While the conference program was well rounded and covered every accustomed subject and many new ones, the response of the audiences brought out the trend of conference thought. And that trend was unmistakably economic—the challenge to the industrial order for sweeping readjustments. However keen the interest in other topics, this was one which never failed to elicit enthusiastic response. It broke out at the opening meeting when President Tucker sounded the call for a more fundamental and largely economic interpretation of social justice; it rose almost thunderously when Dr. McKelway in the conference sermon declared that at the bottom of the whole problem we now face is the question of wages, and added: “Men do not always know what justice is, and their thoughts widen with the process of the suns, but if there is any current of American thought today, it is the demand among the masses of men for justice. We can tell its course by the ripples on the surface, when some obstacle rears its head. Privilege of any kind must go down before the rush of that current.”
The same response rose with every utterance of the slogan “Not charity but justice.” Appreciation of the industrial situation was voiced by speaker after speaker, even though his topic lay in other fields. The new radical labor groups, the I. W. W., Socialism and the single tax were frequently brought into discussion as movements to be reckoned with practically and studiously by social workers. The industrial program was the last ringing note sounded at the closing session with an all-around presentation of the minimum wage, the essence of which, to quote Mrs. Kelley, is that “the payroll has become public property,” and no business can be a going concern which does not pay a living wage, any more than if it could not pay interest or rent.[[38]]
Many of the organizations represented at the conference had initiated valuable civic institutions like public baths, recreational provisions, medical inspection in schools, and, in discussing development of new instrumentalities of social welfare, the delegates of such societies asked for the further extension of municipal functions to meet the needs of the city’s people. Significant of the new spirit actuating the charity workers of the country is the fact that three committees were discontinued at this national convention—Immigration, Commercial Organizations and Social Welfare, and Church and Social Work—while two new committees were formed—Social Hygiene and Defectives (including defective delinquents). The Committee on Families and Neighborhoods was renamed the Committee on the Family and the Community, including community programs. A new committee was created on Neighborhood Development, including recreation, which is a very different thing from the old type of charity committee in a neighborhood.
The part played by women in this forward movement of social workers, who began as charity workers, is only partly revealed in the list of officers and chairmen of standing committees, interesting as they are. Mrs. John M. Glenn is one of the three vice-presidents and the following is a list of standing committees for 1914 with their chairmen: Social Hygiene, Maude E. Miner; Children, Mrs. Mary Vida Clark; Standards of Living and Labor, Including Social Insurance, Charles P. Neill; Health, Dr. Richard C. Cabot; Public Charities, Dr. J. T. Mastin; Defectives, Including Mental Hygiene and Defective Delinquency, Dr. Llwellys Barker; Family and Community, Eugene T. Lies; Neighborhood Development, Mary McDowell; Correction, Amos W. Butler.
Charity workers have thus evidently grown into one definite group of social workers. Another large group is composed of settlement and neighborhood workers who cooperate with, but are distinct from, charity workers. A few may have gone into settlement work from motives of pure philanthropy, but settlements have never been confined to communities of pauperized people and have often been located in communities of industrial workers representing many nationalities affected by the ups and downs of the industrial and social life of our day. Philanthropy, therefore, has been carefully tabooed as a phrase or an ideal by the leaders in the settlement movement, however slowly they have actually been able to lead their colleagues away from instincts of mere pity and charity.
No one can deny that the social functions which have evolved out of the experiments and studies of settlements are in a very large measure the work of women. Jane Addams, Louise Bowen, Julia Lathrop, Lillian Wald, and other social leaders, who have originated many movements, see distinctly that city functions must be extended to absorb their activities as well as those more directly connected with charity. An example is furnished by the work they have done for schools. They feel that private aid should not obscure public responsibility for the welfare of all the people of a community, but rather that interested citizens with constructive programs should but point the way to better assumption of public duties by the city.
The spirit of all these women workers we see in an appreciation of the contributions of Lillian Wald written by the late Jacob A. Riis:
No woman, since Josephine Shaw Lowell, has been able to do what she has done. They trust her absolutely, trust her head, her judgment, and her friendship. She arbitrates in a strike, and the men listen; she sits as one of the Board of Sanitary Control in the cloak and suit trade that has wrought such wondrous great good for the workers, and her judgment stands. When she pleads for housing reform, for playgrounds, for a united stand against child labor, her words carry authority. When politics make for better government, the Nurses’ Settlement is a recruiting station; when push-cart peddlers are blackmailed by the police, she will tell the mayor the truth, for she knows. In the plotting and planning and winding ways of life on the East Side there is one pilot whose chart can be trusted—Miss Wald knows.
In the strife that rages forever around our public schools her feet are planted on solid ground. She pleaded for cooking and housekeeping schools and got them; she believes in vocational guidance. She labored for medical school inspection and when it did only half of what was expected of it, it was Miss Wald who put life into it by giving the doctors backing. Perhaps nothing she ever did gives one a better grip on the woman and her work.[[39]]