As in city clean-up work and other social activities, so in their housing reforms, women have enlisted the aid of school children, forming them into juvenile leagues to act as housing inspectors for the more obvious and outward defects. Boy Scouts have become greatly interested in certain cities in the work of educating tenants to a sense of responsibility for obedience to health laws and also in pointing out violations to the authorities, not only on the part of tenants but of landlords also. A picture at once comes to mind of a little member of a Juvenile League pointing out to a tenement owner certain needs and improvements which she had been taught to regard as requisite—a picture printed in The American City to illustrate the work accomplished by children. Both men and women have been earnest in enlisting the sympathy of children, partly for the actual inspection help rendered by them, and yet more for the sake of educating the children in proper standards of living in order that they may demand for themselves decent conditions through pressure on their parents while they are minors and through individual, social, and political activity when they are adults.
The importance of far-reaching power for the health officer is realized by women housing reformers as well as by men. For example, Mrs. Bacon, who was so instrumental in securing the enactment of the Indiana state housing law, dealt with this subject at the second national housing conference held in Philadelphia, in her paper on “Regulation by Law.” Mrs. Johanna von Wagner of California did the same under her title of “Instructive Sanitary Inspection.” The spirit of the conference showed an earnest desire to coöperate with public officials, extend their powers, and add to the constructive suggestions pointing the way to improvement in city housing. The women delegates and speakers shared this spirit and contributed to the practical suggestions as well as to plans for coöperation.
Housing Associations
Women are not only interested in the special or local housing problems of their own district or city. They are actively affiliated with the National Housing Association and take part in its national conferences They thus coöperate with the men in the great work of arousing the nation to a knowledge of the deadly peril of low standard homes and to a sense of the immediate urgency of reform.
The New York Congestion Committee has not only been an influential body but it has made a most careful study of the causes of congestion and has drafted many, and secured the passage of some, important laws within the past three or four years. Florence Kelley and Mrs. V. G. Simkhovitch are members of the small executive board of the Committee, and women have helped in the campaign of education which has been necessary to place the evils of congestion and the program of the Committee before the public. They have also helped in that most essential work, the securing of signatures to the petition for the referendum on untaxing buildings. In other ways, too, they have assisted: by making investigations and writing to members of the state legislature urging the passage of laws. They also formed the Women’s Society to lower rents and reduce taxes on homes, similar to the men’s society with the same object. Together these two societies have carried on a propaganda among the people of New York which has had a marked influence on public interest in the housing question. They issue a Tenant’s Weekly in the interest of tenants and small home-owners, the slogan of which is “The City for the People.” One of their most effective pieces of work was the Congestion Exhibit, which presented the economic aspects of housing together with an impression which awakened horror at prevalent conditions.
A review of women’s activities in housing reform shows that they are taking no narrow view of the matter. They realize that the problem of congestion, the main element in the housing question, has many elements of an economic, social or administrative nature which involve action on the part of public authorities. Among these elements may be cited the high cost of land; congestion of factories, warehouses, offices and shops; low wages and long hours of labor; immigration; poor and expensive transportation facilities; lack of adequate housing inspection; ignorance of sanitary standards of living; and greed on the part of landlords or real estate managers. Another factor is the temporary foreign dweller who hopes to amass some money quickly and return to his native land to live upon it. Lack of town planning is still another factor that often leads to congestion.
As we shall see, women have entered into the town planning movement to prevent the accumulation of plague spots. They are gradually beginning to realize, as are men, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As town planning is not a private philanthropy, however, their usefulness in this movement is limited wherever they do not possess the ballot.
Women, therefore, are working in far greater numbers in the next phase of housing: that of educating badly housed people in the laws of hygiene. Every social movement which is not strictly evangelical instills some demand for individual and family privacy, and for the material bases of healthful and moral living. In congested areas it is the increase of wants that is essential. More mere things are needed: water, floor space, light, air, toilet conveniences, cooking and laundry equipment for individual or coöperative life, refrigerators, fire escapes, window blinds, wider and safer stairways, and innumerable other material objects. There is no other important outcome of education in hygiene or home beauty or housing standards except an increase of wants and the consequent pressure on the wage standards, without which an improvement in material possessions is impossible. Whatever individual exceptions may be found, the general rule is that the poor overcrowd and do so in order to make their pittances buy a little more food, a few more clothes, books for their children, the month’s actual shelter, or a doctor’s services.
Some women are consciously preaching higher standards of living to foreigners, negroes, and the poor of every race assembled here, knowing the ultimate pressure their work will have on labor demands. The settlements which have almost involuntarily helped in this education from the beginning, are more and more being led into the support of working class movements having for their goal better wages and steadier employment, as we discover in the chapter on social service. Other women are unconsciously creating dissatisfaction with congestion and with that poverty which underlies bad housing, through the teaching of domestic science in all its forms, through public school education, health centers, and the rest. The willingness to pay the price accompanies or follows the desire for the things which make for health and culture.