Toward a National Minimum

Chapter 9 traces Breckinridge’s contributions to the nascent welfare state during the Great Depression. Breckinridge and other activist women made it their mission to establish a national minimum for all Americans by crafting a federal welfare state. Building on the groundwork they had laid in the Progressive era, Breckinridge and her allies in the New Deal administration--especially in the U.S. Children’s Bureau--insisted that it was the federal government’s responsibility to care for all its citizens. They worked to establish federally funded social services, ban child labor, and establish a minimum wage under the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.