Lillian D. Wald

Lillian D. Wald (born March 10, 1867, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died Sept. 1, 1940, Westport, Conn.) was an American nurse and social worker who founded the internationally known Henry Street Settlement in New York City (1893).

Wald grew up in her native Cincinnati, Ohio, and in Rochester, New York. She was educated in a private school, and after abandoning a plan to attend Vassar College she passed a few years enjoying an active social life. In 1889 she broke completely with that life and entered the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, from which she graduated in 1891. For a year she worked as a nurse in the New York Juvenile Asylum. She supplemented her training in 1892–93 with courses at the Woman’s Medical College. She was asked to organize a class in home nursing for the poor immigrant families of New York’s Lower East Side, and in the course of that work she observed firsthand the wretched conditions within the tenement districts.

In the autumn of 1893, with Mary M. Brewster, Wald left medical school, moved to the neighbourhood, and offered her services as a visiting nurse. Two years later, with aid from banker-philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff and others, she took larger accommodations and opened the Nurse’s Settlement. As the number of nurses attached to the settlement grew (from the original 2 in 1893 to 92 in 1913 and to more than 250 by 1929), services were expanded to include nurses’ training, educational programs for the community, and youth clubs. Within a few years the Henry Street establishment had become a neighbourhood centre, the Henry Street Settlement. Over the years the settlement was a powerful source of innovation in the social settlement movement and in the broader field of social work generally. The Neighborhood Playhouse was opened in connection with the settlement in 1915 through the benefaction of Irene Lewisohn. Residents at Henry Street included at various times social reformer Florence Kelley, economist Adolf A. Berle, Jr., labour leader Sidney Hillman, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., U.S. secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wald exerted considerable influence beyond Henry Street as well. In 1902, at her initiative, nursing service was experimentally extended to a local public school, and soon the municipal board of health instituted a citywide public school nursing program, the first such program in the world. The organization of nursing programs by insurance companies for their industrial policyholders (pioneered by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1909) and of the district nursing service of the Red Cross (begun in 1912 and later called Town and Country Nursing Service) were both at her suggestion.

In 1912 Wald’s role as founder of an entirely new profession was formally acknowledged when she helped found and became first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. She also worked to establish educational, recreational, and social programs in underprivileged neighbourhoods. In 1912 Congress established the U.S. Children’s Bureau (headed by Julia Lathrop), also in no small part owing to Wald’s suggestion, and in that year she was awarded the gold medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences.

Wald was active in other areas of reform, particularly with the National Child Labor Committee, which she and Florence Kelley helped found in 1903, the national Women’s Trade Union League, and the American Union Against Militarism, which she, Kelley, and Jane Addams helped organize in 1914 and of which she was elected president. During World War I she headed the committee on home nursing of the Council of National Defense. She led the Nurses’ Emergency Council in the influenza epidemic of 1918–19. Later she founded the League of Free Nations, a forerunner of the Foreign Policy Association. She wrote two autobiographical books, The House on Henry Street (1915) and Windows on Henry Street (1934). In 1933 ill health forced her to resign as head worker of Henry Street, and she settled in Westport, Connecticut.