The inter-city settlement conference held the past month in Boston,
though not the first of such conferences, was unique in that it brought
together settlement residents so widely separated as the New York
Association of Neighborhood Workers and the Boston Social Union.
The first meeting dealt with the problem of securing and training
workers. Eva W. White, headworker of the Elizabeth Peabody House and
lecturer in the Boston School for Social Workers, spoke of the need of
such training as schools of philanthropy and settlements themselves can
give. Richard H. Edwards of the Inter-Collegiate Young Men’s Christian
Association explained the movement for community service by college men.
Settlement Scholarships and School and College Chapters for Settlement
Work was the subject of a paper by Geraldine Gordon of Denison House.
John L. Elliott of New York contributed the suggestion that young
college men and women contemplating social work as a profession might do
a half year’s field work in the settlement at the end of the sophomore
and senior years in lieu of academic courses.
Mrs. Max Morgenthau of the Henry Street Settlement told how that
settlement trained its volunteer workers in clerical work, in regularity
in attendance and in actual personal acquaintance with their tenement
community. This training has created in that settlement a group of
volunteers, who are becoming experts in their work and one of whom has
developed a series of pageant plays. The mistress of the wardrobe in
these pageants is an authority on costume, and has studied the technical
processes of dyeing fabrics in order to obtain the best possible
results.
The subject of an evening meeting was Standards and Stipends for Work
and Workers, and was under the leadership of Lilian D. Wald, president
of the National Federation of Settlements. Miss Wald held that there
should be flexibility in methods of work and a true equality between the
administrative officers of the settlement and the specialists who give
so much distinction to its work. She spoke of a university teacher who
came back to the settlement to “recapture the freedom of her method.” M.
deG. Trenholm, to whom very much of the success of the conference was
due, urged strongly the necessity of proper compensation for settlement
service, if standards are to be maintained.
The Sunday afternoon meeting was devoted to the subject of federation in
relation to standards of work. Henry Moskowitz of Madison House asked
that the settlements keep in mind their primary duty of furnishing
opportunity for the manifestation of local social spirit. He showed that
in an increasing number of neighborhoods the neighbors are forming
federations of their own, made up of representatives of the various
local societies. While this sort of community organization is sometimes
sporadic or indefinite the settlements should be willing to support it
both with money and workers. He warned the neighborhood worker never to
forget that the primary duty of the settlement is to build up
neighborhood life. He must, therefore, not permit what sometimes seems
the larger aspects or implications of neighborhood life to sap his work
at the roots.
Philip Davis of the Civic Service House suggested directions in which
federated action among settlements might be directed. He showed that,
outside of such oversight as the licensing of minors engaged in the
street trades involved, the great mass of the minors of the community
and the street merchants themselves are free to run into danger without
possibility of interference or guarding from the outside. Immigrants are
another class who will in the future be more and more in need of
constructive human service, especially at the point of entrance on
citizenship. The city, either through its officers or by delegating the
work to others, should surround the gift of citizenship with appropriate
safeguards and should make the process itself educational. The minimum
wage is now becoming a significant problem all over the country and Mr.
Davis believed that settlement workers should take their place among the
pioneers in endeavoring to push its benefits.
Elizabeth Williams, of the College Settlement, New York, spoke of the
enthusiasm of the pioneers and outlined some of the means of making the
settlement ideal today as great a challenge to young men and women of
capacity as it was to these early leaders.
Albert J. Kennedy of South End House discussed the question of
federations of settlements in relation to the problem of club and class
work. The chief task of the settlement is in his opinion to bring about
the democratic organization of local communities in order that the
people themselves may in time assume the task of local organization. The
chief function of club work as such must be that of building up
standards toward this end. The fear of rigidity which has oppressed
certain critics of federation is, he believed, unfounded and there are,
he held, great possibilities for settlement federations in enlarging and
bringing to a high standard certain forms of craft work, dramatics,
pageants and large recreational events.
At the evening meeting Jane E. Robbins spoke in behalf of definite work
in training young Italian Americans as social workers who would
contribute their enthusiasm for and knowledge of their own people
definitely to the task of social re-construction and Americanization.
Vida D. Scudder believed settlement work should be made more
fundamentally democratic and should give itself more definitely to the
task of fostering and championing working class movements as such. The
great danger of the settlement, she held, is that it will become one of
the regular philanthropies rather than an advance station, as it were,
in the progressive democratization of the national life. Settlement
residents should be free at times of crisis to drop detail work for the
larger task of assisting in the great forward movement of the people
themselves.
George Hodges, dean of the Episcopal Theological School, believed that
the church also should work along the lines suggested by Miss Scudder.
He believed, however, the best achievement could be secured only on the
high levels of personality.
John L. Elliott of the Hudson Guild held that it should more and more be
the final effort of the settlement to bring the mothers and fathers into
the streets, into the schools and into the dance halls that they may
come to understand the conditions under which their children live, and
contribute of their own experience and power in reorganizing communal
life.
The meeting on Monday morning was opened by Abraham Rosenberg, the
president of the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Union, who spoke of the work of
the various settlement leaders in securing the New York protocol. He
admitted a growing recognition on the part of labor leaders of the
factor of public good will and service.
Mary P. Follett of the Roxbury League urged the continued necessity for
social workers in the civic centre, and Gaylord S. White suggested the
need of such influence in enlarging the scope and horizon of church
work. Robert A. Woods summed up the more telling lines of interest
opened up in the meeting. He urged that the significance of the
settlement for the future, as for the past, lay not in any specific type
of service or reform—valuable as nearly all such effort is—but in the
development of social self sufficiency among the people from
neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the country.
The use which the younger element made of a question box as the meeting
ended led to the motion that at future conferences the junior speakers
should have the floor for at least one session.
“BOXING” THE COST OF LIVING
The cost of living was the very live subject taken up by the seventeenth
annual meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
held in Philadelphia in April. With the exception of the tariff, which
was omitted for lack of time, the session may be said to have covered
the whole field.
The first paper in the session on Family Standards was by Prof. Simon N.
Patten of the University of Pennsylvania. His analysis of changes in
woman’s dress is worth quoting:
“In the early history of America, the dress, the habits, the morality,
the relations between men and women could be predicted with certainty.
This uniformity has been broken up by recent industrial changes
through which the working population has been transferred from the
farm to shops and factories. City life makes new demands and excites
new wants.
“A new woman is appearing who differs in many ways from her
predecessor. She is stronger, more healthy, more ambitious and with
moral qualities that match the new vigor. With greater physical vigor
and more ambition, women love activity and cut out the contrasts in
color and design in which the primitive woman indulged. The man-made
woman dresses to emphasize her sex; the self-conscious woman
subordinates her clothing to the needs of her own personality and her
activity.
“The active, healthy woman creates a spiritual impress by simplifying
her dress and thus enhancing her facial beauty. Her less advanced
sister clings to the older dress forms, through which a lower appeal
is made. Out of the struggle is coming a new womanhood with higher
morality and more beauty. Dressing is thus more than an economy; it is
the essence of moral progress.”
Martha Bensley Bruère of New York city, author of Increasing Home
Efficiency, maintained that twelve hundred dollars a year was the lowest
standard for decent family living. This twelve hundred dollars she found
from her study of family budgets to be distributed as follows:
“Food, $447.15, on the basis of 35 cents per day for an adult male and
a sliding scale for others in the family; shelter, $144; clothes,
$100, based on New York prices “where clothing is cheaper than any
other place in the country,” she said; operation of household,
including light, heat, etc., $150; advancement, meaning education,
recreation, charities, church, savings, etc., $312; incidentals, $46,
a total of $1,199.15.”