RECREATION
The old maxim, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” has been
amplified in the past twenty-five years in many ways. All work and no
play may make Jack a sick boy or a delinquent. If Jack plays not at all,
neither can he work. What is true of Jack is true of all the members of
Jack’s family and of all his relatives and neighbors. What is true of
Jack is equally true of Jill. In order therefore to prevent dullness,
illness, crime and delinquency, recreation has been provided in cities
in homeopathic doses, at least, for Jack and Jill and their relatives
and neighbors.
The interest in, and advocacy of, municipal recreational facilities for
the people of the urban districts grew out of the knowledge that, unless
wholesome recreation is provided, unwholesome recreation will be sought
and found. There is no alternative.
Interesting figures have been compiled by Mrs. Max Thalheimer,
Assistant Probation Officer of Syracuse, N. Y., which show that in
one section of the city, where a public playground has been
established, juvenile delinquency has decreased about 30 per cent.
in two years. The neighborhood of the Frazer School Playground was
selected for the study. The records show that during the year
immediately preceding the establishment of the playground there were
127 cases from that neighborhood in the Juvenile Court, as compared
with a total of but 180 cases for the two years which have since
elapsed. The more time a child spends in well-directed play, the
less time does he have to get into mischief.[17]
It has also been made clear that municipal prevention of arrests,
illness, unemployment, inefficiency, is cheaper than municipal care of
delinquents and criminals, of the sick, of those illy equipped to earn a
livelihood, and of the vicious whose supervision entails such
administrative expense and anxiety. Even motives of economy therefore
may lead to this form of municipal enterprise.
Because the keynote to all modern social activity is prevention and
because prevention is cheaper than cure always, recreation today is of
public concern. That the public’s interest and belief in municipal
recreation has been guided into faith in its educational advantages is
due in no small degree to the patient work of women in behalf of
amusement facilities. In their recreational work, women have also sought
to make recreation serve the purposes of family unity, community spirit,
and an increase in the real joy of living.
The mother’s appreciation of child psychology began in the days when she
excused baby pranks often misunderstood by others with the statement
that “he is just playing.” Realizing the persistence of that play
instinct all through childish development, and never eliminated in fact,
women have sought to direct play so that it may not react to the injury
of the player. That is the explanation of all the intimate guarding of
children from the moment they learn to walk and then on until the child
leaves the protection of home.
Public recreation is but the effort to provide better and safer places
for babies to play in, for growing boys and girls to combine the work
they later desire with play or to make work their play, as they do
instinctively themselves when conditions are suitable, and for adults to
come together for that conviviality or stimulation through association
which leaves no sting in additional family expenditures or ill health or
misery. From all over the country we hear of women initiating and
carrying through movements to provide play facilities for young and old.
PLAYGROUNDS
We may cite a single example which may serve as an inspiration to other
public-spirited women.
A few weeks before her death, Mary Graham Jones, of Hartford,
Connecticut, who did so much during her life for the betterment of
child life and neighborhood life in her native city, submitted to
the city authorities a plan for providing small local playgrounds
for young children in various parts of the city. Her scheme was that
each playground should be near enough to its neighborhood to make it
convenient and safe for the children to reach and use it. The report
recommended the leasing from the city at nominal rent of a dozen or
more vacant lots, the preparation of the lots to be in the hands of
the park department and their supervision in the hands of the
department of education.
The juvenile commission of Hartford petitioned the board of aldermen
for permission to lease these lots and for an appropriation to pay
for their support. The request was granted, and $2,500 was allowed
for the first year’s expense. Nearly all this sum was expended and
the work was carried out under the supervision of the superintendent
of parks, with various successful results. It seems highly probable
that the work will be continued another summer and perhaps something
may be done during the winter to provide for skating and like
sports.
Thus the citizens of Hartford feel that Miss Jones has left their
children a city-wide playground system as an enduring legacy. The
Mary Graham Jones Playground is the name given by the North Street
Settlement of Hartford to a place set aside for all neighborhood
children under nine years of age. Miss Jones had spent sixteen years
in settlement and child welfare work in Hartford. In 1900 she became
headworker of the North Street Settlement.[18]
In a history of the playground movement in America, Herbert H. Weir, one
of the field secretaries of the Playground and Recreation Association of
America, says: “No age has been without its visioners who saw the light
and led the way, so luckily there were men and women, especially women,
who saw and understood and acted.”[19]
The history of their work for playgrounds shows that like almost all
modern social endeavor, there has been, first, private demonstration of
a public utility, then city control, then state-wide legislation to
bring backward communities into line with forward urban movement. Women
have everywhere been largely instrumental in initiating the playground
work, they have followed it in many cases by service on appointed
commissions and as paid city playground employees, and in other cases
they have held positions on state recreation commissions.
Interesting and important as has been the work of individual women in
this great battle for adequate recreation in cities, it is of course the
associations of women that have been most powerful and determined. For
an instance of the associated effort of women, we may turn to the
experience of Winthrop, Massachusetts.
When the cities and towns of Massachusetts were voting on the
playground referendum during the fall of 1908 and the spring of
1909, Winthrop, just outside of Boston, seemed to regret that her
7,034 people did not entitle her to a similar privilege. The people
of Winthrop, however, are ingenious, and they set about seeing what
might any way be done, for they were not willing to give up the idea
of having playgrounds. They, particularly the women, proceeded to
agitate along many lines. At a town meeting in the spring, when the
towns of over 10,000 were voting on the referendum, the people
inserted warrants for various appropriations for playground
purposes. A special committee was appointed to consider the entire
question of parks and playgrounds and report in the fall. The
committee gave hearings during the summer, and went extensively into
the question of the town’s development, its future needs, its
peculiar nature (because of the large areas of marsh land),
available sites, and so on.
In the meantime the people kept busy. They decided to conduct an
experimental playground during the summer so as to gather
experience, show what could be done and develop public sentiment.
The Woman’s Club, the Improvement Association, the Arts and Crafts
Society, the Woman’s Equal Suffrage League, apparently every
organization got into the action and did valiant work. The School
Committee gave the use of a convenient school yard, with a pond and
suitable open area. The societies mentioned provided the apparatus;
money was raised to employ a supervisor; articles such as magazines,
books, toys, games, raffia, sewing materials, scissors, shovels and
hoes, were solicited to give scope to the activities; the meetings
of many of the societies were devoted to discussions of various
aspects of the playground movement; the newspapers were kept filled
with articles, comments, accounts of what other places were doing,
notes on the local activities; and, finally, the whole was capped
with an exhibit when the playground was closed. This exhibit was
witnessed by many people, but particularly by the children, who were
by then as active as any of their parents in support of the
movement.
When the special town meeting was held in the fall the people were
interested. The attendance was so heavy that the voting list had to
be used to check off those who came and admit only voters. When
business was started every seat was taken. There were other articles
ahead, but by a vote of the meeting the playground question was
taken up first, and the extensive report of the special committee
was read throughout.
This report was an interesting civic document. It called attention
to the probable growth of the town, to its peculiar formation, the
centers of its present and probable development, the needs of its
people, and particularly to the fact that large areas of marsh land
had been purchased at low figures to be held till the town would lay
sewers, construct streets and develop values. It was pointed out
that the planning of the marsh lands by private owners was poorly
done, that the lots were small, the houses already built poor, and
that here was a chance for a development of which the town could
ever be proud.
Then came the recommendation that $75,000 be appropriated to buy a
large area of this marsh land for playground purposes. There was but
little discussion, and the motion was unanimously carried. By this
action Winthrop puts herself among the enviable towns of the
country.[20]
Ethel Moore, president of the Board of Playground Directors of Oakland,
California, has the following to say regarding playgrounds in
California:
The first playground in California was opened as an experiment in
1898 by the women of the California Club under the leadership of
Mrs. Lovell White. The experiment proved a success, and in a few
years the same women educated the public to the point of carrying a
bond issue of $741,000 and of amending the city’s charter to provide
for the appointment of a playground committee.
Again the women of a city took the initiative, under the able
generalship of Mrs. Willoughby Rodman and Miss Bessie D. Stoddard
and in 1905 Los Angeles organized its own supervised,
all-the-year-round playground, the beginning of a model recreation
system.
In Oakland, due largely to the inspiration of Mrs. John Cushing, the
women of the Oakland Club opened a vacation playground in a school
yard as early as 1899. When, nine years later, the Playground
Commission was created by municipal ordinance, it was appropriate
that two members of the club that had faithfully provided for the
children season after season, Mrs. G. W. Bunnell and Mrs. Cora E.
Jones, should be appointed commissioners by Mayor Mott.
In 1911 Oakland adopted a charter embodying the commission form of
government. The Playground Department then fell under a Board of
Directors (consisting of five members, “not more than three of whom
shall be of the same sex”) similar to the boards that control the
Public Library, Park Department and School Department.
With the growth of these municipal systems there grew up a
state-wide interest in public recreation. Courses for play-leaders
were offered at the State University, and under the auspices of the
San Francisco Branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, the
Playground Association of California was organized in 1909. The
first annual meeting of the Association took the form of a three
days’ Conference of Playground Workers, the success of the gathering
being due largely to the efforts of Mrs. E. L. Baldwin and Mrs. May
Cheney, of the Committee.
And now each year sees marked advances in both rural and city
communities; larger appropriation, new sites, better trained and
better paid supervision, increased attendance, more intensive work,
greater coöperation with other agencies, wider usefulness in
promoting the opening of school buildings as well as in developing
park properties—thus providing recreation for adults as well as for
children.[21]
In a note to Miss Moore’s report, the editors of _The American City_
add:
Western cities have been the first to make the control of public
recreation a distinct branch of municipal government. Every
California municipality of 8,000 inhabitants and over has a
playground or will have one within the next year or two; all the
large cities have special playground commissions provided for by
their charters. Oakland may well be proud of her playgrounds. We
understand that the city has now spent about half a million dollars
for this purpose, and has 10 playgrounds, 5 in parks and 5 in school
yards. The remodeled Moss residence, one of the finest remaining
specimens of old California architecture, is to become a municipal
country clubhouse, the only one of its kind in the West.
Other reports state that Seattle has already spent more than
$500,000 for playgrounds, and has purchased twenty sites, twelve of
which have been improved and equipped and are now under supervision.
The city has three up-to-date recreational field houses and a large
municipal bathing beach. Tacoma’s fine school stadium is well-known.
Everett and Bellingham are two other cities of the Northwest that
are expending much money and attention upon playgrounds.
Far to the South, as well as the West, we hear of woman’s work. The
Civic Club (women’s) of Charleston, South Carolina, started twenty years
ago a vacation playground and the need of this institution was so well
demonstrated that the City Council finally purchased and established in
that city the first playground in South Carolina. Five women were
appointed on the Playground Commission.
It would be impossible to make even the barest mention of the women who
have promoted the playground movement. Mrs. Caroline B. Alexander has
mothered it in New Jersey, especially in Hoboken, a small densely
populated industrial city; Lillian Wald is secretary of the Parks and
Playground Association of New York which welcomed last summer about
300,000 children to the opening exercises of its summer amusement
centers; a Playground Commission in Richmond, Virginia, is made up of
delegates from the City Council and the Congress of Mothers; in Denver
the executive body includes representatives of the school board, of the
playground commission, and of the Congress of Mothers. Miss Julia
Schoenfeld, field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association, is
one of the most inspiring of the women in this movement and she
stimulates activity in this direction throughout the country. A list
given in its year book of the officers of recreation commissions and
associations shows almost equal responsibility assumed by men and women
for the offices of president and secretary of the same.
Having established playgrounds, women seek to maintain some supervision
over them. They are advocating the use of playgrounds as evening social
centers. They are asking for medical inspection and corrective exercises
in the playgrounds. They are asking for experimentation in teaching in
the playgrounds. They are inculcating ideas of good government among the
children.
Inasmuch as in great cities like New York and Chicago there never can be
enough playgrounds on the street level to meet the needs of the
children, there is a decided movement in such municipalities toward the
transformation of roofs into playgrounds. The Parks and Playgrounds
Association of New York, directed by both men and women, has already
opened several of these roof playgrounds and the influence is being felt
in various constructive ways. Private owners of apartment houses are
beginning to supply these facilities for young tenants as an inducement
to mothers to rent homes with them. Schemes for aerial playgrounds over
the streets on platforms are being proposed also.
Another very practical scheme for playgrounds is the provision of
certain streets for play, traffic being shut off from them during
definite hours of the day. A systematic plan is being made of New York
by the present administration to ascertain to what degree this scheme
can be extended and in this work two lines of interest, in which women
are very active, converge: recreation and safety. Frances Perkins and
other women have stimulated interest in public safety to a marked degree
in New York.
DANCE HALLS
Since the love of dancing persists without abatement through the
centuries, dancing must be accepted as a human need. Dancing should not,
however, cause the ruin of young men and women. That would seem to be a
trite remark but it has apparently taken infinite pains in investigatory
and publicity work to persuade the public or any considerable portion of
it that unregulated modern dance halls do injure their patrons and that
they must be reformed.
The trail out from the home, when followed by women in urban centers,
has led them in almost every case to the dance hall. Health workers, W.
C. T. U. women, welfare workers, social workers, educators,
propagandists of all kinds have found in the public dance hall their
Waterloo. The number of policewomen in the cities now assigned to these
places to safeguard young girls is a direct response to the demands made
by women that such municipal provision be made for their care.
Both men and women have been needed in the investigation of dance halls
and both have responded to the need, comparing notes and conferring on
the general situation. The men can better gain the confidence of the
male patrons, follow them to their resorts and learn whether the dance
hall is allied with vicious interests. On the other hand, the women can
better gain the confidence of their own sex and find out what motives
actuate girl patrons in frequenting such places, in drinking the liquor
that is almost invariably to be found at dance halls, and in succumbing
to the temptations that are offered at the close of the dance. Among the
skillful and ingenious women investigators of dance halls, Julia
Schoenfeld, now field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association,
perhaps takes first rank. Her study of conditions in New York City,
which she made under the most difficult requirements, paved the way for
the municipalization or municipal control of the dance halls which has
become an accomplished fact, if on a small scale at present.
Mrs. Charles Israels of New York and the members of the Women’s
Municipal League, with the facts obtained by Miss Schoenfeld, were able
to start a substantial movement toward the extension of municipal
functions in New York to cover the recreation of dancing, not entirely,
of course, but to the extent of providing greater facilities for this
recreation under careful supervision and with drinking entirely
eliminated. One hears women in New York state as their hope that before
long their city will boast a municipal dancing master who will preserve
for the foreign colonies, that exist in such, abundance, their
old-country folk dancing, who will have facilities for providing
inspiring music and halls where the young may dance with safety and
freedom. In spite of good beginnings in this direction, however, New
York has been slow to follow the excellent example set by Chicago with
its system of field houses for dancing in the public parks.
The evil resulting from the commercialization of the dance hall can be
destroyed only by eliminating the element of profit-making.
Municipalization is the remedy. Well-informed women are now arguing
this. Mrs. Louise de Koven Bowen, head of the Juvenile Protective
Association of Chicago, is one of the women who are educating the public
to a realization of the fact that profit-making from dancing must be
abolished. In a little pamphlet entitled “Our Most Popular Recreation
Controlled by the Liquor Interests,” she presents a study of the public
dance halls of Chicago which is most convincing in its plea for a
department of recreation in Chicago.
In York, Pennsylvania, the Woman’s Club, in coöperation with the
Associated Charities and Mr. Francis H. McLean, compiled an ordinance
now in effect, putting dance halls under city control. Other clubs and
organizations of women have done the same and scarcely a convention of
women anywhere at any time fails to go on record as in favor of similar
measures of control.
In many places, the women are not waiting on the tardy action of city
councils, but are instituting safeguarded dancing places of their own.
“Sunday dances for young people is an innovation by the Women’s Outdoor
Club of San Francisco. Club women will supervise the affair. The reply
to criticism about encouraging Sunday dancing is that young people will
dance anyway on their only free day, and it is better to provide them
with proper surroundings than leave them to the temptations of the
average dance hall.”[22] It is significant that the Department of
Education of the Civic Club of Allegheny County was the one to institute
dances on Sunday evenings for young people over sixteen years of age.
Bringing the question of amusement home to Bridgeport, Connecticut, Mrs.
Upham, industrial secretary of the Y. W. C. A., said that a petition
circulated in the city had brought in 600 signatures of working girls
demanding dance halls where no liquor should be sold and where they
might enjoy themselves in safety.
Simultaneously with the movement for the regulation of the public dance
halls is the movement to establish girls’ dance clubs, non-sectarian and
open to girls in employment, largely in order to wean them away from the
public dance hall. Mrs. Charles Oppenheim of New York is a promoter of
this movement, which she hopes to make one of national proportions. It
is in a way the direct antithesis of the movement toward
municipalization of recreation, and grows out of the success that
private individuals and organizations have met with in making girls so
interested in their own clubs that they prefer them to the public dance.
The two movements are not necessarily antagonistic, however, as they
allow a freedom of choice and insure wider provision for the needs of
the young.
CLUBS
Clubs offer the follow-up work that is necessary after the dance. The
club and the dance are sometimes combined, but serious class work can
often be secured by the relaxation afforded by the weekly dance. Clubs
conducted by women for young people and for adults are very often
serious educational features in the guise of pleasure, and the results
that have already been felt, as well as the realization that far more
can be achieved if attempted on a big social scale, a municipal scale,
if possible, have led to the movement for the opening of schools as
social centers. In Manchester, New Hampshire, the club women organized
and support a Boys’ Club. They look after more than 100 young boys who
sell papers and black shoes and the like. The boys are taught trades and
the clubhouse affords them recreation and protection. No effort is
spared to arouse the ideal of good citizenship and the boys respond
nobly. The Woman’s Club at Green Bay, Wisconsin, remodeled a building
for a center for working women and transformed it into a recreational
and educational center. The Woodlawn Woman’s Club of Chicago established
an organization for housemaids which is a social center. Such centers
for domestic workers have been founded in several cities and the reports
on waywardness among domestic workers indicate that their neglect in any
scheme of recreation is serious indeed. They are a large factor in the
patronage of public dance halls and any public control that reaches the
hall reaches the domestic worker.
For children too old for the playground and too young for the dance the
club is a vital institution. No type of club has appealed to the hearts
of men and women more than the Newsboys’ Club and work with these little
waifs has led on to an interest in the regulation of street trades for
children, mothers’ pensions, and other reform measures.
MUSIC
Music as an element of recreation has been emphasized by women
everywhere as a public necessity. The Westchester Club at Mt. Vernon,
New York, holds each season a series of high-class educational concerts
for the public and these have proved very popular. This Club is composed
of nearly 400 women. It built and thoroughly equipped a large auditorium
seating 800 people, with smaller halls for recreational uses, greatly
needed in that city.
The women and men of Denver have made municipal concerts a striking
feature of their city. These concerts are held indoors in winter as well
as out-of-doors in summer and are of a very high grade.
San Antonio, Texas, is fast developing into a musical center for the
Southwest, owing to the activity of the San Antonio Musical Club of
which Mrs. B. F. Nicholson is president, and the Tuesday Musical Club of
which Mrs. Eli Hertzberg is president. Besides bringing to San Antonio
some of the best artists that appear in New York and Chicago, San
Antonio is also treated to a good concert every Saturday morning, free
to the public, and given by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.
Austin, Texas, is apparently inspired to follow the example of San
Antonio. The Matinée Musical Club, of which Mrs. Eugene Haynie is
president, the oldest musical club there, and the Austin Musical
Festival Association, of which Mrs. Robert G. Crosby is president, are
the leaders in this movement. They are working with others for a
municipally owned auditorium in Austin as there is no satisfactory place
at present where concerts can be given.
The objects of the Music Festival Association are declared to be the
improvement of its members and the development of musical taste
among the people through the presentation of productions by the
greatest artists. The president and members serve the community
without stint and with no thought of personal gain. Owing to the
relative indifference of the business community thus far they are
obliged to assume considerable financial responsibility. This
organization is especially interested in the school children, and a
chorus which the children were permitted to sing to the
accompaniment of the Damrosch orchestra a year or so ago was highly
praised by Mr. Damrosch. It is hoped that a similar thing may be
done when some leading orchestra shall be secured for concerts next
spring. This feature was omitted when during the present month of
May the St. Louis Symphony orchestra gave a concert. This
organization, with its several soloists, was booked at a date too
late to give time for chorus practice. Here it may be remarked that
the musical instruction and training in the public schools, given
under the supervision of Miss Katherine Murrie, is considered a
large factor in the artistic growth of the community.
In Indianapolis, Mrs. Ona Talbot is given credit for having transformed
that city into the musical center which it is now. It has been largely
owing to her interest that the very best of music has been brought to
the well-to-do people, at least, of Indianapolis: the Metropolitan and
Boston Grand Opera companies; the Boston, New York and Chicago symphony
orchestras; the Russian Ballet; opera singers and instrumentalists.
The Civic Music Association of Chicago, first suggested by Mrs. George
B. Carpenter, was recently launched according to plans made by the
Woman’s Club of Chicago. “Music within the reach of all” is its slogan.
Mrs. Carpenter is president and she has the coöperation of the Chamber
of Commerce and prominent women like Ella Flagg Young. Dora Allen, of
the Association, states the aims in an article in _The Survey_:
It is hoped that local committees may be organized at recreation
centers to coöperate, that neighborhood choral and orchestral clubs
may be formed, that opportunity may be given for lecture recitals,
initial appearances of young artists, production of works of
resident composers and all distinctly American music, and that
annual musical festivals may be held, to bring together the local
groups. It is further planned to extend the work from the
playgrounds to the halls in public school buildings, twenty-five of
which are now open as social centers.
We cannot think but with a great deal of concern and with some
humiliation of the effect which America has on some of the best
capacities of the foreigners who come to us. They come singing
folk-songs, national songs, and snatches from their operas. We drown
these beautiful melodies with the tawdry rags and popular songs of
the saloon, the dance hall and cheap theater.
That is a dark picture. A bright one was vividly painted to the
writer by Mrs. Edward McDowell, who is devoting herself to the
interests which aroused her great husband’s greatest enthusiasm: the
development and democratization of music in America. The remarkable
success of the Peterboro pageant is well-known throughout the
country, and yet as Mrs. McDowell pointed out, the people who worked
so hard and who so artistically rendered the music and dances and
dramatic action were the townsfolk and laborers of a small New
England village. With the achievement of this pageant in mind, Mrs.
McDowell after a visit to the Chicago playgrounds in the immigrant
districts was enthusiastic over what might be done with the
coöperation of the Bohemians, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians and
Poles and other art-loving nationalities.
In almost all towns and cities there are free public libraries. In a
growing number there are institutes in which painting and sculpture
are exhibited without charge; and do we not see, here and there, the
beginnings of a movement to present good music, either without
charge or at a cost so small as to place it within the reach of all?
In this development of the passion for good music through coöperation
among the people, we are just beginning to recognize the needs of the
negroes who, by poverty or the sharp color line, have been excluded from
the proper encouragement of their own talents and tastes. The Music
School Settlement for Colored People in New York City is becoming the
nucleus of a recreation center for colored people in which the dramatic
and musical instincts of the race will be developed in an interesting
and creditable way. But it is not alone in the effect it has on the
colored people that the Settlement may be said to have demonstrated its
usefulness; it has also been the means of interesting an increasing
number of white people in the needs and aspirations of the colored. It
is only by mutual understanding and sympathy that the negro question can
be solved. The Music School Settlement for Colored People is trying in
its own way to help in the solution of this grave social problem. The
officers of the Settlement include men and women, and women have been
generous contributors to the support of its work.
MOTION PICTURES
As the moving-picture “show” creeps into every crossroads village and
multiplies in the cities, it becomes the people’s theater. In proportion
as a theater is educational or demoralizing in its influence, the
“movie” becomes the people’s school. What lessons do the people learn
there or is the influence of the movie negative?
“What kind of motion pictures do you like best and why?” was put
recently to more than 2,000 school children in the grammar grades of
Providence, Rhode Island. Mrs. Dwight K. Bartlett, who conducted this
investigation for the Rhode Island Congress of Mothers, classified the
replies as follows:
Grade 5 6 7 8 Totals.
Comedy 85 90 99 100 374
Western or cowboy 192 211 186 146 735
Educational 95 183 317 312 907
Drama 25 34 36 44 139
Do not attend 20 44 47 45 156
Crime 5 19 19 29 72
————
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The influence exercised by certain pictures is exemplified by some of
the answers Mrs. Bartlett received.
A sixth-grade child said, “A child that goes in and sees exciting
pictures comes out excited and starts playing what we saw and becomes
wild.”
“Western pictures sometimes make youths go out West to become cowboys
and run away from home.”
“I like where men has a wife and three children and the wife has a
fellow.”
“I like where the husbun’s go an play pool and then when there money is
gone they go home and take their wife jewels and leave them and never
come back again.”
“If a person goes to a show he goes to laugh and not to cry, for he has
so many troubles at his home.”
“I like love-making picture best. It is exciting when two men want to
marry the same girl.”[23]
A study of moving pictures has been made in other cities by women, and
all over the country they are giving serious attention to the problem of
securing the exhibition of high grade films only. Upon the suggestion of
club women, the Board of Education of Parsons, Kansas, has undertaken to
give two free moving-picture exhibits each month to the school children.
The films are selected by the superintendent of schools assisted by the
manager of the theaters and the subjects are confined to history,
geography and science.
The Mayor of Wichita, Kansas, has asked the club women to appoint a
board of three members to serve without pay as censors of
moving-picture shows, inspectors of theaters, reading rooms and
street cars. Suggestions for correction of evils will be received
and acted upon by the Mayor. The board is to be permanent.[24]
In Pittsburg, Kansas, the club women are working out a censorship
plan for moving-picture shows, which is proving successful. Mayor
Graves appointed a commission of women, headed by Mrs. Harvey
Grandle, president of the Pittsburg Federation of Clubs, which
confers with the managers of all five- and ten-cent vaudeville and
moving-picture shows. A most cordial spirit of coöperation is
reported upon the part of these managers, in eliminating all films
depicting scenes of crime, drinking scenes, and suggestive “love
scenes.” If all mayors would appoint similar commissions, whose work
would be as successful, it would not be long before the
manufacturers of moving-picture films would take the hint, and cease
to put out films of the tabooed classes. Wichita is working out a
similar plan through a commission, and this seems the most practical
plan. A commission, being clothed with authority, is received with
courtesy and acting in coöperative not antagonistic spirit, receives
the assistance of the managers. Local federations or clubs should
make it a point to bring this work before their city council or city
commission.[24]
_The American Club Woman_ declares that “women’s clubs are wisely
deciding to coöperate with the film companies to make them a good
influence upon the millions of young people who patronize them. The
censorship plan is proving successful in many cities. Volunteer boards
of club women who serve without a salary, find that it is not difficult
to secure the rejection of pictures which create a bad impression. Some
tact is useful in persuading the managers of moving-picture shows to use
the right kind of films. Censorship is rather a formidable term, but is
robbed of many of its terrors to managers, when they find that the
approval of the censors means increased business for clean shows.”
The women do not always agree, however, as to the kind of film that
should be shown. New York last winter witnessed a quarrel among women
and also among men as to whether white slave films should be exhibited
or prohibited. “Do they suggest or do they warn?” is the issue that must
be settled by the stronger combatants, for this is destined to be an
issue of increasing insistence.
That the municipality cannot be oblivious to the fact that its
restrictive measures may increase evils elsewhere, is shown by Mrs.
Bowen, of Chicago, who says in a report:
There should be a state or national censorship committee for motion
pictures. The motion pictures of Chicago are very well censored, and
something like one hundred and twenty-six miles of films have been
condemned and permission to exhibit them refused. In consequence,
they have been sent outside the city, all over the state, and many
of the pictures exhibited in the small towns are bad—the rest of the
state suffering for the virtues of Chicago! A state law should be
enacted providing that all moving pictures should be shown in
well-lighted halls, and the posters and advertisements outside all
theaters and throughout the city should be censored and passed upon
by the same committee which censors the moving pictures.
Women play a large part in the work of the National Board of Censorship
of Motion Pictures established by the People’s Institute of New York. In
addition to the members of the Censoring Committee which includes many
women, the National Board has some 300 correspondents in different parts
of the country who are more or less officially identified with it and
who work with women’s clubs, civic and social organizations, in addition
to mayors, license bureaus, and others. The work of the national
association is, therefore, fairly equally distributed between men and
women.
It is not the pictures themselves that are necessarily the worst feature
of the motion-picture theater, as the Board brings out and as social
workers generally emphasize. The lack of ventilation, the fire hazard,
the lack of protection for boys and girls are evils comparable with
indecent films. On all those aspects of the problem of the people’s
theater, groups of earnest men and women are working, securing
ordinances, acting as inspectors and policewomen, and seeking to educate
the patrons to demand decencies.
The standard for censorship set up by the Board is thus stated: “Broad
problems, such as the effect of scenes of violence on the juvenile mind,
still rest in an astonishing obscurity. It is impossible to get either
from the lips of psychologists or from the penal statistics of the
country, any conclusive verdict on this subject. In the same way, it is
hard to distinguish between the immediate effect of a vulgar picture on
the audience, which may be presumed to be degrading, and the ultimate
effect which may, through reaction, be that of exciting the audience to
a permanent disgust with vulgarity in all forms. In matters of this
kind, the Board acts on the general assumption of all its members, which
are general assumptions of people at large.”
The National Board does not and cannot relieve any community of its
local responsibility. As “the motion-picture theater is essentially a
form of public service which is licensed by the community for public
welfare, the same kind of scrutiny should be applied to it that is
applied to any public service monopoly, news-stand privilege or park
concession.”
A compilation of material from all parts of the country as to existing
laws and the methods used in regulating motion-picture theaters in
America and Europe has been made by the National Board and these form a
partial basis for general facts and principles set forth in a Model
Ordinance devised by it with detailed suggestions applicable in all the
cities of the country. This work of securing adequate legislation is
often taken up locally by women’s clubs. For example, the Wisconsin
Federation of Women’s Clubs vigorously supported a bill in the
legislature, providing for a censorship of moving-picture films
throughout the state.
Charlotte Rumbold is the intermediary between the National Board of
Censorship of Picture Films and the St. Louis Police Court. A volunteer
committee of which she was chairman made the St. Louis inspection of
picture shows and dance halls. Officers of the Good Citizenship Club of
Boise, Idaho, a women’s association, act as an advisory committee with
the Law Enforcement League and Ministerial Association in censoring
movies.
Private enterprise joins with public-spirited women in securing model
motion-picture shows. In Boston, Josephine Clement is the manager of the
Bijou Dream Motion Picture Theater and has had five years’ experience in
providing the public with a model theater. Plans for similar theaters
are afoot in two cities. Mrs. Clement declares from her experience that
they are self-supporting and a great deal more satisfactory to the owner
than those which invite constant interference.
Motion-picture films are really receiving more attention than the plays
and comic operas and vaudeville shows which are supported by people who
care less for the movies. Thus the percentage of innocuous films
probably is lower or is becoming lower than the percentage of innocuous
plays in other theaters.
THE DRAMA
Women are working on the elevation of the drama generally, too.
Sometimes they may be excessively Puritanical in this endeavor; again
they see in the presentation of such plays as “Damaged Goods” by Brieux
the highest use to which the stage can be put. This difference of
opinion is bound to exist but the important thing is to have women care
what is produced, as the first step toward superior drama.
Investigation of five- and ten-cent theaters in Chicago by the Juvenile
Protective Association and the presentation of complaints to the
building department, the Board of Health, the Chief of Police and the
State Factory Inspector have led to important changes in the physical
conditions of this grade of theaters in Chicago. Mrs. Bowen of this
Association finds that one grave evil in connection with these theaters
is their location, which takes many boys and girls and men and women
into sections where they would probably not otherwise go and brings them
thus into close contact with disorderly houses, saloons, and boarding
houses. The phrase in Chicago “A Five-Cent Theater Hotel” has become
current because of the general location of these theaters in transient
rooming houses. The menace of this thing to young girls may readily be
imagined. Mrs. Bowen and her association approve of an ordinance
licensing the place rather than the person who operates it, as is now
done in many places with dance halls. They would also prohibit amateur
nights and extend the censorship of plays to advertisements and posters.
In order that the taste of school children may be educated to seek good
drama, the Educational Dramatic League and other similar organizations
have been started by women. Mrs. Emma Fry, the organizer of the
Educational Dramatic League of New York, has met with enthusiastic
response from women and teachers and her movement is well launched.
The Drama League of America is a women’s and men’s organization with
Mrs. A. Starr Best of Evanston, Illinois, as president. Its object is to
support the drama that manifests a high level of art and morals in order
that the theater may assume its rightful place as an educational and
social force.
THE PAGEANT
The pageant is a recent development of the drama in the open-air. The
Deerfield Historical Pageant and the Duxbury pageant were directed by
Margaret MacLaren Eager. In the great pageant of nations, devised by the
People’s Institute in the East Side of New York in 1914, women worked
with vigor. Rose Rosner, a Rumanian girl, now connected with the
People’s Institute, was one most effective organizer, and all the
settlement leaders coöperated with enthusiasm.
The Founding of New Harmony, Indiana, a historical pageant presented by
the school children of that community in June, 1914, was also unique in
its purpose. Mr. W. V. Mangrum, the superintendent of schools, was the
manager and Mrs. Mary H. Flanner the director. Miss Charity Dye who
wrote the “Book of Words,” in her prefatory note explains the object of
the pageant:
The school children’s historical pageant is a distinct division of
pageantry in itself, demanding special considerations of time,
preparation, choice of material, and adjustments to the age and
development of those taking part. It should be borne in mind that
children have no large background of experience and hence the
methods used with adults cannot be used with them. The evolution of
the school pageant has been in response to the play spirit along
educative lines, and marks a difference between the mere spectacular
performance, which is gotten up in haste and dies as soon as it is
born, and the one that makes permanent impression of what is
valuable to the development of the pupil, and is presented in
conformity to the known laws of education. Under the wise management
of Mr. Mangrum, the superintendent of the schools, who began five
months in advance, the New Harmony pageant soon proved its
educational value. It has made community interest and coöperation a
living reality; it has telescoped the history of the town and the
region in the minds of the children and taught them of people and
events more vividly than could have been otherwise possible; it has
united the entire school system of the place by giving every child
some active part in preparing for the great historic event of
celebrating the founding of the town. The very least ones have been
cutting with the scissors the pageant scenes, outlined by the
teacher, and making silhouettes; others have been drawing the
outlines; some naming the birds of the district; others, the trees;
and still others noting the procession of wild flowers, all to show
the nature of the region. Older ones are making maps of the town and
the topography of the land, or drawing posters, and the prominent
buildings of historical note. The higher grades are using the scenes
in original composition work of character study and the
dramatization of events. Music has been a feature all the way along.
Boys have been heard singing “Lo! I Uncover the Land” from the
pageant, with happy loud voices. New Harmony is a rural community
with only three hundred school children; what has been done there is
possible to some degree in every community in the state. The pageant
lends itself especially to rural regions wherever there is a school
or several schools to unite in a festival for honoring those who
have helped to make public education possible. The near approach of
the centenary of the statehood of Indiana in 1916 furnishes the
psychological moment that makes it both a privilege and a duty to
arouse in every school in the state, a new interest in its own
environment or local history, thus leading to a wider interest and
conception of historic growth. The work of the historical pageant in
the schools of Indiana should begin next September so as to give
ample time without interfering with the regular work that must
otherwise be done. Richmond, Vincennes, Fort Wayne, LaFayette and
many other Indiana cities are especially rich in pageant material,
to say nothing of the wealth in this respect in the rural
communities on every side.
Through historical pageants, the dramatic play spirit of whole
communities of people has been aroused and developed and democratic
coöperation achieved. It is only within the past five or six years that
pageants have been held in this country on any large community scale,
but within that time some remarkable performances have been given, and
in all of the pageants women have taken a leading part, in some
instances directing the whole affair. In the future many interesting
pageants are to be held like the one in Redfield, California, which was
suggested by the Contemporary Club of that city.
The pageant given by the town of Arlington, Massachusetts, recently was
started by the Woman’s Club and a guarantee fund of $1,000 was secured
by it. Several hundred of the townspeople participated in the
presentation of the drama.
Charlotte Rumbold was the executive secretary of the St. Louis Pageant
and Masque which attracted national interest, and Mrs. Ernest Kroeger,
the active chairman, with an Executive Committee composed of men and
women. Indeed, this pageant was suggested by Miss Rumbold, Secretary of
the Public Recreation Committee, as a fitting way to celebrate the one
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of St. Louis. Every
agency of the municipal government coöperated to make it a success. “If
we play together, we will work together,” was the slogan adopted, the
whole object being the development of community spirit and not the
commercial advantage of merchants and business men generally. The 7,500
performers were drawn from all walks of life, the idea being to instill
democracy into St. Louis affairs, even the funds being democratically
raised. Other cities were asked to send official heraldic envoys and
general civic pride was to be augmented by a conference of mayors during
the celebration. No other pageant has had the big democratic community
vision of the St. Louis enterprise or has called for such large scale
planning.
FOURTH OF JULY
The Safe and Sane Fourth of July has been greatly promoted by women.
Independence Day has been until within five years or so, and is still in
most places, a thoroughly male day. It has been a day on which the deeds
of men have been exploited without conveying the slightest hint that
women have helped to build the nation. Histories of the American people
have regularly consigned women to a line or two and women have a real
grievance there. Their protest against the day, however, has not been
due to omission in the speeches of orators, but rather to the wanton
destruction of life and property which unregulated celebrations induce.
Promiscuous use of fireworks was the object of their organized attack.
Safe Fourths of July are rapidly becoming possible. When the work that
women have done in communities, the states and the nation is equally
recognized with that done by men, the Fourth of July will be a saner and
more patriotic day still. Thus the country’s past and its future will be
interpreted in a way that will appeal more directly to all the people
and arouse in girls as well as in boys a desire for coöperation in
citizenship.
Many women’s clubs have within recent years placed the Safe and Sane
Fourth on their list of demands and objects for which to work. The
Municipal Bureau of the University of Wisconsin has compiled a list of
all the municipal ordinances regarding explosives on the Fourth of July
and we venture to claim that in every case where one has been secured
the advocacy of women has been at least as pronounced as that of men.
Restriction without substitution, however, is usually idle, as we know
very well at last. In advocating ordinances of a restrictive nature,
therefore, women have not been unmindful of the need of directing
pent-up feelings accustomed to noisy and dangerous exuberance on the
Fourth. Pageants, processions, municipally managed fireworks and musical
festivals are some of the ways in which substitutions have been provided
for dangerous celebrations.
Much stimulus has been given to the Safe and Sane Fourth propaganda by
those social workers whose interests extend largely to our newcomers
from the nations of the world. If to them patriotism expresses itself
merely in Independence Day bandages and noise and drunkenness, American
civilization affords little inspiration. Any movement therefore which
has as its goal an historical explanation of the founding and growth of
the nation and the development of our ideals, and which typifies our
hope of ultimate democracy, is sane as well as safe. The participation
of foreign elements, now being assimilated into our national life, has
added to the richness and interest of Fourth of July pageants. Last year
in New York forty-two nations were represented in native costumes;
Chicago also had a great parade of her nations with floats showing the
parts played by various nations in our war for independence. The
entertainment in Jackson Park, Chicago, consisting of music, folk
dances, drills, games, tableaux and pageants was under the direction of
the Chicago women’s clubs. Baltimore had a wonderful naval pageant.
The leadership by women in this general movement was recently described
in _The American City_. “The part which women have taken in creating a
sentiment for a safe and sane Fourth and in providing acceptable
entertainment is very important. The pioneer work of Mrs. Isaac L. Rice,
president of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, New
York City, for this object, is well-known. Her pamphlet on a ‘Safe and
Sane Fourth’ (published by the Russell Sage Foundation) gives letters
from governors, mayors, fire chiefs, commissioners of health, heads of
police departments and presidents of Colleges, endorsing the movement.
“The Committee on Independence Day Celebrations of the Art Department of
the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs has issued a pamphlet
giving suggestions for the management of an Independence Day celebration
and material for pageantry taken from New Jersey history. The
suggestions for management are detailed and practical for other states
than New Jersey and include the formation of an Independence Day
Association and the work of sixteen different committees. The chairman
of the committee last year was Mrs. Wallace J. Pfleger.... The
Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation reprints this
pamphlet and publishes an excellent set on the same general subject.”
Those who study this movement find that women have contributed largely
to practical programs and plans and have been indispensable factors in
developing the imaginative features and carrying them into execution.
The American Pageantry Board, recently organized in Boston under the
auspices of the Twentieth Century Club, composed of men and women, has
recognized woman’s place in this work by choosing Lotta A. Clark as
executive secretary.
SOCIAL CENTERS
It is not by spasmodic effort that full provision can be made for the
gratification of the common instinct for recreation under wholesome
social conditions. Social centers in abundance and embracing a multitude
of recreational features are therefore an essential in modern cities.
They have not been easy to secure, however, except by private
philanthropy. Indeed we still have to have social center conferences and
carry on a publicity campaign, to demonstrate and argue in order to gain
the general consent for the use of school buildings and other public
property as evening social centers for neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the
movement does have real vitality now and most of the larger cities have
taken definite steps to make greater use of their schools and other
plants, like libraries.
In describing its entrance into the field of activity for social
centers, the Women’s Municipal League of Boston, through its Social
Center Chairman, Mary B. Follett, says:
Because it is our endeavor to make our city a true home for the
people, it is not enough that we should merely make it a house,
though it be clean and healthful to live in; for even health, though
essential, is not all-sufficient. We must also insure that there
shall be within it recreation, enjoyment and happiness for all. In
our great house—the city—a great need exists and it is to supply
this that our Committee for Social Centers was formed.
In Boston there are 56,000 young people between the ages of 14 and
18 who are earning their living, working all day, craving amusement
in the evening, and with no home to provide it. Our committee
organized, as an experiment, this winter, a social center in the
East Boston High School, by permission of the Boston School
Committee, which allowed us the use of the building in the evenings.
Our aim was to offer educational recreation, and at the same time to
provide for the working young people an environment which should
help to prepare them for their future life.
The League engaged a skilled director and his wife to organize this
work. They settled in the district three months before the social
center was opened, making friends of their neighbors, young and old,
and when October came they were thus enabled to begin work with 14
clubs already organized. These clubs have continued with a
constantly increasing membership; there were 300 young people
enrolled at the beginning, and now, after six months, there are 500
members. The clubs are called the East Boston Opportunity Clubs and
are self-governing. The membership consists almost entirely of young
wage-earners, but one club, the Games Club, is made up of high
school pupils at the request of their teachers, in order to suggest
to the girls some other occupation than stenography; they are being
taught kindergarten work for use in vacation schools or with their
own future children.
The list of clubs includes two dramatic and two glee clubs, two
orchestras, a drum corps, two athletic associations, two sewing
classes, a folk dancing class, and a junior city council. The clubs
for boys and girls are kept separate, but on one occasion the Folk
Dancing Club of girls gave a dance, and the members invited their
men friends. The clubs often provide the program for the fortnightly
entertainment given at the Social Center for young and old people.
The Social Center encourages thrift, for each member of a club must
pay weekly dues, and in addition many of the boys of the orchestras
are saving money to buy their own instruments. One young man
surprised us by saying that he had saved money by attending the
Social Center, as otherwise he would have spent his time in the
saloons and poolrooms. The sewing clubs have held a sale, and with
the proceeds will give themselves a day’s outing.
The greatest difficulty we have encountered has been the intense
racial prejudice existing between the different nationalities; but
the tact and fine judgment of our director have overcome this, and
today all members of the Social Center recognize the broadening
influence that comes from being Americans together; in fact, one
young man tells us that the Social Center is the only place since
leaving school where he has met the right kind of friends.
The East Boston Social Center has proved so successful in filling a
genuine need that the Boston School Committee has decided, not only
to take over this Center next year, but to start three others in
different districts, and has engaged our director, Mr. Hawley, to
organize the work. Our Committee is now occupied in formulating
plans for a large social center movement throughout Boston, and is
enlisting the help and coöperation of each neighborhood for its own
center, because no social center can be established on a permanent
basis unless the neighborhood community realizes its own
responsibility in helping to make the plan a success.
There are not enough settlements and other social agencies to
provide for more than a small number of our young people. There are
thousands of young men who have no place to go nights. There are
thousands of girls who used to stay at home in the country but who
have been brought by our changed industrial conditions to the cities
to work in shops and factories. Many of these will be in the streets
nights unless we provide some decent recreation for them. Thus on
the one hand there is this urgent need; on the other there are all
those empty buildings upon which we have spent literally millions
and millions of our money. Such a waste of capital seems bad
business management on our part.
The Women’s Municipal League of Boston is one among the many
organizations that urge the planning of future school buildings with
reference to their use as social centers. Many of the old buildings are
difficult if not impossible to adapt to this use. The interest of the
Boston women in this forward movement toward educational recreation has
strongly supported the Boston School Committee which has now in
operation several evening centers for young and old in its school
buildings.
The little town needs the extension of the use of its school plant quite
as much as the great city as Mrs. Desha Breckenridge shows:
In the small town which I come from, Lexington, Kentucky, with about
40,000 inhabitants, we have built a public school in which we take
much pride. It is in the very poorest section of the town. The
school board had but $10,000 to put into the school. Some years
before, the Civic League of Lexington had established a playground
in this section; then a little vacation school, with cooking, sewing
and carpenter work; and finally it convinced the School Board of the
need of a public school there.
As the years went by and the playground was continued, we began to
feel that not only a public school, but a public school of a very
unusual kind was needed in that section. There was no place for
social gatherings except a saloon or a grocery with saloon
attachments. The young people were going uptown to the skating rinks
and the moving-picture shows, and a little later we were dealing
with them through the Juvenile Court. And more and more it was borne
in upon us that though we might do our best through the Juvenile
Court and the Reform School to repair the damage done, a cracked
vase, no matter how well mended, could never be as good as a whole
one; and that the sensible thing to do was to keep these children
out of the Juvenile Court and the Reform School. The School Board
simply had not the money to build the sort of school we wanted, nor
had it the necessary conviction and faith that a poor part of the
town needed so expensive a school. So when we had gotten the Board
to appropriate the last remaining $10,000, we started out to add to
that sum $25,000, raised by popular subscription, and went to work
on the plans for a school building which would not only allow the
teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, but would have a
kitchen, a carpenter shop, a laundry, a gymnasium, shower baths, a
swimming pool and an auditorium with a stage.
We went to the “professional philanthropists,” and after we had been
turned down by most of them we came back to our own people—with just
enough help from a few generous outsiders to give standing at
home—and raised a large part of the money by a whirlwind campaign,
such as the Y. M. C. A. has tried in many places. We could not stop
at $25,000; the school and grounds have now cost about $45,000, and
we know so well the places we could use a few thousand more!
We began teaching school in the new building last September; it is
full of children and is a joy forever. The swimming pool, the
crowning glory, is not yet completed, for we had to contract for
things whenever the money was in bank, and all trimmings were
postponed as late as possible. The shower baths are in full effect.
The laundry is being used not only to teach the school children how
to wash and iron, but the mothers of the neighborhood, who bring
their washing in, pay so much a wash for the use of the water and
the steam drier and the beautiful ironing boards, with gas burners
at the end. The big room, with the stage at the end, which serves
for kindergarten in the morning and gymnasium in the afternoon, is a
story and a half high, and is used for theatrical performances and
dances at night. It is running full blast. We have various night
clubs already started, but we could have more—and will have more
when there is a little more money to pay for supervisors, or a
little more time to drum up and keep in line volunteer helpers. But,
even now, the school has demonstrated that the evening is the best
time, not only for reaching the fathers and mothers of the school
children, but the young people—girls who work in the laundries and
in the stores at $3.50 a week, and who have no place to go for
dancing and other recreation, and the young men from 20 to 35,
working at the distillery or the tobacco warehouses.
Evening is without doubt the great time to offer recreational
opportunities to working people. Most of them cannot get these
except in the evening, and the meeting at the schoolhouse is a
social event; it is of all others the time when teachers and
settlement workers may make connection with the parents and those
over the school age.[25]
In almost every city, women have been behind the movement for social
centers. In Lynn, Massachusetts, for example, the Women’s Political
Science Club persuaded the school board to install electric lights in
the Breed School so that it could be used in the evenings. One of the
leading topics now in the conventions of state federations of women’s
clubs is the use of the schools as social centers; and this movement is
spreading rapidly to country districts which need it quite as much as do
urban communities.
Miss Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the President of the United
States, is one of the most ardent supporters of social centers. She has
added the weight of her influence privately in constructive work and
publicly in propagandist work at conferences and national conventions of
various kinds.
Women are also adding to the literature on the subject of social centers
for publicity value. “The School House as a Local Art Gallery” by Mrs.
M. F. Johnston, and “The Social Center Movement in Minnesota” by Mrs.
Mary L. Starkweather, Assistant Commissioner Women’s Department, Bureau
of Labor for Minnesota, are two of the nine pamphlets issued by the
Extension Division of the University of Wisconsin on Social Centers.
The Social Center Association of America, recently formed, includes
among its vice-presidents, Miss Anne Morgan of New York, Miss Jane
Addams, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, and Miss Mary McDowell of Chicago.
Wisconsin, California, Indiana, Massachusetts and Ohio have excellent
legislation with regard to the use of schools as social centers; and it
was secured with the help of women in private and organized advocacy,
strengthened by experiments made by them which demonstrated the
advisability of municipal control over educational recreation.
In Detroit two women persuaded the school authorities to grant the use
of a school for evening dances, desiring to make the school a
neighborhood center. The “Buffalo Federation of Women’s Clubs indorses
any plan to make social centers of the public schools along lines so
successful in other cities. An appropriation is asked from the city to
carry on the work.” St. Louis club women have secured the use of several
school buildings as social centers. “A social center in every public
school is the plan of the club women of Syracuse, New York. Plans are
being made to throw open the doors of the school buildings for
neighborhood meetings and entertainments on several evenings of each
week. The school officials are coöperating with the various forces in
favor of social centers.” Women of Chicago asked the coöperation of the
Board of Education in conducting a social center in the winter of
1911–1912. It was open thirty-two evenings with 13,000 people in
attendance.[26]
EXPERIMENTS
Scarcely a town in Illinois and in other states can be found in which a
woman’s club is not planning some wholesome recreation for boys and
girls. Loan collections of games is a practicable method resorted to in
some cases where children have comfortable homes in which to play and
such collections are issued from the library just as books are.
The Good Citizenship Club of Boise, Idaho, a woman’s organization, plans
for municipal entertainment, among other ways, by arranging an address
or various forms of amusement one evening a week in the plaza in the
business district. In planning these entertainments, the women have made
every men’s organization in the city responsible for one evening’s
program: church brotherhoods, labor unions and other non-partisan and
non-sectarian organizations. This Good Government Club is also taking
the initiative in providing for a paid supervisor of the public
playground in the aforesaid plaza for morning and evening play during
vacations.
Bennington, Vermont, had a community sleigh ride one winter as a part of
the town’s recreation program. Recreation activities there are in charge
of the Civic League, a group of young women, and in one year they
included a summer playground providing for tennis, baseball, volleyball
and other games, popular concerts, a community Christmas tree, a pageant
of patriots on Washington’s birthday, story-telling, a baby contest,
athletic meets, skating in safety for five weeks, and folk dancing
festivals. The town voted $500 that year and the rest was raised
privately. The municipal Christmas tree has grown to be a recognized
institution in the larger cities. Mrs. Louise Bowen, however, takes a
very thoughtful position on the question of this form of recreation. She
would prefer indoor fêtes for the people, owing to the menace to health
and young girls in the winter open-air festivity. In support of her
contentions she cites the fact that the committee having the Chicago
Christmas tree affair in charge promised to provide 50 nurses, 25
doctors, and 500 policemen.
California, so far as we know, was the first state to create a
commission for the study of recreation. Five of the members were
appointed by the Governor; one by the President of the Senate, and one
by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Dr. Grace Fernald, of
the Juvenile Court of Los Angeles, is a member, together with Miss
Bessie Stoddard of the Playground Commission of Los Angeles.
The Public Recreation Commission of St. Louis has broad advisory powers
which include supervision of moving-picture shows, dance halls,
poolrooms, steamboat excursions and other “commercial recreation,” as
well as holiday celebrations and recreation in public schools, parks and
libraries. “It is planned to open public dance halls over the public
markets. The school yards are to be used as playgrounds for children
under ten years of age in the daytime under paid women instructors.
Classes will be sent to the swimming pools every morning and afternoon
under the care of teachers. The Public Schools Athletic League will use
the public playgrounds. There will be public concerts in the schools and
the libraries will have clubrooms and evening lecture courses. The
playgrounds in the parks will be open for children in the daytime and
for adults at night. It is interesting to note the composition of each
of the sub-committees of the Commercial Recreation Committee: one
picture exhibitor, one school man, one clergyman, two women and one
policeman. Is there not here a tribute to the civic influence of
womanhood as such, apart from avocation?”[27]
“New York City now has a federation of associations interested in
recreation. The widest meaning will be given to the word recreation.
Committees will look after both indoor and outdoor amusements from the
viewpoints of health and morality. The new federation will act as a
clearing house for information gathered by societies working for the
same general object, pointing out deficiencies and suggesting plans of
work.”
FINANCING OF PUBLIC RECREATION
Women formed part of a New York group of public-spirited citizens that,
in the summer of 1914, presented to the Board of Estimate and
Apportionment, the budget-making authority of the city, an important
memorandum dealing with the great problem of financing the urgent
recreational facilities such as those we have outlined. _The Survey_
published the following commentary on this memorandum:
Beginning with the statement that not more than 5 per cent. of the
population is reached daily by all the intensive or active
recreations under public control, the memorandum finds that “the
mass of the people depend on commercialized amusements, notably
saloons, motion pictures, and dance halls, and on the street, which
is the demoralizing and dangerous playground of most of the
children. We urge that wholesome recreation, publicly controlled, is
needed by all the people, not by the small fraction now cared for.”
In other words, the signers of the memorandum regard public
recreation as being as much a public function as education. “It is
impossible,” says the memorandum, “for the individual to buy
wholesome recreation. Wholesome recreation, in which the social and
civic elements are present, can only be provided through community
coöperation.” Public recreation is net only for the poor, but for
everyone, and without it the rich are nearly as helpless as the
poor.
Free recreation made available to the mass of the people would cost
the city between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, a sum impossible to
raise by taxation. Yet, says the memorandum, “the people of New York
gladly pay $10,000,000 a year for mediocre commercial motion-picture
shows, but the city takes it for granted that they will or should
pay nothing at all for amusements more attractive, including motion
pictures, which can be offered on public properties. The 600 dance
halls of the city are operated in considerable part by voluntary
groups who pay for the privilege of using the halls, but the city
takes for granted that its public properties cannot be operated,
even in part, by voluntary groups, and that the people will not or
should not pay.”
The mass of the people are thus paying for poor recreation which is
not merely neutral, but often demoralizing. The memorandum goes on:
“It has been shown through complete investigation that most juvenile
crime is directly due to the attempt to play in the streets or in
other forbidden places. There is much evidence that crime among
women, especially that which leads to the social evil, is due in
large part to the influences which surround women in their search
for recreation. Neither commerce nor public effort has provided
family recreation places, and most wage-earning families in New York
have no leisure resources beyond what they can find in their
tenement homes, on the streets, or in a small class of commercial
resorts.”
In other words, the memorandum is a challenge to the city to go into
vigorous competition with commercialized amusements and develop all
public properties to the limit for leisure purposes, as the only
means whereby crime can be radically controlled, the family held
together in its pleasures, or civic education carried ahead.
The memorandum proceeds to lay down a constructive program by which
this wider use of all public properties can be put into effect in
line with the social center idea. Its program involves neighborhood
organization, the shaping of public amusement according to local
needs. It involves equally self-government in the use of public
properties for leisure purposes. It goes further and argues that
local self-support is necessary before self-government can become a
reality.
It urges, in the first place, that public recreation cannot be
generally developed unless this be done in a partially
self-supporting way, through dues, entrance fees, or the method of
private concessions operated on public property. The tax burden
would be impossible by any other plan.
It urges also that local self-government in social centers will be a
mere pretense unless it be accompanied with the power to disburse
funds. Self-government is desired primarily because it means that
the local center will, through self-government, begin to take on
individuality, to develop a neighborhood policy, to seek the
fulfillment of neighborhood needs.
For all these purposes a budget will be necessary, and the most
direct, obvious and disciplinary way to raise the budget is through
local effort. The natural method, as already demonstrated in several
New York schools, is to charge an entrance fee to a few popular
features of the center, preferably those which compete directly with
the commercialized amusements. Moving pictures and public dancing
are illustrations. These features, and others such as amateur
theatricals, athletic meets, sociables and bazaars, the renting of
rooms in the school building, club dues, etc., can be made not only
self-supporting but profitable and the surplus can be applied to
other non-profitable activities. At present, even in New York, some
social centers, such as the well-known center in Public School 63,
Manhattan, meet all local expenses, including supervision and
janitor service, by such means as these.
The following paragraph from the memorandum is suggestive:
“Those men and women who are members of private clubs, insist on
being allowed to spend their social hours with their own group,
among people who want what they want in the way they want it. The
great mass of the people, who have no private clubs, are entitled to
these same privileges. They too are entitled to pay for their own
recreation, to govern their own recreation, and to spend their
leisure hours with their own social group. The social center,
whether it be on school property, park property, or other public
property, is such by reason of the very fact that it gives this kind
of right to the average man, woman or child.... The aim of the
social center is that public money shall provide simply the basic
physical opportunity for recreation, while the people themselves,
through the effort of organized voluntary groups, shall make their
own recreation, govern it and pay for it. The social center is not a
form of paternalism, for it merely provides the channels through
which the social life can flow, just as the street provides the
channel through which the physical city is able to move.”