What Eight Million Women Want | Page 7

not
beautifully clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just
children. Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she
couldn't bear the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of
Pittsburg streets and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch
them, dodging wagons and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls,
fighting, and shooting craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting
arrested and being dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the
crime of playing.
"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one another:
"What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've got them
here?"
With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the
work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
successfully in the playground.
The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two in
Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More
money each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were
established. In the summer of 1899, three years after the first
experiment, Pittsburg children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny
children had three, all gifts of the women. By another year the

committee was handling thousands of dollars and managing an
enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also their work was attracting
the admiration of other club women, who asked for an opportunity to
co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of the two cities united, and
formed a joint committee of the Women's Clubs of Pittsburg and
vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.
[Illustration: CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL,
PITTSBURGH. Established by club women and for years supported by
them.]
All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women,
who bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a failure from
the start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
contribution of money.
In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
hundred dollars, with which they established one more playground and
a recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in
manual training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
dollars for the vacation schools.
In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century Club that began the playground
agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper before
the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
chairman of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the
possibility of playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited
the Board of Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked

that the Board conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the
approaching vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in
most cities declined at first.
The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs, until
all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or two
Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds.
The committee went to the Common Council this time and asked
permission to erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of
city land. This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an
abandoned reservoir which had been of no use to anybody for twenty
years. The place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn
neighborhood where many children swarmed.
The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot
does vimmens