Playgrounds
We may cite a single example which may serve as an inspiration to other public-spirited women.
A few weeks before her death, Mary Graham Jones, of Hartford, Connecticut, who did so much during her life for the betterment of child life and neighborhood life in her native city, submitted to the city authorities a plan for providing small local playgrounds for young children in various parts of the city. Her scheme was that each playground should be near enough to its neighborhood to make it convenient and safe for the children to reach and use it. The report recommended the leasing from the city at nominal rent of a dozen or more vacant lots, the preparation of the lots to be in the hands of the park department and their supervision in the hands of the department of education.
The juvenile commission of Hartford petitioned the board of aldermen for permission to lease these lots and for an appropriation to pay for their support. The request was granted, and $2,500 was allowed for the first year’s expense. Nearly all this sum was expended and the work was carried out under the supervision of the superintendent of parks, with various successful results. It seems highly probable that the work will be continued another summer and perhaps something may be done during the winter to provide for skating and like sports.
Thus the citizens of Hartford feel that Miss Jones has left their children a city-wide playground system as an enduring legacy. The Mary Graham Jones Playground is the name given by the North Street Settlement of Hartford to a place set aside for all neighborhood children under nine years of age. Miss Jones had spent sixteen years in settlement and child welfare work in Hartford. In 1900 she became headworker of the North Street Settlement.[[18]]
In a history of the playground movement in America, Herbert H. Weir, one of the field secretaries of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, says: “No age has been without its visioners who saw the light and led the way, so luckily there were men and women, especially women, who saw and understood and acted.”[[19]]
The history of their work for playgrounds shows that like almost all modern social endeavor, there has been, first, private demonstration of a public utility, then city control, then state-wide legislation to bring backward communities into line with forward urban movement. Women have everywhere been largely instrumental in initiating the playground work, they have followed it in many cases by service on appointed commissions and as paid city playground employees, and in other cases they have held positions on state recreation commissions.
Interesting and important as has been the work of individual women in this great battle for adequate recreation in cities, it is of course the associations of women that have been most powerful and determined. For an instance of the associated effort of women, we may turn to the experience of Winthrop, Massachusetts.
When the cities and towns of Massachusetts were voting on the playground referendum during the fall of 1908 and the spring of 1909, Winthrop, just outside of Boston, seemed to regret that her 7,034 people did not entitle her to a similar privilege. The people of Winthrop, however, are ingenious, and they set about seeing what might any way be done, for they were not willing to give up the idea of having playgrounds. They, particularly the women, proceeded to agitate along many lines. At a town meeting in the spring, when the towns of over 10,000 were voting on the referendum, the people inserted warrants for various appropriations for playground purposes. A special committee was appointed to consider the entire question of parks and playgrounds and report in the fall. The committee gave hearings during the summer, and went extensively into the question of the town’s development, its future needs, its peculiar nature (because of the large areas of marsh land), available sites, and so on.
In the meantime the people kept busy. They decided to conduct an experimental playground during the summer so as to gather experience, show what could be done and develop public sentiment. The Woman’s Club, the Improvement Association, the Arts and Crafts Society, the Woman’s Equal Suffrage League, apparently every organization got into the action and did valiant work. The School Committee gave the use of a convenient school yard, with a pond and suitable open area. The societies mentioned provided the apparatus; money was raised to employ a supervisor; articles such as magazines, books, toys, games, raffia, sewing materials, scissors, shovels and hoes, were solicited to give scope to the activities; the meetings of many of the societies were devoted to discussions of various aspects of the playground movement; the newspapers were kept filled with articles, comments, accounts of what other places were doing, notes on the local activities; and, finally, the whole was capped with an exhibit when the playground was closed. This exhibit was witnessed by many people, but particularly by the children, who were by then as active as any of their parents in support of the movement.
When the special town meeting was held in the fall the people were interested. The attendance was so heavy that the voting list had to be used to check off those who came and admit only voters. When business was started every seat was taken. There were other articles ahead, but by a vote of the meeting the playground question was taken up first, and the extensive report of the special committee was read throughout.
This report was an interesting civic document. It called attention to the probable growth of the town, to its peculiar formation, the centers of its present and probable development, the needs of its people, and particularly to the fact that large areas of marsh land had been purchased at low figures to be held till the town would lay sewers, construct streets and develop values. It was pointed out that the planning of the marsh lands by private owners was poorly done, that the lots were small, the houses already built poor, and that here was a chance for a development of which the town could ever be proud.
Then came the recommendation that $75,000 be appropriated to buy a large area of this marsh land for playground purposes. There was but little discussion, and the motion was unanimously carried. By this action Winthrop puts herself among the enviable towns of the country.[[20]]
Ethel Moore, president of the Board of Playground Directors of Oakland, California, has the following to say regarding playgrounds in California:
The first playground in California was opened as an experiment in 1898 by the women of the California Club under the leadership of Mrs. Lovell White. The experiment proved a success, and in a few years the same women educated the public to the point of carrying a bond issue of $741,000 and of amending the city’s charter to provide for the appointment of a playground committee.
Again the women of a city took the initiative, under the able generalship of Mrs. Willoughby Rodman and Miss Bessie D. Stoddard and in 1905 Los Angeles organized its own supervised, all-the-year-round playground, the beginning of a model recreation system.
In Oakland, due largely to the inspiration of Mrs. John Cushing, the women of the Oakland Club opened a vacation playground in a school yard as early as 1899. When, nine years later, the Playground Commission was created by municipal ordinance, it was appropriate that two members of the club that had faithfully provided for the children season after season, Mrs. G. W. Bunnell and Mrs. Cora E. Jones, should be appointed commissioners by Mayor Mott.
In 1911 Oakland adopted a charter embodying the commission form of government. The Playground Department then fell under a Board of Directors (consisting of five members, “not more than three of whom shall be of the same sex”) similar to the boards that control the Public Library, Park Department and School Department.
With the growth of these municipal systems there grew up a state-wide interest in public recreation. Courses for play-leaders were offered at the State University, and under the auspices of the San Francisco Branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, the Playground Association of California was organized in 1909. The first annual meeting of the Association took the form of a three days’ Conference of Playground Workers, the success of the gathering being due largely to the efforts of Mrs. E. L. Baldwin and Mrs. May Cheney, of the Committee.
And now each year sees marked advances in both rural and city communities; larger appropriation, new sites, better trained and better paid supervision, increased attendance, more intensive work, greater coöperation with other agencies, wider usefulness in promoting the opening of school buildings as well as in developing park properties—thus providing recreation for adults as well as for children.[[21]]
In a note to Miss Moore’s report, the editors of The American City add:
Western cities have been the first to make the control of public recreation a distinct branch of municipal government. Every California municipality of 8,000 inhabitants and over has a playground or will have one within the next year or two; all the large cities have special playground commissions provided for by their charters. Oakland may well be proud of her playgrounds. We understand that the city has now spent about half a million dollars for this purpose, and has 10 playgrounds, 5 in parks and 5 in school yards. The remodeled Moss residence, one of the finest remaining specimens of old California architecture, is to become a municipal country clubhouse, the only one of its kind in the West.
Other reports state that Seattle has already spent more than $500,000 for playgrounds, and has purchased twenty sites, twelve of which have been improved and equipped and are now under supervision. The city has three up-to-date recreational field houses and a large municipal bathing beach. Tacoma’s fine school stadium is well-known. Everett and Bellingham are two other cities of the Northwest that are expending much money and attention upon playgrounds.
Far to the South, as well as the West, we hear of woman’s work. The Civic Club (women’s) of Charleston, South Carolina, started twenty years ago a vacation playground and the need of this institution was so well demonstrated that the City Council finally purchased and established in that city the first playground in South Carolina. Five women were appointed on the Playground Commission.
It would be impossible to make even the barest mention of the women who have promoted the playground movement. Mrs. Caroline B. Alexander has mothered it in New Jersey, especially in Hoboken, a small densely populated industrial city; Lillian Wald is secretary of the Parks and Playground Association of New York which welcomed last summer about 300,000 children to the opening exercises of its summer amusement centers; a Playground Commission in Richmond, Virginia, is made up of delegates from the City Council and the Congress of Mothers; in Denver the executive body includes representatives of the school board, of the playground commission, and of the Congress of Mothers. Miss Julia Schoenfeld, field secretary of the National Playgrounds Association, is one of the most inspiring of the women in this movement and she stimulates activity in this direction throughout the country. A list given in its year book of the officers of recreation commissions and associations shows almost equal responsibility assumed by men and women for the offices of president and secretary of the same.
Having established playgrounds, women seek to maintain some supervision over them. They are advocating the use of playgrounds as evening social centers. They are asking for medical inspection and corrective exercises in the playgrounds. They are asking for experimentation in teaching in the playgrounds. They are inculcating ideas of good government among the children.
Inasmuch as in great cities like New York and Chicago there never can be enough playgrounds on the street level to meet the needs of the children, there is a decided movement in such municipalities toward the transformation of roofs into playgrounds. The Parks and Playgrounds Association of New York, directed by both men and women, has already opened several of these roof playgrounds and the influence is being felt in various constructive ways. Private owners of apartment houses are beginning to supply these facilities for young tenants as an inducement to mothers to rent homes with them. Schemes for aerial playgrounds over the streets on platforms are being proposed also.
Another very practical scheme for playgrounds is the provision of certain streets for play, traffic being shut off from them during definite hours of the day. A systematic plan is being made of New York by the present administration to ascertain to what degree this scheme can be extended and in this work two lines of interest, in which women are very active, converge: recreation and safety. Frances Perkins and other women have stimulated interest in public safety to a marked degree in New York.