A Women-Led Movement That Banned Spitting In New York

If you lived in the early 20th century America, the leading cause of death in the country was not a heart attack, right? It wasn’t cardiac cardiovascular stuff. It wasn’t cancer. Instead, it was tuberculosis. Public health experts of the time were aware that spitting could function as a vector of contagion.

It turns out, In the late 1800s. Spitting was super popular. There was a spit culture, men would spit in courtrooms, inside buildings, on streetcars. There would apparently be puddles of spit on the floor to the point where women’s dresses were always in danger of dragging through this disgusting dribble. In the late 1800s courtrooms were considered off-limits for proper ladies. That’s because the men would be, in there milling around, smoking their cigars and spitting willy nilly. This would be a site that would cause a fine lady to clutch her pearls unless of course, that woman was a sex worker.

Given the widespread blatant misogyny at the time, the concept of being a sex worker was also acquainted with being an actor, or an actress, or a dancer. This was a place where people of low reputation went if they were female. The only way a respected female member of society would be in court is if they were a victim or a witness and unfortunately, women were frequently victimized; their honor was on trial in these cases as well.

In 1884, newspapers reported that a group of middle-class women from Manhattan delivered written documentation, wrapped in a “lovely bow,” to a grand jury, according to a paper by Batlan in the Akron Law Review. These women were members of the Ladies’ Health Protective Association (LHPA), a group from Beekman Place in the borough’s East Side. They were filing a lawsuit against a man named Michael Kane, the owner of a giant manure dump in their neighborhood.

This manure dump was apparently quite the moneymaker because he had upwards of 150 employees that would go around, collecting all the poop from various stables around the city, and then dump it in a giant manure dump, then they’d sell it as fertilizer. His manure pile supposedly earned about $300,000 per year, worth about $8 million today.

There weren’t the kinds of health codes that we have today that would prevent something like this from operating. People would capitalize on that. I mean, the cities in general during this period, were absolutely disgusting. They would be flowing sewage through the streets, dead animal carcasses littered everywhere, and spitting. Can you imagine the smell?

So, their package was delivered to the grand jury literally wrapped in a bow from the Ladies’ Health Protective Association (LHPA). According to a New York Times article on December 20, 1884, ten members of the LHPA, including president Mathilda Wendt, testified to the grand jury. They said that the smell was “very disagreeable,” “perfectly frightful,” and “simply unendurable.” They couldn’t open their windows and enjoy the fresh air. They worried it posed a danger to their children’s health. Altogether, they argued, it was a public nuisance and ought to be removed.

This was not the first time Michael Kane had faced accusations of this sort. He just never really got into any serious trouble because his brother-in-law was a New York State Senator. At the time, people suspected there was some corruption which was pretty plausible. So, therefore, they are fighting on two fronts. One, they have to fight off the filth in the city streets, but then they have to fight off the filth of corruption in the political system. So, they create a really clever marketing campaign and their group grows. It starts with a dozen of concerned citizens and then it gets to almost 300 members between the time of the grand jury and the time that Kane actually goes to court.

This was an effective tactic; there is safety in numbers. Not only did they get the manure pile removed, but they also took it a little further. They were able to pressure the Board of Health to deny any future permits for manure dumps within the city limits.

There’s an interesting subversion of socio-economic roles that women were thrust into at the time. Because the traditional expectation at this time in the late 1800s was still that as a woman, you have to be in the kitchen, or you have to be doing laundry, or keep house and leave the outside stuff to the men but they flipped the script in a very real and impactful way.

After their victory over the gigantic mound of crap in their neighborhood, they decide to fight other health concerns. They weren’t doing this for reasons of ego or reasons of adventure-seeking. They were doing this because as I pointed out earlier, in the 1800s, cities were just disgusting places, at least in the West. People were openly defecating in the streets; the rise of tenement buildings has led to a ton of overcrowding. And when there’s a lot of overcrowding, and there’s not a lot of hygiene, diseases spread like a raging wildfire.

Tuberculosis was running a wild ride over the poor citizens of this Metropolis. It spreads the same way our beloved COVID-19 spreads — through those droplets that are aerosolized when a person coughs or sneezes, and it just kind of hangs in the air, and people that walk through, breathe it in and they become infected.

The levity aside, the stats are sobering and terrifying. Tuberculosis killed one in every seven people in Europe and the US over the span of the 19th century. And this problem was even worse if you were a city dweller, just between 1810 and 1815. In the space of five years, tuberculosis was responsible for about 25% of the recorded deaths in the Big Apple.

In 1882, two years before the manure fight, the German bacteriologist Robert Koch had identified the world’s most-wanted germ: Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Koch linked the spread of the diseases to public spitting. So, he teams up with public health organizations and movements to focus on anti-spitting as a way of preventing the spread of tuberculosis. There was no cure for tuberculosis at this point but New York has the distinction of becoming the first city to fight tuberculosis by banning spitting in 1896.

Once again, the Ladies’ Health Protective Association (LHPA) comes to the rescue with their numbers thriving at this point to point out Pre women’s suffrage. Not only are women disrespected, but they also weren’t allowed to vote. So, these types of women’s collectives and groups affecting actual change are a big deal because they didn’t even have the right to vote. This is the only way they could make their voices heard. And this is a very lasting legacy, as we’ll be able to see because they tackled the tuberculosis epidemic head-on by targeting the spitting. And this wasn’t something that was on the radar of the public health officials. They lobbied groups like Brooklyn’s anti-tuberculosis committee, and the National Tuberculosis Association, to get some of these protective measures in place. They made some headway, and they were able to get a city ordinance passed, that made expectoration illegal in public. And along with that comes a very kind of clever ad campaign, the idea of Beware of the careless spitter. You would walk around and see posters that talked about the dangers and the lewd nature of spitting. But they didn’t just talk about spitting, they had other things that they warned about. They were talking about how you also shouldn’t be drunk in public, which at first doesn’t really work. Because people are still spitting left and right. It’s a New York habit.

As we know, people are very stubborn and stuck in their ways, so, it required taking it a little further with things like fines, levying, etc.

There’s also the formation of this thing called the sanitary squad. They’re ghostbusters, but spit busters. And they would round up hundreds of people at one time and bring them to court where they would get these fines, where on average, were a little less than $1. But we have to keep in mind in 1896, $1 was the equivalent of 30 bucks today. So, it’s still a hassle, you’re still dragged to court, and you still have to pay 30 bucks. So, all in all, between 1896–1910, there were more than 2500 people arrested under this new spitting statute.

In 1910, the National Tuberculosis Association said less than half of the cities in the US with any kind of anti-spitting law actually enforced it. It continued to be a pretty divisive issue, letters to the editors, public forums, and discussions. There was a lot of resistance to it but attitudes began to change because their campaigns were effective. Spitting was seen as unsanitary, rude, and an affront to civilized society.

And the thing is that even if this didn’t directly stop TB transmission, it did teach an important lesson in public health. All of these improvements to sanitation in public infrastructure likely contributed to the decline in disease in New York City during the early 1900s. In 2015, researchers compared the rates of tuberculosis in New York, London, and Cape Town, South Africa, beginning in 1900, and found that while New York and London’s tuberculosis rates fell significantly before the first treatment was discovered in the 1940s, the same wasn’t true for Cape Town, where public sanitation measures didn’t advance at the same rate.

Tuberculosis is not something you hear about so much anymore, at least not in terms of it being a death sentence. There are still anti-spitting laws in New York City, which is interesting. There’s a lot of old laws that stay on the books that aren’t really enforced but technically it is in the books in New York City laws that it is illegal to spit on a sidewalk, streets, or in a park.

Luckily, there was light at the end of the tubercular tunnel. In 1943, a biochemist named Selman Wachsman discovered that streptomycin when isolated from a microbe found in the soil, could be an effective antibiotic for tuberculosis. This research led to him winning the Nobel Prize for his work, and finally providing a real treatment against tuberculosis.

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