Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [304]
In the later 1790s the society distributed food to indigent victims of the yellow fever, and after 1800 its charitable horizons widened steadily. In 1802 the society opened a permanent “soup house,” near the jail on Frankfort Street, that dispensed soup to the urban poor at four cents a quart—or free, during epidemics and depressions. New Yorkers took to calling it the Humane Society (a change of name that became official in 1803). During the hard winter of 1804-5, their Frankfort Street operation, and a second “soup house” they opened on Division Street, distributed eighty-four hundred gallons of soup to residents of the city’s poorest wards. The group also dispensed soup tickets for handing out to street beggars in place of money and provisions, lest the poor convert such offerings into liquor.
The city’s doctors had meanwhile taken steps to provide impoverished residents with medical care. In 1791, inspired by similar projects in Europe and Philadelphia, the Medical Society opened the New York Dispensary on Beekman and Nassau streets. Supported by private donations, it treated over two thousand patients in its first five years. In 1791, too, the state provided money to reopen New York Hospital, originally founded in the 1770s but soon forced to suspend operations because of a devastating fire and the turmoil of war. Now designated “the public hospital,” it provided free treatment to the “sick poor” from immigrant ships and the city’s emerging slums. It housed the first nursing school in the United States, established in 1798 by the Quaker physician Valentine Seaman, and soon after the turn of the century it absorbed another charitable institution, the Lying-in Hospital, which had been founded in 1799 to provide care for impoverished pregnant women. In time, and at federal expense, the hospital also began to take in indigent seamen from the navy and merchant marine.
Genteel ladies too immersed themselves in philanthropic work among the poor and laboring classes. In 1797, by which time she was earning a comfortable income from her school, Isabella Graham joined forces with others, notably Elizabeth Ann Seton, wife of a successful merchant, to organize the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. Applicants for assistance were to receive only “necessaries,” never money, and only after “particular enquiry” had determined their moral fitness; no assistance would be given, either, unless younger children were sent to school and older ones placed into trades or into service with “sober virtuous families.” Efficient and resourceful, the society expanded quickly. Within two years it was supplying firewood, food, shoes, clothing, and meal tickets to 150-odd widows and some 420 children.
Mrs. Graham followed up this project with a workhouse for needy women. After a protracted campaign for municipal support, she and her followers, organized as the Society for the Promotion of Industry, founded the House of Industry and won an annual appropriation of five hundred dollars from the legislature. At one time or another over the next decade (it failed in 1820), the House of Industry employed more than five hundred women as tailors, weavers, spinners, and seamstresses.
These and other female charities enabled women (well-to-do women, at any rate) to break the male monopoly on the city’s public life and assert for the first time a separate and distinct role in municipal affairs. Although respectable to a fault and indifferent to women’s rights as such, these initiatives worried even reform-minded men. Women calling meetings, women running organizations, women