Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

The Woman’s Club, of Orange, New Jersey, through Miss Durgin, made an investigation at the House of Detention, which was not only the means of remedying several individual wrongs, but also of supplying the women and the public generally with knowledge on which to urge the modification of the prevailing system of dealing with detained boys and girls and also the establishment of a parental school. Legal steps have been taken for the parental school, and the present chairman of the Civic Committee of this club has been named by the Board of Freeholders as one of the Board of Guardians for the school.

The Chicago Juvenile Court has had a more or less stormy career. Its whole history is indicative of the spirit and constructive ability of women. For many years—before 1906—the Chicago Woman’s Club had been maintaining a school in the Cook County jail. Determined to have the children separated, they had a bill drawn up, which became a law in 1899, and forms the basis of many of the present juvenile court laws.

Jane Addams, in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in 1913, described the Chicago movement very graphically:

Years ago the residents of Hull House were much distressed over the boys and girls who were brought into the police stations for petty offenses and gradually one of the residents gave all of her time to these unfortunate children. The police justices in the two nearest stations regularly telephoned her in regard to the first offense case, and whenever practicable paroled the children in her care. When the Juvenile Court was established in Chicago she was engaged as the first probation officer with twenty-one other persons.

For six years this voluntary association called the “Juvenile Court Committee” paid the probation officers with a well-known educator as chief, and supported the detention home through which passed each year twenty-six hundred children who would otherwise have been in the police stations.

In connection with this home the Children’s Hospital Society supported a medical clinic through which it was discovered that 90 per cent. of the sad little procession were in need of medical attention. Gradually all of these things have been taken over by the county, and now the probation officers, teachers, nurses and doctors have become public officials while the Juvenile Court with the detention home and quarters for medical and psychopathic clinics and for a school under the Chicago Board of Education is housed in the building erected for its special use out of the public taxes.

All went well through various administrations, but recently a president of the Board of County Commissioners, realizing that this developed apparatus of the Juvenile Court would be most valuable in building up party patronage, began a series of attacks upon the administration of the Court which, it is evident, will eventually destroy its usefulness.

The positions of probation officers, formerly occupied by those who had passed a careful civil service examination, were filled by sixty-day appointees, one of whom had been a sewer contractor, another a saloon-keeper. The chief probation officer, after a long and wearisome trial, was dismissed, having been found guilty of not doing those things which under the law he had no authority to do; the physician in charge resigned because a so-called trained nurse on a sixty-day appointment defied his authority, showing her ignorance of nursing by wrapping up the infected leg of a boy in a piece of old newspaper. The Funds to Parents Act, by which the judge is allowed to give ten dollars a month for the care of a child in his own home instead of in an institution, offered, of course, a splendid opportunity for building up a political following among the poorest people, and only through the action of the wise judge, in coöperation with various philanthropic societies, was this beneficent law saved from disaster.

When an aroused public sentiment finally demanded an investigation of the Juvenile Court and the report of the Committee proved favorable to the Court, the president of the County Board refused to have it published and philanthropy, again appearing upon the scene, paid for its publication from private funds.

It was not to be wondered at that a great many public-spirited women of Chicago, through their clubs and other organizations, gave of their time and best efforts last autumn to promote the election of a wiser man as president of the County Board. They would have been stupid indeed to sit quietly while their faithful work of years was being demolished. Of course they were obliged to enter partisan politics because there is no other way, owing to the American system of party nominations, to secure the election of any official, good or bad....