During the first two decades of the twentieth century in cities
across America, both men and women struggled for urban reform but
in distinctively different ways. Adhering to gender roles of the
time, men working for independent research bureaus sought to apply
scientific and business practices to corrupt city governments,
while women in the settlement house movement labored to improve the
lives of the urban poor by testing new services and then getting
governments to adopt them.
Although the two intertwined at first, the contributions of
these "settlement women" to the development of the administrative
state have been largely lost as the new field of public
administration evolved from the research bureaus and diverged from
social work. Camilla Stivers now shows how public administration
came to be dominated not just by science and business but also by
masculinity, calling into question much that is taken for granted
about the profession and creating an alternative vision of public
service.
"Bureau Men, Settlement Women" offers a rare look at the early
intellectual history of public administration and is the only book
to examine the subject from a gender perspective. It recovers the
forgotten contributions of women-their engagement in public life,
concern about the proper aims of government, and commitment to
citizenship and community-to show that they were ultimately more
successful than their male counterparts in enlarging the work and
moral scope of government.
Stivers's study helps explain public administration's
long-standing "identity crisis" by showing why the separation of
male and female roles restricted public administration to an
unnecessary instrumentalism. It also provides the most detailed
examination in half a century of the New York Bureau of Municipal
Research and its role in the development of twentieth-century
public administration.
By reconsidering the origins of the field and calling for a new
sense of purpose in public service, Stivers suggests that public
administrators need not rigidly emulate business practices but
should instead strive to improve the ways in which they deal with
people. Her well-researched critique will help students and
professionals better understand their calling and challenge them to
reconsider how they think about, educate for, and perform
government service.
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