Before T.H. Marshall: the conceptualization of industrial citizenship in the United States, 1900–1920

Abstract

ABSTRACT While T.H. Marshall’s famous three-tiered general analysis of citizenship stands as a landmark development, no one has examined how during the Progressive Era (1890–1920) and thereafter a female group of thinkers and labor leaders in the United States redefined the previously restricted definition of citizenship to produce an ameliorative response to the new trends of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Reformers such as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams established the principles of industrial citizenship in various publications. Kelley then started a movement called social justice feminism to effectuate this new theory. Social justice feminists’ goal of a gender-specific agenda to provide an entering wedge for the eventual inclusion of all workers under the state’s protection originally centered on court action and legislation. Then, labor leader Rose Schneiderman brought the fight of industrial citizenship in the United States to female workers even extending the concept to African-American female laundry workers from 1925 to 1933.