Early Years
She began her social reform work in Richmond, Virginia, where she had spent her childhood. While in her 20s, she supported herself by working as a stenographer but devoted much of her free time to volunteer social service work and political activities on behalf of women's suffrage. In 1914, the Richmond YWCA offered her a job as its industrial secretary, a post she held until 1918, when she stepped down to care for her invalid father. In 1923, Mason resumed her post at the Richmond YWCA, working there until 1932.
During this period, Mason stimulated YWCA involvement with economic advancement in the African American community, and she generated public support for state labor laws that would ensure safer workplaces, end child labor, raise minimum wages and shorten work hours. Mason also traveled throughout the South promoting voluntary employer agreements that incorporated fair labor standards. To aid in this effort, she wrote Standards for Workers in Southern Industry (1931), the first pamphlet of its kind. Mason relied on consumer pressure to raise labor standards as well.
She belonged to the Union Label League in Richmond and was a frequent speaker to community and labor groups about the importance of buying union-made products and services. During World War I, American Federation of Labor (AFL) President Samuel Gompers appointed Mason as the Virginia chairwoman of the Women in Industry Committee, a division of the wartime National Advisory Committee on Labor.
In 1932, Mason succeeded Florence Kelley as the general secretary of the National Consumers League (NCL), the leading national advocate of fair labor standards. From the 1900s to the 1930s, the NCL worked to pass protective labor laws and to convince consumers to buy only goods and services produced by workers who enjoyed a living wage and decent working conditions. Under Mason, the NCL won the passage of new state labor laws, lobbied for improved labor codes in the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and helped ensure the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Read more about this topic: Lucy Randolph Mason
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