Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Pure Water

Pure water as well as pure food and drugs has been the starting-point of many a woman’s organization formed for civic purposes or for a combination of cultural and civic endeavor.

National recognition was won by the women of New Orleans, members of the Era Club, in their successful efforts for a municipal sewerage, water and drainage system. The yellow fever epidemic that raged in that city a few years ago and its attendant sacrifice of life aroused the women even more than the men to the imperative need of a pure water supply and a scientific drainage system adapted to the peculiar conditions of that city.

The women seem to have felt the need; the men to have appreciated the difficulties in the way of securing the system. The Era Club believed that, where there is a need, there is a way and the men finally agreed. Practically every house in the city at the time of the epidemic had a cesspool. “The drainage system was incomplete and inadequate, dependent upon a few drainage machines which paddled the water through troughs into the canals and eventually into Lake Ponchartrain. After a heavy rainfall the streets were flooded; in some sections the water would stand for days.”

Still the men hesitated to undertake the kind of an enterprise that local conditions demanded. For the first and only time the women of New Orleans, who were qualified, voted, instigated and led by that splendid Southern woman, Kate Gordon.

The Survey thus describes the attitude taken by the women:

Under the Louisiana Constitution women property-holders may vote at elections for authorizing municipal bond issues, and any woman who objects to going to the polls may send a proxy, provided that the proxy be given in the presence of two witnesses, which witnesses, by a strange mingling of the old and the new order of things, must be men. The work undertaken by the Era Club was to get the signature of one-third of the taxpayers to a petition praying for a special election; to arouse sufficient interest among both men and women to induce them to vote at the special election, and to furnish proxies to those ladies who feared that by going to the polls they might incur the stigma of being called a new woman. And all this the Era Club accomplished. The special election was held, the women voted or sent proxies, and the necessary sum was authorized. As three-fourths of the property-holders of the city were women, the significance of this work is apparent.

The area that had to be drained and properly supplied with sewers comprised 37½ square miles and 700 miles of streets, and it is claimed even by outsiders that this undertaking was the largest public work of this character ever put through at one time in the United States.

That the women of New Orleans have not voted since that occasion is no evidence of their discouragement at their first vote. Municipal bonds are not issued at every election and these alone entitle any of them to vote. Suffrage conferences are held in New Orleans and the agitation for a wider suffrage in Louisiana is being carried on by the same women who so ably fought to secure pure water for New Orleans.

This would seem like the most direct kind of health work, for we learn that “the death rate has been reduced 20 per cent., business confidence has been restored and New Orleans is today one of the healthiest and most delightful cities of the country,” according to one of the lovers of the city.

One of the papers on the Pacific Coast, the Pasadena Star, recently reported that:

[United States] Surgeon-General Blue pays a handsome, but deserved, tribute to the efficiency of women in practical aid in making cities sanitary, referring particularly to the excellent work of women in San Francisco, in their invaluable assistance in eradicating the plague from the bay city, a few years ago.

From the southern extremity of the continent we pass almost to the northern, noting on our way many a successful attempt of women in towns and cities, to improve water conditions.

In Woonsocket in the dry region of South Dakota the women of a club requested the Town Fathers to supply them with pure and more abundant water. Regret was expressed by the fathers that they could not comply with the request. The women, nothing daunted, organized an Improvement Association, collected money and hired an expert to drill an artesian well. When plenty of pure water gushed forth, the town officials consented to lay mains through the streets and allow the people to receive water from this excellent source. The women were then successful also in persuading the fathers to plan a beautiful park, or accept their own plans for the same, with a charming artificial lake as the crowning pleasure.[^[12]]

In New Mexico the Woman’s Club of Roswell behaved in much the same way. It was irrigation that seemed the crying need of that region. The club had a well dug and erected a tank which holds several thousands of gallons of water. As the women had previously planted some hundreds of trees in their town, they were thus able to maintain them also in a healthy condition.

One who reads the following somewhat casual report of a victory in a fight for better water might have no appreciation of the fact that it was the women of New Canaan who did the fighting, and hard fighting it was, for the filtration plant in their vicinity:

Agitation by the local Civic League for an improved water supply for New Canaan, Connecticut, recently won, through the Public Utilities Commission, a victory which may lead to important results throughout the state. The League, aided by an engineer and a sanitary expert, after a three-day hearing at Hartford, secured an order directing the private water company to install a filtration plant and equipment to purge the water of all odor and color.

The lawyer for the water company in his brief declared that if the request of the petitioners were granted the previous railroad work of the Commission would be small in comparison with what was ahead in adjudicating similar appeals relating to water supply in other towns. “The Commission,” said one of the petitioners after the verdict had been handed down, “has rendered this decision, so let us hope that good days are ahead for Connecticut in regard to water supply, and that it may lead to an efficient system of state inspection.”

It was the women who refused to accept the findings of the male authorities with reference to the purity of the water and proposed methods for its control. Experts were engaged by them and their activity at the hearings at Hartford made their determination to have better water so clear that the men yielded and now New Canaan is proud of its achievement—so proud that notices of the same necessitate an inquiry into the personnel of the Civic League for a complete story.