“WHY DON’T YOU LIVE WITH THOSE GIRLS?”–THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Lillian Wald left her medical studies and asked Mary Brewster, “a comrade from the [nurse’s] training-school,” to “share” in her new “venture.” The two women decided to move to New York’s Lower East Side, “live in the neighborhood as nurses, identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, contribute to it our citizenship.”
Although she was a pioneer, Lillian Wald’s ideas were not new, nor were they unique. Settlement houses–where reformers set up homes in slums in order to live and work among the poor–had begun to appear almost a decade before Wald began her experiment. A group of university-educated men started the first one–Toynbee Hall in London, England–in 1884. Americans, eager to transport the idea to the United States, soon followed suit. Stanton Coitbegan the Neighborhood Guild (later University Settlement) on the Lower East Side of New York in 1886. Jane Addams started Hull House in Chicago in 1889, and Jane Robbins and others founded the College Settlement near the University Settlement that same year.
Wald’s idea to provide skilled nursing services to the poor in their homes was also not new. Starting in 1859, trained nurses in England had been visiting and caring for the sick poor through a system called district nursing. By 1890, over twenty organizations in the United States employed at least one trained nurse each for this purpose. The Women’s Branch of the New York City Mission, one of the earliest, had sent a Bellevue-trained nurse to care for the sick poor starting in 1877. The Society for Ethical Culture, also in New York City, also began hiring a nurse for this work. In Wald’s home town, the Rochester (NY) Homeopathic Hospital employed a nurse to visit the sick poor in their homes starting in 1891.
But Lillian Wald’s venture was different in at least one way. Before she started her work, no settlement house focused on nursing services, and district nursing, in turn, was not usually provided through settlements. It would be Wald’s unique contribution to start the first settlement house that specialized in providing nursing care to the poor.
To find the money to fund her plan, Wald called upon Mrs. Solomon Loeb, a wealthy philanthropist who had helped pay for the nursing lessons Wald had recently given to Lower East Side residents. Mrs. Loeb would always remember the evening when Wald visited, “‘red-cheeked and excited, almost too excited to talk, impetuously begging [me]…to aid in helping those poor, sick neighbors and all there were like them.'” After Lillian left, Mrs. Loeb exclaimed to her daughter, Nina Loeb (later Warburg), “‘I have had a wonderful experience! ….I have talked to a young woman who’s either crazy or a great genius.'”
Mrs. Loeb told her daughter that she preferred to believe that Wald “‘is a genius, so I am going to ask your [U]ncle Jacob [Schiff] to help me give this young woman her chance.'” She set up a meeting to introduce the enthusiastic young nurse to Schiff, a wealthy banker married to her stepdaughter. After the meeting, Mrs. Loeb and Mr. Schiff agreed to help Lillian Wald realize her dream.
Once Wald had secured financial backing, she sought help from another, unnamed, acquaintance–a “young woman who for years played an important part in the life of many East Side people.” Through this woman she gained an introduction to “two men who…knew all about the quarter of the city” that she “wished to enter.” The two men–Charles Stover and Edward King–had helped to start the Neighborhood Guild (University Settlement) in 1886. Charles Stover was a trained Presbyterian minister. Edward King, a type founder from Scotland, was a labor union activist and leader of the Comte Synthetic Society, a self-education group for workers. He taught classes in Greek and Roman history to workers on the Lower East Side.
Wald, with Brewster, called on King and Stover “immediately” to help them find a place to live on the Lower East Side. “Without stopping to inquire into my…motives,” she later recalled with appreciation, “…they set out with me at once, in a pouring rain, to scour the streets for ‘To Let’ signs.” The four spent a long and fruitless day hunting for rooms, a search made more difficult in part because Wald “clung to the civilization of [having] a bathroom….” This was an extremely rare luxury–most of the neighborhood’s older tenements had outdoor “privies,” and while some of its newer buildings had inside toilets, all of the residents who lived on a floor share them and they were usually filthy.
After looking for hours, the four were beginning to get discouraged when Charles Stover came up with an idea. “Why don’t you live with those girls at 95 Rivington Street?” he asked. He was referring to the College Settlement, founded a couple years earlier by a group of idealistic, well-educated young women.
Wald and Brewster followed up on his suggestion. Within a matter of days, they “found” themselves “guests at the luncheon table of the College Settlement on Rivington Street.” The Settlement was housed in “a beautiful old dwelling with heavy mahogany doors separating the two large rooms on the main floor.” The “front room of the house” contained “a library and assembly room.” The “residents’ dining room,” located in the back, “was used for clubs, or, together with the front room, for dancing, parties and meetings of all sorts.” The Settlement also possessed “a spacious back yard.”
Wald and Brewster’s hosts at the College Settlement luncheon were “serious women” who provided “stimulating comradeship.” Shortly after the meeting, the young nurses made their decision. They would move to Rivington Street.
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Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2014