Caroline Gleason

Born to politically active, Catholic parents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1886, Caroline Joanna Gleason grew up surrounded by an ethic of social justice.  Following in her parents’ footsteps, Gleason pursued social reform through her studies and career and continued her dedication to reform work after she joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and became Sister Miriam Theresa. Caroline Gleason specifically took an interest in the new and growing population of wage earning women became more common with the industrialization and urbanization of the United States. Gleason was instrumental in the passage of Oregon’s first minimum wage law for women and minor workers in 1913, and she pursued reform in industrial wage and working conditions throughout her life.

Gleason attended high school at St. Clara College, in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin and, in 1908 she earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, along with a teaching certificate. In 1910 she took advanced studies at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, (now the University of Chicago School of Social Service) the premier training institution for the fledgling profession of social work.  In addition to her academic training, Gleason gained experience in the field doing settlement work and studying industrial conditions for women in several Eastern and Midwestern cities under the auspices of the National Consumers’ League.  Coming from this strong background of academic credentials and practical experience, Caroline Gleason quickly became enmeshed in the social reform movement in the city of Portland and the state of Oregon. 

As a new teacher and social worker, Caroline Gleason moved to Portland, Oregon in 1908. She taught English and Latin classes at St. Mary’s Academy and College. During this time she also helped organize, and volunteered at, the Catholic Women’s League to aid young women wage workers. She also joined the Oregon chapter of the National Consumers’ League, the Consumers’ League of Oregon CLO). In 1912, the CLO hired Gleason to conduct a survey of women’s wages, working conditions, and the cost of living throughout Oregon.  Gleason and her small team of researchers documented workplace realities for women as they entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. In addition to women already working in agriculture and domestic work, women of all ages went to work for wages in factories, offices, canneries, retail stores, restaurants, hotels, and laundries.  Gleason’s survey concluded that the disparity between women’s wages and their living expenses was extensive, and that most working conditions were intolerable.  In the spring of 1913 reformers used the survey’s results to convince the Oregon State Legislature to pass one of the first minimum wage laws in the nation.  An Industrial Welfare Commission was created by the legislature to enforce the new law.  That commission hired Gleason as its paid executive secretary, and for three years she oversaw the implementation of the Commission’s rulings on wages and working conditions and continued inspections of factories and businesses.  

Gleason was lauded for her work on the Industrial Welfare Commission, and while “she loved the things [she] was doing,” she was keenly aware of a lack of spirituality in her work, and her life.  As a result, in 1916 Gleason resigned her position on the Industrial Welfare Commission and “left the world” to enter the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a teaching community.  Upon her investiture, Gleason took the name Sister Miriam Theresa.  Sister Miriam Theresa firmly believed that “the education of youth is one of the best means of achieving social justice.”  Pursuing that principle, Sister Miriam Theresa returned to Portland where she became influential in the education of young women for forty-one years, first at St. Mary’s Academy and later at Marylhurst College.  

Sister Miriam Theresa taught economics and sociology at St. Mary’s until 1924.  That year she left Portland to study at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., earning her Ph.D. in Economics.  Her dissertation, Legislation for Women in Oregon, was published as Bulletin #90 by the U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau in 1931.  Sister Miriam Theresa moved to Marylhurst College in 1930,. where she served as the Dean of the Department  of Social Sciences for many years, and, following other assignments, retired in 1959.  Her interest in labor issues remained constant and she offered courses on labor laws and social reform throughout her tenure at Marylhurst.

Caroline Gleason/Sister Miriam Theresa’s efforts to reform wages and working conditions for many working women in Portland in the early twentieth century received local and national recognition.  Although she “left the world,” Sister Miriam Theresa was regularly consulted on labor issues for many years.  She was asked to mediate disputes in the state over the wage and hour law during the mid-1930s, and during the Roosevelt Administration, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, sought Sister Miriam Theresa’s participation in a Pacific Coast conference on labor.  In 1950, Governor Douglas McKay appointed Sister Miriam Theresa as a delegate to the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth.  The following year she was honored by the Oregonian newspaper as one of twenty-five outstanding women in Oregon in the past one hundred years.  In 1956, the Portland alumnae chapter of Theta Sigma Phi, the national honor society for women in journalism, honored Sister Miriam Theresa as one of five Oregon “Women of Achievement.” A 1980’s publication of the Oregon Lung Association titled, “Women in the History of Oregon,” listed Sister Miriam Theresa/Caroline Gleason’s contributions under two categories: Community Service – Statewide Impact, and Education.  

Although not well known today, Sister Miriam Theresa/Caroline Gleason was involved in precedent-setting labor legislation for Oregon women in the early twentieth century.  Her work was reflective of a larger social reform movement striving for similar legislation across the nation and other industrialized countries.  Like many members of that movement, Sister Miriam Theresa/Caroline Gleason was a pragmatic reformer, not a revolutionary.  When she died in 1962, at the age of 76, Sister Miriam Theresa was remembered as a “pioneer in labor legislation.” 

Photograph: Caroline Gleason, 1910 Courtesy of the Archives of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, U.S.–Ontario Province 

Honored by Janice Dilg, HistoryBuilt.org, 2014