Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

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.