Stivers ’ Bureau Men, Settlement Women

Abstract

Camilla Stivers’book, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, is being misread as a feminist political tract and overlooked as the resource that it is for the field of public administration. A review of the current literature of feminism reveals that Stivers’work, a historical study of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, cannot be described by any version of feminist theory. Rather, her central concern is how the male-dominated Bureau movement pushed the field away from the model of the city as “home”—which developed in the women’s reform movement—and toward the idea of the city as “business. ” A Lacanian psychoanalytic reading reveals a critical implication of her research: The women’s movement carried the potential to bring a balance to public agency discourse, one adequate for the new realities that the social problems of the day required. The administration as business model denies the achievement of this balance