Mrs. Croly said in parting: "I can truly say that during the whole of my working life in New York, a period of more than forty years, my heart has bled for these poor neglected, untrained girls, who yet have the elements of a divine womanhood and motherhood within them, though undeveloped and hidden by the rankest weeds and growth."
At the Convention in New York City, held in 1901, I presented the Industrial School project, and the plan received the unanimous endorsement of all those present. It was, however, deemed wiser to omit the word "wayward," as the school was to be preventive and in no sense reformatory. A Committee was formed, of which Mrs. Croly was made Honorary Chairman; and the work upon a State Industrial School for Girls was begun.
It was my desire as Acting Chairman of the Committee that the movement should carry at all times the banner bearing the name of its inceptor, a name that would always suggest not failure but success. While seemingly insurmountable obstacles at once arose, they were more or less overcome as the preparations and work of the Committee progressed. And at the time of Mrs. Croly's death the project had reached a point more hopeful than assured, resulting in the establishment of at least one school which should stimulate the State Legislature into a realization of the needs of the young girls of the tenement-house neighborhoods, so that some time in the future there might be provided through State legislation, on a broad plan, the State Industrial or Trade School for Girls, the idea of which was conceived by Jenny June.
From Mrs. Croly's Letter to Mrs. Burns, Relative to the Proposed
Industrial School for Girls
222 WEST 23RD STREET,
Feb. 28, 1900.
My dear Mrs. Burns:
There is only one point that I would have emphasized, and that I do not find included in your otherwise excellent statement. It is the moral influence of a training for self-support. Ignorance and idleness lead to vice and crime; and a Technical Training School would do more to remedy the Social Evil and raise the standard of morals than all other influences combined. The fact that work is the great purifier is what I wish could have been embodied in the plan presented.
Yours with real regard.
J.C.C.
From Izora Chandler
How can one picture all that this one woman was to the hundreds of other women who loved her: the gentle demeanor, the thoughtful conversation, the high thinking evidenced not less in her choice of subject than in the fitness of word and phrase which gave a distinctive charm to all her utterances, whether public or private?