The Women of the Administration

Abstract

Many of the city’s women civic and political activists supported La Guardia during his many electoral campaigns. The women he appointed to his administration brought into his government the feminist and social justice ideals they had been espousing since the suffrage and progressive reform movements: an end to sex discrimination, an expansion of measures to benefit human welfare, and the achievement of pay equity and more career opportunities for women. They believed that they would carry out the mayor’s modernizing agendas as well as, if not better than, the men he had appointed as commissioners. This chapter highlights five women who made singular contributions to the success of the La Guardia administration: Rebecca Rankin, Eunice Hunton Carter, Jane Bolin, Elinore Herrick, and Anna Rosenberg.