The field is a large one and covers many things—beautifying public squares and streets, making front and back yards attractive, improving the schools and school-yards, securing parks for the people, making better the towns’ sanitary conditions, establishing dinner-clubs for factory girls, pushing the right kind of legislation for the community, planting trees, flowers and grass, establishing traveling or stationary libraries, starting church or public lecture courses, public baths, hospitals, suppression of smoke and other nuisances such as overhead telephone wires and ugly advertising boards—oh, there is no end to what can be done! Of course, no two communities need just the same improvements and town and country have different problems, but wherever you live you will find something that can be made better. And we women can do it! “A revolutionizing power as to all that changes the ‘order of one day’ lies in feminine hands, through the use of what is distinctly hers,” says that wise woman who, under the name of “C,” writes those splendid articles called “Home Thoughts” for the New York Post.
All this isn’t a matter of theory. These things have been done in many places. And why shouldn’t woman be able to bring about public improvements? More than half the population of the United States are women. In many places we can vote. Everywhere we wield a great influence over those that do vote. And surely we have brains enough.
To my mind, local women’s clubs organized for some such purpose as this are a good deal more worth while than women’s clubs organized merely for self-improvement. Work for the improvement of others—that is the best way to improve yourself. Be a citizen as well as an individual. Women’s literary and current events clubs are good institutions when they don’t try to do foolish things or make us neglect our home duties, but these same clubs might do the world, and the members, too, greater good if they would also turn their attention to helping the whole community to better things.
But to return to that Nebraska letter. I suggest that we keep it till our July number and devote that whole issue to the question of women and civic improvement. I hope that every one of you who has done any work of that kind, or seen it done, will write to the Department and tell us about it. Remember that the July number comes out June 25 and that the letters should reach me about three weeks before that time. Write now.
FLOWERS FOR JUNE NUMBER
June is a month of flowers, how will it do to devote the June number to them? That is a very big subject, so we’d better narrow it down a little. Suppose we consider only the ornamental flowers common to our gardens, woods and fields. Let us all contribute something as to the care and raising and nature of them.
We will not “study botany,” as they do in school and college, but, besides collecting information on planting, watering, repotting etc., we can get a very good bird’s eye view if what flowers are. Nearly all of us have probably raised flowers or seen them raised, but there are enough interesting facts about them to fill a hundred numbers of our Department. Let us try to collect as many interesting facts as possible so that we can have a broader knowledge when we see them or work with them in the future.
We will not include the plants or trees that bear our common fruits and vegetables. This is a subject by itself and perhaps we can take it up in some later number.
Though we are going to confine ourselves to our common flowers and plants let us get a general idea of where they belong in the vegetable kingdom—in regard to ferns, mosses, mushrooms, sea-weeds, lichens, etc.
For instance, which of these is the nearest relative to the asparagus—the oak, the fern, the lily, the mushroom or the rose? The question isn’t important to us in itself, but a very little effort will enable us to understand the general arrangements of the plants so that it will be an added pleasure all our lives.