lightly and unadvisedly. In one of the
club's old pamphlets you'll find it set down that Goethe had said that
activity without insight is an evil. Accordingly, the club had spent
its youth, from 1876 to 1883, reading, considering, discussing. But
certain topics were excluded. _Particularly woman's suffrage._

But kindergartens! Something for children! Could anything be more
womanly? So on the fifth of December, 1883, the long-apprehended
question arose: "Shall Our Club Do Practical Work?" There was much
hesitation. But the vote was affirmative.

Seems strange to-day, doesn't it, that there should have been any
hesitation at all?

There beneath us, on the Lake Front, in the Art Institute, on Sunday
afternoons, there are excellent orchestral concerts to which you will
be admitted on payment of ten cents. A work of this club.

Out over the city, if your eyes could compass it, you would see a
blind man going from place to place, North Side, West Side, South
Side, seeking out other blind people, entering their homes, teaching
them how to read the books published in Braille and Moon raised
characters, teaching them how to weave, teaching them how to use the
typewriter, teaching them even how to make stenographic notes on a
little keyboarded machine which impresses raised characters on a
tape to be read off afterwards with the finger tips, giving his
fellow-dwellers in darkness an occupation to be their solace, and
even an occupation to be their support. A work of this club.

And the interval between these two kinds of work could be filled up
with hundreds of entries. You have grown accustomed to all this. The
Chicago Woman's Club, the scores of other woman's clubs in this city,
the thousands in this country--you expect them to be active. But you
do not perceive the consequences.

When the Chicago Woman's Club started its work in the Brighton School,
there wasn't any such work in Chicago maintained by public funds. The
town's pioneer kindergarten had been founded in 1867, by a woman.
There had then grown up an association called the Chicago Froebel
Association, which established and operated kindergartens in public
school buildings out of its own resources. The Board of Education
provided space, but nothing more. The Froebel Association was composed
entirely of women, and many of its members were also members of the
Chicago Woman's Club. The steam in the cylinders of the kindergarten
movement in Chicago was the enthusia