Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

WOMAN’S WORK IN

MUNICIPALITIES

NATIONAL MUNICIPAL LEAGUE SERIES

WOMAN’S WORK IN MUNICIPALITIES

BY

MARY RITTER BEARD

JOINT AUTHOR OF “AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP”

NEW YORK AND LONDON

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1915

Copyright, 1915, by

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

The plan of this volume demands a few words of explanation. It was originally intended to be a collection of readings illustrating the varied phases of women’s work in municipalities, but an examination of the available literature failed to reveal succinct, up-to-date summaries of the several important branches of that work. It was therefore necessary to search the records of hundreds of organizations and societies in order to obtain a just view of the extent and character of the labors of women for civic improvement of all kinds. Accordingly the volume as finally drafted combines both readings and original surveys.

The method followed has been dominated by a fourfold purpose: (1) to give something like an adequate notion of the extent and variety of women’s interests and activities in cities and towns without attempting a statistical summary or evaluation; (2) to indicate, in their own words, the spirit in which women have approached some of their most important problems; (3) to show to women already at work and those just becoming interested in civic matters, the interrelation of each particular effort with larger social problems; and (4) to reflect the general tendencies of modern social work as they appear under the guidance of men and women alike.

The task has been difficult owing to the immense amount of material which months of research accumulated and the limitations of space which made necessary the compression of important narrative and descriptive accounts within a narrow compass. This difficulty has been further increased by the desire to escape the danger of overemphasizing women’s activities in great cities and of omitting the no less important and significant work of women in smaller towns. Even at the risk of distorting the perspective by giving much space to minor cities and to local club activities, it has seemed worth while to make the book truly representative of American urban life as a whole. All city dwellers do not live in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Limited as are the purposes of the book and serious as its shortcomings may be, it certainly contains the material and suggestions which warrant a new interpretation of that age-worn slogan, “Cherchez la femme,” so long the final suggestion to those who would do detective work into the causes of waywardness in men.

One who accepts the challenge of this slogan and attempts an investigation into the activities of modern women, as here imperfectly outlined, may come to the conclusion that, instead of being the source of all evil, woman comes quite as near to being the source of all good. This does not interfere with the belief that she might be the source of more good.

The “female of the species” may still be pictured as “more deadly than the male” but her attack, we find, is not upon man but upon the common enemies of man and woman. If this new evaluation of woman’s work in civilization seems to err on the side of woman, we shall be satisfied if it helps to bring about a re-evaluation which shall include women not in an incidental way but as people of flesh and blood and brain—feeling, seeing, judging and directing, equally with men, all the great social forces which mold character and determine general comfort, well-being and happiness.

Whichever evaluation is ultimately accepted, the following data are offered not for the purpose of imparting an inflated sense of woman’s importance. Indeed, in spite of what she has done, woman must still feel humble in the presence of the work outlined for the future and of the human problems that appeal to her for solution. Instead, therefore, of seeking to inspire an exaggerated ego by means of this story of woman’s achievements and visions, it is told in the hope that, by the assembling of hitherto disconnected threads and an attempt at the classification of civic efforts, more women may be induced to participate in the social movements that are changing the modes of living and working and playing, and that those who have watched their own threads too closely, may perhaps lift their eyes long enough to look at the whole social fabric which they are helping to weave.

Finally the story is told in the hope that more men may realize that women have contributions of value to make to public welfare in all its forms and phases, and come to regard the entrance of women into public life with confidence and cordiality, accepting in their coöperation, if not in their leadership, a situation full of promise and good cheer.

M. R. B.

INTRODUCTION

With a truly remarkable grasp of a widely extended movement, Mrs. Beard has summarized and emphasized the work that the women of America have done in behalf of rescuing the city from the powers of evil and inefficiency, and placing it upon a higher standard of morality and effectiveness. The story she tells is a striking one and will serve to enhearten the increasing groups of women who are coming into the field of civic endeavor through the inspiration of organizations like those identified with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the lengthening list of associations for specialized effort. Mrs. Beard has very appropriately stressed the part women have played in the modern civic movement, and yet she would be the last to maintain that women were alone responsible for it. As a matter of fact, one of the chief manifestations of the civic movement has been the proper stressing of the duties and obligations of a citizenship which knows no sex lines and enforces no sex obligations. We are all men and women, boys and girls, alike, members of the community, with common duties and obligations, and as such should bear our part and do our share. In the march forward, however, it seems necessary to organize the mass of citizens along various lines in order that the most productive results may be obtained.

Mrs. Beard’s book illustrates again, if that were necessary, the very large contribution which the private citizen has made to municipal and political development and progress in this country. As Mr. Deming pointed out in his address at Harvard when the National Municipal League met in Boston in 1902, the chief improvements in our political machinery have come as a result of the initiative of private citizens and of organizations of private citizens. Mrs. Beard, quoting Franklin MacVeagh, one of Chicago’s most effective civic workers, says that it was the women of Chicago who started every one of the fifty-seven civic improvement centers in that city. Whether the impulse be feminine or masculine, but rarely have progressive measures been initiated by public officials. This is not intended as a criticism of public officials, because their duties as a rule are so exacting, and are every day becoming more so, that they have little time except for their discharge. The impulse for initiative must therefore come from without.

This book is sent forth with the hope that it will stimulate the women of America to still greater endeavors to make American cities better places in which to live. Women by natural instinct as well as by long training have become the housekeepers of the world, so it is only natural that they should in time become effective municipal housekeepers as well. This book demonstrates how successfully they may fulfill this rôle. May the volume prove an inspiration and a guide to those whose interests it may have stimulated. Mrs. Beard has done her work well. May the response be a fitting one.

Clinton Rogers Woodruff

CONTENTS

WOMAN’S WORK IN

MUNICIPALITIES

CHAPTER I
EDUCATION

Women’s connection with the schools and the educational system lies both in professional, or official, and volunteer service. We shall consider their professional relation to the schools in the first place, because it is the older.

The history of the education of women from the early days, when to educate “shes” was viewed with horror as an immoral proposition, to the present time when more “shes” graduate from the high schools than “hes,” is an interesting record in itself. Even more significant, however, is the fact that both hes and shes are educated largely by women in the secondary schools which are the schools of the “people.”

The dominance of women in the secondary schools does not meet with universal approval. The more vigorous of the opponents of the educational monopoly by women argue that women teachers do not comprehend the realities of modern business and political and social life, and are therefore not fitted to give a wide social training to the young, especially to boys.

There is a certain truth in this contention undoubtedly but women are facing this objection, as far as it relates to the mental and moral equipment of teachers, by insisting that women with a broad social training and enlarged outlook can be found today and that the crux of the question is one of pay. They incline to the point of view that equal pay for equal work and better salaries for women teachers generally are two of the means for securing women equally capable with men of imparting the type of education demanded by modern industrial and social conditions. Preparation for such teaching is expensive and can only be entered upon when there is reasonable hope of something approaching a suitable reward. The better pay of men teachers gives them an added stimulus for prolonged study and preparation and the same stimulus will operate in the same way with women, is the reply to the critics who seek a sturdier and more virile leadership in education.

Another reply made to those who criticize the monopoly by women of secondary education is that equal educational facilities for men and women will promote wider social knowledge and sympathy on the part of women students. Certainly in those colleges where courses in Politics and Government, Law, Medicine and technical sciences are now open to women, they are registering in large numbers, and manifesting a readiness to fit themselves properly for the occupation of teaching, among other professions.

This question was recently discussed at length in The Educational Review, where Admiral F. E. Chadwick pleaded for male teachers. Miss Laura Runyon of the State Normal School at Warrensburg, Missouri, in an answer to him said:

Everyone familiar with the history of education knows that men predominated as teachers before the Civil War, and, therefore, if the American boy has been under woman tutelage for generations, it has been the tutelage of his mother.... The American nation has developed more in the last fifty years than in the preceding one hundred. Does this show the evil of women teachers?...

Admiral Chadwick is wrong in his conception of what is wrong in education. Unquestionably, we have confined the school curriculum too closely to a book-course—but throughout the United States courses of study are made chiefly by men. The notable exception is in the Chicago system, where a woman has introduced most radical changes for both boys and girls, and changes which are being hailed as the most satisfactory progressive educational work of the country, and these are due to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young.

Our school courses need revising, and the long hours need to be spent in vigorous, active occupations as well as book and desk work. Along this line should the evolution proceed, not by excluding the efficient and cheap workers who have been discovered.

If the teaching by women in the schools has been narrow, ineffective, and unsuited to the realities of American life, the responsibility lies in part upon the colleges and normal schools that train them, and these institutions, in administration and curricula, have been largely dominated by men. By concentration of attention upon unapplied and inapplicable natural science, narrative history, English literature, and empty “methods,” women actually have been deprived of the educational opportunity for discovering what the world is really like. It will be only when more women alive to the necessities of modern social life, industry, and government gain some power in the training colleges and schools that curricula will be devised to supply the needs of women teachers for the great tasks that, in present day society, fall upon them.

In passing from this problem of the influence of women upon the content and systems of education, it is worthy of note that one of the first names in the field of education today is that of Maria Montessori. Her ideals have spread rapidly in the United States. Speaking of her recent visit to this country, The Survey said:

Most people in the United States had to wait until Maria Montessori came to this country to learn that her educational ideas are being applied in scores of schools here and that Rhode Island has officially indorsed her methods. Experimentation with Montessori practices is being conducted in the Rhode Island Normal School. It is declared that out of a class of eighty-odd teachers who took the Montessori four months’ course at Rome last year, over sixty were Americans.

Madame Montessori’s brief visit is giving rise to a more active discussion of her educational “system” than usual. Those who think it is destined to revolutionize child-training and those who see in it no advance beyond the ideas of Froebel are giving their reasons over again. How much new light will be thrown on the real content of her methods remains to be seen.

Madame Montessori’s way of spreading her gospel during her visit has been by public lectures in large cities. At these she has talked through an interpreter and has illustrated her work with children by motion-picture films. Her visit has been under the auspices of the newly formed American Montessori Association, in whose leadership are Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Wilson, Frederick Knowles Cooper, Anne George (Dr. Montessori’s first American pupil), William Morrow, S. S. McClure and others.

Although we talk of equal educational opportunities for men and women, as a matter of fact in many states, particularly in the East and South, there is nothing approaching equal facilities. There are many “opportunities” for education in most states, it is true, but until the best opportunities are open to women, there is nothing like equality. In states where adequate facilities are not open, we find women awaking to the obligation to see that they are soon provided through public or private funds.

New Jersey club women have been pushing the work for the establishment of a state college for women “to fit our girls to render the best service to New Jersey in many lines as well as to fill teaching positions better, 80 per cent. of which are now filled by women.” The population of New Jersey is over 2,537,167, of whom 1,250,704 are women, yet no provision is made for their higher education. Only in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, besides New Jersey, is that now true. A state college with free tuition is demanded. New Jersey has Princeton, Rutgers, Stevens, for men, but only normal schools for women.

School Administration

Moreover, when the charge of inefficiency is brought against women teachers, it must be remembered that the administration of the schools very largely has been in the hands of men, and the women have been merely routine agents of the authorities. The type of person always content to carry out some other person’s orders is not likely to have either force or initiative. Women seem to have both. Women are no longer content to be mere agents of school authorities. They are seeking and obtaining high administrative positions, and demonstrating by their efficiency and capacity for sustained and unselfish labors their fitness for such work.

For example, “four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent. The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women ‘district superintendents,’ as against twelve ‘school commissioners’ in 1900.”

The most conspicuous battle waged by women for a share in the administration of schools took place in Chicago. It was thus described in The Survey:

The struggle over the superintendency and the policy of Chicago public schools acutely emphasizes the crises which popular local government must meet and turn for better or worse. Coming to the superintendency four years ago in the most troublous times the Chicago public schools had ever experienced, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young brought the badly divided teachers into harmonious relations with each other and with her management and secured an equally remarkable unanimity in the public support of her administration, after a long period of bitterly divisive discussion in the press and among the people.

Within the Board of Education, however, whose twenty-one members have never been able to agree very well with each other, disagreements with Mrs. Young and her policies have come to the surface, especially among the members of the board appointed by Mayor Harrison. He protests his preference for her administration and once before came to the support of her policies when she tendered her resignation rather than surrender the superintendent’s prerogative in the selection of textbooks. The mayor’s opposition to the acceptance of her resignation then kept enough members of the Board in line with her to warrant its withdrawal.

But the divisiveness of that controversy both widened and deepened at many points of personal and administrative difference. Except the two outspoken opponents, the other disaffected members of the board combined their opposition in silence and secrecy. To the surprise of the public, which the mayor, many members of the school board, and even the opposition itself, claimed to share, Mrs. Young failed to receive the eleven votes necessary for her reëlection. Ten members voted for her, six against her, and four were recorded as “not voting” in the secret ballot.

Mrs. Young immediately withdrew her name, claiming that no superintendent can succeed who requires a second ballot for election. The second ballot was taken at once, after reconsideration of the first ballot was refused and John D. Shoop, first assistant superintendent, was elected by a vote of eleven to five, without discussion. The president of the board immediately resigned, as did Dean Walter T. Sumner, from the chairmanship of the school management committee.

Instantly teachers’ organizations, parents’ societies, the Chicago Woman’s Club, the Woman’s City Club, and many other women’s organizations lined up for action. A mass meeting called by them crowded the Auditorium with 4,000 women and men on a Saturday morning. Rousing and determined speeches were made by many representative citizens, among whom were Jane Addams, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Harriet Vittum, and Margaret Haley of the Teachers’ Federation.

The meeting adopted resolutions calling upon the mayor to accept the responsibility for the reinstatement of Mrs. Young to her place in the school system, demanding the immediate resignation of the superintendency by John D. Shoop and appointing a committee to urge him to withdraw; asserting that two of the remaining members of the school board should add their resignation to the four already in the hands of the mayor and asking Governor Dunne to call a special session of the legislature to enact a law making the membership in the school board an elective office and giving the voters the right to recall board members.

Litigation resulted and Mr. Shoop refused to be a party to that and so resumed his former position as first assistant superintendent. The vote at the newly constituted board recorded thirteen for Mrs. Young, seven not voting and one absent.

While Mrs. Young had accepted, before her reinstatement, the position of educational editor of the Chicago Tribune and had published her salutatory, she intimated her willingness to be reinstated on condition that the board of education should be so reconstituted as adequately to support her administration. Although the mayor exacted pledges from his new appointees to assure Mrs. Young’s reëlection, yet the majority of the board is still so negative in its ability and so colorless in its attitude toward educational policies that at best Mrs. Young will find inadequate support for the continuance or development of her positive program. Nevertheless she promptly resumed her duties at the end of December, 1913.

The opposition to Mrs. Young seems to be personal rather than political. Her stout stand for the prerogative of the superintendent to select textbooks and initiate the educational budget may have disappointed the hopes of some members of the board for commercial prestige in letting large contracts. Her cautiously planned instruction for parents and older scholars in sex hygiene, although authorized by a majority of the board, arouses stubborn antagonism, especially among the people in certain ecclesiastical circles.

The most fundamental issue raised by the whole controversy is whether the city administration should be recognized to have any control over the school board and its policies. To safeguard the non-political management of the schools, some are appealing to the legislature to make the office of school trustee elective, while others are content to leave it within the appointive power of the mayor in their hope to make the office of mayor and alderman non-partisan by securing their nominations by petition and their election by a ballot from which the party circle and column shall be eliminated.

The Women’s League for Good Government of Elmira, New York, in the election of November, 1913, was very earnest in its desire to improve the school conditions. In October, before the municipal election there were school elections in three districts of the city. As the machine politicians controlled the schools with other city departments, the Women’s League nominated strong candidates in two of these districts in opposition to the candidates of the machine and carried on a spirited campaign in their behalf. It took the “whole force of the machine” to defeat the candidates of the women and openly “fraudulent” methods were used to win. Hundreds of women in open fight against the “gang,” and almost winning, served as an object lesson to male voters to such an extent that in the November election following this, the non-partisan ticket was victorious.

The Committee of Fifteen on “School Efficiency” of the National Council of Education, to “give heed and guidance to the growing demand for investigating schools and testing the efficiency of school systems,” has three women members: Katherine Blake of New York, Mrs. Young of Chicago, and Adelaide S. Baylor of Indiana, deputy state superintendent.

A league is being organized by Denver women to secure the proper recognition of women in the management of the schools. Forty women’s organizations are interested. Three women are wanted on the board, a woman as medical director of schools, and the repeal of a recent edict against married women as teachers is demanded.

All through Connecticut in the autumn of 1914 an effort was made to get women out to vote on school matters and in many towns the results were unprecedented. Women not only voted in greater numbers but placed their representatives on school boards in some of the towns. In Norwalk they agitated for thorough reorganization, improvement and central control for schools and secured a certain measure of reform.[^[1]]

This contest of women for places of power and for more attention to educational administration is now gaining momentum. Women serve on school boards at present in at least thirty cities.

While an analysis of the school vote in Massachusetts as exercised by women does not indicate any remarkable enthusiasm on the part of women for that slight franchise, in numerous other places and in certain special towns even in that state, school elections have been participated in by women with zest and effect.

Discriminations between the sexes in the teaching profession still extend in many directions. Politics plays an all too important part in advancements; remuneration is in general unequal; and celibacy is sometimes enforced upon women alone. Where women are allowed to retain their positions upon marriage, the birth of a child is occasionally made the excuse for dismissal. Such an explanation is not often frankly made, but in New York, at least, it has been a very thinly veiled excuse, the issue has been fought out on the real grounds and the women have won.

Of course it will not be claimed that women all agree as to the best policy in these and kindred administration matters. Women members of school boards do not always stand as a unit in their attitude toward equal pay for equal work or toward the question of mother-teachers. Women are not like-minded any more than men are like-minded, but they are acquiring positive views very rapidly on all these matters. They are not only holding decided opinions on questions of school administration, but they are seeking more and more a voice in that administration on the inside.

Without going further into the many phased history of the contest of women for a voice in educational administration as well as mute service under it, we may now consider the various lines of women’s interest in school improvement and try to illustrate, by example at least, a portion of the plans which they are supporting in various parts of the country, and their methods of approach to the educational problem.

Educational Experiments

The kindergarten idea appealed from the beginning to women and private experimentation along that line was one of their most successful endeavors. Boards of education have in instance after instance been persuaded to incorporate into the public school system the plan of kindergartens demonstrated to be practical and of social utility by women in their private capacities. Annie Laws, in the Kindergarten Review, states that she “can trace the social spirit of the kindergartner as an important factor in stimulating, and in some cases, even initiating, many of the social movements of today, among them playgrounds, social centers, vacation schools, public libraries, mothers’ clubs and school and home gardens.” The New York Kindergarten Association of today, like many others, is composed of men and women but largely supported by the latter, financially, as well as by active service.

Household Arts—cooking and sewing—were first made subjects of instruction in the public schools about 1876, in Massachusetts, through the work of Miss Emily Huntington.

From cooking and sewing have developed the whole domestic science education of today. Women have been supporters of this movement from the beginning and the Federation of Clubs early took an aggressive position in favor of such addition to the school curricula.

“What you would have appear in the life of the people, that you must put into the schools,” is the idea they had in mind. At first, in many cases, women furnished the equipment and paid for its operation until school boards municipalized this work.

Model housekeeping flats have been instituted by women in many cities to supplement the more limited school equipment. Sometimes, as in New York, the Board of Education itself helps to finance this practical educational work. Mabel Kittredge, who started the housekeeping centers in New York, thus explains their purpose: “It is agreed by all that our immigrants must have better homes. This has been the splendid passionate appeal of men and women for years, and fight after fight has been won at Albany: fights for open plumbing, running water in each apartment, decent sinks, more space; all these measures have been worked for and many adopted, but while we rejoice that the Italian and the Russian and the Pole are to realize better home equipment, we forget that these dazed people have no knowledge as to the way to use the improvements.”

The School of Domestic Arts and Sciences in Chicago was established and is managed by club women. In 1905 it had 1,100 students. A special effort is made to bring out labor-saving devices, the underlying idea being that the common-sense of the American homemaker will in time lift this work to a professional basis through scientific investigation and the contact of the theoretical worker and the practical housekeeper. Young women are trained in the care of children and extension work is done in homes of the people.

Women everywhere are largely instrumental in establishing courses and departments of domestic science in educational institutions, from vocational schools to the university. The Illinois legislature placed household economics in the five normal schools of the state while all the high schools of Ohio have it. Correspondence schools have also been developed.

A School of Mothercraft has been established in New York for exact and scientific knowledge about everything mothers need to know.

“Domestic Education,” too, is a new profession which has been developed by women to carry into the homes, for immediate use, that training which schools alone can give to the next generation.

Music, art, and dramatic taste as elements in school study and training, too, have been created and fostered by women, and each has an interesting history which lack of space forbids recounting here.

“A thorough textbook study of scientific temperance in public schools as a preventative against intemperance” was the aim of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as early as 1879. Forty-three states incorporated this instruction into the school system and twenty-four textbooks on the subject circulate. If the development of scientific knowledge and psychology leads to an appreciation of the inadequacy or failure of these textbooks and former methods of teaching temperance, the fact remains that temperance needs to be taught and improved textbooks and methods will doubtless appear soon.

Today when the major interest in school instruction centers about vocational training, it is interesting to go back over the history of manual training in the schools. “Manual training as a new feature of education was partly the result of an educational philosophy and partly a protest against mere bookishness. The first appearance of constructive work for clearly definite cultural purposes appears to have been in connection with the classes of the workingmen’s school founded in 1878 by the Ethical Culture Society of New York. In 1880, the St. Louis Manual Training School was founded in connection with the Washington University, and in 1882, Mrs. Quincy Shaw of Boston privately supported experimental classes in carpentry at the Dwight School. Two years later the city of Boston also experimented, but it was four years more before manual training was given a place in the curriculum. New York City began instruction in drawing, sewing, cooking and woodwork that same year.”

In Massachusetts, during this decade, eighteen women’s clubs took the promotion of vocational training for their special task and the Federations of Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut urged this upon their members. In some instances this conflict has to be renewed every year in order to maintain that which has been secured with so much labor and expense, owing to new and ignorant or penurious school boards. Sometimes impatient women have raised the money themselves. The Chicago Woman’s Club raised $40,000 for the Glenwood Industrial School for Boys.

Although the charge of lack of virility is so often brought against women school teachers, it is interesting to record that women have been among the pioneers in the advocacy of the introduction of physical training. About 1888, through the efforts of Mrs. Hemenway in Boston, who had experimented with physical training among teachers, the School Board arranged for her to try her system in the schools. Finding it a useful addition to the curriculum, physical training was definitely adopted the following year.

The Girls’ Branch of the Public Schools Athletic League in New York was formed by women to insure sufficient and wholesome recreation for school girls who need outlet for their energies quite as much as boys. While the coöperation of the Board of Education, the Park Department, the Bath Department and the Health Department has been obtained, far better provision is made for athletics for girls by reason of the activity of these women than would otherwise be secured. The closest coöperation exists between the Board of Education and the Girls’ Branch. The President of the Girls’ Branch is a member of the Board of Education, as are several of its Board of Directors, and the Executive Secretary (Elizabeth Burchenal) is Inspector of Athletics for the Board of Education.

The idea behind athletics for girls and boys is not solely the prevention of mischief and of worse things, important as that is. Those interested in physical training desire that “life shall be lived in its beauty, romance and splendor.” They thus approach the problem with positive ideals.

Women have not blindly said: “Physical training shall be an important element in instruction;” but they have stayed by the task of discovering what kind of physical training is best suited to young children and growing boys and girls and whether different training is necessary for the sexes or a mere question of individual capacity and physique is involved.

One of the women who is giving close attention to this is Dr. Jessie Newkirk, member of the Board of Education of Kansas City, Kansas. Dr. Newkirk has been making an extensive educational survey of girls’ schools in the country, particularly to discover whether there are improved hygienic methods anywhere which have not been as yet used in Kansas City. In a newspaper interview she said: “I am able to say that I believe I found one practice a little better in the East than in the West. In our part of the country we have made the physical work of the girls too strenuous. If a girl is going to be an athlete, it is all right for her to take up athletics after she has finished her high school course, but it is a mistake to subject too rapidly growing girls to too rigid physical culture.”

From physical training in the schools to allied forms of hygiene has been an inevitable evolution. Thus we find women supporting and organizing the instruction in sex hygiene in the schools. Dr. Jessie Newkirk, whom we have just quoted, describes this type of instruction and the opposition that it still meets, as follows: “As for our teaching of sex hygiene, it is meeting considerable opposition. We have physicians who deliver a certain number of personal lectures, women physicians to the girls and men physicians to the boys. This we have been trying only for the last year. As we have three physicians on our board, you may imagine we are strongly in favor of it. The opposition of course comes from the parents. I am inclined to think this opposition springs from the objection to the name of ‘sex hygiene.’ If we were to put these lectures into the regular course in physiology, I do not believe the opposition would be anything like as strong. But the term that has been employed has been made fun of and anathematized. We are doing what we can in an educative way through our mothers’ clubs, so that most of the opposition now, I think, comes from the fathers who want to stand on ignorant ground, to keep their children innocent, whereas every thinking person must admit that it is better to be wise and pure than merely ignorant.”[^[2]]

Many of the women still feel that, important as sex hygiene is, it must first be taught in normal schools or to adults and that the effort to introduce it into secondary schools is premature.

One who believes in a system of instruction in hygiene or physical training or what-not is naturally interested in its results when applied and therefore women have watched the effects of attempts at changed curricula on the children themselves. Both the teachers and the promoters of change have had a common interest in these results. It has not taken long to discover that children represent unequal foundations in their physical and mental make-ups for grasping instruction of any kind.

First there are the little crippled children for whom hard physical exercise is an impossibility and upon whose minds their physical condition has undoubted reactions. Crippled children seem first to have been given special educational opportunities in 1861 by the efforts of Dr. Knight and his daughter in their own home in New York City. Their home became a combination of school and hospital and furnished the stimulus for the Hospital-School for the Ruptured and Crippled in that city two years later. This was the first institution in America, it is claimed, to employ teachers of crippled children.

The next task, and women assumed that eagerly, was that of seeking out the little patients, and the Visiting Guild for Crippled Children of the Ethical Culture School was started in 1892 to insure continuance of instruction when the children were discharged from the hospital. Several societies developed then to care for crippled children, to feed them, supply them with orthopedic apparatus, and to carry them to and from schools. In 1906, “the Board of Education joined forces with two private guilds. The school equipment and teachers were supplied by the Board of Education; the building, transportation, nourishment and general physical care were looked after by the guilds. This attempt proved successful, and a further advance was made a year later, in 1907, when classes for crippled children were added to the regular public schools whenever rooms were available. At present there are twenty-three classes for crippled children in the public school system of the city of New York.” Provision was made for crippled children in the Chicago public schools in 1899, and in the schools of Philadelphia in 1903.

Blanche Van LeLuvan Browne, a crippled woman, told recently in the World’s Work how she began seven years ago with six dollars in her pocket and finally built up a hospital school for cripples in Detroit.

Mental defects were as apparent to teachers as physical defects and here and there sporadic attempts were made to classify and adapt instruction to individual needs. The rigidity of the school system, however, the large classes and need of economy led to no large effort on the part of school authorities to deal with mental defectives until some way was demonstrated to be practical.

Special Schools

In New York City mentally defective children were first given special attention in the public schools in 1900 when a class was formed in old Public School No. 1 under the Brooklyn Bridge, in charge of Elizabeth Farrell, who, backed by Josephine Shaw Lowell, had long and earnestly stressed the needs of these children and the way in which they held back their companions. So helpful did the work done by Miss Farrell prove to be that

At the present time there are 144 classes caring for about 2,300 children, with a constant increase in the number of applicants from the grades....

In March, 1912, the State Charities Aid Association, through its special committee on provision for the feeble-minded, presented to the Committee on Elementary Schools of the Board of Education the following resolutions:

“Resolved, That the Board of Education shall be urged: (1) To classify mentally all children of school age under its supervision or brought to its attention by the Permanent Census Board or other agencies. (2) To determine as far as possible, by scientific methods, the degree of mental deficiency of those reported as sub-normal. (3) To keep full and accurate records of all sub-normal children, including school work, home conditions and heredity data. (4) To send to the proper state authorities the names of such children as are deemed to be custodial cases....”

These resolutions were adopted by the Elementary Schools Committee and sent to the board of superintendents, that they might determine what force would be needed to carry them into effect. After the resolutions had passed through their hands and through the Committee on By-laws, the Board of Education was asked to ratify the following positions: Two assistant inspectors of ungraded classes; two physicians on full time and regularly assigned to the department of ungraded classes; two social workers or visiting teachers.

The Public Education Association took up the matter and obtained the coöperation of various organizations, among them the City Club, the Association of Neighborhood Workers, the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, the Women’s Municipal League, and the local school boards, in the effort to induce the Board of Education to take favorable action....

After much discussion, ending in a hearing before the Committee on Elementary Schools attended by many physicians, most of whom were entirely in sympathy with the proposed increase in the department, the resolutions ratifying these positions, as well as additional clerical assistance, were passed in October, 1912....[^[3]]

This segregation of mental defectives in classes is continuing rapidly and a normal course for the teachers of ungraded classes is now being given in the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers.

Miss Farrell, who has been the inspiration of the effort that has been made in the city of New York to deal with defective children, continually contributes to the development of the movement in that direction as her own work among this type expands. The Public Education Association has also worked for greater attention to the problem on the part of the authorities. In one of its recent bulletins, the situation is thus presented:

“We have been told by doctors and psychologists, in terms that we cannot dispute, that actual feeble-mindedness is incurable, that feeble-mindedness is hereditary, and, therefore, that institutional care and constant supervision are the great safeguards against the rapid and appalling increase of feeble-mindedness. We must all agree that the end to work toward is permanent custodial care for all the feeble-minded who have reached the age of fourteen years. Before this age the schools can do much to develop the incomplete individual and train him to a point of distinct usefulness in his later institutional life, or, if he must remain in the community, they will at least have endeavored to develop his latent possibilities of usefulness to their fullest extent.”

To promote needed legislation, a bill has been drafted along the lines of a memorandum prepared by the Advisory Council to the Department of Ungraded Classes. Such women as Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley are active on this Council. The bill calls for the appointment of a commission by the governor to study the entire subject of the education and care of mental defectives of all ages and conditions and recommend suitable and comprehensive legislation.

Within the Public Education Association of New York City there is a Committee on the Hygiene of School Children which engaged Elizabeth A. Irwin to make a study of the situation, as far as defectives are concerned, in the public schools and the schools subsidized by the city: the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society schools, and the schools managed by the American Female Guardian Society. In coöperation with a member of the Children’s Aid Society who came upon her committee, she made a careful study of the situation in schools of that type where hitherto classification had been neglected. The breadth of view of these women is demonstrated in a quotation from their report:

While the first step seems to be the mental classification and recognition of mental defect, the next step is not, in the opinion of the committee, to put these children out of school pending their possible commitment to an institution. If the schools are able, in time, to separate all these children into classes for proper instruction and so rid the normal children of this unnecessary burden, they will also be taking the first step toward demanding institutional care for those unfit to be at large in the community. For they will then be showing, as has never been done before, the numbers that exist and the definite limits of their educability. Surely such a demonstration as this will be a stronger argument for institutional care than either leaving them hidden away, as they now are, among their normal brothers and sisters, or plucking them from school and turning them into the street or back into tenement rooms. Once they are excluded, their parents, ashamed to have a child too stupid to go to school, often regard them as little outcasts, only fit, if indeed they are robust enough for that, to be the family drudge.

By means of Binet tests, home visiting for family study, charity and health records, etc., the investigation revealed enough feeble-mindedness to cause recommendations for a thoroughgoing medical and educational examination to be submitted to those in control of the schools of the Children’s Aid Society. This is of importance to the whole social fabric and its influence extends to all phases of public enlightenment for it must reveal certain causes of poverty or change sentimental ideas about the incapacity of the poor as well as lead to better guardianship of the unfit to prevent the perpetuation of the type. The work of Miss Irwin and her volunteer assistants, under the auspices of the committee on special children, was largely responsible for the reorganization of the department of ungraded classes in the school system last year, we are told in a report.

The report on the feeble-minded in New York generally was made for the Public Education Association by Dr. Anne Moore and published by the State Charities Aid Association’s Special Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded. This report includes a study of feeble-minded children in the public schools.

In several cities, women have been active in the study and solution of this problem. The Civic Club of Philadelphia started the first class for backward delinquent children. The city saw its value and incorporated the plan into its school system. Philadelphia now has seventy-five such classes.

Dr. C. Annette Buckel, of Oakland, California, was a director in the Mary R. Smith Trust for delinquent children from its beginning and took a personal interest in each little girl in the cottage homes. So keen was her concern for handicapped children that at her death she gave her home that the proceeds might help in promoting special training for them.

Knowing that venereal diseases are responsible for a certain amount of feeble-mindedness in children, women have backed the legislation in several states for health certificates for marriage, for one thing. The prohibition of the marriage of the unfit or feeble-minded adults is a measure in which they are also interested as well as in proposals and practices that deal with sterilization and compulsory commitment to institutions.

Colored children, although in general they are only slightly behind white children, are now beginning to receive some of that special attention which they so much need and deserve. In addition to the investigation of mentally defective children, a study is being made by Frances Blascoer of the living conditions of colored children in New York City whose school progress has been retarded.

Blind children in New York City receive education from their earliest years as a result of the agitation and legislative work carried on by Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden of the International Sunshine Society and others. This last winter similar educational care of the blind children of the state was secured through the efforts of Mrs. Alden and the personal appeal to the legislators by a little blind girl, Rachel Askenas. Hitherto children under eight years of age had not been admitted to institutions for the blind. Now during those most receptive years they will get the necessary foundation for impressions which play so vital a part in the lives of normal children.

Special schools for foreigners have generally been started by women, we feel safe in claiming, after a review of all the evidence at hand. The Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, composed of men and women, inaugurated the work among foreigners in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but the women seem to have given most of the time necessary to make it a success.

Some months ago the judge of one of the courts in Savannah, Georgia, started the movement for free night schools for those who have to work by day. “Amid many discouragements, through months of wearying opposition, he would be inspired to renewed effort in behalf of an all-embracing education for the poor, by the knowledge of similar work done on a small scale by a few women in a rector’s study. And every now and then the helpful assurance would be given that the Woman’s Club was anxious for the success of the movement. He only learned of this because his wife was a member of the club.”[^[4]] Night schools are regular municipal institutions in the larger cities.

Truant and parental schools are incorporated also into the programs of innumerable women’s clubs today and have been secured in some cities already by the pressure of these organizations. The truant school in New York is under a woman principal who is practically a juvenile court judge.

So many organizations claim credit for the first vacation school that we shall make no effort to locate it. We do know that the Social Science Club of Newton, Massachusetts, a woman’s club, has maintained a vacation school for seventeen years. In Chicago the Civic Federation opened one vacation school in 1896, the first in Chicago. The next was opened by the University Settlement. In 1898 the women’s clubs took up the work and opened five schools. By 1906 they had eight. Chicago now has a vacation school board with a club woman as president and another as secretary; other members consist of club women and men. From 1898–1906 club women contributed nearly $25,000 annually to these schools, yet “probably 15,000 children were turned away.” The Civic Club of Philadelphia organized the first vacation school in that city and Philadelphia now has many of them under public control.

Newark, New Jersey, was the first city to incorporate vacation schools into its educational system, but in 1909 over sixty cities had some sort of vacation work going on in their school buildings.

While women’s clubs have long been interested in the vacation school, most credit for it is due to the hundreds of women teachers who have given of their services to make it helpful to the child and to the community. These teachers have often, and nearly always in the beginning, given their services without compensation and where they have been paid a salary they have generally taught for less money than they would have received for regular winter classes.

With these summer school teachers, women librarians coöperate as do visiting nurses and other social workers. The children are taken by their teachers on municipal excursions, often too, to visit places of public interest and gain some idea of municipal enterprise and government.

All-year-round schools are projects now in the air which are a natural combination of regular and vacation schools.

School gardens, an important educational addition to school work, have been largely fostered by women. In Seattle the Women’s Congress has coöperated with the Seattle Garden Club in its program to include all the grammar schools of the city in the garden work; the ultimate hope is to persuade the city to take up this work in a systematic way. Harriet Livermore of Yonkers, New York, says of gardening: “It is a happy mingling of play and work, vacation and school, athletics and manual training, pleasure and business, beauty and utility, head and hand, freedom and responsibility; of corrective and preventive, constructive and creative influences, and all in the great school of out-of-doors. It is the corrective of the evils of the schoolroom. It is the preventive of the perils of misspent leisure. It is constructive of character building. It is creative of industrious, honest producers. In fact there is no child’s nature to which it does not in some way make a natural and powerful appeal.”

The Civic Club of Philadelphia seems to have started the first school garden. That city now has over eight large school gardens, nineteen for kindergarten scholars, and 5,000 separate gardens including window boxes, etc. The women of Kalamazoo and Dubuque and Newark are among the groups who inaugurated this work in their towns. The city took over the school garden in Newark after it had been organized and operated for a year by the women. Children’s school gardens in Cincinnati are the result of work started in 1908 by the civic department of the Woman’s Club. In three years’ time thirteen schools were promoting home gardens by distributing seeds among the school children and helping to get results, and there were eight school gardens. Two community gardens crown the educational efforts of the women of Cincinnati.

Mrs. Parsons is president of the International Children’s School Farm League and also director of the Children’s School Farms for the Department of Parks of New York City. The methods used by her in the work in the city parks are original with herself.

The Visiting Teacher

Knowing the vital connection between home life and the proper growth of children in the schools, women interested in educational matters have, within recent years, given great attention to visiting the homes of pupils. The development of the function of the “visiting teacher” is the result of a recognition that the school cannot thrive if it is indifferent to the home surroundings of children.

The visiting teacher is akin to the school nurse, and yet distinct in function. This new office is one of the latest creations in educational experimentation, though not based on novel ideas of education, since the sympathetic teacher has always sought to go beyond her pupils to outside influences that retarded or encouraged development. The visiting teacher comes as an aid to the regular teacher solely for educational purposes. Like the school nurse she makes the child the pivotal point on which she focuses her own experience and training. Like the nurse she may recommend that a child be placed under the care of a psychologist, a physician, a more expert teacher, a kindergartner, or that a social agency be called upon to assist in improving the sanitary, health, or financial features of the home environment. Her point of view, however, is ultimately increased intelligence, whereas the school nurse’s primary aim is health. While the functions of these two public servants are distinct, therefore, there is very often need of perfect coöperation, for health may underlie education in some cases and, in others, poverty may underlie both health and education.

In her report on Visiting Teachers for the Public Education Association of New York, Mary Flexner records the very high ratio of 45 per cent. of the cases covered by visiting nurses for the year 1911–1912 as being “cases” because home poverty retarded the development of the child. In explanation of the term poverty, Miss Flexner says: “This term is interpreted broadly to include all cases in which ‘economic pressure’ makes of the child an illegal wage-earner or a household drudge and forces the family to adopt such a low standard of living that there is neither proper space for the child to study nor proper food to give it the stimulus to do so.” Miss Flexner further shows that 57 per cent. of the cases showed lack of family appreciation of what are the needs of a normal or an abnormal growing child. A summary of the action taken in all the cases is a most vital part of the report.

The work of the visiting teacher began in New York City in 1906 when two settlements managed by women, Hartley House and Greenwich House, placed two visiting teachers in the field. Richmond Hill House and the College Settlement, where women also are the headworkers, were at the same time coöperating with this committee. The Public Education Association became interested at once and added to the number of such teachers. Other agencies soon began to join in the support of these teachers until, in 1913 after three years’ effort, two visiting teachers were placed upon the city’s payroll for ungraded classes.

The Home and School Peace League of Philadelphia has aroused interest in visiting teachers in that city until several are now supported privately for this work and are used to a considerable extent by the Bureau of Compulsory Education to carry out the preventive work in its charge.

In Boston also there are several privately supported social workers of this character, chiefly working for women’s organizations like the Women’s Educational Association, the Home and School Association, and some settlements. Such visitors are connected with a particular school or district and work there only. Worcester, Massachusetts, and Rochester, New York, also carry on some of this work to help the over-burdened teacher get better results in school.

Eleanor H. Johnson of the Public Education Association of New York, writing in The Survey on “Social Service and the Public Schools,” demonstrates the usefulness of the visiting teacher if further evidence were necessary. One of the visitors herself in her report to her Boston supervisors says: “This new work of visiting the homes of the school children is one of continual coöperation with principals, teachers, truant officers, janitors and the children themselves, also with hospitals, dispensaries, employment agencies, the Associated Charities, or whatever the emergency may demand. Too often this sort of effort is scattered and ineffective because of the lack of connection between agencies. With a visitor working from the school as a starting-point and not from any private organization, the connection is quickly made and the influence of each helping agency is strengthened by the added influence of every other. This has proved to be just as true in the case of medical social service, particularly that of public hospitals and institutions, and one might almost prophesy that some day the relief work of philanthropic agencies will come only in response to calls from the social service departments of church, hospital, public institution and school, and that a great clearing house for these agencies, public and private, will be the best way of organizing charity.”

There is great need of the extension of this work. The regular teachers do not have the time and strength to do the visiting that is requisite for successful teaching. Women understand women well enough to know that. They understand teaching of little folks well enough to know that, to keep fit for the classroom, the teacher must have her play time too; and the whole visiting teacher movement which women are fostering is based on their appreciation of the significance of the regular teacher and their realization of the need of her 100 per cent. efficiency for the sake of the child, for the sake of the teacher, for the sake of the taxpayer even, and for the sake of the future.

Vocational Guidance

Not quite as comprehensive in her function as the visiting teacher, but extremely valuable, is the teacher-counselor or vocational guidance visitor. To be able to advise a child intelligently about a preparation for a later vocation, the advisor must know something at least of the family history of the child. Visitors therefore are engaged by those organizations interested primarily in vocational guidance. Miss Marshal, director of the Boston Trades School for Girls and agent of the Industrial Commission, in a paper read before the National Society for Industrial Education, set forth the idea of community responsibility for letting boys and girls drift into low-paid, mechanical and often degrading or health-endangering work. She said: “What happens to girls who must earn their living when they go out from the grammar schools untrained for any trade? They inevitably drift into low-paid, mechanical, wearing, or even into dangerous work as packers in factories, as errand girls in stores, with little chance of rising and less chance of real life. The trade-school training for girls—definite preparation for a trade—rapidly increases a girl’s wages and makes her at once self-supporting and self-respecting.”

There are over one hundred vocational counselors in the public schools of Boston whose duty it is to guide the child while in school, after leaving school, and to follow-up the child to ascertain what becomes of him after he goes to work.

Important work for vocational guidance and education has been done in Boston by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and by the Women’s Municipal League. The latter supervised the investigations made by college students into employments for boys and girls in different districts in Boston as a preparation for the dissemination of knowledge of educational possibilities in occupations. It also prepared a complete city directory of vocational schools and classes which is of great value to teachers, parents, vocational counselors, employers, business directors, social workers, and to organizations for vocational guidance. This association has moreover financed research workers like Mr. McCracken who investigated for it all commercial schools maintained for profit in Boston.

The Placement Bureau of the Boston Women’s Municipal League developed into a city-wide employment bureau extending to all the schools of Boston. This League and the Girls’ Trade Education League, both interested in, and experimenting with, vocational guidance, realized that there should be a close connection between a Placement Bureau and the Employment-Certificate Department, between the Placement Bureau and the Health Examining Department, and the Placement Bureau and the Department of Vocational Guidance and Counseling recently established in the school system. “The Girls’ Trade Education League and the Women’s Municipal League saw therefore that a Central Placement Bureau was the inevitable next step, that the value of what we had already done would be lost unless we carried our work to this further stage and were able to show to School Committee and employers alike, to teachers and parents, to the boys and girls, the real worth to the city of vocational advice, placement, and follow-up. We saw this for the reasons I have already given and also for other reasons, namely: information in regard to industries and individual firms ought to be pooled and centrally filed; for the children also, as well as the employers and the school authorities, the advantages of a general clearing house are large.”[^[5]] The women therefore supported the Boston Placement Bureau as a central board and its directors include representatives of the League and the Girls’ Trade Education League.

The women went into this work originally because they felt they had a distinct contribution to make in follow-up work. That contribution they have carried into the Central Bureau, and its follow-up work is strengthened through the use of evening recreational centers to which children are required to report and where they can be guided in other ways than in the matter of labor only and so correlate the recreation of the evening with the work of the day.

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

The money for the Placement Bureau had to be raised last year by the Girls’ Trade Education League, the Women’s Municipal League and the employers. “For next year we do not speak,” writes the League, “for some of us hope that that magic date—1915—is going to mean for the Boston Placement Bureau a complete official connection with the school, supported in part by the Boston School Committee.”

The Vocation Bureau of Boston was the first to be established, to our knowledge, and the men and women who together founded it were moved by the double conviction that children required a longer period in school and the employment of that period in vocational education. At the Civic Service House in the North End of Boston in 1907 a meeting was called to place this work on its feet and in two years’ time a strong organization had been built up with the Boston school committee interested and anxious for coöperation. Very soon the superintendent of schools, the school board and the Vocation Bureau were working together. Meyer Bloomfield was made director of this work and his very able assistants were, many of them, women. Laura F. Wentworth is secretary of the Vocational Information Department of the Boston Public Schools and Eleanor Colleton has done valuable work in this direction among the Italian and other children in the North End of Boston.

In the autumn of 1906 the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston established three “Trade School Shops” to supplement the work of the Boston Trade School for Girls. The object of these shops, according to May Ayres, who recently described them in the Boston Common, is “to give the girls who have finished their course in the Trade School an extra year of training in order to fit them more fully for the work of the business world. They are paid for what they do and each girl is carefully watched and guided to the end that her individual possibilities may be developed. Special emphasis is laid on the relation of employer to employee, the problems which the employer has to face are explained, and the young workers are given some insight into the general theory of business. Here also is an opportunity for the woman who wishes to become a teacher of industrial branches to acquire a practical knowledge of her subject, through an arrangement with Simmons College.

“A school of salesmanship was next brought about and the leading stores set the stamp of their approval upon the work of the Union. Experience has shown that such training as the girls receive at this school makes them worth much more to the stores which employ them. This idea spread quickly throughout the country and a demand arose for women trained in the art of salesmanship to conduct schools similar to that in Boston. For this reason there has recently been established in connection with Simmons College, a normal course for the training of teachers in this work. Simmons gives the theoretical training; the Salesmanship School the actual experience. For the next few years this will be distinctly pioneer work and women who have been graduated from this course should be sure to obtain interesting and lucrative employment.”

Miss Diana Herschler taught salesmanship in Boston for years. Then the Boston Board of Education introduced the teaching of salesmanship for girls into the public schools. Miss Herschler traveled from coast to coast teaching and then came to New York where she taught in stores and soon organized classes in salesmanship in the evening high schools for women. In New York, a class has been opened in one of the department stores at the instigation of women, and is taught by a teacher supplied by the Board of Education. A Department Store Education Association is now a national project which women are promoting.

The Research Department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union has made a series of studies of trades and occupations to afford a background of information for those interested in vocational education and guidance. Two books on Vocations for the Trained Woman have already been published. “Millinery as a Trade for Women” has also been announced. The study for last year on “Office Service as an Occupation for Women” was published by the Boston School Committee during 1914. Two studies, “Dressmaking as a Trade for Women,” and “Women in the Manufacture of Boots and Shoes,” were advertised by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics for the summer of 1914.

In Connecticut the Child Labor Committee and the Consumers’ League made possible a vocational counselor in schools and planned his work from a previous study of vocational guidance in other countries. In New York City, Mrs. Henry Ollesheimer and Miss Virginia Potter were leaders in the establishment of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. In 1910 the Board of Education assumed control of the school. The previous year, however, the Board of Education had established a vocational school for boys. In that city the Federation of Women’s Clubs repeatedly urged the Board of Education to appoint a committee on Vocational Schools, and finally the committee was established with Mrs. Samuel Kramer as chairman.

A vocational guidance bureau is to be established in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A committee of fifteen from women’s clubs and other associations are to act as advisors to the Board of Education to help young people to select their life occupation on leaving school. Meyer Bloomfield, of the Boston bureau, gave a series of lectures in Minneapolis recently on vocational guidance and crystallized a strong sentiment already existing in favor of such work.

Vocational Education

One of the most constructive pieces of work recently done on vocational education was the survey of the problem made by Alice Barrows Fernandez under the auspices of the Public Education Association of New York. The portion of the report of this Survey, presented to the subcommittee on vocational guidance of the Committee on High Schools and Training Schools of the Board of Education and submitted at the public hearing of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of New York City, June 16, 1914, shows with what clear analysis of social conditions and forces the chairman and her committee have studied this question.

The report emphasizes the need of pre-occupational education for children under sixteen who are to be wage-earners. The incompatibility between the demands of industry and the education of the child is recognized and is met by the proposal to train the child in underlying principles in various processes of work which will enable it to adapt itself to changes in industry and make it later continually intelligent. It proposes to study the metal industry first, which comprises forty-one different branches, and to make an experiment in pre-occupational training in some schools on the basis of this study. It proposes to do this under the Board of Education, and if it works, let it lead to continuation work for employed children.

The question now being discussed is whether this committee of the Vocational Education Survey shall go on with their work under the authority of the Board of Education or whether it must remain a private enterprise. Mayor Mitchel, who made a trip in 1914 through the West to study vocational training, was greatly interested in the Survey. The suggestion that the Board of Education take over the work of the Survey was made by Dr. Ira S. Wile, a member of that board who is also a member of the Survey.[^[6]] The New York Evening Post in reporting this discussion said: “This was after the Board had conducted a year’s general survey of the field of vocational education. In that time the members came to the conclusion that the subject was too comprehensive to admit of an adequate knowledge being gained by a general investigation. Facts, details, painstaking study of varied industries were needed, and this is what the Vocational Education Survey has been gathering in the year and a half of its existence. Mrs. Fernandez, the prime mover in this work, is most practical in her suggestions.”

Women are also actively connected with the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. Under Miss Cleo Murtland, assistant secretary of the Society, a study of the dress and waist industry was made by the New York committee of the Society, and that study together with a study of the cloak, suit and skirt industry, made under the direction of Charles Winslow of the United States Department of Labor, have resulted in a practical program for factory schools which has been approved both by the unions and the manufacturers.

An illustration of the necessity of the woman’s point of view being brought into the discussion and organization of vocational training and guidance is afforded by the criticism made by Alice Barrows Fernandez, of the Vocational Education Survey, in reviewing the report of Dr. Schneider, of the School Inquiry, on “Trade Schools.”

It is unfortunate that Dr. Schneider’s report, which is so valuable in regard to boys’ vocational training, is no different from other reports on the subject of training for girls. One and all devote themselves to what is to be done for boys, and then in an aside mention the girls. Out of every four persons at work in this city one is a woman, and out of every four women here one is earning her livelihood. You can’t dismiss 400,000 women in a parenthesis. This will happen as long as there are not more women on the Board of Education, more women who are workers engaged in gainful employment.

Dr. Schneider says in his report that the New York trade schools for girls should extend their courses so as to give the girls a chance to enter occupations which are not merely humdrum and mechanical, but he does not suggest specifically what trades they should enter. At such schools now the traditional women’s trades are being taught: sewing and millinery, fancy box making, and machine operating. Boys’ trade schools teach the building trades. Women, as shown by the census in New York City, actually work in these trades. There are women carpenters, bricklayers, painters, glaziers, paper hangers, plasterers, and plumbers. These are the energizing trades, as Dr. Schneider himself would call them, and why should girls be fitted only for the enervating trades as they are today, especially as these trades are already overcrowded?

Why should girls not be taught the principles of machinery? Such knowledge should be useful to them in energizing as in enervating occupations. It is only a matter of getting used to the idea. Women who own automobiles know how to run and repair them. Why shouldn’t a girl who works at a machine have a knowledge of mechanics which will enable her to handle the machine better? Women swing golf clubs, hockey sticks, and tennis rackets. Why shouldn’t girls swing hammers?

Dr. Schneider brings in the usual double standard idea of fitting the boys for the world and the girls for the home. He says girls’ trade education must be modified by training for the home. He adds that this is true because most factory girls stop work at the end of seven years. So far as I know, there are no facts to support that statement. It is most important to break down this general impression that women leave work at the end of seven years. As a matter of fact, 50 per cent. of the mothers of boy and girl workers in homes I have investigated still work, although they are no longer single. Since women work after marriage, it is essential that they be given as sound and thorough and concentrated industrial training as boys.

Girls, like boys, should be trained to know the joy of doing a piece of work well. It would be interesting to see what effect that would have on their wages. Women do not earn as high wages as men. The mothers of the children investigated receive only one-half to two-thirds the wages of the fathers. If girls were trained to find the same joy in work that boys do they would be better workers when they returned to work after marriage, and they would respect their work enough to demand at least as high wages as men do for the same work.

Dr. Schneider’s analysis of why boys and girls leave school typifies the usual vague treatment of the girls’ problem as compared with the boys’. Boys leave, he says, because “they want to do things, to be out-of-doors, to build, to earn money, to assert partial independence; they hate books, they crave action.” He says girls leave “because their desire for wider social activity is dominant, because they want to break away from home ties, because their instinct for personal adornment is strong, and because they want to earn money to satisfy it.” What is a desire for wider social activity? That is vague compared with the statement that boys leave because they want to do things, and yet they mean the same thing. When these two series of reasons are boiled down they come to the same thing for both boys and girls—a desire for activity and for independence.

Again he seems inconsistent in suggesting that girls should learn trades intensively earlier than boys in order that they may get higher wages at an earlier age. If early specialization is bad for the boys it is even worse for the girls, because at the present time industry tends to make them machines. Early specialization will increase that tendency and thereby reduce rather than advance their wages. Contrary to the usual point of view, a broad and general industrial training is perhaps more important for those in the automatic trades than in any others, and therefore it is of special importance for girls.[^[7]]

School Buildings

While thus interesting themselves in educational administration and the content of school curricula, women have not neglected the physical aspects of school buildings. The movement for sanitary school buildings in which women have sometimes led, instigated officials to lead, helped personally, or inspired janitors to act, has been followed up by the decoration of the buildings. The beneficial effect of artistic interiors on children, who spend so large a proportion of their waking hours in school buildings, is incalculable. Their physical comfort and their moral and artistic natures are advanced in a measure difficult to estimate.

Organized first for self-culture of a literary and artistic character, the expansive nature of club women has expressed itself in the extension of that acquired culture to the children in the schools. Volumes could be written if an attempt were made to record the stories of the efforts made by women to beautify schools and equip them with books for supplementary reading. That story is one of the best known of all and, for that reason, needs less attention at this place, not because it has been of little importance but because almost every hamlet and town has felt the influence of women in that direction. According to their incomes and their taste, they have sought to introduce as much beauty and harmony and as much literary and scientific appreciation as possible.

Believing that the school yard should receive at least as much care as the town cemetery, women have planted trees, seeds, and bulbs. For the interior of the school building, they have at times furnished an inexpensive photographic reproduction for a school wall and a piece of statuary, or expensive rugs and pictures, or a piano, and many times they have dominated the whole scheme of inside decoration and even the architecture itself.

Apparently women can build as well as suggest how schoolhouses should be built. Miss Alice M. Durkin of New York, who was recently given the contract to build Public School No. 39 in the Bronx, wonders why more women do not go into this work. She built a public school in Jersey City and another in Brooklyn. She employs between 600 and 700 men. In a competitive contest for the $250,000 extension to the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park, New York, Miss Durkin came out second and she was third in the competition for the New York Public Library.

That women have helped to secure better buildings and equipment, abundant testimony, not only from their own reports but from public men, shows. For a single example, under the leadership of Mrs. B. B. Mumford of Richmond, Virginia, former president of the Richmond Education Association, a magnificent high school building costing $500,000 was secured. In innumerable letters comes the modest word that “we worked hard until we got a high school in our town” or “we secured a much needed addition to the school building” or “we are trying to raise the money for a new building.” In one instance a high school was only made possible by the offer of the women to buy the furniture and other needed equipment if the town would erect the building.

In order to maintain high standards of physical equipment in their schools club women have often acted as school inspectors. Mrs. George Steinmetz of Pekin, Illinois, is one of these and of her election she writes: “At our last election for school inspectors two club women were nominated on an independent ticket. I was elected, and I am the first woman in our town to fill that position, but I hope others will be elected next year. The ticket brought out a large vote, and resulted in a majority vote for the building of a new high school and a new grade school and the remodeling of ten others.”[^[8]]

Educational Associations

In addition to their service along many special lines of educational development, women are actively interested in the various societies which concern themselves with the advancement of education.

Schools have been for a long time the object of civic interest among women partly because of their intimate family relation through little children and partly because of the fact that women teachers formed an easy bond for coöperation. Today there exists an incredible number of organizations whose main purpose is coöperation with the schools in one way or another. A study of these organizations and their aims justifies the belief that many of the very best features of the present educational system owe their existence to private suggestion and assistance and experimentation.

Miss Elsa Denison in a book called “Helping School Children” has studied the range of private enterprise in education and throws an interesting light on the part played by women in that form of social service.

Settlements have demonstrated the need of: recreation; child welfare; instruction of mothers in the physical basis of well-being and morals; possible coöperation of home and school; and the need of industrial training. Miss Denison in the study to which we have referred, by means of the following table, illustrates the tendency toward the absorption of these settlement features by the school:

This indicates that the school has already in the most progressive cities become one huge settlement with a thoroughly democratic basis in place of a philanthropic foundation.

The public education associations in our leading cities are among the livest of civic organizations. In all these associations, women participate on equal terms with men, where they do not direct the aims and activities themselves. More than one such association, like that of Worcester, Massachusetts, owes its origin directly to the work and agitation of women.

The Public Education Association of the City of New York is an outgrowth of the Committee on Schools of the Council of Confederated Good Governments, a women’s civic organization. Women are very active on the committees of the Association and Mrs. Miriam Sutro Price is chairman of the Executive Committee. This organization has grown from a small committee of women interested in improving the public schools to an organization of over 850 capable members, men and women, under the direction of two trained educators, who supervise a regular staff of trained workers, besides experts employed from time to time and volunteer workers organized in standing committees. Its programs have included bills affecting the educational chapter of the city charter, compulsory education enforcement, truancy and child labor laws, permanent census laws, oversight of the school budget, and the initiation, extension or improvement of many new types of schools for special classes, and the extension of the use of library and school plants.

The Public Education Association of Worcester, Massachusetts, developed from the Committee on Public Schools of the Woman’s Club. Mrs. Eliza Draper Robinson was the energetic organizer of this influential association.

In Philadelphia we have a Public Education Association whose history, “since its organization, is the history of school progress in Philadelphia. To date, it has had a busy career of over thirty years, covering the conspicuously constructive period in the development of city school administration in all the United States and particularly in Philadelphia.”

Providence, Rhode Island, has, in its Public Education Association, Mrs. Carl Barus as secretary, and two of the five members of its executive committee are women: Dean Lida Shaw King and Mrs. Albert D. Mead. This association is striving to bring the educational system of Providence up to the standards set by the majority of other cities in the country. One of its most valuable publications is entitled “Should Providence Have a Small School Commission?” It represents a study of school administration in other cities corresponding reasonably in size with Providence.

The Providence Public Education Association has also been greatly interested in industrial education, among other things, and in pushing through a child labor bill. It had written into the measure the requirement “that every child under sixteen years of age must be able to read and write simple sentences in English before it can receive a working certificate” which will undoubtedly increase the regularity and prolong the school attendance of children as well as increase the demand for schoolhouses in mill towns if it is enforced. The Association has worked for medical inspection in the schools, open-air classes, public lectures in the schools at night and proper provision for assembly rooms in which to hold them, visiting teachers, better sanitation of schoolhouses, fire drills, and parents’ education. Many of the investigations and reform measures in Providence undertaken by this Association are directly traceable to its women members.

Among the volunteer associations whose aim is the better education of children, the American Institute of Child Life holds a worthy place. Dr. Wm. B. Forbush is president but the officers and active workers include both men and women. Mrs. M. A. Gardiner of Philadelphia and Miss Edna Speck of Indianapolis are the field secretaries of the Institute and they go from city to city seeking to interest mothers in the study of their own children.

The Institute grew out of a conference held at the White House during the administration of President Roosevelt during which it was argued that most mothers are too busy with their home tasks to search in books on child study and in other sources for just the right material to supply their children’s mental and moral requirements. Hence the need of an association to assist them.

The object of the Institute is thus explained by Mrs. Gardiner: “Our Institute of Child Life occupies a unique place among educational organizations. Its purpose is to collect from the most authentic sources the best that is known about children and to put such knowledge within easy reach of busy parents and teachers. The Institute provides expert help in children’s needs, amusements and varied interests.”

Believing that “women can best overcome the superstitions of women and men about their children which would prevent their standing for reforms and proper education,” the Federation for Child Study was recently formed in New York City with Mrs. Howard S. Gans as president. The board of managers, composed entirely of women, is divided into the following committees: reference and bibliography, ways and means, comic supplements, children’s literature, work and play for children, schools, and legislative. Conferences are held regularly by the Federation on matters affecting the nurture and education of children. Well-known educators often address the conference and the women discuss the issues raised by such lectures.

Efforts to unify the educational work of the women of each state are being made by the Department of School Patrons of the National Educational Association. Members in each state are suggested as follows: one member Association of Collegiate Alumnæ; one member General Federation of Clubs; one member Council of Jewish Women; one member National Congress of Mothers; one member Southern Association of College Women; and one member at large.

The union of club and college women in Connecticut is called the Woman’s Council of Education, and affiliated therewith are the W. C. T. U.; the Congress of Mothers; Holyoke Association; and Teachers’ League. Each society is assigned a definite line of special study; then all work together for laws and for better prepared and paid teachers.

Libraries

No survey of women’s work for education would be complete without some mention of their part in promoting the circulation of good books. The educational work which women have done through libraries is both great and obvious, although the public that profits by them may not fully realize the number of traveling libraries and stationary and circulating libraries that women have directly established.

The first large concerted movement on the part of the club women was for the extension of education through books and scarcely a woman’s club in the country fails to report an initial activity in that direction. In little log cabins on the frontiers as well as in splendid buildings in the cities books have been housed and distributed among readers by the earnest efforts of women whose culture early ceased to be individual; that is, they were anxious to pass on to the multitudes such culture as they themselves possessed.

With their interest in reading and encouraging the reading habit in others, women have helped to develop a wonderful social service for the library. As truly as any other group of social workers, librarians are educators and physicians of mind and body. While too many of them still are too circumscribed in their thinking and merely reflexes of their clerical training, there is a rapidly increasing number of library workers everywhere who realize the effect of reading on social thinking and sympathies as well as on individual ambitions, and are seeking to stimulate social forces by encouraging that reading which will increase the interest in the common good. By means of bulletins, exhibits, personal suggestions, public lectures, and in many other ways, the library is developing into a people’s school, beginning with early childhood and continuing throughout life.

The library can no longer be regarded as a minor educational institution. Indeed it is closely affiliated in many cities with the schools: the teacher and the librarian coöperating definitely all the time. In some cases the library and school are housed together and this plan is warmly sanctioned by many educators. At any rate the field is growing so rapidly in connection with the furnishing of reading matter for the public that the library and the school must stand as a unit in educational consideration.

Women have kept pace with this library development and have extended the field appreciably. There is no way of measuring statistically how far initiative has been due to them, but anyone familiar with the predominance of women on library forces and governing bodies cannot fail to recognize their great influence in the library movement.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the reading rooms with library equipment that women have established. In settlements, Y. W. C. A.’s, homes for working girls, rescue homes, rural centers, villages, churches, institutions, and wherever there is the slightest chance, women have slipped in the books and the magazines. Their interest has usually been altruistic but now and then it has been augmented by hobbies of health, science, literature, poetry, art, religion, industry, and politics, one often being stimulated by observation of the advance movement of another, the work thus ending in many cases in the creation of a well-balanced assortment of books.

It is a significant fact at the present time that more girls than boys are graduating from our high schools. Women, it seems, are both giving and getting the education.

CHAPTER II
PUBLIC HEALTH

“The public health is the foundation on which reposes the happiness of the people and the power of a country. The care of the public health is the first duty of a statesman.” Such was Lord Beaconsfield’s standard of public values, and it is that of a veritable army of women health workers in the United States, who not only share his vision but are rapidly learning the processes by which the foundation of general happiness and power may be firmly established on American soil.

It has been through conferences, conventions and publications that women have gained an appreciation of the manifold activities that must be included in any comprehensive public health program, but they have been led up to the point of effective participation in health conferences through their own practical experiences.

In the first place, the self-preservative interest or the mere instinct for a proper environment has forced women into public health activities; in the second place, they have done their health work well considering their own indirect influences, the opposition of interests, and popular indifference; in the third place, they have sought to avoid duplication of effort by establishing clearing houses for information and guidance for themselves and for the public; in the fourth place, they have moved step by step into the municipal government itself, pushing in their activities through demonstrations of their value to the community and often going with their creations into municipal office; and lastly and most important of all, as the climax of their wisdom and endeavor, they now begin to realize that the government itself in towns and cities should absorb most of their activities, coördinate them and be itself the agent for public health for the sake of greater economy of time, money, effort and efficiency, and also for the sake of eliminating all flavor of charity. In brief, it may be claimed that women have broadened into the democratic and governmental point of view toward health problems at the same time that they have been perfecting the machinery by which democracy may lay its foundation of health, happiness and power in governmental functions.

This does not mean that even in fundamental matters of physical well-being the accomplishment of the means to that end have been simple in any case. There has had to be a strong organization of the women in a given community who were interested in its health problems. These women have had to study the most intricate mechanical problems like municipal engineering. They have had to understand city taxation and budget making. They have had to educate those less interested to something approaching their own enthusiasm. Moreover they have had to work for the most part without political influence, which has meant that they have had to overcome the reluctance of public officials to take women seriously; they have had to understand and combat the political influence of contractors and business men of all kinds; they have had to enter political contests in order to place in office the kind of officials who had the wider vision; and they have had to watch without ceasing those very officials whom they have helped to elect to see that they carried out their campaign pledges. Sometimes it has happened that women have campaigned for a non-partisan ticket pledged to put through certain municipal health reforms and the ticket has been defeated at the polls. Under such circumstances they have had to renew their courage, maintain their organization, raise more funds and keep up the fight. Women who have experienced these political reverses have often become ardent suffragists, because they realized that the direct way to work for sanitary municipal housekeeping is through elected officials, and, having been unable to influence the votes of men, they have acquired the desire and determination to cast the necessary ballots themselves.

All these educational methods which women have used for their own development and for the instruction of voters, the political machinations with which they have had to deal, the necessity they have been under of “nagging” without mercy until they achieved their desired results, the sympathy and encouragement on the part of men, the coöperation of progressive officials, their ways of raising money, their means of perfecting organization, and their publicity enterprises will be illustrated in the pages that follow. Some of their failures to obtain the municipalization of certain proposals will also be recorded.

In spite of all the handicaps under which they have had to labor, women have steadily forged ahead in medical knowledge and skill. It was the munificent gift of a woman to Johns Hopkins on the condition that it admit women as medical students that forced open the doors of that institution to them. Now Dr. Louise Pearce of that university has been appointed assistant to Dr. Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. Women moreover hold high executive positions in the leading medical societies of the country today. Only within the last few years, however, have women been accepted anywhere as internes in hospitals and yet some municipalities, Jersey City for instance, have women physicians on the staffs of their city hospitals. Failing to get experience in other hospitals as internes, women have often established their own and they serve as superintendents, internes, consulting physicians in many such institutions.

Large contributions have been made by women for the founding of various types of hospitals, both private and public. In instance after instance, the first hospital to make its appearance in a town represents the hard work of the women of that town in the raising of money or in the education of public opinion to demand it.

Free dental clinics, dispensaries and women’s clinics for the dissemination of knowledge of sex hygiene are some of the more recent results of women’s interest and effort. The first hospital ambulance in Chicago was bought by a woman’s club. A long list could be given of the efforts of women to establish adequate public provision for the sick.

In 1910 it was reported at the Biennial of Women’s Clubs that 546 individual clubs had aided in the establishment of camps, sanatoria, tuberculosis clinics and hospitals; 452 had conducted open-air meetings for the improvement of health conditions; and 246 had placed wall cards in public places to convey information about public health ordinances.

The sale of Red Cross Christmas seals alone has produced marvelous results in increased hospital provision, the work of tuberculosis clinics, open-air schools, camps and sanatoria. Hundreds of women in various states act as agents for the sale of these stamps and they sit at their little tables in shops, post-offices and elsewhere day after day during Christmas week, raising money for health work. Emily Bissell of Delaware is responsible for the recent use of these stamps. As president of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society of Delaware, she writes: “All our work on tuberculosis has been done by women and men working together, and while the women’s clubs have done their part, the men, in their benefit societies, labor unions, Catholic and Jewish associations, etc., have all had their part, and it will be difficult to disentangle their activities from ours. All this is as it should be, but it makes data more difficult when restricted to either sex.”

Another example of effective and direct tuberculosis work is afforded by the Association of Tuberculosis Clinics of New York City which includes women on its board of directors and has, for its executive secretary, Miss F. Elizabeth Crowell. The importance of an association like this lies in its ideals for prevention and in its stimulation to the individual clinics composing its membership to increase their work among children and their family care. It is of comparatively little use to treat a single adult in a family and neglect the other members. Children may inherit the tendency to the disease or be infected before the adult member appears for treatment or the family’s mode of living may create the same disease for all its members. It is therefore very direct and effective work to make family care the basis of prevention. Partly as a result of the conferences held by this Association, “the Department of Health has enlarged and strengthened its clinical work, has reorganized its system of registration and has increased both the quantity and quality of its nursing service.”

In various ways, women have sought to control the spread of this dread disease. They did much to abolish the common drinking cup and have worked for the establishment of sanitary drinking fountains in public squares and sanitary faucets in public schools and public buildings. They have agitated against spitting in public places, and have seen their agitations rewarded with anti-spitting ordinances; and they have organized junior and other leagues to help with their enforcement. They have pressed upon the attention of the authorities the necessity for medical inspection in the schools and for open-air schools; and Mrs. Vanderbilt of New York has built some splendid open-air homes for tuberculous patients, which have served as models for later attempts to deal with the housing requirements for the permanent cure of tuberculosis.

Testimonials to the initiation and pressure by women along these lines, all of which are of the utmost importance in checking the ravages of tuberculosis, come from all quarters.

The Buffalo Federation of Clubs, the organized women of Minneapolis, the Women’s Municipal League of Boston, and the Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, are among the groups that have insisted upon open-air schools for children either infected with the germs of tuberculosis or so anæmic that they might readily fall a prey to infection.

Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools in Chicago, brought the open-air idea into the ordinary schools by seeing that properly devised window boards were installed so that school children might regularly study with open windows. This makes possible the wide extension of preventive health work, and her scheme is being extended to other cities.

Occupational Diseases

In addition to the communicable diseases there are occupational diseases some of which, like tuberculosis, are communicable, while others are not.

Women were behind the agitation for the abolition of poisonous matches—matches which produced sulphur poisoning for those who made them. In the official organ of the Federation of Clubs was found zealous advocacy of the Esch-Hughes law until its passage.

Occupational diseases are ills which are quite distinct in causation from fevers and other epidemics due to germs. Relatively little has been done in the United States toward the study and prevention of such diseases, however, and the recent quickening of consciences and interest in that direction is true of women as well as of men. The reports of Dr. Alice Hamilton on lead-poisoning and of Mrs. Lindon Bates on mercury poisoning are excellent contributions to the subject and are among the rare studies of occupational hygiene in this country.

The widespread interest in industrial accidents may well extend to the more subtle industrial diseases which may not be as sensational as cataclysmic events but are not the less sure in their depletion of vigor and in the hardships they bring into the lives of the workers and thousands of families. The activity of the Women’s Municipal League of Boston affords us an example of the way in which women are awakening to their own and the public responsibility for such occupational diseases. In their study of these dread enemies of working people, they have begun with lead-poisoning and, perhaps wisely, since painters come into their homes and they themselves often share directly in the responsibility for the infection through their failure to provide hot water and other cleansing materials at the close of the painter’s day of work. This League has become interested in the physical troubles of telephone operators also, such as the loss of voice and hearing.

Family Visitation

As in other branches of social endeavor, we see public health work tending more and more toward prevention. The ideal now is not merely to provide more ambulances, but rather to reduce the necessity for so many ambulances. This need early became apparent as hospitals discharged patients only to find them soon fallen into sickness again.

In all varieties of hospitals where the poor are admitted as patients, the follow-up treatment is often as vital as the immediate prescription and nursing. This involves family visitation and advice and is called by Miss Katherine Tucker, president of the New York Association of Hospital Social Service Workers, “a new profession.” Miss Ida M. Cannon, headworker of the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, puts these pertinent questions about the social work of hospitals:

OF WHAT USE IS IT—

If a patient for whom the surgeon orders a back brace starves herself to pay the bill?

If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp cellar which caused it?

If a clerk, fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which crippled her sight?

If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the maternity ward back to the neighborhood that ruined her?

Medicine and surgery, supplemented by social service, not only cure disease but restore to full health and working capacity.

The theory and practice of this youngest handmaiden of medical science are fully, simply and interestingly told in the latest Russell Sage Foundation Publication.

Dr. Richard Cabot, of Boston, was one of the first physicians to emphasize the social background of health; but it is admitted on all sides that women are proper persons to treat the family and discover its needs. They are social physicians in a very real sense and their knowledge must be industrial, economic, psychological, as well as medical.

At the fifteenth annual convention of the American Hospital Association held in Boston last summer (1914), Dr. Frederick Washburn, president of the association, insisted that the function of the hospital is not merely to treat patients acutely sick, but to aid in the prevention of disease, and to undertake social service and coöperation with community agencies. Other speakers dwelt on the necessity of better care of the “out-patient,” the social service side of health work. The Survey had this to say: “A new note was struck by Elizabeth V. H. Richards, headworker of the social service department of the Boston Dispensary, who showed that the social service department is not only of assistance to individual patients, but that the medical social worker can be of value to the managing authorities of the institution as a whole, in studying the efficiency of its clinical work, and in planning the broader relations which its work may bear to other welfare resources in the community.”

The home situation clearly has to be considered as well as the physical ailment in almost every case requiring medical care. Thus the task is a coöperative one between the social worker and the medical scientist. Every attempt to improve labor and living conditions is a similar aid to medical science if not to the medical profession, so that any proper study of health or physical well-being must lead us on to an examination of efforts for better housing, a living wage, for social insurance, for workmen’s compensation, and the many other devices that make a decent standard of living possible.

After-care is especially imperative in cases of mental disorder. Patients may be discharged from insane hospitals in some cases if the physician can trust in the home environment. The social worker is his aid in these cases and thus helps to keep families together. The prevention of insanity and the after-care of patients is the object of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene which numbers Julia Lathrop, Jane Addams, Mrs. Philip Moore and several other women among its members. Dr. Thomas Salmon, a leader in this work, writes: “Women are active in this committee and I can say that we rely very much upon the wise counsel of these members of the committee.”

District Nursing

Care of the sick in hospitals, as everyone knows, depends almost as much upon efficient nursing as upon the skill of the physician—in many cases, far more. Of the labors of nurses for humanity, it is not necessary to speak here. But in our present public health campaign, a new type of nurse has appeared, “the visiting nurse,” who watches homes to guard against disease as well as to cure, and she is now regarded by competent observers as the strategic point in the battle for improved health in our cities and towns.

Ysabella Waters in her examination into the system of visiting nursing in the United States shows that in 1913 “50 health departments employed 867 visiting nurses, including 345 school nurses, 350 tuberculosis nurses, 107 infant hygiene nurses and 65 employed in other fields of sanitary work. At the same time 64 departments of education reported the employment of 200 visiting nurses in their work and Miss Waters obtained records of 2,367 nurses taking part in public health work under other auspices, most of them being engaged in the campaign against tuberculosis.”

An excellent system of district nursing is that developed by Miss Lillian Wald from her Nurses Settlement in New York City, and, according to Professor Winslow, it was due to her far-sightedness and organizing ability that the application of the educational force of district nursing was made to the problem of tuberculosis. Miss Wald’s belief that the hospitals can never cope with disease and that home treatment is better and more practicable is borne out by the figures given for the total number of patients treated last year by the district nurses which indicates that the number visited and cared for was larger than the number treated by three large city hospitals in the same space of time. Ten per cent. is the proportion usually cited as the ratio of the sick taken to hospitals. Miss Wald contends that the treatment of patients in their homes, especially where children are concerned, is preferable to hospital care in most cases, and can be carried on in a way that compares favorably with the treatment accorded in hospitals and by the private nurse in the homes of the well-to-do.

Miss Wald began her work for public nursing twenty-four years ago and has steadily pushed its importance into public recognition and changed the official attitude, as well as the attitude of doctors and laymen, from that of indifference or contempt to that of sympathy and understanding and public support.

In other cities, the idea has been taken up and developed in many ways. The Visiting Nurses’ Society of Philadelphia wants to increase its force to enter industrial nursing and here as elsewhere in the various aspects of nursing, the demand for training far exceeds the equipment. Here, too, just as the hospital nurse soon sees the necessity of economic backgrounds for cure and prevention of disease, so the industrial nurse is seeing and writing on the causes and prevention of ills among working men and women. They are greatly aided in this study by that splendid contribution by Miss Goldmark on “Fatigue and Efficiency.”

Los Angeles was the first city to municipalize the district nurse, and this bold step was taken at the instigation of Mrs. Maude Foster Weston and the College Settlement workers who furnished statistics and reports, which they themselves had gleaned from their own observations with private district nursing, to prove that such a step was municipally advantageous. The first school nurse was also secured in that city through the efforts of the same women. In 1909 a practical demonstration was given of the value of the district nurse in daily coöperation with the city physician in controlling an epidemic of measles.

Mrs. Weston thus explains the woman’s point of view about this work: “Someone has said that infant mortality is the most sensitive index we possess of social welfare. It may be that in our fair climate we need never reach the appalling records of our eastern cities, but we who know the true state of things in Los Angeles believe that if there is not more care of our newly-born, that, while the death list may not compare with the East, we shall produce a sickly, ailing set of children who will be unable, at maturity, to cope with disease. We are accused of standing for a sort of social service which has to do with the effects only and not with the causes which create them.... We approach however our problems in a modern and scientific manner and we always seek for causes.”

The Women’s Municipal League of Boston has made a thorough study of public nursing and has adopted a scheme whereby the nurse and houseworker are combined. This system is called Household Nursing and its aim is to be self-supporting. The nurses are called “attendants” and the problem of their training has had to be worked out by patient experimentation.

Significant of the times, too, is the awakening of the women of the negro race as well as of the white. The negro woman is especially adapted through her past experiences for the profession of nursing and now, with the addition of scientific training, a means of skilled employment, coupled with an opportunity to render public service, in addition to her age-long domestic service, is open to her.

Women are developing largely for themselves the whole science of training for public nursing. The National Organization for Public Health Nursing has a broad social point of view, realizing that upon the district nurse rests the responsibility of applying in a very practical way among the people the results of scientific thought and research.

Infant Mortality

In this social battle to arrest and prevent disease, the campaign against infant mortality assumes an ever larger proportion, and as we should naturally expect, women are also in the front ranks here. More or less quietly for a long period women have studied and worked on the problem of infant mortality. In addition to their private efforts to reduce its amount, they have served in official capacities. In 1908, for example, a division of Child Hygiene was created in the New York City Health Department, after careful study of the organization of such an enterprise; and a competent woman physician, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, was placed at the head of it. It is believed to be the pioneer—the first bureau established under municipal control to deal exclusively with children’s health. There had previously been diverse or scattered activities in that direction but under the new plan all these were coördinated.

In Milwaukee, baby-saving on a “hundred per cent. basis” was being worked out by Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips when the defeat of the Socialists brought their labors there to an end. Their experiment was made possible largely by the financial and personal support of Mrs. Sarah Boyd.

The combination of private and official activities in behalf of Child Welfare led to the agitation of women for a Federal Children’s Bureau to study infant mortality and nutrition. The scheme was proposed by the National Child Labor Committee and supported by the club women. Julia Lathrop was made Chief of the Bureau.

She was given a very small appropriation however. Furthermore she was handicapped from the outset by her lack of satisfactory records as a basis of work. “What do we know of infant mortality when not a single state or city in the United States has the data for a correct statement?” was her first query.

While pursuing the Bureau’s first study therefore, that of infant mortality, Miss Lathrop emphasized the need of better birth and death registration laws and methods.

It was soon recognized that women’s clubs in the various states were the most hopeful agencies for bringing about better statistical records. “The plan [of the Bureau] is to have the actual investigating done by committees of women—in most instances members of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs—who will take small areas in which they have an acquaintance and, selecting the names of a certain number of babies born in the year 1913, will learn by inquiry of the local authorities whether the births have been recorded, sending the reports to this bureau. An investigation dealing with about 5 per cent. of the reported number of births will probably constitute a sufficient test. The women’s clubs are responding well and the work is progressing satisfactorily.”

The recent Kentucky vital statistics law is due in a large measure to the women’s clubs of the state, and the Chicago Woman’s Club was also instrumental in getting a state bill for the registration of births.

The first monograph of the Federal Bureau was that on Birth Registration and this was requested by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Other bulletins issued by the Bureau up to the present time include Infant Mortality Series, No. 1; Baby-saving Campaigns—a statement of efforts made in cities of 50,000 and over to reduce mortality; Prenatal Care—a study made at the request of the Congress of Mothers which is the first of a proposed series on the care of young children in the home; A Handbook of Federal Statistics of Children, giving, in convenient form, data concerning children which had hitherto been scattered through many unwieldy volumes; a review of child labor legislation in the United States and one of mothers’ pensions systems. All of this information is of the greatest assistance to workers in municipal reforms.

While women in official positions are working to educate the public in child saving, women physicians and social workers are constantly emphasizing the value of baby conservation at conferences of one kind and another. An instance of this among the many that might be cited is the participation of women in the meetings of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality. Dr. Mary Sherwood of Baltimore, speaking at the last annual meeting, said: “Communities and individuals must be made to realize the fact that the babies of today will be the fathers and mothers of tomorrow. Make the babies well, prevent mortality, and we have strengthened a great weakness. No community is stronger than its weakest point.”

Dr. Sherwood is chairman of the Association’s committee on prenatal care, instruction of mothers and adequate obstetrical care; Harriet L. Lee, superintendent of nurses of the Cleveland Babies’ Hospital and Dispensary, is chairman of the committee on standards of training for infant welfare nursing and problems that confront the city and rural nurses engaged in baby-saving campaigns; and Dr. Helen Putnam, of Providence, is chairman of the committee on continuation schools of home-making and training for mothers’ helpers, and for agents of the board of health, such as visiting nurses, sanitary inspectors, visiting housekeepers, and others. Included in the membership of this Association are over one hundred societies which represent organized baby-saving activities in 53 cities in 27 states. Women are hard workers as well as scientific contributors in this Association.

One of the most effective ways of stimulating the interest of mothers in educating themselves in the care and feeding of young children is through baby contests or shows or “derbies” as they are called in some places. One of the pioneers of this movement was Mrs. Frank De Garmo, of Louisiana, who organized a contest at a state fair there, and later, one in Missouri.

It was Mary L. Watts who so forced the better baby movement upon the attention of Iowa, through a contest for prize babies held at the state fair a few years ago, that farmers and their wives began to ask the question: “If a hog is worth saving, why not a baby?” Baby exhibits with their attendant instructions to mothers, whose pride and interest are aroused by the public admiration of fine infants, are now held from coast to coast.

Pure Milk

In the education of public opinion on the question of reducing infant mortality, it is inevitable that great attention should be given to the matter of pure milk. One cannot think of a baby without thinking of milk, so that the effort to provide pure milk is directly associated with every effort to reduce infant mortality and make children strong. The problem of milk is twofold: to supply the best possible grade for bottle-fed babies, on the one hand, and on the other to provide the mother of the breast-fed baby with necessary conditions for nursing her infant properly. There is no dispute as to the greater importance of the latter phase of the problem.

The milk station to supply pure milk to the poor at low cost is an outgrowth of the knowledge that the greater part of infant mortality comes in summer months from the feeding of babies upon unsatisfactory milk. The risk of death among such babies is far greater than it is among breast-fed babies so that emphasis has perhaps naturally been placed there to an undue degree. Knowing that bottle babies were subject to such danger, the first thought was to minimize the peril for such babies. As Miss Lathrop points out, however, in harmony with the best scientific teaching: “There may be and in some places there have been certain attending dangers where the furnishing of milk has been the only thing attempted. On this account in many, if not most, milk stations, positive proof is required that the mother either cannot or ought not to nurse her baby before she can get the pure milk, and this precaution has been found necessary in order to prevent an increase in bottle feeding in the community as a result of the feeling of greater safety which the pure milk station gives to mothers who, while perfectly able to nurse their children, would prefer, for insufficient reasons, not to do so. It is never intended that there should be less insistence upon the duty of breast feeding because of the milk station, for while the death rate among the bottle-fed is reduced by pure milk, the death rate among the bottle-fed from the purest milk possible is still much higher than the death rate among the breast-fed, and if there is any perceptible increase in bottle feeding as against breast feeding because of the milk station the latter might thus become an agency to increase rather than decrease infant mortality.”[^[9]]

Dr. S. Josephine Baker of the Bureau of Child Hygiene of the New York Health Department also has a large perspective in dealing with this problem. She says: “The evolution of the infants’ milk station is essential. Pure milk, however desirable, will never alone solve the infant mortality problem. Under our system of home visiting to instruct mothers in the care of babies we have demonstrated that babies may be kept under continuous supervision at the cost of 60 cents per month per baby, and the death rate among babies so cared for by us has been 1.4 per cent. The death rate among babies under the care of milk stations has been 2.5 per cent., and the cost $2 per month per baby. Without overlooking the value of pure milk, I believe this problem must primarily be solved by educational measures. In other words, the solution of the problem of infant mortality is 20 per cent. pure milk and 80 per cent. training of the mothers. The infants’ milk stations will serve their wider usefulness when they become educational centers for prenatal instruction and the encouragement of breast feeding and teaching better hygiene, with the mother instructed to buy the proper grade of milk at a place most convenient to her home.”

Here, as in medical prescriptions, it is futile to insist that a mother who is physically able shall nurse her baby if she is so poor that she must work under conditions that weaken her and thus reduce the grade and quality of her milk or that preclude leisure in which to nourish the infant. The question of poverty, that skeleton in every social closet, looms up here with an insistency that nothing will banish. No kind of philanthropy will solve the requirements of infant welfare when poverty or labor conditions are the root of the problem.

Babies’ milk thus becomes essentially a social-economic problem. It is so recognized by many women and is becoming more and more recognized as such by those who work along baby-saving lines. No one sees this fact more clearly perhaps than Miss Lathrop who joins in the ever-growing cry for a “war on poverty.” Mothers’ pensions, and every attempt to increase the wage of the husband or of the wife before the child-bearing experience has entered into her life, that she may lay by a sum for that function, reaches infant mortality more fundamentally and directly than do milk stations. In spite of this truth, milk stations are a useful supplementary social service and the value of pure milk where mothers cannot nurse their offspring or secure a competent wet-nurse must not be underestimated. The milk station, too, for one thing, affords an acceptable avenue through which to reach mothers and instruct them in the care of infants, to assist them with a nurse in times of trouble or crisis, and to prepare them for the hour when milk from the stations becomes a necessity.

In most cases women now recognize the milk station not as a private but as a public responsibility. They first demonstrated the wisdom and practicability of the enterprise as direct health activity, then urged the municipalities to incorporate the plans into their regular health department program. Cities have accepted the lesson readily, although there are still places like our national capital, where the death rate among infants is disgracefully high and where no provision is made by the commissioners, during even the hot summer months, to care for babies in this way.

The superiority of breast feeding is so well-known that the provision of wet-nurses is recognized as a social advantage. The examination, registration, pay and care of wet-nurses are matters of increasing interest to women health workers and the Women’s Municipal League of Boston is attempting to deal seriously with this social mother.

No more interesting story of women’s help on the problem of general milk supply is to be found than comes from the Oranges, although it is fairly typical of the way women have viewed their responsibility elsewhere. In the spring of 1913, the Civic Committee of the Woman’s Club of Orange, New Jersey, offered, for the summer, the services of its secretary to the Orange Board of Health in order that a more thorough study of the milk supply might be made than was possible with the limited official staff alone. “Through the courtesy of the Board, Miss Hall was made a temporary special milk inspector in June, 1913, and has enjoyed the use of the department’s laboratory in assisting in the test of over 600 samples on which conclusions are based as to the quality of the milk furnished in the Oranges.” Those conclusions are published in a report by the aforesaid club in order to give the consumer a better knowledge of the production and supply of milk “in the hope of arousing citizen interest in a union of effort among the four municipalities, toward a more efficient control.”

The joint effort of the Woman’s Club and of the Department of Health led to their common support of certain proposals dealing with the milk situation in the four Oranges. In this case, after a careful and detailed study of all the elements that enter into the provision of milk for these communities, the women determined upon a citizen support of the health officers that, among other proposals, they might obtain better appropriations for the work of inspection. Their publications and general agitation have been marked by exact information.

From New York on the eastern seaboard to Portland on the western come countless reports of the activities of organized groups of women in behalf of pure milk. The “Portland Pure Milk War” was graphically described by Stella Walker Durham in a recent number of Good Housekeeping. The struggle to secure the kind of milk they wanted meant a year’s fight for the women who knew and proved that they knew the true conditions of their city’s milk supply.

Dr. Harriet Belcher, formerly bacteriologist in the Rockefeller Institute in New York, in her campaign for clean milk, made a close study of dealers, delivery, refrigeration, balanced rations for cows, care of cows, process of milking, soils in relation to cost of production, and many other phases of the problem. She did field work as well as laboratory work, and is justly entitled to the name of expert.

While the advisability of mothers learning to care properly for milk and other food in their own homes instead of relying solely upon public care, is evident and is urged even at the milk stations in their educational capacities, such right care in the home necessitates the ability to secure ice easily and cheaply.

Ice

A tragic story of the scarcity and cost of ice in summer has come from more than one large city and the machinations of ice trusts have been among the most scandalous of business revelations. Here and there in the United States sporadic attempts have been made to establish municipal ice plants. Women have been prominent in the agitation for cheaper and more plentiful ice. An instance of this agitation is afforded by the following clipping from the New York Times, May, 1914:

More than one hundred mothers attended a meeting yesterday afternoon in the offices of the East Side Protective Association, No. 1 Avenue B, and discussed plans for the establishment on the east side of a municipal ice plant whereby ice could be distributed to mothers during the coming summer for their infants. At the conclusion of the meeting a letter was forwarded to Mayor Mitchel, signed by Harry A. Schlacht, Superintendent of the Association, asking the Mayor to do all in his power to aid the project, pointing out that through it lives of hundreds of infants would be saved.

A report on Municipal and Government Ice Plants in the United States and Other Countries was prepared last winter by Mrs. Jeanie W. Wentworth, who has been assisting Mr. McAneny, president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, to study the question of ice.

Child Welfare

The reduction of infant mortality is only one phase of child welfare. However imperative it is to save little babies, unless they are watched over and safeguarded physically during the after years of growth and nutrition, the earlier work is wasted. It is this conception of the unity of health work that has resulted in the formation by women of child welfare associations and of such committees within women’s associations all over the country.

The General Federation of Women’s Clubs voted several years ago to work for the following five universal needs of the American child:

1. For better equipped, better ventilated and cleaner school buildings.

2. For more numerous, larger and better supervised playgrounds.

3. For medical school inspection and school nurses.

4. For physical education and instruction in personal hygiene.

5. For instruction in normal schools in wise methods of presenting the essentials of personal and sex hygiene.

Every medical inspection of the poor children in the public schools of large cities reveals a state of anæmia from undernourishment. A hungry child cannot learn rapidly, if at all. Teachers are the ones to see the connection between hunger and mentality, and the first school lunch in Cleveland was therefore started by teachers in a neighborhood where many of the mothers of the children were forced to go out of the home each day to earn all or part of the family income. Everywhere women have been largely instrumental in initiating and defending the school lunch.

Promoters of the school lunch often have as competitors the candy vender, the ice cream man and sellers of adulterated and low dietary wares of various kinds who stand even at the school gates to wean the children away from less exciting but more nutritious food. School lunches cannot be compulsory, or are not compulsory, and the child must be led to realize that good nutrition is fundamental and desirable. Then he can be led on to an interest in pure food laws and their enforcement, and kindred civic matters.

The school lunch is therefore of high social utility and an invaluable adjunct to the work of the school medical inspector or nurse. Yet it has its critics.

Mr. Joseph Lee of Boston is one of the more outspoken of these, claiming that school lunches will disrupt the family.

Mrs. George B. Twitchell of Cincinnati gave a spirited defense of the school lunch in a letter to The Survey:

I want to ask Mr. Lee how it is possible to disrupt a family when our social conditions are such that the mother has to go out to help make a living. Isn’t that family already disrupted? We are all working to bring about social conditions when it will be possible to have a home for all the people, when father will be able to earn enough to make it possible for mother to remain at home; but until such time the children must be given some good, substantial food, not candy, pickles and such trash as they can buy at the candy store....

The teachers of Cleveland proved that their pupils could not work on a diet of candy and pickles. The school lunch has proved so helpful that ten have been established in Boston, all but one in the poor districts. The one in the Mt. Auburn school was started by the Mothers’ Club because they wished to give their children better food than they could get at the candy store at recess time. The mothers report that since they have opened the lunch room and the children get good food at recess time they have better appetites and eat more than they did before.

Many times children do not eat because they are too hungry and tired after the walk home and really have lost their appetites on account of that. Children often eat a very light breakfast and need a lunch at recess. They are like little chicks, they thrive best if fed every three hours. We believe there should be a lunch room in every school which should supply the children with good food, rather than depend on commercialism, as in that case we know the only interest is to make money.

Undaunted by those who fear that the school lunch may pauperize the poor, some of its defenders would go further. Miss Mabel Parker, of New York, proposes to unite with the school lunch a “pre-natal restaurant” in certain districts where poor women in a pregnant condition can get for five cents a nourishing lunch which they could not get for a great deal more money at home. With the school plant already equipped for meeting the extra work, these same women, instead of living on bread and bologna, could be provided with a nourishing midday meal and child welfare be promoted from the very start. Her belief is that this extended work would be self-supporting. Miss Parker says: “We have learned from our work in the Board of Health milk stations that education is not enough. The people of the tenement districts simply cannot afford good food, even if they have learned how desirable it is. That is why the city is willing to sell them milk at cost and why mothers must be provided with good food.”

Not only must mothers be taught better care of their infants but the “little mothers” and “little fathers” upon whose young shoulders devolves the burden of taking mother’s place, while she goes out to earn or help earn the family living, must receive the education which will enable them to preserve the lives intrusted to their care until such time as the real mothers and fathers can be placed in an economic situation whereby they themselves are able to assume that burden which is rightfully theirs alone. Dr. S. Josephine Baker appreciates the value of this work and through the organization of groups of young guardians of children, this information is being imparted.

Mrs. Clarence Burns of New York has been among the women who have sought to make the burdens of the “little mothers” lighter and her “Little Mothers’ Aid Society” is one of the well-known institutions of that city. Recently the little fathers have begun to feel that their position of responsibility was ignored too much in the greater efforts made to smooth the way of girls who have parental tasks, and their protest has served to call attention again to the extent to which the oldest child whether boy or girl is the real person charged with the task of prolonging infant life and keeping or making baby brothers and sisters well and strong.