Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
As the housing reform movement assumed wider aspects than the
destruction of limited slum areas or the construction of model
tenements, women were everywhere found active along the new lines of
development. The Housing Problem, it is now recognized, offers different
aspects for different classes in society, although the requirements for
all individuals in the matters of light, air, warmth, sanitation, and
freedom from overcrowding, are similar.
HOMES FOR WORKING WOMEN
Homeless working women, for instance, are face to face with a serious
problem, for, as lodgers with very small incomes, they are not only
unable to secure airy and sanitary rooms, but they are often forced into
immoral surroundings and led to supplement their earnings in ways that
menace their own future. Homes for working girls have, therefore, been a
special concern of women in many of our cities.
Edith Hadley, president of the Chelsea House Association, New York,
shows the spirit with which women have generally undertaken this work:
“If we who have privileges and warm, comfortable, clean homes, cannot
say to these girls, ‘My sister, come home,’ surely it rests upon us to
do it in some community way. And if we cannot get the housing of girls
taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by
private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no
town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl cannot
find safe shelter, a place which, if her need is great, she may call
home.”
Even better wages would not alone solve this need and women realize
that. In New York, the census returns show 22,700 wage-earning women and
girls living by themselves in the city; yet there are still only some
forty houses where definite preparation for their home comfort has been
undertaken. Realizing the inadequacy of the housing provision for such
women, a boarding-house bureau was recently organized by certain women,
under the chairmanship of Cornelia Marshall, to investigate and report
on reliable boarding-houses and bring the list to the attention of
working women. This bureau was an outcome of a conference of authorities
in charge of working girls’ houses.
Housing reform, in its larger aspects, however, is a persistent struggle
to control the situation permanently by legislation, efficient
inspection, garden cities, and model small houses in place of tenements.
Added to this is the necessity of assimilation work with foreigners, of
education in personal and public hygiene in schools and homes, and
control of profit-making interests for the sake of homes for the people.
SURVEYS
The more thoughtful women interested in housing reform soon came to
realize that mere sentimental talk about housing evils is futile, and
that effective improvements must be based on actually known conditions,
their causes and effects.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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