By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
In addition to working with Shaw Lowell to obtain relief for her patients during the hard winter of 1893-94, Wald also worked to support Josephine Shaw Lowell’s philosophical push for scientific charity. Wald had come to share some, if not all, of Lowell’s beliefs as a result of her training and experience in the field.
As a visiting nurse, Wald became convinced that helping the poor on a daily basis by performing works that amounted to charity or benevolence was not enough. Indeed, she disliked the very idea of traditional charity, thinking it was humiliating and demeaning to those who received it. Instead, as she worked among the poor she came to believe that all human beings deserved a decent standard of living, a better quality of life, and an equal chance to raise themselves up. She wanted no less than to eliminate the injustice and misery caused by a life at the bottom of society. She wanted to change what it meant to be poor.
One way that Wald could do this was by making sure that the money and services provided to the poor were available on a regular and ongoing basis. This could be done by establishing stable, permanent agencies staffed by professionals in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. These institutions would allow society to provide help in a non-condescending way, allowing the poor to maintain their pride and human dignity. If Lillian Wald and her fellow reformers could implement their vision, the poor would no longer have to beg and face humiliation in order to have access to resources that would allow them to survive.
Although she was a reluctant public speaker, Wald accepted speaking opportunities to publicize her (and Josephine Shaw Lowell’s) belief that society should provide permanent, professionally-staffed agencies for the poor. This topic was the subject of at least two speeches that she gave during the 1890s. Just a few months before she moved into Henry Street, she spoke at the Temple Emanu-el, then the largest synagogue structure in America, located on Fifth Avenue and East 43rd Street.
Here Wald addressed the New-York Section of the National Council of Jewish Women, a group with a total membership of 170. Her topic was “Friendly Visiting Among the Poor.” In the speech, she declared that the best way to find out what the poor needed was by having professionally-trained staff visit them in their homes, observe and collect data from these visits and then make reports using this data. She was supported by two other women at the meeting, who “spoke in favor of making the labor of charity a study and systematizing all work in the field.”
Wald described how the new type of systematized charity worked in another speech that she gave in December of 1897, this time to the Methodist Social Union, a club formed in 1887 “‘to promote social intercourse and the spirit of Christian enterprise among the members of Methodist churches and Congregations in this city.’” On the evening Wald spoke, the club met “in the rear dining room of the St. Denis Hotel, Eleventh Street and Broadway.” There, she and three other speakers addressed the topic “Women in Many Fields: What They Have Done and Are Doing….Their Trials and Needs.” Wald used her time to give a brief history and description of settlement houses and the settlement movement in general and to talk specifically about her own work and that of the other women in the Nurses’ Settlement. She emphasized that she and those who staffed the settlement “had received professional training” as nurses. She also stressed the reliability and consistency of the Settlement and the fact that the service was provided without condescension: “They lived with and among the people as their neighbors, nursed them when they were sick, exchanged visits with them, and did all they could to make life brighter without in any degree assuming the attitude of dispensers of charity.”
Wald also joined with Josephine Shaw Lowell in signing written arguments supporting specific scientific charity endeavors. In February of 1899, she, Shaw and Elizabeth S. Williams of the College Settlement issued a “statement regarding the suffering caused by the severe cold and storms of February, and the efforts made to relieve it.” In the statement, they reiterated their contention that “money should be donated regularly and systematically and not held back for eleven months and poured out lavishly during the twelfth.” The three women provided vivid and dramatic examples as to why this old system of charity was not only inefficient, but also harmful. During a recent cold spell, “when it was widely advertised that vast amounts of money had been given to ‘furnish relief,’” the poor, “tempted out of their homes,” walked “long distances” and waited “in the cold for hours for an order of food or fuel,” which caused “great suffering and in not a few cases illness and death.”
Wald, Shaw and Williams maintained in the statement that “the true way to make sure that the poor people will not suffer when an emergency arises is to strengthen, by generous donations, the societies which are constantly at work trying to help them.” These societies,” they said, “should be provided with plenty of money and plenty of workers, who will learn to know the individuals and so be able to help them effectively when the emergency arises.”
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016