Document 7: Mary Garrett Hay to Frances Perkins, 10 December 1918, WCCNY Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Hunter College, New York, N.Y. (WCCNY microfilm, reel 20, frame 233).

Document 7: Mary Garrett Hay to Frances Perkins, 10 December 1918, WCCNY Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Hunter College, New York, N.Y. (WCCNY microfilm, reel 20, frame 233).

Introduction

       This letter from Mary Garrett Hay, President of the Women's City Club, to Frances Perkins, representative of the Maternity Center Association, formalizes the cooperation of the club's clinic with the Association. It also specifies the club's retention of financial and administrative responsibility for their zone. For more on Hay's suffrage activism in this period, see What Lobbying Tactics Did Suffragists Use to Obtain Congressional Approval of a Women Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1917-1920? and What Conflicts Emerged after New York Suffragists Won the Vote and Entered Electoral Politics?, two other document projects on this website.

Women's City Club of New York
22 Park Avenue
                December Tenth,
                Nineteen Eighteen.

My dear Miss Perkins:[A]

       Your letter was presented to the Board of Directors of the Women's City Club and they unanimously voted to accept the plan and invitation to join the Maternity Center Association as outlined in the enclosed excerpt from the minutes of the meeting held November 26, 1918.

Recommendation adopted:

"That the Maternity Center of the Women's City Club accept the invitation of the Maternity Center Association to unite with them for the purpose of unifying as far as possible, all standards of medical and nursing work and effecting more complete cooperation between centers in the various zones of the City. In uniting, however, the Committee recommends that the City Club maintain its present financial independence, and that the Executive Committee appointed by the Club shall continue to determine the general policy of the work in Zone 7, including the extension of the Center's work in Zone 7, publicity concerning the work, special investigations and reports, public meetings, and any other matters which the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee deem necessary."

                    Sincerely yours,

                    (signed) Mary G. Hay
                    President

Miss Francis Perkins,
4 East 39th Street,
City.

A. Frances Perkins (1880-1965) became one of the most powerful women in New York state in 1918 when governor Alfred Smith appointed her as a member of the New York State Industrial Commission. In 1933 she became the first woman cabinet member when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor.
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