bers of the Chicago
Board of Education only one is a woman? And doesn't this become still
stranger when it is recollected that most members of the Board of
Education (to say nothing of their not having merited their
appointment by any notable benefits conferred on the school system)
are so overwhelmed by private business as to find their attendance on
board committee meetings a hardship?

This last feature of the situation is the one that more and more fills
me with amazement. Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational
developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in
cooeperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose
time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free
disposal--here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the
school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices
of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive
questions of educational policy.

But never mind. Things may change. The present superintendent of
schools is a woman. That's something. And, anyway, the women I am
speaking of, though increasingly conscious of the degree of their
exclusion from the collective civic life of the town, do not spend so
much time in repining about it as they spend in seeking new
opportunities for such civic service as is possible to them.

Sometimes it is hard to say whether they are within the bounds of
private life or not.

If you will go up the Chicago River, up past that bend, into the North
Branch, up beyond that gas plant where vagrant oils streak the surface
of the muddy water, vilely, vividly, with the drifting hues of a lost
and tangled rainbow, up by factory and lumber yard, up into the
reaches of the open fields, till the straight lines of wharves give
way to tree-marked windings, graceful bendings gracefully followed by
bending willows, you will come presently to a school which tries to
restore to city children something of the peace and strength of the
country.

It is the Illinois Industrial School for Girls. A few years ago it was
in collapse--filthily housed, educationally demoralized, heavily
indebted. A few women, principally from the Chicago Woman's Club,
became interested in it. They bought a farm for it. They put up
buildings for it. Not a big prison dormitory. Little brick cottages.
Matron in each one. Chance for a kind of home life. Chance, also, for
instruction in housekeeping. Big vegetab