Campbell, Helen Stuart

CAMPBELL, HELEN STUART (1839–1918). Social reformer and noted home economist, Campbell became a prominent member of the Edward Bellamy Nationalist movement. Born in Lockport, New York, and raised in New York City, Campbell turned to issues of poverty and unemployment while working in a waterfront mission and recorded her observations in Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1891). She published several landmark studies of wage-earning women, her major subject of investigative journalism. A series of descriptive articles published originally in the New York Tribune were collected as Prisoners of Poverty (1887). A sequel, Prisoners of Poverty Abroad, followed in 1889. Campbell’s Women Wage-Earners (1891) won a prize from the American Economics Association and played an instrumental role in the formation of the first consumers’ leagues in the 1890s.

Campbell began her career by writing children’s stories and returned intermittently to fictional forms. Mrs. Herndon’s Income (1886) joined her concern for women to a nascent faith in socialism. This allegorical novel relates interlocking stories about two unhappily married women of different class positions. By showing how a common condition of economic dependence on men shapes their lives, Campbell concludes with a critique of capitalism and remakes each into a socialist appropriate to her station. The middle-class heroine finds companionship with a Christian socialist, her working-class alter ego with a German-born revolutionary. Campbell wrote for such journals as the Nationalist, American Fabian, and the Arena.

Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Campbell, Helen Stuart. Harvard University Library Open Collections Program.

Farma, Katherine A. “Domestic Data and Feminist Momentum: The Narrative Accounting of Helen Stuart Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman” Studies in American Naturalism. University of Nebraska Press, Vol. 12, No. 1(Summer 2017), pp. 105-126.

Women Working, 1870–1930; full-text searchable online database with complete access to publications written by Helen Stuart Campbell. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/women-working-1800-1930/catalog?utf8=✓&utm_source=library.harvard &exhibit_id=women-working-1800-1930&search_field=all_fields&q=Helen+Campbell