Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch

• Mary Melinda Kingsbury Simkhovitch
• Born: September 8, 1867
• Died: November 15, 1951

Housing reformer and settlement worker, was born in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, the daughter and eldest of two children of Isaac Franklin Kingsbury and Laura (Holmes) Kingsbury, both descended from old New England stock. The Kingsburys held large amounts of real estate in their area. Given to intellectual pursuits, Laura Holmes Kingsbury was an ex-school teacher and the grandaughter of abolitionist Cornelius Holmes. Isaac Kingsbury served as a Massachusetts state legislator and was the town clerk of Newton, Massachusetts.

Mary Kingsbury was a Congregationalist upon whom Pilgrim’s Progress made an early mark. Despite her family’s affluence, she was moved by the sight and plight of the poor. “How could” there be poor people, she asked later, “when all the people I knew had all the food and clothing and warmth they deserved?”

Graduating from Newton High School in 1886, she went to Boston University where she perceived more possibilities of enriching herself; she excelled in Latin and comparative philology and listened carefully to the arguments of Prof. Borden P. Bowne against conservative social thought and the social Darwinist ideas associated with Herbert Spencer, and got to know the Rev. W.D.P. Bliss, Episcopal clergyman, socialist, and editor of The Encyclopedia of Social Reform, whose Church of the Carpenter became a center for many reformers and intellectuals, as well as labor leaders and workers. She frequented Denison House, a settlement house in Boston’s South End run by Helena Stuart Dudley, which was a haven for female intellectuals who exchanged views on social issues. Leading a club for teenage girls at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, she saw slum life at first hand and became drawn to issues of housing reform. She became convinced that only direct experience with the poor could sustain intellectual or practical solutions to their problems; her settlement house activity would eventually fill this need.

After two years of teaching Latin in Somerville, Massachusetts, she enrolled in graduate courses in the social sciences at Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) in 1892, while working with blacks in Boston in association with St. Augustine’s. A scholarship from the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union enabled her to study in Berlin during 1893; she read Kant in the parks and listened attentively to lectures in history and sociology. She and her friend, Emily Greene Balch, after visiting Italy, observed socialist leaders Jean Jaurès, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw in London, at the International Socialist Trade Union Congress.

Returning to the United States, she resumed graduate study with James Harvey Robinson and E.R.A. Seligman at Columbia. She honed her views on social issues and became more convinced than ever that only “wider personal experience” could fully validate any social theory.

Accordingly, she became head resident in 1897 of the College Settlement House on Rivington Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, an institution founded in 1889 by women college graduates in an area described as “noisy and rank with the smell of overripe fruit, hot bread and sweat soaked clothing.” To Kingsbury it was a “new and overpowering reality” to which she responded by beginning to learn Yiddish, listening carefully to the critical views of society expressed among Jewish workers, and forming a Sunday Evening Economics Club. The women who ran the settlement sought the fullest cooperation with the neighboring residents and were open to experimentation with new social and economic ideas. Kingsbury met social reformers and settlement house leaders from other parts of the city, who gave her valuable ideas. She worked with tenants on housing reform and with the Outdoor Recreation League begun at the College Settlement House. For Kingsbury the house stood for the “interplay of happy neighborly relationships which kept the resident from an unreal or academic sense of the changes they hoped to effect.”

In 1899 she married a fellow reformer, Russian-born Vladimir Simkhovitch, a professor of economic history at Columbia University, whom she had first met in Berlin. They bought a farm in New Jersey, where they raised their children Stephen and Helena with the help of a governess.

Simkhovitch’s experience at the College Settlement House contrasted sharply with what she encountered in her next position—chief resident of the Friendly Aid House on East Thirty-Third Street, for three years beginning in 1898. This institution, supported by the Unitarian church, stressed moral uplift and religious education rather than social change. It tended to discourage controversial discussion. Simkhovitch commented that a settlement should not be run, “as a factory is run,” and she established the social-issue oriented Association of Neighborhood Workers as well as Greenwich House (first on Jones Street and then on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village). Under her direction Greenwich House, which began to link “the labor movement and the community movement,” became an important connection between settlement work and social reform in general. It assisted in the study of social issues, analyses of unemployment, ethnic assimilation, the housing problem, and so forth. Local improvements, Simkhovitch stressed, required indigenous leadership. “If social improvements are to be undertaken by one class on behalf of another, no permanent changes are likely to be effected,” she said. Her involvement in local cultural life included the encouragement of neighborhood centers created out of schools, a settlement music school and neighborhood theater, as well as support for local recreational facilities.

Simkhovitch also used Greenwich House as a base in the campaign for woman suffrage, for which she spoke widely. The settlement movement already had close ties to the progressive impulses of the times and to its desire for practical economic reform and social analysis. Simkhovitch’s campaigning for the Progressive party candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 gave her connections to progressive politics. Since 1898 she had been involved in progressive activity in a different way, as board member of the National Consumers League, where she cooperated with Florence Kelley. Simkhovitch broke with many progressives when she supported American entry into World War I. (Among the nonpolitical wartime activities of Greenwich House was its fight against the influenza epidemic of 1918.)

Although Simkhovitch appeared to the public mainly as a settlement worker, her greatest contribution to reform may have been in housing improvement. As early as 1907, as chair of the Committee on the Congestion of Population, Simkhovitch had argued that overcrowding caused many urban problems. A quarter of a century later, when housing construction nearly dried up in the Great Depression of the 1930s, she sought a serious federal commitment to a housing program. President of the Public Housing Conference from 1931 to 1943, she gained critical support for a federally financed low-income public housing provision in the National Industrial Recovery Act that was proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. As vice chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, to which she had been appointed by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1934, she helped to draft the federal Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, which mandated the construction of public housing. Her nationwide activity did not diminish her fondness for local and neighborhood ties: “My life at Greenwich House taught me not to despise small things.” She valued tradition and encouraged restoration of old buildings as a supplement to new construction.

During her reform activities she retained her academic ties, teaching at Barnard College from 1907 to 1910, at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1910 to 1913, and at Columbia University in 1929. Mary Simkhovitch retired as director of Greenwich House in 1946 and died there five years later. She was a pioneer in the settlement house movement, tying it closely to grassroots impulses of progressive reform as well as to intellectual understanding of the causes of human suffering.

For biographical and genealogical material, speeches, articles, and files of Greenwich House, the Greenwich Village Association, and other activities, see the Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Her Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (1938) is a moving account of her early development as well as her later work. The article in the Notable American Women contains a bibliography of her writings which include Standards and Tests of Efficiency in Settlement Work (1911), The Settlement Primer (1926), The Red Festival (1934), Group Life (1940), and many more books. See F. A. Davis, Spearheads of Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890-1914; Current Biography 1943; Encyclopedia of Social Work (1971); T. L. McDonnell, The Wagner Housing Act; A Case Study of the Legislative Procedure. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, November 16, 1951.