She tapped my shoulder and laughed.
“You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier, scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and steam—and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer mounds of stock certificates and masses of men—and organize armies for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge—and write your treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion—and write your poem. Then you’re through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable whole—that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce, produce, produce—a certain thing, a one certain thing, any 185 one certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas—you can do it. But to make a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total of warm, charming, noble, livable life—you’ll never do it, by yourself.”
She paused.
“Well,” she said, “why don’t you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside from any special qualities of my sex, don’t you know that the greatest reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and semi-leisure of certain classes of its women?”
“But they can give their leisure to ‘good works’ now if they want to,” I answered.
“Yes,” she said, “but if they do that, they’ll want to go farther. Look!”
And this is what she showed me—what she told me:
Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago Woman’s Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school, northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing 186 the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy—everything but the room.