Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
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