Barnard B.A. and Columbia M.A. Labor economist Louise C. Odencrantz, 1907-1912

 

Rummaging through the digital archives of Barnard College in search of curricular materials, I was paging through scrapbooks of Barnard graduates in search of old syllabi and exams when I happened to stumble upon the five year self-reports of the class of 1907. There I found the story of an empirical labor researcher who after getting her B.A. went on to get an M.A. at Columbia University. While by today’s standards Louise Odencrantz would not technically be regarded as an economist, a glance at her work reveals an empirical labor economist with a focus on women’s labor force experience. I found her story compelling enough to transcribe for Economics in the Rear-view Mirror and then discovered that her papers were donated to the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

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Louise C. Odencrantz.
Biography

Louise C. Odencrantz was born on August 22, 1884, in Gothenburg, Nebraska; she received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1907 and her M.A. in Social Sciences from Columbia University in 1908. From 1908 to 1915 she was an investigator in industrial relations for the Russell Sage Foundation. From 1915 through 1919 she supervised both the New York State and the United States Employment Bureaus on the wartime employment of women in industry. As Personnel Director (1919-1924) for Smith & Kaufmann, Inc., a New York City silk ribbon company, she was active in labor negotiations and employee welfare programs. In 1922 she helped organize the International Industrial Relations Association and attended its congresses as United States delegate in 1922, 1925, and 1928. From 1927 to 1936 she was Director of the Employment Center for the Handicapped in New York. For the next three years she helped organize and train new staff for the New York State Division of Placement and Unemployment Insurance, and during World War II was Executive Director of the Social Work Vocational Bureau in New York City. She retired from the business world in 1946, remaining active in many volunteer programs until her death in April 1969.

Odencrantz was the author of Italian Women in Industry (1915) and The Social Worker in Family, Medical and Psychiatric Social Work (1927), and co-author of Industrial Conditions in Springfield, Ill. (1915) and Public Employment Services in the United States (1938).

 

Source: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Louise C. Odencrantz Papers, 1909-1968.

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Selection of Publications

Louise C. Odencrantz. Irregularity of employment of women factory workers. Survey, 21: 196-210. 1909.

Louise C. Odencrantz and Zenas L. Potter. Industrial Conditions in Springfield, Illinois: A Survey by the Committee on Women’s Work and The Department of Surveys and Exhibits, Russell Sage Foundation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, June 1916.

Louise C. Odencrantz. Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1919.

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Odencrantz’s Report in the 1907 Class Book. 1907—1912 (Barnard College)

Louise C. Odencrantz. “Writing one’s memoirs when she has been out of college five years is something like summarizing her life history at the age of five. At least, I feel as if life had just begun. (If indeed you could see how the handsome young Italian fellows roll “dem soulful eyes” at me, you’d think I was still Sweet Sixteen.) During these years you are in a sort of suspended state, not knowing for certain whether you want to stick to your present job or not for the rest of your working days. And in these years you rapidly discover that the work you took in college seems to be of little use, but the courses that you didn’t take would have been so helpful. For instance my head ached with Latin, French, Greek and German when I left college, and Italian is the only language I have ever had to use. And why didn’t I take a course in Statistics instead of Art Appreciation? It would have saved me many a worry. But how could I tell I was never going to teach?

My work has been practically the same since 1907, investigating always, but my employers have changed much. The first year it was for the College Settlements’ Association for which I held a fellowship. That same winter saw me one of two lone women in the Columbia Economics Seminar of some fifty Japs, Americans, Chinese, Russians and other miscellanies. If my mind had not been so full of the unemployment of factory girls, the seminar would have offered a good thesis on the immigrant question. The following year I was investigator for the Alliance Employment Bureau and for the last three years for the Committee on Women’s Work of the Russell Sage Foundation.

No one of my friends has ever been able to discover what I do other than that I go to see all sorts of factories and queer people, to discover what the trade conditions are for women in New York City. It is all most interesting to me as it is to every other investigator. What more absorbing than to enter almost into a working girl’s life, learn her ways of thinking, her ambitions, her sorrows and worries and her points of happiness? It is pathetic to find girls remembering you years after you have been to ply them with an hundred questions, and that your friendly visits have been epochs in their lives. There is Jennie, one of my staunch friends. She is an Italian flower maker, 34 years old, who had to go to work when she was 12 years old. “It must be lovely to know how to read and write”, she said. Now she supports three strong, grown brothers, her mother and herself. Why? Because her mother would not leave these sons tho they abuse and boss her, and Jennie would not leave her mother. To you she would appear only a large, stout, cross-eyed woman, ignorant and coarse, but get acquainted! Do you wonder I am a hot suffragist and am willing to wear out the asphalt on Fifth Avenue on May 4^th?

It is indeed a life of motleyed experience, drinking wine almost by the quart, eating super with these people (oh, don’t mind if the macaroni is served from a wash bowl in the middle of the table, or that the glass you drink from has not been washed since the last imbiber), trying to persuade Angelina not to take back her good-for-nothing husband when he gets out in 6 months, or getting a place in the country for Katie, an Irish bookbinder, pale and worn out. She is 22 but tells you that she used to go to dances and weddings when she was young.

For the last months I have been playing statistician and I feel as if my legs were tables, my arms appendices, my body a census volume, covered with dollar marks and percents and diagrams. Even in writing this I can scarcely refrain from inserting a few tables and statistics.

I have no photographs to send of a husband, etc., as I have none. One married shirtwaist maker asked me the other night, “You got a fellow?” and when I replied “No,” she exclaimed, “What’s the matter?””

Louise received an M.A. in 1908 and the results of her investigation for C.S.A. were published in the Survey for May, 1909.

 

Source: Found in the Barnard Digital Collection. Mary Catherine Reardon Scrapbook, 1903-1911: 1907 Class Book. 1907—1912, Edited by Sophie Parsons Woodman, pp. 14-15.

Image Source: Class portrait of Louise Christine Odencrantz, Barnard Class of 1907 in Mortarboard 1907, p. 173.