Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Even in the field of technical finance, which is supposed to be somewhat outside of woman’s interest (although in view of her household budgetary experience, we know not why) we find women doing efficient and telling work. To select a single example, we may take Mrs. Mathilde Coffin Ford, of New York City, whose labors are thus described in a recent issue of The American City by Frank Parker Stockbridge:

In the government of New York, the greatest city of the western world, women play a much more important part than is known to the public—a more important part than they have in the government of any other city in this country. Their part in and influence upon the government of New York is constantly increasing, and the results are good.

A woman is superintendent of schools in Chicago, but she hasn’t a word to say about spending the taxpayers’ money upon the schools. She has to take what is voted to her. A man is superintendent of schools in New York City, but here it is a woman who tells him how much money he can have to run his schools with. And she isn’t stingy, either, because she lets him have something over forty million dollars each and every year to compete with the motion pictures.

The woman who exercises such an amazing financial power is Mrs. Mathilde Coffin Ford, examining inspector for the Bureau of Municipal Investigation and Statistics. Forty millions a year for one woman to spend—and she receives a salary of $3,500 a year! Judge Gary, head of the Steel Trust, gets $100,000 a year for spending less, and certainly accomplishing less.

Of course, strictly and legally speaking, Mrs. Ford doesn’t have the whole say-so of those forty millions a year; but in reality that is just what she does. Not one dollar is spent by the Board of Estimate upon the school system unless Mrs. Ford has looked into the proposed expenditure, studied the possible educational result, reported favorably upon it, and drafted (for the Comptroller to sign) a resolution authorizing it. Thus, you see, Mrs. Ford knows what every woman knows, how to keep the purse strings firmly and to let the man think he is really doing the spending. Mrs. Ford is the housewife of the city’s educational system, a kind of magnified housewife, simply doing on a huge scale and with marvelously sharpened feminine powers what any janitor’s wife in any schoolhouse under Mrs. Ford’s control does for her household.

Take an instance. Mrs. Ford is now drafting the corporate stock budget for the educational system. The Superintendent of Schools has asked for forty-six new buildings in the five boroughs and named the sites that he wants. His requests have been referred to Mrs. Ford. All the requests of parents and neighborhood improvement clubs on the same subject have been referred to Mrs. Ford. In three months Mrs. Ford has found time to slip out of her office and go shopping on the matter of new schools. She has gone to every one of the proposed sites. She has studied the educational need of the given neighborhoods. Her judgment outweighing the Superintendent’s, she has, with her woman’s small hands, lifted some of the proposed buildings bodily out of the proposed sites and placed them elsewhere, where schools seemed to her to be more needed. In each case she framed up a report embodying her reasons, which the Comptroller solemnly signed without more ado, and which the Board of Estimate will act upon without much ado. Thus Mrs. Ford did about twelve million dollars’ worth of shopping.

In the fall Mrs. Ford spends a great deal more money. That is the time for drafting the tax budget, or maintenance budget. Something over thirty millions of dollars are spent annually in maintaining the schools at their given efficiency. Last fall the Department of Education asked for thirty-three millions, submitting a detailed report of how they intended to spend the money. Mrs. Ford had to go over every item. When she got through she had pared down the estimate to thirty millions, and that was after she had allowed for a more liberal expenditure in some items where she thought the policy of the department niggardly.

These two instances do not begin to show Mrs. Ford’s complete range of authority. She fixes compensation for all employees of the Department of Education, save those of the teachers. She keeps track of all the funds and accounts of the Department, recommends changes from time to time in the financial arrangements for spending the money voted. She follows the course of the legislation at Albany which affects the school system in the city. In short, she more than any other person is the public school system of New York City.

Back of all this power are years of experience in school work. Mrs. Ford has headed nearly every sort of school in the country, and was for years nominally Assistant Superintendent and really Superintendent of Schools of Detroit. She has delivered over four thousand lectures to teachers’ associations, telling them then, as now she tells New York, how to run a school system. Mrs. Ford knows how. It was no fluke that gave a woman such a strategic position in the city’s administration.

Whether or not they are concerned in holding offices themselves, women have taken an interest in the character of the officers charged with every kind of public function. Civil service reform is one of the earliest changes espoused by women. Their first paths beyond the home threshold led them into fields of relief, correction, and labor where their home training in thrift was rudely shocked at the extravagance and irresponsibility which they met among officials in public institutions and in city positions.