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Erased History

Frances Perkins and the Emergence of Care-Centered Public Administration

Ohio University, Athens, burnier{at}ohio.edu

This article argues that the "other" reform movement associated with the settlement women that Camilla Stivers identified in Bureau Men/Settlement Women did not disappear with the Progressive era. In fact, the settlement women's emphasis on care, connection, and concrete experience came to inform the national policies, values, and practices of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, most notably in the figure of Frances Perkins. Perkins and other New Deal women administrators long have been erased from American public administration's histories. This article not only hopes to make Perkins and other New Deal women visible, but more importantly it offers a fresh reading of the 1930s based on the care perspective implicit in the settlement ethos. Such a reading would provide a more complex and gender-inclusive view of the period than the familiar textbook narrative with its focus on government growth, executive reorganization, and the "principles approach" to management.

Key Words: Frances Perkins • care • gender

Administration & Society, Vol. 40, No. 4, 403-422 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0095399708317016


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