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.”
The “City Slave Girls” exposé launched the child labor reform movement in Chicago and brought national attention to the brutal factory conditions endured by young workers in industrial cities. Cusack, however, said nothing about labor legislation in her twenty-three-part series. Instead, Cusack concluded “City Slave Girls” with a call to reform Chicago’s public schools. She warned readers that factory girls would exit the workforce unprepared for motherhood without “practical education” for the home. She urged school officials to introduce hands-on classes that taught girls “to cook, to sew, to mend, to mind their children, and to care for their own health.” In her final article, Cusack argued that public schools had a responsibility to reform their curriculum in service of the urban working girl. “What the shop-girl and factory-girl needs is training,” she wrote, “training that the scholastic stuffing of our public schools does not supply.”
Home Work highlights how women’s groups reformed public schools to regulate the labor lives of working-class girls following during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using Chicago as a case study, the book argues that women reformers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley viewed schools as tools for social reform in urban America. They lobbied for mandatory school attendance laws to protect “the growing girl” from industrial labor after Cusack’s reporting. Chicago’s wealthy “clubwomen” demanded seats on the Board of Education and introduced new courses like domestic science, hygiene, and childcare into the girls’ curriculum. After World War I, college-educated Chicago women secured new positions with federal agencies to bring wage-earning girls back into the school system through mandatory “continuation” classes. The reformers highlighted in Home Work created careers for themselves by using public education to regulate how working-class girls made their legal transition from school to work.
The book uncovers how these efforts to “protect” girls from industrial capitalism ultimately segregated urban education by gender, race, and class. Chicago’s women reformers contributed to racial inequality in public education through their demands for girl-centered vocational courses, attendance policies, and guidance programs. Each of their initiatives positioned American-born daughters of immigrants as the most vulnerable children in industrial cities and therefore the worthiest of state investment. The women highlighted in Home Work rendered the labor of Black girls invisible or, at the very least, outside the scope of public school attention. Women-led reforms to the vocational curriculum reinforced racial disparities in Chicago’s female workforce by training Black girls for paid domestic service while encouraging immigrant daughters to envision futures as full-time American homemakers. Home Work explores these complexities to reveal how the use of schooling to solve the “girl problem” created new educational inequalities that persisted throughout the twentieth century.
Ruby Oram is assistant professor of practice in the Department of History at Texas State University. Her new book Home Work is now available from the University of Chicago Press.