Numerous accounts were produced during the progressive era of the unsafe and unhealthy conditions, grueling hours, and numbing labor for insufficient pay that characterized garment factories and other industrial facilities. Some of the accounts were written by women of middleor upper-class standing who actually took jobs in such factories to encounter the conditions firsthand and later report them as accurately as possible. Marie van Vorst took a job cleaning shoes at a factory to observe the conditions in which workers toiled there. She reported standing for five hours straight in one stretch, having cleaned over one hundred shoes, and earning twenty-five cents.35 Alzina Stevens, a Hull House member, had worked in a textile mill at age thirteen and lost a finger on one hand while working there.36

Child labor in particular galled many reformers, and some of the most vocal and determined reform efforts were directed at curbing the hours and improving the conditions in which children worked. The ultimate goal was the abolition of child labor.37 Progress in this area was frustratingly slow and unsteady. Settlement workers were key players in the campaign against child labor; Julia Lathrop, a Hull House resident, was appointed in 1913 as the first director of the Childrens Bureau, a federal department charged with overseeing child labor issues.38 Working conditions in the city also provoked concern and calls for change. Concern about working conditions in factories grew exponentially in the aftermath of the Triangle Fire. That 1911 disaster, in which 146 women perished, exposed unhealthy conditions and unsafe practices that were not unique to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and led to new factory safety laws,

39 Even so, the enforcement of such laws was sometimes weakened or severely curtailed by business interests. Though facing daunting tasks, progressives as a rule were optimistic,

Richard Hofstadter observes the underlying hopefulness of some important book titles of the period, such as The Old Order Changeth, The New Democracy, and The Promise of American Life.40 This optimism stemmed primarily from a strong conviction that the problems faced by American society could be solved, once those problems were studied, analyzed, and understood, and once people were convinced of the need for change. As a result, progressive reform methods were typically characterized by thorough study and analysis of a problem, with the application of modern techniques of sociology, psychology, and statistics; the dissemination of the information so gathered and the exhortation of the citizenry to action; reliance on the expert solutions proposed by trained professionals; and, eventually, the execution of reform through governmental action.