Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury (March 12, 1876 – March 10, 1933) was an American economist, academic, historian and public official.

Biography

Woodbury was born Helen Laura Sumner on 12 March 1876 to the district attorney and later

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

judge George True Sumner and Katherine Eudora Marsh in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Woodbury attended

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...

where she got her undergraduate degree in 1898 before going on to be one of the first women to earn a PhD in economics, from the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

in 1908 with her thesis, "The Labor Movement in America, 1827–1837" Wellesley College 1881

Woodbury was influenced by her professors, including

Katharine Coman Katharine Ellis Coman ( – ) was an American social activist and professor. She was based at the women-only Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she created new courses in political economy, in line with her personal belief in social change ...

and

Emily Greene Balch Emily Greene Balch (January 8, 1867 – January 9, 1961) was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, a ...

in her undergraduate years as well as Richard T. Ely and

John Commons John Rogers Commons (October 13, 1862 – May 11, 1945) was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early years John R. Commons was born in Hollansburg, Ohio on ...

in her postgraduate career. She focused on labour economics and suffrage. She published her 2-year investigation into women's suffrage in Colorado as "Equal Suffrage" in 1909 as well as working on Commons' "Trade Unionism and Labor Problems" and for his American Bureau of Industrial Research. Woodbury was also associate editor on Commons' "A Documentary History of American Industrial Society". Her work and investigations into suffrage was the core of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' "History of Women in Industry in the United States". Woodbury published regularly for the

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of th ...

and travelled Europe looking at the labour laws and how they might apply in the US before she became a full-time staff member of the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1913. In 1918 Woodbury was promoted to director of investigations for the Bureau. She resigned from that position when she married fellow economist Robert Morse Woodbury but went on to work for the Institute of Economics in 1924. Woodbury created standards for gathering labour statistics as well as contributing to the

Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences The ''Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences'' is a specialized fifteen-volume Encyclopedia first published in 1930 and last published in 1967. It was envisaged in the 1920s by scholars working in disciplines which increasingly were coming to be know ...

and the Dictionary of American Biography. Woodbury died in 1933 in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Bibliography

*'The Cross of Gold'- short story (1896) * Industrial Courts in France, Germany, and Switzerland (1910) * Child Labor Legislation in the United States (1915) * The Working Children of Boston: A Study of Child Labor under a Modern System of Legal Regulation (1922)

Sources

{{DEFAULTSORT:Woodbury, Helen Laura Sumner 1876 births 1933 deaths University of Wisconsin alumni Wellesley College alumni American women economists