Search Results for: social work

National Child Labor Committee

In the late 1700′s and early 1800′s, power-driven machines began to replace hand labor for the making of most manufactured items. Factories sprung everywhere, first in England and then in the United States. The owners of these factories found a new source of labor to run their machines — children.

Settlement Houses

Settlement Houses In many ways, Settlement Houses were the “seedbed of social reform” in the first part of the 20th Century. Residents and volunteers of early settlement houses helped create and foster new organizations and social welfare programs, some of which continue to the present time. Settlements were action oriented and new programs and…

Madison House Speaks in 1916

In 1916, using personification, a very different type of progress report was prepared to describe the growth and changes experienced by Madison House over its first 18 years. Titled “The Old House Speaks” thats document is displayed here.

National Women’s Trade Union League

The National Women’s Trade Union League of America (NWTUL) was established in Boston, MA in 1903, at the convention of the American Federation of Labor. It was organized as a coalition of working-class women, professional reformers, and women from wealthy and prominent families. Its purpose was to “assist in the organization of women wage workers into trade unions and thereby to help them secure conditions necessary for healthful and efficient work and to obtain a just reward for such work.”

The 19th Amendment

The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest.

Why A Woman’s Rights Convention?

Determined to overcome the social, civil, and religious disabilities that crippled women of their day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 July 1848. It drew over 300. Stanton drafted the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document that stated “men and women are created equal”

Woman Suffrage: History and Time Line

A resolution calling for woman suffrage had passed, after much debate, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, convened by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. In The Declaration of Sentiments, a document based upon the Declaration of Independence, the numerous demands of these early activists were elucidated. The 1848 convention had challenged America to a social revolution that would touch every aspect of life. Early women’s rights leaders believed suffrage to be the most effective means to change an unjust system.

Child Labor in New York City

Written by Mary Van Kleeck, 1908. “The following brief report gives the results of a joint investigation made during the months from October, 1906, to April, 1907, into the labor of children in manufacture in tenement houses in New York City. The National Consumers’ League and the Consumers’ League of New York City, the National and New York Child Labor Committees, and the College Settlements Association co-operated in the undertaking.”

Roosevelt, Eleanor: The Women’s Movement

Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) became aware of the barriers women faced while working with other women on other social justice issues. Although she did work in a settlement house and joined the National Consumers League before she married, ER’s great introduction to the women’s network occurred in the immediate post World War I period when she worked with the International Congress of Working Women and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to address the causes of poverty and war.

Board of Pardons and Parole

In 1908, shortly after Jacob Billikopf moved to Kansas City to head up the Federation of Jewish Charities, he became involved in a variety of non-sectarian civic projects and philanthropies. Due to the deplorable conditions in penal institutions, the Mayor of Kansas City, Thomas Crittenden, asked Billikopf to serve as Chairman of a Commission and undertake a study of the area’s correctional institutions and submit to him a list of recommendations on ways to improve conditions.