Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Recent municipal purchase of a private company’s reduction plant provides a temporary plan for the disposal of Chicago’s garbage and ends a hard civic struggle to overcome exploitation of the public on the one hand and amazing lack of official foresight and planning on the other. But it is merely an escape from a bad muddle. The struggle is still on to secure for the city a scientific and adequate city-wide system of garbage collection and disposal.

During most of the time prior to this crisis the issue had been mainly a plaything of politicians. But it began to assume a new aspect when the vote was given to women and they thus came to have a voice in municipal housekeeping.

The care of the city’s waste had been a serious matter to the Woman’s City Club, whose committee on the subject had been for three years urging the wisdom of preparing for the day, September 1, 1913, when the contract with the reduction plant would end. For nineteen years the University of Chicago Settlement had protested against making the twenty-ninth ward the city’s dumping ground, but without avail.

In the midst of the intense political fight over the garbage question there seemed to be no one with courage to lead toward any constructive plan. The administration and the aldermen played battledore and shuttlecock with the question of responsibility. At this crisis—when the summer’s heat was intense and no definite plans were in sight for caring for the daily six hundred tons of garbage—the Woman’s City Club’s Waste Committee sent a series of pointed questions to the city officials whom they held responsible for this situation. The press published these questions and, as the questioners had secured the vote, the city officials were much disturbed. They then brought the matter before the city’s Health Committee, making an adequate and scientific city-wide plan for the collection and disposal of the city’s refuse. The chairman of the Health Committee, Alderman Nance, backed by Alderman Merriam, from that moment became the leader of the movement to secure a scientific report and plan.

The members of the City Council, glad to have a definite thing to do to save themselves politically, created a City Waste Commission with an appropriation of $10,000. Two women from the Woman’s City Club were appointed on this commission, Mrs. William B. Owen, chairman of the Clean-up Day Committee, and Mary E. McDowell, chairman of the City Waste Committee. The club for the three years had carried to every section of the city its welfare exhibit. In connection it gave stereopticon lectures showing the city dumps and noxious garbage wagons overloaded with reeking garbage and then in contrast the motor garbage wagon of the city of Furth, Bavaria, and the model incineration plants which Miss McDowell had seen in Germany. By this method the average citizen was made more intelligent and wideawake than the city government. He had been educated to look upon dumps as antediluvian and intolerable.

The Woman’s City Club has issued bulletins to educate a public that will demand the best collection and disposal system known, one that will not be an unpleasant industry in any community, and a collection system that will make short hauls, with frequent collections in wagons that are closed tight and fly-proof. This is possible to any people who demand sanitation first and economy second, who take municipal housekeeping out of the hands of politicians, put at the head of “the cleansing department” a sanitary engineer and give the city the right to collect all garbage from hotels and restaurants as well as households. According to the data shown by the Woman’s Club, the city can in this way make enough money to pay for the whole system of collection and disposal.

The movies which are being utilized all along the line have been brought into play in several places for sanitary education. In Boston one of the theaters is coöperating with the Women’s Municipal League “by giving an eight-minute picture act showing striking facts about children playing on top of sheds, in dark alleys and in the refuse from overturned garbage cans; about dirty and unsanitary streets and unsightly and obnoxious dumping at sea and on land; showing, also, better ways of doing things and better places to play, and giving the theater-goers something interesting and worth while to think about.”

Smoke

Perhaps the position taken by the Civic League of St. Paul in demanding the enforcement of the Smoke ordinance illustrate very well the attitude of the women toward this nuisance. Its campaign is thus described:

This occurred quite early in our career and kicked up quite a dust, really making the atmosphere almost as murky as the smoke had done. We succeeded in doing what no power in the city had hitherto been able to do; that is, in getting the ordinance actually enforced—for about a week. The mayor’s orders were positive and not to be ignored. Several arrests were made, prosecutions by the city were conducted with vigor and judgments rendered against several offenders. It was proved to most people’s satisfaction that there were smoke consumers which consumed and smoke preventers which prevented smoke. But on an evil day it fell out that an officer “on the force” said unto himself, “Go to, this is my day for arresting somebody.” He put his telescope to his eye and, turning his back upon the wicked city where burglars and gamblers and such like birds of night disport themselves and a forest of chimneys was belching furiously, he espied a flying plume of smoke outlined upon the horizon of the Sixth Ward. “Ah,” said he, “there is my man,” and he went forth and laid rough hands upon him and fetched him into court.