Mary Williams Dewson (1874–1962) was an American feminist and political activist. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1897, she worked for the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. She became an active member of the National Consumers League (NCL) and received mentorship from Florence Kelley, a famous advocate for social justice feminism and General Secretary of the NCL. Dewson's later role as civic secretary of the Women's City Club of New York (WCCNY) led to her meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, who later convinced Dewson to be more politically active in the Democratic Party. Dewson went on to take over Roosevelt's role as head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. Dewson's "Reporter Plan" mobilized thousands of women to spread information about the New Deal legislation and garner support for it. In connection with the Reporter Plan, the Women's Division held regional conferences for women. This movement led to a historically high level of female political participation.
Early life and education
Dewson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on February 18, 1874. She was the youngest of six children. Her mother, Elizabeth Weld Williams, and father, Edward Henry Dewson, lived in Roxbury when they had their first child, Francis Williams. After moving to Quincy, they had five more children: George Badger, William Inglee, Edward Henry Jr., Ellen Reed, and Mary Williams.
Dewson's mother took on a domestic role and took care of the household during Dewson's childhood, while her father worked in the leather business. She also taught a course on household economics. The lack of reading material for the course inspired her to write and publish The Twentieth Century Expense Book (1899). It served as a basic guide to help American women budget a household and prioritize expenses.
Mary W. Dewon started her career in Massachusetts reform and suffrage circles. In the 1920s in New York she was a civic secretary of the Women's City Club of New York, and the research secretary of the National Consumers' League. By 1929 Dewson knew all of the leading women reformers in the city. Because of Dewson's connections Eleanor Roosevelt recruited her into the Democratic political party. It was during this time that Dewson entered politics more personally, organizing Democratic women for Al Smith's presidential campaign at Eleanor Roosevelt's request. She performed a similar feat for Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930 gubernatorial and 1932 presidential races. Because of her work on FDR's campaigns (and ER's intense lobbying), Dewson was appointed head of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Division (DNC). She reorganized the division to be utterly different. She found government jobs for female party workers, more than had been given to women under any previous administration. She is credited with securing the post of secretary of labor for Frances Perkins, and placing women high up in the Social Security and National Recovery Administrations. Even so, she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. Despite this opposition, she began to push for state laws or state party rulings that would provide even representation in membership and leadership positions for women on party committees from the precinct level up. She created the Reporter Plan, which educated female party workers on New Deal programs so that they could explain them to voters. In the 1936 election, the women's division provided 90 percent of the campaign fliers the DNC produced. That same year she got a rule passed that provided for a member and an alternate for each state on the DNC Platform Committee; the rule also required that each pair be composed of one man and one woman. Because of Dewson's organizational skills, FDR nicknamed her "the little general."
She withdrew from the women's division's day-to-day affairs in 1936 because of poor health, but continued to be available to her successors. In 1937 she again returned to active public life when she was nominated and confirmed as a member of the Social Security Board. There she set up effective systems of federal-state cooperation, an issue that had been problematic. However, she again had to step down because of illness in 1938.
Personal life
Dewson met her life partner Mary "Polly" Porter in 1909, when both women were working at the Massachusetts State Industrial School for Girls. Dewson was then director of the parole board and living with her mother, and Porter, ten years her junior, was working an internship as part of her studies at the Massachusetts School for Social Work. The two became a couple and moved in together in 1912, after the death of Dewson’s mother. They were together for more than fifty years, until Dewson's death in 1962. Throughout their lives together, the two women referred to themselves as the Porter-Dewsons.
In 1913, the Porter-Dewsons bought a dairy farm near the central Massachusetts hamlet of South Berlin and briefly became "gentlewoman farmers."
In 1911, Dewson visited Polly Porter's family summer home in Castine, Maine, and the couple made frequent visits there during the summers.