Club Work
Of the local work of women’s associations in behalf of better opportunities for the alien, the reports are too numerous for the barest mention. Only an example or two may be cited by way of illustration. Pittsburgh, the city second to Chicago as a distributing center for immigrants, has many individuals and organizations alive to the problem of assimilation. The Y. M. C. A. and the Civic Club of Allegheny County have coöperated to establish a foreign immigration distributing station at the railway depot and will do follow-up work with the new residents of that city. In this work these two organizations will have the coöperation of the Council of Jewish Women and other important social agencies in the city.
The Education Committee of the Civic Club arranged conferences in Pittsburgh on the Americanization of foreign-born families, frankly accepting Miss Kellor’s program: “The State should take up, at the point where the Federal government lays aside its responsibility, the real question of immigration, which is the problem of making the immigrant into a good citizen, protecting him when he is looking for a job and helping him to go to the part of the state where he is most needed, where the best conditions exist, where there is the best standard of living and where he may find congenial associates.”
Evening classes for foreigners were also undertaken by this club, and its women members worked hard at that enterprise until the Board of Education decided to assume responsibility for it.
All over the state of Pennsylvania thoughtful women are turning seriously to the question of the alien in their midst. The American Club Woman reports that “the immigration problem is regarded as very important by Mrs. Samuel Semple, State President of Pennsylvania Clubs. She has traveled all over the state and observed the vast throngs of foreign immigrants pouring into the industries. She urges a special effort to educate the immigrant into a good citizen. The establishment of social centers in the schools is the first step advocated.” “Women inspectors at every port where immigrants land is a much needed reform. The Civic Club of Philadelphia has made a study of immigrant stations and finds that there is no adequate provision for the proper handling of women and children, and that no privacy is allowed, and that women are frequently subjected to embarrassment and distress because of being entirely at the mercy of male inspectors.”
In Boston, the Women’s Municipal League is a center for all agencies, including that of the League, which are working for the assimilation of the foreign elements in the community. We are told that “it has also reached the point when it can develop, within the League, a plan to unify all the educational activities of every department until no vital interest in home or school or social life is left untouched; a plan which shall include the emigrant woman and thus become the basis of a genuine democracy.”
In California, the women like many men are beginning to wrestle with the immigration problem, which has been augmented already by the opening of the Panama Canal and which will, unless proper safeguards are at once set up, produce the evil conditions in the western seaports and western cities that now exist in the eastern ports and other cities.
The Women’s Civic League of Baltimore has made a serious effort to secure adequate protection for the immigrants that come in such numbers to that city.
Commissions
The Women’s Municipal League of New York formed in 1906 a Research Committee which made an intensive study of a group of immigrants and reported the need of better public protection. As a result of the pressure exerted by this Committee, the League itself, and the Association of Neighborhood Workers, a state immigration bill was passed in 1908 creating a non-salaried commission of nine members. Miss Frances Kellor, who had directed the research work among immigrants, was made a member of this commission and later became head of the State Bureau of Immigration.