This is the first part of a two-part series highlighting United Hospital Fund’s Women’s Division and its evolution and impact over a century. Stay tuned for part two later this month.
Founded in 1879, the United Hospital Fund was formed just before a turning point in the women’s rights movement, which had struggled to gain mainstream momentum despite decades of tenacious lobbying efforts.
Middle-class women in the late 1880s and early 1890s were beginning to rapidly “expand their sphere of activities further outside the home,” getting involved in activism, women’s clubs, professional societies, and local civic or charity organizations.1 This surge of activity would catapult momentum for the suffragist movement.
At UHF, then called the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, the first move to capitalize on this new force of volunteerism began in 1887.
After noting with regret in its 1886 annual report that “no organization of ladies has offered to cooperate with the committee,” UHF made a written appeal to women of the time. Researchers would later call the move “one of the most constructive steps in [UHF] history.”
The appeal was answered by philanthropist Mary Morris Irvin, who invited 50 women to her home on West 36th Street and persuaded them to join what became UHF’s Women’s Auxiliary. Mrs. Irvin would become its first president. Women were formally recognized as voting members of UHF in 1890 and joined its new trustees board in 1897.
A banker’s wife who dedicated her life to charitable work, Mrs. Irvin was a trailblazer for women and children’s causes at the time, also serving as president and founder of Loomis Sanitarium, and president of St. Mary’s Free Hospital for Children, one of UHF’s member hospitals. Though it opened after her death in 1918, Mrs. Irvin also organized the Hotel Irvin for Women—a safe, affordable place for working women to live.
Mrs. Irvin later served as president of an organization founded by another notable philanthropist and UHF Women’s Auxiliary founder, Ellin Prince Speyer. The organization, the Irene Club for Working Girls2, was noted as the “seed from which grew a national network of societies supporting the needs of working girls.”3 Mrs. Speyer, who served as Women’s Auxiliary treasurer, was also a founder of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, was appointed by Mayor John P. Mitchel as chair of a subcommittee on unemployment among women, and raised funds for the Lafayette Street Hospital for animals, eventually named in her honor.
Mighty from the Start
Under this impressive leadership, UHF’s Women’s Auxiliary became a reliable fundraising source for United Hospital Fund.
The Auxiliary raised money in three ways: individual donations from women, contributions from merchants or others that the women solicited, and collection boxes. Despite consistent prejudice—their collection boxes were nicknamed “mite boxes” since it was thought women would only be able to help a “mite”—the Auxiliary contributed significantly to the organization. By 1897, the Auxiliary’s efforts accounted for 14 percent of the total dollars collected that year.
An energetic fundraiser, Mrs. Irvin also convinced the owner of the Waldorf Hotel to host UHF’s benefit concert annually. One year, when the concert didn’t take place, the Women’s Auxiliary raised the money to replace its usual proceeds.
Joseph Hirsch, who wrote about the auxiliary’s first years in a recounting for UHF’s 75th anniversary, would even note that UHF was able to survive the financial depression of 1893 largely unscathed “due in large measure to the energetic work of the Women’s Auxiliary,” who made up the difference of big givers who had fallen away. The women’s fundraising made sure annual appeals were unaffected despite the hard financial times.
Ahead of the Curve
The Women’s Auxiliary—later integrated as a formal Women’s Division at UHF—would become essential in meeting yet another wave of change that landed in hospitals in the 1930s: social services.
Social service departments, which cared for the most vulnerable by addressing social needs like finances, housing, or employment, were few and far between in hospitals despite growing health and social needs of the time.
United Hospital Fund’s Women’s Division was in a unique position to change this. The division, for the first time, brought together the thousands of women working in New York’s hospitals under one coordinated body. This was especially significant because women had already been at the forefront of what limited social work did exist in hospitals, including improving standards of nursing or increasing child-care at hospital facilities.
The Women’s Division eventually published a guide for the use of medical social service committees in hospitals, a particularly cutting-edge undertaking given that the importance of medical social service work in hospitals "was just beginning to be realized by physicians, hospital administrators and hospital accrediting bodies," researchers noted. The rest of the health care world took notice.
“Although the Guide was compiled primarily to suit the needs of the New York metropolitan area, hospitals and social service committees throughout the country and abroad have used it in organizing or reorganizing their own social service committees and departments,” Hirsch wrote.
The UHF Women’s Division also took on other significant roles in its first official years, including persuading hospital boards to include women as members, raising standards in social work by advising existing committees, and educating the public on the importance of hospitals to the community. Their impressive fundraising efforts also continued, collecting more than $500,000 in the first campaign as an official division of UHF.
Going to War
Women’s power as a force of volunteerism became even more essential to hospitals in the early 1940s when it became clear the United States was on its way to war.
By the end of 1942, World War II had commandeered more than 10,000 doctors, nurses, and other personnel from hospitals to serve in the armed forces, leaving UHF's women’s committees with the “chief responsibility” of filling those gaps with volunteer programs.
A Volunteer Bureau created by UHF in 1942 worked with organizations like the Office of Civilian Defense, the American Women’s Voluntary Services, and the Red Cross to recruit and train thousands of volunteers. Collectively, those volunteers would log more than 1.7 million hours of service over the next few years.
“In view of the unprecedented shortage of hospital personnel, the value of these services cannot be overestimated,” Hirsch wrote.
The women’s committees also spearheaded the creation of a Hospital Library Bureau in 1941, which trained hundreds of its own volunteers and gathered more than 675,000 books for distribution at hospitals in its first seven years.
Another effort stemming from the 1940s volunteer push, a Committee on Volunteer Aides helped the effort by creating a handbook on volunteer services, which “was used as a standard guide in hospitals throughout the city,” according to researchers. That committee also trained hundreds of its own volunteers.
Hirsch notes that it was these volunteerism efforts that allowed the hospitals to maintain a high standard of medical practice despite the huge loss of personnel during the war.
[1]The Women’s Rights Movement, 1848—1917 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
[2]Speyer, Ellin Prince (1849–1921)
[3] Drawn by the manufacturing boom of the 19th century to work in cities for the first time, around 20 percent of women worked outside the home by the early 20th century, often in dangerous factory jobs. Working girls' clubs and homes were instrumental in providing lodging, community, and safety for these women. Women's role in the workforce would transform drastically over the next century as attitudes, policies, and opportunities changed. By the 1990s, labor force participation had reached 74 percent. (The history of women's work and wages and how it has created success for us all | Brookings; All the Single Ladies: Women-Only Buildings in Early 20th-Century New York | New-York Historical Society (nyhistory.org))