Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, ... More

Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, they joined political party clubs and began to run for office. Their plan was 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 inquiry into alleged corruption in the city’s government, long dominated by the Democratic Party’s machine, Tammany Hall. The inquiry turned first to charges of Vice Squad entrapment of women for sex crimes and their treatment in the city’s Women’s Court. Outraged by the inquiry’s disclosures and impressed by La Guardia’s pledge to rein in Tammany, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. As appointees in his administration, they then helped him fulfill his plans for modernizing city government. This book argues that La Guardia’s women appointees contributed to his administration’s success and left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in politics.