Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Juvenile Courts

Following the example set by Judge Lindsey in Denver, women have been active in creating the public opinion which has brought about the creation of juvenile courts in so many cities of the South, as well as of the North. In Atlanta, the women acted immediately upon the suggestion of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, in session there. It is generally conceded in Pennsylvania that the five bills passed in that state providing for juvenile courts owe their passage to the agitation and pressure brought to bear by the Pennsylvania Federation of Women’s Clubs and its enthusiastic president. In at least eight states it is claimed that the juvenile court system owes its inception largely to the work of women. Coupled with their interest in the court has often gone their desire to accompany the court work with model reform schools for boys and for girls. In Alabama and other states these were secured by the insistence of women.

In Iowa the Congress of Mothers took the lead for the Juvenile Court Law, and this congress has pushed steadily in other states for the same legislation. The Ohio law, passed in 1904, was due in a large measure to the fact that the juvenile court was a paramount issue of club work in that state at that time.

Club women feel that they deserve credit also for the St. Louis and Kansas City Courts. In Michigan, when the law was declared unconstitutional, women pledged their effort to the securing of a new bill.

The Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, together with the Civic Committee of the women’s clubs, secured the organization of the juvenile court of that county. They then sent women and men speakers into neighboring counties and thus extended the movement. The first juvenile court was organized and supported entirely by the Club for several years, until it was legally incorporated and became independent. The Club also established an industrial and training school for boys, to solve the question of the care of boys that came before the court.

Detention homes preceded as well as accompanied efforts for juvenile courts. The Civic Club of Allegheny County secured the proper enforcement of the Juvenile Court Law in its provision as to rooms of detention for children under sixteen who are in custody and awaiting hearing or placement. The same club hopes soon to secure a model children’s court building along the lines adopted in a few other cities.

By the year 1906 detention homes and a juvenile court law had been actively taken up by women’s clubs in California and other western states. Since then many places have been catching up, and these two issues form part of the propaganda of club women everywhere.

The Municipal League of Utica, composed of men and women, secured recently an appropriation for a detention home and juvenile court. The Women’s Civic League, of Meadsville, Pennsylvania, also established a detention home for juvenile delinquents.

The Woman’s Club, of Orange, New Jersey, through Miss Durgin, made an investigation at the House of Detention, which was not only the means of remedying several individual wrongs, but also of supplying the women and the public generally with knowledge on which to urge the modification of the prevailing system of dealing with detained boys and girls and also the establishment of a parental school. Legal steps have been taken for the parental school, and the present chairman of the Civic Committee of this club has been named by the Board of Freeholders as one of the Board of Guardians for the school.

The Chicago Juvenile Court has had a more or less stormy career. Its whole history is indicative of the spirit and constructive ability of women. For many years—before 1906—the Chicago Woman’s Club had been maintaining a school in the Cook County jail. Determined to have the children separated, they had a bill drawn up, which became a law in 1899, and forms the basis of many of the present juvenile court laws.

Jane Addams, in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in 1913, described the Chicago movement very graphically:

Years ago the residents of Hull House were much distressed over the boys and girls who were brought into the police stations for petty offenses and gradually one of the residents gave all of her time to these unfortunate children. The police justices in the two nearest stations regularly telephoned her in regard to the first offense case, and whenever practicable paroled the children in her care. When the Juvenile Court was established in Chicago she was engaged as the first probation officer with twenty-one other persons.

For six years this voluntary association called the “Juvenile Court Committee” paid the probation officers with a well-known educator as chief, and supported the detention home through which passed each year twenty-six hundred children who would otherwise have been in the police stations.

In connection with this home the Children’s Hospital Society supported a medical clinic through which it was discovered that 90 per cent. of the sad little procession were in need of medical attention. Gradually all of these things have been taken over by the county, and now the probation officers, teachers, nurses and doctors have become public officials while the Juvenile Court with the detention home and quarters for medical and psychopathic clinics and for a school under the Chicago Board of Education is housed in the building erected for its special use out of the public taxes.

All went well through various administrations, but recently a president of the Board of County Commissioners, realizing that this developed apparatus of the Juvenile Court would be most valuable in building up party patronage, began a series of attacks upon the administration of the Court which, it is evident, will eventually destroy its usefulness.

The positions of probation officers, formerly occupied by those who had passed a careful civil service examination, were filled by sixty-day appointees, one of whom had been a sewer contractor, another a saloon-keeper. The chief probation officer, after a long and wearisome trial, was dismissed, having been found guilty of not doing those things which under the law he had no authority to do; the physician in charge resigned because a so-called trained nurse on a sixty-day appointment defied his authority, showing her ignorance of nursing by wrapping up the infected leg of a boy in a piece of old newspaper. The Funds to Parents Act, by which the judge is allowed to give ten dollars a month for the care of a child in his own home instead of in an institution, offered, of course, a splendid opportunity for building up a political following among the poorest people, and only through the action of the wise judge, in coöperation with various philanthropic societies, was this beneficent law saved from disaster.

When an aroused public sentiment finally demanded an investigation of the Juvenile Court and the report of the Committee proved favorable to the Court, the president of the County Board refused to have it published and philanthropy, again appearing upon the scene, paid for its publication from private funds.

It was not to be wondered at that a great many public-spirited women of Chicago, through their clubs and other organizations, gave of their time and best efforts last autumn to promote the election of a wiser man as president of the County Board. They would have been stupid indeed to sit quietly while their faithful work of years was being demolished. Of course they were obliged to enter partisan politics because there is no other way, owing to the American system of party nominations, to secure the election of any official, good or bad....

The larger plans for meeting these general needs can only be carried out with the consent of all the people and the wisdom of such plans must be submitted to them during a political campaign.

Certainly woman’s rôle of non-partisanship needs to be examined afresh when a multitude of men and women have come to challenge the sincerity and moral value of that combination of reverence and disregard which does not permit a woman to fulfill the traditional obligations to the community simply because to do this she must participate in political life.

If women would bear their share in those great social problems which no nation has yet solved, but which every nation must reduce to political action if it would hold its place in advancing civilization, they are fairly forced to choose between standing for an impossible ideal, quite outside the political field, or upholding moral standards within political life itself.

The entrance of women into the political combat in Chicago helped to defeat the régime which was undermining the Juvenile Court. A temporary setback was threatened by the decision of the state court that probation officers were not included in the officers under the civil service law, but until their position under that law could be strengthened the situation was met by an advisory committee, appointed by Judge Pinckney, in whose hands lay the appointment of probation officers, to examine and pass upon all applicants. Louise De Koven Bowen, president of the Juvenile Protective Association and of the Chicago Woman’s Club, and Leonora Meder, president of the Federation of Catholic Women’s Charities, were on this advisory council.

In summing up the efforts of women for, and their attitude toward, the Juvenile Court, Julia Lathrop, chief of the Children’s Bureau, says: “Important as are the immediate services of a Juvenile Court to the children who are daily brought before it for protection and guidance, painstaking as are the Court’s methods of ascertaining the facts which account for a child’s trouble, his family history, his own physical and mental state, hopeful as are the results of probation, yet the great primary service of the Court is that it lifts up the truth and compels us to see that wastage of human life whose sign is the child in the Court. Heretofore the kindly but hurried people never saw as a whole what it cannot now avoid seeing—the sad procession of little children and older brothers and sisters who for various reasons cannot keep step with the great company of normal, orderly, protected children.”