Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

The American Journal of Hygiene recently printed a paper by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards of Boston on “Instructive Inspection,” elucidating the advantages to be derived from the Board of Health’s appointment of a teacher to be sent with power like any other inspection officer “wherever ignorance, usually diagnosed as stubbornness,” is found.

Detroit club women are asking to be appointed as instructive inspectors to do this kind of work while women in the Municipal League of Boston are already performing a somewhat similar service, clothed with official authority. Fifty St. Louis club women have volunteered and been accepted as city inspectors “to help make St. Louis the healthiest city in the country.”

In the sphere of municipal housekeeping, which forms such an easy transition from domestic housekeeping, women have proved themselves interested and efficient in suggesting reforms and helping to see them completed to the minutest detail.

The sanitary survey of a municipality has had to precede, of course, any large constructive proposals for improvement. One of our leading experts in this field is Mrs. Caroline Bartlett Crane, who has been pressed into service far and wide for this purpose. A number of her reports on sanitary and social conditions have been published, describing such places as Nashville, Tennessee; Erie, Pennsylvania; Saginaw, Michigan; Rochester, New York; and seventeen cities in Minnesota. These reports represent comparative studies on different topics; such as, water works, sewers, street sanitation, garbage collection and disposal, the smoke nuisance, milk supply, meat supply, markets and food factories, hygiene and sanitation of school houses, housing problems, almshouses and jails. These surveys were made at the request of local associations and officials, usually instigated, we believe, by women. The surveys in Minnesota, for example, were made at the invitation of the State Board of Health and the Federation of Women’s Clubs with the coöperation of the State Medical Association, the local medical societies, and the commercial clubs of some of the larger cities. In Rochester the survey was undertaken at the invitation of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union seconded by the mayor and a number of official and civic organizations. Mrs. Crane has written on “Factors of the Street Cleaning Problem,” and similar questions, in a way that shows intimate acquaintance with the technique of road-making and other municipal enterprises.

The organization of junior leagues for guarding the streets has seemed to some persons, women included, as a very trivial public activity. They have had an impression that budget-making or public accounting were far more intellectual operations and of more social value. Are they?

One of the most expensive of public departments is the street cleaning one. Shall any sum demanded by the present incumbent in the office of chief of that department be granted lightly and the books be well kept and the affair end? Or shall causes of dirty streets be investigated to the full and the problem of heavy expense for cleaning be tackled perhaps by some measure for the prevention of dust and refuse? The education of the people so that they may desire permanent cleanliness instead of the mere excitement of a spectacular clean-up week is of the most fundamental concern. No element in that education is too insignificant to deserve attention.

Children, through ignorance, are habitual misusers of city streets, but they are also the most enthusiastic clean-up crusaders and rubbish preventers when they are once aroused. All sections of the country announce the formation of these children’s leagues to assist the women and the city officials in cleaning-up enterprises, and in carrying home the messages of prevention and the feeling of public interest which they have acquired at school or at their little meetings. In New York, circulars were printed recently in Yiddish, Italian, and English and distributed to children by women’s clubs, teachers, churches, and civic organizations, to aid the Health Department in its annual clean-up program.

Junior leagues may greatly reduce the cost of the street cleaning department and the work of the courts in enforcing city ordinances and thus materially assist in the city budget-making; but it requires tact and patience and more than a mere bookkeeper’s mind to make them effective.

Garbage Disposal

Jane Addams and other members of the Woman’s Club of Chicago on their own initiative gave a practical demonstration of their ability to keep hitherto neglected streets clean and of the wisdom of the municipal exercise of such a function. Two members of the Club later were appointed on the Municipal Garbage Commission which helped to solve Chicago’s problem in an expert and comprehensive way. Miss Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement made effective contributions to this work through a personal study of refuse disposal systems in Europe. The story of the efforts of Chicago for a proper refuse disposal system here reprinted from The Survey is well worth study: