiqued the gen-

dered approach to canon formation in public administration as other scholars

were doing in a range of social sciences, showing the gendered aspects

1New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA

Corresponding Author:

Hindy Lauer Schachter, Martin Tuchman School of Management, New Jersey Institute of

Technology, Newark, 420 E. 64 Street APT W10D NY 10065, USA.

Email: schachte@njit.edu

1172150AAS0010.1177/00953997231172150Administration & SocietySchachter

research-article2023

1458 Administration & Society 55(7)

through which earlier disciplinary leaders had marked out who constituted

the intellectual progenitors in a given field (Hutchings & Owens, 2021;

Silverberg, 1998). Attention focused on the Progressive era because this

period was considered important in consolidating a self-conscious sense of

public administration as a field of study in the United States (Luton, 2002).

This article centers on adding a working class perspective to accounts of

Progressive era women’s participation in urban reform and public policy

expansion.

The impetus for showing the importance of female voices to administra-

tive and policy initiatives in the Progressive era (ca. 1895–1919) had several

prongs. Skocpol (1992) and Skocpol et al (1993) showed that women active

in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs played a key role in state legis-

latures enacting mothers’ pensions and labor legislation. Stivers (1995, 2000)

analyzed the role of settlement house leaders such as Jane Addams in spur-

ring the development of social policies that supported the institutionalization

of medical and educational services and workplace safety as public sector

activities. A third avenue of exploration focused on women who were

involved in organizations such as the New York Bureau of Municipal

Research and the Taylor Society that sought to extend scientific management

insights to the public sector (Schachter, 2002, 2011). Multiple case studies of

the accomplishments of individual women associated with the settlement and

scientific management movements supported the second and third initiatives

(e.g., Alchon, 1992; Burnier, 2022; Felbinger & Haynes, 2004; McGuire,

2011; Stivers, 2002).

Twenty years ago this outpouring of scholarship constituted a necessary

act of unsettling the assumption that public administration thought depended

historically only on insights provided by males. It reconstituted academic

curricula to be more inclusive than the male dominated view of Progressive

actors supplied by the first public administration textbook (White, 1926) or

Waldo’s (1948) seminal analysis of Progressive thought. Today, however, the

three prongs of scholarship noted above seem themselves to have exclusion-

ary aspects of race and class as in each endeavor almost all of the women

proposed as progenitors are white, middle class Americans. Contemporary

theorists of intersectionality have questioned the extent to which women of

one race or class can be said to represent the entire population of women,

arguing instead that this equivalence imposes unity on a social category

whose members have many intersecting—and sometimes oppositional—

identities based on race, ethnicity, age, religion, and other characteristics

(Bearfield, 2009; Breslin et al., 2017; Crenshaw, 1991). Other theorists have

argued that the positionality of change agents—their social position—affects

the type of issues they tackled and strategies used so if analysts want to get a