1 gen 1906 anni - Upton Sinclair publishes the Jungle, Food and Drug administration established

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Pure Food and Drug Act: A 1906 law that created the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the food and drug industries to ensure safety.
National Consumer's League(NCL): A national progressive organization that encouraged women, through their shopping decisions, to support fair wages and working conditions for industrial laborers.
Women's Trade Union League (WTUL):A labor organization for women founded in New York in 1903 that brought elite, middle-class, and working-class women together as allies. The WTUL supported union organizing efforts among garment workers.
Struggles to improve factories, tenements, and neighborhoods in large cities quickly expanded into national movements for reform. In 1906, journalist Upton Sinclair exposed some of the most extreme forms of labor exploitation in his novel The Jungle, which described appalling conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants. What caught the nation’s attention was not Sinclair’s account of workers’ plight, but his descriptions of rotten meat and filthy packing conditions. With constituents up in arms, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and created the federal Food and Drug Administration to oversee compliance with the new law.
The impact of The Jungle showed how urban reformers could affect national politics. Josephine Shaw Lowell, a Civil War widow from a prominent family, spent years struggling to aid poverty-stricken individuals in New York City. By 1890, she concluded that charity was not enough: she helped found the New York Consumers’ League to improve wages and working conditions for female store clerks. The league encouraged shoppers to patronize only stores where wages and working conditions were known to be fair. By 1899, the organization had become the National Consumers’ League (NCL). At its head stood the outspoken and skillful Florence Kelley, a Hull House worker and former chief factory inspector of Illinois. Kelley believed that only government oversight could protect exploited workers. Under her crusading leadership, the NCL became one of the most powerful progressive organizations advocating worker protection laws.

Many labor organizations also began in a single city and then grew to national stature. One famous example was the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), founded in New York in 1903. Financed by wealthy women who supported its work, the league trained working-class leaders like Rose Schneiderman, who organized unions among garment workers. Although often frustrated by the patronizing attitude of elite sponsors, trade-union women joined them in the broader struggle for women’s rights. When New York State held referenda on women’s suffrage in 1915 and 1917, strong support came from Jewish and Italian precincts where unionized garment workers lived. Working-class voters hoped, in turn, that enfranchised women would use their ballots to help industrial workers.

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