After the Vote

Soon after his inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms in office, he had installed almost a hundred as lawyers in his legal department, but also as board and commission members and as secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. Aware they were breaking new ground for women in American politics, the "Women of the LaGuardia Administration," as they called themselves, met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This is the first book to tell their stories. Author Elisabeth Israels Perry begins with the city's suffrage movement, which prepared these women for political action as enfranchised citizens. After they won the vote in 1917, suffragists joined political party clubs and began to run for office, many of them hoping to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiryinto alleged corruption in the city's government, long dominated by the Tammany Hall political machine. The inquiry turned first to the Vice Squad's entrapment of women for sex crimes and the reported misconduct of the Women's Court. Outraged by the inquiry's disclosures and impressed by La Guardia'spledge to end Tammany's grip on city offices, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. It was in partial recognition of this support that he went on to appoint an unprecedented number of them into official positions, furthering his plans for a modernized city government. In these new roles, La Guardia's women appointees not only contributed to the success of his administration but left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women inAmerican politics.

Elisabeth Israels Perry explodes traditional assumptions that once they had the vote, American women settled passively into voting as their husbands and fathers had done. Her formidable research and vivid prose reveal that in the nation's largest city, from Greenwich Village to Harlem, women civic activists set their sights on corrupt judges, policemen, and politicians. Aligned with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, they fought to reshape courts and prisons, to rehabilitate sex workers and to punish pimps, to modernize city government and to sustain progressive agendas. Their vision, practical ideas, and sophisticated political skills continue to resonate in our own time., This is quite simply a wonderful book. It asks what happened to the powerful women who emerged from the women's suffrage movement. And it brilliantly answers the question by tracing the lives and activities of two generations of female political activists who altered New York City's government forever. Filled with illuminating detail, this is a must read for anyone interested in the future of women in politics., With keen insight, Perry illuminates the origins of the broader fight for women's unity and equality.

Elisabeth Israels Perry is professor emeritus of history and women's and gender studies at Saint Louis University. She has published extensively on American women's history, and is the author of Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith, a biography of her grandmother and one of the original "Women of the La Guardia Administration."