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.
CHAPTER III
THE SOCIAL EVIL
The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most encouraging fact of the century. With the revelations which have come both from women and from men physicians, nurses, and scientists of the causes, spread, and effects of venereal diseases, the conscience and intelligence of women have fairly leaped in response to the demand made upon them for recognition of the situation and for remedies and prevention.
Their work here as elsewhere has been varied; for the problem of prevention is complex, many causes more or less combining to produce the undesirable vice conditions. There are those, for example, who make underfeeding—malnutrition—responsible for the physical and mental defects which distort the mind and the will and which feed houses of prostitution and the clandestine trade. Others lay emphasis upon the liquor traffic and refer to the obvious connection between bars and dance halls, between liquor and feeble-mindedness and degeneracy in general. Yet others see in the commercial spirit of the age and the avarice for profits and unearned livelihoods the basis of sex vice. Education, the responsibility of doctors and parents, marriage laws and customs, recreation, labor conditions and wages all receive their emphasis in the discussion of the causes of sex irregularities and morbidity.
In each line of thought and endeavor women will be found today in the United States as leaders in the crusade against the social evil. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs some time ago took official cognizance of the imperative necessity for women to attack the evils which eat at the heart of womanhood and maternity and thus endanger the infant and the adult man and woman. At its Biennial Convention in Chicago in June, 1914, the Federation made all aspects of this question one of its main considerations for study and action.
As a further evidence of the determination of club women not to shrink from the discussion of this question, we have The American Club Woman, the organ of the Federation, declaring under the heading, “Women Will Not Hush Up,” as follows:
There is deep significance in the fact that women are rejecting the idea of keeping silent about vice problems. There is strong enthusiasm for the suppression of the social evil. A well-known New York club woman said the other day: “I attend committee meetings and discuss the facts about the social evil in as impersonal a manner as I do child labor or the high cost of living. Twenty years ago I would have blushed with embarrassment at the mention of the social evil in a mixed company of men and women. I know my mother would have been terribly shocked at the idea of my reading a report on the white slave traffic.”
Times change. I believe we may make mistakes, but if we women are asking for political equality, we had better know what is happening to other women. It is as much our duty to try to suppress the so-called social evil as it is to promote higher education or secure a living wage for women in employment.
Apropos of this humane sentiment, we note that women in various parts of the country are tackling the problem with a vigor and common-sense that astonishes city officials.
In Detroit recently the club women persuaded the city officials to coöperate with civic organizations and order disorderly houses to close and stay closed after a certain date.
A peculiar phase of the situation is that no provision seems to have been made for the women who will be turned out of these resorts. Being human, even if immoral, they are likely to continue living and the presumption is that those who profit by their traffic will remove them to some other city—which is not exactly a final solution of the evil.
The club women who have labored so earnestly to improve the morals of their city are not to blame. They would be glad to see an asylum provided where such women might be cared for and given an opportunity to return to a normal life, but the State has not provided any such shelter, although the matter has been before the legislature more than once. Possibly some effort will be made by private subscription to do this work which the State should look after.
Michigan is no worse than many other States in this respect and Detroit shows courage in attempting to stamp out an evil which is usually allowed to flourish without restraint. The case only illustrates what confusion exists when practical measures of reform are attempted. The study of social hygiene and eugenics inevitably leads to the consideration of the ugly problems of life. Any attempt at their solution is certainly better than the ignorant or indifferent attitude which women have hitherto been encouraged to take. Women are beginning to revolt against the atrocities of commercialized vice. They do not believe that all this degradation is inevitable. Every protest brings us nearer some right solution of the whole problem of woman’s place in life.