St. Louis, Mo.
1. A close partnership formed between a newly aroused public and existing agencies working for the welfare of children.
2. The Exhibit is continued as a part of the traveling libraries department of the public library.
3. Sections of the Exhibit, dealing with particular subjects, loaned for circulation in churches, schools, settlements and clubs.
4. The Children’s Agencies and the churches stimulated to a stock-taking of progress and furnished an exact basis for mapping out the next steps ahead.
One of the women social workers at an Exhibit said: “We are all of us learning, for the first time, what place our work has in the city’s life. We have worked over our exhibits, trying to state in concrete terms our purpose and our success; then we see our organization placed here beside all the others, and we find out how inadequate we all are, and yet how important, each at our own job. We find out where there is overlapping and where we can use each other in the future. And then we walk over to the section on industrial conditions, or on housing, or on infant mortality, and we see the big underlying problems, that we haven’t any of us touched yet. And we realize that no private organization ever can touch those problems. Only all the people, acting for themselves through their representatives, can begin to make a dent in them.”
Dr. Anna Louise Strong, the director of exhibits of the National Child Welfare Exhibit Committee, upholds the service of the Exhibit in the face of certain critics: “I believe in the exhibit method, whatever its risks, through the faith that when the widest publicity possible is secured, truth will win out. The light that beats around a throne is no fiercer than the light that has beat around disputed statements in a child welfare exhibit. And because of this, however and whenever individual exhibitors fail, I feel that the exhibit method is, in spite of its dangers, one of the safest, just because of the wideness of its reach, and the many-sidedness of the comments aroused.”
Literature
It is not alone in such more or less spectacular educational work as exhibits of various kinds, that women have participated with such success. They are helping to create the scientific literature of social service which is based upon accurate observation and generalization. To enumerate even the important contributions of women to this literature would be impossible here, but by way of illustration we may cite simply the contributions made by women to the studies issued under the auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation:
The Evening Post of New York said of “Women and the Trades,” by Elizabeth B. Butler, who made her study in the Pittsburgh Survey, that it “represents the most complete and careful study ever made in any country of the actual working conditions of the wage-paid women of a great city.” Miss Butler has also made a study of saleswomen in mercantile stores.