The more thoughtful women interested in housing reform soon came to realize that mere sentimental talk about housing evils is futile, and that effective improvements must be based on actually known conditions, their causes and effects.

Surveys have therefore taken precedence generally of propaganda for legislation or enforcement of laws; and many of the very best of the housing surveys in the country have been made by women. Here again it is because of the greater readiness of women to admit women into the secrets of the home that investigations carried on by them are apt to be more successful. Women can best understand women’s and children’s needs in the way of shelter, for one thing, and how far the labor of one woman can accomplish housekeeping results. Theirs having been the tasks of doing the family wash, guarding the babies at sleep and at play, cooking and serving meals, removing dust and rubbish, they are in a better position than men to know what conveniences facilitate that work and what deprivations retard or prevent its accomplishment. No clearer proof of that fact is needed than the response and testimony which poured into the Bureau of Agriculture in reply to its query as to how it could best serve women on the farms. These farmers’ wives cried with pitiable appeal just for running water. Many instances were given of excellent shelter and water provision for pigs and cattle while the wife and babies were deprived of the commonest decencies.

The following is a partial list of housing surveys made by women within the past five years:^[31]

Mount Vernon. 1913. Report of Housing Investigation by Miss Udetta D. Brown.

Pittsburgh. 1909. The Housing Situation in Pittsburgh, by F. Elisabeth Crowell, Charities and the Commons, February 6.

Sacramento. 1913. Report of Investigation of Housing Conditions, by Miss Caroline Schleef. Under direction Chamber of Commerce.

Newburgh. 1913. Report of Housing Investigation made by Miss Amy Woods of the Newburgh Associated Charities for the Social Survey, conducted by the Russell Sage Foundation. She pointed out opportunities for a better housing code and will have much to do with the follow-up work.

1913. Housing Investigation by Miss Helen Safford Knowles, supplementing Report of Carol Aronovici, on the Housing Conditions of the Welcome Hall District.

Cambridge. 1913. Report of Investigation by Miss Flora Burton in First Report of Cambridge Housing Association.

Chicago. 1912. Tenement Housing Conditions in Twentieth Ward, Chicago. Report of Civics Committee of Chicago Woman’s Club.

1912. The Problem of the Negro. Report of Investigation by Alzada P. Comstock, for Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy.

1912. Two Italian Districts, by G. P. Norton, ed. by S. P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. American Journal of Sociology. Consists of seven articles on housing among the different races in Chicago.

Grand Rapids. 1913. Housing Conditions and Tendencies in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Report of Housing Investigations by Miss Udetta D. Brown. Under the supervision of the Charity Organization Society.

Portland, Oregon. A housing survey made by the Consumers’ League which then drew up a housing ordinance to eliminate slums and presented it for the consideration of the city council. Club women and welfare organizations supported it.

Bridgeport, Connecticut. Survey of housing made for Housing Association by Miss Udetta C. Brown.

Elmira, New York. 1913. Esther Denton made report on housing conditions which aroused citizens.

Hartford, Connecticut. 1912. Through investigation of housing conditions by Mary S. Heilman made for the Civic Club, whose president is Dorothy B. Hillyer, Hartford was aroused and instances of deplorable conditions of affairs were laid before the Board of Health.

California Cities. In 1911 housing conditions were studied and reported on by Mrs. Johanna von Wagner, an expert of the Los Angeles Housing Commission. Her report and influence helped to secure the enactment of the state tenement house law.

In 1908 Charlotte Rumbold prepared for the Housing Committee of the Civic League of St. Louis a report on tenement house conditions so vividly written and illustrated that not only St. Louis but many other localities were stirred and eventually framed reform legislation. It took five years, however, to win a tenement house law in St. Louis.

In 1904 Miss Emily Dinwiddie made an investigation of three typical sections of Philadelphia to pave the way for housing legislation, especially for the enforcement of legislation through adequate inspection. It was years before the legislation sought by Miss Dinwiddie and her colleagues was secured, but in 1911 a state provision was finally obtained. At the present time Miss Dinwiddie is in charge of the Trinity property, of New York City, which was formerly accused of being managed solely for profits. She is proving that rookeries can be turned into homes and made to pay.

Alice S. Griffith, secretary of the San Francisco Housing Association, emphasizes the need of more housing inspections. “How Social Workers Can Aid Housing Reform,” by Mary E. Richmond, indicates their value as inspectors.

The Women’s Municipal League of Boston took for study the Board of Health’s record of 1,500 basements occupied for living purposes and came to the decided opinion that basements at best are unfit for human habitation. The League then petitioned the Legislature to make a law governing basements erected subsequent to the passage of the acts of 1907, retroactive.

The housing work done by this League has been under the able leadership of Miss Amelia Ames. The Committee of the League has been enlarged to include representatives of the Massachusetts Civic League, the Roxbury Welfare League, the Roxbury Charitable Association, South End House, Elizabeth Peabody House, Associated Charities, the Homestead Commission, and the Chamber of Commerce.

The first work of the original Municipal League Committee, as of its enlarged group, was an investigation carried on largely by trained women inspectors. The coÖperation of the settlements and other organizations helped materially in this survey, as it enabled a district examination to be made, and placed the worst conditions in each district as a definite responsibility on some neighborhood organization, like a settlement, which could be charged with the duty of securing the district improvement. None of this work was haphazard. Only trained investigators were sought and employed. Miss Theodora Bailey, for example, made over 400 inspections and carefully tabulated over 200. She was able to interest legislators and reporters in the deplorable conditions in Boston.

The Women’s Municipal League of New York has also investigated tenements and reported violations of the law to the Department affected. It helped to defeat proposed legislation which would remove all three-family houses from the surveillance of the Tenement House Department, a piece of reactionary legislation which aroused a successful protest from all women interested in social welfare, as well as from all men similarly interested.

This League also wishes to have all two-family houses and the rented room houses placed under the Tenement House Department. It made a study of the janitor’s situation and discovered that the janitors labor under such disadvantages that they are responsible for many violations of Health, Fire and Tenement Department laws. “The janitors should be decently paid and decently housed; they should be instructed briefly in the laws,” is the League’s decision.

From across the continent, we hear of women’s associations concerning themselves with housing reform. The American Club Woman reports: “Los Angeles is studying the housing problem. It expects a great influx of laboring population on the heels of the opening of the Panama Canal. The Woman’s Friday Morning Club therefore has built a model cottage for $500. The club proposes to acquire lands along the river bed and through semi-isolated sections and there erect these small houses. Gardens about the houses will help reduce the cost of living. The dream of the club is: a city without a tenement; a city spotlessly clean in every nook and corner; a city where there shall be thousands of small homes, renting at the same cost as in a court, and in which the individuals shall have sanitary comforts, the right of personal development and the privacy which tends toward morality and pride. The Los Angeles Housing Commission of which Mrs. Johanna von Wagner and other women are members, has done some interesting housing in the case of Mexicans transferred from their crude shacks to decently sanitary homes on city land.”

In Chicago, Mrs. Emmons Blaine was one of the founders of the City Homes Association which started the housing movement there and she is still one of the leaders in the Chicago work.

In the middle western states, Miss Mildred Chadsey of Cleveland, Ohio, stands out conspicuously as a housing reformer and in an official capacity. The Cleveland Bureau of Sanitation, of which she is chief, has a sergeant, twenty policemen, and an office force under her direction. Miss Chadsey up to the present has succeeded in demolishing over two hundred wretched hovels and is demonstrating that bad housing does not pay the city but is on the contrary frightfully expensive property. Some of the slogans that have developed from her work are these: “It costs less to be comfortable than it does to be uncomfortable.” “A good home is less expensive than a poor one.” “Health and cleanliness come cheap.” “Dirt and diseases are more costly than frankincense and myrrh.” This new vision for Cleveland was largely the result of a survey made by fourteen college investigators, under Miss Chadsey, who went out to ascertain facts in two sections of Cleveland—one the famous “Haymarket” district in the congested heart of the city; the other an open section on the edge of the city. The Survey published the report of that investigation.

Indiana has a splendid housing reformer in Mrs. Albion Fellows Bacon, an officer in the National Housing Association, who started a campaign for a tenement house law before that association was formed. Her book, “Beauty for Ashes,” a narrative of discovery out along the road from a sheltered woman’s threshold, reveals the forces which have drawn most of the women out into social activity and into governmental interest. No woman can read this story without being moved to see what effect bad housing has on the community and woman’s responsibility toward her fellow-creatures in this as in other civic questions. Mrs. Bacon in her observations out from her own threshold has been forced to see that the war on bad homes is a war on poverty and its manifold products, vice and disease among others. She well illustrates the logic and the fearlessness with which even the most sheltered women often face facts when once their human sympathy is awakened and their eyes are opened to a public question. Mrs. Bacon, almost single-handed, secured housing laws for the cities of Evansville and Indianapolis. Last year she secured a still better law than that which crowned her first campaign.

In Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the Civic Club, a woman’s organization, has been at the forefront in housing reform.

Miss Kate McKnight, of that association, initiated practically every movement of the club till her death in 1907. Mrs. Franklin P. Adams, acting president, drafted the tenement house laws governing cities of the second class in Pennsylvania. Mrs. Adams is chairman of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and of other societies. The Civic Club also got an increase in the force of tenement inspectors and the chief inspector was for some time a woman member of the club.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the Federation of Clubs passed resolutions and sent letters to the legislature urging the enactment of a housing bill. Moreover, they sent a delegation of women to the hearing before the Judiciary Committee.

In New Orleans, Miss Eleanor McMain, the head of Kingsley House, was very influential in securing the law regulating tenements in her city.

In Washington, D. C., the housing problem has been forced upon the attention of Congress which has shown gross neglect all these years in its care of the national capital’s population and especially of the negroes there. The voteless citizens of the capital and their sympathizers from outside attempted for a long time to secure remedial activity in the city of Washington whose alleys and slums were a national disgrace from the standpoint of health, morals and crime. Booklets and reports were published and organizations formed for the purpose of bringing pressure to bear upon Congress to improve housing conditions.

President Roosevelt had appointed a Homes Commission to study and report on the alley dwellings but nothing had resulted from this except possibly the conversion of Willow Tree Alley into an interior park. Women and men felt that such an apparent remedy might cause still greater evils by leaving many of the poor altogether homeless, and the agitation was pushed the harder for the creation of a system of minor streets created out of the alleys.

Last year two pamphlets of a vigorous nature were published by the Monday Evening Club and by the Women’s Welfare Department of the National Civic Federation. Public meetings were arranged by the Civic Federation and conferences of social workers in Washington were called, one of the biggest of these being held at the White House last winter—an evidence of the interest taken by the wife of President Wilson in the housing of the people in Washington.

Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, who had been aroused by visits made to the alleys under the guidance of Mrs. Archibald Hopkins and Mrs. Ernest Bicknell, piloted senators and congressmen into the bad areas to make them see and feel the need of change. As a consequence of this work, bills were introduced into both houses of Congress for some solution of the alley problem. How much progress would have been made with the bills it is difficult to know but the significant thing is that Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, in almost her last conscious breath, made an appeal for the passing of that legislation. Her husband, the President, fortunately, sent word that such was her dying wish and out of sentiment for the “first lady of the land” this much needed legislation was hurriedly passed by the Senate of the United States, the lower house promising to add its approval. Mrs. Wilson was told the good news before she died.

In a case where neither the men of the district involved nor the women were voters, apparently an affecting sentimental situation saved the day for the poor families herded in their misery in dark alleys. Certainly up until this time, congressional land speculators in Washington had turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the women and the men who sought help for the slum dwellers.

In commenting on the situation in Washington, The Survey said:

Washington has long enjoyed the reputation of being the best planned city in America, the one large city in the world which from the day of its foundation has been built more or less consistently along the lines of a carefully thought-out plan. Only recently has it been realized that from the beginning this plan has been incomplete. While it provided for great public buildings and for dwellings of the wealthy and the well-to-do, it not only failed to provide homes for wage-earners, but actually offered temptations to house these wage-earners in an unwholesome manner. The magnificent wide avenues designed by Major L’Enfant, bordered along a great part of their distance by very deep lots, led inevitably to the construction of winding, branching alleys and the erection of hidden houses which had no place in the original plan.

Modern city planning lays the emphasis less on public buildings and boulevards and more on providing sites for homes. So the original plan of Washington must be supplemented by a modern plan providing a system of minor streets to let the wholesome light of publicity into the hidden slums of Washington and to provide economic use for the backs of the overdeep lots that line the avenues. They will do away with the present temptation to keep the old shacks standing or to build houses fronting on the avenues, but extending so far back that their middle rooms are dark and airless. Halfway measures at this time may wipe out the alley slums of the Capital only to give in place of them a far more difficult problem, the deep, unlighted and unventilated multiple dwelling.

In the South, as well as the North, women are at work on the housing question. At the 1912 convention of the National Municipal League, in Richmond, Virginia, it was manifest to the northern delegates that the South and its women are awaking rapidly to the housing needs. Miss Elizabeth Cocke in a talk on housing and morals in Richmond said:

Our local conditions in Richmond have, as yet, nothing which approaches the tenement. There are a few old houses occupied by, possibly, some half-dozen families to the house, but though these show very bad conditions in room overcrowding, there are no conditions of lack of light and air, if the windows are opened to admit ventilation. In one instance I have found a bedroom, occupied presumably by seven people, in which there is no window at all; one door opening upon another room with two windows, and a second door upon the entry on the upper landing.

Among the comparatively small foreign population there is a very great deal of room overcrowding, but the most extensive of these conditions exist among the negroes. These appear to be the most squalid and least progressive, but this I believe to be largely due to the demoralizing effects of bad housing and surroundings which do not tend to any uplift.

Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like dump of rotting rags and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks, have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red-light” district? When a dry-closet blocks the one small window of the kitchen, can lack of decency be called to account? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than cleanliness and health and morality?

It is certainly a fallacy that the poor do not want good housing. In a wonderful address, given last spring at the Child Welfare Conference, in Richmond, a negro speaker said in substance: “We would use the bath tub as frequently and enjoy it as much as our white brother and sister, if we could afford to rent houses which have the bath tub in them. We do not prefer dilapidation and discomfort, nor being forced to live in districts where there is only depravity and low surroundings; but the better ones of us have too much self-respect to force ourselves on our white brothers, if they do not want us living alongside of them.”

All that Miss Cocke said was indorsed by the chairman, John Stewart Bryan, who as publisher of one of the most influential newspapers in the South, The News Leader, is in a position to know the facts. “It is an old story to any engaged in work of this sort,” he declared, “that a person situated as the negro is in Richmond pays more taxes than the richest man in Richmond, because the taxes he pays take such a large part of his income and he gets so little in return. All that Miss Cocke says is true. They are segregated in Jackson ward, and under a new ordinance they are being still further segregated. That is radically wrong, it is economically wrong, and nothing in the world can change it but an awakening of public sentiment, and it ought to be awakened and it will be.”^[32]

A study of the activities of women and women’s associations along housing reform lines shows that they are beginning to recognize the importance of good homes for our colored citizens. Professor Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, of Chicago University and the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, has given this subject special study, and it is to her that we owe the following thoughtful statement of this particular housing question, published in The Survey:

One of the many serious problems that now confront the negro not only in southern communities but also in many a northern city is the difficulty he experiences in finding decent housing accommodations for his family. In the face of increasing manifestations of race prejudice, he has come to acquiesce silently, as various civil rights are withheld from him in the old “free North,” which was once the Mecca of his race. He rarely protests, for example, at being excluded from restaurants and hotels or at being virtually refused entertainment at the theater or the opera. There are three points, however, which he cannot yield and in regard to which he should not be allowed to yield. He must claim a decent home for his family in a respectable neighborhood and at a reasonable rental, an equal chance of employment with the white man, and education for his children. We will consider here only the first of these three demands.

In a recent investigation of general housing conditions in Chicago,^[33] the problem of the negro was found to be quite different from that of immigrants. With the negro, the housing dilemma was found to be an acute problem not only among the poor, as in the case of the Polish, the Jewish, or the Italian immigrant, but also among the well-to-do. The man who is poor as well as black must face the special evil of dilapidated insanitary dwellings and the lodger evil in its worst form. But for every man who is black, whether rich or poor, there is also the problem of extortionate rents and of dangerous proximity to segregated vice. The negro is not only compelled to live in a segregated black district, but this region of negro homes is almost invariably the one in which vice is tolerated by the police. That is, the segregation of the negro quarter is only a segregation from respectable white people. The disreputable white element is forced upon him. It is probably not too much to say that no colored family can long escape the presence of disreputable or disorderly neighbors. Respectable and well-to-do negroes may by subterfuge succeed in buying property in a decent neighborhood, but they are sure to be followed soon by those disreputable elements which are allowed to exist outside the so-called “levee” district.

In no other part of Chicago, not even in the Ghetto, was there found a whole neighborhood so conspicuously dilapidated as the black belt on the South Side. No other group suffered so much from decaying buildings, leaking roofs, doors without hinges, broken windows, insanitary plumbing, rotting floors, and a general lack of repairs. In no other neighborhood were landlords so obdurate, so unwilling to make necessary improvements or to cancel leases so that tenants might seek better accommodations elsewhere. Of course, to go elsewhere was often impossible because nowhere is the prospective colored tenant or neighbor welcome. In the South Side black belt 74 per cent. of the buildings were in a state of disrepair; in a more fortunate neighborhood, partly colored, only 65 per cent. of the buildings were out of repair, but one-third were absolutely dilapidated.

Not only does the negro suffer from this extreme dilapidation, but he pays a heavy cost in the form of high rent. A careful house to house canvass showed that in the most rundown colored neighborhoods in the city, the rent for an ordinary four-room apartment was much higher than in any other section of the city. In crowded immigrant neighborhoods in different parts of the city, the median rental for the prevailing four-room apartment was between $8 and $8.50; in South Chicago near the steel mills it was between $9 and $9.50; and in the Jewish quarter, between $10 and $10.50 was charged. But in the great black belt of the South Side the sum exacted was between $12 and $12.50. That is, while half of the people in the Bohemian, Polish, and Lithuanian districts were paying less than $8.50, for their four-room apartments; the steel-mill employees less than $9.50, and the Jews in the Ghetto less than $10.50, the negro, in the midst of extreme dilapidation and crowded into the territory adjoining the segregated vice district, pays from $12 to $12.50. This is from $2 to $4 a month more than the immigrant is paying for an apartment of the same size in a better state of repair.

It seemed worth while to collect and to present the facts relating to housing conditions in the negro districts of Chicago because one must hope that they would not be tolerated if the great mass of white people knew of their existence. Most people stand for fair play. The persecutions which the negro endures because of race prejudice undoubtedly express the feeling of but a small minority of his fellow-citizens of the white race. Their continuance must be due to the fact that the great majority are completely ignorant of the heavy burden of injustice that the negro carries. Ignorance is the bulwark of prejudice, and race prejudice is singularly dependent upon an ignorance which is, to be sure, sometimes willful but which more often is unintentional and accidental. It has come about, however, that the small minority who cherish their prejudices have had the power to make life increasingly hard for the black man. Today they not only refuse to sit in the same part of the theater with him and to let him enter a hotel which they patronize, but they also refuse to allow him to live on the same street with them or in the same neighborhood. Even in the North where the city administration does not recognize a black “ghetto” or “pale,” the real estate agents who register and commercialize what they suppose to be a universal race prejudice are able to enforce one in practice. It is out of this minority persecution that the special negro housing problem has developed.

But while it is true that the active persecution of the negro is the work of a small minority, its dangerous results are rendered possible only by the acquiescence of the great majority who want fair play. This prejudice can be made effective only because of the possible use of the city administration, and the knowledge that legal action intended to safeguard the rights of the negro is both precarious and expensive. The police department, however, and the courts of justice are, in theory at least, the agents of the majority. It comes about therefore that while the great body of people desire justice, they not only become parties to gross injustice but must be held responsible for conditions demoralizing to the negro and dangerous to the community as a whole.

Those friends of the negro who have tried to understand the conditions of life as he faces them are very familiar with these facts. But it is hoped that those who have been ignorant of the heavy costs paid in decent family life for the ancient prejudice that persists among us, will refuse to acquiesce in its continuance when the facts are brought home to them.

Among the other women interested in the housing of negro families is Mrs. John D. Hammond, the wife and coworker of the president of Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. Believing that a better housed negro can be better educated, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have worked out a system for negro housing in cities with that end in view. Their plan was recently outlined in The Survey. The Society for the Improvement of Urban Conditions among Negroes, composed of men and women, has a housing bureau in New York which seeks by lectures, by literature, by personal instruction, and by legislation, to promote better housing conditions among the negroes of the city.