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Ruby Oram, "Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Dr. Ruby Orem
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Ali Morris
To the new Books Network hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Ali Morris, and I have the honor of speaking with Dr. Ruby Orem about her new book titled Homework and Gender, Child labor and Education for Girls In Urban America, 1870-1930, which is out now from the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Orem is an assistant professor of practice in the History department at Texas State University where she studies social histories of gender, labor and urban reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to her book, she has published on Gender, labor and Urban School Reform and the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and A Girl Can Recognizing and Representing Girlhood. She also co coordinates the Public History graduate concentration and serves as Internship Director for the Texas center for Public History. Her current public history practice focuses on local historic preservation and site interpretation. To highlight inclusive stories in the built environment, she's nominated two historic public schools in Chicago to the National Register of Historic Places, the Lucy Flower Technical School for Girls and Chicago Vocational School. Dr. Orem, welcome to the show.
- [02:28]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Of course.
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Ali Morris
So I want to begin by asking how your extensive background and public history shaped your approach to writing this book. This is a two part question. So first, can you talk a little bit about your work as a public historian? And second, to what extent did that work influence you to write a book about education, gender and child labor?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah.
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Ali Morris
So I came to the field of.
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Dr. Ruby Orem
History, and came to this book project by way of my public history work. Before pursuing my PhD in history, I worked for the Chicago architecture Center, which was then called the Chicago Architecture Foundation. And I helped run a annual architecture festival called Open house Chicago, which is a great event that I recommend anyone go to. But it was through that work that I became really passionate about historic preservation and historic sites and using the built environment to study the city, to study Chicago's history through its historic landscape. So in graduate school, when I was taking classes on historic preservation, we learned that most sites that are listed on the national register or receive, you know, municipal level landmark designation are typically sites associated with elite history, because those are what have remained and received the most municipal investment. It's skyscrapers, it's banks, it's mansions, it's theaters. And for that reason, it's really hard to interpret and find stories of marginalized people, women, children in the built environment. As of 2020, there were about 100,000 buildings on the National Register, and only 8% represented histories of women or communities of color. And so when I was in graduate school, I made it my mission to find a building that specifically had to do with women or gender or sexuality, and listed on the national register, because that's an area that's particularly difficult to find because so few buildings were constructed specifically for the purpose of women or girls or for their use. So as of 2020, there were 388 buildings in Chicago or properties listed on the national register. Only six were there for women's history. So that led me to a public school, an all girl public school that was founded during the progressive era in Chicago called the Lucy Flower Technical School for girls. And I found that simply because it had the name of a woman attached to it, which alone in a historic building is pretty rare, like remarkably rare in the built environment. And so researching that school and ultimately nominating it to be on the national register Led me to this book project, which started as my dissertation in graduate school, where I was really just interested in why this school existed. Why was there an all girl public school named after Lucy Flower? Who was that? Why were there all girl public schools at all? Which was a concept that I really wasn't aware of, that there were, like, boys only and girls only, public schools, not just private schools and Catholic schools. So in researching that, I got interested in gender and education and education history more broadly speaking, because to my previous point about, you know, the sites that are typically preserved represent elite histories because they represent elite architecture, skyscrapers, Ornate banks, theaters, et cetera. But historic public schools are also, like, architecturally significant. And, you know, they're typically designed in Gothic style. And they're these, like, huge monuments to public education that are, you know, made of brick and limestone. And they have what preservationists call architectural integrity they're worthy of investing in because they're still standing. They're not like dilapidated tenement houses and warehouses and other historic sites that are useful for telling marginalized history that aren't often as well preserved. So this led me to a larger interest in like, preserving historic public schools because you can tell and interpret diverse stories through looking at public schools. And in my case, I was interested in stories of girlhood and girls education.
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Ali Morris
Absolutely. Well, thank you for explaining, sort of like peeling behind the curtain of how you came about this project. I am curious if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the process of transitioning your doctoral dissertation into a published book.
- [06:52]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah. So the dissertation that I wrote at Loyola University in Chicago was really just centered around a question of Flower Tech or the Lucy Flower Technical School for Girls, which opened in 1911 in Chicago. I was curious what led women to create schools like Flower Tech during the Progressive Era and what these institutions meant to the girls who went there. In transitioning this into a book, I really broadened that research question to answer a larger question about urban education during the Progressive Era. Why was there a gendered school reform movement centered around girls that led to all girl public schools, all girl programs like domestic science classes, that particular initially only catered to girls, like health classes and vocational guidance counseling. Why was there this entire girl centered school movement that not only led to this one school? I nominated Flower Tech, but really redefined public education and helped segregate public education by gender across the urban north during the Progressive Era. And then answering that larger question, I thought a lot more about child labor. And child labor as a historical theme wasn't really in my dissertation because I was just interested in gendered education reform and how it affected girls everyday lives in school. But in revising this for the book, I realized that child labor is at the heart of not only this gendered story, but of all mass schooling. And that's not a particularly revelatory argument. Most historians of education connect the emergence of mass education, meaning, like the mass accessibility of public schooling to all urban children, to the problem of child labor. That mandating schools, or excuse me, mandating schooling for children was a way to keep them out of the factory. It was to keep them off the street. It was a way to enforce normative ideas of childhood at a moment when there are masses of urban children from immigrant families crowding city schoolhouses. And my research argues that that story misses a really critical part of this history because we're not gendering that child labor problem. That mass education in the Progressive era and the expansion of public schooling wasn't just about child labor. It was about girlhood labor and these really specific anxieties about what would happen if girls entered the workforce without a certain type of education. What would happen if they entered the workforce too soon, what would happen to their bodies, what would happen to capacity for healthy reproduction, to be good mothers, to be good wives and to be mothers of the race in the context of some of these more racialized reforms that I can talk more about. But yeah, centering child labor, I think is the biggest shift from the dissertation into the book.
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Ali Morris
Yeah, you can really see that shift with how you start off your book. So in the introduction, you begin with such a compelling story about Helen Cusack, a 25 year old, quote, lady reporter for the Chicago Times who went undercover in 1888 as a girl working in Chicago's garment factories. Cusack then published daily reports about what she witnessed. Yet after concluding her 23 part series that brought national attention to working class girls in industrial cities like Chicago, Cusack did not demand factory inspections or ban child labor. Instead, she ended her expose with a call to reform Chicago's public schools. So can you explain why someone like Helen Cusack could see public school reform as a solution rather than labor reform to working class girls?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, that's a great question and I have many answers to it. But to start, I mean, as I said, most historians of urban childhood and public education have looked at child labor as the central driving force for the expansion, or many, not all argue that child labor, the child labor problem, is the driving force for the expansion of public schooling, compulsory attendance laws, et cetera. And this example of Cusack and her reporting a 23 part expose that she titled the City Slave Girls. Other historians of labor and child labor have looked to this expose as a kind of turning point towards child labor reform. Because after Cusack publishes this expose, groups of women, notably the Illinois Women's alliance, start demanding the first child labor reforms. They argue that children should not be allowed to work in factories until they're at least 16 years old. But they argue at the same time that we need mandatory school attendance, that these are two sides of the same coin. And however, they're making really specific gendered arguments that have been Ignored not only in how we tell that story about child labor regulation and compulsory education, but even in how we talk about qsac. She's not talking about child labor, she's talking about girl labor. She's talking about the, quote, city slave girls, girls as young as 12, who are sewing buttons on blouses and making gloves and doing all of this like unregulated labor to support their families. So I start with that example because it's a really illustrates the point I'm making that we're missing part of the story when we're talking about child labor, when really she doesn't just galvanize child labor activism in Chicago, she galvanizes girlhood labor reform in Chicago. And as I argue in the book, the laws that follow her expose regulate girlhood labor in specific ways. They regulate whether girls can work jobs that require constant standing. They keep girls in school often longer until the age of 16, when boys can leave at 14. Right. So it's a whole, yeah, it's a whole gender piece of this story that's missing. But also I think the reason why she's looking to schools rather than labor form is twofold. One, this is happening at a moment when the concept of childhood is entering middle class reformers minds. For the first time in the 19th century, reformers, intellectuals, medical professionals started to talk about adolescence as a distinct life stage that needed special protections and regulations from the state, arguing that children should not be in factories, not only because it's unethical or because it's, you know, as one reformer argued, a blot upon our civilization, but because childhood is this protected state of development and that children have a right to learn and to play and to be protected and shielded from the burdens of adulthood, which include labor and wage earning. So the fact that these reformers are looking to the school rather than just looking towards labor reform is also because this is happening in conjunction with new ideas about childhood, which we take for granted in the 21st century, but were new in the late 19th century to be talking about children not just as little adults, but as like their own category that was worthy of protection. And then finally, women like Cusack are looking to schools because increasingly in the Progressive era, schools are one of the main urban institutions where women have power, right? Women start to outnumber men as teachers. They're organizing teacher unions, advocating for teachers rights. In Chicago, women gain seats on the Chicago Board of Education a year after she writes this expose and in other aspects of school governance. So progressive era women's groups also look at the school as a kind of rare example of an urban institution where they have power and they can kind of exert their vision of what they think girlhood should be and womanhood should be through reforming public education.
- [14:42]
Ali Morris
Yeah, it brings up an interesting question about sort of like adding nuance to the history of women reformers, perhaps by presenting some of their more self serving interests, perhaps. What does your book add to this understanding of women's rights and feminism during this period?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, that's a great question. The women reformers that my book focuses on are for the most part Protestant, white, wealthy, so called club women of the progressive era who are the wives of bankers and politicians and lawyers, or middle class Protestant white women who are college educated and among the first generation of women who are going to college. And that section of progressive era women reformers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelly, and names that'll be really familiar to historians of women and political reform, are often positioned as really important figures in the history of feminism and the women's movement and women's rights. And in my book I am complicating some of their legacy, perhaps by offering a more intersexual understanding of, you know, rights and advancement. For who? Question mark. Because many of these women, to your point, advance their own careers through policing working class immigrant and working class black girlhood labor. And they argue that they deserve more political power and they deserve more economic power and educational rights themselves and colleges and universities through positioning themselves as a virtuous maternal protectors of the working class girl. And I think that's really important because it's a reminder that just because one woman succeeds or is in a leadership position does not mean that women are succeeding. Right. And relatedly, that a movement by women is not necessarily a movement for women. And that second point I think historians are much more comfortable interrogating when we look at movements of conservative women over the course of the 20th century, like, oh, these are anti feminist activists. And we can see that really clearly. But we can also see the ways in which, you know, quote unquote, liberal or progressive histories of women are also fraught with all of this, you know, intersectional hypocrisy. For example, in the 1920s, this is something I cover in the last chapter of the book. In the 1920s, there are groups that we associate with feminism and women's rights in the post suffrage era, like the League of Women Voters, who argue that expanding access to home economics education for girls was equality for women. They demanded that Congress allocate equal funds for home Economics under the Smith Hughes act of 1917 as quote, equalization for women. And that if Congress didn't invest in training all girls for home economics, it was tantamount to sexism because Congress was investing in industrial education and agricultural education for boys. But that's not equalization. It's separate but equal provisions for boys and girl students. So I think my book offers a more critical and nuanced look at even these reformers and even these reform movements that we put in the liberal progressive pocket. I think it's important that we ask advancement for who and rights for who. Deck your HomeWithBlades.com. Diy or let us install.
- [18:25]
Ali Morris
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- [18:30]
Dr. Ruby Orem
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Ali Morris
Yeah, absolutely. And I have a follow up question. So it's maybe a two part question. But first, so what did girls lose by some women reformers gains. And also, you know, you note that working class girls in Chicago recognize these club women's efforts as self serving from sort of the very beginning. Can you tell us a little bit more about how girls resisted and the ways that they resisted against this domestic education?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, what girls lost. I mean, let me answer that second part first because I think it'll get to the first question. The girls in my book, in this story resisted this education movement in all ways, which I think is a really good reminder that we cannot just study the actions and the successes of reformers because just because a successful school policy was instituted or just because a, you know, school program was mandatory in schools doesn't mean girls paid attention to it, or it doesn't mean that girls or students used it in the way that reformers intended. So it's really important to study what students are actually doing, what the girls are actually doing and saying, because it offers this other perspective that I think again complicates, complicates the the idea that this is a movement for women, you know, by women for women. So my first chapter looks at carceral schools, reformatories for girls that were founded by progressive era women before they looked to the public schools. So kind of some of these school reform movements start in carceral schools and then move to the public schools, which I think is important because often in histories of education we start with the school and move to the prison. And my book kind of goes in the other direction and incarceral schools. Women designed these reformatories to train girls for domestic service. At the exact moment when a lot of working class girls didn't want to work as housekeepers anymore, they're entering the public world of work. They're working in factories and offices and shops. And these wealthy club women in Chicago create these schools that train them for domestic servitude and then place them in their own homes, essentially as domestic servants. And girls, as you mentioned, see this as self serving. From the beginning. They're writing letters saying that this is so, you know, obviously self serving to these wealthy women who position themselves as their saviors and maternal guardians, but really just, like, want to exploit their labor, and they rebel in a lot of ways. They're difficult to find in the archives, but we do know through records of these juvenile carceral schools that girls started riots. And when they were asked why, they would specifically say, you know, we did not want to sew, we did not want to cook. They started fires in their sewing rooms. Or they just, like, resisted doing this labor, which I think is a really important part of the story. It doesn't mean the schools didn't still exist and have really exploitative impacts on girls. But a lot of girls also just didn't buy into this education. Even in a carceral school. Kind of the most extreme example of this education at the high school level in Chicago, like in public high schools, girls resisted by just ignoring these classes. For example, in 1913. Well, let me back up. By 1910, the first household arts, which would later be home economics classes, are offered in all Chicago's high schools. But by 1913, only 2% of high school girls are taking household arts. Instead, they're taking general studies because they just want a liberal arts education that is seen as vocational for them to get a job, particularly for students who don't have great English skills because they're from immigrant families, et cetera. And notably, one in three female students are taking classes that were not designed for them at all. They're taking stenography and bookkeeping classes that are originally designed for male students. And they're demanding access to white collar work because that is what these girls want to do. They want to work in offices. Even though these reformers are like, success, there's now cooking in every public school. But you have to look at what the girls are actually doing because they don't want to cook. And we have many oral history testaments of this where they're literally saying, I hated cooking. I wanted to learn to type. I wanted an American education, and I wanted to be an American girl, which to them meant liberal arts education and white collar skills for many of these immigrant daughters in particular.
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Ali Morris
Yeah, thank you for sharing insight because I found that part particularly interesting. I want to ask about some of the new categories that sort of appear in this period about categories of girlhood such as dependent and delinquent. And I'm wondering how these categories varied by race affect these girls experiences.
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah. So as I said, my first chapter looks at carceral school reform, where many of these women reformers got their start before then moving into public school reform, which in itself I think is an important part of this story that's often lost that not only were carceral schools for, you know, delinquent children founded in the progressive era, while we're having an expansion of mass schooling, but in many cases that's where a lot of these reformers get their start. They get their start building carceral schools and then bring a lot of that education into the public school. But yeah, I argue in the book that these women's school reformers in Chicago, members of groups like the Chicago Women's Club, which was a very influential group of club women, codify these new categories of non normative girlhood behavior like the dependent girl and the delinquent girl. And Chicago is very well known among urban historians and historians of childhood because Chicago had the first juvenile court system in America, which opens at the turn of the century, but nearly 20 years before that, these women write the first definition of a dependent child in Illinois state law in the process of founding these carceral school for girls they deem as wayward and wandering the street and appearing homeless, not necessarily being homeless, but that category of dependency is specifically associated with like white worthy poor girls, girls who are seen as being homeless or poor due to no fault of their own because of parental death or neglect. And those girls are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively white, American born, English speaking. And those are the girls that are first. This carceral network of schools first caters to delinquency is a term that's more applied to black girls, immigrant girls, non English speakers, girls that are seen as sexually deviant. And you know, the Venn diagram that associates all three of those things at the turn of the century. And I think laying out those categories is really important, was really important for me at the beginning of the book. Because dependency, the worthy poor girl who is worthy of state investment, being white and American born and English speaking, that doesn't just shape carceral schools and who gets to stay in a kind of more benevolent reform home versus a State training school for delinquent girls. It also shapes public school reforms. It shapes child labor law because that same language about the dependent girl who needs support from the state and protection also shapes the idea that, you know, the child laborer is conceptualized as white, not black, that the girl who needs more school resources is the girl in the immigrant neighborhood school who's the American born daughter of immigrants who will give birth to American born white citizen children. Right. So those categories are, you know, very defined by race, but also by class. And they shape not just the juvenile justice system or carceral system, which is often where we find those terms like dependency, delinquency. Right. Those are like legal terms used by the court, but they also shape how reformers are thinking about schools and what classes and policies are meant to protect which types of students.
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Ali Morris
Yeah. And how did you manage to capture and incorporate so many different of these historical voices in your book? Do you have a specific source or archive that you really relied on?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, I relied on three, for the most part, three different types of archival sources. As I mentioned, I wanted this book to both be about the reformers and rethinking their role in school reform. Reformers that are familiar to a lot of scholars of women, gender, political reform, Progressive era history. Right. I mentioned Jane Addams, Florence Kelly. These are names that would be familiar to historians of women and gender. So I wanted to look at their papers. What are they saying about schools? What are they saying about not just child labor and children, but girls? What are their anxieties about girls, how to train them to be women as age becomes a category of analysis that they're, whether consciously or not, really thinking about in this era. So I read a lot of papers of individual reformers and reform groups like the Chicago Women's Club, the Settlement House, papers like Hull House. And then I would go to the Chicago Board of Education archives and see whether any of this stuff was actually successfully being implemented. Because you cannot just rely on what these women are saying. And I would look at school records. I'd go to individual schools where I knew these programs were being offered. And then that was helpful to see enrollment numbers or what school officials are saying about whether these programs are successful or not. And then I would go and find the girls voices, which are the hardest to find, as any historian of childhood knows, in the archival records record. I was lucky to find an incredible oral history collection of girls who went to the Lucy Flower Technical School, reflecting on their time at that school from the 1910s through the 1960s. So I relied on that oral history collection a lot throughout the book. And then I also would review transcripts from the Cook County, Chicago's juvenile court. And I would read these transcripts and find anytime that girls were talking about school and education and what they wanted from school. Because many times girls are arrested for truancy because they're not going to school or they're violating child labor laws. And I would try to cull from those records, which is difficult because it's a specific type of source where girls are couching what they're saying in front of a court or in front of a judge, rather, usually Judge Mary Bartlemy, who dealt with delinquent girls in Chicago. But those are really the best records I could find to try to find some sense of like, what do these things mean to girls? And typically what girls are saying is, I hate these classes, I don't want to take these classes.
- [29:57]
Ali Morris
Yeah, that's interesting. It kind of brings up a question that just History of Education is constantly trying to reckon with. And I'm wondering, do you see a tension between schools or educational institutions as sort of social control versus social advancement? Where does this book sort of fit in that conversation?
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Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, I think my book adds nuance to that debate. Often historians of education fall in, oh, we often put books in the field of education into one or two camps, right? This is a story of social control, meaning this is a story of schools controlling and exploiting the working class or black students, or immigrant students, or a story of social advancement, meaning the mass, you know, the availability of public education to the mass of urban children allowed for social advancement and uplift and et cetera, et cetera. And my book argues that both is true and I think adds some nuance into where social control is happening and where social advancement is happening. What I mean by that is access to public education provided paths of social advancement to many of the groups of girls in this book, for the most part the daughters of European immigrants, American born white girls or girls that would later be seen as white. But the path to social advancement that white American born girls took, and black college, excuse me, college bound high school girls as well, were not the paths that reformers anticipated. Girls used schools for social advancement by using the school system on their own accord, often in direct contradiction to social reformers who were trying to socially control them with the schools. So I mentioned white collar work earlier, but I think that this is a really good example that I return to in the later half of the book. Many of the middle class reformers like Jane Addams, Florence Kelly. Women that are coming out of the settlement house movement at the turn of the century, they're very concerned about office work for girls, particularly white worthy poor girls, because they view offices as places of sexual immorality, because men work there. Married men having these young girls entering the office in a mixed sex environment where men are married, where they're working under male managers who could sexually exploit them, they view this as a really dangerous space and argue that if a working class girl needs to earn wages, wages, she should do so in an all female environment like a dress shop. Now, girls, that's social control, right? They push, there's this effort to push girls out of typing classes, which girls want, and into household arts, into dressmaking, into millinery, hat making, design. And girls, however, reject this. They choose social advancement. They crowd these bookkeeping classes with male students because they view that as their path to white collar work. They don't want to be more empowered blue collar workers in the women's labor movement. They want to leave the blue collar field and enter the white collar field. And we see how they're pushing their way in through using the school system in this way that it's not designed to be used for. For example, in 1912, 90% of office workers in Chicago are men and teenage boys. But girls represent 30% of bookkeeping students. They represent 47% of the stenography students. So they are using the schools for social advancement because to them, again, to them, working in an office, working as a secretary is social advancement, even though reformers are trying to control them in other ways.
- [33:47]
Ali Morris
That's so interesting. And I, I'm wondering how. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll say this. When I was reading your book, it, it spoke to so many fields and just hearing you talk, I'm thinking of, you know, gender and women, education, childhood and youth, carcerality, urban histories. Do you, do you feel that your book talks to one sort of field more? Or, or perhaps do you feel that your book contributes to or challenges a field more than perhaps the others?
- [34:25]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, I'm glad that you picked up on all those fields because one of my goals with this book is to bridge subfields that I found typically don't talk to each other, particularly the history of education, which is often siloed from the history of women and gender, carcerality, urban history, the history of childhood and youth. My goal is to bridge all of these together and I think it speaks to the scholarship on women and gender, childhood and youth, urban history, history of education equally. And scholars and students interested in those fields will find something for them in this book. But I think I'm making different. The book is making different contributions to these fields. So for women and gender, I argue throughout the book that schools are really understudied sites of reform for women in the Progressive era. The progressive era is a really important period to understand women and gender history. You know, this is the period in American history when the first generation of college educated women are spearheading urban reform campaigns, gaining political power through the vote, creating national reform networks to improve tenement housing, address child labor. But schools and education are often really absent from that larger story we tell about Progressive era women and the political reform traditional that comes out of progressivism in that era. And I argue throughout the book that schools were a central site for forwarding women's broader reform agendas in the Progressive Era. And for that reason, we cannot fully understand women's political tradition and the women's political tradition that emerges in this period without centering education and school reform. I think in the history of education, the book makes a different contribution which revolves around girls and gender. As I mentioned, historians of education often talk about children and students. Right. But programs were rarely, if ever designed for students or children. They're designed for boys or girls. Right. Children are gendered. So. And I find that really missing in a lot of the scholarship in the history of education. And my goal is to bring girls and gender into this story. I will say that the book is mostly about girls, but there's also a lot about boys. I talk about reform movements that were specifically targeting boys to demonstrate, like, the contrast and how schools are affecting children differently in these decades. And I argue that by centering girls, and if we do choose to center girls and see gender as one of the primary constructions that's shaping the development and expansion of public schooling in America, it shows us all of these different nuances in mass education. I mentioned, you know, compulsory schooling being one that is not just about childhood, but about girls. And it demonstrates how anxieties about immigration, sexual delinquency, motherhood, civilization, and kind of the white nationalist lens, how all of these complicated ideologies that are all shifting in the Progressive Era because these are such transformative decades, how all of those things shaped the development of schools. And in centering those things, we can see new inequalities in urban education that you just really can't understand if you're not centering gender and girls.
- [37:53]
Ali Morris
Yeah, no, that. That makes perfect sense. I'm wondering, you Talked a little bit about, you know, viewing the history of mass education, public or public education. I'm wondering in your research on Chicago, how representative were these schools that you could find in other industrial cities?
- [38:15]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, very. So Chicago is unique in a few ways. Namely, Chicago has the first, you know, the first female superintendent of schools that is at the helm of the school system, Dr. Ella Flagg Young, who is a really singular figure in terms of the history of education in this period. And because Chicago public schools have this woman at the helm of this major public school System by the 19 teens, women are able to do a lot of things in the Chicago school system that are unique. However, as I argue in the book, I think some historians of education have overstated what they're able to do with this woman in charge of the school system. Because Ella Flag Young pushed back on a lot of reforms that women like Jane Addams and people that are coming out of the settlement house movement are demanding. She's really critical of gender segregated education in general. She believes in co education. She argues that girls should not be separated in different classes to learn dressmaking or whatever else, and that women really have to fight to convince her that, no, it's actually good for the future generation of women that girls have this kind of gender segregated education, which I argue ultimately doesn't end up great for female students or women in the 20th century. So there are some things that are distinct about Chicago in that way. But the types of schools and programs that I discuss in the book are nationalized, particularly across the urban North. This is really a story about industrial America and urban America in the manufacturing belt. So domestic science, cooking classes, those are first offered in Boston public schools before they come to Chicago. Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, all of these cities had a Lucy Flower technical school for girls, some version of that school. There's the Manhattan Trade School for girls. There's the Boston Trade School for girls. So these gender segregated high schools, programs, policies, the way that gender is shaping child labor law and compulsory attendance, shaping decisions about when and who and how girls are able to make their legal transition from school to work that is shaping all of these major school systems. And I know in the book how women in Chicago are really seeing themselves in a national reform network. They're visiting the public schools of Boston to learn what they're doing there. New York women are coming to Chicago to see what's happening in Chicago schools. They're having conferences, they're building these networks across cities. So this is really a larger story about urban America that uses Chicago as a case study so that I could better draw out the individual experiences of girls and what's happening at the community level. And then I'll say lastly, my final chapter zooms out to the national. Because a lot of these reforms that are happening at the local level being spearheaded by local women in cities like Chicago, where my book focuses, but also, you know, parallel in Boston and New York, they become nationalized after World War I through the Smith Hughes act of 1917, which is a really landmark education policy. The historians of education have written about a lot of. Because it is the federal program, excuse me, policy that basically cements vocational education as a part of the American students curriculum in secondary education during World War I. With the Smith Hughes act of 1917, Congress allocates funds for schools to offer courses in industrial trades for boys, agricultural trades for boys in rural school districts. And because of lobbying from women in my book Home Economics, Home Economics as vocational education for girls. So these programs all become nationalized and with more state and federal funding become just the average part of the American students public education experience, like shop class for boys, home economics for girls. So the kind of national impact of the story I'm telling, the Chicago story I'm telling you is the subject of the final chapter.
- [42:32]
Ali Morris
Thank you. And I'm wondering when you're, you know, all throughout the whole process, whether that's research, writing, publishing, what was the most surprising thing that you came across or that you learned.
- [42:48]
Dr. Ruby Orem
So many surprises. I the two that are coming to my mind now that I was surprised about, one I've sort of mentioned in relation to white collar work. I wouldn't. I was surprised that these progressive era women like Jane Addams and other reformers in Chicago viewed offices as these places of like deviant sexual immorality. Because I think from my perspective, the corporate world is so sterile and so like, like. But their biggest fear was not even the factory. Like, they argued that the office was somehow this much more dangerous space for like a single working girl than the factory. And that initially really shocked me because it was one of the many contradictions where I was where it made me think, you know, factories are so physically dangerous. These same women have spent the last 20 years trying to keep girls out of factories because of the physical dangers of this unregulated work. But then that shifts towards these moral dangers of the office. The idea that girls that the new danger when child labor law becomes better enforced by the 19 teens, the new danger is sexual safety and immorality. And what I argue in looking into this because to me it was such an odd hysteria that these women had about offices was, you know, why? And what they kept returning to was the wages that girls that worked in offices, they made more money to buy clothing and luxuries and that these luxuries would seduce them into like lives of deviance. And it's this incredible. There's so many hypocrisies in the book that I highlight or contradictions that I think just demonstrate how influx these ideas about gender and sex were in the progressive era. But one of the great ironies in the office work chapter is that on the one hand, women reformers argue that girls who earn higher wages as stenographers are more likely to become sex workers and sexually deviant because now they have this, this they're seduced by consumer luxury and they'll want more and more and more and need to make more and more and more money. And so they'll start, you know, the practice of like treating and sexual favors in the office so they can afford these like flights of fancy. At the same time, they're arguing that public schools need to have more vocational programs for girls in dressmaking so they can earn higher wages. Because if they don't earn higher wages, then they'll turn to sex work. So higher wages lead to sex work, but not making enough wages also leads to sex work. So all roads lead to sex work. So I found those contradictions, like, really fascinating. Another contradiction related to child labor reform is that by 1903, Illinois passes the first compulsory or the first really robust compulsory school attendance law that keeps girls in school until 14 or usually 16 if they deem the job is too strenuous for the girl or requires constant standing. And they amend that law so that girls who leave school not just to earn wages, but to support their own families in their home provide providing childcare for younger siblings on behalf of working mothers, that that is also child labor that is illegal and requires regulation from both school and state officials. However, at the same time, they're requiring girls in their school day to practice childcare through little mothers classes, as they were called. Housekeeping, cooking. So in the school taking care of children, because often live babies would be brought into these little mothers classes for girls to practice caring for. So caring for children during the school day under the supervision of a middle class education professional, that's educational. But if that girl leaves school to perform that same labor in her home on behalf of her parents, that is child labor, those parents can be arrested, they can be fined, they are violating Child labor laws. So there's. There's a million examples of that in the book that I found. The most fascinating and surprising thing is realizing that this is why none of this is really about material reality. It is about ideology and culture and anxiety because none of it makes sense when you actually look at what these people are doing. Right.
- [47:21]
Ali Morris
That's really interesting that you bring up. And I, and I have a quick follow up question about sort of the role of parents in this book. Can you explain just like briefly or however you want, the role of parents when we're talking about, you know, girls and children, what their overall role was?
- [47:40]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, parents are, in my book, a more important part of the story. With the primary grades and then at the high school level, parents are often really in conflict with their own daughters about what they want to study, which is I also found fascinating and another reminder about why age is such an important category of analysis. For example, at the high school level, a lot of black women wanted their daughters to study domestic science because they viewed it as a part of, like, the respectability politics of preparing their daughters to be respectable, to learn how to cook and clean and be good mothers. Right. But their daughters are like, no, no, no, I'm not learning to cook in school because these white teachers want me to be a domestic servant. They view me, they view this training for us as servitude. This is not training for homemaking and motherhood. That training is being provided to my white classmates, but not me. So that example is a reminder of we can't just talk about black women's perspective on domestic science or household arts or these kind of courses because there's a generational dividend. Which black women in which era of what class? Right. Because there's a divide between mother and daughter. In that case, women, mothers in particular, are really active in pushing back on some of the reforms more at the elementary primary school level. For example, I mentioned that the child labor law in Chicago was ultimately changed to include and regulate and police girls unpaid household work at home. And that was largely because a lot of immigrant mothers were like, I have to take my oldest daughter out of school because someone needs to be home caring for my younger siblings. It's either I go to work or I send her to work. Someone has to be home. Right. So they really push back on truant officer. Truant officers who are arguing like that, you know, they're violating law when they're like, you are putting me in an impossible circumstance. Like if I send my daughter into the factory that's child labor. But if I keep her at home to babysit, that's also child labor. So there's a lot of pushback on that, on this system from parents. Yeah.
- [49:53]
Ali Morris
So I'm wondering who you hope gets to read your book. And what is the takeaway you hope that they will get from it?
- [50:01]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Yeah, I hope everyone reads my book. I think, as I mentioned, this book bridges a lot of subfields. And a lot of scholars who maybe don't think about other subfields can see themselves in this book. So I hope it has a broad readership for historians, students, scholars and history. Curious folks who are interested in women and gender and women's political traditions in the 20th century. History of public schools and education, urban history, histories of childhood girlhood, sexuality, carcerality, and the kind of policing elements of girlhood behavior. And the legal categories of girlhood that become policed by Truman officers in the school and court officials alike. And Chicago history broadly and urban history, those are the fields that this speaks to the most. I also think there's policy relevancy for those who are interested in education policy to be reflective on the successes and failures of expecting schools to change society and what burdens that expectation can often place on students. What I mean by that is the women that I focus on in this book had a really idealistic, remarkable faith in the power of schools to transform society. A lot of these women, most of them, I would argue, are really, well meaning. They argue, you know, if only girls who live in tenement districts learned how to cook and clean and care for babies in school, then the tenement housing would be uplifted. We would have less malnutrition in the tenements. We would have less infant mortality. Right. Less domestic health issues. They really viewed a lot of this education for girls as a part of a broader investment in women, families, immigrants, and public health writ large. But I argue throughout the book that that expectation that schools alone can reshape society was really misplaced, because they can't. It's not enough to just offer vocational classes if you don't have a strong labor movement and an empowered working class. It is not enough just to teach girls how to take care of their homes and care for their future children. They needed better housing. They needed more municipal resources. Right. And a lot of time. This expectation that schools and education, if we only provide this training, it will have all of these incredible social benefits that will ripple through generations. It ultimately just placed burdens on students because suddenly girls are the ones that have to pick up the slack to uplift the tenements. Right. Solve domestic health issues where no one's expecting the boys to take their shop room training home and uplift their families and future generations. So I think that's a really good lesson to make sure that we are not putting too much expectation on schools and on literal children and students.
- [53:03]
Ali Morris
Yeah, absolutely. I'm really glad that you answered that question and you and you gave us sort of what to do next and what to look out for. My next question is, is what is next for you? What are you currently working on?
- [53:20]
Dr. Ruby Orem
I am working on my second book which is going much quicker than the first, which I'm curious how most people feel. Yeah, I'm working on a second book right now that is also rooted in gilded age progressive era history. It's moving slightly away from history of education, at least formally in the form of schools. But it's a story of temperance activism. Women's temperance activists, police and the carceral State is my short pitch. I'm exploring how members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was an evangelical anti alcohol lobbying group that was at one point the largest women's organization in America, how they reformed urban policing and prison systems. Some of the first women who were on salaried officers on urban police departments were members of the wctu. They were temperance activists and they entered law enforcement and they entered the field of prison reform because of their commitment to the anti alcohol crusade and to policing in particular women's drinking and women's drunkenness, which they, you know, connected to a host of other problems in cities like sexual immorality and the breakdown of American families. So yeah, I'm interested in again, kind of bridging some typically disparate fields of scholarship, which is history of prohibition, history of the carceral state, you know, policing prisons and women's reform traditions in this period.
- [54:53]
Ali Morris
That sounds so interesting. I am so excited to follow your future achievements and I'm so excited I'll be on the lookout for that, for that new book. And I'm glad it's going quicker than it has before. But I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me about your new book and for allowing me to gain so much more insight just through this one conversation. It was an absolute pleasure to read.
- [55:21]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Thank you.
- [55:22]
Ali Morris
And for listeners, please make sure to check out Professor Ruby Orem's book out now from the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Orem, once again, thank you for joining and congratulations on your excellent book.
- [55:35]
Dr. Ruby Orem
Thank you for having me.