Office Holding
Many states do have women on their institutional boards, and women are superintendents, in some cases, of penal institutions for women, and generally of reform institutions for women. The application of civil service reform to these institutions is urged enthusiastically and earnestly by women members of the civil service reform leagues as well as indorsed by clubs and other women’s organizations.
A public tribute to woman’s ability in correctional work was made in New York in 1914 by the appointment of Dr. Katharine B. Davis to the post of city commissioner of corrections. Dr. Davis is a national figure, owing to her work at the Bedford Reformatory. In answer to critics of her appointment, it is agreed that her present work “is not a man’s job nor a woman’s job; it is a job for one who knows how.” Dr. Davis, it was decided, knew how. Soon after she entered upon her public duties, Dr. Davis said: “Everybody knows New York’s prison institutions to be little better than medieval. I hope to bring them up to something nearer to the modern standard.... The thing for which I hope most earnestly is light upon the mental and physical causes leading to the production of the individual human type which commits crime. Such knowledge would lead us to prevention.”
Dr. Davis, by virtue of her office, is ex-officio member of the New York City Board of Inebriety, created and established to maintain a hospital and industrial colony for inebriates—the first municipal institution for these unfortunates.
It is not merely in public and official capacity that women are helping in the improvement of the conditions of correction. They are to be found among the leading students and original investigators who concern themselves with prison methods.