Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930

How reforms to girlhood education in the Progressive Era cemented inequalities of gender, race, and class in urban school systems.

In Home Work, historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley used education reform to target working-class communities and advocate for th...