On March 3, 1914, a brief profile of activist Frances Kellor (1873–1952) was published in The Day Book, under the heading “Woman Changes Old Political Methods.” One of several short articles cloned in news outlets across the country, it reported that Theodore Roosevelt had proclaimed Kellor “the best man in the Progressive party” for her work as “chief of service in the Progressive national service bureau.” Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party had made an impressive showing in the presidential election of 1912, defeating Republican William Howard Taft but losing to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Optimism remained high for many Progressive Party members when Kellor’s unusual position of responsibility was publicized. The profile featured an image of Kellor sitting at her desk in the typically plain style of female dress she adopted in professional life (in contrast to the masculine dress she sometimes adopted in private). She stared directly into the camera, radiating firmness, confidence, and calm. If some readers were intrigued by the startling rise of this forty-year-old woman in the world of party politics, the reactions of old political men were not quoted.Footnote 1 (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Frances Kellor, Chief of Service. The Day Book (Chicago, Illinois), March 3, 1914. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1914-03-03/ed-1/seq-21/.
Frances Kellor holds an important place among a small group of reform-minded women, prior to 1920, who chose to forgo the segregated women’s political cultures of settlement houses, reform organizations, and the suffrage movement, to compete head-on with men in government and party politics.Footnote 2 This article provides a brief summary of Kellor’s life and largely overlooked achievements, and describes the mixed success of Kellor’s early career efforts to acquire political power as she worked within traditional institutional frameworks for women’s activism. It then examines in detail her pioneering role as Chief of the Progressive Service, and the resistance to her authority posed by ambitious young men who sought to kick her downstairs (as one of her antagonists memorably described it). The story of Kellor’s tenure in this position serves as a revealing case study of what it meant to be on the leading edge of women’s entry into traditionally male realms in this historical moment. Kellor was placed in a position of significant formal authority within a national political party and with the backing of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most powerful and revered men in the United States. Yet Kellor’s reputation was traduced by lower-level staffers who worked their network within the male-dominated political world while Roosevelt was absent from the scene. Her experience indicates the magnitude of the challenges and costs faced by the few women of the Progressive Era who attempted to breach the citadel.
The Progressive Service was an elaborately constructed organization within the fledgling Progressive Party. Designed to complement electoral activities, it sought to entrench public support between elections by developing policy planks and model legislation, and by deploying speakers and publicity materials to educate voters. Many luminaries from academia and public affairs populated the volunteer committees of the Service, with Kellor leading a small staff of full-time employees. Roosevelt thoroughly endorsed Kellor’s vision for the Service, and credited her as its chief architect.Footnote 3 But by the time Kellor’s profile appeared in The Day Book in March 1914, her leadership of the Progressive Service was in trouble. She described herself as “a besieged general holding a fort with a small garrison.” She noted: “reports and little things happen every day which convince me that our assistant leaders are not only slowly strangling the service but that women are gradually being excluded from councils and from the campaign. Part of it is unconscious, part deliberate.”Footnote 4
Beginning with John Garraty in 1960, several historians have referred to Kellor’s difficult time as Chief of the Progressive Service. Mid-twentieth-century accounts of Kellor’s performance in this role are brief, but they generally depict her as a kind of destructive office harridan who caused morale problems among otherwise dedicated staff. In 1990, Ellen Fitzpatrick acknowledged that “it is doubtful that fault for these persistent conflicts belonged solely to Kellor. Not many staff members were used to taking orders from a woman.” Yet Fitzpatrick remained critical of Kellor as an arrogant progressive, imperious in attitude, and overly confident in social science methods. Fitzpatrick argued that, in part, “her own impatience cost Kellor many of the organization’s brightest and most creative young workers.” Since historians, as well as some contemporaries, have charged Kellor with lowering morale and harming the Progressive Party, this article challenges those impressions by revisiting the primary source material. It argues that no prior account of Kellor’s tenure provides a balanced picture of her capabilities in this exceptional moment, since each ignores or discounts evidence of a misogyny-tinged campaign to undermine and unseat her.Footnote 5
Histories of American women in politics and government—predominantly white and middle-class women in the first instance—depict a long, hard struggle to achieve positions in public office, even after the vote was granted in 1920.Footnote 6 Frances Kellor had some remarkable achievements before the vote; indeed, by 1920 her career in party politics and government was effectively over. Alongside numerous executive positions with private reform organizations, some of which she founded, she was appointed in 1910 to head the New York State Bureau of Industries and Immigration. At the start of 1913 she moved to her role as Chief of the Progressive Service, and remained until the Progressive Party unraveled in the 1914 election. Kellor simultaneously served as Vice Chairman of the New York-New Jersey North American Civic League, funded by Felix Warburg and fronted by railroad magnate Frank Trumbull, which in spring 1914 became the nationwide Committee for Immigrants in America. In 1914, she was instrumental in forging a joint venture with the federal government to create a Division of Immigrant Education, reflecting her longstanding advocacy for the welfare of European immigrants and their integration into American life. By 1918, she was working as a special advisor on Americanization to President Wilson’s Education Commissioner, despite having worked conspicuously for Republican Charles Evans Hughes’s failed presidential campaign in 1916. In 1919, Wilson’s administration outlawed the private funding of federal initiatives, and Kellor’s career in government came to an end.Footnote 7
Kellor has received fairly little historiographical attention relative to her achievements. As she left no papers and wrote no memoir, historians must rely on what can be known from scattered primary evidence.Footnote 8 Further exploration of Kellor’s case adds to understandings of the variation that existed within white middle-class women’s activism in the early twentieth century: the extent to which they worked within a segregated female political culture; their dedication to the cause of suffrage; and their attitudes toward political partisanship. Kellor certainly remained close to certain networks of women’s political culture throughout her life, via a small circle of intimate friends. Her life partner, Mary Dreier, and Mary’s sister, Margaret, were, notably, collaborators in early ventures and leading figures in the Women’s Trade Union League. Kellor certainly supported the suffrage movement—the Progressive Party uniquely endorsed it in 1912—but was exasperated by its insistence on non-partisanship and obsessive singularity of purpose. She came to believe that only elected party government, advised by a permanent staff of social science experts, could effectively deliver social change.Footnote 9
Lillian Faderman profiles the partnership of Kellor and Mary Dreier in her account of the same-sex partnerships that were ubiquitous within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reform circles. Such leaders, Faderman contends, “can be said to have performed the role of ‘woman’ while conducting their battles to invade the public spaces belonging to men”; these women “insisted that if the influence of the ‘mother-heart’ … intrinsic to all women, were expanded to spheres outside the home, everyone would profit.” Kellor engaged in this kind of rhetoric early in her career, but not for long. By 1910, she had emerged from the world of civic housekeeping and cast off, for the most part, the cloak of maternalism. She expressed herself with the directness of any man and expected to be treated as an equal. If most of the cohort profiled by Faderman knew they were not going to marry and had less fear of offending men, “since they did not have to care what men thought,” Kellor—having gained entry to the male world of government and politics—had very much to care what men thought. She needed allies on the ground and was heavily reliant in the course of her career on the sponsorship, material and moral, of prominent men such as Felix Warburg, Louis Marshall, Charles Evans Hughes, and Frank Trumbull.Footnote 10
Kellor’s most notable sponsor was Theodore Roosevelt, to whom she owed her Progressive Service appointment. There is no small irony in the debt that Kellor, along with other women social reformers, owed to the sympathetic encouragement and material assistance of “the quintessential symbol of turn-of-the-century masculinity,” the man who had exhorted other men to exercise the rough, manly virtues of practical politics, to be “able to hold our own in rough conflict with our fellows.”Footnote 11 From the approximately 140 letters that Kellor and Roosevelt exchanged from 1906 to 1918, it is clear that Roosevelt truly valued Kellor and that a strong working sympathy existed between them.Footnote 12 Unfortunately for Kellor, Roosevelt chose a rather critical time to absent himself from party activities, embarking on a search for the River of Doubt in Brazil in 1913 (which he called “my last chance to be a boy”).Footnote 13 This story then—as much else in Kellor’s long and complex career trajectory—illustrates both a historical experience of male resistance to a woman’s presence in a position of political authority and also the enormous difference that a sympathetic and powerful man could make.
Kellor’s Early Career Efforts
Frances Kellor was white and middle-class, though not unambiguously middle-class. Brought up in the small town of Clearwater, Michigan, by a single mother who took in washing to make ends meet, Kellor achieved a hard-won education with the help of a series of ministers and wealthy women who took her under their wings. She earned a law degree at Cornell Law School in 1897, the third woman to do so, but appears not to have been greatly inspired by the law. She enrolled at the University of Chicago Department of Sociology in 1898, among the first group of women to be trained in the social sciences at that new institution. These women, despite a relatively welcome reception in graduate school, found themselves upon graduation immediately excluded from the academic positions granted to male peers. From 1898 to 1902, Kellor combined part-time studies with research and writing on criminology and other social issues, all precariously funded by part-time work and research grants from women’s associations. In 1902, she enrolled at the New York Summer School of Philanthropy, which brought her new contacts and a decisive departure from her life in the Midwest. (She left the University of Chicago without a doctorate, for reasons unknown.) From 1902 to 1905, she lived at the College Settlement in New York City.Footnote 14
In 1903, Kellor joined with the Women’s Municipal League (WML) under a College Settlement Association fellowship to conduct a study of domestic worker employment agencies. Here she encountered Margaret and Mary Dreier, the daughters of a wealthy German industrialist. Kellor moved in with Mary in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, and they remained together until Kellor’s death in 1952. The WML, founded by Josephine Shaw Lowell in 1894, was a fascinating mix of the partisan and nonpartisan. Its women launched seemingly apolitical hygiene and betterment committees—to implement new ice water fountains and public comfort stations, and to monitor ash cart collections, pavement repairs, and the city’s progress in removing dead cats—while also engaging with the harder-hitting topics of Tenement House Law and the condition of immigrants and of female inmates in the Tombs prison. At the same time, the WML also participated vigorously in electoral activities to replace Tammany officials with reform candidates.Footnote 15
For her research on employment agencies, Kellor and eight investigators spent several months undercover, posing as would-be employers or domestic workers to determine prevailing conditions. Among many abuses found, Kellor saw that fees charged to would-be employers and employees were not contingent on satisfactory placements, and that agents employed a variety of fee-churning practices to defraud clients of their money. She believed that many agencies sent innocent immigrant and migrant girls to lives of shame in brothels. Kellor worked with Margaret Dreier to translate her research findings into a draft bill for their regulation via a system of licensing and bonding to ensure standards of conduct (passed at Albany, New York, in June 1904). Kellor’s employment agency research also resulted in her well-received book Out of Work (1904), which caught the attention of Theodore Roosevelt.Footnote 16
In 1904, and in parallel with WML activities, Kellor and the Dreiers founded the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research (IMCHR) to conduct research on a number of topics impacting the home, extending the committee’s geographic reach to encompass New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Many contributors to the IMCHR Bulletin engaged in a fruitless campaign to solve “the servant problem,” as factory work and retail stores enticed suitable native-born girls away from the uncongenial demands of domestic service. In addition, Kellor documented her continued investigation and ranking of employment agencies, periodically referring complaints to the city’s Commissioner of Licenses. Kellor and her researchers further developed their interests in the problems of European immigrant women, as well as African American women migrating from the South to the urban North. Kellor turned also, increasingly, to the problems of male immigrants employed in the construction and mining camps, or those who traveled long distances in search of such work.Footnote 17
Along with this broadening agenda (the term Household was dropped from the Inter-Municipal Committee’s title in 1905), there are further early signs that Kellor desired to engage in social reform debates outside the lines of women’s maternalist rhetoric. Out of Work was itself a peculiar mixture of voices: part social science, part muckraking exposé of the employment agency business, and sometimes a melodramatic white slave narrative—complete with girls imprisoned in mountain hotels who escape their abusers only to turn insane and die. It reads as a warring of discourses, the beginnings of a process in which Kellor would cast off the gendered language of housekeeping and social purity and begin to adopt the more gender-neutral language of political economy, a language in which she might argue with progressive men on equal terms. In the moralizing tone of a middle-class matron, Kellor viewed with distaste the promiscuous mixing of classes in the lower-grade agencies: “the negro and immigrant, the less prosperous American, and many of the separate nationality offices crowd together all classes—old and young, sober and drunk, clean and unclean, good and bad, and innocent fresh girls and old hags.” But there were also subversive jabs at middle-class prejudice. Kellor liked to walk into employment offices and let the staff talk to her as a would-be employer for a few minutes, before informing them that she was actually a domestic worker looking for a job. “Such a situation certainly gives some idea of the possibilities of change in the human voice and attitude,” she wrote. The book also provided a distinctly amoral discussion of the domestic service industry as a dysfunctional system compromised by information problems and perverse incentives: a system in which all the players—employers, job-seekers, and employment agents—take advantage of one another at various times, and must be prevented from doing so by a well-designed scheme of state regulation.Footnote 18
Kellor’s renunciation of women’s social reform organizations, along with her rhetorical transformation, did not occur evenly or all at once. She maintained an advice column, “The Housekeeper and Her Helper,” in Ladies’ Home Journal until October 1907, and in later years sometimes still argued for reforms based on their impact on the home. Her March 1906 article, “The Inter-Municipal Research Committee,” published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, touted the organizational strength of the Committee’s federated structure and its alliances with women’s groups. It emphasized that women’s civic work was “the most-free from suspicion of political influence,” even as it described the Committee’s assistance to the re-election campaign of anti-Tammany Machine crusader, District Attorney William Travers Jerome. It was also at pains to circumscribe the scope and ambition of women’s activism and to stress the need for women to build their credibility with patience and humility. “The more active and communistic life of man,” she wrote, “has given him a broader foundation for his social service work, a work which is at last open to women. They must construct an equally firm foundation if their work is to be well done, though it may differ in many essentials, because of their duties as home-makers and mothers.”Footnote 19
No sooner were these humble words published than a remarkable sequence of events unfolded. In the spring of 1906, Kellor tried to assert herself as an independent overseer to Democratic mayor George B. McClellan Jr.’s Commission of Licenses, which was responsible for enforcing the employment agency law that she and the women of the WML had brought into being. Attempts by women’s groups to insert themselves in municipal affairs were not completely unprecedented, but Kellor assumed a startling degree of individual authority in her dealings with the mayor. Kellor had clashed with the McClellan administration at least once before. An attempt to present her employment agency research findings at the City Club in March 1904, just after McClellan took office, was sharply rebuffed as a partisan insult to the efficacy of his police commissioner. A May 1906 letter, expressing the willingness of her office to “give its cooperation” to McClellan’s appointee as Deputy Commissioner, makes it clear she imagined the mayor regarded her personally as a force with which to be reckoned.Footnote 20
There is evidence that the New York branch of the IMCR had previously brought data on employment agency law violations to the attention of McClellan’s Commissioner of Licenses. Documents in the papers of Margaret Dreier (dating back to March 1905) include lists of unlicensed agencies, agencies operating illegally from saloons, instances of false advertising, and investigator reports of women and girls sent to so-called disorderly houses. Evidently, Commissioner John Bogart was refusing to act on their evidence and enforce the law.Footnote 21 In November 1906, Kellor compiled a damning report on the Commissioner’s performance for the mayor, who promptly forwarded it straight to Bogart. But Kellor’s report seems to have focused on the work habits of Bogart’s staff rather than on substantive evidence of law violations. On November 22, Bogart responded to McClellan in excoriating terms: “Nearly all the charges are without foundation in fact, being fully contradicted by recent special inspections and by the daily records of my office, which indicate that the reports to Miss Kellor have not been based on actual investigations but upon fabrications by her detectives … Miss Kellor may be again depending for information upon unreliable persons, like the chief investigator whom she employed a year ago and who is now in the State prison of New Jersey, having been convicted of forgery.” Bogart claimed that Kellor had provided no specific information that agencies were sending women and girls to houses of prostitution. Instead, “several inspectors are alleged to have been ‘shadowed’ by Miss Kellor’s detectives and their movements on certain days are recorded with remarkable detail in the document submitted to your honor.” In multiple affidavits attached to his response, Bogart’s inspectors indignantly defended themselves against the reports of Kellor’s investigators that on given days they did not show up, arrived late to work, left early, took long lunchbreaks, hung out in restaurants and saloons when they should have been working, illegally engaged in outside business interests, and so forth.Footnote 22
We cannot know whether Kellor’s charges or Bogart’s repudiation of her findings is the more accurate. But it seems fair to say that her effort to investigate the investigators was an ill-advised attempt to micromanage an organization over which she had no executive authority and was guaranteed to elicit intense resentment. Kellor also made personal criticisms of the qualifications of individuals, complaining, for example, that Bogart was not a lawyer. This last comment surely reflected the frustration of the Cornell law graduate, whose only way of participating in civic life was to build from scratch her own research organization, as an institutional base from which to critique the executive skills of men rather less qualified than herself. Kellor surely overestimated her standing with McClellan, a patrician conservative and cynic, who believed in minimal government and bemoaned the contemporary mania for legislation. Though he was not likely to be a congenial partner for (predominantly Republican) women agitating for civic reform, the dozens of women who devoted their voluntary labor toward civic improvement might have been surprised to learn how little he valued them. McClellan wrote, sarcastically, in his posthumously published autobiography that “[one] society, of which a very charming and good-looking lady was the head, required its members to walk the streets noting … the location of all ash cans they saw which had not been emptied by ten o’clock in the morning. Every Monday this lady insisted on seeing me personally … Fortunately for my peace of mind, this society lived through only one winter.”Footnote 23 On November 26, the mayor’s Assistant Corporate Counsel Franklin Hoyt wrote Kellor that a full response to her report was available for review. It is not clear if she sought to access the response; perhaps the legal formality (and finality) of Hoyt’s letter suggested that this issue was better not pursued.Footnote 24
Rebuffed in private for her attempts at municipal oversight, Kellor’s continued research work and writing on the condition of immigrants brought her the admiration of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, he wrote letters to introduce her to his cabinet members as a special advisor and to instruct them to engage with her.Footnote 25 Kellor’s beautifully crafted essay, The State and the Immigrant, completed around 1907 or 1908, combined her research findings on the problems of new arrivals with additional material gathered by government agencies at the request of Roosevelt and his cabinet, and covered the current status of laws impacting their employment, education, and welfare.Footnote 26 Kellor’s growing reputation resulted in her 1908 appointment to New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes’s nine-person Commission of Immigration, chaired by Louis Marshall. Perhaps due to the existence of the ready-made research and analysis that Kellor already had in her pocket, the Commission completed nine conferences and 193 witness interviews to deliver their report within the space of eight months. The report, written by Kellor, contained evidence and arguments very familiar from her earlier essay on the defrauding and exploitation of immigrants perpetrated by steamship agents, internal transportation businesses, bankers, employment agents, and padrone. Kellor’s report recommended the creation of a state bureau for immigration and resulted in numerous instances of protective legislation. It had a fair amount to say about employment agencies, a topic Kellor knew well. New York City’s Commissioner of Licenses (John Bogart) was brought in to testify and asserted that “of the 800 agents in the city, I would say there are hardly 150 that handle immigrants.” In contrast, the report continued: “the Commission ascertained that a large number of the licensed agencies in New York city deal regularly with aliens, and that it is possible if not probable that most of them do so.” It then quoted contradictory testimony from Bogart’s own deputy, which could not have inspired much confidence in this person’s command of the facts. The report went on to provide a detailed, multipage assessment of the condition of New York’s employment agency business in relation to the law, further suggesting—to anyone paying attention to this aspect of it—that the report-writer knew more about Bogart’s business than he did. The Commission recommended that, regardless of what the city might continue to do, the state should assume responsibility for oversight of employment agencies providing services to immigrants as part of the remit of a Bureau of Industries and Immigration.Footnote 27 In 1910, this body was created, and Kellor was appointed its head. Clearly, Kellor had learned from experience the grounds on which to fight. The imprimatur of a state commission gave her the leverage with city officials that the privately organized women’s Inter-Municipal Committee could not.
In parallel with her New York State Immigration Commission work, Kellor joined another mixed-sex investigative body, the privately-funded Committee of Fourteen, established in 1905 to continue the ongoing middle-class crusade against commercial vice. In the period of Kellor’s tenure (1907–1910), the Committee’s chairman, the Reverend John Peters—working largely with male Executive Committee members—sought to close down illicit Raines Law hotels, ten-room establishments qualified to serve liquor on Sundays and notorious as venues for prostitution. This action was done via a set of coercive alliances with the Brewers’ Association, the surety companies, the State Excise Department, and the Police Department that Mara Keire has described, collectively, as “astonishingly overt blackmail.” Kellor’s participation on the Committee of Fourteen has received little attention from historians, perhaps because neither she nor any of her female colleagues seem to have been substantially engaged in its primary project to shut down Raines Law hotels. While the Committee could boast a handful of female participants, the limited evidence provided by its proceedings and correspondence suggests something well short of a collegial partnership between men and women. Around the time of her appointment to the Committee, Kellor was assigned—along with Mary Simkhovitch and Ruth Standish Baldwin—to a Women’s Committee with a rather vague remit. Full committee meetings were called relatively rarely; instead, the Executive Committee’s activities were reported out in a series of monthly Bulletins, beginning in February 1907. Minutes show that several attempts by women members to expand the scope of the Committee’s activities into a variety of social investigations were rebuffed by Peters and his close associates. The exclusion of women from meaningful participation is all the more intriguing in light of evidence that Kellor was conducting significant extracurricular research into vice. This research was partly reflected in her testimony as an expert witness to the Rockefeller Grand Jury on White Slavery in 1910.Footnote 28
Determined to have something to show for their labors, the Women’s Committee (renamed the Research Committee) published The Social Evil in New York City in 1910, written by George Kneeland and edited by Kellor.Footnote 29 This report examined the adequacy of forty-two laws, charter provisions, and ordinances which had some bearing on the problem of prostitution: laws relating to conduct in tenements and dance halls; liquor licensing and building codes; vagrancy, probation procedures, marital relations, accessibility to lewd publications, abortion and midwifery, child protection, and employment agencies. While it earned a rather small paragraph at the end of the Chairman’s January 1910 Annual Report, The Social Evil was well received in the reform world. As the Committee’s Bulletin No. 40 put it, perhaps a little churlishly, “the Research Committee report has been very favorably received with less technical criticism than anticipated.” In his Story of the Committee of Fourteen, Peters noted that the Committee based its future agenda on The Social Evil, the phase of eliminating Raines Law hotels having concluded successfully. At this point in the narrative, Peters appeared to have forgotten that women were ever involved in its work: “banded together for a special purpose … all the members of the Committee of Fourteen, comprising men of large affairs and high political experience, had come to a unity of belief that prostitution … must be rendered dangerous and unprofitable.”Footnote 30
Stymied in her work with the Committee of Fourteen, Kellor resigned in November 1910 to take up her position as the first New York State Commissioner of Industries and Immigration. In this role she continued to pursue immigrant protection measures with a meager appropriation and corresponded with Roosevelt on her vision for an immigration policy that would support the welfare and assimilation of the immigrant population beyond existing government powers to admit and deport. Just two years later, a position of even greater scope and opportunity beckoned. Kellor was elected, along with Jane Addams, as a Progressive Party Committee Member at Large, then appointed by Roosevelt to be Chief of the Progressive Service. Kellor thanked Roosevelt on December 31, 1912: “may I acknowledge my very great personal indebtedness to you for the very wonderful opportunity you have given me to be of service.”Footnote 31
Kellor and Party Politics
For many leaders of women’s reform groups, a woman’s superior moral refinement and dedication to the principles of good government mandated opposition to traditional party machines. Many suffragists believed that political partisanship created divided loyalties and diverted energy from the cause. Some were embittered that their years of loyalty to a seemingly sympathetic Republican Party had gained them nothing. Others, reformers and suffragists alike, simply stressed the importance of working without prejudice with politicians from all parties.Footnote 32 But Kellor embraced party politics with passion. In “A Message to Women,” published in September 1912, she advocated partisanship over “the indirect method, so much heralded as the preserver of womanliness,” and urged every woman to get involved in politics because “somewhere some one man or men in authority have the granting or vetoing of the thing that lies nearest her heart … it is more effective to be on the inside and be backed by the ‘someones’ than to try pushing the ‘someones’.” She claimed that the Progressive Party offered women unprecedented opportunities to be heard and represented on equal terms (“there are no auxiliary committees of women”).Footnote 33
In the same article, Kellor quoted at length a speech from Roosevelt supporting suffrage, based on his acquaintance with women who believed in it: “with Miss Addams, with Miss Kellor, with Mrs. Kelly [sic] and many others.” In the run-up to the 1912 election, Kellor urged suffragists to join the Party and urged Roosevelt to advocate for woman suffrage at every opportunity.Footnote 34 While she solicited party support wherever she could find it, Kellor deplored what she saw as the suffragists’ fixation with the vote and condemned women who would not use it in their own interest when they had it. She was exasperated that the suffragists failed to rally around the one party offering explicit support for their cause in 1912. In a bitter note following a defeat for woman suffrage and political officeholding in Ohio, she wrote, “Does this not convince you: That women cannot win by the policy of neutrality outside of party lines?”Footnote 35 Five years later, she expressed dismay at women’s failure to support the party of Charles Evans Hughes (when so many states with pending suffrage referendums were Republican), writing ominously that “the Republican Party will be loath either to forget or to forgive the women voters of 1916.”Footnote 36
Having failed to secure the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt broke with his former party to form the Progressive Party. Described by John Gable as a party of the well-heeled middle classes—a mixture of experienced politicians and political neophytes—the party touted a so-called New Nationalism of strong central government to fulfill the needs of the states and the people. The Progressive Service—with its mission of policy development and voter education—combined Kellor’s full-time staff with its committees of academics and social workers, who included Jane Addams, John Dewey, Charles Merriam, Lillian Wald, Gifford Pinchot, and Paul Kellogg. Its structure was both innovative and highly bureaucratic (Gable has even described it as a “shadow government”). It reflected the faith of its participants that a national program of social reform, designed by experts with an engineering mentality, could transform every area of socioeconomic life. Among the many programs the Progressive Service was designed to promote was Kellor’s long-cherished dream of a domestic immigration policy in which the state would take an active interest in the welfare and distribution of immigrants already admitted to the country.Footnote 37
In January 1913, Kellor began to form committee structures and programs for the Progressive Service. Under Kellor, Paxton Hibben was hired as head of the Bureau of Education to organize materials and speakers to advertise progressive goals and programs. Chicago lawyer Donald Richberg was brought in as head of the Legislative Reference Bureau to draft model statutes to enact the party’s platform. Both bureaus were also steered by their own committees of volunteer experts. Both Richberg and Hibben would soon cause trouble for Kellor. The Progressive Service enjoyed broad support within the Progressive Party for most of 1913, but toward the end of that year a chronic shortage of funds combined with anxiety about the upcoming 1914 elections to intensify internal party criticism of impractical social workers and academics. The head of the Progressive Party’s political wing, George Walbridge Perkins (a close associate of J. P. Morgan), became convinced of the need to divert precious funds away from social research and voter education in support of electoral candidates. The battle between politicos and social scientists took place against the broader antagonism of the latter camp toward Perkins, who was seen as a monopoly-supporting creature of Wall Street. At the same time, a further human relations subplot emerged, as Bureau heads Hibben and Richberg launched an open revolt against Kellor’s management. Ultimately, political pressures and internal conflicts destroyed the Progressive Service. In January 1914, Perkins initiated a significant defunding and the closing of the Legislative Reference Bureau. Kellor tried to continue on, but by December the Executive Committee had voted to cancel it altogether, and Kellor was asked to give up her space at Progressive Party headquarters.
The role of Richberg and Hibben in the rancorous collapse of the Progressive Service, and of Kellor’s conduct as its head, is worth new scrutiny. In the extensive archives provided by male protagonists, it does not take too much reading between the lines to see the intensity of the men’s discomfort with female hierarchical power, as well as the virulence of their reaction to it. Kellor’s responses to their actions are less easy to gauge, because they are more sparsely documented, but her confidence, emotional containment, and executive judgment—all critical to the execution of high-level leadership—must surely have been impacted by her knowledge of an underhanded war being waged against her. In the decades following her death, Kellor has been variously tagged as petty, emotional, and lacking in judgment, while the markedly bad behaviors of her male antagonists have largely escaped comment.
It all began so well: Pax Hibben urged his Harvard classmate Don Richberg to join the team (“I have talked to Miss Kellor … she begs me to get you”).Footnote 38 But the two seem subsequently to have envisioned a role collaborating among esteemed men of affairs that did not include Kellor. In 1913, Richberg and Hibben were in their early thirties, and only seven or eight years younger than Kellor. As Kellor’s correspondence with Roosevelt shows, by 1912 she enjoyed a warm and trusting relationship with the ex-President and leader of the Progressive Party, a relationship that the younger men clearly coveted. Kellor had a semi-official role as the gateway to Roosevelt, which some in the Progressive Party resented. Roosevelt had put her in charge of determining what appearances he should make to best leverage his limited time in the service of party publicity. In July 1913, Harold Ickes wrote to Richberg, deriding Kellor for “elbowing in” to set the terms of Roosevelt’s attendance at a gathering of Illinois Progressives (“Cook County … will not be dictated to”). Richberg had to explain to Ickes that he could not “help with the Colonel as a Chicago man” since her position in the matter had Roosevelt’s full backing.Footnote 39
Richberg and Hibben began to chafe at Kellor’s authority. They tried to work around her directives by appealing to their respective committee chairmen, William Draper Lewis and Samuel McCune Lindsay. On August 5, 1913, Richberg wrote in frustration to Lewis that “no man can be expected to accomplish creative work of any value, without complete control over the facilities necessary for that work.” Historian John Garraty’s primary example of Kellor’s supposed pettiness is a memo to the staff in which she threatened to withhold salaries if reports were not produced on time. Yet Garraty revealed neither a handwritten note on Richberg’s copy of Kellor’s edict attempting to countermand her directive by referring it to Lewis, nor annotations suggesting that Richberg refused to provide Kellor with the reports for which she had asked. Kellor’s attempt to set rules on expense claims and timekeeping was similarly referred to Lewis and Lindsay for arbitration.Footnote 40 Kellor may well have been overly controlling and petty in minor matters, but she was not the sole fount of this office culture. A Miss Stricker, secretary to the party treasurer, complained frequently to Kellor’s team about misdirected or opened mail and the unauthorized use of Perkins’ conference room.Footnote 41 Most of the battling that took place involved questions about charges and allocations amidst a chronic shortage of funding, for which Kellor was not to blame. When the local Progressive organization in Newport, Rhode Island, refused to meet expenses for a Navy Day event arranged with the Service in July 1913, it was too much to bear: she unwisely directed Hibben to “drop up there in Newport quietly” and “carry off” evidence of their having contracted for vendor services (which he sensibly refused to do).Footnote 42
Richberg and Hibben were keen to establish their own direct relationships with Roosevelt. Richberg wrote to Roosevelt on occasion, offering up his poetry and advice. Both of Richberg’s autobiographies suggest he spent his days at the Progressive Service working cheek-by-jowl with Roosevelt. Kellor is not mentioned. Hibben came to the Progressive Party by way of the diplomatic service. His family biographer recounts incident after incident of reckless behavior and interpersonal strife in a variety of global locations, following his initial appointment as a diplomat. Shortly before Hibben began to work for the Progressive Party, in fact, he had been forced to resign for slapping a Chilean national at a dinner party in Santiago.Footnote 43
In June 1912, Hibben wrote to offer his services to Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential campaign, as “a private in the People’s army.” Appointed to the Progressive Service, Hibben’s initial communications with Roosevelt (or his secretary Frank Harper) referenced arrangements for speeches and educational materials, all entirely within his remit. Starting in June 1913, however, Hibben penned a series of letters in which he tried to position himself as a Latin American advisor to the ex-President and attempted to secure meetings with Roosevelt for his friends and acquaintances. He sharply criticized a Progressive Service policy document on treaty rights written by Henry Moskowitz, and attempted to bond with Roosevelt over the supposed incapacity of Latin Americans for self-government. The correspondence did not indicate how Roosevelt viewed Hibben’s many unsolicited suggestions and requests, or whether Kellor knew about them in advance. It seems reasonable to assume, given the relationship she enjoyed with Roosevelt, that Kellor became aware of them. It seems also probable that she did not appreciate Hibben’s disloyal criticism of the work of the Service; his presumptuous claims on Roosevelt’s time; and his direct lobbying for position, all outside the chain of command.Footnote 44
In October 1913, Kellor told Hibben that she could not keep him in a salaried position after January 1914. After that, the work environment rapidly descended into rancorous toxicity. Records show Richberg and Hibben mobilizing the junior staff in protest against Kellor, compiling a staff petition with a peremptory set of demands that she must follow. A further report by employee Montaville Flowers of the Speaker’s Bureau complained that his recommendations had been foolishly ignored by management due to lack of funds and lectured the boss on what she must do to satisfy his expectations.Footnote 45 The personalized agitation by Richberg, Hibben, and their junior staff occurred in tandem with broader financial and jurisdictional disputes between the Progressive Service and the political wing. It seems likely that animus toward Kellor from political men with whom Richberg and Hibben corresponded may have emboldened their actions. Richberg clearly hoped to head the Service himself. He claimed in one of his autobiographies that Perkins had said the Legislative Reference Bureau “was the only thing in the Progressive Service that had proved of positive value and which ought to be continued.” He further claimed that Perkins proposed to reorganize the entire Service with Richberg in charge. Richberg’s papers contain a couple of hand-drawn organization charts, more to his liking than the one that actually existed. By early November 1913, Richberg was actively in discussions with Progressive Party leaders on a potential reorganization plan.Footnote 46
On November 20, 1913, Hibben resigned from the Progressive Service, and attempted to take Kellor down, via a memo he sent to members of the Party’s National Executive Committee, among others. Hibben’s self-important resignation letter questioned Kellor’s authority to terminate him. It blasted her management ability and attacked the whole notion of the Service itself as duplicative with the political wing: extravagant, ineffective, cumbersome, bureaucratic, and so on. The staff’s “devotion to the Progressive cause … has been constantly thrown away by a cavalier and inconsiderate spirit in the administration of the office” he wrote, citing “capricious haste” in the termination of three staff members. He bemoaned a “lack of personal encouragement and kindliness in the office,” and proclaimed, “I am absolutely unwilling to condone this emasculation of the work planned for the service.”Footnote 47 Kellor responded swiftly to Hibben’s attempt to humiliate her with her peers by announcing that she had terminated him. On November 25, she informed the staff that he would not be allowed to reenter the building.Footnote 48 Yet Hibben would not go quietly. On December 1, 1913, he wrote another long letter of grievance, this time focused on the inconsistent reasons Kellor had given for his dismissal. He was sorry to say that his patience had reached its limit. Perhaps forgetting the very insulting resignation letter he had written a few days earlier and forwarded to a large group of Kellor’s peers, he complained that she had corresponded with multiple parties about his dismissal. “I have avoided personalities as long as I could, but feel I must do something to meet this attack,” he wrote.Footnote 49 It seems that, in the face of furious pushback to the personnel decision she had made, Kellor did indeed equivocate on the reasons for Hibben’s firing. One explanation she had given him was that he had embarrassed the work of the Progressive Service by making critical comments. As Hibben’s tempestuous diplomatic career suggests, he did not easily absorb basic life lessons.Footnote 50
A few days later, Hibben attempted to blackmail the Progressive Party. On December 7, he drafted an open letter, bemoaning the Service Board’s failure to investigate the complaints he had made against Kellor. She was, he said, “a menace and a source of peril to the whole organization.” Since the Board had failed to act, Hibben—as the high-minded individual he was, and regardless of “whatever harm a disagreeable publicity may do to the cause in which I believe”—must “purge” the Party by publishing to the press Kellor’s ill-advised internal note from July, which suggested Hibben might take a trip to Newport, Rhode Island, to capture the correspondence of the Navy Day Committee.Footnote 51 Richberg saw fit to construct his own memo of grievance against Kellor, bemoaning “the concentration of all power and authority in the hands of the Chief of Service.” He complained about Kellor’s financial decisions and made sweeping denunciations of her executive ability, interpersonal skills, and “interference.” He included petty refutations of things she was alleged to have said (which supposedly proved she was a “liar”); alleged mail tampering; and ended with a recap of her unwise instructions to Hibben over Navy Day.Footnote 52
Richberg and Hibben were clearly in cahoots. Richberg kept copies of Hibben’s communications to senior party officials. Hibben’s handwritten note to Richberg, composed in the aftermath of his firing (and which seems to regard this event as a joke), began, “Nothing easier! Here is the dope.”Footnote 53 Richberg joined the attempt to re-litigate Hibben’s firing, which was none of his business. He penned a series of unhinged notes and letters to senior Progressives, demanding action. On December 8, 1913, he wrote to Harold Ickes:
There is a story here which at least two papers are trying to get that is so very nasty and involves so many of the really big men that if it comes out, I don’t know what it will do to us. For a week or more I have been sitting on the lid (the name of the lid is Hibben) trying to prevent an explosion. Meanwhile the men who should save the situation are walking all around the subject trying how to figure out how to kick a lady downstairs like perfect gentlemen. Meanwhile the lady is waving a torch over a keg of gunpowder and leading a hired orchestra in “Hail to the Chief”. If the whole house blows into atoms the fault will not be mine, or Hibben’s, or even the lady’s, since God refused to give her the same sense of decency commonly allotted to other humans.Footnote 54
Richberg claimed to Charles Merriam that Lewis, Pinchot, Herbert Knox Smith, and Perkins were all on his side. He wrote: “Miss Kellor with her usual blindness probably does not yet grasp the seriousness of the situation or at least the inevitable result. She is undoubtedly planning a fight for the meeting of [the] Service Board next Saturday.” Kellor had become, by this point, something of a cartoon villain, the target of Richberg’s barely coherent rage. In his letter to Merriam, Richberg expressed confidence in the outcome but then fretted that Kellor might get to Jane Addams before he did. In the very act of conniving with Merriam (he wanted his letter shown to Addams but otherwise kept secret) he wrote, “Miss K.’s whole game has been in keeping people apart and then misrepresenting one to the other.”Footnote 55 Richberg and Hibben felt perfectly entitled to circulate withering written critiques of their supervisor and claimed to speak for others. There are surely few men in institutional life, then or since, who would have put up with these disrespectful and insubordinate behaviors for very long.
There is little evidence, outside of Richberg and Hibben’s assertions, that Kellor was suffocating junior talent. Kellor’s letters to Richberg in the summer of 1913 are directive, but friendly and encouraging. She praised his tact and sought his advice.Footnote 56 He clearly operated with significant autonomy. Hibben was freely and independently in correspondence with Roosevelt and others. Kellor could act rashly on occasion, as evidenced by her instruction to Hibben over Navy Day (which was rendered in a friendly, even conspiratorial, tone, if poorly judged in substance). She could express herself tartly, dismissing criticisms from the political wing—so one colleague reported—as the whining of office seekers who cared nothing for the party, and sought distraction from their own political incompetence.Footnote 57
Kellor can surely be criticized for pressing ahead with ambitious plans to expand the Progressive Service when the Progressive Party’s funding and lack of electoral success could not justify it. Her essay, “A New Spirit in Party Organization,” conveyed a somewhat manic vision for an elaborate institutional construct extending to the states that was not really practical in the short term. Edith Tate, the junior staff member and co-conspirator with Hibben, wrote rather tentative letters to party leader Raymond Robins on Kellor’s blind spot in this regard, her critique perhaps tempered by the knowledge that Robins had a close relationship with Kellor (as Margaret Dreier Robins’s husband, he was effectively Kellor’s brother-in-law).Footnote 58 While Robins wrote supportive letters to Kellor in this period, expressing confidence in her ability to rise above the crisis, he acknowledged her tendency to over-engineer things. In this respect, Kellor was in good company with many other social-scientist progressives who were committed to maintaining the Service.Footnote 59 Whatever her shortcomings, Kellor inspired intense admiration among a number of colleagues over the course of her career. Several individuals who had worked under her direction followed her loyally from one position to the next. One was Lithuanian immigrant and lawyer Joseph Mayper. In the letter he wrote Mary at Kellor’s death in 1952, Mayper said that Kellor “influenced my life in so many ways and my memories of her are filled with her nobility, her standards and her sense of justice … She once wrote me, what we both felt so strongly, of our ‘fine enduring friendship in which there has been no flaw.’”Footnote 60
In her analysis of misogyny, Kate Manne observes that “women who compete for [men’s roles] will tend to be perceived as … insufficiently caring and attentive … illicitly trying to gain power that she is not entitled to; and morally untrustworthy.”Footnote 61 If Richberg was concerned to maintain Jane Addams’s esteem, Manne observes that misogyny is not a generalized condition of woman hating, but can result when the goods to which men feel entitled are threatened or captured by women in a social context in which actors are “jostling for position.”Footnote 62 Addams had a position of unusual respect within the Party and the country—and Richberg did not report to her.
The comportment of Progressive Party leaders charged with sorting out the mess is also instructive. If women in institutional life can be derailed by hostile attack, such attacks often rely upon the inaction of nominally feminist and well-meaning men. Correspondence between Progressive Party leaders William Draper Lewis, Herbert Knox Smith, and Gifford Pinchot showed them reluctant to exercise the leadership the moment required. Pinchot had been a warm and enthusiastic collaborator with Kellor in the formation of the Progressive Service (and Kellor also became a personal friend of both his mother and his wife). At the beginning of December 1913, Pinchot and Lewis both urged Kellor to put her view of the Hibben situation in front of Perkins. As things escalated, they agreed in private that it was an unfortunate situation. They neither defended Kellor’s authority over her own department nor suggested she had exceeded it. Their correspondence expressed little indignation at Hibben and Richberg’s blackmail attempt.Footnote 63
On December 17, Richberg virtually immolated himself by sending out a memo signed by other staff members, including Hibben—still styling himself “Director of the Bureau of Education,” even though his employment had terminated a month earlier—demanding “an immediate discontinuance and an early repudiation of the tactics which have characterized the active administration of the Service and against which we have earnestly protested.” Perkins reacted with fury to Richberg’s demand note, which seemed to communicate a lack of confidence in whatever promises he had made a few days prior.Footnote 64 As a result, the Service was substantially reorganized—the Legislative Bureau wound down, the Speaker’s Bureau moved to the political wing—and the budget was slashed, but Kellor was allowed to remain in a diminished role. She must have felt chastened but acted with grace, accepting organizational changes proposed by Smith and Lewis in a report of February 1914. It was surely around this time that Kellor, in her letter to Robins, characterized herself as “a besieged general.” In the same letter she suggested going abroad for six weeks to study unemployment insurance and lamented Addams’s determination to resign from the Executive Committee.Footnote 65
Chastised by Perkins, Richberg tried to hang on, documenting the financial sacrifices he had incurred through his loyalty to the Party. But Richberg was out by April 1914 and returned to private practice in Chicago. If the Service was principally doomed by Progressive Party finances and impending electoral challenges, Richberg certainly miscalculated the strength of his alliances, as Perkins’s note to Roosevelt on his emergence from the Brazilian jungle in January 1914 made clear: “A good many of Miss Kellor’s Bureau Chiefs … rebelled and filed charges of one sort and another against her, and we had a regular mare’s nest on our hands [i.e. ‘a situation of great disorder or confusion’]; but … it has all been straightened out … [Miss Kellor] and I are on just as good terms as ever.”Footnote 66
Kellor outlasted the men who refused her authority, holding on to her role without much office support until the Progressive Party’s disastrous showing at the polls in November 1914. While direct evidence of her behavior in this episode is limited, it seems reasonable to conclude that there were things she might have handled differently. However, the accounts of Hibben and Richberg have been too unquestioningly accepted as reality: their voluminous correspondence reveals entitled and poisonous behavior at every turn. Kellor had risen to an extraordinary position in a period where a woman’s attempt to break free from gendered modes of politics was extremely rare. There was no playbook for how to operate, and the resistance was fierce. On the surface, Kellor appears to have emerged from the Progressive Service debacle with resilience. In July 1914, she wrote to Mary Pinchot from her summer quarters in Maine, of a recent experience teaching entitled small boys to be team players at baseball: “It is a regular Standard Oil team, [including] 2 little Rockefellers … They are getting so now even a ball in the eye doesn’t send them to the sidelines weeping and they are getting some idea of team work. It is quite apparent they haven’t sensed its meaning before.”Footnote 67
Kellor after the Progressive Service
Following the November 1914 elections, Kellor’s letters to Roosevelt included a further outline for a “domestic immigration policy” in which she now hoped to interest “Mr. Ford, or some big American with vision.”Footnote 68 She pivoted swiftly to her writing and longstanding work with the National Americanization Committee (NAC), and brokered an arrangement to finance a Division of Immigrant Education within the federal Bureau of Education. In 1916, she played a leading role—back in women’s auxiliary mode—in the narrowly failing presidential campaign of Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes, who had appointed her to his Immigration Commission in 1908. Kellor appears to have enjoyed a friendly and mutually respectful relationship with Education Commissioner Philander Claxton during the war years, serving as NAC-funded special advisor. When her government service ended in 1919, Kellor continued with Americanization work for a time under the banner of the Inter-Racial Council (sponsored by Felix Warburg) but—as John Higham has chronicled—public interest in this theme began to wane after World War I. As a leading promoter of Americanization, Kellor organized numerous programs of English-language instruction, community development, and national publicity. Though not herself immune to widespread fears of immigrant disloyalty during the war, she continued to defend the majority of immigrants against the disparaging assertions of nativists and fought to keep the gates open. Kellor had invested much of her professional life in arguing the liberal case for immigration, but this was a losing position by the early 1920s.Footnote 69
From 1926 onward, Kellor led the American Arbitration Association, which may have offered her some respite from the bitter political battles she had endured. Many of her male sponsors were gone by 1930.Footnote 70 In an extraordinary draft essay titled “Cloisters in American Politics,” which Kellor wrote around 1922, she provided extended reflections on the current state of women’s representation and lamented their diminished contributions to public life in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment. Kellor complained that women of the 1920s were providing little thought leadership and seemed happy to drift with the tide. She had harsh words for “immensely wearied” and “embittered” suffragist leaders who had positioned themselves poorly against the future: for their insistence on nonpartisanship, the narrowness of their training, and their failure to embrace influential women outside the movement, once the vote was won.Footnote 71
Kellor offered mild praise for women’s efforts toward a brief list of legislative topics that showed women’s political thought is “rather well cloistered within sex lines.” But her thoughts rapidly took a darker turn: “women’s interests” had “[led] the political thought of the country to regard them as incapable of any broader capacity,” and “hobbl[ed] … their mental processes.” Kellor suggested the time had come to dismantle women-only organizations and movements in order to facilitate an “increase in contacts between men’s and women’s minds.”Footnote 72 Yet she reserved her strongest invective for “that highly sensitized masculine organization called the political machine.” She claimed, “there exist in this political world traditions so sacred that in the family men speak of them only to their sons; prerogatives so precious that their usurpation arouses the fiercest jealously; precedents so honored that they are inseparable from pride ever sensitive to the least humiliation.” Fearing the women’s vote, which had “put [them] on their mettle,” men had been working hard to ensure that political organizations made the most of women’s labor without permitting them to significantly impact policies or appointments.Footnote 73
Kellor did not consider that it was the single-mindedness of suffragists and the specializations of women reformers that had produced the vigor, and victories, of women’s political activism, which she now saw melting away into apathy and insignificance. She argued that insistence on a distinct women’s perspective was intellectually stunting. At the same time, she suggested that women possessed superior moral and aesthetic qualities that could enrich public life and argued that they had special needs for protection. In Kellor’s railing against associational paths not taken in her own career, one senses the disappointment that her own approach had ultimately reached something of a dead end. Disgusted with the cynicism and vicious competition of political life, she proposed that women might dedicate themselves to self-education in the liberal arts and social sciences, in the vague hope of discovering some set of fundamental laws to guide a gendered path forward. She scorned men’s advice for women to begin their political careers by seeking low-level, local offices: “Men who have served with distinction in high public office, who have not been professional politicians, have been called to these offices not from some little local office, but because they had reached distinction in their chosen profession or business.”Footnote 74 She suggested that a period of consolidation in business and the professions might be needed for women to demonstrate their credibility. Kellor’s essay was bitter in tone and was surely written at a period of intense frustration. At the same time, it spoke to the dilemma of many middle-class women leaders of the 1920s: caught between a sense of themselves as a still-subjugated class, yet harshly self-critical and pressured to abandon thoughts of “sex consciousness” or the mass mobilization of women toward meaningful legislation (for women’s rights, or for peace objectives). As Nancy F. Cott recounts, a distinctly feminist outlook had come to be denigrated as “sex antagonism,” uncomfortably akin to the class war promise of Bolshevism. Equality of opportunity in the professions—for what, realistically, could only be a small number of individualist career women—was as radical a notion as women’s leaders could then comfortably pursue.Footnote 75
If integration of men and women in the business of politics and government were ever to be achieved, a few politically minded women must, of necessity, have broken into the bastions of male power to begin a decades-long struggle for respect and influence. Early pioneers could not have had an easy time of it. Kellor’s essay inserted a telling, and possibly apocryphal, anecdote about a woman on the executive committee of a state party organization who was tricked into missing a crucial meeting at which machine politicians dismissed her favored gubernatorial candidate for one of their own. Since this woman had “a very influential father,” she told him of the disrespect shown to her, at which point he came to her rescue, exposed the attempt to silence her voice, and inspired other men to switch their support to her preferred political candidate.Footnote 76 As this tale of male rescue suggests, Kellor put a high degree of faith in the willingness of men in power to reward her capabilities and effort as the quid pro quo for her support, or simply as a matter of friendship and fairness. It was not a completely unsuccessful strategy: Kellor was a person of extraordinary talents and energy who achieved much for herself and others. But following her early work on state-level employment agency regulation and immigrant protections, her legislative aspirations—notably, for a federal domestic immigration policy—remained unfulfilled. As a seeming insider, she was not able to match the influence of early twentieth-century voluntary women’s groups wielding well-honed techniques of pressure group politics from the outside. With the protection of powerful men who valued her, Kellor was powerful herself; when they disappeared, she was greatly—and sometimes fatally—weakened.
When Kellor died in January 1952, the New York Times published a cloying obituary, which seemed oblivious to the person she was: “One may look back with occasional nostalgia to the reform movements of a generation ago, so often led by the pure in heart. The days of Frances Kellor’s prime were idealistic and hopeful. But many of the hopes were fulfilled—thanks to that self-sacrificing group of which Frances Kellor was so noble an example.”Footnote 77 The condescension of this appraisal is scarcely an improvement on the ugly politics Kellor had experienced in her heyday. In “Cloisters in American Politics”—bitter and contradictory though it sometimes is, and typically parochial as to race and class—Kellor seemed to recognize that women could not be a political force without concerted action toward focused goals, and a willingness to organize themselves as a self-conscious political unit. Some forty years later, these lessons would be taken to heart by the women of the second wave of feminism with considerable success. In her day, Kellor took an enormous risk by attempting to go it alone, outside the bounds of conventional women’s collective political action. The trajectory of Kellor’s pioneering efforts highlights the far-reaching constraints of gendered beliefs and traditions that continued to limit women’s political power for decades after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. As we now contemplate a much-changed twenty-first-century world, less able to believe in the notion of a universal womanhood, strategic choices continue to perplex.Footnote 78
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