Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
The New York-New Jersey Committee of the League was organized in 1909
for the purpose of developing permanent city, state, and federal
policies regarding conditions created by immigration. Experiments have
been tried since then and as soon as a successful policy of meeting
conditions has been demonstrated, some private enterprise, or the city,
state or federal government, has been urged to pursue the same policy.
The necessity of definite systems of protection, education,
distribution, and assimilation has been continually urged by the League
upon public authorities.
The women of the League have experimented in the field of education,
first in Buffalo and later in other cities. In these cities, hundreds of
foreign-born housewives have been taught domestic science in their own
homes. They have been taken to markets and taught to buy wisely; young
members of the family have been reached as well as the mother. Domestic
education among the foreign women has thus supplemented the work of the
schools in such a way as to secure the coöperation of parents and
teachers in the nurture and protection of their children in the new
country. In order to avoid the stigma of charity, women promoters of
this domestic education have been asking Boards of Education to assume
responsibility for the same.
Begun in Buffalo, domestic education has now extended to New York and
Rochester; to Mineville, a mining community of 3,000; to Barren Island,
New Jersey, an industrial community of 1,400; a canners’ camp at Albion,
New York; and an aqueduct labor camp at Valhalla. Three distinct types
of cities and four distinct types of isolated communities were thus
tried and the results, it is felt, amply justify the expenditure of time
and effort.
The North American Civic League for Immigrants supported for some time
in Rochester a Bureau of Information and Protection for Foreigners,
which was the creation originally of Florence Cross (now Mrs. Kitchelt),
a social worker among the Italians there. Miss Cross explained the need
of this bureau in this way:
“There are in Rochester a large number of foreign-born inhabitants who
are ignorant of our civic institutions, ignorant of the laws of
sanitation and hygiene, ignorant of the protection offered them by our
laws and our various philanthropic institutions. Except through the
influence of their children in the schools, many of these adult
foreigners have little opportunity to understand those municipal
activities which are intended to help rather than to punish. Many of
them know nothing of the Public Health Association, the Legal Aid
Protection Committee, the Provident Loan Association, the evening
schools and similar well-established agencies for reaching just such
needs as theirs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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