Lillian D. Wald

Nurse

• Born: March 10, 1867
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: September 1, 1940
• Place of death: Westport, Connecticut

American social reformer

Wald was a major social reformer during the Progressive Era who founded the Henry Street Settlement and organized the first public health nursing system.

Areas of achievement Public health, social reform

Early Life

Lillian D. Wald was one of four children in a Jewish family. Her parents, Minnie Schwarz and Marcus Wald, emigrated from Germany and Poland, respectively, fleeing revolutions in central Europe. Since her father traveled often, selling optical supplies, Minnie was the major influence on Wald. Minnie loved all forms of beauty flowers, music, furnishings and she brought warmth and good taste into the household as well as devotion to family ties.

In 1878, the family moved to Rochester, New York. The city was a center for optical supplies, which made Marcus Wald’s work easier, and family relatives were well established there, people of wealth and status. Like many upper-middle-class girls, Wald attended a boarding and day school, the School for Young Ladies and Little Girls. The nonsectarian school prepared young women to be wives and mothers, but Wald aspired to more than a conventional life.

At sixteen, Wald applied to Vassar but was rejected as too young, so she stayed two more years at school, feeling closed in no profession, no career, no training. Isolated from the larger world, she knew little of the growing social unrest and demands for reform.

Wald spent much time with her married sister, Julia Barry. During Julia’s pregnancy a nurse was hired, and Wald questioned her extensively about her training at Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing in New York City. Wald saw an opportunity for a noble career, and, in 1889, she applied to the New York Hospital’s School of Nursing and was accepted. With limited training gleaned from lectures, Wald learned to make bandages and dressings, and to sterilize instruments. Her patients and colleagues alike found her a cheerful, dedicated person with extraordinary energy and ability. After her graduation in March, 1891, she helped to train incoming students.

In August, 1891, Wald began her new job as staff nurse at the New York Juvenile Asylum. One thousand children between the ages of five and eighteen were housed in the asylum. Outraged by the poverty, injustice, and abuses the children faced, Wald left after one year, and, in the fall of 1892, she enrolled at Women’s Medical College, which was part of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Her studies and work made the poor very visible to Wald. She began a volunteer class, teaching home-care and hygiene to immigrant women. Based in the Louis Technical School at 267 Henry Street, she was exposed directly to scenes of poverty and degradation so intense that her life was changed.

Life’s Work

Wald dropped out of medical college, determined to change the dreadful social conditions she encountered in New York’s Lower East Side. She and a former schoolmate, Mary Brewster, planned to live among the poor, nursing them in their own homes. Support from wealthy patrons gave them economic security to do so. Wald and Brewster moved into a settlement house on Rivington Street with college graduates who were also willing to share their lives intimately with the poor. Classes were given in English, art, music, history, and economics, but Wald and Brewster focused on nursing the sick. The two nurses went from door to door in the tenements, handing out ointments, antiseptics, and advice. They wrote up their cases for a card file and reported monthly to their chief benefactor, Jacob Schiff, a senior partner in the international banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company.

Moving to a new address, the top floor of a six-story tenement, Wald and Brewster lived in the district in which they worked. They determined to remain independent and nonsectarian, resisting efforts to join forces with relief agencies. They visited homes, compiling statistics on the wretched situations and conditions they encountered. Immigrants poured into New York’s Lower East Side. They clung together in religious and kinship groups, working twelve to fourteen hours daily, trying to survive. Wald wrote vivid reports to Jacob Schiff, describing these poverty-stricken people. Her experiences opened Wald to progressive thinkers and reformers such as Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Josephine Lowell (founder of the Consumers’ League of New York).

In April of 1895, Schiff bought a house on Henry Street that became Wald’s second home and the center for the Visiting Nurse Service. A second building next door was added later to accommodate the growing number of nurses asking to work with Wald. Henry House became a refuge for sick, needy neighbors who found nursing care as well as friendship there.

In 1900, the family of nurses grew to fifteen an educated, middle-class, unmarried support network. Wald was the heart of this family, to which she also brought an executive ability to link Henry Street with the world of financial backers and with the larger reform movements. To save her patients’ pride, Wald charged from ten cents to a quarter to those who could pay for personal health care, though no one was refused care. She wanted to treat the sick in their homes, referring only the extreme cases to dispensaries or the hospitals.

In 1899, the dynamic Florence Kelley joined Wald’s inner circle of friends and advisers, becoming general-secretary of the National Consumers’ League. A lawyer and social activist, Kelley had served as special investigator of child labor conditions in Illinois. Wald and Kelley allied for social change, especially on behalf of children. Frequent visits by Jane Addams, head of Hull House Settlement, based in Chicago, further enlarged Wald’s insights into the need for practical, political solutions to the economic and social problems of the day, which impinged heavily on health conditions. Addams’s sharp mind and organizational skills were highly prized, and Wald and her coworkers often turned to her for advice.

Wald was moved particularly by the plight of children playing in crowded streets, attending crowded schools, and living in crowded homes. They faced hunger and disease daily, and Wald tried to awaken a social consciousness of their situation. She promoted neighborhood parks and more playgrounds, and she urged that public schools stay open after school hours and in summer as recreation centers. Wealthy patrons offered homes for day and weekend visits by the children, some bequeathing their estates as camps for Henry Street use.

Wald initiated the hiring of the first public school nurse. Worried that ill children were spreading contagious diseases, she offered to pay half the salary for a nurse if the Board of Education would pay the other half. A Henry Street nurse supervised four schools, identifying illnesses and visiting sick children’s homes. When it was found that these schools had healthier children and better attendance than did all the others, the Board of Education agreed to make school nurses part of the system.

Forced to work to supplement their parents’ wages, many children were not in school at all. In 1903, pressured by the National Consumers’ League, settlement houses, and other reform organizations, New York established limits on child labor, although proper inspection was often absent. In 1905, Wald and Kelley proposed a federal bureau to care for the welfare of children. The proposal reached President Theodore Roosevelt, who discussed it with Wald and others. He supported a bill for a Federal Children’s Bureau, and it was introduced in the 1906 Congress.

The bill was backed by prominent organizations and individuals such as women’s clubs, state labor committees, newspaper publishers, and religious leaders. The bureau was envisioned as a national research center to collect and classify information on the nation’s children. Because Congress refused to hold hearings on the bill, Roosevelt asked Wald to arrange what became, in January of 1909, a Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. When hearings on the bill began, Wald and Kelley testified in Washington, but Congress balked, and Wald and her colleagues kept up a barrage of writing and speaking to get the bill passed. In April of 1912, President William H. Taft signed the bill into law.

Expanding public health nursing into rural as well as urban areas, in 1908 Wald persuaded Schiff to give an initial grant of $10,000 to aid the Red Cross in establishing a Department of Town and Country Nursing. Realizing that there were too few nurses, she envisioned a corps of teachers to train more nurses. She persuaded another wealthy patron to bequeath a large sum to endow Teachers College of Columbia University with a postgraduate school for teacher nurses.

In 1913, the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service celebrated twenty years of work in the Lower East Side. Wald could look back on twenty years of achievements, including improved status and increased self-esteem for all nurses.

The 1918 worldwide outbreak of influenza put new demands on Wald and her nurses. As head of the Nurses’ Emergency Council, she created an effective administration to mobilize nurses, teachers, social workers, and volunteers to meet the health crisis. The Red Scare of 1919-1920, however, gripped the nation in a madness of violence, hatred, and intolerance. Dissent was dangerous, and Wald found herself censured as radical and unpatriotic because of her pacifist stand during World War I. Raising money became more difficult. Schiff died suddenly in September of 1920, ending the longest, steadiest, and most generous source of support for Wald’s work.

The 1920’s were a conservative age, and social reforms were not supported by the federal government as they had been in the past. Wald and her allies fought to retain progressive gains. She became vice president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, contributed to the American Anti-Imperialist League, and sponsored the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. Wald remained very active on behalf of civil liberties, but her health declined with overwork. Wald died on September 1, 1940, and she was mourned by thousands. Her legacy the Visiting Nurse Service, the Henry Street Settlement, the Federal Children’s Bureau, the public school nurse would endure.

Significance

During the Depression, Henry Street continued as a haven for the needy. The Visiting Nurse Service now had twenty centers, handling almost 100,000 cases annually. In 1933, Wald resigned as head of Henry Street but remained as president of the board of directors.

Wald enriched the lives of many through her work as a pioneer public nurse, a settlement worker, a feminist, and a reformer roles she imbued with a wealth of enthusiasm and charm. Through her many efforts to improve health care and remedy the societal ills of poverty, ignorance, and inequality, Wald had an immense impact on U.S. society, the effects of which can still be perceived. Her initial interest in social reform was sparked by the misery she witnessed in poor neighborhoods, but her special contribution to the field was perhaps her identification of the root causes of the problems she saw around her. She did seek to solve the immediate problems of those who required help by providing health care and education, but she also went further, calling for the establishment and support of human rights, civil liberties, and opportunities for all citizens to live decent lives.

Bibliography

Daniels, Doris G. Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1989. A selective biography centered on Wald’s feminist thinking and actions. Chapter notes, a bibliographical essay, and an index are included.

Duffus, Robert L. Lillian Wald, Neighbor and Crusader. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Written with Wald’s cooperation, this is a glowing tribute to her and her career. Includes an index.

Fabricant, Michael B., and Robert Fisher. Settlement Houses Under Siege: The Struggle to Sustain Community Organizations in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Includes information about Wald and the Henry Street Settlement.

Siegel, Beatrice. Lillian Wald of Henry Street. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1983. An excellent biography that captures the private Wald as well as the public figure. Chapter notes, sources, and an index are included.

Trolander, Judith A. Settlement Houses and the Great Depression. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1975. The introduction and chapters one through three are superb regarding settlement houses and reform. Includes an appendix, chapter notes, and a bibliography.

Wald, Lillian D. The House on Henry Street. New York: Holt, 1915. An engrossing narrative of the famous settlement and its role in social reform. Many stories illustrate conditions among the poor. Includes an index.

Williams, Beryl. Lillian Wald, Angel of Henry Street. New York: Julian Messner, 1948. A lively biography meant mainly for young readers. Includes frequent dialogue and many anecdotes. A brief biography and an index are provided.

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