Participation of Women
In the national magazines and associations which deal with civic improvement the work of women in this field is frankly recognized. The American City, a live magazine of municipal advance, published in New York, has on its advisory board Mrs. Philip N. Moore, of St. Louis, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, who has stimulated civic work in many cities, and Mrs. Thomas M. Scruggs, who is the moving spirit in welfare work for children in that city.
That men greatly outnumber women on this board is not surprising, but numbers do not necessarily determine the relative amount of service, for Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Scruggs have a country-wide influence and practical experiences which make them valuable members of the Board. Furthermore many of the men on the Board like Benjamin Marsh, Irving Fisher, John Nolen, and J. Horace McFarland have testified to the splendid coöperation and stimulating work of women in the cities everywhere.
The American City recently devoted one issue, and it was a large one, to the civic work of women representing phases of modern city planning. Testimonials and detailed descriptions of the work of women poured in from all over the country.
Richard Watrous, of the American Civic Association, which is primarily concerned with the improvement of towns and cities, is not unmindful of the municipal services of women. He says:
To the enthusiasm, the untiring efforts and the practical suggestions of women, as individuals and in clubs, must be credited much of the splendid headway attained by the general improvement propaganda. They have been leaders in organized effort and have enlisted the sympathy and actual coöperation of men and associations of men in their laudable undertakings. Hundreds of cities that have distinguished themselves for notable achievements can point to some society or several societies of women that have been the first inspiration to do things. Hundreds of these women’s clubs are affiliated members of the American Civic Association, so that its influence is made powerful by having back of it the moral support of hundreds of thousands of men and women. Commercial organizations are beginning now, as never before, to recognize that it is just as much within their province to assist and to originate improvement work as it is to promote the industrial growth and power of the communities they represent. Thus it is that the most active of these organizations in all parts of the United States are identifying themselves with the American Civic Association and appointing committees on such special improvements as parks, streets, illumination, nuisances—the billboard and smoke—and lending material assistance to those committees in carrying out various plans for the physical development and upbuilding of their cities. These business organizations are realizing that in their effort to induce the investment of capital and labor with them, they must be in a position to offer superior advantages, such as are afforded by ample park areas, broad clean streets, intelligently planted and carefully kept trees, pure water and sanitary housing conditions.
With all such admirable enterprises the American Civic Association is most intimately connected. It strives to arouse communities, large and small, to the necessity of such work and assists them in it, whether it be merely an awakening to the desirability of maintaining clean back yards, or undertaking a comprehensive development along plans laid down by landscape architects, involving large bond issues and the rebuilding of cities according to the latest and most approved methods of city planning.[[50]]
The president of the same Association, Mr. J. Horace McFarland, when introduced, on one occasion, as “the man who made over Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” said that it was not he, nor any man or set of men, who should have the credit for that. “It was the women of Harrisburg who dinned and dinned into our ears until at last we men got ashamed of our laziness and selfishness as citizens; and then the women and the men of Harrisburg made Harrisburg over into the beautiful and favored city that it is.” The vice-president-at-large, the Hon. Franklin MacVeagh, then said it was the women of Chicago who had started every one of the fifty-seven civic improvement centers in that city, and that after they were started, the men joined in and helped. This he believed to be the history of civic improvement everywhere.
The civic leagues that have sprung up everywhere in towns and even in villages in the past decade are often composed entirely of women, sometimes of both sexes, but rarely exclusively of men. The leagues are in a great many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, affiliated with the American Civic Association. To its conferences they send representatives who bring back fresh ideas and increased fervor as a result of the mingling of varied views and the leadership of experienced workers. To those conferences they often carry, on the other hand, stimulating stories of the rewards of persistence and a steadfast vision.
The National Municipal League, under whose auspices this volume is published, like The American City and the American Civic Association, recognizes the work of women in municipal improvement. Women’s associations are affiliated with it; women attend its annual conferences and read papers and take part in the discussions; its official organ, the National Municipal Review, contains many articles by women on civic improvement and on women’s work in cities; and Miss Hasse, of the New York Public Library, is one of its able associate editors.
Some light is shed on the attitude of women voters toward civic improvement by an account of their action in a recent election in Chicago, as related by Llewellyn Jones in the Chicago Evening Post of April 30, 1914.
While many of Chicago’s first women voters left the booths with the idea that they had done all that was necessary until the next election came around, the more far-seeing among them are popularizing the idea that women’s participation must be a perpetual and not a merely periodical performance.
The particular plot of the local political field which many of these women mean to cultivate is the administration of the city’s parks. The parks of Chicago are preëminently the concern of the homemakers of the city, as they take up, widen and socialize the best activities of the home—the activities of the child and social intercourse.
Dancing, music and such festivals as those recently celebrated in the parks in honor of Arbor Day; the meeting of the young and old for pleasure and the exchange of ideas—these things the park managements have fostered, broadened and put on a democratic basis which sweeps away racial and other barriers that do more than walls and doors to isolate the families that dwell in the crowded parts of the city.
Women who would otherwise lack opportunity to hear and discuss civic matters find an opportunity to do so in non-partisan organizations that avail themselves of fieldhouse facilities for getting together; people who would otherwise not hear good music hear it in the open-air of the parks in summer or in the assembly halls in winter; while those same halls afford opportunity for lectures to the dwellers in their neighborhoods or for debates, dances or other activities by those residents.
All that is in addition to the provision made for the enjoyment and physical welfare of the children through swimming, supervised games and physical culture.
The women who have been interested in these activities find, however, that political action will be necessary before the parks can be used to the greatest advantage. As things are now, there are thirteen different park governments in Chicago, and the bill passed at the last session of the legislature to consolidate them was vetoed. Attorney General Lucey advised the governor that it was unconstitutional because the park districts were really separate municipalities and could not be eliminated without consent given through the ballot of their inhabitants.
That the park governments should be unified is admitted on all hands. Now there are districts in Chicago which are not in any park district and so escape taxation while enjoying the privileges of the parks, while the crowded districts, not being able to pay for park facilities, do not get any to speak of, although there is a crying need for them.
For instance, the South Park area is three times that of either the North or West Sides, but there are three times as many children on the North and West Sides as there are on the South Side. Meanwhile the South Park commission has a surplus in the bank which has frequently been over a million dollars, while the other park commissions often find it impossible to carry on the projects which would mean so much to their constituents.
With consolidation, too, would come a reform which it is not now possible to obtain—the standardization of the services which the parks render the public. At the present time, for instance, the South Park system employs only three social-play leaders—who perform a very valuable social function in bringing the various users of the parks together in games and conferences—although it has eleven recreation centers, while on the West Side the social-play leader is considered as necessary an adjunct to the park staff as are the gymnasium directors.
Women have a further interest in the parks, however, than in their consolidation, for they see in their administration the need as well as the opportunity for woman’s service.
At present the park commissioners are men, although the constituency they serve is largely one of women and children. Were the women represented on every park board—which is an impossibility until there is at least some measure of consolidation—the needs of the women and children using the parks would be more closely studied, the value of the parks in ways now overlooked would be emphasized, and the playgrounds would return to the public a larger dividend than heretofore on the public’s expenditure.
As it is hardly practicable to get the voters’ consent in every park district before merging them—as Attorney General Lucey says must be done—the advocates of consolidation are pinning their hopes to the proposal for a constitutional convention. This convention would result in a wholesale unification of Chicago’s present chaotic welter of nineteen separate governments, and the various park boards, thirteen out of the nineteen of those unrelated governing and taxing bodies, would undoubtedly be welded without any legal trouble arising.
And then the women of the city will have their chance to put efficiency into the Chicago parks.