Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
In the midst of the intense political fight over the garbage
question there seemed to be no one with courage to lead toward any
constructive plan. The administration and the aldermen played
battledore and shuttlecock with the question of responsibility. At
this crisis—when the summer’s heat was intense and no definite plans
were in sight for caring for the daily six hundred tons of
garbage—the Woman’s City Club’s Waste Committee sent a series of
pointed questions to the city officials whom they held responsible
for this situation. The press published these questions and, as the
questioners had secured the vote, the city officials were much
disturbed. They then brought the matter before the city’s Health
Committee, making an adequate and scientific city-wide plan for the
collection and disposal of the city’s refuse. The chairman of the
Health Committee, Alderman Nance, backed by Alderman Merriam, from
that moment became the leader of the movement to secure a scientific
report and plan.
The members of the City Council, glad to have a definite thing to do
to save themselves politically, created a City Waste Commission with
an appropriation of $10,000. Two women from the Woman’s City Club
were appointed on this commission, Mrs. William B. Owen, chairman of
the Clean-up Day Committee, and Mary E. McDowell, chairman of the
City Waste Committee. The club for the three years had carried to
every section of the city its welfare exhibit. In connection it gave
stereopticon lectures showing the city dumps and noxious garbage
wagons overloaded with reeking garbage and then in contrast the
motor garbage wagon of the city of Furth, Bavaria, and the model
incineration plants which Miss McDowell had seen in Germany. By this
method the average citizen was made more intelligent and wideawake
than the city government. He had been educated to look upon dumps as
antediluvian and intolerable.
The Woman’s City Club has issued bulletins to educate a public that
will demand the best collection and disposal system known, one that
will not be an unpleasant industry in any community, and a
collection system that will make short hauls, with frequent
collections in wagons that are closed tight and fly-proof. This is
possible to any people who demand sanitation first and economy
second, who take municipal housekeeping out of the hands of
politicians, put at the head of “the cleansing department” a
sanitary engineer and give the city the right to collect all garbage
from hotels and restaurants as well as households. According to the
data shown by the Woman’s Club, the city can in this way make enough
money to pay for the whole system of collection and disposal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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