author
Frances Blascoer
1873–1938
A progressive-era investigator and reformer, she is remembered both for her early leadership in the NAACP and for her close-up study of working women and girls in Honolulu. Her writing captures the social realities behind labor statistics and policy debates.
1 Audiobook
The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study
by Frances Blascoer
About the author
Born in 1873, Frances Blascoer was an American reform worker and researcher whose career crossed social investigation, civil rights organizing, and public advocacy. She served as the NAACP's first Executive Secretary from 1910 to 1911, placing her at the center of the organization's earliest work.
Blascoer also wrote The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study (1912), a detailed examination of labor conditions in Hawaii. The book reflects her interest in how women and girls lived and worked, and it stands as an example of the fact-based social research used by reformers in the early twentieth century.
Later in life, she lived in China for several years and afterward worked as an antique dealer in New York. She died in 1938. Although she is not widely known today, her career links early civil rights history with the broader world of Progressive Era social reform.