| Line | Womens grassroots activism and their vision |
| of a new civic consciousness lay at the heart of | |
| social reform in the United States throughout the | |
| Progressive Era, the period between the depression | |
| (5) | of 1893 and Americas entry into the Second |
| World War. Though largely disenfranchised except | |
| for school elections, white middle-class women | |
| reformers won a variety of victories, notably in | |
| the improvement of working conditions, especially | |
| (10) | for women and children. Ironically, though, |
| child labor legislation pitted women of different | |
| classes against one another. To the reformers, | |
| child labor and industrial home work were equally | |
| inhumane practices that should be outlawed, but, | |
| (15) | as a number of women historians have recently |
| observed, working-class mothers did not always | |
| share this view. Given the precarious finances of | |
| working-class families and the necessity of pooling | |
| the wages of as many family members as possible, | |
| (20) | working-class families viewed the passage and |
| enforcement of stringent child labor statutes as a | |
| personal economic disaster and made strenuous | |
| efforts to circumvent child labor laws. Yet | |
| reformers rarely understood this resistance in terms | |
| (25) | of the desperate economic situation of working- |
| class families, interpreting it instead as evidence | |
| of poor parenting. This is not to dispute women | |
| reformers perception of child labor as a terribly | |
| exploitative practice, but their understanding of | |
| (30) | child labor and their legislative solutions for ending |
| it failed to take account of the economic needs of | |
| working-class families. |
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