House on Henry Street.
Wald, Lillian. The House On Henry Street. With illustrations from etchings and drawings by Abraham Phillips and from photographs. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915.
8vo.; light foxing to preliminaries; discrete bookseller’s tag to rear pastedown; blue cloth, stamped in gilt, tiny tear to head of spine.
First edition of Wald’s first book, a narrative account of the founding and inner workings of the Henry Street Settlement; adapted from a series of six articles Wald published in Atlantic Monthly, between March and August 1915.
Lillian D. Wald was an American pioneer in the field of social work, whose Henry Street settlement proved to be the New York analog to Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago. Wald’s settlement, in which she and dedicated volunteers saw to the needs of the overworked, the underpaid, the neglected and abused children of the tenements and those in need of medical attention, galvanized the interest of several leaders in the burgeoning national social relief efforts such as Margaret Sanger, Florence Kelley, and Governor Alfred E. Smith. (Smith would contribute dust-jacket copy to its sequel.) Soon after its founding the Henry Street Settlement rose to prominence as the most influential settlement house in the United States; for her part, Wald became internationally known for her efforts on behalf of the poor, immigrant, predominantly Jewish families on New York’s Lower East Side. Wald’s decades of advocacy for a decent quality of life for disenfranchised urban dwellers served as a lasting model for later feminist public health educators.
Wald dedicates this book to “the comrades who have built the House”—the patrons, both financial and emotional, without whom, she notes in her preface, the House would not exist. Modestly overlooking the impact of her own great energy, intelligence and compassion, she writes: “…I should be quite overwhelmed with the debt I owe did I not feel that all of us who have worked together have worked not only for each other but for the cause of human progress; that is the beginning and should be the end of the House on Henry Street” (p. vi).
But each chapter of The House on Henry Street reveals the force of Wald’s leadership in this cause. In dealing with topics such as “Education and the Child,” “Children who Work” and “Friends of Russian Freedom,” Wald saturates detailed descriptions of her efforts with incisive analyses of social issues, touching upon two of her greatest concerns: children’s welfare and the ways in which women, whose roles in society have been steadily expanding, might work together to address the issue. In her preface she writes:
During the two decades of the existence of the Settlement there has been a significant awakening on matters of social concern, particularly those affecting the protection of children throughout society in general; and a new sense of responsibility has been aroused among men and women, but perhaps more distinctively among women, since the period coincides with their freer admission to public and professional life.
Wald would continue to tap into the growing empowerment of women in society to achieve international recognition and to build her settlement into one of the dominant social forces in the country.
(#1321)
Print Inquire
