In the Progressive Era, reformers like Jane Addams understood the link between public health and urban poverty. Today’s leaders could learn a lot from them.
Coronavirus can infect anyone, but the pandemic’s impact has not been equal. In the United States, with the highest death toll in the world, the death rate among black Americans is more than double that of white ones, and infections among Latinos in some states are rising at a faster clip. Crowded, polluted neighborhoods and workers in low-paid yet critical service jobs seem to be at highest risk of infection. Women make up a majority of these front-line workers, and they bear the heavier burden of childcare duties with schools still closed.
What would Jane Addams, the famed Progressive Era activist, sociologist, philosopher, and Nobel Prize winner, do about the glaring social gaps in the greatest infectious disease crisis the nation has faced in more than a century?
Read more at City Lab.