Woman's work in America

by Unknown

In Illinois, women have organized associations for the protection of women and children which seem to be more far-reaching than any such in other States.

The second article of “The Protective Agency for Women and Children of Chicago” reads as follows:

Its objects are to secure protection from all offenses and crimes against the purity and virtue of women and children; protection against any injustice to women or children of a financial character, such as withholding of wages, exacting of exorbitant interest, violation of contract, or fraudulent advertisements of any kind; enforcement of existing laws, and efforts toward the enactment of better ones, for the protection of women and children against wrongs and abuses, of whatever nature; the extension of a wholesome moral support to women and children who have been wronged, discriminating wisely between misfortune and guilt.

For three years the agency has fulfilled its objects and has carried out the wish expressed in its first annual report in the following words: “Justice is better than charity, and we wish to be a terror to evil-doers as well as a good Samaritan to the unfortunate.”

The Agency is carried on by a governing board consisting of delegates from sixteen different associations of women in Chicago, and it has taken its stand by the side of the poor and oppressed and demanded and obtained justice for them in the courts. In its third annual report it publishes the following extracts from a letter of John P. Altgelt, Judge of Superior Court of Cook County: “... I wish to express my high appreciation of the work the Agency is doing.... You have rendered a double service to the courts and have materially aided in the administration of justice.” In Peoria, Ill., there is also such an Agency, and a National Association has been formed “for the purpose of establishing, or helping to establish, similar societies in different parts of the country.”

Another important woman’s society is the “Illinois Woman’s Alliance,” which declares its objects to be: “1. To agitate for the enforcement of all existing laws and ordinances that have been enacted for the protection of women and children, as the factory ordinances and the compulsory education law. 2. To secure the enactment of such laws as shall be found necessary. 3. To investigate all business establishments and factories where women and children are employed, and public institutions where women and children are maintained. 4. To procure the appointment of women as inspectors and as members of boards of education and to serve on boards of management of public institutions.”

The Woman’s Alliance has already been “largely instrumental in procuring the passage of a compulsory education law, and has secured the appointment of women factory inspectors.”

Another branch of work taken up by women in some of our cities is the owning and hiring of tenement houses, for the purpose of improving the houses and thereby serving the tenants and the public. This is done both by individuals, who undertake the oversight of the houses and the collecting of rents themselves (following the example of Miss Octavia Hill in London), and by associations such as the Co-operative Building Association of Boston, which is a joint stock company of men and women, who buy and build houses and oversee their property by means of committees of their own number. The object is to raise the standard of the houses for working people in any given locality, and also to show that such houses, when managed for the benefit of the tenants, may be made to pay a fair return to the owners. This work seems peculiarly fitting for women, who carry sympathy and conscience into their business relations.

Indeed, the work of women seems to be unending, and it is impossible to compute its value. The only feeling evoked by the study of the reports of what is going on all over the country is that of deep gratitude, and of regret that the whole cannot be spread out for the encouragement and inspiration of others, and that so meager an account as this must suffice.

It is strange to remember that all this activity has had its rise in less than a hundred years. The simple story of the first organized charitable work ever done, so far as we know, by women in this country is thus told in an account of the “Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor:”