Elizabeth Beardsley Butler (1885–1911) was a pioneering social investigator of the Progressive Era. She is best known for her contributions to The Pittsburgh Survey, a landmark study of social conditions in an American city.
A 1905 graduate of Barnard College, she also took courses at the New York School of Philanthropy before securing employment as a researcher of wage earners, both female and child, in Jersey City, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Beginning in 1907 she worked for Paul Kellogg's Pittsburgh Survey, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. Her resulting 1909 book, Women and the Trades, was the first large survey of wage-earning women in America and the first of the six volumes of the Survey.
Butler died of tuberculosis at age 26 in Saranac Lake, New York.
Her final book, Saleswomen in Mercantile Stores: Baltimore, 1909, was posthumously published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1912.
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“I consider women a great deal superior to men. Men are physically strong, but women are morally better.... It is woman who keeps the world in balance.”
—Mrs. Chalkstone, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, ch. 16, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1882)
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And do you gather about us when pale light
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