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This chapter describes the context in which the Progressive campaign for protective laws arose, assessing reformers' rationales and the oppositions they faced. Passage of the 1893 Illinois law marked the start of the Progressive Era campaign for protective labor laws. Through law, reformers hoped to impose standards on factories and improve the lives of industrial workers. Resistance to laws that affected men—from courts, legislators, unions, and public opinion—made protective laws for women and children imperative; reformers hoped that they would provide precedents for more “general” laws. Thus, single-sex laws became a crucial link in protectionist plans. The campaign for protective laws involved a range of supporters but rested largely on a dynamic organization, the National Consumers' League (NCL), and its determined leader, Florence Kelley (1859–1932), and the small group of activists that shaped its development.

This chapter talks about how Illinois enacted the Workshop and Factories Act in 1893, establishing new regulations on the employment of women and children in manufacturing, and creating the state's first factory inspection system. The system was markedly different from those of Germany and Massachusetts: not only did it grant inspectors robust policing power, but it mandated that five of the state's twelve inspectors be women. The chapter illustrates the feminist enforcement model, which was the brainchild of lifelong child labor activist Florence Kelley. The chapter recounts how Kelley made her way into the state's policy field by capitalizing on alliances and experiences gained through her affiliation with Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago. From this position at the center of the state's nongovernmental social reform field, Kelley seized professional opportunities that opened doors to the policy field.

Chapter 7 describes how class intersected with the Nineteenth Amendment, in the context of the United State Supreme Court’s decision in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital and the divisions over a proposed Equal Rights Amendment. It explores the NWP’s negotiations with social feminists and legal progressives, in the three years after ratification. That negotiation was focused on modifying the language of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to ensure that courts would not use it to strike down protective labor legislation for women. These efforts came to naught, and the “neutrality feminists” within the NWP arranged for the ERA to be introduced into Congress in 1923. Chapter 7 argues that Adkins was the high watermark for a potentially robust or “thick” interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. Social feminists and legal progressives feared that the ERA would be used in the same way Justice Sutherland invoked the Nineteenth Amendment in Adkins, to justify invalidating minimum wage legislation for women. One consequence of this battle over the ERA is that it has still not been ratified, one hundred years later. But, another consequence was to create a vacuum around the Nineteenth Amendment, contributing to the thin constitutional conception that emerged following ratification.

Chapter 3 raises the issue of how race intersected with the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment. It argues that the immediate pivot of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), to a federal equal rights amendment, played a significant role in the failure of enforcement legislation to be enacted by Congress. The chapter explores the fear of a “Second Reconstruction,” by white southern congressmen, as an element in that story. And it suggests that the NWP’s failure to support African American women suffragists, and white NWP members who were co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was both a moral and a strategic failing. That choice, animated by concerns around white southern political support for the proposed equal rights amendment, contributed to the failure of enforcement legislation. The chapter links the lack of such legislation to the absence of a federal judicial forum, in which to more fully develop the meaning and scope of the Nineteenth Amendment.

New laws call for new stories, and in the early 1900s those stories were increasingly told by muckraking journalists, documentary photographers, and social reformers. Upton Sinclair, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, and many others focused on the evils of street work, including sexual bartering. But circulation managers professionalized and stepped up their newsboy welfare work. The proliferation of precociously cute newsboy images in advertisements and comic strips further neutralized reform efforts and legitimized newspapers’ use of child labor. Ethnic newspapers multiplied during this period and developed their own sales and distribution forces. Also propelling newspapers into the new century were automobiles, which presented newsboys with a new occupational hazard. Pushed and pulled by the commercial interests of publishers, and the social agendas of reformers, and the economic needs of their families, this generation of newsies rose up to assert their own vision of progress.

During the 1920s and 1930s, New York City’s civic women activists expended the most energy and passion over three campaigns: winning state acceptance of federal funds for improving the health of mothers and babies (the Sheppard-Towner Act), legalizing women’s jury service, and passing laws to protect women wage earners. Using the tactics and networks they had developed during the suffrage movement and working through both partisan and nonpartisan voluntary associations, they led other public policy campaigns, such as legalizing the dissemination of birth control information, repealing national prohibition, and modernizing state government. The stories of these campaigns demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of New York City women’s efforts to sustain feminist progressive reform after enfranchisement.

After the vote was won, Crystal Eastman hoped to transform successful but single-issue suffragism into a class- and race-conscious, transnationally minded feminism. She ran afoul of Alice Paul, unquestioned leader of the National Woman’s Party, who wanted another targeted single-issue campaign. By 1923, Eastman, Paul, and the organization agreed on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as their new “great demand.” In its all-encompassing simplicity, the ERA solved the problem of how a single-issue campaign could seek redress for the huge and complicated problem of gender inequality. Unfortunately, the idea splintered coalitions in the wider women’s movement, alienating the party from a whole network of once-compatible Progressive groups. Eastman, now living in her husband’s native London with their children, worked as a journalist, covering this debate. By 1926, little progress had been made, and she welcomed a fresh tack. She began working with Paul to campaign for equal rights provisions in international treaties.