March 10, 1867 – Birth of Lillian Wald, Women’s Rights Activist and Founder of American Community Nursing

Lillian Wald was born in Ohio but grew up primarily in Rochester, New York. She graduated from the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses in 1891, then took courses at the Woman’s Medical College.

Lillian Wald, when young, in a nurse uniform; public domain

Michael Bronski, Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, writes about Wald’s career in his book A Queer History of the United States for Young People. He recounts:

Inspired by Jane Addams and Hull House, upon graduating, Wald and her close friend Mary Brewster moved into a tenement in the immigrant communities of New York’s Lower East Side and began their nursing careers. They believed that nursing involved more than physical care. It was important for them, and other nurses, to live in the neighborhoods of the people for whom they cared and to address the social and economic problems as much as the physical ills.”

Harris & Ewing/LOC hec.07332. Lillian Wald (left), and Jane Addams (right), 1916

In 1893, after witnessing first-hand the poverty and hardship endured by immigrants on the Lower East Side, Wald founded Henry Street Settlement. (Even today it endures and delivers a wide range of social service, arts and health care programs to New Yorkers. You can read about all their innovations and services on their website, here.)

Wald quickly came to devote herself to the community full-time. Along with Brewster, she moved into a room near her patients, in order to care for them better. Around that time she coined the term “public health nurse” to describe nurses whose work is integrated into the public community. By 1913, the Settlement had expanded to seven buildings on Henry Street and two satellite centers, with 3,000 members in its classes and clubs and 92 nurses making 200,000 visits per year.

Bronski reports:

Wald and Brewster received emotional and financial support from many women, and some men. But, much of the core of Henry Street Settlement was formed around a close network of single women, who among themselves had a complex series of personal friendships and romantic relationships.”

Bronski argues that these supportive circles enabled these women to defy expectations and conventions:

Unburdened by the expectations of heterosexual marriage these women imagined and explored new ways of organizing the world. They created new social and housing structures – extended non-biological families – that were more efficient and more capable of taking care of a wealth of human social, physical and emotional needs. In large part they were able to do this because they did not rely on the traditional model of heterosexual marriage and home as the building block of society. Instead, they rejected this model.”

According to the Henry Street Settlement website, Wald integrated her Settlement into powerful political networks for social change. During her 40 years at the helm, she established herself as a courageous national leader advocating for children, labor, immigrant, civil and women’s rights.

Wald helped found the National Organization for Public Health Nursing and Columbia University’s School of Nursing. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, started by Wald at the Settlement, broke off as a separate entity in 1944. Wald also helped institute the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United States Children’s Bureau, the National Child Labor Committee and the National Women’s Trade Union League. 

Lillian Wald.
Courtesy of the Henry Street Settlement.

In 1934, one year after she retired from her position as headworker of Henry Street Settlement House on New York’s Lower East Side, Wald recalled the lesson of her years there:

‘We have found,’ she wrote, ‘that the things which make men alike are finer and stronger than the things which make them different, and that the vision which long since proclaimed the interdependence and the kinship of mankind was farsighted and is true.’”

Lillian Wald died of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 1, 1940. A few months later at Carnegie Hall, over 2,000 people gathered at a tribute to Wald that included messages delivered by the president, governor and mayor.

Wald was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1970 and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993.