Board of Education only one is a woman? And doesn't this become still
stranger when it is recollected that most members of the Board of
Education (to say nothing of their not having merited their
appointment by any notable benefits conferred on the school system)
are so overwhelmed by private business as to find their attendance on
board committee meetings a hardship?
This last feature of the situation is the one that more and more fills
me with amazement. Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational
developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in
cooeperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose
time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free
disposal--here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the
school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices
of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive
questions of educational policy.
But never mind. Things may change. The present superintendent of
schools is a woman. That's something. And, anyway, the women I am
speaking of, though increasingly conscious of the degree of their
exclusion from the collective civic life of the town, do not spend so
much time in repining about it as they spend in seeking new
opportunities for such civic service as is possible to them.
Sometimes it is hard to say whether they are within the bounds of
private life or not.
If you will go up the Chicago River, up past that bend, into the North
Branch, up beyond that gas plant where vagrant oils streak the surface
of the muddy water, vilely, vividly, with the drifting hues of a lost
and tangled rainbow, up by factory and lumber yard, up into the
reaches of the open fields, till the straight lines of wharves give
way to tree-marked windings, graceful bendings gracefully followed by
bending willows, you will come presently to a school which tries to
restore to city children something of the peace and strength of the
country.
It is the Illinois Industrial School for Girls. A few years ago it was
in collapse--filthily housed, educationally demoralized, heavily
indebted. A few women, principally from the Chicago Woman's Club,
became interested in it. They bought a farm for it. They put up
buildings for it. Not a big prison dormitory. Little brick cottages.
Matron in each one. Chance for a kind of home life. Chance, also, for
instruction in housekeeping. Big vegetable patches for instruction in
gardening. Friendly cows to help along with instruction in dairying.
Everything for outdoor life, working life, life that engages and
disciplines.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: IMPROVEMENT OF CITY
SQUARES; NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATIONS; INDUSTRIAL AND AGRICULTURAL
EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.]
All the twenty-four directors of this school (with two exceptions) are
women. Most of them are members of the Chicago Woman's Club. One of
the cottages is named after the club. But the school is, in a way, a
county institution. That is, the county makes a certain contribution
to it, under a state law, for the support of each girl committed to it
as a dependent by the Juvenile Court. The directors, therefore, are
trustees each year for a large amount of public money.
Question: Are they in public life?
Answer: If the school is ever really owned by the public, they will be
discharged from public life with extraordinary immediacy. The way to
deprive any enterprise of the possibility of effective support from
the female half of the community is to give it to the community.
No, I'll admit that isn't quite true. The women do keep on trying to
help.
How I wish I could make you see the whole of this city, its streets,
its vacant places, the inside of its buildings, all, all at once, with
all the things happening which have been set going by this Chicago
Woman's Club and by the organizations with which it associates
itself!
You'd see (and in each case you'd know that what you were seeing was
due either entirely or very largely to the labors of the club, its
committees, its departments, or its close allies)----
You'd see night matrons in the police stations giving women arrests a
degree of protection they did not at one time have.
You'd see in the Art Institute a line of pupils who from year to year
have passed through its study rooms because of a certain scholarship
yearly offered.
You'd see in the City Hall a new official called the city forester,
helping to save the trees the town now has, issuing bulletins of
professional advice, giving his aid to the Arbor Day enthusiasm which
last year put some 400,000 seedlings into the parkways and private
yards of Chicago.
You'd see, over the whole extent of the city, local improvement
associations, which on street cleaning and other local needs, not
adequately met by the city government, spend a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars a year.
You'd see, in the jail, a school for young men prisoners, now taken
over and supported by the county, but still watched by the club. You'd
also see certain recent interests of the club: a woman's dining room,
an examining physician to segregate contagious diseases, a fumigating
plant.
You'd see the paintings on the walls of the assembly hall of the
McKinley High School--the first mural paintings in any school in
Chicago.
You'd see children, after school, in the park playhouses, listening to
"story ladies," who tell them fairy tales, historical tales, tales of
adventure and achievement.
You'd see, in one of the small parks of the West Side, a woman "social
worker," who gets the mothers and fathers of the neighborhood into
the way of using the park and the park building, even for Christmas
Eve family parties. And then you'd see "social workers" appointed by
the park board itself and paid with public money.
You'd see, in many places, audiences listening to free lectures on
Social Hygiene.
You'd see important excerpts from the city code bearing on personal
conduct being taken into the newspaper offices to be printed under the
heading--"Ordinances You Ought to Know."
You'd see paintings and engravings being hung in the public schools by
the Public School Art Society, till in a case such as that of the
Drake School the collection in a single school building amounts in
value to several thousand dollars.
You'd see wagonloads of coats and hats and dresses and trousers being
carried from the School Children's Aid Society to public schools in
all parts of the city, to be secretly conveyed to boys and girls who
otherwise could not come through wintry weather to their lessons.
You'd see flower gardens springing up in many school yards, after a
little encouragement and advice from the Women's Outdoor Art League.
You'd see a girl behind the walls of the Northwestern University
Building, over there on Dearborn Street, telling her story of
deception, or of outrage, or of error, to the superintendent of the
Legal Aid Society. It used to be the Women's Protective Association
till it was merged with the Bureau of Justice a few years since. It
was initiated by the Chicago Woman's Club a generation ago. It has
ministered to thousands of young women cursed with that curse both of
God and of man which gives them, however wronged, almost all the
burden and almost all the shame of the event. It is due mainly to the
work done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent
to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that
even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature's revenge,
is not immune from the law's.
These things you'd see, and innumerable others. All that I have
mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication which
stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted.
If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should
keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to
other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this
community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.
They began, those women of the Chicago Woman's Club, with remembering
that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring
they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president,
retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of
thousands of other woman's clubs thus:
"Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be
gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the
way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher
things; through study, through _interest_ in humanity, the supreme
motive of this club has come to be _service_ to humanity."
And yet I haven't mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the
town by its women.
One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There
were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and
rocking-chair. She inquired about him. "Him?" said the children,
"He's a fellow just murdered his wife. He's our boss."
Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile
Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it
gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine
interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that
the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.
The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes
farther.
At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared
two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other,
with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to accumulate
a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.
From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during
the next eight years was an integral part of the administration of
the Juvenile Court. There's little wisdom (in a city as large as
Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there's a probation officer
to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from
relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pass
through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of
them. The probation officers are the judge's eyes and hands, giving
him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation
officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an
effective agency for juvenile regeneration.
The Juvenile Court Committee developed a staff of probation officers,
which finally had twenty-two members. The Juvenile Court Committee
also undertook the maintenance and management of the detention home in
which boys were sheltered and instructed while awaiting the final
disposition of their cases. The Juvenile Court Committee also gave
time and money to many other features of the development of the court,
all the way from paying the salaries of a chief clerk and a chief
stenographer to suggesting the advisability and securing the adoption
of necessary amendments to the Juvenile Court law.
From the year 1898 to the year 1907 the Juvenile Court Committee
raised and spent $100,000. But it did its best work in depriving
itself of its occupation. It secured the passage of a law which
established the probation officer system as part of the Juvenile Court
system, to be maintained forever by the county authorities. And it
succeeded, after long negotiations, in persuading the county and the
city governments to cooeperate in the erection of a Children's
Building, which houses both the court and the detention home.
The original purpose of the Juvenile Court Committee was now
fulfilled. The Committee perished. But it immediately rose from its
ashes as the Juvenile Protective Association. Instead of supporting
_probation_ officers to look after children who are _already_ in the
care of the court, it now spends some $25,000 a year on _protective_
officers, who have it for their ultimate object to prevent children
from _getting into_ the care of the court. Can anything be done to dam
the stream of dependent and delinquent children which flows through
the children's building so steadily? What are the subterranean sources
of that stream? Can they be staunched?
The managers of the Juvenile Protective Association, in going back of
the court to study the home lives, the industrial occupations, and the
amusements which form the characters, for better or for worse, of the
city's children, are approaching the field in which the causes of
social corruption will stand much more clearly revealed than at
present to our intelligence and conscience. It is fundamental work.
But what of the women who are directing that work? What of the women
who are directing the other enterprises I have mentioned? Would they
make good citizens?
They are militant citizens now, _with the rank of noncombatants_.
* * * * *
We crossed the roof's tarred gravel once more, and once more leaned
over the tiled parapet and looked abroad at the city.
"I told you," she said, "that women cannot give their leisure to
useful activity without verging toward citizenship. That is the rule.
There are exceptions, caused by individual temperament. But that
is the rule. Make one group of the women who use their leisure to
_good_ purpose. Make another of the women who use their leisure to
_no_ purpose. You'll find a growing desire for citizenship in the
former. You'll find little such desire in the latter. The conflict
that is going on among women who have any leisure at all is between
the spirit which drives them toward a union with the life of the
world and the spirit which drives them toward complete detachment
and irresponsibility.
"So let's say no more about the suffrage agitation. It's simply a
sequel to women's interest in the world's housekeeping. The broader
question is, 'Will that interest grow?'
"One would think it could hardly help growing. The hosts of women who
are earning their living--they are immersed in the world even as men.
But the women who are at home, with little children about them!
They're abstracted from the world, aren't they? Yes, _physically_,
just as much as ever. But _mentally_ they come closer and closer to
the world all the time.
"Have you read the Home Economics books? The day is coming, you know,
when every girl will have the training those books suggest. It will
make her a home woman, you say. Yes, it will help do that. But it will
help even more to make her something else, too.
"Do you know that the Home Economics literature has more in it about
civic service than any other one general kind of educational
literature you can lay your hands on?
"Does that seem odd to you? I'll tell you the reason for it.
"Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the
importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things
of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure
food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the
family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and
regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the
closeness of the relationship between the life of the individual and
the life of the community.
"The so-called bread-and-butter studies, now being inserted into
women's education, have the merit, superficially paradoxical, of
raising the mind to the duties of citizenship. The simplest mother,
immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come
realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the
milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of
the health department, mean to those children. She will know--and when
she knows she will care.
"Let me give you one illustration of the extent to which certain
teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities
of their pupils.
"In a little town far up in the Northwest there's a famous Homemakers'
School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations.
Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its
two-year course, you'll find a series of lectures on 'Home and Social
Economics' based on a theory which I'll try to give in almost the very
words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy.
It's this:
"'The growing wealth of different communities, the application of
modern inventions to home industries, the passing of many of the
former lines of women's work into the factory have brought to many
women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic
cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city beautiful,
education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral
influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected
children and to reform delinquent children--all are legitimately
within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve
conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.'
"Is that radical? Surely not. Surely it's conservative. There's not a
suggestion in it of any change in woman's interests. There's only an
awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused throughout
the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness
cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.
"I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach
better housekeeping to the whole world.
"I know I could if I would. But----
"I'm thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home
duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more
livable world life. Will they? I can't say. But I will say this:
"Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will
decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure
of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must
sanctify it or perish by it.
"Leisure! Culture! Emancipation! All nothing unless there is something
more. Culture without action is an ingrowing disease which first
debilitates and then dissolves the will to live. Emancipation without
duty is a mirage of pleasure which raises thirst but never quenches
it. The Romans emancipated their women, in the days of their
degeneration, but with no result except a completer collapse of family
life and of personal virtue.
"But perhaps there will be a new issue of events this time. It looks
as if there might be.
"That weary ancient world, recoiling from its luxuries, its
dissipations, its surfeits, turned to pessimistic mysticism, to the
theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh are vile, to
monastic withdrawal into the desert and the mountains, to the life of
inward searchings.
"This modern world is turning to optimistic materialism, to the theory
that the flesh and the things of the flesh can be made noble, to
anti-tuberculosis societies and juvenile courts, to the life of
outward workings.
"_That_ world found peace in _renunciation_. _This_ world seeks peace
in _service_.
"It is going to be an era of the importance, the utility, and the
possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. It is going
to be an era of Right Living.
"Will not woman have a _particular_ part in it? May she not even have
a _dominant_ part in it?
"I have watched her every hour from the beginning--from the very first
beginning of any life that had any warmth of love in it. I have seen
her make the hearth the symbol of the stability of the individual
life. Now, when the duties of the home, the stones of which that
hearth was made, are scattered far and wide, shall I not see her
reassemble them on a grander scale to make a total of stability for
all life whatsoever? Shall I not?"
"But who?" I said, "who are you?"
"I," she said, "I am the spirit that made woman love her child, and
that shall yet make her love her kind."