Grace Abbott (1878-1939)

Grace Abbott was an educator, author, and a well-known social reformer during the first half of the twentieth century. Miss Abbott, a Grand Island, Nebraska, native, attended the Grand Island Baptist College, and then taught in high schools in Grand Island and in Broken Bow, Nebraska. In l907 she went to Chicago to continue her education at the University of Chicago.

Miss Abbott began her career in social work in l908, working with immigrants at Hull House in Chicago. For nine years she directed the Immigrants Protective League, which helped immigrants adjust to their new life, and to protect them from exploitation. She wrote several books about the problems of immigrants, including The Immigrant and His Community.

Concerned about the welfare of children and infants, especially the low pay and long hours required of children who worked in factories, she became a leader in the fight for federal legislation protecting children's rights. Through her efforts, the Sheppard-Towner Act, coordinating federal and state aid for mothers and children, was passed.

In 1921 President Warren Harding appointed Miss Abbott head of the Children's Bureau in the Department of Labor. As head of the bureau, she administered the Sheppard-Towner Act's provisions. She continued in this position until 1934 when she resigned to become a professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago. Her two-volume book, The Child and the State, became a classic and was used as a text by the University of Chicago.

Abbott received her master of philosophy degree in political science in 1909 from the University of Chicago. Honorary degrees were conferred upon her by the University of New Hampshire in 1931 and by the University of Wisconsin in 1932.

Abbott headed the U.S. delegation to the Pan-American Child Welfare Congress in Mexico City in 1935. She also headed the delegation from the United States to the International Labor Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1937.

Grace Abbott died in Chicago on June 19, 1939. For thirty years she had fought against infant and mortality, child labor, and juvenile delinquency. Abbott had been named one of America's most distinguished women by Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931. Grace Abbott Park, a children's playground park in Grand Island, was named in her honor. She was voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1976.