author
Frances Blascoer
1873–1938
Best remembered as the NAACP’s first executive secretary, she also wrote sharp, ground-level studies of working women, education, and social conditions in early twentieth-century America and Hawaiʻi. Her work blends reform-minded investigation with a close eye for everyday life.
1 Audiobook
The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study
by Frances Blascoer
About the author
Born in Wisconsin in 1873, Frances Blascoer was an American investigator, writer, and organizer whose career moved between social research and civil-rights administration. Reliable sources available here identify her as the first executive secretary of the NAACP, serving in 1910–1911, and note that she later lived in China for several years before working as an antique dealer in New York.
Blascoer is especially notable in an audiobooks context because she published detailed social studies, including The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu and work on Black schoolchildren in New York. Her writing focused on labor, education, and the daily realities facing women and marginalized communities, giving modern readers a vivid window into Progressive Era reform and the social questions of her time.
She died in 1938. Although she is not widely known today, her surviving work connects social investigation, activism, and early twentieth-century history in a way that still feels immediate and readable.