Abstract
Social workers who specialize in child and family welfare and immigration reform would delight in reading A Sister’s Memories. Editor John Sorensen has compiled an invaluable collection of reflections written retrospectively by the renowned social work educator, Edith Abbott (1876–1957). The book relays Edith’s observations of her younger sister, Grace Abbott (1878–1939), whose social work career is an odyssey of swimming against the current in the course of making extraordinary contributions to the welfare of U.S. immigrants and children. Sorensen has assembled and edited a treasure trove of memories and analyses by Edith Abbott about Grace Abbott’s settlement house activities and women’s suffrage work at Hull House in Chicago; local, state, and national efforts to assist immigrants at the Immigrants’ Protective League from 1908 to 1917; and her leadership of the U.S. Children’s Bureau (USCB) from 1921 to 1934. Grace Abbott’s pioneering international involvement in child welfare work after World War I is also detailed.
Grace and Edith grew up in Grand Island, NE, when it was newly populated by settlers of European descent. Descended from a Mayflower passenger of pilgrim stock on one side of their family and from abolitionist Quakers on the other side, they learned early about Protestant dissent, extreme oppression, social reform, and the hard work involved in prior centuries’ campaigns for religious freedom and social justice. Their mother and other contemporaneous women in their family worked for women’s suffrage in Illinois and Nebraska. Edith and Grace Abbott were both primed for lives of social work before the profession had yet congealed. Edith contributed singularly to early social work through scholarship, academic teaching, and administration as an economist and founding leader of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. Grace became an activist, administrator, and internationally recognized leader in the efforts to end child labor, launch child welfare and maternal health programs, support the rights and integration of immigrants into the United States, and assist refugees in Europe dislocated by World War I.
The book highlights Grace Abbott’s responsibilities for aiding in the legislative passage in 1921 of the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act also known as the Sheppard–Towner Act. To achieve passage of the law, she worked closely with her mentors, Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelley, and the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a powerful lobbying group during the 1920s made up of former suffragists, settlement house leaders, and other female social reformers.
The Sheppard–Towner Act, in effect from 1921 to 1929, provided federal grants to states that created maternal and infant care clinics, staffed by public health nurses. Approximately 3,000 such state-run clinics were established during the 8 years of the Act’s existence, many of them in rural areas that had previously lacked any form of medical care for pregnant women, new mothers, and infants. The USCB, under Grace Abbott’s direction, administered the Sheppard–Towner Act, the very first example of a social security program that distributed federal grants-in-aid to states. Public health education of new mothers and fathers through brochures, lectures, workshops, and hands-on health examinations was a key part of Sheppard–Towner’s initiatives.
Grace Abbott also became an early champion of gathering precise statistics and using them as an evidence base for program development, program evaluation, and lobbying. As head of the USCB, she compiled and distributed data on child labor, maternal and infant health and sickness, and the numbers of children reliant upon local- and state-level public welfare during the Great Depression. The statistics of the USCB helped Abbott, in close alliance with Frances Perkins and others, to justify and draft core elements of national social security bills that became the New Deal.
It would be difficult to name a citizen, official, or social worker who had more influence on the development and expansion of services for economically marginalized children and their families and immigrants in the United States than Grace Abbott. She was a pivotal architect of and link between Progressive era and New Deal social reforms.