Cohen, Lucy Kramer

Economist, anthropologist.

Lucy Kramer Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from Barnard College in 1928, and earned her Master's degree in 1929 in mathematics and anthropology at Columbia University. She married Felix S. Cohen, a lawyer, in 1931, and they had two daughters, Karen and Gene. Kramer Cohen worked as an unpaid assistant with her husband in the United States Department of the Interior, helping to draft the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and The Handbook of Federal Indian Law in 1942. She was on the staff of Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-Calif.) during Douglas's three terms in the House from 1944 to 1950. Kramer Cohen also worked for the War Labor Board, the Office of Price Administration, the State Department and the Public Health Service, where she wrote and edited reports in its office of data analysis and management. She also did research work for anthropologists in Washington in between her government jobs, and did researching and writing for Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. She collected, edited, and published her husband's work as The Legal Conscience (New Haven, Yale University Press: 1960) after his death in 1953. She served on the board of directors of the Association on American Indian Affairs from 1961 to 1994. Kramer Cohen officially retired from the federal government in 1977, but continued to work on contract until her actual retirement in 1989. In her later years, she took up drawing and painting, and served as editor of the Washington Watercolor Association newsletter. She died of a stroke in 2007.