Julia Lathrop:
The Story of a True Fairy God Mother

           Once upon a time, not too long ago, children would do very hard and dangerous work for very low pay. Some children lost fingers in cotton mills, had their spines deformed by hours at  sewing machines, or damaged their lungs severely in the coal mines.
            But on June 29th, 1858, in Rockford, Illinois, a girl was born unto William and Sarah Adeline Lathrop who would grow up to be a hero to all of those poor, overworked, children and would work to create laws against child labor. Her name was Julia Lathrop.
            When Julia Lathrop became an adult she decided if she was going to make the world a better place she was going to have to be very well educated. She attended Rockford Seminary for two years. There she met two of her closest, most loyal friends: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates-Starr. Then she transferred to Vassar where she learned statistics, community organization, and institutional history. Finally in 1880 she graduated from Vassar.
            In 1889 Julia did an amazing thing for children who were having a tough time in life and made bad decisions. She created the juvenile delinquency program because she noticed that children were being tried in court the same way adults were, with the same punishments. She created the juvenile delinquency program for children 18 years and younger with a focus on helping them learn to make better decisions and control their feelings.
            After that, beginning in 1890, she worked for 10 years as a secretary for her supportive, Republican father, William Lathrop. They were similar in many aspects. He had been an abolitionist and believed in women's rights. They found it extremely easy to work together. Three years into that ten-year time period the Governor of Illinois appointed her as the first-ever female member to the Illinois State Board of Charities, for which she visited all 102 poor houses that existed in Illinois at that time. She also inspected orphanages and soup kitchens.
       It sounds like a lot for one woman to do. But she did still more to help others. She collaborated with a minister/ social worker named Graham Taylor to start The Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. In those days many people considered math "man's work" and thus women incapable of doing complicated mathematics, but math was one of Julia’s most important tools, and she was good at using it. Math was the key component in some of her most important discoveries.
    At the school she taught people how to teach Occupational Therapy classes to the people who were going to assist the mentally ill; in other words, she taught the teachers. Later, in 1909, she helped to start The National Committee of Mental Hygiene. During that same time period she founded Illinois Immigrants Protective League.
    In 1912 a wonderful thing happened to our very fairy-godmother-like (referring to the fact that she made so many wishes come true for so many people) Julia Lathrop. President William Taft made her the first head of the newly founded Federal Children’s Bureau. Over the next 9 years she directed lots of research programs, mostly for mothers and/or babies/children. What she discovered--and this is where the importance of her advanced mathematical skills comes in--was that instead of dying from new un-treatable diseases, they were dying from easily preventable things like contaminated water and dirty living conditions.
    Though Julia was only trying to do good, people were very mean to her. Most of the rude comments directed towards her she didn’t mind that much. Except for those that came directly from the people she was trying to help: Mothers. The mothers became very defensive because they were doing their best to protect their babies; they just didn’t have the supplies or money they needed to do so. They would say things like: "Who are you to speak for our children, you don’t even have kids of your own?"
    It's true though, that this fairy tale isn’t like most, where a prince whisks away the princess and all live happily ever after. Things like the stuff talked about in this story still go on, some children  are still over-worked and under-paid, a lot of diseases still need cures, other wrongs need to be corrected. But Julia Lathrop died after a goiter operation on April 15th 1932, and she's not here to do all those things.
    She did leave us a gift though, that still exists today, and will forever more. It’s of the most important gifts an activist can give: Inspiration. That’s one reason why people like to read about Martin Luther King, or Eleanor Roosevelt--it’s uplifting, inspiring, and shows us that no matter where we live or what our ethnic background is we are all capable of wonderful things.
    But it's completely up to us to take charge of the gift of inspiration that Julia Lathrop, and others like her, gave us and do something. We can’t just sit around idly waiting for the world to become perfect all of a sudden. We must rise up to the challenges that we face, like others before us have.


The End