Campbell, Helen Stuart (July 4, 1839-July 22, 1918), author, reformer, and home economist, was born Helen Campbell Stuart in Lockport, N.Y. Her parents, Homer H. and Jane E. (Campbell) Stuart, were Vermonters of Scottish descent. Early in her childhood her father moved to New Yprk City, where for half a century he eas a lawyer and at one time president of the American Bank Note Company. Helen was educated in New York public schools, at the Gammell School in Warren. R.I., and at Mrs. Cook's Seminary in Bloomfield, N.J. In or about 1860 she was married to Grenville Mellen Weeks, who next year graduated from University Medical College (now part of New York University). In the Civil War he served as surgeon aboard the U.S. ironclad Monitor and after the war was medical director of the Florida military district and a surgeon and Indian agent in the West. Shortly after his return to civilian life in 1871 the marriage broke up, and it ultimately ended in divorce.
Beginning in 1862, Helen Campbell published children's stories under her married name in the Riverside Magazine, Our Young Folks, and St. Nicholas. These were well received, and in 1868-69 a number were collected in the four-volume "Ainslee Series," which sold well enough to warrant a London reprint. She also published several adult novels under the names "Campbell Wheaton" and "Helen Stuart Campbell" the latter the name she subsequently used throughout her life. Shorter works of popular fiction apeared in Lippincott's, the New England Magazone, and Harper's.
During the late 1870's she became active in the early home economics movement. Having taken lessons from Juliet Corson, Mrs. Campbell in 1878 began teaching on the Raleigh (N.C.) Cooking School. While there she wrote a textbook, The Easiest Way in House-Keeping and Cooking (1881). In 1880 she was associated with Mrs. Anna Lowell Woodbury in founding a mission cooking school and diet kitchen in Washington, D.C. Back in New York, she served as literary and household editor of the short-lived Our Continent magazine (1882-84). Later, in 1893, she helped organize the National Household Economics Association, an outgrowth of the Women's Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition; this subsequently (1903) merged into the committee on household economics of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.
Helen Campbell's career had meanwhile taken a new turn in 1882 with the publication of The Problem of the Poor, in which she described the work of a city mission on the New York waterfront with which she was associated, run by Jerry McAuley, a reformed criminal. The book also dealt generally with property in New York, stressing particularly the effects of low wages upon women. This was followed in 1886 by Mrs. Herndon's Income (originally a series in Lyman Abbott's Christian Union magazine), portraying the impossibility of living decently on the poor wages being paid many women workers. Mrs. Campbell also contributed a column on "Woman's Work and Wages" to Good Housekeeping. For a time she continued to write light novels, but her growing reputation rested on her books about the poor. The New York Tribune commissioned her to study conditions aomng women in the needle trades and department stores of New York City; her weekly articles which began in October 1886, were collected on the following year as Prisoner of Poverty. After a lengthy European trip she wrote a sequel, Prisoners of Poverty Abroad, published in 1889. Herself drawn toward social reform, she joined the First Nationalist Club of Boston, founded by the followers of Edward Bellamy, and wrote occassionally for the Bellamyite monthly in the Nationalist, for the Rev. W.D.P. Bliss' American Fabian, and, particularly, for Benjamin O. Flower's Arena.
In 1891 her monograph, "Women Wage Eraners," received an award from the American Economic Association. A general survey of the condition of working women in America and Europe, it concluded by suggesting workers' associations and Consumers' Unions as means of forcing better wages and working conditions. It was published in 1893 with an introduction by Richard T. Ely, the liberal University of Wisconsin economist, with whom she studied that year. Ely persuaded hte regents of the university to invite her to deliver two courses of lectures in the spring of 1895 on "Household Science" and "Social Science," Ely personally arranging for her rumuneration. Although the lectures did not, as she had hoped, lead to a permanent academic appointment, the first series was published in 1897 as Household Economics - a subject she viewed as "the connecting link between the physical economics of the individual and the social economics of the state." Meanwhile she had served briefly (1895-96) as head resident of Unity Settlement (later Eli Bates House) in Chicago, in association with the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, with whom she had lived for a time in California in 1894. In 1897, once more on the recommendation of Ely and others, she was appointed professor of home economics at the Kansas State Agricultural College, where a Populist-dominated admonistration was hiring a number of Eastern reformers. Plagued by ill health and difficulty in getting along with subordinates, she resigned in March 1898 to resume her career as a free-lance writer and lecturer.
Mrs. Campbell produced little after 1900. After leaving Kansas she spent several years in Denver, and around the turn of the century she moved with Charlotte Perkins Gilman to New York City. For the last six years of her life she was in the Boston area, dying at her home in Dedham, Mass., in 1918 (of endocarditis and nephritis) at the age of seventy-nine. As early as 1896 she had visited and written enthuriastically about "Green-acre," a summer retreat at Eliot, Maine, that had gradually become a center of the Bahai'i religion. In her final years she became a Bahai'i devotee, and her remains were taken to Eliot for burial.
Helen Campbell's vivid portrayals of New York poverty had considerable impact in her day. She was miscast as a scholar; even so friendly a critic as B.O. Flower wrote: "Mrs. Campbell skims over the surface of conditions,and though often very helpfully suggeststive, she fails to strike at the root of economic evils" (Arena, Aug. 1901). Though not of hte first rank, she was one of a significant group of writers who, seveal decades before the muckrakers, drew the nation's attention to appalling conditions in American slums.