Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

The Women’s Municipal League of Boston is one among the many organizations that urge the planning of future school buildings with reference to their use as social centers. Many of the old buildings are difficult if not impossible to adapt to this use. The interest of the Boston women in this forward movement toward educational recreation has strongly supported the Boston School Committee which has now in operation several evening centers for young and old in its school buildings.

The little town needs the extension of the use of its school plant quite as much as the great city as Mrs. Desha Breckenridge shows:

In the small town which I come from, Lexington, Kentucky, with about 40,000 inhabitants, we have built a public school in which we take much pride. It is in the very poorest section of the town. The school board had but $10,000 to put into the school. Some years before, the Civic League of Lexington had established a playground in this section; then a little vacation school, with cooking, sewing and carpenter work; and finally it convinced the School Board of the need of a public school there.

As the years went by and the playground was continued, we began to feel that not only a public school, but a public school of a very unusual kind was needed in that section. There was no place for social gatherings except a saloon or a grocery with saloon attachments. The young people were going uptown to the skating rinks and the moving-picture shows, and a little later we were dealing with them through the Juvenile Court. And more and more it was borne in upon us that though we might do our best through the Juvenile Court and the Reform School to repair the damage done, a cracked vase, no matter how well mended, could never be as good as a whole one; and that the sensible thing to do was to keep these children out of the Juvenile Court and the Reform School. The School Board simply had not the money to build the sort of school we wanted, nor had it the necessary conviction and faith that a poor part of the town needed so expensive a school. So when we had gotten the Board to appropriate the last remaining $10,000, we started out to add to that sum $25,000, raised by popular subscription, and went to work on the plans for a school building which would not only allow the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, but would have a kitchen, a carpenter shop, a laundry, a gymnasium, shower baths, a swimming pool and an auditorium with a stage.

We went to the “professional philanthropists,” and after we had been turned down by most of them we came back to our own people—with just enough help from a few generous outsiders to give standing at home—and raised a large part of the money by a whirlwind campaign, such as the Y. M. C. A. has tried in many places. We could not stop at $25,000; the school and grounds have now cost about $45,000, and we know so well the places we could use a few thousand more!

We began teaching school in the new building last September; it is full of children and is a joy forever. The swimming pool, the crowning glory, is not yet completed, for we had to contract for things whenever the money was in bank, and all trimmings were postponed as late as possible. The shower baths are in full effect. The laundry is being used not only to teach the school children how to wash and iron, but the mothers of the neighborhood, who bring their washing in, pay so much a wash for the use of the water and the steam drier and the beautiful ironing boards, with gas burners at the end. The big room, with the stage at the end, which serves for kindergarten in the morning and gymnasium in the afternoon, is a story and a half high, and is used for theatrical performances and dances at night. It is running full blast. We have various night clubs already started, but we could have more—and will have more when there is a little more money to pay for supervisors, or a little more time to drum up and keep in line volunteer helpers. But, even now, the school has demonstrated that the evening is the best time, not only for reaching the fathers and mothers of the school children, but the young people—girls who work in the laundries and in the stores at $3.50 a week, and who have no place to go for dancing and other recreation, and the young men from 20 to 35, working at the distillery or the tobacco warehouses.

Evening is without doubt the great time to offer recreational opportunities to working people. Most of them cannot get these except in the evening, and the meeting at the schoolhouse is a social event; it is of all others the time when teachers and settlement workers may make connection with the parents and those over the school age.[^[25]]

In almost every city, women have been behind the movement for social centers. In Lynn, Massachusetts, for example, the Women’s Political Science Club persuaded the school board to install electric lights in the Breed School so that it could be used in the evenings. One of the leading topics now in the conventions of state federations of women’s clubs is the use of the schools as social centers; and this movement is spreading rapidly to country districts which need it quite as much as do urban communities.

Miss Margaret Wilson, the daughter of the President of the United States, is one of the most ardent supporters of social centers. She has added the weight of her influence privately in constructive work and publicly in propagandist work at conferences and national conventions of various kinds.

Women are also adding to the literature on the subject of social centers for publicity value. “The School House as a Local Art Gallery” by Mrs. M. F. Johnston, and “The Social Center Movement in Minnesota” by Mrs. Mary L. Starkweather, Assistant Commissioner Women’s Department, Bureau of Labor for Minnesota, are two of the nine pamphlets issued by the Extension Division of the University of Wisconsin on Social Centers.