Robyn Muncy

In Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935, Robyn Muncy argues, within the network of female reform organizations, “female professionals and their followers preserved for the New Deal the reform values and strategies of the Progressive era” (pg. xii). Further, “this understanding of professionalism had profound implications for the continuation of reform in the early twentieth century” (pg. xiv). She believes “that the female professions created during the Progressive era contained as part of their professional creeds many of the commitments of the progressive reformers who gave them birth” (pg. xiv).
Muncy begins with settlement organizations, such as Jane Addams’ Hull House, arguing that they laid the groundwork for later Progressive institutions. Muncy writes of the organizations, which used personal relationships as the basis of their social structure, “In the 1890s, women were thus creating a professional culture different from that of the older, male professions. One reason for the difference was that women entered the professional world most successfully when they carved out wholly new areas of expertise in which they did not compete with men for jobs or training” (pg. 20). Women worked within a system that expected them to focus on selflessness and sacrifice for the community. Muncy writes, “Only by justifying an occupation in terms of service to the dispossessed could professional women solicit such support” (pg. 22). A lack of reliable private patronage led women to focus their attention toward getting government sponsorship, counting them in Muncy’s opinion as “America’s first progressives” (pg. 27).
The creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 offered women the opportunity to work on a national level. According to Muncy, “As these women moved their reforming strategies to the national government, their inclination to combine investigation and promotion encouraged them to advocate a more activist government than some of their male counterparts” (pg. 45). Discussing the development of social science, Muncy writes, “The peculiarities of the female search for professional opportunities begin to explain the continuity of progressivism among middle-class women” (pg. 73). Educated women, limited in their career prospects by the gendered dimension of the workforce, followed the paths others tread before them. According to Muncy, “During the implementation of the Maternity and Infancy Act, the Children’s Bureau and its subordinate organizations achieved their greatest power” (pg. 93). Women were able to weave together “the causes of child welfare reform and professional opportunity for women” (pg. 105). They used the auspices of the federal government for social engineering, though with a classist and racist bent. Muncy writes, “The professional arrogance and cultural chauvinism inherent in accusations of superstition [practiced by immigrants] also manifested themselves in campaigns to discipline midwives” (pg. 115). Muncy writes, “The implementation of the Sheppard-Towner Act…revealed some of the class, race, and ethnic identities that divided American women in the 1920s” (pg. 123). Muncy concludes, “Apparently the leadership within the dominion was so intent on keeping alive the values of the founders that it could not hear the new concerns of women that were surfacing in the 1920s and that would have required innovations in their program of child welfare policy” (pg. 162).
Muncy’s work draws upon the techniques of gender history, unpacking the roles of women and men and how societal expectations circumscribed or opened new opportunities for them. She demonstrates, similarly to Michael McGerr in A Fierce Discontent, that the goals of Progressivism were to socially engineer society for what middle-class whites considered best using the power of the government. The techniques developed in Hill House offered a framework for women professionals when they entered government service.… (altro)