Smith dismissed women and reformers alike until they proved useful

Evidence

However similar their ultimate aims were to turn out to be, Smith had nothing but contempt for typical reformers. Regarding them as wild-eyed, impractical and, most important, incapable of producing results, he called them “crackpots.” Women reformers, he had found, were invariably crackpots. Women, he felt, didn’t belong in politics anyway. In the tight little tenement Irish world in which he lived, most of them confined their interests to their homes and their children, and that was how it should be. He was prepared to listen to his new adviser with no more than token interest. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 406