Queer Places:
Hull House, 800 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Grand Island Cemetery
Grand Island, Hall County, Nebraska, USA
Grace
Abbott (November 17, 1878[1] –
June 19, 1939) was an American social
worker who specifically worked in improving the rights of immigrants and
advancing child welfare,
especially the regulation of child labor.[2] Her
elder sister, Edith
Abbott, who was a social worker, educator and researcher, had professional
interests that often complemented those of Grace's. The Abbott sisters' mother
had come from upstate New York and graduated from Rockford Female Seminary;
their father was an Illinois lawyer who became Lieutenant Governor of
Nebraska. Grace Abbott, living at Hull House and a close friend of
Jane
Addams, became Julia Clifford Lathrop's assistant at the federal Children's
Bureau in 1917, and, in 1921, succeeded her mentor Lathrop as head of the
Children's Bureau. Grace Abbott was pilloried for her association with the
pacifist and suffrage movements, and was alleged to be involved in a sinister
alliance with the Russian communist revolutionary
Alexandra Kollontai,
People’s Commissar for Social Welfare in the new Soviet republic in 1917.
Born in Grand
Island, Nebraska, the daughter of O. A. Abbott and Elizabeth M. Griffin,[3] Grace
graduated from Grand Island College in 1898. Before embarking on her career
in social work, she
was employed as a high school teacher in her hometown through 1906. In 1903,
she started graduate studies at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1907, she moved to Chicago,
where she entered the career of social work. She took up residency in the Hull
House,[2] an
urban center for women engaged in early proto-feminism and
social reform, as well as a safe haven for the poor. In 1909, Abbott received
a Ph.M. in
political science from the University
of Chicago. She wrote a series of weekly articles in the Chicago
Evening Post, titled Within the City's Gates from 1909–1910, which brought
to light the exploitation of immigrants.[2]
Abbott served on several committees and organizations for advancing the
societal cause of child welfare, including the Immigrants' Protective League
(1908-1917),[2] Child
Labor Division of the U.S.
Children's Bureau (1921 to 1934) and was also a member of the Women's
Trade Union League. In 1911, she co-founded the Joint Committee for
Vocational Training with Sophonisba Breckenridge, PhD, JD, and Edith
Abbott, PhD, JD. From 1917–1919, she was the director of the child labor
division of the U.S. Children's Bureau. It was in this capacity that she was
responsible for administering the Keating-Owen
Act (1916). This law was reversed by the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1918. She was responsible for portions of this law
continuing by inserting clauses into the war-goods contracts between the
federal government and private industries.[2]
In 1924, she worked tirelessly to pass a constitutional amendment against
child labor, an amendment that never gained statewide ratification.[2] Abbott
was an author of several sociological texts, including The Immigrant and the
Community (1917)[2] and The
Child and the State (1938, 2 volumes).[2] She
was also responsible for incorporating social
statistics and research into legislative policy-making, as well as
investigating child labor violations in shipbuilding plants and in factories
across the United States. Abbott pioneered the process of incorporating
sociological data relating to child labor, juvenile
delinquency, dependency and statistics into the lawmaking process; she
spent much of her time as a political lobbyist for social issues in Washington,
D.C.. She was associated with the Social
Security Administration from 1934 until her death in 1939; during that
time period, Abbott helped draft the Social
Security Act and chaired several government committees on child welfare
and social issues.[4]
She was the first woman to be nominated for a Presidential cabinet position,
but was not confirmed. Her mother was a Quaker turned Unitarian and
her father, Othman A.
Abbott, was the first Lt. Gov. of the state of Nebraska.
Grace never married. She was a professor of public welfare at the University
of Chicago from 1934 until 1939.[2]
During a 1938 health checkup, doctors discovered that she was suffering from multiple
myeloma. The disease caused her death one year later. Cancer was
considered such a dreaded disease at the time that she and her sister hid her
diagnosis and her obituary in The New York Times listed her cause of death as
"anemia".[5]
Abbott is a member of the Nebraska
Hall of Fame.[6]
The School of Social Work at the University of Nebraska at Omaha is named in
her honor.[7]
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