CHAPTER I

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WOMAN’S WORK IN

MUNICIPALITIES

NATIONAL MUNICIPAL LEAGUE SERIES

WOMAN’S WORK IN MUNICIPALITIES

BY

MARY RITTER BEARD

JOINT AUTHOR OF “AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP”

[Illustration]

NEW YORK AND LONDON

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PREFACE

The plan of this volume demands a few words of explanation. It was

originally intended to be a collection of readings illustrating the

varied phases of women’s work in municipalities, but an examination of

the available literature failed to reveal succinct, up-to-date summaries

of the several important branches of that work. It was therefore

necessary to search the records of hundreds of organizations and

societies in order to obtain a just view of the extent and character of

the labors of women for civic improvement of all kinds. Accordingly the

volume as finally drafted combines both readings and original surveys.

The method followed has been dominated by a fourfold purpose: (1) to

give something like an adequate notion of the extent and variety of

women’s interests and activities in cities and towns without attempting

a statistical summary or evaluation; (2) to indicate, in their own

words, the spirit in which women have approached some of their most

important problems; (3) to show to women already at work and those just

becoming interested in civic matters, the interrelation of each

particular effort with larger social problems; and (4) to reflect the

general tendencies of modern social work as they appear under the

guidance of men and women alike.

The task has been difficult owing to the immense amount of material

which months of research accumulated and the limitations of space which

made necessary the compression of important narrative and descriptive

accounts within a narrow compass. This difficulty has been further

increased by the desire to escape the danger of overemphasizing women’s

activities in great cities and of omitting the no less important and

significant work of women in smaller towns. Even at the risk of

distorting the perspective by giving much space to minor cities and to

local club activities, it has seemed worth while to make the book truly

representative of American urban life as a whole. All city dwellers do

not live in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Limited as are the purposes of the book and serious as its shortcomings

may be, it certainly contains the material and suggestions which warrant

a new interpretation of that age-worn slogan, “Cherchez la femme,” so

long the final suggestion to those who would do detective work into the

causes of waywardness in men.

One who accepts the challenge of this slogan and attempts an

investigation into the activities of modern women, as here imperfectly

outlined, may come to the conclusion that, instead of being the source

of all evil, woman comes quite as near to being the source of all good.

This does not interfere with the belief that she might be the source of

more good.

The “female of the species” may still be pictured as “more deadly than

the male” but her attack, we find, is not upon man but upon the common

enemies of man and woman. If this new evaluation of woman’s work in

civilization seems to err on the side of woman, we shall be satisfied if

it helps to bring about a re-evaluation which shall include women not in

an incidental way but as people of flesh and blood and brain—feeling,

seeing, judging and directing, equally with men, all the great social

forces which mold character and determine general comfort, well-being

and happiness.

Whichever evaluation is ultimately accepted, the following data are

offered not for the purpose of imparting an inflated sense of woman’s

importance. Indeed, in spite of what she has done, woman must still feel

humble in the presence of the work outlined for the future and of the

human problems that appeal to her for solution. Instead, therefore, of

seeking to inspire an exaggerated ego by means of this story of woman’s

achievements and visions, it is told in the hope that, by the assembling

of hitherto disconnected threads and an attempt at the classification of

civic efforts, more women may be induced to participate in the social

movements that are changing the modes of living and working and playing,

and that those who have watched their own threads too closely, may

perhaps lift their eyes long enough to look at the whole social fabric

which they are helping to weave.

Finally the story is told in the hope that more men may realize that

women have contributions of value to make to public welfare in all its

forms and phases, and come to regard the entrance of women into public

life with confidence and cordiality, accepting in their coöperation, if

not in their leadership, a situation full of promise and good cheer.

M. R. B.

INTRODUCTION

With a truly remarkable grasp of a widely extended movement, Mrs. Beard

has summarized and emphasized the work that the women of America have

done in behalf of rescuing the city from the powers of evil and

inefficiency, and placing it upon a higher standard of morality and

effectiveness. The story she tells is a striking one and will serve to

enhearten the increasing groups of women who are coming into the field

of civic endeavor through the inspiration of organizations like those

identified with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the

lengthening list of associations for specialized effort. Mrs. Beard has

very appropriately stressed the part women have played in the modern

civic movement, and yet she would be the last to maintain that women

were alone responsible for it. As a matter of fact, one of the chief

manifestations of the civic movement has been the proper stressing of

the duties and obligations of a citizenship which knows no sex lines and

enforces no sex obligations. We are all men and women, boys and girls,

alike, members of the community, with common duties and obligations, and

as such should bear our part and do our share. In the march forward,

however, it seems necessary to organize the mass of citizens along

various lines in order that the most productive results may be obtained.

Mrs. Beard’s book illustrates again, if that were necessary, the very

large contribution which the private citizen has made to municipal and

political development and progress in this country. As Mr. Deming

pointed out in his address at Harvard when the National Municipal League

met in Boston in 1902, the chief improvements in our political machinery

have come as a result of the initiative of private citizens and of

organizations of private citizens. Mrs. Beard, quoting Franklin

MacVeagh, one of Chicago’s most effective civic workers, says that it

was the women of Chicago who started every one of the fifty-seven civic

improvement centers in that city. Whether the impulse be feminine or

masculine, but rarely have progressive measures been initiated by public

officials. This is not intended as a criticism of public officials,

because their duties as a rule are so exacting, and are every day

becoming more so, that they have little time except for their discharge.

The impulse for initiative must therefore come from without.

This book is sent forth with the hope that it will stimulate the women

of America to still greater endeavors to make American cities better

places in which to live. Women by natural instinct as well as by long

training have become the housekeepers of the world, so it is only

natural that they should in time become effective municipal housekeepers

as well. This book demonstrates how successfully they may fulfill this

rôle. May the volume prove an inspiration and a guide to those whose

interests it may have stimulated. Mrs. Beard has done her work well. May

the response be a fitting one.

CLINTON ROGERS WOODRUFF

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. EDUCATION 1

II. PUBLIC HEALTH 45

III. THE SOCIAL EVIL 97

IV. RECREATION 131

V. THE ASSIMILATION OF RACES 170

VI. HOUSING 199

VII. SOCIAL SERVICE 220

VIII. CORRECTIONS 259

IX. PUBLIC SAFETY 287

X. CIVIC IMPROVEMENT 293

XI. GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION 319

INDEX 339

WOMAN’S WORK IN

MUNICIPALITIES

CHAPTER I

EDUCATION

Women’s connection with the schools and the educational system lies both

in professional, or official, and volunteer service. We shall consider

their professional relation to the schools in the first place, because

it is the older.

The history of the education of women from the early days, when to

educate “shes” was viewed with horror as an immoral proposition, to the

present time when more “shes” graduate from the high schools than “hes,”

is an interesting record in itself. Even more significant, however, is

the fact that both hes and shes are educated largely by women in the

secondary schools which are the schools of the “people.”

The dominance of women in the secondary schools does not meet with

universal approval. The more vigorous of the opponents of the

educational monopoly by women argue that women teachers do not

comprehend the realities of modern business and political and social

life, and are therefore not fitted to give a wide social training to the

young, especially to boys.

There is a certain truth in this contention undoubtedly but women are

facing this objection, as far as it relates to the mental and moral

equipment of teachers, by insisting that women with a broad social

training and enlarged outlook can be found today and that the crux of

the question is one of pay. They incline to the point of view that equal

pay for equal work and better salaries for women teachers generally are

two of the means for securing women equally capable with men of

imparting the type of education demanded by modern industrial and social

conditions. Preparation for such teaching is expensive and can only be

entered upon when there is reasonable hope of something approaching a

suitable reward. The better pay of men teachers gives them an added

stimulus for prolonged study and preparation and the same stimulus will

operate in the same way with women, is the reply to the critics who seek

a sturdier and more virile leadership in education.

Another reply made to those who criticize the monopoly by women of

secondary education is that equal educational facilities for men and

women will promote wider social knowledge and sympathy on the part of

women students. Certainly in those colleges where courses in Politics

and Government, Law, Medicine and technical sciences are now open to

women, they are registering in large numbers, and manifesting a

readiness to fit themselves properly for the occupation of teaching,

among other professions.

This question was recently discussed at length in _The Educational

Review_, where Admiral F. E. Chadwick pleaded for male teachers. Miss

Laura Runyon of the State Normal School at Warrensburg, Missouri, in an

answer to him said:

Everyone familiar with the history of education knows that men

predominated as teachers before the Civil War, and, therefore, if

the American boy has been under woman tutelage for generations, it

has been the tutelage of his mother.... The American nation has

developed more in the last fifty years than in the preceding one

hundred. Does this show the evil of women teachers?...

Admiral Chadwick is wrong in his conception of what is wrong in

education. Unquestionably, we have confined the school curriculum

too closely to a book-course—but throughout the United States

courses of study are made chiefly by men. The notable exception is

in the Chicago system, where a woman has introduced most radical

changes for both boys and girls, and changes which are being hailed

as the most satisfactory progressive educational work of the

country, and these are due to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young.

Our school courses need revising, and the long hours need to be

spent in vigorous, active occupations as well as book and desk work.

Along this line should the evolution proceed, not by excluding the

efficient and cheap workers who have been discovered.

If the teaching by women in the schools has been narrow, ineffective,

and unsuited to the realities of American life, the responsibility lies

in part upon the colleges and normal schools that train them, and these

institutions, in administration and curricula, have been largely

dominated by men. By concentration of attention upon unapplied and

inapplicable natural science, narrative history, English literature, and

empty “methods,” women actually have been deprived of the educational

opportunity for discovering what the world is really like. It will be

only when more women alive to the necessities of modern social life,

industry, and government gain some power in the training colleges and

schools that curricula will be devised to supply the needs of women

teachers for the great tasks that, in present day society, fall upon

them.

In passing from this problem of the influence of women upon the content

and systems of education, it is worthy of note that one of the first

names in the field of education today is that of Maria Montessori. Her

ideals have spread rapidly in the United States. Speaking of her recent

visit to this country, _The Survey_ said:

Most people in the United States had to wait until Maria Montessori

came to this country to learn that her educational ideas are being

applied in scores of schools here and that Rhode Island has

officially indorsed her methods. Experimentation with Montessori

practices is being conducted in the Rhode Island Normal School. It

is declared that out of a class of eighty-odd teachers who took the

Montessori four months’ course at Rome last year, over sixty were

Americans.

Madame Montessori’s brief visit is giving rise to a more active

discussion of her educational “system” than usual. Those who think

it is destined to revolutionize child-training and those who see in

it no advance beyond the ideas of Froebel are giving their reasons

over again. How much new light will be thrown on the real content of

her methods remains to be seen.

Madame Montessori’s way of spreading her gospel during her visit has

been by public lectures in large cities. At these she has talked

through an interpreter and has illustrated her work with children by

motion-picture films. Her visit has been under the auspices of the

newly formed American Montessori Association, in whose leadership

are Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Wilson, Frederick Knowles

Cooper, Anne George (Dr. Montessori’s first American pupil), William

Morrow, S. S. McClure and others.

Although we talk of equal educational opportunities for men and women,

as a matter of fact in many states, particularly in the East and South,

there is nothing approaching equal facilities. There are many

“opportunities” for education in most states, it is true, but until the

_best_ opportunities are open to women, there is nothing like equality.

In states where adequate facilities are not open, we find women awaking

to the obligation to see that they are soon provided through public or

private funds.

New Jersey club women have been pushing the work for the establishment

of a state college for women “to fit our girls to render the best

service to New Jersey in many lines as well as to fill teaching

positions better, 80 per cent. of which are now filled by women.” The

population of New Jersey is over 2,537,167, of whom 1,250,704 are women,

yet no provision is made for their higher education. Only in Delaware,

Maryland and Virginia, besides New Jersey, is that now true. A state

college with free tuition is demanded. New Jersey has Princeton,

Rutgers, Stevens, for men, but only normal schools for women.

SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION

Moreover, when the charge of inefficiency is brought against women

teachers, it must be remembered that the administration of the schools

very largely has been in the hands of men, and the women have been

merely routine agents of the authorities. The type of person always

content to carry out some other person’s orders is not likely to have

either force or initiative. Women seem to have both. Women are no longer

content to be mere agents of school authorities. They are seeking and

obtaining high administrative positions, and demonstrating by their

efficiency and capacity for sustained and unselfish labors their fitness

for such work.

For example, “four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming,

have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now

495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the

number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a

monopoly of the higher positions in the public school system. In

Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent,

all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by

women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is

reported as holding the position of county superintendent. The increase

in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the

West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two

women ‘district superintendents,’ as against twelve ‘school

commissioners’ in 1900.”

The most conspicuous battle waged by women for a share in the

administration of schools took place in Chicago. It was thus described

in _The Survey_:

The struggle over the superintendency and the policy of Chicago

public schools acutely emphasizes the crises which popular local

government must meet and turn for better or worse. Coming to the

superintendency four years ago in the most troublous times the

Chicago public schools had ever experienced, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young

brought the badly divided teachers into harmonious relations with

each other and with her management and secured an equally remarkable

unanimity in the public support of her administration, after a long

period of bitterly divisive discussion in the press and among the

people.

Within the Board of Education, however, whose twenty-one members

have never been able to agree very well with each other,

disagreements with Mrs. Young and her policies have come to the

surface, especially among the members of the board appointed by

Mayor Harrison. He protests his preference for her administration

and once before came to the support of her policies when she

tendered her resignation rather than surrender the superintendent’s

prerogative in the selection of textbooks. The mayor’s opposition to

the acceptance of her resignation then kept enough members of the

Board in line with her to warrant its withdrawal.

But the divisiveness of that controversy both widened and deepened

at many points of personal and administrative difference. Except the

two outspoken opponents, the other disaffected members of the board

combined their opposition in silence and secrecy. To the surprise of

the public, which the mayor, many members of the school board, and

even the opposition itself, claimed to share, Mrs. Young failed to

receive the eleven votes necessary for her reëlection. Ten members

voted for her, six against her, and four were recorded as “not

voting” in the secret ballot.

Mrs. Young immediately withdrew her name, claiming that no

superintendent can succeed who requires a second ballot for

election. The second ballot was taken at once, after reconsideration

of the first ballot was refused and John D. Shoop, first assistant

superintendent, was elected by a vote of eleven to five, without

discussion. The president of the board immediately resigned, as did

Dean Walter T. Sumner, from the chairmanship of the school

management committee.

Instantly teachers’ organizations, parents’ societies, the Chicago

Woman’s Club, the Woman’s City Club, and many other women’s

organizations lined up for action. A mass meeting called by them

crowded the Auditorium with 4,000 women and men on a Saturday

morning. Rousing and determined speeches were made by many

representative citizens, among whom were Jane Addams, Jenkin Lloyd

Jones, Harriet Vittum, and Margaret Haley of the Teachers’

Federation.

The meeting adopted resolutions calling upon the mayor to accept the

responsibility for the reinstatement of Mrs. Young to her place in

the school system, demanding the immediate resignation of the

superintendency by John D. Shoop and appointing a committee to urge

him to withdraw; asserting that two of the remaining members of the

school board should add their resignation to the four already in the

hands of the mayor and asking Governor Dunne to call a special

session of the legislature to enact a law making the membership in

the school board an elective office and giving the voters the right

to recall board members.

Litigation resulted and Mr. Shoop refused to be a party to that and

so resumed his former position as first assistant superintendent.

The vote at the newly constituted board recorded thirteen for Mrs.

Young, seven not voting and one absent.

While Mrs. Young had accepted, before her reinstatement, the

position of educational editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ and had

published her salutatory, she intimated her willingness to be

reinstated on condition that the board of education should be so

reconstituted as adequately to support her administration. Although

the mayor exacted pledges from his new appointees to assure Mrs.

Young’s reëlection, yet the majority of the board is still so

negative in its ability and so colorless in its attitude toward

educational policies that at best Mrs. Young will find inadequate

support for the continuance or development of her positive program.

Nevertheless she promptly resumed her duties at the end of December,

1913.

The opposition to Mrs. Young seems to be personal rather than

political. Her stout stand for the prerogative of the superintendent

to select textbooks and initiate the educational budget may have

disappointed the hopes of some members of the board for commercial

prestige in letting large contracts. Her cautiously planned

instruction for parents and older scholars in sex hygiene, although

authorized by a majority of the board, arouses stubborn antagonism,

especially among the people in certain ecclesiastical circles.

The most fundamental issue raised by the whole controversy is

whether the city administration should be recognized to have any

control over the school board and its policies. To safeguard the

non-political management of the schools, some are appealing to the

legislature to make the office of school trustee elective, while

others are content to leave it within the appointive power of the

mayor in their hope to make the office of mayor and alderman

non-partisan by securing their nominations by petition and their

election by a ballot from which the party circle and column shall be

eliminated.

The Women’s League for Good Government of Elmira, New York, in the

election of November, 1913, was very earnest in its desire to improve

the school conditions. In October, before the municipal election there

were school elections in three districts of the city. As the machine

politicians controlled the schools with other city departments, the

Women’s League nominated strong candidates in two of these districts in

opposition to the candidates of the machine and carried on a spirited

campaign in their behalf. It took the “whole force of the machine” to

defeat the candidates of the women and openly “fraudulent” methods were

used to win. Hundreds of women in open fight against the “gang,” and

almost winning, served as an object lesson to male voters to such an

extent that in the November election following this, the non-partisan

ticket was victorious.

The Committee of Fifteen on “School Efficiency” of the National Council

of Education, to “give heed and guidance to the growing demand for

investigating schools and testing the efficiency of school systems,” has

three women members: Katherine Blake of New York, Mrs. Young of Chicago,

and Adelaide S. Baylor of Indiana, deputy state superintendent.

A league is being organized by Denver women to secure the proper

recognition of women in the management of the schools. Forty women’s

organizations are interested. Three women are wanted on the board, a

woman as medical director of schools, and the repeal of a recent edict

against married women as teachers is demanded.

All through Connecticut in the autumn of 1914 an effort was made to get

women out to vote on school matters and in many towns the results were

unprecedented. Women not only voted in greater numbers but placed their

representatives on school boards in some of the towns. In Norwalk they

agitated for thorough reorganization, improvement and central control

for schools and secured a certain measure of reform.[1]

This contest of women for places of power and for more attention to

educational administration is now gaining momentum. Women serve on

school boards at present in at least thirty cities.

While an analysis of the school vote in Massachusetts as exercised by

women does not indicate any remarkable enthusiasm on the part of women

for that slight franchise, in numerous other places and in certain

special towns even in that state, school elections have been

participated in by women with zest and effect.

Discriminations between the sexes in the teaching profession still

extend in many directions. Politics plays an all too important part in

advancements; remuneration is in general unequal; and celibacy is

sometimes enforced upon women alone. Where women are allowed to retain

their positions upon marriage, the birth of a child is occasionally made

the excuse for dismissal. Such an explanation is not often frankly made,

but in New York, at least, it has been a very thinly veiled excuse, the

issue has been fought out on the real grounds and the women have won.

Of course it will not be claimed that women all agree as to the best

policy in these and kindred administration matters. Women members of

school boards do not always stand as a unit in their attitude toward

equal pay for equal work or toward the question of mother-teachers.

Women are not like-minded any more than men are like-minded, but they

are acquiring positive views very rapidly on all these matters. They are

not only holding decided opinions on questions of school administration,

but they are seeking more and more a voice in that administration on the

inside.

Without going further into the many phased history of the contest of

women for a voice in educational administration as well as mute service

under it, we may now consider the various lines of women’s interest in

school improvement and try to illustrate, by example at least, a portion

of the plans which they are supporting in various parts of the country,

and their methods of approach to the educational problem.

EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS

The kindergarten idea appealed from the beginning to women and private

experimentation along that line was one of their most successful

endeavors. Boards of education have in instance after instance been

persuaded to incorporate into the public school system the plan of

kindergartens demonstrated to be practical and of social utility by

women in their private capacities. Annie Laws, in the _Kindergarten

Review_, states that she “can trace the social spirit of the

kindergartner as an important factor in stimulating, and in some cases,

even initiating, many of the social movements of today, among them

playgrounds, social centers, vacation schools, public libraries,

mothers’ clubs and school and home gardens.” The New York Kindergarten

Association of today, like many others, is composed of men and women but

largely supported by the latter, financially, as well as by active

service.

Household Arts—cooking and sewing—were first made subjects of

instruction in the public schools about 1876, in Massachusetts, through

the work of Miss Emily Huntington.

From cooking and sewing have developed the whole domestic science

education of today. Women have been supporters of this movement from the

beginning and the Federation of Clubs early took an aggressive position

in favor of such addition to the school curricula.

“What you would have appear in the life of the people, that you must put

into the schools,” is the idea they had in mind. At first, in many

cases, women furnished the equipment and paid for its operation until

school boards municipalized this work.

Model housekeeping flats have been instituted by women in many cities to

supplement the more limited school equipment. Sometimes, as in New York,

the Board of Education itself helps to finance this practical

educational work. Mabel Kittredge, who started the housekeeping centers

in New York, thus explains their purpose: “It is agreed by all that our

immigrants must have better homes. This has been the splendid passionate

appeal of men and women for years, and fight after fight has been won at

Albany: fights for open plumbing, running water in each apartment,

decent sinks, more space; all these measures have been worked for and

many adopted, but while we rejoice that the Italian and the Russian and

the Pole are to realize better home equipment, we forget that these

dazed people have no knowledge as to the way to use the improvements.”

The School of Domestic Arts and Sciences in Chicago was established and

is managed by club women. In 1905 it had 1,100 students. A special

effort is made to bring out labor-saving devices, the underlying idea

being that the common-sense of the American homemaker will in time lift

this work to a professional basis through scientific investigation and

the contact of the theoretical worker and the practical housekeeper.

Young women are trained in the care of children and extension work is

done in homes of the people.

Women everywhere are largely instrumental in establishing courses and

departments of domestic science in educational institutions, from

vocational schools to the university. The Illinois legislature placed

household economics in the five normal schools of the state while all

the high schools of Ohio have it. Correspondence schools have also been

developed.

A School of Mothercraft has been established in New York for exact and

scientific knowledge about everything mothers need to know.

“Domestic Education,” too, is a new profession which has been developed

by women to carry into the homes, for immediate use, that training which

schools alone can give to the next generation.

Music, art, and dramatic taste as elements in school study and training,

too, have been created and fostered by women, and each has an

interesting history which lack of space forbids recounting here.

“A thorough textbook study of scientific temperance in public schools as

a preventative against intemperance” was the aim of the Women’s

Christian Temperance Union as early as 1879. Forty-three states

incorporated this instruction into the school system and twenty-four

textbooks on the subject circulate. If the development of scientific

knowledge and psychology leads to an appreciation of the inadequacy or

failure of these textbooks and former methods of teaching temperance,

the fact remains that temperance needs to be taught and improved

textbooks and methods will doubtless appear soon.

Today when the major interest in school instruction centers about

vocational training, it is interesting to go back over the history of

manual training in the schools. “Manual training as a new feature of

education was partly the result of an educational philosophy and partly

a protest against mere bookishness. The first appearance of constructive

work for clearly definite cultural purposes appears to have been in

connection with the classes of the workingmen’s school founded in 1878

by the Ethical Culture Society of New York. In 1880, the St. Louis

Manual Training School was founded in connection with the Washington

University, and in 1882, Mrs. Quincy Shaw of Boston privately supported

experimental classes in carpentry at the Dwight School. Two years later

the city of Boston also experimented, but it was four years more before

manual training was given a place in the curriculum. New York City began

instruction in drawing, sewing, cooking and woodwork that same year.”

In Massachusetts, during this decade, eighteen women’s clubs took the

promotion of vocational training for their special task and the

Federations of Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut urged

this upon their members. In some instances this conflict has to be

renewed every year in order to maintain that which has been secured with

so much labor and expense, owing to new and ignorant or penurious school

boards. Sometimes impatient women have raised the money themselves. The

Chicago Woman’s Club raised $40,000 for the Glenwood Industrial School

for Boys.

Although the charge of lack of virility is so often brought against

women school teachers, it is interesting to record that women have been

among the pioneers in the advocacy of the introduction of physical

training. About 1888, through the efforts of Mrs. Hemenway in Boston,

who had experimented with physical training among teachers, the School

Board arranged for her to try her system in the schools. Finding it a

useful addition to the curriculum, physical training was definitely

adopted the following year.

The Girls’ Branch of the Public Schools Athletic League in New York was

formed by women to insure sufficient and wholesome recreation for school

girls who need outlet for their energies quite as much as boys. While

the coöperation of the Board of Education, the Park Department, the Bath

Department and the Health Department has been obtained, far better

provision is made for athletics for girls by reason of the activity of

these women than would otherwise be secured. The closest coöperation

exists between the Board of Education and the Girls’ Branch. The

President of the Girls’ Branch is a member of the Board of Education, as

are several of its Board of Directors, and the Executive Secretary

(Elizabeth Burchenal) is Inspector of Athletics for the Board of

Education.

The idea behind athletics for girls and boys is not solely the

prevention of mischief and of worse things, important as that is. Those

interested in physical training desire that “life shall be lived in its

beauty, romance and splendor.” They thus approach the problem with

positive ideals.

Women have not blindly said: “Physical training shall be an important

element in instruction;” but they have stayed by the task of discovering

what kind of physical training is best suited to young children and

growing boys and girls and whether different training is necessary for

the sexes or a mere question of individual capacity and physique is

involved.

One of the women who is giving close attention to this is Dr. Jessie

Newkirk, member of the Board of Education of Kansas City, Kansas. Dr.

Newkirk has been making an extensive educational survey of girls’

schools in the country, particularly to discover whether there are

improved hygienic methods anywhere which have not been as yet used in

Kansas City. In a newspaper interview she said: “I am able to say that I

believe I found one practice a little better in the East than in the

West. In our part of the country we have made the physical work of the

girls too strenuous. If a girl is going to be an athlete, it is all

right for her to take up athletics after she has finished her high

school course, but it is a mistake to subject too rapidly growing girls

to too rigid physical culture.”

From physical training in the schools to allied forms of hygiene has

been an inevitable evolution. Thus we find women supporting and

organizing the instruction in sex hygiene in the schools. Dr. Jessie

Newkirk, whom we have just quoted, describes this type of instruction

and the opposition that it still meets, as follows: “As for our teaching

of sex hygiene, it is meeting considerable opposition. We have

physicians who deliver a certain number of personal lectures, women

physicians to the girls and men physicians to the boys. This we have

been trying only for the last year. As we have three physicians on our

board, you may imagine we are strongly in favor of it. The opposition of

course comes from the parents. I am inclined to think this opposition

springs from the objection to the name of ‘sex hygiene.’ If we were to

put these lectures into the regular course in physiology, I do not

believe the opposition would be anything like as strong. But the term

that has been employed has been made fun of and anathematized. We are

doing what we can in an educative way through our mothers’ clubs, so

that most of the opposition now, I think, comes from the fathers who

want to stand on ignorant ground, to keep their children innocent,

whereas every thinking person must admit that it is better to be wise

and pure than merely ignorant.”[2]

Many of the women still feel that, important as sex hygiene is, it must

first be taught in normal schools or to adults and that the effort to

introduce it into secondary schools is premature.

One who believes in a system of instruction in hygiene or physical

training or what-not is naturally interested in its results when applied

and therefore women have watched the effects of attempts at changed

curricula on the children themselves. Both the teachers and the

promoters of change have had a common interest in these results. It has

not taken long to discover that children represent unequal foundations

in their physical and mental make-ups for grasping instruction of any

kind.

First there are the little crippled children for whom hard physical

exercise is an impossibility and upon whose minds their physical

condition has undoubted reactions. Crippled children seem first to have

been given special educational opportunities in 1861 by the efforts of

Dr. Knight and his daughter in their own home in New York City. Their

home became a combination of school and hospital and furnished the

stimulus for the Hospital-School for the Ruptured and Crippled in that

city two years later. This was the first institution in America, it is

claimed, to employ teachers of crippled children.

The next task, and women assumed that eagerly, was that of seeking out

the little patients, and the Visiting Guild for Crippled Children of the

Ethical Culture School was started in 1892 to insure continuance of

instruction when the children were discharged from the hospital. Several

societies developed then to care for crippled children, to feed them,

supply them with orthopedic apparatus, and to carry them to and from

schools. In 1906, “the Board of Education joined forces with two private

guilds. The school equipment and teachers were supplied by the Board of

Education; the building, transportation, nourishment and general

physical care were looked after by the guilds. This attempt proved

successful, and a further advance was made a year later, in 1907, when

classes for crippled children were added to the regular public schools

whenever rooms were available. At present there are twenty-three classes

for crippled children in the public school system of the city of New

York.” Provision was made for crippled children in the Chicago public

schools in 1899, and in the schools of Philadelphia in 1903.

Blanche Van LeLuvan Browne, a crippled woman, told recently in the

_World’s Work_ how she began seven years ago with six dollars in her

pocket and finally built up a hospital school for cripples in Detroit.

Mental defects were as apparent to teachers as physical defects and here

and there sporadic attempts were made to classify and adapt instruction

to individual needs. The rigidity of the school system, however, the

large classes and need of economy led to no large effort on the part of

school authorities to deal with mental defectives until some way was

demonstrated to be practical.

SPECIAL SCHOOLS

In New York City mentally defective children were first given special

attention in the public schools in 1900 when a class was formed in old

Public School No. 1 under the Brooklyn Bridge, in charge of Elizabeth

Farrell, who, backed by Josephine Shaw Lowell, had long and earnestly

stressed the needs of these children and the way in which they held back

their companions. So helpful did the work done by Miss Farrell prove to

be that

At the present time there are 144 classes caring for about 2,300

children, with a constant increase in the number of applicants from

the grades....

In March, 1912, the State Charities Aid Association, through its

special committee on provision for the feeble-minded, presented to

the Committee on Elementary Schools of the Board of Education the

following resolutions:

“RESOLVED, That the Board of Education shall be urged: (1) To

classify mentally all children of school age under its

supervision or brought to its attention by the Permanent Census

Board or other agencies. (2) To determine as far as possible, by

scientific methods, the degree of mental deficiency of those

reported as sub-normal. (3) To keep full and accurate records of

all sub-normal children, including school work, home conditions

and heredity data. (4) To send to the proper state authorities

the names of such children as are deemed to be custodial

cases....”

These resolutions were adopted by the Elementary Schools Committee

and sent to the board of superintendents, that they might determine

what force would be needed to carry them into effect. After the

resolutions had passed through their hands and through the Committee

on By-laws, the Board of Education was asked to ratify the following

positions: Two assistant inspectors of ungraded classes; two

physicians on full time and regularly assigned to the department of

ungraded classes; two social workers or visiting teachers.

The Public Education Association took up the matter and obtained the

coöperation of various organizations, among them the City Club, the

Association of Neighborhood Workers, the Association of Collegiate

Alumnæ, the Women’s Municipal League, and the local school boards,

in the effort to induce the Board of Education to take favorable

action....

After much discussion, ending in a hearing before the Committee on

Elementary Schools attended by many physicians, most of whom were

entirely in sympathy with the proposed increase in the department,

the resolutions ratifying these positions, as well as additional

clerical assistance, were passed in October, 1912....[3]

This segregation of mental defectives in classes is continuing rapidly

and a normal course for the teachers of ungraded classes is now being

given in the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers.

Miss Farrell, who has been the inspiration of the effort that has been

made in the city of New York to deal with defective children,

continually contributes to the development of the movement in that

direction as her own work among this type expands. The Public Education

Association has also worked for greater attention to the problem on the

part of the authorities. In one of its recent bulletins, the situation

is thus presented:

“We have been told by doctors and psychologists, in terms that we cannot

dispute, that actual feeble-mindedness is incurable, that

feeble-mindedness is hereditary, and, therefore, that institutional care

and constant supervision are the great safeguards against the rapid and

appalling increase of feeble-mindedness. We must all agree that the end

to work toward is permanent custodial care for all the feeble-minded who

have reached the age of fourteen years. Before this age the schools can

do much to develop the incomplete individual and train him to a point of

distinct usefulness in his later institutional life, or, if he must

remain in the community, they will at least have endeavored to develop

his latent possibilities of usefulness to their fullest extent.”

To promote needed legislation, a bill has been drafted along the lines

of a memorandum prepared by the Advisory Council to the Department of

Ungraded Classes. Such women as Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley are

active on this Council. The bill calls for the appointment of a

commission by the governor to study the entire subject of the education

and care of mental defectives of all ages and conditions and recommend

suitable and comprehensive legislation.

Within the Public Education Association of New York City there is a

Committee on the Hygiene of School Children which engaged Elizabeth A.

Irwin to make a study of the situation, as far as defectives are

concerned, in the public schools and the schools subsidized by the city:

the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society schools, and the

schools managed by the American Female Guardian Society. In coöperation

with a member of the Children’s Aid Society who came upon her committee,

she made a careful study of the situation in schools of that type where

hitherto classification had been neglected. The breadth of view of these

women is demonstrated in a quotation from their report:

While the first step seems to be the mental classification and

recognition of mental defect, the next step is not, in the opinion

of the committee, to put these children out of school pending their

possible commitment to an institution. If the schools are able, in

time, to separate all these children into classes for proper

instruction and so rid the normal children of this unnecessary

burden, they will also be taking the first step toward demanding

institutional care for those unfit to be at large in the community.

For they will then be showing, as has never been done before, the

numbers that exist and the definite limits of their educability.

Surely such a demonstration as this will be a stronger argument for

institutional care than either leaving them hidden away, as they now

are, among their normal brothers and sisters, or plucking them from

school and turning them into the street or back into tenement rooms.

Once they are excluded, their parents, ashamed to have a child too

stupid to go to school, often regard them as little outcasts, only

fit, if indeed they are robust enough for that, to be the family

drudge.

By means of Binet tests, home visiting for family study, charity and

health records, etc., the investigation revealed enough

feeble-mindedness to cause recommendations for a thoroughgoing medical

and educational examination to be submitted to those in control of the

schools of the Children’s Aid Society. This is of importance to the

whole social fabric and its influence extends to all phases of public

enlightenment for it must reveal certain causes of poverty or change

sentimental ideas about the incapacity of the poor as well as lead to

better guardianship of the unfit to prevent the perpetuation of the

type. The work of Miss Irwin and her volunteer assistants, under the

auspices of the committee on special children, was largely responsible

for the reorganization of the department of ungraded classes in the

school system last year, we are told in a report.

The report on the feeble-minded in New York generally was made for the

Public Education Association by Dr. Anne Moore and published by the

State Charities Aid Association’s Special Committee on Provision for the

Feeble-Minded. This report includes a study of feeble-minded children in

the public schools.

In several cities, women have been active in the study and solution of

this problem. The Civic Club of Philadelphia started the first class for

backward delinquent children. The city saw its value and incorporated

the plan into its school system. Philadelphia now has seventy-five such

classes.

Dr. C. Annette Buckel, of Oakland, California, was a director in the

Mary R. Smith Trust for delinquent children from its beginning and took

a personal interest in each little girl in the cottage homes. So keen

was her concern for handicapped children that at her death she gave her

home that the proceeds might help in promoting special training for

them.

Knowing that venereal diseases are responsible for a certain amount of

feeble-mindedness in children, women have backed the legislation in

several states for health certificates for marriage, for one thing. The

prohibition of the marriage of the unfit or feeble-minded adults is a

measure in which they are also interested as well as in proposals and

practices that deal with sterilization and compulsory commitment to

institutions.

Colored children, although in general they are only slightly behind

white children, are now beginning to receive some of that special

attention which they so much need and deserve. In addition to the

investigation of mentally defective children, a study is being made by

Frances Blascoer of the living conditions of colored children in New

York City whose school progress has been retarded.

Blind children in New York City receive education from their earliest

years as a result of the agitation and legislative work carried on by

Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden of the International Sunshine Society and

others. This last winter similar educational care of the blind children

of the state was secured through the efforts of Mrs. Alden and the

personal appeal to the legislators by a little blind girl, Rachel

Askenas. Hitherto children under eight years of age had not been

admitted to institutions for the blind. Now during those most receptive

years they will get the necessary foundation for impressions which play

so vital a part in the lives of normal children.

Special schools for foreigners have generally been started by women, we

feel safe in claiming, after a review of all the evidence at hand. The

Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, composed of men and women,

inaugurated the work among foreigners in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but

the women seem to have given most of the time necessary to make it a

success.

Some months ago the judge of one of the courts in Savannah, Georgia,

started the movement for free night schools for those who have to work

by day. “Amid many discouragements, through months of wearying

opposition, he would be inspired to renewed effort in behalf of an

all-embracing education for the poor, by the knowledge of similar work

done on a small scale by a few women in a rector’s study. And every now

and then the helpful assurance would be given that the Woman’s Club was

anxious for the success of the movement. He only learned of this because

his wife was a member of the club.”[4] Night schools are regular

municipal institutions in the larger cities.

Truant and parental schools are incorporated also into the programs of

innumerable women’s clubs today and have been secured in some cities

already by the pressure of these organizations. The truant school in New

York is under a woman principal who is practically a juvenile court

judge.

So many organizations claim credit for the first vacation school that we

shall make no effort to locate it. We do know that the Social Science

Club of Newton, Massachusetts, a woman’s club, has maintained a vacation

school for seventeen years. In Chicago the Civic Federation opened one

vacation school in 1896, the first in Chicago. The next was opened by

the University Settlement. In 1898 the women’s clubs took up the work

and opened five schools. By 1906 they had eight. Chicago now has a

vacation school board with a club woman as president and another as

secretary; other members consist of club women and men. From 1898–1906

club women contributed nearly $25,000 annually to these schools, yet

“probably 15,000 children were turned away.” The Civic Club of

Philadelphia organized the first vacation school in that city and

Philadelphia now has many of them under public control.

Newark, New Jersey, was the first city to incorporate vacation schools

into its educational system, but in 1909 over sixty cities had some sort

of vacation work going on in their school buildings.

While women’s clubs have long been interested in the vacation school,

most credit for it is due to the hundreds of women teachers who have

given of their services to make it helpful to the child and to the

community. These teachers have often, and nearly always in the

beginning, given their services without compensation and where they have

been paid a salary they have generally taught for less money than they

would have received for regular winter classes.

With these summer school teachers, women librarians coöperate as do

visiting nurses and other social workers. The children are taken by

their teachers on municipal excursions, often too, to visit places of

public interest and gain some idea of municipal enterprise and

government.

All-year-round schools are projects now in the air which are a natural

combination of regular and vacation schools.

School gardens, an important educational addition to school work, have

been largely fostered by women. In Seattle the Women’s Congress has

coöperated with the Seattle Garden Club in its program to include all

the grammar schools of the city in the garden work; the ultimate hope is

to persuade the city to take up this work in a systematic way. Harriet

Livermore of Yonkers, New York, says of gardening: “It is a happy

mingling of play and work, vacation and school, athletics and manual

training, pleasure and business, beauty and utility, head and hand,

freedom and responsibility; of corrective and preventive, constructive

and creative influences, and all in the great school of out-of-doors. It

is the corrective of the evils of the schoolroom. It is the preventive

of the perils of misspent leisure. It is constructive of character

building. It is creative of industrious, honest producers. In fact there

is no child’s nature to which it does not in some way make a natural and

powerful appeal.”

The Civic Club of Philadelphia seems to have started the first school

garden. That city now has over eight large school gardens, nineteen for

kindergarten scholars, and 5,000 separate gardens including window

boxes, etc. The women of Kalamazoo and Dubuque and Newark are among the

groups who inaugurated this work in their towns. The city took over the

school garden in Newark after it had been organized and operated for a

year by the women. Children’s school gardens in Cincinnati are the

result of work started in 1908 by the civic department of the Woman’s

Club. In three years’ time thirteen schools were promoting home gardens

by distributing seeds among the school children and helping to get

results, and there were eight school gardens. Two community gardens

crown the educational efforts of the women of Cincinnati.

Mrs. Parsons is president of the International Children’s School Farm

League and also director of the Children’s School Farms for the

Department of Parks of New York City. The methods used by her in the

work in the city parks are original with herself.

THE VISITING TEACHER

Knowing the vital connection between home life and the proper growth of

children in the schools, women interested in educational matters have,

within recent years, given great attention to visiting the homes of

pupils. The development of the function of the “visiting teacher” is the

result of a recognition that the school cannot thrive if it is

indifferent to the home surroundings of children.

The visiting teacher is akin to the school nurse, and yet distinct in

function. This new office is one of the latest creations in educational

experimentation, though not based on novel ideas of education, since the

sympathetic teacher has always sought to go beyond her pupils to outside

influences that retarded or encouraged development. The visiting teacher

comes as an aid to the regular teacher solely for educational purposes.

Like the school nurse she makes the child the pivotal point on which she

focuses her own experience and training. Like the nurse she may

recommend that a child be placed under the care of a psychologist, a

physician, a more expert teacher, a kindergartner, or that a social

agency be called upon to assist in improving the sanitary, health, or

financial features of the home environment. Her point of view, however,

is ultimately increased intelligence, whereas the school nurse’s primary

aim is health. While the functions of these two public servants are

distinct, therefore, there is very often need of perfect coöperation,

for health may underlie education in some cases and, in others, poverty

may underlie both health and education.

In her report on Visiting Teachers for the Public Education Association

of New York, Mary Flexner records the very high ratio of 45 per cent. of

the cases covered by visiting nurses for the year 1911–1912 as being

“cases” because home poverty retarded the development of the child. In

explanation of the term poverty, Miss Flexner says: “This term is

interpreted broadly to include all cases in which ‘economic pressure’

makes of the child an illegal wage-earner or a household drudge and

forces the family to adopt such a low standard of living that there is

neither proper space for the child to study nor proper food to give it

the stimulus to do so.” Miss Flexner further shows that 57 per cent. of

the cases showed lack of family appreciation of what are the needs of a

normal or an abnormal growing child. A summary of the action taken in

all the cases is a most vital part of the report.

The work of the visiting teacher began in New York City in 1906 when two

settlements managed by women, Hartley House and Greenwich House, placed

two visiting teachers in the field. Richmond Hill House and the College

Settlement, where women also are the headworkers, were at the same time

coöperating with this committee. The Public Education Association became

interested at once and added to the number of such teachers. Other

agencies soon began to join in the support of these teachers until, in

1913 after three years’ effort, two visiting teachers were placed upon

the city’s payroll for ungraded classes.

The Home and School Peace League of Philadelphia has aroused interest in

visiting teachers in that city until several are now supported privately

for this work and are used to a considerable extent by the Bureau of

Compulsory Education to carry out the preventive work in its charge.

In Boston also there are several privately supported social workers of

this character, chiefly working for women’s organizations like the

Women’s Educational Association, the Home and School Association, and

some settlements. Such visitors are connected with a particular school

or district and work there only. Worcester, Massachusetts, and

Rochester, New York, also carry on some of this work to help the

over-burdened teacher get better results in school.

Eleanor H. Johnson of the Public Education Association of New York,

writing in _The Survey_ on “Social Service and the Public Schools,”

demonstrates the usefulness of the visiting teacher if further evidence

were necessary. One of the visitors herself in her report to her Boston

supervisors says: “This new work of visiting the homes of the school

children is one of continual coöperation with principals, teachers,

truant officers, janitors and the children themselves, also with

hospitals, dispensaries, employment agencies, the Associated Charities,

or whatever the emergency may demand. Too often this sort of effort is

scattered and ineffective because of the lack of connection between

agencies. With a visitor working from the school as a starting-point and

not from any private organization, the connection is quickly made and

the influence of each helping agency is strengthened by the added

influence of every other. This has proved to be just as true in the case

of medical social service, particularly that of public hospitals and

institutions, and one might almost prophesy that some day the relief

work of philanthropic agencies will come only in response to calls from

the social service departments of church, hospital, public institution

and school, and that a great clearing house for these agencies, public

and private, will be the best way of organizing charity.”

There is great need of the extension of this work. The regular teachers

do not have the time and strength to do the visiting that is requisite

for successful teaching. Women understand women well enough to know

that. They understand teaching of little folks well enough to know that,

to keep fit for the classroom, the teacher must have her play time too;

and the whole visiting teacher movement which women are fostering is

based on their appreciation of the significance of the regular teacher

and their realization of the need of her 100 per cent. efficiency for

the sake of the child, for the sake of the teacher, for the sake of the

taxpayer even, and for the sake of the future.

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Not quite as comprehensive in her function as the visiting teacher, but

extremely valuable, is the teacher-counselor or vocational guidance

visitor. To be able to advise a child intelligently about a preparation

for a later vocation, the advisor must know something at least of the

family history of the child. Visitors therefore are engaged by those

organizations interested primarily in vocational guidance. Miss Marshal,

director of the Boston Trades School for Girls and agent of the

Industrial Commission, in a paper read before the National Society for

Industrial Education, set forth the idea of community responsibility for

letting boys and girls drift into low-paid, mechanical and often

degrading or health-endangering work. She said: “What happens to girls

who must earn their living when they go out from the grammar schools

untrained for any trade? They inevitably drift into low-paid,

mechanical, wearing, or even into dangerous work as packers in

factories, as errand girls in stores, with little chance of rising and

less chance of real life. The trade-school training for girls—definite

preparation for a trade—rapidly increases a girl’s wages and makes her

at once self-supporting and self-respecting.”

There are over one hundred vocational counselors in the public schools

of Boston whose duty it is to guide the child while in school, after

leaving school, and to follow-up the child to ascertain what becomes of

him after he goes to work.

Important work for vocational guidance and education has been done in

Boston by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and by the

Women’s Municipal League. The latter supervised the investigations made

by college students into employments for boys and girls in different

districts in Boston as a preparation for the dissemination of knowledge

of educational possibilities in occupations. It also prepared a complete

city directory of vocational schools and classes which is of great value

to teachers, parents, vocational counselors, employers, business

directors, social workers, and to organizations for vocational guidance.

This association has moreover financed research workers like Mr.

McCracken who investigated for it all commercial schools maintained for

profit in Boston.

The Placement Bureau of the Boston Women’s Municipal League developed

into a city-wide employment bureau extending to all the schools of

Boston. This League and the Girls’ Trade Education League, both

interested in, and experimenting with, vocational guidance, realized

that there should be a close connection between a Placement Bureau and

the Employment-Certificate Department, between the Placement Bureau and

the Health Examining Department, and the Placement Bureau and the

Department of Vocational Guidance and Counseling recently established in

the school system. “The Girls’ Trade Education League and the Women’s

Municipal League saw therefore that a Central Placement Bureau was the

inevitable next step, that the value of what we had already done would

be lost unless we carried our work to this further stage and were able

to show to School Committee and employers alike, to teachers and

parents, to the boys and girls, the real worth to the city of vocational

advice, placement, and follow-up. We saw this for the reasons I have

already given and also for other reasons, namely: information in regard

to industries and individual firms ought to be pooled and centrally

filed; for the children also, as well as the employers and the school

authorities, the advantages of a general clearing house are large.”[5]

The women therefore supported the Boston Placement Bureau as a central

board and its directors include representatives of the League and the

Girls’ Trade Education League.

The women went into this work originally because they felt they had a

distinct contribution to make in follow-up work. That contribution they

have carried into the Central Bureau, and its follow-up work is

strengthened through the use of evening recreational centers to which

children are required to report and where they can be guided in other

ways than in the matter of labor only and so correlate the recreation of

the evening with the work of the day.

A connection is also being worked out between the Placement Bureau and

the evening schools.

The money for the Placement Bureau had to be raised last year by the

Girls’ Trade Education League, the Women’s Municipal League and the

employers. “For next year we do not speak,” writes the League, “for some

of us hope that that magic date—1915—is going to mean for the Boston

Placement Bureau a complete official connection with the school,

supported in part by the Boston School Committee.”

The Vocation Bureau of Boston was the first to be established, to our

knowledge, and the men and women who together founded it were moved by

the double conviction that children required a longer period in school

and the employment of that period in vocational education. At the Civic

Service House in the North End of Boston in 1907 a meeting was called to

place this work on its feet and in two years’ time a strong organization

had been built up with the Boston school committee interested and

anxious for coöperation. Very soon the superintendent of schools, the

school board and the Vocation Bureau were working together. Meyer

Bloomfield was made director of this work and his very able assistants

were, many of them, women. Laura F. Wentworth is secretary of the

Vocational Information Department of the Boston Public Schools and

Eleanor Colleton has done valuable work in this direction among the

Italian and other children in the North End of Boston.

In the autumn of 1906 the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of

Boston established three “Trade School Shops” to supplement the work of

the Boston Trade School for Girls. The object of these shops, according

to May Ayres, who recently described them in the _Boston Common_, is “to

give the girls who have finished their course in the Trade School an

extra year of training in order to fit them more fully for the work of

the business world. They are paid for what they do and each girl is

carefully watched and guided to the end that her individual

possibilities may be developed. Special emphasis is laid on the relation

of employer to employee, the problems which the employer has to face are

explained, and the young workers are given some insight into the general

theory of business. Here also is an opportunity for the woman who wishes

to become a teacher of industrial branches to acquire a practical

knowledge of her subject, through an arrangement with Simmons College.

“A school of salesmanship was next brought about and the leading stores

set the stamp of their approval upon the work of the Union. Experience

has shown that such training as the girls receive at this school makes

them worth much more to the stores which employ them. This idea spread

quickly throughout the country and a demand arose for women trained in

the art of salesmanship to conduct schools similar to that in Boston.

For this reason there has recently been established in connection with

Simmons College, a normal course for the training of teachers in this

work. Simmons gives the theoretical training; the Salesmanship School

the actual experience. For the next few years this will be distinctly

pioneer work and women who have been graduated from this course should

be sure to obtain interesting and lucrative employment.”

Miss Diana Herschler taught salesmanship in Boston for years. Then the

Boston Board of Education introduced the teaching of salesmanship for

girls into the public schools. Miss Herschler traveled from coast to

coast teaching and then came to New York where she taught in stores and

soon organized classes in salesmanship in the evening high schools for

women. In New York, a class has been opened in one of the department

stores at the instigation of women, and is taught by a teacher supplied

by the Board of Education. A Department Store Education Association is

now a national project which women are promoting.

The Research Department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union

has made a series of studies of trades and occupations to afford a

background of information for those interested in vocational education

and guidance. Two books on Vocations for the Trained Woman have already

been published. “Millinery as a Trade for Women” has also been

announced. The study for last year on “Office Service as an Occupation

for Women” was published by the Boston School Committee during 1914. Two

studies, “Dressmaking as a Trade for Women,” and “Women in the

Manufacture of Boots and Shoes,” were advertised by the _United States

Bureau of Labor Statistics_ for the summer of 1914.

In Connecticut the Child Labor Committee and the Consumers’ League made

possible a vocational counselor in schools and planned his work from a

previous study of vocational guidance in other countries. In New York

City, Mrs. Henry Ollesheimer and Miss Virginia Potter were leaders in

the establishment of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. In 1910 the

Board of Education assumed control of the school. The previous year,

however, the Board of Education had established a vocational school for

boys. In that city the Federation of Women’s Clubs repeatedly urged the

Board of Education to appoint a committee on Vocational Schools, and

finally the committee was established with Mrs. Samuel Kramer as

chairman.

A vocational guidance bureau is to be established in Minneapolis,

Minnesota. A committee of fifteen from women’s clubs and other

associations are to act as advisors to the Board of Education to help

young people to select their life occupation on leaving school. Meyer

Bloomfield, of the Boston bureau, gave a series of lectures in

Minneapolis recently on vocational guidance and crystallized a strong

sentiment already existing in favor of such work.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

One of the most constructive pieces of work recently done on vocational

education was the survey of the problem made by Alice Barrows Fernandez

under the auspices of the Public Education Association of New York. The

portion of the report of this Survey, presented to the subcommittee on

vocational guidance of the Committee on High Schools and Training

Schools of the Board of Education and submitted at the public hearing of

the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City, June 16, 1914,

shows with what clear analysis of social conditions and forces the

chairman and her committee have studied this question.

The report emphasizes the need of pre-occupational education for

children under sixteen who are to be wage-earners. The incompatibility

between the demands of industry and the education of the child is

recognized and is met by the proposal to train the child in underlying

principles in various processes of work which will enable it to adapt

itself to changes in industry and make it later continually intelligent.

It proposes to study the metal industry first, which comprises forty-one

different branches, and to make an experiment in pre-occupational

training in some schools on the basis of this study. It proposes to do

this under the Board of Education, and if it works, let it lead to

continuation work for employed children.

The question now being discussed is whether this committee of the

Vocational Education Survey shall go on with their work under the

authority of the Board of Education or whether it must remain a private

enterprise. Mayor Mitchel, who made a trip in 1914 through the West to

study vocational training, was greatly interested in the Survey. The

suggestion that the Board of Education take over the work of the Survey

was made by Dr. Ira S. Wile, a member of that board who is also a member

of the Survey.[6] The _New York Evening Post_ in reporting this

discussion said: “This was after the Board had conducted a year’s

general survey of the field of vocational education. In that time the

members came to the conclusion that the subject was too comprehensive to

admit of an adequate knowledge being gained by a general investigation.

Facts, details, painstaking study of varied industries were needed, and

this is what the Vocational Education Survey has been gathering in the

year and a half of its existence. Mrs. Fernandez, the prime mover in

this work, is most practical in her suggestions.”

Women are also actively connected with the National Society for the

Promotion of Industrial Education. Under Miss Cleo Murtland, assistant

secretary of the Society, a study of the dress and waist industry was

made by the New York committee of the Society, and that study together

with a study of the cloak, suit and skirt industry, made under the

direction of Charles Winslow of the United States Department of Labor,

have resulted in a practical program for factory schools which has been

approved both by the unions and the manufacturers.

An illustration of the necessity of the woman’s point of view being

brought into the discussion and organization of vocational training and

guidance is afforded by the criticism made by Alice Barrows Fernandez,

of the Vocational Education Survey, in reviewing the report of Dr.

Schneider, of the School Inquiry, on “Trade Schools.”

It is unfortunate that Dr. Schneider’s report, which is so valuable

in regard to boys’ vocational training, is no different from other

reports on the subject of training for girls. One and all devote

themselves to what is to be done for boys, and then in an aside

mention the girls. Out of every four persons at work in this city

one is a woman, and out of every four women here one is earning her

livelihood. You can’t dismiss 400,000 women in a parenthesis. This

will happen as long as there are not more women on the Board of

Education, more women who are workers engaged in gainful employment.

Dr. Schneider says in his report that the New York trade schools for

girls should extend their courses so as to give the girls a chance

to enter occupations which are not merely humdrum and mechanical,

but he does not suggest specifically what trades they should enter.

At such schools now the traditional women’s trades are being taught:

sewing and millinery, fancy box making, and machine operating. Boys’

trade schools teach the building trades. Women, as shown by the

census in New York City, actually work in these trades. There are

women carpenters, bricklayers, painters, glaziers, paper hangers,

plasterers, and plumbers. These are the energizing trades, as Dr.

Schneider himself would call them, and why should girls be fitted

only for the enervating trades as they are today, especially as

these trades are already overcrowded?

Why should girls not be taught the principles of machinery? Such

knowledge should be useful to them in energizing as in enervating

occupations. It is only a matter of getting used to the idea. Women

who own automobiles know how to run and repair them. Why shouldn’t a

girl who works at a machine have a knowledge of mechanics which will

enable her to handle the machine better? Women swing golf clubs,

hockey sticks, and tennis rackets. Why shouldn’t girls swing

hammers?

Dr. Schneider brings in the usual double standard idea of fitting

the boys for the world and the girls for the home. He says girls’

trade education must be modified by training for the home. He adds

that this is true because most factory girls stop work at the end of

seven years. So far as I know, there are no facts to support that

statement. It is most important to break down this general

impression that women leave work at the end of seven years. As a

matter of fact, 50 per cent. of the mothers of boy and girl workers

in homes I have investigated still work, although they are no longer

single. Since women work after marriage, it is essential that they

be given as sound and thorough and concentrated industrial training

as boys.

Girls, like boys, should be trained to know the joy of doing a piece

of work well. It would be interesting to see what effect that would

have on their wages. Women do not earn as high wages as men. The

mothers of the children investigated receive only one-half to

two-thirds the wages of the fathers. If girls were trained to find

the same joy in work that boys do they would be better workers when

they returned to work after marriage, and they would respect their

work enough to demand at least as high wages as men do for the same

work.

Dr. Schneider’s analysis of why boys and girls leave school typifies

the usual vague treatment of the girls’ problem as compared with the

boys’. Boys leave, he says, because “they want to do things, to be

out-of-doors, to build, to earn money, to assert partial

independence; they hate books, they crave action.” He says girls

leave “because their desire for wider social activity is dominant,

because they want to break away from home ties, because their

instinct for personal adornment is strong, and because they want to

earn money to satisfy it.” What is a desire for wider social

activity? That is vague compared with the statement that boys leave

because they want to do things, and yet they mean the same thing.

When these two series of reasons are boiled down they come to the

same thing for both boys and girls—a desire for activity and for

independence.

Again he seems inconsistent in suggesting that girls should learn

trades intensively earlier than boys in order that they may get

higher wages at an earlier age. If early specialization is bad for

the boys it is even worse for the girls, because at the present time

industry tends to make them machines. Early specialization will

increase that tendency and thereby reduce rather than advance their

wages. Contrary to the usual point of view, a broad and general

industrial training is perhaps more important for those in the

automatic trades than in any others, and therefore it is of special

importance for girls.[7]

SCHOOL BUILDINGS

While thus interesting themselves in educational administration and the

content of school curricula, women have not neglected the physical

aspects of school buildings. The movement for sanitary school buildings

in which women have sometimes led, instigated officials to lead, helped

personally, or inspired janitors to act, has been followed up by the

decoration of the buildings. The beneficial effect of artistic interiors

on children, who spend so large a proportion of their waking hours in

school buildings, is incalculable. Their physical comfort and their

moral and artistic natures are advanced in a measure difficult to

estimate.

Organized first for self-culture of a literary and artistic character,

the expansive nature of club women has expressed itself in the extension

of that acquired culture to the children in the schools. Volumes could

be written if an attempt were made to record the stories of the efforts

made by women to beautify schools and equip them with books for

supplementary reading. That story is one of the best known of all and,

for that reason, needs less attention at this place, not because it has

been of little importance but because almost every hamlet and town has

felt the influence of women in that direction. According to their

incomes and their taste, they have sought to introduce as much beauty

and harmony and as much literary and scientific appreciation as

possible.

Believing that the school yard should receive at least as much care as

the town cemetery, women have planted trees, seeds, and bulbs. For the

interior of the school building, they have at times furnished an

inexpensive photographic reproduction for a school wall and a piece of

statuary, or expensive rugs and pictures, or a piano, and many times

they have dominated the whole scheme of inside decoration and even the

architecture itself.

Apparently women can build as well as suggest how schoolhouses should be

built. Miss Alice M. Durkin of New York, who was recently given the

contract to build Public School No. 39 in the Bronx, wonders why more

women do not go into this work. She built a public school in Jersey City

and another in Brooklyn. She employs between 600 and 700 men. In a

competitive contest for the $250,000 extension to the Metropolitan

Museum in Central Park, New York, Miss Durkin came out second and she

was third in the competition for the New York Public Library.

That women have helped to secure better buildings and equipment,

abundant testimony, not only from their own reports but from public men,

shows. For a single example, under the leadership of Mrs. B. B. Mumford

of Richmond, Virginia, former president of the Richmond Education

Association, a magnificent high school building costing $500,000 was

secured. In innumerable letters comes the modest word that “we worked

hard until we got a high school in our town” or “we secured a much

needed addition to the school building” or “we are trying to raise the

money for a new building.” In one instance a high school was only made

possible by the offer of the women to buy the furniture and other needed

equipment if the town would erect the building.

In order to maintain high standards of physical equipment in their

schools club women have often acted as school inspectors. Mrs. George

Steinmetz of Pekin, Illinois, is one of these and of her election she

writes: “At our last election for school inspectors two club women were

nominated on an independent ticket. I was elected, and I am the first

woman in our town to fill that position, but I hope others will be

elected next year. The ticket brought out a large vote, and resulted in

a majority vote for the building of a new high school and a new grade

school and the remodeling of ten others.”[8]

EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS

In addition to their service along many special lines of educational

development, women are actively interested in the various societies

which concern themselves with the advancement of education.

Schools have been for a long time the object of civic interest among

women partly because of their intimate family relation through little

children and partly because of the fact that women teachers formed an

easy bond for coöperation. Today there exists an incredible number of

organizations whose main purpose is coöperation with the schools in one

way or another. A study of these organizations and their aims justifies

the belief that many of the very best features of the present

educational system owe their existence to private suggestion and

assistance and experimentation.

Miss Elsa Denison in a book called “Helping School Children” has studied

the range of private enterprise in education and throws an interesting

light on the part played by women in that form of social service.

Settlements have demonstrated the need of: recreation; child welfare;

instruction of mothers in the physical basis of well-being and morals;

possible coöperation of home and school; and the need of industrial

training. Miss Denison in the study to which we have referred, by means

of the following table, illustrates the tendency toward the absorption

of these settlement features by the school:

SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

Study Rooms Study-recreation-rooms

Clubs Clubs

Entertainments Social Center Parties

Kindergartens Public Kindergartens

Games Public School Athletic League

Relief School Association

Clinics Inspection Medical

Dental

Visiting Nurses School

Music Gardens Music Gardens

Playgrounds Playgrounds

Home Visitors Visiting Teachers and Truant Officers, Vocational and

High Schools, Open-air Classes, Popular Lectures,

Mothers’ Clubs, Libraries, Defective and Catch-up

Classes.

This indicates that the school has already in the most progressive

cities become one huge settlement with a thoroughly democratic basis in

place of a philanthropic foundation.

The public education associations in our leading cities are among the

livest of civic organizations. In all these associations, women

participate on equal terms with men, where they do not direct the aims

and activities themselves. More than one such association, like that of

Worcester, Massachusetts, owes its origin directly to the work and

agitation of women.

The Public Education Association of the City of New York is an outgrowth

of the Committee on Schools of the Council of Confederated Good

Governments, a women’s civic organization. Women are very active on the

committees of the Association and Mrs. Miriam Sutro Price is chairman of

the Executive Committee. This organization has grown from a small

committee of women interested in improving the public schools to an

organization of over 850 capable members, men and women, under the

direction of two trained educators, who supervise a regular staff of

trained workers, besides experts employed from time to time and

volunteer workers organized in standing committees. Its programs have

included bills affecting the educational chapter of the city charter,

compulsory education enforcement, truancy and child labor laws,

permanent census laws, oversight of the school budget, and the

initiation, extension or improvement of many new types of schools for

special classes, and the extension of the use of library and school

plants.

The Public Education Association of Worcester, Massachusetts, developed

from the Committee on Public Schools of the Woman’s Club. Mrs. Eliza

Draper Robinson was the energetic organizer of this influential

association.

In Philadelphia we have a Public Education Association whose history,

“since its organization, is the history of school progress in

Philadelphia. To date, it has had a busy career of over thirty years,

covering the conspicuously constructive period in the development of

city school administration in all the United States and particularly in

Philadelphia.”

Providence, Rhode Island, has, in its Public Education Association, Mrs.

Carl Barus as secretary, and two of the five members of its executive

committee are women: Dean Lida Shaw King and Mrs. Albert D. Mead. This

association is striving to bring the educational system of Providence up

to the standards set by the majority of other cities in the country. One

of its most valuable publications is entitled “Should Providence Have a

Small School Commission?” It represents a study of school administration

in other cities corresponding reasonably in size with Providence.

The Providence Public Education Association has also been greatly

interested in industrial education, among other things, and in pushing

through a child labor bill. It had written into the measure the

requirement “that every child under sixteen years of age must be able to

read and write simple sentences in English before it can receive a

working certificate” which will undoubtedly increase the regularity and

prolong the school attendance of children as well as increase the demand

for schoolhouses in mill towns if it is enforced. The Association has

worked for medical inspection in the schools, open-air classes, public

lectures in the schools at night and proper provision for assembly rooms

in which to hold them, visiting teachers, better sanitation of

schoolhouses, fire drills, and parents’ education. Many of the

investigations and reform measures in Providence undertaken by this

Association are directly traceable to its women members.

Among the volunteer associations whose aim is the better education of

children, the American Institute of Child Life holds a worthy place. Dr.

Wm. B. Forbush is president but the officers and active workers include

both men and women. Mrs. M. A. Gardiner of Philadelphia and Miss Edna

Speck of Indianapolis are the field secretaries of the Institute and

they go from city to city seeking to interest mothers in the study of

their own children.

The Institute grew out of a conference held at the White House during

the administration of President Roosevelt during which it was argued

that most mothers are too busy with their home tasks to search in books

on child study and in other sources for just the right material to

supply their children’s mental and moral requirements. Hence the need of

an association to assist them.

The object of the Institute is thus explained by Mrs. Gardiner: “Our

Institute of Child Life occupies a unique place among educational

organizations. Its purpose is to collect from the most authentic sources

the best that is known about children and to put such knowledge within

easy reach of busy parents and teachers. The Institute provides expert

help in children’s needs, amusements and varied interests.”

Believing that “women can best overcome the superstitions of women and

men about their children which would prevent their standing for reforms

and proper education,” the Federation for Child Study was recently

formed in New York City with Mrs. Howard S. Gans as president. The board

of managers, composed entirely of women, is divided into the following

committees: reference and bibliography, ways and means, comic

supplements, children’s literature, work and play for children, schools,

and legislative. Conferences are held regularly by the Federation on

matters affecting the nurture and education of children. Well-known

educators often address the conference and the women discuss the issues

raised by such lectures.

Efforts to unify the educational work of the women of each state are

being made by the Department of School Patrons of the National

Educational Association. Members in each state are suggested as follows:

one member Association of Collegiate Alumnæ; one member General

Federation of Clubs; one member Council of Jewish Women; one member

National Congress of Mothers; one member Southern Association of College

Women; and one member at large.

The union of club and college women in Connecticut is called the Woman’s

Council of Education, and affiliated therewith are the W. C. T. U.; the

Congress of Mothers; Holyoke Association; and Teachers’ League. Each

society is assigned a definite line of special study; then all work

together for laws and for better prepared and paid teachers.

LIBRARIES

No survey of women’s work for education would be complete without some

mention of their part in promoting the circulation of good books. The

educational work which women have done through libraries is both great

and obvious, although the public that profits by them may not fully

realize the number of traveling libraries and stationary and circulating

libraries that women have directly established.

The first large concerted movement on the part of the club women was for

the extension of education through books and scarcely a woman’s club in

the country fails to report an initial activity in that direction. In

little log cabins on the frontiers as well as in splendid buildings in

the cities books have been housed and distributed among readers by the

earnest efforts of women whose culture early ceased to be individual;

that is, they were anxious to pass on to the multitudes such culture as

they themselves possessed.

With their interest in reading and encouraging the reading habit in

others, women have helped to develop a wonderful social service for the

library. As truly as any other group of social workers, librarians are

educators and physicians of mind and body. While too many of them still

are too circumscribed in their thinking and merely reflexes of their

clerical training, there is a rapidly increasing number of library

workers everywhere who realize the effect of reading on social thinking

and sympathies as well as on individual ambitions, and are seeking to

stimulate social forces by encouraging that reading which will increase

the interest in the common good. By means of bulletins, exhibits,

personal suggestions, public lectures, and in many other ways, the

library is developing into a people’s school, beginning with early

childhood and continuing throughout life.

The library can no longer be regarded as a minor educational

institution. Indeed it is closely affiliated in many cities with the

schools: the teacher and the librarian coöperating definitely all the

time. In some cases the library and school are housed together and this

plan is warmly sanctioned by many educators. At any rate the field is

growing so rapidly in connection with the furnishing of reading matter

for the public that the library and the school must stand as a unit in

educational consideration.

Women have kept pace with this library development and have extended the

field appreciably. There is no way of measuring statistically how far

initiative has been due to them, but anyone familiar with the

predominance of women on library forces and governing bodies cannot fail

to recognize their great influence in the library movement.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the reading rooms with library

equipment that women have established. In settlements, Y. W. C. A.’s,

homes for working girls, rescue homes, rural centers, villages,

churches, institutions, and wherever there is the slightest chance,

women have slipped in the books and the magazines. Their interest has

usually been altruistic but now and then it has been augmented by

hobbies of health, science, literature, poetry, art, religion, industry,

and politics, one often being stimulated by observation of the advance

movement of another, the work thus ending in many cases in the creation

of a well-balanced assortment of books.

It is a significant fact at the present time that more girls than boys

are graduating from our high schools. Women, it seems, are both giving

and getting the education.