Simkhovitch and Slumless
Better known as founder of a settlement house to help incoming immigrants, Mary K. Simkhovitch left her biggest mark on what is now called Affordable Housing. It was a quest she shared with her friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wrote her in 1943, to acknowledge what she had already accomplished and to assure her that he looked forward to working with her for a slumless America.
Introduced to publicly funded housing in Berlin in 1895, Mary K was shocked at the overcrowded, poorly maintained housing she found in New York City when she returned to US. Any mention of public funding (like that in Berlin and other parts of Europe) was met with the objection that this was both "unAmerican" and unacceptably "Socialistic." While she waited for public opinion to change, she raised two children and made her settlement house the "most important place in Greenwich Village." Not only did it aid newly arrived immigrants, it helped launch the women who staffed it into professions formerly closed to them. After the Great Depression exposed how very deplorable housing had become in the nation's largest cities, Simkhovitchh realized public opinion on government funding had changed, and she formed the National Housing Conference to put federal funding for housing on the national agenda. As Vice Chairman of the New York City Housing Authority for 14 years, she spearheaded the first public housing in the US and was dubbed the "mother of public housing." It comes as no surprise that DC Comics featured her as a "Wonder Woman of History."
Previous Books and Public Appearances
Betty Boyd Caroli's A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing follows Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage that Made a President (Simon & Schuster, 2015); The Roosevelt Women (Basic, 1998; 1999); America's First Ladies (GuildAmerica, 1996) Inside the White House (Abbeville, 1992; expanded ed., GuildAmerica, 1999); Immigrants Who Returned Home (Chelsea, 1990); and multiple editions of First Ladies, originally published by Oxford University Press in 1987, with expanded editions in 1995, 2003, 2010, and 2019. A different version of First Ladies was published (in both regular and large print editions) by Literary Guild (later BookSpan) in 1988, 1995, 2001, and 2009.
Caroli also authored Italian Repatriation from the U.S. (Center for Migration Studies, 1973; iUniverse, 2008); co-authored with Thomas Kessner, Today's Immigrants: Their Stories (Oxford University Press, 1981, 1982) and co-edited with Robert Harney and Lydio Tomasi The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America (Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto, 1978).
Frequently appearing on national television to discuss the role of presidents' wives in American politics, Caroli has been a guest on Today, The O'Reilly Factor, Lehrer NewsHour, "Book Notes" with Brian Lamb, and others. Outside the US, she has appeared on BBC, Al Jazeera, French Public TV, and Italy's RAI.
Biography
A graduate of Oberlin College, Caroli holds a master's degree in Mass Communications from the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University. A Fulbright scholar to Italy, she also held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Hoover Presidential Library, the LBJ Foundation, and others. After studying in Salzburg, Austria and Perugia, Italy (but before joining the faculty at the City University of New York), she taught in Palermo and Rome, Italy.
She divides her time between New York and Italy.