Behind Every Successful Man?

Abstract

Belle Moskowitz and Molly Dewson were arguably two of the three most important women in American politics in the 1920s and '30s. (Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked closely with both women, would be the third on many lists.) These biographies separately give the first full assessment of each life. Read together, they provoke questions about the political options for women of that generation and comparisons between the achievements of these two women who were powers in the Democratic Party, sometimes colleagues yet never friends. Moskowitz (1877?193 3) was the daughter of a Prussian Jewish immigrant. A New Yorker, she had a brief training in drama, a short career delivering dramatic monologues, was active in social reform causes by the time she was twenty and first tried her hand at partisan politics in 1912, in the state Progressive Party. In 1918, when the women of New York had just won the vote, she was among the prominent names invited to join the Independent Citizens' Committee for Alfred E. Smith. This event changed her life, from social reformer to politician. The change was precipitated by Moskowitz's belief that the female electorate must be wooed into a Democratic Party which they would not naturally support. She pioneered the strategy of a separate Women's Division, later to be exploited to great effect by Dewson. In short order, she came to Smith's attention and became his trusted adviser. This was her role for the rest of her life. She used it