Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Gilded Age, 1870 – 1900

• Growing Economy
  • Rapid industrialization
  • Big business
  • Government corruption
• Immigration
• Urbanization

Progressive Era, 1890s – 1920s

• Goals for Progressive Reformers
  • Protect social welfare
  • Promote moral improvement
  • Create economic reform
• Popularized by literature
  • Expose inequities, corruption and other problems plaguing society
• Muckrakers – authors who exposed corruption

Ida Tarbell

• Investigative Reporter
• Exposed Standard Oil for unfair practices
• The Business of Being a Woman 1912
• The Ways of Women 1915

Urbanization

• Work drew people into towns and cities
  • National pop. doubled between 1860 and 1910
  • Urban pop. doubled each decade

Family Unit

• Immigrants identified with their own ethnic group
• Creation of ethnic ghettos
• The condition of these neighborhoods added to anti-immigrant sentiment from WASPs White Anglo Saxon Protestants

Immigrant Girls

• Young unmarried immigrants or the daughters of immigrants
  • Factory work, mill work, domestic work
  • 3 out of 4 were under 25

Immigrant Women

• Married women rarely took full-time work outside of the home
• They took in piecework or boarders
• By 1900 1 out of 5 urban homes took in boarders

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

• Worked to end the sale and use of alcohol
• The vote would help women pass local laws against alcohol
• National Consumers League
  • Consumer power
  • Florence Kelly
  • Child labor
  • Food safety

Child Labor

• Children worked
  • Tenement manufacture
  • Textile factories
  • Mining / quarrying
  • Agriculture

Child Labor Movement

• Rise of the middle class
• Changing attitude towards children
• New focus on childhood as a special age
• Education important but not accessible to all children
• Reformers public demonstrations against child labor

National Child Labor Committee

• Founded by Addams, 1907
  • Lillian Wald
  • Florence Kelly
  • Federal child labor law was passed, 1916

Opposition

• Male union members did not want interference between the labor-capital relationship
• Parents 
  • Wanted children to work
  • Families needed the income
  • Not all families expected their children attend school
• Business
  • Source of abundant source of cheap labor
  • Size meant they could fit into small spaces
  • Were easy to control / take advantage of

Invisible Labor

• Domestic labor continued for women even when they joined the paid labor force.
• “Invisible work” work that women did that was unrecorded and not included in the census
  • This includes work they did for pay at home

Factory Work

• Textile industry
• Assemble shirtwaists
• Insufficient wages
• Long hours
• Unsafe conditions
• Locked doors
• Girls and women provided their own basic materials

Women and Labor Unions

• Men’s unions excluded women from joining 
• A threat to male workers
  • Thought women’s work to be temporary
  • Thought to reduce men’s wages
  • Fear of pushing men out of work
• Ideal of domesticity
  • Women shouldn’t work
  • Although it was necessary for the poor

Labor Strikes

• Women were  involved in labor strikes although initially not part of an organized unions
• In time, women formed their own unions

Mary Harris Jones – “Mother Jones”

• Labor Activist
  • Worked with Knights of Labor
  • Gave inspirational speeches to workers during strikes
• A founder of the Social Democratic Party 1898
• Helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World 1905
• Some quotes
  • “I’m not a humanitarian.  I’m a hell-raiser”
  •  “Sit down and read.  Educate yourself for the coming conflicts”
  • “Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.”

Clara Lemlich, 1886 – 1982

• Factory worker
• Labor activist
• Jewish immigrant from Ukraine
• International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union

Uprising of 20,000

• Great New York Shirtwaist Strike
• Nov 1909 – Feb 1910
• Settled with improved: 
  • Hours
  • Working conditions
  • Wages

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

• March 25, 1911
• 145 workers killed
• Brought attention to sweatshop conditions

Protective Laws

• By 1914, 27 states regulated women’s hours
• By 1920, 15 states set minimum wage laws
• Laws did protect women but also limited them in many ways