In Home Work, Ruby Oram takes readers across the long Progressive Era to show how the middle- and upper-class ladies of Chicago’s settlement house and club movements tried to shape the terms of urban industrial girlhood for a diversifying working class. Ultimately, Oram reveals how pillars of twentieth-century schooling—carceral reformatories, attendance laws, home economics, guidance counseling, and the racial stratifications and exclusions woven into each—originated in these maternalist projects of gendered social control: for girls, by women. Importantly, however, Oram demonstrates that reformers’ motives and designs were frequently redirected and even overridden by the choices that girls themselves made on the ground as they pursued their own visions of fulfillment and social mobility. Still, Oram argues, as women reformers asserted their jurisdiction over the various problems, panics, and policies related to white urban girlhood, they also expanded the scope of bureaucratized state action—in some cases becoming managerial professionals within the new administrative systems they helped to build.

Home Work begins by documenting the role of Chicago’s elite women’ s clubs in creating and governing girls’ reform schools (or “carceral schools,” as Oram dubs them) as state subcontractors in the late nineteenth century. Oram argues that these institutions of moral correction and training in domestic service, designed as a solution for the working-class “girl problem,” also solved the “servant problem”—a shortage of maids and nannies in the homes of middle- and upper-class women. Ultimately, the first Great Migration of black southerners to Chicago proved better at solving this problem, bringing a new wave of domestics and a further racialization of girlhood labor to Chicago. Next, Oram explores the push by clubwomen and anti-child labor activists for child labor laws and compulsory attendance at the turn of the century to protect girls from the physical dangers of industrial work. Oram argues that the school, where girls would be regulated by new health and hygiene initiatives, was also infused with racial science, pushing black girls from standard definitions of healthy girlhood. Extending their regulatory ambitions into the working-class family, reformers also hoped to end the exploitation of girl laborers in the home—where these “little mothers” labored for their families without pay.

A series of ironies and anxieties flowed from the new educational agenda for girlhood. If girls labored in the home as miniature nannies and housekeepers, reformers saw a shame and a scourge. If girls practiced cooking, cleaning, sewing, and childcare at the schoolhouse under the tutelage of a middle-class expert, the setting was one of “domestic science” (p. 71). In Oram’s view, the domestic science movement introduced a newly gendered segmentation of the curriculum while also attempting to deputize immigrants’ daughters as little reformers—spreading the gospel of scientific housekeeping to the womenfolk in their squalid tenements. By the midpoint of Home Work, we see how overwhelming the gendered logic of vocational education had become, convincing even the tech school skeptic and committed co-educationist Ella Flagg Young to endorse the founding of the city’s first all-girls trade school. The Lucy Flower Technical School for Girls combined training in needle trades with what Young rebranded as “household arts” (p. 91). Oram also uncovers competing threads in Chicago’s reform community: clubwomen who preferred the scientific homemaking approach and labor unionists who wanted a working-class incubator for the paid trades. In an impressive feat of corroboration across multiple source bases, Oram compellingly demonstrates that girls fulfilled neither the designs of the clubwomen nor those of the labor unionists. Instead, they flocked to clerical tracks and “pushed their way in” (p. 114) to downtown office jobs. Meanwhile, the girls who enrolled at Flower Tech (especially high achievers from the city’s Black Belt) did so in pursuit of the social prestige that an urban school of choice offered—not for the trade programs that reformers had originally pitched.

By the 1910s and 1920s, reformers and educators, increasingly concerned with vice and delinquency, launched vocational guidance programs to monitor teenagers’ employment and sexuality. Even as the expansion of feminized clerical work during the First World War destigmatized the office girl from her prior reputation as frivolous and seducible, the institutionalization of school-based counseling and juvenile-court networks allowed public bureaucrats to assert new surveillance over multiple aspects of girls’ social life. Concluding her study in the post-World War I decade, Oram shows how reformers nationalized their earlier urban school experiments in vocational and domestic science education through the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act. In the home economics movement, women professionals suddenly became federal (and imperial) players, converting their urban reform visions into a state-sponsored curriculum on “American homemaking” (p. 157). Female home economics advocates equated the expansion of their program and the elevation of their careers with the advance of women’s equality more generally. Oram disagrees, arguing that home economics nationalized the gender segmentation of vocational education and encouraged the ongoing racial sorting of white girls as homemakers and black girls as housekeepers.

As in other histories of Progressive Era women reformers, Home Work casts maternalism in a leading ideological role, “a gendered responsibility to guide white American-born girls toward respectable womanhood” (p. 7). In Oram’s account, however, the maternal impulse is more than a shared political idiom or a strategic metaphor for women’s civic activity. For Oram’s reformers, maternalism had real-world dimensions, both in terms of the pedagogical content that they delivered to girls and the new bureaucratic offices that they designed and staffed. Oram’s fundamental contribution comes in demonstrating the remarkable degree to which the path to professional womanhood in Progressive Era America was paved by cataloging and treating the purported moral vulnerabilities of working-class girlhood.

In less capable hands, Home Work’s central argument might have degraded to a crude caricature of girlboss bureaucracy: middle-class reformers ascending the feminized public-sector career ladder by stomping on the backs of working-class girls—scolding their way to the top. Indeed, Oram concludes by inviting readers to take a broadly skeptical view of the lift-as-she-climbs celebrations that tended to accompany the rise of gender parity in educational attainment across the longer twentieth century. Viewed through the activities and legacies of Oram’s reformers, Progressivism imparts a bleak heritage. Readers will struggle to discern the “vast democratic potential” or “healthy moral imperative” that Robert D. Johnston seeks among the Progressives. Nor are the social rights of William J. Novak’s “new democracy” easily recognizable under the garb of coercive vocational maternalism. It is only in reference to reformers’ public health initiatives and the general expansion of access to schooling that Oram concedes that reformers’ “well meaning” (p. 185) efforts might be worthy of praise. When it came to the lives and labors of working-class girls, argues Oram, morality, not democracy, was the watchword for reform—a license for an escalating encroachment on physical, financial, and sexual autonomy. On this count, Home Work’s evidence is undoubtedly persuasive and provocative. But one wonders how the story might change if “autonomy” (which stalks the text as an implicit moral lodestar) was subjected to the same critical and historicizing energy that Oram applies to morality and maternalism.

On balance, however, Oram’s critique is structural, not moralistic—an account of how the preoccupations of Robyn Muncy’s “female dominion” produced a gendered version of Cristina Groeger’s “education trap.” More fundamentally, Oram’s commitment to rendering—in clear and engaging prose—the textures and contingencies of Progressive Era Chicago allows a complex range of motives and incentives to propel her historical protagonists through their various school-based initiatives. Historians of education, gender, incarceration, and social welfare should assign themselves Home Work for homework right away. But historians of American politics and statecraft should not miss the chance to engage with Oram’s work, either. Indeed, it is at the intersection of these various subfields that Home Work promises to provoke a fruitful revival of historiographic debates among scholars of Progressive Era America.