Miss Gallagher & Miss Maher Join a Community of Women - Changing the World - Bringing Light to Dark Times
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Miss Gallagher & Miss Maher
Join a Community of Women
Bringing Light to Dark Times
& Changing the World
by Jim
PageTarbell
1
Miss Gallagher & Miss Maher
Join a Community of Women
Bringing Light to Dark Times
& Changing the World:
by Jim Tarbell
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January 18, 2021
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Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Vanquishing Economic Misery 1 And Political Patriarchy 2 Rachel Shaw Gallagher: The Making of a Dedicated 6 Quaker Citizen 3 Amy Grace Maher: The Making of a Child Welfare 8 Advocate and Feminist 4 A Woman’s Right to Vote: Establishing a Woman’s Equal 10 Standing with Men in the Political Process. 5 US Women’s Bureau: Researching and Advocating for 14 Working Women 6 Paris 1926: Tenth Congress of the International 17 Women’s Suffrage Alliance 7 Women Deliver New Deal: Saving America in the 20 Depths of the Depression 8 Afterword: The Bomb and the Future 24
Dedicated to all women who devote their lives
to promoting the common good.
Photo by Associated Press
Photo by Jacob Riis
John D. Rockefeller Tenement Housing,
Introduction
Vanquishing Economic Misery
and Political Patriarchy
T
his is a tale about a community of women who took on the
most formidable forces of their day. Through the strength,
joy and support of their relationships, they worked to ensure
that we have the economic and political tools to move beyond a white
supremacist past, driven by wealthy economic elites. Their tools play
a critical part in our ability to create multi racial, multi ethnic, gender
inclusive future for the United States. My Great Aunt Rachel Shaw Gal-
lagher and her long-time partner, Miss Amy Grace Maher, played a role
in that process. When you think of them, think of Alexandria Ocasio
Cortez today, railing against the violence of white supremacy and the
importance of building a true democracy in our country.
Through these vignettes we meet the dedicated, formidable and
strong community Amy and Rachel were part of and see all that their
community accomplished. Their pivotal work changed the world. A
century later, their achievements made it possible for the American peo-
ple to confront authoritarian Trumpism, embrace popular democracy
and survive economic collapse brought about by the pandemic.
Our family lived in a different world than Aunt Rachel. I remember
meeting her once or twice when she made the long trip from Washing-
Page 1
ton DC to our family gatherings in California. No one ever discussed
the particulars of her life and Amy Maher never joined her there.
Rachel’s central role in world events became apparent when my Aunt
Patsy gave me a two-page letter from Albert Einstein, addressed to Ra-
chel, on letterhead of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists.
Written in 1947, on the two year anniversary of the bombing of Hiro-
shima, it warned of the dangers the atomic bomb posed to humanity.
That letter is as relevant today as it was 73 years ago.
Inspiration for researching and writing these stories came out of Ra-
chel’s 1956 obituary, which magically appeared on my desk. It said she
worked with the Works Progress Administration in FDR’s New Deal
and took part in the social justice organization Americans for Demo-
cratic Action, which had been founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, anther
member of their community. When it said that Rachel lived with her
long-time friend Amy Maher, I knew this story needed to be told. I had
no idea what an immense story it would be.
These stories celebrate
three centennials:
• The coming together
of Rachel Gallagher and
Amy Maher;
• The ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment
giving women the right
to vote; and
• The creation of the US
Women’s Bureau in the
Department of Labor,
The years 1919 to
1921, had a lot in
common with 2020:
a surging socialist
movement; politically
engaged females; and
a general cry for racial
and economic equal-
ity. Those years also
Page 2
endured: an explosion of white supremacy; a raging anti-immigration
movement; extreme income inequality; pandemic; and authoritarian,
white, monopoly-capitalist patriarchs.
In 1920, after more than a hundred years of effort, women gained
the right to vote. It catalyzed great social change on many levels.
Simultaneously, Workers went on strike to regain their share of the
American pie after World War I denied them wage increases. A general
strike engulfed Seattle in February 1919. In September, the Amal-
gamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers walked out across the
country. In August 1921, 10,000 striking coal miners in West Virginia
faced off against 3,000 armed lawmen and strike breakers.
In June 1919 people frustrated to the point of revolution, set off
bombs in eight cities, including at the house of US Attorney General
Mitchell Palmer in Washington DC. In September 1920 a bomb went
off at the Wall Street office of the JP Morgan Company. In November
1920, desperate workers and their families gave almost a million votes
to Socialist Party candidate for President,Eugene Debs, who white
supremacist Mitchell Palmer had imprisoned long before election day.
Meanwhile, during the war, profiteering corporations fattened the
hordes of the ultra-rich, while Attorney General Palmer plotted to
remove anyone who threatened the status quo. He hired young J. Edgar
Hoover to oversee the operation. Over the next year they raided polit-
ical organizations in over 30 cities and 23 states and rounded up over
10,000 civilians, many of them not even connected to any political
cause and many of them beaten in the process.
In August 1919, white racists attacked Chicago’s black community,
killing 23 people and destroying over 1000 homes. In Omaha, a white
mob of 10,000 burned the courthouse and went on a 12-hour lynch-
ing, beating and killing spree. In Tulsa, on May 31, 1921, white rioters,
armed and empowered by the city, destroyed 35 square blocks of the
wealthiest black community in America in “the single worst incident of
racial violence in American history.”
In those same years: union members were massacred in Centra-
lia, Washington; federal authorities deported thousands of immi-
grants on fallacious charges; and anti-immigrant sentiment drove
the unjustified execution of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Page 3
Data from US Census
The causal factors in these events came out of the consolidation of
US economic and political power over the previous 50 years. In 1882
John D. Rockefeller, in Cleveland Ohio, started it off when, by hook
or by crook, he merged most of the oil producing companies in the
United States into one big Standard Oil Trust. By the early 1900s,
monopolizing trusts controlled almost every industry in the United
States. In our economic/political system, where money is power, these
trusts exercised overarching control over American lives.
By 1885, big money had taken over the Supreme Court, leading it to
decree that business corporations had the same rights as people. By 1896,
under the tutelage of Rockefeller protege Mark Hanna, Wall Street mon-
ey swept into the Presidential election and put Rockefeller cohort, Ohio
Governor William McKinley, into the White House. As a result the rich
got richer and the poor became wage slaves.
Subsistence-wage workers toiling in giant manufacturing facilities
supported the wealth and power of the Trusts. As shown in the above
chart, manufacturing jobs in this county took off after 1870, growing
500% in the next 50 years.
Graphic: Puck Magazine Graphic: The Truth of Slavery in America:
Page 4Data from Migration Policy Institute
Immigration to the US followed the growth of industrial jobs The ability
of the trusts to amalgamate a slave-wage workforce from around the world
served as a central factor in allowing them to make huge profits for their
stock holders. Trusts controlled what workers earned, what hours they
worked and the absence of any workplace health and safety regulations.
Then they played off one ethnic, racial or gender group against another,
either as competitive workforces or strike breakers. As a result, workers had
to accept a pittance for their work, and live in disease-ridden, cold, damp
housing. At the same time antagonistic workforces developed a hatred for
other races, other ethnic groups and often the other gender. This added up
to the social mayhem of 1919-1921
It also drove concerned women to move into the immigrant ghettos
of the big cities to bring culture and creativity to the immigrant masses
in what became known as the settlement movement. It also allowed
researchers like Rachel Gallagher and Amy Maher to mine the statistical
depths of the disaster, which they used to develop public policy. Then,
through education, struggle, and determination, their womens commu-
nity pushed out public policies to end the misery.
Graphic: Shorpy.com Photo: Jacob Riis
Page 5Photo: Studio Grand Cincinnati
Miss Rachel Shaw Gallagher
The Making of a Dedicated
Quaker Citizen
R
achel Shaw Gallagher descended from five generations of Quaker
pioneers. In the early 1800s, her maternal Cadwallader family
joined a wave of Quakers fleeing the south to get away from the
scourge of slavery. They settled in southwest Ohio. As strong abolitionists
active in the underground railroad, they helped slave escape their slave mas-
ters in the south. They also helped freed slaves and their descendants make
it in a world of white supremacy.
Rachel’s mother, Dora Priscilla Cadwallader attended the Quaker
Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia and returned to Ohio in 1882
to marry prominent Cincinnati lawyer John D. Gallagher. He descended
from a line of bankers and entrepreneurs and attended Cornell College as
well as University of Leipzig in Germany and L’Ecole de Droit in Paris. The
newlyweds settled back in the Cadwallader family hometown of Morrow,
Ohio and then moved south ten miles to Branch Hill where Rachel was
born on August 29th 1886, the third of five siblings.
When Rachel’s father passed away ten years later, Dora Priscilla moved
the family back to the Cadwallader home in Morrow. After high school,
Rachel earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Cincinnati and did
graduate work at the University of Chicago.
Turn-of-the-century Chicago bustled with factories and immigrants,
Page 6who came to America with the promise of a good life, but ended up essen-
tially enslaved. Men, women and children worked 16-hour days and lived
in crowded, unhealthy tenement squalor.
Amidst this disaster, activist, reformer and social worker Jane Addams
established Hull House in the immigrant ghetto of Chicago and drew
young women into her effort to bring a semblance of culture, creativity and
caring into immigrant lives.
Propelled by this milieu, Rachel created a career protecting children
and advocating for working women. By her early 30s, she directed the Girls
and Womens Bureau in Cleveland and researched and wrote for the US
Employment Services of Ohio. She also acted as the placement officer for
the Cleveland Cooperative Employment Bureau, which “offered to put
before any Cleveland girl any information she may ask concerning any
occupation, or the training and education it requires. ”
She wrote for many US Labor Department publications and industrial
and union journals on topics ranging from women working in the facto-
ries, to the cost of living for female workers during the war, as well as the
advantage of younger women working with more experienced women. She
also spoke at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public
Employment Offices at the Statler Hotel in Buffalo.
She advocated that schools should not just provide training for a partic-
ular job, but should provide an education for living a full life. This included
“good working conditions, more leisure and actual living.”
Photo: Gallagher Collection
Cadwallader House, Morrow, Ohio. Rachel is in the white dress on the stairs.
Page 7Photo: Maher Collection
Miss Amy Grace Maher
The Making of a Child Welfare Advocate
and Feminist
A
my Grace Maher grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, au-
thors, educators and community-spirited activists. Her father,
William H Maher, came to Toledo, Ohio at age 21 and, over
four decades, helped start a hardware and cutlery business, the Toledo
Natural Gas Company, the Union Savings Bank and the Independent
Party. He also wrote advice books for young entrepreneurs, which he
provided freely with what is now known as the Creative Commons.
Anne (Kelsey) Maher taught school and gave birth to Amy Grace
Maher in 1883.
After growing up in Toledo, Amy Maher attended and graduat-
ed from Smith College in Western Massachusetts. There an alum-
nae-driven campaign to involve young women in the settlement
movement inspired her to dedicate her life to improving the plight of
poverty stricken immigrant neighborhoods in the big cities. In 1906
she organized a prize honoring Smith alumnus Mary van Kleek, the
pioneer in researching and advocating for working women.
In 1909, Amy joined 30 women and 185 men at the 1909 White
House Conference on Child Welfare, the first of a series of White
House Conferences on child welfare that continued over the next 70
Page 8years. It focused on improving the lives of children and formulating
“standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earn-
ing women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency,
and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” This first
conference concentrated on the lives of dependent and neglected chil-
dren and the problems with institutionalized solutions in fulfilling the
needs of suffering or abandoned children.
In 1911, Amy helped start the first open-air school for tubercu-
lar children in Toledo. In 1916 she founded the Toledo Consumers
League that participated in a nation-wide effort of politically engaged
women “to insure female laborers decent wages, hours and working
conditions.”
Olive A. Colton, prominent Toledo suffragette, credited Amy Maher
for getting her involved with giving women the right to vote. Once the
19th Amendment became law, the Ohio Women’s Suffrage Alliance fol-
lowed the national trend and became the Ohio League of Women Voters
(OLWV). That meeting also chose Amy Maher to be the first President
of OLWV. She also became the national chairman of the LWV Com-
mittee on Women in Industry. During her years in Washington, DC,
she headed up the League of Women Voters lobbying efforts on various
pieces of legislation.
Writing about the League of Women Voters in the Smith College
alumnae magazine in 1921, Amy quoted an 80-year-old female activ-
ist that “the hope of the world is in the unitedness of women.” Amy’s
article celebrated the success of the League in helping to pass the 1921
Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act.
That Act helped introduce modern medicine into maternity and child
birth, reduced infant mortality and expanded federal welfare legislation.
She also pointed out that women’s issues are non-partisan issues.
That was the year that
Amy and Rachel formed
a 35-year, life-time bond
of fun, friends and travel
as well as a partnership in
politics, research and edu-
cation on working women,
suffrage and ending war.
Page 9Graphic: Everett Historical
A Woman’s Right to Vote
Establishing a Woman’s Equal Standing with
Men in the Political Process.
W
omen lost political equality with men thirty five hundred
years ago when the Mediterranean partnership cultures
fell to the violence of men coming out of the steppes with
horses and wheeled chariots. In the ensuing years, religious doctrine
proclaimed women inferior to men and political practice placed men
at the top of a hierarchical family structure. The male as the family
representative in the political world formed the central argument
against giving women the vote.
Female avatars waged a grueling campaign against religious, finan-
cial and political patriarchy to reclaim their rightful place in political
decision making. Beginning with Abigail Adams telling her husband
,and future President, John Adams, “not to forget the ladies” during the
writing of the US Constitution, American women pushed to be polit-
ical equals with men. By the 1850s, an organized women’s movement
began working to reclaim political power. After the Civil War, women
became even more insistent on getting the vote when blacks and immi-
grant men gained the right to vote before women.
Wealthy corporate CEOs financed the opposition to the suffrage
movement, often pushing their wives to the forefront. This anti suffrage
Page 10movement always referred to these women as Mrs. Elihu Root or, in
the case of Oregon, Mrs. William S. Ladd, instead of using their given
names. For those unfamiliar with William S. Ladd, he monopolized
the wheat trade on the Columbia River and manipulated the Portland
water supply to go right through his development known as the Ladd
Division. He also hired Theodore B. Wilcox, of Wilcox Estates, to carry
on his business. Men like Root, Ladd and Wilcox used their money,
power and influence to delay political equality for women for decades.
The political energy for women’s suffrage came out of the political drive
to abolish slavery, making suffrage work a natural evolution for Rachel Gal-
lagher in southwest Ohio. Amy Maher is credited with igniting womens
suffrage work in Toledo, Ohio.
Many independent thinking women in Ohio served as models for
them to admire as young women, including:
Painting: NY Historical Soc
• Frances Wright, the first woman to speak out
publicly for women’s rights, who stood strong
in the face of criticism and threats of violence.
Based in Cincinnati, she also worked with and
promoted model communities of equality in
Indiana and Tennessee. Francis Wright
• Pauline Steinem, grandmother of women’s
advocate Gloria Steinem, became the first
woman on the Toledo School Board. In 1908,
photo: Wiid Toledo, Oh
she became the leader of the Ohio Wom-
en’s Suffrage Association. She also promoted
pro-suffrage delegates to the 1912 Ohio Con-
stitutional Convention.
• Bettie Wilson joined a local Cincinnati school
Pauline Steinem
board in 1896 and “became a convincing speaker”
who “never lost an opportunity to push the cause
photo: American Jewish Archives
of suffrage.” She enlisted many people to join the
movement giving women the right to vote.
With these women as their models and politi-
cal equality with men as their cause, Rachel and
Amy worked with and developed a life-long rela-
tionship with Carrie Chapman Catt.
As chairperson of the National American
Bettie Wilson
Page 11Suffrage Association, (NAWSA)
Carrie Chapman Catt drove the
campaign for a constitutional
amendment that gave women
political equality in the United
States. She oversaw passing the
photo: History comes alive.org
bill through two-thirds of Con-
gress, and convinced President
Wilson to support their efforts.
She also strategized getting three
quarters of the states to ratify
the amendment.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Inspiration for granting the
first of women’s suffrage in the United States came from the 1850
Ohio Women’s Conference attended by young John Campbell who
signed the first women’s voting right law as the territorial governor
of Wyoming in 1869. That same year, women founded the American
Woman’s Suffrage Association in Cleveland and their headquarters
was located in Ohio for years.
From the voting rights bill in the Wyoming territory, the granting of
suffrage marched through all of the western states. Meanwhile, the eastern
and southern states opposed the enfranchisement of women. Blockaded
at the state level, NAWSA promoted a US Constitutional Amendment
guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. This drama involved
millions of women marching across America.
photo: National Archives
Womens Suffrage Procession, 1913. First ever political march in Washington.
Page 12Once again most of the southern states were opposed. With the
suffrage movement one state short of the necessary 36 states to ratify
the amendment, Tennessee had the role as the last state that could
possibly make the Amendment part of the US Constitution. The
state legislature politically divided over the issue. Finally, after days of
debate, young Harry Burns changed his vote due to encouragement
from his mother.
With women guaranteed the right to vote in the US, Carrie Chap-
man Catt shifted her attention to the International Women’s Suffrage
Alliance (IWSA), which she had started in 1902 to promote womens
suffrage around the world. Both Rachel and Amy were delegates to the
IWSA conventions in Paris in 1926 and in Berlin in 1929.
Mrs. Catt also ushered into existence the National League of Wom-
an Voters out of what had been the NAWSA. She designed the new
group to be non-partisan and non sectarian. She wanted the league to
“foster education in citizenship and to support legislation.” She also
proclaimed that it was time to shift the movement over to “younger
and fresher women.”
On that note, when the Ohio chapter of the NAWSA convened in
1920, it resolved to dissolve and reincarnate itself as the Ohio League
of Woman voters. They then made Amy G. Maher the first President
of the Ohio League of Women Voters.
Carrie Catt did not stop there. In 1924, she joined representatives
of nine other women’s organizations to form a new anti-war group,
The National Committee on the Causes and Cure of War (NC-
CCW). With Catt as their chosen leader and with Eleanor Roosevelt
in attendance at their first convention, Catt proclaimed “Sooner or
later the white races must disgorge some of their spoils and give a
place to the other races of the world. We stole land— whole conti-
nents; we stole it at the point of swords and guns; and we might as
well understand that we must not have an acre to a man while they
have an inch to a man. We must leave the door open to whatever ar-
rangements we may make for peace in order that justice can be done
to all the races on all the continents.”
The NCCCW carried on with conventions for the next 20 years.
Amy Maher and Rachel Gallagher participated loyally and energeti-
cally in all the events promoted by Carrie Chapman Catt.
Page 13US Women’s Bureau
Researching and Advocating for
Working Women
A
my Maher and Rachel Gallagher worked closely with the US
Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor for many
years. The agency grew out of the horror of the Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the wartime Women in Industry Service
headed by Mary van Kleek.
Amy Maher attended Smith College with Mary van Kleek, who
was equally influenced by Smith College’s community social justice
and Jane Addams type settlement work. After graduation, Mary van
Kleek went right to work in a New York settlement house.
In 1916, she became the director of the Russel Sage Foundation
Department of Industrial Studies where she researched and wrote
about women in the workplace, much like Rachel Gallagher and
Amy Maher had been doing for years. During World War I Presi-
dent Wilson appointed van Kleek to the Women in Industry Ser-
vice to establish workplace standards for women suddenly entering
the work world during the war. This made her the first woman
appointed to a position of authority in the American federal gov-
ernment during the war.
After the war, van Kleek pushed for a permanent Women’s Bureau
Page 14and President Wilson appointed her to head up this new agency at
the Department of Labor. For personal reasons, she soon went back
to work at the Russell Sage Foundation and her colleague, Mary An-
derson, took over as the long-time head of the US Women’s Bureau.
Mary Anderson’s work on women’s issues came from an entirely
different trajectory than Rachel, Amy or Mary van Kleek. Born in
Sweden, at 16 years old she immigrated to the US and worked as a
dishwasher at a lumberjack boarding house in the Michigan woods.
From there she went to the factories of Chicago where she worked
making garments and shoes. She became involved in labor organiz-
ing and ended up President of the Local 94 of the Boot and Shoe
Worker’s Union. From there she became a leader of the National
Women’s Trade Union League where she became a major advocate
for working women.
Jane Addam’s Hull House project in Chicago also inspired Mary
Anderson. She appreciated their focus on the plight of all working
immigrants and what could be done to improve their lot.
Under Mary Anderson, the US Workers Bureau used statistical
research to highlight the dangerous, long and ill-paid working con-
ditions for women in multiple industries including canning, candy
and cotton mills. They used that data as the basis for creating public
policies rectifying the deplorable conditions women worked in.
This type of information had never been collected, analyzed
and published before on a national level and must have been very
exciting and empowering for Mary Anderson, Rachel Gallagher and
Amy Maher who involved themselves in these projects. Amy worked
as the Information Director of the Toledo office of the Women’s Bu-
reau. She completed reports on: textile and rubber workers, book-
keepers, stenographers, and office clerks. She also wrote a booklet
on Women Workers of Ohio 1914-1929, and collected testimony
on the value of the minimum wage for the California Industrial
Welfare Commission. Amy and Rachel both became involved in
Womens Bureau studies on women’s hours, wages and working con-
ditions in 23 states.
Those reports formed the basis for the establishment of the Fair
Labor Standards Act and other social justice legislation to equalize
hours, wages and working conditions with those of men. They also
Page 15led the Civil Service
Commission to open up
all federal employment to
both men and women.
The Feminist Majority
Foundation named Mary
Anderson a Founding
Feminist for distribut-
ing information from
Womens Bureau surveys
that showed that, as the
depression advanced,
women lost jobs much
photo: Ms. Magazine
faster than men, especially
women in managerial and
administrative positions.
During the depression,
Mary Anderson, Director
US Woman’s Bureau 1920-1944 female garment workers
in Connecticut only made
$4-$6 for a 48 to 50 hour week. Five years earlier, garment workers in
New York made $40-$50 for a 44 hour work week
In 1938, Amy and Rachel moved to Washington, DC and main-
tained their involvement with the US Women’s Bureau. One indica-
tion of Amy and Rachel’s friendship with both Mary Anderson and
Carrie Chapman Catt is a long letter that Amy wrote to Carrie Chap-
man Catt in 1944 on the occasion of Mary Anderson’s retirement
from the US Women’s Bureau. The second paragraph of this newsy
letter reads:
Dear Mrs. Catt and Mary Peck . . .
You saw Mary Anderson retired? We 2, [Rachel and
I] had a dinner for her last week. A dozen of her intimate
friends. There are so few women in administrative positions,
and very few share in making policy. It takes a long time,--
and we’ll gradually have more. . .
Much Love to You
Amy G. Maher
Page 16Paris 1926
Tenth Congress of the International
Women’s Suffrage Alliance
O
ur two heroines loved to travel. They sailed to Europe
several times in the 1920s, initially in 1924, voyaging on
the Aquitania for a five-week visit. Amy expressed particular
excitement, writing in her diary that “Rachel has never crossed the
ocean before and we are both on tip toes with expectation.”
They started in Paris, moved on to Dijon and then to the League of
Nations in Geneva. There they listened to the League’s progress in dis-
arming the world and the visited its Labor Department, where they
would have loved to work while living in lovely Geneva.
Two years later they undertook an even more exciting adventure as
two of the 12 US delegates to the Congress of the International Wom-
en’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) at the Sorbonne Amphitheatre in Paris.
Sixty-five affiliates from 50 countries participated in the Congress
that the New York Times called, “one of the most important world
gatherings of women since the War.” The experience introduced Amy
and Rachel to international women’s politics and the French working
women’s movement.
An ongoing conflict between the US League of Women Voters
(LVW) and the US National Women’s Party (NWP) over establishing
regulations for women’s work roiled the IWSA gathering. Conflict
Page 17between the groups began thirteen years earlier when the NWP broke
off from the American suffrage movement over the NWP’s strategy of
aggressively using picketing and parades to demand that women be
given the right to vote. They paid for this strategy with blood sever-
al times, most violently, on the Night of Terror, November 14,1917,
when prison guards beat up 33 women for continuing their ten month,
24 hour a day picket of the White House.
The conflict at the Paris Congress pitted the NWP’s desire for
women to be under the same workplace regulations as men against
the LWV’s desire for women to have special regulations for their
special needs. IWSA acceptance of one strategy or the other would
establish a pattern of how workplace regulations would be established
internationally.
Since 1920, the League of Women Voters (LWV), as the successor
organization of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association,
represented the interests of American women at the IWSA. Before
the 1926 Paris Conference, the NWP challenged LWV’s proprietary
representation and asked to be a second US delegation at the Congress,
as had been granted to several countries. LVW had a right to veto their
participation. An IWSA official predicted that there was little chance
of the NWP gaining admittance to the Congress.
Despite this prediction, the NWP sent 24 delegates to Paris. They
failed to join the Congress, but they did get a committee of the
Congress to overwhelming endorse their proposition declaring that
photo: Library of Congress
National Women’s Party delegation en route to the 1926 Congress of the IWSA.
Page 18all labor regulation be based on the nature of the work rather than
the sex of the worker. Our heroines, as representatives for the LVW,
doubtlessly found themselves deeply involved in this imbroglio.
Another conflict at the Congress involved a resolution the National
Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) wanted the Congress to
address. Mary Anderson, head of the US Women’s Bureau and leader
of the NWTUL for many years, no doubt supported the NWTUL’s
position, and probably lobbied our heroines to support the measure.
That resolution challenged the IWSA’s definition of equality and
advocated that women in the individual countries should define what
equality meant for them.
Paris in the 1920s swirled with the creativity and social currents of
the “lost generation” where writers artists and political philosophers
generated a bubbling brew of social criticism and political action. Mary
Anderson provided Rachel and Amy entree into that world with a letter
of introduction to French labor organizer and writer Jeanne Bouvier.
Jeanne Bouvier, at age 12, worked 13 hours a day in an illegal silk factory
to support her family. She moved on to become a labor organizer and
member of the Women’s Employment Committee and the Joint Commit-
tee for Unemployment Fund. Both Bouvier and Anderson helped organize
the 1919 International Congress of Working Women in Washington DC
after an effort put together by Jeanne Bouvier to include women’s rights
in the Versailles Treaty failed. When the National Womens Trade Union
League heard about her efforts, they sent Mary Anderson and her organiz-
ing cohort Rose Schneiderman to Paris to reconnoiter with Bouvier. The
Congress of Working Women grew out of that meeting and produced the
first paid maternity leave policy, which the
International Labor Organization adopted
later in 1919.
By 1926 Bouvier dedicated her life in
Paris to researching and writing about
working women’s issues and maintaining
an international network of connections
photo: Leftinparis.org
with other working women activists.
After meeting with her, Amy Maher and
Rachel Gallagher remained part of that
network as long as they lived.
Jeanne Bouvier, French feminist
Page 19photo: Summoned: Frances Perkins and the General Welfare
Frances Perkins eyes the camera as FDR signs the National Labor Relations Act.
Women Deliver New Deal
Saving America in the Depths
of the Depression
I
n 1929, the euphoria of the 1920’s became the depression of the
1930’s. By 1933, industrial production had fallen in half and
unemployment had quadrupled. Even though Amy, Rachel and
their cohorts had been working for years to institute some sort of safe-
ty net for American workers, they had only had localized successes.
Since 1917, Rachel promoted unemployment insurance, minimum
wage, and other safety net mechanisms with research, writing and
lecturing. She initially did this for the Cleveland and State of Ohio
Employment agencies and then for the United States Employment
Services as a senior examiner.
In that same time period, Amy had been writing and working on these
topics in her work for the US Women’s Bureau. In 1929 she also became
the President of the Ohio Consumers League (OCL), associated with the
National Consumer’s League (NCL). She helped the OCL develop a plan
for Ohio unemployment insurance and worked to pass legislation in the
Ohio legislature on child labor and a shorter work week for women.
Founded at the turn of the twentieth century, the goal of the
National Consumers League (NCL) was to leverage the power of the
Page 20consumer to improve working conditions, particularly for women
and children, in factories across the country. To communicate their
message to consumers and leverage employers to support their mis-
sion, NCL created a special label that producers could show on their
product. Thousands of women across the country supported their ef-
fort including Eleanor Roosevelt who became Vice President of NCL.
Florence Kelley’s leadership made NCL a nationally prominent
institution, following her motto “To live means to buy, to buy means
to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.” Florence
Kelley drove NCL to protect in-home workers from abusive employ-
ers, promote the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug
Act of 1906, and worked to protect laws that determined how many
hours a day employees worked.
Florence Kelly, with whom our heroines had close contact since Amy
started the Toledo Consumers League in 1916, came out of the same
milieu that had driven Amy and Rachel in their life work. After gradu-
ating from Cornell, she became deeply involved with Jane Addams and
the settlement house movement and moved from there into improving
working conditions for all workers. She came from a strong abolitionist,
Quaker family which led her to join the Suffrage Movement. She also
became the mentor to Frances Perkins.
Frances Perkins attended Mount Holyoke College under the fiery,
feminist administration of Mary Wooley, who had imbued Mount
Holyoke College, with the same social justice atmosphere that Mary
Van Kleek and Amy Maher had experienced at Smith College After
graduation, Frances Perkins too joined the settlement movement and
marched with the suffragettes, giving soap box speeches to further the
cause. She was struck with sorrow after witnessing the Triangle Shirt-
waist Factory Fire, which she said ““seared on my mind as well as my
heart—a never-to-be-forgotten reminder of why I had to spend my
photo: National Consumers League
Page 21life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy.” That expe-
rience drove her to organize those workers with Rose Schneiderman,
Mary Anderson’s old cohort from the National Women’s Trade Union
League. Perkins also became the Secretary of the New York Consum-
ers League where she fell under the mentor ship of Florence Kelley.
As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Frances
Perkins to the top labor job in the state government. From that position
she limited the number of hours employers could make women work and
promoted a minimum wage and unemployment insurance. There must
have been whoops of euphoria at the US Womens Bureau and in the living
room of our heroines the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Fran-
ces Perkins to be Secretary of Labor for his incoming administration.
Tributes to the achievements of Frances Perkins and her enthusiastic
team at the Labor Department are legendary. Modern day journalist/broad-
caster Lawrence O’Donnell proclaims “There is no greater contribution
that cabinet members have made in the history of this country, that has had
the lasting effect on all of us, and the way we live, than what Frances Per-
kins did . . . I do not believe that the Social Security Act would have made
it into law without Frances Perkins”
Historian Alice Kessler Harris added that Perkins was, “unusually
committed, unusually brave, alone in a world full of men, moving into
a field that no woman had ever moved into before. I think for all of
that, we owe her a great deal of thanks.” The ethics, care and responsi-
bility of the community of women, with whom our heroines were so
involved, supported Frances Perkins in accomplishing all that she did.
Determined, focused and caring, Frances Perkins dove into the
New Deal to ameliorate the pain, poverty and social insecurity
mural: Seymour Fogel
Page 22brought about by the Great Depression. From her first day in office
she outlined this vision: “a forty-hour workweek, a minimum wage,
worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance, a federal law
banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social
Security, a revitalized public employment service and health insur-
ance.” She implemented almost all of them during her time as Secre-
tary of Labor. She also drove the National Labor Relations Act into
law, guaranteeing the right of workers to join a union.
Roosevelt turned to Frances Perkins to design programs en-
suring that American families could look forward to a secure future.
She came up with 21 different forms of aid the federal government
needed to provide to American Families to ameliorate the misery of
the Depression. These were all rolled into the Social Security Act that
became law in 1935.
Both Rachel Gallagher and Amy Maher found themselves deeply
involved in the New Deal. In the first months of the New Deal, federal
programs hired thousands of unemployed workers to plant trees and
build needed infrastructure projects. The United States Employment
Service did all of the hiring and as a Senior Examiner, Rachel Gallagher
engaged in that project of giving employment to people who wanted
to work. She moved from there to the Works Progress Administration
handling employment there. By the end of the depression,the US gov-
ernment became the biggest employer in the country.
Meanwhile, Amy Maher , as head of the Ohio Consumers League,
worked on giving American families the security they needed. She
promoted unemployment insurance and how it was financed.
To help carry the New Deal forward, Frances Perkins brought Ra-
chel Gallagher to work in Wash-
ington DC as an expert in un-
employment insurance and Amy
Maher as a technical advisor to
the Social Security Commission.
graphic: US Postal Service
They worked in Washington DC
until after World War II, when
they retired from government
service at age 65.
Page 23Page 24
Afterword
T
he bomb changed everything. It swept the world out of the
nation-state mind set and into the global era where human exis-
tence hung in the balance, dependent on what we did and how
we behaved. It swept us into an era of global issues that we are dealing
with today: climate change, global war, global migration, global pollution
and global resource depletion.
Albert Einstein and his colleague Leo Szilard, who invented the atomic
bomb and headed the effort to convince the US government to build
the bomb, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to
ring the alarm and rally the world to make sure all future development of
nuclear weapons stopped and that the bomb would never be used again.
This followed their 1945 petition, signed by 70 scientists who helped
Page 25build the bomb, to President Truman declaring the immorality of the
US dropping the bomb without first fully informing the Japanese of the
annihilation it would cause. The Truman administration never addressed
that petition and the bomb was dropped on August 6 1945. That bomb,
and the one that followed a few days later, killed over 200,000 people and
decimated huge swaths of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Einstein’s plea for Rachel to keep supporting their efforts shows she
still involved herself in making life secure for everyone on planet earth.
Besides working to keep the world safe from nuclear destruction, Rachel
worked with Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) to keep the New
Deal policies viable. ADA also became involved in the civil rights move-
ment as it developed in the 1950s.
During her working years, outside of her work advocating for working
women, Amy Maher had also been involved in global issues with the
National Citizens Committee on Relations with Latin America. Head-
ed by Senator George Norris of Nebraska and Senator B.K. Wheeler of
Montana, that group took on the “iron heel” of the US State Department
as it smashed down on the lives of the people in Nicaragua, Mexico, and
Haiti. She had also been a member of the Save Our Schools Committee,
put together by Jane Addams and the ACLU to take patriotic propagan-
da out of our school systems.
Both Rachel and Amy retired from government service by 1950. Their
work and the efforts of their womens community of laid the groundwork
for public benefits including the right to unionize; an old-age pension
giving workers a viable end to their lives; and unemployment insurance
when the vicissitudes of corporate America left workers jobless.
These policies helped forsaken workers ever since the depression. Our
current pandemic is a great example. It instantly threw people out their
jobs across the country and unemployment insur-
ance provided the main resource keeping many
families alive and safe in their homes.
More importantly, these women guaranteed
that female America citizens had the right to vote.
Without that reality, Donald Trump never would
have been voted out of office. Election results
for 2020 show that 58% of women voted to get
Trump out of office while 53% of male voters
Page 26wanted to give Trump a second term as President of the United States.
Amy Maher remained in Washington lobbying for women for eight
years after her retirement. When Rachel passed away in 1956, she re-
turned to Toledo where she continued to work on myriad projects. She
passed away in Toledo in 1965.
That was almost the final passing of the great generation of women that
worked so hard to make sure that women had the right to vote, and that
the lives of working Americans, and particularly working women, remained
safe and secure. In 1947 Carrie Chapman Catt passed away from a heart
attack and was buried beside her 20-year companion Mary Garrett Hay.
After Mary Anderson retired from the Women’s Bureau in 1944, she
spent the rest of her life lobbying in Washington for equal pay for women.
She died in 1964.
Mary van Kleek retired from the Sage Foundation in 1948 and dedicated
the rest of her life to international peace and a nuclear free planet. She died
in 1972. Florence Kelley oversaw the operations of the National Consum-
ers League until her death at age 77 in 1932.
Frances Perkins retired as Secretary of labor in 1945, the only original
FDR Cabinet member to last through his four presidential terms. She then
served on the US Civil Service Commission until 1952 and spent the rest
of her life lecturing and teaching at Cornell until she passed away in 1965.
The institutions these women established live on. As so many people
have reiterated, “America today would be unrecognizable without the
architecture to it that Francis Perkins supplied.” The League of Women
Voters is the most viable non-partisan pro-democracy institution in the
country. The National Consumers League still carries on advocating for
consumers and the workers that produce the products they consume. The
Women’s Bureau just celebrated its 100th anniversary and is still looking
out for the working woman as Miss Mary Anderson, Miss Rachel Shaw
Gallagher and Miss Amy Grace Maher intended.
In a letter to Jeanne Bouvier, Mary Anderson referred to a secret that
all these women shared, noting “I know we have so much in common
and are never able to express to one another.” This secret embellished
their community with love and respect for each other that nourished
rich relationships able to work through any conflicts and facilitated
their amazing accomplishments. It was then, and always will be, an
effective model for political organizing.
Page 27Acknowledgments
W
ithout the Internet, help from my family, friends and
dedicated researchers, it would have been impossible to
put together these tales on Rachel Gallagher, Amy Maher
and the community of women they worked with. Thanks to my wife
Judy, our offspring, Shamli, Beca and Crescent, and their spouses, my
siblings Pat Leiser and Hank Tarbell, along with enthusiastic friends
for their support and help with this project. The resources on the In-
ternet including: Wikipedia; Google Books; Google and Duck Duck
Go image and information searches; websites for the various organiza-
tions discussed here; the historical societies that store so many his-
torical records, and the multiple genealogy sites proved invaluable in
putting these short stories together from a remote Northern Califor-
nia location in a limited time period.
I am also thankful to my parents and ancestors that collected and
stored photos and letters that helped my understanding of Rachel
Gallagher’s childhood and life. I am also thankful to Ann of the Tole-
do Lucas County Library, and the University of Toledo for the infor-
mation they have provided on Amy Maher and her family.
On the cover, the photo of Rachel Gallagher comes from the
Gallagher collection of photos. The photo of Amy Maher comes from
the Maher family papers at the University of Toledo. The illustration,
titled Twos a Company Threes a Crowd is by Joseph Keppler for Puck
Magazine. It shows a woman labeled “Votes for Women” holding a
paper labeled “The Ballot”, parting a curtain on a darkened room
where two men labeled “Honest Graft” and “Political Boss” are sit-
ting, huddled over a money bag labeled “Corruption Fund”. “Honest
Graft”, startled, begins to rise, knocking over a basket full of papers.
The image is available through the Library of Congressphoto: Library of Congress
US Women’s Bureau: Amy Maher (center left) and Rachel Gallagher (center
right) join Carrie Chapman Catt presenting a book to Mary Anderson (seated).
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