Women's Work And Public Policy: A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945-1970

by Kathleen A. Laughlin

For over seventy-five years, the Women's Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Labor, has played a major part in the struggle for equal rights. In this institutional history, Kathleen A. Laughlin offers the fullest account to date of the Women's Bureau during the post-World War II era, showing how its long tradition of linking government with grassroots constituents supported and sustained the political milieu for women's rights activism in the 1940s and 1950s, and set the foundation for resurgent feminism in the 1960s.

This insightful study chronicles how the federal agency's quiet, backstage activism promoted an economic agenda for women and paved the way for more public, center stage feminist advocacy. It challenges traditional beliefs that women's activism was dormant during the 1940s and 1950s, and makes a significant contribution to revisionist scholarship on social and political reform movements in the postwar decades.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2000