pressure to address economic injustice grew, spearheaded by organized labor and others, including
women reformers such as Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet
member. A longtime ally of the New York branch of the WTUL, Perkins had championed social welfare
and labor legislation in New York State since before World War I. In response, Congress eventually
enacted an unprecedented and ambitious set of programs that changed the balance of power between labor
and capital and helped create a new American middle class. Many of the specific policies were ones
social justice feminists had advocated for decades: social security and income support for the elderly,
disabled, and poor; legislation prohibiting child labor and setting a national minimum wage and other fair
working conditions for men and women; and the Wagner Act guaranteeing workers freedom of speech and
assembly and the right to independent trade union representation.
While an older group of women reformers like Frances Perkins and Mary Anderson, who remained
head of the U.S. Women’s Bureau until 1944, generated pressure for change inside the new Democratic
administration, a new generation of social justice feminists pushed for reform from below. The sit-down
strikes of 1937 led by Myra Wolfgang and countless others were the culmination of years of labor
protests, including citywide general strikes in San Francisco and Minneapolis and nationwide walkouts in
textile and other industries. Prompted to act by their own thwarted dreams and the frustration and misery
around them, young activists, men and women, were drawn too by the excitement of being part of a new
and creative movement they believed could remake the world. For the young women labor activists who
would come to lead the American women’s movement of the 1940s, both the turmoil and the exhilaration
of Depression-era economic and social justice struggles left their mark.
For some, the personal and political transformations of the 1930s were profound. Esther Peterson, for
example, left her conservative Mormon Republican roots far behind after she moved from Utah to New
York City and threw herself into the whirlwind of 1930s labor and reform politics. In 1961, she would
become the highest-ranking woman in the Kennedy administration and the leading national advocate for
legislative reform on behalf of women, but in 1927, as a senior at Brigham Young University, she faced an
excruciating choice: her fiancé offered her security and love in the Mormon family-centered world she
knew well, but, as she remembered it, his view of the world left little room for her independence or self-
expression. “The man I thought I was in love with,” she recounted later, saw life as “a pocket watch, with
God as the mainspring” and himself as “one of the bigger wheels.” He put “sweet little me somewhere
down in the parts you can’t see with the rest of the women.” She broke off the engagement and took a job
teaching dance and physical education at Branch Agricultural College in Cedar City, Utah. After being
reprimanded by the college administration for an “immoral” Isadora Duncan–style modern dance
performance she organized on the college lawn, she finished her year but decided to “go East” and study
at Columbia University Teachers College thousands of miles away. “I wasn’t sure exactly what I was
looking for,” she confessed in her memoirs, “but I thought I might find it in New York.”^9
Once in New York, she attended classes, finishing her master’s degree at Columbia in 1930, and
frequented the many political gatherings of the day. At one, a lecture at the local YMCA sponsored by the
Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace and social justice organization, she met her husband-to-
be, Oliver Peterson, a young working-class University of North Dakota graduate studying sociology at
Columbia and working at the Y. Soon they were part of an energetic group of young social activists. In
1932, they married and moved to Boston, where Esther got a job at the Winsor School, an elite private
school for girls, and at night volunteered to teach “working girls” through the YWCA’s industrial
program. When some of the young immigrant garment workers in her class struck to protest pay cuts and
work speed-up, she joined the picket line and helped the women organize their own union.
A revived and powerful labor movement, Peterson now believed, was crucial for achieving economic