Out of Work

"If the winter of 1914-15 marks the inception of a finer zeal in the treatment of unemployment, it is well that this volume is written, for it is eminently readable."
-Ordway Tead, Secretary Massachusetts Committee on Unemployment (1915)

In Out of Work (1915 edition), Frances Kellor, a highly regarded American social reformer, provided a study of immigrant employment in the United States, with a particular focus on the lack of data recorded on the unemployment of women at the time the book was first published in 1904. In the tradition of muckraking and as a student of the treatment of women in education and in the workforce, Kellor discussed the reasons why women employees did not attain equity through labor unions, how helpless unemployed women were, and the connection between unemployment and prostitution.