Gender Research as Labor Activism: The Women's Bureau in the New Era

It is not, after all, because they are women, but because they are the low wage group that we must study their problems and discover the basis for determining their wages.

—Mary Van Kleeck, director of Women in Industry Service (predecessor to the Women's Bureau)

The women of today, as well as their employers . . . want facts, and if the facts are presented strongly and clearly they will get action. But the facts must be collected first, and the field is open and crying for attention from scientists and health experts as well as from industrial engineers.

—1921 Women's Bureau Bulletin

On June 5, 1920, Congress established the Women's Bureau, charging it to "formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment."¹ Support for the bureau was such that the House passed the bill by a vote of 255 to 10, and the Senate passed it without a recorded vote, though the Monthly Labor Review noted that "there was some opposition."² During a decade when policymakers celebrated the fruits of economic abundance garnered with only the lightest touch from the state, bureau leaders and investigators saw gender research as a form of labor activism that would advance the cause of all workers. The bureau provided a unique site for discourse and deliberation concerning labor standards that did not exist in any other branch of the federal government. No other organization in the federal government thought harder about how policies could be constructed to protect workers, irrespective of gender, from the continued harsh reality of employment in American industry. Along the way, advocates of protective legislation for women sought not only to protect the particular interests of women workers, but also to drive a wedge through a post-Adkins understanding of the "right to contract" and to expand the number of issues that should be seen as affected with a public interest.³ As the bureau made clear, the "woman worker" included a diverse body of citizens with varied workplace experiences and racial and ethnic backgrounds who could not be parsed out of or differentiated from the larger labor question. While recognizing that women encountered "certain peculiar difficulties" in industry, Mary Van Kleeck argued, "We must of course agree that women workers are not to be considered a group apart, for they are part of the labor problem as workers and not as women."⁴

In addition to advancing the cause of what Alice Kessler-Harris and others have described as social justice feminism, the bureau's work should also be understood as part of the dramatic expansion in the institutional capacity of research organizations in government, business, labor, and nonprofit sectors that sought to remake labor relations and shift the boundary between public and private issues.⁵ these organizations devoted increasing energies and resources to making sense of the labor question and to considering and debating whether statist or voluntary measures would be the most effective means of promoting a fair distribution of the nation's economic abundance. Among many of these groups, a general understanding emerged, recognizing the potential of workers as employees and consumers to contribute to a more rational, fair, and stable form of capitalism. By the mid-1920s, when court decisions and modest enforcement mechanisms inhibited statist solutions to workers' problems, the bureau supplemented its advocacy of labor standards by joining other labor experts in promoting and experimenting with voluntary measures to encourage employers to improve working conditions as a method for increasing worker efficiency, promoting a more just workplace, and decreasing labor turnover.⁶

From the Gilded Age through the 1920s, the federal government's role in addressing the labor problem expanded, but it did so rather unevenly and episodically, in response to the general ambiguity regarding what government should do in the field of industrial relations and to various pressures. As a result, there was ample room for the bureau's labor activism to include more than just advocating statist solutions to the...