author
Sue Ainslie Clark
A quietly important voice in early social reform writing, best known for helping document the everyday finances of self-supporting working women in New York. Her work turns wages, rent, meals, and exhaustion into vivid human stories.
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 for Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (1911), a social study she wrote with Edith Wyatt. The book grew out of work connected with the National Consumers' League and closely examined how young working women in New York earned, spent, and stretched their money.
Contemporary editions and library records consistently link her name to that book, and the text itself explains that Clark spent about a year and a half gathering workers' budgets through interviews in rooms, boarding houses, hotels, night schools, and clubs. That on-the-ground reporting gives the book much of its power: it reads not just as research, but as a careful record of lived experience.
Very little clearly verified biographical information about Clark was easy to confirm from reliable public sources beyond her authorship of this work. For that reason, the safest picture of her is as a researcher and writer whose lasting reputation rests on a detailed, humane account of women workers' lives in the early twentieth century.