1 <h1>Single Women of Boston Picket Relief Headquarters</h1><h2>Photograph</h2><p><b>By:</b> Anonymous</p><p><b>Date:</b> June 24, 1935</p><p><b>Source:</b> © Corbis/Bettmann.</p><p><b>About the Photographer:</b> The photographer is unknown. Otto Bettmann, a librarian and curator in Berlin in the 1930s, began collecting photographs to preserve as a historical archive. Fleeing Germany with several trunks of photographs in his possession, he settled in the United States. By 1995, his collection included over 11 million items, including this picture of single women picketing in Boston.</p><h2>INTRODUCTION</h2><p>The Roaring Twenties, a time of great economic gains in the stock market and of a widening in the gap between rich and poor in the United States, came to an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, when the stock market lost twelve percent of its value in one day. The stock market continued to decline for the next thirty-two months, finally bottoming out in June 1932, losing 89.2% of its value from October 28, 1929 levels. The country sank into the Great Depression as Republican President Herbert Hoover struggled to prevent economic freefall.</p><p>Unemployment went from 3.3 percent to 8.9 percent in one year; by 1933 unemployment hit 24.3 percent, the worst rate on record. Unemployment rates in the U.S. would not dip below 10 percent again until 1941, at the start of U.S. involvement in World War II (1941–1945). The 1930s saw farm prices drop forty to sixty percent, and the depression affected countries worldwide.</p><p>Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned as a Democrat for the presidency in 1932; Americans viewed Hoover as uncaring and unwilling to take needed measures to pull the country out of the Great Depression, in spite of his efforts to establish protective tariffs and to encourage business leaders to keep wages high for those who were still employed. Roosevelt was elected in November 1932 and by March 1933, when he took office, he initiated a series of programs that fell under the umbrella title "The New Deal."</p><p>Job creation was one of Roosevelt's primary goals; Hoover had created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, sometimes known as the ERA or FERA, and Roosevelt expanded it. Between May 1933 and December 1935, when it was replaced by the Works Progress Administration, the FERA provided jobs for more than 20 million Americans, at a government cost of more than $3.1 billion.</p><p>In this photograph, single women in the Boston area—single, widowed, and divorced—picketed the local headquarters of the FERA in protest of their belief that married women were receiving a higher percentage of FERA jobs and the higher paying positions.</p><h2>PRIMARY SOURCE</h2><p><b>SINGLE WOMEN OF BOSTON PICKET RELIEF HEADQUARTERS</b> </p><p><i>See</i> primary source image.</p><h2>SIGNIFICANCE</h2><p>Women poured into the workforce during the Great Depression of the 1930s in an attempt to secure any form of employment; many employers would hire women over men because women's wages were set at lower rates. As the Depression continued, men began to accept the lower wages, and women at times found themselves jobless as well. During the 1930s married and single women increased their numbers in the workforce; when the FERA was established men and women flocked to the local headquarters in search of aid or jobs.</p><p>With no husband or partner to help shoulder the burden of support during the Depression, and for those women with no sons or other male relatives to help, the lack of a job could literally mean the difference between life and death. As the signs in this photograph show, single women viewed themselves as subjects of discrimination in the assignment of FERA jobs. Some local FERA agencies assigned single women and married men supporting families priority over married women; the Boston picketing is in response to the perception that such prioritization was not applied at that location.</p><p>In the mid 1930s—with the Great Depression at its peak in terms of unemployment—public sentiment turned sharply against married women "taking jobs" from married men or single women and men. A 1936 survey of Americans showed that eighty-two percent believed that married women should not work if their husbands held jobs. By the late 1930s, twenty-six states considered laws that would restrict a married woman's right to work. Nevertheless, by 1940 more than twenty-five percent of all married women would be in the workforce.</p><p>The single women's protest at the FERA headquarters helped to shape federal job allocation as the FERA closed and its responsibilities fell under a new agency, the Works Progress Administration, in late 1935. The WPA restricted both spouses in a marriage from working, believing that this took a job away from another person in need. The WPA hired women, minorities, and immigrants according to need, and single women found the need-based policy in line with their protest. After the United States entered into World War II in 1941, millions of men were drafted into the military and demand for industrial products for military use soared. This created a situation in which men and women, married or otherwise, had little trouble finding work; and the WPA and similar job creation programs soon came to an end.</p><h2>FURTHER RESOURCES</h2><h3>Books</h3><p>Breyer, Stephen. <i>Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution</i>. New York: Knopf, 2005.</p><p>Nelson, Samuel P. <i>Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism</i>. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.</p><p>Stone, Geoffrey R. <i>Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism</i>. New York: W.W. Norton, Inc., 2005.</p><h3>Web sites</h3><p><i>United States Department of Labor</i>. "Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression." 2001. &lt;http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm&gt; (accessed June 3, 2006).</p>