Middle West US

The Dark Side of Reform: Child Labor, School Reform, and Inequality in Public Education

March 11, 2026

By Ruby Oram

Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 demonstrates how a girl-centered school reform movement in Chicago cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in public education.

This history starts in 1888 when a twenty-five-year-old “lady reporter” for the Chicago Times, Helen Cusack, went undercover as a factory girl in Chicago’s garment district. Disguised in “the rags of poverty,” Cusack spent a month working alongside immigrant daughters as young as twelve who stitched corsets, trimmed winter cloaks, and sewed buttons on blouses. She spoke to girl seamstresses with “deathly pale faces” who worked elbow to elbow on a diet of cold coffee and black bread. She interviewed twelve-year-old girls in another “slave-grinding hell-hole” who worked ten-hour days wearing shoes held together with thread and tape. For a month, Cusack’s accounts of “miserable girlhood” appeared daily on the front pages of the Chicago Times and the New York World under the sensational title “City Slave Girls.”