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ABBOTT, GRACE 1878-1939

SOCIAL WORKER AND DIRECTOR, FEDERAL CHILDREN'S BUREAU

Passion to Reform

Grace Abbott inherited her inclination toward public affairs from her father, who was active in Nebraska politics and the state's first lieutenant governor. From her mother, an abolitionist and suffragist, she derived her passion to reform the world. Abbott grew up on the expansive Nebraska prairies and in 1898 graduated from Grand Island College in her hometown. She taught high school in Grand Island for eight years and in 1907 followed her sister, social worker Edith Abbott, to Chicago to attend graduate school in political science at the University of Chicago. Grace Abbott earned a master's degree in 1909.

Hull House

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Chicago was home to a vital circle of women intellectuals and social reformers. Grace Abbott was immediately attracted to Hull House, Jane Addams's pioneer social settlement, where she became a resident in 1908 and lived for nine years. Hull House placed her in the midst of social activism: she participated in the Chicago garment workers' strike of 1910-1911, she worked for the election of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, she was involved in the successful Illinois worn an-suffrage campaign of 1913, and she went with Jane Addams to the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915.

Immigrants' Protective League

Abbott first gained public attention as head of the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL), an organization founded to shelter new immigrants from abuse by unscrupulous lawyers, travel agents, and operators of fraudulent savings banks and employment agencies. Particularly sympathetic to the situations of people removed from a foreign rural setting into a bustling American city, Abbott worked to remedy the exploitation of immigrants, and her first book, The Immigrant and the Community (1917), was based on her experience at the IPL. She also taught a course on immigration at the newly established Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Abbott secured state legislation regulating employment agencies and persuaded officials at Ellis Island to take responsibility for the immediate situation of the immigrants they admitted.

Child Labor

In 1917 Abbott accepted the longstanding invitation of her Hull House friend and director of the Children's Bureau, Julia Lathrop, to join the bureau's staff in Washington. Turning her focus to child welfare since the flood of immigration to the United States had slowed, she became director of the bureau's child-labor division. Abbott was responsible for the detailed investigation of the dates of birth of working children, information necessary for the enforcement of the first federal child-labor law, passed in 1916. When that law was declared unconstitutional in 1918, Abbott saw the need for a constitutional amendment abolishing child labor, an issue for which she campaigned the rest of her life. She turned to the preparation of Children's Year conferences at the bureau in 1919 and returned to Illinois that autumn to become director of the new Illinois State Immigrants' Commission.

Children's Bureau

In the summer of 1921 Abbott was appointed director of the federal Children's Bureau, a position she held for thirteen years. Her first task was to administer the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, the first federal law providing direct federal aid to states to provide programs combating infant and maternal disease and mortality. The act was controversial; many who carried on the Red Scare mentality claimed it was "under direct orders from Moscow." Abbott eloquently and vigorously fought back, administering the Children's Bureau and the Sheppard-Towner Act with painstaking care throughout the 1920s. She established three thousand child-health and prenatal-care centers throughout the country and instituted an enduring model of state-federal cooperation in social-welfare programs. But in 1929, Abbott's vehement opposition, Sheppard-Towner was killed in Congress. In the face of this defeat, she asserted the continued authority of the Children's Bureau over all aspects of child welfare.

Other Accomplishments

In addition to her leader-ship of the Children's Bureau, Abbott served as an unofficial U.S. delegate to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children and as president of the National Conference of Social Work. In the early 1930s she greeted the New Deal with enthusiasm, though she commented ironically, "I am beginning to feel quite unnecessary. During the past few years one felt that the few liberals in the federal government who were ready to speak up when necessary could not be spared. Now I have the comfortable feeling that my job will be taken care of if I leave." Abbott remained at the Children's Bureau until 1933 in order to assist her friend, Frances Perkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's new secretary of labor. In late 1933 Abbott organized the Child Health Recovery Conference. As a member of Roosevelt's Council on Economic Security in 1934-1935, she helped draft the Social Security Act, which greatly expanded the philosophy of Sheppard-Towner.

Final Years

In 1934, her health failing, Abbott returned to Chicago to become professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration (successor to the School of Civics and Philanthropy), where her sister, Edith, was dean. Abbott's final book, The Child and the State, appeared in 1938. Although she never saw the ratification of an amendment banning child labor, Abbott was gratified to see the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which restricted child labor.