Womens Rights Essay, Research Paper

Women and the Fight for Reform

Women in the late 19th century, except in the few western

states where they could vote, were denied much of a role in the

governing process. Nonetheless, educated the middle-class women

saw themselves as a morally uplifting force and went on to be

reformers.

Jane Addams opened the social settlement of Hull House in

1889. It offered an array of services to help the poor deal with

slum housing, disease, crowding, jobless, infant mortality, and

environmental hazards. For women who held jobs, Hull House ran a

day-car center and a boardinghouse. Addams was only one of many

early reformers to take up social work. Jane Porter Barrett, an

African American, founded the Locust Street Social Settlement in

Hampton, Virginia, in 1890. Her settlement offered black women

vital instruction in child care and in skills of a being a

homemaker.

Lillian Wald, a daughter of Jewish immigrants from New

York City, began a visiting- nurse service to reach those too

poor to pay for doctors and hospitals. Her Henry Street

Settlement offered a host of vital services for immigrants and

the poor. Wald suggested the formation of a Federal Children’s

Bureau.

By the end of the 19th century, many women reformers

focused on the need for state laws to restrict child labor.

Young children from poor families had to work late hours in mines

and mills and were exploited by plant managers. No state laws

prevented the children from being overworked or abused.

One of the first to challenge the exploitation of

orphaned or dependent children was Sophie Loeb, a Jewish

immigrant from Russia Once her father was deceased, she watched

the desperation of her mother as the family slipped into poverty.

As a journalist, Loeb campaigned for window’s pensions when this

was still a new idea.

Helen Stuart Campbell, born in 1839 in New York, began

her public career as an author of children’s books. Then she

used novels to expose slim life’s damaging effect on women. In

1859 she wrote a novel about two women who break from their

dependence on men and chart new lives. Campbell also wrote how

easy it was fir women’s lives to be ruined by poverty and

despair. Some women went beyond advocating reform to promoting

revolution.

There are many other famous women who helped lead the

fight to reform. Like Florence Kelley. In 1891 Kelley worked

with Addams at Hull House and became an investigator for the

Illinois Bureau of Labor, and then was appointed the U.S.

Commissioner of Labor. In 1891 Kelley returned to New York City

and worked with Wald’s Henry Street Settlement and helped

create the U.S. Children’s Bureau. In 1921 secured passage of

the Infant and Maternity Protection Act.

More than anyone else, Ida B. Wells exposed lynchings as

a crime against humanity. er 40 years of unrelenting effort

failed to stop the crime and did not produce a federal anti

lynching law. However, lynchings decreased by 80 percent after

her campaign began, and her documented evidence on the crime of

lynching and her commitment to justice roused the world’s

conscience. By the time Wells died in 1931, other women and men

had picked up her touch.Bibliography

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