Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Knowing that venereal diseases are responsible for a certain amount of feeble-mindedness in children, women have backed the legislation in several states for health certificates for marriage, for one thing. The prohibition of the marriage of the unfit or feeble-minded adults is a measure in which they are also interested as well as in proposals and practices that deal with sterilization and compulsory commitment to institutions.

Colored children, although in general they are only slightly behind white children, are now beginning to receive some of that special attention which they so much need and deserve. In addition to the investigation of mentally defective children, a study is being made by Frances Blascoer of the living conditions of colored children in New York City whose school progress has been retarded.

Blind children in New York City receive education from their earliest years as a result of the agitation and legislative work carried on by Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden of the International Sunshine Society and others. This last winter similar educational care of the blind children of the state was secured through the efforts of Mrs. Alden and the personal appeal to the legislators by a little blind girl, Rachel Askenas. Hitherto children under eight years of age had not been admitted to institutions for the blind. Now during those most receptive years they will get the necessary foundation for impressions which play so vital a part in the lives of normal children.

Special schools for foreigners have generally been started by women, we feel safe in claiming, after a review of all the evidence at hand. The Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, composed of men and women, inaugurated the work among foreigners in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but the women seem to have given most of the time necessary to make it a success.

Some months ago the judge of one of the courts in Savannah, Georgia, started the movement for free night schools for those who have to work by day. “Amid many discouragements, through months of wearying opposition, he would be inspired to renewed effort in behalf of an all-embracing education for the poor, by the knowledge of similar work done on a small scale by a few women in a rector’s study. And every now and then the helpful assurance would be given that the Woman’s Club was anxious for the success of the movement. He only learned of this because his wife was a member of the club.”[^[4]] Night schools are regular municipal institutions in the larger cities.

Truant and parental schools are incorporated also into the programs of innumerable women’s clubs today and have been secured in some cities already by the pressure of these organizations. The truant school in New York is under a woman principal who is practically a juvenile court judge.

So many organizations claim credit for the first vacation school that we shall make no effort to locate it. We do know that the Social Science Club of Newton, Massachusetts, a woman’s club, has maintained a vacation school for seventeen years. In Chicago the Civic Federation opened one vacation school in 1896, the first in Chicago. The next was opened by the University Settlement. In 1898 the women’s clubs took up the work and opened five schools. By 1906 they had eight. Chicago now has a vacation school board with a club woman as president and another as secretary; other members consist of club women and men. From 1898–1906 club women contributed nearly $25,000 annually to these schools, yet “probably 15,000 children were turned away.” The Civic Club of Philadelphia organized the first vacation school in that city and Philadelphia now has many of them under public control.

Newark, New Jersey, was the first city to incorporate vacation schools into its educational system, but in 1909 over sixty cities had some sort of vacation work going on in their school buildings.

While women’s clubs have long been interested in the vacation school, most credit for it is due to the hundreds of women teachers who have given of their services to make it helpful to the child and to the community. These teachers have often, and nearly always in the beginning, given their services without compensation and where they have been paid a salary they have generally taught for less money than they would have received for regular winter classes.

With these summer school teachers, women librarians coöperate as do visiting nurses and other social workers. The children are taken by their teachers on municipal excursions, often too, to visit places of public interest and gain some idea of municipal enterprise and government.