|
|
This essay on women's history and Chicago is reprinted, with permission, from Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (2001). The introduction by Dr. Schultz pulls together essential themes and topics that emerged from the 423 biographies of Chicago women that appear in this book – History Fair students will find inspiration for research projects and a wealth of information about both known and unknown women who made a difference to our city, and often the nation.
We suggest students first browse through the essay or direct themselves to the specific topics of interest. To explore further, students will need to see the book which is available at every branch of the Chicago Public Library (HQ1439.C47W66 2001). Note that the entries conclude with a list of recommended primary and secondary sources which will help students on the next phase of their research journey. The Index of WBC is another helpful tool in locating History Fair topics related to women.
Our thanks to the CAWHC for giving History Fair the permission to reprint Dr. Schultz's Introduction. For more information about the organization, visit http://www.cawhc.org.
Introduction
From these 423 biographies of Chicago women emerges a synthesis of Chicago history that provides the beginnings of a new narrative. Many volumes have been devoted to documenting Chicago's history as the quintessentially American saga of entrepreneurial development that catalyzed commercialization, industrialization, and urbanization on a vast scale. The biographies of Chicago women in this volume provide the reader with a new context for understanding the growth and development of this midwest city. The depth and scope of the contributions to Chicago of the majority of the women included here will be new to the reader and should provoke questions leading to a more inclusive and complex explanation of the factors involved in the transformation of American society and the rise of the modern city.
The historical survey that follows attempts to sketch for the reader the major themes that have emerged from a collective reading of the biographies and to provide an understanding of some of the larger themes in American history and in the growing scholarship on the history of women in the United States. As for the biographies themselves, taken individually, they inform the reader of the personal ambitions, struggles, and achievements of women from a wide variety of backgrounds in different periods of history.Taken topically, they provide the reader with histories of women's progress in various fields, including art, education, literature and the theater, politics, law, and medicine. They provide a history of the suffrage movement in the Chicago area and of women in politics and in social movements. Read collectively and interconnectedly, the biographical narratives provide an appropriate, congruent context for understanding the meaning of the individual lives and, beyond this, a new interpretation of Chicago and American history.
WOMEN CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMMERCIAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHICAGO, 1790-1860 Back to top
Chicago emerged as a boomtown during a period in which the canon of domesticity contrasted the home and the world, defining the former as a sanctuary, an oasis, a place where character-building takes place and where women as wives and mothers work selflessly for the good of family and society out of religious conviction as well as republican ideology; and depicting the latter as a place of pecuniary self-interest and competition. In the heady excitement of land speculation during the transition from an economy of fur-trading to one of commercial investment and speculation, Chicago personified the masculine spirit of capitalism. In the early days, men outnumbered women inhabitants. In 1837, of the 3,989 white persons residing in the city, more than forty-five per cent were males twenty-one years of age or over, and there were less than half as many women as men" (Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago: The Beginning of a City 1673-1848, [1937], I, 172).
Yet gender issues are strikingly present even in the precommercial period prior to the incorporation of the town in 1833 when, with the end of the Black Hawk War and the signing of a treaty, the Potawatomi tribe was resettled. When the French and Indians began to trade in the 1600s, American Indian women were often critical to the success of such enterprises. Women such as Archange Chevallier Ouilmette acted as intermediaries between tribal groups and Europeans. They knew the languages and the social mores of the tribes; they had important skills for the fur trade itself, and alliances were made between European men and Indian or métis women that, as in the case of Archange Chevallier Ouilmette, lasted a lifetime. In 1796 or 1797, Chevallier, a métis born to a French fur trader and his Potawatomi wife, married Antoine Ouilmette, a French Canadian fur trader who came to Chicago in 1790.
A consideration of the woman's sphere in pre-Civil War Chicago indicates that home and church-traditional places for female activity were hardly insignificant in the construction of cultural authority and influence for society as a whole. These venues in a small and new place, which Chicago was in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, were significant arenas for political and social interchanges and the planning of cultural and charitable enterprises. In a world where local government was minimal and public space was not yet defined by museums, lecture halls, and other cultural institutions, the private residence retained an important, quasi-public role. Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie, perhaps the best example of this feature of life in early Chicago, was a social leader influential in the politics at St. James Episcopal Church – established in 1834 largely through her efforts – including the hiring and firing of clergy. Without her approval it was difficult to carry on a charity event or plan a church expansion. As the wife and daughter-in-law of early settlers, Kinzie had a position as a leading citizen that came naturally but was enhanced by her education and talents – including piano playing and fluency in French – and her literary skills as the popular historian of early Chicago history.
From another perspective, private domestic space was enmeshed in the entrepreneurial development of the city in immediate and focused ways. City improvements, for example, were paid for by a special tax assessed according to the direct value a bridge, sidewalk, or sewer added to private property. If a person's property gained more value than a neighbor's down the block, the person's assessment was higher. In most Protestant denominations, church membership was determined by the purchase or rental of pews. Class exclusion as well as gender exclusion typified the privatized nature of the pursuit of culture. The first libraries and reading rooms run by the leading men in Chicago were not open to the public but based on subscription and membership dues, and privileged and educated families had private collections of books and art that made up for the embryonic cultural establishments. Refined people had performances of music and readings of poetry and plays in their own homes since public entertainment was limited to public taverns and music halls.
Matters of politics and public policy did, however, intrude into domestic space. Mary Jane Richardson Jones played a major role in the tiny community of free African Americans; she and her husband, John Jones, the first Black to be elected to a political office in Illinois, were part of an interracial abolitionist network in Chicago. Their home was one of only two Underground Railroad terminals operated by African Americans in the city. Frederick Douglass and John Brown were guests in the Joneses' home, and Mary Jane Richardson. Jones maintained contacts with them and other national leaders in the abolitionist movement through her letter writing. In a parallel way, Mary Ann Mills Hubbard, wife of meat packer and Chicago civic leader Gurdon S. Hubbard, a former antebellum mayor, held court in her own home and became known for her intelligence and knowledge of public affairs and politics. Guests in her household in the 1850s included Abraham Lincoln and Orville H. Browning, who came to visit when Gurdon Hubbard, a leader in the recently formed Republican Party in Illinois, brought his colleagues home to strategize. Memorialized by a member of the Chicago History Museum, Mary Ann Hubbard was remembered for her remarkable and "almost masculine understanding and grasp of affairs generally" (Chicago History Museum, Annual Report, 219).
While it is true that women did not participate in government or business, early Chicago women made an essential contribution to the creation of a commercial society as leaders in the expansion of literacy in the West. Many economic and social factors were involved in the settlement of the American continent; yet the process of community-building, the development of commerce and trade, and the organization of industrial and manufacturing enterprises required an infrastructure of workers with basic communication skills. For those who would be the managers of the burgeoning market system, a basic education was a requirement, not a luxury. In the context of postrevolutionary America, the development of responsible and harmonious civic life required an educated citizenry. The moral imperative to develop a virtuous citizenry required a level of literacy sufficient to sustain Bible reading.
Early Chicago developed because of the confluence of an agricultural and commercial revolution and an educational revolution for women in the United States and in parts of Europe, for example, in Ireland. Commercial development was also aided by the Second Great Awakening (1800-30) in the United States, a religious movement in which thousands of women and men committed or recommitted their lives to an acceptance of Jesus Christ as their savior. For many women, the conversion experience led to careers in moral reform and in teaching others to read so that the Gospel message would be available to them. The conversion experiences of Frances Langdon Willard in 1820 in New England and Eliza Emily Chappell Porter in Rochester, New York, in 1828, link the Second Great Awakening to Chicago's early development, since both women became convinced that their role in life was to spread the Gospel through their calling as schoolteachers in new settlements in the West. Before her marriage to Presbyterian minister and missionary Jeremiah Porter, Eliza Chappell started the first public school in Chicago in 1833, partially funded by money from the school fund. Willard was well-versed in the work of such educational pioneers as Sarah Pierce, Mary Lyons, Emma Willard, and Catharine Beecher. Both Willard and Chappell came to the West as single women and traveled without family or colleagues for support. Both women were advocates of education and education training; they organized and founded new schools, and they mentored other women in their school teaching roles. As a missionary's wife and mother of nine children (three died in infancy), Chappell Porter established schools where her husband planted Presbyterian churches in Illinois and Wisconsin in the 1830s through the 1850s, resettling in Chicago in 1858. During their stay in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Porter home was the last stop on the Underground Railroad before slaves crossed by boat into Canada. After the Civil War, Eliza Chappell Porter began schools for freedmen in Tennessee and Texas and, when Jeremiah Porter received a commission as an army chaplain, the Porters spent twelve years in a succession of western army camps. Wherever she went she established schools, taught in them, and trained others to teach.
Frances Willard opened a Female School in Chicago in 1836, and during a career that lasted three decades, she established schools in seven states and twenty-three towns and provided opportunities for advanced training to at least twelve hundred girls and women. Seventy-four of these young women became teachers. Willard's indefatigable efforts were commendable; her vision of what young women should learn in school, however, set the stage for the development of a female consciousness that would rebel against the constraints imposed by contemporary social mores. She taught natural philosophy, chemistry, bookkeeping, logic, and moral philosophy in addition to the frequently prescribed subjects for a girl's training. Classes in botany and calisthenics in the 1830s were unusual. Such courses, however, were increasingly popular among the new middle class of commercial settlers and their families, whose experiences with female academies in the East had whetted their appetite for a more rigorous curriculum for young girls.
SCHOOLTEACHING AND FEMALE SOCIAL MOBILITY Back to top
Chappell Porter's and Willard's biographies illustrate the ways in which single and married women participated in the opening up of the commercial frontier and took paths that were distinct from those of women and men who cultivated midwest farmland. From the earliest period of commercial settlement, the entrepreneurial frontier was a force in dislodging women from the so-called domestic sphere. Female school teachers were in great demand, since conventional mores allowed them to be paid half what their male counterparts received. Female school teachers quickly became the norm. School teaching also became an avenue for women's further professionalization. The first and second generation of women college students often taught school prior to finishing either college or advanced degrees as a way of financing further education. Since requirements for teaching school were minimal, even at normal schools, which initially had two-year programs at best, it was not unusual for a young woman to teach for a few years before going
on to study law or medicine, or even before entering a doctoral program. The biographies of Sarah Ann Hackett Stevenson, Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite, and Myra Colby Bradwell, a physician and two lawyers, respectively, suggest the pattern.
No group of women illustrates this pattern of social and occupational mobility more than Roman Catholic women religious. It is a paradox that the hierarchical and patriarchal system to which they owed absolute obedience (in theory) provided independence and a degree of autonomy for immigrant and working-class women. Mother Mary Agatha O'Brien, born Margaret O'Brien in 1822 in Graigue, County Carlow, Ireland, was only twenty-four years old when she arrived in Chicago in 1846 after three years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the first foundation of Mercy Sisters in the United States. She entered the Carlow Sisters of Mercy as a lay sister (a nun without a dowry) and worked in the kitchen until she and six others emigrated to Pittsburgh. Had she remained in Ireland, her lot in life would most likely have remained unchanged, since European religious orders retained class and status distinctions. But Margaret O'Brien had benefited from the recently developed Irish national school system. In the United States, her literacy and her natural abilities marked her as a leader, and, with no restrictions to overcome, she rose to a position of authority. O'Brien found that half the population of the booster lake port were Irish and German immigrants, the majority Catholic and working class.
Under O'Brien's leadership, three schools were opened almost immediately: St. Mary's (for girls) and St. Joseph's (for boys) were free and provided education for the children of immigrant Catholics; St. Francis Xavier Academy charged tuition and enrolled well-to-do young women from Protestant and Catholic families a decade before Chicago erected its first public high school. As with the Protestant women who taught school, the Catholic teaching sisters continued to open new schools, teach students, and create systems of teacher training and supervision. Biographies of Mother Mary Francis De Sales Monholland, a Mercy Sister and Irish immigrant; Sister Mary Agatha Hurley, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, another order predominantly of Irish immigrants and Irish American women; and Sister Walburga Gehring, Daughters of Charity, an order of German immigrant women, document the early activities of women religious in Chicago during the antebellum and Civil War period. These women, like Protestant women schoolteachers, experienced opportunities for career advancement and personal freedom through acts of moral benevolence that society had defined as woman's work. Their biographies describe the acquisition of land, successful efforts at fund-raising and financial planning, capable supervision of construction projects, and intelligent administration and counseling of staff and personnel in the running of educational programs, hospitals, orphanages, and rescue missions.
Women's roles as educators did not challenge the cultural authority of the leading men in the city, who retained their monopoly on politics and economic affairs and who were also the trustees of the school fund and in charge of public education. Teaching enabled women to rise above humble beginnings and, in some cases, to overcome a bad start in life. Such was the experience of Kate Newell Doggett. In 1853, after she buried her infant daughter and divorced her adulterous husband, Kate
Newell Horton dropped her married name and at age twenty-six taught school in Cleveland, Ohio, then resettled in Chicago. In a short time "Mrs. Kate E. Newell," whom Chicagoans met as a young, well-educated, and cultivated "widow," opened her own school and soon married the wealthy, civic-minded William E. Doggett, a boot and shoe manufacturer.
WOMEN AND MORAL BENEVOLENCE IN ANTEBELLUM CHICAGO
Back to top
Women's work of moral benevolence in antebellum Chicago became a training ground for the assumption of civic leadership by females during the Civil War. Among the charitable and benevolent institutions founded in Chicago in the decade of the 1850s were Mercy Hospital and Orphan Asylum (1852), the Magdalene Asylum (1858), the Providence for Working Girls (1859), St. James Hospital (1854), and the Home for the Friendless (1858). The first three were the work of Catholic Mercy Sisters; the last two were established by the efforts of Episcopalians and an interdenominational group of Protestant women, respectively. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, Jane Currie Blaikie Hoge, and other prominent Chicagoans who founded the Home for the Friendless represented the various organized Protestant churches in the city; the home assisted friendless women and children in finding suitable employment and permanent housing, admitting them without regard to creed, color, or nationality. Women board members were responsible for fund-raising and ran the day-to-day operations, which included rescuing women and children from the streets and bringing them to the home. These efforts to provide for the health and well-being of Chicagoans were critical, since Chicago's death rate exceeded that of New Orleans, Louisiana – which was known for its epidemics – as a result of yearly epidemics of typhoid, smallpox, and cholera; tuberculosis in the city was also serious. City and county public institutions were inadequate for a municipality whose population reached 109,620 in 1860, 50 percent of it foreign born. Efforts by the mayor and fire department in 1857 to clean out an area on the North Side of the city along the lakefront known as "The Sands," which was notorious for its saloons, gambling dens, and bordellos, were inadequate; the city counted more than one hundred houses of prostitution in 1858. Both the Chicago Relief and Aid Society and the Chicago United Charities were established in 1857, when a national economic panic and depression that began that year had serious consequences in the city. As business failures dampened the booster mentality of Chicagoans, businessmen flocked to revivals where such evangelical ministers and popular preachers as Dwight L. Moody attempted to restore confidence and offer a religious interpretation of secular events.
THE CIVIL WAR AND WOMEN'S RELIEF WORK Back to top
Soon after the first battles of the Civil War awakened women's and men's sensibilities to the lack of organizations to aid Union soldiers and care for the wounded and sick, the United States Sanitary Commission was formed to assist the Medical Department of the Army with disease prevention and
relief. The Chicago (later Northwestern) Branch of the United States Sanitary Commission was established in 1861; soon after, in 1862, Mary Livermore and Jane Hoge were named associate managers of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission and lent their considerable experience and leadership to the cause. As associate managers, women learned how to run mass organizations and to raise funds on a scale exceeding local ladies' auxiliary efforts. Ultimately, about three thousand aid societies came under the supervision of Livermore and Hoge, who had organized many of them personally. Other war workers in Chicago included Myra Bradwell, Kate Newell Doggett, and Eliza Chappell Porter, who provided nursing assistance on the battlefield. Helen Culver also responded to a call for nurses from the Sanitary Commission after the Battle of Stones River near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and took charge of a forty-bed hospital. Catholic women religious made a significant contribution in the field of nursing. Sisters of Mercy from Chicago were one of the twelve orders of Catholic nuns who ministered to the wounded and sick soldiers in the North and the South. Sisters of Mercy, who had learned their nursing skills under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, were valued; and Mother Francis De Sales Monholland sent Mercy sisters and a group of thirty lay women assistants to Lexington, Missouri. Back in Chicago in 1863, Mother Monholland directed her sisters in nursing typhoid and smallpox patients at Mercy Hospital; Monholland and her sisters also ministered to Confederate prisoners incarcerated in Camp Douglas, Chicago. Daughter of Charity Sister Walburga Gehring worked in the ambulance corps during the war; her order tended both Union and Confederate wounded on the battlefields.
THE MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS Back to top
In the midst of relief efforts, women in Chicago were beginning to come together in a movement for women's rights, including suffrage; an end to sexual discrimination in occupations; improvement of educational and economic opportunities; and the right to work and wages. They were doing so in a highly polarized political environment in which leaders in the northern Democratic Party and Republican Party were debating citizenship issues and the political settlement of the war. In Chicago women and men who had supported Lincoln and the Union army – many of whom had been Free Soilers or abolitionists in the 1850s – saw the opportunity to bring state and federal constitutions into alignment with more inclusive notions of citizenship. For women, however, issues of social justice had a particular meaning, and questions of wages and the right to work – poverty and dependency – resonated among female war relief workers brought up in the context of gender-specific relationships to property and citizenship. Even before the end of the war, Chicago women had expanded their initial goals of raising money and supplies for soldiers to include the relief of women on the home front. Sanitary Commission workers observed the hardship and need of women and children that resulted from the dislocations occasioned by war as well as the economic problems that befell many widows. Mary Livermore and others began to question whether or not women were actually protected by the patriarchal arrangements of society and the
laws that kept married women from owning property, entering into contracts, or keeping their own wages. In the short term, the Chicago branch hired women in its offices and sewing rooms and provided them with wages. The idea that women needed training and experience outside the domestic sphere to insure the stability of family life gained adherents. Mary Livermore was radicalized by the contradictions in her legal status as a married woman unable to sign a business contract and head of a relief agency worth millions. Her abolitionist background had led to her immersion in war relief work, but before the Civil War she had opposed woman suffrage. In 1867 Livermore wrote to Susan B. Anthony, explaining that she had once believed the ballot would come to women after the right to work and wages but that she had recently decided women had to vote first and that the other goals would follow women's full realization of citizenship.
Myra Bradwell's involvement in the battle for legal equality of women began in part because of her own unsuccessful efforts to be admitted to the Illinois bar. She had read law with her husband, James Bradwell, who, in 1861, was elected judge in Cook County; in 1868 she founded Chicago Legal News, a legal newspaper that soon became one of the most important legal publications in the Midwest. The following year she passed the bar exam but was rejected for admission to the Illinois bar on the grounds that as a married woman she was unable to enter into contracts and, therefore, could not practice law. Her case was argued unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1872. That year Illinois women's rights activists, including Alta May Hulett, and Myra and James Bradwell, lobbied successfully for passage by the state legislature of an anti-sex discrimination act. Hulett became the first woman admitted to the Illinois bar on June 6, 1873, two days after her nineteenth birthday. In the early efforts by women lawyers to become licensed, arguments were made that combined talk about rights and citizenship with discussions about the importance of economic independence for women. By 1868, ferment among women regarding these issues as well as the debate about the proper method for achieving advancement and equality had, in the minds of a core group of activists, solidified around the belief that women had to obtain the right to vote first. This right, they argued, was central to women's struggle for political equality, and it alone made women the legal equals of men. Without the vote, women were robbed of their natural rights.
In 1855, Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite, an Oberlin graduate who taught school, and was married to Charles Waite, a lawyer and freethinker, founded Illinois' first suffrage organization in Earlville, a small town west of Chicago. Her plea for political rights for women, the first to be written in the state, was published in the Earlville Transcript that year. The following year both Waites lectured on equal rights throughout the state. In 1859 the Illinois legislature passed a law permitting women to reclaim their maiden names after divorce. It was almost ten years before the next step was taken toward the organization of women to obtain their rights. In June 1868, a woman's association, Chicago Sorosis – after the New York Sorosis formed a few months earlier – was formed; it specifically avoided calling itself a "suffragist' society. Catharine Waite, Cynthia Leonard, and Mary Livermore attended the founding meeting and, from the
beginning, women's rights issues dominated. Internal conflict split Chicago Sorosis into two competing groups, one following the leadership of Mary Livermore and the other that of Cynthia Leonard; the two groups hosted simultaneous but separate suffrage conventions in the city on February 11 and 12, 1869, at Liberty Hall (Mary Livermore) and at Crosby Hall (Cynthia Leonard). Guest speakers included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone, who participated in both conventions. Stanton introduced a resolution that prefigured the controversial resolution presented in New York at the Equal Rights Association (ERA) meeting in May 1869. At the New York meeting, the ERA split, with Stanton and Anthony forming the National Woman Suffrage Association. In Chicago, Stanton and Anthony argued that black and female enfranchisement had to be treated as inseparable; since the Republicans in Congress had determined in the Fourteenth Amendment to enfranchise black men but not women, Stanton and Anthony called for resolutions withdrawing support from the Republican Party. Their position was not supported in Liberty Hall, where judges James Bradwell and Charles Waite – husbands of Myra Bradwell and Catharine Waite – spoke out against the Stanton-Anthony position. The Crosby Hall group, which brought together Spiritualists, Fourierites, freethinkers, and suffragists, passed resolutions that were more consonant with the Stanton-Anthony position. At the conclusion of the meetings, two Illinois suffrage groups emerged: the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association with Mary Livermore as president, and the Universal Suffrage Association. The former led the movement for women's rights in Illinois in association with Stanton and Anthony's national group; the latter lasted only several months.
The revolution in women's lives brought about by the opportunities for education coincided with a new understanding of the fragility of domestic relations. Women in Chicago, as elsewhere in the nation, had lived through two major economic depressions – in 1837 and 1857 – prior to the upheavals of the Civil War. Great risk was associated with entrepreneurial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. In 1861, married women in Illinois obtained the right to ownership of separate property brought to a marriage and could control, transfer, and contract upon this property as they saw fit. This right was, in part, a response to the insecurities married women faced when husbands failed in business. The ability to retain inherited property gave a woman security in a volatile, unpredictable economy. A year later, lobbying efforts to secure joint guardianship of children and easier access for widows to deceased husbands' property failed to secure passage by the legislature.
With the impetus from the conventions and the creation of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA), women immediately turned to the state legislature in session in Springfield. The major figures from Chicago – Livermore, the Bradwells, and the Waites – lobbied successfully for the passage of legislation that would entitle a married woman to receive, use, and possess her own earnings and sue for the same in her own name, protected from the interference of her husband or his creditors. The act, passed in March 1869, made clear that it was not to be construed as giving to a wife any compensation for any labor she performed in the care of her children or husband.
Kate Doggett returned from her experience as a delegate to the September 1869 Women's Industrial Congress in Berlin, Germany, opposed to the creation of separate institutions for employment of women and critical of the idea of a separate woman's sphere.
CULTURE ON THE MARGINS: THE PARADOX OF WOMEN INTELLECTUALS Back to top
In the 1870s Doggett remained frustrated at the contradiction between women's engagement in cultural affairs in certain quarters and exclusion from membership in many of the standard societies of learning – the dilemma of the female intellectual and new professional. For example, she and other Chicago women participated in the Philosophical Society of Chicago when it was formed in 1873 by leading men, and women intellectuals, including Unitarian minister Celia P. Woolley, medical doctors Julia Holmes Smith and Sarah Hackett Stevenson, liberal Protestant ministers Robert Collyer and David Swing, Liberal-Reform Rabbi Bernard Felsenthal, and prosuffragist and freethinker Judge Charles B. Waite. The group presented papers to one another on a range of topics, including the position of women in society, evolution, sacred books and mythologies, and geology. Many members of the Philosophical Society were also women's rights activists in the late 1860s and 1870s. Generally they were middle-class women (Kate Doggett was probably the wealthiest in the group) whose husbands were professionals – clergy or lawyers – and who shared the ideology of the radical Republicans, whose zeal for citizenship rights for Blacks had carried in Congress. They were liberal in their religious views and interested in the new ideas of science and social science. Also involved were the new professional women – ministers, doctors, lawyers. The Philosophical Society remained the exception to a cultural and business milieu in which Victorian mores dictated that women be excluded from membership in the newly established institutions of culture, including the Chicago History Museum and the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Kate Doggett was elected to the Chicago Academy of Sciences only five years after its founding in 1864, even though she had curated the academy's valuable collection of plant specimens.
Doggett's achievements serve to underline the lack of inclusion of women intellectuals; caught in this paradox, she began the Fortnightly of Chicago in 1873. Originally attended by women and men, it soon became a literary society of largely self-educated women who presented serious papers on philosophy, literature, art, and women's history. Three years later the Chicago Women's Club (renamed Chicago Woman's Club in 1895) launched an ambitious agenda of education and social action that drew on six committees – reform, philanthropy, education, housekeeping, art and literature, science and philosophy. The Chicago Woman's Club (CWC) was basically the domain of privileged white women; admission of its only black member, Fannie Barrier Williams, had been controversial, and she remained the only African American in the club for the next thirty years. The CWC became a network of influential women whose overlapping memberships in other clubs and associations further strengthened the women's movement in the city. The club movement in Chicago, as elsewhere, was related to the larger movement of women, nationally and internationally, who were working to advance themselves and their gender toward full participation in the mainstream of economic, political, and social life.
Closely associated with the growth of sophisticated cultural institutions in the rising metropolis of Chicago was the interest shown by the city's elites in acquiring art, both for themselves and for public museums. Women had roles as both artists and art patrons. One exceptional woman became a major art dealer for many of the elite of Chicago. Women artists such as Cornelia Adele Fassett were accepted. She exhibited her watercolor of Abraham Lincoln, painted from life in 1860, at the Ladies' Northwestern Fair for war relief held in 1863. An accomplished portraitist, Fassett and her husband had a studio in Chicago; there he was active in the new field of photography and she painted the portraits of prominent Illinois and Chicago men. Annie Cornelia Shaw began studying at the Chicago Academy of Art and in 1873 exhibited her painting View on the Des Plaines at the second annual Chicago Inter-State Industrial Exposition. One year later, she opened her first studio; by 1875 both Shaw and Fassett had been elected to associate membership in the Chicago Academy of Design, and four years later the academy elected Shaw to full status as an academician.
Other late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women artists in Chicago included painters Mary Hackney Wicker and Enella Benedict; sculptors Bessie Onahotema Potter, Julia Bracken Wendt, and Nellie Verne Walker; and etcher Bertha Evelyn Clauson Jaques. Three years before the Art Institute of Chicago was incorporated by leading men cultural philanthropists, women established the Chicago Society of Decorative Art (later the Antiquarian Society of Chicago), and Sara Tyson Hallowell began her career as the leading art agent for wealthy Chicagoans, including Bertha Honore Palmer. Alice DeWolf Kellogg and a friend, Marie Koupal, along with a handful of others, all of them female students at the new School of the Art Institute of Chicago, established the Bohemian Art Club (later the Palette Club), one of the first art associations for women in Chicago. Rose Fay Thomas and three other women launched the all-female Amateur Musical Club in the 1870s and began playing piano quartets together. The organization grew into a society of female pianists and singers with professional ambitions but few opportunities. Most of them taught music, since it was not until the 1950s that women began to appear with any frequency as orchestral performers. The careers of these women were typical: while there were gains made by individuals, women generally found it necessary to create separate female-only professional groups to support their careers.
Women remained marginalized in institutions of cultural philanthropy while men served as trustees, museum directors, and curators. Sara Hallowell's influence with the major art collectors in Chicago – the core founding fathers of the Art Institute of Chicago – was informal. She was denied directorship of the art exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in spite of the strong endorsement of Bertha Honore Palmer, a cultural and civic leader whose position as head of the Board of Lady Managers for the exposition gave her significant power. Palmer's French impressionist collection, key to the reputation of the Art Institute of Chicago, derived from Hallowell's advice and the connection this female art dealer made between Bertha Palmer and artist Mary Cassatt. Hallowell, who had been the art agent for the Inter-State Industrial Exposition from the 1870s and had traveled between European art capitals and Chicago to arrange annual exhibitions, held her final exhibition in 1890, when she showed works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissaro to midwest art collectors. Museum trustees, including Bertha Palmer's husband, disregarded her innovative and bold art patronage, and Hallowell's institutional role at the museum came from her membership in the female-only Antiquarian Society. The same is true of other women art patrons whose collections were formative for the museum – Kate Sturges Buckingham, Annie Shaw Coburn, and Margaret Day Blake. Antiquarian Society member Frances MacBeth Glessner, who patronized arts and crafts artists and did silversmithing in her home studio, endorsed the museum's innovative decorative arts acquisitions. The Antiquarian Society created the groundwork for the museum's acknowledgment of the importance of decorative arts and for the appointment in 1914 of Bessie Bennett as Curator of Decorative Arts, the first woman to become curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871 Back to top
The exclusion of women from governing boards of cultural institutions, in spite of new educational opportunities and career initiatives that were propelling women beyond the home, is evident in relief efforts after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 that ignored women leaders of the Sanitary Commission. The Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a private charitable organization run by the city's business elite since the late 1850s, was authorized by Mayor Roswell B. Mason to become the official relief effort of the municipality and to distribute goods and supplies. Mason distrusted the elected alderman, whose narrow political interests he thought would get in the way of a scientific and prudent handling of the substantial relief fund of more than four million dollars. Instead, Mason and other supporters of the Relief and Aid Society argued that the wealthiest and most influential men of the city had no pecuniary interest and would be wise and economical in the distribution of relief. This approach also reflected the theories of scientific charity that dominated private relief agencies, whose fear of creating dependency among the able-bodied poor led to stringent rules regarding worthy and unworthy applicants for relief. In addition, the Relief and Aid executive committee privileged those individuals who had previously owned a home by providing small, prefabricated shanties; renters were sent to barracks. While the Employment Bureau of the society outfitted tradesmen who had lost their tools, jobless laborers had to take whatever jobs were available. In short, the Relief and Aid Society ran its programs so that the victims of the fire were assisted, but help was not extended to those whose economic plight was deemed unrelated to the conflagration. At the end of eighteen months of relief distribution, the Relief and Aid Society discontinued relief to eight hundred families deemed the "chronic poor," and the Relief and Aid Society used the six hundred thousand dollars left in its coffers to
create a comfortable operating fund that allowed the organization to suspend all of its own fund-raising for the next decade.
The Chicago Relief and Aid Society's outreach was limited. Others, especially groups run by women, ignored or rejected the scientific charity approach and provided relief more inclusively. Sister Mary Francis De Sales Monholland and her nursing staff at Mercy Hospital assisted victims of the Chicago Fire. Sister Walburga Gehring and the Daughters of Charity took charge of the Barracks Hospital that had been set up as an emergency hospital for the fire victims.
While the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 continues to dominate the narrative of the city's history as a commercial and industrial metropolis, fire stories figure less frequently in the narratives of Chicago women. Martha Joanna Reade Nash Lamb's novel Spicy, published in 1872, describes women's benevolent work in Civil War Chicago, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the Great Chicago Fire. Lamb's female characters are strong and heroic in the novel and are based on the leading figures who supervised the work of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission during the war. Biographers of Cyrus H. McCormick agree that his wife, Nettie Fowler McCormick, who was twenty-six years his junior, provided the energy and will power to rebuild the McCormick Reaper plant after the fire destroyed the works. She wrote in her journal: "I constantly urge Mr. McC. to miss no opportunity to go forward with the new factory THIS YEAR" (Stella Virginia Roderick, Nettie Fowler McCormick [1956], 100). Emma Dryer, who was close to Nettie McCormick, recalled in her memoirs that the couple had prayed together on the subject and that McCormick left the decision to his wife since she would outlive him and had the children's future to consider. Nettie McCormick's decision-making in the business increased after her husband's death in 1884, when she became the chief stockholder and began writing to lawyers, financial agents, and advisers, including J. Pierpont Morgan, Cyrus Bentley, and Charles Deering. She was one of the few women in Chicago whose participation in industrial growth after the fire approximated that of male capitalists.
By the late 1870s the newly organized clubwomen in Chicago were working on two agendas: the advancement of white, middle-class women into the economic mainstream, and a reform agenda that had as a major goal the protection and assistance of working-class women and children. Efforts to protect working women came out of a shared gender experience that crossed class lines. For middle-class and working-class women, women's dependency was not an abstract concept but one that touched their lives directly. The wives and daughters of middle-class husbands and fathers were not defined by their class position in the same way that males were. Women could not be equal if they remained dependent on husbands and fathers. The movement for women's equality first had to battle for women's right to work, for married women's right to their own wages, and for acceptance in professions that initially excluded women. Women learned from experience that economic fluctuations in the market affected the security of middle-class families, as did the death of husbands.
During the post Civil War era, American society experienced profound social, economic, and political changes. Transportation systems linked mechanized farms with urban centers in a national economy. Within a generation after the war, the United States was transformed from a predominantly agricultural to a manufacturing nation. The demographic and physical changes in urban areas shocked a generation whose childhood had been spent in pre-industrial, antebellum America. Chicago's population rose from 298,977 in 1870 to 503,185 ten years later to 1,099,850 in 1890. The annexation of surrounding towns in 1889 accounted in part for the growth. Chicago was the leading meat packer and the leading grain and lumber market in the United States. In 1860 Chicago became the center of the world's largest rail network, and by 1871 twenty-one mainline railroad tracks entered the city. The Union Stockyards opened in 1865. Thousands of Chicago workers, like their counterparts in other American cities, were employed in factories, sweatshops, and industrial plants, where they earned low wages for long hours and received no unemployment insurance or compensation for industrial accidents. Women and children worked many hours for pennies an hour in factories and sweatshops that were foul, unsanitary, and dangerous. Trade unionism was in its infancy, and there was a rise of industrial violence between organized labor, which was seeking recognition, and capital, which rejected collective bargaining. There were no child labor laws, no rules regulating the industrial workplace, and no safety nets for working-class or, for that matter, for middle-class employees.
In demanding changes in working conditions for women, middle-class clubwomen rejected the prevailing economic and social theory – the doctrine of laissez-faire, which dictated that the natural laws of supply and demand controlled prices and wages. The development of an alternative vision of how social and economic relations should be arranged in society was the major contribution of the post-Civil War women suffragists and reformers. Well before Progressive Era politics, middle-class women began advocating the same measures that militant trade unionists and socialists in workingmen's parties championed. Legislation to put an end to sweatshops became a rallying point for organized women across class, religion, and ethnic divisions. Women bucked the conventional thinking of the majority of Protestant clergy and benevolent workers in nineteenth-century America, whose ideas about the proper response to cases of poverty in were based on laissez-faire theory that reinforced theological ideas of personal sin and conversion. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was translated by conservative economists and social theorists into a Social Darwinism that supported the laissez-faire concept. Progress demanded that a government assume only minimal responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry; workers' demands for minimum wages, the eight-hour day, or even child labor restrictions and other kinds of protective legislation for women and children had to be rejected because such legislation interfered with the natural laws of the market system. Unscientific kinds of charity were especially suspect since indiscriminate, sentimental almsgiving created dependency and interfered with the laws of supply and demand. Attempts by workers' unions to bargain collectively for better wages and hours were also rejected. Middle-class and wealthy women who were engaged in reformist activities in the Chicago Woman's Club redefined their class position substantially enough to advance a critique of unregulated capitalism and to offer counterproposals for the way in which decisions about compensation for a person's labor should be made. These views did not mean, however, that middle-class and wealthy women who allied with working-class women agreed completely with the latter's positions and tactics. Nor did it mean that cross-class alliances among women were without tensions and conflicts. Yet many privileged women responded affirmatively to the call for a shorter work day, for regulation of factories, for minimum wages, and for an end to child labor – even though businessmen of their own class fought these reforms.
It is easy to understand why working-class women and men in trade unions and workingmen's parties rejected the rhetoric of the ruling elite. Clashes between labor and capital increased during the 1870s and 1880s, as did the incidence of state-supported violence against striking and demonstrating workers. In 1877 radical women workers participated in street activities in Chicago during the Railroad Workers' Strike that had spread across the United States and that reached Chicago in July. The following year, Alzina Parsons Stevens, Elizabeth Flynn Rodgers, Elizabeth Morgan, Lizzie Swank Holmes, and Lucy E. Parsons joined Chicago's first labor organization for working women, Working Women's Union No. 1 (WWU), with Stevens as the first president. The WWU was conceived by leaders of the Chicago Council of Trades and Labor Unions and the Socialist Labor Party, who thought it was time to organize yet unorganized women workers. Membership included workers from the Scandinavian, German, and English-speaking women's sections of the Socialist Labor Party. Many of the first generation of women trade union leaders in the city came out of the WWU. Elizabeth Flynn Rodgers, for example, served as a delegate to the Knights of Labor State Trades' Assembly of Illinois in 1880, and the following year she led one of the Knights of Labor's first all-women assemblies. Lucy Parsons, whose experiences with trade unionism and electoral politics in the Workingmen's Party (later the Socialistic Labor Party of North America) transformed her into a revolutionary socialist and one of the leaders of the new International Working People's Association (IWPA), wrote for the Alarm, which was edited by her husband, Albert Parsons. Her "To Tramps," published on the front page of the first issue, reflected her intense anger at social injustice as the unemployed and homeless died of hunger and exposure during the severe winter of 1883-84. She had come to believe that wage slavery would be defeated in the same way chattel slavery had been ended, and she adopted the ideology of propaganda by the deed in response to the state-sanctioned violence used against workers organizing for better wages and the eight-hour day.
For anarchist women such as Parsons and Lizzie Swank Holmes, the suffrage convention held in Chicago in 1884 had little meaning. Holmes, writing in the Alarm in 1885, debated whether or not socialist women should engage in the struggle for woman suffrage. She argued that the ballot was not the cure for women's problems, agreeing with Lucy Parsons and others who believed that the revolutionary workers' movement took priority and was, ultimately, the only way to improve conditions of women and men. Holmes and Parsons became involved with the nationwide eight-hour-day campaign, and on May Day 1886, hundreds of working women participated in the Chicago parade of eighty thousand workers. Two days later a clash between strikers and police took place at the McCormick Reaper Works. In response to the incident at the McCormick plant, protesters called a meeting at Haymarket Square for May 4. The peaceful crowd was about to conclude its speeches and disperse when a contingent of 180 police arrived. Moments later a bomb exploded, sparking a police riot. Eight policemen died as a result of the bombing and the crossfire among police. In the disorder, an undetermined number of demonstrators lost their lives. The identity of the bomb thrower remained unknown, but eight anarchists, including Lucy Parsons's husband, Albert, were tried and convicted of conspiracy to murder a policeman. Four of them, including Parsons, were sentenced to death; a fifth condemned anarchist killed himself in jail; and three others stayed in jail until released in 1893 by Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, whose pardon message contained a bold indictment of the trial.
MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN ADVANCE A REFORM AGENDA FOR THE CITY
Back to top
During the 1870s and 1880s, activist middle-class women also tried to make sense of the industrial city and found themselves repelled by the disorder, immorality, corruption, and violence. While women suffragists in the 1860s had been interested in protecting dependent women and children (Susan B. Anthony organized her radical Working Woman's Association in 1866), the leaders of the suffrage movement began to articulate a reform agenda in the late 1870s that became more fully developed in the Progressive Era. One of the first groups to assert the new agenda was the Illinois Social Science Association founded in 1877 by Elizabeth Boynton Harbert. An affiliate of the American Social Science Association, the Illinois group under Harbert argued that social progress would occur when women's moral influence was combined with up-to-date knowledge of the new industrial conditions in urban America. They also thought that traditional charity and moral reform directed at individual salvation were inadequate to solve the problems of modern society and that scientific charity organizations were limited responses to social concerns. Harbert had no confidence in the political system's ability to solve urban problems. She expressed her repulsion of men's abuse of power in ways that resembled the rhetoric of local temperance crusaders, whose protest against public drunkenness and political corruption had gathered support in small towns throughout the Midwest and in 1874 had led to the formation of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In 1878 Mary E. McDowell heard Frances E. Willard address a group of young women in Chicago; impressed,. the young McDowell joined in the temperance work and by 1887 was the national director for the WCTU's Young Woman's branches in Illinois and other states. With Willard's assumption of the presidency in 1879, the WCTU began advocating many of the same reforms that Harbert called for in her column, "Woman's Kingdom," which first appeared in 1879-80 in the Chicago Inter-Ocean, a daily newspaper. The column reported news about suffrage campaigns, reform movements, temperance, education, and health and offered a critique of existing societal institutions.
As secular clubwomen moved toward a new definition of their role in public affairs (and in turn redefined an expanded role for the state in an industrial democracy), women in traditional fields of benevolent work also redefined their roles and explored new avenues of service (and in turn redefined and expanded the sphere of woman's work and woman's ministry in religion). The Woman's Presbyterian Board of Missions of the North-West was organized in December 1870; under the leadership of Jane Hoge, it expanded from 70 auxiliaries in eight states to more than 1,430 auxiliaries in eleven states by 1885. The focus of the work was on the Christianization of heathen women and the support of female missionaries. Also in 1870, the Reverend Augusta Jane Chapin, the second woman to be ordained in the Universalist denomination, served on the Universalist General Convention, the denomination's governing body; and the following year she formed, with other activist Universalist women, the Woman's Centenary Association of the Universalist Church, the forerunner of the Association of Universalist Women. Emma Dryer came to Chicago in 1870 to take up benevolent work for women and children and became a leader in the Ladies' Christian Union; after the Chicago Fire of 1871, this organization engaged in relief work and changed its name to the Women's Aid Association. By 1873 it had reorganized as the Women's Christian Association after having affiliated with the Young Men's Christian Association. One of the outcomes of Dryer's leadership was the establishment of a home for "self-dependent girls." In 1871 Mary Jane Richardson Jones and three other women organized the Workers for the King, a religious group that offered aid to the growing African American poor population in the city. Rumah Avilla Crouse became the founding president of the Women's Baptist Home Missionary Society in 1877; run by women, its purpose was to develop missions within the United States rather than in foreign countries. Considered a controversial departure, it was a direct response to the pleas of women missionaries in the field who faced poverty, racism, and social problems from rapid urbanization and immigration. Women from a conservative religious tradition tended to identify differently with the problem of the unmarried working girl in the city, the so-called "woman adrift," than did secular social reformers, although from the 1880s through 1900s the common ground that united all middle-class and privileged women was a deepening anxiety over women who lived alone in the city and worked in factories, department stores, or sweatshops. There was growing alarm about the loss of innocence of young immigrant women and migrants from small towns and, worse, a fear that such women would become victims of the sex trade. The range of responses to the problems of youth in the city and the potential for corruption and exploitation of young women and men included those of Matilda Carse, a WCTU leader who, in 1882, helped open the Rehoboth, a refuge and alcohol recovery home, at a mission in an African American neighborhood on Chicago's South Side; Sister M. Theresa Dudzik, a Polish immigrant and founder of the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago, who opened a rescue mission in the 1880s; urban evangelist Mary Everhart, who opened the Olive Branch Mission in 1893, which continued a longstanding tradition of
ministering to the homeless; and women such as Louise de Koven Bowen, whose interest in protecting youth in the cities was directed to legislation to close dance halls. Providing an increasing number of independent women workers with appropriate housing and recreation also had moral overtones, even when such projects were undertaken by social reformers who advocated the emancipation of women. Ina Law Robertson established Eleanor Clubs, low-cost boarding houses for single working women that provided safe homes and a Christian atmosphere. In the African American community, clubwomen Elizabeth Lindsay Davis and Fannie Emanuel, a medical practitioner, provided black single working women with housing in the Phyllis Wheatley Club, which opened in 1896.
THE CLUBWOMAN AS CAREER PROFESSIONAL: THE CASE OF PHYSICIANS Back to top
Characteristic of the emerging woman's culture of the 1880s was the way in which the first generation of women in the fields of law, journalism, medicine, religion, and in the academy maintained connections with women's organizations not related to professional advancement per se as well as with the suffrage movement. Women physicians, lawyers, and university professors played prominent roles in the Chicago Woman's Club. Conversely, such organizations as the Illinois Woman's Press Association, founded in 1885, or the Cordon Club, founded in 1915, while focused on the advancement of women's careers in journalism and art, respectively, had a broad membership of women from the larger woman's movement. Another way of looking at the cross membership of women is the way in which middle-class women supported women's trade union organizations, for example, the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), founded in 1903. Trade union women such as Agnes Nestor played important roles in the suffrage movement in Illinois and in the League of Women Voters of Illinois after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. There were serious divisions and class conflicts, however, that made such alliances precarious and often short-lived. An examination of the way in which the first generation of women physicians participated in the social and political ferment of the woman's movement helps define the nature of the first wave of feminism in the United States.
Women doctors' intellectual achievements and consummate professional work ethic could not compensate for the conventional attitudes of both women and men to female practitioners. They constructed careers as physicians out of the women's movement in which they were activists. Clubwomen offered them support, both financial and in terms of acceptance and status; they in turn provided professional expertise and were able to guide women's political culture toward women's and children's health care agendas. Women's culture campaigned for public health programs, and clubwomen (career volunteers) raised funds to establish nursing schools and hospitals where women doctors could practice. Women physicians such as Sara Hackett Stevenson, Julia Holmes Smith, Frances Dickinson, and Lucy Waite, and women lawyers, artists, and social activists established the Queen Isabella Association in 1889. Stevenson, Dickinson, Smith, and Waite were leaders in the Chicago Woman's Club. Stevenson became president of the medical staff of the Frances E. Willard National Temperance Hospital when it opened in 1886. She had joined the WCTU in 1881 and served as the first superintendent of its department of hygiene, responsible for publicizing the negative effects of alcohol on health. Julia Holmes Smith was president of the Chicago Woman's Club, presided over the biennial meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Women in Chicago, and served on Julia Ward Howe's Woman's Committee at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1884-85. She became director in 1886 of the Illinois Training School for Nurses, founded in 1880 by a group of clubwomen led by Lucy Coues Flower to train working women for a profession and to supply trained nurses to the poor.
In the field of medicine the career pattern for women differed substantially from that of men. Mary Harris Thompson graduated from New England Female Medical College, Boston, Massachusetts, in 1863 and selected Chicago as a place of opportunity where an ambitious new doctor could overcome the disabilities of her sex; Thompson promoted the education of women doctors. Not only were women denied access to most male schools of medicine, but those who were able to graduate from the minority of schools in the United States that took both women and men or who had the opportunity to study abroad where there were opportunities for women, were refused hospital privileges. Women graduating from female colleges of medicine often sought another M.D. degree from either a European school of medicine or a coeducational school in the United States perceived to be more "reputable." The first and second generations of women doctors were activists in establishing hospitals and schools of medicine for women, in creating separate societies for women physicians, and in pushing for removal of the.limitations that kept them on the margins of male-dominated institutions. They were also activists who participated in the new woman's movement, taking leadership roles in clubs and reform societies and volunteering their expertise and time in clinics and agencies to protect and care for women and children. They wrote textbooks, delivered scientific papers, and published their findings on medical issues and public health. Mary Harris Thompson's initial involvement in Chicago was with the Sanitary Commission, where she became convinced that the city needed a hospital for women and children. Through her efforts the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children (in 1895 renamed the Mary Thompson Hospital of Chicago for Women and Children) was opened May 8, 1865.
Following the pattern of many women in medicine, Thompson sought advanced training at Rush Medical College, but like Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite, who had been rejected by Rush in 1866, Thompson was turned away. Rush's rival, Chicago Medical College, was willing to accept Thompson as a result of the efforts of a liberal faculty member, Dr. William H. Byford. He encouraged Thompson to establish a women's medical college in connection with the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children and, in 1870, under Byford's direction, the Woman's Hospital Medical College opened (it was renamed Chicago Woman's Medical College in 1879). Thompson taught hygiene and obstetrics and gynecology. Marie Josepha Mergler also graduated from the Woman's Medical College; but although she finished first in the exam for appointment as intern at the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning, she did not receive the appointment. She went to Switzerland for postgraduate work in clinical medicine and pathology at Zurich. Frances Dickinson interned at Women's and Children's Hospital under Mary Harris Thompson and studied at the Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary, then at the Royal Ophthalmic Hospital, London, where women had just been admitted in 1883. She then worked with Dr. Adolph Weber, an internationally known ophthalmologist in Darmstadt, Germany.
In a world where the professionalization of medicine was itself in flux, women could make strides in alternative medicine. Julia Holmes Smith completed her medical education at the Chicago Homeopathic College and practiced homeopathic medicine for the next forty years. Homeopathy was a more hospitable field for women and in the late nineteenth century was considered by many to be a legitimate alternative to allopathic medicine. Alice Stockham also graduated from the Chicago Homeopathic College. Smith and Stockham were critical of standard medicine, especially the treatment of women's diseases. Stockham's book, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (1883), was a manual on women's health and pregnancy that sold 160,000 copies by 1891 and, six years later, was in its forty-fifth edition.
Sarah Hackett Stevenson's career, on the other hand, was equal to that of many men in the medical field. Initially benefiting from Thompson's pioneering efforts, Stevenson graduated with highest honors from Woman's Hospital Medical College in 1874. The next year she traveled extensively in Europe for postgraduate study, visiting several hospitals in Dublin and London; while in the latter city, she studied under scientists Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Back in Chicago in 1875, she was appointed to the physiology chair at the Woman's Hospital Medical College and elected to membership in the Illinois State Medical Society. Illinois Governor John Beveridge sent her as a delegate to the First Sanitary Conference in Vienna. In 1876 she attended the convention of the American Medical Association (AMA) in Philadelphia as an alternate delegate and, when the delegate was unable to attend, took his place and became the first woman member. An exception was made for Stevenson, and she remained the only woman in the AMA until it formally accepted women members in 1915. Stevenson was the first woman appointed to the staff of Cook County Hospital in 1881.
BLACK WOMEN PROFESSIONALS IN THE 1880S AND 1890S Back to top
The biographies of two of the first generation of new black women professionals demonstrate that race rather than class or education predetermined the outcomes for African Americans in this country. In 1894 Ida Platt became the first African American woman to earn her Illinois law license. African American men were allowed to enter the legal profession four years before white women were, yet the number of black men admitted to practice law in Illinois increased slowly. Platt remained the sole African American woman lawyer in the state until 1920, when Violette Anderson graduated from Chicago Law School (later
Kent College of Law). In 1887 Harriet Rice was the first African American woman to graduate from Wellesley College. She earned her medical degree at the Women's Medical College of New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1891 and, after postgraduate work in New York and Philadelphia, resettled in 1893 in Chicago, where she took up residence at Hull-House. Both Platt and Rice had experienced little race prejudice as children and young adolescents; they came from black families with long traditions of freedom and professionalism in communities where they were part of a small minority. Rice and Platt had little reason to doubt that they would be judged by their individual achievement and were not prepared for the realities of race discrimination and prejudice that they experienced as professional women. They were not, however, willing to become "race women," as the generation of black clubwomen saw themselves. Rice and Platt both resisted working in all-black institutions or for black clients.
THE ILLINOIS WOMAN'S ALLIANCE Back to top
By the 1880s and 1890s, women's professional organizations, clubs, benevolent missions, trade unions, and political equality organizations were an indication of the scope of women's participation in public affairs and the mainstream economy. Much remained to be accomplished, however. The Seneca Falls declaration had been conceived in the world of agrarian America at the dawn of urban, industrial society. The rights discussions in which women engaged in the 1880s reflected the changed context; in addition to their continued interest in legal or political rights for themselves, the vast majority of women had begun to think about the ways in which women and children were disproportionately damaged by industrial and urban conditions. An agenda of protection emerged in the 1880s: Frances E. Willard introduced an entire platform of demands under the heading "Home Protection"; Ellen Henrotin and Sarah Hackett Stevenson of the Chicago Woman's Club created the Protective Agency for Women and Children in 1886, and by 1889 it had become an independent institution functioning as a legal aid bureau successfully filing court claims in cases of wife abuse, desertion, and divorce. By 1896, with the help of women lawyers, the agency had collected $1,249,000 in fraud, injustice, and divorce cases from 7,197 complaints.
Concern for the well-being of working women reached a peak in the summer of 1888 when a series of exposes on the city's sweatshops appeared in the Chicago Times. Responding to a call from two socialist women, Elizabeth Morgan and Corinne Stubbs Brown, leaders of the Ladies' Federal Labor Union No. 2703, members of the Chicago Woman's Club, and around thirty other women's organizations had formed the Illinois Woman's Alliance (IWA), a cross-class coalition, by November. The IWA put forward counterproposals that questioned laissez-faire capitalism and called for the state to take responsibility for minimal standards of public welfare. The groups represented in the IWA reveal how the movement for women's rights and professional opportunities had now expanded to include in its agenda a strong social justice component. The first coordinating committee included Corinne Brown as chair, representing the
Ladies' Federal Labor Union (LFLU). The daughter of a skilled worker, Brown was a former teacher and principal in the Chicago public school system who had married a prominent banker; her involvement in the LFLU was part of a pattern of support and participation by middle-class women in the early organization of women's trade unions in Chicago. Caroline Alden Huling, of the Cook County Suffrage Association, was a new career woman who arrived in Chicago in 1884 to attend a national suffrage convention and remained to make her way as a self-supporting journalist. Her father had owned a newspaper and publishing firm in upstate New York, and the family's political connections to then-governor Grover Cleveland made possible Caroline Huling's appointment as notary public. She was one of the first women to hold the position in the state. Huling had just attended the International Council of Women conference held in Washington, D.C., in March 1888 and was a link between Chicago and the women's movement internationally. Fannie Barrier Williams, a leader in the black clubwoman movement in Chicago, also participated in the IWA; between 1891 and 1894, she held almost every office including vice-president and secretary. In 1894 she was head of the Alliance's Committee on State Schools for Children. Her participation in the IWA is noteworthy since her proposed membership in 1894 in the Chicago Woman's Club took fifteen months to confirm because of bitter debates among the all-white membership.
The IWA's practical agenda endorsed a variety of legislative initiatives and city programs that, taken together, aimed to eliminate the sweatshop system. The women understood that factory inspection alone could not end some of the worst aspects of the system. It was necessary to remove children from the workplace and put them in schools, and demands were made for new schools, compulsory education laws, and the prohibition of child labor. The IWA also addressed the issue of police victimization of prostitutes and demanded an end to the double standard under which women were convicted of prostitution while the men who engaged in sex for money remained anonymous and went unpunished.
In 1892 the Alliance broadened to include Hull-House residents Alzina Parsons Stevens and Florence Kelley; the former had returned to Chicago where earlier she had organized the Working Women's Union; the latter, the daughter of a prominent Pennsylvania industrialist and politician, had become a socialist while in graduate school in Zurich, Switzerland, and had recently moved to the city from New York. The Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, Hull-House residents, the IWA, and well-known radicals such as Henry Demarest Lloyd successfully pressured the state legislature to pass the Illinois Factory and Inspection Act (also known as the Sweatshop Act) in 1893; the act set sanitary standards for the workplace, prohibited the employment of children under age fourteen in any manufacturing enterprises, limited the daily working hours of females to eight, and increased the enforcement powers of factory inspectors. Governor John P. Altgeld appointed Kelley chief inspector and Stevens assistant inspector. Although the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the eight-hour clause of the 1893 Sweatshop Act in 1895, the legislation was a significant victory for organized women workers and social reformers. In 1894 the IWA dissolved over internal tensions between working-class and middle-class segments of the organization. There would be other attempts at alliances between working-class women and middle-class allies, notably in the Women's Trade Union League; but issues of class presented serious challenges to the, vision of a united womanhood. Male-dominated trade unionism showed ambivalence if not outright distrust of efforts to organize women, especially those engaged in unskilled jobs. First-wave social feminists such as Mary E. McDowell, Margaret Dreier Robins, and Florence Kelley argued that their support was crucial in the early years of women's trade union organizing.
While the IWA did not last, it was, for women in Illinois, one of the first expressions of a political and social philosophy that would be most extensively implemented during the Progressive Era. The IWA's three fundamental principles – written in 1891– summarize the philosophy of the social feminists who became the leaders of organized women in Chicago from 1890 to 1920: first, "the actual status of the poorest and most unfortunate woman in society determines the possible status of every woman" (Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 [1980], 71). This concept of reciprocal social responsibility and an awareness of interdependence between labor and capital, rich and poor, immigrant and American-born was further elucidated and implemented through the leadership of Jane Addams. With Ellen Gates Starr, Addams had founded the Hull-House Settlement in 1889. The second concept was the belief that "the civilization of the future depends upon the present condition of the children" (p. 71). As a consequence of this view, different branches of organized womanhood sought to accomplish their goals through the education of the child in the broadest sense, an education that included the construction of appropriate moral and physical environments in which children and adolescents would thrive. The third principle held that "public money and public officials must serve public ends" (p. 71). Rejecting the idea of a limited role for government, women's organizations demanded that public monies be spent appropriately and efficiently for the common good. Women had to involve themselves in the political process; woman suffrage had become a vehicle for achieving reform of society rather than an end in itself.
THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION OF 1893: ISABELLAS AND LADY MANAGERS Back to top
Women looked to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 as an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual and cultural accomplishments. The exposition was also an opportunity to forge connections nationally and internationally with like-minded women.
How and in what context women would participate in the World's Columbian Exposition became a divisive issue for different groups, and it reflected many of the tensions and growing pains of the women's movement itself. Did married, white, privileged clubwomen such as Bertha Honore Palmer and Ellen Martin Henrotin speak for all women? Were black clubwomen to be included on boards and committees? Should Jewish women participate on a religious basis or as another "branch" of women's clubs? Should women have their own separate building at the fair or participate in all of the exhibits alongside men? Women had begun to plan for their participation in the exposition as early as 1889, when the Queen Isabella Association was established. Drs. Julia Holmes Smith, Sarah Hackett Stevenson, and Frances Dickinson, lawyer Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite, and poet and Catholic art expert Eliza Allen Starr were active Isabellas and argued that women's representation at the exposition should be integrated into all the exhibition halls and displays along with the works of men, not separated into a building solely for woman's work. Starr's Isabella of Castile was published in 1889 and made the case for the significance of the female ruler of Spain in the exploration and discovery of the New World. As the Isabellas worked toward their goal of inclusion and integration, Bertha Palmer had the inside track on control of women's representation. She and her husband, well-known business leader Potter Palmer, had been busily engaged with other influential Chicagoans in making certain that their city was the site chosen for the Columbian Exposition. Bertha Palmer steered a moderate course in her role as head of the Board of Lady Managers. The women had been appointed by the Fair Commission in 1890 and had as their major task approval of applications for exhibition space in the women's pavilion.
Palmer resolutely held fast to the concept of a separate woman's building where exhibits by women would be displayed without a political context or any discussion of suffrage or the women's rights movement. Unable to persuade Palmer and the managers to integrate women's work into men's exhibits, the Isabellas, through their Physicians Publishing Company, financed the construction of their own building, the Isabella Hotel and Club House. In the mid, the lawyers and physicians who were Isabellas and had fought for full and equal inclusion of women were as removed from the major exhibits as was the Woman's Building. Dr. Julia Holmes Smith, when the Isabellas lost their argument, organized a model hospital and emergency clinic for women and children at the exposition. This exhibit had a building of its own with a model hospital, up-to-date operating room, diet kitchen, office and reception room, a section of a children's ward and women's ward, and a private room for patients. Julia Smith, Dr. Sarah Stevenson, and others recruited volunteer women homeopathic, allopathic, and eclectic doctors, as well as nurses from the Illinois Training School for Nurses to staff the clinic, which treated more than three thousand patients during the exposition. Every attempt to penetrate male-dominated organizations forced women into the creation of separate associations. Julia Smith was the only woman on the committee that was organizing the Homeopathic Physicians and Surgeons Congress and eventually became the head of the Woman's Committee of the same congress. Women lawyers experienced a similar fate. Attorney Ellen Martin, a vice-president of the board of directors and chair of the legal department of the Isabellas, organized a meeting of women lawyers in August 1893; fourteen prominent women attorneys spoke on a variety of topics. Martin, whose private practice in downtown Chicago was a model of achievement even by male professional standards, felt it necessary to cofound the National League of Women Lawyers to promote the interests of women in the practical work of the legal profession and also to found the Chicago Political Equality League with Catharine McCulloch and other Chicago Woman's Club activists.
The organizational politics and representational dilemmas of women in 1893 clarified for many equal rights activists and professionals the need to battle for advancement in every arena. The case of women artists makes this clear. By 1893, membership in the all-women Palette Club included more than seventy women, one-third of whom had studied abroad. The World's Columbian Exposition served as a vehicle for success for individual members as well as for the club as a whole. The all-male jury, established to select work to be exhibited in the Palace of Fine Arts, chose 520 painters and sculptors, 104 of whom were women. Of these women, eight were members of the Palette Club.
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION Back to top
Other divisions among women also surfaced. There were no African American board members, and no provisions were made for the inclusion of exhibits from black women. An ad hoc group of black women requested that an office be established to collect exhibits from "colored" women in the United States. Instead of creating the proposed office, the Fair Commission appointed a black woman, Chicagoan Fannie Barrier Williams, to assist in supervising the installation of exhibits in the Woman's Building. Williams also served as secretary of the art department of the women's branch of the congress auxiliaries held in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. While Ida B. Wells expressed outright criticism of the exclusion of black Americans from the exposition – at the exposition Wells distributed her pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition – Williams's connections with white clubwomen and more conciliatory approach were evident in the two addresses she delivered at the exposition, the first at the World's Congress of Representative Women, the second at the World's Parliament of Religions, where she was one of five African American women to speak.
THE WORLD'S PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS Back to top
Since 1848, when one of the resolutions at Seneca Falls called for overthrowing the monopoly of the religious pulpit by men, women had continued to exercise marginal leadership at the ministerial level in religious institutions dominated by men. Events in 1893 may have provided a falsely optimistic picture of progress in women's long struggle for equality in the polity and ministry of the different Protestant denominations and in the liberal movement in Judaism because so many women engaged in the World's Parliament of Religions and related congresses. They included Universalist ministers Augusta J. Chapin and Olympia Brown and Universalist lay leader Julia Ward Howe; ordained Unitarian women Celia Parker Woolley, Ida Hultin, and Marion Murdock; lay Methodist leader and Woman's Christian Temperance Union president Frances E. Willard. Clubwoman Fannie Barrier Williams spoke on "Religion's Duty to the Negro." Two Jewish women, Josephine Lazarus and Henrietta Szold, addressed the parliament, and the Congress of
Jewish Women, organized by Hannah Solomon and Sadie American, was held in conjunction with the parliament. Solomon and American favored the ordination of women as rabbis and both had delivered lectures from the pulpit at Chicago Congregation Sinai, a leading temple in the liberal Reform movement in Judaism. On the recommendation of Chapin, as chair of the Woman's Committee of the World's Congress Auxiliary, women members of the Theosophical Society spoke at the Theosophical Congress held at the World's Parliament of Religions. Emma Curtis Hopkins's students in the Hopkins Metaphysical Association formed the Columbian Congress of Christian Scientists (New Thought) to interact with the women's organizations affiliated with the Queen Isabella Association.
NATIONALIZING TRENDS IN WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS Back to top
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition accelerated trends already emerging in the multifaceted infrastructure of women's organizations. The General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), with a membership of 185 clubs located in twenty-nine different states, had its first biennial convention in Chicago in 1892. The exposition became a vehicle for the implementation of nationalizing trends in women's separate organizations: Sadie American presented a speech, "Organization," on the final day of the Congress of Jewish Women, in which she elaborated a plan for an organization called the National Council of Jewish Women; the first official meeting of the International Kindergarten Union was held during the exposition; the National Convention of Women's Amateur Musical Clubs met (Rose Fay Thomas was head of the Committee on Representation of Women's Amateur Musical Clubs); Ellen Henrotin, whose belief in the power of women's associations was strong, helped to found several organizations at the 1893 women's congresses, including the National Household Economic Association, the National League of Roman Catholic Women, the International League of Lutheran Women, and the League of Superintendents of Manual Training Schools. Under the aegis of the Woman's Branch of the Congress Auxiliary of the Columbian Exposition, 210 congresses were scheduled; Bertha Palmer was president of the body of congresses, but Ellen Henrotin served as vice-president and chief executive. The women's congresses, like the women's clubs, were divided into departments, with Mary Wilmarth running education, Lucy Flower heading moral and social reform, Jane Addams coordinating social settlements, and Ellen Henrotin managing the labor congress.
One of the messages that ran through many of the congresses and meetings of women was that women were in the labor market to stay – as factory workers, professionals, and even as financial investors and owners of property – with the potential to influence the relationship of labor and capital. Ellen Henrotin, who became president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1894 and during her presidency supported uniform state labor legislation, improvement of the state educational systems, the eight-hour working day for women, and women's business clubs committed to cooperation and self-support, called for financial independence for women. In a speech, "The Financial Independence of Women," Henrotin elaborated on a theme she had introduced earlier: wealthy women had responsibilities in society and should use their privilege to effect moral and social reform. She explained that women were emerging from the domestic sphere and entering the business and labor market, earning money, and investing hundreds of millions of dollars in building and loan associations and real estate. Instead of depicting women as victims of discrimination or as selfless benevolent workers, Henrotin argued that women had power that they had not yet marshaled and used. Women needed to vote their own stock, to become corporate directors, and to learn to manage their own financial affairs. Even Bertha Palmer, still sitting on the fence regarding support of woman suffrage in 1893, took the opportunity of her opening remarks at the dedication of the World's Columbian Exposition, October 21, 1892, to promote women's material interests and women's industrial equality and to call for equitable compensation for services rendered. Such statements reflected the growing reality that women were, in fact, a presence in the labor force.
Historian Joanne Meyerowitz has estimated that 3,800 wage-earning women lived independently in Chicago in 1880 and that the entire female labor force in the city that year was 35,600. By 1910 the number of wage-earning women living independently in Chicago had grown to approximately 31,500, and the percentage of women heading households had increased from 5 percent in 1880 to 13 percent in 1910. The steady increase in women entering the work force continued. From 1880 to 1930, the female labor force in Chicago increased more than 1,000 percent; this rate of increase was three times as great as the rate of increase of the female labor force for the nation as a whole.
In addition, between 1900 and 1910 more than six million immigrants arrived in the United States, adding to the millions of immigrants who had settled in America between 1860 and 1900. No more than one-third of the immigrants went into farming or related activities after 1900; instead, they went to the already congested cities. In cities like Chicago, immigrants and their children were the overwhelming majority of residents. Citizenship questions were immediately apparent to women activists, whose engagement in suffrage and women's legal rights advocacy made them sensitive to the ways in which immigration law affected women and children differently from men. Social control issues in urban areas seemed more complicated and threatening to so-called American values because of high rates of immigration. From this viewpoint, urban America did not resemble the New England village or the midwest town.
WOMEN AND MODERNIZATION Back to top
For many women the way to deal with industrial America was to educate young women and mothers in scientific methods of child development, household economy, and sanitation, and to obtain legislation to build healthy environments in the city. Not only did women see themselves as entering the mainstream of economic life, they defined their contributions to society in the broadest sense as a belief in progress. Women demonstrated not only receptivity to modernization but leadership in forging an industrial society in which technology and innovation would be used not only to build private fortunes but to create the good society. The sources for women's interest in modernizing the American city were diverse. The tradition of Christian moral benevolence, reshaped to include trained deaconesses and churchworkers, led to the institutional expansion of modern health care in the United States and abroad. New women professionals created training schools and modern institutions to deal with urban industrial problems. And, as noted, the merging of social science and social reform in the approaches of the varied organizations that made up the women's political movement in the Progressive Era advanced the trends of modernization a thousandfold in the cities of the United States.
Women on the political Left contributed to the modernization of industrial society. Mary Walden Kerr's monthly column of advice, "The Home," published in Charles H. Kerr's New Times, emphasized the need for rational action in the life of each and every home. A socialist, Mary Kerr's approach was reminiscent of the writings of such other women reformers as Mary Livermore, whose article "Cooperative Womanhood in the State," in the North American Review (1891), postulated a new period of progress and harmony in which women and men would adopt more nurturing, harmonious, and rational or scientific solutions in both the public and private spheres. So extensive was the acceptance of the need for social planning among leaders in the progressive women's political culture that the major antisuffrage leader in the Midwest, Caroline Fairfield Corbin, was initially sympathetic to the woman suffrage movement. Her first book, Rebecca, or A Woman's Secret, published in 1867, supported women's rights. In 1888 she had a change of heart and wrote two pamphlets addressed to Frances E. Willard, whose leadership of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had merged temperance reform with advocacy of woman suffrage and, in her agenda to reform society, introduced socialism to otherwise conservative, middle-class white married women. Willard's Christian socialism, an expression of the Social Gospel, was widely held by many women who found Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) the expression of a possible new cooperative order for society. According to Bellamy, private enterprise, shown as a wasteful system fostering inequality and poverty, would give way to the collective organization of the state in an evolutionary, nonviolent, rational process in which women were equal and involved in the leadership of society. Nationalist Clubs – advocating the transformation of American society along the lines of Bellamy's vision of a cooperative order – flourished in the 1890s with significant women's membership and leadership. In post-Haymarket Chicago, Corbin, however, associated socialism with the anarchists and Marxists whose views, she believed, were potentially violent and lured women from the home. Corbin, who founded the Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women in 1897, was a Social Darwinist who believed that the progress of society depended on the differentiated roles of men and women within the family.
MUNICIPAL HOUSEKEEPING AND MODERNIZATION Back to top
Chicago and other American cities engaged in a modernization process of great breadth and scope. Women's clubs and political organizations and coalitions forged alliances that promoted modernization.
In the area of education, women activists engaged in political activity to advance women's involvement in the administration of public schools and in support of child labor laws; women were leaders in curricular innovation that included kindergartens, household arts, vocational education for girls as well as boys, physical education, parenting education, sex education, special education for handicapped children, occupational therapy, "Americanization" classes for immigrants, vacation schools, and school gardens. Agnes Nestor was named to the federal Commission on Vocational Education that shaped the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917; the act provided the first federal aid to vocational education. Structural innovations in the field of education included visiting nurses, visiting teachers, school physicians, vocational guidance, employment bureaus, development of schools as community centers, and school libraries. And there were efforts to address physical concerns: better school buildings, sanitation in schools, and better design, decoration, furnishing as a means to aesthetic development.
In the category of public health, women's political activity included support for the federal Children's Bureau; regulation of milk supplies; pure food and drug legislation; slaughterhouse monitoring; regulation of perceived health hazards, including cigarettes; and support for housing legislation and studies of occupational health hazards. In 1892 Ada Celeste Sweet founded the Municipal Order League of Chicago and served as its first president. Sweet was dedicated to cleaning up the city and successfully lobbied for a department of street cleaning, instead of private contractors, and for municipal incineration of garbage. In 1911 Ethel Sturges Dummer financed a trip to European cities by Mary E. McDowell, who studied those cities' waste disposal procedures. Upon McDowell's return, she put together a coalition of supporters drawn from the male City Club and Citizens' Association, the University of Chicago faculty, the Chicago Woman's Club, and the new Woman's City Club. They demanded that Chicago improve its method of collecting trash and garbage and build either incinerators or reduction plants to dispose of waste. After Chicago women secured municipal suffrage in 1913, Mayor Carter Harrison appointed a City Waste Commission that included McDowell and promised money to hire sanitary engineers to devise a solution to Chicago's garbage disposal problem. The commission's recommendations were followed and open dumps were finally phased out.
Women also founded hospitals, premature infant stations, dental clinics, free dispensaries, well-baby clinics, ambulance services, tuberculosis sanitariums, open-air schools, district nurses, baby-saving conferences and expositions, school lunch programs, public baths, and public laundries.
Related to the issue of public health was the campaign against infectious diseases and the "social evils" of prostitution and venereal disease. Women supported the work of the Chicago Vice Commission (on which Ellen Henrotin served),
the scientific study of prostitution and venereal disease, laws to raise the age of consent, and laws to close houses of prostitution. Sadie American represented the National Council of Jewish Women at the International Anti-White Slavery Conference. Rejecting the sexual double standard, women monitored judicial decisions relating to prostitutes and threatened the recall of judges whom they took to be prejudiced against women. Institutions that dealt with issues of prostitution included the Immigrants' Protective League, the Juvenile Protective League, detention homes for delinquent girls, and committees on sex hygiene.
Women offered positive approaches to the prevention of juvenile delinquency and fought for legislation to regulate dance halls and motion pictures and to support public financing of recreation. They advocated the building of playgrounds, formed working girls' clubs and societies, and recreation centers for working women. They developed drama and pageant as alternative forms of recreation. Women worked in corrections and prevention as probation officers, police matrons, and policewomen. They advocated the creation of juvenile courts and reformatory institutions, and they conducted investigations of prisons and advocated prison reform.
Women social reformers also took up the issue of race relations in American society. They studied foreign cultures, surveyed the industrial and educational problems of immigrant communities, studied the conditions of African Americans in cities, and held conferences on Americanization. Institutions such as settlement houses, the Immigrants' Protective League, and – in Chicago – the Frederick Douglass Center, the Abraham Lincoln Center (where Thyra Edwards was active), the Urban League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People developed programs for assimilation and the improvement of race relations.
Women reformers pioneered in the expansion of social services. Organized women were the political force behind support for mothers' pensions. Women developed the National Consumers' League, state and national conferences for social service, Associated or United Charities, Jewish communal services, public health exhibits, and schools of social work.
Women were active in city planning. They demanded city parks and public beaches, creation of municipal art commissions, preservation of natural areas, and creation of city planning boards and metropolitan planning districts. In 1905 Helen Culver made a major donation to the City Club of Chicago to pay for the Merriam investigation of municipal government in Chicago. Civic Federation participants included Bertha Palmer, Jane Addams, and Ellen Henrotin.
The institution in Chicago that took a central role in linking all of the different elements of the progressive women's agenda was Hull-House. When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr began to think about founding a settlement in a Chicago immigrant neighborhood, they presented their plans to leaders of the Chicago Woman's Club (CWC) in meetings at the homes of CWC leaders Mary J. Hawes Wilmarth and Lydia Coonley-Ward, where they received enthusiastic support for their proposal. Jane Addams and the Hull-House women were the "daughters," literally or figuratively, of the first generation of organized womanhood that included Mary Wilmarth and Lucy Flower. While some, like Addams, personally fought the "family claim," the women of her generation who sought careers and a different, more expanded relationship with public affairs were not necessarily in opposition to their mother's generation. Addams and her generation, however, wanted to express their commitment to social justice and religious values in new ways, and this required carving out new institutions in which women could legitimate their interests and lifestyles outside traditional family arrangements. Addams and Starr wanted to have an impact on the industrial and political problems of their society; in the context of Victorian society, they had to overcome conventional boundaries and leave the traditional sphere of women's activities. Historians, including Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Horowitz, and Robyn Muncy, have shown how Hull-House became, among other things, a new space for women.
Within a short time, Hull-House became a central link between the larger movement for women's advancement in society and the new social science disciplines (political science, sociology, psychology, and anthropology). One result of this interaction was the development of new practical schools for training in social work, public health, occupational and recreational therapy, and pedagogy. Hull-House women had a significant role in creating these institutions. Addams and Starr were soon joined by Julia C. Lathrop and Florence Kelley. After 1900, Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Grace Abbott became residents. Lathrop and Kelley were, like Addams and Starr, educated women without professional jobs or affiliations. Kelley had graduated from Cornell University but had to go to Europe to pursue graduate studies; Lathrop graduated from Vassar College, then returned home and read law informally in her father's office. At Hull-House they functioned the way social policy specialists interested in gender and class issues might operate out of a university-affiliated institute, a government agency, or perhaps, a foundation or not-for-profit interest group. Hull-House provided the collective authority for innovation. Abbott, Hamilton, and Breckinridge later brought the Hull-House point of view back to the university and, as a result of the historical conditions present there, were reasonably successful in creating "institutional space" for the production of research and scholarly books noteworthy for their focus on women's issues. But they were forced to do so in separate women's departments such as household economy (home economics) rather than in the economics and political science departments where they had been awarded doctorates. Still, much of what we know about women in the labor market and women's legal disabilities as immigrants comes from the work of Abbott and Breckinridge. Hamilton developed the field of occupational medicine and industrial toxicology and was the first woman on the faculty of Harvard University. One could make the case, however, that it was Hull-House and its climate of research combined with social activism rather than the medical school community that was most influential in Hamilton's understanding of the relationship of the environment to disease. While conducting research on antibodies and on scarlet fever and other diseases, she concentrated at Hull-House on public health efforts that allied her with progressive medical and lay circles. In 1909 she studied sixteen hundred working-class families and found that high infant mortality rates correlated with high birth rates. Hamilton worked in the initial phase of the Chicago birth control movement, led by gynecologist Rachelle Yarros. These experiences provided the context for Hamilton's growing awareness of the environmental causes of disease.
Breckinridge and Abbott received their advanced degrees at the University of Chicago; the former received a Ph.D. in political science in 1901 and a J.D. degree in 1904; the latter completed her dissertation, "The Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States, 1850-1900," and received a Ph.D. with honors in 1905. Despite Breckinridge's graduation summa cum laude in both political science and law, no academic position was offered to her, while male students went to positions on college or university faculties. Her opportunity for research and teaching came first through Hull-House, where the new Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (CSCP), an early social work school (later the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago), was housed. In 1908 it moved to larger quarters adjoining the Immigrants' Protective League office, another Hull-House spin-off. This arrangement facilitated interaction as well as collaborative research between the two agencies. In 1907 Julia Lathrop, temporarily the director of research at CSCP, asked Breckinridge to take that position. Edith Abbott accepted their offer to be assistant director of research at CSCP.
Universities did not have a monopoly on social science research in the 1890s or the first two decades of the twentieth century. Hull-House, for example, was able to produce an extraordinarily successful work of scholarship in 1895 with the publication of the historic Hull-House Maps and Papers. Kathryn Kish Sklar has called the book a work of "female social science," since it was the product of the Hull-House women and reflected the new women's agenda. In it the social feminist women of Hull-House began to define an agenda for social science as well as a plan of social activism that overlapped with the Chicago Woman's Club's agenda; but they were doing something new. They were staking out a new realm for the production of knowledge in society; twenty years later, the existence of this alternative place for the development of social policy initiatives would influence the shaping of academic departments and professional schools at the University of Chicago. These women also implicitly established the value, indeed the necessity, of a relationship between the realms of knowledge and of politics and practical activity. Five of the ten articles in the Hull-House book focused on. what might be called female-specific issues: sweatshop labor; Cook-County charities; child labor; labor organizations for working women; a description of the work of Hull-House residents. The maps themselves were based on data collected by agents employed by the U.S. Department of Labor under the direction of Florence Kelley.
The fact that this work emanated from Hull-House gave it independence from the male-dominated departments at the University of Chicago and allowed for a focus on women and children. Residents of the Hull-House settlement believed that research was done to serve those in need and to heal social problems. The opposite, pure research removed from any social content, would not have been valorized by Addams and the other
residents, who commented negatively on those who did not have "the settlement spirit" and worked individualistically or for personal gain.
Hull-House was a place for women who remained marginalized in the university environment. But the settlement was not the full extent of the connection university women maintained with organized womanhood and the woman's movement. Women were better educated by the late nineteenth century, but they remained underemployed. The discrimination against women physicians, lawyers, and Ph.D. holders and their virtual exclusion from employment in male-controlled institutions meant that college graduates and professionals continued to participate in the agencies of organized womanhood, such as the Chicago Woman's Club, and to be involved in the politics of the woman's movement. Activist members of the Chicago Woman's Club's ranged from birth control advocate and physician Rachelle Yarros to the first woman elected judge in Cook County, Mary Bartelme. She became president of the Chicago Suffrage Club in 1907, nine years after her appointment as public guardian of Cook County. Julia Lathrop retained her membership in separate woman's organizations before and after she was appointed the first director of the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1912, and she was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters. Jane Addams and other prominent settlement leaders were active, and university-attached women such as Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott retained memberships in the separate woman's movement organizations long after they became professors at the University of Chicago.
Hull-House continued to support the research its women residents undertook; it also grew institutionally as an outcome of the implementation of social policy derived from the research. The Immigrants' Protective League and the Juvenile Protective Association were special interest agencies designed to deliver services. They were also part of the system of investigation, policy formation, and advocacy that characterized Hull-House enterprises. National legislation on immigration policy (the Cable Act) was influenced by the Immigrants' Protective League, and the Juvenile Protective Association spoke authoritatively on juvenile delinquency and its prevention.
Hull-House's encouragement of research into new areas led to the growth of the physical campus. The first building in the early years was adequate for readings in literature and the establishment of clubs; but soon the opening of a kindergarten and interest in art, theater, and music all required new space. The original Hull mansion was joined by a series of buildings that made up a complex of educational and philanthropic enterprises. When Addams and Starr moved in, they occupied only the second floor of the old building and had the use of the drawing room on the first floor. By spring they were able to lease the entire house. In 1891, they erected the Butler Art Gallery on adjacent property to the south. The building was a two-story structure that housed a branch of the public library and the art gallery and had space for clubs and classes. In 1892, the donation of dilapidated buildings – owned by businessman turned progressive reformer William Kent – in the immediate vicinity of Hull-House, made it possible to demolish the structures and construct the first public playground in Chicago, which was opened on May 1, 1892. In 1893 a second building was constructed with
a coffee house below and a gymnasium above. A third story was added to the Butler Art Gallery building in 1896 to provide rooms for men in residence; in 1898 a special building was erected for the Jane Club, a cooperative residence for working girls. A new coffeehouse, with a theater above it, was built in 1899, while the old coffeehouse and gymnasium were moved and remodeled. The next year the Hull-House Labor Museum was established. In 1908 the last of thirteen Hull-House buildings opened. Included in this complex were the offices of the Immigrants' Protective League and the Juvenile Protective Association; these "institutions" reflected the degree to which Hull-House initiated new areas of social enterprise.
Hull-House also made a lasting contribution to the University of Chicago: in 1920, Breckinridge and Abbott, who were convinced that a university was the proper place for a professional social work school, negotiated to move their school to the University of Chicago. I |
