SOCIAL SERVICE
Social service is not an exact science and it does not mean the same
thing to all people. Charity or philanthropy was more definite and has
always been more or less of an official concern in municipalities. In
times of crises, floods, panics, fires, earthquakes, extreme cold or
excessive heat, cities and towns have supplemented the help rendered by
individuals in alleviating hunger, homelessness, illness and want. The
municipality thus often makes charitable doles to the victims of the
elements, regarding the service as necessary, but temporary; remedial,
not preventive.
The social investigations which have been made in recent years, together
with the revelations made by charitable organizations, have driven home
the fact that while intermittent fire and water and industrial crises
and heat and cold undoubtedly add to human helplessness or distress,
there is a steady and constant helplessness and distress based on
underfeeding, homelessness or bad housing, unemployment, lack of
vocational training, low wages, ignorance, occupational diseases and
accidents, sexual irregularity, and other causes for which spasmodic
almsgiving, however tenderly and efficiently applied, is no remedy
whatever. Added to this definite knowledge is the knowledge, based on
the experience of charity workers, of the opprobrium which is cast upon
charity of the personal type, at least, by industrious wage-earners, the
products of whose toil, instead of being used to provide them with the
creature comforts, are, in many cases, consumed by those who toil not,
neither do they spin, but who are active in distributing alms to
producers.
Partly to satisfy their own intelligence and partly to overcome the
resentment among working people at the idea of charity, the social
worker has come into being and social service has developed into a
philosophy, an education, and to a certain extent into a science. Step
by step it has been pushed into municipal departments—notably, the
health and educational departments. Where associated charities have been
well developed and the city has the idea of social service in its
charitable work, the tendency is to use the word “welfare” and to
designate this function as “public welfare.”
It is the same development which has characterized all other public
work—the growth from remedy to prevention—and the growth is stable for
the reason that it represents economy in place of the former waste of
money and effort and because popular education is leading to the demand
for prevention and justice rather than charity.
In this expansion of municipal functions there can be little dispute as
to the influence of women. Their hearts touched in the beginning by
human misery and their sentiments aroused, they have been led into
manifold activities in attempts at amelioration, which have taught them
the breeding places of disease, as well as of vice, crime, poverty and
misery. Having learned that effectively to “swat the fly” they must swat
its nest, women have also learned that to swat disease they must swat
poor housing, evil labor conditions, ignorance, and vicious interests.
Sometimes the mere self-preservative instincts have forced women out to
work among their neighbors; for in cities one’s neighbors may murder in
innumerable ways besides with the pistol or dirk.
Middle- and upper-class women, having more leisure than middle- and
upper-class men, have had greater opportunity for social observation and
the cultivation of social sympathies, for the latter accompanies the
former instead of preceding it, as all active emotions are the reflexes
of experience. It is these women therefore who have seen, felt,
experimented, learned, agitated, constructed, advised, and pressed upon
the municipal authorities the need of public prevention of the ills from
which the people suffer. In their municipal demands they have often had
the support of women of the working class and of working men, among
others, whose own preservation is bound up with legislation and
administration to an ever-increasing degree.
Just in the proportion that social service develops into public action,
and away from private philanthropy and personal interference, is the
help of working people secured. With the increase of the demands of
working people for the means with which to prevent their own destruction
and the undermining of the rest of society, will come, many predict, the
absorption of social service into organized public service just as the
absorption of the settlement is gradually being accomplished by the
school center.
Whatever may be the outcome of the present tendencies in social service,
it is certain that women are actively engaged in every branch of it: in
organized charity, in all the specialized branches of kindred work, such
as care for the several types of dependents and delinquents, in
organizing women workers in the industries, in making social surveys and
special investigation, and in creating the literature of social service.
ASSOCIATIONS
Women have rendered valiant service in various permanent associations
concerned in the improvement of social conditions. The largest gift ever
given by a single donor to such an organization was that of Mrs. Abram
A. Anderson who gave $650,000 to the New York Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor, for a specific purpose; namely, the founding
of a department of social welfare with experimental and demonstrating
laboratories. In the letter accompanying her gift, Mrs. Anderson
specifically stated that three departments to be established at once
shall relate to public health and hygiene, matters pertaining to the
welfare of school children, and the solution of problems connected with
the food supply.
A study of the work performed by women engaged in the activities of this
Association reveals the fact that they prepare many of its important
publications. Interior pictures inserted in the last report show large
offices filled with women, in one case forty of them preparing their
daily reports on visiting. The advisory committees in the Bureau of
Rehabilitation and Relief are composed of women who assume the burden,
on stated mornings, of meeting applicants and helping with “instruction;
with the correction of defects, physical, mental, moral; with patient,
careful planning; with continued interest and personal service.”
The National Consumers’ League was organized by women and is largely
supported by them. This society “is an association of people who believe
to buy is to have power, to have power is to have responsibility.
Therefore it seeks to better the industrial conditions of the worker,
and to insure sanitary articles to the consumer, by educating the public
to avoid rush orders, to shop early in the day, early in the week, and
early in the Christmas season; by furnishing a label which guarantees
the product bearing it to be made under sanitary conditions and without
hardship to the workers; by assisting in the enforcement of present laws
relating to child labor, women workers, sweat shops, fire hazards, pure
foods, and other matters. Locally it makes investigations and reports
facts to city authorities.”[34] In addition to the direct good which the
League has accomplished, it has incidentally interested hundreds of
women in the conditions of industrial workers.
The Travelers’ Aid Society, a great protective and preventive agency,
which assumes large responsibilities in looking after foreigners, women,
and girls traveling on railways, is helped by personal service and the
financial support of such organizations as the following: the Granges,
the Gideons, King’s Daughters and Sons, Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, Catholic Women’s League, Council of Jewish Women, other women’s
clubs, missionary societies, the Young Men’s Christian Association and
the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Not only do women coöperate with various agencies for social service.
Their clubs and associations of all kinds are turning more and more to
the consideration of social matters outside of the range of their
immediate interests. Indeed one might say with justice that “social
economy” is now one of the chief studies of women’s societies and that
social service in an ever broader sense is becoming more and more the
goal of their activities.
The women’s clubs, singly and in their federations, have now largely
outgrown the self-improvement stage of their career and are going into
matters of public health, education, recreation, corrections, and labor.
For example, the New England Conference of State Federations of Women’s
Clubs representing over 55,000 women is a permanent organization of
recent formation designed as an alliance for educational and social
service. Speeches at this Conference emphasized the need of better
housing and divorce laws; vocational training; pure food legislation; a
single standard of morality for men and women; the suppression of
“nauseous” news in the daily press; health measures; and the enforcement
of laws for the protection and conservation of womanhood, childhood and
the home.
The general trend of club women’s development in the United States as a
whole is shown by the following resolutions passed at the Biennial
Convention of Women’s Clubs held in Chicago in June, 1914: approval of
equal suffrage; better fire protection; increased appropriations for
city and state boards of health; university extension work for the
prevention of disease; federal bureau of Home Economics; the use of
school buildings as social centers; the support of Miss Lathrop in her
propaganda for better systems of birth registration; and hostility to
the liquor traffic. The social evil question loomed large at the
Convention and drastic measures for dealing with it were discussed.
The large and influential Council of Jewish Women is also concerned with
these lines of social service. Some of their special activities and
interests will be considered in other chapters.
If we turn to localities and study the work of single clubs, we find an
ever-increasing interest in social service and that interest accompanied
by practical action. For instance, the Woman’s Club of Paducah,
Kentucky, proved so efficient in its administration of funds for relief
of the poor that the mayor and council asked its assistance in other
lines: inspection of dairies, slaughter houses, etc.
The social service work of such a specialized society as the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union reflects a wide range of interests and
activities, its development being an inevitable response to needs
growing out of its study of the evils accompanying the liquor traffic.
It has worked among all races and industrial groups of men and their
families; it has done prison visiting, reformatory and prisoners’ aid
work; it has helped courts and probation work; it has helped to secure
police matrons and policewomen: it has stood for the single standard of
morals and the suppression of the white slave traffic; it has helped to
secure playgrounds and other recreational facilities; it has tried to
teach thrift through school savings banks; it has done rescue work; and
it has drafted and urged and watched the enforcement of legislation
relating to industrial education and vocational guidance, child labor,
liquor and narcotics and cigarettes, gambling, curfew, polygamy,
segregation of prostitutes, labor, and all similar problems. It has
opposed segregated districts and worked whole-heartedly for woman
suffrage.
The National Civic Federation has a woman’s department interested in
“securing needed improvements in the working and living conditions of
women and children wage-earners in various industries and the
governmental institutions throughout the United States.”
SOUTHERN WORK
Everywhere among women’s associations the call for social service is
sounding forth. The spirit of this movement is admirably illustrated in
an article bearing the title of “Women and Social Service,” written by
Mrs. R. R. Cotten, of North Carolina, for the _Social Service
Quarterly_:
The term Social Service means work for the welfare of humanity, and
there can be no doubt as to the relation between that work and
women. Primarily and ultimately it is work for women. As the givers
of life, as the mothers of humanity, their activities must be
unremitting in the effort to promote the welfare of humanity. In the
past their efforts were devoted to the welfare of their families,
and to a limited extent reached the communities in which they lived,
but now few fields of service are closed to them.
The world has realized that the welfare of a _few_ cannot be assured
except by securing the welfare of _all_, while the security of all
assures the safety of our own special few. Christian effort is no
longer limited to the churches. The human heart has overflowed with
a great yearning to make this earth better by filling it with
healthier, happier, more human people. In response to this yearning
everywhere heads are planning and hands are clasping in a determined
effort to accomplish this result.
This desire led to the formation of the North Carolina Conference
for Social Service, the aim of which is “to study and improve
social, civic, moral, and economic conditions in our State,
especially conditions that injuriously affect child life, or tend to
perpetuate preventable ignorance, disease, degeneracy, or poverty
among our people.” Every woman’s heart responds to this call to
service for the benefit of the children. Every woman is interested
in the investigation of the conditions which surround child life,
and every woman will coöperate in seeking to remedy such conditions
as are injurious.
The difficulty lies in reaching women and arousing them to the
consciousness of their power and the need for their assistance. I
hope all the women in the state will ally themselves with the work
and “lend a hand” to the general uplift which it will bring. If they
cannot all attend the conferences, they can read the Quarterly and
thus keep in touch with the work, and coöperate in the effort by
working at home and in their communities. They are interested in
every line of thought discussed at the conferences, and can select
those lines in which they are most interested for the bestowal of
their energies.
In educational progress; in the promotion of public health, which
necessarily includes individual health; in prison reform; in the
study of eugenics; in the improvement of country life, and in all
social, civic, and economic problems men need and welcome the help
of women. Neither can accomplish much _alone_; together they must
strive and overcome, together they must win or lose. Together they
must attack “the conditions which injuriously affect child life”
until all children shall have opportunity for development into
useful citizens. This being true no one can deny that Social Service
is woman’s work.
The day is past when we deluded ourselves with the thought that our
responsibility ceased with the performance of our individual duties.
We are jointly responsible for the existing conditions, and only by
a joint effort can they be improved. Our neighbor’s welfare is our
business and our neighbor is all mankind.
The power of environment to influence the life of an individual is
known to all, and it is the natural duty of all women to see that
all children are surrounded by conditions under which they can
develop into good men and women. It may be a difficult task, it
doubtless will require a long, persistent effort, but the object is
well “worth while.” In the stress of busy lives men may sometimes
forget these obligations, but women must ever bear them in mind,
doing their own part toward improving conditions, and stimulating to
renewed effort on these lines the men who forget. Together they can
strive and win, remembering that the welfare of the next generation
should be the very highest ambition of this generation.
The challenge of social service proclaimed by the North Carolina
Conference is vigorous:
It is a challenge to the Church to prove her right to social mastery
by a universal and unselfish ministry.
It is a challenge to fathers and mothers and all social workers to
lift the burdens of labor from childhood and to make education
universal.
It is a challenge to all citizens to rally to the leaders of social
reforms, so as to secure for the nation civic righteousness,
temperance, and health.
It is a challenge to American chivalry to see that justice is
guaranteed to all citizens regardless of race, color or religion,
and especially to befriend and defend the friendless and helpless.
It is a challenge to the present generation to show its gratitude
for the heritage bequeathed to it through the toil and blood of
centuries, by devoting itself more earnestly to the task of making
the nation a universal brotherhood.
It is a challenge to the men who make and administer laws to
organize society as a school for the development of all her
citizens, rather than simply to be a master to dispose of the
dependent, defective, and delinquent population with the least
expense to the State.
It is a challenge to strong young men and women to volunteer for a
crusade of social service, to be enlisted for heroic warfare against
all destroyers of social health and justice, and to champion all
that makes for an ideal national life.
ASSOCIATED CHARITIES
Outside of their own clubs and associations, constructive, organizing
ability in social service has been shown by women, first, in their
desire to consolidate social work for reasons of economy and efficiency.
Josephine Shaw Lowell conceived the idea of a New York Charity
Organization Society and took the lead in establishing it in 1882, but
chose a man for the executive position.
The Woman’s Club of York, Pennsylvania, took the initiative in the
establishment of associated charities.
The Associated Charities of Mt. Vernon, now known as the People’s
Institute, was initiated by women, and they are large factors in it
still. The second vice-president, recording secretary and treasurer are
women, and the Visiting Nurse Association, the Consumers’ League and the
Westchester Woman’s Club are members.
In Denver, the Jewish Social Service Federation has been made a
permanent organization to work in the field covered by United Hebrew
Charities in other cities. Women predominate in this Federation.
Under the inspiration and guidance of Miss McKnight, of the Civic Club
of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, organized charities became an
accomplished fact in Pittsburgh and Allegheny.
Word comes by letter from clubs and civic organizations of women, where
charities are yet to be organized, stating their agitation with this in
view.
When it was discovered in 1907 in New York that the care of babies was
distributed among some fifty societies, a step was taken toward
coördination of activities for babies. Social facts thus attacked at a
thousand points gradually converge in one more harmonious and unified
effort.
A plan for “benevolence by coöperation in place of benevolence by
competition” was recently put into effect in Cleveland when the
Federation for Charity and Philanthropy was formed as an alliance of
fifty-three social organizations. In the formation of the alliance three
hundred social workers, mainly women, toured the city to explain its
purpose and secure the concentration of funds in the hands of its board,
as well as wider participation in charity-giving. Economy of time and
effort, it was felt, would thus be coupled with larger gifts when they
came in the bulk. The experiment proved the theory to be sound.
The purpose of the Cleveland Federation is to provide clearing house
facilities through discussion, committees, files of social data and the
like for the interchange of information, ideas and plans relative to
community welfare with a view to preventing duplicated or unrelated
efforts and to recommend to proper agencies or individuals needed work.
Belle Sherwin—prominent in philanthropic work—was elected president of
the council. The initial members of the council include: the Chamber of
Commerce, Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, Cleveland Foundation
of Federated Churches, Catholic Diocese, Academy of Medicine, Western
Reserve University, Case School of Applied Science, Federation of Labor,
Federation of Jewish Charities, Child Welfare Council, City Club, Civic
League, and Chamber of Industry.
The results are more than financial or time saving. What small
organizations cannot accomplish in the way of social investigation and
education, united they can go far toward accomplishing. The women who do
so much of the actual daily labor in connection with social service thus
are getting an economic and educational training by their own
experiences which render them valuable assets to any community.
MUNICIPAL CHARITIES
That which some cities attempt to secure through coördinated private
activities, the City of Los Angeles, California, now undertakes as a
municipal experiment in its newly created Municipal Charities
Commission. This Commission, established by city ordinance, “aims not
only to protect the public in its expenditure of money, but to prevent
the overlapping and misdirection of philanthropic endeavor. That this is
made possible is due to the broad power conferred on the Commission and
to the appointment of members who are familiar with all phases of social
work.” Two women are members of this Commission. It will be watched with
interest: hopefully by those who believe in a thorough public
correlation of overlapping agencies; somewhat despairingly by those who
fear political influence and the reëstablishment of the old system of
relief.
The skillful organization of private charity and its success in
gathering financial support has led to a comparison of state, county and
municipal charitable institutions with those under private management.
This comparison has generally revealed an astonishing disproportion in
values; in Pennsylvania, for instance, it was shown, “that a single
hospital under private management had received a larger subsidy from the
legislature than the Eastern Penitentiary, with an average of 1,400
convicts; that of $16,000,000 which had been appropriated at the last
session to charitable and correctional institutions nearly half had gone
to 273 agencies under private management, and that 263 of these were
local in sphere and yet received over $6,000,000; and that there was
almost no coördination or articulation among the state, county,
municipal and private agencies that have been multiplying of late, some
of which were declared to be utterly superfluous; the need was felt for
some strong standardizing influence that should bring order out of the
chaos, put the state’s care of its wards on a non-political and
scientific basis and act as the originator of new and modern ways of
fighting poverty, degeneracy and crime.”[35]
To meet this situation men and women came together and formed the Public
Charities Association of Pennsylvania. Private support will still be
necessary but its aim will be to secure united support for a state-wide
plan of charitable distribution. Pennsylvania needs, it is claimed, a
woman’s reformatory, an institution for feeble-minded women, one for
inebriates, and more extensive provision for the insane. This
Association hopes to keep the public informed of these and similar
needs. The organizing committee which becomes the first board of
managers includes Martha P. Falconer, Mrs. Louise C. Madeira, Mrs.
Edward Biddle and Mrs. Sarah Rauh. The board will organize county
committees in the cities of Pennsylvania.
In other states there are state boards of charities for the
establishment of which women have worked and on which they usually serve
officially. The powers of these boards vary greatly, from a pure
advisory function which is of little avail, unrecommended institutions
winning subsidies over its advice, to a department of control carrying
on preventive work against insanity, tuberculosis, inebriety,
feeble-mindedness and similar evils.
EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN
The service of women on charity commissions and as public relief
officers has so long been an accepted fact that it scarcely needs notice
here, but the argument for it advanced by the Massachusetts Committee on
Women as Overseers of the Poor, a committee composed of both men and
women, is so emphatic that it deserves special notice:
The experience of the town of Brookline since 1877 and Winchester
since 1891 and the city of Boston since 1891 has made it apparent
that it is desirable to elect women upon the Boards of Overseers of
the Poor—desirable for the following reasons:
Because the time necessary for this important work is more often at
their disposal.
Because the classes to be aided are largely composed of women and
children.
Because of their special fitness to advise with the matrons of
almshouses about the domestic arrangements of these institutions.
Because of their fitness to discharge the duty now devolving upon
Boards of Overseers of the Poor of towns, as well as of cities, of
finding suitable homes outside the almshouse for dependent children.
The Legislature at its last session enacted that the Overseers of
the Poor of all towns within the commonwealth shall place every
child in their charge, and over four years of age, in some
respectable family in the state, or in some asylum therein. No such
child, who can be thus cared for without inordinate expense is now
to be retained in any town or city almshouse in Massachusetts unless
idiotic, or otherwise so defective in body or mind as to make his
detention in an almshouse desirable or unless he is under the age of
eight years and his mother is an inmate thereof and is a suitable
person to aid in taking care of him.[36]
In many places, women officials in charge of public charities have shown
that directness in action, that promptness, and that efficiency which
characterize the new type of public official generally. For instance,
Kate Barnard, the secretary of the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections, is Commissioner of Charities in Oklahoma. The legal
department conducted under her direction has wrested from incompetent or
dishonest guardians and returned to orphans some $950,000 in cash, in
addition to land probably several times the value of that cash return.
The number of orphans involved is 1,373. The department also acts as
public defender to prevent miscarriages of justice as far as possible
for the poor. This work has been with a very limited appropriation and
equipment.
Amelia Sears, the Director of the Cook County, Chicago, Bureau of Child
Welfare, has under her direction a corps of assistants trained by her
largely, who are to do personal work with the inmates of public
institutions and their dependent families. The Juvenile Protective
Association will thus be relieved of its volunteer work for prisoners in
the county jail, and their dependents. The families of children
committed to or released from institutions are to be studied in the hope
that their after-care may diminish the “in-andout” cases which are now a
drain upon the expenses of the county.
Whenever there is a single piece of relief work on a large scale to be
undertaken, women are always to be found on the spot. One of the most
conspicuous pieces of immediate relief on a rehabilitation basis was
carried out in Dayton, Ohio, after the recent devastation wrought by the
river floods. Newspaper accounts told of tragic losses, the dashes of
important federal officers to the scene, and the like, but very little
has leaked through the press as to the tedious, yet faithful, skillful,
and intelligent work of rehabilitation which alone has pulled out of the
wreckage the individuals affected and set them on their feet not only
once more, but in many cases more firmly, than they had stood before. Of
this unobtrusive local work, _The Survey_ said:
“While Edward T. Devine and Eugene T. Lies went to Dayton originally for
the Washington Headquarters of the Red Cross, they also are doing their
work under the authority and with appropriations from the local
committee. They are assisted by Amelia N. Sears, secretary of Woman’s
City Club, Chicago, who took part in the San Francisco rehabilitation
work; Rose J. McHugh, secretary of Funds to Parents Committee, Chicago;
Ada H. Rankin and Johanne Bojesen of the New York Charity Organization
Society, who helped in the relief of the victims of the Triangle
shirtwaist fire and the Titanic disaster; Grace O. Edwards of the
Chicago United Charities; Edna E. Hatfield, probation officer, Indiana
Harbor, Ind.; Edith S. Reider, general secretary, Associated Charities,
Evanston, Ill.; Helen Zegar of the Compulsory Education Department,
Chicago, who was in special charge of the relief of Polish and other
immigrant families at the time of the Cherry Mine disaster. These Red
Cross agents are in turn aided by a corps of local citizens, especially
principals and teachers in the public schools, members of spontaneously
organized local committees, and others.”
CHARITY TRANSFORMED
Active and efficient as women have shown themselves in high offices in
public and private associations for charitable work, they have not
lagged behind in the movement that is transforming the relief of the
needy into a war on poverty. Little by little as the work of associated
charities has widened, forces within the very organizations themselves
necessitated the expansion of the idea of charity into one with broader
implications. The organization of relief and the centralization of funds
bring about a greater demand for relief because they abolish much of the
personal succor of the old type. Instead of more or less lavish care of
a few families intimately, all cases of relief that come to the notice
of charitably minded persons are, through an organized system of relief,
referred to the central agency which is expected when it receives
thousands of dollars to do marvelous things with them. The very
centralization of charity, however, creates the necessity for offices,
clerks and stenographers, investigators, perhaps a training school,
salaried heads, publications, and the like which consume funds rapidly.
Indeed it has been estimated that in New York City under the system of
the Charity Organization Society, it costs several dollars to distribute
every single dollar in relief. The system of charity therefore breaks
down of its own weight in time, or is transformed, much of the relief
money being used for social workers instead of the poor, and the little
money that is left being spread over a larger group of recipients.
Of course a centralized bureau of charities can make appeal for money
and get responses, but here again it has been estimated that for public
movements it often costs a large portion of a dollar to bring in one,
even when the greatest care is used in selecting probable donors.
Owing to the financial situation within organized charity, the inquiries
into efficiency in relief, and the criticism of almsgiving, charity
workers have sought to alleviate distressing conditions by suggesting
other means of reform than monetary help. In their own defense they have
had to do this, but they have learned by experience that mere monetary
relief may sometimes keep a family or an individual under their care in
perpetuity. Not being able to secure funds to assist all cases
indiscriminately, even had they wished, charity workers began to ask why
relief was needed in each case. Thus they learned by home visiting and
personal investigation that lack of education, unemployment, sickness,
intemperance or poverty, singly or in company, were at the bottom of
dependence as it came under their surveillance.
Gradually they realized that the remedy for lack of education was not
charity, but schools, and many charity workers went over to vocational
education and guidance activity; the remedy for unemployment they found
to be a labor issue and many of them joined the working class movement
or social reform movements having as their goal continuous labor, well
requited; the remedy for sickness they found to be prevention and many
of them went into public health work in all the ramifications described
in Chapter II; the remedy for intemperance they found to be complex and
many of them joined in prohibition or recreational or labor activities
in the hope of checking its ravages; the remedy for preventable poverty
they found to be its abolition and charity workers studied and divided
into groups according as they thought it might be abolished—political
groups for the most part.
For example, Josephine Shaw Lowell, who was for years a member of the
New York State Commission on Lunacy and Charity, saw that “she was
giving the best years of her life to the service of the sick poor in the
public institutions. Meanwhile, honest working people were being made
sick by overwork in the service of the Christmas shopping mob. Mrs.
Lowell proceeded, without loss of time, to invite to her home some
leading retail merchants who were her friends, and some working people
acquainted with the effects of long working hours. She, herself,
represented the shopping public. The Consumers’ League was the
result.”[37]
The Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, soon
after its establishment, formed a Housing and Tuberculosis Committee.
The field workers in all such associations have helped to educate the
executive bodies of the organization and the Executive Committee has
helped to educate the people and municipal officials, and thus the whole
social movement verges toward an increase of public functions.
Indeed, everywhere charity workers are saying: “The people who come to
us should be thrown back upon industry. It is a poor sort of an
industrial system that cannot support those willing and able to work in
it.”
COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY
Finally social workers have come to the conclusion, many of them, that
in most cases these are not private problems at all but socio-economic
ones for which the social system, through government, is responsible.
They therefore talk “community and public responsibility” and insist
more and more that there shall be no public shirking or shrinking.
With the trend toward public social service, organized charity itself
becomes more and more a clearing house for other agencies or, in its
effort to maintain itself through the self-preservative instinct that
all institutions have, it assumes also the task of prevention by
offering employment; opening hospitals and rest homes, milk stations,
day nurseries; circulating educational pamphlets and the like. Thus
duplication of work is occasionally found where the social workers of a
hospital, of a settlement, and of a charity branch visit in the same day
a tenement mother and force her to repeat the story of her problems. The
only way in which such duplication can be avoided is through the
organization of social service and the extension of municipal functions
in that line. When the hospital is a municipal enterprise, its social
service department would seem to be the proper and legitimate one to
have the right of way and of support; and this is especially justified
through the ability of the municipality to coöperate systematically
among its departments: the health department working with the education
and police departments; public works with health and education; and so
on.
The beginnings of the coördinated social service under municipal control
are already on the horizon. Take, for instance, the Board of Public
Welfare of Kansas City, Missouri. This Board is four years old. Women
are active on it as district superintendents, investigators, factory
inspectors; in the social service department, parole department,
department of lunches and unemployed, and women’s reformatory.
The establishment of this Board makes possible an intensive district
study in which is listed every special agency, school, church,
institution, foreign, or negro colony. It provides for the teaching of
sex hygiene in the schools and has all the up-to-date machinery, like
school nurses. The work of the Board comprises studies of housing,
recreation, health, temperance, vice, wage-earning women and women
employed in industries, labor conditions, welfare work and industrial
accidents. In short, its field is as broad as social needs.
“What good does it all do?” asks the Bureau, and then answers the
question itself:
Well, in the first place, 4,517 people are living in better homes
today because of the work done by our housing inspectors during the
past year.
Daily 40,000 men and women go to safer places to work because of the
693 orders issued by our factory inspection department and complied
with by the employers of Kansas City.
Thirty-one thousand times during the year have eager men looking for
work been rewarded in their search by our employment bureau.
Over 3,000 families have been guided, inspired or comforted by our
social workers in the Social Service Department.
To over 2,000 prisoners applying for parole our Board has answered
with freedom and a chance.
Fifty thousand pleasant evenings were spent in social center
meetings last winter, and most of these would not have been except
for the efforts of the Board of Public Welfare.
Twenty-six hundred public dances, with an aggregate attendance of
over 500,000, were cleaner and safer because of the presence of
Board of Public Welfare Inspectors.
For the past few months there has not been a day when the 25,000
attendants on our motion-picture theaters have not, many of them,
been shielded from vulgar or brutal scenes eliminated from the shows
by the hot educational campaign carried on by our Recreation
Department.
Fifteen hundred people, frightened or worried by some crisis in
their battle for bread and butter, have turned to the Welfare Loan
Agency and found relief in a temporary loan.
About 6,000 people, embittered by fraud, deceit, and oppression,
turned to our Legal Aid Bureau for justice, which is often sweeter
than any food.
If human life, if morality, health and financial prosperity have any
value, then these paragraphs answer what good has been done.
The accomplishment of large results is due to the fact that organization
on such a plan frees more money for relief than it consumes in salaries.
All employees of the Board are chosen by civil service examinations. The
Board “believes that social action should be based on accurate knowledge
and investigations should both precede and accompany all efforts to
improve social conditions. It strives for harmonious coöperation with
all existing agencies, both public and private, and does not duplicate
the work of any. The Board gives no public outdoor relief except in
cases where the breadwinner of the family is a city prisoner, and then
only on the basis of actual destitution, and upon the recommendation of
the superintendent of the Provident Association.”
The policy of the Board is briefly summarized in its annual report as
follows: “It lays emphasis on justice before charity and on prevention
rather than cure. It agrees that the burden of caring for the poor
should be laid upon the entire community through taxation rather than be
provided for by the voluntary gifts of the generous minority.”
This very gradual transition from private to public control is
especially apparent in the development of child-helping agencies. The
Children’s Clinic in Chicago, for example, was first established by the
Children’s Hospital Society. The county looked upon it, saw it was good,
and assumed responsibility for it. Then social workers backed by
philanthropists went a step further and established a psychopathic
clinic with an alienist in charge to examine the children for mental
weaknesses. “Of course,” says Jane Addams, “women interested in these
children are not more interested in the psychopathic feature, which is
philanthropic, than they are in the medical clinic, which is political.
They are not more interested in the children who are dependent and are
sent to one of the homes which are supported partly by public funds and
partly by philanthropy than they are in those children who are sent to
the homes which are supported altogether by public funds. And there you
are—the whole thing absolutely mixed! Now a child may be paroled in care
of its mother and paid by Court—where it once was dependent on private
charity. We are not quite out of charity for the judge is often assisted
by a committee composed of representatives of various city charities,
but it is hard to tell what is philanthropy and what public service.”
ATTITUDE OF SOCIAL WORKERS
The spirit of this whole movement from old-fashioned charity to
coördinated social service was abundantly manifested at the Seattle
Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1913. With the opening of the
Panama Canal problems are arising along the Pacific coast in increased
numbers. As preventive work, the Seattle Charity Organization Society
was anxious to secure, and did secure, the National Conference of
Charities and Corrections in order to arouse local interest in the
impending situation. Of the Seattle Charities, Mr. Richard Hayter is
director and Miss Virginia McMechan, widely known for her social work,
is general secretary—never an insignificant office, and by no means a
purely clerical one.
For the sake of the whole Pacific coast the Seattle charity workers
advertised this conference far and wide.
Under the Central Council of Social Agencies, representing the
fifty-six leading public and private social agencies of the
city—from labor unions to the chamber of commerce, with the mayor at
the head—active local committees were formed [consisting of men and
women]. The Rotary Club, a business men’s body, raised the necessary
$2,000, a corps of speakers was sent to organizations all over the
city and state, even into Idaho, and a vigorous advertising campaign
was conducted by means of billboards, 50,000 circulars, and columns
of newspaper publicity. Country newspapers were reached by
news-letter service. Letters sent out along the entire coast brought
in three hundred new conference members.
In the midst of this glowing setting the fortieth conference camped
on July 5, registering at the close, July 12, an attendance of paid
members numbering from outside the state of Washington over 450, and
from Seattle and Washington 350 more. Seattle people fairly swarmed
to the evening meetings, and the conference sermon drew a packed
house of between 3,000 and 3,500. President Tucker estimated the
total attendance at the thirty meetings during the week at between
25,000 and 30,000. Enthusiasm was no less remarkable. Through all
the seven days the conference was “live.” The newspapers gave it
practically unlimited space, one paper running two extra conference
pages almost every day containing the important speeches in full.
This was done, the editor said, “as a good business proposition.”
When the conference got down to work, it was clearly evident that social
welfare, not charity, was the spirit of the delegates and speakers.
Preventive measures, standards of living and labor, the relation of
commercial organizations to social welfare, and the distribution and
assimilation of immigrants were predominant over talk of mere relief.
Courts, city officials, lawyers, and teachers were drawn into the
conference as an evidence of its wider appeal and public importance.
While the conference program was well rounded and covered every
accustomed subject and many new ones, the response of the audiences
brought out the trend of conference thought. And that trend was
unmistakably economic—the challenge to the industrial order for
sweeping readjustments. However keen the interest in other topics,
this was one which never failed to elicit enthusiastic response. It
broke out at the opening meeting when President Tucker sounded the
call for a more fundamental and largely economic interpretation of
social justice; it rose almost thunderously when Dr. McKelway in the
conference sermon declared that at the bottom of the whole problem
we now face is the question of wages, and added: “Men do not always
know what justice is, and their thoughts widen with the process of
the suns, but if there is any current of American thought today, it
is the demand among the masses of men for justice. We can tell its
course by the ripples on the surface, when some obstacle rears its
head. Privilege of any kind must go down before the rush of that
current.”
The same response rose with every utterance of the slogan “Not
charity but justice.” Appreciation of the industrial situation was
voiced by speaker after speaker, even though his topic lay in other
fields. The new radical labor groups, the I. W. W., Socialism and
the single tax were frequently brought into discussion as movements
to be reckoned with practically and studiously by social workers.
The industrial program was the last ringing note sounded at the
closing session with an all-around presentation of the minimum wage,
the essence of which, to quote Mrs. Kelley, is that “the payroll has
become public property,” and no business can be a going concern
which does not pay a living wage, any more than if it could not pay
interest or rent.[38]
Many of the organizations represented at the conference had initiated
valuable civic institutions like public baths, recreational provisions,
medical inspection in schools, and, in discussing development of new
instrumentalities of social welfare, the delegates of such societies
asked for the further extension of municipal functions to meet the needs
of the city’s people. Significant of the new spirit actuating the
charity workers of the country is the fact that three committees were
discontinued at this national convention—Immigration, Commercial
Organizations and Social Welfare, and Church and Social Work—while two
new committees were formed—Social Hygiene and Defectives (including
defective delinquents). The Committee on Families and Neighborhoods was
renamed the Committee on the Family and the Community, including
community programs. A new committee was created on Neighborhood
Development, including recreation, which is a very different thing from
the old type of charity committee in a neighborhood.
The part played by women in this forward movement of social workers, who
began as charity workers, is only partly revealed in the list of
officers and chairmen of standing committees, interesting as they are.
Mrs. John M. Glenn is one of the three vice-presidents and the following
is a list of standing committees for 1914 with their chairmen: Social
Hygiene, Maude E. Miner; Children, Mrs. Mary Vida Clark; Standards of
Living and Labor, Including Social Insurance, Charles P. Neill; Health,
Dr. Richard C. Cabot; Public Charities, Dr. J. T. Mastin; Defectives,
Including Mental Hygiene and Defective Delinquency, Dr. Llwellys Barker;
Family and Community, Eugene T. Lies; Neighborhood Development, Mary
McDowell; Correction, Amos W. Butler.
Charity workers have thus evidently grown into one definite group of
social workers. Another large group is composed of settlement and
neighborhood workers who cooperate with, but are distinct from, charity
workers. A few may have gone into settlement work from motives of pure
philanthropy, but settlements have never been confined to communities of
pauperized people and have often been located in communities of
industrial workers representing many nationalities affected by the ups
and downs of the industrial and social life of our day. Philanthropy,
therefore, has been carefully tabooed as a phrase or an ideal by the
leaders in the settlement movement, however slowly they have actually
been able to lead their colleagues away from instincts of mere pity and
charity.
No one can deny that the social functions which have evolved out of the
experiments and studies of settlements are in a very large measure the
work of women. Jane Addams, Louise Bowen, Julia Lathrop, Lillian Wald,
and other social leaders, who have originated many movements, see
distinctly that city functions must be extended to absorb their
activities as well as those more directly connected with charity. An
example is furnished by the work they have done for schools. They feel
that private aid should not obscure public responsibility for the
welfare of all the people of a community, but rather that interested
citizens with constructive programs should but point the way to better
assumption of public duties by the city.
The spirit of all these women workers we see in an appreciation of the
contributions of Lillian Wald written by the late Jacob A. Riis:
No woman, since Josephine Shaw Lowell, has been able to do what she
has done. They trust her absolutely, trust her head, her judgment,
and her friendship. She arbitrates in a strike, and the men listen;
she sits as one of the Board of Sanitary Control in the cloak and
suit trade that has wrought such wondrous great good for the
workers, and her judgment stands. When she pleads for housing
reform, for playgrounds, for a united stand against child labor, her
words carry authority. When politics make for better government, the
Nurses’ Settlement is a recruiting station; when push-cart peddlers
are blackmailed by the police, she will tell the mayor the truth,
for she knows. In the plotting and planning and winding ways of life
on the East Side there is one pilot whose chart can be trusted—Miss
Wald knows.
In the strife that rages forever around our public schools her feet
are planted on solid ground. She pleaded for cooking and
housekeeping schools and got them; she believes in vocational
guidance. She labored for medical school inspection and when it did
only half of what was expected of it, it was Miss Wald who put life
into it by giving the doctors backing. Perhaps nothing she ever did
gives one a better grip on the woman and her work.[39]
EDUCATING THE PUBLIC BY EXHIBITS
Having discovered the wide ramification of the social diseases which
call for social service and come more and more to a recognition of
community responsibility in such matters, social workers, men and women,
have realized the necessity of educating the public to a sense of that
responsibility. Hence the “social exhibit” of every type, and wherever
we find an exhibit, even if it be under the direction of men, we also
discover a group of patient, skilled, energetic women workers.
Child welfare exhibits took precedence of some of the constructive
programs for child nurture that are now coming into prominence and in
all these exhibits, from the first to the last, most ardent labor has
been contributed by women toward their success. Often they have
themselves been the instigators and main support of an exhibit.
Through the first large exhibit of the New York Child Welfare Committee
in the 71st Regiment Armory, and since, by neighborhood exhibits, a
wider knowledge of city child life and conditions affecting it prevails
among city people. Public opinion as to what ought to be done has been
aroused so that existing agencies with carefully worked out plans for
child welfare have received a more sympathetic and generous support.
Charles F. Powlison thus summarizes the leading results of Child Welfare
Exhibits:
NEW YORK CITY
1. The city increased its appropriation to the division of child hygiene
of the health department by $167,705.
2. The Department of Parks set aside an old mansion in Carl Schurz Park
for child welfare work.
3. The city appropriated $235,000 for a new children’s court building.
4. The children of the city were stimulated to a greater use of the
children’s department of the public libraries.
CHICAGO
1. Establishment of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund. The work of
this foundation is primarily child welfare.
2. Introduction of course on Children’s Welfare in the Chicago School of
Civics and Philanthropy.
3. The City Welfare Exhibits conducted in the public schools and
neighborhood centers of Chicago under the auspices of the Woman’s City
Club of Chicago used material shown at the Child Welfare Exhibit.
KANSAS CITY, MO.
Two days after the Exhibit closed the citizens were able to get passed
an ordinance requiring the appointment of factory inspectors, thus
making operative the laws regarding child labor, etc.
L. A. Halbert, general superintendent of the Board of Public Welfare,
writes: “I believe that the popular understanding of the work of the
Board of Public Welfare and other social work which was begotten by this
Exhibit has been a very important element in protecting this kind of
work from any sordid political influences.”
NORTHAMPTON, MASS.
1. A $25,000 school building is now being constructed in the congested
Polish district. Conditions had been reported for six years without
result. Four photographs in the Exhibit did the work.
2. The formation of a Central Advisory Council (to be made up of one
delegate from each church, civic, charitable or religious organization),
to confer monthly and arrange a program for concerted action in all
problems touching civic and child welfare.
3. Radical change of policy on the part of one large manufacturing
concern relating to work put out in families.
ST. LOUIS, MO.
1. A close partnership formed between a newly aroused public and
existing agencies working for the welfare of children.
2. The Exhibit is continued as a part of the traveling libraries
department of the public library.
3. Sections of the Exhibit, dealing with particular subjects, loaned for
circulation in churches, schools, settlements and clubs.
4. The Children’s Agencies and the churches stimulated to a stock-taking
of progress and furnished an exact basis for mapping out the next steps
ahead.
One of the women social workers at an Exhibit said: “We are all of us
learning, for the first time, what place our work has in the city’s
life. We have worked over our exhibits, trying to state in concrete
terms our purpose and our success; then we see our organization placed
here beside all the others, and we find out how inadequate we all are,
and yet how important, each at our own job. We find out where there is
overlapping and where we can use each other in the future. And then we
walk over to the section on industrial conditions, or on housing, or on
infant mortality, and we see the big underlying problems, that we
haven’t any of us touched yet. And we realize that no private
organization ever can touch those problems. Only all the people, acting
for themselves through their representatives, can begin to make a dent
in them.”
Dr. Anna Louise Strong, the director of exhibits of the National Child
Welfare Exhibit Committee, upholds the service of the Exhibit in the
face of certain critics: “I believe in the exhibit method, whatever its
risks, through the faith that when the widest publicity possible is
secured, truth will win out. The light that beats around a throne is no
fiercer than the light that has beat around disputed statements in a
child welfare exhibit. And because of this, however and whenever
individual exhibitors fail, I feel that the exhibit method is, in spite
of its dangers, one of the safest, just because of the wideness of its
reach, and the many-sidedness of the comments aroused.”
LITERATURE
It is not alone in such more or less spectacular educational work as
exhibits of various kinds, that women have participated with such
success. They are helping to create the scientific literature of social
service which is based upon accurate observation and generalization. To
enumerate even the important contributions of women to this literature
would be impossible here, but by way of illustration we may cite simply
the contributions made by women to the studies issued under the auspices
of the Russell Sage Foundation:
_The Evening Post_ of New York said of “Women and the Trades,” by
Elizabeth B. Butler, who made her study in the Pittsburgh Survey, that
it “represents the most complete and careful study ever made in any
country of the actual working conditions of the wage-paid women of a
great city.” Miss Butler has also made a study of saleswomen in
mercantile stores.
_The Scientific American_ said of “Work Accidents and the Law,” by
Crystal Eastman, who made this important study in Pittsburgh and who was
formerly the secretary of the New York State Commission on Employers’
Liability: “The book is one of the finest exponents we have ever seen of
this twentieth century humanitarian interest.”
_The Literary Digest_ said of “Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town”
by Margaret Byington: “Miss Byington brought to the task excellent
training and made her studies after the most approved methods. It is a
book legislators, ministers, editors, and story writers should ponder
before they preach to, or write at or about, the wage-earners and their
wives, from apprentices to superintendents.”
“The Delinquent Child and the Home” by Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and
Edith Abbott, according to the _Boston Evening Transcript_, is “a
storehouse of information to the individual or society seeking to know
better the needs of children and to provide them with decent homes,
fresh air, education and recreation.”
“Fatigue and Efficiency” by Josephine Goldmark furnishes the basis for
arguments in favor of governmental control over health conditions in
industry and has already produced results.
“Among School Gardens” by M. Louise Greene is a valuable propaganda for
open-air exercises for children.
“One Thousand Homeless Men” by Alice Willard Solenberger, until her
death an active leader in the Chicago Bureau of Charities,—a study of
original records—is approved by Ernest P. Bicknell, director of the
American Red Cross as follows: “A confidence-impelling power was hers
which often led to the most unexpected results. Beggars and tramps,
confirmed in their manner of life, gave her the real facts about their
homes and families and transgressions. More than one hardened fellow
became her ally, and helped her search out the young boys and persuade
them to go home to their parents. She had so many sources of information
that her power of securing hidden facts from the lodging houses and
saloons and dark places seemed almost uncanny.”
“Women in Various Trades in New York” by Mary Van Kleeck maintains the
standard set by all the Russell Sage publications.
“Our Slavic Fellow Citizens” by Emily Greene Balch is thus praised by
the Chicago _Record-Herald_: “Miss Balch has given us one of the most
valuable books on immigration that we know of, a work full of guidance,
of truth, of understanding.”
“Visiting Nursing in the United States” by Ysabella Waters completes
these studies at present and is a “convincing argument,” according to
the _Nurses’ Journal of the Pacific Coast_, for nursing and educating in
their homes some of the sick who will not or cannot go to hospitals.
Wherever social welfare work reaches the stage of legislation we find
women supplying data for intelligent action, arguing before legislative
committees, and impressing upon lawmakers their competence to deal with
social problems in a large way. Moreover, in every important battle over
legislation, women have their own special contributions to make. Space
forbids anything like a survey of the legislative work of women in
social service, but some notion of their interest and labors is to be
gathered from the current discussions of mothers’ pension laws.
MOTHERS’ PENSIONS
On account of the fact that the major portion of charitable relief has
always gone to poor widows with young children to support, family
rehabilitation has been a main study of social workers. Charity and
institutional relief have combined forces—orphan asylums taking the
children in many cases of destitution while work for her own support was
found for the mother. The slight assistance that could be rendered in
each case to supplement the mother’s earnings and the necessity of her
putting the children to work too early or overtaxing the oldest child in
family labor soon showed the ineffectiveness of this method of family
rehabilitation, for broken-down physiques, undeveloped minds, wrong
associations and delinquency were recognized as the outgrowth of the
enforced neglect of home care and training by mothers.
Thus arose a general demand for public aid for mothers as a preventive
measure, for the sake of the family, and for greater economy, much of
the institutional care of delinquents, sick, orphaned, in day nurseries
and the like being saved thereby. Mothers’ pension laws now exist in
seventeen states, the great majority of which passed the laws within the
past year, a year in which women have been their busiest in urging this
legislation. In Pennsylvania the law creates an entirely new set of
administrative officials—unsalaried boards of women, from five to seven
in number, appointed by the governor—in all counties which elect to make
use of the act.
New York passed a bill for a commission instead of the pension act
itself, being conservative enough to desire further investigation. Two
women who have worked for mothers’ pensions in that state are on this
commission—Mrs. William Einstein and Sophie Irene Loeb. The New York
City Federation of Women’s Clubs asked for this commission.
The Federal Children’s Bureau has taken a great interest in state aid
for dependent mothers with children and has published a study by Laura
Thompson of laws relating to the same in the United States, Denmark and
New Zealand, with all the legislative technicalities so much discussed.
Perhaps more women have agreed on the wisdom of mothers’ pensions than
on any other single piece of social legislation. They have even been
accused of rushing heedlessly into the support of such laws on purely
sentimental grounds, and they are vigorously opposed by many charity
workers. Public relief for mothers strikes at the very vitals of private
philanthropy which makes its most effective appeals for funds for
dependent widows. Dr. Devine, of the New York Charity Organization
Society, vigorously opposed the idea of public pensions, and published
in _The Survey_ his views on the matter. The following spirited defense
by Clara Cahill Park, represents the attitude of a large number of women
workers who support the measure:
Dr. Devine’s article[40] on mothers’ pensions seems to show that
even the learned doctors of our social ills may disagree as to this
matter. So perhaps it is not surprising that a plain mother may
still go on thinking that such aid is in reality preventive in that
it reaches the affairs of the home at a crisis, and tides them over
without loss of self-respect. You see, mothers, in spite of the
sociologists, feel themselves, for once, on their own ground in this
matter; and in possession of all their faculties, will continue to
think that, as far as children are concerned, not they, but the
learned doctors, are in the amateur class.
As far as care and time and money for children’s needs are
concerned, they, and they alone, feel that they know how imperative
those needs are, and from the mere fact of being able to gain more
aid for more mothers by state subsidies the idea seems to them of
value. They, and perhaps they only, can also feel the importance of
preserving self-respect as an asset to be saved by the new attitude
of the states. It is not, for them, “a mere sentiment and solemn
pretense of changing the names of things.”
Why, to most of us, is a marriage service a wholesome formality, if
changing the name, if deriving comfort from legal sanction (even
sometimes of a bad husband), is merely “a solemn pretense”?
The question seems to me to touch the social evil and the housing
problem (as shown in Chapter IV of Miss Addams’ “A New Conscience
and an Ancient Evil”), the menace of child labor, of the sweat
shops, and neglected childhood and starved motherhood on many sides.
Why is a free chance to live and grow, for a child, any worse than
free education? A child does not ask where things come from, at
first. He only knows that he is cold, or hungry, or neglected. In
the nature of the case he is dependent on someone.
Dr. Devine asks one question, which I should like to try to answer.
He asks: “Who are the sudden heroes of a brand-new program of state
subsidies to mothers, that they have grown so scornful of poor
relief administration, of religious alms, of a thousand forms of
organized benevolence, of the charity which, in all ages, organized
and unorganized, has comforted the afflicted, fed the hungry,
succored the widow and the fatherless?”
They are, if I am permitted to answer what I believe, the
old-fashioned givers, the passing of whom Dr. Devine goes on to
deplore. They are the people, too, whom Dr. Devine and _The Survey_
are waking up, who are not satisfied to go all through life having
their ideas predigested for them; more than all, they are social
workers, who have come to distrust some of the methods of social
work. Starting out with a blind faith in philanthropic methods, I
have found, time and again, not that the work was so much hampered
as some have found it, by “investigation, the keeping of records,
discriminating aid, etc.,” but that the work was not exact, and not
careful and that its faults were not mitigated by that human
sympathy which would atone for human faults.
This is not always true, but it has become proverbial, and we see
why. If we could have always with us the great people of the earth,
like Miss Addams, Miss Lathrop, Judge Mack, and others, there would
be no such proverbs as those the poor now murmur among themselves.
State aid, to my mind, is an advance, as showing the policy of the
nation, to conserve its children and its homes, and in recognizing
the mother as a factor in that campaign, for the welfare of all.[41]
Mrs. Park is a member of the Massachusetts commission on widows’
pensions which proposed legislation on the subject, not all the members
agreeing on public aid, however. The existence of this commission was
largely due to Mrs. Park but Miss Helen Winslow helped by lecturing on
the subject before more than sixty women’s clubs in Massachusetts.
All women, however, are by no means committed to the policy of public
aid for dependent mothers. Grace P. Pollard, for instance, president of
the Liberal Union of Minnesota Women, objects in these terms:
With indications that the “public” is being swayed by appeals to
protect motherhood through pensions, the presentation of “Motherhood
and Pensions” by Miss Richmond is a relief. Aside from the economic
waste of human energy which a “pension” system may induce, it is
likely to lessen individual initiative, to reduce its possible
recipients to the condition of petitioners for favors, and hence to
weaken the social structure.
It is unfortunate that our city, state and national treasuries bear
so impersonal a relation to the members of society. Intelligent
citizens know that the poor and ignorant pay an indirect tax out of
all proportion to their resources, that this condition is fostered
by those who have in hand larger resources, and that poverty and
ignorance are necessary factors in the explanation of human energy.
The poor and the ignorant are paying the price of that which is to
be returned to them as pensions.
If the time, money and energy now being used to establish pensions
could be directed into the establishment of fair conditions of
industry, of sanitary conditions of living, of greater opportunities
to acquire knowledge, of equal privileges and duties for men and
women, might not the nation’s integrity be better safeguarded?[42]
Where mothers’ pension laws are enacted, women are called to aid in
their administration. Massachusetts has a “Mothers’ Act,” the
enforcement of which is under the Special Committee of the State Board
of Charity, with Ada Eliot Sheffield as Chairman. Overseers of the poor
administer the law under the direction of this Special Committee, and
Emma W. Lee has charge of a corps of women who will work with the
overseers. Caroline B. Alexander is a member of the New Jersey State
Board of Children’s Guardians which administers the State Mothers’
Pension Law.[43]
In all the states where home assistance has been secured for dependent
mothers, women have agitated and lobbied for the measure. In states
which do not yet have such legislation, women’s clubs and organizations
have this legislation as one of their demands. The Association of
Neighborhood Workers and many leaders in the women’s clubs of New York
are among those who have labored for home assistance in that state.
OTHER LEGISLATION
Recognizing the importance of enlightened coöperation in the matter of
law making, a Committee on Social Legislation was recently formed in
Chicago to act as a clearing house for bills intended to improve social
conditions. The constituent organizations include the following:
Anti-Cruelty Society, Associated Charities of Danville, Associated
Charities of Rock Island, Associated Jewish Charities, Bureau of
Associated Civics and Charities of Freeport, Bureau of Personal Service,
Central Association of Charities, Evanston, Central Howard Association,
Chicago Federation of Churches of Christ, Chicago Medical Society,
Chicago Playground Association, Chicago Tuberculosis Institute, Chicago
Woman’s Aid, Chicago Woman’s Club, Citizens’ League, City Club of
Chicago, Committee on Institutional Visitation, Conference of Jewish
Women’s Organizations, Consumers’ League, Elizabeth McCormick Memorial
Fund, Federation of Settlements, Illinois Association for Labor
Legislation, Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society, Immigrants’
Protective League, Infant Welfare Society.[44]
Jersey social workers have formed a similar bureau, similarly
constituted. “At the meeting there was some sentiment in favor of
lobbying, but those who initiated the plan had no intention that it
should act as a lobbying agency. It was pointed out that members of the
bureau might differ as to the wisdom of legislation. Participation in
the bureau will not commit a member to any definite stand on various
measures. But, it is expected that through the clearing house and
information service of the bureau, those favoring a given measure will
be enabled to conduct their legislative campaign with greater
efficiency.”[45]
SCHOOLS FOR WORKERS
The development of organized charity and social service with their
investigations and legislative and institutional activities has produced
the need for workers trained for research and the preparation of
data—trained in sociology, economics, and industry; in health, education
and hygiene.
In response to this need have risen schools for the education of social
workers. The New York School of Philanthropy is one of the largest of
these professional schools. A partial list includes the School of Social
Economy of Washington University, St. Louis; the Chicago School of
Civics and Philanthropy; the Boston School for Social Workers; and the
Philadelphia Training School for Social Workers.
In all of these schools, women help to instruct as well as study. Julia
Lathrop is vice-president of the Chicago School and Sophronisba
Breckinridge is dean to assist the president in the educational
administration.
SOCIAL SERVICE AND POLITICS
As private philanthropy advances to social service and then to public
action, women all over the country are asking, “Shall the control which
we have hitherto been exercising be turned over to the men voters
alone?” They are, in increasing numbers, answering this question in the
negative.
Club women and women teachers and doctors last summer (1914) declared
emphatically that social activities must continue to be the joint work
of men and women and that political equality is a prime essential in the
evolution of social service.
Sophronisba Breckinridge succinctly explains this point of view in an
article in _The Survey_ designed to answer Dr. Simon Patten’s strictures
on suffrage and social service:
In his editorial comment of January 4, Professor Patten not only
addresses certain questions to the social workers of the country,
but draws vivid contrasts between “dozens of little coercions” and
“doses of freedom.” It is not my purpose to undertake to answer his
questions. The program of the social workers has been so definitely
outlined by action taken at Cleveland in June at the time of the
National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and is so
definitely formulated in the platform of the Progressive Party, to
which Miss Addams gave her adherence, that further reply seems
superfluous.
I should be glad, however, to ask Professor Patten in return to
consider more carefully the nature of certain “small coercions”
against which the women of the country and the social workers as
well are now protesting. Professor Patten contrasts the value of a
“suffragette agitation” with the value of a “clearer vision.” He
cannot, however, be ignorant of the fact that the efforts of women
to become politically free have revealed as no other agency has been
able to do, the nature and extent of the coercion exercised over the
voters of the community by the organized forces of vice and alcohol.
The women think that, in their efforts to secure political freedom
so that they may be able to serve the community, they should have
Professor Patten’s acquiescence in increased control exercised over
these common foes of the race. In Professor Patten’s judgment the
“only effective check to the natural expansion of clear ideas and
social emotions is offered by the members of the degenerate,
defective or dependent classes.” Commercialized alcohol and vice may
be included in these groups; but will the classifications likewise
include the competitor who remains in the market by adulterating the
food supply of the people, the unintelligent producers of unclean
and unsafe milk, the employer of children in the southern cotton
mills, those who fatten on the labor of underpaid girls in our
department stores and factories? I fancy these “enemies of the
people” would be greatly surprised to find themselves so classified.
Nor is the strength of their position or the disastrous consequences
of their freedom lessened by so characterizing them. “Little
coercions” upon them mean “large doses of freedom” to the child, the
women workers, the men helpless before conditions of physical hazard
in our industrial establishments.
Political action without philanthropy is of course like the human
skeleton equipped perhaps with muscle but lacking the nervous and
circulatory systems. Philanthropy on the other hand without
political capacity is like an invertebrate structure, inert and
incapable of efficient self-direction. It seems entirely in accord
with her general experience of helplessness when relying on
philanthropy alone and with her observation of the social
aimlessness of the older political parties that Miss Addams should
demand that the strength and stability of one be added to the life
and persistence of the other.