Breaking boundaries in La Guardia’s New York
In this excerpt from After the Vote: Feminist Politics in LaGuardia’s New York, Elizabeth Israels Perry tells the story of Pearl Bernstein, a young woman and member of the New York City League of Women Voters who went on to serve in Governor Fiorello La Guardia’s progressive administration in 1930s New York, one of the first in the country to feature women in prominent positions.
Shortly before his inauguration as mayor in January 1934, Fiorello La Guardia asked Pearl Bernstein, a young woman then working for the New York City League of Women Voters, to come see him. She had voted for him but never met him before. Wasting no time, he asked her straight out: “How would you like to be Secretary of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment and Director of the Budget?” This was a new position he hoped would rationalize the board’s chaotic budget procedures.
“What they did,” Bernstein recalled later, “was to put some figures together and then every week they would add or subtract or multiply or divide — and nobody knew in the middle of the year how much had been spent.” The mayor chaired the board, but the borough presidents also submitted budgetary proposals, “and so it was a very unsatisfactory situation.” The League of Women Voters, where Bernstein had worked for the previous seven years monitoring municipal affairs, had advocated the city’s adoption of an executive budget prepared solely by the mayor. In the end she persuaded La Guardia to separate the two jobs he offered her, and because she knew nothing about accounting or budgets, she took the post of secretary. In January, the new board of estimate confirmed her appointment.
Born in 1904, the eldest of six in a family that had come from Russian Poland in the 1870s, Bernstein grew up around Mount Morris Park in Harlem, then a predominantly Jewish section of Manhattan. Her attendance at Hunter College High School’s annex at 108th Street and Amsterdam Avenue brought her into contact with a “bigger world” and helped her “blossom.” Unlike most of her friends, who went to Hunter College to become teachers, Pearl won a Regents Scholarship to Barnard College. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1925 with a degree in history and political science.
Her favorite Columbia University political science professor, Raymond Moley, asked her, “What do you want to do?”
“Well, I’d like to get a job in some kind of civic or city work, some sort of government activity,” she answered.
At the end of the summer, one of Moley’s colleagues, Joseph McGoldrick, recommended her for a three- month job at the Citizens Union, a nonpartisan reform organization, keeping track of its pamphlets and books during the 1925 mayoral campaign. When that job ended she supported herself as a substitute teacher and volunteered at the League of Women Voters. Attorney Dorothy Strauss enlisted her to monitor legislation. Other league members — Agnes (Mrs. Henry Goddard) Leach and Caroline (Mrs. F. Louis) Slade — soon asked her to attend and report on board of estimate meetings. They donated her starting salary. When she first started going to city hall, she recalled,
there were no women at all at the Board of Estimate Meetings or any of the other meetings that I attended and being a brash young woman and also knowing that I could get away with things that a man probably couldn’t, I got up and asked for information that wasn’t available and I wanted a copy of the city budget — and who had a copy of the city budget? Nobody had that — not even the members of the Board — but finally I got one and the League became quite respected grudgingly because of its knowledge of and interest in a non- partisan way in City affairs.
Next thing she knew, the New York Sunday World was asking her to write a series of front- page articles on the city budget for its magazine. “Well, that set the League up no end,” she concluded, and it “became quite a force in local political affairs.”
In addition to coordinating the league’s municipal affairs committee, Bernstein also joined the Women’s City Club and Citizens Budget Commission. Then came the 1930– 32 investigations led by Judge Samuel Seabury of corruption in city government. This “aroused everybody’s interest,” Bernstein said, and culminated in the determination of Fiorello La Guardia to run for mayor. She could not join his campaign, as she was holding a nonpartisan job, but whenever campaign staff asked for information she provided it. When the mayor- elect decided that the board of estimate needed an administrator, Bernstein’s league mentors Agnes Leach and Caroline Slade, who had both contributed to his campaign, nominated her. Commenting on the paucity of women in government posts at that time, Bernstein said,
[…] there were very few women in local positions of responsibility at that time. And La Guardia was the first Mayor to really give women a very important role in municipal affairs. He appointed quite a number of women to important posts . . . and there were quite a number of women who were very close advisors of his.
Elisabeth Israels Perry was Professor Emeritus of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Saint Louis University. She published extensively on American women’s history, and is the author of Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith, a biography of her grandmother and one of the original “Women of the La Guardia Administration.”
