From Domestic to Municipal Housekeeper: The Influence of the Sanitary Reform Movement on Changing Women's Roles in America, 1860–1920

By modern standards Americans were dreadfully dirty in 1850. Although the mechanisms by which diseases were transmitted (such as micro-organisms) were not understood until late in the century, the connection between filth and disease was understood as a powerful one. Early public health reformers like Elisha Harris, later a founder, with Henry W. Bellows, of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, agreed that disease could be prevented and controlled by cleaning up the environments. But popular behavior lagged behind in America. Whether on farms or in towns and cities, Americans lived in dirty, smelly, bug-infested surroundings. More than four out of five Americans lived in hygienically primitive situations on small farms or in country villages, and conditions in cities like Boston and New York were no better (Hoy 3). Unsanitary water supplies, infectious disease, and the urban explosion had produced socially intolerable conditions. Americans-and women in particular-- found it difficult to keep their families, homes, and cities clean. In this era water supplies were limited to what one could carry, housekeeping tools often consisted of little more than a broom and a cloth, and cleaning was back-breaking. However, as this nineteenth-century generation learned, the failure to be clean could be dangerous to one's health. Only with the onset of the Civil War would a sense of urgency fuel the drive toward cleanliness. In this pre-antibiotic, pre-sulfa age, diseases like tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, and polio were a constant threat. But in the 1880s, views on urban planning and increasing scientific understanding of infectious disease came together in a broadly focused movement for preventive sanitation, then known as sanitary reform. The debate over the mechanisms by which diseases were transmitted occurred as virtually every aspect of American society was being revamped, reformed, or otherwise improved. For example, municipal governments and the nation's banking system were streamlined; housing and health care standards were raised; public education was expanded; and the federal government addressed child-care issues. These developments also brought a tradition of women's involvement in government affairs to public attention. Throughout this period, anti-suffragists and many suffragists agreed on one thing: a woman's place was in the home. From this domain-as wife, daughter, and especially, mother-- women devoted themselves to matters connected with the well-being of women, children, the home, and the community. Most importantly, many women fashioned significant public roles for themselves by working outside of electoral channels, stepping out of their homes into volunteer services, club work, reform movements, new work for pay, and into politics. The sanitary reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrates one way in which women fused domesticity and politics. Throughout the crusade, women expanded their sphere, promoted professionalization, and advanced science. But women's charitable work to remedy social problems like poverty and disease hardly made a dent in the social dislocations of the emerging industrial society. These problems simply could not be solved at the local level. Women, therefore, turned their efforts toward securing legislation-laws to require street cleaning, to establish tenement inspections, and to enact food protection-that addressed what they perceived as the sources of the sanitary problems. In the process, women gained political skills, a sense of consciousness as women, and feelings of competence and self-worth. But as important as their lobbying and reform activities were, women were also shaped by-and in turn affected-American government and politics. Attention to the interaction between women's political activities in movements like sanitary reform and the political system can tell us much about the status of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …