During the summer, in three school yards—the Lake View on the North Side, the Penn on the West, the Libby on the South—there were vacation schools for six weeks in the open air, with special teaching and special feeding. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided the meals and the cooks.
The gain made in physical and mental condition by the children so treated was such that the time is sure to come when the principle of extra air and extra food for below-par pupils, like the principle of kindergartens, the principle of vacation schools, and the principle of school social centers, will be absorbed into the general policy of the public school system.
And now I will say the things I hesitated to say a few moments ago.
First. Is it likely that women who have helped to add element after element of value to the public school system would fail to acquire an interest in the public school system itself? Is it likely that women who have had a voice in certain important matters would relinquish all personal concern about them immediately upon their absorption into the city government? In other words, is it strange that the topic of woman’s suffrage is now tolerated on the floor of the Chicago Woman’s Club?
Second. Might not one unwarily imagine that among the women who for so many years have given so much thought and action to school affairs there would be found many whose experience and whose leisure would be draughted (with a press gang, if necessary) into the public service?
Is it not strange that among the twenty-one members of the Chicago Board of Education only one is a woman? And doesn’t this become still stranger when it is recollected that most members of the Board of Education (to say 195 nothing of their not having merited their appointment by any notable benefits conferred on the school system) are so overwhelmed by private business as to find their attendance on board committee meetings a hardship?
This last feature of the situation is the one that more and more fills me with amazement. Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in coöperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free disposal—here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive questions of educational policy.
But never mind. Things may change. The present superintendent of schools is a woman. That’s something. And, anyway, the women I am speaking of, though increasingly conscious of the degree of their exclusion from the collective civic life of the town, do not spend so much time in repining about it as they spend in seeking 196 new opportunities for such civic service as is possible to them.
Sometimes it is hard to say whether they are within the bounds of private life or not.