Volume 14 , Issue 26

1913 April 13, Miss Perkins Addresses Consumers' League

Consumers' League Meets Tomorrow, was the headline in The Washington Herald, dated 13 April 1913, Sunday, Washington, DC. In 1913 Miss Frances Perkins was secretary of New York Committee on Safety. Miss Frances Perkins of New York and Representative Andrew Peters of Massachusetts, were reported to be the principal speakers at the Consumers' League meeting on 14 April 1913.

Representative Andrew Peters and Miss Frances Perkins would be the speakers at the second annual meeting of the Consumers' League that was to be hold 14 April 1913, in the afternoon at 4:45p.m. at Rauscher's. Mr. Peters spoke on the Peters-LaFollette bill, which had just been re-introduced into both Houses of Congress, and Miss Perkins should speak on the general aspect of such protective legislation.

The president of the local Consumers League, Mrs. Harvey Wiley, was quoted as saying, "Our discussion this year will be confined to the question of legislation. The original policy of the National Consumers' League when it was founded twenty-three years ago (1890) was to try to ameliorate the conditions of working women and children by a policy of persuasion, the consumer, or purchaser, bringing pressure to bear on her own tradespeople, who were employers of labor. By degrees, however, the pioneers of the movement saw that what they could accomplish by this means was strictly limited, and that they would have to have recourse to legislation in order to protect the well-intentioned employer against the competition of his unscrupulous rival. The Consumers' League has standards in regard to hours, wages, and general sanitation and fire protection, which it considers absolutely essentially to the physical welfare of the working women of the country. These standards it is trying to enforce by statute in State after State."   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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