ng committees on education which are active in the
entire school system.
Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University, paid a
deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:
In Massachusetts the various women's organizations have, within the
past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
throughout the State with a thoroughness that has never been
attempted before.
Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
important reform movements in elementary education within the past
twenty years have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of
organized women. And he is right.
The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie. Early
in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
object of the libraries was diverted. Instead of collections of books on
special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
to isolated towns and villages.
Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference
books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in
getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
their work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have supplied
reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.
One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode
Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like forty
of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
of each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which
local health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the
General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and
exhibits in every State.
Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, ha
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