Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Miss Frances M. Kubicki Regarding the Employment of Married Women

This letter typifies several hundred letters sent to the National Recovery Administration that complain about the employment of married women whose husbands are also employed. Writers, like Miss Kubicki, used adjectives such as “greedy” to describe married women who “cheat” their single sisters and drain the lean job market. Miss Kubicki is typical of working women of her time because single women (divorced and widowed) were 71 percent of the female labor force, although women were only 21 percent of the total labor force in 1930. Although Miss Kubicki wrote to President Roosevelt, her letter was referred to the correspondence branch of the NRA for reply. That reply was sympathetic, but not altogether reassuring. it urged her to write members of Congress and suggested that increased public criticism on the subject of working/married women might result in “some action” in the current session of Congress; yet it informed her firmly “…the authority vested int his administration by the National Industrial Recovery Act does not permit us to intervene in matters of this type and the government cannot say just whom a certain firm shall or shall not employ.” While uncertain about Miss Kubicki’s employment future, we do know that, as a federal policy, the government never ruled against hiring married women, although some state regulations and popular sentiment were generally opposed to married women working at that time.