Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
The meeting adopted resolutions calling upon the mayor to accept the
responsibility for the reinstatement of Mrs. Young to her place in
the school system, demanding the immediate resignation of the
superintendency by John D. Shoop and appointing a committee to urge
him to withdraw; asserting that two of the remaining members of the
school board should add their resignation to the four already in the
hands of the mayor and asking Governor Dunne to call a special
session of the legislature to enact a law making the membership in
the school board an elective office and giving the voters the right
to recall board members.
Litigation resulted and Mr. Shoop refused to be a party to that and
so resumed his former position as first assistant superintendent.
The vote at the newly constituted board recorded thirteen for Mrs.
Young, seven not voting and one absent.
While Mrs. Young had accepted, before her reinstatement, the
position of educational editor of the Chicago _Tribune_ and had
published her salutatory, she intimated her willingness to be
reinstated on condition that the board of education should be so
reconstituted as adequately to support her administration. Although
the mayor exacted pledges from his new appointees to assure Mrs.
Young’s reëlection, yet the majority of the board is still so
negative in its ability and so colorless in its attitude toward
educational policies that at best Mrs. Young will find inadequate
support for the continuance or development of her positive program.
Nevertheless she promptly resumed her duties at the end of December,
1913.
The opposition to Mrs. Young seems to be personal rather than
political. Her stout stand for the prerogative of the superintendent
to select textbooks and initiate the educational budget may have
disappointed the hopes of some members of the board for commercial
prestige in letting large contracts. Her cautiously planned
instruction for parents and older scholars in sex hygiene, although
authorized by a majority of the board, arouses stubborn antagonism,
especially among the people in certain ecclesiastical circles.
The most fundamental issue raised by the whole controversy is
whether the city administration should be recognized to have any
control over the school board and its policies. To safeguard the
non-political management of the schools, some are appealing to the
legislature to make the office of school trustee elective, while
others are content to leave it within the appointive power of the
mayor in their hope to make the office of mayor and alderman
non-partisan by securing their nominations by petition and their
election by a ballot from which the party circle and column shall be
eliminated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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