Helen Stuart Campbell

• Helen Stuart Campbell
• Born: July 4, 1839
• Died: July 22, 1918

Fiction writer, home economist, and social reformer, was born Helen Campbell Stuart in Lockport, New York, the daughter of Homer H. Stuart, a lawyer and banker, and Jane E. (Campbell) Stuart. Both parents were natives of Vermont. Her paternal ancestors were early New England settlers, and several generations of Stuarts had fought in the colonial Indian wars, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution.

Shortly after her birth the family moved to New York City, where she attended public school. She continued her education at the Gammell School in Warren, Rhode Island, and Mrs. Cook’s Seminary in Bloomfield, New Jersey. At the age of twenty she married Grenville Mellen Weeks, a surgeon who served on the Monitor during the Civil War and as a government administrator and agent for Indian affairs until 1871. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1862, with her husband at war, Helen Weeks had begun writing children’s stories under her married name. She wrote short fiction for Lippincott’s Magazine, Harper’s, and the New England Magazine, and published several novels under the names Campbell Wheaton and Helen Stuart Campbell (her mother’s maiden name, which she adopted in 1877). Her participation in the home-economics movement began in the late 1870s, after her separation from her husband.

This movement had developed largely as a result of industrialization. As the home changed from a center of production to one of consumption, often with both parents away at outside jobs, the responsibility for training young women for their future role as homemakers fell to the schools. In 1862 a land-grant act of Congress provided federal funds to state universities to promote the teaching of courses in practical (as opposed to scholarly) subjects, and colleges began to educate women students in what was called “domestic” or “household” science—the efficient and businesslike management of the home, with the woman as chief engineer. The application of scientific principles to home life was expected to advance the political and social reforms of the Progressive Era. The modern home, as Campbell wrote, was modeled on “an office, ... the kitchen of a buffet car or steamship, the arrangement of a laboratory or a store.”

After taking private cooking lessons, Campbell began teaching in 1878 at the Raleigh Cooking School in North Carolina, where she produced a textbook, The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking (1881). With Anna Lowell Woodbury she founded, in Washington, D.C. in 1880, a mission cooking school and diet kitchen whose objective was to provide the maximum nourishment at the lowest possible cost to working-class families. She was household editor of Our Continent magazine in New York City from 1882 to 1884.

Campbell’s career took a new direction in 1882, when she returned to New York City. While working with a waterfront mission run by a reformed criminal, Jerry McAuley, she became interested in economic and social issues, especially those connected with working women, which she described in her book The Problem of Poverty (1882). The disastrous effects of low wages on the morals, health, and families of working women were treated by Campbell in Mrs. Herndon’s Income (1886) and in “Women’s Work and Wages,” a column she wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine.

These publications brought to Campbell to the attention of the editors of The New-York Tribune, who hired her in 1886 to study the working conditions of women employed in department stores and in the garment industry. Her articles for the Tribune were collected the following year as Prisoners of Poverty, an example of what later came to be called muckraking journalism. Her research showed that employers, even well-intentioned ones, were forced by intense competition to choose between bankruptcy and the economic exploitation of their employees, especially female employees. The book detailed numerous cases of women living on less than three dollars a week and showed how declining rates for piecework unsettled their standards of living. A sequel, Prisoners of Poverty Abroad, appeared in 1889. Campbell was the coauthor of Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1891), an account of McAuley’s mission.

Campbell’s work drew her into the social-reform movement. She became a member of the First National Club of Boston and wrote for such reform papers as the Nationalist, American Fabian, and The Arena, for which she served as specialist on women’s affairs. In 1891 her survey Women Wage-Earners won an award from the American Economics Association. Published in 1893, at the start of one of America’s worst economic depressions—one that saw hundreds of thousands of women unemployed, many freezing and starving on the streets—the book helped arouse the conscience of the country. Campbell’s reports led to the founding in the 1890s of consumers’ leagues that publicized the exploitation of saleswomen, tried to unionize department-store workers, and investigated shops to make sure that management was dealing fairly with employees.

In 1893 Campbell helped organize the National Household Economics Association and studied with the liberal economist Richard T. Ely of the University of Wisconsin. On the recommendation of Ely she was invited in 1895 to lecture at the university on household and social science. A number of these lectures were published as Household Economics in 1897. With the writer and reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman she edited Impress in San Francisco (1894) and worked with Unity Settlement in Chicago (1895-96). In 1897-98 she was professor of home economics at Kansas State Agricultural College.

Campbell lived for several years in Denver, Colorado, and then returned to New York City to live in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s household. She became a member of the Sorosis Club of New York, the American Home Economics Association, the Consumer’s League, and the Women’s Press Club. From 1912 to her death she lived in Dedham, Massachusetts, where she joined the Baha’i faith. She died of endocarditis and nephritis at the age of seventy-nine in Dedham, and was buried at the Baha’i center in Eliot, Maine.

Campbell’s main contributions to reform were as a writer and propagandist. Through her vivid descriptions of poverty, especially its effects on women, she drew the attention of the American people to the terrible conditions in the nation’s slums and tenements. She was both a pioneer in social investigative journalism and a precursor of the muckrakers.

Helen Stuart Campbell’s works, in addition to those noted above, include The Ainslee Series, 4 vols. (1868-71); His Grandmothers (1877); Six Sinners (1878); Unto the Third and Fourth Generation (1880); The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play (1883); The Housekeeper’s Year-Book (1883); The What To Do Club: A Story for Girls (1885); Good Dinners for Every Day in the Year (1886); Miss Melinda’s Opportunity: A Story (1886); Roger Berkeley’s Probation: A Story (1888); Anne Bradstreet and Her Time (1891); In Foreign Kitchens (1893); and Ballantyne; A Novel There is no full-length account of Campbell’s life. The best modern sketch is to be found in Notable American Women (1971). Also useful is the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 9 (1922). For her work in home economics see the pamphlet by H. T. Craig, The History of Home Economics (1945). For her poverty and reform activities see P. S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I, vol. 1 (1979); J. J. Kenneally, Women and American Trade Unions (1978); R. H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (1956); A. E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy (1944); and W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (1942). For her connection with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, see Gilman’s The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). An obituary of Campbell appeared in the Boston Transcript, July 23, 1918.