Grace Abbott 1878-1939, American social worker, b. Grand Island, Nebr. She did notable work as director (1921-34) of the Child Labor Division of the U.S. Children's Bureau. The Child and the State (2 vol., 1938) is her most important publication. Her sister, Edith Abbott, 1876-1957, became dean of the School of Social Service Administration, Univ. of Chicago, in 1924. Her publications include Women in Industry (1910) and The Tenements of Chicago (1936).

Grace Abbott

The social worker and agency administrator Grace Abbott (1878-1939) awakened many Americans to the responsibility of government to help meet the special problems of immigrants and of children.

Grace Abbott was born and raised in Grand Island, Nebraska. Her father was lieutenant-governor, and her mother was an abolitionist and suffragist. Grace received her bachelor's degree from Grand Island College in 1898 and taught for several years at Grand Island High School. She did graduate work in political science and in law at the University of Chicago, receiving a master's degree in 1909. The year before, greatly attracted to the pioneering social work of Jane Addams, she became a resident of Hull House in Chicago and collaborated effectively with Addams for over a decade.

She shared Addams' interest in the cause of world peace, and she worked effectively to advance women's suffrage. But very early she became preoccupied with the problem of immigrants. For over 20 years many Americans had been worried that the flood of immigrants—as many as a million in a single year—arriving from eastern and southern Europe constituted a severe threat to American life and institutions. These "new immigrants"—as they were called—seemed dangerously "different" in language, dress, religion, and their disposition to cluster in the cities (as most people in this era were also doing). Other Americans—like Addams and Abbott—believed that it was not the immigrants who were "new," but America—increasingly urban, industrial, impersonal; to them, the problem was how to help the newcomers find and maintain their families, get jobs, and learn to play a knowledgeable part in a democracy.

From 1908 to 1917 Abbott directed the Immigrants' Protective League in Chicago. Close personal contact with immigrants made her aware of how difficult it was for new arrivals from Poland, or Italy, or Russia to find the relatives or friends they depended on; how hard it was to get jobs that were not exploitative; and how tricky it was not to be abused by the political machines. A trip in 1911 to eastern Europe deepened her understanding of the needs and hopes of the immigrants. Abbott's point-of-view is eloquently summarized in her The Immigrant and the Community (1917). To Abbott, the "new immigrants" were every bit as desirable as additions to America as were the older arrivals. In modern American society, they needed help; and, while the states and local philanthropic organizations such as the Immigrants' Protective League could and should help, the federal government had an important role to play. It was wrong, she argued, to concentrate on restricting or excluding immigration; the government should plan how best to accommodate and integrate the newcomers. She was not successful in redirecting federal policy; the acts of 1921 and 1924 drastically reduced the number of new immigrants. But her writings and her work with the Immigrants' Protective League helped develop a more widespread and a more generous understanding of the difficulties the immigrants encountered.

Work in the Children's Bureau

In 1912 Congress established the Children's Bureau in the recognition that children were entitled to special consideration in schools, in the workplace, in the courts, and even in the home. In 1916 Congress passed a law prohibiting the shipment in interstate commerce of products made by child labor. It remained for the Children's Bureau to make the law effective. Julia Lathrop, the first head of the bureau, in 1917 asked her friend Abbott to head up the child labor division. She proved to be an exceptionally able administrator. However, within a year the Supreme Court invalidated the law as an infringement upon the rights of the states to deal with child labor as they thought best. Abbott resigned and for the rest of her life worked to secure an amendment to the Constitution outlawing child labor. To her regret, this effort, too, was frustrated by states-rights feelings and by the concern that the amendment would jeopardize the rights of parents and churches to supervise the rearing of children.

After a brief period back in Illinois, Abbott returned to Washington in 1921 as the new head of the Children's Bureau. Probably her most important responsibility was to administer the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), which extended federal aid to states that developed appropriate programs of maternal care. Abbott had been appalled to find that infant mortality was higher in the United States than in any country where records were kept, and she was convinced that the best way to reduce that mortality was to improve the health of the mother, before and after childbirth. The Supreme Court rejected protests against this dramatic extension of federal government responsibilities for social welfare. Abbott, while seeing to it that the over 3,000 centers across the country met federal standards, showed herself sensitive to the special concerns of localities. Though Congress terminated the program in 1929, the act, as administered by Abbott, was a pioneering federal program of social welfare.

Abbott never lost faith that the American people would, when properly informed and led, support enlightened welfare programs. She was optimistic that the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and of her old friend Frances Perkins would realize many of her dreams. She had the satisfaction of helping draft the Social Security Act of 1935 which, among other things, provided federal guarantees of aid to dependent children.

Ill health prompted her to resign in 1934. She became professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago, where her sister, Edith Abbott, was a dean. She lived with Edith until her death in 1939. Quiet and forceful, compassionate and efficient, singularly immune to cant or prejudice, Grace Abbott epitomized the enormous contribution made by her generation of women. She helped make America a more decent place.

Further Reading

There is an excellent summary of Abbott's life in Notable American Women (1971). Edith Abbott wrote three helpful articles about her sister in Social Service Review (1939 and 1950). Grace Abbott's role is clearly indicated in Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (1963). Abbott wrote many reports, articles, and books. Among the most instructive are The Immigrant and the Community (1917) and two volumes of documents, with critical introductions, The Child and the State (1938).

Additional Sources

Costin, Lela B., Two sisters for social justice: a biography of Grace and Edith Abbott, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. □

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.

Source:

Lela B. Costili, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana & Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983).