Mollie orshansky biography samples
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Bronx, New York City, USA
Manhattan, New York City, USA
Biography
Mollie Orshansky's parents, Samuel and Fannie Orshansky, lived in the Ukraine but poverty had encouraged them to seek a better life and they had emigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx. Samuel Orshansky was a plumber and ironworker, but was often unemployed; he and his wife spoke only a little English. The family were Jewish and Mollie was the third of her parents' six daughters. The six girls shared three beds and often had to depend of charity to provide their food. Despite this, Mollie was admitted to Hunter College High School which was set up to educated gifted girls. After graduating from Hunter College High School, Mollie entered Hunter College in 1931 where she majored in mathematics and statistics. She graduated with an A.B. in 1935 and then undertook graduate studies at the American University in Washington D.C. where she also studied economics and statistics at the Department of Agriculture Graduate School.In 1939 Orshansky was appointed as a Research Clerk with the U.S. Children's Bureau. There she worked on topics that meant a lot to her given the poverty of her own childhood, namely biometric studies of child health, growth, and nutrition. In 1942 she was employed as a statistician in the New York City Department of Health where she worked on devising an important survey into pneumonia, collecting data both on its incidence and treatment. She moved to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1945 where she spent thirteen years as a statistician in the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics involved in collecting and analysing data on family expenditure of various kinds, particularly looking at expenditure on food relative to family inco
In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled “Children of the Poor.” “The wonders of science and technology applied to a generous endowment of natural resources have wrought a way of life our grandfathers never knew,” she wrote. “Creature comforts once the hallmark of luxury have descended to the realm of the commonplace, and the marvels of modern industry find their way into the home of the American worker as well as that of his boss. Yet there is an underlying disquietude reflected in our current social literature, an uncomfortable realization that an expanding economy has not brought gains to all in equal measure. It is reflected in the preoccupation with counting the poor—do they number 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million?”
Orshansky’s timing was propitious. In December of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had asked Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to gather statistics on poverty. In early 1963, Heller gave the President a copy of a review by Dwight Macdonald, in The New Yorker, of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” in which Harrington claimed that as many as fifty million Americans were living in penury.
The federal government had never attempted to count the poor, and Orshansky’s paper proposed an ingenious and straightforward way of doing so. Orshansky had experienced poverty firsthand. Born in the South Bronx in 1915, she was one of six daughters of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who barely spoke English. Her father, a plumber and ironworker, was often unemployed, and Orshansky and her sisters wore hand-me-downs and slept two to a bed. Sometimes the family stood in relief lines to collect food. Nevertheless, Orshansky attended Hunter College High School, which was then a school for gifted girls, and went on to Hunter College, where s in: People by Gordon M. Fisher Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 68 No. 3, 2008 Introduction: In a federal government career that lasted more than four decades, Mollie Orshansky worked for the Children’s Bureau, the Department of Agriculture, the Social Security Administration, and other agencies. While working at the Social Security Administration during the 1960s, she developed the poverty thresholds that became the federal government’s official statistical measure of poverty; her thresholds remain a major feature of the architecture of American social policy and are widely known internationally. Mollie Orshansky was born in New York City in 1915, the daughter of immigrants from what is now Ukraine (Chan 2006, 4; Cassidy 2006, 42). Although her father worked hard at a number of different jobs, Mollie and her sisters grew up poor—in her words, the family could “barely…make ends meet” (Social Security Administration 1971, 15–16; Hadnot 1999). Mollie remembered going with her mother to stand in relief lines to get surplus food. As she was to say later, “If I write about the poor, I don’t need a good imagination—I have a good memory” (Eaton 1970, 24). Her experience also gave her first-hand awareness that it is possible to work full-time and still be poor (Burke and Burke 1974, 12). Mollie was both the first high school graduate and the first college graduate in her family; she graduated from Hunter College in 1935 with an A.B. in mathematics and statistics. Later, after she started working as a federal employee in Washington, she took graduate courses in economics and statistics at the Department of Agriculture Graduate School and at American University. Mollie started her first job in 1935, working i Mollie Orshansky, Statistician, Dies at 91
Mollie Orshansky, a statistician and economist who in the 1960s developed the federal poverty line, a measurement that shaped decades of social policy and welfare programs, died Dec. 18 at her home in Manhattan, a family member said yesterday. She was 91.
The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, said a niece, Eda F. Shapiro. She said the family had not immediately announced the death because of concerns over a long-running legal dispute in Washington over Miss Orshansky's estate. Miss Orshansky was buried a day after her death in Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, Ms. Shapiro said.
Miss Orshansky, whose parents had known poverty in Ukraine, worked for the Social Security Administration from 1958 until she retired in 1982. She was "one of a respected but mostly invisible cadre of women research professionals based at S.S.A. and other government agencies during the postwar years," the historian Alice O'Connor wrote in "Poverty Knowledge," a 2001 history of poverty research.
"These women," Ms. O'Connor wrote, "found job opportunities in federal government and other 'applied' endeavors when university jobs were largely closed off to them, although within government they were often clustered in research bureaus focusing on such traditional 'women's' concerns as social welfare, female labor force participation, families and children, and home economics. That experience as a career government statistician, a far cry from systems analysis, was what gave Orshansky the wholly unexpected designation as author of the government's official poverty line."
In 1963 and 1964, Miss Orshansky conducted the research that would become the basis of the poverty thresholds. She used the economy food plan -- the cheapest of four "nutritionally adequate" food plans developed by the Department of Agriculture -- and multiplied the dollar costs by roughly three to come up with a minimum cost-of-living estimate. (A household food Orshansky, Mollie
Remembering Mollie Orshansky—The Developer of the Poverty Thresholds