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During the 1920s and 1930s, New York City’s civic women activists expended the most energy and passion over three campaigns: winning state acceptance of federal funds for improving the health of mothers and babies (the Sheppard-Towner Act), legalizing women’s jury service, and passing laws to protect women wage earners. Using the tactics and networks they had developed during the suffrage movement and working through both partisan and nonpartisan voluntary associations, they led other public policy campaigns, such as legalizing the dissemination of birth control information, repealing national prohibition, and modernizing state government. The stories of these campaigns demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of New York City women’s efforts to sustain feminist progressive reform after enfranchisement.

Many of the city’s women civic and political activists supported La Guardia during his many electoral campaigns. The women he appointed to his administration brought into his government the feminist and social justice ideals they had been espousing since the suffrage and progressive reform movements: an end to sex discrimination, an expansion of measures to benefit human welfare, and the achievement of pay equity and more career opportunities for women. They believed that they would carry out the mayor’s modernizing agendas as well as, if not better than, the men he had appointed as commissioners. This chapter highlights five women who made singular contributions to the success of the La Guardia administration: Rebecca Rankin, Eunice Hunton Carter, Jane Bolin, Elinore Herrick, and Anna Rosenberg.

In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an investigation first into New York City’s lower court system and then into its entire government. The investigation, known by the name of its head, retired judge Samuel Seabury, had a dramatic impact on the city’s politics and its powerful Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall. Because the investigation began with an inquiry into the entrapment of women for alleged sex crimes and their subsequent treatment in the city’s women’s court, it attracted great interest from the city’s women civic activists. These women played significant roles in encouraging and later broadening the Seabury investigation and in making decisions about its consequences.