Susan Ware

Books

Partner and I:
Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics

(Yale University Press, 1987)

Molly Dewson, a life-long Progressive reformer and the driving force behind women's expanded roles in politics and government in the New Deal, inhabited a world where women's personal friendships and professional associations often overlapped. Dewson shared most of her adult life with a woman named Polly Porter, a fifty-two-year partnership that profoundly affected her career. Dewson's woman-centered existence led her to develop a style of feminist political activism that was based on mobilizing networks of reform-minded women in public life and shows one direction feminism took in the years after suffrage.