Grace Abbott

• Grace Abbott
• Born: November 17, 1878
• Died: June 19, 1939

Social worker and public administrator was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, the second daughter and third of four children of Othman Ali Abbott and Elizabeth (Griffin) Abbott. Her father, a lawyer and politician, was the first lieutenant governor of Nebraska; her mother, a graduate of Rockford (Illinois) Seminary was a Quaker, an abolitionist, and a woman suffragist.

After attending an Omaha boarding school, Grace Abbott was graduated from the Grand Island high school, received a Ph.D. degree from Grand Island College in 1898, and taught for seven years in the local high school. During this period she spent some time as a graduate student at both the University of Nebraska and the University of Chicago. In 1907 she moved to Chicago to study law and government at the University of Chicago, and in 1909 she took her master’s degree in political science. Her lifelong career as a social worker and political activist began in 1908 when she became a resident of Hull House and director of the newly formed Immigrants’ Protective League, a position she held until 1917.

In her efforts to remedy the abuses to which immigrants were subjected Grace Abbott employed the combination of methods typical of progressive-era reforms: scientific fact-finding with precise documentation, publication of the results in professional journals and the popular press, and lobbying for remedial and protective legislation. She wrote a series of articles deploring the exploitation of immigrants published in book form as The Immigrant and the Community (1917), successfully worked for state legislation to regulate employment agencies, and persuaded officials at Ellis Island to adopt measures to protect new arrivals against the crooks and confidence men who preyed on them. She made a four-month fact-finding tour to eastern Europe in 1911, and in 1912 spoke before a congressional committee against a proposed literacy test that would have curtailed the so-called new immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Late in 1913 she took a nine-month leave of absence to direct a Massachusetts state investigation of the exploitation of immigrants. Drawing on the seemingly boundless energy that colleagues attributed to her prairie upbringing, Grace Abbott also found time to teach a course at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, where her older sister Edith was an administrator; actively support labor in the garment-workers’ strike of 1910—11; take part in the 1912 presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt and the successful drive in 1913 for woman suffrage in Illinois; and accompany Jane Addams to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1915.

In 1917 another former Hull House friend, Julia Lathrop, head of the federal Children’s Bureau, invited Grace Abbott to join her staff to administer the child labor law enacted the previous year. When the law was declared unconstitutional in 1918 and a second child labor law met the same fate in 1922, Grace Abbott began a lifelong campaign for the adoption of a child-labor amendment to the Constitution. In 1919 she became the first director of the Illinois State Immigrants’ Commission. Two years later President Warren G. Harding appointed her to succeed Julia Lathrop as head of the Children’s Bureau, which was charged with administering the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided federal grants-in-aid to the states to develop infant and maternal health-care programs. Over 3,000 health clinics were opened in the forty-five states that voted to accept the federal grants. Health-care methods previously tested in large cities were adapted to rural conditions, and a pattern of federal-state cooperation was established that anticipated many of the welfare measures of the New Deal. Throughout the 1920s the Sheppard-Towner Act was under constant fire from critics who considered it a concession to communism, and in 1929 Congress rescinded it. In 1930, by vigorous lobbying and public appeals, Grace Abbott defeated a proposal to transfer child health concerns to the Public Health Service, a measure she feared would fragment and weaken the federal government’s coordinating role in child welfare programs. Throughout this period she also directed many valuable studies of child welfare issues. She served from 1922 to 1934 as an official U.S. delegate to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, and attended conferences of the International Labor Organization in 1935 and 1937 as its first American delegate. In 1923-4 she was president of the National Conference of Social Work.

Forthright, persuasive, and a courageous fighter, Grace Abbott was one of the small group of liberals, many of them women, who sustained both the spirit and the institutions of social reforms in the uncongenial climate of the 1920s. With the advent of the Roosevelt administration, she felt free to leave her child welfare programs in safe hands and return to Chicago. During the year in which she stayed in Washington to help her friend Frances Perkins, the new secretary of labor, she organized a Child Health Recovery Conference, and as a member of the President’s Council on Economic Security helped draft the child welfare provisions of the Social Security Act.

In 1934 she became professor of public welfare administration at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, where her sister Edith was dean. She continued to testify before congressional and state legislative committees, was an editor of the Social Service Review from 1934 to 1939, and compiled an extensive collection of documents published in 1938 as The Child and The State. In June of the following year, after her death in Chicago of acute anemia, her ashes were buried in a Grand Island cemetery.

Grace Abbott’s personal papers are in the library of the University of Chicago; her Children’s Bureau papers and reports are in the National Archives. In addition to the books mentioned in the article, The Immigrant in Massachusetts was published in 1915, and From Relief to Social Security was published posthumously in 1941. Biographical articles by her sister Edith appeared in the Social Service Review, September 1939, and September and December 1950. The August 1939 issue of The Child, published by the U.S. Children’s Bureau, is a memorial to Grace Abbott. C. A. Chambers, Seed-time of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-33 (1963), gives an account of the period. See also the articles by J. K. Conway in Notable American Women and M. Eliot’s article in The Dictionary of American Biography.