XI Suffrage and the Social Worker
Dorothy Godfrey Wayman
Dorothy Godfrey Wayman, wife of C. S. Wayman; was educated at Bryn Mawr and at the School for Social Workers in Boston; has done organized charity and settlement work in Fitchburg and Boston; was for one year state organizer of the Massachusetts Womans’ Anti-Suffrage Association; is a member of Massachusetts Civic League.
J. A. H.
Among people who have what has been called “the sheep type of mentality,” it is frequently asserted that since Miss Jane Addams, Miss Julia Lathrop, Dr. Katherine Davis, and other “servants of humanity” are suffragists, it follows that all women should become suffragists. Such people do not, however, carry this line of thought to its logical conclusion; for even they do not consider themselves bound to become Progressives because that is Miss Addams’s political party, nor to become members of her church.
This argumentum ad hominem has great weight in the suffrage propaganda, and it is high time that it should be considered less superficially. Having been a social worker myself in a large city, I have been much interested in the history and career of such workers, and find therein one of the most positive anti-suffrage arguments.
It is a striking fact that the very women whom suffragists use as personal exhibits accomplished the social work that won them fame, under male suffrage. Conversely, in the long list of women’s names honored for their social service, not one of national reputation earned that reputation in a woman suffrage state.
The National Institute of Social Science awards a gold medal for distinction in social service. Men like William H. Taft and Charles W. Eliot have been thus decorated. Miss Jane Addams, Miss Lillian D. Wald of the Henry Street Nurses’ Settlement in New York, Miss Mabel Boardman of the National Red Cross, and Miss Anne Morgan of New York are the women who have been presented with this medal in past years.
On February 25, 1915, the National Institute of Social Sciences conferred this medal for distinction in social service upon Miss Louisa Schuyler of New York City. In a long life of useful citizenship, though unblessed by the ballot, Miss Schuyler has contrived to inaugurate several undertakings and lived to see them grow, till from radical innovations, they have become the groundwork of much of our modern charity. Miss Schuyler discovered the shocking conditions prevailing in almshouses fifty years ago, and organized a series of volunteer visiting committees which eventually became the N. Y. State Charities’ Aid Association, with headquarters in New York City. Miss Schuyler was the organizing genius of the Bellevue Visiting Committee, which from visiting the poorhouses of Westchester County, progressed to the establishment of the first training school for nurses in this country. Trained nurses have come to be such a necessity today, that I imagine few suffragists realize that they are indebted to one woman’s initiative for the ministrations of skilled hands that so often may mean the difference between life and death. Today there are 1100 training schools for nurses, whose existence can be traced to the ideas of a woman living and working in a male suffrage state. Another feat, more political in its aspects, accomplished by Miss Schuyler was the inauguration of the system now in force of State care for the insane, and of the removal of insane persons and children from the physically and morally degrading atmosphere of the almshouse where they were formerly cared for. In 1908, Miss Schuyler grappled with another of our great modern problems and organized the first committee in this country, composed of physicians and laymen, for the prevention of blindness. What a long way behind the world would be today if Miss Schuyler had done as Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and devoted her great organizing genius to suffrage propaganda!
Miss Jane Addams’ achievements in Chicago at Hull House, are too widely known to require any enumeration, but I would emphasize the fact that her work was done while Illinois was still a male suffrage state. In Twenty Years at Hull House, which was published in 1910, three years before women attained partial enfranchisement in Illinois, Miss Addams gives her estimate of the field of a settlement in social work for a community: “It seems impossible to set any bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold under ideal civic and educational conditions. But, in order to obtain these conditions, the Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and the conservative, and from the very nature of the case, the Settlement cannot limit its friends to any one political party or economic school.” Since these words were written, Miss Addams has allied herself definitely with a political party, at great loss of personal prestige, but that does not alter the truth of her written opinion. The end of every public spirited woman is identical with that of the Settlement, “to obtain ideal civic and educational conditions” for her community; and “the very nature of the case,” as Miss Addams says, demands that they be not obliged to limit their friends to any one political party, but remain free from political affiliations in order that their disinterestedness may not be cavilled at.
Miss Lillian D. Wald’s work as a district nurse at the Henry Street tenement she chose to occupy on graduating from her training course as a nurse showed the way to the efficient Visiting Nurses’ Associations that are being organized today all over the country, and also to the public recognition of the value of instruction in health which is finding expression in the staffs of nurses maintained in many cities by the Board of Health and School Departments whose services are free to the people. This humanitarian work manifestly had no connection with the ballot.
Miss Kate Barnard, the “Girl Commissioner of Charities” in Oklahoma, is a striking figure of our day. The neighboring state of Kansas is a woman suffrage state, yet Miss Barnard seems to prefer residence in the male suffrage state of Oklahoma and has done great things there. When Oklahoma was admitted to statehood, it was Miss Barnard who wrote the child labor, prison reform, and other humanitarian measures into the State constitution; and she was made State Commissioner of Charities, which position she holds today. Miss Barnard, too, recognizes the power for evil of partisan politics. She is at present waging a bitter fight for the property rights of the Indian wards of her state, and writing in the Survey, says: “I want the people of the U.S. to stand by me until the hand of partisan politics is wrested from the control of Indian affairs in Oklahoma and in the nation.”
In 1912, when the Children’s Bureau was established at Washington, we might have expected that one of the women constituents of the petticoated West would be placed at its head. Instead, President Taft appointed Miss Julia C. Lathrop, a resident of Hull House in Chicago, and a former member of the Illinois State Board of Charities, where she was credited with the enlargement of the Illinois State charitable institutions and their thorough reorganization, though, of course, obliged to work without the ballot. Time has proved the wisdom of Mr. Taft’s appointment and also borne witness to the peculiar advantage enjoyed by women in politics, provided they are not shackled with the ballot.
One of the thought-inspiring books of 1914 was also a splendid argument for the anti-suffragists. It was Beauty for Ashes, Mrs. Albion Fellowes Bacon’s account of the securing of the Indiana Model Housing Act, which was accomplished through the initiative and leadership of this one woman, mother, and home-maker, with no political prestige, with no previous reputation built by long publicity, without the all-powerful ballot.
Mrs. Bacon was supported by the Federated Woman’s Clubs of her State, and enlisted the aid of earnest men and women citizens throughout the State. Her bill was bitterly contested by the worst class of landlords, but after three sessions of the Legislature, at which Mrs. Bacon was obliged to appear in person and explain her bill, it was passed. She says of that day: “The women, the homes of Indiana, were honored that day by the men of the Legislature, and we had won a law for the 101 cities of our State. No wonder the women applauded as some of the men who gave their reasons, added ‘and because the women wanted it’.” Her conclusion is: “Most strongly have I desired to show how much can be done by women’s organizations by simply demanding right legislation, and to show their equally important part of helping to enforce legislation after they get it.”
Speaking of her own work, she says: “Having no hand in the management of political affairs, I may leave to the various political parties the care of reaping the thorns in each other’s fields. It has been my pleasand task to gather only the grapes.... I have encountered more figs than thistles, and fewer thistles than what seems to be a sort of cacti, that, I firmly believe, might be Burbankized for human good. Would that they might be, and that we might include in the conservation of vital resources those great powers for good that are now so wasted by constant warring for political supremacy.”
That last sentence forms a scathing indictment of the shortsightedness of suffrage policy. It is pitiful to think of the energy and ability which today is diverted from channels of human helpfulness to this sensational struggle for a mistaken cause. It is not to be thought of that we can permit woman’s energy to be permanently dissipated in political warfare or handicapped by party vicissitudes.
These examples of achievements by women of our own day, in our own country, should convince the clear thinker that woman’s contribution to community organization and progress is best accomplished as a non-partisan. The stories of Miss Schuyler and Mrs. Bacon prove that whenever a woman has a righteous cause or a sane ideal, she will be successful in its realization without the ballot. The three women cited above whose work most depended on legislation for its accomplishment, Miss Addams, Miss Barnard and Mrs. Bacon, have all in their penned words lauded the power of non-partisanship.
And, borrowing from Miss Barnard, the anti-suffragist may say to the woman who seeks to enfranchise her sister, thus destroying the power of that great, womanly contribution towards the solving of the vexed questions of the day made by the disinterested, because disfranchised citizenness: “Stand by me till the hand of partisan politics is wrested from the control of society’s charities, till prisons, almshouses, children’s homes, public hospitals, are administered for the public good rather than private profit; till decent housing, progressive education, adequate recreation, pure food, living wages have been made a matter of public, rather than political, concern.” Let us not dissipate our energies in internecine warfare, nor yet seek to perpetuate the drawbacks of our partisan system of government by enfranchising the women who now stand outside politics.