Queer
Places:
Rockford Female Seminary, 5050 E State St, Rockford, IL 61108
Vassar College (Seven Sisters), 124 Raymond Ave, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604
Hull House, 800 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Greenwood Cemetery
Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois, USA
Julia
Clifford Lathrop (June 29, 1858 – April 15, 1932) was an American social
reformer in the area of education, social policy, and children's welfare. One
of Jane Addams's close colleagues, and
probable lesbian lover, at Hull House was the tough, truculent Julia Lathrop,
whose father, William, had migrated from upstate New York to Rockford in
northern Illinois. William Lathrop, an attorney, was a descendant of the
eminent English Nonconformist and Yankee minister, the Reverend John Lathrop.
William became a trustee of the Rockford Female Seminary, and was elected
Republican U.S. Senator from Illinois. His daughter Julia was graduated from
the Seminary earlier than Addams, and then went on to Vassar College. Julia
Lathrop moved to Hull House in 1890, and from there developed a lifelong
career in social work and government service. Julia founded the first Juvenile
Court in the country, in Chicago in 1899, and then moved on to become the
first female member of the Illinois State Board of Charities, and president of
the National Conference of Social Work. In 1912, Lathrop was appointed by
President Taft as head of the first U.S. Children's Bureau, the first woman
ever to head a United States federal bureau.[1]
Julia Clifford Lathrop was born in Rockford, Illinois. Julia's father, a
lawyer and personal friend of
Abraham Lincoln, helped establish the Republican Party and served in the
state legislature (1856–57) and Congress (1877–79). Her mother was a
suffragist active in women's rights activities in Rockford and a graduate of
the first class of Rockford Female Seminary. Lathrop attended Rockford Female
Seminary where she met Jane Addams and Ellen
Gates Starr. After one year, she transferred to Vassar College, developing
her own multidisciplinary studies in statistics, institutional history,
sociology, and community organization and graduated in 1880.[2] Afterwards,
she worked in her father's law office first as a secretary and then studying
the law for herself.
In 1890, Lathrop moved to Chicago where she joined Jane Addams, Ellen Gates
Starr, Alzina Stevens, Edith
Abbott, Grace Abbott, Florence
Kelley, Mary McDowell, Alice
Hamilton, Sophonisba
Breckinridge and other social reformers at Hull House.[3] Lathrop
ran a discussion group called the Plato Club in the early days of the House.
The women at Hull House actively campaigned to persuade Congress to pass
legislation to protect children. During the depression years of the early '90s
Lathrop served as a volunteer investigator of relief applicants, visiting
homes to document the needs of the families. In 1893, Lathrop was appointed as
the first ever woman member of the Illinois State Board of Charities,
beginning her lifelong work in civil service reform: advocating for the
training of professional social workers and standardizing employment
procedures. This would lead to opening the labor market for educated women as
well as improving social services in Progressive Era cities and towns. Over
the next few years she helped introduce reforms such as the appointment of
female doctors in state hospitals and the removal of the insane from the state
workhouses.
At the turn of the twentieth century, educated women who chose to have
careers often chose to forego heterosexual marriage; many partnered with other
professional women instead. Shown here (left to right) are reformers Julia
Lathrop, Jane Addams, and Mary Eliza McDowell on a 1913 suffrage trip to
Capitol Hill. None of them ever married. Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-50050
Reacting to pressure from Progressive women reformers for the appointment
of a woman for the newly created Children's Bureau, in 1912, President William
Taft appointed Lathrop as the first bureau chief.[4] Over
the next nine years Lathrop directed research into child labor, infant
mortality, maternal mortality, juvenile delinquency, mothers' pensions and
illegitimacy.[5]
The Children's Bureau under Lathrop (1912–21) (known as "America's First
Official Mother") and her successors became an administrative unit that not
only created child welfare policy but also led its implementation. For many
conservative women, the Bureau's focus on maternal and child welfare gave them
a role in politics for the first time—something that the suffrage or women's
rights movements had not offered them. The Bureau expanded its budget and
personnel to focus on a scientific approach to motherhood in order to reduce
infant and maternal mortality, improve child health and advocate for trained
care for children with disabilities. Lathrop modeled the Children's Bureau
investigations from the work she did while at Hull-House. The Bureau also
lobbied to abolish child labor. Scientific language became critical to the
reform efforts such as the baby-saving campaigns in towns with large working
class and immigrant populations where the middle class maternalists battled
contemporary beliefs in the inevitability of high infant mortality rates.
"Mother-work in the community"[1]:34 meant
that women educated in the latest scientific theories about children's health
and safety would lead the movement for child welfare reform. In her first
annual report for the agency, Lathrop described the plans for expansion:
promotion of birth registration, infant mortality field studies, production of
instructional pamphlets and reports, expand the study of child labor laws,
explore issues regarding mothers' pensions, and study the status of
"dependent, defective, and delinquent children."[5]:52 Lathrop
wrote in 1914: "Work for infant welfare is coming to be regarded as more than
a philanthropy or an expression of good will. It is a profoundly important
public concern which tests the public spirit and the democracy of a
community."[1]:74
Unlike the National Congress of Mothers, Lathrop's leadership of the
Children's Bureau relied on her belief in the New Woman's right to freedom for
individual development and opportunities, including a college degree of equal
merit to men's and a decent job. However, Lathrop was careful to insist that
motherhood was "the most important calling in the world"[1]:81 and
to deny that women should have career ambitions. This way Lathrop could avoid
controversy even while she built public support for the new agency. In 1917,
the American Association for Labor Legislation proposed a national health
insurance act that included a provision for weekly cash allocations for
pregnant women. Lathrop went against the private insurance industry and
the American Medical Association to support this proposal, believing that the
maternity benefit systems already in place in Germany, England and France left
too many women and their babies uninsured. Lathrop argued in an address before
the American Public Health Association's 1918 meeting in Chicago that U.S.
leaders needed to address the reasons for poverty in order to address
children's health needs—that high infant mortality among the poor and working
class in American cities was not just due to ignorance or laziness. Lathrop
asked: "Which is the more safe and sane conclusion! That 88 per cent of all
these fathers were incorrigibly indolent or below normal mentally, or that
sound public economy demands an irreducible minimum living standard to be
sustained by a minimum wage and other such expedients as may be developed in a
determined effort to give every child a fair chance?"[5]:63
The attitude of most of the staff in the Children's Bureau and other
government agencies however, was that women—especially with children—should
not work outside of the home even if impoverished. Any connections between
children's health and such issues as expansion of workers' insurance, minimum
wage or sanitation systems lost credence. The popular strategy remained
focused on "Americanizing" immigrant workers and teaching white mothers how to
take care of babies. It is important to note that the Bureau chose not to
address the horrifyingly high mortality rates among babies in families of
color. In the South, much of the public health campaigns were undertaken by
African-American, Hispanic or black clubwomen working in their own segregated
communities.[6][7][8]
In 1921 the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act became the first
federally funded social welfare measure in the United States.[3] The
law provided federal matching grants to the states for prenatal and child
health clinics, visiting nurses for expectant and new mothers, distribution of
information on nutrition and hygiene as well as midwife training. Contrary to
Lathrop's original ideas, the final version of the law did not provide any
financial aid or medical care. The first 30 years of the twentieth century
marked a transition between traditional social medicine that included the use
of relatives or local midwives and the rise of a modern medical management of
childbirth and childrearing by experts outside the family and home.[1]:33 However,
as the federal bureaucracy blossomed in the years after World War II, the only
agency focused solely on children lost its power and influence.
As early as 1898, at the third Annual Illinois Conference on Charities,
organized by the philanthropist Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop, reformers
called for a separate system of courts for children.[9] Lathrop's
experience at the Hull House and as a Charities Board member had given her
firsthand knowledge of the conditions for children in county poorhouses and
jails. Prior to the reform era, children over the age of seven were imprisoned
with adults. Lathrop helped found the country's first juvenile court in 1899,
and the Chicago Woman's Club established the Juvenile Court Committee
(electing Lathrop as its first president in 1903) to pay the salaries of
fifteen probation officers and run a detention home located at 625 West Adams
Street. By 1904, Julia Lathrop helped organize and then became the president
of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. The director was psychologist William
A. Healy who led scientific studies of the physical and mental health of the
children, shifting away from the belief that environment alone was responsible
for a child's delinquent behavior. Together with members of the National
Congress of Mothers Lathrop worked to organize a juvenile court movement
nationally with justice law reformers such as Judge Ben Lindsey (who later
chaired the National Conference of Charities and Correction's juvenile court
subcommittee).[10]
In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson sent Lathrop and Grace Abbott to
represent the U.S. at an international conference on child welfare. There
Lathrop consulted on the formation of a childcare bureau in the newly formed
country of Czechoslovakia. After her retirement from the Children's Bureau in
1922, Lathrop became president of the Illinois League of Women Voters. She
also helped form the National Committee of Mental Illness. In 1925 Lathrop
represented the U.S. in Switzerland at the Child Welfare Committee established
by the League of Nations.
There is a residence hall at Rockford University and an elementary school
in Rockford named after Lathrop.[11] An
intermediate school in Santa Ana, California also bears her name. Although a
residence hall at Vassar College is named for Dr. Edward Lathrop, a charter
trustee, he was not Julia's father. Julia's father was William Lathrop, a
lawyer and (briefly) a congressman, from Rockford, IL. In 1938, the Chicago
Housing Authority opened the Julia C. Lathrop Homes, a public housing project
in the North Center neighborhood on Chicago's north side.
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