Abstract
This microhistory is a study of one woman's efforts in New York City between 1907 and 1911 to join the efforts of three local feminist organizations—Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL)—that were combining the energies of women from the industrial working class, middle class, and upper class in sustained drives to improve the working conditions and wages of women factory and steam laundry workers. One woman who devoted herself to these three organizational cross-class initiatives was Carola Woerishoffer (1885–1911). Microhistory is a method of studying the past that makes use of remnants of evidence still available about people, organizations, or communities that have been partially or completely forgotten.
Keywords
This microhistory is a study of one woman's efforts in New York City between 1907 and 1911 to join the efforts of three local feminist organizations that were combining the energies of women from the industrial working class, middle class, and upper class in sustained drives to improve the working conditions and wages of women factory and steam laundry workers. One woman who devoted herself to these three organizational cross-class initiatives was Carola Woerishoffer, hereafter referred to as “Woerishoffer”. She was born in 1885 into a New York City family of considerable material wealth secured by her father's foresighted investments in railroad stocks (Berson, 1994, p.315; Recchiuti, 2015).
There are three purposes of this study. First, I hope to demonstrate the value of microhistorical research for expanding social work knowledge about mezzo- and macro-structures and processes at play in the lives of individuals of earlier times who are no longer alive to speak or write for themselves. Second, I want to spotlight examples of cross-class feminist organizations that had a constructive impact on the life chances of female factory laborers. Finally, my intention is to illuminate the accomplishments of a feminist—Woerishoffer—whose early death in the line of duty made it unlikely for later generations to know about her work.
What is Microhistory?
Microhistory is a method of studying the past that concentrates on slim segments of research data (Gamsa, 2017, p. 240). The subject might be a single event, a brief portion of an individual or family's life, or a minor slice of the history of an institution, organization, or process. Frequently, microhistories are rooted in fragments or remnants of historical data. They might rely upon small slivers of historical materials that constitute the only remaining records concerning a person, organization, movement, or act. In this one respect, microhistory resembles archaeology in that it inductively and deductively generates concepts, representations, and relationships about a past time and place from minute bits of formerly buried evidence. Microhistory has become an especially important research method since its origins at the end of the 1970s in recovering and interpreting information about historically neglected individuals, groups, and entities whose voices and memories are the least likely to be written down, archived, published, photographed, or recorded.
Microhistory has “. . . the capacity to bring social and cultural history together, as an approach that can both supply the explanations of social history and grasp the meanings of cultural history within a single very circumscribed investigation [my emphasis added]. . . All this can only be brought together, without running the risk of over-simplifying the past, when historians investigate a narrowly defined subject” [my emphasis added] (Magnusson and Szijarto, 2013, p. 7).
Scott W. Stern writes that “Microhistory is more intensive and focused than a survey, more far-reaching in its implications than a case study, and more centered on those at “the bottom” than most biographies. It utilizes a single incident to make a broader point about society. It is one of the most powerful methodologies that historians have to engage with the public, tell a story, and still make an argument about the past and present” (Stern, 2020, pp. 128–129).
Similarly, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia asserts that microhistory is frequently based on narratives shared by common people and elite individuals that reveal local and regional power relationships, social forms of stratification and inequality, community contours and tensions, and recurring or exceptional topics of discontent. In Moreno Garcia's words, microhistorians rely on “. . . anecdotal information that might cast . . . unexpected light on ordinary events and everyday activities, as well as on places frequented by both common people and the elite, revealing factors that tie together a community, or exposing informal mechanisms of authority, resistance, sociocultural identity, and political participation . . . ” (Moreno Garcia, 2018, p. 2).
An example of a microhistory relevant to twenty-first-century critical feminists is Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (Davis, 1983). This compelling book, which was made into an acclaimed French film, was based on a sixteenth-century archival record stored in a village's church archive in the French Pyrenees. Historian Davis artfully told the story of a peasant woman, Bertrande Guerre, whose husband, Martin, had gone away to war. Eight to nine years later, a man claiming to be Martin Guerre came to the village and moved in with Bertrande and her children. A few years later, he was charged with fraud and adultery by his uncle. A trial ensued, which explored, among other concerns, Bertrande's reasons for accepting the impostor as her husband and testifying in his defense.
An equally illuminating illustration of microhistory is Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Ulrich, 1990).This Pulitzer Prize-winning book was based primarily on a highly elliptical work diary kept by a midwife in rural Maine. Ulrich drew a layered and nuanced picture of the contextualized life of the midwife who kept the work diary about her patients’ physical and emotional trials during late pregnancy and childbirth and about the midwife's relationships with local obstetricians and her patients.
This study of Woerishoffer's social activism between 1907 and 1911 also qualifies as a microhistory because of its strictly limited timeframe. In 1907, Woerishoffer graduated from Bryn Mawr College, moved back to her home city of New York, immediately took residence in Greenwich House in the summer of 1907, a settlement house on the far west side of Greenwich Village, and plunged into social action as a member of the National Consumers League and Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Tragically, her activity and life as a social reformer came to a sudden end when she died in a fatal car accident in 1911 while she was en route to inspecting an upstate canning factory for New York State. While this study's four-year timespan is brief, it nevertheless offers an intriguing window into both Woerishoffer's activism and one stream of feminist politics active in her time and place, a form of feminism close to the heart of some early social workers who were inventing professional practices concerning urban families, poverty, work, immigration, and neighborhoods.
Social workers and other health professionals who are knowledgeable about single-case clinical studies will probably find the microhistorical approach methodologically and epistemologically familiar. The analytic dynamic of starting by offering specific delineation of one complex subject, moving next to generating observations about a grouping of similar topics, and then reversing the thinking process to go from the general back to the specific, when done iteratively, is central to both single-case studies and microhistories.
Incorporating Primary and Secondary Sources
Anyone who writes a microhistorical account by necessity must search high and low for reliable information and evidence since scarcity of data is one of the predictable hallmarks of the method. Consequently, people who write microhistories sift through all available primary and secondary sources like miners in search of gold nuggets.
Drawing on primary sources, this study shines a light on Woerishoffer's advocacy, investigation, and philanthropy, locating her activism at the conjunction of weighty early twentieth-century social issues, including massive immigration, accelerating industrial capitalism, Jim Crow customs of racial segregation in workplaces and housing, and dense urban poverty in New York City. This microhistory of Woerishoffer is anchored, in part, in a primary historical source, a memorial book that allows contemporary readers to observe aspects of the vigorous and interlinked community of New York City feminists whose advocacy organizations were seeking to partner with industrial working women in the massive projects of documenting the daily circumstances of female factory laborers and of moderating—through laws, regulations, and union organizing—the extreme harshness of factory and laundry environments. The commemorative book is entitled, Carola Woerishoffer: Her life and work, which was a volume published by peers in her graduating class, the Class of 1907 of Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912). This 137-page publication contains: (i) a photograph of Woerishoffer; (ii) an introduction to Woerishoffer's life by muckraking journalist, Ida M. Tarbell; (iii) reprints of the nine addresses and two statements In Memoriam given at the memorial service for Woerishoffer held at Greenwich House on 30 October 1911; iv) two New York City newspaper obituaries that appeared soon after her death; and (v) formal minutes, resolutions, and written extracts issued after her death in honor of Woerishoffer by nine institutions and organizations in which she had been an active participant or benefactor or both. Small in size (8″x 5.5″), this memorial book has accomplished the large task of preserving for posterity accounts of Woerishoffer's efforts in concert with Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL.
Carola Woerishoffer: Her life and work constitutes an invaluable piece of material culture, a palpable and invaluable chunk of evidence about the feminist organizations in the first years of twentieth-century New York City that concentrated on industrial working women's daily conditions in their workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods. The memorial text highlights the sensibilities of feminist organizational leaders and their network of allies from the spheres of academia, local government, and settlement houses who came together to mourn the loss of Woerishoffer and to honor her contributions as a feminist labor reformer.
Of course, speeches and organizational resolutions made in the wake of the sudden death of a young social reformer while she was carrying out a public investigatory duty tended, understandably, to emphasize her contributions and omit mention of her shortcomings and inconsistencies. Therefore, readers and I should take with a proverbial grain of salt the unreserved praise of Woerishoffer found in the commemorative volume of 1912.
This study would have benefited from any form of writing by Woerishoffer during her lifetime. Sadly, nothing formal or informal that was written by her is known to have survived. That is one reason that I pursued a microhistorical approach to the four years of her reform activities. Fortunately, published studies about Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL constituted secondary sources that helped me interpret Woerishoffer's efforts as a participant in these three organizations. Pertinent secondary sources are cited in the analysis that follows.
Another crucial primary source that this author relied upon is the official archival record of Greenwich House available at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of the Bobst Library at New York University (Greenwich House Records, 1902–1970). Minutes of meetings, annual reports, monthly reports, speeches made by Greenwich House leaders, publications of Greenwich House, letters sent to and from key officers, photographs, and newspaper clippings about the settlement's activities and new initiatives comprise the papers.
The third form of primary source available to this researcher are two obituaries published in the days immediately after Woerishoffer's accidental death. An editorial in the New York Evening Post of 12 September 1911, read: “Able . . . to frequent balls and ‘functions’ and have her box at the opera, she actually preferred the humble work of State inspector of labor, and it was in this that she was engaged when the fatality occurred” (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 113). The New York Times also published an editorial about Woerishoffer's death that was published on 15 September 2011. It read in part: “She did not content herself with the bestowal of alms . . . . On the contrary, she worked in order to learn something at first hand of the pains and burdens of the working people . . . ” (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 113–114).
Secondary sources that have proved useful include articles in two encyclopedias—Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Williams & MacClean, 2015) and American National Biography (Recchiuti, 2015). Also, R. K. Berson wrote a chapter about Woerishoffer in her book, Marching to a different drummer (Berson, 1994) and a one-page article in the Bryn Mawr College Alumnae Bulletin (Berson, 2019). Happily, sound secondary sources have been published previously on Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL. Re ferences to them surface throughout the rest of this article.
Carola Woerishoffer
Woerishoffer (1885–1911) was a Progressive-era feminist, activist, and labor reformer in New York City and New York State. Born in New York City in 1885, she died at the age of 27 years in Delaware County, New York, while she was driving during wet weather to investigate the factory conditions of a food canning factory that employed industrial women workers, many of whom were recent immigrants. At the time, she was employed as one of the first New York State inspectors and investigators of women's factory work. The renowned investigative journalist, Ida M. Tarbell, memorably characterized Woerishoffer's life: “Twenty-six fuller years are rarely lived” (Tarbell, 1912a, p. 287).
Woerishoffer, born as she was into a family that was intergenerationally dedicated to social and political reform, may have heard stories as a child about her maternal grandmother, Anna Uhl Ottendorfer (Berson, 1994, p.315; Recchiuti, 2015). Ottendorfer had served as business manager of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung from 1845 to 1884. This liberal, German language newspaper, founded in New York City in 1834, was initially a weekly newspaper, but soon grew in popularity and distribution to become a prominent daily newspaper (Arndt & Olson, 1976). The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung focused on the importance in both the US and German states (later, Germany) of expanding voting bases; reducing unemployment; supporting labor unions; democratizing literacy, education, and power; and shrinking the economic gulfs between rich and poor (New Yorker Staats-Zeitung: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/832dbbec-225d-37d2-e040-e00a180650ef).
Woerishoffer's family of origin was a wealthy one. Her mother, therefore, had the freedom to involve herself extensively in advocating for a graduated income tax in New York State, labor reforms, and a variety of philanthropic activities within New York City (Berson, 1994, p. 315; Recchiuti, 2015). Woerishoffer's childhood and adolescence were times during which she enjoyed unusual privilege—rooted as she was in circles of economic, social, and White elites.
From the summer of 1907 until her death in 1911, Woerishoffer chose to live at a settlement house, Greenwich House, that was part of a citywide, national, and international network of neighborhood centers created, in part, to diminish social class chasms that yawned between the wealthy, the middle-class, the working-class, and poor Americans (Davis, 1984; Lasch-Quinn, 1993; Stivers, 2000; Trolander, 1987; Williams & MacClean, 2015). Concomitantly, Woerishoffer immersed herself completely in two additional feminist activist organizations in New York City that concentrated on documenting and improving working-class women's conditions of work in factories and laundries. Aware from their founding days of the bitter social class divisions that often fractured associations that sought to expand the resources, rights, and options of economically precarious populations, founders of the National Consumers League and the WTUL sought to unite the energies and aspirations of industrial women workers with feminist reformers from the middle and upper social classes. Political solidarity across class lines served as intentional associational glue within all three organizational bodies in which Woerishoffer placed herself. A definition of political solidarity has been conceptualized by feminist philosopher Sally Scholz: Political solidarity is a unity of individuals each responding to a particular situation of injustice, oppression, social vulnerability, or tyranny. Each individual makes a conscious commitment to a cause . . . if an individual or group of individuals is threatened with severe harm, violence, or death because of injustice or oppression, and if one is in a position to assist that group, one may feel compelled to so do (Scholz, 2008, pp. 51-52).
Woerishoffer felt compelled to act, as did other members of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL. She and they were responding in political solidarity to the direct threats to industrial working women's health, safety, and lives posed by the accelerating pace and unforgiving labor conditions in factories and steam laundries.
Race and Social Class
The term, “political solidarity”, did
Because of the greater visibility of more glaring forms of apartheid in the U.S. South during the first decade of the twentieth century, northern Jim Crow practitioners looked down on segregationist practices of states of the former Confederacy while, at the same time, excluding Black people in the North from most residential areas and categories of work. “The same ideas they used to take down the South's brand of Jim Crow became ones that masked and perpetuated the Jim Crow North. They created and maintained a system of racial inequality—all the while denying it was a system.”(Purnell, Theoharis & Woodard, 2019, p. 7).
Black women in New York State and New York City between 1907 and 1911 were rarely, if ever, hired in the White-owned garment industry, the food canning industry, steam laundries, or in retail sales in stores that served a primarily White customer base. (Later, during the late 1920s and 1930s, steam laundries began to employ Black women in significant numbers) (Carson, 2021).
Greenwich House between 1907 and 1911 did offer services to Black adults, children, and adolescents who lived in a racially segregated part of Greenwich Village at that time (Ware, 1935; Simkhovitch, 1938). These activities and programs for Black residents of Greenwich Village were offered separately from the services in which other residents of the area took part, meaning people who were primarily recent immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Central and Eastern Europe (Simkhovitch, 1938). In the archival documents of Greenwich House, Greenwich House Records, which are available in New York University's Bobst Library, the Monthly Report of April 1909, notes that: . . . group activities and food distribution for Negro neighbors were begun on March 14th, 1909, to serve the tenement dwellers of the northwest corner of Greenwich Village. Our prior efforts to include Negro neighbors in the groups held at Greenwich House met with outright hostility from immigrant neighbors, who walked out of nine different group activities in February and March of this year when Negro women and girls entered the room (Greenwich House Records, Monthly Report, April 1909).
The leadership and ranks of the National Consumers League and the WTUL were made up of White women and immigrant women who were not classified as Black. Some women, such as Italian, Irish, Greek, and Eastern European Jewish and Christian immigrants who were participants in WTUL or the National Consumers League, were not thought of as White in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, they were categorized as being innately different from and superior to Black people in the racist hierarchy of eugenists’ pseudoscience that permeated popular culture, journalism, government, law, medicine, social work, and academia in the period under discussion (Grant & Mislan, 2020; Kevles, 1985; Leonard, 2016).
The starting point of this study (1907) is only 11 years after the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the US Supreme Court, a ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine in American public and social life. Black people in New York City and New York State during the earliest decades of the twentieth century were not welcomed into White spheres of life except as household servants, farm workers, and gardeners (Purnell, Theoharis, & Woodard, 2019). In the words of contemporary ethnographer, Elijah Anderson, “While some Black men got jobs as laborers, most Black women were confined to domestic service, and both were vulnerable to unemployment. For a long time these arrangements undergirded, supported, and elaborated the powerful caste-like system of racial exclusion, resulting in ever more profound inequality” (Anderson, 2022, p. 66).
Woerishoffer's contributions and those made by other White elite women to social welfare in the United States during the Progressive era (ca. 1885–1917) must be read in juxtaposition to the important interrogation by scholars who correctly point out the glaring neglect of the significant influence and creativity of men and women of color who were leading social reformers and shapers of social welfare institutions and community practice in social work during the same historical period (Carlton-LaNey, 2001, 2013; Carlton-LaNey & Hodges, 2004; Dowden-White, 2011; Lasch-Quinn, 1993; O’Donnell, 2013). At the same time, Woerishoffer's hard work in relation to the deprivations facing recent immigrants, racially blinkered as it was, is important to portray and remember on its own terms and to be understood as activity informed and characterized by the prevailing conventions and outlooks of White northerners during the Jim Crow era.
Woerishoffer as a Philanthropist
Philanthropy is a genre of altruism that takes the form of major monetary or in-kind contributions to the general welfare or to a particular part of the public. Woerishoffer's accidental death at such a young age might have foreclosed the possibility of her designating her inheritance for causes and organizations that she made priorities while living. And yet, because of her foresight and generosity, her fatal car crash meant that her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, received a bequest from her will that gave rise to one of the earliest schools of social work in the United States. The President of Bryn Mawr College from 1894 to 1922, M. Carey Thomas, shared news of the donation in her comments at Woerishoffer's 1911 memorial service: Carola Woerishoffer has made Bryn Mawr College the great gift of $750.000. I saw the will just before I came to this meeting. It is left entirely without restriction . . . I venture to promise that the Carola Woerishoffer Endowment Fund will be used in a manner worthy of her who gave it, . . . and her own life of social work . .. (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 47–48).
What President M. Carey Thomas, her administrative advisors, and faculty colleagues did with the Woerishoffer fund was to endow and open at Bryn Mawr College in 1915 the Bryn Mawr Department of Social Economy and Social Research, later renamed the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research of Bryn Mawr College. More than a century later, the graduate school continues to educate social work students at the masters and doctoral levels in knowledge bases, skill sets, and values reflective of the global social work profession (https://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/about-school). The Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research of Bryn Mawr College, like many other schools, offers graduate education in social work practice and research with individuals, groups, families, organizations, communities, and social policy practice (Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research webpage: https://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/about-school).
Woerishoffer: An Activist in Three, Pivotal Feminist Organizations in New York City
Woerishoffer also acted as a philanthropist while she was alive, realizing that she had access to unusually large material resources because of her family's wealth. This realization meant to her that she was fortunate not to have to earn her living, a reality that liberated her to participate in full-time volunteering in social and political action that included investigating and advocating, as well as donating money. Upon moving back to New York City after graduating from college, she sought permission to live at Greenwich House and decided to make herself useful in relation to one of the most pressing concerns of poor women and girls—that of earning wages for themselves and their families.
New York City during the first decade of the 1900s was a major center of diverse manufacturing (Freeman, 2019, p. 81). The needle trades and industrial steam laundries were two common employers of immigrant women and adolescents. Woerishoffer took up residence at Greenwich House at a time when that settlement house's staff and academic allies were vigorously involved in researching and publishing studies of the working and living conditions of immigrant and migrant neighbors living in tenements on the west side of Greenwich Village (Simon, 2018). She took note of those industries and joined the fact-gathering and advocacy of two feminist organizations that were focused on those labor sites—the National Consumers League and the WTUL. A discussion of Woerishoffer's work with these three nonprofit bodies follows.
Greenwich House and Woerishoffer
Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch founded, together with her husband and a small cluster of friends and colleagues, Greenwich House in Greenwich Village in November of 1902 (https://www.greenwichhouse.org/history/#event-greenwich-house-opens-its-doors). She served as a headworker of Greenwich House from 1902 through her retirement in 1946 (Recchiuti, 2015; Simon, 2018, 2020). A settlement house leader who became a fierce advocate for affordable, good quality, public housing for residents of New York City and, later, the nation under Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency, Mary Simkhovitch was one of the invited speakers at the memorial service for Woerishoffer because of her personal knowledge of this former resident of Greenwich House.
According to Mary Simkhovitch in her speech that day, But not only did she [Woerishoffer] find time as a member of the Board to inform herself as to every branch of the work of Greenwich House; not only did she give generously toward the support of Greenwich House; but she was always ready to give emergency help of a personal sort. In ways unknown to others, she often lent personal assistance (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 84).
Mary Simkhovitch continued, in a comment on Woerishoffer's interests and preferences: She liked strife, turmoil, noise. She enjoyed her tiny front room in the settlement, where she could look out upon the street and hear everything happening in it. She loved things in the making rather than the finished product. She deeply loved New York and its upheaval, its crudeness, its sense of power, its heterogeneous character, its giant strength (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 84–85).
Greenwich House, the settlement house in which Woerishoffer chose to live, like many other community centers of the time period in New York City, other US cities, and those of the United Kingdom and Europe, generated a varied range of programs and services for immigrants living nearby. Evening classes in speaking and writing English; public health nurses’ home visits to family members who were pregnant, ill, or living with a disability; and kindergarten classes for neighborhood children at Greenwich House were among the initiatives begun during the four years under study. Greenwich House residents also conducted observational and survey research on the state and cost of rental housing, working conditions, and garbage removal in the immediate area (Simon, 2018, 2020; Simkhovitch, 1926, 1938, 1940).
Involving neighbors (the term used by the early settlement movement for participants in a community center's activities) to the maximal possible extent in planning, evaluating, and reshaping programs was and remains a fundamental tenet of Greenwich House and many other settlement houses. Neighbors were asked to articulate priorities for Greenwich House, to co-design activities with staff, and, whenever possible, to co-lead group activities with a staff member, such as a study group about current events in the evenings. During Woerishoffer's years in Greenwich Village, 1907–1911, Greenwich House staff devised, circulated, and collected surveys in which neighbors’ written or oral evaluations of the utility and quality of House programs were recorded. Program participants were encouraged to make suggestions about initiatives they hoped Greenwich House would take up. For example, the Greenwich House's community garden came about because of several neighbors’ recommendations (Glantz, 1968; Simkhovitch, 1938; Simkhovitch, 1926; Simkhovitch, 1940). Keenly aware of the social class and educational disparities between Greenwich House residents (staff) and their neighbors, Mary Simkhovitch hammered home, when hiring, training, and supervising staff, the importance of their listening with care to and soliciting neighbors’ comments, concerns, and recommendations. Moreover, she emphasized repeatedly the importance of demonstrating respect for the wisdom that life experience had taught people who had risked everything to come across thousands of miles and usually at least one ocean to start anew (Simon, 2018; Simkhovitch, 1938).
The husband of Mary Simkhovitch, Vladimir Simkhovitch, a labor economist on the faculty of Columbia University and a founder and resident of Greenwich House, summed up Woerishoffer's dedication to the social welfare of immigrants at the memorial service in the wake of her death. Being himself an immigrant from Russia, he highlighted with firsthand knowledge her concern for people uprooted from another land: . . . Carola Woerishoffer was devoted to and interested primarily in very old-fashioned neighborhood work—settlement work . . . Greenwich House was to her another home from which all her work radiated. She constantly had new plans for Greenwich House, which, with Mrs. Simkhovitch, she was working out, and for which she took financial responsibility. Her interest in industrial problems thus began with the life of the industrial family . . . “(Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 101–102).
The National Consumers League and Woerishoffer
Rooted in the principle of consumer citizenship, the National Consumers League was chartered in 1899 by Jane Addams and Josephine Shaw Lowell and remains to this day an active advocacy consumer organizationl (National Consumers League website: https:/nclnet.org/; Nathan, 2019). Its first general secretary and driving force were Florence Kelley (Kelley, 1986; Boris, 2005; National Consumers League, 2009; National Consumers League, 1925; Sklar, 1995; Woloch, 2015; Storrs, 2000). Consumer citizenship is a political concept that involves two basic activities. First, consumer citizenship asks individual consumers to use their purchasing power to create a more ethical market in manufacturing, sales, and consumption by boycotting consumer goods made, distributed, or sold under oppressive circumstances. Second, citizens as consumers have a duty to advocate both individually and as part of the National Consumers League for governmental legislation that would lead to fairer workplaces and marketplaces in which workers and consumers are protected from exploitative or dangerous practices, conditions, and products.
From its beginning days, the National Consumers League relied upon securing detailed data from female industrial workers in factories and laundries and salespeople in retail stores to understand and document working conditions, wages, and supervisory practices. Similarly, the League depended upon middle-class and wealthy shoppers, who were mostly women in the early part of the twentieth century, to report their observations of conditions under which sales personnel were working in department stores and other retail firms. In pressing city, state, and federal governments to pass and administer protective labor and consumer legislation, the National Consumers League also expected both working women and consumers to join the organization's effort to advocate and lobby for its proposed laws. Data gathering, advocating for labor and consumer protective legislation, and boycotting products were cross-class organizational efforts.
When Woerishoffer, upon moving back to New York City after college, heard second-hand reports about the working conditions of steam laundry workers in New York City, she decided that first-hand experience with that work was needed to document with precision its nature and effects on laborers. In the words of Ida M. Tarbell, Woerishoffer wanted to “get to the bottom of things” (Tarbell, 1912, pp. 14–16). Tarbell continued: It was this eagerness which led her to offer herself as a worker in the laundries of the city in order to get for the Consumers’ League the facts it needed for an investigation it had on hand. She, of course, knew nothing about the processes of laundry, nothing of washing, drying, starching and ironing, nothing of mangles and ringers and jiggers. . . . she obtained through a friend “a job as a learner on collars.” . . . she never was without work for more than a day during the full four months of the summer . . . (Tarbell, 1912, pp. 14–16).
Florence Kelley, an internationally eminent social and labor reformer, was another person who gave a speech at Woerishoffer's memorial service. Her comments included a direct quotation from Woerishoffer that Kelley had noted down during a 1907 conversation with her: . . . I [Woerishoffer] undertook, when I began working in the laundries, to find out as nearly as I could how it would feel just to have the amount of money that I could earn with my strength, without skill, and now I have been dismissed for taking the part of an old woman in a scrap with the foreman . . . If I were a real laundry worker, I should not have any money until next Wednesday (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 62). When we did really get the truth expressed, I think it is not much to say that life has been made a little better for some thousands of young and old workers in the laundry trade, . . . I did not see her much after that [conversation]. When I did, she was so blunt in her frank criticism of the things we were leaving undone . . . She came to ask why we [the National Consumers League] had not done something more effective, why we had not been quicker, why things were not getting better more promptly, and . . . why [we] were not successfully stirring more people to change these things (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 64.).
The impatience and single mindedness of youth, in this case of Woerishoffer, drove her to confront in this brusque a manner a woman—Florence Kelley—who was already renowned throughout the United States and Europe as a social reform leader and intellectual. Kelley had become famous for her pathbreaking work inspecting labor conditions in Chicago's industries; serving as the Chief Factory Inspector for the State of Illinois; joining Jane Addams and many others in woman's suffrage campaigning in Illinois; and leading the fight to eliminate child labor in Chicago and New York City (Norwood, 2017; Sklar, 1995). Additionally, in 1887, Kelley was the first person to translate into and publish in English The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels (Sklar, 1995).
Woerishoffer's direct interrogation of Florence Kelley that the latter recalled in her spoken tribute appears to have been characteristic of the young woman's approach to activism and relationships. Two individuals whom she had known at college highlighted her frankness and courage. Comfort W. Dorsey, a classmate of Woerishoffer's at Bryn Mawr, wrote: She [Woerishoffer] was, to use her own words, an experiment . . . She was indeed a figure to fire the imagination, sound of body, of incredible physical endurance, and with such a mind, so clear, so receptive, so vigorous, so unfettered by convention and tradition! . . . Others were more sympathetic, perhaps. But where would you find such originality, such audacity, such range of vision, such penetration? . . . (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 108–9).
Bryn Mawr College's President, M. Carey Thomas, made similar observations: As I look back on my memories of Carola Woerishoffer in college, I see her on the margin of the swimming pool, splendidly athletic and vigorous, . . . She was absolutely brave and fearless; both physically and mentally . . . (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 45).
The WTUL and Woerishoffer
From 1903 to 1950, the WTUL in the United States combined the efforts of industrial women workers, middle-class women, and wealthy women in mobilizing the formation of labor unions in manufacturing processes, like the garment, stream laundry, and food canning industries. The WTUL's aims in supporting the organizing of labor unions peopled mostly by women were to do away with unhealthy factory conditions, improve hourly wages, shorten the workday and workweek, and, later, gain health and other benefits for employees (Dye, 1980, 1991). According to Nancy Dye, a historian who conducted a multi-year study of the WTUL's archives: Together these women forged a unique coalition of women workers and wealthy women disenchanted with conventional philanthropic and reform activities. The women wage earners and reformers who made up the Women's Trade Union League defined themselves as both feminists and trade unionists. As unionists, they worked to integrate women into the mainstream of the early twentieth-century labor movement. As feminists, they sought to create an egalitarian alliance of working-class and upper-class women and to make the early twentieth-century woman movement relevant to working women's concerns (Dye, 1980, p. 1).
For a young woman with Woerishoffer's values and politics, the WTUL quickly became one of the focal points of her reforming energies. That she chose to link some of her energies and financial contributions to the WTUL reveals her political commitment to forces that advocated alongside and on behalf of some of the city's most vulnerable and disempowered residents. She was someone who allied herself with hard-working underdogs.
It is worth emphasizing in characterizing Woerishoffer's values and politics that her first political act upon moving back to New York City after college was to spend a four-month summer in 1907 working in the steam laundry industry in Manhattan as an undercover investigator (Dye, 1980, p. 43). The data she gathered proved invaluable to the advocacy work of the WTUL, as well as to the National Consumers League (Dye, 1980, pp. 51–62). The Executive Secretary of the WTUL, Helen Marot, remembered one aspect of Woerishoffer's work during her speech at the latter's memorial service in 1911: You will remember that, in answer to a call two years ago [1910] for a strike among the shirtwaist makers, thirty thousand women laid down their tools and for thirteen weeks suffered exposure, hunger, and arrest. It became evident by the third day of the strike that unless bail could be furnished at a moment's notice, hundreds of young girls would be detained for hours, many for the night, in jail.
The courts demanded real estate security. With characteristic directness Carola Woerishoffer set about securing the necessary bond. Her mother co-operated with her and, for affection and one dollar, transferred to her daughter real estate to the value of $75,000.
There was a sensation in the court-room when she [Woerishoffer] appeared with her $75,000 bond, and when it was learned that she would remain in court as long as the strike lasted and would see that the girls got fair play. ..
For the WTUL, her loss is irreparable, and as the weeks go by, we find it more and more difficult to work without her sustaining force (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 66–76).
Historian Nancy S. Dye offered further evidence of Woerishfffer's commitment to the cause of the WTUL. In 1907, when Woerishoffer first joined the organization, she submitted a check for $5000 instead of the usual $2 initiation fee (Dye, 1980, p. 44). Similarly, Ida M. Tarbell recalled in her commemoration speech in 1911 Woerishoffer's commitment to industrial women workers: Her [Woerishoffer's] experience in the shirt-waist strike made her realize the need of a fund for emergencies in time of strike. “Don’t you think it would be a good thing to have a strike fund started?” she said casually to Miss Marot; . . . From her tone, Miss Marot thought that her [Woerisoffer's] contribution would be possibly $500. She [Woerishoffer] handed her a check for $10,000. It was with that check that the Strike Council was organized and incorporated, with the purpose of anticipating strikes of employees in trades where there are women workers (Tarbell, 1912, p. 23).
An adequate strike fund, it goes without saying, can make the difference for striking workers and their families between starving or eating and between being evicted from home or being able to pay rent. Therefore, Woerishoffer's philanthropic contribution meant that the WTUL's strike fund made it possible for women garment workers, among others, to deploy labor strikes as the ultimate stick they could wield in negotiations for better pay and improved factory conditions with factory owners and management.
Discussion
Microhistory is a method that has much to offer social workers and social work's knowledge base. Bringing forward into the published and digitalized worlds historically situated information about past people, communities, organizations, and policies is scholarly action that can fill in major gaps in our understanding of neglected or forgotten individuals, collective efforts, and institutionalized barriers and initiatives. Microhistorical publications have the possibility of transforming social work practice by recalling and detailing forgotten approaches to rectifying historical wrongs that have proved effective and by pointing out past professional strategies and tactics that unintentionally undermined the very people and groups that social workers were intending to help.
As the common adage goes, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” In historical research, partial evidence is worth reporting in a meticulous fashion, even when there are missing aspects of the story that are yet to be uncovered or recovered. This study's documentation of Carola Woerishoffer's activities from 1907 to 1911 is an incomplete, but nonetheless, valuable examination of one individual's attempts, within three organizational settings, to fathom, document, and regulate severe abuses of working women's lives.
Hopefully, this microhistorical study has provided an informative glimpse into the cross-class feminism and bridge-building labors of Woerishoffer and the members of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL in New York City between 1907 and 1911. What might the reader take away about cross-class feminist endeavors in early twentieth-century feminism from reading this account? One can learn that first-hand investigation of the working and living conditions of disenfranchised groups is a necessary predicate for efficacious feminist advocacy. Also, a close reader will notice the interdependence of feminist organizational initiatives and leaders when they face a huge problem—such as inhumane working conditions—that have been baked into the economic calculus of success for factory owners and their allies in the private and public sectors. Additionally, the reader can carry away the message that cross-class cooperation in service of a major goal—in this case, enhancing the working circumstances and pay of immigrant women factory workers—is possible and productive when representatives from every class of women choose to pull their oars in unison together toward the same finish line.
Conclusion
Polarization in the contemporary United States along many fault lines places serious demands on critical feminists of goodwill to help devise links that can span the present rifts and ruptures that threaten the very heart of our democracy in the United States. Historical studies of bridge-builders in our collective past may inspire imaginative approaches to increasing social and civic union. Excavating through microhistorical methods a four-year period of activism by one woman—Carola Woerishoffer—within the cross-class organizations of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL is, I hope, one step in that direction.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
