The work done by Miss Ellen Collins in New York is told by Miss Emily Dinwiddie in “Tenements for a Million People.” Jacob Riis thus had able assistants.
Women of wealth have helped to build some of the model tenements which were, in the earlier stages, regarded as most important contributions to the housing movement. Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Sr., for example, spent one million dollars in erecting four model tenements in New York to meet the needs of tuberculosis patients and their families.
As the housing reform movement assumed wider aspects than the destruction of limited slum areas or the construction of model tenements, women were everywhere found active along the new lines of development. The Housing Problem, it is now recognized, offers different aspects for different classes in society, although the requirements for all individuals in the matters of light, air, warmth, sanitation, and freedom from overcrowding, are similar.
Homes for Working Women
Homeless working women, for instance, are face to face with a serious problem, for, as lodgers with very small incomes, they are not only unable to secure airy and sanitary rooms, but they are often forced into immoral surroundings and led to supplement their earnings in ways that menace their own future. Homes for working girls have, therefore, been a special concern of women in many of our cities.
Edith Hadley, president of the Chelsea House Association, New York, shows the spirit with which women have generally undertaken this work: “If we who have privileges and warm, comfortable, clean homes, cannot say to these girls, ‘My sister, come home,’ surely it rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we cannot get the housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl cannot find safe shelter, a place which, if her need is great, she may call home.”
Even better wages would not alone solve this need and women realize that. In New York, the census returns show 22,700 wage-earning women and girls living by themselves in the city; yet there are still only some forty houses where definite preparation for their home comfort has been undertaken. Realizing the inadequacy of the housing provision for such women, a boarding-house bureau was recently organized by certain women, under the chairmanship of Cornelia Marshall, to investigate and report on reliable boarding-houses and bring the list to the attention of working women. This bureau was an outcome of a conference of authorities in charge of working girls’ houses.
Housing reform, in its larger aspects, however, is a persistent struggle to control the situation permanently by legislation, efficient inspection, garden cities, and model small houses in place of tenements. Added to this is the necessity of assimilation work with foreigners, of education in personal and public hygiene in schools and homes, and control of profit-making interests for the sake of homes for the people.
Surveys
The more thoughtful women interested in housing reform soon came to realize that mere sentimental talk about housing evils is futile, and that effective improvements must be based on actually known conditions, their causes and effects.