The U.S. Women's Bureau, established in 1920, remains the only federal agency specifically devoted to the advancement of women workers. Created as a temporary agency during World War I, the bureau developed the first U.S. standards for the employment of women workers. After the war, women's organizations successfully lobbied Congress to establish the bureau permanently. Mary Anderson, a member of the Chicago boot and shoe union and a founder of the Chicago Women's Trade Union League, was the first director. Her long term of leadership (1920-45) cemented the bureau's ties to (white) middle-class women's organizations and (white) working-class women in the trade unions and stamped it with a firm commitment to "maternalist" ideas about women workers.
The Women's Bureau was a relatively small, ineffective agency during its first forty years. Anderson's weak leadership, the battle among women reformers over the ERA, and the inhospitable climate for a federal labor agency during the 1920s consigned it to the margins of the federal government. During the New Deal era and World War II, the bureau provided data on women workers to the National Recovery Administration and the National War Labor Board and lobbied ceaselessly for more equitable treatment of women workers. But the bureau was unable to benefit permanently from the great expansion of governmental authority that took place at this time. The rationale for an agency devoted specifically to women workers seemed to disappear when the Supreme Court upheld labor legislation for men as well as women. From 1937 on, the Women's Bureau was bypassed, as federal authority over employment was placed in new agencies responsible for both male and female workers.
The Women's Bureau remained active during the postwar years. Hoping to build on wartime regulations, the bureau campaigned unsuccessfully for congressional enactment of an equal pay law. The bureau also led the campaign within the federal government to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, which the bureau believed would jeopardize the legal status of the special labor legislation passed for women in the early twentieth century. Even after the Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1941, establishing the legality of wage and hours laws for men and women, the bureau maintained that women workers needed additional legal protection. The Women's Bureau did not drop its opposition to the ERA until the 1970s.
The bureau's height of influence occurred during the Kennedy administration. Under the leadership of Esther Peterson, a savvy former lobbyist for the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the bureau achieved many of its long-standing goals. The Women's Bureau finally convinced Congress to approve the Equal Pay Act in 1963. It also persuaded Kennedy to establish the President's Commission on the Status of Women (1961-63), the first national committee to review the position of women in U.S. society. Though the bureau never again achieved a similar degree of influence, it has continued to be an important voice for women workers within the federal government.
Helene Silverberg
See also
Commissions on the Status of Women;
Equal Pay Act.
