The pioneering feminists and other women reformers of the nineteenth century created roles and opportunities for women which never previously existed. During the first half of the twentieth century these roles were expanded, first by the woman suffrage movement, and then by the increasing impact of prominent, reform minded women whose program was often not explicitly feminist, and who therefore, in some respects, could more readily escape being "ghettoized" as concerned only with "women's issues."
The Great Depression played a signficant role in separating the role of woman reformers from feminism per se, and created new linkages between quasi traditional women's roles and the most critical social issues of the day. Women had long been involved as poverty workers, in one way or another and the harsh effect of the Depression was to bring poverty to the fore as a public concern.
Two women who between them could characterize and in a way symbolize the role and nature of the Depression era woman reformer were Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Day, co founder and long time leading figure in the Catholic Worker movement. Although they evidently never met, and worked in very different spheres, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Day had much in common. Both were born in the late nineteenth century and grew up in comfortable (in Eleanor Roosevelt's case, considerably more than comfortable) surroundings. Both came to the fore as public figures in the Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt as FDR's activist First Lady, Dorothy Day as leading light of the Catholic Worker," which published its first issue on May 1, 1933. Both were damned by conservatives as subversives (and in Dorothy Day's case intensively scrutinized by the FBI).
Both also continued to have active public careers well into the postwar decades. Eleanor Roosevelt was prominent in international public affairs almost till her death in 1962, while Dorothy Day c...