With all such admirable enterprises the American Civic Association is most intimately connected. It strives to arouse communities, large and small, to the necessity of such work and assists them in it, whether it be merely an awakening to the desirability of maintaining clean back yards, or undertaking a comprehensive development along plans laid down by landscape architects, involving large bond issues and the rebuilding of cities according to the latest and most approved methods of city planning.[50] The president of the same Association, Mr. J. Horace McFarland, when introduced, on one occasion, as “the man who made over Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” said that it was not he, nor any man or set of men, who should have the credit for that. “It was the women of Harrisburg who dinned and dinned into our ears until at last we men got ashamed of our laziness and selfishness as citizens; and then the women and the men of Harrisburg made Harrisburg over into the beautiful and favored city that it is.” The vice-president-at-large, the Hon. Franklin MacVeagh, then said it was the women of Chicago who had started every one of the fifty-seven civic improvement centers in that city, and that after they were started, the men joined in and helped. This he believed to be the history of civic improvement everywhere. The civic leagues that have sprung up everywhere in towns and even in villages in the past decade are often composed entirely of women, sometimes of both sexes, but rarely exclusively of men. The leagues are in a great many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, affiliated with the American Civic Association. To its conferences they send representatives who bring back fresh ideas and increased fervor as a result of the mingling of varied views and the leadership of experienced workers. To those conferences they often carry, on the other hand, stimulating stories of the rewards of persistence and a steadfast vision. The National Municipal League, under whose auspices this volume is published, like _The American City_ and the American Civic Association, recognizes the work of women in municipal improvement. Women’s associations are affiliated with it; women attend its annual conferences and read papers and take part in the discussions; its official organ, the _National Municipal Review_, contains many articles by women on civic improvement and on women’s work in cities; and Miss Hasse, of the New York Public Library, is one of its able associate editors. Some light is shed on the attitude of women voters toward civic improvement by an account of their action in a recent election in Chicago, as related by Llewellyn Jones in the Chicago _Evening Post_ of April 30, 1914.