author
Sue Ainslie Clark
Best known for helping document the daily economics of self-supporting women in early 20th-century New York, this writer brought careful reporting and human detail to a subject that still feels strikingly modern. Her most noted work, co-written with Edith Wyatt, looks closely at how working women stretched small wages to cover rent, food, and clothing.
1 Audiobook
Making Both Ends Meet: The income and outlay of New York working girls
by Sue Ainslie Clark, Edith Wyatt
About the author
Sue Ainslie Clark is known today for Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (1911), written with Edith Wyatt. The book grew out of an investigation into the budgets of wage-earning women in New York City and closely examines what it cost to live on modest earnings.
Contemporary editions and library records credit Clark with gathering the material for the study over many months, interviewing young women in rooms, boarding houses, hotels, night schools, and clubs. That hands-on reporting gave the book its grounded, practical feel and helped make it an important snapshot of urban working life in the Progressive Era.
Little biographical information about Clark was easy to confirm from reliable public sources, so her surviving reputation rests mainly on this book. Even so, that work remains a vivid and thoughtful record of women’s labor, money, and independence in early modern New York.