Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
One of the women social workers at an Exhibit said: “We are all of us
learning, for the first time, what place our work has in the city’s
life. We have worked over our exhibits, trying to state in concrete
terms our purpose and our success; then we see our organization placed
here beside all the others, and we find out how inadequate we all are,
and yet how important, each at our own job. We find out where there is
overlapping and where we can use each other in the future. And then we
walk over to the section on industrial conditions, or on housing, or on
infant mortality, and we see the big underlying problems, that we
haven’t any of us touched yet. And we realize that no private
organization ever can touch those problems. Only all the people, acting
for themselves through their representatives, can begin to make a dent
in them.”
Dr. Anna Louise Strong, the director of exhibits of the National Child
Welfare Exhibit Committee, upholds the service of the Exhibit in the
face of certain critics: “I believe in the exhibit method, whatever its
risks, through the faith that when the widest publicity possible is
secured, truth will win out. The light that beats around a throne is no
fiercer than the light that has beat around disputed statements in a
child welfare exhibit. And because of this, however and whenever
individual exhibitors fail, I feel that the exhibit method is, in spite
of its dangers, one of the safest, just because of the wideness of its
reach, and the many-sidedness of the comments aroused.”
LITERATURE
It is not alone in such more or less spectacular educational work as
exhibits of various kinds, that women have participated with such
success. They are helping to create the scientific literature of social
service which is based upon accurate observation and generalization. To
enumerate even the important contributions of women to this literature
would be impossible here, but by way of illustration we may cite simply
the contributions made by women to the studies issued under the auspices
of the Russell Sage Foundation:
_The Evening Post_ of New York said of “Women and the Trades,” by
Elizabeth B. Butler, who made her study in the Pittsburgh Survey, that
it “represents the most complete and careful study ever made in any
country of the actual working conditions of the wage-paid women of a
great city.” Miss Butler has also made a study of saleswomen in
mercantile stores.
_The Scientific American_ said of “Work Accidents and the Law,” by
Crystal Eastman, who made this important study in Pittsburgh and who was
formerly the secretary of the New York State Commission on Employers’
Liability: “The book is one of the finest exponents we have ever seen of
this twentieth century humanitarian interest.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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