Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and industrialist. ... more Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and industrialist. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health-care policy that Americans are still having today. In this gripping biography, Robyn Muncy offers Roche’s persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
In this book, Muncy explains the continuity of white, middle-class, American female reform activi... more In this book, Muncy explains the continuity of white, middle-class, American female reform activity between the Progressive era and the New Deal. She argues that during the Progressive era, female reformers built an interlocking set of organizations that attempted to control child welfare policy. Within this policy making body, female progressives professionalized their values, bureaucratized their methods, and institutionalized their reforming networks. To refer to the organizational structure embodying these processes, the book develops the original concept of a female dominion in the otherwise male empire of policy making. At the head of this dominion stood the Children's Bureau in the federal Department of Labor. Muncy investigates the development of the dominion and its particular characteristics, such as its monopoly over child welfare and its commitment to public welfare, and shows how it was dependent on a peculiarly female professionalism. By exploring that process, this book illuminates the relationship between professionalization and reform, the origins and meaning of Progressive reform, and the role of gender in creating the American welfare state.
Engendering America was the first documentary history of gender in the U.S. The documents, both w... more Engendering America was the first documentary history of gender in the U.S. The documents, both written and visual, illustrate the variety of ways that Americans defined manhood and womanhood at any one time (since 1865) and the ways those definitions have changed over time. The book demonstrates the interconnections between the histories of gender and sexuality, and it introduces students to the use of primary sources in history.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2019
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to enshrine in the Constitution of the United States a... more The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to enshrine in the Constitution of the United States a guarantee of equal rights to women and men, has had a long and volatile history. When first introduced in Congress in 1923, three years after ratification of the woman suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, the ERA faced fierce opposition from the majority of former suffragists. These progressive women activists opposed the ERA because it threatened hard-won protective labor legislation for wage-earning women. A half century later, however, the amendment enjoyed such broad support that it was passed by the requisite two-thirds of Congress and, in 1972, sent to the states for ratification. Unexpectedly, virulent opposition emerged during the ratification process, not among progressive women this time but among conservatives, whose savvy organizing prevented ratification by a 1982 deadline. Many scholars contend that despite the failure of ratification, equal rights thinking so triump...
More than 40 years ago the first courses in women’s studies were introduced in American universit... more More than 40 years ago the first courses in women’s studies were introduced in American universities: it was the beginning of a revolution which was going to transform academic institutions in radical and unforeseeable ways. The feminist focus on the ways in which political assumptions shaped all instances of knowledge production and dissemination called into question no less than the epistemological apparatus on which universities had traditionally relied. Raffaella Baritono and Valeria Gennero argue that the turn from women to gender in search of higher levels of critical coherence and theoretical complexity has led to a transformation of the field of American Studies, introducing references to transnational practices and histories that complicate received ideas about sex, culture, sexuality and politics. In this context, the category of intersectionality, first introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw, has been widely invoked as a way to resist single-axis analysis of identity. In order t...
Marilyn Lake’s important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages a... more Marilyn Lake’s important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages and relationships (mostly between America and Australia) that animated Progressive Era reform in the United States. Lake adopts the approach she and coauthor Henry Reynolds used to great effect in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008), which broke new ground on the study of whiteness by tracing the circulation of people, ideas, and technologies among white settler societies that gave rise to what W. E. B. Dubois famously called the global color line (or what Pankaj Mishra has recently dubbed the “religion of whiteness”). The settler colonialism framework reveals the dark side of American progressivism by highlighting the racial exclusion and indigenous dispossession that went into the project. “Such a perspective,” Lake explains, “allows us to better understand progressivism’s ambiguous character as simultaneously democratic and elitist, reformist and coercive, advanced and assimilationist, uplifting and repressive” (4 – 5). In taking this approach, Progressive New World expands the geography of progressive reform beyond Europe and the “Atlantic crossings” traced by Daniel Rodgers (though she doesn’t exactly frame it this way) and, in doing so, shows that a transnational progressivism didn’t merely grow out of a shared sense of dilemma brought on by industrial capitalism. In Lake’s story, reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes looked across the Pacific into the anglophone settler world for inspiration and workable social models. They admired and sought to emulate the Australasia example that had yielded progressive achievements like the secret ballot, women’s suffrage, legal minimum wage, industrial arbitration, children’s courts, and oldage pensions. Indeed, Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential candidacy was condemned for being a “mere rehash of policies long in vogue in Australia and New Zealand” (7). Reformers in the United States did not imbibe these ideas or policies wholesale: they recognized that differences in political systems and cultures required adaptation or made some of them unsuitable for the American context. In some cases, they were more interested in the “voluntarist” elements of anglophone settler reform, as opposed to statist regulations of a “socialistic” system. The peripatetic labor reformer Victor Selden Clark, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, found Australia’s and New Zealand’s compulsory minimum wage, maximum work hours, and industrial arbitration “too radical” to be applied
This paper, available only online, analyzes the history and current possibilities of the Equal Ri... more This paper, available only online, analyzes the history and current possibilities of the Equal Rights Amendment. It will be open to the public until late April 2020, when it will again be available only on a subscription basis as part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.
This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s... more This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s. It finds that in the NEW YORK TIMES at least, authors began in the late 1960s to use the term especially when they wanted to identify as specifically as possible racist white people and when workers were down on their luck, defeated, struggling. The essay explains why so many observers attributed the election of Donald Trump to the working class.
This is a round table on the state of women's and gender studies within American Studies. It was... more This is a round table on the state of women's and gender studies within American Studies. It was published in the RSA, an Italian journal of American Studies.
This paper synthesizes histories of the middle class in Germany, France, Peru, Chile, and Argent... more This paper synthesizes histories of the middle class in Germany, France, Peru, Chile, and Argentina published in A. Ricardo Lopez and Barbara Weinstein, eds., THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS: TOWARD A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY (Duke University Press, 2012).
This paper is the English-language version of Robyn Muncy's participation in a forum on U.S polit... more This paper is the English-language version of Robyn Muncy's participation in a forum on U.S political history published in the Italian journal, Ricerche di storia politica (March 2012).
The forum was facilitated by editor, Raffaella Baritono.
Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and industrialist. ... more Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and industrialist. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health-care policy that Americans are still having today. In this gripping biography, Robyn Muncy offers Roche’s persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
In this book, Muncy explains the continuity of white, middle-class, American female reform activi... more In this book, Muncy explains the continuity of white, middle-class, American female reform activity between the Progressive era and the New Deal. She argues that during the Progressive era, female reformers built an interlocking set of organizations that attempted to control child welfare policy. Within this policy making body, female progressives professionalized their values, bureaucratized their methods, and institutionalized their reforming networks. To refer to the organizational structure embodying these processes, the book develops the original concept of a female dominion in the otherwise male empire of policy making. At the head of this dominion stood the Children's Bureau in the federal Department of Labor. Muncy investigates the development of the dominion and its particular characteristics, such as its monopoly over child welfare and its commitment to public welfare, and shows how it was dependent on a peculiarly female professionalism. By exploring that process, this book illuminates the relationship between professionalization and reform, the origins and meaning of Progressive reform, and the role of gender in creating the American welfare state.
Engendering America was the first documentary history of gender in the U.S. The documents, both w... more Engendering America was the first documentary history of gender in the U.S. The documents, both written and visual, illustrate the variety of ways that Americans defined manhood and womanhood at any one time (since 1865) and the ways those definitions have changed over time. The book demonstrates the interconnections between the histories of gender and sexuality, and it introduces students to the use of primary sources in history.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2019
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to enshrine in the Constitution of the United States a... more The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to enshrine in the Constitution of the United States a guarantee of equal rights to women and men, has had a long and volatile history. When first introduced in Congress in 1923, three years after ratification of the woman suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, the ERA faced fierce opposition from the majority of former suffragists. These progressive women activists opposed the ERA because it threatened hard-won protective labor legislation for wage-earning women. A half century later, however, the amendment enjoyed such broad support that it was passed by the requisite two-thirds of Congress and, in 1972, sent to the states for ratification. Unexpectedly, virulent opposition emerged during the ratification process, not among progressive women this time but among conservatives, whose savvy organizing prevented ratification by a 1982 deadline. Many scholars contend that despite the failure of ratification, equal rights thinking so triump...
More than 40 years ago the first courses in women’s studies were introduced in American universit... more More than 40 years ago the first courses in women’s studies were introduced in American universities: it was the beginning of a revolution which was going to transform academic institutions in radical and unforeseeable ways. The feminist focus on the ways in which political assumptions shaped all instances of knowledge production and dissemination called into question no less than the epistemological apparatus on which universities had traditionally relied. Raffaella Baritono and Valeria Gennero argue that the turn from women to gender in search of higher levels of critical coherence and theoretical complexity has led to a transformation of the field of American Studies, introducing references to transnational practices and histories that complicate received ideas about sex, culture, sexuality and politics. In this context, the category of intersectionality, first introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw, has been widely invoked as a way to resist single-axis analysis of identity. In order t...
Marilyn Lake’s important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages a... more Marilyn Lake’s important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages and relationships (mostly between America and Australia) that animated Progressive Era reform in the United States. Lake adopts the approach she and coauthor Henry Reynolds used to great effect in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008), which broke new ground on the study of whiteness by tracing the circulation of people, ideas, and technologies among white settler societies that gave rise to what W. E. B. Dubois famously called the global color line (or what Pankaj Mishra has recently dubbed the “religion of whiteness”). The settler colonialism framework reveals the dark side of American progressivism by highlighting the racial exclusion and indigenous dispossession that went into the project. “Such a perspective,” Lake explains, “allows us to better understand progressivism’s ambiguous character as simultaneously democratic and elitist, reformist and coercive, advanced and assimilationist, uplifting and repressive” (4 – 5). In taking this approach, Progressive New World expands the geography of progressive reform beyond Europe and the “Atlantic crossings” traced by Daniel Rodgers (though she doesn’t exactly frame it this way) and, in doing so, shows that a transnational progressivism didn’t merely grow out of a shared sense of dilemma brought on by industrial capitalism. In Lake’s story, reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes looked across the Pacific into the anglophone settler world for inspiration and workable social models. They admired and sought to emulate the Australasia example that had yielded progressive achievements like the secret ballot, women’s suffrage, legal minimum wage, industrial arbitration, children’s courts, and oldage pensions. Indeed, Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential candidacy was condemned for being a “mere rehash of policies long in vogue in Australia and New Zealand” (7). Reformers in the United States did not imbibe these ideas or policies wholesale: they recognized that differences in political systems and cultures required adaptation or made some of them unsuitable for the American context. In some cases, they were more interested in the “voluntarist” elements of anglophone settler reform, as opposed to statist regulations of a “socialistic” system. The peripatetic labor reformer Victor Selden Clark, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, found Australia’s and New Zealand’s compulsory minimum wage, maximum work hours, and industrial arbitration “too radical” to be applied
This paper, available only online, analyzes the history and current possibilities of the Equal Ri... more This paper, available only online, analyzes the history and current possibilities of the Equal Rights Amendment. It will be open to the public until late April 2020, when it will again be available only on a subscription basis as part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.
This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s... more This article explores the use of the term "working class" in US political culture since the 1950s. It finds that in the NEW YORK TIMES at least, authors began in the late 1960s to use the term especially when they wanted to identify as specifically as possible racist white people and when workers were down on their luck, defeated, struggling. The essay explains why so many observers attributed the election of Donald Trump to the working class.
This is a round table on the state of women's and gender studies within American Studies. It was... more This is a round table on the state of women's and gender studies within American Studies. It was published in the RSA, an Italian journal of American Studies.
This paper synthesizes histories of the middle class in Germany, France, Peru, Chile, and Argent... more This paper synthesizes histories of the middle class in Germany, France, Peru, Chile, and Argentina published in A. Ricardo Lopez and Barbara Weinstein, eds., THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS: TOWARD A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY (Duke University Press, 2012).
This paper is the English-language version of Robyn Muncy's participation in a forum on U.S polit... more This paper is the English-language version of Robyn Muncy's participation in a forum on U.S political history published in the Italian journal, Ricerche di storia politica (March 2012).
The forum was facilitated by editor, Raffaella Baritono.
Page 1. ROBYN MUNCY Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the US Welfare State: The Ca... more Page 1. ROBYN MUNCY Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the US Welfare State: The Careers of Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, 1890-1935 In response to New Deal legislation, veteran reformer Molly ...
This article argues that the trustbusting campaign in the United States between 1898 and 1914 was... more This article argues that the trustbusting campaign in the United States between 1898 and 1914 was in part a response to perceived threats to middle-class white manhood and was largely of interest only to white men. Black progressives and white women reformers were focused overwhelmingly on other issues. Trustbusting turns out to be a marginal interest of the full community of progressive reformers.
Nineteenth Amendment and Women's Access to the Vote Across America, 2019
This essay argues that the U.S. woman suffrage movement grew out of and was continually fed by ot... more This essay argues that the U.S. woman suffrage movement grew out of and was continually fed by other social movements, including the struggle for racial justice, the labor movement, and initiatives to regulate alcohol.
This round table discusses the place of women's and gender studies in U.S. history and American S... more This round table discusses the place of women's and gender studies in U.S. history and American Studies for a journal published by the Italian American Studies Association.
Questions and Muncy's Answers: 1. The emergence of both women's and gender studies was characterized by the strong connection between women's politics and feminist reflection. In your opinion, is this connection still vital? Or is a trend toward a more 'scientific' (and perhaps more neutral) methodological approach prevailing? I believe that the connection between feminist politics and scholarship on women and gender remains vital. I am trying to think of any work of U.S. women's history that does not have at its heart the hope of achieving gender justice; I cannot come up with one. Works of women's and gender history generally aim to understand the means by which different kinds of women have been subordinated to men (as well as to each other) and the methods by which different kinds of women have resisted subordination and chipped away at gender injustice. These works are driven by and contribute to feminist politics. Indeed, in the absence of a mass movement on behalf of women's advancement, feminist scholarship remains a reliable site for the nurturing of feminist politics.
This is a draft of an essay on the Great Society for the Encyclopedia of American Governance. Fo... more This is a draft of an essay on the Great Society for the Encyclopedia of American Governance. For the final version, see Muncy, Robyn. "Great Society." American Governance. Ed. Stephen Schechter, et al. Vol. 2. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016. 362-366. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.
You may follow the attached link to locate the web version.
World War I and Women's Suffrage Victories is a comment on a panel titled “Fighting on Two Fronts... more World War I and Women's Suffrage Victories is a comment on a panel titled “Fighting on Two Fronts: Women's Suffrage, World War One, and Jack Pershing's ‘Hello Girls,’" at the Organization of American Historians Convention, New Orleans, LA, April 2017.
This paper was delivered in April 2013 at the convention of the Organization of American Historia... more This paper was delivered in April 2013 at the convention of the Organization of American Historians in San Francisco. It argues that the Age of Reform, which Richard Hofstadter famously identified as extending from 1890 to roughly 1940, lasted instead from the 1890s into the 1970s. The paper sees the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society as the three great outbursts of progressive reform in twentieth-century America.
In this paper, delivered at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2011, I argue tha... more In this paper, delivered at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2011, I argue that one meaning of left-feminist heterosocial networks in the New Deal Era was to expand the purview of women's authority beyond the parameters that more exclusively female groups had achieved. Indeed, heterosocial networks may have given left feminism its scope within the New Deal government. The paper uses the life of Josephine Roche to demonstrate the significance of mixed groups of women and men to the advancement of women from the Progressive Era through the New Deal.
This paper was delivered at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2008. Its purpos... more This paper was delivered at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 2008. Its purpose was to explain why Josephine Roche, a political celebrity in the 1930s, disappeared from history and memory in the postwar period. It argues that the anti-communist crusade encouraged Roche to keep a low profile in order to protect her innovative work in health care at the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund.
This lecture identifies the millions of women who were still barred from the polls after ratifica... more This lecture identifies the millions of women who were still barred from the polls after ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution and the various new challenges taken up by those enfranchised by the amendment.
In this podcast, Paul Vogelzang interviews Robyn Muncy about the meaning of the the Nineteenth Am... more In this podcast, Paul Vogelzang interviews Robyn Muncy about the meaning of the the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which said that no state could deny the vote on the basis of sex.
In this podcast, Robyn Muncy discusses her recent research on the meaning of the term "working cl... more In this podcast, Robyn Muncy discusses her recent research on the meaning of the term "working class" in U.S. political culture since the 1930s. The interview was conducted by Beth English, president of the Southern Labor Studies Association.
This is a video of a panel discussion sponsored by the National Archives and the Women's Equality... more This is a video of a panel discussion sponsored by the National Archives and the Women's Equality National Monument in Washington, DC on June 16, 2017. Panelists considered the history and contemporary meaning of the Equal Rights Amendment.
This post explores the use of the term “working class” in media coverage of U.S. politics during ... more This post explores the use of the term “working class” in media coverage of U.S. politics during the current election cycle and since 1960. It argues that journalists and politicians have often used the term pejoratively and especially to suggest that only those in the working class are racist. These acknowledgments that the US has a working class are of no benefit to American workers.
AHA Blog: Economic inequality has surfaced as a central issue in the 2016 presidential race. Hi... more AHA Blog: Economic inequality has surfaced as a central issue in the 2016 presidential race. Historian Robyn Muncy explains that Americans know how to diminish inequality because they have done it before. The history of progressive reform reveals especially how important a strong labor movement is to the reduction of economic inequality.
In March 2015, Tom Klammer of KKFI community radio in Kansas City interviewed me about RELENTLESS... more In March 2015, Tom Klammer of KKFI community radio in Kansas City interviewed me about RELENTLESS REFORMER, the biography of Josephine Roche. The podcast of the interview is available online. The link is provided here.
Princeton University Press interviewed me about the writing of RELENTLESS REFORMER: JOSEPHINE ROC... more Princeton University Press interviewed me about the writing of RELENTLESS REFORMER: JOSEPHINE ROCHE AND PROGRESSIVISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA. The interview appears on the Princeton University Press blog at the link provided here.
C-SPAN taped a book talk I did at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Januar... more C-SPAN taped a book talk I did at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on January 12, 2015. Here's the link to the lecture!
This classroom lecture, filmed by C-SPAN in 2013, demonstrates that the assumption that American ... more This classroom lecture, filmed by C-SPAN in 2013, demonstrates that the assumption that American women workers left the workplace after World War II is mistaken. As historians have been showing for a generation, American women's labor force participation increased through the 1950s and for the rest of the twentieth century.
To mark the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a group of labor and consumer groups held ... more To mark the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a group of labor and consumer groups held a conference at the U.S. Capitol in March 2011. The purpose was to draw attention to issues of workplace safety in our own day. My contribution to a panel on the historic fire was to lay out conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 and point to the larger meaning of the fire then and now. The panel appears on YouTube.
This is a syllabus for a course I taught in 2018 on women and the Great Society. It included an ... more This is a syllabus for a course I taught in 2018 on women and the Great Society. It included an experiential learning component: all students volunteered in an agency or program originally created by the Great Society. In that way, they lived the legacy of the Great Society as they studied its history.
This is a syllabus for a course on women in progressive reform movements in twentieth-century Ame... more This is a syllabus for a course on women in progressive reform movements in twentieth-century America.
... the middle class emerged, although as members of the "Elite 400," they mutually ...... more ... the middle class emerged, although as members of the "Elite 400," they mutually ... Located primarily in the Black Belt, these institutions provided lodging, employment referrals, day ... During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African American men and women were ...
... The moral frameworks of public life: Gender, politics, and the state in rural New York, 1870-... more ... The moral frameworks of public life: Gender, politics, and the state in rural New York, 1870-1930. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Baker, Paula C. PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press (New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1991. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0195064526 ). ...
This masterful biography by one of America's foremost historians of women tells the ... more This masterful biography by one of America's foremost historians of women tells the story of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era. The book is also a political history of the United States during a period of transforming change when women worked ...
... A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1974); Samuel E. Mori... more ... A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1974); Samuel E. Morison, Henry S. Commager, and William E. Leuchtenherg, A ... Steven Mmtz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988), 1-2 ...
... The moral frameworks of public life: Gender, politics, and the state in rural New York, 1870-... more ... The moral frameworks of public life: Gender, politics, and the state in rural New York, 1870-1930. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Baker, Paula C. PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press (New York). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1991. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0195064526 ). ...
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The forum was facilitated by editor, Raffaella Baritono.
The forum was facilitated by editor, Raffaella Baritono.
Questions and Muncy's Answers: 1. The emergence of both women's and gender studies was characterized by the strong connection between women's politics and feminist reflection. In your opinion, is this connection still vital? Or is a trend toward a more 'scientific' (and perhaps more neutral) methodological approach prevailing? I believe that the connection between feminist politics and scholarship on women and gender remains vital. I am trying to think of any work of U.S. women's history that does not have at its heart the hope of achieving gender justice; I cannot come up with one. Works of women's and gender history generally aim to understand the means by which different kinds of women have been subordinated to men (as well as to each other) and the methods by which different kinds of women have resisted subordination and chipped away at gender injustice. These works are driven by and contribute to feminist politics. Indeed, in the absence of a mass movement on behalf of women's advancement, feminist scholarship remains a reliable site for the nurturing of feminist politics.
You may follow the attached link to locate the web version.