Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

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.

Dance Halls

Since the love of dancing persists without abatement through the centuries, dancing must be accepted as a human need. Dancing should not, however, cause the ruin of young men and women. That would seem to be a trite remark but it has apparently taken infinite pains in investigatory and publicity work to persuade the public or any considerable portion of it that unregulated modern dance halls do injure their patrons and that they must be reformed.