Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald (review)

The social crusader and anti-war activist Lillian Wald remains an undervalued figure in United States history. Her initiative in founding the Henry Street Settlement, the Visiting Nurse Service and her other pioneering reform achievements should have placed her unequivocally in the company of remarkable leaders like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley but somehow she slips off that heady crest. Periodically we are reminded of her solid accomplishments. Toward that end historian Doris Groshen Daniels has expanded our understanding of Wald by viewing her life and work in the context of feminism.

Wald had her beginnings as a community activist. The first step in her odyssey was to live among the immigrant poor on the Lower East Side and to nurse the sick in their own homes. The community became her seed bed, for visible to her eye each day were the distressing medical and economic conditions of her neighbors and from her flowed creative and practical measures to address those conditions: parks and playgrounds; clubs, classes and lectures; the public school nurse, school lunches, and uncontaminated milk stations; prenatal care for pregnant women and camps for poor children. Through her practical work in the community she put a solid foundation under the Visiting Nurse Service and the Henry Street Settlement House.

While bringing about these changes she lived in a woman’s world among nurse colleagues, settlement workers and social reformers. They saw in Wald a skilled, dedicated woman, helped stretch her capacities and gave her an intellectual understanding of the forces behind the economic misery. Nurse Lavinia Dock, community leader Josephine Shaw Lowell, reformers Jane Addams and Florence Kelley and other colleagues drew her out of the community into the public sphere and into the political ferment of the turn of the century. She was a brilliant strategist, a skill she put to work in her relentless fight for health care and child labor laws. In every public issue of the day she became a leading figure, in the women’s trade union movement, suffrage, the founding of the Children’s Bureau, and the Anti-War movement. Her voice was in the community of reformers who urged government to assume responsibility for the problems of poverty.

Daniels stretches the canvas to view Wald as a feminist whose main goal was to fight for female equality. She claims that “Wald’s belief in the need for equal rights for women was a vital ingredient of her thinking and a part of her belief in social reform” (p. 2).

It is not clear that Wald was motivated by the intellectual concept of feminism in her early years. Feminism was perhaps implicit in her compelling impulse to become a nurse and lead an independent life and in her founding of a nurses residence where women lived and worked together. Her early feminism was intrinsic to the reform fabric of the times, when women, agents for change, tried to improve living conditions for women and children in the home and in the workplace. Daniels says, for example, that “throughout her (Wald’s) battle for children’s rights, Wald believed she was working within the women’s movement.” Wald has not left us with any analytical writings of her work; and Daniels’s book lacks a clear assessment of what it meant to be a feminist in the Progressive Era. Though she points out that Wald was sensitive to the conditions of women we do not know how Wald’s thinking fit into the often conflicting aspects of the women’s movement at the time. The book dealing topically rather than chronologically with Wald’s life also does not permit a sequential approach to the subject. There is no portrait of Wald’s growth and development into a conscious feminist but rather segments of it in her fight for social reforms.

Nor does Daniels come to grips with the views of today’s feminists who are raising questions about the Reform Era...