Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [933]
Soon enough, however, they were providing more vital services, no one more so than Lillian Wald, who in 1893 convinced Sophia Loeb and Jacob Schiff to underwrite a visiting nurse service. Wald, raised in a comfortable bourgeois Rochester family, came to study at New York Hospital’s School of Nursing in 1889. After graduating in 1891 she worked for a year at an orphan asylum, enrolled for a time in Elizabeth Blackwell’s Women’s Medical College, then taught a course in home nursing at an East Side program run by Mrs. Loeb.
Stunned by the suffering and poverty, Wald decided to move there permanently. Charles Stover of the University Settlement guided Wald around the neighborhood; she joined a Social Reform Club discussion group that included Felix Adler; she stayed for a time at the College Settlement on Rivington Street; then she won Schiff’s backing for establishing the visiting nurse service with Mary Brewster, a friend from nursing school, out of a fifth-floor apartment on Jefferson Street. Called the Nurses’ Settlement, it would be renamed the Henry Street Settlement when it relocated in 1895.
Wald and Brewster were by no means the first women to offer medical services to poor communities. Catholic nuns had long been in the field, and in the years after Father McGlynn founded the Anti-Poverty Society in 1887—an organization that merged Christian morality with secular reform in much the way Protestant social gospelers did—the number of hospitals under Catholic auspices steadily increased. (Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini’s Columbus Hospital for Italian immigrants opened in 1892.) What the Nurses’ Settlement offered was nonsectarian care—Wald originated the term “public health nurse”—and the women provided it in patients’ homes, a service for which they charged next to nothing, or nothing at all. Wald and Brewster were pioneers, as well, in searching out tuberculosis victims, supplying them with sputum cups and disinfectant, and teaching them how to protect others from infection.
Daily life in the slums nudged Wald—and most other settlement workers—toward an ever more sympathetic and sophisticated understanding of the roots of poverty. Like social gospelers generally, they began to jettison moralistic explanations of poverty in favor of sociological ones. They shed as well the nativism and maternalism/paternalism that had characterized previous generations of genteel reformers. Increasingly, they got caught up in workplace and trade union struggles. In time, settlement workers would take the lead in campaigns for sanitation, industrial regulation, public education, better housing, parks and playgrounds, gyms and camps, and women’s rights. From being missionaries to the poor they became advocates for the poor.
THE WHITE LIST
The changing character of genteel reform in New York—its new willingness to see poverty as a social rather than individual problem and its preference for engaged activism over pious exhortation—was registered with unusual clarity in the metamorphosis of Josephine Shaw Lowell. From being a chilling anticharity crusader in the 1860s and 1870s, she blossomed in the 1880s and 1890s into a warm advocate of social reform.
What appears to have started her down the road from Auntie Scrooge to militant activist was eloquent denunciations of her Charity Organization Society issuing from the social gospel ranks, notably from the Rev. Dr. B. F. DeCosta, Episcopal minister of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, a founder of CALL, and a close friend of Father Huntington. COS, said DeCosta in 1884, was “the meanest humbug in the city of New York” and was engaged in a “heartless oppression of the unfortunate.” “While the rich are allowed systematically to rob the poor,” he charged, “we have a Society carried on at a large cost to prevent the poor from robbing the rich.” COS closed