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.
"Partner and I places Molly Dewson where she eminently belongs – high in the New Deal pantheon. Her papers have long beckoned a biographer. She has now found a fine one in Susan Ware whose superior knowledge of the history of women and the New Deal splendidly qualifies her for the job."
Joseph P. Lash