Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury

Helen Laura Sumner Woodburywas an American economist whose investigative work centred largely on historical and contemporary labour issues, particularly in relation to women and children.

Helen Sumner grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado. In 1898 she graduated from Wellesley (Massachusetts) College, where she had developed an interest in social settlement work. A novel published in 1896, The White Slave; or, The Cross of Gold, reveals her early grasp of economic issues. In 1902 she began graduate studies in economics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she worked as secretary to Richard T. Ely and studied with John R. Commons. Sumner contributed to Commons’s Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (1905) and with Thomas S. Adams wrote Labor Problems (1905), a widely used college textbook. From 1906 to 1907 she conducted a field investigation of woman suffrage in Colorado, publishing her report, Equal Suffrage, in 1909.

Resuming her studies, Sumner helped compile and edit several volumes of the Documentary History of American Industrial Society published by Commons’s American Bureau of Industrial Research. In 1908 she received her Ph.D. for a dissertation on “The Labor Movement in America, 1827–1837,” which became a major portion of the first two volumes of History of Labour in the United States (1918) by Commons and several students. Sumner’s pioneering study entitled “History of Women in Industry in the United States” was published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as Volume IX of its Report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States in 1910. From 1909 to 1913 she undertook various contract studies for the federal government. On a European research tour she gathered information for Industrial Courts in France, Germany, and Switzerland, published in 1910 as a bulletin of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 1913 Sumner joined the year-old Children’s Bureau as an industrial expert, and two years later she advanced to assistant chief under Julia Lathrop. She later gave up the administrative post to serve as the bureau’s chief investigator. Following her marriage in 1918 to Robert M. Woodbury, an economist, she worked for the bureau on a contract basis. Her published work for the bureau includes Child Labor Legislation in the United States (1915; with Ella A. Merritt), The Working Children of Boston: A Study of Child Labor Under a Modern System of Legal Regulation (1922), and Standards Applicable to the Administration of Employment-Certificate Systems (1924). She also contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.