Mary Dewson - Suffrage Movement

Suffrage Movement

Molly Dewson was ready for a break. In 1913 she and her lifelong partner, Mary G. (Polly) Porter, moved to a dairy farm in Worcester, Massachusetts. By 1915, however, Dewson had recharged her batteries; she entered the Massachusetts suffrage movement. During World War I, both she and Porter went with the American Red Cross to France to aid war refugees. Dewson was chief of the Mediterranean Zone by war's end. After returning from Europe, Dewson worked as Florence Kelley's principal assistant in the National Consumers' League campaign for state minimum wage laws for women and children. From 1925 to 1931, Dewson served as president of the New York Consumers' League, working closely with Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), leading the lobbying effort of the Women's Joint Legislative Conference and playing a central role in the passage of a 1930 New York law limiting women to forty-eight-hour work weeks.

Mary W. Dewon started her career in Massachusetts reform and suffrage circles. In the 1920s in New York she was a civic secretary of the Women's City Club and the research secretary of the National Consumers' League. By 1929 Dewsonknew all of the leading women reformers in the city. Because of Dewson's connections Eleanor Rossevelt recruited her into the Democratic political party. It was during this time that Dewson entered politics more personally, organizing Democratic women for Al Smith's presidential campaign at Eleanor Roosevelt's request.She performed a similar feat for Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930 gubernatorial and 1932 presidential races. Because of her work on FDR's campaigns (and ER's intense lobbying), Dewson was appointed head of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Division (DNC). She reorganized the division to be utterly different. She found government jobs for female party workers, more than had been given to women under any previous administration. She is credited with securing the post of secretary of labor for Frances Perkins, and placing women high up in the Social Security and National Recovery Administrations. Even so, she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Despite this opposition, she began to push for state laws or state party rulings that would provide even representation in membership and leadership positions for women on party committees from the precinct level up. She created the Reporter Plan, which educated female party workers on New Deal programs so that they could explain them to voters. In the 1936 election, the women's division provided 90 percent of the campaign fliers the DNC produced. That same year she got a rule passed that provided for a member and an alternate for each state on the DNC Platform Committee; the rule also required that each pair be composed of one man and one woman. Dewson's organizational abilities so impressed FDR that he nicknamed her "the little general."

She withdrew from the women's division's day-to-day affairs in 1936 because of poor health, but continued to be available to her successors. In 1937 she again returned to active public life when she was nominated and confirmed as a member of the Social Security Board. There she set up effective systems of federal-state cooperation, an issue that had been problematic. However, she again had to step down because of illness in 1938.

For several years, she and Porter split their time between New York City and Castine, Maine. In 1952, they retired to Castine full time. Even in retirement, Dewson was busy, becoming the vice-president of the Maine Democratic Advisory Committee in 1954. Dewson died in Castine in October 1962 of complications following a stroke.