In response to New Deal legislation, veteran reformer Molly Dewson exclaimed: “I cannot believe I have lived to see this day. It's the culmination of what us girls and some of you boys have been working for for so long it's just dazzling.” Historians have subsequently confirmed Dewson's judgment that female New Dealers had been hawking their agenda for a long time before Franklin Roosevelt's administration finally bought it. Indeed, Clarke A. Chambers, Susan Ware, and J. Stanley Lemons have carefully documented the activities of a large contingent of women who inaugurated their battle for public welfare programs during the Progressive Era (1890–1920), continued their fight through the 1920s—a decade that one activist called the “tepid, torpid years”—and stood ready with their programs when the Great Depression renewed the possibility of federal welfare legislation in the 1930s. Now we need an explanation for the continuity of this female commitment to public welfare programs: Why was it that middle-class women played such a prominent part in sustaining the Progressive Era's social welfare agenda into the 1930s.