Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
Miss Kate McKnight, of that association, initiated practically every
movement of the club till her death in 1907. Mrs. Franklin P. Adams,
acting president, drafted the tenement house laws governing cities of
the second class in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Adams is chairman of the State
Federation of Women’s Clubs, and of other societies. The Civic Club also
got an increase in the force of tenement inspectors and the chief
inspector was for some time a woman member of the club.
In Providence, Rhode Island, the Federation of Clubs passed resolutions
and sent letters to the legislature urging the enactment of a housing
bill. Moreover, they sent a delegation of women to the hearing before
the Judiciary Committee.
In New Orleans, Miss Eleanor McMain, the head of Kingsley House, was
very influential in securing the law regulating tenements in her city.
HOUSING IN WASHINGTON
In Washington, D. C., the housing problem has been forced upon the
attention of Congress which has shown gross neglect all these years in
its care of the national capital’s population and especially of the
negroes there. The voteless citizens of the capital and their
sympathizers from outside attempted for a long time to secure remedial
activity in the city of Washington whose alleys and slums were a
national disgrace from the standpoint of health, morals and crime.
Booklets and reports were published and organizations formed for the
purpose of bringing pressure to bear upon Congress to improve housing
conditions.
President Roosevelt had appointed a Homes Commission to study and report
on the alley dwellings but nothing had resulted from this except
possibly the conversion of Willow Tree Alley into an interior park.
Women and men felt that such an apparent remedy might cause still
greater evils by leaving many of the poor altogether homeless, and the
agitation was pushed the harder for the creation of a system of minor
streets created out of the alleys.
Last year two pamphlets of a vigorous nature were published by the
Monday Evening Club and by the Women’s Welfare Department of the
National Civic Federation. Public meetings were arranged by the Civic
Federation and conferences of social workers in Washington were called,
one of the biggest of these being held at the White House last winter—an
evidence of the interest taken by the wife of President Wilson in the
housing of the people in Washington.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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