Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,992

This is the grave of Mary McDowell.

Born in 1854 in Cincinnati, McDowell grew up pretty wealthy. Her father was a prominent Republican, Civil War veteran, and mill owner who relocated the family to Chicago after the war. Her mother was an invalid by the time Mary was in her teenage years and she had to take care of her younger brothers, so things weren’t that easy. She first entered the public spotlight in 1871, when despite her age, she did a lot of coordination of relief efforts after the Great Chicago Fire, which led Rutherford B. Hayes, then a rising Ohio politician who had himself worked to get Ohio residents to donate, to publicly commend her.

McDowell was a little older than many of the women who played such a critical foundation in the Progressive Movement, but she was already embodying many of their principles–using feminine ideals to be an independent and unmarried woman dedicating herself to social change. She got involved in the temperance movement, working for Frances Willard in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for awhile, organizing religious classes, and the like. When Jane Addams opened Hull House, the first American settlement house, in 1889, McDowell quickly joined her. The University of Chicago decided to open its own settlement house in 1893. Despite its later reputation as the home of the worst and most vile academics to ever exist in its Economics department, the University of Chicago was initially founded as an experimental institution applying the new social sciences to society. So it hired McDowell to run its Back of the Yards House, which was actually more of a community than a single structure like Addams had founded. This was a notorious neighborhood–the area where Upton Sinclair set The Jungle, for example. McDowell dedicated herself to neighborhood uplift. This was a neighborhood that housed (barely) the city’s enormous eastern European immigrant communities and the city’s growing Black population, so the settlement house worked for both.

Where McDowell ended up after not too long was moving toward unionism. Unions are and remain the only effective medium of collective action among working class people. The settlement house movement had its problems of condescension for sure, not to mention policing sexuality, but the people who ran them generally did believe in forms of organizing for collective power, though most certainly not in a revolutionary way. But within the confines of a respectable, wages and conditions kind of unionism, there was a lot of room for McDowell to use their considerable cultural capital to support collective organizing.

So for example, McDowell would support women organizing into Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, at the time a new union that organized in the horrors of the Chicago meatpacking district. In 1904, there was a big strike in the meatpacking district. She strongly urged racial harmony. It didn’t really work. The truth was that the meatpackers could easily hire Black strikebreakers–often brought in directly from the South without actually telling the workers what they were being brought up for. The strike failed due to this and the violence it started, but McDowell became more known for her open advocacy of the strike. McDowell would also help found the Women’s Trade Union League in Chicago, which was the Progressive movement to clean up conditions for women and children in apparel primarily, with a goal of ending child labor entirely. This was founded by Florence Kelley, another of the early settlement house workers, and McDowell was right on board with it. She would later work to get the Wilson administration to found the Women’s Bureau, which still exists today within the Department of Labor, to produce data on women’s work and to promote policies to create more equity.

McDowell and Addams also worked together to fight for better garbage cleanup in the city. This was the Big Bill Thompson era and the city was just so nakedly corrupt. Garbage cleanup was a wholly patronage operation and no one really cared if the garbage was actually picked up so long as the people who needed to get paid got paid. At first, these campaigns went nowhere, much to the anger of both women. They found themselves and their rational arguments stonewalled by indifference. But exposure did matter and that especially true after Upton Sinclair embarrassed Chicago leadership so deeply with The Jungle, which came out in 1906. Reform would slowly come to Chicago. In 1923, there was a brief interregnum in the Thompson era of Chicago corruption. William Everett Dever won election as a reformer. One of his appointees was Mary McDowell, who was named Commissioner of Public Welfare, with a charge to produce the type of data used for good governance as the twentieth century went on.

Now, like a lot of Progressives, McDowell could be very naive about her reforms. When Thompson was mayor, she led a campaign to force him to appoint a woman to the city government. After all, women would clean up government because that’s what women do! But this is, of course, stupid, much like essentialist beliefs about women being inherently less warlike or aggressive sometimes still comes out of feminist political circles and then Trump names Pam Bondi Attorney General to push forward fascism. Well, Thompson laughed at McDowell openly, appointed a woman to a position, who immediately engaged in massive levels of graft, even for the Thompson regime. But this kind of naivety was part and parcel of the often simple-thinking Progressives.

But no one is perfect. The Progressives often get a bad rap these days for good reason–their social control is pretty awful by modern standards. But they also fought to empower the state to improve lives for workers as well. We probably need a new overview of the Progressives that deals with both sides of their use of coercion seriously. Unlike many Progressive women, she was a supporter of American involvement in World War I and was on the advisory council for the Council of National Defense, unsurprisingly focusing on women’s issues and foreign-born workers. She was also involved in the Urban League and the NAACP and was a long time ally of civil rights workers in Chicago.

McDowell worked until pretty close to the end, which for her was in 1936, when a stroke felled her at the age of 81. She was famous enough at the time to have a long New York Times obituary in an era when few women received one. She had run her settlement house until 1930, finally relinquishing daily control as she turned 75, but remaining quite active in its running.

Mary McDowell is buried in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois,

If you would like this series to visit other settlement house workers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mary Rozet Smith is also buried in Chicago and Julia Lathrop is in Rockford, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.