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Hidden Laborers: Female Day Workers in Detroit, 1870–19201

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Kyle E. Ciani
Kyle E. Ciani
Affiliation:
Illinois State University
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On October 1, 1898, twenty-year-old laborer Peter Dumbrowski married Lettie, a girl from his Detroit neighborhood. Both of their Polish immigrant families had left their new Canadian homes in 1881, joining thousands of other families who had already moved south for the promise of good wages in an emerging city. The following summer, at the age of seventeen, Lettie gave birth to their first daughter and would soon be pregnant with a son. Peter earned enough as a metalworker to support the small family as well as make a down payment toward the purchase of a six-room home on the west side. By Peter's fortieth birthday, he could claim that he made thirty dollars a week at one of Detroit's most important employers of men, Timken Detroit Axle. His eldest son, now sixteen, contributed to the family economy most of his salary (twenty dollars per week) from another key operation, Insulated Wire Works.

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Essays
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 23 - 51
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Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

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References

2 These migrations are assessed in the Journal of American Ethnic History 20 (Spring 2001) by Faires, NoraGoogle Scholar, “Poor Women, Proximate Border: Migrants from Ontario to Detroit in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 88–109; and Ramirez, Bruno, “Canada in the United States: Perspectives on Migration and Continental History,” 50–70Google Scholar.

3 Quote defining day work found in Associated Charities Research Bureau (ACRB), “Districting Detroit: For the Use of Employment Substations Furnishing Day-Work, Preliminary Report,” April 18, 1917, in United Community Services Central Files Collection, Series I, Agencies-Members, [hereafter UCS], Box 5, folder 11, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs and University Archives, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University [hereafter Reuther]

4 Katzman, David, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana, 1981), 87.Google ScholarHe also notes that “in the metropolitan cities of Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, New York City, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, the proportion of servants who were married changed from being below that of female wage earners who were married in 1900 to being above it in 1920.” For details of married women entering the paid workforce, especially as domestics see,Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth, Uving In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, 1994)Google Scholar;Kleinberg, S. J., The Shadow of the Mills: Working-Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870–1907 (Pittsburgh, 1989)Google Scholar;Cooper, Patricia A., Once a Cigar Maker Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar;Deutsch, Sarah, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Pleck, Elizabeth, Black Migration and Poverty, Boston 1865–1900 (New York, 1979).Google ScholarThe history of African American domestic women in Southern cities, especially Atlanta, is analyzed by Hunter, Tera W., To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 In 1919, the Detroit Associated Charities published a study by sociologists Arthur Evans Woods and Harry L. Lurie, Trouble Cases: A Study of the More Difficult Family Problems and the Work Upon Them of 'the Detroit Agencies. The authors drew from a pool of 30,000 families recorded by social welfare agencies in a single year in Detroit (August 1916 to August 1917) and reviewed the cases of families who were known to at least five agencies during that year. That limitation yielded 752 families for a total of 4,635 records. This study [hereafter Trouble Cases] is located in the UCS Studies and Reports Collection, Box 7, Reuther. Family names used in Trouble Cases were changed, and I employ that fictitious name when I refer to a family in the report. Only a sampling of cases (those that most represented a particular issue) made their way into Trouble Cases. I have reviewed the raw data from which this report was devised and draw from some of those cases in my analysis. Those files are located in UCS Collection, Series III, Box 19, Case Studies 1919 [hereafter, UCS Cases]. I have also created fictitious names and supply the case number as assigned by the Associated Charities recorder. Thus, the “Dumbrowski” family is UCS Cases 19–10, #7227.

6 The work of Heidi Hartmann opened the field of labor history to this insight. See “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1976): 137–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 In her study of the development of mothers' pensions, Joanne L. Goodwin explains the varying views that reformers advocated in supporting “paid motherhood” while positing the principle of motherhood as a dependent characteristic. In all reform circles, mothers were to dedicate their lives to raising children who would become strong citizens and not to earning wages; that role was to fall to their husbands. See , Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago, 1997), 21–55.Google ScholarAn excellent theoretical discussion of dependency is Fraser, Nancy and Gordon, Linda, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19 (1994): 309–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 ACRB, “Districting Detroit,” 1.

9 The literature on Henry Ford's influence in labor relations is extensive, but Martha May's analysis of the company's effect on strengthening male dominance in the workforce is a classic study of the family wage mentality in the twentieth century. See May, Martha, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day,” Feminist Studies 8 (Summer 1982): 399–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 From street protests to leisure zones, the struggles and opportunities for Michigan workers have a decidedly male cast in much of the literature. Visual expressions of Detroit as labor's masculine domain abound as well; one need only view the muscled assembly line workers in Diego Rivera's depression-era mural, “Detroit Industry,” at the Detroit Institute of Arts to understand the powerful connection between men and the work force. Mike Smith's essay is an excellent overview of this subject:“‘Let's Make Detroit a Union Town’: The History of Labor and the Working Class in the Motor City,” Michigan Historical Review 27 (Fall 2001): 157–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also Babson, Steve, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (Detroit, 1986).Google ScholarExamples of scholarship focusing on female attempts to unionize include Cobble, Dorothy Sue, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1991)Google Scholar;Deslippe, Dennis A., “Rights, Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80 (Urbana, 2000)Google Scholar; and Gabin, Nancy, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, 1990)Google Scholar.

11 UCS Cases 19–5, #960.

12 Data on workers in Detroit's manufacturing sector during this period is analyzed in Oestreicher, Richard, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar; and Zunz, Olivier, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanisation, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1982).Google ScholarSee , Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, 3–7Google Scholar, for figures on 1900.

13 Hill, Joseph A., “Table 156: Percentage of Women Engaged in Gainful Occupations, Classified by Marital Condition, for Cities of 100,000 Inhabitants or More: 1920, 1910, and 1900,” in Census Monographs, IX: Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920 (Washington, DC, 1920), 31 and 250Google Scholar; Michigan State Bureau of Labor Statistics,Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics (Lansing, 1892), 144Google Scholar; and , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 94Google Scholar.

14 On enumerators classifying work see Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, especially chapter 6, “A Statistical Representation of Work: La Statistique de l'industrie a Paris, 1847–1848.”

15 For example,Gabaccia, Donna R., From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, 1984)Google Scholar.

16 Boris, Eileen, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge, 1994), 151.Google Scholar

17 Use of such sources is not a new methodology for understanding working-class networks, and in particular, how immigrants sought assistance from benevolent and public institutions. For Detroit see the works of Nora Faires, David Katzman, Richard Oestreicher, Victoria W. Wolcott, and Olivier Zunz cited elsewhere in this essay. A sampling of scholar-ship that uses casework evidence to analyze the lives of women in the work force includes:Alexander, Ruth M., The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca and London, 1995)Google Scholar;Broder, Sherri, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelpia, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988)Google Scholar;Iacovetta, Franca and Mitchinson, Wendy, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Odem, Mary E., Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar;Rose, Elizabeth, A Mother's Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Stadum, Beverly, Poor Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases, 1900–1930 (Albany, 1992)Google Scholar; and Strange, Carolyn, Toronto's “Girl Problem”: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 I owe a tremendous debt to staff at the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library [hereafter Burton], especially former director John Gibson, who gave me full access to the Franklin-Wright Manuscript Collection [hereafter FW] prior to its permanent processing. Consequently, readers should be aware that citations in this essay might differ from any current catalogue or finding aid.

19 Analyses of these reforms is voluminous but a sampling includes Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children; Clapp, Elizabeth J., Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park, 1998)Google Scholar;Crocker, Ruth Hutchinson, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana and Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar;Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1870–1935 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar;Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Matemalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993)Google Scholar;Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar.

20 David Katzman, S. J. Kleinberg, and Elizabeth Pleck do this on a much larger scale in their monographs on domestic workers and family economies. See note 4 for full citations of their analyses.

21 Historians of female wage earners have noted how women often exchanged important information about how best to provide for their families in such public spaces as the door-step, daily market, and church. See Cameron, Ardis, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar;, Deutsch, Women and the CityGoogle Scholar;, Hunter, To Joy My FreedomGoogle Scholar; and Ross, Ellen, Love & Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

22 “Detroit in the Van,” American Federalist II (December 1895): 188Google Scholar; Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers (Commons),“Cost of Living in American Towns: Report of an Enquiry by the Board of Trade,” (1911): 173–81.Google Scholar

23 Leslie, Genevieve, “Domestic Service in Canada, 1880–1920,” in Women at Work: Ontario, 1850–1930, eds. Acton, Janice, Goldsmith, Penny, and Shepard, Bonnie (Toronto, 1974): 71–125.Google ScholarData is sketchy for the 1870s; however, the Sixth Canadian Census reports that in 1891, 41 percent of the female workforce in Canada labored as domestic servants. Leslie argues that the foundations for these figures date to the 1870s.

24 Calculations found in , Katzman, Seven Days a Week, Tables A–5 and A–6 on pages 286–87Google Scholar; and , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 70–71Google Scholar.

25 See Leashore, Bogart R., “Black Female Workers: Live-In Domestics in Detroit, Michigan, 1860–1880,” Phylon (June 1984): 111–20, esp. pp. 114)Google Scholar; and Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985), 155–56Google Scholar.

26 , Leashore, “Black Female Workers,” 113.Google Scholar

27 , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 63–64.Google Scholar

28 Similar sorts of associations appeared throughout the United States. See Meyerowitz, Joanne J., Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar.

29 , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 63–64.Google Scholar

30 Wolcott, Victoria W., Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, 2001), 43.Google Scholar

31 , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 70–71.Google Scholar

32 Zunz calculated that “in 1880, 28 percent of all households were headed by an immi-grant from Germany,” in Changing Face of Inequality, 34.

33 Elizabeth Clark-Lewis found that for African-American women living in Washington, D.C. at the turn of the century “looking for day work was a hallmark of personal triumph.” African-American women moved from live-in service to day work through a process they called “getting set” during which time they learned to set more money aside and became familiar with their environs by riding the streetcars., Clark-Lewis, Uvingln, Living Out, 134–36Google Scholar, quote on p. 34. The shifting from live-in service to day work became noticeable in communities experiencing cultural shifts from the Great Migration. For instance, according to Ruth Crocker, African-American domestics in Indianapolis began living out in the 1920s., Crocker, Social Work and Social Order, 89.Google ScholarSee Hunter's, TeraTo Joy My Freedom, 57–65Google Scholarfor analysis of such resistance by African-American domestic workers in the late-nineteenth-century South.

34 , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 156.Google Scholar

35 , Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, 9–10.Google Scholar

36 Starting in the early 1880s, local newspapers such as the Labor Leaf and Detroit Evening News cited prevalent safety violations including poor ventilation, broken machinery, structural damage, and the practice of employers locking in their employees. Additionally, the papers reported infractions of newly passed child labor laws as well as uncivil relations with employers. See State of Michigan,Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics (Lansing, 1885), 91Google Scholar;, Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 229Google Scholar; and , Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, 16–20Google Scholar.

37 Exceptions did occur. For examples of girls as young as fourteen earning their own way in Detroit, see Cases 9 and 142 of the National Federation of Settlements, Case Studies ofUnemployment, located in the Social Welfare History Archives, Clark Library, University of Minnesota [hereafter SWHA].

38 Zunz, , Changing Face of Inequality, 229.Google Scholar

39 , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, “Table 11.2: DAC and BPC recipients by place of birth, Detroit, 1891–1901,” p. 271.Google Scholar

40 As historians of religion in Detroit make clear, ethnicity and race were critical elements in establishing parishes and elementary schools, and that same principle applies to the expansion of day care in Detroit. For instance, the United Jewish Charities of Detroit (UJCD) established a kindergarten just two years after the organization formed in 1899, and a gift from UJCD President, Bernard Ginsburg, in 1903, allowed them to open the Ida E. Ginsburg Day Nursery. Like most day nurseries, it operated from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., but unlike Protestant and Catholic nurseries, it closed Saturday (for Sabbath reverence) and Sunday. Prior to the creation of the UJCD, the Beth El Hebrew Relief Society, Self-Help Circle, Hebrew Ladies Serving Society, and the Jewish Relief Society of Shaarey Zedek operated independendy. The UJCD brought these charities under one roof to eliminate duplication of efforts. See Rockaway, Robert A., The Jews of Detroit: From the Beginning, 1762–1914 (Detroit, 1986), 104–05.Google ScholarFor a thorough examination of Catholic influences in the city see Tender, Leslie, Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit, 1990)Google Scholar, and Vinyard, JoEllen McNergney, For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805–1925 (Urbana, 1998).Google ScholarBrian Wilson describes the literature on religion in Detroit in “The Spirit of the Motor City: Three Hundred Years of Religious History in Detroit,” Michigan Historical Review 27 (Spring 2001): 21–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also Elizabeth Rose's study of Philadelphia day care, A Mother's Job, for a careful analysis of how religion and ethnicity defined how day care operations grew in that community.

41 Figures taken from “Table 5.3: Ethnic Groups, Detroit, 1900,”, Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 104Google Scholar.

42 Between 1910 and 1920, over 528,000 people moved to Detroit; American migrants totaled 412,000 or 78 percent of these newcomers. See Bolkosky, Sidney, Harmony and Dissonance: Voice of Jewish Identity in Detroit, 1914–1967 (Detroit, 1991)Google Scholar;Griffin, Farah Jasmine, “Who Set you Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Hine, Darlene Clark, HineSight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Brooklyn, 1994)Google Scholar;Thomas, Richard W., Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington, 1992)Google Scholar;Vargas, Zaragosa, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933 (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar; and Wolcott, Remaking Respectability. The migration of Southern whites displaced from tenant farming is the least studied. See Carey, John W., “A History of the Brightmoor Community Center,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1941)Google Scholar.

43 My numbers culled from documents in the FW, UCS, and Federation of Settlements and Day Nursery Collection [hereafter NFSDN] in SWHA. Judith Ann Trolander and Janet Langlois explain day care at Detroit settlement houses, but because they deal with different time periods than the scope of this essay, their numbers differ from mine and from each other. See , Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression (Detroit, 1975), 161–62Google Scholar; and , Langlois, Serving Children Then and Now: An Oral History of Early Childhood Education and Day Care in Metropolitan Detroit (Detroit, 1989), 7Google Scholar.

44 As is typical in such groups, documents usually refer to Ella Hammond as “Mrs. George H. Hammond.” We know little about her, more about her husband. Born in Ohio in 1855, George came to Detroit at the age of seven. He founded Winn and Hammond Printing at the age of thirty. The company employed 125 people in 1900. See Appendix 6 (The Leaders of Detroit's Industrialization) in , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 446–47.Google ScholarI stumbled upon Ella Hammond's first name buried in a footnote on page 2 of “The Story of Franklin Setdement,” a type-script history with no author or date (although probably ca. 1938 since language refers to the “recent” move to a new facility which transpired in 1938), in UCS, Box 37, folder 15.

45 “The Story of Franklin Setdement"Google Scholar;, Langlois, Serving Children Then and Now, 5Google Scholar; and McClymer, John F., “Gender and the ‘American Way of life’: Women in the Americanization Movement,” Journal of American Ethnic History 9–10 (Spring 1991): 3–20Google Scholar.

46 Franklin Street Settlement Annual Reports for 1912–13, 1915–16; and 1916–17. All found in UCS, Box 37, folder 10.

47 “The Story of Franklin Setdement,” UCS.

48 , Vinyard, For Faith and Fortune, 103.Google Scholar

49 The Sophie B. Wright Day Nursery and Kindergarten, FW, Box 1, folder 3.

50 Whereas tobacco strippers earned $117 per year, capsule makers such as the young, white women who worked in the Parke, Davis and Company pharmaceutical, made almost double that amount, $207, in a year. See , Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 229, 232Google Scholar; and Oestreichet, Solidarity and Fragmentation, photo caption following page 102.

51 For instance, after male workers in a tobacco factory strike in 1896 failed to block hiring females, their employment rose in Detroit until the total number of women working in the city's tobacco factories reached 10,000 in 1915. All the while, the percentage of married women in Detroit's cigar factories increased from less than one percent in 1900 to 22.4 percent by 1920. In those same twenty years, the percentage of Polish female tobacco workers aged twenty-five years or younger dropped from 92.8 to 64.2 percent as married women with children entered the factory. See , Cooper, Once a Cigamaker, 190–94.Google Scholar

53 History of the East Side Settlement of Detroit, Michigan, 1907 in FW, Box 1, folder 3 (History 1884–1945).

53 For instance, by 1910, Franklin Street staff daily placed an average of twenty women in day work positions; and in 1915, Wright reports indicate average day work placements of fifteen women each day. Franklin Street Settlement Annual Report, 1910–11 in UCS, Box 37, folder 10 (Franklin Setdement; Annual Report, 1910–17, 1935, 1955, 1955); and Sophie B. Wright Day Nursery and Kindergarten in UCS, Box 67, folder 4 (Sophie Wright Settlement; Annual Report 1915–16, 1950–51).

54 East Side Settlement House: A Neighborhood Center, 1909; and The Sophie B. Wright Day Nursery and Kindergarten, FW, Box 1, folder 3.

55 Sophie B. Wright Day Nursery and Kindergarten, 1911, FW, Box 1, folder 3.

56 Wrigley, Julia, “Children's Caregivers and Ideologies of Parental Inadequacy,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives, eds. Abel, Emily K. and Nelson, Margaret K. (Albany, 1990): 291.Google Scholar

57 Horn, Margo, “The Moral Message of Child Guidance, 1925–45,” Journal of Social History 18 (Fall 1984): 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Research Bureau of the Detroit Associated Charities and Visiting Housekeeper Association, “Report of Mothers' Pensions and Family Budgets,” [hereafter “MP Report"] September 21, 1918 in UCS, Box 5, folder 11.

59 , Faires, “Poor Women, Proximate Border,” 89.Google Scholar

60 , Hunter, To Joy My Freedom, 132Google Scholar; and Leashore who explains agent responses in Detroit in “Black Female Workers,” 118.

61 In Remaking Respectability, 72, Wolcott explains that while job opportunities for African-American women expanded in Detroit slightly during the interwar period (1917–1941) to include “‘legitimate’ entrepreneurial endeavors” such as operating beauty shops and neighborhood groceries, day work proved vital to the survival of African-American families living in the city prior to World War I.

62 ACRB, “Districting Detroit,” 3.

63 Young Women's Christian Association, “Detroit YWCA Annual Statement, 1914,” 17–20 in UCS, Box 68, folder 17.

64 Michigan Free Employment Bureau figures in UCS, Box 5, folder 14.

65 Triennial Report, 1913–16,” no author, no date, in UCS, Box 5, folder 14.

66 ACRB, “Districting Detroit,” 1.

67 I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for pointing out Judith Sealander's important counter to other scholarship on mothers’ pension. In it, Sealander explains how analysts at private foundations such as Mary Richmond with the Russell Sage Foundation engaged in active debates with reformers connected to public concerns such as the Children's Bureau regarding the effectiveness of assistance programs like mothers’ pensions. In assessing a sample population of 985 widows from the nation's twenty largest charity organization societies reporting findings to the foundation (Detroit was not among this data), Richmond “concluded that paid outside work provided the best supplement to the aid given widows from either private or public sources. Any measures that forbade such work constituted bad policy.”, Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore, 1997), quote on page 114Google Scholar.

68 Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1992), 444.Google ScholarSee also pages 548–49 of her Appendix Two.

69 , Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 424–79 (quote from 465).Google Scholar

70 Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana, 1994), 149Google Scholar; and , Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 467Google Scholar.

71 Sanders, Claire M., “Parental Education in the Mothers’ Pension Department of Detroit,” 63–66Google Scholar, in Box 26, folder 5 (Conferences; Parental Education, 1926), of the Merrill-Palmer Kresge Historical Library Collection, [hereafter MPK], Reuther.

72 “MP Report.” Unless otherwise noted, all figures regarding mothers’ pensions in Michigan during this period come from this report.

73 , Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 43.Google Scholar

74 Mink, Gwendolyn, Wages ofMotherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, 1995), 49–51.Google Scholar

75 , Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 12.Google Scholar

76 , Sanders, “Parental Education,” 65.Google Scholar

77 The School's programs are detailed in Ciani, Kyle Emily, “Training Young Women in the ‘Service’ of Motherhood: Early Childhood Education at Detroit's Merrill-Palmer School, 1920–1940,” Michigan Historical Review 24 (Spring 1998): 103–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 See Catherine M. Brown, “Study of Nutrition Problems of Different Nationalities, 1922–1923,” and Leila McGuire, “Classes for Foreign Groups, January 1924-January 1925,” in Box 37, folder 3 (Foreign Born; Reports, 1921–35), MPK; and Sanders, “Parental Education,” 63–66.

79 According to Claire M. Sanders, Chief Probation Officer of the Michigan Juvenile Division of the Probate Court, children had to reside with their mother, and upon inspection by a pension worker, the mother “must [have been] found suitable or trainable.” Pension officers scrutinized families to uncover any signs of “poor discipline and poor child training, bad housekeeping, ill health, or badly adjusted financial arrangements.” If homes displayed any of the above conditions, the pension officer had the authority to enlist experts from Legal Aid, the Visiting Housekeeper Association, or the Wayne County Psychopathic Clinic to regulate the family's behavior. Sanders, “Parental Education,” 64.

80 “MP Report,” Part II, 8.

81 , Sanders, “Parental Education,” 65.Google Scholar

82 In Detroit, a stenographer's salary was second only to a tobacco hand worker who could earn as much as $648 per year, and accessible in the 1910s to only native-born, white young women. Margery W. Davies explains the transition of clerical work from a male to female profession as well as race and age issues in Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter. Office Work and Office Workers.1870–1930 (Philadelphia, 1982)Google Scholar.

83 UCS Cases 19–1, #1.

84 Lunbeck, Elizabeth, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, 1994).Google Scholar

85 UCS Cases 19–10, #7912.

86 Untitled type-script in FW, Box 1, folder 3.

87 “History of Mother's Clubs,” no author, no date, in FW, Box 1, folder 2 (History).

88 On domestic violence in working class life, see Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers and Neglected Children; Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Liver,Nadelhaft, Jerome, “Wife Torture: A Known Phenomenon in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American Culture 10 (1987): 39–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and , Ross, Love & ToilGoogle Scholar.

89 , Iacovetta and , Mitchinson, “Social History and Case Files Research,” in On the Case, 6.Google Scholar