Modern Boston History Exam

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Week 2.3 The Progressive Era History 385

Julie de Chantal

Return on the Gilded Age As we saw in the last module, the Gilded Age was an era of excesses, industrialization, and urbanization. It was an era where white middle-class reformers saw the exploitation of workers and of city dwellers, and began to push for reform across the board. As we discussed, the Massachusetts legislature and Boston city officials were ahead of the curve. The progressive nature of the state made it such that both governments pushed for reform in the industry (for example with the labor laws), in electoral politics (with the abolition of the poll tax), and at the city level (with the city beautiful movement). During the Progressive Era, other reformers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and later Woodrow Wilson, pushed for reform in their city, state, and at the federal level.

Context of the Progressive Era So what exactly was the Progressive Era? The Progressive Era was a period starting around 1890 and ending with the end of the First World War and the negotiation of the peace treaties around 1920. It was a period where reformers pushed back against the ills and the excesses of the Gilded Age (industrialization, urbanization, immigration). These reformers want to better their cities, state, and the country to fit their ideals.

Reformers were for the most part WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). They were from the middle-class and the elite. They were especially educated. A large portion of these reformers were nativists and racists. (The Progressive Era is considered the nadir of race relations in the United States). Because the Progressive Era was the nadir of race relations, progressive reform transcended the boundaries of race. Middle-class and elite African Americans develop what historians described as the “politics of respectability.” The politics of respectability meant that if the Black middle-class encouraged working-class African Americans to behave like the white middle-class, they could possibly gain respect, which in turn, could eventually curb white discrimination against Black communities. The politics of respectability was particularly used in Boston as the Black Brahmins became more and more vocal on the national scene.

During the Progressive Era, Women, who were expected to stay in the private sphere, played an important role in the reform movements, especially in terms of the settlement house movement, suffrage, temperance, and the Women’s movement.

Role of women in the reform movement As you may remember, women, in the 1890s, were not yet able to vote. The suffrage movement had pushed for the vote, albeit unsuccessfully. During the Progressive Era, the emergence of the New Woman challenged the ways in which women were perceived and how they could act.

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New Woman The New Woman was a feminist ideal which emerged in the late nineteenth century. The New Woman had a lot more autonomy than her predecessors. She was a suffragist. She had access to higher education. (I will get back to this in a few minutes). The New Woman also left the dress of her ancestors behind (for example the corset) to wear something more suited to her active nature. (she especially wore the shirtwaist).

Side note: there is a difference between the terms suffragist and suffragette. The suffragist was usually less radical. She pushed for legal method to get suffrage. The suffragette was seen mainly in the UK context. She was more radical, broke away from playing feminine roles and traditional women’s roles. The suffragettes were not against using violence to get the vote (some even used bombs in the UK).

In terms of her activities, the New Woman could ride a bicycle, cross gender boundaries, or be self-sufficient without the help of a husband.

Boston Marriage She could also be in what many at the time called a “Boston marriage.” The term came from the publication of Henry James’s novel The Bostonians in 1886. The novel was based on the long- term relationship of two women who lived together and supported themselves without the help of husbands.

These relationships were not necessarily romantic relationships, but could be. It is important to know that women used romantic language to speak to each other in the 19th century without necessarily being in a romantic relationship. For that reason, from a historical perspective, it is hard to tell if these women were romantically involved or not. However, it is important to understand that these relationships were seen as acceptable, but rarely discussed.

If the New Woman married, she could delay having children. As you can see from the graphs, during this period, age of first marriage rises and number of children per women declines (this is a national phenomenon).

Bachelor culture Urbanization also offered men the ability to live on their own without the help of women. They could eat sitting in restaurants, have their laundry done, tailors could sew for them, cobblers could make their shoes, etc. These services available in the city could replace women’s duties in the home. I would like to point out that a large number of these services were provided to men by immigrants who had recently settled in the city.

Creation of a culture of the city During the Progressive era, we can see the emergence of a city culture. Vaudeville, for example, emerged in the 1880s. Vaudeville performances were made up of a series of separate and

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unrelated acts, grouped together on a common bill. Acts could be popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies. It was not a freak show, but could include freak show acts, it was not a burlesque but could involve burlesque acts. In Boston, Vaudeville had to be quite tame as to not offend the conservative middle-class and elite.

Education of Women Considering all of these, the only piece missing to the puzzle is the increase in education for women. This access to education could explain why Massachusetts was at the forefront of the reform movement prior to the Progressive Era. As we discussed in past lectures, women who lived in Boston had access to education up to a certain level through the city’s public schools. However, higher education was still restricted to men only. During the first half of the century, some colleges opened for women.

For example: • Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina was founded in 1772 • Oberlin in Ohio opened in 1833 (this is where Lucy Stone enrolled) • Mary Lyon helped in opening Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, MA in 1835

prior to founding Mount Holyoke College in 1837. • Wesleyan College of Macon, Georgia, was founded in 1839 • Bridgewater State University was opened in 1840 as a normal school. It’s first class

admitted 21 women and 5 men for teachers’ training. (A normal school usually focused on teachers’ training)

• In 1848, a group opened the Boston Female Medical School to train female doctors. The school closed its doors in 1874.

• Auburndale Female Seminary (now Lasell College) opened in 1851 by Edward Lassell who was a professor of Chemistry at Mount Holyoke. The college is located Auburndale, MA.

• Salem State College was also opened with the intention of training women at its foundation as Salem Normal School in 1854. It became coeducational in 1892.

• Boston State college was founded in 1852 as a Girls’ high school, and became a Normal school in 1872.

• Vassar College 1861 (relationship with Yale University) • Massachusetts College of Arts and Design opened 1869 and allowed men and

women

From the Gilded Age on, more colleges opened for women: • Wellesley College chartered 1870, opened in 1875 (Relationship with MIT) • Smith College chartered in 1871, opened in 1875 (Relationship with Amherst

College) • Radcliffe College opened in 1879, chartered in 1894 (relationships with Harvard)

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• Gordon College opened in 1889 in Wenham, Massachusetts admitted men and women of different ethnicity to train them as Christian missionaries.

• Carney Hospital Training School for Nurses (Labouré College) was founded in 1892 in South Boston

• Tufts had been opened in 1852, but received its first class of women in 1892. • Simmons College opened in 1899.


 The study of sociology, economics, psychology, and anthropology gave future reformers the tools that they needed to understand their world better and attempt to act on it. The development of social work as a university discipline, using those discipline as a scientific background, gave the framework necessary for the reform movement to become a professional movement.

Caveat: if women, especially middle-class women, who were the ones getting into private schools, but were supposed to stay in the private sphere, how did they carve themselves a position in the public sphere with the reform movement here?

Extension of the role of women through the public sphere using their role as women Women, and especially the New Woman, justified their role in the public sphere as reformers through the extension of their role in the home to the street and to the city. For example, reformers would argue that if the street was dirty, their house was dirty. If the poor was suffering, their home was suffering. This helped frame the Settlement House movement.

Settlement House Movement The movement emerged in London, England. in the mid-19th century. The Toynbee Hall was opened in the East End of London in 1883. The Toynbee Hall was seen as community of university men living together in a home. It acted as a bridge between people of all social backgrounds who wanted to focus on working toward a future without poverty. In 1887, The Women’s University Settlement was opened by representatives from the Women’s Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Most of these institutions offered shelter, food, activities, and access to education (especially higher education) to their residents.

The most popular settlement house in the United States is the Hull House founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 in Chicago. Addams and Starr had studied at Toynbee Hall and brought the concept across the ocean. The mission of the Hull House, however, was not to give higher education to their residents. They only offered shelter, food, activities, English and history classes, mostly to immigrant women had just arrived in the city. They also took on tasks that other organizations did not do. For example, preparing the dead for burial or taking in women who were fleeing domestic abuse. The Hull House had an Americanization mission, where they helped immigrants assimilate to the American culture. Quickly the movement picked on in other cities.

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Settlement House in Boston In 1891, William J. Tucker, a professor at the Andover Theological Seminary, opened the Andover House in the South End of Boston. Tucker believed that the foundation of the residence on Rollins Street would simply “bring about a better and more beautiful life in its neighborhood and district and to develop new ways (through study and action in this locality) of meeting some of the serious problems of society.” He worked with Robert A. Woods who was a social worker. Woods took over as head of the house. The mission of the house was “designed to stand for the single idea of resident study and work in the neighborhood where it may be located…” It was a religious mission but the founders made it such that the tone was educational and not evangelistic.

Their goals were as follows (According to the City Wilderness, a book on the Andover house) • to rehabilitate neighborhood life and give it some of that healthy corporate vitality

which a well-ordered village has • to undertake objective investigations of local conditions • to aid organized labor both in the way of inculcating higher aims and in the way of

supporting its just demands • to furnish a neutral ground where separate classes, rich poor, professional and

industrial, capitalist and wage earners, may meet each other on the basis of common humanity

• to initiate local co-operation for substantial good purposes • to strive for a better type of local politics, and to take part in municipal affairs as they

affect the district • to secure for the district its full share of all the best fruits of the city’s intellectual and

moral progress • to lead people throughout the city to join in this aim and motive. • Its aim is to work directly in one neighborhood, indirectly through the city as a

whole, for the organic fulfillment of all the responsibilities, whether written down or implied for the well being of the community that attach to the citizen in a republic.

Mission of the Andover House The Andover House operated on several fronts.

Housing it conducted studies on housing conditions in the city, and testified before several commissions to advocate for city involvement in the construction, and to secure laws on housing. They especially lobbied for the enforcement of the building code since they did not want a second Great Fire.

Streets and Sanitation It acted as a center to receive the complaints of residents in the neighborhood on sanitation issues (debris in the street, sewage issues, etc),

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Playgrounds (A number of settlement houses get involved in the playground reform nationwide). In the case of Boston, they cooperated with the various city-wide endeavors for parks and playgrounds. They helped to secure the Ward Nine playground. They also “endeavor[ed] to secure the adequate use of the playground by providing direction of groups of children and young people.” (i.e. they trained people to play in playgrounds since playgrounds are a new concept at the time). They also maintained vacant lot playgrounds.

Public Schools and education They “cooperated with neighborhood public schools through visitation, meetings with teachers, conferences, work for backward children, etc.” (backward children could be students with disabilities or immigrants here). A resident at the Andover House acted as home and school visitor. Furthermore, the manual added that “The head residents has long interested himself in the development of the idea of industrial education, pointing out the present waste of years between the age of 14 and 16 in the case of working children, and served as temporary secretary of the state commission on industrial education.” -> this points to a change in the perception of education and the emergence of the vocational and technical education that we know today.

Labor They established relationships with trade unions, and the head of the house acted as treasurer of the relief committee of the Central Labor Union in 1893-1894. Unions cooperated with the house to secure the Dover Street Bath house (Bathhouses are used by anyone who does not have indoor plumbing in the city. They were especially important for working class people who rarely had indoor plumbing in their apartments). They organized conferences on labor matters, arbitrated in times of strike, and acted as an intermediary between unions and government (city & state). They also developed an interest in women’s work and helped form the Women’s Trade Union League.

Suffrage movement vs anti suffrage movement The suffrage movement was part of this reform movement. As you may remember, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe had founded the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Their organization emphasized a state by state strategy to secure the vote. For that reason, they present petitions to the state legislature every year until 1880. They had the support of reformers, editors, politicians, educators, and church people. Even after all of these attempts, the state does not do anything to support the vote of women. In 1879, though, the suffrage associations thought that they had made a breakthrough.

Partial suffrage With the temporary support of the Republicans, who controlled the state, suffrage associations secured the right for women to vote for and to serve on their local school committees. The Republicans recognized the stake women, as mothers, had in the education of their children. However, this new privilege was also a tactical maneuver from the Republicans party. They hoped that middle-class Yankee women would help fight the growing voting power of Catholic immigrants and working-class men in local communities. The bill to pass women’s suffrage in school committee only required a simple majority hence passed it without any difficulty.

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The Members of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (The MWSA) moved to take advantage of the victory of 1879. They worked to secure additional partial suffrage at the city level, and played down their demand for a state wide vote. Their argument this time was that women could clean up city politics, combat boss rule, and restore municipal order which had been upset by industrialization and immigration. As you can imagine those women were mostly middle-class Yankee women whose families had been in Boston or in the state for many generations.

The new strategy, however, was a disaster. In Boston, they had crafted an alliance with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Catholic Loyal Women of America. After they failed to reclaim the Republican Party’s support for more rights, they turned to the Democratic party. As you can imagine, the Democrats did not like the women’s nativist stance. As a result, their activism elicited the strongest anti-suffrage movement in the city and in the State.

The Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of the Suffrage to Women (MAOFESW) The MAOFESW was formed in 1895 to defeat a state referendum on whether or not women should vote in municipal election. Women who had the right to vote in the school elections could vote in the referendum, and overwhelmingly voted yes to the question. However, only 4% of them cast their ballot. The anti-suffragists used the low turnout to prove their point, that women were not interested in gaining suffrage.Yet, even if the referendum did not secure the vote for women, several organizations were reinvigorated in their fight for suffrage, and began to push even more for a state law.

Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government The Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government was formed in 1901 by Pauline Agassiz Shaw, Maud Wood Park, and Mary Hutcheson Page to “...to promote a better civic life, the true development of the home and the welfare of the family, through the exercise of suffrage on the part of the women citizens of Boston.”

The President, Pauline Agassiz Shaw, was an interesting woman. She was born in Switzerland in 1841 to Louis Agassiz, who was a professor of biology and geology. Her father visited Harvard in 1847 and they moved to Boston in 1850. In 1860 at age 19, she married Quincy Adam Shaw, who was a Boston Brahmin and a business magnate who worked in the mining industry (Quincy Adam Shaw was the uncle of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts). After her marriage, she used her new found wealth and social capital in the city to help the poor. She founded the first Trade school, the North Bennet Street Industrial School in the North End. She introduced kindergartens in the public school system. She also opened several child care centers in the city (the idea was that Child Care centers, if ran properly would help make up for the shortcomings of the working class).

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Her organization, the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, showcased the push for protestant reform in the city. They especially addressed issues of poverty, prison reform, and suffrage. Instead of aligning themselves with the anti-Catholic leagues and the WCTU, they sought support in colleges. They also looked at how the British suffragists were leading their campaign in England to gain the vote and used several of their strategies. For example, they used a door-to-door approach to the immigrant neighborhoods and handed out Yiddish and Italian flyers to rally the immigrant vote.

Florence Luscomb was one of the activists who did the door-to-door canvassing. She was born in Lowell in 1887, and moved to Boston with her mother when her parents separated. After accompanying her mother to women’s suffrage events to see Susan B. Anthony speak, she became a suffragist. She was one of the first 10 women to earn an architecture degree from MIT in 1910. Despite her degree in-hand from MIT, she could not find an internship (she had to ask 12 firms before one even considered her application seriously!). She became a fervent activist for the vote, using the tactic of neighborhood canvassing. Why do you think that the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government did not associate with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union? (think about who drinks and who does not in Boston at the time).

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union The organization was founded in 1873 in Ohio. It quickly became a national movement. The WCTU aimed to end the manufacturing and sale of liquor, and agitated against the use of tobacco. They attacked a number of social issues, labor, prostitution, public health, sanitation, and international peace, but did so through an evangelical approach. They were nativists, especially against Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and promoted the Americanization of immigrants. They believed that alcohol limited one’s ability to climb up the social ladder. They opened a chapter in Boston in the late 1870s. Boston reformers also form the Anti-Saloon League. The Anti-Saloon league was mainly a men’s organization while the WCTU was a women’s association. As you can imagine, both organization promoted nativism to some extent.

Push for Americanization As I mentioned in several of the blurbs above, reform organization pushed for the Americanization of immigrants. They wanted to “convert” immigrants, if you will, to the American way of life through language, culture, and history courses. Some of them did so through food.

In the 1890s, Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards pioneered work in “sanitary engineering” and domestic science. She is considered to be the scientist who invented home economics as a science. Her idea was to apply scientific principles to the home.

Richards was born in 1842. She was the first American woman to obtain a degree in Chemistry which she earned at Vassar College in 1870. She was then the first woman admitted the MIT, where she earned a second bachelors in chemistry in 1873. She continued her studies and would

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have gotten a Masters in Chemistry, had the university not refused to grant an advanced degree to a woman.

Richards especially worked on applying science to homemaking, for example with the idea of home sanitation. She worked from the premise that women were responsible for the home and for the proper nutrition of their family. For that reason, she promoted teaching women basic scientific knowledge to help them in their duties. For example, she wrote a book called The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning in 1882. In 1885, she wrote Food Materials and Their Adulterations which leads to the state to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act in Massachusetts several years before the federal government passed its own law. Richards promoted the use of gas over cooking oil and coal heating in the home due to the risk of pollution in the home, and created the field of home economics to promote the use of efficient home management techniques.

In 1890, she founded the New England Kitchen of Boston at 142 Pleasant Street. The New England Kitchen aimed to teach poor women how to prepare inexpensive, nutritious, and delicious foods. She used accessible ingredients, portioned meals (prior to the advent of home economics, women “winged it”), and standardized practices in the kitchen. She published several books for the homemaker to use to improve their homemaking skills, and helped modernize the kitchen through her experimentations on efficiency. She created the first Public School lunch programs in the city 1894 with the idea to provide nutritional meals at low price to poor students through the New England Kitchen. The idea was taken on by Harry S. Truman in 1946 to create the national school lunch programs.

Cooking as a way to Americanize people So how was cooking a way to Americanize people? What is American food anyways? Reformers developed the idea that immigrants needed to reduce their use of spices, since it made them “too fiery.” For example garlic, dill, hot spices, paprika, which were not commonly used in the United States were suspected of agitating people. In New England, especially in Boston, bland food (cabbage, potatoes & root vegetables, beef, pork, chicken, and dairy) made up for the bulk of one’s nutritional intake daily.

The clam chowder became the quintessential Boston/New England food during the Progressive era. Prior to the Progressive Era, the clam chowder was seen as a poor people’s food. If you think about it, clam chowder does not require much. It is usually made of clams, potatoes, onion, celery, milk or cream, and some flour as a thickening agent (it was often thickened with oyster crackers, invented in 1828, instead of flour). In Boston, it was especially popular due to the availability and low cost of the catches in the port, and the need for Catholics to abstain from eating meat on Fridays. In the Progressive era, reformers use it as an Americanization too since they believed that milk appeased people. It was also an extremely efficient food: it was cheap, nutritious, and delicious. As a result, the chowder became associated with Boston and New England, and adopted across classes as a “refined” food in the late 19th century.

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African Americans in Boston During the Progressive Era, African Americans in Boston became especially vocal against the rise of Jim Crow in the South. People like Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, and others used the radicalism of the abolitionist legacy to justify their voice in the public arena. As with the abolitionists though, most of the civil rights activism which took place in the Progressive Era was based on the work of a biracial coalition, which regrouped elites from both races. We will see more about this coalition in the upcoming weeks. You have to keep in mind though that racism and segregation are still present in Boston, even if the leaders of the community are especially vocal at a national level. They used Boston as an example of liberalism but this reputation is not true for most African Americans living in the city. They are the ones who confront Jim Crow on a daily basis, especially with the arrival of migrants from the South.

Roxbury Fire of 1894 Despite all of the reform and the efforts to enforce the city’s laws, the city remained in bad shape throughout the Progressive Era. In 1894, the neighborhood of Roxbury was partially destroyed in a fire which started at a Boston Beaneaters’ game. On May 15, the Beaneaters played the Baltimore Orioles. The ball park had been built in 1871, but enlarged to host the new stands in 1888. After the end of the third inning, attendees noticed smoke coming from under the right field bleachers. Reports after the fire said that a small group of men saw the fire, and could have stomped it out, but that a policeman told them to leave it alone, and that he would take care of it. As you can imagine, things did not go as planned.

When Beaneater right fielder Jimmy Bannon saw flames through the stands, he ran to put it out. A gust of wind fed the flames, and Bannon was driven back. Soon, the right field bleachers caught fire. From there, the outfield fence caught fire, and ran to the left field bleachers, engulfing them as well. Fans stood in the middle of the field to avoid the flames. Observers later said that district fire chief Sawyer, present at the game, refused to call in the alarm until it was too late to prevent the spread of the fire from the bleachers to the grandstand and out into the surrounding neighborhood. The buildings that backed on Berlin street were soon burning. In an hour, twelve acres had burned, 200 buildings had been destroyed, and 1900 people were homeless. The neighborhood had to be rebuilt, this time, with more care and precaution.

So where does that lead us? During the Progressive Era, the reform movement is led by middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, educated people. Women especially played an important role in the reform movement. The New Woman, a younger and more educated woman, pushed for the vote. As you saw, the reform movement, even with its scientific approach, does not resolve all of Boston’s problems. However, it pushed boundaries and helped the city lead progressive reform nationwide.

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Discussion this week For our discussion this week, you will read two pieces published by reformers in The Bostonians. They are pieces aimed at Reformers living in the city. When reading these pieces, think about the context of reform in Boston in the late 1890s.