A Microhistory of Cross-Class Feminism in New York City,1907–1911: The Activism of Carola Woerishoffer

This microhistory is a study of one woman's efforts in New York City between 1907 and 1911 to join the efforts of three local feminist organizations that were combining the energies of women from the industrial working class, middle class, and upper class in sustained drives to improve the working conditions and wages of women factory and steam laundry workers. One woman who devoted herself to these three organizational cross-class initiatives was Carola Woerishoffer, hereafter referred to as “Woerishoffer”. She was born in 1885 into a New York City family of considerable material wealth secured by her father's foresighted investments in railroad stocks (Berson, 1994, p.315; Recchiuti, 2015).

There are three purposes of this study. First, I hope to demonstrate the value of microhistorical research for expanding social work knowledge about mezzo- and macro-structures and processes at play in the lives of individuals of earlier times who are no longer alive to speak or write for themselves. Second, I want to spotlight examples of cross-class feminist organizations that had a constructive impact on the life chances of female factory laborers. Finally, my intention is to illuminate the accomplishments of a feminist—Woerishoffer—whose early death in the line of duty made it unlikely for later generations to know about her work.

What is Microhistory?

Microhistory is a method of studying the past that concentrates on slim segments of research data (Gamsa, 2017, p. 240). The subject might be a single event, a brief portion of an individual or family's life, or a minor slice of the history of an institution, organization, or process. Frequently, microhistories are rooted in fragments or remnants of historical data. They might rely upon small slivers of historical materials that constitute the only remaining records concerning a person, organization, movement, or act. In this one respect, microhistory resembles archaeology in that it inductively and deductively generates concepts, representations, and relationships about a past time and place from minute bits of formerly buried evidence. Microhistory has become an especially important research method since its origins at the end of the 1970s in recovering and interpreting information about historically neglected individuals, groups, and entities whose voices and memories are the least likely to be written down, archived, published, photographed, or recorded.

Microhistory has “. . . the capacity to bring social and cultural history together, as an approach that can both supply the explanations of social history and grasp the meanings of cultural history within a single very circumscribed investigation [my emphasis added]. . . All this can only be brought together, without running the risk of over-simplifying the past, when historians investigate a narrowly defined subject” [my emphasis added] (Magnusson and Szijarto, 2013, p. 7).

Scott W. Stern writes that “Microhistory is more intensive and focused than a survey, more far-reaching in its implications than a case study, and more centered on those at “the bottom” than most biographies. It utilizes a single incident to make a broader point about society. It is one of the most powerful methodologies that historians have to engage with the public, tell a story, and still make an argument about the past and present” (Stern, 2020, pp. 128–129).

Similarly, Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia asserts that microhistory is frequently based on narratives shared by common people and elite individuals that reveal local and regional power relationships, social forms of stratification and inequality, community contours and tensions, and recurring or exceptional topics of discontent. In Moreno Garcia's words, microhistorians rely on “. . . anecdotal information that might cast . . . unexpected light on ordinary events and everyday activities, as well as on places frequented by both common people and the elite, revealing factors that tie together a community, or exposing informal mechanisms of authority, resistance, sociocultural identity, and political participation . . . ” (Moreno Garcia, 2018, p. 2).

An example of a microhistory relevant to twenty-first-century critical feminists is Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (Davis, 1983). This compelling book, which was made into an acclaimed French film, was based on a sixteenth-century archival record stored in a village's church archive in the French Pyrenees. Historian Davis artfully told the story of a peasant woman, Bertrande Guerre, whose husband, Martin, had gone away to war. Eight to nine years later, a man claiming to be Martin Guerre came to the village and moved in with Bertrande and her children. A few years later, he was charged with fraud and adultery by his uncle. A trial ensued, which explored, among other concerns, Bertrande's reasons for accepting the impostor as her husband and testifying in his defense.

An equally illuminating illustration of microhistory is Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Ulrich, 1990).This Pulitzer Prize-winning book was based primarily on a highly elliptical work diary kept by a midwife in rural Maine. Ulrich drew a layered and nuanced picture of the contextualized life of the midwife who kept the work diary about her patients’ physical and emotional trials during late pregnancy and childbirth and about the midwife's relationships with local obstetricians and her patients.

This study of Woerishoffer's social activism between 1907 and 1911 also qualifies as a microhistory because of its strictly limited timeframe. In 1907, Woerishoffer graduated from Bryn Mawr College, moved back to her home city of New York, immediately took residence in Greenwich House in the summer of 1907, a settlement house on the far west side of Greenwich Village, and plunged into social action as a member of the National Consumers League and Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Tragically, her activity and life as a social reformer came to a sudden end when she died in a fatal car accident in 1911 while she was en route to inspecting an upstate canning factory for New York State. While this study's four-year timespan is brief, it nevertheless offers an intriguing window into both Woerishoffer's activism and one stream of feminist politics active in her time and place, a form of feminism close to the heart of some early social workers who were inventing professional practices concerning urban families, poverty, work, immigration, and neighborhoods.

Social workers and other health professionals who are knowledgeable about single-case clinical studies will probably find the microhistorical approach methodologically and epistemologically familiar. The analytic dynamic of starting by offering specific delineation of one complex subject, moving next to generating observations about a grouping of similar topics, and then reversing the thinking process to go from the general back to the specific, when done iteratively, is central to both single-case studies and microhistories.

Incorporating Primary and Secondary Sources

Anyone who writes a microhistorical account by necessity must search high and low for reliable information and evidence since scarcity of data is one of the predictable hallmarks of the method. Consequently, people who write microhistories sift through all available primary and secondary sources like miners in search of gold nuggets.

Drawing on primary sources, this study shines a light on Woerishoffer's advocacy, investigation, and philanthropy, locating her activism at the conjunction of weighty early twentieth-century social issues, including massive immigration, accelerating industrial capitalism, Jim Crow customs of racial segregation in workplaces and housing, and dense urban poverty in New York City. This microhistory of Woerishoffer is anchored, in part, in a primary historical source, a memorial book that allows contemporary readers to observe aspects of the vigorous and interlinked community of New York City feminists whose advocacy organizations were seeking to partner with industrial working women in the massive projects of documenting the daily circumstances of female factory laborers and of moderating—through laws, regulations, and union organizing—the extreme harshness of factory and laundry environments. The commemorative book is entitled, Carola Woerishoffer: Her life and work, which was a volume published by peers in her graduating class, the Class of 1907 of Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912). This 137-page publication contains: (i) a photograph of Woerishoffer; (ii) an introduction to Woerishoffer's life by muckraking journalist, Ida M. Tarbell; (iii) reprints of the nine addresses and two statements In Memoriam given at the memorial service for Woerishoffer held at Greenwich House on 30 October 1911; iv) two New York City newspaper obituaries that appeared soon after her death; and (v) formal minutes, resolutions, and written extracts issued after her death in honor of Woerishoffer by nine institutions and organizations in which she had been an active participant or benefactor or both. Small in size (8″x 5.5″), this memorial book has accomplished the large task of preserving for posterity accounts of Woerishoffer's efforts in concert with Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL.

Carola Woerishoffer: Her life and work constitutes an invaluable piece of material culture, a palpable and invaluable chunk of evidence about the feminist organizations in the first years of twentieth-century New York City that concentrated on industrial working women's daily conditions in their workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods. The memorial text highlights the sensibilities of feminist organizational leaders and their network of allies from the spheres of academia, local government, and settlement houses who came together to mourn the loss of Woerishoffer and to honor her contributions as a feminist labor reformer.

Of course, speeches and organizational resolutions made in the wake of the sudden death of a young social reformer while she was carrying out a public investigatory duty tended, understandably, to emphasize her contributions and omit mention of her shortcomings and inconsistencies. Therefore, readers and I should take with a proverbial grain of salt the unreserved praise of Woerishoffer found in the commemorative volume of 1912.

This study would have benefited from any form of writing by Woerishoffer during her lifetime. Sadly, nothing formal or informal that was written by her is known to have survived. That is one reason that I pursued a microhistorical approach to the four years of her reform activities. Fortunately, published studies about Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL constituted secondary sources that helped me interpret Woerishoffer's efforts as a participant in these three organizations. Pertinent secondary sources are cited in the analysis that follows.

Another crucial primary source that this author relied upon is the official archival record of Greenwich House available at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of the Bobst Library at New York University (Greenwich House Records, 1902–1970). Minutes of meetings, annual reports, monthly reports, speeches made by Greenwich House leaders, publications of Greenwich House, letters sent to and from key officers, photographs, and newspaper clippings about the settlement's activities and new initiatives comprise the papers.

The third form of primary source available to this researcher are two obituaries published in the days immediately after Woerishoffer's accidental death. An editorial in the New York Evening Post of 12 September 1911, read: “Able . . . to frequent balls and ‘functions’ and have her box at the opera, she actually preferred the humble work of State inspector of labor, and it was in this that she was engaged when the fatality occurred” (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, p. 113). The New York Times also published an editorial about Woerishoffer's death that was published on 15 September 2011. It read in part: “She did not content herself with the bestowal of alms . . . . On the contrary, she worked in order to learn something at first hand of the pains and burdens of the working people . . . ” (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 113–114).

Secondary sources that have proved useful include articles in two encyclopedias—Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Williams & MacClean, 2015) and American National Biography (Recchiuti, 2015). Also, R. K. Berson wrote a chapter about Woerishoffer in her book, Marching to a different drummer (Berson, 1994) and a one-page article in the Bryn Mawr College Alumnae Bulletin (Berson, 2019). Happily, sound secondary sources have been published previously on Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL. Re ferences to them surface throughout the rest of this article.

Carola Woerishoffer

Woerishoffer (1885–1911) was a Progressive-era feminist, activist, and labor reformer in New York City and New York State. Born in New York City in 1885, she died at the age of 27 years in Delaware County, New York, while she was driving during wet weather to investigate the factory conditions of a food canning factory that employed industrial women workers, many of whom were recent immigrants. At the time, she was employed as one of the first New York State inspectors and investigators of women's factory work. The renowned investigative journalist, Ida M. Tarbell, memorably characterized Woerishoffer's life: “Twenty-six fuller years are rarely lived” (Tarbell, 1912a, p. 287).

Woerishoffer, born as she was into a family that was intergenerationally dedicated to social and political reform, may have heard stories as a child about her maternal grandmother, Anna Uhl Ottendorfer (Berson, 1994, p.315; Recchiuti, 2015). Ottendorfer had served as business manager of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung from 1845 to 1884. This liberal, German language newspaper, founded in New York City in 1834, was initially a weekly newspaper, but soon grew in popularity and distribution to become a prominent daily newspaper (Arndt & Olson, 1976). The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung focused on the importance in both the US and German states (later, Germany) of expanding voting bases; reducing unemployment; supporting labor unions; democratizing literacy, education, and power; and shrinking the economic gulfs between rich and poor (New Yorker Staats-Zeitung: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/832dbbec-225d-37d2-e040-e00a180650ef).

Woerishoffer's family of origin was a wealthy one. Her mother, therefore, had the freedom to involve herself extensively in advocating for a graduated income tax in New York State, labor reforms, and a variety of philanthropic activities within New York City (Berson, 1994, p. 315; Recchiuti, 2015). Woerishoffer's childhood and adolescence were times during which she enjoyed unusual privilege—rooted as she was in circles of economic, social, and White elites.

From the summer of 1907 until her death in 1911, Woerishoffer chose to live at a settlement house, Greenwich House, that was part of a citywide, national, and international network of neighborhood centers created, in part, to diminish social class chasms that yawned between the wealthy, the middle-class, the working-class, and poor Americans (Davis, 1984; Lasch-Quinn, 1993; Stivers, 2000; Trolander, 1987; Williams & MacClean, 2015). Concomitantly, Woerishoffer immersed herself completely in two additional feminist activist organizations in New York City that concentrated on documenting and improving working-class women's conditions of work in factories and laundries. Aware from their founding days of the bitter social class divisions that often fractured associations that sought to expand the resources, rights, and options of economically precarious populations, founders of the National Consumers League and the WTUL sought to unite the energies and aspirations of industrial women workers with feminist reformers from the middle and upper social classes. Political solidarity across class lines served as intentional associational glue within all three organizational bodies in which Woerishoffer placed herself. A definition of political solidarity has been conceptualized by feminist philosopher Sally Scholz:

Political solidarity is a unity of individuals each responding to a particular situation of injustice, oppression, social vulnerability, or tyranny. Each individual makes a conscious commitment to a cause . . . if an individual or group of individuals is threatened with severe harm, violence, or death because of injustice or oppression, and if one is in a position to assist that group, one may feel compelled to so do (Scholz, 2008, pp. 51-52).

Woerishoffer felt compelled to act, as did other members of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL. She and they were responding in political solidarity to the direct threats to industrial working women's health, safety, and lives posed by the accelerating pace and unforgiving labor conditions in factories and steam laundries.

Race and Social Class

The term, “political solidarity”, did not, however, mean racial inclusiveness in New York City in the early twentieth century. It is important to note that the years of Woerishoffer's life that are analyzed in this study took place during the decades during which Jim Crow customs and practices—the racial domination of Black citizens and residents by White people and institutions—pervaded the northern United States (DuBois, 1899; Schneider, 2019). Primary sources from the first part of the twentieth century that feature Woerishoffer, Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL echo a sustained chorus of informed and steady protests about the injustices of and harm done to New Yorkers by social class hierarchies and unregulated capitalism. However, Woerishoffer and the three nonprofit advocacy organizations she was most active in maintained at the time a conspicuous silence about the misery and structural disenfranchisement caused by institutional and interpersonal racism. The oppression and suppression of people of color by Jim Crow customs and practices in the North was, unhappily, a topic altogether missing from the political agenda of Woerishoffer, Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL League between 1907 and 1911.

Because of the greater visibility of more glaring forms of apartheid in the U.S. South during the first decade of the twentieth century, northern Jim Crow practitioners looked down on segregationist practices of states of the former Confederacy while, at the same time, excluding Black people in the North from most residential areas and categories of work. “The same ideas they used to take down the South's brand of Jim Crow became ones that masked and perpetuated the Jim Crow North. They created and maintained a system of racial inequality—all the while denying it was a system.”(Purnell, Theoharis & Woodard, 2019, p. 7).

Black women in New York State and New York City between 1907 and 1911 were rarely, if ever, hired in the White-owned garment industry, the food canning industry, steam laundries, or in retail sales in stores that served a primarily White customer base. (Later, during the late 1920s and 1930s, steam laundries began to employ Black women in significant numbers) (Carson, 2021).

Greenwich House between 1907 and 1911 did offer services to Black adults, children, and adolescents who lived in a racially segregated part of Greenwich Village at that time (Ware, 1935; Simkhovitch, 1938). These activities and programs for Black residents of Greenwich Village were offered separately from the services in which other residents of the area took part, meaning people who were primarily recent immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Central and Eastern Europe (Simkhovitch, 1938). In the archival documents of Greenwich House, Greenwich House Records, which are available in New York University's Bobst Library, the Monthly Report of April 1909, notes that:

. . . group activities and food distribution for Negro neighbors were begun on March 14^th, 1909, to serve the tenement dwellers of the northwest corner of Greenwich Village. Our prior efforts to include Negro neighbors in the groups held at Greenwich House met with outright hostility from immigrant neighbors, who walked out of nine different group activities in February and March of this year when Negro women and girls entered the room (Greenwich House Records, Monthly Report, April 1909).

The leadership and ranks of the National Consumers League and the WTUL were made up of White women and immigrant women who were not classified as Black. Some women, such as Italian, Irish, Greek, and Eastern European Jewish and Christian immigrants who were participants in WTUL or the National Consumers League, were not thought of as White in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, they were categorized as being innately different from and superior to Black people in the racist hierarchy of eugenists’ pseudoscience that permeated popular culture, journalism, government, law, medicine, social work, and academia in the period under discussion (Grant & Mislan, 2020; Kevles, 1985; Leonard, 2016).

The starting point of this study (1907) is only 11 years after the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the US Supreme Court, a ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine in American public and social life. Black people in New York City and New York State during the earliest decades of the twentieth century were not welcomed into White spheres of life except as household servants, farm workers, and gardeners (Purnell, Theoharis, & Woodard, 2019). In the words of contemporary ethnographer, Elijah Anderson, “While some Black men got jobs as laborers, most Black women were confined to domestic service, and both were vulnerable to unemployment. For a long time these arrangements undergirded, supported, and elaborated the powerful caste-like system of racial exclusion, resulting in ever more profound inequality” (Anderson, 2022, p. 66).

Woerishoffer's contributions and those made by other White elite women to social welfare in the United States during the Progressive era (ca. 1885–1917) must be read in juxtaposition to the important interrogation by scholars who correctly point out the glaring neglect of the significant influence and creativity of men and women of color who were leading social reformers and shapers of social welfare institutions and community practice in social work during the same historical period (Carlton-LaNey, 2001, 2013; Carlton-LaNey & Hodges, 2004; Dowden-White, 2011; Lasch-Quinn, 1993; O’Donnell, 2013). At the same time, Woerishoffer's hard work in relation to the deprivations facing recent immigrants, racially blinkered as it was, is important to portray and remember on its own terms and to be understood as activity informed and characterized by the prevailing conventions and outlooks of White northerners during the Jim Crow era.

Woerishoffer as a Philanthropist

Philanthropy is a genre of altruism that takes the form of major monetary or in-kind contributions to the general welfare or to a particular part of the public. Woerishoffer's accidental death at such a young age might have foreclosed the possibility of her designating her inheritance for causes and organizations that she made priorities while living. And yet, because of her foresight and generosity, her fatal car crash meant that her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, received a bequest from her will that gave rise to one of the earliest schools of social work in the United States. The President of Bryn Mawr College from 1894 to 1922, M. Carey Thomas, shared news of the donation in her comments at Woerishoffer's 1911 memorial service:

Carola Woerishoffer has made Bryn Mawr College the great gift of $750.000. I saw the will just before I came to this meeting. It is left entirely without restriction . . .  I venture to promise that the Carola Woerishoffer Endowment Fund will be used in a manner worthy of her who gave it, . . . and her own life of social work . .. (Bryn Mawr College Class of 1907, 1912, pp. 47–48).

What President M. Carey Thomas, her administrative advisors, and faculty colleagues did with the Woerishoffer fund was to endow and open at Bryn Mawr College in 1915 the Bryn Mawr Department of Social Economy and Social Research, later renamed the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research of Bryn Mawr College. More than a century later, the graduate school continues to educate social work students at the masters and doctoral levels in knowledge bases, skill sets, and values reflective of the global social work profession (https://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/about-school). The Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research of Bryn Mawr College, like many other schools, offers graduate education in social work practice and research with individuals, groups, families, organizations, communities, and social policy practice (Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research webpage: https://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/about-school).

Woerishoffer: An Activist in Three, Pivotal Feminist Organizations in New York City

Woerishoffer also acted as a philanthropist while she was alive, realizing that she had access to unusually large material resources because of her family's wealth. This realization meant to her that she was fortunate not to have to earn her living, a reality that liberated her to participate in full-time volunteering in social and political action that included investigating and advocating, as well as donating money. Upon moving back to New York City after graduating from college, she sought permission to live at Greenwich House and decided to make herself useful in relation to one of the most pressing concerns of poor women and girls—that of earning wages for themselves and their families.

New York City during the first decade of the 1900s was a major center of diverse manufacturing (Freeman, 2019, p. 81). The needle trades and industrial steam laundries were two common employers of immigrant women and adolescents. Woerishoffer took up residence at Greenwich House at a time when that settlement house's staff and academic allies were vigorously involved in researching and publishing studies of the working and living conditions of immigrant and migrant neighbors living in tenements on the west side of Greenwich Village (Simon, 2018). She took note of those industries and joined the fact-gathering and advocacy of two feminist organizations that were focused on those labor sites—the National Consumers League and the WTUL. A discussion of Woerishoffer's work with these three nonprofit bodies follows.

Discussion

Microhistory is a method that has much to offer social workers and social work's knowledge base. Bringing forward into the published and digitalized worlds historically situated information about past people, communities, organizations, and policies is scholarly action that can fill in major gaps in our understanding of neglected or forgotten individuals, collective efforts, and institutionalized barriers and initiatives. Microhistorical publications have the possibility of transforming social work practice by recalling and detailing forgotten approaches to rectifying historical wrongs that have proved effective and by pointing out past professional strategies and tactics that unintentionally undermined the very people and groups that social workers were intending to help.

As the common adage goes, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” In historical research, partial evidence is worth reporting in a meticulous fashion, even when there are missing aspects of the story that are yet to be uncovered or recovered. This study's documentation of Carola Woerishoffer's activities from 1907 to 1911 is an incomplete, but nonetheless, valuable examination of one individual's attempts, within three organizational settings, to fathom, document, and regulate severe abuses of working women's lives.

Hopefully, this microhistorical study has provided an informative glimpse into the cross-class feminism and bridge-building labors of Woerishoffer and the members of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL in New York City between 1907 and 1911. What might the reader take away about cross-class feminist endeavors in early twentieth-century feminism from reading this account? One can learn that first-hand investigation of the working and living conditions of disenfranchised groups is a necessary predicate for efficacious feminist advocacy. Also, a close reader will notice the interdependence of feminist organizational initiatives and leaders when they face a huge problem—such as inhumane working conditions—that have been baked into the economic calculus of success for factory owners and their allies in the private and public sectors. Additionally, the reader can carry away the message that cross-class cooperation in service of a major goal—in this case, enhancing the working circumstances and pay of immigrant women factory workers—is possible and productive when representatives from every class of women choose to pull their oars in unison together toward the same finish line.

Conclusion

Polarization in the contemporary United States along many fault lines places serious demands on critical feminists of goodwill to help devise links that can span the present rifts and ruptures that threaten the very heart of our democracy in the United States. Historical studies of bridge-builders in our collective past may inspire imaginative approaches to increasing social and civic union. Excavating through microhistorical methods a four-year period of activism by one woman—Carola Woerishoffer—within the cross-class organizations of Greenwich House, the National Consumers League, and the WTUL is, I hope, one step in that direction.