Women and the Fight for Reform

Women in the late 19th century, except in the few western states

where they could vote, were denied much of a role in the governing process.

Nonetheless, educated the middle-class women saw themselves as a morally

uplifting force and went on to be reformers.

Jane Addams opened the social settlement of Hull House in 1889. It

offered an array of services to help the poor deal with slum housing,

disease, crowding, jobless, infant mortality, and environmental hazards.

For women who held jobs, Hull House ran a day-car center and a

boardinghouse. Addams was only one of many early reformers to take up

social work. Jane Porter Barrett, an African American, founded the Locust

Street Social Settlement in Hampton, Virginia, in 1890. Her settlement

offered black women vital instruction in child care and in skills of a

being a homemaker.

Lillian Wald, a daughter of Jewish immigrants from New York City,

began a visiting- nurse service to reach those too poor to pay for doctors

and hospitals. Her Henry Street Settlement offered a host of vital

services for immigrants and the poor. Wald suggested the formation of a

Federal Children's Bureau.

By the end of the 19th century, many women reformers focused on the

need for state laws to restrict child labor. Young children from poor

families had to work late hours in mines and mills and were exploited by

plant managers. No state laws prevented the children from being overworked

or abused.

One of the first to challenge the exploitation of orphaned or

dependent children was Sophie Loeb, a Jewish immigrant from Russia Once

her father was deceased, she watched the desperation of her mother as the

family slipped into poverty. As a journalist, Loeb campaigned for window's

pensions when this was still a new idea.

Helen Stuart Campbell, born in 1839 in New York, began her public

career as an author of children's books. Then she used novels to expose

slim life's damaging effect on women. In 1859 she wrote a novel about two

women who break from their dependence on men and chart new lives. Campbell

also wrote how easy it was fir women's lives to be ruined by poverty and

despair. Some women went beyond advocating reform to promoting revolution.

There are many other famous women who helped lead the fight to

reform. Like Florence Kelley. In 1891 Kelley worked with Addams at Hull

House and became an investigator for the Illinois Bureau of Labor, and then

was appointed the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. In 1891 Kelley returned to

New York City and worked with Wald's Henry Street Settlement and helped

create the U.S. Children's Bureau. In 1921 secured passage of the Infant

and Maternity Protection Act.

More than anyone else, Ida B. Wells exposed lynchings as a crime

against humanity. er 40 years of unrelenting effort failed to stop the

crime and did not produce a federal anti lynching law. However, lynchings

decreased by 80 percent after her campaign began, and her documented

evidence on the crime of lynching and her commitment to justice roused the

world's conscience. By the time Wells died in 1931, other women and men

had picked up her touch.