Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
Volumes could be written if an attempt were made to record the stories of the efforts made by women to beautify schools and equip them with books for supplementary reading. That story is one of the best known of all and, for that reason, needs less attention at this place, not because it has been of little importance but because almost every hamlet and town has felt the influence of women in that direction. According to their incomes and their taste, they have sought to introduce as much beauty and harmony and as much literary and scientific appreciation as possible.
Believing that the school yard should receive at least as much care as the town cemetery, women have planted trees, seeds, and bulbs. For the interior of the school building, they have at times furnished an inexpensive photographic reproduction for a school wall and a piece of statuary, or expensive rugs and pictures, or a piano, and many times they have dominated the whole scheme of inside decoration and even the architecture itself.
Apparently women can build as well as suggest how schoolhouses should be built. Miss Alice M. Durkin of New York, who was recently given the contract to build Public School No. 39 in the Bronx, wonders why more women do not go into this work. She built a public school in Jersey City and another in Brooklyn. She employs between 600 and 700 men. In a competitive contest for the $250,000 extension to the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park, New York, Miss Durkin came out second and she was third in the competition for the New York Public Library.
That women have helped to secure better buildings and equipment, abundant testimony, not only from their own reports but from public men, shows. For a single example, under the leadership of Mrs. B. B. Mumford of Richmond, Virginia, former president of the Richmond Education Association, a magnificent high school building costing $500,000 was secured. In innumerable letters comes the modest word that “we worked hard until we got a high school in our town” or “we secured a much needed addition to the school building” or “we are trying to raise the money for a new building.” In one instance a high school was only made possible by the offer of the women to buy the furniture and other needed equipment if the town would erect the building.
In order to maintain high standards of physical equipment in their schools club women have often acted as school inspectors. Mrs. George Steinmetz of Pekin, Illinois, is one of these and of her election she writes: “At our last election for school inspectors two club women were nominated on an independent ticket. I was elected, and I am the first woman in our town to fill that position, but I hope others will be elected next year. The ticket brought out a large vote, and resulted in a majority vote for the building of a new high school and a new grade school and the remodeling of ten others.”[8]
Educational Associations
In addition to their service along many special lines of educational development, women are actively interested in the various societies which concern themselves with the advancement of education.
Schools have been for a long time the object of civic interest among women partly because of their intimate family relation through little children and partly because of the fact that women teachers formed an easy bond for coöperation. Today there exists an incredible number of organizations whose main purpose is coöperation with the schools in one way or another. A study of these organizations and their aims justifies the belief that many of the very best features of the present educational system owe their existence to private suggestion and assistance and experimentation.
Miss Elsa Denison in a book called “Helping School Children” has studied the range of private enterprise in education and throws an interesting light on the part played by women in that form of social service.
Settlements have demonstrated the need of: recreation; child welfare; instruction of mothers in the physical basis of well-being and morals; possible coöperation of home and school; and the need of industrial training. Miss Denison in the study to which we have referred, by means of the following table, illustrates the tendency toward the absorption of these settlement features by the school:
| SETTLEMENT | SCHOOL |
|---|---|
| Study Rooms | Study-recreation-rooms |
| Clubs | Clubs |
| Entertainments | Social Center Parties |
| Kindergartens | Public Kindergartens |
| Games | Public School Athletic League |
| Relief | School Association |
| Clinics | Inspection Medical Dental |
| Visiting Nurses | School |
| Music Gardens | Music Gardens |
| Playgrounds | Playgrounds |
| Home Visitors | Visiting Teachers and Truant Officers, Vocational and High Schools, Open-air Classes, Popular Lectures, Mothers’ Clubs, Libraries, Defective and Catch-up Classes. |
This indicates that the school has already in the most progressive cities become one huge settlement with a thoroughly democratic basis in place of a philanthropic foundation.
The public education associations in our leading cities are among the livest of civic organizations. In all these associations, women participate on equal terms with men, where they do not direct the aims and activities themselves. More than one such association, like that of Worcester, Massachusetts, owes its origin directly to the work and agitation of women.
The Public Education Association of the City of New York is an outgrowth of the Committee on Schools of the Council of Confederated Good Governments, a women’s civic organization. Women are very active on the committees of the Association and Mrs. Miriam Sutro Price is chairman of the Executive Committee. This organization has grown from a small committee of women interested in improving the public schools to an organization of over 850 capable members, men and women, under the direction of two trained educators, who supervise a regular staff of trained workers, besides experts employed from time to time and volunteer workers organized in standing committees. Its programs have included bills affecting the educational chapter of the city charter, compulsory education enforcement, truancy and child labor laws, permanent census laws, oversight of the school budget, and the initiation, extension or improvement of many new types of schools for special classes, and the extension of the use of library and school plants.
The Public Education Association of Worcester, Massachusetts, developed from the Committee on Public Schools of the Woman’s Club. Mrs. Eliza Draper Robinson was the energetic organizer of this influential association.
In Philadelphia we have a Public Education Association whose history, “since its organization, is the history of school progress in Philadelphia. To date, it has had a busy career of over thirty years, covering the conspicuously constructive period in the development of city school administration in all the United States and particularly in Philadelphia.”
Providence, Rhode Island, has, in its Public Education Association, Mrs. Carl Barus as secretary, and two of the five members of its executive committee are women: Dean Lida Shaw King and Mrs. Albert D. Mead. This association is striving to bring the educational system of Providence up to the standards set by the majority of other cities in the country. One of its most valuable publications is entitled “Should Providence Have a Small School Commission?” It represents a study of school administration in other cities corresponding reasonably in size with Providence.
The Providence Public Education Association has also been greatly interested in industrial education, among other things, and in pushing through a child labor bill. It had written into the measure the requirement “that every child under sixteen years of age must be able to read and write simple sentences in English before it can receive a working certificate” which will undoubtedly increase the regularity and prolong the school attendance of children as well as increase the demand for schoolhouses in mill towns if it is enforced. The Association has worked for medical inspection in the schools, open-air classes, public lectures in the schools at night and proper provision for assembly rooms in which to hold them, visiting teachers, better sanitation of schoolhouses, fire drills, and parents’ education. Many of the investigations and reform measures in Providence undertaken by this Association are directly traceable to its women members.
Among the volunteer associations whose aim is the better education