Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Housing Associations

Women are not only interested in the special or local housing problems of their own district or city. They are actively affiliated with the National Housing Association and take part in its national conferences They thus coöperate with the men in the great work of arousing the nation to a knowledge of the deadly peril of low standard homes and to a sense of the immediate urgency of reform.

The New York Congestion Committee has not only been an influential body but it has made a most careful study of the causes of congestion and has drafted many, and secured the passage of some, important laws within the past three or four years. Florence Kelley and Mrs. V. G. Simkhovitch are members of the small executive board of the Committee, and women have helped in the campaign of education which has been necessary to place the evils of congestion and the program of the Committee before the public. They have also helped in that most essential work, the securing of signatures to the petition for the referendum on untaxing buildings. In other ways, too, they have assisted: by making investigations and writing to members of the state legislature urging the passage of laws. They also formed the Women’s Society to lower rents and reduce taxes on homes, similar to the men’s society with the same object. Together these two societies have carried on a propaganda among the people of New York which has had a marked influence on public interest in the housing question. They issue a Tenant’s Weekly in the interest of tenants and small home-owners, the slogan of which is “The City for the People.” One of their most effective pieces of work was the Congestion Exhibit, which presented the economic aspects of housing together with an impression which awakened horror at prevalent conditions.

A review of women’s activities in housing reform shows that they are taking no narrow view of the matter. They realize that the problem of congestion, the main element in the housing question, has many elements of an economic, social or administrative nature which involve action on the part of public authorities. Among these elements may be cited the high cost of land; congestion of factories, warehouses, offices and shops; low wages and long hours of labor; immigration; poor and expensive transportation facilities; lack of adequate housing inspection; ignorance of sanitary standards of living; and greed on the part of landlords or real estate managers. Another factor is the temporary foreign dweller who hopes to amass some money quickly and return to his native land to live upon it. Lack of town planning is still another factor that often leads to congestion.

As we shall see, women have entered into the town planning movement to prevent the accumulation of plague spots. They are gradually beginning to realize, as are men, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As town planning is not a private philanthropy, however, their usefulness in this movement is limited wherever they do not possess the ballot.

Women, therefore, are working in far greater numbers in the next phase of housing: that of educating badly housed people in the laws of hygiene. Every social movement which is not strictly evangelical instills some demand for individual and family privacy, and for the material bases of healthful and moral living. In congested areas it is the increase of wants that is essential. More mere things are needed: water, floor space, light, air, toilet conveniences, cooking and laundry equipment for individual or coöperative life, refrigerators, fire escapes, window blinds, wider and safer stairways, and innumerable other material objects. There is no other important outcome of education in hygiene or home beauty or housing standards except an increase of wants and the consequent pressure on the wage standards, without which an improvement in material possessions is impossible. Whatever individual exceptions may be found, the general rule is that the poor overcrowd and do so in order to make their pittances buy a little more food, a few more clothes, books for their children, the month’s actual shelter, or a doctor’s services.

Some women are consciously preaching higher standards of living to foreigners, negroes, and the poor of every race assembled here, knowing the ultimate pressure their work will have on labor demands. The settlements which have almost involuntarily helped in this education from the beginning, are more and more being led into the support of working class movements having for their goal better wages and steadier employment, as we discover in the chapter on social service. Other women are unconsciously creating dissatisfaction with congestion and with that poverty which underlies bad housing, through the teaching of domestic science in all its forms, through public school education, health centers, and the rest. The willingness to pay the price accompanies or follows the desire for the things which make for health and culture.

CHAPTER VII
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.