Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Tree Planting

While seeking to clear our city streets of unsightly and even demoralizing billboards, women have given equal attention to the constructive work of beautifying streets by the encouragement of tree planting. Of woman’s service in this field, one competent to speak, Mr. J. J. Levinson, Forester of Brooklyn and Queens Parks, New York City, has written as follows:

Never before have people cared so much about other people as they do today. Social thought and sympathy are growing more intense every day, both among men and women. The woman of today is different from the woman of yesterday, not so much in her ideals or sympathies as in the expression of these ideals. Women have always been naturally idealistic and always will be, but the difference between their present and past idealism lies in the fact that today it is more far-reaching, extending to the interests of their neighbors and the community at large.

There is a new field opening for women as factors in civic improvement. Women have always set the moral and esthetic standard in the community in which they lived, and when they once get into this new field of making our cities more beautiful—a field which is really closest to their natural bent, they ought to accomplish wonders. Their confined life of former years gave them no chance to demonstrate their fitness for this sort of work. But today new interest in outdoor life together with new social relations is bringing out the wonderful esthetic and moral qualities that have been so long diverted from the problems of the city beautiful, and are now demonstrating a woman’s superior fitness to do much in this new field. The instances where women have helped to improve their cities with trees are numerous.

In Brooklyn it was women who organized a national city tree association and who started the first tree clubs among school children in this country. The association is located at the Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. In my own work, I find that it is always the women who fight for the preservation of their trees when some public service corporation tries to injure them. It was a woman and an energetic one at that who started our Children’s Farms in Brooklyn.

Last winter, I was invited by the ladies of Rome, N. Y., to come to that city and tell them what to do for their trees. Those ladies formed a civic organization, and collected sufficient funds to care for their trees all the year. In less than a year they have demonstrated the value of their work, and are now influencing the city authorities to appropriate sufficient funds for the preservation and planting of their city trees. In Morristown, N. J., the same thing occurred. It was a Massachusetts woman who founded the first improvement society in the United States. About ten years ago women formed a civic improvement association in South Park, Chicago, and within a few years not only changed the esthetic and sanitary appearance of their own section, but extended their influence to the whole city. At Lincoln, Nebraska, the women started their civic work on the school grounds, where they planted trees, and tried by this means to inculcate in the children a love for the beautiful. How much better are such practical lessons in civics than much of our routine teaching! Only the other day, I was in communication with the mothers’ club of a public school in Flatbush which started a campaign to plant trees around their school and in the neighborhood. In California women saved the famous Calaveras grove of big trees, a matter that has become a question of national interest, and has received the commendation of Congress and the leading men of the country.

I will not cite the hundreds of other cases where women have been the prime factors in beautifying our cities with shade trees and well-kept parks, but I will say that here is a broad and interesting field awaiting the modern woman, a field that tends to make our surroundings worth living in and our citizens better and healthier; a field that requires every virtue a woman possesses—her good taste, her moral instincts, her love of the beautiful, her patience and perseverance. Because of these, her natural gifts, she is bound to excel man in this field of endeavor, for, after all, man’s sphere of influence, in a general way, is his work and this work too often tends to become a matter of such routine that there is absolutely no inspiration in it. Men too often cannot see the moral issues at stake in living on treeless streets or in sections devoid of parks. Here we are spending so many millions of dollars on our schools, and out of the 166 public schools in Brooklyn, 86 have not even one tree in front of them, and only 10 are completely surrounded by trees. I do not believe that women would tolerate this if they could help it. There is no doubt that women are the natural leaders for the realization of the city beautiful—beautiful not with a lot of expensive cut stone, formidable fences or marble columns, but beautiful with natural parks, with avenues lined with fine trees and with front yards covered with verdure and blossoms, and beautiful with children, healthy mentally and physically.

The whole subject of city trees and its vast opportunities for helping mankind has been greatly overlooked. Our schools and many other forms of civic improvement have received our attention because we have realized their importance to our health and development, but our trees, both in the parks and on the streets, have been slighted in spite of the fact that as a civic problem they are as important to our health and development and are as influential in the making of our future citizens as any other institution or form of civic improvement today.[^[52]]

Women have had to resort to law courts occasionally in their struggle for shade trees. In San José, California, they won in the courts against a corporation or mercenary property owner who wanted to override their love of beauty.