Clare de Graffenried

Mary Clare de Graffenried (May 19, 1849 – April 26, 1921) was an American labor researcher and writer, who worked as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Labor beginning in 1888. She wrote a number of influential articles on the conditions of working-class people, particularly women and children, including the controversial 1891 essay "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mill." Her work is notable for its early inclusion of scientific data as a basis for rhetorical argument in discussions of the American working class.

Early life and education Mary Clare de Graffenried, usually known as Clare, was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1849. Her mother was Mary Holt Marsh, and her father was Colonel William Kirkland de Graffenried, a lawyer who had initially opposed secession but eventually came to support the Confederacy in the American Civil War and serve in Georgian Governor Joseph E. Brown's administration.

De Graffenried attended Macon's Wesleyan College, then known as Wesleyan Female College, graduating with honors in 1865, the same year Union troops took control of Macon. As the school's valedictorian, de Graffenried went off-script in her graduation speech, criticizing the troops led by James H. Wilson who were camped in the city. Wilson threatened to shutter the college in response, but he held off after hearing it was an impromptu, non-sanctioned speech.

Career After spending another decade in Macon, in which time she most likely worked as a schoolteacher, de Graffenried moved to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1870s, apparently due to the postwar economic depression in the South. She taught math, literature, and languages at Georgetown Female Seminary, then, thanks to her father's connections with Interior Secretary L. Q. C. Lamar, she was given a job working in the patent office in 1886. It was based on her interviews with poor, white mill workers in Georgia. While it was praised in the North as a compelling argument that incorporated detailed research, it drew an angry response in the South, particularly in Georgia, because it was perceived as ridiculing Southern whites.

Personal life De Graffenried lived in Washington, D.C., until her death in 1921. She turned her home at 1935 7th St NW into a "house museum" of antiques and souvenirs of her travels to Europe and Asia. She moved in the city's high-society circles, associating with the likes of first lady Ellen Axson Wilson, but was also described as an "original type" who "never gave a thought to her personal appearance." She never married.