The story of Lillian Wald is the story of a selfless woman who devoted her life to helping others. The Henry Street Settlement House on New York's lower East Side is only one of the many monuments to her life's work.

Lillian was a happy, spoiled and carefree daughter of a wealthy Rochester family when she decided she wanted to be a nurse. She trained at New York Hospital and went on to study an M.D., but when she was asked by the philanthropic Mrs. Loeb to teach the essentials of sanitation and nutrition to a group of immigrant women on the East Side, Lillian abandoned her studies — and found her life's work. Her first visit to this teeming, poverty-stricken district, with its odorous, filthy, disease-ridden slums, its grimy children, shawl-wrapped women, its garbage-laden gutters and network of bedding-festooned fire escapes, were startling evidences of a life she did not know existed. Overcome by shame that she herself was part of a society that permitted such things to exist, Lillian went back to Mrs. Loeb for help. Mrs. Loeb enlisted the aid of her son-in-law, Jacob Schiff, and they agreed to finance Lillian and her friend, Mary Brewster, as visiting nurses.

The two girls went to live on the East Side among the people they wanted to help. During their first year they climbed stairs, washed patients, gave free nursing and medical care, begged from their friends and from charities for money and help in carrying on their work.

Several years later Jacob Schiff bought the house on Henry Street for Lillian and the growing staff, which was to become known as the Henry Street Settlement House — famous throughout the world.

Out of the work of these brave young women grew many reforms: school doctors and nurses, city-supported visiting nurses, medical examinations in all grades and New York City's bureau of Child Hygiene were only a few of the important developments resulting from their work. Perhaps most important of all was the first public playground started in the backyard of the settlement house and from which developed the many Outdoor Recreation Leagues and playgrounds of today.

Because of Lillian Wald, schools are better today, health rates higher, fewer mothers die in childbirth, children have legal protection and courts of their own, laws were passed controlling the conditions under which the young might work, and "sweat shops" and child labor were abolished. 

Lillian Wald was never militant. She did not march in parades, but she did sincerely believe in the dignity of human beings. She assumed that men, women and children all felt the same way about the same things, that they hungered for beauty and laughter. She admitted no barriers of race or creed. She neither lectured nor preached, knowing in her heart that the differences between people give variety and excitement to life rather than an excuse for dislike and disrespect. 

From the dust jacket