[Arno Press has recently printed some 53 volumes of literature pertaining to women and some 105 volumes pertaining to labor in America. Among these are dozens or so, originally published in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries and having to do with the lives of wage-earning women. They are an impressive collection. Written and compiled by sociologists, economists, and interested observers, they are replete with statistical tables, firsthand observations, and documents written by working women themselves. Their rich data offer irrefutable testimony to the consistency of women's collectively unfortunate experience as wage laborers. But in the years before the First World War, such data were not unusual.]–first paragraph for lack of synopsis