DEWSON, MARY WILLIAMS 1874-1962

Social worker suffragist, democratic party leader

Childhood and Education

Mary Dewson, known as Molly, grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, the youngest of six children. Because of her father's poor health, her mother became the backbone of her family. Dewson acquired her father's interest in history and government and would always remember her mother's happiness in being a wife and mother. She was also influenced by her neighbor Elizabeth Cabot Putnam's idealism and commitment to prison reform, Dewson was educated at Dana Hall School in Wellesley and at Wellesley College, There she studied economics, history, and sociology and related these subjects to emerging industrial problems. As president of the senior class at Wellesley, Dewson demonstrated her leadership and organizational talents and the class predicted she would become president of the United States.

Domestic Reform

After graduating from Wellesley in 1897, she became secretary of the Domestic Reform Committee of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, Boston's most influential women's social and reform club. Dewson was charged with finding out ways to professionalize housework, in order to provide working women with alternatives to factory work, and to free middle-class women to pursue work outside the home. Dewson conducted statistical studies of the home, reorganized the union's domestic employment office, and taught at a school of housekeeping organization by the leader of the home economics movement, Ellen Richards. From this experience Dewson viewed the reform of consumption and housework as keys to the improvement of society.

Probation Reform and Minimum Wages

In 1900 Dewson became superintendent of the Parole Department of the Massachusetts State Industrial School for Girls. There she studied causes of female delinquency and methods of rehabilitation. Dewson applied social casework methods to penal reform, establishing close contact between the social worker, the ward, and the family. In 1912, after publishing several articles on probation, Dewson became involved in the minimum-wage movement and was appointed to study the wages of women and children in Massachusetts. Her report became the basis of the minimum wage act of 1912, the first of its kind in industrial America.

Domesticity

Dewson's report also led to several job offers, which she declined because of her grief over her mother's death. She had lived with her mother in the family's home in Quincy, and in 1913 she and an old friend, Mary G. Porter, settled down to run a dairy farm near Worcester. Dewson and Porter lived together for the rest of her life.

Suffrage Movement and World War I Service

Drawn again into active political life, in 1915 Dewson turned to the woman's suffrage movement and became a leader in the Massachusetts Suffrage Association. Like many social workers, Dewson traveled to Europe during World War I, serving as chief of the American Red Cross's Bureau of Refugees in France's Mediterranean Zone.

National Consumers' League

After the war Florence Kelley of the National Consumers' League appointed Dewson her chief assistant in the league's drive for state minimum-wage laws for women and children. Dewson's contribution was to compile data used in briefs by league attorney Felix Frankfurter, in his court defense of the California and District of Columbia minimum-wage laws. When the courts ruled against the laws, Dewson concluded that a national minimum-wage crusade was hopeless and resigned. Dewson became president of the New York Consumers' League from 1924 to 1931 and played a central role in the passage of a 1930 New York law limiting women's workweeks to forty-eight hours.

Democratic Party

Dewson then became involved in New York Democratic Party politics. At Eleanor Roosevelt's request Dewson organized Democratic women in Alfred E. Smith's 1928 presidential campaign and did the same for Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930 New York gubernatorial campaign and his presidential campaign of 1932.

Influence in Roosevelt Administration

Eleanor Roosevelt brought Dewson into national politics by getting her a position in the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Dewson set out to create a nationwide network of party workers similar to the core that sustained the reform of the Democratic Party in New York. Dewson's first step was to secure government jobs for women party workers. She won important jobs for key party women at both the state and national levels. Her influence helped secure the appointment of Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, the first woman cabinet member. Working through the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dewson arranged for high-level appointments of women throughout the administration of New Deal programs. Dewson believed that women should be promoted in politics because their special sensitivity to human welfare was needed in public life.

Reporter Plan

In 1934 Dewson instituted the Reporter Plan, a national program to train women campaign workers to understand and explain the New Deal. The goal of the plan was to make the Democratic Party more attractive to issue-oriented citizens of both sexes and ensure its victory in the polls. Dewson persuaded President Roosevelt to allocate Democratic National Committee funds for headquarters for the Women's Division between election years. In 1935 the Women's Division started holding regional conferences to train women in carrying out the Reporter Plan, and by the eve of the 1936 election the Women's Division was better prepared than any other group of the party.

Record of Accomplishments

Heart problems caused Dewson to give up direction of the Women's Division after the election of 1936, but she remained responsible for the appointment of its directors until 1941. In the 1930s Dewson's leadership was responsible for bringing large numbers of women into Democratic Party politics. The number of women campaign workers increased from 73,000 in 1936 to 109,000 in 1940. She was also a member of the President's Committee on Economic Security, responsible for shaping the Social Security Act of 1935. Roosevelt then appointed her as a member of the Social Security Board, a role in which her political finesse helped establish effective state-federal working relationships in the administration of old-age assistance and unemployment insurance.

Retirement

Ill health forced Dewson to resign from the Social Security Board in 1938 and kept her in semi-retirement for the rest of her life. In her retirement she and Mary Porter moved to a home in Castine, Maine. Dewson still kept a hand in politics, serving as elder stateswoman to the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee and as vice president of Maine's Democratic Advisory Committee in 1954. She died in 1962.

Source:

Paul C. Taylor, Entry on Dewson, in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Green, Ilene Kantrov, and Harriette Walker (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 188-192.

Mary Williams Dewson

Mary Williams Dewson (1874-1962), widely known as Molly Dewson, was a reformer, government official, and organizer of women for the Democratic Party.

Molly Dewson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1874. In her youth a number of influences awakened in her an interest in public affairs. Her father gave her an appetite for reading books on politics and government. Many of her neighbors and female relatives—such as her aunt Elizabeth Putnam, a pioneer in reforming delinquent girls—were active in public causes.

After attending private schools in the Boston area, she entered Wellesley College, where she was an excellent student. She was also president of her class in her junior and senior years, organized the Wellesley Athletic Association, introduced the Australian ballot for class elections, and began the Wellesley alumnae fund by raising money for the first class gift.

Upon graduating in 1897, she quickly established herself as one of the ablest of the generation of younger women who seconded the initiatives of such older women reformers of the progressive era as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. Dewson got her first job when the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, the most important women's club in Boston, hired her to investigate and improve the living and working conditions of female domestics in the Boston area. Then, as the organizer and first superintendent of the Massachusetts Parole Department for delinquent girls between 1900 and 1912, she became a national authority on the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders.

As executive secretary of an investigating commission set up by the Massachusetts legislature she produced a report on the living conditions of women and children in industry. The report became the basis of the 1912 Massachusetts minimum wage act, the first such act passed in modern industrial America. Dewson went on to become a leader in the Massachusetts campaign of 1915 for the passage of a referendum favoring woman suffrage and then assumed the leadership of the state Suffrage Association.

After World War I Florence Kelley chose Dewson to take charge of the National Consumers League's national campaign for state minimum wage laws for women and children. Then switching to the New York Consumers League in 1924, she became the president. Dewson soon emerged as the leader of the Women's Joint Legislative Conference, most notably in lobbying for the passage through the New York legislature of a 1930 act limiting the hours of women and children in industry to 48 hours a week.

Starting in 1928 Eleanor Roosevelt, who was active in the Consumers League and in the Women's Division of the Democratic Party, persuaded Dewson to accept various positions of leadership within the Democratic Party in New York and on the national level in order to make women more effective in politics. As director of the Women's Division of the Democratic Party in Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential campaigns of 1932 and 1936, Dewson led in trying to make women voters an important part of the voting coalition behind President Roosevelt. She believed that his New Deal program was the best hope for enacting national legislation to protect working men and women in industry.

Through the Women's Division Dewson developed many techniques to stimulate women who were timid about becoming politicians to be campaigners, party officials, and even candidates for office. She thus created the first effective nationwide vote-getting organization of women ever sponsored by a political party. This organization marked the decisive entrance of women into party politics on both the national and state levels.

Dewson found some time in the 1930s to promote industrial and welfare programs in such capacities as official adviser to Frances Perkins (secretary of labor) and as presidential appointee to the Social Security Board in 1937. But, due to chronic heart trouble, she resigned from the board in 1938 and, except for occasional participation in party affairs, retired to her home in Castine, Maine, where she died in 1962.

Further Reading

A short biography of Dewson by Paul C. Taylor is in Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980). She figures prominently in Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (1981). Dewson's importance to Eleanor Roosevelt is illustrated in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and to Frances Perkins in George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (1976).

Additional Sources

Ware, Susan, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, feminism, and New Deal politics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. □