The Women of Tomorrow Part 16

How I wish I could make you see the whole of this city, its streets, its vacant places, the inside of its buildings, all, all at once, with all the things happening which have been set going by this Chicago Woman's Club and by the organizations with which it a.s.sociates itself!

You'd see (and in each case you'd know that what you were seeing was due either entirely or very largely to the labors of the club, its committees, its departments, or its close allies)----

You'd see night matrons in the police stations giving women arrests a degree of protection they did not at one time have.

You'd see in the Art Inst.i.tute a line of pupils who from year to year have pa.s.sed through its study rooms because of a certain scholars.h.i.+p yearly offered.

You'd see in the City Hall a new official called the city forester, helping to save the trees the town now has, issuing bulletins of professional advice, giving his aid to the Arbor Day enthusiasm which last year put some 400,000 seedlings into the parkways and private yards of Chicago.

You'd see, over the whole extent of the city, local improvement a.s.sociations, which on street cleaning and other local needs, not adequately met by the city government, spend a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

You'd see, in the jail, a school for young men prisoners, now taken over and supported by the county, but still watched by the club. You'd also see certain recent interests of the club: a woman's dining room, an examining physician to segregate contagious diseases, a fumigating plant.

You'd see the paintings on the walls of the a.s.sembly hall of the McKinley High School--the first mural paintings in any school in Chicago.

You'd see children, after school, in the park playhouses, listening to "story ladies," who tell them fairy tales, historical tales, tales of adventure and achievement.

You'd see, in one of the small parks of the West Side, a woman "social worker," who gets the mothers and fathers of the neighborhood into the way of using the park and the park building, even for Christmas Eve family parties. And then you'd see "social workers" appointed by the park board itself and paid with public money.

You'd see, in many places, audiences listening to free lectures on Social Hygiene.

You'd see important excerpts from the city code bearing on personal conduct being taken into the newspaper offices to be printed under the heading--"Ordinances You Ought to Know."

You'd see paintings and engravings being hung in the public schools by the Public School Art Society, till in a case such as that of the Drake School the collection in a single school building amounts in value to several thousand dollars.

You'd see wagonloads of coats and hats and dresses and trousers being carried from the School Children's Aid Society to public schools in all parts of the city, to be secretly conveyed to boys and girls who otherwise could not come through wintry weather to their lessons.

You'd see flower gardens springing up in many school yards, after a little encouragement and advice from the Women's Outdoor Art League.

You'd see a girl behind the walls of the Northwestern University Building, over there on Dearborn Street, telling her story of deception, or of outrage, or of error, to the superintendent of the Legal Aid Society. It used to be the Women's Protective a.s.sociation till it was merged with the Bureau of Justice a few years since. It was initiated by the Chicago Woman's Club a generation ago. It has ministered to thousands of young women cursed with that curse both of G.o.d and of man which gives them, however wronged, almost all the burden and almost all the shame of the event. It is due mainly to the work done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature's revenge, is not immune from the law's.

These things you'd see, and innumerable others. All that I have mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication which stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted.

If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.

They began, those women of the Chicago Woman's Club, with remembering that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president, retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of thousands of other woman's clubs thus:

"Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher things; through study, through _interest_ in humanity, the supreme motive of this club has come to be _service_ to humanity."

And yet I haven't mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the town by its women.

One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and rocking-chair. She inquired about him. "Him?" said the children, "He's a fellow just murdered his wife. He's our boss."

Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.

The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes farther.

At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other, with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to acc.u.mulate a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.

From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during the next eight years was an integral part of the administration of the Juvenile Court. There's little wisdom (in a city as large as Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there's a probation officer to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pa.s.s through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of them. The probation officers are the judge's eyes and hands, giving him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an effective agency for juvenile regeneration.

The Juvenile Court Committee developed a staff of probation officers, which finally had twenty-two members. The Juvenile Court Committee also undertook the maintenance and management of the detention home in which boys were sheltered and instructed while awaiting the final disposition of their cases. The Juvenile Court Committee also gave time and money to many other features of the development of the court, all the way from paying the salaries of a chief clerk and a chief stenographer to suggesting the advisability and securing the adoption of necessary amendments to the Juvenile Court law.

From the year 1898 to the year 1907 the Juvenile Court Committee raised and spent $100,000. But it did its best work in depriving itself of its occupation. It secured the pa.s.sage of a law which established the probation officer system as part of the Juvenile Court system, to be maintained forever by the county authorities. And it succeeded, after long negotiations, in persuading the county and the city governments to cooperate in the erection of a Children's Building, which houses both the court and the detention home.

The original purpose of the Juvenile Court Committee was now fulfilled. The Committee perished. But it immediately rose from its ashes as the Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation. Instead of supporting _probation_ officers to look after children who are _already_ in the care of the court, it now spends some $25,000 a year on _protective_ officers, who have it for their ultimate object to prevent children from _getting into_ the care of the court. Can anything be done to dam the stream of dependent and delinquent children which flows through the children's building so steadily? What are the subterranean sources of that stream? Can they be staunched?

The managers of the Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation, in going back of the court to study the home lives, the industrial occupations, and the amus.e.m.e.nts which form the characters, for better or for worse, of the city's children, are approaching the field in which the causes of social corruption will stand much more clearly revealed than at present to our intelligence and conscience. It is fundamental work.

But what of the women who are directing that work? What of the women who are directing the other enterprises I have mentioned? Would they make good citizens?

They are militant citizens now, _with the rank of noncombatants_.

We crossed the roof's tarred gravel once more, and once more leaned over the tiled parapet and looked abroad at the city.

"I told you," she said, "that women cannot give their leisure to useful activity without verging toward citizens.h.i.+p. That is the rule.

There are exceptions, caused by individual temperament. But that is the rule. Make one group of the women who use their leisure to _good_ purpose. Make another of the women who use their leisure to _no_ purpose. You'll find a growing desire for citizens.h.i.+p in the former. You'll find little such desire in the latter. The conflict that is going on among women who have any leisure at all is between the spirit which drives them toward a union with the life of the world and the spirit which drives them toward complete detachment and irresponsibility.

"So let's say no more about the suffrage agitation. It's simply a sequel to women's interest in the world's housekeeping. The broader question is, 'Will that interest grow?'

"One would think it could hardly help growing. The hosts of women who are earning their living--they are immersed in the world even as men.

But the women who are at home, with little children about them!

They're abstracted from the world, aren't they? Yes, _physically_, just as much as ever. But _mentally_ they come closer and closer to the world all the time.

"Have you read the Home Economics books? The day is coming, you know, when every girl will have the training those books suggest. It will make her a home woman, you say. Yes, it will help do that. But it will help even more to make her something else, too.

"Do you know that the Home Economics literature has more in it about civic service than any other one general kind of educational literature you can lay your hands on?

"Does that seem odd to you? I'll tell you the reason for it.

"Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the closeness of the relations.h.i.+p between the life of the individual and the life of the community.

"The so-called bread-and-b.u.t.ter studies, now being inserted into women's education, have the merit, superficially paradoxical, of raising the mind to the duties of citizens.h.i.+p. The simplest mother, immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of the health department, mean to those children. She will know--and when she knows she will care.

"Let me give you one ill.u.s.tration of the extent to which certain teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities of their pupils.

"In a little town far up in the Northwest there's a famous Homemakers'

School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations.

Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its two-year course, you'll find a series of lectures on 'Home and Social Economics' based on a theory which I'll try to give in almost the very words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy.

It's this:

"'The growing wealth of different communities, the application of modern inventions to home industries, the pa.s.sing of many of the former lines of women's work into the factory have brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city beautiful, education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected children and to reform delinquent children--all are legitimately within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.'

"Is that radical? Surely not. Surely it's conservative. There's not a suggestion in it of any change in woman's interests. There's only an awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused throughout the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.

"I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach better housekeeping to the whole world.

"I know I could if I would. But----