Woman's work in America

by Unknown

Many respectable families in the country are glad to receive the services of an able-bodied, though inefficient woman, in return for low wages, and the privilege of allowing a small child to run about the house. In this way, these poor creatures are encouraged to regain the path of honesty and virtue, and, as the child grows older, its love and helpless demands form the strongest barrier which can surround the mother’s life.

The work of placing these women at service has increased to such an extent that the entire attention of one person might be given to this department.

Besides the mother and her child the Society deals with a third member of this caricature of family life, namely, the father. Here the strong arm of the law is required to fix the responsibility, secure support for the child, and, if possible, to punish the wrong-doer. The services of our Solicitor are in constant requisition for this retributive task....

The Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania has forty-four County Committees, besides its Central Board in Philadelphia.

In Connecticut, County Homes have been opened (under Laws of 1883–4–5) to receive temporarily children dependent upon the public, and committees, composed almost exclusively of women, appointed to supervise these Homes and find permanent homes in families for the children.

In Massachusetts, women are appointed as members of the Board of Managers of the State schools for delinquent and dependent children, and a very important work for women has been developed in caring for such children outside the schools. In order not to injure the boy or girl by longer retention in the school than is absolutely required for training, each one is, at the earliest moment when his progress warrants the trial, placed in a family to work; but that the trial may be as favorable as possible, for each child so placed, a volunteer friend is found by the Board in the neighborhood, who is to watch over and give advice and assistance both to the child and its guardian. There are at present (October, 1889) eighty-four of these women visitors, officially appointed and recognized by the State as part of its system of caring for dependent and delinquent children. Of these children, thus freed from the weakening influence of a too long extended institution life, there are now in Massachusetts 1063 boys and girls under this State care.

This special work (of taking dependent children from poorhouses and other public institutions and placing them in private families, thus returning to a natural and happy life those who, but for such transplanting, would have been doomed to grow up tainted with pauperism and vice) owes its inception to the personal devotion and the labor of years of individual women in certain counties of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. But for the proof of its wisdom and practicability which they gave by their successful work, it would never have assumed the position it now holds. These women have not only saved the individual children whom they took from vile surroundings, amid the contaminating companionship of the lowest of men and women, but they have set an example which is spreading over the country and which will change for the better the future of whole States.

The Women’s Prison Association of New York visits the prisons of New York and Brooklyn, and within a few years the Women’s Christian Temperance Union has organized a department of prison work, which will be spoken of elsewhere in this book,[^[191]] but until their attention was thus called to the horrible evils of the county jails of this country, its women, with the rarest exceptions, seemed absolutely ignorant of this great national wickedness. In Massachusetts women are, and have been for a few years, members of the Prison Board, and in Massachusetts, Indiana, and New York, there are State prisons and reformatories for women under the charge of women officers.

Women are peculiarly fitted for the work of inspecting public institutions, and it would be much better if, in every community, instead of starting so many private institutions of charity, they would give their attention to the oversight of the public institutions, already necessarily existing, and which, too often, by their mismanagement, very much increase, not only the sufferings of the miserable people already in them, but also the number of those who will hereafter have to be supported as inmates.

II. Another class of sufferers needing tender care are the inmates of private Homes for old people, convalescents, and incurables; and of hospitals, reformatories, and asylums for children. Such institutions as these are usually established and managed by women, excepting the hospitals, which, though under the care of men, often have an associate board of women to take the oversight of the daily comfort of the patients.