University of Virginia Library

II

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.

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 rose: " 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 Institute, 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 compass 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 key-boarded machine which impresses raised characters on a tape to be read off afterward 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 association called the Chicago Froebel Association, which established and operated kindergartens in public school buildings out of its own resources. The Board of Education provided space, but nothing more. The Froebel Association 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 passed

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 rôle 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 the ore-boat was turning in, the "Johnson Cubs" and the "South Side Stars" and other organizations of boys, principally 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.

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 classes 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 in 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 drafted (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, principally from the Chicago Woman's Club, became interested in it. They bought a farm for it. They put up buildings for it. Not a big prison dormitory. Little brick cottages. Matron in each one. Chance for a kind of home life. Chance, also, for instruction in housekeeping. Big vegetable patches for instruction in gardening. Friendly cows to help along with instruction in dairying. Everything for outdoor life, working life, life that engages and disciplines.

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

Question: Are they in public life?

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

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

How I wish I could make you see the whole of this city, its streets, its vacant places, the inside of its buildings, all, all at once, with all the things happening which have been set going by this Chicago Woman's Club and by the organizations with which it associates itself.

You'd see (and in each case you'd know

that what you were seeing was due either entirely or very largely to the labors of the club, its committees, its departments, or its close allies)-

You'd see night matrons in the police stations giving women arrests a degree of protection they did not at one time have.

You'd see in the Art Institute a line of pupils who from year to year have passed through its study-rooms because of a certain scholarship yearly offered.

You'd see in the City Hall a new official called the City Forester, helping to save the trees the town now has, issuing bulletins of professional advice, giving his aid to the Arbor Day enthusiasm, which last year put some 400,000 seedlings into the parkways and private yards of Chicago.

You'd see, over the whole extent of the city, local improvement associations, which on street cleaning and other local needs, not adequately met by the city government, spend a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

You'd see, in the jail, a school for young men prisoners, now taken over and supported by the county, but still watched by the club. You'd also see certain recent interests of the club: a woman's diningroom, an examining physician to segregate contagious diseases, a fumigating plant.

You'd see the paintings on the walls of the assembly hall of the McKinley High School the first mural paintings in any school in Chicago.

You'd see children, after school, in the park playhouses, listening to "story ladies," who tell them fairy tales, historical tales, tales of adventure and achievement.

You'd see, in one of the small parks of the West Side, a woman "social worker," who gets the mothers and fathers of the neighborhood into the way of using the park and the park building, even for Christmas Eve family parties. And then, you'd see "social workers " appointed by the park board itself and paid with public money.

You'd see, in many places, audiences listening to free lectures on Social Hygiene.

You'd see important excerpts from the city code bearing on personal conduct being taken into the newspaper offices to be printed under the heading "Ordinances You Ought to Know."

You'd see paintings and engravings being hung in the public schools by the Public School Art Society, till in a case such as that of the Drake School the collection in a single school building amounts in value to several thousand dollars.

You'd see wagonloads of coats and hats and dresses and trousers being carried from the School Children's Aid Society to public schools in all parts of the city, to be secretly conveyed to boys and girls who other-wise could not come through wintry weather to their lessons.

You'd see flower gardens springing up in many school-yards, after a little encouragement and advice from the Women's Outdoor Art League.

You'd see a girl behind the walls of the Northwestern University Building, over there on Dearborn Street, telling her story of deception, or of outrage, or of error, to the Superintendent of the Legal Aid Society. It used to be the Women's Protective Association till it was merged with the Bureau of Justice a few years since. It was initiated by the Chicago Woman's Club a generation ago. It has ministered to thousands of young women cursed with that curse both of God and of man which gives them, however wronged, almost all the burden and almost all the shame of the event. It is due mainly to the work done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature's revenge, is not immune from the law's.

These things you'd see, and innumerable others. All that I have mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication which stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted. If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.

They began, those women of the Chicago Woman's Club, with remembering that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president, retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of thousands of other woman's clubs, thus:

"Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher things; through study, through interest in humanity, the supreme motive of this club has come to be service to humanity."

And yet I haven't mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the town by its women.

One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and rocking-chair. She inquired about him. " Him?" said the children, " He's a fellow just murdered his wife. He's our boss."

Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.

The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes farther.

At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other, with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to accumulate a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.

From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during the next eight years was an integral part of the administration of the Juvenile Court. There's little wisdom (in a city as large as Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there's a probation officer to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pass through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of them. The probation officers are the judge's eyes and hands, giving him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an effective agency for juvenile regeneration.

The Juvenile Court Committee developed a staff of probation officers, which finally had twenty-two members. The Juvenile Court Committee also undertook the maintenance and management of the detention home in which boys were sheltered and instructed while awaiting the final disposition of their cases. The Juvenile Court Committee also gave time and money to many other features of the development of the court, all the way from paying the salaries of a chief clerk and a chief stenographer to suggesting the advisability and securing the adoption of necessary amendments to the Juvenile Court Law.

From the year 1898 to the year 1907 the Juvenile Court Committee raised and spent a hundred thousand dollars. But it did its best work in depriving itself of its occupation. It secured the passage of a law which established the probation officer system as part of the Juvenile Court system, to be maintained forever by the county authorities. And it succeeded, after long negotiations, in persuading the county and the city governments to cooperate in the erection of a Children's Building, which houses both the court and the detention home.

The original purpose of the Juvenile Court Committee was now fulfilled. The Committee perished. But it immediately rose from its ashes as the Juvenile Protective Association. Instead of supporting probation officers to look after children who are in the care of the court, it now spends some $25,000 a year on protective officers, who have it for their ultimate object to prevent children from getting into the care of the court. Can anything be done to dam the stream of dependent and delinquent children which flows through the children's building so steadily? What are the subterranean sources of that stream? Can they be staunched?

The managers of the Juvenile Protective Association, in going back of the court to study the home lives, the industrial occupations, and the amusements which form the characters, for better or for worse, of the city's children, are approaching the field in which the causes of social corruption will stand much more clearly revealed than at present to our intelligence and conscience. It is fundamental work.

But what of the women who are directing that work? What of the women who are directing the other enterprises I have mentioned? Would they make good citizens?

They are militant citizens now, with the rank of noncombatants.