‘An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed. In the case of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, it is the lengthened shadow of one remarkable woman. In 1893, Lillian Wald (1867-1940) was a 26-year-old nurse training to become a doctor at New York’s prestigious Woman’s Medical College and teaching a homemaking class for impoverished immigrant women on the city’s Lower East Side. One raw March day, as Wald memorably recounted in her 1915 autobiography, her class was interrupted by a little girl who implored Wald to help her mother—one of Wald’s students—who was near death in a...

Source: Wall Street Journal August 17, 2020 22:52 UTC