Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930(Historical Studies of Urban America)

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 their middle-class ideals of girlhood and femininity, which could vary depending on the racial or socio-economic backgrounds of the girls. For example, reformers generally encouraged white girls to care for their future families, while pushing Black girls toward becoming domestic workers in others' homes. Using Chicago as a case study, Oram also explores how many of the reforms sought by white women were in response to evolving anxieties about immigration, health, and sexual delinquency. An illuminating addition to the history of urban education in America, Home Work enriches our understanding of educational inequality in twentieth-century schools.

Table of Contents:
Group Abbreviations Introduction: The Girl Problem 1. The “Girl Problem” or the “Servant Problem”?: Policing Girlhood Labor in Illinois Carceral Schools, 1870–1910 2. Fit for Motherhood: Regulating Girlhood Health and Labor in Chicago Public Schools, 1888–1915 3. The Bane of the Tenement: Educating Immigrant Daughters for Scientific Housekeeping, 1890–1910 4. A School Built Around the Girl: Education for Paid and Unpaid Labor in Chicago High Schools, 1900–1915 5. Sex, Spending, and “Going Astray”: Vocational Guidance Counseling for Girls of Legal Working Age, 1910–1920s 6. A Nation of Good Homes: Labor, Citizenship, and Home Economics for American Girls, 1917–1930 Conclusion Acknowledgments Archive Abbreviations Notes Index

About the Author :
Ruby Oram is assistant professor of practice in the Department of History at Texas State University.  

Review :
"Exploring educational sites that range from carceral institutions for girls to public high schools, Ruby Oram’s Home Work broadens our conception of turn-of-the-twentieth-century school reform and our understanding of women’s progressivism. Focused on Chicago as a case study, she analyzes public education as a site of struggle between middle-class women reformers and working-class girls, both Black and white. The outcomes of those struggles, Oram demonstrates, illuminate the sources of gender- and race-inequalities in public education for decades thereafter."   "In Home Work, Oram adds an important new perspective about the history of industrial cities like Chicago. Oram shows that working-class girls flocked to new high schools not for housekeeping and dressmaking classes, but as a base for careers as teachers, nurses, and secretaries.”  “Home Work is ambitious in its wide-ranging analysis, exploring state reformatory education, vocational training for girls, and home economics curricula, among other subjects. It is an important addition to the historical scholarship on urban America, the history of social and education reform in Chicago, and the gendered and classed dimensions of girlhood, womanhood, education, and labor in the industrial era.”