Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

In commenting on the situation in Washington, The Survey said:

Washington has long enjoyed the reputation of being the best planned city in America, the one large city in the world which from the day of its foundation has been built more or less consistently along the lines of a carefully thought-out plan. Only recently has it been realized that from the beginning this plan has been incomplete. While it provided for great public buildings and for dwellings of the wealthy and the well-to-do, it not only failed to provide homes for wage-earners, but actually offered temptations to house these wage-earners in an unwholesome manner. The magnificent wide avenues designed by Major L’Enfant, bordered along a great part of their distance by very deep lots, led inevitably to the construction of winding, branching alleys and the erection of hidden houses which had no place in the original plan.

Modern city planning lays the emphasis less on public buildings and boulevards and more on providing sites for homes. So the original plan of Washington must be supplemented by a modern plan providing a system of minor streets to let the wholesome light of publicity into the hidden slums of Washington and to provide economic use for the backs of the overdeep lots that line the avenues. They will do away with the present temptation to keep the old shacks standing or to build houses fronting on the avenues, but extending so far back that their middle rooms are dark and airless. Halfway measures at this time may wipe out the alley slums of the Capital only to give in place of them a far more difficult problem, the deep, unlighted and unventilated multiple dwelling.

Homes of Negroes

In the South, as well as the North, women are at work on the housing question. At the 1912 convention of the National Municipal League, in Richmond, Virginia, it was manifest to the northern delegates that the South and its women are awaking rapidly to the housing needs. Miss Elizabeth Cocke in a talk on housing and morals in Richmond said:

Our local conditions in Richmond have, as yet, nothing which approaches the tenement. There are a few old houses occupied by, possibly, some half-dozen families to the house, but though these show very bad conditions in room overcrowding, there are no conditions of lack of light and air, if the windows are opened to admit ventilation. In one instance I have found a bedroom, occupied presumably by seven people, in which there is no window at all; one door opening upon another room with two windows, and a second door upon the entry on the upper landing.

Among the comparatively small foreign population there is a very great deal of room overcrowding, but the most extensive of these conditions exist among the negroes. These appear to be the most squalid and least progressive, but this I believe to be largely due to the demoralizing effects of bad housing and surroundings which do not tend to any uplift.

Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like dump of rotting rags and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks, have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red-light” district? When a dry-closet blocks the one small window of the kitchen, can lack of decency be called to account? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than cleanliness and health and morality?

It is certainly a fallacy that the poor do not want good housing. In a wonderful address, given last spring at the Child Welfare Conference, in Richmond, a negro speaker said in substance: “We would use the bath tub as frequently and enjoy it as much as our white brother and sister, if we could afford to rent houses which have the bath tub in them. We do not prefer dilapidation and discomfort, nor being forced to live in districts where there is only depravity and low surroundings; but the better ones of us have too much self-respect to force ourselves on our white brothers, if they do not want us living alongside of them.”

All that Miss Cocke said was indorsed by the chairman, John Stewart Bryan, who as publisher of one of the most influential newspapers in the South, The News Leader, is in a position to know the facts. “It is an old story to any engaged in work of this sort,” he declared, “that a person situated as the negro is in Richmond pays more taxes than the richest man in Richmond, because the taxes he pays take such a large part of his income and he gets so little in return. All that Miss Cocke says is true. They are segregated in Jackson ward, and under a new ordinance they are being still further segregated. That is radically wrong, it is economically wrong, and nothing in the world can change it but an awakening of public sentiment, and it ought to be awakened and it will be.”[^[32]]