Immigration

Between the 1890s and 1915, well over 15 million immigrants arrived in America.  Most settled in America’s major industrial cities and quickly faced extraordinary challenges.  Keenly aware of these hardships, Grace Bagley became deeply committed to improving conditions and opportunities for the nation’s foreign-born residents— especially women and children.

Grace Bagley managed a large Italian tenement that her family owned in the “Levee,” Chicago’s red-light district.  She did not consider herself an arbiter of moral behavior and eschewed that approach to social reform.  Instead, she formed close friendships with the tenement occupants and worked to improve sanitary conditions in the neighborhood.

After the Bagley family moved to Boston around 1908, Grace continued focusing on ways to help immigrants and their children. Concerned that immigrant mothers were especially isolated, she organized free English language classes for them in Boston’s North End.

In 1917, as America entered WWI, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were deeply concerned about the growing bigotry against immigrants and believed that the inclusion of the nation’s foreign-born women was essential to the suffrage movement.  Grace Bagley was appointed as chairman of NAWSA’s National Americanization Committee.  In this role, she led a campaign to help women immigrants throughout the nation.  This included surveying the immigrant populations, determining where there were language barriers, and establishing organizations across the country to help with Americanization activities.