Smith, Hilda Worthington.

Opening Vistas in Workers Education. An Autobiography. Introduction by Lyn Goldfarb and Stephen Macfarlane.

1978. Octavo. Original Softcover. Secondhand book in very good condition.

Hilda Worthington Smith (June 19, 1888 – March 3, 1984) was an American labor educator, social worker, and poet. She is best known for her roles as first Director of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry and as a co-founder of the Affiliated Schools for Workers (later known as the American Labor Education Service), though she also had a long career in government service supporting education for underserved groups including women, labor workers, and the elderly.
Smith also wanted to teach “workers’ education”, a term that had a strong communist association. She related years later, “I hardly dared mention it because it was so unpopular.″
Workers’education was … “unusual because it involved three groups virtually ignored at the time: women, blue collar workers, and blacks..”—Priscilla Van Tassel, New York Times, June 24, 1984, NJ5. (Caption for HWSmith picture) from the interview for the story in the NYTimes
“And what is workers’ education? I think the first thing is to say what workers’ education is and what it is not. I’d like to say, first, it is not vocational education. Many people think that that is what it is; it’s not trade training for workers. That’s entirely separate, should supplement workers’ education and go along with it. But it is not the same thing. Workers’ education is a specialized branch of adult education. It covers in general the economic and labor problems related to the experience of industrial workers, office workers, farmers, anything that touches the economic field. It is also and usually supplemented with much work in English, with elementary science, social psychology, with history, with a background of life in the United States. It touches: employers’ problems, trade union problems, the worker in the community as citizen, the government’s relation to industry and to the labor movement.” Interview with Hilda Worthington Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY, October 17, 1963. (Wikipedia).
From the Book:
Table of Contents: Early Years On a College Campus Through City Courts and Employment Bureaus Country People; Two Hundred Orphans; A Comnunity Center; A Dean’s Job; A School for Women Workers in Industry; More Schools for Workers; What Dreams May Grow; Years of Depression; An Office in Washington: Federal Funding for Workers’ Education; War Housing 1943-1945; Learning to Lobby; My Years in OEO.

• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 400835AB

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