Hull-House Highlights

"Louise deKoven Bowen and the Bowen Country Club"
Hull-House neighborhood mothers and children in the Formal Garden, Bowen Country Club, Waukegan, 1924.

By the late 1890s, [Louise deKoven Bowen’s] involvement in Hull-House broadened both [her] concerns for children's welfare and her strong sense of social responsibility. Bowen brought her considerable energies and skills when she joined with other social and child welfare activists in developing a reform agenda for women and children's protection and betterment. By 1898, a coalition of county judges, the Chicago Bar Association, and women reformers successfully lobbied for a new juvenile court in Chicago—the first juvenile court in the United States. It opened in 1899 and handled delinquent children separately from adult criminals, though no provision had been made to pay probation officers. To meet this need and make certain the system did its job, the women reformers organized a Juvenile Court Committee (JCC) whose major initial goal was fund-raising for probation officers' salaries; Bowen first served as vice-chair, and by 1904 chaired the committee. Soon JCC extended its purpose to include finding suitable homes for dependent and delinquent children. Toward this end, Bowen led efforts to establish a Juvenile Court Building and Detention Home by obtaining commitments from the City of Chicago to provide the land and from the Cook County Board to provide funding for construction.

With the completion of this project, the JCC was "disbanded" in 1907 "but at the same time absorbed a small organization called the Juvenile Protective Association, started by judge [Julian] Mack, Mr. Hastings Hart and Miss Minnie Lowe [sic]" (Growing Up with a City, 115). Bowen became president of the Juvenile Protective Association (JPA). Following the approach of Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), studies were published as inexpensive pamphlets widely distributed to social welfare activists, public officials, and the public-at-large. Bowen authored many of the studies and demonstrated an acute understanding and analysis of the need for both local and state government action and intervention to prevent juvenile delinquency.

The JPA studies identified aspects of urban life that had negative consequences for unprotected and unsupervised children whose family circumstances forced them into the city's streets and created an environment that promoted delinquency. Public dance halls and theaters were areas where liquor and prostitution flourished. Children were also at risk when they were employed in street peddling. Bowen led the campaign for laws to prohibit liquor sales in public dance halls and to regulate street peddling. In 1912, a city ordinance regulating peddling by boys and girls was passed during the administration of Mayor Carter H. Harrison Jr., who cooperated with Bowen and the JPA's reform agenda. When William "Big Bill" Thompson was elected mayor, the political climate for reform worsened. Political bossism, corruption, and the incompetence of Mayor Thompson's administration made adequate enforcement of the 1912 ordinance difficult. Bowen shifted from a private letter-writing campaign criticizing Thompson to public denunciation of the mayor. Later, using one of her pamphlets as campaign literature, Bowen was able to get a bill prohibiting liquor sales in public dance halls introduced and referred to a legislative committee in 1917.

Bowen was one of the first reformers in Chicago to become aware of the need for Chicago's African American community to have "an equal chance for work, for living accommodations, and for recreation" ("Annual Report," 1912-13, 48, JPA Records). In 1913 Bowen authored The Colored People of Chicago, one of the first social investigations into the social and economic conditions of Blacks in the city. Bowen concluded that Chicago's African American children's lives were "so circumscribed on every hand by race limitations" (Speeches, Addresses, and Letters, vol. 1, 275) that action was necessary against the deep-seated and extensive injustice first before the JPA could itself help the children. The JPA published the in-depth study of racial prejudice and discrimination in education, employment, housing, law enforcement, and entertainment as one of its pamphlets.

To fund JPA activities, Bowen contributed significant sums of her own money. In addition, because no one else would accept the responsibility, Bowen became the long-term chair of the organization's finance committee in 1910. In this capacity, she solicited corporate as well as individual contributions. Among the major individual benefactors were Bertha Palmer, from Bowen's own elite circle, and Augusta Rosenwald, Julius Rosenwald's wife, from Bowen's elite and social welfare contacts. Nevertheless, Bowen was aware of the JPA's continual funding problems. In 1919, when the JPA executive director Jessie Binford wanted the organization to do protective work with girls and not just with boys, Bowen knew that the association was already overextended financially because of child labor work assumed from the defunct Illinois Consumers' League. Facing a JPA budget of $27,000 and a deficit of $1,100 in October 1918, Bowen was rightly concerned. By 1929, when the budget was $40,000, Bowen resigned from the presidency because of the difficulties of funding a budget "about $12,000 more than I can raise and be moderately sure of (JPA Board "Minutes," October 11, 1929, JPA Records). Yet, within three months, Bowen was back as president with a presumably lowered budget.
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[excerpted from] Sharon Z. Alter, "Louise deKoven Bowen," in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001): 101-6.

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