KEY FACTORS

• – The number of industrial workers in the United States more than tripled between 1860 and 1900.
• – Most common laborers were immigrants.
• – In 1890, the average workingwoman was twenty-two and had been working since the age of fifteen.
• – In most working-class families, economic survival depended on the pooled wages of most or all members of the family.
• – By the 1890s, secretarial work was the overwhelming choice of native-born, single white women, who constituted more than 90 percent of the female clerical force.