The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-09-07
CIVIC NEEDS IN
 THE SUBURB Team Work for Community Recreation
EMIL s. JOHNSON
Exclusive Service The Survey Press
 Bureau)

The large cities of the country, waking up to the chaotic condition of their reforms and charities, have been themselves organized and .ssurveyed.'' The suburbs go 8unsur- veyed It is in the suburbs that the charitable societies are seldom coup led together, seldom try for team- work It is in the suburbs that the ladies' aid society refuses to perform anything but a solo part in the music of the spheres, making it's independ- eIlt, independab1e contribution to the community, raising money wildly and spending it wildly.
 For no ladies' aid society-the term is used generically and not limited to any church organization-has a common standard or a common aim with any other. Trained workers do not have anything to do with spend- ing the funds. for trained workers are not employed. There is no attempt to plan ahead toward improving next years town. All the money that is not spent for the sectarian uses of one or another congregation is de- voted to giving food, medicine, or clothing to the very poor or to nurs- ing the sick. Essentially, this is the old fashioned woman's way of '"do- ing good"
 A WRONG START
 The truth is that women got start edwrong years ago. The trouble be- gan with the Pilgrim Fathers in the cabin of the Mayf1ower. The day long. while the men looked. forward planned constructively for the future, the women sat together mending up torn garments, knitting up raveled stockings, cutting over old clothes for thee hildren, and saving all the tiny scraps of fabric by making patch work quilts And every woman, for a moral certainty, pieced her own ma terial all into her own quilt, minded her own task. Team-wrok in mend ing Elder Brewsterss doubIet was un- thought of. Cole, Carver, and Brad ford patches were never pooled to make one quilt! Regular laid soci- ety. work, right at the start of things.
 Women have been a very long time learning the principle of cooperation, the multiplied power there is in com munity of effort. Some of them in this country are learning it now. The labor unions and the suffrage move ment are grinding it into them day by day. Certainly, modern industrial life is shaping the long dormant in- stinct for group work. Some groups already have a sense of identity, of power, of purpose
 MILLIONS WASTED
 NOW, Just as III OISWSC0I-S day, women's vital activity is the nur tllre of their own households, the safeguarding of children, the nursing of the sick, this whether by their own hands directly or by the maintenance of hospitals and nursing societies. In work for children and sick people, women's societies raise and dispense millions of dollars a year in this coun-- try Some other millions, women raise for churches. There are some millions of the total wasted, some worse than wasted. The spending lacks team work, and has no plan to- ward an ultimate end.
 have in mind an industrial sub urb with meagre opportunity for re- creation. Had $3,O00 been spent to provide some wholesome, democratic desirable place of amusement for working boys and girls the town would save amazingly on the court costs and community costs of juven- ile crime.
 Recently, group of women in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. published one is; sue of a daily paper of that city as d women's edition. Women's work in community life was especially to be sought after. But the more one trav- eled, talked, saw, the more one realiz- ed that constructive civic work in the suburbs could not be written about, because it wasn't there. Instead, one found the omnipresent social patch work club at work, it was at work that day in the Mayf1ower's cabin. There was no diseOsitjon to team