Letter to Emma Ward from Herbert Wenzel,
regional Industrial Advisor, August 26, 1944

Emma France Ward, the daughter of Wilbur F. and Emma Albert Ward, was born in Baltimore in 1886. She graduated from Goucher College in 1909; later she received a degree in public health medicine from Johns Hopkins University, and engaged in further studies at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and in Europe. Early in her career Ward did settlement work. In 1931 she was the official delegate from the U.S. Public Health Service and one of three American women out of 500 delegates to attend the 6th International Congress of Accidents and Industrial Diseases in Geneva. Her long government career included appointments with the U.S. Children's Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Internal Revenue Service. During WWII Ward worked for the Maritime Commission as the officer in charge of women workers in shipyards. After the war she worked with the Brookings Institution in Washington until her retirement in 1958. She died of a stroke in Baltimore in 1963.

Papers include biographical information; personal and professional correspondence; articles written by Ward about the health and safety of women workers; and pamphlets, reprints, periodicals and other publications devoted to women industrial workers' health and safety, especially in shipyards. The strength of this collection is its documentation of Ward's career as a woman government bureaucrat during a period in which governmental influence in the regulation of industry increased dramatically. It is also a rich source of information about women workers, especially those in the shipbuilding industry, and especially during the World War II period.