Born: 17 November 1878, United States
Died: 19 June 1939
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Grace Island
American social worker Grace Abbott worked for the rights of immigrants and advancing child welfare, especially the regulation of child labor. Moving to Chicago in 1907, she moved to Chicago, living at Jane Addams’s Hull House. She completed her Ph.M. in political science at the University of Chicago in 1909. From 1909 to 1910, she wrote Within the City’s Gates, weekly articles for the Chicago Evening Post about the exploitation of immigrants. She served with child welfare organizations such as the Immigrants’ Protective League (1908-1917), and was director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s child labor division from 1917 to 1919, where she was responsible for administering the 1916 Keating-Owen Act until it was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1918. However, Abbott was able to continue parts of the law by including clauses in war-goods contracts between the federal government and private industries. She also fought for a consitutional amendment prohibiting child labor, but it never achieved state ratification
Abbott was a professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago from 1934 to 1939 and wrote several sociological texts, including The Immigrant and the Community (1917) and The Child and the State (1938, 2 volumes). She pioneered the use of sociological data relating to child labor, juvenile delinquency, dependency, and statistics in the lawmaking process and lobbied politicians for social issues in Washington, D.C. She was associated with the Social Security Administration from 1934 until her 1939 death, helped draft the Social Security Act and chaired several government committees on child welfare and social issues.
Abbott was a member of the Women’s Trade Union League and in 1911, co-founded the Joint Committee for Vocational Training with her older sister, Edith Abbott, and Sophonisba Breckenridge. She was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1976; the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s School of Social Work is named for her. She was also the first woman nominated for a Presidential cabinet position, but was not confirmed.