1920 June 5

Women’s Bureau is Created

 

The Women’s Bureau was established as a unit within the U.S. Department of Labor on this day by President Woodrow Wilson.

The original mandate of the Women’s Bureau was to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”

The Bureau continues today; see the link below to learn about its current range of activities related to women.

From 1961 to 1964 the head of the Women’s Bureau was Esther Peterson, a strong advocate for women and organized labor, who was largely responsible for persuading President John F. Kennedy to appoint his President’s Commission on the Status of Women, on December 14, 1961. It was the first-ever presidential commission on women.

The President’s Commission issued its report on October 11, 1963. While it generally reflected the liberal values and policies of the day, it did not touch on the subject of interracial marriage. Most important, in response to a study by Pauli Murray that it had commissioned, it endorsed the idea of legal challenges to discrimination against women based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time, this was a novel and challenging argument. But in the 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, made it the basis for her highly successful legal program that established new legal protections for women.

Read about the history of the Women’s Bureau here

Learn more about the Women’s Bureau today: http://www.dol.gov/wb/

Read about the explosion in the rights of women in the 1960s: Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009)

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