Reforms
The Women’s Municipal League of New York has also investigated tenements and reported violations of the law to the Department affected. It helped to defeat proposed legislation which would remove all three-family houses from the surveillance of the Tenement House Department, a piece of reactionary legislation which aroused a successful protest from all women interested in social welfare, as well as from all men similarly interested.
This League also wishes to have all two-family houses and the rented room houses placed under the Tenement House Department. It made a study of the janitor’s situation and discovered that the janitors labor under such disadvantages that they are responsible for many violations of Health, Fire and Tenement Department laws. “The janitors should be decently paid and decently housed; they should be instructed briefly in the laws,” is the League’s decision.
From across the continent, we hear of women’s associations concerning themselves with housing reform. The American Club Woman reports: “Los Angeles is studying the housing problem. It expects a great influx of laboring population on the heels of the opening of the Panama Canal. The Woman’s Friday Morning Club therefore has built a model cottage for $500. The club proposes to acquire lands along the river bed and through semi-isolated sections and there erect these small houses. Gardens about the houses will help reduce the cost of living. The dream of the club is: a city without a tenement; a city spotlessly clean in every nook and corner; a city where there shall be thousands of small homes, renting at the same cost as in a court, and in which the individuals shall have sanitary comforts, the right of personal development and the privacy which tends toward morality and pride. The Los Angeles Housing Commission of which Mrs. Johanna von Wagner and other women are members, has done some interesting housing in the case of Mexicans transferred from their crude shacks to decently sanitary homes on city land.”
In Chicago, Mrs. Emmons Blaine was one of the founders of the City Homes Association which started the housing movement there and she is still one of the leaders in the Chicago work.
In the middle western states, Miss Mildred Chadsey of Cleveland, Ohio, stands out conspicuously as a housing reformer and in an official capacity. The Cleveland Bureau of Sanitation, of which she is chief, has a sergeant, twenty policemen, and an office force under her direction. Miss Chadsey up to the present has succeeded in demolishing over two hundred wretched hovels and is demonstrating that bad housing does not pay the city but is on the contrary frightfully expensive property. Some of the slogans that have developed from her work are these: “It costs less to be comfortable than it does to be uncomfortable.” “A good home is less expensive than a poor one.” “Health and cleanliness come cheap.” “Dirt and diseases are more costly than frankincense and myrrh.” This new vision for Cleveland was largely the result of a survey made by fourteen college investigators, under Miss Chadsey, who went out to ascertain facts in two sections of Cleveland—one the famous “Haymarket” district in the congested heart of the city; the other an open section on the edge of the city. The Survey published the report of that investigation.
Indiana has a splendid housing reformer in Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon, an officer in the National Housing Association, who started a campaign for a tenement house law before that association was formed. Her book, “Beauty for Ashes,” a narrative of discovery out along the road from a sheltered woman’s threshold, reveals the forces which have drawn most of the women out into social activity and into governmental interest. No woman can read this story without being moved to see what effect bad housing has on the community and woman’s responsibility toward her fellow-creatures in this as in other civic questions. Mrs. Bacon in her observations out from her own threshold has been forced to see that the war on bad homes is a war on poverty and its manifold products, vice and disease among others. She well illustrates the logic and the fearlessness with which even the most sheltered women often face facts when once their human sympathy is awakened and their eyes are opened to a public question. Mrs. Bacon, almost single-handed, secured housing laws for the cities of Evansville and Indianapolis. Last year she secured a still better law than that which crowned her first campaign.
In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the Civic Club, a woman’s organization, has been at the forefront in housing reform.
Miss Kate McKnight, of that association, initiated practically every movement of the club till her death in 1907. Mrs. Franklin P. Adams, acting president, drafted the tenement house laws governing cities of the second class in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Adams is chairman of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and of other societies. The Civic Club also got an increase in the force of tenement inspectors and the chief inspector was for some time a woman member of the club.
In Providence, Rhode Island, the Federation of Clubs passed resolutions and sent letters to the legislature urging the enactment of a housing bill. Moreover, they sent a delegation of women to the hearing before the Judiciary Committee.
In New Orleans, Miss Eleanor McMain, the head of Kingsley House, was very influential in securing the law regulating tenements in her city.