Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Gradually they realized that the remedy for lack of education was not charity, but schools, and many charity workers went over to vocational education and guidance activity; the remedy for unemployment they found to be a labor issue and many of them joined the working class movement or social reform movements having as their goal continuous labor, well requited; the remedy for sickness they found to be prevention and many of them went into public health work in all the ramifications described in Chapter II; the remedy for intemperance they found to be complex and many of them joined in prohibition or recreational or labor activities in the hope of checking its ravages; the remedy for preventable poverty they found to be its abolition and charity workers studied and divided into groups according as they thought it might be abolished—political groups for the most part.

For example, Josephine Shaw Lowell, who was for years a member of the New York State Commission on Lunacy and Charity, saw that “she was giving the best years of her life to the service of the sick poor in the public institutions. Meanwhile, honest working people were being made sick by overwork in the service of the Christmas shopping mob. Mrs. Lowell proceeded, without loss of time, to invite to her home some leading retail merchants who were her friends, and some working people acquainted with the effects of long working hours. She, herself, represented the shopping public. The Consumers’ League was the result.”[^[37]]

The Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, soon after its establishment, formed a Housing and Tuberculosis Committee. The field workers in all such associations have helped to educate the executive bodies of the organization and the Executive Committee has helped to educate the people and municipal officials, and thus the whole social movement verges toward an increase of public functions.

Indeed, everywhere charity workers are saying: “The people who come to us should be thrown back upon industry. It is a poor sort of an industrial system that cannot support those willing and able to work in it.”

Community Responsibility

Finally social workers have come to the conclusion, many of them, that in most cases these are not private problems at all but socio-economic ones for which the social system, through government, is responsible. They therefore talk “community and public responsibility” and insist more and more that there shall be no public shirking or shrinking.

With the trend toward public social service, organized charity itself becomes more and more a clearing house for other agencies or, in its effort to maintain itself through the self-preservative instinct that all institutions have, it assumes also the task of prevention by offering employment; opening hospitals and rest homes, milk stations, day nurseries; circulating educational pamphlets and the like. Thus duplication of work is occasionally found where the social workers of a hospital, of a settlement, and of a charity branch visit in the same day a tenement mother and force her to repeat the story of her problems. The only way in which such duplication can be avoided is through the organization of social service and the extension of municipal functions in that line. When the hospital is a municipal enterprise, its social service department would seem to be the proper and legitimate one to have the right of way and of support; and this is especially justified through the ability of the municipality to coöperate systematically among its departments: the health department working with the education and police departments; public works with health and education; and so on.

The beginnings of the coördinated social service under municipal control are already on the horizon. Take, for instance, the Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City, Missouri. This Board is four years old. Women are active on it as district superintendents, investigators, factory inspectors; in the social service department, parole department, department of lunches and unemployed, and women’s reformatory.

The establishment of this Board makes possible an intensive district study in which is listed every special agency, school, church, institution, foreign, or negro colony. It provides for the teaching of sex hygiene in the schools and has all the up-to-date machinery, like school nurses. The work of the Board comprises studies of housing, recreation, health, temperance, vice, wage-earning women and women employed in industries, labor conditions, welfare work and industrial accidents. In short, its field is as broad as social needs.

“What good does it all do?” asks the Bureau, and then answers the question itself: