“The Long Progressive Era”: A Roundtable on After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York by Elisabeth Israels Perry

Abstract

In a series of Zoom calls that evolved into what one of us called “an advanced seminar on the Long Progressive Era,” we were glad to be historians, teaching and learning together, as American democracy weathered challenges not seen since the mid-nineteenth century and a global pandemic reminded us of our place on a shrinking planet. In case after case, Perry’s evidence in After the Vote demonstrates that the women who joined La Guardia’s administration brought talents developed decades earlier—in the admission of women to the city’s law schools, in work on labor-related commissions, and in the prominence of women’s activism in defense of African American civil rights. Perkins was already working closely with Kelley as executive secretary of the New York Consumers League in 1911, when she witnessed the death of more than a hundred garment workers, most of whom were young women, in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. In 1919, the state legislature created an industrial commission to administer and enforce safety rules, and Governor Al Smith appointed her as one of three commissioners, her responsibility being to supervise the bureau of statistics and information and the bureau of mediation and arbitration.