“Guard Well the Gains”: Laurel C. Thayer, Self-Supporting Workingwomen, and the “Ladylike” Struggle for Waged Equality in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Archives and public records are “tricksy” places for women. Women’s writings have often been ignored, or deemed unworthy of archival space. Recovering their voices, legacy, and agency can require not only “reading along and against the grain” but also turning to alternative sources. Women who took charge of the expanding state in the Progressive Era wrote with tremendous frequency as part of their jobs as friendly visitors, public health field workers, social workers, probation officers, and the like. This is how I initially encountered Laurel C. Thayer and a number of other professional and semi-professional Hoosier women, through my research on the Indiana Girls School. Their record keeping and signatures served to commit some 5000 young women and girls, ages 10-20, to custodial state care between 1873 and 1929. Digging into the state archives, one encounters a rich and complicated record of women’s efforts to assess the home and working conditions of other Hoosiers in the Progressive Era. Their reports, investigations, letters, and ongoing case notes bring these workingwomen into focus, even if we gain only a limited understanding of their subjects. In the case of Thayer and a few others, their commentary on their work conditions periodically slipped into the official records, and it affords us even greater insight into their lives as workingwomen in this time period.