A groundbreaking sociological study of one of America's largest and most industrialized cities, the Pittsburgh Survey (1907-8) sought to provide a model for how to implement lasting civic and industrial reform through political activism that was built on the methodical investigation, scholarly analysis, and "diagnosis" of existing urban conditions. Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and organized by the Charities Publication Committee under the direction of the journalist Paul Underwood Kellogg, the Pittsburgh Survey presented the findings of more than fifty social science researchers in six published volumes as well as through a wide variety of public education presentations and exhibits. The pioneering reform-minded photographer Lewis Wickes Hine was among those who provided evidence.

The Social Museum Collection holds more than thirty original boards with enlarged Hine photographs from a Pittsburgh Survey display. A selection of them corresponds to Elizabeth Beardsley Butler's study "The Stogy Industry" from the Pittsburgh Survey's first volume, Women and the Trades. Escalating demand by industrial laborers for what was called the "workman's cheap smoke" fed the stogie trade, which in Pittsburgh by 1907 employed more than 2600 poor immigrant women, often working in repugnant conditions in the city's 32 factories and 203 sweatshops. Outnumbering men in the industry three to one, women generally performed such unskilled tasks as stripping, rolling, and bunching. Middle-class anxiety about the social impact of the changing industrial order permeated the Pittsburgh Survey. The emphasis on speed and output over craftsmanship, Butler argued, for example, caused the "nervous exhaustion" and "social waste" of young women and what she described as the interconnected spread of "unfit homes and undervitalized children."