What Eight Million Women Want | Page 8

know about poys' play?--No!" And that settled it.
The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time
with better success. They received permission to open and conduct,
during the long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two
summers the women maintained that playground, holding their faith
against the opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and
the constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common
Council gracefully surrendered. They have plenty of playgrounds in
Detroit now, the latest development being winter sports.
If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared
before the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give
children skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire
plugs were for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In
fact there was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in
winter, except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on

the part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it,
and the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
playgrounds.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON
PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women
more than three hundred playgrounds for children have been
established.]
In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation schools,
established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
process of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it is
difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
different needs from the country or village children of a generation ago.
Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories
of the old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them,
and they instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The
process of educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia
sixty public schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the
city appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.
Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years
of its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds
for children. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum
providing that all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon
the question of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that
every city and town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall
after July 1, 1910, provide and maintain at least one public playground,
and at least one other playground for every additional twenty thousand
inhabitants. Something like twenty-five cities in the State have
accepted the playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the
movement, "The boy without a playground is the father of the man

without a job," has swept over the continent.
[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND,
CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL.]
This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however.
Its president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even
now the work would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's
clubs.
The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt,
how difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter,
and how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report
of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says
in part:
"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply, a
healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. _This
work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
Works, and by the Park Commission._"
Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic Club has