Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
Clubs offer the follow-up work that is necessary after the dance. The
club and the dance are sometimes combined, but serious class work can
often be secured by the relaxation afforded by the weekly dance. Clubs
conducted by women for young people and for adults are very often
serious educational features in the guise of pleasure, and the results
that have already been felt, as well as the realization that far more
can be achieved if attempted on a big social scale, a municipal scale,
if possible, have led to the movement for the opening of schools as
social centers. In Manchester, New Hampshire, the club women organized
and support a Boys’ Club. They look after more than 100 young boys who
sell papers and black shoes and the like. The boys are taught trades and
the clubhouse affords them recreation and protection. No effort is
spared to arouse the ideal of good citizenship and the boys respond
nobly. The Woman’s Club at Green Bay, Wisconsin, remodeled a building
for a center for working women and transformed it into a recreational
and educational center. The Woodlawn Woman’s Club of Chicago established
an organization for housemaids which is a social center. Such centers
for domestic workers have been founded in several cities and the reports
on waywardness among domestic workers indicate that their neglect in any
scheme of recreation is serious indeed. They are a large factor in the
patronage of public dance halls and any public control that reaches the
hall reaches the domestic worker.
For children too old for the playground and too young for the dance the
club is a vital institution. No type of club has appealed to the hearts
of men and women more than the Newsboys’ Club and work with these little
waifs has led on to an interest in the regulation of street trades for
children, mothers’ pensions, and other reform measures.
MUSIC
Music as an element of recreation has been emphasized by women
everywhere as a public necessity. The Westchester Club at Mt. Vernon,
New York, holds each season a series of high-class educational concerts
for the public and these have proved very popular. This Club is composed
of nearly 400 women. It built and thoroughly equipped a large auditorium
seating 800 people, with smaller halls for recreational uses, greatly
needed in that city.
The women and men of Denver have made municipal concerts a striking
feature of their city. These concerts are held indoors in winter as well
as out-of-doors in summer and are of a very high grade.
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