Edith Elmer Wood
Edith Elmer Wood was a prominent housing reformer and writer born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1872. The daughter of a naval officer and a suffragist, she was educated at Smith College, where she excelled in literature. Despite facing societal expectations, Wood pursued a career in housing reform, particularly after her husband's naval service in Puerto Rico highlighted the severe housing issues faced by residents. Her advocacy included drafting a new housing code for San Juan and later writing influential works, such as *The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner*, which pushed for national policies to support low-cost housing.
Wood played a significant role in the early 20th-century housing reform movement in the United States, collaborating with notable figures like Ellen Wilson, the wife of President Woodrow Wilson. She contributed to the establishment of the National Conference on Public Housing and was instrumental in the passage of the first peacetime housing legislation in the U.S., which laid the groundwork for future public housing initiatives. Throughout her career, Wood remained dedicated to advocating for improved housing standards and continued her efforts even after suffering a disabling illness. She passed away in 1945 and is remembered for her lasting impact on housing policies and public welfare.
Subject Terms
Edith Elmer Wood
- Edith Wood
- Born: September 24, 1871
- Died: April 29, 1945
Housing reformer, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the elder of the two children and only daughter of Horace Elmer, a naval officer, and Adele (Wiley) Elmer, an active suffragist. Her parents came from English colonial families and were both born in New Jersey.
As her father’s career necessitated frequent moves, Edith Elmer was tutored privately until she entered Smith College, where she studied literature and earned a Phi Beta Kappa key in three years. Following her graduation at the age of nineteen, she began to write fiction. Her entry in the 1903 volume of Who’s Who in America cited as her more notable works Her Provincial Cousin (1893), Shoulder Straps and Sun-Bonnets (1901), and Spirit of the Service (1903). Despite deep family opposition, she became a nonresident worker at the University Settlement in New York City. As with many women of her era, however, her public career was cut short by marriage. In 1894 she married Albert Norton Wood, a naval officer, with whom she had four children: Horace Elmer (born in 1895; died in infancy), Charles Thurston Elmer (born in 1897), Horace Elmer II (born in 1900), and Albert Elmer (born in 1910).
Wood’s career in housing began in 1906 in Puerto Rico, where her husband was stationed. After conducting an island-wide antituberculosis campaign, she concluded that eradication of the disease required the elimination of the dark, unventilated houses in which many Puerto Ricans lived. As part of this effort, she wrote a new housing code for San Juan.
When her husband retired in 1909, Wood returned with her family to the United States, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C. She was drawn into the capital’s housing-reform movement, whose participants included Ellen Wilson, wife of President Woodrow Wilson. Dismayed by the results of such contemporary solutions to housing problems as housing-code enforcement and slum clearance, which in her view worsened the problem by constricting the supply of lowcost units, Wood decided to stop writing fiction and to become a professional “houser.”
This decision, made in 1914, necessitated a family move to New York City so that Wood could go back to school. Five years later, having completed a graduate course at the New York School of Philanthropy and a doctorate in political economy at Columbia University, she published her dissertation, The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner (1919). Noted for its advocacy of a national policy to facilitate the construction of low-cost housing, this study became a classic in modern housing-reform literature.
For the next twenty-five years Wood worked as a writer, lobbyist, and government consultant. For twelve years, beginning in 1917, she chaired the national housing committee of the American Association of University Women. She published three more major books—Housing Progress in Western Europe (1923), Recent Trends in American Housing (1931), and Slums and Blighted Areas in the United States (1936)—as well as numerous articles, including “The Statistics of Room Congestion.” These works laid the philosophical foundation of New Deal housing policy and established criteria for judging housing standards.
Of equal importance was her participation in the founding and lobbying activities of the National Conference on Public Housing and the National Association of Housing Officials; her work led to the passage of the first peacetime housing legislation at the national level (it was included in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1932) and later to the permanent public-housing program established by the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937, which provided low-cost federal loans to municipalities to build approved projects for poor families. In her ten-year tenure as a consultant to the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration and its successor, the U.S. Housing Agency, she helped shape the drafting of laws according to her earlier recommendations. All these activities contributed to the period’s characteristic definition of early public-housing architecture as low-density, low-lot-coverage, multifamily units.
Wood remained active in housing into her seventies. In 1943 she suffered a disabling heart attack. Although bedridden, she wrote housing articles and advised government officials on war housing until ill health forced her complete retirement. She died at seventy-three of a cerebral hemorrhage in Greystone Park, New Jersey, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Aside from her major housing studies, Wood wrote extensively for the Survey, the Survey Graphic, the Architectural Record, and the American City Magazine. Her earlier fictional writing appeared in the Century, Scribner’s, and Harper’s Bazaar. Wood’s papers are in Avery Library, Columbia University. A full bibliography is to be found in E. L. Birch, “Edith Elmer Wood and the Genesis of Liberal Housing Policy,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University (1976). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973) and Notable American Women (1971). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, April 30, 1945.