These efforts also produced generations of women who went on to be leaders in the broader labor movement and in the broader movements for equality. The rise in female labor force participation was an early focus of and helped establish the fields of statistics and labor economics in their modern incarnations.
Carroll Wright, the first commissioner of what is now known as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and who established the high standards for data collection and analysis for which the  - 11 bureau is known, devoted his agency’s fourth annual report, for the year 1888, to the topic of Working Women in Large Cities.