Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

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.”