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by Allison Rein
=Definition and Scope:=

This resource guide includes sources about American women doing “work” during the Progressive Era. My definition of work includes factory and office work, contractual work done in the home, as well as nursing, social work, political activism, teaching or going to an institution of higher education, and even illegal forms of work like prostitution. It excludes traditional ideas of women working as daughters, wives, and mothers. I concentrated on urban areas in order to exclude agricultural work done by women.I wanted to focus on less "traditional" kinds of work being done by women at the dawn of the 20th century. This guide is not exhaustive, particularly when it comes to primary sources available from this era. Certain categories are meant to be starting points for further research, like Databases, Journals, & Websites and Archival Collections.

Structure:
This resource guide is organized by type of material, with each including a range of subjects:


 * * historiography
 * immigration and ethnicity
 * race
 * representations of work in fiction and film
 * working-class leisure ||< * working-class, middle-class, & upper-class women
 * political activists and suffragists
 * reformers and social workers
 * types of labor ( factory workers, nurses, scientists, doctors, secretaries, prostitutes, etc.)
 * labor activists, union activity, and strikes ||