BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Polly Porter
Queer
Places:
Wellesley College (Seven Sisters), 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481
171 West 12th Street,
10011, NYC, NY, USA
Moss Acre, Castine, Maine, Stati Uniti
Mary
Williams (Molly) Dewson (February
18, 1874 – October 21, 1962) was a feminist and
political activist. Frances
Perkins, together with
Eleanor Roosevelt and another indomitable political activist,
Molly (Mary) Dewson, were the
triumvirate at the centre of the influential New Deal political
sisterhood. Historical figures suspected of having same-sex desires
whose personal documents were destroyed include suffragist
Alice Paul, educator
M. Carey Thomas, interior
designer Henry Davis
Sleeper, and reformers Jane
Addams, Molly Dewson, and
Miriam Van Waters. At the
Women's Educational and Industrial Union (Boston), Dewson studied ways
to professionalize housework. She was the first head of the parole
department (1900-1912) of the Massachusetts State Industrial School for
Girls (Lancaster), and worked in Massachusetts and with the National
Consumers’ League for the establishment of a minimum wage. She active in
the fight for women’s suffrage and worked with the American Red Cross in
France from 1917 to 1919. Believing she could best further social
justice by strengthening women's activities in the Democratic Party, she
organized women in the party from 1928 until she resigned as head of the
Women's Division in 1936. She continued to advise the division until
1941.
Right after graduating from Wellesley in 1897,
Molly Dewson worked for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union.[1] She became an active member of the
National Consumers League (NCL) and
received mentorship from Florence Kelley, a famous advocate for
social justice feminism and General Secretary of the NCL. Dewson’s later
role as civic secretary of the Women's City Club of New York (WCCNY) led
to her meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, who later convinced Dewson to be
more politically active in the Democratic Party. Dewson went on to take
over Roosevelt’s role as head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic
National Campaign Committee.[2] Dewson’s famous
“Reporter Plan” mobilized thousands of women to spread information about
the New Deal legislation and garner support for it. In connection with
the Reporter Plan, the Women’s Division held regional conferences for
women. This movement led to a historically high level of female
political participation.[3]
Dewson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1874. She was
the youngest of six children. Her mother, Elizabeth Weld Williams, and
father, Edward Henry Dewson, lived in Roxbury when they had their first
child, Francis Williams. After moving to Quincy, they had five more
children: George Badger, William Inglee, Edward Henry Jr., Ellen Reed,
and Mary Williams.[4]
171 West 12th Street
Dewson’s parents followed typical gender roles of the time in terms
of occupation. Her mother took on a domestic role and took care of the
household during Dewson’s childhood, while her father, as well as the
other men in her family, were active members in the leather
business. Dewson, however, did not reflect all the
gender expectations of the late 1800s. She was very athletic and played
both baseball and tennis. She was not concerned with her appearance, and
preferred to play with “boy’s” toys like paper soldiers instead of the
traditional dolls made for young girls.
She attended three private schools, including the
prestigious Dana Hall School, before entering Wellesley College,
from which she graduated as a social worker in 1897. At Wellesley,
she was senior class president and her classmates believed she might one
day be elected president of the United States.
Shortly after graduating from Wellesley in 1897, Dewson
began working as research assistant at the Women's Educational and
Industrial Union, an organization that originated in Boston to
advocate for the social advancement of women, women’s education, and
rights of women in the workforce. Dewson was offered
this job by Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a reformer from Boston and one of
Dewson’s mentors. During her time at the WEIU, Dewson
conducted statistical studies and reported on women’s poor working
conditions.[5]
She also taught a course on household economics. The lack of reading
material for the course inspired her to write and publish ''The
Twentieth Century Expense Book'' (1899). It served as a basic guide to
help American women budget a household and prioritize expenses.
In 1900, Dewson joined the
Massachusetts State Industrial School for Girls, located in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. By 1904, she became the first superintendent of their
parole department. The school’s goal was to
rehabilitate young women delinquents, especially those who grew up in
poverty. Dewson put her efforts towards understanding
the different factors that affect female crime and delinquency. She
gathered statistical data and used this information to improve the
rehabilitation process. She wrote a paper titled “The Delinquent Girl on
Parole” about her findings. She presented it in 1911 at the National
Conference of Charities and Correction.
Even before leaving the Industrial School (1912), she became
involved in the minimum wage movement (1911). She was named executive
secretary of the Minimum Wage Investigative Committee, which produced a
report that led to Massachusetts' (and the nation's) first minimum wage
law. This report brought her national recognition.
Molly Dewson was ready for a break. In 1913 she and
her lifelong partner, Polly Porter, moved
to a dairy farm in Worcester, Massachusetts. By 1915, however, Dewson had recharged her batteries;
she entered the Massachusetts suffrage movement. During World War I,
both she and Porter went with the American Red Cross to France to
aid war refugees. Dewson was chief of the Mediterranean Zone by war's
end. After returning from Europe, Dewson worked as
Florence Kelley's principal assistant in the
National Consumers' League campaign for state minimum
wage laws for women and children. From 1925 to 1931, Dewson served as
president of the New York Consumers' League, working closely with
Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), leading the lobbying effort of the Women's Joint
Legislative Conference and playing a central role in the passage of a
1930 New York law limiting women to forty-eight-hour work weeks.
Mary W. Dewon started her career in Massachusetts reform and suffrage
circles. In the 1920s in New York she was a civic secretary of the
Women's City Club of New York,[6] and the
research secretary of the National
Consumers' League. By 1929 Dewson knew all of the leading women
reformers in the city. Because of Dewson's connections Eleanor Roosevelt
recruited her into the Democratic political party. It was during this
time that Dewson entered politics more personally, organizing Democratic
women for Al Smith's presidential campaign at
Eleanor
Roosevelt's request. She performed a similar feat for Franklin D.
Roosevelt's 1930 gubernatorial and 1932 presidential races. Because of
her work on FDR's campaigns (and ER's intense lobbying), Dewson was
appointed head of the Democratic
National Committee's Women's Division (DNC). She reorganized the
division to be utterly different. She found government jobs for female
party workers, more than had been given to women under any previous
administration. She is credited with securing the post of secretary of
labor for Frances Perkins, and placing women high up in the Social Security and National Recovery
Administrations. Even so, she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
Despite this opposition, she began to push for state laws or state party
rulings that would provide even representation in membership and
leadership positions for women on party committees from the precinct
level up. She created the Reporter Plan, which educated female party
workers on New Deal programs so that they could explain them to voters.
In the 1936 election, the women's division provided 90 percent of the
campaign fliers the DNC produced. That same year she got a rule passed
that provided for a member and an alternate for each state on the DNC
Platform Committee; the rule also required that each pair be composed of
one man and one woman. Dewson's organizational abilities so impressed
FDR that he nicknamed her "the little general." Dewson is also connected
with Frances Kellor.
Dewson was responsible for many high-level appointments of women:
Nellie Tayloe Ross as director
of the mint, Florence
Allen as a judge on the circuit court of appeals (the highest position
a woman had ever attained in the federal judiciary),
Marion Glass Banister as
assistant treasurer of the United States,
Ruth Bryan Owen as
minister to Denmark (the first woman to represent the United States
abroad). Because of Dewson, women were afforded gre respect in the
Democratic Party through two elections.
She withdrew from
the women's division's day-to-day affairs in 1936 because of poor
health, but continued to be available to her successors. In 1937 she
again returned to active public life when she was nominated and
confirmed as a member of the Social Security Board. There she set up
effective systems of federal-state cooperation, an issue that had been
problematic. However, she again had to step down because of illness in
1938.
For several years, she and Porter split their time between
New York City and Castine, Maine. In 1952,
they retired to Castine full-time. Even in retirement, Dewson was busy,
becoming the vice-president of the Maine Democratic Advisory Committee
in 1954. Dewson died in Castine on October 21, 1962.
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