Caroline Julia Bartlett Crane

• Caroline Julia Bartlett bioxCrane
• Born: August 17, 1858
• Died: March 24, 1935

Municipal hygiene reformer and Unitarian minister, was born in Hudson, Wisconsin, the daughter of Lorenzo Dow Bartlett and Julia A. (Brown) Bartlett, of Massachusetts and Kentucky lineage, respectively. Of the four Bartlett children only Caroline Bartlett and her younger brother survived childhood. Lorenzo Bartlett engaged at various times in running a steamboat, in medical practice, and in inventing. The Bartlett family moved during Caroline Bartlett’s youth back from Hudson to Hamilton, Illinois, where it had lived prior to her birth.

In Hamilton the young woman entered Carthage College, graduating in 1879. She then began a period of groping for an appropriate calling. Under pressure from her family, she discarded plans to become a Unitarian minister— plans that had been aroused by a sermon she had heard as a teenager. After four years as a schoolteacher in Iowa, a lonely existence for half a year on a homestead claim in the Dakotas, and two and a half years as a journalist—most of this time on The Minneapolis Tribune, and six months as city editor of The Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Daily Times—she again turned to her youthful dream. In Sioux Falls, in the Dakota Territory, she became pastor of a Unitarian group striving to establish itself, and in 1889 she was ordained and installed at the Unitarian Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. At this time she supplemented her education by studying theology at the University of Chicago for several months. Her religious activities began to open up visions of social reform. In the summer of 1891 she traveled to England, where she observed the Salvation Army working in urban slums and preached in Unitarian churches. In Britain she also conferred with the Unitarian theologian James Martineau.

Returning to the United States she instituted marked changes in her Kalamazoo church. She found a practical approach to religion appealing and was familiar with the views of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who had developed such an approach at Wisconsin and Chicago. Her church adopted a creedless Bond of Union and, refashioned as the People’s Church, constructed a building designed to house a black literary organization, educational classes in manual vocations and domestic training, a kindergarten open to the public, a gymnasium, and musical activities. In 1895 the well-known agnostic Robert Ingersoll lauded her church, giving it national publicity, and the Kalamazoo school system integrated many of the activities into its programs. However preempted, she did not turn back to theology but plunged deeper into social reform, using guidelines provided by University of Chicago sociologists to investigate urban needs in Kalamazoo.

Her social convictions entered her personal life symbolically when Jenkin Lloyd Jones presided over her marriage in 1896 to Augustus Warren Crane, a prominent Kalamazoo radiologist and pioneer researcher. They had no children of their own but adopted a son and a daughter. In 1898 Caroline Crane returned from a siege of ill health to resolve differences with the church leadership. She resigned as minister; thereafter she worked for reform outside of any formal religious organization, although she retained her influence over the church.

Crane began to examine the problem of urban hygiene, a topic that was becoming a major issue for reformers. Unable to find any experts in the field, she became one herself by investigating the poor sanitary conditions in the slaughterhouses that supplied meat to Kalamazoo. On the basis of these visits, she gave a series of courses on meat preparation before the Michigan State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and in 1901 she wrote a manual and taught a course on housekeeping for the federation in Kalamzoo. She also lobbied successfully for the adoption of local meat-inspection ordinances. Under her prodding the Kalamazoo City Council adopted an ordinance for which she had drawn the model.

Crane used her photographs of grossly unsanitary street conditions in Kalamazoo to galvanize the formation of the Women’s Civic Improvement League and to persuade the city council to allow the league to begin a model project of street sanitation. As head of the project, Crane experimented successfully with a program of regular street flushing and the employment (begun earlier in New York City) of white-uniformed street sweepers.

Crane’s wide-ranging interest in reform was symbolized by her founding of the League’s Charity Organizations Board. She worked for the equitable distribution of relief funds to all the needy, instituted penny-bank deposit programs for the poor, and provided jobs in the woodyard for beggars. Through the board she also helped provide services for family counseling and visiting nurses. A consultant with a national reputation—”America’s public housekeeper”—she had, by 1917, inspected sixty-two cities in fourteen states, with a special eye to the sanitary conditions of food-supplying establishments. She was often hired to investigate the causes of epidemics. In a series of articles in Pearson’s Magazine (1913) she criticized the federal meatinspection program for failing to insure proper hygiene in the packinghouses.

An active worker for woman suffrage since 1891, and a speaker at several feminist conventions, Crane chaired the woman’s committee of the United States Council of Defense during World War I. In 1924 she won first prize, from the National Better Homes program, for a model house in Kalamazoo that she had designed.

In the Progressive tradition, Crane used new social scientific methods and data to launch a struggle for hygienic and social reform, first through religious channels and then by direct involvement with civic and political organizations. Avoiding the sensationalism of what became known as muckraking, she nevertheless helped to expose many environmental sources of poor health and to propose remedies, at the same time engaging in other reform movements against poverty and for women’s rights. Crane died in Kalamazoo at the age of seventy-six, after a paralytic stroke.

The Historical Collections of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo hold the papers of Caroline Bartlett Crane, including those dealing with her ministerial career and her reform activities. Other material, particularly reprints of her work, is at the Kalamazoo Public Library. An example of one of her out-of-state investigations is her Report on a Campaign to Awaken Public Interest in Sanitary and Sociological Problems in the State of Minnesota (1911). For biographical material see Notable American Women (1971), which also contains a bibliography. See also F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); and S. H. Adams, Survey, September 6, 1913. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, March 25, 1935.