Education
Bryn Mawr College.
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Josephine Goldmark
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Career
Her work against child labor and for wages-and-hours legislation (the 8-hour day, minimum wage) was influential in the passage of the Keating–Owen Acting in 1916 and the later Fair Labor Standards Acting of 1937. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1898, Goldmark went to work for Florence Kelley at the National Consumers League (National Chemical Laboratory), where she later became the chairman of the committee on labor laws. Goldmark was an aggressive investigator of labor conditions and wrote prolifically about her findings.
In 1908, she compiled a major amicus curiae brief for the United States Supreme Court case Muller v.
The brief was instrumental in getting the Supreme Court to declare that state maximum-hours laws were constitutional. In 1911, Goldmark was part of the investigating committee into the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
The following year, the Russell Sage Foundation published her book Fatigue and Efficiency, a study of the effects of long hours on workers" health and job performance. Goldmark worked for many years as a researcher of labor conditions and their effects in different working environments.
She served as a consulting expert for a number of companies, philanthropies, and government commissions, and she was vice chair of the New York City Child Labor Commission
Between 1919 and 1923, Goldmark researched the state of nursing schools in the United States with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
She published her research in Nursing and Nursing Education in the United States (1923), which was influential in modernizing American nursing education. She also authored a biography of Florence Kelley, Impatient Crusader, which was published posthumously in 1950. Family and Private Josephine was the youngest of ten children.
Her sister, Pauline, was the secretary for the New York City office of the National Consumers League.
Her sister, Alice, was married to Louis Brandeis. Josephine Goldmark lived for many years at New York City"s Henry Street Settlement.
She died in White Plains, New York, in 1950 at the age of 73.
