During the Progressive era, some women believed they could improve conditions for workers through their power as consumers—how they decided what products to buy, and from which stores. At both the local and national levels, women organized…

Women, who did most of the shopping in turn-of-the-century households, used their purchasing power to push forward many Progressive reforms. They organized local and national consumers' leagues to boycott businesses that employed unfair labor…

Progressive social scientists, like economist Alvin S. Johnson, disagreed with those who held Mexican and other immigrants as racially inferior an undesirable. Instead, he and his peers claimed that Mexican government and culture were "inferior" and…

This short essay describes Jacob Riis and Lewis Hines, two important documentary photographers of the turn of the twentieth century.

In this activity students explore how Progressive Era reforms did not apply universally, but rather varied depending on issues like race and class. Students watch the 30-minute film Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl and read an article that…

These words and phases from the Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl documentary may be unfamiliar to students.

In this activity, students watch the documentary Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl in sections, with documents and exercises designed to support and reinforce the film's key concepts: workers challenging the effects of industrial capitalism, the…

This worksheet helps students to identify and understand the meaning of "loaded language" in a statement from the Women's Trade Union League.

This essay explains the significance of young female immigrants in the labor upheavals that helped define the Progressive Era.

Jacob Riis—a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant—exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, first published in…