TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Author
Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor of history, women, and gender at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is co-director of Children and Youth in History, author of Babysitter: An American History, and editor of The Girls' History and Culture Readers, among other works.
Girls’ Labor and Leisure in the Progressive Era
Primary Sources
Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. New York: George H. Doran, 1918. An autobiographical account of an Eastern European immigrant girl’s struggle to reconcile the cultures of the old world and the new.
Library of Congress. National Child Labor Committee Collection. This collection includes more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives along with the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) records.
Marquette University. Children in Urban America Project. A digital archive on the history of children in Milwaukee that includes newspapers, government records, oral histories, memoirs, and many other documents useful to teachers, students, and historians.
Marten, James. Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era: A Brief History with Documents. (Bedford Series in History and Culture). New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. Provides an introduction to the issues of Progressive-era reformers as well as a collection of primary sources from the period including documents by children.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. American History Online. This online project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Illinois provides access to historical digital library collections. There are 176 primary sources on “Girls child labor,” 166 of which are photographs by Lewis Hine.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers: A Novel. 1925. An autobiographical coming-of-age story about the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who contests her father’s rigid conceptions of Jewish girlhood as she pursues her independence.