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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) 201-207



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Book Review

Women's Work and Public Policy:
A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945-1970

The Other Feminists:
Activists in the Liberal Establishment

Everybody's Grandmother & Nobody's Fool:
Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice


Women's Work and Public Policy: A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945-1970 by Kathleen A. Laughlin. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000, 172 pp., $40.00 hardcover.
The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment by Susan M. Hartmann. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, 292 pp., $35.00 hardcover. [End Page 201]
Everybody's Grandmother & Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice by Kathryn L. Nasstrom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, 221 pp., $26.00 hardcover.

Late twentieth-century movements for sexual equality and women's liberation, often classified as second wave feminism, are undergoing reinterpretation. While aging activists fashion memoirs, historians have been disrupting the standard story of the origins, scope, and meaning of that "second wave." The standard story had located feminism in the interstices of other social movements of the 1960s, most prominently the Civil Rights Movement and New Left. Recent research, however, has turned the early post-World War II years into a virtual cauldron for the politics of women's issues, stirred by trade unionists, Communists, government officials, African Americans, and mainstream women's voluntary organizations, like the League of Women Voters (LWV). Groups and individuals once dismissed as not feminist, because they rejected the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for negating protective labor laws for women, now appear to have paved the way for the feminist revival. Each of these three books significantly challenges conventional understandings of feminism, politics, and the relationship between the two.

For Kathleen A. Laughlin, author of Women's Work and Public Policy: A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945-1970, the Women's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor sustained women's policy activism between World War II and the 1970s by "linking government and the grassroots" (4). Under its leadership, a women's policy network inside and outside of the government pushed for women's right to earn, countering the old myths that women neither need to work nor are committed to their jobs. Laughlin objects to interpretations that dismiss the Bureau as an obstacle to the new feminism because it continued to portray women as different from men, requiring protection in the workplace. Instead, she argues that the Bureau's precarious status within the Department of Labor generated bureaucratic restraints that led it to maintain a public, or center-stage, advocacy of protective labor laws at the same time that its backstage activism pushed for economic equity, especially equal pay for comparable work and the development of womanpower for labor market expansion. Staff and funding depended on monitoring state minimum wage, maximum hour, and other women-only labor standards; eliminating these laws thus threatened to undermine the Bureau as an institution.

Lack of enforcement power pushed the Bureau to rely on policy partners as lobbyists for its goals, especially women's organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Council of Negro [End Page 202] Women, the LWV, and the Young Women's Christian Association. These groups continued to support state-level protective laws. After activist women embraced equality following the addition of sex to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and focused on passing the ERA, "the bureau's staff soon recognized that status of women institutions provided more powerful rationales for the maintenance of a separate women's agency than the anachronistic women's difference argument" (10). Nonetheless, by the mid-1970s, the Bureau lacked the political clout to keep its...

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