Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
At the Inter-city Conference of Settlement Workers in Boston last year
it became very clear that some of the leaders were anxious to make their
work among foreigners count for more. Dr. Jane Robbins took the position
that assimilation would be expedited and rendered more stable by means
of the training of young foreigners, Italians and the like, as social
workers in order that they might contribute their own enthusiasm and
knowledge of the traditions and prejudices of their people to the task
of Americanization. Miss Lillian Wald, the president of the National
Federation of Settlements, maintained that the best assimilative work of
all could be done through the settlement which she called “The House of
the Interpreter.” The inculcation of the neighborhood spirit, she added,
stimulates a wholesome rivalry and promotes better housing and social
standards than can be secured by other means. Vida Scudder insisted upon
the vital necessity of rescuing settlement work from philanthropic
tendencies. She suggested that truer democracy and helpfulness in the
work of assimilation of all elements of the national life could be
brought about by greater attention on the part of settlements to all the
forward movements of the working class for whom settlements exist. Miss
Scudder argued that settlement workers ought to perfect the technique of
the settlement organization in such a way that they would be free in
times of crises to assist in all working class movements which have as
their aim the improvement of the conditions of life and labor. In this
position, Miss Scudder would sympathize with and encourage work along
lines similar to that pursued by Miss Cross in her Rochester work, to
which we have referred.
THE NEGRO
The problem of fair citizenship for the negro is receiving no little
attention from those women interested in the assimilation of races. The
National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes is an organization of
men and women with headquarters in New York, formed “to help in
counteracting this migration to the cities and to make efforts for
improving the serious social conditions growing up among the negroes in
the cities.”
This League is a consolidation of the National League for the Protection
of Colored Women formed in 1906, after revelations were made of the
abuses in the employment agencies connected with the emigration of negro
women from the South, and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial
Conditions of Negroes, in New York, which recognized the industrial and
educational handicaps of the negro and sought to equip him better for
life.
The consolidated body is making studies of negroes in cities, seeking to
secure wider recreational, educational, and industrial facilities, and,
what is perhaps most important of all, training negro social workers to
do themselves the needed work for their own race. Among the effective
women workers in this organization is Elizabeth Walton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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