sPARAkPAR@`{TEXT`mMcDowell, Mary Eliza 18541936 social worker and reformer Born in Cincinnati on November 30, 1854, Mary McDowell moved with her family to Chicago at the end of the Civil War. Her first experience in social service came in the aftermath of the Chicago fire of 1871, when she assisted in relief work among refugees. Later she moved to suburban Evanston, where an acquaintance with Frances Willard drew her into the work of the Womans Christian Temperance Union. She soon became head of the unions kindergarten department, which stimulated her in turn to attend Elizabeth Harrisons Chicago Kindergarten College for formal training. In 1890, after a brief sojourn as a kindergarten teacher in New York City, she returned to Chicago and joined Jane Addamss Hull-House settlement. In 1894 McDowell moved back to Evanston for a short time to nurse her mother. In that year a faculty group at the University of Chicago decided to establish a settlement in an immigrant industrial neighborhood as a laboratory for social observation and experiment. They chose Packingtown, also known as Back of the Yards, the neighborhood on the west of the Union Stockyards on Chicagos South Side, and on recommendation by Jane Addams they invited Mary McDowell to be resident director. That fall she took a tiny flat on Gross Avenue and began her work. Packingtown was a drab, treeless ward inhabited mainly by Germans and Irishthe wave of immigration from Poland, Lithuania, and other Slavic lands was only then beginningand overall pervaded by the stench and filth of the stockyards, of open pits where the citys garbage was dumped and left uncovered, and of Bubbly Creek, a stagnant branch of the Chicago River that was literally an open sewer. After establishing contact with her new neighbors through day nurseries and a variety of clubs, Mary McDowell began agitating for neighborhood improvement. Three years of work resulted in the establishment of Packingtowns first public bath and its first public park. McDowell then took on the much knottier problem of sanitation. Her campaign against uncontrolled dumping lasted until 1913 and was highlighted by her exposure of the wards alderman, who was paid to allow dumping in his clay pits, and by her own tour of European sanitation facilities in 1911. She was named to the City Waste Commission when it was created in 1913, and open pits were shortly afterward replaced by incinerators. The campaign against Bubbly Creek was greatly boosted by the publication of Upton Sinclairs shocking novel The Jungle in 1906. The city, the railroads, and the meat packers were finally persuaded to finance an intercepting sewer, and the creek was drained and filled. The University of Chicago Settlement had meanwhile moved to larger quarters over a feedstore in 1896 and to a permanent residence on Gross Avenue in 1906. Its facilities eventually included a gymnasium, a playground, arts and crafts instruction, classes in English and music, and a summer camp in the Indiana dunes. The general problem of industrial poverty led McDowell naturally to support labor organization, and during the bitter stockyard strike of 1904 she was virtually the only public figure in the area to support the strikers openly. Her mediating efforts helped prevent violence on more than one occasion. In 1903 she helped found the National Womens Trade Union League, and she was president of the leagues Chicago branch from 1904 to 1907. She instigated an investigation by the federal government into the role of women and children in industry in 1907, worked for the passage of hours and wages legislation in Illinois and several other states, and was instrumental in securing the creation of a Womens Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1920. In the wake of the bloody Chicago race riots of 1919 she formed the Interracial Cooperative Committee to help promote racial peace and understanding. In 1923 the new reform mayor of Chicago, William Dever, appointed her commissioner of public welfare. Her many improvements in the office were negated when Democratic party boss William Hale Thompson was elected mayor in 1927 and she was removed. Mary McDowell was an active member of such groups as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of Women Voters, the Immigrants Protective League, and the Urban League. Known at various times as the Garbage Lady, the Duchess of Bubbly Creek, and the Angel of the Stockyards, she retired as director of the University of Chicago Settlement in 1929. She died in Chicago on October 14, 1936. In that year Gross Avenue, home of the settlement, was renamed McDowell Avenue. styl`!555;!I~!I!I5!IG!I!I!I 5!I 5!I !I !I 5 !Im 5n!I>link`HYPR~HYPR5GHYPR