This chapter provides historical analysis of the United States Women's Bureau focusing on its role in women's rights, immigration, and economic advancement in the United States from 1917-1930. The decade of the 1920s dawned on August 18, 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote in every state. But there was another, less known victory that had already occurred on June 5, 1920, one that was pivotal in the trajectory of the next phase of the women's rights movement throughout the 1920s: House Resolution 13229.
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Josephine Schain wrote in 1918 that “a tremendous obligation rests upon the coming generation of women, those who inherit these new opportunities” (p. 120). Two years later those opportunities culminated in the largest women’s rights victory in popular living memory up that time in the United States of America. The decade of the 1920s dawned on August 18, 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote in every state (Ayers, Gould, Oshinsky, & Soderlund, 2012). But another victory had already occurred on June 5, 1920—one that was pivotal in the trajectory of the next phase of women’s rights movement throughout the 1920s: House Resolution 13229—“An Act To establish in the Department of Labor a bureau to be known as the Women’s Bureau” (also known as USC 41 Stat. L., 987, see United States House of Representatives, 1920).
Congress initially authorized the formation of Women in Industry Service in late 1917 with official formation in 1918 because of “the present emergency” (Weber, 1923, p. 1). That emergency was the labor vacuum caused by so many men fighting in the First World War. The unit Women in Industry Service was renamed the Women’s Bureau in June 1920 indicating its full bureau status within the United States Department of Labor. Women filled the labor vacuum during the last year of the First World War. This set a precedent upon which “women’s organizations successfully lobbied Congress to establish the bureau permanently” on June 5, 1920. According to Weber (1923), the Women’s Bureau was successful in convincing Congressman P. P. Campbell. He expressed his support for House Resolution 13229 by arguing that it was “wise” and “humane” for women to be in charge of their work methodology (Women’s Bureau, n.d.; Weber, 1923, p. 1).
The findings of the Women’s Bureau and the perspective of Italian immigrant George La Piana about the integration of immigrant women into the American workforce relative to native-born women are the focus. The contributions of the Women’s Bureau to the study of immigrant and native-born women from 1920-1930 have only just begun to be studied by scholars. The gendered cultural change that began in the 1910s and 1920s is also suggested in the unique papers of George La Piana who wrote about part of the situation of Italian immigrants within the same temporal context. Most articles that analyze the women’s bureau focus on the Bureau’s contributions from after the Second World War (see Mastracci, 2004). This chapter adds to the literature by analyzing the Women’s Bureau from its founding in 1917 up to 1930 that are its formative, precedent-setting years.
The Annual Reports of the Women’s Bureau from 1920-1930 focused on generally young “wage-earning women” and female European immigrants, during the popular countercurrent of “Americanization.” The Annual Reports of the Director of the Women’s Bureau and the Bulletins of the Women’s Bureau from the 1920s portray a time of upward mobility and increasing employment opportunities for women. The Women’s Bureau analyzed the immigrant laborers’ economic integration into American society from different perspectives—one bureaucratic and the other personal (United States Department of Labor, 1930; United States Department of Labor, 1921, p. 3; Manning, 1930; Gullett, 1995; Olneck, 1989; La Piana, n.d., 1916a, 1916b).