Grace Abbot shared her mother’s zeal to make a the world a better place, although she did not become a Quaker to achieve the dream. Lizzie Abbot was a very big influence on young Grace. She’d been an abolitionist, and a supporter of suffrage. Her father was also socially conscious, being both an attorney and a politician later in his life.
When Abbot graduated Grand Island College in 1898, she became a high school teacher. She kept the job for nine years, before she moved to Chicago to advance her education and pursue a new goal. In Chicago, she truly found herself. She became involved with Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, two prominent social activists from that time. Grace even switched majors to political science, a degree she completed in 1909.
Abbot noticed that immigrant workers in Chicago were getting a bad bargain. Those with poor language skills, for instance, were often swindled by employers making them sign contracts in English.
She became an advocate for laws that helped to shield immigrants from this kind of treatment. She traveled briefly to Eastern Europe in order to learn more about the immigrants coming into Chicago, and she returned to Washington D.C. in 1917 with a clear mission: to care for immigrant children.
She took the lead of the new Child Labor Division, which became part of the Children’s Bureau. At one point, Abbot stopped interstate commerce of goods made with child labor, until the Supreme Court struck down her actions as an interference with state’s rights.
Before her death in June of 1939, Abbot helped write some of the legislation that went into the 1935 Social Security Act. Although she never married, Abbot is fondly remembered as a mother to 43 million immigrant children.
About the Author: Phineas Upham is an investor at a family office/ hedgefund, where he focuses on special situation illiquid investing. Before this position, Phin Upham was working at Morgan Stanley in the Media and Telecom group. You may contact Phin on his Phineas Upham website or Twitter page.
