By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Lillian Wald had a strong, magnetic personality and an unwavering vision. Yet unlike many leaders of communal living arrangements, she did not expect subservience from those who lived with her at Henry Street. Wald also made sure to keep the influence of the Settlement’s benefactors to a minimum. There was “no outside management, no committee of ladies, no board of directors.” To the contrary, in its early years the Henry Street Settlement was “entirely elastic and uncrystallized.”
Because of its lack of hierarchy, the Settlement attracted many formidable and independent progressive women who found it an exciting and congenial environment—as well as a supportive place to pursue their work. Its preponderance of powerful women distinguished the Henry Street Settlement (HSS) from many similar ventures, contributing to its popularity and effectiveness. As a student of settlements later observed,
There is no more pitiful figure in social service work than a strong personality surrounded by mediocrities. I attribute much of the success that has attended the work of Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement to her ability to attract and keep with her strong personalities capable of leadership each in his own specialty.
The group of “strong” women who would become long-term residents formed the foundation of the Henry Street Settlement—and the core of Lillian Wald’s lifelong “Family.” Family members included outstanding leaders of the nursing profession—Harriet Knight, Ysabella Waters, Annie Goodrich, and Lavinia Dock. Some members of the Family had distinguished careers as reformers but they were not nurses. Elizabeth Farrell created and implemented the first Special Education program in New York City schools, while Florence Kelley, head of the National Consumers League, was a prominent advocate against child labor and for workers’ rights.
Although Wald and the HSS had the backing of Jacob Schiff and others in his circle, the financial arrangements at Settlement were fairly unstructured, and the group relied on no one person or organization for its funding. Some of the nurse residents were paid by “different persons who are interested and want to help,” while others were subsidized by organizations such as the New York Society for Ethical Culture and “the Directors of the Presbyterian Hospital and the Nurses’ Alumnae Association of the training school.” Still others “frequently offer their services for a month or two, or come there and pay their board to get an insight into the work.” No matter where the money originated, the Settlement’s residents shared “alike in the expenses of living, no fixed allowance or stated sum being attempted.”
While most came to the Settlement to pursue public health nursing or other reform activities, not all residents engaged in professional work. The House had one family member who
undertakes the housekeeping, sees the people who come on all sorts of errands, and presides in the little dispensary where appliances of all kinds are kept on hand for emergencies, and where supplies of clothing and conveniences for the sick are stored, to be carried out and used or loaned by the nurses.
Wald’s biographer Doris Daniels stated that “Henry Street provided an intense community life like that of an exclusive sorority. The women worked hard and then took time to play.” Settlement members lived together, ate her meals together, and worked together on reform causes. They entertained each other nights and weekends. Some even vacationed together. In short, as Wald elaborated, “We have had a continuity of family life, developing a fellowship rich beyond description or appraisal.”
Wald later wrote with pride of everyday life at the Settlement and the relationships that flourished among the group of people who came together to form her intentional Family. “Newcomers to a settlement are often surprised,” she declared, by
the natural simplicity of the household; the happy relations that grow out of this kind of living together. At Henry Street, our experience has been rich in the fellowship that is inevitable in a united company.
The Henry Street Settlement’s emphasis on “family life” served as a deliberate counter to the sterility and inflexibility that often characterized large group living situations. To Family member Lavinia Dock, the Settlement’s intentional community of women was in fact the polar opposite of institutional—“One would not say that every trace of institutionalism had been banished, because it never dreamed of getting anywhere near” the House in the first place. Dock described her chosen home and family to the contrary—
Simplicity, comfort, and beauty characterize this interior, within which goes on a life so full, free, and untrammeled in its cooperative independence, that it is hard to know with what to compare it. Perhaps it is most like the pleasantest type of family life—a family, to be sure, composed only of women, each one absorbed in busy interests, but in no sense a community or institution.
Yet while Dock may have characterized the Settlement as possessing “simplicity, comfort, and beauty,” it was far from a peaceful retreat. Its inhabitants were surrounded by the constant noise of the neighborhood, from the wail of “fire-engines” to the boisterous shouts of the children who populated the “playground.” The dining room may have offered vibrant and congenial conversation, yet it was often “hot, noisy,” and “confused.” Neither were the House’s living arrangements particularly commodious. Florence Kelley’s “cubicle,” a “back room at 265 Henry Street where one hears the constant roar of Grand Street and the lower East Side” had just enough room for her four pieces of mahogany furniture—a chair, a bookcase, bed and dressing table.
In spite of the noise and inconvenience, in spite of the controlled chaos, long term family members of the Henry Street Settlement lived happily together for years, sharing cramped but vibrant living quarters. They came for “indefinite periods” and ended up “never wishing to leave,” content to give up their comforts and their personal privacy in exchange for the excitement of a life of service in the midst of a warm and engaging environment. As Florence Kelley wrote to a sister resident, “If I had not spent the unhappiest years of my life in very beautiful houses and the happiest years” at Settlements, “it would be hard for me to understand how you can prefer your roost at…Henry Street to [your parents’] beautiful and charming home.”
The Henry Street Settlement’s atmosphere of vibrant chaos was enhanced by many “temporary” family members. Young nurses and recent college graduates interested in reform spent time with the permanent family before getting married or moving on to the next phase of their careers. Nursing and non-nursing students alike joined the bustling household, either working summers, or as interns, or while taking time off from their studies. Some newly graduated nurses sought field experience as public health nurses. Many labor union leaders and social activists stayed at HSS for extended visits in order to organize and learn from living among the immigrants on the Lower East Side.
Wald had mentored student nurses since the Settlement’s early days, and she began to formalize the HSS temporary nurse internship program within the first decade of the Settlement’s history. In 1900, she proposed “to offer” these formal internships to students who had completed “two years’ training within the hospital” in “certain training-schools having…the three-years’ course.” Once the hospital signed off on the arrangement, each student nurse would “have no less than two months’ training,…reporting at the Settlement at eight o’clock in the morning, and going back to the school for her dinner (evening) and bed.” Interns would spend their days working “in the tenements” under the supervision of “one of the experienced nurses of the Settlement.”
The number of resident nurses at the Henry Street Family remained relatively stable during the first decade of the Settlement’s existence. There were at least four, counting Wald, in the rooms at Jefferson Street. By 1898 nine nurses (out of eleven residents) lived at the Henry Street Settlement’s houses. This number had grown to fifteen by 1900.
Most adult women in the late nineteenth century resided in traditional families, either as wives, widowed mothers, or unmarried daughters or sisters. Indeed, it was considered somewhat scandalous for a single adult woman to live on her own without relatives—especially in a city. What Lillian Wald and her housemates at the Henry Street Settlement created was at once radical and respectable. At the Henry Street Settlement, a growing number of permanently “unattached” women would form their own “attachments.” They would find an independent, congenial and loving atmosphere in which to develop and pursue their careers. They would, in short, create a family—an intentional family composed of unrelated women.
Bibliography
Adler, Cyrus, Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., 1929, vols. I & II.
American Nurses Association, “Goodrich, Annie Warburton,” http://www.nursingworld.org/AnnieWarburtonGoodrich Current 10/24/16.
Blumberg, Dorothy Rose, Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.
Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough, The Emergence of Modern Nursing, 2d ed., London: The Macmillan Co., 1969.
Cohen, Naomi W., Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999.
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, New York, Feminist Press, 1989.
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Lillian D. Wald: The Progressive Woman and Feminism, Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, c1976. (City University of NY, Ph.D., 1977.)
Dock, Lavinia, “The Nurses’ Settlement in New York,” (from L.L. Dock, Short Papers on Nursing Subjects, New York: M. Louise Longeway, 1900.
Duffus, R.L., Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939.
Goldmark, Josephine, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley’s Life Story, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953.
Holden, Arthur C., The Settlement Idea: A Vision of Social Justice, New York: The Macmillan Co., 1922.
James, Janet Wilson, ed., A Lavinia Dock Reader, edited with a biographical introduction by Janet Wilson James, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985.
Kode, Kimberly,Elizabeth Farrell and the History of Special Education. Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children, 2002. ERIC Number: ED474364. For full text PDF get link at abstract: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED474364 For direct link to PDF: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED474364.pdf Both current 10/24/16.
Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, & Paul S. Boyer, eds., v.3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Beverly Wilson Palmer, The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Wald, Lillian D., The House on Henry Street, N:Y: Henry Holt & Co., 1915.
Wald, Lillian D., Lillian Wald Papers. New York: New York Public Library, 1983.
Wald, Lillian, “Nurses’ Settlement,”The American Journal of Nursing,Vol. 1, No. 1 (Oct., 1900), p. 39.
Wald, Lillian D., Windows on Henry Street, Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1934.
Illustrations
Dock, Lavinia
Dock, Lavinia, Photo/Portrait, public domain Link to Illustration Current 11/11/16
Ethical Culture Society
Ethical Culture Society. From Wikipedia, released into public domain by creator Link to Source Current 11/14/16
Ethical Culture Society. From NYC DORIS, Ethical Culture School, BPM (Borough President Manhattan Collection, Identifier bpm_0535-1, Subject Central Park West, Description Looking northwest from 63rd Street (Ethical Culture School), Date Feb. 4, 1931
Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
Farrell, Elizabeth
Farrell, Elizabeth, Photo/Portrait (copyright?) Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
Goodrich, Annie Warburton
Goodrich, Annie Warburton, photo, Immediate source: Link to Illustration Photo and info on source and fair use at Link to Illustration Both links current 10/1/21
Henry Street Family
Jewish Women’s Archive. “The “Henry Street Family” circa 1900.” (Viewed on November 15, 2016) Link to Illustration .
Henry Street Settlement
Henry Street Settlement, “263-267 Henry Street between Montgomery and Grand Streets in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City…” Link to Illustration Cleaner image at: Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
New York City Department of Records, 265-67 Henry Street, Collection name: DOF: Manhattan 1980s Tax Photos, 1983-1988; Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
Kelley, Florence
Kelley, Florence, Portrait, public domain Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
Kelley, Florence, 1925, Public domain Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
New York, NY—Grand Street
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. (1900). Looking down the Bowery from Grand Street, N. Y. Retrieved from Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
New York, NY–Presbyterian Hospital
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “The Presbyterian Hospital.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Link to Illustration Public domain. Current 10/1/21
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Presbyterian Hospital, 73rd St., bet. 4th and Madison Ave.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Link to Illustration
Presbyterian Hospital, Park Ave. & 70th St., New York City. ca. 1910. Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002698450/. (Accessed November 15, 2016.)
Schiff, Jacob
Schiff, Jacob, Image Title : Jacob H. Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Source : Print Collection portrait file. / S / Jacob H. Schiff. Location : Stephen A. Schwarzman Building / Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs Digital ID : 2054988
Record ID : 1959462 Digital Item Published : 9-2-2011; updated 1-24-2012 NYPL Image: Link to Illustration Current 10/1/21
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2021