At
the end of the 19th century a group of social reformers involved in
the Hull House settlement in Chicago,
began to call for a federal agency to help protect children living
in poverty. Women involved in this campaign included Jane
Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Julia
Lathrop, Lillian Wald, Alzina
Stevens, Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Florence Kelley, Mary
McDowell, Alice Hamilton and Sophonisba
Breckinridge.
In 1912 President William Taft created the
Children's Bureau to "investigate and report upon all matters
pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes
of our people." Taft appointed Julia
Lathrop, a member of the Hull House
settlement, as the chief of the bureau. Over the next nine years Lathrop
directed research into child labour, infant
mortality, mother mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers' pensions
and illegitimacy.
When Julia Lathrop resigned in 1921
she was replaced by Grace Abbott, another
member of the Hull House settlement.
However, her work was handicapped by the Sheppard-Towner
Act being declared unconstitutional in 1922.
In 1934 Grace Abbott helped Franklin
D. Roosevelt draft the Social Security
Act (1935). This legislation authorized the Children's Bureau
to supervise child health and welfare. The bureau was granted an annual
sum of $1,500,000 to aid state public welfare agencies to help them
develop adequate methods of community child welfare organization.
(1)
Thomas Bayard of Delaware, speech in Congress (1926)
It is of the utmost significance
that practically all the radicalism started among women in the United
States centers about Hull House, Chicago, and the Children's Bureau
at Washington, with a dynasty of Hull House graduates in charge of
it since its creation.
It has been shown that both the legislative program and the economic
program - "social-welfare" legislation and "bread and
peace" propaganda for internationalism of the food, farms, and
raw materials of the world for their chief expression in persons,
organizations, and bureaus connected with Hull House.
And Hull House has been able to cover its tracks quite effectively
under the nationally advertised reputation of Miss Jane Addams as
a social worker - who has often been painted by magazine and newspaper
writers as a sort of modern Saint of the Slums - that both she and
Hull House can campaign for the most radical movements, with hardly
a breath of public suspicion.
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