Women-wise and Other Wise

Mrs. Randolph Guggenheimer, Editor

In the course of 1934 the Jewish Social Service Association will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of its founding. And if one speaks to its director, Miss Frances Taussig, who has guided the Association now for many years and steered it through the nightmare-years of the depression, one feels that this anniversary is one that should interest the widest circles, and that the work of the Association ought to receive on this occasion the unanimous public approval it so richly deserves.

For the Jewish Social Service Association does by far more than offer merely financial relief to the many Jewish families and individuals who have suffered under the economic stress of the times. Perforce, suffering under an unavoidable scarcity of means, Jewish Social Service has had to curtail mere material help, diverting such cases to the various public welfare organizations, and retaining for its own special field of activity only those families and individuals who need even more than money the help and understanding a trained staff of social workers is able to give.

Sitting in her office, like a marvelous queen bee, inspiring and directing the activity of the entire hive, Miss Taussig tells the visitor in a very quiet but most impressive manner:

“Despite all Home Relief activities, despite all that City and State try to do for the unemployed and needy, our organization has a special and important mission, a mission the full value of which will only be apparent in future years. We try to treat our clients not merely on a factual and economic basis, but we approach each case from a psychological angle. We know that the demoralization caused by long unemployment cannot be healed merely by relief checks, but that an internal adjustment to changed economic conditions must be fostered. We try to make the dependent family still function normally, thus providing for growing children an opportunity for healthful development into a satisfactory and well-adjusted adult life.

“We know—alas! we know only too well—that the failure of so many individuals and families to cope with life and its problems is not merely the outcome of poverty and insecurity, but that certain intangible constituents, such as feelings, habits, personal relations, hatreds, love, prejudice, fears — yes, above all fears — are fundamental factors in maladjustment, and that we have to uncover and cure these pernicious and faulty factors in order to bring about a new and wholesome attitude which alone makes an economic rehabilitation possible.

“Our case workers must, in order to do all this, possess a definite psychological training, in addition to a true quality of imagination and a fine feeling for people, so that it is possible for them to enter into the hidden life of those who come to us for help. For our aim is not merely surface relief, social medication, so to say, but— to continue the simile — social surgery: we try to employ not only palliative but truly curative measures.”

The woman behind this tremendous work is very simple, very unassuming, but despite her gentle quietness is charged with an indomitable will and an energy that burns with a gemlike flame in her eyes. And Miss Taussig has more than energy, knowledge and experience: she has vision, and it is this vision which has made her into a true healer of maimed lives.