Noise
The excessive noise in urban communities adds to the nervous tension under which city dwellers must live. Effort has been made with some success to reduce the “yelling peril” as it has been called; namely, the nervous peril that results from trying to study, to sleep, to convalesce, or to work in the midst of constant uproar.
Mrs. Isaac Rice instigated the anti-noise crusade in New York in the desire to make her city a better place in which to sleep, for one thing. Nerve specialists and hospital superintendents and baby doctors have been among those who have added the weight of their testimony to the value of a quieter urban life. Through the agitation carried on by Mrs. Rice and the committee she formed, 80 per cent. of the river whistles were driven, by means of congressional and municipal legislation, out of the waters that surround the island-city. New legislation which Mrs. Rice and her colleagues secured caused certain streets like those in front of schools and hospitals to be marked as such, and driving laws enforced to prevent fast driving and the blowing of automobile horns in the vicinity of such places. “Walk your horses—hospital street” is as familiar a sign in New York now as “Keep off the grass.”
Mr. Edward A. Abbott, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who has also worked for a quieter home city, says of the anti-noise crusade initiated by Mrs. Rice: “The unfortunates in the hospitals and the babies in the cradles of the great city, if they knew their benefactress, would canonize her.” In Chattanooga the campaign was planned to show “by argument and testimony that noise injures health, disturbs the right development of infants, destroys the value of property, hinders the growth of cities, promotes hate and resentment and is useless and silly.” The ringing of railroad and other bells, crowing roosters, barking dogs and church chimes were attacked in that southern city.
That many women are not unmindful of the fact that the anti-noise movement must not be purely a middle-class movement is indicated by their activity against prolonged hours of work amid the whir of factory machinery. Noiseless machinery has not yet been a possibility, whatever the future may hold in store for us in that respect; but any attempt to limit one’s interest in health to a particular group is short-sighted, to say the least. Jaded nerves are to be found in large numbers among the factory men and women and boys and girls, whose daily bread is won amid the incessant din of wheels and engines during a long work day. Miss Goldmark has fully established the evils of these conditions, and she speaks for a vast number of women in her analysis of, and emphasis upon, overwork amid machinery as a cause of excessive fatigue. Women physicians also are calling attention to the conditions of factory labor.