This Women’s History Month, Regional Plan Association would like to recognize the impacts made on our region and organization by female staff members and Board members, particularly in the first half of the organization’s history.

RPA may not have even existed if it wasn’t for the generosity of Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, who established the Russell Sage Foundation. Charles Dyer Norton, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, proposed that funds from Margaret’s estate be allocated to the creation of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs.

The Committee of the Regional Plan recruited experts from a variety of fields to conduct a series of inquiries and lay the groundwork for the Plan. These experts included Dr. Josephine Baker, the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health in the United States, and Clara Noyes, president of the American Nurses Association. Other advisors included Caroline Bayard Stevens Wittpenn, a social reformer based out of New Jersey; Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College; Mary Dreier, social reformer, feminist, and philanthropist; Eleanor Elise Robson Belmont, founder of the Metropolitan Opera Guild; and Lillian D. Wald, founder of Henry Street Settlement. Lillian was a frequent speaker at Committee meetings and was a mainstage speaker at the presentation of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs in 1929.

There have always been women involved in RPA, going back to the Regional Surveys of New York and Its Environs. Economists Mabel Newcomer and Faith Williams were principal authors of surveys, which were published between 1927 and 1929 and helped form the foundation of the first Regional Plan. Mabel Newcomer was an economics professor at Vassar College specializing in public finance and overlapping taxes. Later in her career, she was a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and was the only female U.S. delegate to the U.N. Conference at Bretton Woods, the gathering which resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Faith Williams studied at Columbia and her dissertation focused on food industries in the region. Later in her career, she helped develop what would become the U.S. Consumer Price Index and was a Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Names of contributors to the first Regional Plan are listed on the acknowledgements page. Members of the Administration team included Frances Perry, Abby R. Pike, Margaret A. Purdy, Lorraine C. Smith, Loretta P. Hendrick, Ruth A. Hemenway, Inez Price, Dorothy B. Morris, and Cecile Randau. Members of the Engineering Division and Planning team included Kathryn M. Duffy and Lulu Fisher. On the public relations team was Meta D. Osmer and Hilda Reich. According to the oral history of C. McKim Norton, a leader of RPA and son of Charles Dyer Norton, there were several female staff members in the 1930s and 1940s, including at least one landscape architect. For example, Mabel H. Ward was RPA’s secretary and librarian in the 1940s and 1950s. She also served as editor of RPA’s newsletters. Yvonne Wong and Kay Olson were staff librarians that facilitated book purchases and temporary loans in the 1950s and 1960s.

The first female Board member of RPA was Katherine McKim Garrison, wife of Charles Dyer Norton. Katherine joined the RPA Board in the early 1930s. The second was Harriet Barnes Pratt, who was a very engaged member of the RPA Board. She was chairman of the City Planning Commission in Glen Cove, and Board member of several horticultural organizations, including the NY Botanical Garden. She also worked on the 1939 World’s Fair with George McAneny, RPA’s president in the 1930s. The Queens Botanical Garden recounted Harriet’s painstaking care with the World’s Fair:

“On September 21, 1938, a hurricane tore through the Long Island region, within hours of Gardens on Parade being extensively planted. In addition to the damaging effects of wind and rain, the Flushing River rose and made ​“mud ponds of the garden plots.” The next day it was reported that Mrs. Pratt ​“was on the grounds, in boots and old clothes, supervising the work of reconstruction.”

It is unclear, however, if Harriet would’ve been granted RPA board membership on her own merits, or if she was primarily granted access due to her ties to the Pratt family. Harriet was married to Harold Pratt, whose father founded Pratt Institute, and Frederic Pratt, his relative, was one of the original signers of the RPA incorporation paperwork.

Women on the Board would typically be listed under their husbands’ names, making it sometimes difficult to identify them. For example, there is a Mrs. William S. Ladd listed on the Board in the 1930s, who was one of three female Board members, alongside Harriet and Katherine.

Unfortunately, the number of women on the Board stagnated after the 1930s. RPA’s 25th Anniversary Brochure lists all the Board members from 1929 to 1954. In RPA’s first 25 years, there were only three women on the Board - Katherine, Harriet, and Mrs. Ladd. There were also no women listed on the Board of Directors on the Second Regional Plan’s Draft for Discussion – though there were a handful of women on the Committee for the creation of the Second Regional Plan.

It was not until the 1970s that women reappeared on the RPA Board in greater numbers. They include Martha Greenawalt, who was active with the Westchester 2000 project; Verdell Roundtree, an educator and vice president for national programs of the United Negro College Fund; Katharine Elkus White, Mayor of Red Bank, NJ; Yolanda Sanchez of the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs; and Josephine Nieves, head of the Puerto Rican Institute at Brooklyn College at CUNY. In the early 1970s, Verdell, Katharine, and Josephine were all members of the RPA Executive Committee, which guides the strategic directions of RPA. They made up approximately 20% of the Executive Committee at the time.

With regards to staff members and consultants, Judith Kuznets (later Stein) was a planning assistant in the early 1960s. She was the lead on the New Homes 1961 & 1962 bulletin. Also hired around that time was Gay Botway, a receptionist and Nancy Anderson, executive secretary.

Shirley Adelson Siegel partnered with RPA in 1960 to write The Law of Open Space, the first of four publications of the Park, Recreation, and Open Space Project. At the time, Shirley was the Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York and ran the Civil Rights Bureau of the New York State Law Department.

Joan Gordon of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research helped inform RPA’s views on race and poverty in the early 1960s, and her work would go on to shape the tenor of Goals for the Region, the Second Regional Plan, and CHOICES for ​‘76. Administrative staff like Lilly Chin, librarians like Janice Stewart, graphic designers like Barbara Towery and Caroline Jewett, development directors like Pearl Hack, planners like Shirley Sherak, Joan Luster, and Ellen Jeronimo, and economists like Susan Stevens Sullivan helped shepherd the organization through the 1960s and 1970s. Regina Belz Armstrong was RPA’s Chief Economist for several years and the lead author of major reports such as The Region’s Money Flows and Regional Accounts: Structure and Performance of the New York Region’s Economy in the Seventies.

RPA celebrates the accomplishments of these women, and the vital contributions of all women to the field of urban planning.