PUBLIC HEALTH
“The public health is the foundation on which reposes the happiness of
the people and the power of a country. The care of the public health is
the first duty of a statesman.” Such was Lord Beaconsfield’s standard of
public values, and it is that of a veritable army of women health
workers in the United States, who not only share his vision but are
rapidly learning the processes by which the foundation of general
happiness and power may be firmly established on American soil.
It has been through conferences, conventions and publications that women
have gained an appreciation of the manifold activities that must be
included in any comprehensive public health program, but they have been
led up to the point of effective participation in health conferences
through their own practical experiences.
In the first place, the self-preservative interest or the mere instinct
for a proper environment has forced women into public health activities;
in the second place, they have done their health work well considering
their own indirect influences, the opposition of interests, and popular
indifference; in the third place, they have sought to avoid duplication
of effort by establishing clearing houses for information and guidance
for themselves and for the public; in the fourth place, they have moved
step by step into the municipal government itself, pushing in their
activities through demonstrations of their value to the community and
often going with their creations into municipal office; and lastly and
most important of all, as the climax of their wisdom and endeavor, they
now begin to realize that the government itself in towns and cities
should absorb most of their activities, coördinate them and be itself
the agent for public health for the sake of greater economy of time,
money, effort and efficiency, and also for the sake of eliminating all
flavor of charity. In brief, it may be claimed that women have broadened
into the democratic and governmental point of view toward health
problems at the same time that they have been perfecting the machinery
by which democracy may lay its foundation of health, happiness and power
in governmental functions.
This does not mean that even in fundamental matters of physical
well-being the accomplishment of the means to that end have been simple
in any case. There has had to be a strong organization of the women in a
given community who were interested in its health problems. These women
have had to study the most intricate mechanical problems like municipal
engineering. They have had to understand city taxation and budget
making. They have had to educate those less interested to something
approaching their own enthusiasm. Moreover they have had to work for the
most part without political influence, which has meant that they have
had to overcome the reluctance of public officials to take women
seriously; they have had to understand and combat the political
influence of contractors and business men of all kinds; they have had to
enter political contests in order to place in office the kind of
officials who had the wider vision; and they have had to watch without
ceasing those very officials whom they have helped to elect to see that
they carried out their campaign pledges. Sometimes it has happened that
women have campaigned for a non-partisan ticket pledged to put through
certain municipal health reforms and the ticket has been defeated at the
polls. Under such circumstances they have had to renew their courage,
maintain their organization, raise more funds and keep up the fight.
Women who have experienced these political reverses have often become
ardent suffragists, because they realized that the direct way to work
for sanitary municipal housekeeping is through elected officials, and,
having been unable to influence the votes of men, they have acquired the
desire and determination to cast the necessary ballots themselves.
All these educational methods which women have used for their own
development and for the instruction of voters, the political
machinations with which they have had to deal, the necessity they have
been under of “nagging” without mercy until they achieved their desired
results, the sympathy and encouragement on the part of men, the
coöperation of progressive officials, their ways of raising money, their
means of perfecting organization, and their publicity enterprises will
be illustrated in the pages that follow. Some of their failures to
obtain the municipalization of certain proposals will also be recorded.
In spite of all the handicaps under which they have had to labor, women
have steadily forged ahead in medical knowledge and skill. It was the
munificent gift of a woman to Johns Hopkins on the condition that it
admit women as medical students that forced open the doors of that
institution to them. Now Dr. Louise Pearce of that university has been
appointed assistant to Dr. Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research in New York. Women moreover hold high executive
positions in the leading medical societies of the country today. Only
within the last few years, however, have women been accepted anywhere as
internes in hospitals and yet some municipalities, Jersey City for
instance, have women physicians on the staffs of their city hospitals.
Failing to get experience in other hospitals as internes, women have
often established their own and they serve as superintendents, internes,
consulting physicians in many such institutions.
Large contributions have been made by women for the founding of various
types of hospitals, both private and public. In instance after instance,
the first hospital to make its appearance in a town represents the hard
work of the women of that town in the raising of money or in the
education of public opinion to demand it.
Free dental clinics, dispensaries and women’s clinics for the
dissemination of knowledge of sex hygiene are some of the more recent
results of women’s interest and effort. The first hospital ambulance in
Chicago was bought by a woman’s club. A long list could be given of the
efforts of women to establish adequate public provision for the sick.
In 1910 it was reported at the Biennial of Women’s Clubs that 546
individual clubs had aided in the establishment of camps, sanatoria,
tuberculosis clinics and hospitals; 452 had conducted open-air meetings
for the improvement of health conditions; and 246 had placed wall cards
in public places to convey information about public health ordinances.
The sale of Red Cross Christmas seals alone has produced marvelous
results in increased hospital provision, the work of tuberculosis
clinics, open-air schools, camps and sanatoria. Hundreds of women in
various states act as agents for the sale of these stamps and they sit
at their little tables in shops, post-offices and elsewhere day after
day during Christmas week, raising money for health work. Emily Bissell
of Delaware is responsible for the recent use of these stamps. As
president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society of Delaware, she writes: “All
our work on tuberculosis has been done by women and men working
together, and while the women’s clubs have done their part, the men, in
their benefit societies, labor unions, Catholic and Jewish associations,
etc., have all had their part, and it will be difficult to disentangle
their activities from ours. All this is as it should be, but it makes
data more difficult when restricted to either sex.”
Another example of effective and direct tuberculosis work is afforded by
the Association of Tuberculosis Clinics of New York City which includes
women on its board of directors and has, for its executive secretary,
Miss F. Elizabeth Crowell. The importance of an association like this
lies in its ideals for prevention and in its stimulation to the
individual clinics composing its membership to increase their work among
children and their family care. It is of comparatively little use to
treat a single adult in a family and neglect the other members. Children
may inherit the tendency to the disease or be infected before the adult
member appears for treatment or the family’s mode of living may create
the same disease for all its members. It is therefore very direct and
effective work to make family care the basis of prevention. Partly as a
result of the conferences held by this Association, “the Department of
Health has enlarged and strengthened its clinical work, has reorganized
its system of registration and has increased both the quantity and
quality of its nursing service.”
In various ways, women have sought to control the spread of this dread
disease. They did much to abolish the common drinking cup and have
worked for the establishment of sanitary drinking fountains in public
squares and sanitary faucets in public schools and public buildings.
They have agitated against spitting in public places, and have seen
their agitations rewarded with anti-spitting ordinances; and they have
organized junior and other leagues to help with their enforcement. They
have pressed upon the attention of the authorities the necessity for
medical inspection in the schools and for open-air schools; and Mrs.
Vanderbilt of New York has built some splendid open-air homes for
tuberculous patients, which have served as models for later attempts to
deal with the housing requirements for the permanent cure of
tuberculosis.
Testimonials to the initiation and pressure by women along these lines,
all of which are of the utmost importance in checking the ravages of
tuberculosis, come from all quarters.
The Buffalo Federation of Clubs, the organized women of Minneapolis, the
Women’s Municipal League of Boston, and the Civic Club of Allegheny
County, Pennsylvania, are among the groups that have insisted upon
open-air schools for children either infected with the germs of
tuberculosis or so anæmic that they might readily fall a prey to
infection.
Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools in Chicago, brought the
open-air idea into the ordinary schools by seeing that properly devised
window boards were installed so that school children might regularly
study with open windows. This makes possible the wide extension of
preventive health work, and her scheme is being extended to other
cities.
OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES
In addition to the communicable diseases there are occupational diseases
some of which, like tuberculosis, are communicable, while others are
not.
Women were behind the agitation for the abolition of poisonous
matches—matches which produced sulphur poisoning for those who made
them. In the official organ of the Federation of Clubs was found zealous
advocacy of the Esch-Hughes law until its passage.
Occupational diseases are ills which are quite distinct in causation
from fevers and other epidemics due to germs. Relatively little has been
done in the United States toward the study and prevention of such
diseases, however, and the recent quickening of consciences and interest
in that direction is true of women as well as of men. The reports of Dr.
Alice Hamilton on lead-poisoning and of Mrs. Lindon Bates on mercury
poisoning are excellent contributions to the subject and are among the
rare studies of occupational hygiene in this country.
The widespread interest in industrial accidents may well extend to the
more subtle industrial diseases which may not be as sensational as
cataclysmic events but are not the less sure in their depletion of vigor
and in the hardships they bring into the lives of the workers and
thousands of families. The activity of the Women’s Municipal League of
Boston affords us an example of the way in which women are awakening to
their own and the public responsibility for such occupational diseases.
In their study of these dread enemies of working people, they have begun
with lead-poisoning and, perhaps wisely, since painters come into their
homes and they themselves often share directly in the responsibility for
the infection through their failure to provide hot water and other
cleansing materials at the close of the painter’s day of work. This
League has become interested in the physical troubles of telephone
operators also, such as the loss of voice and hearing.
FAMILY VISITATION
As in other branches of social endeavor, we see public health work
tending more and more toward prevention. The ideal now is not merely to
provide more ambulances, but rather to reduce the necessity for so many
ambulances. This need early became apparent as hospitals discharged
patients only to find them soon fallen into sickness again.
In all varieties of hospitals where the poor are admitted as patients,
the follow-up treatment is often as vital as the immediate prescription
and nursing. This involves family visitation and advice and is called by
Miss Katherine Tucker, president of the New York Association of Hospital
Social Service Workers, “a new profession.” Miss Ida M. Cannon,
headworker of the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General
Hospital, puts these pertinent questions about the social work of
hospitals:
OF WHAT USE IS IT—
If a patient for whom the surgeon orders a back brace starves
herself to pay the bill?
If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp
cellar which caused it?
If a clerk, fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which
crippled her sight?
If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the
maternity ward back to the neighborhood that ruined her?
Medicine and surgery, supplemented by social service, not only cure
disease but restore to full health and working capacity.
The theory and practice of this youngest handmaiden of medical
science are fully, simply and interestingly told in the latest
Russell Sage Foundation Publication.
Dr. Richard Cabot, of Boston, was one of the first physicians to
emphasize the social background of health; but it is admitted on all
sides that women are proper persons to treat the family and discover its
needs. They are social physicians in a very real sense and their
knowledge must be industrial, economic, psychological, as well as
medical.
At the fifteenth annual convention of the American Hospital Association
held in Boston last summer (1914), Dr. Frederick Washburn, president of
the association, insisted that the function of the hospital is not
merely to treat patients acutely sick, but to aid in the prevention of
disease, and to undertake social service and coöperation with community
agencies. Other speakers dwelt on the necessity of better care of the
“out-patient,” the social service side of health work. _The Survey_ had
this to say: “A new note was struck by Elizabeth V. H. Richards,
headworker of the social service department of the Boston Dispensary,
who showed that the social service department is not only of assistance
to individual patients, but that the medical social worker can be of
value to the managing authorities of the institution as a whole, in
studying the efficiency of its clinical work, and in planning the
broader relations which its work may bear to other welfare resources in
the community.”
The home situation clearly has to be considered as well as the physical
ailment in almost every case requiring medical care. Thus the task is a
coöperative one between the social worker and the medical scientist.
Every attempt to improve labor and living conditions is a similar aid to
medical science if not to the medical profession, so that any proper
study of health or physical well-being must lead us on to an examination
of efforts for better housing, a living wage, for social insurance, for
workmen’s compensation, and the many other devices that make a decent
standard of living possible.
After-care is especially imperative in cases of mental disorder.
Patients may be discharged from insane hospitals in some cases if the
physician can trust in the home environment. The social worker is his
aid in these cases and thus helps to keep families together. The
prevention of insanity and the after-care of patients is the object of
the National Committee for Mental Hygiene which numbers Julia Lathrop,
Jane Addams, Mrs. Philip Moore and several other women among its
members. Dr. Thomas Salmon, a leader in this work, writes: “Women are
active in this committee and I can say that we rely very much upon the
wise counsel of these members of the committee.”
DISTRICT NURSING
Care of the sick in hospitals, as everyone knows, depends almost as much
upon efficient nursing as upon the skill of the physician—in many cases,
far more. Of the labors of nurses for humanity, it is not necessary to
speak here. But in our present public health campaign, a new type of
nurse has appeared, “the visiting nurse,” who watches homes to guard
against disease as well as to cure, and she is now regarded by competent
observers as the strategic point in the battle for improved health in
our cities and towns.
Ysabella Waters in her examination into the system of visiting nursing
in the United States shows that in 1913 “50 health departments employed
867 visiting nurses, including 345 school nurses, 350 tuberculosis
nurses, 107 infant hygiene nurses and 65 employed in other fields of
sanitary work. At the same time 64 departments of education reported the
employment of 200 visiting nurses in their work and Miss Waters obtained
records of 2,367 nurses taking part in public health work under other
auspices, most of them being engaged in the campaign against
tuberculosis.”
An excellent system of district nursing is that developed by Miss
Lillian Wald from her Nurses Settlement in New York City, and, according
to Professor Winslow, it was due to her far-sightedness and organizing
ability that the application of the educational force of district
nursing was made to the problem of tuberculosis. Miss Wald’s belief that
the hospitals can never cope with disease and that home treatment is
better and more practicable is borne out by the figures given for the
total number of patients treated last year by the district nurses which
indicates that the number visited and cared for was larger than the
number treated by three large city hospitals in the same space of time.
Ten per cent. is the proportion usually cited as the ratio of the sick
taken to hospitals. Miss Wald contends that the treatment of patients in
their homes, especially where children are concerned, is preferable to
hospital care in most cases, and can be carried on in a way that
compares favorably with the treatment accorded in hospitals and by the
private nurse in the homes of the well-to-do.
Miss Wald began her work for public nursing twenty-four years ago and
has steadily pushed its importance into public recognition and changed
the official attitude, as well as the attitude of doctors and laymen,
from that of indifference or contempt to that of sympathy and
understanding and public support.
In other cities, the idea has been taken up and developed in many ways.
The Visiting Nurses’ Society of Philadelphia wants to increase its force
to enter industrial nursing and here as elsewhere in the various aspects
of nursing, the demand for training far exceeds the equipment. Here,
too, just as the hospital nurse soon sees the necessity of economic
backgrounds for cure and prevention of disease, so the industrial nurse
is seeing and writing on the causes and prevention of ills among working
men and women. They are greatly aided in this study by that splendid
contribution by Miss Goldmark on “Fatigue and Efficiency.”
Los Angeles was the first city to municipalize the district nurse, and
this bold step was taken at the instigation of Mrs. Maude Foster Weston
and the College Settlement workers who furnished statistics and reports,
which they themselves had gleaned from their own observations with
private district nursing, to prove that such a step was municipally
advantageous. The first school nurse was also secured in that city
through the efforts of the same women. In 1909 a practical demonstration
was given of the value of the district nurse in daily coöperation with
the city physician in controlling an epidemic of measles.
Mrs. Weston thus explains the woman’s point of view about this work:
“Someone has said that infant mortality is the most sensitive index we
possess of social welfare. It may be that in our fair climate we need
never reach the appalling records of our eastern cities, but we who know
the true state of things in Los Angeles believe that if there is not
more care of our newly-born, that, while the death list may not compare
with the East, we shall produce a sickly, ailing set of children who
will be unable, at maturity, to cope with disease. We are accused of
standing for a sort of social service which has to do with the effects
only and not with the causes which create them.... We approach however
our problems in a modern and scientific manner and we always seek for
causes.”
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston has made a thorough study of
public nursing and has adopted a scheme whereby the nurse and
houseworker are combined. This system is called Household Nursing and
its aim is to be self-supporting. The nurses are called “attendants” and
the problem of their training has had to be worked out by patient
experimentation.
Significant of the times, too, is the awakening of the women of the
negro race as well as of the white. The negro woman is especially
adapted through her past experiences for the profession of nursing and
now, with the addition of scientific training, a means of skilled
employment, coupled with an opportunity to render public service, in
addition to her age-long domestic service, is open to her.
Women are developing largely for themselves the whole science of
training for public nursing. The National Organization for Public Health
Nursing has a broad social point of view, realizing that upon the
district nurse rests the responsibility of applying in a very practical
way among the people the results of scientific thought and research.
INFANT MORTALITY
In this social battle to arrest and prevent disease, the campaign
against infant mortality assumes an ever larger proportion, and as we
should naturally expect, women are also in the front ranks here. More or
less quietly for a long period women have studied and worked on the
problem of infant mortality. In addition to their private efforts to
reduce its amount, they have served in official capacities. In 1908, for
example, a division of Child Hygiene was created in the New York City
Health Department, after careful study of the organization of such an
enterprise; and a competent woman physician, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, was
placed at the head of it. It is believed to be the pioneer—the first
bureau established under municipal control to deal exclusively with
children’s health. There had previously been diverse or scattered
activities in that direction but under the new plan all these were
coördinated.
In Milwaukee, baby-saving on a “hundred per cent. basis” was being
worked out by Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips when the defeat of the
Socialists brought their labors there to an end. Their experiment was
made possible largely by the financial and personal support of Mrs.
Sarah Boyd.
The combination of private and official activities in behalf of Child
Welfare led to the agitation of women for a Federal Children’s Bureau to
study infant mortality and nutrition. The scheme was proposed by the
National Child Labor Committee and supported by the club women. Julia
Lathrop was made Chief of the Bureau.
She was given a very small appropriation however. Furthermore she was
handicapped from the outset by her lack of satisfactory records as a
basis of work. “What do we know of infant mortality when not a single
state or city in the United States has the data for a correct
statement?” was her first query.
While pursuing the Bureau’s first study therefore, that of infant
mortality, Miss Lathrop emphasized the need of better birth and death
registration laws and methods.
It was soon recognized that women’s clubs in the various states were the
most hopeful agencies for bringing about better statistical records.
“The plan [of the Bureau] is to have the actual investigating done by
committees of women—in most instances members of the General Federation
of Women’s Clubs—who will take small areas in which they have an
acquaintance and, selecting the names of a certain number of babies born
in the year 1913, will learn by inquiry of the local authorities whether
the births have been recorded, sending the reports to this bureau. An
investigation dealing with about 5 per cent. of the reported number of
births will probably constitute a sufficient test. The women’s clubs are
responding well and the work is progressing satisfactorily.”
The recent Kentucky vital statistics law is due in a large measure to
the women’s clubs of the state, and the Chicago Woman’s Club was also
instrumental in getting a state bill for the registration of births.
The first monograph of the Federal Bureau was that on Birth Registration
and this was requested by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Other
bulletins issued by the Bureau up to the present time include Infant
Mortality Series, No. 1; Baby-saving Campaigns—a statement of efforts
made in cities of 50,000 and over to reduce mortality; Prenatal Care—a
study made at the request of the Congress of Mothers which is the first
of a proposed series on the care of young children in the home; A
Handbook of Federal Statistics of Children, giving, in convenient form,
data concerning children which had hitherto been scattered through many
unwieldy volumes; a review of child labor legislation in the United
States and one of mothers’ pensions systems. All of this information is
of the greatest assistance to workers in municipal reforms.
While women in official positions are working to educate the public in
child saving, women physicians and social workers are constantly
emphasizing the value of baby conservation at conferences of one kind
and another. An instance of this among the many that might be cited is
the participation of women in the meetings of the American Association
for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality. Dr. Mary Sherwood of
Baltimore, speaking at the last annual meeting, said: “Communities and
individuals must be made to realize the fact that the babies of today
will be the fathers and mothers of tomorrow. Make the babies well,
prevent mortality, and we have strengthened a great weakness. No
community is stronger than its weakest point.”
Dr. Sherwood is chairman of the Association’s committee on prenatal
care, instruction of mothers and adequate obstetrical care; Harriet L.
Lee, superintendent of nurses of the Cleveland Babies’ Hospital and
Dispensary, is chairman of the committee on standards of training for
infant welfare nursing and problems that confront the city and rural
nurses engaged in baby-saving campaigns; and Dr. Helen Putnam, of
Providence, is chairman of the committee on continuation schools of
home-making and training for mothers’ helpers, and for agents of the
board of health, such as visiting nurses, sanitary inspectors, visiting
housekeepers, and others. Included in the membership of this Association
are over one hundred societies which represent organized baby-saving
activities in 53 cities in 27 states. Women are hard workers as well as
scientific contributors in this Association.
One of the most effective ways of stimulating the interest of mothers in
educating themselves in the care and feeding of young children is
through baby contests or shows or “derbies” as they are called in some
places. One of the pioneers of this movement was Mrs. Frank De Garmo, of
Louisiana, who organized a contest at a state fair there, and later, one
in Missouri.
It was Mary L. Watts who so forced the better baby movement upon the
attention of Iowa, through a contest for prize babies held at the state
fair a few years ago, that farmers and their wives began to ask the
question: “If a hog is worth saving, why not a baby?” Baby exhibits with
their attendant instructions to mothers, whose pride and interest are
aroused by the public admiration of fine infants, are now held from
coast to coast.
PURE MILK
In the education of public opinion on the question of reducing infant
mortality, it is inevitable that great attention should be given to the
matter of pure milk. One cannot think of a baby without thinking of
milk, so that the effort to provide pure milk is directly associated
with every effort to reduce infant mortality and make children strong.
The problem of milk is twofold: to supply the best possible grade for
bottle-fed babies, on the one hand, and on the other to provide the
mother of the breast-fed baby with necessary conditions for nursing her
infant properly. There is no dispute as to the greater importance of the
latter phase of the problem.
The milk station to supply pure milk to the poor at low cost is an
outgrowth of the knowledge that the greater part of infant mortality
comes in summer months from the feeding of babies upon unsatisfactory
milk. The risk of death among such babies is far greater than it is
among breast-fed babies so that emphasis has perhaps naturally been
placed there to an undue degree. Knowing that bottle babies were subject
to such danger, the first thought was to minimize the peril for such
babies. As Miss Lathrop points out, however, in harmony with the best
scientific teaching: “There may be and in some places there have been
certain attending dangers where the furnishing of milk has been the only
thing attempted. On this account in many, if not most, milk stations,
positive proof is required that the mother either cannot or ought not to
nurse her baby before she can get the pure milk, and this precaution has
been found necessary in order to prevent an increase in bottle feeding
in the community as a result of the feeling of greater safety which the
pure milk station gives to mothers who, while perfectly able to nurse
their children, would prefer, for insufficient reasons, not to do so. It
is never intended that there should be less insistence upon the duty of
breast feeding because of the milk station, for while the death rate
among the bottle-fed is reduced by pure milk, the death rate among the
bottle-fed from the purest milk possible is still much higher than the
death rate among the breast-fed, and if there is any perceptible
increase in bottle feeding as against breast feeding because of the milk
station the latter might thus become an agency to increase rather than
decrease infant mortality.”[9]
Dr. S. Josephine Baker of the Bureau of Child Hygiene of the New York
Health Department also has a large perspective in dealing with this
problem. She says: “The evolution of the infants’ milk station is
essential. Pure milk, however desirable, will never alone solve the
infant mortality problem. Under our system of home visiting to instruct
mothers in the care of babies we have demonstrated that babies may be
kept under continuous supervision at the cost of 60 cents per month per
baby, and the death rate among babies so cared for by us has been 1.4
per cent. The death rate among babies under the care of milk stations
has been 2.5 per cent., and the cost $2 per month per baby. Without
overlooking the value of pure milk, I believe this problem must
primarily be solved by educational measures. In other words, the
solution of the problem of infant mortality is 20 per cent. pure milk
and 80 per cent. training of the mothers. The infants’ milk stations
will serve their wider usefulness when they become educational centers
for prenatal instruction and the encouragement of breast feeding and
teaching better hygiene, with the mother instructed to buy the proper
grade of milk at a place most convenient to her home.”
Here, as in medical prescriptions, it is futile to insist that a mother
who is physically able shall nurse her baby if she is so poor that she
must work under conditions that weaken her and thus reduce the grade and
quality of her milk or that preclude leisure in which to nourish the
infant. The question of poverty, that skeleton in every social closet,
looms up here with an insistency that nothing will banish. No kind of
philanthropy will solve the requirements of infant welfare when poverty
or labor conditions are the root of the problem.
Babies’ milk thus becomes essentially a social-economic problem. It is
so recognized by many women and is becoming more and more recognized as
such by those who work along baby-saving lines. No one sees this fact
more clearly perhaps than Miss Lathrop who joins in the ever-growing cry
for a “war on poverty.” Mothers’ pensions, and every attempt to increase
the wage of the husband or of the wife before the child-bearing
experience has entered into her life, that she may lay by a sum for that
function, reaches infant mortality more fundamentally and directly than
do milk stations. In spite of this truth, milk stations are a useful
supplementary social service and the value of pure milk where mothers
cannot nurse their offspring or secure a competent wet-nurse must not be
underestimated. The milk station, too, for one thing, affords an
acceptable avenue through which to reach mothers and instruct them in
the care of infants, to assist them with a nurse in times of trouble or
crisis, and to prepare them for the hour when milk from the stations
becomes a necessity.
In most cases women now recognize the milk station not as a private but
as a public responsibility. They first demonstrated the wisdom and
practicability of the enterprise as direct health activity, then urged
the municipalities to incorporate the plans into their regular health
department program. Cities have accepted the lesson readily, although
there are still places like our national capital, where the death rate
among infants is disgracefully high and where no provision is made by
the commissioners, during even the hot summer months, to care for babies
in this way.
The superiority of breast feeding is so well-known that the provision of
wet-nurses is recognized as a social advantage. The examination,
registration, pay and care of wet-nurses are matters of increasing
interest to women health workers and the Women’s Municipal League of
Boston is attempting to deal seriously with this social mother.
No more interesting story of women’s help on the problem of general milk
supply is to be found than comes from the Oranges, although it is fairly
typical of the way women have viewed their responsibility elsewhere. In
the spring of 1913, the Civic Committee of the Woman’s Club of Orange,
New Jersey, offered, for the summer, the services of its secretary to
the Orange Board of Health in order that a more thorough study of the
milk supply might be made than was possible with the limited official
staff alone. “Through the courtesy of the Board, Miss Hall was made a
temporary special milk inspector in June, 1913, and has enjoyed the use
of the department’s laboratory in assisting in the test of over 600
samples on which conclusions are based as to the quality of the milk
furnished in the Oranges.” Those conclusions are published in a report
by the aforesaid club in order to give the consumer a better knowledge
of the production and supply of milk “in the hope of arousing citizen
interest in a union of effort among the four municipalities, toward a
more efficient control.”
The joint effort of the Woman’s Club and of the Department of Health led
to their common support of certain proposals dealing with the milk
situation in the four Oranges. In this case, after a careful and
detailed study of all the elements that enter into the provision of milk
for these communities, the women determined upon a citizen support of
the health officers that, among other proposals, they might obtain
better appropriations for the work of inspection. Their publications and
general agitation have been marked by exact information.
From New York on the eastern seaboard to Portland on the western come
countless reports of the activities of organized groups of women in
behalf of pure milk. The “Portland Pure Milk War” was graphically
described by Stella Walker Durham in a recent number of _Good
Housekeeping_. The struggle to secure the kind of milk they wanted meant
a year’s fight for the women who knew and proved that they knew the true
conditions of their city’s milk supply.
Dr. Harriet Belcher, formerly bacteriologist in the Rockefeller
Institute in New York, in her campaign for clean milk, made a close
study of dealers, delivery, refrigeration, balanced rations for cows,
care of cows, process of milking, soils in relation to cost of
production, and many other phases of the problem. She did field work as
well as laboratory work, and is justly entitled to the name of expert.
While the advisability of mothers learning to care properly for milk and
other food in their own homes instead of relying solely upon public
care, is evident and is urged even at the milk stations in their
educational capacities, such right care in the home necessitates the
ability to secure ice easily and cheaply.
ICE
A tragic story of the scarcity and cost of ice in summer has come from
more than one large city and the machinations of ice trusts have been
among the most scandalous of business revelations. Here and there in the
United States sporadic attempts have been made to establish municipal
ice plants. Women have been prominent in the agitation for cheaper and
more plentiful ice. An instance of this agitation is afforded by the
following clipping from the _New York Times_, May, 1914:
More than one hundred mothers attended a meeting yesterday afternoon
in the offices of the East Side Protective Association, No. 1 Avenue
B, and discussed plans for the establishment on the east side of a
municipal ice plant whereby ice could be distributed to mothers
during the coming summer for their infants. At the conclusion of the
meeting a letter was forwarded to Mayor Mitchel, signed by Harry A.
Schlacht, Superintendent of the Association, asking the Mayor to do
all in his power to aid the project, pointing out that through it
lives of hundreds of infants would be saved.
A report on Municipal and Government Ice Plants in the United States and
Other Countries was prepared last winter by Mrs. Jeanie W. Wentworth,
who has been assisting Mr. McAneny, president of the New York City Board
of Aldermen, to study the question of ice.
CHILD WELFARE
The reduction of infant mortality is only one phase of child welfare.
However imperative it is to save little babies, unless they are watched
over and safeguarded physically during the after years of growth and
nutrition, the earlier work is wasted. It is this conception of the
unity of health work that has resulted in the formation by women of
child welfare associations and of such committees within women’s
associations all over the country.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs voted several years ago to work
for the following five universal needs of the American child:
1. For better equipped, better ventilated and cleaner school buildings.
2. For more numerous, larger and better supervised playgrounds.
3. For medical school inspection and school nurses.
4. For physical education and instruction in personal hygiene.
5. For instruction in normal schools in wise methods of presenting the
essentials of personal and sex hygiene.
Every medical inspection of the poor children in the public schools of
large cities reveals a state of anæmia from undernourishment. A hungry
child cannot learn rapidly, if at all. Teachers are the ones to see the
connection between hunger and mentality, and the first school lunch in
Cleveland was therefore started by teachers in a neighborhood where many
of the mothers of the children were forced to go out of the home each
day to earn all or part of the family income. Everywhere women have been
largely instrumental in initiating and defending the school lunch.
Promoters of the school lunch often have as competitors the candy
vender, the ice cream man and sellers of adulterated and low dietary
wares of various kinds who stand even at the school gates to wean the
children away from less exciting but more nutritious food. School
lunches cannot be compulsory, or are not compulsory, and the child must
be led to realize that good nutrition is fundamental and desirable. Then
he can be led on to an interest in pure food laws and their enforcement,
and kindred civic matters.
The school lunch is therefore of high social utility and an invaluable
adjunct to the work of the school medical inspector or nurse. Yet it has
its critics.
Mr. Joseph Lee of Boston is one of the more outspoken of these, claiming
that school lunches will disrupt the family.
Mrs. George B. Twitchell of Cincinnati gave a spirited defense of the
school lunch in a letter to _The Survey_:
I want to ask Mr. Lee how it is possible to disrupt a family when
our social conditions are such that the mother has to go out to help
make a living. Isn’t that family already disrupted? We are all
working to bring about social conditions when it will be possible to
have a home for all the people, when father will be able to earn
enough to make it possible for mother to remain at home; but until
such time the children must be given some good, substantial food,
not candy, pickles and such trash as they can buy at the candy
store....
The teachers of Cleveland proved that their pupils could not work on
a diet of candy and pickles. The school lunch has proved so helpful
that ten have been established in Boston, all but one in the poor
districts. The one in the Mt. Auburn school was started by the
Mothers’ Club because they wished to give their children better food
than they could get at the candy store at recess time. The mothers
report that since they have opened the lunch room and the children
get good food at recess time they have better appetites and eat more
than they did before.
Many times children do not eat because they are too hungry and tired
after the walk home and really have lost their appetites on account
of that. Children often eat a very light breakfast and need a lunch
at recess. They are like little chicks, they thrive best if fed
every three hours. We believe there should be a lunch room in every
school which should supply the children with good food, rather than
depend on commercialism, as in that case we know the only interest
is to make money.
Undaunted by those who fear that the school lunch may pauperize the
poor, some of its defenders would go further. Miss Mabel Parker, of New
York, proposes to unite with the school lunch a “pre-natal restaurant”
in certain districts where poor women in a pregnant condition can get
for five cents a nourishing lunch which they could not get for a great
deal more money at home. With the school plant already equipped for
meeting the extra work, these same women, instead of living on bread and
bologna, could be provided with a nourishing midday meal and child
welfare be promoted from the very start. Her belief is that this
extended work would be self-supporting. Miss Parker says: “We have
learned from our work in the Board of Health milk stations that
education is not enough. The people of the tenement districts simply
cannot afford good food, even if they have learned how desirable it is.
That is why the city is willing to sell them milk at cost and why
mothers must be provided with good food.”
Not only must mothers be taught better care of their infants but the
“little mothers” and “little fathers” upon whose young shoulders
devolves the burden of taking mother’s place, while she goes out to earn
or help earn the family living, must receive the education which will
enable them to preserve the lives intrusted to their care until such
time as the real mothers and fathers can be placed in an economic
situation whereby they themselves are able to assume that burden which
is rightfully theirs alone. Dr. S. Josephine Baker appreciates the value
of this work and through the organization of groups of young guardians
of children, this information is being imparted.
Mrs. Clarence Burns of New York has been among the women who have sought
to make the burdens of the “little mothers” lighter and her “Little
Mothers’ Aid Society” is one of the well-known institutions of that
city. Recently the little fathers have begun to feel that their position
of responsibility was ignored too much in the greater efforts made to
smooth the way of girls who have parental tasks, and their protest has
served to call attention again to the extent to which the oldest child
whether boy or girl is the real person charged with the task of
prolonging infant life and keeping or making baby brothers and sisters
well and strong.
CHILDREN BORN OUT OF WEDLOCK
In leaving the matter of women’s interest in the reduction of infant
mortality and the proper preparation of women for motherhood, mention
should be made of the growing recognition of the right of the child to
be well born. Realizing the responsibility of the father, as well as the
mother, for the physical and mental vigor of children, women in many
states are discussing in their associations the proposition for
requiring health certificates for those who seek the marriage license.
In some states such laws have been already passed. The right of the
woman (as well as of the man) to know that her children are to have a
proper physical heritage is now included in the new Declaration of
Independence.
Mothers there are with no legal husbands and for these and their
children the problem is difficult indeed. Mrs. Weston of Los Angeles
states that the care of such children and their mothers presents a large
and serious question economically and that the ratio of these children
and their mothers is very high among the patients visited by the nurses.
The infant mortality among children born out of wedlock has been
suspected of a high ratio but it remained for the Juvenile Protective
Association of Chicago, of which Mrs. Bowen is president, to undertake
an investigation into child mortality among this group. In its summary
of the investigation which was carefully made, the Association states
that:
“From the facts obtained it is evident that three main causes lie at the
bottom of the prodigious child mortality among the illegitimate.
“First: The lack of method in recording vital statistics, some being
kept at the city health department, the logical repository for such
records, and others by the county clerk, who has no special interest in
the matter.
“Second: The laxity of institutions and individuals in reporting
promptly and fully the items which the law demands.
“Third: The inadequate provision for disposing of children who cannot be
kept by the mothers. This last is perhaps the greatest factor.
“In conclusion, the truth is that thousands of children are lost in
Chicago. Physicians and hospitals are careless in reporting demanded
facts. Some hospitals give children away indiscriminately. Doctors,
midwives and maternity homes do likewise. There is absolutely no check
upon such disposition of babies; many hospitals and doctors and others
do not want any safe supervision.”
Mrs. Stanley King, of Boston, the Secretary of the Conference on
Illegitimacy, is one of the women who insist that the unmarried mother
and her child must receive equal consideration with other mothers and
children in any sincere plans for the reduction of infant mortality. As
for the rest of the Conference, Mrs. King states that[10] “it has faced
the question of segregation (of the feeble-minded of this class) in
institutions and of sterilization as a means of preventing a continuance
of this evil in future generations. They have asked whether it was ever
safe to return a feeble-minded girl to the community. While agreeing
that marriage of feeble-minded persons ought not to be permitted they
have not reached a final conclusion as to the best means of prevention.
“A committee has been appointed to make an investigation of the causes
other than feeble-mindedness that are at the root of illegitimacy. This
committee has already done valuable work as a by-product of its main
purpose in suggesting important points which agencies are apt to omit in
their histories and in aiding in a greater standardization of work. A
full report of this committee is expected next year.
“Study groups are being organized to take up the questions of
legislation, venereal disease, the efficiency and range of existing
institutions, public opinion, feeble-mindedness and statistics.”
The definite proposals of the Juvenile Protective Association and of the
Society for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality for proper care
of children born out of wedlock include: better systems of records, a
better system for the legal adoption of infants, provision for
well-organized infants’ homes, better bastardy laws, and a system of
probation for the mother of an illegitimate child during the first year
of its life in order to secure proper nursing and care of the child.
The district nurse becomes again the most important agent in the real
nurture of infants of this group through her supervision of all young
mothers among the poor. Owing to the fact that the deserted mother must
assume the burden of her own support and that of her child and therefore
finds nursing the child extremely difficult if not, in fact, impossible,
the whole question of mothers’ pensions comes to the fore in the
discussion as to whether widows alone should be the recipients or
whether any needy mother should share their benefits. While women do not
stand as a unit for recognition of the unmarried mother where they do
support home pensions, there is evidence of strong advocacy among women
of her inclusion in the benefits of this legislation. At all events
women are opening their eyes to the problem.
PURE FOOD
Being principally responsible for the food of the family as well as the
children, women have joined with spirit in what is known as the pure
food movement. In many a city, large and small, women’s associations
have taken up the question of the proper food supply and by concerted
efforts wrought marvelous results. An illustration of an active
municipal campaign for pure food carried on by women is described in the
_American City_ for June, 1914, by Katherine G. Leonard, secretary of
the Pure Food Committee of the Civic League of Grand Forks, North
Dakota:
What has been accomplished by the Pure Food Committee of the Civic
League of Grand Forks may be equaled or surpassed by any group of
determined women in any small city. To be sure, it is somewhat
easier to keep clean in a climate which has no excessive heat and
moisture and with a population made up for the most part of
Americans and Scandinavians. However, vigilance and education will
more than make up for differences in climate, but efforts must be
ceaseless if results are to be forthcoming.
When this committee was organized under the able leadership of Dr.
May Sanders, chairman, the work was new to all, and methods had to
be devised. The first step was a consultation with Prof. E. F. Ladd,
State Pure Food Commissioner, who was of great assistance in
suggesting just and reasonable methods of dealing with the subject
of sanitary inspection of foods so that the interests of both
merchant and consumer might be safeguarded.
A general educational campaign was inaugurated. The state pure food
and drugs act was printed in folder form, and a copy, together with
a personal letter calling attention to the provisions of the law and
asking coöperation in its enforcement, was mailed to each of the 128
food merchants then doing business in the city. The portion of the
law applying to a special class of stores or goods was red-lined
when sent to a man selling that article. For example, sections
relating to bakeries were red-lined when sent to bakers; those
applying to groceries were marked for grocers. Ten days were given
the merchants in which to clean house and prepare for state
inspection.
The state inspection continued five days, of eight hours each, and
the inspector was accompanied by Mrs. R. A. Sprague, who later
became local officer. Each merchant was rated on a score card
provided by the state commissioner for the purpose.
It became evident that the only way to secure sanitary inspection of
food at intervals frequent enough to make the city food supply
reasonably clean was to have a regular city official for the
purpose. To that end a second petition was presented to the city
council, with the result that an ordinance was passed providing for
the office of food inspector. Mayor Murphy was fortunate in his
choice of Mrs. R. A. Sprague, as she had proved her ability in the
work of general inspector for the Civic League. The ordinance is an
excellent instrument and answers many questions that arise in the
work of inspection.
Since her appointment as local food inspector, Mrs. Sprague has also
been made resident food inspector by the state pure food
commissioner.
The work of the food inspector showed conclusively that the
education of the public had only begun and that in order to make her
labors most efficient the pure food committee must devise means of
keeping the subject before the people. The greatest menace during
the late summer and autumn is the house fly, and no work along the
line of sanitary food supply can be effective that does not
emphasize the necessity of doing away entirely with the breeding
places of this deadly pest. Grand Forks has a garbage ordinance
which, if strictly enforced, would go far toward accomplishing this
end.
However, no matter how good the law, public opinion must be back of
it to make it effective, and education must be administered in large
and frequent doses. The newspaper and motion-picture theater are
excellent teachers, since they reach the largest audience, and the
one most difficult to interest. Through the courtesy of the _Grand
Forks Herald_, a fly-page was edited by the pure food committee in
August, when the fly season is at its height and the dread of
typhoid is strong with the parents of the less fortunate classes.
Yellow journalism of the most lurid type was resorted to, and so
black was the little pest painted in both prose and verse that the
public seemed roused to the situation.
Closely following the press exposé of the fly came the climax of the
season’s campaign for pure food and sanitary conditions. The
public-spirited proprietor of one of the motion-picture theaters
gave the pure food committee the use of the theater with all
proceeds for one day for the presentation of the fly-pest film....
As a result of complaints from dairymen and confectioners that
bottle and ice cream cans were returned in bad condition, cards with
hints to housewives were printed and distributed by milkmen to their
customers.
The subject of a municipal slaughter house was brought before
various organizations and committees were appointed to coöperate in
a city-wide effort to solve the problem. The subject of a city
incinerator for the disposal of garbage was also agitated.
The pure food committee, through the courtesy of the Minnesota food
commission, secured the pure food exhibit of the commission, placing
it in a conspicuous place on the grounds during the state fair, with
a lecturer in charge. This proved a great attraction, and the space
in front of the exhibit was crowded with people from the rural
districts who had heard little of the new gospel of pure food. The
local food inspector visited each food concession as it was being
placed, and explained the pure food law, with a hint that it was to
be enforced on the grounds during the fair. Several later visits
were made to the concessions, and suggestions were made and many bad
practices discovered and stopped. For example, lemonade must be made
from lemons rather than from acid powder was one order enforced. It
was noticeable that the eating places having screens were the most
popular.
The second season of pure food education is naturally less strenuous
for the committee, but not so for the inspector, who, if she be the
woman for the place, continually finds new problems to be solved. No
small part of her time must be devoted to receiving complaints and
assisting merchants in planning ways of complying more completely
with the law. She should be kind, tactful, firm and resourceful,
with a touch of the Sherlock Holmes quality.
It is well to invite the members of the city council and board of
health to take an early spring drive to the city dumping grounds and
slaughter houses—early enough to find conditions at their worst.
No one factor can make for the health of a community more surely
than a strict enforcement of the pure food laws. This enforcement by
a special officer makes it possible for bad practices of all kinds
to be traced and eliminated, either by persuasion or fine. It makes
it possible for the poor to be supplied with clean, pure food, and
this is really the greatest good that can come of the law, since the
well-to-do, who buy at large, well-kept stores on main business
streets, where neatness is an asset, can more easily influence the
food merchants. The poor, buying in small quantities, patronize the
small, ill-kept store in the vicinity of the home, and have little
influence. With food inspectors, one store is as rigidly scrutinized
as another, and the small buyer at the small, out-of-the-way store
has equal protection with the large buyer at the large store in the
center of business.
In response to an inquiry the following report comes later from Mrs.
Leonard:
The municipal abattoir was built in Grand Forks, and, by dint of all
the pressure the Civic League could bring to bear, it was put in
working order after being carelessly constructed. After working for
years to get the abattoir and telling the Council what features were
necessary to make it efficient and sanitary, not one of the women
was put on the advisory committee, even, when it was being built. It
is still far from perfect and yet scarcely a week passes that the
food inspector does not receive inquiries for plans and advice from
towns all over the West, such is the interest in the smaller Western
cities in doing things for themselves. With all the bad management,
the abattoir has some months paid expenses, which is an excellent
showing for so new an institution.
The activity of Indiana women was a large factor in the establishment of
a state laboratory of hygiene under the Board of Health charged with the
examination of food and drugs and assistance in the enforcement of
health laws. The chief of the food research laboratory in Philadelphia
is a woman—Dr. Mary Pennington.
Missouri women pledged their efforts to a pure food crusade some time
ago, while the excellent laws in Texas reflect the interest of the women
of that state. In 1906 the women of Iowa drafted a pure food bill which
they presented to the legislature. In Ohio where fair legislation
existed, the women worked to have it enforced.
In Kansas State Food Commissioner Fricke appealed to the club women to
aid him in enforcing food regulations of that state by acting as
volunteer inspectors. Where they have not been asked by city and state
officials to act, women have often proceeded to act on their own
initiative. An official inspection and report on dairy products were
recently undertaken by Chicago Club women during the session of the
National Dairy Show. Women in Louisiana are active in the inspection of
bakeries, meat markets and dairies. It is largely due to the work of
women that fruit stands and markets are screened in New Orleans, a city
in utmost need of such care. This is true of many other cities.
Louisiana has a woman as state health inspector—Agnes Morris.
In Wheeling, West Virginia, the club women have been asking for a woman
food inspector. Tacoma, Washington, is one of those cities which already
have a woman serving in that capacity. Such a clean food supply is
reported from that city that other communities in the state are
imitating its example. The women of Seattle, Washington, transformed
some old plants into five large modern sanitary bakeries.
Mrs. Sarah Evans was in 1909 Inspector of Markets in Portland, Oregon,
and her publication of clean market requirements was the inspiration of
more than one organization of women for better civic conditions.
The Housewives’ League, organized and directed by Mrs. Julian Heath of
New York, has the twofold aim of securing pure food uncontaminated by
dust and flies and of securing it at a lower cost. In the general pure
food war, Mrs. Heath and her assistant, Miss M. E. McOuat, have, among
other things, sought to interest girls in their teens in the purity and
cleanliness of the candy and soda water they buy. Open-air meetings in
the poorer districts of New York City, where cheap and dangerous wares
are on every hand, have been held to warn young children against poisons
of various kinds. At the same time this organization has assisted those
officials who have sought to induce storekeepers to carry better
varieties. They have also reported violations of the law as they have
been discovered.
The Women’s Health Protective Association of Philadelphia had a Bakeshop
Committee which visited bakeries and consulted with the bakers
themselves over conditions. The state of affairs that was revealed to
the women led to a public agitation and legislation controlling the most
unsanitary features of these places.
A new bakeshop code secured by the women of Cleveland requires absolute
cleanliness and a ten-hour day for employees. A “White List” is
published showing those bakers who best observe the code.
Mrs. E. E. McKibber, chairman of the Food Sanitation Committee of the
General Federation of Clubs, has sent a letter to the clubs of each
state to this effect:
“Do you as club women keep yourselves informed and discriminate against
poor food as you do against poor clothing?
“Have you helped pass an ordinance looking to a better food supply, to
the better handling of food?
“Have you any organization in your town that looks after the food
supply?”
This pressure by the chairman of the Food Sanitation Committee of the
clubs indicates that hundreds of committees representing thousands of
women are instituting a constructive campaign for better and cleaner
food.
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston has been very active. “The
cleanliness and hygienic condition of markets seems to me to belong
peculiarly to woman’s province,” writes the chairman of its market
committee, “and I confess it gives me a certain feeling of shame that a
comparatively small and new city like Portland should be more civilized
in this respect than Boston. It is, however, encouraging to think that
Portland has been brought to this standard from a lower condition than
Boston’s by the efforts of a few women.”
The Boston League in connection with its market work made a study of
oysters last year in their relation to the transmission of infectious
diseases, and cold storage.
For an investigation of provision shops, twenty-four Radcliff students
were used who conducted the investigations “with enthusiasm and success,
bringing to the committee papers of decided ability. Could this plan,
modified perhaps in some details, be extended successfully over the
whole city there would result from it such a mass of information
respecting the small shops as would cast a very strong light upon the
whole problem of the proper marketing of the food supply in a big city.
As far as we know no such investigation has been undertaken before.”
The Boston League has very positive ideas about legislation and
enforcement, as the analysis in its 1913 report indicates.
Sometimes despairing of securing the sanitary conditions that they deem
essential in the handling of food, women seek to establish public
markets under stricter surveillance. In Pasadena, California, for
instance, the Shakespeare Club sought to persuade the City Fathers to
establish a free public market under conditions satisfactory to
intelligent housewives. The City Fathers ignored the plea and the women
are raising money with which to finance the enterprise themselves. The
Pasadena Elks have donated a lot and the women will pay an overseer and
make rules for the sale of foodstuffs.
Market conditions in New Orleans are being closely studied by a
committee of housewives, headed by that very able woman, Mrs. J. C.
Matthews. Among the recommendations are:
The repeal of all restricting ordinances which militate against
healthy competition in the handling of produce—game, fruits, fish
and meats.
That the city maintain two or three model sanitary central markets
for the wholesale and retail handling of supplies.
That a market commission composed of men and women be appointed to
coöperate with the commissioner in charge of the markets, so as to
secure the best possible sanitary and distributing conditions.[11]
PURE DRUGS
In connection with this battle for pure food and drugs, it is
interesting to see open credit given, in a conservative and
anti-feminist paper in New York like _The Times_, to a woman for
securing the new drug law in 1914. Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt led the
fight for this new legislation which goes further than any other in
stopping the sale of habit-forming drugs in that it provides a simple
and effective way of discovering and punishing the sellers of such drugs
as cocaine and opium. Chloral, morphine and opium and any compounds and
preparations derived therefrom can no longer be sold except on the
prescription of a regularly licensed medical practitioner or dentist or
veterinarian. Prosecutions have already taken place under the new law.
While the new drug law was due to Mrs. Vanderbilt, according to the
newspaper headlines and the discussion of its passage in the above
mentioned paper, influential men and women were her active aiders and
abettors. Among these were judges of the New York courts, men and women
probation officers, representatives of both sexes from reformatory
institutions, the prison associations, and others. Dr. Katharine B.
Davis, the city commissioner of corrections, worked for the success of
the measure.
PURE WATER
Pure water as well as pure food and drugs has been the starting-point of
many a woman’s organization formed for civic purposes or for a
combination of cultural and civic endeavor.
National recognition was won by the women of New Orleans, members of the
Era Club, in their successful efforts for a municipal sewerage, water
and drainage system. The yellow fever epidemic that raged in that city a
few years ago and its attendant sacrifice of life aroused the women even
more than the men to the imperative need of a pure water supply and a
scientific drainage system adapted to the peculiar conditions of that
city.
The women seem to have felt the need; the men to have appreciated the
difficulties in the way of securing the system. The Era Club believed
that, where there is a need, there is a way and the men finally agreed.
Practically every house in the city at the time of the epidemic had a
cesspool. “The drainage system was incomplete and inadequate, dependent
upon a few drainage machines which paddled the water through troughs
into the canals and eventually into Lake Ponchartrain. After a heavy
rainfall the streets were flooded; in some sections the water would
stand for days.”
Still the men hesitated to undertake the kind of an enterprise that
local conditions demanded. For the first and only time the women of New
Orleans, who were qualified, voted, instigated and led by that splendid
Southern woman, Kate Gordon.
_The Survey_ thus describes the attitude taken by the women:
Under the Louisiana Constitution women property-holders may vote at
elections for authorizing municipal bond issues, and any woman who
objects to going to the polls may send a proxy, provided that the
proxy be given in the presence of two witnesses, which witnesses, by
a strange mingling of the old and the new order of things, must be
men. The work undertaken by the Era Club was to get the signature of
one-third of the taxpayers to a petition praying for a special
election; to arouse sufficient interest among both men and women to
induce them to vote at the special election, and to furnish proxies
to those ladies who feared that by going to the polls they might
incur the stigma of being called a new woman. And all this the Era
Club accomplished. The special election was held, the women voted or
sent proxies, and the necessary sum was authorized. As three-fourths
of the property-holders of the city were women, the significance of
this work is apparent.
The area that had to be drained and properly supplied with sewers
comprised 37½ square miles and 700 miles of streets, and it is claimed
even by outsiders that this undertaking was the largest public work of
this character ever put through at one time in the United States.
That the women of New Orleans have not voted since that occasion is no
evidence of their discouragement at their first vote. Municipal bonds
are not issued at every election and these alone entitle any of them to
vote. Suffrage conferences are held in New Orleans and the agitation for
a wider suffrage in Louisiana is being carried on by the same women who
so ably fought to secure pure water for New Orleans.
This would seem like the most direct kind of health work, for we learn
that “the death rate has been reduced 20 per cent., business confidence
has been restored and New Orleans is today one of the healthiest and
most delightful cities of the country,” according to one of the lovers
of the city.
One of the papers on the Pacific Coast, the _Pasadena Star_, recently
reported that:
[United States] Surgeon-General Blue pays a handsome, but deserved,
tribute to the efficiency of women in practical aid in making cities
sanitary, referring particularly to the excellent work of women in
San Francisco, in their invaluable assistance in eradicating the
plague from the bay city, a few years ago.
From the southern extremity of the continent we pass almost to the
northern, noting on our way many a successful attempt of women in towns
and cities, to improve water conditions.
In Woonsocket in the dry region of South Dakota the women of a club
requested the Town Fathers to supply them with pure and more abundant
water. Regret was expressed by the fathers that they could not comply
with the request. The women, nothing daunted, organized an Improvement
Association, collected money and hired an expert to drill an artesian
well. When plenty of pure water gushed forth, the town officials
consented to lay mains through the streets and allow the people to
receive water from this excellent source. The women were then successful
also in persuading the fathers to plan a beautiful park, or accept their
own plans for the same, with a charming artificial lake as the crowning
pleasure.[12]
In New Mexico the Woman’s Club of Roswell behaved in much the same way.
It was irrigation that seemed the crying need of that region. The club
had a well dug and erected a tank which holds several thousands of
gallons of water. As the women had previously planted some hundreds of
trees in their town, they were thus able to maintain them also in a
healthy condition.
One who reads the following somewhat casual report of a victory in a
fight for better water might have no appreciation of the fact that it
was the women of New Canaan who did the fighting, and hard fighting it
was, for the filtration plant in their vicinity:
Agitation by the local Civic League for an improved water supply for
New Canaan, Connecticut, recently won, through the Public Utilities
Commission, a victory which may lead to important results throughout
the state. The League, aided by an engineer and a sanitary expert,
after a three-day hearing at Hartford, secured an order directing
the private water company to install a filtration plant and
equipment to purge the water of all odor and color.
The lawyer for the water company in his brief declared that if the
request of the petitioners were granted the previous railroad work
of the Commission would be small in comparison with what was ahead
in adjudicating similar appeals relating to water supply in other
towns. “The Commission,” said one of the petitioners after the
verdict had been handed down, “has rendered this decision, so let us
hope that good days are ahead for Connecticut in regard to water
supply, and that it may lead to an efficient system of state
inspection.”
It was the women who refused to accept the findings of the male
authorities with reference to the purity of the water and proposed
methods for its control. Experts were engaged by them and their activity
at the hearings at Hartford made their determination to have better
water so clear that the men yielded and now New Canaan is proud of its
achievement—so proud that notices of the same necessitate an inquiry
into the personnel of the Civic League for a complete story.
PUBLIC BATHS
Women were instrumental in establishing public baths in several cities;
notably in Pittsburgh, where The Civic Club of Allegheny County led in
the agitation. The Woman’s Institute of Yonkers campaigned for baths in
that community and some were secured. In cases where women have been
directly interested in having baths arranged for the people, better
sanitary conditions seem sometimes to have prevailed than in cases where
they just passively approved and the city established the baths. In
Newark, New Jersey, for example, a few women made an examination of the
conditions of the public baths which had been established in that city
for some time. To their horror they found them in a positively infected
condition and their task therefore was the purification of existing
bathing places. This they had to bring about by public sentiment and its
concentration on the officials responsible for the condition of affairs.
A water supply in every home, therefore, interests many women far more
than any public bath proposal.
PUBLIC LAUNDRIES
There is more foundation for the arguments in favor of public wash
houses than for the arguments in favor of public baths. Whatever the
equipment in individual homes for bathing, and however excellent the
individual water service, there are health considerations of a very
different character to be met in connection with the family laundry
work. In large towns and even in small towns in congested areas there
are no facilities for drying the clothes and the sanitary conditions
which result from indoor home drying are deplorable and dangerous. In
addition to health considerations, the mental effect of sitting in rooms
filled with damp clothes is so depressing that many a man and many a boy
or girl has fled from home to the saloon and dance hall as a more
cheerful place to spend the evening. The poor mother who has done the
washing must bear its company in solitary submission.
In an effort to alter this pathetic condition of affairs, some attempt
has been made to establish public laundries with drying rooms attached
and every facility for rapid and sanitary disposal of the weekly
laundry. There are economic features which add reasonableness to the
agitation for public laundries, for the waste of fuel and energy
involved in individual fires for washing and ironing is incalculable and
useless, for the most part.
The Civic Club of Allegheny County has laundries in connection with its
bath houses, but their use is a matter of gradual education as the
masses are slow to give up cherished customs, however harmful and
wasteful. Where day nurseries exist side by side with the public wash
house or in close proximity the situation is more easily met as then the
mothers can leave their babies in safe hands while they are at work in
the laundry. Philadelphia, Buffalo, Baltimore and Elmira and a very few
other cities have already these public wash houses.
CLEAN STREETS
Woman’s historic function having been along the line of cleanliness, her
instinct when she looks forth from her own clean windows is toward
public cleanliness. Her indoor battle has been against the dirt that
blew in from outside, against the dust and ashes of the streets, and the
particles of germ-laden matter carried in from neglected refuse piles.
Ultimately she begins to take an interest in that portion of municipal
dusting and sweeping assigned to men; namely, street cleaning.
A volume itself could be written on the activities of women for clean
streets and public places. Little towns have needed and received the
treatment even as the great cities—not every little town nor every large
city but countless numbers of them. Lack of space prevents the
recounting here of many significant or typical cases of women’s work for
public cleanliness as an aid to general health.
The Women’s Civic League of Baltimore originated in that city the idea
of a “Clean City Crusade,” and its application was acknowledged by city
officials to have been of great assistance to various departments:
street cleaning, fire and health. Chief Engineer August Emrich of the
Fire Department said, in 1913, that the fire losses for 1912 were less
than they had been for the previous 34 years, and he gave much of the
credit for this result to the Clean City Crusade which led to the
removal of rubbish and other inflammable materials.
That Pennsylvania women generally are alert to the needs of greater
public cleanliness is evidenced by the publication issued by the Civics
Committee of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women of which Mrs.
Owen Wister was chairman. This is a list of suggestions for the
“Observance of Municipal Housecleaning Day,” and consists of practical
directions for this work with a list of civic activities closely allied
with “housecleaning day” which should be undertaken as rapidly as
possible.
The Civic Club of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, says: “It is no longer
necessary for us to maintain at our own cost the practical experiment we
began in street cleaning or to advocate the paving of a single principal
street as a test of the value of improved city highways, nor is it
necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply, a healthier sewerage
system, or the construction of playgrounds for the pleasure of our
fellow-citizens. This work is now being done by city councils or the
Board of Public Works and by the Park Commission.” That was in 1906 and
it proves that, after one or two demonstrations of the possibilities and
practical advantages of cleanings, the city proves ready to assume the
responsibility for them.
The next great problem is how to keep the city clean, for real health
protective work is not a matter of annual and sensational hauling away
of miscellaneous rubbish, but an every-day-in-the-year campaign for the
elimination of disease-breeding germs and dust provokers. As they
volunteered to show the wisdom of better disposal of rubbish and of
street flushing and oiling, so women are volunteering to educate the
people to desire permanent cleanliness. The inherited instincts of the
cleanly housekeeper thus become a valuable municipal asset.
In Philadelphia, Mrs. Edith Pearce, a club woman, is a city inspector of
street cleaning. _The Woman’s Home Companion_ thus described the way she
goes about her work:
First she planned for making the children her aids, teaching them
not only to refrain from throwing fruit skins, paper and other
rubbish into the street, but also to prevent others from so doing.
She reached the children and awoke in them a wholesome interest in
the city’s appearance by means of addresses in the public schools
and the distribution of simple circulars. Then she urged clubs,
neighborhood groups and whole communities to coöperate with the
street cleaners. In one week she addressed ten of the city’s leading
clubs for women on her chosen theme. In the crowded poorer sections
she speaks from a soap box to corner gatherings of the housekeepers
of the neighborhood, telling them, often with the aid of an
interpreter, how to handle their waste, and inspiring them to do
their part in keeping their surroundings clean and sanitary. She has
found that the Italian, Polish, and Russian mothers whom she
addresses become deeply interested in municipal housecleaning; some
of them “point with pride” to alleys, formerly reeking with filth
but now clean and orderly.
The _American Journal of Hygiene_ recently printed a paper by Mrs. Ellen
H. Richards of Boston on “Instructive Inspection,” elucidating the
advantages to be derived from the Board of Health’s appointment of a
teacher to be sent with power like any other inspection officer
“wherever ignorance, usually diagnosed as stubbornness,” is found.
Detroit club women are asking to be appointed as instructive inspectors
to do this kind of work while women in the Municipal League of Boston
are already performing a somewhat similar service, clothed with official
authority. Fifty St. Louis club women have volunteered and been accepted
as city inspectors “to help make St. Louis the healthiest city in the
country.”
In the sphere of municipal housekeeping, which forms such an easy
transition from domestic housekeeping, women have proved themselves
interested and efficient in suggesting reforms and helping to see them
completed to the minutest detail.
The sanitary survey of a municipality has had to precede, of course, any
large constructive proposals for improvement. One of our leading experts
in this field is Mrs. Caroline Bartlett Crane, who has been pressed into
service far and wide for this purpose. A number of her reports on
sanitary and social conditions have been published, describing such
places as Nashville, Tennessee; Erie, Pennsylvania; Saginaw, Michigan;
Rochester, New York; and seventeen cities in Minnesota. These reports
represent comparative studies on different topics; such as, water works,
sewers, street sanitation, garbage collection and disposal, the smoke
nuisance, milk supply, meat supply, markets and food factories, hygiene
and sanitation of school houses, housing problems, almshouses and jails.
These surveys were made at the request of local associations and
officials, usually instigated, we believe, by women. The surveys in
Minnesota, for example, were made at the invitation of the State Board
of Health and the Federation of Women’s Clubs with the coöperation of
the State Medical Association, the local medical societies, and the
commercial clubs of some of the larger cities. In Rochester the survey
was undertaken at the invitation of the Women’s Educational and
Industrial Union seconded by the mayor and a number of official and
civic organizations. Mrs. Crane has written on “Factors of the Street
Cleaning Problem,” and similar questions, in a way that shows intimate
acquaintance with the technique of road-making and other municipal
enterprises.
The organization of junior leagues for guarding the streets has seemed
to some persons, women included, as a very trivial public activity. They
have had an impression that budget-making or public accounting were far
more intellectual operations and of more social value. Are they?
One of the most expensive of public departments is the street cleaning
one. Shall any sum demanded by the present incumbent in the office of
chief of that department be granted lightly and the books be well kept
and the affair end? Or shall causes of dirty streets be investigated to
the full and the problem of heavy expense for cleaning be tackled
perhaps by some measure for the prevention of dust and refuse? The
education of the people so that they may desire permanent cleanliness
instead of the mere excitement of a spectacular clean-up week is of the
most fundamental concern. No element in that education is too
insignificant to deserve attention.
Children, through ignorance, are habitual misusers of city streets, but
they are also the most enthusiastic clean-up crusaders and rubbish
preventers when they are once aroused. All sections of the country
announce the formation of these children’s leagues to assist the women
and the city officials in cleaning-up enterprises, and in carrying home
the messages of prevention and the feeling of public interest which they
have acquired at school or at their little meetings. In New York,
circulars were printed recently in Yiddish, Italian, and English and
distributed to children by women’s clubs, teachers, churches, and civic
organizations, to aid the Health Department in its annual clean-up
program.
Junior leagues may greatly reduce the cost of the street cleaning
department and the work of the courts in enforcing city ordinances and
thus materially assist in the city budget-making; but it requires tact
and patience and more than a mere bookkeeper’s mind to make them
effective.
GARBAGE DISPOSAL
Jane Addams and other members of the Woman’s Club of Chicago on their
own initiative gave a practical demonstration of their ability to keep
hitherto neglected streets clean and of the wisdom of the municipal
exercise of such a function. Two members of the Club later were
appointed on the Municipal Garbage Commission which helped to solve
Chicago’s problem in an expert and comprehensive way. Miss Mary McDowell
of the University of Chicago Settlement made effective contributions to
this work through a personal study of refuse disposal systems in Europe.
The story of the efforts of Chicago for a proper refuse disposal system
here reprinted from _The Survey_ is well worth study:
Recent municipal purchase of a private company’s reduction plant
provides a temporary plan for the disposal of Chicago’s garbage and
ends a hard civic struggle to overcome exploitation of the public on
the one hand and amazing lack of official foresight and planning on
the other. But it is merely an escape from a bad muddle. The
struggle is still on to secure for the city a scientific and
adequate city-wide system of garbage collection and disposal.
During most of the time prior to this crisis the issue had been
mainly a plaything of politicians. But it began to assume a new
aspect when the vote was given to women and they thus came to have a
voice in municipal housekeeping.
The care of the city’s waste had been a serious matter to the
Woman’s City Club, whose committee on the subject had been for three
years urging the wisdom of preparing for the day, September 1, 1913,
when the contract with the reduction plant would end. For nineteen
years the University of Chicago Settlement had protested against
making the twenty-ninth ward the city’s dumping ground, but without
avail.
In the midst of the intense political fight over the garbage
question there seemed to be no one with courage to lead toward any
constructive plan. The administration and the aldermen played
battledore and shuttlecock with the question of responsibility. At
this crisis—when the summer’s heat was intense and no definite plans
were in sight for caring for the daily six hundred tons of
garbage—the Woman’s City Club’s Waste Committee sent a series of
pointed questions to the city officials whom they held responsible
for this situation. The press published these questions and, as the
questioners had secured the vote, the city officials were much
disturbed. They then brought the matter before the city’s Health
Committee, making an adequate and scientific city-wide plan for the
collection and disposal of the city’s refuse. The chairman of the
Health Committee, Alderman Nance, backed by Alderman Merriam, from
that moment became the leader of the movement to secure a scientific
report and plan.
The members of the City Council, glad to have a definite thing to do
to save themselves politically, created a City Waste Commission with
an appropriation of $10,000. Two women from the Woman’s City Club
were appointed on this commission, Mrs. William B. Owen, chairman of
the Clean-up Day Committee, and Mary E. McDowell, chairman of the
City Waste Committee. The club for the three years had carried to
every section of the city its welfare exhibit. In connection it gave
stereopticon lectures showing the city dumps and noxious garbage
wagons overloaded with reeking garbage and then in contrast the
motor garbage wagon of the city of Furth, Bavaria, and the model
incineration plants which Miss McDowell had seen in Germany. By this
method the average citizen was made more intelligent and wideawake
than the city government. He had been educated to look upon dumps as
antediluvian and intolerable.
The Woman’s City Club has issued bulletins to educate a public that
will demand the best collection and disposal system known, one that
will not be an unpleasant industry in any community, and a
collection system that will make short hauls, with frequent
collections in wagons that are closed tight and fly-proof. This is
possible to any people who demand sanitation first and economy
second, who take municipal housekeeping out of the hands of
politicians, put at the head of “the cleansing department” a
sanitary engineer and give the city the right to collect all garbage
from hotels and restaurants as well as households. According to the
data shown by the Woman’s Club, the city can in this way make enough
money to pay for the whole system of collection and disposal.
The movies which are being utilized all along the line have been brought
into play in several places for sanitary education. In Boston one of the
theaters is coöperating with the Women’s Municipal League “by giving an
eight-minute picture act showing striking facts about children playing
on top of sheds, in dark alleys and in the refuse from overturned
garbage cans; about dirty and unsanitary streets and unsightly and
obnoxious dumping at sea and on land; showing, also, better ways of
doing things and better places to play, and giving the theater-goers
something interesting and worth while to think about.”
SMOKE
Perhaps the position taken by the Civic League of St. Paul in demanding
the enforcement of the Smoke ordinance illustrate very well the attitude
of the women toward this nuisance. Its campaign is thus described:
This occurred quite early in our career and kicked up quite a dust,
really making the atmosphere almost as murky as the smoke had done.
We succeeded in doing what no power in the city had hitherto been
able to do; that is, in getting the ordinance actually enforced—for
about a week. The mayor’s orders were positive and not to be
ignored. Several arrests were made, prosecutions by the city were
conducted with vigor and judgments rendered against several
offenders. It was proved to most people’s satisfaction that there
were smoke consumers which consumed and smoke preventers which
prevented smoke. But on an evil day it fell out that an officer “on
the force” said unto himself, “Go to, this is my day for arresting
somebody.” He put his telescope to his eye and, turning his back
upon the wicked city where burglars and gamblers and such like birds
of night disport themselves and a forest of chimneys was belching
furiously, he espied a flying plume of smoke outlined upon the
horizon of the Sixth Ward. “Ah,” said he, “there is my man,” and he
went forth and laid rough hands upon him and fetched him into court.
Now, it happens in this city that there is one whose cry strikes
terror to all hearts—it is the manufacturer. When the manufacturer
doesn’t like anything, he says: “If you interfere with me I won’t
play on your cellar door any more, but I’ll go over and play in
Minneapolis.” That settles it. It mattered not that in this case he
bought two smoke consumers on his way home, which people in his
employ testify not only materially decreased the smoke, but saved
fuel as well. The mischief was done. The newspapers went into spasms
and told how there was “money in the smoke,” as the current saying
runs in Pittsburgh.
Far be it from the loyal women of the Civic League to interpose a
barrier to the tide of our city’s prosperity. Rather let our carpets
lose their patterns and our draperies forget their color—if there’s
“money in the smoke,” our lords can buy us more. Though the clothes
we wear are ruined, though the air we breathe is foul, though we
cannot see the sun, we will wipe our smut-begrimed faces, Oh my
sisters, and be joyful if there’s “money in the smoke.”
But is there? Is it not true that 99 per cent. of the smoke which
pollutes the atmosphere we breathe is belched forth, not from the
chimneys of factories, not from the smokestacks of producers in any
capacity, but is the direct result of the carelessness, selfishness
and indifference of the owners of office buildings, apartment houses
and—more shame to us—the public buildings of the city. If citizens
are to be required to put up patiently and peaceably with the smoke,
it behooves the men of the city who profess to like it so much to
make their boast good. Let them develop manufactures; let them found
new industries; let them turn the energy and creative force of our
people to making things which the world wants to buy—let them put
“money in the smoke.” Then at least will there be some compensation
for the inconvenience, the filth and the waste which the people are
called upon to endure.[13]
The women of Baltimore have been educating their city to see the folly
of smoking chimneys, with considerable success.
From every section of the country come reports of antismoke committees
in women’s organizations and it all points to the fact that women are
just housecleaning as usual.
FLIES, MOSQUITOES, RATS
Flies, mosquitoes, and rats as spreaders of disease have been attacked
with avidity by women.
“The anti-fly campaigning is a movement of more far-reaching importance
and more promising of prolonged life and freedom from disease than
perhaps any other single activity going forward in the community,” said
Mayor Baker of Cleveland recently in a letter to the city council.
The leader in the effort for a “flyless city of Cleveland” has been Jean
Dawson, professor of civic biology at the Normal School. In her work
emphasis was as usual these days laid on prevention, and breeding places
were attacked. As it had been estimated that a single pair of flies is
capable of reproducing two million young flies, the necessity of such a
movement was evident. Owners of stables throughout Cleveland were
compelled to clean-up, and keep clean, their premises. The schools were
utilized in an educational campaign and various civic bodies together
with the health officials eagerly coöperated.
The interesting thing about this campaign in Cleveland is that it
started before the flies hatched; in fact, it was directed against the
winter flies before they could lay their eggs. Miss Dawson issued a
“fly-catechism” which helped to win the coöperation of the women of the
city in her effort to eliminate the pest.
The occasional threat of bubonic plague and its actual appearance now
and then in port cities draws the serious attention of the public to the
necessity for the elimination of the rat. “Starve the rat and let him
go” is the war cry of women in New Orleans as well as in other cities,
especially as it becomes recognized that it is not merely the rat but
the fleas which live upon it which are carriers of disease.
NOISE
The excessive noise in urban communities adds to the nervous tension
under which city dwellers must live. Effort has been made with some
success to reduce the “yelling peril” as it has been called; namely, the
nervous peril that results from trying to study, to sleep, to
convalesce, or to work in the midst of constant uproar.
Mrs. Isaac Rice instigated the anti-noise crusade in New York in the
desire to make her city a better place in which to sleep, for one thing.
Nerve specialists and hospital superintendents and baby doctors have
been among those who have added the weight of their testimony to the
value of a quieter urban life. Through the agitation carried on by Mrs.
Rice and the committee she formed, 80 per cent. of the river whistles
were driven, by means of congressional and municipal legislation, out of
the waters that surround the island-city. New legislation which Mrs.
Rice and her colleagues secured caused certain streets like those in
front of schools and hospitals to be marked as such, and driving laws
enforced to prevent fast driving and the blowing of automobile horns in
the vicinity of such places. “Walk your horses—hospital street” is as
familiar a sign in New York now as “Keep off the grass.”
Mr. Edward A. Abbott, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who has also worked for
a quieter home city, says of the anti-noise crusade initiated by Mrs.
Rice: “The unfortunates in the hospitals and the babies in the cradles
of the great city, if they knew their benefactress, would canonize her.”
In Chattanooga the campaign was planned to show “by argument and
testimony that noise injures health, disturbs the right development of
infants, destroys the value of property, hinders the growth of cities,
promotes hate and resentment and is useless and silly.” The ringing of
railroad and other bells, crowing roosters, barking dogs and church
chimes were attacked in that southern city.
That many women are not unmindful of the fact that the anti-noise
movement must not be purely a middle-class movement is indicated by
their activity against prolonged hours of work amid the whir of factory
machinery. Noiseless machinery has not yet been a possibility, whatever
the future may hold in store for us in that respect; but any attempt to
limit one’s interest in health to a particular group is short-sighted,
to say the least. Jaded nerves are to be found in large numbers among
the factory men and women and boys and girls, whose daily bread is won
amid the incessant din of wheels and engines during a long work day.
Miss Goldmark has fully established the evils of these conditions, and
she speaks for a vast number of women in her analysis of, and emphasis
upon, overwork amid machinery as a cause of excessive fatigue. Women
physicians also are calling attention to the conditions of factory
labor.
HEALTH ASSOCIATIONS
Among other miscellaneous health activities of value may be mentioned
the American Posture League, which has been incorporated in New York to
start an organized campaign to secure “correct posture or carriage of
the body as of fundamental importance for health and efficiency.” The
points of immediate attack are to be: school furniture, and seats in
cars, theaters and other public places. Men and women in medical and
educational professions are on the committee.
While women are working in their localities and through their clubs for
improved health conditions, they are also affiliated in large numbers
with general associations interested in the advancement of public and
private hygiene.
The National First Aid Association of America, an inspiration of Clara
Barton, is a life-saving agency of incalculable worth. Young and old are
taught methods by its members to bring quick and proper relief to the
injured, which may preserve their lives until a physician can give them
better care. Policemen and firemen are taught this lesson and Boy Scouts
are becoming adepts in first aid.
A Central Council of Public Health was lately formed by the Academy of
Medicine, in New York, to act “as a medium for concerted action by
various health agencies, when need should arise.” While not distinctly a
woman’s council, it is composed both of women and men representing
women’s and men’s organizations.
Its general aims and purposes are thus set forth:
1. To provide for conferences of private health organizations,
2. To act as a clearing house for the exchange of ideas and
information in reference to the public health of the city,
3. To coördinate and prevent duplication of the various public
health activities of the city,
4. To promote coöperation in the investigation and study of health
problems,
5. To study the city budget in its relation to public health,
6. To take an active interest in the administration of all such
branches of the city government as have a direct bearing on public
health, and
7. To provide for a combined expression of opinion on matters
relating to public health.
At the first of their conferences on the city’s health, members of the
Council discussed the problem with the police commissioner and the
health commissioner and there was an exchange of viewpoints that was of
inestimable value.
At the great Hygienic Congress held at Buffalo in 1914 women were
prominent during the sessions and they helped largely to awaken public
interest in the meeting. Report had it that 7,000 representatives of
women’s clubs coöperated to secure the participation of school and civic
authorities in the Congress. At the Fifteenth International Congress of
Hygiene and Demography which was held in Washington, D. C., last year,
women not only participated but furnished one of the most interesting
features of the event—a notable health exhibit.
If Lord Beaconsfield’s test of statesmanship were applied today, women
would be seen to qualify.