What Eight Million Women Want | Page 5

happens to be a skimmer, a wader, or a deep-sea diver in
standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social hour, however,
occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the realms of pure
culture.
Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a
few years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population,
a woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members
arrived with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and

indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.
"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
park since the snow melted?"
She drew a lively picture of a state of things gravely menacing to the
health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes
faced the neglected square.
"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded.
"Why don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might
at least adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed.
What do you think, Madam President?"
Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"
At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the park
made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the woman's
club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
dollars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that the money be used to
clean up and plant the park.
The council replied that it had always intended to get around to that
park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was no
park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
board.
The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
these unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make

a park board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
city attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or
bullied into giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a
park board followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became
interested in the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was
doubled by popular subscription, and the work of turning a town
rubbish heap into a cool and shady garden spot was brief but durable.
You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
woman's club was the parent of them all.
There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get."
The theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action
on any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world
have discovered a means through which they may express their
collective opinions and desires: organization, and more organization.
Lake City is but one instance in a thousand.
When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves
into clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
education; the higher education they missed by not going to college,
and they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.
The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from the
beginning, for it is not in the nature of