This landmark work of social investigation was written in 1903 by two women of New York's privileged class, who assumed names and toiled as factory girls in a number of eastern U.S.locations.

'The Woman Who Toils' is a fascinating investigative journalism account conducted by two sisters, Bessie and Marie Van Vorst. In writing the book, they began an undercover investigation into women and child factory laborers by finding jobs in factories under aliases. Bessie worked in a plant in Perry, New York, a knitting mill near Buffalo, and a Pittsburgh pickle factory, among other places, using the name "Esther Kelly". Marie Van Vorst found employment in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and a cotton mill in Columbia, South Carolina, under the alias "Bell Ballard". In their book the Van Vorsts portrayed the troublesome working and living conditions they had observed, and their consequences for women and girls. Bessie appealed for a more compassionate attitude towards these employees. Van Vorst also noted that factory women enjoyed the independence afforded them by paid labor and therefore delayed marrying. "I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby while I was in town", Van Vorst wrote after nearly three weeks spent in Perry. She also discussed sociability and the discipline of factory work as a dangerous alternative to family unity.

In her provocative book, Brooke Kroeger argues for a reconsideration of the place of oft-maligned journalistic practices. While it may seem paradoxical, much of the valuable journalism in the past century and a half has emerged from undercover investigations that employed subterfuge or deception to expose wrong. Kroeger asserts that undercover work is not a separate world, but rather it embodies a central discipline of good reporting—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public’s attention. Together with a companion website that gathers some of the best investigative work of the past century, Undercover Reporting serves as a rallying call for an endangered aspect of the journalistic endeavor.

Now available in two-volume splits as well as the combined version. Through Women’s Eyes: An American History was the first textbook in U.S. women’s history to present an inclusive narrative within the context of the central developments of U.S. history and to integrate written and visual primary sources into each chapter. The result, according to authors Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, was to "reveal the relationship between secondary and original sources, to show history as a dynamic process of investigation and interpretation rather than a set body of facts and figures." The enormous success of the first edition confirms that the field of U.S. women’s history was ready for a ground-breaking textbook that focuses on women from a broad range of ethnicities, classes, religions, and regions and that helps students understand how women and women’s history are an integral part of U.S. history. Click here to read about packaging with the Women and Social Movements Database!

Reproduction of the original: The Nine-Tenths by James Oppenheim