Woman's work in America

by Unknown

Another Boston society (in whose establishment and management women have always had a large part) is also distinguished for the continued oversight of its charges after they have quitted the institutions it has established. The Boston Children’s Aid Society maintains three distinct farm schools for boys, in each of which a small number of boys (it is the intention never to have more than thirty in any one school) are under the care of a farmer and his wife, who teach them to work, while they receive a common school education from a teacher in the house. The majority of the boys, when received, are either under arrest, or are threatened with arrest, and they are committed to the care of the society for reformation. After such a term of training, as seems needed in each case, the boys are generally sent to work in the country, and a paid agent (a lady) has the oversight of them, writing to them and visiting them. For the boys who have returned to Boston, a club has been formed “to afford opportunities for studying the careers of the boys, noting their progress, learning the plans of such as had plans, and stimulating those who had none to form them, and in general arousing the boys to a livelier sense of their duties and opportunities.”

The Boston Children’s Aid Society has also a certain number of girls under its care, either at work or boarded in private families. The aim of the society is to put the children in its charge into private families as soon as they are fitted for such a life, and it had in 1888 more children outside its farm schools than in them to take care of.

We have so far been speaking of people living in institutions, living, that is, under unnatural conditions, uprooted, as it were, from their own place in life, and set in artificial surroundings. There are a third and fourth class still to consider.

III. The third class are those who neither support themselves entirely in self-respecting independence, nor are subject to the discipline of an institution, those who are constantly being tempted to depend upon others, to think their circumstances too hard for them, to regard as unattainable the heights of self-support which the mass of mankind reach,—the weak, the inefficient, the unwise, the self-indulgent,—in a word, those who are unequal to the demands of life. They need all the “help” they can get, but not of the kind which is usually given to them, not that which enervates them, which encourages all their weaknesses, which makes the dependent more dependent, the inefficient more inefficient, the self-indulgent more self-indulgent. They need real help, help to stand upon their own feet, help to respect themselves, help to play their part in life with energy and intelligence, help to be men and women, strong, self-dependent, ready to help others.

The “relief” which is poured out indiscriminately simply serves to check their efforts at self-support, and to turn all their energies to the pursuit of more “relief.” It is not that they are different from other people; no human being will put forth greater exertion to sustain himself in the way he likes than is required for that purpose. No man will devote more time or more labor than is necessary to maintain himself and his family at his own standard. If his standard is so low that what comes to him in “relief” is enough for him, why should he spend time and strength in getting more? But if his standard is so low, then the help he needs is that which will raise his standard, but not his standard of physical life only; far more important is it to raise his moral standard,—to raise his character, so that degrading surroundings cannot be endured, so that they cannot exist.

By the different kinds of “help” offered to those in want, they may be trampled down into the mire and left, body and soul degraded, a curse to themselves and others, or they may be lifted into the healthy, self-respecting life of the men and women who do the work of the world, of the mass of the people, who lead hard lives of struggle and self-sacrifice, but whose intellects are strengthened, whose characters are strengthened, whose souls are strengthened, by the daily and hourly trials they meet and overcome.

The account of the way in which American women have dealt with these suffering people, those upon whom most of the experiments of the benevolent are tried, is not, as I have already said, entirely discouraging. In all their dealings with them, they always seem to have had a latent consciousness at least that they had minds and souls, and not bodies only. I think women have seldom been responsible for the “charities” which were satisfied to give one meal to a hungry fellow-being and then turn from him with no further sense of responsibility for any subsequent meal. They have usually sought to enter into some sort of human relation with those they tried to help, to make material relief the vehicle for moral and spiritual relief, and even when the material relief was actually doing far more harm in undermining character and self-dependence than could be counteracted by all the teaching given, still this sad fact was not recognized, or at least not realized, and the intention was far better than the performance.

Within the past ten or fifteen years, all over the country, an awakening of conscience in regard to these subjects has been taking place, and in almost all the larger cities and in many of the towns of our country there are already formed associations whose object it is to cure and prevent pauperism. This movement is in this country due in a great degree to women, and in all the sixty or seventy societies which now exist men and women work together, and in many of them women take the lead. The “old charity” sought mainly to relieve physical suffering by physical relief; the “new charity” seeks to relieve physical suffering by raising the character of the sufferer and by discovering the underlying causes of the suffering both in himself and in his surroundings.

IV. The fourth class whom we can serve are the people who are generally thought to need no “charity” at all, and who indeed get but little of it, either by word or deed—the wage-earners of the world—those who dig and hammer, who sew and scrub, who toil and sweat, to feed and clothe themselves and all the world besides.

Fortunately, there has, within the past few years, grown up a strong conviction among those who seek to serve their kind, that to help these men and women, to strengthen them, to teach them, is the real means of lifting the race, and hence have been developed (especially by women, and for women and children) many plans for making their lives not only easier, but richer and nobler, and more what a human life should be.