What Eight Million Women Want | Page 9

gone out of business.
It still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling libraries
for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.
In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized
officially. The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of
the women living in each block, and the mayor has invested them with
powers of supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste
and garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
incompetent employees.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women have
succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
against throwing litter into the streets.
Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the women's
clubs hold regular town house-cleanings. One large town in the Middle
West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor
of spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club
sent a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with
its members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no
attention was paid to the notes, the photographs were posted
conspicuously in the club's public exhibit.
If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey
women, by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson
from destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a
public park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff
Dwellers' remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other
priceless relics of those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.
I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only giving a few crucial
instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically in
Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them, to
a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which lasts
a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say nothing
of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them, journey
to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts a week.
And at these state and national conventions the club women compare
their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and decide

which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all
lines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is national
in its scope.
In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in
the clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs,
holding in common certain definite opinions, and working
harmoniously towards certain definite social ends. Remember that
these eight hundred thousand women are the educated, intelligent,
socially powerful.
Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense
power an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had
courage to direct the forces under them towards vital objects.
When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected
President of the General Federation, she found a number of
old-fashioned clubs still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the
classic writers. Mrs. Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker
of prominence in her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out
of existence.
"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' and
proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."
[Illustration: MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER]
Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to the
pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are
organized for social service. A glance at their national program shows
the modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,

Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Education, Civics, Legislation,
Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state federation has
adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the individual clubs
follow as