Molly Dewson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1874.
She attended three private schools, including the prestigious
Dana Hall, 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.
After graduating, Dewson began working as a secretary of
the Domestic Reform Committee of the Women's Educational
and Industrial Union, a social and reform club in Boston.
There she conducted statistical studies of homelife that
led to several articles. She also reorganized the club's
employment office for domestic workers, formed social clubs
for them, and taught at a school for housekeeping. In 1899,
she published The Twentieth Century Expense Book,
about how to manage a household on a budget. In 1900, she
left the union to set up the parole department of the Massachusetts
State Industrial School for Girls. She was also the department's
first superintendent. While there, she tracked the girls
to understand the motives behind their deliquency and crimes,
and to aid in their rehabilitation. These activities led
to further articles and a presentation at the 1911 National
Conference of Charities and Correction, entitled "The Delinquent
Girl on Parole." 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, Mary G. (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 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.
In 1928, 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 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 utterly.
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."
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 in 1962 of complications
following a stroke.
Sources:
Ware, Susan. Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism,
and New Deal Politics. New Haven: Yale University
Press. 1987.
passim.
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