Clubs
Clubs offer the follow-up work that is necessary after the dance. The club and the dance are sometimes combined, but serious class work can often be secured by the relaxation afforded by the weekly dance. Clubs conducted by women for young people and for adults are very often serious educational features in the guise of pleasure, and the results that have already been felt, as well as the realization that far more can be achieved if attempted on a big social scale, a municipal scale, if possible, have led to the movement for the opening of schools as social centers. In Manchester, New Hampshire, the club women organized and support a Boys’ Club. They look after more than 100 young boys who sell papers and black shoes and the like. The boys are taught trades and the clubhouse affords them recreation and protection. No effort is spared to arouse the ideal of good citizenship and the boys respond nobly. The Woman’s Club at Green Bay, Wisconsin, remodeled a building for a center for working women and transformed it into a recreational and educational center. The Woodlawn Woman’s Club of Chicago established an organization for housemaids which is a social center. Such centers for domestic workers have been founded in several cities and the reports on waywardness among domestic workers indicate that their neglect in any scheme of recreation is serious indeed. They are a large factor in the patronage of public dance halls and any public control that reaches the hall reaches the domestic worker.
For children too old for the playground and too young for the dance the club is a vital institution. No type of club has appealed to the hearts of men and women more than the Newsboys’ Club and work with these little waifs has led on to an interest in the regulation of street trades for children, mothers’ pensions, and other reform measures.