“‘What was the matter? Mother did not come to the Mothers’ Meeting yesterday.’
“‘Oh, she couldn’t leave the baby.’
“‘Leave the baby! Why, of course not. No one expected her to leave the baby. Tell her to come and bring the baby along.’”
So another meeting was held, and another to which the babies were brought—some women bringing as many as three, who were too young to go to school. At one Mothers’ Meeting, after the club had been well organized, there were twenty women, listening, discussing and nursing babies, all at once.
If the beginnings of the experiment were discouraging the results have more than offset the original disappointment. At the last meeting (in January) seventy of the eighty-five paid up members were present, intelligent, eager, interested, participating heartily in the discussions. It has cost years of labor, but these mothers have reached the point where they can talk intelligently about the children and their needs.
“Only yesterday,” said Miss Phelps, Kindergarten Director, “one mother said to me: ‘I used to be the most impatient woman with my children—I simply couldn’t stand it when they refused to do what I told them. The other day my mother said to me, “You’re about the most patient woman I ever saw. What’s done it?” And I said to her: “Well, mother, I do not know of anything except those folks at the kindergarten, which all helped me to look at children in a very different way.”’”
Through the Mothers’ Meetings the mothers have come to feel that they are co-operating with the teacher and the school. Those mothers who have children in the upper grades as well as in the kindergarten go to the grade teachers too, seeking advice, or making suggestions. They have learned to feel that they are an essential part of the educational plan, and their enthusiastic interest tells of the advantages gained by this co-operation.
The Oyler Mothers’ Club has been the center of the movement to clear up the community. Through them and through the grades refuse has been cleaned and kept from the streets. The club maintains, out of its fund, a medicine chest at the school, which is used by the visiting nurse. It has cleaned up the children, and that is no small item.
“Back in 1904,” says Mr. Voorhes, “I had five hundred of the children vaccinated in my office, and such dirt and vermin I never saw! Nearly every child had the high water mark on his wrist, and their clothes and bodies were filthy. They didn’t know a bathtub from a horse trough; they don’t now for the matter of that, because there are scarcely a dozen houses in this section that have bathtubs, but the children are clean.”
Each year the old members of the Mothers’ Club bring in the new mothers, saying to Miss Phelps: “This is my mother, I brought her,” “This is mine!” with a delighted satisfaction in having added something to the club. The kindergarten, filling two rooms, is thriving, and the kindergarten teachers, visiting and advising in the home, are cordially welcomed everywhere.