Mary Williams Dewson

Open full sized image

Mary Williams Dewson being sworn in as a member of the Social Security Board, Washington, D.C., 1937.

Harris & Ewing, Inc./Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-hec-23251)

Mary Williams Dewson was an American economist and political organizer, closely associated with the political campaigns and administrative programs of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Dewson graduated from Wellesley (Massachusetts) College in 1897. For three years she worked as a research economist for the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, after which she became superintendent of the Massachusetts Girls’ Parole Department (1900–12). In 1911 she served also as secretary of the Commission on Minimum Wage Legislation for Massachusetts. After time spent dairy farming (1912–17), she returned to public service and for two years served as zone chief of the Bureau of Refugees of the American Red Cross in France. She was then research secretary of the National Consumers’ League (1919–24) and president of the Consumers’ League of New York (1925–31).

In 1928 Eleanor Roosevelt prevailed upon her to help organize women within the Democratic Party, and thenceforth Dewson was politically and personally close to the Roosevelt family. She took an active role in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gubernatorial campaign in New York in 1930 and in his presidential campaign in 1932. In 1933 she was appointed director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. The next year she became director of the General Advisory Committee of the Women’s Division, and from 1933 to 1935 she sat on the Consumers’ Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration (originally under the chairmanship of Mary H. Rumsey). Dewson again headed women’s campaign activities in the party in 1936, and from 1936 to 1937 she was vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee. She served as well on the President’s Advisory Committee on Economic Security, where much of the planning for the Social Security system was done, and in 1937 Roosevelt named her to the Social Security Board, where she sat as the only woman member until ill health forced her to resign in 1938. She emerged from retirement in 1940 to take part in Roosevelt’s third presidential campaign, and in later years she was a director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation and of the International Migration Service.