During the American Civil War, he worked in Port Royal, South Carolina, with some of the first newly freed people to be liberated by the Union Army.
[2] Caroline's father, also named Henry Ware, was a municipal judge, lawyer, and member of the Brookline town meeting.
As a teacher, Ware provided the workers with a liberal arts education, many of whom had left school after the sixth grade.
Following her experience at the Bryn Mawr Summer School, Ware continued to teach worker education classes throughout her life.
[1] Two years later, Houghton-Mifflin published her dissertation, titled The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings.
[4] Ware moved to New York in 1931 in order to join her husband, Gardiner Means, who was completing his dissertation at Columbia University.
Ware became involved in President Roosevelt's New Deal, specifically creating a new field called "consumer affairs.
[1] The New Deal expanded this idea with the concept that consumers were also in need of protection from neglect or greed by local government.
[1] Ware became involved in several New Deal agencies that dealt with consumer protection problems, and often faced opposition from labor and business representative and bureaucrats.
She learned how to effect change in Washington D.C from the perspective of a bureaucrat and lobbyist, which became useful knowledge in her later work as an activist and historian.
[3] In 1939 Ware was asked to organize a series of papers to be presented at the American Historical Association's annual meeting.
Despite the obstacles of finding a teaching position as a woman, Ware taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1935 to 1937, and at American University graduate school from 1936 to 1945.
President Roosevelt appointed Ware to be deputy to Harriet Elliott, the consumer representative of a National Defense Advisory Commission.
[1] Ware faced gender discrimination in this position, as the members of the commission had condescending attitudes towards consumers and towards female commissioners.
Ware taught social science at Sarah Lawrence College from 1935 to 1937, and was an associate professor at American University from 1936 to 1940.
[4] Ware edited the influential book The Cultural Approach to History (1940), which featured distinguished historians such as Merle Curti, Ray Allen Billington, Constance Green and Ralph Gabriel.
[4] Ware and her husband bought seventy acres of land in the rural community of Vienna, located in northern Virginia.
"The Farm" housed various friends and acquaintances of the couple, including students, government workers, writers, professionals, travelers on international missions, and humanitarians.
Caroline Ware's friend, Pauli Murray describes her time at the Farm: Gardiner and Lina combined their intellectual pursuits with rugged outdoor life... A visitor was free to disappear with a book [...] or to join in the physical chores as a FIBUL (Skipper's acronym for "Free Intelligent But Unskilled Labor") painting the barn, cutting and stacking wood, pulling up weeds.
They sought to preserve the natural landscape, and searched for solutions through which local fishermen could earn higher wages.
[3] The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings, published in 1929 by Houghton-Mifflin, was based on the dissertation Ware wrote at Radcliffe College.
[1] In her book, Ware argued that the early cotton mill industry in New England transformed rural life, particularly for women, and influenced the future industrial development in the United States:[3] The class alignment and the power of the capitalist brought new problems to the American democracy.
Could political democracy encompass industrial autocracy, could it harbor a working class and a moneyed power and survive?