Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Club women and women teachers and doctors last summer (1914) declared emphatically that social activities must continue to be the joint work of men and women and that political equality is a prime essential in the evolution of social service.

Sophronisba Breckinridge succinctly explains this point of view in an article in The Survey designed to answer Dr. Simon Patten’s strictures on suffrage and social service:

In his editorial comment of January 4, Professor Patten not only addresses certain questions to the social workers of the country, but draws vivid contrasts between “dozens of little coercions” and “doses of freedom.” It is not my purpose to undertake to answer his questions. The program of the social workers has been so definitely outlined by action taken at Cleveland in June at the time of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and is so definitely formulated in the platform of the Progressive Party, to which Miss Addams gave her adherence, that further reply seems superfluous.

I should be glad, however, to ask Professor Patten in return to consider more carefully the nature of certain “small coercions” against which the women of the country and the social workers as well are now protesting. Professor Patten contrasts the value of a “suffragette agitation” with the value of a “clearer vision.” He cannot, however, be ignorant of the fact that the efforts of women to become politically free have revealed as no other agency has been able to do, the nature and extent of the coercion exercised over the voters of the community by the organized forces of vice and alcohol. The women think that, in their efforts to secure political freedom so that they may be able to serve the community, they should have Professor Patten’s acquiescence in increased control exercised over these common foes of the race. In Professor Patten’s judgment the “only effective check to the natural expansion of clear ideas and social emotions is offered by the members of the degenerate, defective or dependent classes.” Commercialized alcohol and vice may be included in these groups; but will the classifications likewise include the competitor who remains in the market by adulterating the food supply of the people, the unintelligent producers of unclean and unsafe milk, the employer of children in the southern cotton mills, those who fatten on the labor of underpaid girls in our department stores and factories? I fancy these “enemies of the people” would be greatly surprised to find themselves so classified. Nor is the strength of their position or the disastrous consequences of their freedom lessened by so characterizing them. “Little coercions” upon them mean “large doses of freedom” to the child, the women workers, the men helpless before conditions of physical hazard in our industrial establishments.

Political action without philanthropy is of course like the human skeleton equipped perhaps with muscle but lacking the nervous and circulatory systems. Philanthropy on the other hand without political capacity is like an invertebrate structure, inert and incapable of efficient self-direction. It seems entirely in accord with her general experience of helplessness when relying on philanthropy alone and with her observation of the social aimlessness of the older political parties that Miss Addams should demand that the strength and stability of one be added to the life and persistence of the other.

CHAPTER VIII
CORRECTIONS

“Women are vastly more interested than we are in the administration of the criminal law, in the preservation of law and order, and in the suppression and punishment of crime,” declared the Hon. Joseph Choate a few years ago in New York to a large group of women organized to help in the non-partisan ticket which had Mr. Jerome at its head for district attorney. Mr. Choate added that Mr. Jerome would owe his election more to the women than the men. His prediction proved true; but whether the women who worked so hard for Mr. Jerome were fully satisfied with his administration is another story.

There are abundant reasons why women take so much interest in the whole problem of criminal law and correction. A great many crimes are definite offenses against women and children; their comparative defenselessness makes them suffer more than men from brutality, neglect, and vices; and there are certain technical legal requirements of the law that constitute, in the matter of punishment, sex discriminations which arouse rebellion on their part.

Perhaps other reasons predominate, however. The interest in public correction is but a simple and inevitable extension of the function of private correction which has been generally allotted to women in the home and in the school. Even over husbands they have been urged by church and moralists of all kinds to exercise reformatory influences and their acknowledged sphere of “protection” and “prevention of delinquency” is evident in the popular explanation of every great man by the fact that “he had a good mother.”

Again, middle-class women have more leisure than men under modern conditions of industry, and an army of women choose to spend their leisure mothering the poor and the friendless or in the prevention of poverty and dependence. Furthermore women spend more of the world’s wealth than men spend, and hundreds of well-to-do women are becoming, with their advancing education and travel and observation, satiated with material possessions, and are spending their wealth for social possessions—public health, public ornamentation, public recreation, protection of girls and boys, infant welfare, and the like. Even the “sheltered” woman has grown to realize that all children as well as her own need homes, protection, education, sympathy and justice; that even self-preservation and self-respect for herself, her husband and her children are endangered by proximity to vice, crime, neglect, disease, and immorality.