The Women of Tomorrow Part 15

"Even the tenderer phases of housekeeping, those which are more subtle than mere administration, move steadily toward becoming yours. I will give you an ill.u.s.tration of that. The very children, now no longer always at their mothers' knees, but spread abroad through school and park and playground and street and factory, are now much in your hands, for school and park and playground and street and factory are essentially controlled by you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living.

But who are you, you that now control Living? You are----"

She tapped my shoulder and laughed.

"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier, scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and steam--and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer mounds of stock certificates and ma.s.ses of men--and organize armies for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge--and write your treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion--and write your poem.

Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable whole--that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce, produce, produce--a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas--you can do it. But to make a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total of warm, charming, n.o.ble, livable life--you'll never do it, by yourself."

She paused.

"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside from any special qualities of my s.e.x, don't you know that the greatest reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and semi-leisure of certain cla.s.ses of its women?"

"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to,"

I answered.

"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther.

Look!"

And this is what she showed me--what she told me:

Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago Woman's Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school, northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy--everything but the room.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: DOMESTIC SCIENCE CLa.s.sES; INSTRUCTION FOR THE BLIND; ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS; SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGNS.]

It was a "good work," one might think, quite within "woman's sphere."

But it wasn't entered into lightly and unadvisedly. In one of the club's old pamphlets you'll find it set down that Goethe had said that activity without insight is an evil. Accordingly, the club had spent its youth, from 1876 to 1883, reading, considering, discussing. But certain topics were excluded. _Particularly woman's suffrage._

But kindergartens! Something for children! Could anything be more womanly? So on the fifth of December, 1883, the long-apprehended question arose: "Shall Our Club Do Practical Work?" There was much hesitation. But the vote was affirmative.

Seems strange to-day, doesn't it, that there should have been any hesitation at all?

There beneath us, on the Lake Front, in the Art Inst.i.tute, on Sunday afternoons, there are excellent orchestral concerts to which you will be admitted on payment of ten cents. A work of this club.

Out over the city, if your eyes could compa.s.s it, you would see a blind man going from place to place, North Side, West Side, South Side, seeking out other blind people, entering their homes, teaching them how to read the books published in Braille and Moon raised characters, teaching them how to weave, teaching them how to use the typewriter, teaching them even how to make stenographic notes on a little keyboarded machine which impresses raised characters on a tape to be read off afterwards with the finger tips, giving his fellow-dwellers in darkness an occupation to be their solace, and even an occupation to be their support. A work of this club.

And the interval between these two kinds of work could be filled up with hundreds of entries. You have grown accustomed to all this. The Chicago Woman's Club, the scores of other woman's clubs in this city, the thousands in this country--you expect them to be active. But you do not perceive the consequences.

When the Chicago Woman's Club started its work in the Brighton School, there wasn't any such work in Chicago maintained by public funds. The town's pioneer kindergarten had been founded in 1867, by a woman.

There had then grown up an a.s.sociation called the Chicago Froebel a.s.sociation, which established and operated kindergartens in public school buildings out of its own resources. The Board of Education provided s.p.a.ce, but nothing more. The Froebel a.s.sociation was composed entirely of women, and many of its members were also members of the Chicago Woman's Club. The steam in the cylinders of the kindergarten movement in Chicago was the enthusiasm of women.

Well, in 1892, the Board of Education took the kindergartens over. The kindergarten system became thoroughly public, civic, collective. The control of it had lain with women. The control of it now pa.s.sed to men. Oh, there's no complaint. It's what the women wanted. They asked the men to do it. But I say--No, I'll postpone saying it till I've told you another story or two.

In the late nineties the Chicago Woman's Club took the leading role in the formation of what was known as the Vacation Schools Committee.

More than sixty woman's organizations finally sent delegates to it.

Its object was to give city-street children, in summer time, some sort of experience resembling, if not reproducing, the activity and the knowledge of nature which comes with summer life in the country.

The vacation school, with its play and its nature study, turned out to be both useful and popular. For a decade or more the Vacation Schools Committee, composed entirely of women, raised large sums of money and extended its efforts from school to school till there came to be an established and recognized vacation schools system. The women whose energy carried it forward year after year were, in fact, school directors. Now the vacation schools system has been adopted by the Board of Education. Those women are school directors no longer. Nor have they any voice in the _selecting_ of school directors.

Almost immediately the women changed the name of the Vacation Schools Committee to Permanent School Extension Committee. Its objects now are to extend the use of school buildings and to extend the educational system itself. Its work may be seen in many parts of town.

Ten miles to the south, near the mouth of the Calumet River, where that ore-boat was turning in, the "Johnson Cubs" and the "South Side Stars" and other organizations of boys, princ.i.p.ally from the Thorp School, have been getting manual training and football and cross-country hikes and gymnastic skill under the direction of a salaried representative of the Permanent School Extension Committee, who has been trying to make their hours out of school count for something in their development.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: PARK ATTENDANTS; MOTHERS' CLUBS; HOSPITAL KINDERGARTENS; VACATION SCHOOLS.]

Southwest of us, far over, back of the Yards, at the Hamline School, for five years the Committee has maintained a "social worker" who, through clubs and cla.s.ses and entertainments and festivals in the evenings as well as in the afternoons, for adults as well as for children, has been trying to write over the doors of the school the words which appear frequently enough elsewhere: "Family Entrance."

Trifling? Dreamy? Just the sort of thing woman's club women would do?

Well, it seems to be about to lapse. But why? Because the Board of Education, at last half-convinced, has appropriated $10,000 for social-center work of its own in the school buildings.

The rest of the present work of the Permanent School Extension Committee will lapse, too--in time.

Last spring, in the Hamline School, for six weeks eighteen children who needed the treatment did their work in a room in which the windows were kept open. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided special chairs, blankets, milk and eggs for morning and afternoon, a hot meal for lunch.

During the summer, in three school yards--the Lake View on the North Side, the Penn on the West, the Libby on the South--there were vacation schools for six weeks in the open air, with special teaching and special feeding. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided the meals and the cooks.

The gain made in physical and mental condition by the children so treated was such that the time is sure to come when the principle of extra air and extra food for below-par pupils, like the principle of kindergartens, the principle of vacation schools, and the principle of school social centers, will be absorbed into the general policy of the public school system.

And now I will say the things I hesitated to say a few moments ago.

First. Is it likely that women who have helped to add element after element of value to the public school system would fail to acquire an interest in the public school system itself? Is it likely that women who have had a voice in certain important matters would relinquish all personal concern about them immediately upon their absorption into the city government? In other words, is it strange that the topic of woman's suffrage is now tolerated on the floor of the Chicago Woman's Club?

Second. Might not one unwarily imagine that among the women who for so many years have given so much thought and action to school affairs there would be found many whose experience _and whose leisure_ would be draughted (with a press gang, if necessary) into the public service?

Is it not strange that among the twenty-one members of the Chicago Board of Education only one is a woman? And doesn't this become still stranger when it is recollected that most members of the Board of Education (to say nothing of their not having merited their appointment by any notable benefits conferred on the school system) are so overwhelmed by private business as to find their attendance on board committee meetings a hardship?

This last feature of the situation is the one that more and more fills me with amazement. Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in cooperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free disposal--here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive questions of educational policy.

But never mind. Things may change. The present superintendent of schools is a woman. That's something. And, anyway, the women I am speaking of, though increasingly conscious of the degree of their exclusion from the collective civic life of the town, do not spend so much time in repining about it as they spend in seeking new opportunities for such civic service as is possible to them.

Sometimes it is hard to say whether they are within the bounds of private life or not.

If you will go up the Chicago River, up past that bend, into the North Branch, up beyond that gas plant where vagrant oils streak the surface of the muddy water, vilely, vividly, with the drifting hues of a lost and tangled rainbow, up by factory and lumber yard, up into the reaches of the open fields, till the straight lines of wharves give way to tree-marked windings, graceful bendings gracefully followed by bending willows, you will come presently to a school which tries to restore to city children something of the peace and strength of the country.

It is the Illinois Industrial School for Girls. A few years ago it was in collapse--filthily housed, educationally demoralized, heavily indebted. A few women, princ.i.p.ally from the Chicago Woman's Club, became interested in it. They bought a farm for it. They put up buildings for it. Not a big prison dormitory. Little brick cottages.

Matron in each one. Chance for a kind of home life. Chance, also, for instruction in housekeeping. Big vegetable patches for instruction in gardening. Friendly cows to help along with instruction in dairying.

Everything for outdoor life, working life, life that engages and disciplines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: IMPROVEMENT OF CITY SQUARES; NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATIONS; INDUSTRIAL AND AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.]

All the twenty-four directors of this school (with two exceptions) are women. Most of them are members of the Chicago Woman's Club. One of the cottages is named after the club. But the school is, in a way, a county inst.i.tution. That is, the county makes a certain contribution to it, under a state law, for the support of each girl committed to it as a dependent by the Juvenile Court. The directors, therefore, are trustees each year for a large amount of public money.

Question: Are they in public life?

Answer: If the school is ever really owned by the public, they will be discharged from public life with extraordinary immediacy. The way to deprive any enterprise of the possibility of effective support from the female half of the community is to give it to the community.

No, I'll admit that isn't quite true. The women do keep on trying to help.