The Women’s Municipal League of Boston took for study the Board of Health’s record of 1,500 basements occupied for living purposes and came to the decided opinion that basements at best are unfit for human habitation. The League then petitioned the Legislature to make a law governing basements erected subsequent to the passage of the acts of 1907, retroactive.
The housing work done by this League has been under the able leadership of Miss Amelia Ames. The Committee of the League has been enlarged to include representatives of the Massachusetts Civic League, the Roxbury Welfare League, the Roxbury Charitable Association, South End House, Elizabeth Peabody House, Associated Charities, the Homestead Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce.
The first work of the original Municipal League Committee, as of its enlarged group, was an investigation carried on largely by trained women inspectors. The coöperation of the settlements and other organizations helped materially in this survey, as it enabled a district examination to be made, and placed the worst conditions in each district as a definite responsibility on some neighborhood organization, like a settlement, which could be charged with the duty of securing the district improvement. None of this work was haphazard. Only trained investigators were sought and employed. Miss Theodora Bailey, for example, made over 400 inspections and carefully tabulated over 200. She was able to interest legislators and reporters in the deplorable conditions in Boston.
Reforms
The Women’s Municipal League of New York has also investigated tenements and reported violations of the law to the Department affected. It helped to defeat proposed legislation which would remove all three-family houses from the surveillance of the Tenement House Department, a piece of reactionary legislation which aroused a successful protest from all women interested in social welfare, as well as from all men similarly interested.
This League also wishes to have all two-family houses and the rented room houses placed under the Tenement House Department. It made a study of the janitor’s situation and discovered that the janitors labor under such disadvantages that they are responsible for many violations of Health, Fire and Tenement Department laws. “The janitors should be decently paid and decently housed; they should be instructed briefly in the laws,” is the League’s decision.
From across the continent, we hear of women’s associations concerning themselves with housing reform. The American Club Woman reports: “Los Angeles is studying the housing problem. It expects a great influx of laboring population on the heels of the opening of the Panama Canal. The Woman’s Friday Morning Club therefore has built a model cottage for $500. The club proposes to acquire lands along the river bed and through semi-isolated sections and there erect these small houses. Gardens about the houses will help reduce the cost of living. The dream of the club is: a city without a tenement; a city spotlessly clean in every nook and corner; a city where there shall be thousands of small homes, renting at the same cost as in a court, and in which the individuals shall have sanitary comforts, the right of personal development and the privacy which tends toward morality and pride. The Los Angeles Housing Commission of which Mrs. Johanna von Wagner and other women are members, has done some interesting housing in the case of Mexicans transferred from their crude shacks to decently sanitary homes on city land.”
In Chicago, Mrs. Emmons Blaine was one of the founders of the City Homes Association which started the housing movement there and she is still one of the leaders in the Chicago work.
In the middle western states, Miss Mildred Chadsey of Cleveland, Ohio, stands out conspicuously as a housing reformer and in an official capacity. The Cleveland Bureau of Sanitation, of which she is chief, has a sergeant, twenty policemen, and an office force under her direction. Miss Chadsey up to the present has succeeded in demolishing over two hundred wretched hovels and is demonstrating that bad housing does not pay the city but is on the contrary frightfully expensive property. Some of the slogans that have developed from her work are these: “It costs less to be comfortable than it does to be uncomfortable.” “A good home is less expensive than a poor one.” “Health and cleanliness come cheap.” “Dirt and diseases are more costly than frankincense and myrrh.” This new vision for Cleveland was largely the result of a survey made by fourteen college investigators, under Miss Chadsey, who went out to ascertain facts in two sections of Cleveland—one the famous “Haymarket” district in the congested heart of the city; the other an open section on the edge of the city. The Survey published the report of that investigation.
Indiana has a splendid housing reformer in Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon, an officer in the National Housing Association, who started a campaign for a tenement house law before that association was formed. Her book, “Beauty for Ashes,” a narrative of discovery out along the road from a sheltered woman’s threshold, reveals the forces which have drawn most of the women out into social activity and into governmental interest. No woman can read this story without being moved to see what effect bad housing has on the community and woman’s responsibility toward her fellow-creatures in this as in other civic questions. Mrs. Bacon in her observations out from her own threshold has been forced to see that the war on bad homes is a war on poverty and its manifold products, vice and disease among others. She well illustrates the logic and the fearlessness with which even the most sheltered women often face facts when once their human sympathy is awakened and their eyes are opened to a public question. Mrs. Bacon, almost single-handed, secured housing laws for the cities of Evansville and Indianapolis. Last year she secured a still better law than that which crowned her first campaign.