Lillian Hatcher with a group of UAW volunteers during the 1960 presidential election. Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Of equal importance, Esther Peterson had renewed her friendship with Kennedy in 1958 as she made
the rounds in her new job as the Washington lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, the fifteen-million-member labor
federation. Peterson voiced her support of Kennedy’s candidacy early, before many other labor people.
Later, she handled the labor desk for him at the Democratic Party national headquarters and put together a
national three-hundred-member “Committee of Labor Women for Kennedy and Johnson” to coordinate
labor support across the country. Peterson had gotten to know Kennedy when they worked together on
minimum wage legislation after he was first elected to Congress in 1946. As she often laughingly
recounted, in 1945, when her fellow labor lobbyists, all men from the big industrial unions—steel, auto,
rubber—met her for the first time, they didn’t know what to do with her. Finally someone said, “Oh, give
her to Kennedy, he won’t amount to much.” But he did, and he remembered Peterson, her command of
facts, and their compatibility in crafting legislative options in the 1940s as well as her substantial efforts
on his behalf during the presidential campaigns. Kennedy appointed her director of the U.S. Women’s
Bureau and a few months later, in early 1961, promoted her to assistant secretary of labor, making her the
most influential woman in the Kennedy administration. A thirty-year veteran of the labor movement and of
social justice feminist politics, Peterson brought a long-standing reform agenda with her, and she moved
quickly to act on it.
Shortly after Kennedy’s inaugural, Peterson met with trade union women to discuss reviving the idea
for a presidential commission on the status of women. She then formed a committee, including her
longtime collaborator Kitty Ellickson, then AFL-CIO Social Security expert, as well as former laundry
worker leader Dollie Robinson, to draft a proposal. Before approaching Kennedy, Peterson lined up her
old friend Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, a former labor counsel to the Steelworkers and the CIO,
and other government officials. She also made sure she had the support of her base: women in labor
organizations, in the Democratic Party, and in the social feminist women’s organizations grouped around
the Women’s Bureau. In December 1961, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10980, setting up the
President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW).
The two-year PCSW process involved hundreds of participants. Peterson served as executive vice
chair and convinced Eleanor Roosevelt to act as chair, a largely honorary position. For the day-to-day