What Eight Million Women Want | Page 6

women, or at least it is not in the
habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have served
for so many generations that they have learned to like serving better
than anything else in the world, and they add service to the pursuit of

culture, just as some of them add the important postscript to the
unimportant letter.
Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of the culture caste. One
spring day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets,"
and another member had rendered a Chopin _étude_ on the piano, they
began to talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that
the annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect
had to be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply
swarming with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed
stegomyias, merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or
said they hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.
"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's buy
a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."
So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their forces,
bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools, got
teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. The
study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.
That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States.
Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
institution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
suspects it.
An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before

the fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.
"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said there
was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is bound
to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to Mrs.
Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."
The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco did
not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and antique
art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts of things
that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.
"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.
"Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to
come from?"
"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.
They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where
people would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants
and cut flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing
else so stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct,
usually confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered
that the flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the
market over.
These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local affairs,
ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has resulted
in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for children began
as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's
clubs all over the country had been establishing playgrounds,
supporting them out of their club treasuries, and using every power of
persuasion to educate boards of education and city councils in their

favor.
Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club of
Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children;