Mary Eliza McDowell

• Mary Eliza McDowell
• Born: November 30, 1854
• Died: October 14, 1936

Social reformer and settlement house founder, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of six children of Malcolm McDowell, an owner of a steel rolling mill, and Jane Welsh (Gordon) McDowell. Her father’s ancestors were Scottish-Irish, and had emigrated to the United States in the 1730s. They settled for a brief period in Pennsylvania, and then moved to Virginia. Later generations of McDowells migrated to Ohio and Kentucky. Malcolm McDowell, a strong opponent of slavery, was a paymaster in the Union army of Tennessee during the Civil War. Afterward he moved his family to Chicago. Mary McDowell was devoted to her father, and when he left the Episcopal church to join a Methodist chapel, she also converted.

She was educated in public and private schools in Illinois, but her real education came from running the family’s household when her mother became an invalid. Her first social service experience took place in 1871, when she assisted in relief coordination during the Great Chicago Fire. In 1880 the McDowell family moved to Evanston, Illinois, and she ran a Methodist Sunday school class. There she met temperance leader Frances Willard, and was drawn into the movement, becoming national organizer of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s young woman’s division in 1887.

Her work in the WCTU led her to develop an interest in early childhood education. She became head of the WCTU’s kindergarten division after attending Elizabeth Harrison’s training school. For a brief period after graduation she taught in New York City; returning to Chicago in 1890, she became a resident of Jane Addams’s Hull House. There she organized a women’s group and began a settlement kindergarten. However, she was obliged to return to Evanston when her mother’s health grew worse.

She was deeply shocked by the violence of the Pullman strike in 1894, and became concerned about economic unrest and the conditions of industrial life. The chance for her to help came in the same year. On the recommendation of Ad-dams, she was asked to head the new settlement project that a group of University of Chicago sociology faculty was planning as a laboratory for social service work in the immigrant, industrial area behind the stockyards, known as Pack-ington. With her acceptance of the directorship of the University of Chicago Settlement, she plunged into action: setting up a day nursery, organizing youth and adult clubs, taking tenement children to city parks and summer camps, overseeing the erection of a settlement playground and gym, and fund-raising for a municipal bathhouse and public library.

This work led her into public health reform. Incensed by the open garbage pits that surrounded Packington, she began a crusade to educate the public on the health dangers of the holes. Due to her efforts the pits were closed, and a City Waste Commission established. Additionally, she worked for the filling of Bubble Creek, a stream polluted with refuse from the stockyards and meat packing plants that ran through the center of the tenement district. She won city and packers’ financing for filling it and building an intercepting sewer to relieve the danger.

Mary McDowell, typical of reformers of the progressive era, was also a strong supporter of women’s rights, an early advocate of woman suffrage, and a member of the first national board of the League of Women Voters. With Michael Donnelly, president of the packers’ union, she established the Illinois Women’s Trade Union League in 1903, to help improve women’s working conditions, serving as its president from 1904 to 1907. She was also one of the main organizers of the National Women’s Trade Union League in 1903. In 1907 she persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to commission a government investigation of women and children in industry; she led the drive in several states for legislation to improve the working conditions and to limit hours of employment for both women and children. In World War I she served on several national committees on women workers and helped prevent wartime suspension of protective legislation. She was one of the main leaders in the campaign to create a Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor in 1920.

Her activities in behalf of labor were not limited to women. She assisted in organizing the stockyard laborers into unions, serving as an intermediary between the packers and union officials in the Chicago Stockyard Strike of 1904. Although the strikers did not obtain any financial concessions or improved working conditions, their union did receive recognition. After the strike, a letter she wrote to the president combined with the public outcry set off by Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, to lead to a federal investigation of the stockyards.

Also keenly interested in politics, she worked for the Progressive party in 1912, and tried but failed in 1916 to win a seat as a county commissioner. In every Chicago ward election during her tenure at the settlement house she worked as a leader of the reform element. In 1923 “the Duchess of Bubble Creek” or “the Garbage Lady,” as she had been nicknamed, was appointed a commissioner of public welfare by the reform mayor of Chicago, William E. Dever. The Public Welfare Department became a clearinghouse for the city’s social agencies. During her term in office she established bureaus of social surveys and employment. She held the post until 1927, when the new mayor, William Thompson, terminated the project.

Mary McDowell’s settlement work made her a staunch defender and friend of the waves of minority groups that lived in Packington. The Chicago race riots of 1919 strengthened her determination to work for improvement of black-white relations. In that year she established an Interracial Cooperative Committee for joint legislative and civic activities, and she also became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League of Chicago, the Immigrant’s Protection League, and the YMCA. Active in the peace movement, she campaigned for the acceptance of the League of Nations.

In 1929 McDowell retired from the University of Chicago Settlement House. She died seven years later at the age of eighty-one, a year after suffering a paralytic stroke, and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.

Mary McDowell’s papers are housed in the Chicago Historical Society. Her works include An Appeal to Union Women (1909) and An Appeal to Self-Supporting Women (1913). The only full-length biography is H. E. Wilson, Mary McDowell Neighbor (1928). For additional information see C. M. Hill, comp., Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping (1938), L. D. Taylor, “The Life Work of Mary McDowell and Graham Taylor, “Social Service Review (March 1954), and Notable America Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (1971). For her WCTU activities see H. E. Tyler, Where Prayer and Purpose Meet (1949). An obituary appeared in The New York Times on October 15, 1936.