Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future by Helen Stuart Campbell
page 76 of 244 (31%)
page 76 of 244 (31%)
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can find small space here. With difficulty consent was obtained to
establish a bureau which should inquire into the causes of all this; and the first report was given to the public in 1870. It was descriptive rather than statistical, and necessarily so. Methods were still a matter of question and experiment. The public had small interest in the project, and it was essential to outline, not only the work to be done, but the reasons for its need. Naturally, then, the volume touched upon many abuses,--children in factories, and the factory system as a whole; the homes of workers, and their needs in sanitary and other directions; and toward the end a few pages of special comment on the hard lives of working-women as a whole. The report for 1871 followed the same lines, giving more detail to each. That for 1872 took up various phases of women's work,[21] with some of the general conditions then existing. For the following year elaborate tables of the cost of living were given, and are invaluable as matters of reference; and in 1874 came a no less important contribution to social science in the report on the "Homes of Working-People." Those of working-women were of course included, but there was still no description of many of the conditions known to hedge them about. Each inquiry, however, turned attention more and more in this direction, and emphasized the need of some work given exclusively to women workers. In 1875 attention was directed to the health of working-women, and a portion of the report was devoted to the special effects of certain forms of employment upon the health of women,[22] the education of children, the conditions of families, etc. That for 1876 discussed the question of wives' earnings, and gave tables of what proportion they made; and that for 1877 took up "Pauperism and Crime," in the growing |
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