During The Progressive Era

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The 1890s marked the beginning of the Progressive Era. Society was starting to change. Social reformers, like Jane Addams, were hard at work trying to change things for the better and were strong influences for progressivism. (The Progressive Era) If you were an immigrant coming to America during the Progressive Era, you would expect to be in a land of opportunity and prosperity. In the cities, though, the reality was filthy streets and overcrowded living spaces. Tenements, large buildings about four to five stories high, were occupied by several families at a time. Women stayed at home to take care of the children while their husbands went off to find work. Children could not be properly taken care of. Mothers could not provide their children …show more content…
Together they established the New York Child Labor Committee, now known as the National Child Labor Committee, in 1904. The committee held a mass meeting in Carnegie Hall that was attended by both men and women who were concerned with the conditions that children worked in. The group quickly gained support from many Americans and identified the extent of the problem. By 1912, they reached their first goal. They managed to establish the Children’s Bureau in both the U.S Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Labor. For the next couple of decades, the bureau battled the Supreme Court, which found that federal legislation banning the use of child labor was unconstitutional. (About NCLC) It wasn’t until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, setting, for the first time, minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children.
In her essay, “Why Women Should Vote”, Jane Addams described the conditions that lower class woman and their families had to live in. She argued that in order to preserve her home, a woman must have the right to vote. Voting would allow a woman to keep her traditions alive. It would allow her to educate her children. It would allow her to keep them from working in factories and out of reach of bad influences. (Addams,
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(National American Woman Suffrage Association) The two groups had very different ways in achieving their goal to vote, but in the 1890s the members decided that it would be in their cause’s best interest to consolidate both groups and become the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The leaders of the group included Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all big contenders in the suffrage movement. The ladies’ strategy was to push for voting legislation with the state governments, and then that would pressure the federal government into finally granting women the right to vote. (Dumenil, 2007)
Men played a large part in the women’s suffrage movement. The AWSA was actually co-founded by Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell. Another group was the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage, which was formed in 1907. (Rights for Women) The members of the MLWS helped considerably in bringing forth the issues of women’s suffrage to the public eye. With the combined efforts of the MLWS and the NAWSA, the suffrage movement gained the support of dozens of

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