A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 9780226156156

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A City for Children

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

Also in the series: a world more concrete: real estate and the remaking of jim crow south florida by N. D. B. Connolly

building a market: the rise of the home improvement industry, 1914–1960

urban appetites: food and culture in nineteenth-century new york

segregation: a global history of divided cities by Carl H. Nightingale

by Cindy R. Lobel

crucibles of black power: chicago’s neighborhood politics from the new deal to harold washington by Jeffrey Helgeson

the streets of san francisco: policing and the creation of a cosmopolitan liberal politics, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee

harlem: the unmaking of a ghetto by Camilo José Vergara

planning the home front: building bombers and communities at willow run by Sarah Jo Peterson purging the poorest: public housing and the design politics of twice-cleared communities by Lawrence J. Vale

brown in the windy city: mexicans and puerto ricans in postwar chicago by Lilia Fernandez

by Richard Harris

sundays at sinai: a jewish congregation in chicago by Tobias Brinkmann

in the watches of the night: life in the nocturnal city, 1820–1930 by Peter C. Baldwin

miss cutler and the case of the resurrected horse: social work and the story of poverty in america, australia, and britain by Mark Peel the transatlantic collapse of urban renewal: postwar urbanism from new york to berlin by Christopher Klemek i’ve got to make my livin’: black women’s sex work in turn-of-thecentury chicago by Cynthia M. Blair Additional series titles follow index

A City for Children Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

M a r t a G u t ma n

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Marta Gutman is associate professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and visiting professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City College of New York. She is a licensed architect. A City for Children has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities through a Research Fellowship (FB-38618-03), the Research Foundation of the City University of New York through a PSC-CUNY 37 Research Grant, the University Seminars at Columbia University, and the dean’s office at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, the City College of the City University of New York. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to include in this book material from her essay “The Physical Spaces of Childhood” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 249–65. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14   1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31128-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-15615-6 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226156156.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gutman, Marta, author.   A city for children : women, architecture, and the charitable landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 / Marta Gutman.     pages : illustrations ; cm. — (Historical studies of urban America)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-226-31128-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-15615-6 (e-book)  1. Women in charitable work—California—Oakland—History.  2. Child welfare—California—Oakland—History.  3. Urban renewal— California—Oakland—History.  4. Buildings—Remodeling for other use—California—Oakland—History.  5. Architecture—Conservation and restoration—California—Oakland—History.  6. Oakland (Calif.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—History.  I. Title.  II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.   HV99.025G88 2014   362.709794'6609041—dc23 2014010891 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Eugene, and all that we have built together

Contents

List of Illustrations / ix Acknowledgments / xv ONE

/ New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 1

TWO

/ The Landscape of Charity in California: First Imprints in San Francisco / 35

/ The Ladies Intervene: Repurposed and Purpose-Built in Temescal / 71 THREE

F O UR / The West Oakland Home: The “Noble Work for a Life Saving” of Rebecca McWade / 109 F I V E / The Saloon That Became a School: Free Kindergartens in Northern California / 143 SIX

/ The Art and Craft of Settlement Work in Oakland Point / 177

S E V E N / “The Ground Must Belong to the City”: Playgrounds and Recreation Centers in Oakland’s Neighborhoods / 213 E I G H T / Orphaned in Oakland: Institutional Life during the Progressive Era / 247

/ Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland: Day Nurseries during the Interwar Years / 291

NINE

Epilogue / 331 Oral Histories and Interviews / 351 Abbreviations Used in the Notes / 353 Notes / 355 Index / 435

I ll u s t r a t io n s

1.1

West Oakland Free Kindergarten, Oakland, 1895 / 2

1.2 San Antonio Creek, California, from a trigonometrical survey under the direction of A. D. Bache, United States Coastal Survey, 1857 / 5 1.3 Map of Oakland, recorded and surveyed by Jeremiah E. Whitcher, 1860 / 6 1.4 Steam train on Cedar Street, Oakland, 1880s / 10 1.5 Oakland Long Wharf viewed from Goat Island in the San Francisco Bay, October 1886 / 11 1.6 Butler and Bowman, real estate advertisement for Eighth Street tract, Oakland, 1876 / 12 1.7 Albert Miller house, Oakland, undated photograph / 13 1.8 Albert Miller house, first floor plan, sketched by Christian (C. O. G.) Miller in 1943 / 14 1.9 African American girl skipping rope near the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 1912 / 16 1.10 Railroad Exchange Hotel, Oakland, 1902 / 17 1.11 Davidson/Patterson cottages, Oakland, 1997 / 18 1.12 Davidson/Patterson cottage, first-floor plan, 1996 / 19 1.13 Jackson Street looking toward Lake Merritt, Oakland, 1890s / 21 1.14 Charitable landscape for children, Oakland / 26 1.15 House lifting, Oakland, 1901 / 31 1.16 Seventh Street, Oakland, 1896 / 32 2.1

“The Hearth-Stone of the Poor—Waste Steam Not Wasted,” 1876 / 43

2.2 “Alms House, Blackwell’s Island, New York, As Seen Looking North-West,” 1852 / 47 2.3

Orphan Asylum in Bloomingdale, New York, c. 1840 / 49

2.4 Robert Durkin, 1859 / 51 2.5 San Francisco Industrial School viewed from the San Jose Road, 1865 / 53 2.6

“Protestant Orphan Asylum, San Francisco,” 1870 / 57

 / Illustrations 2.7 Membership certificate for the Female Charitable Asylum, Newburyport, Massachusetts / 58 2.8

Dormitory at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, 1899 / 60

2.9 Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, San Francisco, opened in 1855 / 62 2.10 “Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society Building, Franklin Street, from the West, San Francisco,” 1870 / 65 3.1 Broadway looking south toward the harbor from Thirteenth Street, Oakland, 1873 / 74 3.2 “The Chicago Fire—Ladies Distributing Clothes to the Sufferers of Both Sexes— From a Sketch by Joseph Becker,” 1871 / 78 3.3

Mills Hall, Mills College, Oakland, 1870 / 79

3.4 Children’s Home (formerly George Beckwith’s house), Temescal, 1883. / 85 3.5 “Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five Points House of Industry,” New York City, photograph by Jacob A. Riis, c. 1880 / 86 3.6 Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and upper floor plans, c. 1878 / 88 3.7

Children’s Home, reconstructed building section, c. 1878 / 89

3.8 Home for Aged Women in Temescal, 1898 / 92 3.9

California Architect and Building News, front cover, May 1883 / 94

3.10 Home for Aged Women, 1882 / 97 3.11 Home for Aged Women, first- and second-floor plans, 1882 / 98 3.12 Home for Aged Women, longitudinal and transverse sections, 1882 / 100 3.13 Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1882 / 101 3.14 Children’s Home, 1898 / 105 3.15 Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1911–12 / 107 4.1

Whittier State School, Whittier, California, 1890 / 111

4.2 Rebecca McWade, undated photograph / 113 4.3 Rebecca McWade’s house, Oakland / 114 4.4

West Oakland Home, site development history, 1883–1904 / 119

4.5

West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1891 / 120

4.6

Prescott Grammar School, Oakland, 1893 / 121

4.7 “Cradle of  Tragedy—Substitute for European Revolving Cradle,” San Francisco Babies’ Aid, 1916 / 124 4.8 “Little Laborers of New York—Work of the Children’s Aid Society,” 1873 / 127 4.9 West Cottage at the Preston School of Industry, Ione, California, 1916 / 131 4.10 Boys and girls at the West Oakland Home, 1890s / 139 5.1

Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1895 / 145

5.2 Kate Douglas Wiggin (“The Author in Her Kindergartening Days”), undated photograph / 147 5.3 Silver Street Free Kindergarten and Training School, San Francisco, c. 1880 / 151 5.4 View of Pine Street near the corner of Chase Street, Oakland, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934 / 156

Illustrations / xi 5.5

West Oakland Free Kindergarten, context map, 1889 / 159

5.6

Davidson/Patterson saloon and rooming house, Oakland, 1997 / 160

5.7

Mint Saloon, Oakland, undated photograph / 161

5.8 Directors of the Woman’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, San Francisco, photograph by Louis Thors, 1895 / 169 5.9

Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, Oakland, c. 1894 / 173

6.1

Garment class, West Oakland Settlement, 1900 / 178

6.2

Almira Huntington’s house, Oakland, 1997 / 185

6.3

Hull House, Chicago, original mansion and addition, 1891 / 187

6.4 West Oakland Settlement and New Century Club, site development history, 1895–1910 / 189 6.5

View of the West Oakland Settlement, 1900 / 190

6.6 Elizabeth Watt and the Mizpah Sewing Class at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900 / 195 6.7

“A Quiet Hour” at the Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 1900 / 197

6.8 “The Living-Room: Much in Little Space,” 1881 / 198 6.9

Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900 / 199

6.10 Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900 / 200 6.11 “Practice Class in the Oakland Cooking School,” 1900 / 206 7.1

Playground at Tompkins Grammar School, Oakland, 1910 / 214

7.2

Mothers’ Charity Club, Oakland, undated photograph / 215

7.3 “Presenting the Extreme of International Adjustment,” Vacation School at the Tompkins Grammar School, 1900 / 218 7.4 “Our Pond, Oakland, Cal.,” 1884 / 219 7.5 Boys’ Club using the free library at the New Century Club, Oakland, 1902 / 229 7.6

“The Cooking School of the New Century Club,” 1902 / 230

7.7 The New Century Club’s “Committee Room,” 1902 / 231 7.8 Ebell Society, after 1906 / 233 7.9

“Home of the New Century Club,” after 1906 / 234

7.10 Gymnastics class at the New Century Club, 1910 / 236 7.11 New Century Club Recreation Center Playground, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934 / 239 7.12 Tompkins Grammar School and the Oakland social settlement, site plan, 1910 / 241 7.13 Women distributing pure milk in front of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1912 / 246 8.1 “Little Girls at Dumbbell-Exercise,” City Hospital and Orphanage (under the direction of the Grey Nuns of the Cross), Ogdensburg, New York, 1903 / 250 8.2

Amy Steinhardt, photograph by Arnold Genthe, c. 1905 / 256

8.3

West Oakland Home, Oakland, context map, 1910 / 262

8.4

Home Club and Smith Cottages, Oakland, undated photograph / 264

xii / Illustrations 8.5

Florence Cottage, Oakland, 1902 / 265

8.6

Cottage for Babies and Small Children, Oakland 1916 / 266

8.7

Playground for toddlers at the West Oakland Home, after 1904 / 267

8.8

West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1916 / 269

8.9

Matron and children at the West Oakland Home, Oakland, 1920s / 270

8.10 Campers from the West Oakland Home at Crow’s Canyon, California, 1920s / 270 8.11 Mary Crocker Cottage, Oakland, 1930 / 271 8.12 Oakland Technical High School, photograph by Harry Courtright, c. 1917 / 273 8.13 Oakland Technical High School seen from the air, undated photograph by Harry Courtright / 275 8.14 Ladies’ Relief Society, Oakland, site plan, 1928 / 276 8.15 Mollie and Berta Lee Cooley outside the De Fremery Nursery, 1925 / 278 8.16 Lois and Belva Cooley outside the Children’s Home, 1926 / 279 8.17 Studio One Art Center, formerly the Children’s Home, Oakland, 2001 / 280 8.18 Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and second floor plans, 1930 / 280 8.19 Boys’ dining room at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900 / 284 8.20 Girls’ dormitory at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900 / 286 8.21 Cooley sisters and their father at Mosswood Park, Oakland, 1929 / 287 8.22 Cooley sisters in front of the De Fremery Nursery, 1932 / 288 9.1 Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland, 2001 / 292 9.2 Day nursery at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 / 297 9.3 St. Vincent’s Day Home, Oakland, 1996 / 299 9.4 Children gathered on the front lawn of St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1922 / 304 9.5 Easter Sunday at Beth Eden Baptist Church, Oakland, c. 1901 / 305 9.6 Ku Klux Klan marching in the Independence Day parade, Richmond, California, 1924 / 307 9.7 Fanny Wall and Lucinda B. Tilghman, undated photographs / 309 9.8 Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland, undated photo­graph / 313 9.9 Birthday party at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 1940s / 314 9.10 Mary C. Jackson Netherland at her house, Oakland, 1940s / 316 9.11 St. Vincent’s Day Home and Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Oakland, site plan, 1951 / 317 9.12 Linden Street (“Colored”) Branch of the YWCA, Oakland, undated photograph / 318 9.13 Board of directors of the Fannie Wall Home, undated photograph / 322 9.14 Ceremony at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 1948 / 324 9.15 St. Vincent’s Day Home after slum clearance, 1960s / 326 9.16 St. Vincent’s Day Home, Oakland, site plan, 1972 / 327

Illustrations / xiii 9.17 Addition to St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1995 / 328 E.1 “Wrecker Uses Sherman Tank to Blitz Old Homes,” 1960 / 332 E.2 US Post Office sorting facility, Oakland, 1997 / 333 E.3 Arthur Patterson, 1995 / 334 E.4 Campbell Village, Oakland, in construction, 1940 / 340 E.5 Campbell Village, Oakland, with a racially integrated playground in 1941 / 341 E.6 Former central headquarters of the Black Panther Party, Oakland, 2012 / 345 E.7 Studio One Art Center, Oakland, photograph by Alan H. Woo, 2012 / 348

A ck n owledgme n t s

It’s possible to look over West Oakland from the elevated platform of the Bay Area’s commuter train and grasp, all too easily, the devastation wreaked by the state on an impoverished community. From this perspective, West Oakland is a textbook example of the failure of postwar urban planning in the United States; a place where the size, singularity of purpose, and design of freeways, rapid transit, public housing, vast parking lots, and a mammoth mail sorting facility overwhelm the physical remains of an older, smallerscale, heterogeneous city. Missing is a sense of the vitality of the remaining older residential fabric and of public buildings and spaces, including the charitable landscape built by women for children. With so many sites cleared, this largely erased landscape became apparent to me through a series of fortuitous and not so fortuitous events. After the Cypress Freeway collapsed in West Oakland during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the California State Department of Transportation formed a study team to document the area as part of the replacement project. I was invited to join the group, and while working under the auspices of the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University, I learned that women repurposed buildings to make public architecture for children in Oakland. This method of making urban institutions, which I had learned about in architecture practice in New York City, tied into my abiding interest in investigating how in different historical circumstances men, women, and children harness opportunities in the built environment to make better lives for themselves and their fellow citizens. This book, many years in the making, is the result. It has benefited from and been sustained by generous colleagues, friends, and institutions. I am deeply grateful to Linda Gordon, Abigail A. Van Slyck, Carla Yanni, and

xvi / Acknowledgments

an anonymous scholar for reading the manuscript in its entirety and challenging me to write a better book. Amy Ogata shared her expert knowledge of the Arts and Crafts movement, and Ellen Handy did the same for nineteenth-century photographic prints. Dell Upton watched over this project from the beginning, helping me frame questions, and inspiring me with his own exemplary scholarship. Mary Ryan patiently taught me to analyze gender at work in the landscape, for which I am most grateful, as I am for our ongoing spirited conversations about women’s public culture, localism, municipalism, and reform. As Paul Rabinow and the late Allan Pred tutored me in social theory, they helped me to think about architecture history in new and creative ways. Paul Groth took me on my first trip to West Oakland, one that, with this project, changed my understanding of American urban history. Paul also read an earlier draft of the revised manuscript and offered comments that sharpened the thinking and the writing. For reading portions of the manuscript in various stages of its preparation, my thanks to Zeynep Çelik, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Paula S. Fass, Barrie Thorne, Greg Hise, Sally McMurry, Annmarie Adams, Daniel Bluestone, Alice Friedman, Eric Sandweiss, Carl Abbott, Max Page, Daphne Spain, Janice Reiff, Scott Henderson, and especially Camille Hall, Elaine JacksonRetondo, Jim Buckley, and Bill Littmann. A research fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities made it possible to start revising the book manuscript (and my thanks to Dick Walker for welcoming me to the California Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley, while I did so). Over the years, this project has profited from conversations with many other people including the late Robert Gutman, the late William Jordy, the late Roger Montgomery, Richard Longstreth, Hilary Ballon, Dolores Hayden, Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Alison Isenberg, David Sloane, Catherine Zipf, Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Michael Sorkin, Carol Willis, Peggy Deamer, Andrew Dolkart, Marci Reaven, Zeynep Kezer, Jyoti Hoshagrahar, Diane Harris, Swati Chattopadhyay, Rebecca Ginsberg, Diane Shaw, and Greg Castillo. Thanks for comments and counsel that enriched my work immeasurably— and also to Louis P. Nelson, Cynthia G. Falk, Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, and Catherine Bishir for inspiring me to become a better writer, through our shared work on Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Archi­ tecture Forum. Betty Marvin, Jim Buckley, Gray Brechin, Gretchen LemkeSantangelo, Donald Hausler, Michael Knight, Donna Graves, Robert O. Self, and Donna Murch generously shared documents and insights about the history of Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis included me in the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, and others on the

Acknowledgments / xvii

team graciously shared materials—most importantly, Aicha Woods, Karana Hattersley-Drayton, and Elaine-Maryse Solari. My understanding of children and childhood in the charitable landscape began to unfold through lively conversations with Paula S. Fass during my fellowship at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (when it was directed by Randolph Starn and Christina Gillis). This understand­ ing took off during my subsequent fellowship at the Berkeley Center for Working Families, where Ning de Coninck-Smith joined the discussions, which were led by Barrie Thorne and Arlie Hochschild; Paula Fass, Peter Stearns, and John Gillis pitched in too. Thanks to these exchanges, collaboration with Ning on Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Ma­ terial Culture of Children, and the hard work of like-minded historians, we know more than we did about the history of children’s spaces in modern society. It’s been a pleasure to work with Abby Van Slyck, Amy Ogata, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Anna Davin, Anne-Marie Châtelet, Roy Kozlovsky, Ann­ marie Adams, Cathy Burke, Marie Warsh, Simon Sleight, and others to make this happen. This project, to write children into the history of architecture, has also been helped by presentations at conferences and symposia—and the smart comments offered by my colleagues. Especially helpful have been “A New Social Order,” the interdisciplinary symposium at the Sackler Art Museum held in conjunction with the exhibit “Classified Documents: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931” at Harvard University (2007); “Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children,” sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Cotsen’s Children’s Library, Princeton University (2008–9); and “Urban Childhoods,” the interdisciplinary conference at the New York Institute of Technology (2009). Thanks, respectively, to Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamuniere, to Georgia Barnhill and Andrea Immel, and to Nicholas Bloom for inviting my participation. Early in my research, Zeynep Çelik and Tony Schuman invited me to present to the City Seminar at Columbia University, where I continue to profit from the stimulating intellectual exchange. Joan Ockman and Mary McLeod did the same at the Buell Dissertation Colloquium, also at Columbia University. Librarians, archivists, and other historians offered invaluable assistance. Betty Marvin opened the research files of the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey; all historians should be so fortunate to have access to such accurate, thorough materials, and to work with such a dedicated and generous historian. At the Oakland History Room of the Oakland Public Library, William Sturm, Kathleen DiGiovanni, Steven Lavoie, and Dorothy Lazard

xviii / Acknowledgments

patiently answered requests for materials and then some, turning up new documents and images. I could not have completed this book without their help. Shannon McQueen, Kim Anderson, and Rick Moss helped find images at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO), and Donald Bastion, former director of the Richmond Museum of History, shared newspaper clippings describing the infamous Ku Klux Klan parade of July 1924. Susan Snyder, at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, started to help me at the beginning of my research, and it has been my great pleasure to work with her through completion of the book. I am also grateful to Jackie Pennie at the American Antiquarian Society; Mary Morganti at the California Historical Society; Kathleen A. Correia at the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento; Anne Clary at the Chapin Hall Center for Children; Angela Hoover at the Chicago History Museum; Brian Quigly at the Earth Sciences Library at University of California, Berkeley; Isabella Donadio at the Harvard University Art Museums; Nilda Rivera at the Museum of the City of New York; Eleanor Gillers at the New-York Historical Society; Nathan Kerr at the Oakland Museum of California; Melinda McCrary at the Richmond Museum of History; Patricia L. Keats at the Society of California Pioneers; Raquel Chavez and Michele Welsing at the Southern California Library, Los Angeles; Valerie Harris at the Special Collections, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Alan Woo, for his stunning photograph of Studio One. One of the great joys of this research has been to meet people in the Bay Area, so many of them women, who have had firsthand experiences with the charitable landscape. I especially want to thank Sister Corinne Marie Mohrmann, executive director of the St. Vincent’s Day Home, for taking time from her busy schedule to share knowledge of the day home, for allowing me to visit the home, and for granting permission to use material in this book. Sister Michaela O’Connor shared her experiences working at the day home and helped me connect with the Mother House of the Sisters of the Holy Family in Fremont, California, where I spent hours in the archive—and had my first hands-on experience with Froebel blocks! When Maryanne McKale directed the Lincoln Child Center, she gave generously of her time and knowledge, discussed the intricacies of licensing, and allowed me to visit the center and peruse its archives, where I discovered the marvelous scrapbooks that women put together to record the center’s history. Christine Stoner-Mertz, chief executive officer of the LCC since 2006, has also helped me in countless ways, most recently by welcoming me to Lincoln’s new facility in West Oakland. I am grateful for permission to publish material (and to Ronit Tulloch for following up on my inquiries). It was a

Acknowledgments / xix

great pleasure and honor to be invited to share what I had learned about Lincoln with women who continue to work and volunteer at this important charity for children in the Bay Area. Thanks are also due to the people who welcomed me to buildings once owned by the Ladies’ Relief Society—at the Park Day School (formerly the Babies’ Nursery), Tom Little, Flo Hodes, and Laurie Grossman; at the former Matilda Brown Home (now owned by Park Day), Lois O’Connell, Ella Raiford, and Rosa West; at the Studio One Art Center (formerly the Children’s Home), Johnette Jones-Morton, Sandy Strehlou, Betsy Yost, Chris Noll, and especially Jeff Norman, who generously shared his knowledge of Studio One. It’s been a great pleasure to work with Jeff over the years, contributing to the effort to list Studio One on the National Register, convincing the Oakland City Council to float the bond issue that made the restoration possible, and ensuring that the archive of the Ladies’ Home Society was donated to the Bancroft Library. Then, there are all who talked about their childhoods with me. I am deeply indebted to Di Starr for introducing me to Mollie Fisher and Belva Heer, who made it possible to integrate children’s voices and experiences into this book. I thank Mollie and especially Belva, who traveled to Oakland to visit Studio One in spite of a painful terminal illness. Sally Gorham, Roberta White McBride, Robert White, and Sara McCullen-Krueger also discussed childhood in various institutions. I thank them for answering all my questions and wish that I could have answered all of theirs, including the most burning one: Why did their placement in an orphanage happen in the first place? Arthur Patterson spent many hours helping me to dissect the architectural history of the New Century Club and to understand his life as an African American boy in West Oakland and the challenges faced by his mother, Annie Patterson. A project that began in the Bay Area was finished on the East Coast, amid new and supportive colleagues. My special thanks to George Ranalli, dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, for welcoming me to the City College of New York, supporting my research, and generously underwriting the illustration program. A full sabbatical leave gave me needed time for revisions, and I thank both the dean and Lisa StaianoCoico, president of City College, for all that they have done to sustain a vibrant research culture at CCNY. At the architecture school Camille Hall and her predecessor, Stephanie Smith, worked with me to manage the arduous task of collecting permissions from a daunting number of archives and libraries. Stopping by Camille’s office to chat about history writing always makes my day. Michael Miller, Erica Torres, and Jacqueline Aguilar

xx / Acknowledgments

helped in countless ways. Judy Connorton and Ching-Jung Chen, librarians extraordinaire, cheered me on, along with Nilda Sanchez and Todd Pickens. Aja Garzon and Junko Fujimoto accomplished wonders, making beautiful scans of old photographs at the SSA Visual Resources Library. I am also grateful to the University Seminars at Columbia University and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York for their support of the illustration program. Many thanks to Mireille Moga and Sheila Moss for all their hard work on illustrations, to Mireille and Alexandra Kruger for collating permissions, and to George Caranza, key worder extraordinaire. Special thanks to Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Gene Sparling, and Christian Dauer for assistance with drawings early on, and to Rebecca Ginsberg, Tamsen Anderson, and especially Karen McNeill for research in Berkeley. Earlier versions of some chapters in this book were published as working papers by the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project and the Berkeley Center for Working Families, and as articles in the Pacific Historical Review and People, Power, and Places, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VIII, edited by Sally McMurray and Annmarie Adams. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to include in this book material from my essay “The Physical Spaces of Childhood” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass. I owe a special debt to Alison Isenberg, who brought my work to the attention of Robert Devens at the University of Chicago Press. I thank Robert and the editors of Historical Studies of Urban America, especially Becky Nicolaides, for their unstinting support of this book. Robert’s expert editing made me a better writer; his patience and unflagging good humor made it a pleasure to work with him. After Robert moved on, Tim Mennel cheerfully stepped in to guide the book into and through production, ably assisted by Russell Damien. Renaldo Migaldi copyedited the book with care, diligence, and precision; Laura Bevier prepared the index; and Jeana Ganskop helped with proofreading. Finally, my thanks take me to debts of a more personal nature. On the East Coast, all of the extended Gutman clan—especially Judith Mara Gutman, Nell Gutman, Halley Gutman McWilliam, and Lily Gutman McWilliam— bolstered spirits and celebrated successes. On the West Coast, Virginia and Gerald Sparling have been model parents-in-law: Ginny helped me understand, through her personal example, the rich history of women’s volunteerism in our country. Sadly, she passed away before I could hand her a copy of this finished book. From near and far, Frances Campani, Wendy Lamb, Jeri Zempel, Amy Stein, and so many other friends cheered me on, offering support in countless ways. I hope they can see themselves and their insights in

Acknowledgments / xxi

the following pages (and thanks especially to Zeynep, Mary, Hilary, Paula, and Abby for the nudges to get this book done). As I worked on this book, Gene Sparling and I raised our children, Isaac and Nina. Our experiences, as parents with a growing family and with our circle of friends in the Bay Area, opened me to new understandings of children and childhood as we watched our kids on the playground, brought them to school, and arranged child care, music lessons, and summer camps. I thank all for the lessons learned, especially Jenny Holland, Madeline Prager, Lincoln Spector, Malcolm Waugh, Abby Ginzberg, Diane Douglas, Darryl Dickerhoff, Elaine Jackson-Retondo, Pete Retondo, Chris Celata, Jay Marx, and our now grown children. I also thank Nina, Isaac, and Gene for moving across the United States twice—for taking the trip from New York to Berkeley and back again to New York. Since I set aside practicing architecture for writing its history, Gene has sustained me in every possible manner, putting up with dry runs of conference papers, crafting drawings at midnight, reading countless drafts, insisting on precision in conceptualization, demanding elegance in language, and, most importantly, offering unflagging companionship and love. This book is a better one for his care and attention. From my earliest childhood, my parents, the late Herbert G. Gutman and Judith Mara Gutman, shared their love of reading and research with me, as they taught me to think historically and to admire ordinary people, record their stories, and appreciate their places. They insisted that I examine power and culture in all walks of life, and that I bring a passion for social justice to scholarship. My debt to them is deep and abiding. A piece of this book belongs to each of them, as it does to Nina, Isaac, and Gene.

one

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland

Let’s start early on an August morning in 1888, as Elizabeth Betts readied herself for work. The kindergarten teacher, a graduate of the California Kindergarten Training School in San Francisco, lived and worked in the urbanizing flatlands in the western part of Oakland, California. In the early 1940s a former resident, evidently without sympathy for African Americans arriving during the Great Migration, recalled that only earlier in the city’s history had West Oakland “contained many of the city’s best citizens.”1 To those men and women who, like Betts, were white, Protestant, and economically privileged in the late nineteenth century, the regular urban fabric spoke of successful city building; a success needed to cement their imperial ambition in the American West and to secure a good childhood for their children. In Betts’s residential neighborhood, narrow wooden sidewalks separated gravel-covered streets from neatly fenced front yards, and the occasional empty lot, filled with tall grasses, yellowed from the long dry spell of a Cal­ ifornia summer. I like to think that as the morning fog started to clear, Betts stepped out the front door, saw the foothills of the San Leandro Mountains shimmering in the distance, and perhaps imagined the fecund terrain beyond in the great Central Valley. She waved goodbye to her parents—William, a wealthy English immigrant who owned a carriage spring company in San Francisco, and Sarah, active in the Congregational Church—as she walked across the sidewalk and stepped into the waiting carriage. Even in this seemingly bucolic setting, railroad schedules and factory whistles outlined the rhythm of the day. At nine o’clock sharp, “Miss Lizzie” expected thirty boys and girls at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten (figure 1.1). Two years earlier she had set up the charity school for working-class children in Oakland Point, a neighborhood that was also in West Oakland but closer to the heart of the

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Figure 1.1.  The West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 341 (757) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1895. By the time this photograph was taken, Winnie McFarland had replaced Elizabeth Betts as head teacher; she may be the woman seated in the midst of more than forty children. Edna Jones and Maud Cheek, standing at the left, are assistants. Two doors open into the schoolroom, which previously had been used as a saloon. Since Oakland’s street addresses changed in 1910, both the contemporary and the historic numbers are indicated (the latter in parentheses). Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

industrial machine than the capacious home of the Betts family on Myrtle Street. From the many properties for rent, Betts selected a sunny room inside an inexpensive building on Peralta Street, close to the Southern Pacific’s sprawling railroad yards. Her decision to repurpose this place, remembered to have been “the former premises of a liquor-saloon,” rendered explicit her intent to educate and to socialize children in need.2 “She didn’t look for an elaborate house and in a location where she would be surrounded by her friends,” an admirer wrote subsequently in the Sunday Call Magazine. “No, not she. Instead she went into the quarters of the poorest of Oakland’s poor.”3 The author of the Call article, Madge Moore, may have exaggerated the poverty of Oakland Point in the late 1880s, but she nonetheless underscored with her backward glance this important point. Differences between the single-use neighborhood, where Betts lived, and the mixed-use neighborhood, where she worked, prompted women of  her social class to venture to unfamiliar urban places to change the circumstances of working-

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 

class childhood. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten was one result. It belonged to the charitable landscape for children—the physical network of buildings and spaces that women put together in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to improve cities for kids. In the gendered, mixed economy of social welfare that prevailed historically across the United States, state, county, and municipal governments counted on women to care for children in need, and women were more than eager to oblige. Although the precise configuration of responsibility varied from state to state, women relied on the same instrument to structure public-private partnerships. They organized voluntary associations, the element of civil society that Americans from all walks of life used in the nineteenth century to extend state power—in this case, to protect children.4 The investments in childhood helped to make the American city a place for hope about the future, rather than only for despair about poverty, pollution, disease, crime, corruption, and injustice in the present.5 Charitable institutions for children, often housed in repurposed buildings and run by female volunteers, played a key role in addressing the social ills brought about by industrialization and urbanization, bringing order to the urban landscape, and creating reserves of public places freed from speculative development. However, not all problems were resolved. As America urbanized, the charitable landscape rendered public the architectural decisions of women and the social needs of children; it also inscribed physical reminders of the failures that had demanded its creation. Since children did not benefit equally from adult largesse, the physical spaces made for them in the charitable landscape served to ingrain inequalities and prejudices as well as to endow them with a special, idealized world. The process of giving and getting, the presence of many kinds of buildings, and the unpredictable relationships between people and places made the charitable landscape one of many intersecting cultural landscapes that gave an incomplete, tenuous, fragile, and imperfect order to nineteenth-century American cities. California was no exception. Americans held dear to the romantic sense of the West as a special region, even after Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, the feature that he alleged defined the region.6 In California more than elsewhere, the natural beauty, astonishing landforms, and abundant plant and animal species stunned newcomers.7 Especially for children, they praised the advantages of a temperate climate and ready access to nature—the sense that this was a new Eden. Nevertheless Americans, hun­ gry for land and greedy for gold, introduced a market economy and class structure to this place: they seized the province of Alta California in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, executed the Treaty of Guadalupe

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Hidalgo in 1848, which delivered the territory to the United States, and wrote a constitution during the Gold Rush, in anticipation that the territory would be admitted to the Union. The victors had promised to respect Mexican civil law, which had banned slavery since 1823, but the status of slavery in this new territory of the United States erupted during the 1848 presidential election. Opponents to slavery’s advance formed the Free Soil Party, while Whigs and Democrats, the nation’s main political parties, waffled on whether to restrict slavery in California—the explosive issue that had at least in part inspired the Mexican-American War. Even though the proslavery Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, a war hero and slave owner from Louisiana, won the election, Free Soil sentiment took hold on the Pacific Coast. The conveners of the constitutional convention in Monterey voted to ban slavery in 1849, and California was admitted—as a free state, in 1850.8 In the face of ensuing bitter contests over land and water rights, huge capitalist enterprises based on the extraction of natural resources spread across the hinterland, railroads linked them to markets, and city builders began to make California urban. By the 1870s, California ranked among the ten most urbanized states in the nation.9 By then, women had put in place components of the charitable landscape for children. Their concern was the crises that damaged childhood during industrialization, urbanization, and migration even in a small city like Oakland. During the heady years of the Gold Rush, Horace Carpentier and two other Yankee land speculators set out to plat this new city, eight miles across the bay from the booming town of San Francisco. They staked adjacent claims on the flatlands of the contra costa (other shore), north of an estuary that assured a sheltered harbor (figure 1.2). Most of the stately oak trees that gave the town its name were cleared, milled, and used to build on the 480-acre site. The town sat within the El Rancho de San Antonio, 44,800 acres of land that had once been home to the Miwok people. In 1820 the Spanish crown had given this huge parcel to Luís María Peralta in thanks for military service to the colony. Peralta and his sons retained ownership after Mexico won independence from Spain in the following year, but their claim to this property came to naught. Like other wealthy Californios, the family could not control its vast holdings in the face of the Anglo invasion.10 The commission in 1850 of a plat on the land stolen from this family, state approval in 1852 of the charter based on the illegal plat, and another action endorse the claim that the city was “conceived in iniquity and nurtured on corruption.”11 In 1868, Carpentier bribed Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis P. Huntington, the directors of

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 

Figure 1.2.  San Antonio Creek, California, from a trigonometrical survey made under the direction of A. D. Bache, United States Coastal Survey, 1857. This view, a detail of a much larger drawing, shows the new city of Oakland in relationship to the bay, the estuary, and the Oakland hills. Visible downtown is the street grid, delineated by Julius Kellersberger in 1850 but not yet fully platted on the flatlands. Broadway is the central street, with San Pablo Avenue and Telegraph Avenue branching to the northwest. At the site of the small dock in Oakland Point, jutting into the bay, the Pacific Railroad built two huge piers, the Long Wharf and the Oakland Mole. Californios lost control of virtually all the land depicted on this map, which they had earlier seized themselves from the Miwok and other Indian tribes. Courtesy of the NARA CG&S Collection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Historic Coast & Geodetic Survey Image ID cgs05168.

the transcontinental railroad, to terminate that railroad in Oakland. The deal they struck delivered to these men, the Big Four, all riparian rights, including those to the harbor.12 The Big Four won control of a city with a prosaic plan (figure 1.3). Julius Kellersberger, the surveyor, delivered the expected and nothing more to Carpentier and his partners—an even grid of streets, rectangular city blocks divided into narrow building lots, four public squares, and one main street, Broadway, that linked the harbor to Telegraph Avenue and San Pablo Avenue. To the west, the skew of Market Street, off the Kellersberger plat, set the orientation for streets that would over time fill the area known as “West of Market.”13

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Figure 1.3.  Map of Oakland, recorded and surveyed by Jeremiah E. Whitcher, 1860. The 480-acre Kellersberger plat is shown in full, with Market Street skewed off the downtown street grid. West of Market, Eighth Street is the principal east-west street, and Adeline Street runs north and south, platted at the behest of James and Virginie de Fremery, adjacent to their estate and named after their daughter. Women in this family were active in Oakland charities. The Pullman Palace Car Company designated Adeline Street the eastern edge of settlement for black porters in its employ. The extent of the wetlands separating Oakland Point from downtown is clear, as is the rural character of settlement, even though speculators had started to assemble building lots. The buildings illustrated in the map border include the College of California (located on the double lot labeled “college block”), precursor of the public university in Berkeley. Courtesy of  The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Three years after the delineation of the plat, the city opened its first public school (a one-room schoolhouse) and an educator set up a private academy (three kids enrolled in an institution that would become the nucleus of the University of California).14 The modest buildings indicated a remarkable change about to burst forth—one that would transform cities and alter childhood. Kids have always lived, played, learned, and worked in urban spaces. However, the provision of places purposefully made for children is an invention of the modern world. As a new understanding of childhood began to emerge in early modern Europe, privileged classes embraced a sentimental ideal that emphasized a child’s innocence.15 The sentimental construction of childhood intersected with other revolution-

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 

ary social changes—the separation of home and work, the modern concept of public and private life, the rise of consumer society—and a new belief that was a product of the Enlightenment. Positing an active relationship between buildings and people, it asserted that because material culture affects human beings, it should shape their behavior.16 Places and objects started to change as adults used them to ensure that children had a good childhood—one that was protected, happy, and playful. They also counted on all sorts of “stuff” to protect children from adult sexual desire, to display kids as valuable objects, and to insulate themselves from childish behavior and activities. In houses, middle- and upper-class parents expected children to play in nurseries and to sleep first in separate bedrooms and then in separate beds. Orphanages, schools, kindergartens, day care centers, hospitals, reform schools, and special prisons were built, followed by playgrounds, summer camps, museums, and libraries. Even if the metaphor of “islands” is sometimes used to describe this differentiation, children’s places were not isolated from adult hopes and fears for childhood. Adults used physical spaces and material culture to set out and put in place their goals for childhood.17 Taken together, changing ideals and changing places worked to define and prolong childhood as a time of dependency. The condition of depen­ dence, tied to “powerlessness, submission, bodily inferiority or weakness,” one historian has argued, set parameters for childhood in Western culture before it was described in terms of a specific biological age.18 As middle-class children became treasured for their emotional role in family life rather than for the market value of their wage labor, a broad consensus developed that kids should learn and play in settings made with those purposes in mind. This process, called the “sacralization of childhood” by Viviana A. Zelizer, galvanized reformers.19 They asserted the right of all kids to childhood as Americans struggled to reconcile demands for protection, charity, and dependence with the dearly held belief that liberty, rights, and independence go hand in hand in a democracy. These reformers refused to countenance resistance to the top-down call for protection even when it trounced on treasured prerogatives. One of those prerogatives was parental autonomy. In a patriarchal household, fathers, not a charity or the state, determined the course of childhood.20 A photograph of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten gives some sense of the situation in the mid-1890s (see figure 1.1). Now the building is gone, cleared in the 1920s to make way for a public playground. Since this structure, like so many others, has been lost, it’s necessary to use historic photographs to grasp the architectural character of the charitable landscape and to

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assess its effects on children.21 In this example the actual institution building process, the alteration of a saloon into a kindergarten, underscored the breadth of Betts’s message. Her goal was not only to improve childhood, but also to reform the working class family. Forty clean, neatly dressed children inhabited a place that had been made on purpose for them: the backyard of a school. Extraordinarily (remember that the US Supreme Court was about to declare that separate was equal), the charity was racially integrated. If the photograph portrayed these children as individuals by virtue of their demeanor and dress, they also belonged to an age-graded group, the kindergarten class. Supervised by three teachers and gathered to learn through play, these kids were protected from danger, disease, crime, immorality, and other contagions that kindergartners (as teachers and promoters of kindergartens were called) and other child savers believed were legion among the immigrants who lived in a neighborhood like Oakland Point.22 Reformers may have appreciated that working-class parents loved their children, but they could not grasp the manner in which these parents invested in childhood. Skilled railroad workers allowed their kids to attend the free kindergarten and gave them toys and pets to play with—and dolls and a dog are shown in the photo, an indicator that the right to play had emerged as a powerful site of identity formation by the 1890s.23 A parent with fewer resources to call upon—for example, a mother who worked in a cannery—may have struggled to do the same as she tried to strike a balance between competing areas of work, play, and education (and contested definitions of their value, too).24 The relationships depicted in figure 1.1 invite consideration of how the power produced through them shaped modern childhood. A useful concept is governmentality—offered by Michel Foucault to explain how we act in concert with others, and directed by Nikolas Rose toward children and families.25 The boundary between private and public life dissolved in the nineteenth century as the problems of children were construed to be social issues, subject to conditioning by the family, state, market, and civil society. Citizenship no longer inhabited one sphere, the political sector, in Rose’s terms. That means the photo in figure 1.1 depicts a society on the cusp of change, as the social was invented, to borrow a concept from Jacques Donzelot. The human being, in this case the child, was not conditioned solely as a moral subject, an individual shaped by religious creed; nor was the child’s body conditioned only by a normalizing gaze, directed by state authority. The child was becoming a social subject of solidarity, with citizenship rights that depended on adult protection and a childhood that needed spaces purposefully made for a young person.26

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 

All that said, any avowal of success in the conditioning of any childhood should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless of its purpose or origin, an official record, like the photograph of a kindergarten class in figure 1.1, doesn’t give a full picture of a child’s experience in an institution, to say nothing of a child’s point of view. As the anthropologist James C. Scott insists, “condition” is not by necessity “consciousness”; people invent mechanisms (he calls them “hidden transcripts”) to contest power and authority.27 Social historians also argue that a child’s “attendance” at a charity didn’t mean “acceptance.” Patrons of philanthropies balanced self-interest with altruism and desire for social control with freedom and individualism; and parents, especially single mothers, demanded help from charities to protect children and themselves from abuse.28 A woman like Betts also carried more than one vision for childhood to a charity like the free kindergarten. Kindergartners put in place programs to Americanize immigrants and ready boys and girls for gender-, class-, and race-specific futures in modern society. Even though the social construction of the economically worthless child was in place for middle-class children by the mid-1880s, the situation remained open for working-class children. In Oakland Point, more often than not, the family economy prevailed in households, where children lived, worked, and played in the shadow of the Southern Pacific railroad.

In the Shadow of the Railroad The railroad and its enormous yard in Oakland Point, filled with buildings, machines, and equipment, were the biggest things in town. The railroad monopoly also invested in several sets of parallel iron tracks. One, for freight trains, ran through the marshy wetlands that separated Oakland Point from downtown; another, for passenger trains, ran on Seventh Street, also known as Railroad Avenue; and a third set traveled north along the bay. The outcome could be deadly, as was so often the case for children. Ungated tracks ran down the middle of Railroad Avenue, and since trains barreled along at fifty miles an hour, noise, smoke, and danger were inescapable (fig­ure 1.4).29 The trains headed at first to Long Wharf, made eleven thousand feet long to handle freight and passenger traffic, and then also to the Oakland Mole, another enormous dock (figure 1.5). For a modest fare, steamboats carried people and goods from these docks to San Francisco, the biggest city in the West and the hub of the regional economy.30 Immediately, the new infrastructure spawned visions of the wealth to be won from land speculation on the east side of the bay. Soon after the first

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Figure 1.4.  Steam train on Cedar Street, crossing Seventh Street, Oakland, 1880s. This dramatic photograph depicts a common event in the gritty, mixed-use neighborhood near the railroad yards: a steam train belching a great cloud of smoke as it barrels along ungated tracks. The two-story hotel was known as Centennial House in 1881, and train smoke was a fact of life for patrons whether they were sitting on the porch or in the hotel’s saloon. In the background, four boys appear to be running alongside the train. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

transcontinental cars rolled into town, a resident declared, “The foundation of an immense city has been laid.”31 That dream failed to bear full fruit, but the link to the railroad did trigger growth in Oakland. A town of about 1,500 in 1860 became one of 10,500 in 1870 and of more than 100,000 after the turn of the century. “The locomotive is a great centralizer,” journalist Henry George insisted. “It kills little towns and builds up great cities.”32 Even if Oakland was not quite a great city, the press to urbanize altered its landscape on the Pacific Coast. The antidemocratic results were clear to George when he rode through the Oakland hills shortly after the Pacific Railroad arrived. “Like a flash,” he wrote, “it came upon me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth.”33 Skyrocketing property values did give untold advantage to a few, fulfilling George’s prophecy and spreading railroad antagonism in the state. Plenty of land and the prospect of a shorter commute to San Francisco motivated middle- and upper-class families to live west of Market Street—odor, smoke, noise, and danger to children notwithstanding. The city should not become a “smut-mill to San Francisco millionaires,” one irate taxpayer de-

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 11

clared, but rather a “city of homes” for the middle class.34 The latter outcome prevailed, and this immediate gain was obvious to many, including H. H. Bancroft, an early chronicler of California history. He noted Oakland’s “extraordinary growth as a residence suburb for San Francisco.”35 Speculators built substantial dwellings on large lots, and Eighth Street won accolades as a grand boulevard lined with poplar trees and handsome homes (fig­ure 1.6).36 The wealthy banker Albert Miller (born Mueller) commissioned an architect to design a grand home on the corner of Fourteenth and Union Streets (figures 1.7 and 1.8). Miller’s mansion may have been larger than most in the neighborhood, but it contained the specialized rooms and outdoor spaces that he and his neighbors, the de Fremery and Cole families, counted on to define a good childhood. Ostentatious display of wealth did not set the norm for construction south of Seventh Street. “Small operators” and “heavy builders,” as Betty

Figure 1.5. Oakland Long Wharf viewed from Goat Island in the San Francisco Bay, October 1886. Shaded by at least one of the great oak trees that gave Oakland its name, Goat Island offered an excellent prospect for viewing the 11,000-foot-long railroad pier projecting into the bay and the shoreline of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Although the island offered a refuge from city life, a perfect place to sail to for a weekend picnic, a military outpost had been built on it in the 1870s. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

Figure 1.6.  Butler and Bowman, real estate advertisement for Eighth Street tract, Oakland, 1876. Speculators began to transform West Oakland into a bedroom suburb of San Francisco during the 1870s. The property (shaded on the map) offered at auction by Olney & Company is close to the Center Street station of the Pacific Railroad’s passenger line. The ad reminds prospective buyers that West Oakland is “only thirty minutes from San Francisco.” This neighborhood is dramatically different from the one depicted in figure 1.4. After the land was sold and developed, the pattern of development resembled the one shown for Chestnut Street north of Ninth Street. It no longer made economic sense to surround a mansion with a grand estate, as Charles McDermott had done between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, also depicted on this map. John Ziegenbein, an important builder and developer in West Oakland, owned property adjacent to that offered at auction by the Olney Company. Women from the Olney family were active in Oakland charities. Courtesy of the Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Mr. William G. Boardman.

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 13

Marvin has shown, continued to build in Oakland after the railroad arrived, targeting as consumers old-timers and newcomers who continued to come west.37 Membership in the self-defined “pioneer generation” may have been used to build status, but the groups on both sides of this divide were part of the movement of men, women, and children who, with their possessions, their “things,” transformed world culture, starting in early modern Europe. The white population of California increased by 88 percent between 1860 and 1870, with Irish, German, and old-stock Americans predominating.38 Despite linguistic differences, cultural antagonisms, and the invidious appeal of nativism, these new Americans shared experiences—of deprivation, persecution, and migration—that engendered the hope for a better future grounded in homeownership. Many white wageworkers succeeded. On Peralta Street, Americans of Irish heritage who owned homes near the kindergarten in the 1880s included Ellen Kenney, Cordelia Fike, and Nicholas Doran, the sexton at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church. Another homeowner was John Prairo, a blacksmith born in Portugal.39

Figure 1.7.  Albert Miller house, Fourteenth and Union Streets, Oakland, erected 1879, undated photograph. The Miller family, who lived in one of the grandest houses in West Oakland, supported charities for children in the Progressive Era. The eighty-five-foot-long house faced east, with a terrace surrounding the building and a cast-iron fence built around the corner lot. The steep stair under a prominent porch identifies the front entry. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

Figure 1.8.  Albert Miller house, first floor plan, sketched by Christian Otto Gerberding (C. O. G.) Miller in 1943. C. O. G. Miller, banker and founder of the precursor to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, sketched this plan from memory toward the end of his life, as the house had been torn down earlier in the twentieth century. Organized around a central hallway, the library, parlors, and dining room are clustered toward the Union Street entrance; the sitting room, conservatory, pantry, kitchen and other service spaces are located toward the back of the dwelling. Miller remembered seven bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs; servants slept in the attic—except for two who were Chinese, and who slept in the stable. Janet McAlpin Watt, Elizabeth Watt’s daughter, was Miller’s second wife, and he directed money to Watt’s settlement house in Oakland Point. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room, the Voiles Collection.

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 15

Migration as a solution to adversity and a route to a better future was not new news to blacks either. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 gave African Americans reason to embark on the arduous journey west. From the start, blacks made cosmopolitan San Francisco the center of their urban settlement, even if the hope that they would find tolerance, a safe haven, was misplaced in the 1850s.40 California stomached slavery, its legislature passed a local fugitive slave law, and it contemplated an anti-immigration bill that would have prohibited free blacks as well as slaves from entering the state.41 Black men organized the Colored Conventions to win white support for reforms guaranteeing basic civil liberties, but the political situation worsened as the nation drifted toward war.42 In 1858 and 1859 the legislature attempted to pass a law that required all men of color to register with the state government. That assault on human dignity, when coupled with the Dred Scott decision, caused an exodus to Canada. “They had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared, after the Supreme Court voted to deny citizenship rights to any American of African ancestry.43 African Americans also settled in smaller numbers in Oakland, and after the Civil War this community began to grow in response to an edict from the Pullman Palace Car Company. Starting in 1869, it required a porter to be a black man, to attend each sleeping car, and to live close to the yards. In Oakland, the designated western boundary was Adeline Street (see fig­ure 1.3). This steady source of employment for men expanded to include other trades needed by the railroad, like cooks, waiters, and laborers; women also found work, largely as maids. The almost six hundred African Americans living in Oakland in 1880 set up businesses on Seventh Street, opened cultural institutions, and ran other enterprises, including boarding houses.44 One such person was Lucinda Tilghman, a widow who owned a home on Fifth Street. Her deceased husband, Robert, had taken part in the Second Colored Convention of 1856; both Tilghmans migrated to Canada in 1858 and later moved to Oakland with their three children. The el­ dest son was institutionalized in an asylum. A relative through marriage, Hettie B. Tilghman, would lead woman-run charities for black children early in the twentieth century.45 The geography of residence determined where most children attended school. The city built a grammar school on Tenth Street near Union Street; it was named after R. E. Cole, president of the Oakland Board of Education, who also lived in that neighborhood. Middle- and upper-class parents expected their kids to attend the city’s public high school downtown, if not a private academy. It was not so for less privileged boys and girls; they

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Figure 1.9.  An African American girl skipping rope near the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 1912. A joyous young girl is happy to be at play on a newly paved sidewalk bordered by planting strips and new trees. The old cottage in the foreground sits tight to the property line without a front yard, but newer houses were set back from sidewalks and streets. From the New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1912 (Oakland, 1912), 20.

started work after graduating either from Tompkins Grammar School on Fifth Street or from Prescott Grammar School on Campbell Street. The West Oakland Home, the local orphanage, was across the street from Prescott School and immediately to the south of three private schools for Catholic children. In all of these institutions, children played outside in large dirt yards, set aside for play but not purposefully designed or equipped for it. Otherwise kids, played on streets (which for the most part were unpaved and unsewered), in vacant lots, and near marshes that were not yet drained. Boys had more freedom than girls to roam the unfinished city; they swam in the estuary, snuck into the railroad yards, slid down coal piles, and hung out around muddy ponds not too far from the center of town. Each place, but especially the street, held multiple attractions. “The whole street was at their command,” one woman recalled.46 A small child could find much to enjoy—a gate to swing on, a picket fence to walk on, a stair to climb, a pile of mud to play with, a cart to jump on, or a horse to pet. Children also could follow a funeral or a fire, watch a boxing match, start a game of marbles, raid a fruit stand, or jump rope on a new sidewalk (figure 1.9).47 Kids,

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 17

especially boys, also worked outside, hawked goods, ran errands, and sold newspapers; and the train stops turned into a magnet for older, disaffected male youth. “A gang of hoodlums congregate on the corner of Seventh and Center streets regularly every evening,” the Enquirer declared in 1887.48 Close to the Wood Street station the rowdy Fish Gang hung out at saloons. They jumped aboard the train without paying fare, threw rocks at windows, and taunted Chinese passengers.49 Near the railroad terminus, where most African Americans lived and the monopoly’s great piers jutted into the bay, speculators jumped into action, despite a faulty sewer outlet that spewed noxious fumes. The lamentable condition prompted suggestions for upgrading the entire urban network of public drains, but taxpayers refused to finance the project.50 By the late 1880s, stables, wood and coal yards, restaurants, laundries, some factories, commercial blocks, halls, some hotels, and many saloons lined the western end of  Seventh Street (figure 1.10). In 1889 fifteen establishments for public drinking were open for business between Peralta and Bay Streets, along

Figure 1.10.  The Railroad Exchange Hotel, Seventh and Bay Streets, Oakland, 1902. This handsome hotel, built in two stages, is presented as a respectable place with a fine porch, American flag, and men and women gathered together in front of the building. Just out of sight, however, are three railroad lines that converged to enter the yards, directly to the left (west) of the hotel. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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Figure 1.11.  Davidson/Patterson cottages, 362–364 (742) and 358–360 (740) Peralta Street, Oakland. Initially one-story dwellings, these cottages were raised between 1902 and 1912, with the arrangement of the new first floor of each replicating that on the second. Photograph by the author, 1997.

with a seaman’s mission and a free reading room. Many of these businesses were close to Wood Street, where the passenger train made its last stop before the Mole. Builders also had a choice of prime lots for working-class housing. “Dwellings of more humble pretensions, mostly built for homes by the workingmen of the city are by far the most numerous of all,” an observer noted in 1878.51 Working-class neighborhoods in California were not as functionally differentiated or racially segregated as they were in other American cities. Oakland Point was no exception.52 Old mansions, flats, cot­ tages, hotels, rooming houses, and a few tenements stood cheek-to-jowl with factories, coal yards, stables, food processing plants, laundries, and many saloons. The diverse housing stock, one historian argues, lends support to memories of a place where class lines did not matter or at least were less rigidly expressed than in other railroad towns.53 An excellent example is the motley group that James Davidson built at the corner of Peralta and Fifth Streets. In the mid-1870s Davidson, a carpenter from Scotland, bought two lots on Peralta Street and built a small one-story house on each one (figures 1.11 and 1.12).54 The four-room cottage, about 550 square feet in size, housed as many as seven people, not all from the same family. About a

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Figure 1.12.  Davidson/Patterson cottage, 362 Peralta Street, Oakland, first floor plan, drawn from field survey in 1996. Key: (1) front room; (2) kitchen; (3) back porch with outdoor toilet and bathroom; (4) back bedroom (5) front bedroom; (6) shed.

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decade later the carpenter erected flats on Fifth Street and a rooming house with a saloon and a stable on Peralta Street. Let’s imagine that Betts asked her driver to speed past the saloon when he drove down Peralta Street. Mere proximity to a promiscuous place like a saloon could compromise the reputation of a respectable woman, and reformers, especially from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, targeted the spaces as damaging to childhood. Betts did not belong to the WCTU, but she expected to greet at the school the temperance advocates who had just formed the West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association. These churchwomen had raised enough money to pay Betts a salary, hire more teachers, and rent more space for classrooms. Some also proposed to make the charity sectarian. Even though a web of familial, business, and re­ligious relationships tied together members of voluntary associations, women disagreed about the purpose and direction of charities for children. At the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, women committed to preserving Betts’s vision of racially integrated, nonsectarian education prevailed.

The Long Life of Elizabeth Watt Elizabeth Dewey Watt was one such woman. Watt, who with Betts is an important actor in this story, lived in one of Oakland’s wealthiest neighborhoods in the late 1880s (figure 1.13). Of the many women and children discussed in this book, Watt is the only one who I know wrote a memoir. Composed in 1925, three years before her death at eight-one years of age, it is appropriately titled “My Long Life.”55 Some details of her early life are important to set the stage for the ensuing discussion of architecture, women, public culture, and childhood; her life story links the personal with the political, since relations between the sexes and to the life cycle of her family affected a woman’s decisions about charity. Betts had opened a kindergarten, from which she resigned after becoming engaged to be married; Rebecca McWade had set up the West Oakland Home while raising her children, in part to instruct her daughter in the practice of munificence; Watt became active after her kids were grown.56 Watt’s later good fortune also belies the difficult circumstances of her early life; her sense of entitlement, her noblesse oblige, and her use of charity to build status all mask the fact that she too was a migrant, brought to California by the desire for change. Born in New Hampshire in 1844, Watt came from a modest background, even though she was fond of boasting of her relation to an illustrious New England family. Her grandmother, Sophronia Dewey, belonged to “the same family as Admiral Dewey of later day fame.”57 During the Second

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 21

Figure 1.13.  Jackson Street looking toward Lake Merritt, Oakland, 1890s. This was Elizabeth Watt’s neighborhood. Along with very large, stylish houses sitting on generously sized lots, the uniform social character, developed infrastructure, and access to the lake rendered this part of the city very appealing to wealthy residents. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room, J. J. Earle Collection.

Great Awakening, her Quaker father, James Frederick Eaton, quit the faith to become a circuit-riding Methodist minister. On one trip his carriage overturned, injuring and rendering bedridden his Baptist wife, Mary Merrill Watt. After James’s sudden death in 1849, Mary followed his deathbed wishes and sent her eldest child, five-year-old Lizzie, to live with her relatives Elizabeth and John Leighton in Philadelphia; a younger daughter went elsewhere, and the youngest child, a son, stayed at home. This situation—a child’s known world shattered by accident, illness, and death—was commonplace in the United States during the nineteenth century, as was the reliance on extended kin networks for help. Even so, I wonder whether this devastating experience shaped Elizabeth Watt’s decision later in life to help children by improving the physical city for them. She was a half-orphan and lived with a foster family, although she never described herself as such, reserving those terms for children less privileged than she was. Watt migrated west with her new family, moving first to Chicago, then to San Francisco. The Leightons arrived on a bleak November day in 1858, rented rooms at the What Cheer Hotel (despite the name, one of the best

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in town), and then left the city for the gold fields. The family lived in a oneroom shack in Red Dog, a four-room house in Little York (where Methodist families shared a Bible and held church services in the water company’s offices), and a larger home in Placerville. Watt’s foster father, who had previously worked for the railroad, set up a mule train company, having learned like Charles Crocker (shovels) and Leland Stanford (groceries) that businesses serving miners offered a surer route to economic advancement than scrambling for gold with them. “Digging” is a better word than “scrambling” because by the late 1850s, surface mining was over in the foothills, having been replaced by its capital-intensive, hard rock, flume, and hydraulic iterations.58 The success of Leighton’s company and the extreme skew in the sex ratio translated into an offer of early marriage for Lizzie; the sixteen-year-old girl turned it down so that she could study music. She started to offer lessons after the family piano arrived; it had taken six months to traverse the Horn, and sixteen mules were needed to haul it to the camp. The Leightons returned (with piano) to San Francisco in 1861, as the nation plunged into war. Watt alluded in her memoir to momentous events of her time, but did not give the Civil War its due even though she admired Abraham Lincoln; she also ignored women in the Sanitary Commission, even though they inspired female activism in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.59 Other events took center stage. The music teacher met Robert Watt, a wealthy Scottish mining engineer. After their marriage in 1863, the couple moved to Grass Valley, where Robert’s older brothers had staked or perhaps jumped—that is, stole—a claim early in the Gold Rush. Rumor valued it at $2.5 million.60 Robert built a house for his bride, Elizabeth became a mother within the year, and in 1867 she moved again—this time to Sacramento, where the new state capitol graced the skyline. Her husband had been elected state comptroller in the administration of  Governor Henry H. Haight. This, the first victory for the Democratic Party in California after the Civil War, opened battles that cleaved the polity throughout the Gilded Age. Haight came into office supporting the eight-hour day, opposing railroad subsidies, and giving voice to rabid racist rhetoric. “In this result,” the governor stated in his victory speech, “we protest . . . against populating this fair State with a race of Asiatics” and “against sharing with inferior races the Government of the country,” referring to the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. This protest would continue, he promised, until the “Southern States are emancipated from negro [sic] domination.”61 In his Sinophobia, if not his opposition to Reconstruction, Haight, the savvy politician, found an ally in Henry George, the radical journalist. Witness to

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 23

and fearful of the power of monopoly capital, George argued that Chinese laborers were complicit in its concentration because they exerted downward pressure on wages.62 Tragically, and in part because of prevailing biological definitions of racial superiority, he saw no reason to forge common cause with all the groups that made up the working class in the state. Like whites, Chinese started to immigrate to California in 1850, escaping hard times and looking for better. Men mined (permitted to do so only in abandoned fields), worked on farms, and built railroads. Faced with a threatened strike and behind schedule in 1865, Charles Crocker hired Chinese laborers to work on the transcontinental railroad and never looked back on the decision. Neither did Chinese workers, who started to look for jobs in sectors other than mining. Their principal destination was San Francisco, which had plenty of service and industrial work. By 1870, Chinese immigrants made up about 26 percent of the city’s population.63 Watt, who embraced racially integrated women’s clubs in the Progressive Era, alluded in her memoir to these contentious political matters but did not discuss them in depth. Rather, she focused on the whirlwind of social activity in Sacramento. Although censured by her minister, Elizabeth attended dancing parties with her husband’s boss, his wife Anna (who became a close friend), the Crockers, and the Stanfords. Although they were bitter political enemies, the governor and the Big Four could dance together with their wives. Watt also did not leave the Methodist for the Presbyterian Church until her husband’s term was up and the family moved to San Rafael. Robert commuted by ferry to San Francisco; Elizabeth kept house and began to venture into cultural affairs. The national economy started to tank in 1873, soon after the Watts settled in Marin County. The depression reached California in 1876, along with almost 155,000 people who are estimated to have come to the Bay Area hungry, homeless, and looking for work.64 By the summer of 1877, the economy was in tatters. Workers staged strikes and boycotts in San Francisco to show solidarity with the national railroad strike; in July they attacked Chinese immigrants and the homes of employers, blaming both for a crisis not of their making. One protest, on the sandlots near the construction site for the new city hall, ended with men and women burning Chinese laundries. By destroying a work site, these protesters invoked a nasty tradition in American politics, linking bias against a group of people with bias against their places. The long-term costs of this kind of outrage were grave; Chinese districts would be burned again and again in California’s history.65 In the short run, the sandlot revolt led to more parades, more protest, and the formation in September of the Workingman’s Party of California,

24 / Chapter One

led by Denis Kearney. “Women’s Rights to No More Chamber Maids,” signs read, alluding to fierce competition for this low-wage work among white working-class women and Chinese men.66 Oakland had its share of sandlotters, as Kearney’s backers were called. An anti-Chinese club met in 1876, urging the discharge of Chinese workers and the enforcement of the “cubic air” ordinance (directed at Chinese lodging houses).67 The Chinese “infest” the city, Mayor Washburne Andrus, a member of the Workingman’s Party, said in 1879. His promise, to “drive off the swarm” because they stole jobs from white workers, was made law by the new state constitution, adopted the same year.68 When this assertion of states’ rights was declared unconstitutional, the US Congress followed in kind and in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This, the first legal restriction on immigration in US history, legitimized racism as public policy, albeit not for the first or last time.69 Imagine the effect of this depression and this racism on women, children, and the charitable landscape in California. Children arrived at orphanages in droves.70 Sometimes a door opened, and sometimes not. An orphanage’s decision depended on a host of factors: the color of a child’s skin, the child’s age and sex, the parents’ character and religious practice, and the number of kids already in residence at the orphanage. In the face of this demonstrated need, which escalated each day, women struggled to raise funds to expand overcrowded institutions for kids and to open entirely new ones for them. Watt did nothing. It took another crisis to spur her to take action, although the sandlot rebellion affected her family directly. The effect of the anti-Chinese movement on building trades unions has been discounted, but the prejudice touched architecture and construction again and again in the later nineteenth century.71 Around this time, Robert decided to build a home more than large enough to house his wife, five surviving children (one had died in infancy), and servants in San Rafael. Still involved in state politics, serving on the state banking commission and eying a run for governor, he made sure to hire “white men” rather than Chinese carpenters. This decision expressed “consistency” in his political convictions, according to his wife, but it came at a high cost for the frugal businessman: $2.50 rather than $1.00 a day for labor.72 A few years later, the Watts sold the estate at a handsome profit and moved to Oakland, where they rented a house near Lake Merritt. By the 1880s, women in California were as eager as women elsewhere in the United States to join charity with social reform, confident in their place within civil society. In short order, Elizabeth joined the Congregational Church and became active in women’s clubs and charitable affairs.

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 25

The West Oakland Free Kindergarten won pride of place in Watt’s philanthropic portfolio in the midst of another devastating economic depression that was even worse than prior ones. During the mid-1890s, as the destitute once again filled California’s cities, the kindergarten association elected Watt its president and expanded its purpose. By taking charge of urban benevolence in the nineteenth century, women built support for a host of essential reforms, including suffrage; they also forged ties, with policy and through space, between antebellum moral reform, Gilded Age activism, and the new social movements of the Progressive Era.73 Watt’s project is a case in point. She decided to set up a social settlement house in Oakland Point, modeled on Hull House in Chicago. Like Betts, her predecessor, Watt insisted that the charity be nonsectarian and racially integrated. She also counted on the architectural tool that Betts, Jane Addams, and other women used to build institutions. She repurposed a building, selecting one near the kindergarten to make legible her convictions for childhood. For her settlement house, Watt rented Ellen Kenney’s dwelling, which was directly across Peralta Street from James Davidson’s saloon.

This book tells the story of how Betts, Watt, Tilghman, McWade, and other women repurposed everyday buildings to make cities better places for children in California. I start with San Francisco in 1850, when it had no public places made on purpose for children, and show how women put in place the first imprints in the charitable landscape; afterwards, I move to Oakland, where they extended it. San Francisco continues to enter into the discussion, as do Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities at home and abroad where experiments with new spaces for kids shaped the decisions of women in Oakland. These conversations among national and international actors rendered the charitable landscape in California part of global culture. However, the focus of this book is on the small city on the east side of San Francisco Bay, one akin in size and scale to many others in the United States. This decision, to root this history in the particularities of a time and a place, makes it possible to execute a fine-grained analysis of the charitable landscape as it grew to become an important infrastructure in the modernizing city (figure 1.14). Close scrutiny is needed to understand how specific nodes in this landscape were created, expanded, and, starting in the middle of the twentieth century, all too often ruthlessly destroyed. The last point is telling. “History is not just an account of the past,” R. J. Morris has written; “it is an account of the relationship between the past and the present.”74 The successive waves of migration particular to the

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Figure 1.14.  The charitable landscape for children in Oakland. The Oakland charities discussed in this book are superimposed on the “Map of the City of Oakland” published by the J. H. MacDonald Real Estate Company around 1910. Key: (1) Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland; (2) Little Workers’ Home for Foundlings and Destitute Children of Oakland (East Oakland site); (3) West Oakland Home; (4) West Oakland Free Kindergarten; (5) Hansen’s Hall and the Athenaeum; (6) New Century Club; (7) Tompkins Grammar School (vacation school and playground); (8) Garfield Grammar School (vacation school and playground); (9) Oakland Public Library (Children’s Reading Room); (10) Prescott Grammar School (playground); (11) Oakland Social Settlement House; (12) Smith Cottages and Home Club; (13) Lincoln Child Center; (14) Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (Peralta Street); (15) St. Vincent’s Day Home (Eighth Street) and Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (Linden Street); (16) Linden Street YWCA, “Colored” Branch. The base map is in the collection of the Earth Sciences Library, the University of California, Berkeley.

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 27

history of conquests and identities in California brought to Oakland affluent white women, working-class Irish Catholic nuns, and middle-class African American clubwomen.75 They built the charitable landscape for an even more diverse group of kids who hailed from points east, west, north, and south of the city. The effort began in the 1870s with an orphanage, and expanded to include more orphanages in the 1880s, free kindergartens and settlement houses in the 1890s, and playgrounds and day nurseries after the turn of the century. The emphasis on children was useful in winning support for expanded state programs for social assistance, because this focus allowed reformers to play on innocence and the need for protection.76 Each place—which I call a node, following city planners—also created a physical armature that guided the expansion of public buildings and spaces for children as state, county, and municipal governments took charge of social welfare during the Progressive Era.77 Experts, rather than volunteers, ran programs in places that continued to represent the needs of children to the urban public. In California, where the Progressive Party was invented, women set up new public agencies to deliver the interests of children right into the heart of government. The results were mixed. Philanthropic work, via voluntary associations, forced the state to address the needs of all citizens, not only the powerful and the privileged; it also allowed the state to penetrate into family life.78 The institutions also registered human differences among poor children. Catholic and Protestant women competed to care for children (and win converts to either faith), and many charities were racially segregated, excluding children of color. Very often, but not always, Mexican, Asian, African American, and Native American children were kept out. This situation is one reason why leaders asserted that their institutions buttressed the broader project of building a white nation in the multiethnic West. Starting in the Progressive Era and continuing through the New Deal, racial segregation, including that of previously integrated charities, went hand in hand with state-mandated modernization of orphanages. So too did the counsel by trained experts to sort children by other categories that included qualification for state aid. Contrary to liberal hopes, each child was not treated as a social asset of equal value. Even before the Great Migration began in earnest, racial exclusion was a matter of course in institutions for children in the cosmopolitan city of Oakland. The story takes an even more tragic turn in the 1950s. This is when the state started to destroy this landscape in ways that put in plain view the bigotry attendant to its fabrication. In white neighborhoods, institutions for children survived, whereas in the chiefly African American neighborhood

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of West Oakland, slum clearance programs erased thousands of buildings. One federal project demanded demolition of the settlement house initiated by Watt, even though it had been expanded and made into a bona fide public place, owned and operated by the city of Oakland. During the Great Depression thousands of children played in the recreation facility. It was never replaced, despite solemn promises to the contrary. Looking to communities like West Oakland makes it possible to grasp the devastating effects of state power on ordinary people, their experiences, and the built environment. Looking to communities like West Oakland makes it possible to grasp the actions Americans take to resist and contest these processes. Faced with the violence of slum clearance, police brutality, and other expressions of the most extreme racism, black militants in West Oakland organized the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. That alone gives historians reason to write about Oakland; another is the Great Migration.79 I join these and other scholars in inserting this city into the urban history of the West Coast and offer, by a study of the period 1850 to 1950, a prolegomenon to accounts focused on the later twentieth century. This story is also a national and transnational one, involving histories of childhood, women, architecture, and social welfare, and I call on all of that work and more to achieve this result. It is to excavate an erased charitable landscape, to examine its complexities, and to judge it as a reference for building a just, plural society for children in our own troubled times.80

Repurposed and Purpose-Built What follows is the recreation of a lost world—one rendered not only fragile but also difficult to document because of the manner of its making. I needed to put words and buildings together with photographs, maps, and drawings to reconstruct the architectural history of an erased charitable landscape. Architectural historians turn to drawings, building permits, and like sources to unravel the physical history of a place. Many such materials never existed for buildings in this landscape, or, if made, were later lost (like so many structures). My research began in the field, visiting neighborhoods, recording buildings, noting erasures, and talking with residents about the significance of each. I also turned to insurance maps, city directories, census records, and tax records, learning to reconcile contradictory information. Especially in that aspect of the research, the work of other historians, who have spent untold hours scouring public records, helped me to put together the history of everyday places and people in West Oakland.81

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 29

During the course of this research, as I combed newspapers, annual reports (a requirement of incorporation), and other publications for information, I came to appreciate the degree to which the history of modern childhood is intertwined with the history of print culture and civil society. Most charities have disbanded, with their records dispersed to archives, libraries, and museums, but the ones that continue to operate opened their doors and archives. Along the way, a treasure trove of visual material, from maps to photographs, snapshots, and sketches, fell into place. Most importantly, the stories of children, unmediated by charity workers, proved elusive until I met elderly women who had lived in one orphanage as children; thankfully, they agreed to an interview. Their stories, other oral histories, multivolume scrapbooks (made by women to record institutional histories), and unanticipated discoveries (a roll of architectural drawings, believed lost, turned up in a cellar) confirm my argument. Physical spaces offer a unique and useful tool to grasp childhood as an ideal imagined by adults, as an arena shaped by social relationships, and as an experience of children. Since space is where childhood is lived, the material world offers a treasure trove of historical evidence of how children use, interpret, shape, and imagine their everyday lives. Physical spaces, as the architectural historian Abigail A. Van Slyck insists, allow us to grasp “the experience of being young.”82 Objects and spaces are also useful for studying the cultural exchanges that shaped women’s decision making in California, and for assessing results, including whether or not adults use space to achieve ethically adequate objectives for children and their childhoods. Physical spaces are not a backdrop for childhood; rather, space and childhood are mutually constitutive. An informed observer would no longer suppose a child to be the blank slate proposed by John Locke—an empty vessel that a parent or teacher fills up with social norms and cultural ideals. A child is also no longer imagined to be a “passive receptor” of any sort.83 Similarly, to consider a building or place in isolation—as an entity unto itself, to call on the theory of the political philosopher Henri Lefebvre—strips the physical world of significance.84 For any person, including a child, there is a dynamic rather than a static relationship between a physical place, its social makeup, and childhood as an ideal or imagined condition. We may shape our buildings and thereafter they may shape us, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, but human actions also mold the built environment.85 Historically, women appreciated the first point more than the second when they counted on material culture to form childhood.

30 / Chapter One

The result of this research is an architectural history with some architects and many builders. Women relied on builders to execute the repurposing that made practical sense for first imprints; they hired architects to design additions and new buildings as needed. It’s misguided to judge repurposing only as a gauge of adult parsimony. Antebellum charities tested the waters by opening orphanages in repurposed buildings; the YMCA and YWCA did the same when they set up new branches in existing buildings.86 Women in the Progressive Era opened libraries in commercial blocks; they also made savvy decisions about siting and location, especially for settlement houses.87 And migrants, historically and in our own time, have repurposed all sorts of places for worship.88 Since procuring low-rent spaces in older buildings facilitated innovation, this method of building institutions for children is a telling example of the point, underscored by Jane Jacobs throughout The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that new places and ideas come from experimenting with older things and practices. Plenty of building lots were available in California’s cities, and since 1849 the state constitution had protected women’s property rights.89 Even so, women, even very wealthy women, were often without the financial wherewithal to build from scratch. They thus learned to conceive of urban land not as a tabula rasa—a slate to wipe clean—for profit-driven development, but as something else. The strategy of repurposing belonged to the recycling and dispersion of used goods that have been part of the global economy since the eighteenth century. Buildings, like other forms of material culture, accrued meaning through the mobility of reuse. In calling on the metaphor and practice of salvage, privileged women used charity to reconstruct the bourgeois self in Oakland. Wealthy Victo­ rians, as a whole, worked very hard to maintain the gendered distinction between public and private life, trying to invest the bourgeois public sphere with masculine attributes and the domestic sphere with feminine ones. 90 But, as Jürgen Habermas argued, “the line between private and public sphere extended right through the home” in the nineteenth century. In the parlor, the most important room in a distinguished residence, a private individual greeted the public, albeit one of a select nature.91 When women repurposed houses, they further manipulated the division between the public and private sphere and the public and private self, to redefine lives stifled by rigid social conventions. This is not to dismiss the heated disputes about class-driven changes to the use of either houses or other structures. In Oakland Point the saloon, made into a free kindergarten, offered middle-class women and working-class children a public place outside the home that they could call their own. Railroad workers saw the alteration for what it

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 31

Figure 1.15.  House lifting, Oakland, 1901. The owner of this one-story dwelling may have intended to move the cottage to another site or to build a new “first” floor underneath the house. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

also was—an assault on working-class masculinity, which was defined in saloons, treasured sites for male sociability in industrial cities. Deciding to repurpose spaces also made lots of sense on the West Coast, where timber was the building material of choice. Wood was plentiful and affordable, and a freestanding wood-frame building on an open lot was easier to amend than one made of masonry. This malleability, coupled with the absence of substantive municipal regulation, encouraged owners, builders, and tenants to alter buildings repeatedly (figure 1.15).92 They continued to lift, move, alter, and otherwise modify real property after the city adopted its first building code in 1914.

Figure 1.16. Seventh Street, Oakland, 1896. Altered houses, one a middle-class house and the other a modest working-class cottage, abut the purpose-built commercial block. From E. S. Glover, Illustrated Directory of Alameda County (Oakland, 1896), 46. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

New Ideas from Old Things in Oakland / 33

This building culture indicates that the familiar phrase “overturn, overturn,” is too simplistic to characterize the history of real estate development in American cities. Philip Hone invented the term “overturn, overturn,” to describe purpose-built construction, its erasure, and its recreation in antebellum New York City.93 Many years later, Joseph Schumpeter referred to “the perennial gale of creative destruction” in the urban landscape. He meant the waves of construction and destruction taken in response to swings of the business cycle.94 The importance of creative destruction to capitalist urban development is not denied for Oakland, but its effects are not emphasized until the end of this account, because the concept does not explain all the facts found on the ground in this city (figure 1.16). In addition to “overturn, overturn,” alterations, additions, and repurposing are key spatial practices in modernizing cities. Power is always at work in the urban landscape, at the grand scale of city building and monument making as well as in a more fine-grained, subtle manner, centered on individuals and the everyday world. In urbanizing California, women imbued places for children with ideas and values; they contested meanings and disagreed about effects. Even if the physical form of an urban space did not determine the habits of daily life mechanistically, the material results of human relationships, social dominations, and ideological conflicts were threaded through urban landscapes at both small and large scales. During the Gold Rush, women in San Francisco realized that the physical world was more than a background for social practices. The material facts of everyday life seized their imaginations and inspired them to act on the belief that they could, and should, amend their city to offer destitute children a better childhood.

two

The Landscape of Charity in California: First Imprints in San Francisco

When Elizabeth Betts walked out of the front door of her home, she entered the public realm of her Oakland neighborhood. Like Elizabeth Watt, she knew the spatial restrictions of separate spheres, the popular ideological construction that in the mid-nineteenth century presumed to link women to private, domestic spaces and men to the public realm. We know now that these rigid distinctions did not map easily or directly onto the physical city, and both women challenged them historically when they crossed the publicprivate divide to organize, fund, and build charities for children.1 Their decision was not unusual in northern California. In the early 1850s, Protestant and Catholic women started to ameliorate the physical city for children when they made the first imprints in the landscape of charity in San Francisco. Having lived in San Francisco in the 1850s and extended her social circle in Sacramento in the 1860s, Watt knew some of the women who built the first charities for children after California entered the Union in 1850. In a period of aggressive westward expansion and rapid urbanization, her friends had applied habits of mind, learned in their former North American homes, as they opened orphanages for homeless boys and girls. In short order, women expanded the charitable landscape in the biggest, most important city in the American West to include not only orphanages and rescue homes for white, Protestant, and Catholic children, but also day nurseries and infant asylums for children of other religions, races, and ethnicities. By the 1870s, the scope of this network set a model for other institution builders in the region, including several in Oakland, where women also built a landscape of charity. With no state orphanages and very few other public institutions for children, middle- and upper-middle-class women shouldered the responsibility for social welfare for children in California for the balance of the century.2

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Starting in the 1850s, women on the West Coast used this kind of institution building to win a foothold in urban public culture. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the gender order in California was as marked as any by the asymmetry of gender relations in the United States; women were relegated to second-class, segregated citizenship until the battle for suffrage was won in 1911. In this state, organizing to win the vote did coincide with and contribute to the remarkable flowering of women’s public culture during the Progressive Era.3 But even before the suffrage battle took off in the West, white women in California coalesced around other matters that brought them face-to-face with the effects of gender inequality. One of the most important issues was the feminization of urban poverty; and a principal corollary, the need to organize social welfare for children also motivated these reformers. The latter cause appealed to conservative, often very privileged Protestant women who ascribed to the ideology of domestic femininity, had little interest in suffrage, and did not support economic equality for women in the workplace. Even though not feminist in the strict political sense of the term, Protestant churchwomen, joined by Catholic nuns, grappled with charity for urban children as a pressing matter of public importance to the female sex. The female defense of children’s well-being, because it contributed to maternalist politics, laid the groundwork for the welfare state and thus helped women reach and achieve citizenship.4 In California as elsewhere in the West, this political work began locally, through churches, clubs, and charities, and demanded the construction of physical places as well as the organization of formal institutions.5 Women intervened in the chaotic years after the Gold Rush, when they were confronted with children living on the streets of San Francisco. In the face of market neglect and limited state interest, this crisis made palpable and vividly apparent the unmet social needs in the new, crude, and unhealthy city. The decision to intervene—white Protestant women organized an Orphan Asylum Society in 1851, and others followed quickly—put into the limelight not only how rapidly homeless children became a problem for the urban elite, but also how women would cross the public-private divide to build for them. By the mid-1850s, impressive stone orphanages had been constructed for Protestant and Catholic children. South of the city, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in concert with the state legislature, set aside a large plot for a brick and stone “House of Refuge,” renamed the Industrial School when it opened in 1859.6 These were the first architectural imprints, and thus the first nodes, in the charitable landscape for children: institutions owned and run by Protestant churchwomen, the Irish Catholic Sisters of Charity, and the city govern-

The Charitable Landscape in California / 37

ment. The large masonry buildings held architectural features in common, even if verbal rhetoric emphasized the contrary, given that Protestants and Catholics competed for the care of orphaned children. In California, public subsidies supported private charities for children at the same time as the gender division of labor supported the electorate’s taste for low taxes and thus for inexpensive government. Private charities for children cost less to run than public ones, and they quickly outnumbered public (state-run) institutions.7 Almost all the private charities were managed by women, if not owned by them outright. From the outset, Protestant and Catholic women who promoted the ideology of domestic femininity used the constituent elements of civil society to win support from both sexes and alter the physical city for children. Protestant women called on models of organizing known to them, their mothers, and probably their grandmothers as they formed voluntary societies, publicized charities in newspapers and magazines, held public meetings, and called on social networks, including ties to prominent men in politics and business, to build institutions. The pursuit of reform causes had encouraged Protestant women to engage in activities like these, which had political character and had shaped civic behavior since the end of the eighteenth century.8 The public voice of Catholic nuns was more limited, but voluntary societies supported their charities; and Catholic women, like Protestant women, engaged with the market, law, and government as they bought, sold, and rented property, erected buildings, took advantage of public subsidies for childcare, and secured legal guardianship of children.9 With these activities, women secured a foothold in the public sphere in San Francisco during the 1850s and in Oakland during the 1870s. This success becomes visible when the nature of urban public culture is assessed not only with written evidence, but also with artifacts.10 Taken together, words and buildings offer first-rate clues about the significance of women’s charity not only to women and children, but also to city building, urban politics, and public culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the West Coast, organizing charities and building institutions went hand in hand with plans to expand the scope of services that needed spaces to house them.11 Initially, women and men could afford to construct big, new freestanding institutions out of  brick and stone—monumental markers of nationalist as well as philanthropic and gender ambition. In San Francisco the new charities were more startlingly visible in the urbanizing landscape than in the Northeast and Midwest, where charities for children were also built before and after the Civil War. In older cities, new institutions for children were added to existing landscapes of charity where almshouses,

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asylums, prisons, and so forth were clustered together and located in or relatively close to urban downtowns.12 Make no mistake; it was hard to miss any of these buildings. However, the absence of state-run institutions made the landscape of charity a qualitatively different place in the new city rising from the sand dunes on the West Coast. Depending on the character of the architecture and the siting strategy (in town, at the edge of town, or distant from the urban center), the buildings could be seen for miles. For each building, the tangible presence was as important to the order and to the experience of the landscape of charity as other aspects of philanthropic service and building programs. This characteristic stands out: the determination to carve out a special public realm for needy kids, an ambition with long roots in European culture. It began in the Renaissance when cities opened institutions for children in need of the care and assistance of the public. Municipalities sought to take care of foundlings and orphans in orphanages long before either families or schools gave attention to making special spaces for children.13 Whether these spaces were repurposed or purpose-built, their effect was intended to be long-lasting, to endure—not only to shape childhood within each institutional home but also, through instruction and indenture, to direct children to specific futures in the adult world. By the mid-nineteenth century, children were sorted in institutions according to categories in­ vented in England to describe adult poverty: dependent, delinquent, and disabled. One sociologist calls buildings like these “machines for the registration of human differences.” Even if some sponsors hoped to deliver at least some aspects of the good childhood to boys and girls housed in philanthropic institutions, other convictions won out. Poor children were taken to be malleable enough to be savable, and unruly children, especially street children, were perceived to be a threat to the social order.14 The use of caregiving institutions to rationalize people and things was essential to the growth of an orderly, moral, and, above all, American society in the West. Not surprisingly, “American” was equated with white skin color in California, and claims to privilege based on it and other physical characteristics affected the lives of institutionalized children during this period of xenophobic nationalism. To begin with, public charities (reform schools) were racially integrated by force of circumstance, but private charities were not. Protestant and Catholic women largely took care of white children. However, the intent to order urban society on the basis of set categories (whether race, religion, sex, or age) was fraught with difficulty in the nineteenth century, especially in the multiethnic urbanizing West, where children and their needs defied easy, rigid classification.15

The Charitable Landscape in California / 39

A Mixed Economy for Welfare in California In the chaotic years that followed California’s entry into the Union, its legislature adhered to a well-beaten path with respect to organizing charity. It embraced a mixed economy for social welfare, writing into law the expectation that private societies would work with government to deliver charity in the new state. The intertwined system of public and private responsibility was a familiar one in the United States; it developed in the Northeast, fed by the spread of a market economy, wage labor, and a taste for inexpensive government. In the climate of economic liberalism, the middle classes came to blame the poor for their poverty, extending the censure to immigrants, single mothers, and street children.16 As evangelical Protestants spread the message of human perfectibility and benevolent associations petitioned city councils for financial support, modest cooperation between public authorities and private societies set in place a mixed economy for social welfare— one that kept taxes low, presumed to reward the worthy, and discharged elected officials from caretaking responsibilities.17 In the middle of the nineteenth century, Californians were no different from other Americans in their faith in the efficacy of public-private partnerships; they were willing, very willing, to cede responsibility for poor relief to voluntary associations, including those run by women. This institutional framework, delivered from New England to points west, set in place a gendered culture of organization that benefited Catholic and Protestant charities as the two groups competed for the care of children.18 White men counted on white women to provide poor relief for less fortunate women and children, and the female sex obliged in California as elsewhere in the nation. The civic activism of pious Protestant women deferred to a conservative interpretation of gender norms early in the nineteenth century; the focus on children and the supposed “benign influence” of female benevolence did not unsex these activists. This stood in sharp contrast to allegations made about women who campaigned for the vote and the abolition of slavery.19 In northern California, although women and men depended on one another to manage and fund philanthropic institutions, women deferred to the ideology of separate spheres, to the sense that there was a female dominion in philanthropy (focused on other women and children); they also expected charity to ameliorate rather than alter the structure of a capitalist economy. These conservative values, including the use of charity to articulate class interest and define racial advantage, held grave consequences for women of privilege and children in need on the West Coast. Benevolent women in San Francisco carried their conservatism

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into the public sphere, Mary Ryan has argued, by endorsing domestic seclusion and representing themselves as inspiring and pure in public ceremonies. This strategy affirmed rather than challenged female exclusion from the sphere of democratic participation.20 However, organizing to meet collective needs, in addition to pressing for rights and civil liberties, may enhance democratic citizenship. It is in this sense that women planted the seeds of a democratizing political critique, as they built a network of caregiving institutions and suggested that child care ought to be a civic responsibility in modern society.21 The new American government declined to endorse that radical proposition. It adopted instead the worst aspects of the prevailing mixed economy of social welfare. Because it refused to organize an adequate machinery of government, the state legislature failed to redress the deleterious effects of laissez-faire capitalism on the citizens who were most in need of protection during westward expansion: poor women, children, and families; the sick and disabled; immigrants; Mexican workers; American Indians; and migrants of color. The legislature did make funds available to private charities, and it did set up state boards to supervise public schools, prisons, health, and labor.22 Still, no group, public or private, won the authority to oversee charity and correction in California until early in the twentieth century. Other urban states granted the privilege to regulate in the 1860s, but it was not possible to garner the will to do so in the West. Why? According to liberal analysts writing during the New Deal, entrenched interests and corruption occluded political imagination in California after statehood.23 Arriving for the most part from New England and the mid-Atlantic, the forty-niners and those who followed close on their heels destroyed the prevailing way of life in the small Mexican town of Yerba Buena and, with the aid of the US government during the Mexican-American War, challenged all prior claims to the territory of Alta California. After a military treaty delivered the fort, mission, and pueblo to the United States in 1848 and James Marshall found a chunk of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Sacramento in the same year, newcomers flooded the city now called San Francisco. Arriving on sailing ships, these men would be known as Argonauts in deference to their arrogance, rough masculinity, and thirst for gold.24 Working fast to introduce a capitalist economy in a conquered land, city builders platted an extension close to the bay and at some distance from the dilapidated Spanish mission with the only (Catholic) church and the Presidio, the deteriorated Spanish fort. In the midst of meteoric growth—the settlement of eight hundred people in 1848 grew to thirty-

The Charitable Landscape in California / 41

six thousand by 1852 and fifty-six thousand by 1860—immigrants from France, Germany, Spain, and China claimed a piece of the urban territory as their own. The Irish, who came from Australia, New Zealand, and the Northeast, also formed ethnic enclaves, as did African Americans.25 The first US census in California, recorded in 1852, reported a 9:8 ratio of foreignto native-born (one that exceeded that which existed in East Coast cities). Irish Catholics were the largest single ethnic group represented, followed by Germans (many of whom were Jewish) and Chinese. The financial elite in San Francisco included more Irish Catholics and Jews than elsewhere in the United States, and these wealthy leaders would be an important resource for each group when it started to build charities for children.26 Men and women immediately displayed an affinity for the practice of association by building churches and organizing voluntary societies. In the absence of a bona fide public system, men and women formed social networks that worked through and around government to address the need for welfare in San Francisco.27 One historian has counted twenty-five organizations in the city with the words “benevolent or social” in their titles in 1852. Another found thirty houses of worship in 1856: two synagogues, and six Catholic and twenty-two Protestant churches.28 Even though the bleak frontier town included manifestations of culture and civility, its rapid growth belied hopes that civil society would spring into life easily along the fecund Pacific Coast. “California had a fresh and vigorous start, with a clean bill of health,” the attorney Frederick Billings told the Protestant Orphan Asylum Society in 1856 during its fifth annual meeting. “And she has fewer heir-looms of feebleness and infirmity, of dependence and disease, than the same number of people anywhere else in the world. Her troubles are those coming from and belonging to her own peculiar growth, and as that growth has been full of marvellous [sic] incidents and startling accidents and strange surprises, she has troubles that occur not to a State of slower and steadier development.” Other observers seconded the point, linking “peculiar growth” to crime and vice, including that which occurred among children.29 Even if sentimentalized, these assessments of the urban scene alluded to the feminization of poverty. This problem was already known to Americans, as were the deleterious effects of economic liberalism on working-class and immigrant children.30 These unfortunate circumstances led to a proliferation in the popular press of sentimental representations of women and children in need; the images capitalized on the sense of female dependence and the fragility of childhood to elicit feelings of sympathy, especially from other

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women (figure 2.1).31 These cultural constructions developed in concert with a national campaign to remove children from city streets, whether they were begging to support themselves or hawking goods to contribute to the family economy. In New York City, the police launched the attack on street children a few years after the department was municipally organized. When the new chief of police, George W. Matsell, called the situation a “growing evil” in 1849, he meant “the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares.”32 The Children’s Aid Society, founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, a young, charismatic, Protestant minister, took up the cause and used the new terms of “homeless child” and “street orphan” to describe children who may have been neither without a home or a parent. The society’s sensational language and its ambitious programs made removing children from the evil of the streets fundamental to the reform of urban poverty.33 Sentiment aside, there was an urgent need to organize public assistance for urban children, especially in San Francisco where boys and girls were exposed on arrival to the hazards and privations of living in the West. The numbers were small (about one thousand school-age children lived in the city in 1851); and the newness and crudeness of the city exaggerated their vulnerability.34 In the unfinished, unhealthy city, poor sanitation and rudimentary medical care exacerbated the ill effects of the boom and bust economy and explosive population growth on all residents, including children. The system of urban governance didn’t help. Because elected officials wanted to encourage growth and preserve low taxes in the mid-nineteenth century, cities invested conservatively in public buildings and other amenities. The value of real estate determined the provision of infrastructure in a neighborhood because property taxes financed the construction of public works. As one historian has commented, the “market-based allocation rule might be considered ‘fair.’ ” It was not “democratic.”35 In San Francisco, a city known for its battles between vice and virtue, the fabled frontier spirit of cooperation fractured along familiar religious, racial, and ethnic lines in this period of aggressive westward expansion. Tolerant, pluralistic solutions were not imminent in reform landscapes for children on either coast during the 1850s, a period of chauvinistic racial nationalism.36 At the beginning of this fractious decade, the Democratic Party, dominated by Irish Catholics, staked its claim in San Francisco politics; in conjunction with a celebrated murder, Protestants disparaged the Irish political machine as lawless and criminal. Periodically, the challenge to Irish hegemony erupted into civic violence, labeled “vigilante action” by native-born Protestant merchants and ministers.37 Another telling

Figure 2.1.  “The Hearth-Stone of the Poor—Waste Steam Not Wasted,” 1876. This drawing, by Sol Etyinge, illustrated the cover of Harper’s Weekly on February 12, 1876. The stout man with cigar, top hat, and greatcoat represents the indifference of the marketplace and the male sex to urban poverty. By contrast, the well-dressed children of the prosperous woman call her attention to an impoverished mother who is forced to live on city streets with her children and the family dog during the winter. This virtuous mother hasn’t brought her children to the street to beg; rather, they sit on a cold stone sidewalk to take advantage of escaping—“free”—steam heat. Both mothers protect their children from the snow—the wealthier woman with her fashionable umbrella and the poorer one with her tattered shawl (and in a manner that evokes the Madonna and child). Courtesy of the Collection of the New-York Historical Society, negative #80317d.

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example is that although California joined the union as a free state, it legitimatized second-class citizenship for blacks and denied it altogether to Chinese immigrants.38 At statehood, only white male citizens of United States and Mexico won the right to vote; after 1852, a black, mulatto, or Indian was prohibited from giving evidence in court against a white man; the rule applied to Chinese too. This bigotry shaped a child’s public world. Public schools were racially segregated; and private, including Catholic, schools did not receive public money after 1856 when an initial experiment in joint funding was abandoned. The former New Englanders who dominated the Board of Education and belonged to Protestant churches intended to build a school system like the one they had left behind. They supported the new state law that declared in 1852 that a school could not receive dispensation from the public purse unless it was “free from all denominational and sectarian bias, control, or influence whatsoever.”39 This directive, similar to public policy in the Northeast, did not interpret as sectarian the reading of the Protestant Bible in public schools. The friction among Protestants and Catholics invaded urban charity as each group laid claim to poor children. In keeping with the taste for sentiment, romantic stories of actual human deprivation set the tone for accounts describing the founding of each charity. Cholera proved a recurring fact and thus also a trope in discourse. A Protestant churchwoman reported that the plight of five children orphaned by the disease on the journey west prompted the call to organize the Orphan Asylum Society in January 1851. “At the request of the Ladies of San Francisco public notice was given both from the pulpit and by the press as to the expediency of establishing an orphan Asylum on these western shores similar to the plans adopted by the eastern states.”40 Women met at the First Presbyterian Church to organize the charity and designated a “Board of Lady Managers” to run it. The board decided to open the orphanage in Happy Valley, south of Market Street and close to another Presbyterian church on Howard Street. William Howard, the Boston-born adventurer turned merchant, had donated the lot for the church and backed the orphan asylum. He provided a small cottage rentfree for a few months, and another backer did the same after the lease was up on Howard’s property.41 Irish Catholic men answered in kind when they met in February 1851 to form the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum and Free School Society. Intent to keep the care of Catholic children in church hands, the bishop egged them on, eager to win financial assistance from these men of affairs.

The Charitable Landscape in California / 45 Those who do not profess our religion have constructed asylums to which the Catholic orphans are admitted and invited; but oh! with what detriment to their faith, it is not necessary to inform you. But if we have not a Catholic institution to maintain our orphans, many of the Catholic children will have to take refuge in these asylums and receive a Protestant education!42

Happy Valley was also the neighborhood of choice. Here, Bishop (later Archbishop) Alemany set up the second Catholic parish in the city, and after wealthy Catholic real estate brokers donated a prime building lot, he authorized the construction of the orphanage and a new church facing Market Street.43 The Sisters of Charity arrived one year later to take charge of the charity, having been called to the city for this express purpose. Their first charge was a Catholic girl who had lost her mother to cholera on the trip west; her father died soon after. In the meantime, bouts of the disease devastated San Francisco. Within two years the orphanage, a wood-frame building, was bursting at the seams, with sixty-five children in residence.44 The similarities between Catholic and Protestant institutions are as important to recognize as the differences.45 As much as each group sought to protect indigent boys and girls from the other religion, instances of tolerance graced the landscape of charity in its early stages.46 Nativists did not attack the Catholic orphanage; and businessmen of one faith supported charities of the other. Protestants and Catholics also depended on each other to care for white children. Neither group organized a private philanthropy for children of color—meaning African American, American Indian, and Asian children—although that would change. Mexican and other Hispanic children would find the doors of Catholic orphanages opened to them, at least in theory, in spite of widespread antipathy for Californio culture. As one Chilean journalist wrote, “The Yankee egoists persecute everywhere all that have the disgrace of being Spanish.”47 The distaste infected building practice. Before the Mexican-American War, settlers from points east experimented with adobe construction.48 This openness to local building culture persisted after California joined the Union, but not among Protestant and Catholic institution builders. They lost interest in the cultural syncretism that had produced the Monterey style, with buildings made from adobe and shaded with generous porches. Instead, they constructed a landscape of charity, with buildings made from stone, brick, and timber and decorated in a manner that expressed elite taste in Anglo-American culture.

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Charity, Childhood, and Architecture The joint effort of Protestants and Catholics to create a landscape of charity for children squared with new ideals of charity and childhood. Starting early in the nineteenth century, opposition to poor relief made it the custom to try to limit the distribution of charity to people in need, especially outdoors. The term “outdoor relief” and its corollary, “indoor relief,” refer to the En­ glish practice of defining charity according to the physical setting where it was dispersed and the spirit of its delivery. Broadly speaking, indoor relief was aid given in institutions to people deemed worthy of its receipt; outdoor relief was charity received in homes and public spaces, usually without scrutiny of need.49 “Working-class experience was a continuum; no clear line separated the respectable poor from paupers,” one historian of social welfare reminds us.50 Yet San Francisco and Oakland joined other cities in banning most forms of outdoor relief in the nineteenth century. Regardless of faith, unemployed men, orphaned children, and destitute women and children begging on streets, even unpaved ones, offended middle-class sensibilities; and street children were anathema to elites on either coast.51 Despite efforts to regulate the flow of poor relief in cities, market capitalism assured that charity would remain as much about “getting” a “gift” as it was about “giving” one.52 Solicitations for relief made heterogeneous the charitable landscapes of American cities—a landscape made up of transitory sites and informal buildings as well as grand purpose-built institutions. Other historians have applied the term “charitable landscape” to alms­ houses, asylums, prisons, and other public institutions that proliferated at the edges of cities in response to the crises of the early nineteenth century.53 An excellent example is the node that the city of New York developed at Blackwell’s Island. A new penitentiary opened there in 1832, followed by separate almshouses for men and women in 1848; a workhouse, an insane asylum and other institutions completed the complex by the early 1850s (figure 2.2).54 Here as elsewhere, the institution builders coupled monumental architecture put in out-of-the-way places with the newfound faith in human perfectibility. Using buildings to separate the worthy poor from paupers and criminals would facilitate personal reform, mitigate disease, and eradicate environmental influences that caused immorality and crime. Isolating institutions on large tracts of land at the edge of the urban settlement, a convention since the Middle Ages, offered the added benefit of low cost for property.55 Regardless of motive, the spread of specialized facilities for the dependent, the disabled, and the delinquent and the application of these classifications to children helped to rationalize American cities by

The Charitable Landscape in California / 47

Figure 2.2.  “Alms House, Blackwell’s Island, New York, As Seen Looking North-West,” 1852. Frank Leslie, the delineator of this view, highlighted the stone almshouse for indigent women, also showing in the background the one for indigent men. A grand portico marks the entry to the institution, the dormitory opens onto large two-story porches, and the setting is portrayed as if it were bucolic, but this was a very grim place. By highlighting nature, by showing women at rest rather than at work, and by suggesting that children survived, the drawing masks the horror that attended living here; it also suggests that this setting was not urban, when in fact it was. Female inmates were required to care for abandoned children until the city opened a foundling hospital nearby, on Randall’s Island, in 1869. From Gleason’s Pictorial, October 9, 1852. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, Print Archives.

categorizing people and things. But the charitable landscape remained a dynamic, complicated space, much more than a static collection of formidable institutions for children surrounded by a geographically defined bubble of space.56 The sorting process accelerated in American institutions during the 1850s as agitation against the catchall character of almshouses intensified and cities faced the escalating costs of public charity. Special groups were removed (“siphoned”) from the poorhouse to specialized institutions.57 Children were targeted because they continued to live in almshouses even though orphanages, asylums for pauper children, and houses of refuge (reform schools) had been made expressly for them.58 In California, county authorities sent impoverished children to the local almshouses—also known as county hospitals, county farms, county houses, and poor farms—until after the turn of the twentieth century. Boards of supervisors ran these sites,

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which all too often were set up in dilapidated buildings.59 Nonetheless, it had become important at least to try to separate children from adults in institutions, as childhood came to be seen as a distinct, important phase in life, and as a child’s upbringing was taken to be crucial in the shaping of adult behavior. Reformers had come to appreciate that a child’s personality was plastic, that it could be molded and changed for the better or the worse. This recognition reinforced the conviction that poor children were vulnerable—susceptible to moral temptation and environmental degradation—and it encouraged the construction of more new, specialized institutions for them.60 In keeping with the federated system of government in the United States, the nature of public private partnerships varied from state to state. In general, private charities and churches ran orphanages (often receiving some public funding to defray daily expenses); state, county, and city governments divided responsibility for the rest.61 Pieties were offered about the need to recreate home life in institutions, but boys and girls were subject to rigid routines and strict gender segregation, and were scrutinized according to these moralistic categories. In practice it proved easier for a private charity to sort a “dependent” from a “deficient” or “delinquent” child than for a public one to do so. Private societies could refuse to admit unruly or sick children, while public institutions had less discretion. Whether applied in a private or a public facility, admissions policies also belied the singularity of purpose implied by the term “orphanage” or “orphan asylum.” Doors were opened to half-orphans (with one living parent), abandoned children (with known parents who had left them at the orphanage), foundlings (left at the orphanage by unknown parents), and deserted children (found on city streets), as well as to bona fide orphans.62 Since the Renaissance, architects had answered the need to shelter an abandoned baby from inclement weather and to render anonymous the person who delivered the child to the charity. The solutions ranged from arcades to porches or small revolving doors.63 Exiting was also monitored closely. If not claimed by a parent, placed with a foster family, or indentured, the child was forced to leave the orphanage and start working for wages. The typical cutoff age was twelve (sometimes ten for boys) in the middle of the nineteenth century. One reason for this was cost. In California, the state didn’t want to subsidize the care of older kids, who cost more to feed and clothe than younger ones. Another reason was the determination to put needy children to work, and yet another was fear of sexuality. Managers did not relish the challenge of supervising boys and girls as they approached puberty.

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Figure 2.3. The Orphan Asylum in Bloomingdale, New York, c. 1840. Founded in 1806, the orphanage (the city’s first) moved from Greenwich Village to the semirural setting of Bloomingdale in 1840. Viewing the front of the new building on West 74th Street, four contented visitors (three men and a girl) seem pleased that the children have avoided the almshouse. The frontal view of the imposing institution is deceptive, giving no indication that the institution is organized in a U-shape. The central block contained the entry and common rooms (including a chapel on the second story); the side wings held sleeping rooms (orga­ nized as congregate dormitories) and formed a service courtyard in the back. The building was decorated in the fashionable Gothic Revival style (including a crenellated cornice, pointed arches, and thin turrets), popular with the wealthy New Yorkers who summered in this part of town. Courtesy of the Collection of The New-York Historical Society, negative #80316d.

The nineteenth century is known for institution building, but the rapid diffusion of orphanages during that time is astonishing. There were six orphanages in the entire country in 1800 and almost one hundred in New York State alone by 1850 (figure 2.3). Nine out of ten institutionalized children were likely cared for in private establishments during the second half of the nineteenth century.64 The proliferation held special meaning for the urban children who were asked to learn to live in these places. Occurring in tandem with the spread of public schools, the increase contributed to a highly regulated (in theory at least) public landscape for city children.65 However, the rationalization of capitalist cities was a messy, drawn out, and contested process, and its effects on children and institutions were not always logical. This is shown by the faulty application of sorting mechanisms inside institutions. The imperfection of sorting mechanisms also points to

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contradictions rife in the ideology of separate spheres, whether for children or women. In the case of children, categories used to classify impoverished adults—delinquent, dependent, and disabled—were applied to boys and girls, even though adults were beginning to grasp that kids needed a different kind of care than men and women did. All of these issues and more would come to the fore in the charitable landscape that women built for children in California.

Delinquent or Dependent: Sorting Children in California The new urban elite of San Francisco applied imperfect sorting mechanisms to the landscape of charity for children in the 1850s and 1860s. The familiarity with institutions in the East and the intent to import conventions, crucial to the construction of middle-class identity, ensured these results. Men took charge of delinquent children in nominally public buildings, isolated from the temptations and squalor of city life; women took charge of dependent boys and girls in nominally private ones, close to or in new downtowns; and Catholics and Protestants built separate institutions. This institution building was one way to connect to another place, a world, left behind. However, the speed with which the new buildings appeared is astonishing. In San Francisco the Industrial School, the Protestant Orphan Asylum, and the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum offered prescient examples of specialization, inherent in modernization. Each institution, a monumental marker of morality and discipline, also benefited in some way from public subsidy and, to a lesser extent, Protestant and Catholic cooperation.66 The San Francisco Industrial School was the first institution to be purposebuilt by the state for children in California. The state legislature autho­rized construction of the reform school in 1858 following public outcry over widespread juvenile crime and the incarceration of children in the San Francisco city jail. One advocate wrote, “We have amongst us an unusually large number of idle, vagrant, vicious, unprotected children in the city, who must in some manner be reclaimed, or they will grow quickly into confirmed thieves, drunkards, murderers and vagabonds; vice and crime mature as rapidly and attain as huge proportions under the festering influences that surrounded them here, as our vegetable wonders under the fertilizing effects of sunshine and rain.”67 Bob Durkin was one of the first children to be moved from the jail to the new school, and, astonishingly enough, the police photographed him on arrival (figure 2.4).68 Isaiah W. Lees, a patrolman who became chief of the police force, started photographing criminals in the early 1850s. According to a later admirer, Lees insisted that the

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Figure 2.4.  Robert Durkin, 1859. Durkin (right) is recorded as the first youthful prisoner sent from the city jail to the San Francisco Industrial School. This mug shot, one of the first made for the Rogues’ Gallery, was intended not to elicit sympathy for a troubled boy, but rather to objectify him as delinquent. Durkin looks younger than fifteen, the age given on arrest. From “Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement,” vol. 21 (also published in Camera Craft 7 no. 5 (March 1901): 383). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

pictorial record helped him execute his “duty”: keeping a “watchful eye” on lawbreakers and furnishing his colleagues with “close descriptions” of offenders.69 The photographs objectified even very young criminals, emphasizing their differences from other children. By the time Durkin arrived on the scene, Lees had abandoned daguerreotypes for the collodion wet plate process. The new method simplified picture taking and made it possible to mount inexpensive prints in portable leather-bound volumes. This extensive collection of mug shots grew rapidly (more than forty thousand by 1901), and it came to be known as the Rogues’ Gallery, touted by San Franciscans, at least, as the first in the United States. Durkin’s mug shot, labeled no. 4, was posted on page two of the first book of the

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gallery (figure 2.4). Theodore Kytka, the admirer of Lees mentioned above, described the boy in an essay about the gallery, published in Camera Craft in 1901: “On the right side of picture are the features of Robert Durkin, alias English, alias Ellick. The record book gives his age as ‘fifteen years; born in England; has been arrested and sent to prison frequently for cutting and stealing.’ ”70 Durkin moved into a grim institution on the outskirts of town. Explicitly based on East Coast models, a geographical bubble of space surrounded this brand new node in the charitable landscape. The school sat in the middle of a one hundred-acre plot about five miles south of the city, on the road to San Jose. Known as the “House of Refuge” lot, the parcel offered commanding views (Mount Diablo could be seen in the distance) and contained plenty of arable land. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, owner of the public institution, invested the organization of the reform school with some features of a private charity, to facilitate fundraising and management. After the all-male board of managers raised ten thousand dollars for the construction of the new school, the Board of Supervisors allocated an additional twenty thousand to build the place.71 The managers commissioned a grand design—one that would serve as an emblem of the moral authority of an expanding American nation. The hope was to organize the institution around a courtyard that would include a large building with apartments for the superintendent and his staff, topped by a bell tower and flanked with two dormitory wings for inmates. A separate service building with a dining room and hospital ward was proposed for the back of the lot. The managers instructed Reuben Clarke, the architect, to adopt for the principal structure the massing most often used for antebellum institutions in the United States: a central pavilion with pitched roof, flanked by two lower wings with hyphens (smaller projecting volumes) at each end (figure 2.5). Built of brick, with a massive stone basement and exaggerated rustication, the severity of architectural style, referred to as “Roman,” made clear the building’s punitive purpose. The special prison for children opened in 1859, surrounded by a twelvefoot high fence. Praise was lavished on the institution, although the cost of construction limited the scope of work. The central pavilion was built for staff, and even if it lacked the hoped-for bell tower, its generosity of ame­nity stood in sharp contrast to that in the one wing constructed for children. Although it was called the “dormitory wing,” it included a dining room, hospital ward, washrooms, bathrooms (in the end pavilion), and sleeping rooms (in the main segment, lit by six arched windows). These rooms may have been called dormitories, but the wing contained two banks

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Figure 2.5. The San Francisco Industrial School viewed from the San Jose Road, 1865. This view, with the Coastal Range in the background, was issued after the second dormitory wing was completed and a right-of-way through the center of the lot had been sold to the San Jose Railroad. A close look reveals the cellblock, visible through the arched windows; a modest playground in front of the prison; construction debris to the left (perhaps in the yard where boys worked); and two men, who appear to be Chinese, peering into the front yard. A series of boundaries separate the viewer from the school: the new railroad track, which blocks the main entry; a double fence (one enclosure is twelve feet tall); and steep stairs. Inside the yard a group of boys plays tag while another boy swings on a rope, set up as a swing. From Pascal Loomis and John Swett, “Views of California Schools and Colleges, 1864–1865.” Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

of brick cells, three stories high. Each small cell, intended for a single inmate, 5'6" by 7'6" in size, had a barred window and an iron grating in the door, as did the cells in the institution on which the design of the wing was based, the House of Refuge in New York State (1825).72 To reach a toilet, an inmate had to leave his cell and go to one of four galleries that surrounded the cellblock. The hope was that individual confinement in a cell would facilitate reform, but strict discipline (including hard manual labor for boys) and deteriorating physical conditions quickly obviated the optimistic aspiration in San Francisco.73 “This is more like a prison than an ‘Industrial School,’” a visitor commented in 1862. “Indeed they [the inmates] are made to feel by far too much that they are juvenile prisoners, rather than boys and girls who are placed there, by a generous public, for their physical, mental, and moral improvement.” The absence of a gymnasium, workshop and a suitable playground were cited as evidence of poor treatment, as was the minimal time spent in school—two hours a day in the late afternoon and one hour after

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supper. With a workday that started at six-thirty in the morning and ended at three o’clock in the afternoon, with a short break for a midday meal, it’s likely that the tired children did not absorb much in the classroom.74 In ways other than these, the Industrial School drove home the point that the state would do only so much for delinquent children. The social heterogeneity of the place, which replicated the ethnic mix of the city, was a result of public parsimony rather than of dedication to social inclusion in a democratic society. All sorts of kids were sent to the Industrial School: homeless children, orphans, children convicted of crimes, children of imprisoned parents, children who didn’t get along with their parents, children rejected from orphanages, children of color (meaning African Americans, American Indians, and Asians), boys and girls as young as three and as old as twenty-one.75 Imagine the chatter inside this institution as children tried to speak to one another in languages that replicated the diversity of their city. Imagine the baffled look on the face of a German, Spanish, or Chinese boy as he tried to grasp a command offered in English. Imagine the swift punishment that followed his lack of comprehension. Soon enough, the school was overflowing with children. In 1864 ninety kids lived in the forty-eight cells that made up the sole dormitory wing, and almost all were boys. By force of circumstance this concentration, almost two times the intended occupancy, defeated the intent to reform the delinquent child through isolation in one small room. One year later, the population jumped to 150 after the second dormitory wing was built.76 Not surprisingly, there were repeat offenders, a fact made startlingly clear in the Rogues’ Gallery. It included serial photographs of them, Bob Durkin being one, James (Nanny Goat) Burns another.77 The city responded first by sending some children to private orphanages, and then by dedicating the institution to boys.78 Subject to abuse (one small girl was raped and murdered) and presumed to be a source of moral contagion, delinquent girls were sent to the Magdalen Asylum for wayward girls and unmarried pregnant women. Purposely isolated, the new asylum opened in 1864 and was partially subsidized by the state legislature after it was agreed that the Sisters of Mercy, the order charged with running the place, would assume responsibility for delinquent girls. Whether Protestant or Catholic, those girls were separated from other residents and housed in a special part of the facility, paid for by taxpayers.79 The tactic, an “architecture of containment,” resembled that taken in Ireland, where this order built similar institutions for wayward girls.80 Protestants and Catholics cooperated to create this new node in the charitable landscape—in this case, to shelter endangered daughters and

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fallen women, as well as to incarcerate street girls and prostitutes. In this instance, as Ruth Shackelford has shown, it seems certain that the Sisters of Mercy were eager to extend their philanthropic work into the municipal terrain—and elected officials were willing to oblige, even though the order had been accused of impropriety in handling the funds of another private facility, a hospital supported with public money.81 Although the presence of Irish Catholics on the board of managers of the Industrial School facilitated the exchange and a state board praised the charity, the benefits of mutuality should not be exaggerated. The Magdalen Asylum proved to be a grim place for girls, not so different from the reform school for boys. Repeated attempts at escape led to the installation of bars on the windows and the construction of cells in the basement and other floors. It was “a dismal and terrible thing called an asylum, where little girls who got into any kind of trouble were slammed in there like prisoners. They were prisoners,” one woman recalled.82 With the Industrial School plagued by scandal and subject to investigation, the board of managers voted to disband in 1872. The school came under the direct control of the government, and the purpose narrowed from reform to one more thoroughly focused on punishment. Boys were no longer placed out in homes and jobs, and the construction of the House of Correction for adult male prisoners on the very same parcel seconded this shift in ethos.83 By 1889 the deficiencies of the overcrowded school on the old House of Refuge lot became too egregious to ignore, and the state legislature decided to replace it with two new reform schools, the Whittier State School and the Preston School of Industry (see figures 4.1 and 4.9).84 This may be hard to fathom, but the only other state-run facilities for children in the mid-1890s were a home for deaf and blind children and one for boys and girls suffering from mental illnesses.85 Aside from county almshouses, four buildings constituted the public sites in the landscape of charity for children in California.

Churchwomen Build Charities for Children With no state orphanages for children, private charities in California ran almost every institution for orphaned or otherwise needy children during the second half of the nineteenth century. As Billings pointed out to the Orphan Asylum Society in 1856, “It is in the more variously active benevolence of individuals and associations that the fervent spirit and faithful labor of charity in California find their truest illustration.”86 The words of the San Francisco attorney direct our attention to the Protestant churchwomen who,

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with Catholic nuns, had by then amended the public sphere with three orphanages. The Protestant churchwomen’s eagerness to build was prompted not only by class privilege, the gender ideology of domestic femininity, and a Christian sense of duty, but also by anxiety about their hold on propriety, which was key to the social standing of a middle-class woman in any nineteenth-century city. San Francisco was no exception; as Mary Ann Irwin has argued, its economic volatility, disease outbreaks, and periodic fires made clear to a woman the fragility of her class standing. All too easily she (or her orphaned daughter) could find herself walking the streets of the rough frontier town.87 As a city made up of tents and shacks turned into one built of stone and brick, the lady managers of the Protestant Orphan Asylum decided to replace the rented cottage. The asylum’s new stone building would be located not in Happy Valley but rather on Laguna Street, one block northwest of the intersection with Market Street and thus distant from the center of town and the raucous life along the waterfront (figure 2.6).88 The double lot at this location also happened to be owned by the city. The speed with which more than twenty-two thousand dollars was raised is clear evidence of the wealth flowing into the city as well as of the depth of concern about children. Elizabeth Waller and Anna Haight (a future friend of Elizabeth Watt) joined the Board of Lady Managers and called on their husbands, Judge Royal A. Waller and Supervisor Henry H. Haight (later a state governor), to expedite the new asylum’s construction.89 Social networks and political contacts proved as important to women’s success in San Francisco as they were to women’s philanthropy in the East and would be in Oakland. The mayor smoothed the way for the purchase of the two city-owned lots for the excellent price of one hundred dollars; Supervisor Haight expedited the survey of two streets (subsequently named Waller and Haight), so that construction could proceed; a water company donated the stone, although the society paid to transport it.90 Sited on the rise of a hill, topped by a bell tower and steep gable roofs and surrounded by empty lots, the four-story stone building could be seen for miles. It reminded San Franciscans that children’s needs were a public matter, that women would organize to make sure they were met, and that AngloAmerican culture had arrived in the West. Twenty-six children lived in the orphanage in 1853; the number more than doubled in three years as the charity took in orphaned and half-orphaned boys and girls.91 Like other antebellum charity workers, the organizers of this charity believed children’s institutions should be modeled on the middle-class family and its home. Physical interpretations of this mandate changed dramatically

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Figure 2.6.  “Protestant Orphan Asylum, San Francisco,” 1870. Sited on a hill, the large stone building with a striking tower could be seen for miles. The small front door, covered by a porch and facing Laguna Street, reinforces the fortress-like character of the isolated institution. Market Street is in the foreground of the photograph. From “Lawrence & Houseworth Photography Albums: California Views, 1860–1870.” Courtesy of the Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, gift of Florence V. Flinn.

in the first half of the nineteenth century. Orphanage managers started in the 1830s to reject the cellular sleeping spaces used in houses of refuge. The obvious reason was their close resemblance to prison cells, even if they were called bedrooms. Congregate sleeping rooms, associated in nineteenthcentury parlance with dormitories, came into favor because they recalled the setting of a middle-class home, where children shared sleeping spaces. Proper “shelter and sanctuary,” coupled with training and rehabilitation, held great promise for molding the character of indigent children in the eyes of antebellum charity workers.92 An excellent illustration of these objectives may be found on a certificate of membership for an orphanage in Newburyport, Massachusetts, from the 1830s (figure 2.7). The women who set up the female charitable asylum decided to embellish the certificate with an engraving and a poem. The text suggests the challenges faced in “teaching a young idea how to

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Figure 2.7.  Membership certificate for the Female Charitable Asylum, Newburyport, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Cox Akin, engraver (d. 1834). The text reads: “Delightful task! to rear the tender thought, to teach the young idea how to shoot—happily exemplified in the efforts of the Ladies of Newburyport, who have laudably established the Female Charitable asylum, for the protection of indigent orphans. Mrs. Akin furnishes each member with a specimen of her abilities in the Graphic Art, emblematic of the institution.” Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

shoot,” meaning to thrive and develop. Elizabeth Cox Akin, the engraver, used a popular technique, contrasting the “before” and “after” state of kids to underscore the benefits of institutional care. In line with romantic theories of childhood, Akin emphasized childlike innocence and vulnerability and the possibility of redemption from sin and temptation. In her engraving a modest young woman, the caretaker, encourages little girls in tattered

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rags, without shoes and hats, to leave a cave (their “natural” home) for an asylum (their “civil” home), which is lifted off the ground and equipped with a sturdy door. Having been thus protected, a girl would leave the institution respectably dressed and virtuous in demeanor. Departing probably at twelve years old meant that she would need to work before marriage. The usual job would be that of a servant, where long hours, poor pay, and unwanted attention from men in the household awaited her, even if she would be working for a lady manager of her former home. For that situation, the term “Janus-faced women” was applicable. The abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké used the term to castigate the benevolent women of Charleston, South Carolina, who helped poor whites and free blacks during the day and abused slaves in the evening at home.93 As orphanages spread across the United States, critics began to question the efficacy of congregate care. Certainly, very large orphanages where one hundred or more children slept in enormous cavernous rooms were properly described as inhumane. As the reform attack escalated, the preference came to be for a ward that held no more than twenty-five children. Smaller congregate dormitories were used in the Protestant and Roman Catholic orphanages in San Francisco, and the same efficient, economical solution remained in use elsewhere through the end of the century, even for very young children. That was the case at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum. A rare interior view of a congregate dormitory shows about twenty children gathered for bedtime prayers in 1899 (figure 2.8). Faith in the transformative effects of the environment is evident, with the trappings of domesticity (separate beds and clothes just for sleeping, the draped mantel, pictures on the wall) clearly present in this institutional setting. The matron, with her back turned modestly to the photographer, supervises children. Each child is assigned to a separate slot of space, is dressed in a white nightgown, and hair is shorn to prevent lice infestation. This routine, which repressed individuality in favor of conformity, and this material expression of the congregate ideal taught children to value order, piety, decorum, and cleanliness inside and outside the institution. Respectable white Protestant women were hard to find in San Francisco in the early 1850s, where men outnumbered women by six to one. In this city bursting with single men, the scarcity of the female sex made all the more impressive their success in organizing the charity for children. “Beautiful as she is in all her ways, she [charity] is never so beautiful as when in the form of woman she takes by the hand the orphan child, wandering and lost in the confusion of the tumultuous city, and guides it to a home,”

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Figure 2.8.  View of the dormitory at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, 1899. Courtesy of the Chapin Hall Center for Children.

Billings declared to the Orphan Asylum Society. “Woman, guarding and cherishing the orphan child! There is no sight in life more touching to the heart, no work of love more acceptable, I believe, to Heaven.”94 The attorney gave voice to these sentiments at an exemplary site of the public sphere, the San Francisco Musical Hall, where the Orphan Asylum Society held its fifth annual meeting in 1856. In a city known for its newness, crudeness, and rough working-class masculinity, Billings adhered to middle-class conventions when he spoke for women in this public place. He urged men in the audience to recognize their manly duty and give “Charity a Living Presence” in California.95 He alluded to the importance of the brand-new stone building, but did not enumerate these significant qualities: The first Protestant orphanage on the West Coast was a formidable work of architecture, owned in the clear by the women of the charity; in short, an impressive addition to urban public culture. Instead, he used sentimental metaphors—tumultuous city, lost child, safe home—and paid deference to the ideology of separate spheres—true womanhood, innocent childhood, bourgeois manliness—as he pressed hard for contributions. He reminded

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men in the audience that Christian duty obliged them to help children, as did their affection for childhood, motherhood, and a loving home. “The man never yet was born who was not blessed by the presence of children,” he stated.96 The interlocking gender ideologies of domestic femininity and respectable masculinity were important themes in this speech, as was the sense that women and men were compelled to take care of children, using their unlike capacities for civic action. The phrases used in antebellum society to describe these qualities were “feminine influence” and “masculine power.”97 But as omniscient as these values were on the West Coast, they do not fully explain the place women claimed in this city as they built institutions for children. Billings made clear that the Protestant orphanage was already enmeshed in the state’s mixed economy of social welfare—that it belonged to a charitable landscape, which was made up of private charities and a few public buildings. He also drove home the point that the government counted on men to support women’s charity for children. “By the interest of the State—and the voice of the church, and the command of God, are we constrained to run with full hearts and full hands to the orphan’s aid,” he said, referring to his sex.98 By that time, the Orphan Asylum Society had received a modest, albeit short-lived, monthly subsidy from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a larger one from the state legislature. The new Poor Law of 1855 allocated a five-thousand-dollar lump sum grant to private charities taking care of homeless or orphaned children, regardless of religious affiliation.99 In 1855, the only other beneficiary of either subsidy was the Roman Catholic orphanage in San Francisco. Between them, both woman-run charities took care of a large proportion of homeless children in the city. That amounted to about two hundred in 1855, more or less 10 percent of the number in enrolled in public schools.100 The Sisters of Charity had also faced the challenge of construction. The number of needy Catholic children kept increasing as Irish immigrants flocked to the city, and the church needed to replace the first orphanage with a bigger brick building in 1855 (figure 2.9). For the time being, the charity elected to stay in Happy Valley and erect an institution that mimicked the form of elite houses, with a Georgian form and a fence and front steps to separate it from the street. The cross, mounted atop the pediment on the centralized projecting entry, made clear that this was a Catholic institution while the site, facing Market Street and adjacent to St. Patrick’s Church and the parish school, deftly illustrated the orphanage’s connection to the new Irish (for the most part) Catholic community, rather than to what little

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Figure 2.9. The Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, San Francisco, opened in 1855. This three-story stone building, entered directly from Market Street, was smaller than the Protestant asylum, although as many children if not more lived in this building. St. Patrick’s Church—visible on the right, on the southeast corner of Annie Street—ran the first parish school in the city. From Roy D. Graves Pictorial Collection Series 1: San Francisco Views, Subseries 1: San Francisco, pre-1906. Volume 2: Pioneer San Francisco. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

remained of the Mexican one. After the US territorial conquest of 1848 the diocese had acquired the Mission Dolores and other ecclesiastical property, but in matters other than land acquisition it now showed little interest in forging strong ties with the older church.101 This decision to remain downtown made it possible for the Sisters of Charity to expand social services in a way that addressed the needs of the working class constituency.102 More than 120 children lived in the San Francisco orphanage in 1857; the number would increase to 275. The Sisters of Charity also cared for the children of working mothers during the day. As the trustees explained, In our city there are many mothers who earn their support by their labor, at employment which oblige them to leave their homes. Many of these place their children under the charge of the Sisters in the morning, until their return

The Charitable Landscape in California / 63 from employment, and in this manner, through the Institution, are assisted to maintain their families.103

By the early 1860s, three more Catholic orphanages had been built in and around San Francisco: St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum, for boys (1856), and Mount St. Joseph’s Infant Orphan Asylum, for babies of both sexes (1861), as well as the Magdalen Asylum. The Sisters of Charity opened St. Vincent’s, but handed it over to the male-run Order of St. Dominic, since the sisters were prohibited by the rules of their order from caring for older boys. Irish Catholic immigrants quickly made up the bulwark of the working class in San Francisco; they and their children made up the city’s largest ethnic minority after the Civil War. In this period, boys and girls of Irish parentage constituted a plurality in the city’s institutions.104 The outreach to children and the interest in family preservation was typical of Catholic charity, as the church moved toward a national organization in the middle of the nineteenth century. The church was not a homogeneous institution; its policies were enacted in individual parishes and threaded with the class, gender, ethnic, racial, and generational divisions typical of immigrant society in American cities. Nonetheless and broadly speaking, focusing on child care helped the church reach across diverse urban constituencies as it protected children from “marauding” Protestant child savers.105 Building charities for children also helped defend the church from accusations of having failed to meet its obligation to care for children. Even so, nativists charged new institutions with not being “American” enough. In no small measure, the indictments zeroed in on the competing gender norms that shaped philanthropic practice as well as family life. During the 1850s and 1860s, nativists disputed the leadership role of nuns in Catholic orphanages in New York City, preferring the married women and mothers who usually ran Protestant charities. Protestants were interested in “saving” working-class Irish boys and girls from this un-American way of life, one historian argues, not only because the children were denied the benefits of a “good childhood” but also because they were white. Teaching Protestant values to future voters (and future mothers of voters) was vital to political stability in a racially segregated society.106 Irish Catholic women in San Francisco were as determined as they were in other cities to take care of orphans and otherwise needy Catholic children. Motivated by sentiment and faith, they wanted to control cultural reproduction through childhood, to save boys and girls from Protestant child savers bent on refashioning immigrant culture, family life, and religious

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practice. Choices made in this city about location underscore the point. As soon as was possible, Protestant churchwomen moved the orphanage out of Happy Valley. The Sisters of Charity owned real estate in San Francisco in the 1850s (unlike the order in New York) and were keenly aware of the need for child care among working-class Irish Catholic women. Their Catholic orphanage was built downtown and remained there, next door to the parent church, for more than twenty years. Reluctantly, the Sisters agreed to move the orphanage to South San Francisco in 1872. The men who ran the diocese forced the relocation, to capitalize on the highly valued Market Street lot on which the original orphanage had stood, which they then sold to the developers of the Palace Hotel.107 It’s important to understand that women who ran urban charities grasped the importance of location to the delivery of social services. Certainly, putting the Roman Catholic orphanage downtown made it easier for the Sisters of Charity to provide day care for working-class Irish Catholic families. But it would be a mistake to interpret this choice in San Francisco as a general rule for Catholic charities; architectural decisions did not characterize one religion or the other. As much as the Irish formed their ethnic identity in opposition to English culture, the spatial structure of Catholic charity for children was grounded in the discourse of Anglo-American philanthropic practice.108 Catholics built charities at some remove from the city as well as close in; they tried to sort children in institutions using the same categories as Protestants; they built similar buildings and counted on women to run them without compensation. In San Francisco, similarities in institutional practice took on heightened meanings in light of the Irish Catholic experience of nativism and the ambiguous position of Irish immigrants in the regional social hierarchy. Although intense, the nativist attacks on Irish Catholics in San Francisco were not as severe as in Boston or New York, because the presence of Chinese immigrants, Mexicans, and American Indians helped to redirect nativist anger to other ethnic groups. This situation made it possible for the Irish to begin to share in the racial privileges of being white in a city where all residents were intensely aware of the advantages to be won, and lost, due to skin color.109 Children were on the front lines of this battle in California, just as they were elsewhere in the West. The willingness to negotiate nativism, if not the biological construction of race, left other marks on the local landscape of charity. A good example is the home built by the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society. The women of this charity, formed in 1853, helped white women and children without male protection to find work and housing;

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Figure 2.10.  “Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society Building, Franklin Street, from the West, San Francisco,” 1870. This institution was located a few blocks north of the site where the cornerstone was laid for the city hall in 1878. The Workingman’s Party staged the battle over the right to work on sandy soil near the construction site; “the sandlots” were similar to those shown in the photograph. From “Lawrence & Houseworth Photography Albums: California Views, 1860–1870.” Courtesy of the Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, gift of Florence V. Flinn.

they also offered relief and in time expanded their mission to include providing shelter. The charity’s managers rented space until they were able to buy a house; in 1863 it was replaced with a new home that was partially subsidized by the state legislature.110 This new masonry building—a broad horizontal block with a central entry, projecting roof, and bell tower—was similar to the Catholic orphanage on Market Street and the main building of the Industrial School. Like the Protestant Orphan Asylum, the new institution sat on a large tract—an entire city block—at the edge of settlement (figure 2.10). The parcel was a gift—from a nativist who made similar donations to Catholic charities in spite of his membership in the Know

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Nothing Party, whose anti-Catholic stance is notorious in American history. Admission policies at the home run by the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society reflected the group’s ambiguous link to nativism. The charity offered shelter and aid to white Protestant women, but opened the doors to boys and girls regardless of religion or race.111 The admission of any child of color to an orphanage built by white women for white children was unusual in the West, to say the least, in the 1860s and 1870s. More typically, Protestant and Catholic orphanages each competed to house children of the other, “wrong” religion. The religious interpretation of the open-door policy had manipulative, even coercive aspects when it came to religion, as women were determined to win converts to one or the other faith. However, identity was organized along more than religious lines in antebellum San Francisco, and other social formations were important in this multiethnic city where white people had a heightened consciousness of race privilege. The relative liberality of admissions spoke to the readiness of white women to share the project of using children and institutions to “civilize” the raucous West. New developments in public policy, which underscored the place of this work in the state’s mixed economy of welfare, encouraged women to build.

Women Become Partners with the State San Francisco’s orphanages, whether affiliated with the Protestant or Catholic religion, benefited in exactly the same manner from the distinction between indoor and outdoor relief written into law in 1855. When the legislature agreed to aid children within institutions but not outside of them, it recognized the power of these historic categories in the structure of benevolence in the United States. However, the government used its discretion in setting parameters for dispensing relief to children. The 1855 law set in place a framework for institutionalization that was later called the “New York System”; this term meant that state subsidies would be used to care for orphaned children solely in private charities, regardless of faith.112 The basic conditions remained in place in California until the twentieth century, although some provisions would be amended. As in-state residence requirements were stiffened, the subsidy would be extended to half-orphans and abandoned children, but refused to “Oriental” children. The new rules were one of many ways in which race prejudice left an ugly imprint on charity in the Golden State. It is very difficult to extract from nineteenth-century records the exact figures needed to describe the precise demography of children’s institu-

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tions. That said, and as New Deal researchers later pointed out, the 1890 US Census showed that California had a higher proportion of children in private institutions than was typical of the country as a whole. Because of the relatively generous state subsidy to private institutions, the number of people receiving public aid in private charities was larger proportionally than elsewhere in the country (exceeded only in New York State).113 In large measure, children lived in woman-run institutions, because in the meantime women had continued to build. Following the first imprints erected in and around San Francisco, Protestant and Catholic orphanages were built in Los Angeles (1856), Grass Valley (1865), Sacramento (1867), and Oakland (1871); more orphanages opened in the San Francisco, including one for Jewish children (1872), an infant shelter (1874), and a nursery for homeless children (1878).114 Protestant women also took a public stand against prostitution and determinism in the construction of race: the woman-run Methodist Episcopal Oriental Home (1870) and Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home (1872) offered shelter to Chinese prostitutes and their children. Although ethnocentric and self-righteous, the Protestant lady managers promoted women’s moral authority and traversed sharply drawn racial and cultural boundaries to extend relief and rescue to Asian women and children.115 Protesting this transgression of social boundaries, in 1877 the Workingman’s Party rioted outside the Presbyterian mission home.116 Women also took the lead in organizing child care for women who worked outside the home (usually abandoned wives, widows, and single mothers). The solutions included the informal care offered in Catholic orphanages mentioned above. Women opened other charities for this express purpose: the Little Sisters’ Infant Shelter (1871), a Protestant charity, and the day nursery that Elizabeth Armer started in 1872 for Catholic children. Armer, foster child of a wealthy Irish Catholic family, founded the Sisters of the Holy Family to run the day nursery and meet the need of Catholic families for daycare; the order would go on to build and operate day nurseries across the San Francisco Bay Area, including one in Oakland.117 The result was a charitable landscape that, because of its urbanity, diversity, and complexity, underscored an obvious and very important point: Since the nineteenth century new forms of charity have been imagined in cities because the need for these institutions has been a logical result of rapid urbanization. As R. J. Morris has written, “The nineteenth-century city became a vast laboratory, which tested the effectiveness of market mechanisms to the limit and the operation of other ways of producing and delivering goods and services.”118 Because cities are dense, big, and complex, their power structures needed to formulate responses to externalities—meaning

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in this context human services that could not be priced profitably, like social welfare. As cities grew, the need for these services, and thus the need for the power elite to intervene outside the market, only increased.119 In California this situation put pressure on women to construct more buildings, to invent more material resources for children. After 1870 the authorization of new subsidies for orphans in California strengthened the partnership of woman-run charities with the state government. In the 1869–70 session, the legislature changed the formula from a lump sum grant to one based on the actual head count in a charity; the per capita method remained in place for the rest of the century.120 Why did the funding mechanism change? In the Progressive Era, a critic explained the decision as having been taken because requests for the lump sum subvention consumed too much time during the legislative session; the legislature found itself giving aid to the most demanding lobbyists rather than to the most worthy (likely a code word for woman-run) charities.121 All that may have been true, but the change in state subsidy constituted a dramatic increase; it meant that a private facility with one hundred orphans in residence would receive $5,000 a year from the state government; previously, the orphanage would have qualified for this amount of money only once, rather than every year. In 1874 state aid was increased and extended to abandoned children. Inevitably this situation led to the proliferation of institutions for children and the elderly after the subvention was extended to include the “indigent aged.”122 Looking back on the situation, New Deal reformers explained California’s interest in expanding institutions for children as having resulted from the extreme skew in the state’s sex ratio. The lack of women translated into an “acute need for a substitute for home life,” especially among immigrants, because there were not enough women to take care of children, the elderly, the sick, and other people in need.123 However, this explanation ignores the fact that the skew between the sexes began to equalize after the Civil War, and that the state government always counted on women to do the work in charities. The expectation was due not only to high-minded moralism, but also to the blunt facts of a political economy that was grounded in the gender asymmetry and hierarchy of American society. For the most part, a private charity, owned and managed by women, cost far less to operate than an institution owned and run by the state. Women worked for free as volunteers; they pressed men for money and scoured the city for in-kind donations of food, fuel, clothing, and other necessities. In other words, the regularization of state funding took account of the economic benefit to the people of California of female philanthropy for children.

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The timing of the new law was fortuitous. In May 1869 Leland Stanford, president of the Pacific Railroad, picked up a silver sledgehammer in Promontory, Utah, and on his second try pounded in a gold stake that joined the parallel iron tracks stretching from coast to coast. On November 8, 1869, the first passenger train bound for the East Coast left Oakland on the Central Pacific; the first westbound transcontinental train pulled into town on the same day.124 With the transcontinental telegraph line, completed in 1861, the transcontinental railroad linked city to nation and advanced dreams of westward expansion.125 This new infrastructure tied California more securely to the national economy, with its booms and its busts, than before; it also delivered new people and more goods to the Pacific Coast and promised heightened industrial competition. Women in Oakland took steps to organize the charitable landscape after the transcontinental railroad arrived in their city. Applying habits of mind used in San Francisco, habits that deferred to the preference for inexpensive government in the United States, white Protestant women defined public charity as a private responsibility. Their first step was to work with men to form the Oakland Benevolent Society, although within two short years a separate charity, the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California, would be organized. Calling on their unlike capacities for civic action, these women altered the public sphere by taking charge of urban charity for children.

three

The Ladies Intervene: Repurposed and Purpose-Built in Temescal

As the transcontinental railroad transformed Oakland, white Protestant women began to build the charitable landscape for children. They took the first step in 1869, when they decided to cooperate with men to organize the Oakland Benevolent Society, and the next one in 1871, when they seceded from it to form a single-sex charity, the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California. “Our charitable public,” the Enquirer called men and women who directed philanthropies in the city, suggesting that homogeneity of purpose unified the beneficent endeavors of both sexes.1 Since the visit of Alexis de Tocqueville to the United States in the 1830s, observers had lavished praise on voluntary societies for the many improvements rendered by them to the urban landscape, including charity. Although the French political thinker had missed the place women claimed in building this part of the public realm, the female presence in urban philanthropy was readily apparent to other observers, including those in Oakland. “The most ambitious can hardly fail to be impressed with a sense of large responsibilities when looking over the wide field of public and private effort,” the Enquirer noted in 1897. Clubs, societies, and charitable institutions were “occupied, if not monopolized, by women.”2 The comment had a double edge. In lauding the achievement, the newspaper admitted that women had created many places in the charitable landscape; it also deferred to the gender ideology of domestic femininity that assigned to them the care of other women and children. The gendered differentiation packed a powerful political punch. Separatism exposed the strength of female public culture as women demanded equality and agitated for the vote. The assertion of female moral authority also added clout to claims that women could resolve other appeals to the public conscience,

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including charitable ones.3 The women who formed inaugural charities in Oakland chose the latter course of action. Like women in San Francisco, the leading Protestant ladies of Oakland did not blockade saloons, campaign for suffrage, or parade down streets to win backing for like causes. Rather, these advocates of domesticity and the work ethic defined the benefits of their public action when they pressed the charitable public for support. “Whatever we may think of Woman’s Rights, Woman’s Mission is unmistakable and supreme,” a member of the Ladies’ Relief Society wrote in the Daily Transcript in 1872. “What can man do compared to her, where sick women and helpless children are the objects of commiseration?”4 This woman was referring to the Christian sense of duty that compelled her coworkers to break apart from the Oakland Benevolent Society in October 1871 and incorporate a new charity in June 1872. Their goal was to build an asylum for women and children in need of shelter. Observers in the Progressive Era later looked back on this time and asserted that the women of this charity had humanized the small railroad town by adding a modicum of feminized civility to a roughly hewn public face.5 Women used their perceived moral authority and ties to religious and family life to advantage in order to open a charity and secure a space of their own. Their institution building also buttressed the state government (and its project to build a white nation in the West) and saved the taxpayers expense, especially for the care of poor children.6 A new understanding of the importance of the physical environment in child development bolstered the claims to civic significance. There is a “political as well as Christian economy of establishing and maintaining in every community a sufficient number of protective or relief institutions to properly care for and educate all neglected children,” Sarah Sawtelle Weston argued in 1878.7 This officer of the Ladies’ Relief Society alluded not to the fiscal benefit that came from the gender division of labor, but rather to the abject failure of institutions like the San Francisco Industrial School. Without women in the lead, Weston suggested, incarceration in an institution only temporarily restrained the behavior of indigent children. All too often, a place like the Industrial School encouraged kids to become paupers and criminals who continued to make claims on the public dole. Weston could have cited Bob Durkin as an example of the high cost to taxpayers of the inadequate care of indigent children (see figure 2.4). Durkin, one of the first children put in the Industrial School, was incarcerated repeatedly as an adult.8 In Weston’s view, a woman-run asylum, a home, offered surer results than the public charity delivered in reform schools or the scientific charity practiced by the Oakland Benevolent Society.

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The Oakland Benevolent Society In 1869 Elijah Bigelow, a real estate broker, and Emma McLachlan Bigelow, his wife, joined twenty-eight men and women to form the Oakland Benevolent Society, the first nonsectarian charity in Alameda County.9 The society’s stated objectives—to remove beggars from city streets and to aid families in need, including children—could have seemed incongruous to a casual observer of the urban scene (figure 3.1). Without paved streets or a working sewer system, a hard-nosed city builder with his eye on the bottom line could have argued that Oakland needed improvements to its physical in­frastructure more than it needed the moral uplift and social control promised by the new charity. That was not the case. The Oakland Benevolent Society appealed to the city’s builders and boosters, who included backers of this charity. They celebrated the completion of the transcontinental railroad, taking it to be a sure sign from heaven of prosperity to come. The parallel iron tracks, which made it possible to cross the country in seven short days, brought rapid change to California, including Oakland, the last stop on the line.10 Men and women, who lived in Oakland in almost equal number in 1870, filled the city of 10,500 people with voluntary associations.11 The first directory of Alameda County listed twenty-two societies in 1869–70 and indicated that three—the temperance society, the literary union, and the Oakland Benevolent Society—welcomed women and men to meetings. Germans, Catholics, and Jews organized other societies with social assis­ tance in mind, if not always with the word “benevolent” in their names. The directory identified ten churches and almost as many Sabbath schools: nine Protestant churches (Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist) and St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, supported by the women of the Convent of the Sacred Heart. African Americans organized a Protestant church, not listed in the directory but nevertheless part of the urban scene, and the Congregational Church opened near the harbor a mission for Chinese immigrants. Other fixtures of civil society—public schools, a military academy, a seminary for girls, a college for women, a fire department, and a public library—dotted the urban landscape. Nearby, in the new city of Berkeley, the state-run Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum was almost complete, despite earthquake damage sustained in 1868, and the Board of Regents commissioned buildings for the new University of California.12 The extent and diversity of these organizations suggests that the transcontinental railroad brought a larger, more mobile, and ethnically diverse workforce to Oakland. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, all sorts of people

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Figure 3.1.  Broadway looking south toward the harbor from Thirteenth Street, Oakland, 1873. With railroad tracks, unpaved streets, commercial blocks, and arcaded wooden sidewalks prominent, Oakland is shown to have been a typical small Western town of the early 1870s. From the oral history of Mary McLean Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880–1895” (1963). Courtesy of  The Bancroft Library, University of California. Berkeley.

arrived in Alameda County looking to live and work in places created by an expanding regional economy. The wealth of the West flowed through San Francisco, but the commerce on which it was based started in or passed through Oakland, which would become the shipping and transportation hub for the western United States.13 In the early 1870s, enterprises in addition to railroads included agriculture (Chinese immigrants were among those who labored on farms), manufacturing based on agricultural products (a brewery, a cannery, and flour and lumber mills), an industrial laundry, and a chemical paint works. Entrepreneurs also opened a gaslight company, a street railroad company, a water company, and two savings banks. Even so, work remained unsteady, irregular, and seasonal in any railroad town; this situation, when coupled with poor wages, disease, and a host of other factors, made poverty a routine part of daily life in Oakland.14 Faced with this situation, the state took action to remediate indigence. Decisions of the legislature during the 1869–70 session shaped actions taken in Oakland. The state set up a board of health and appointed Thomas

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Logan director. Logan proposed to rectify abuses in county poor farms by replacing dilapidated buildings with institutions, based on the model designs of an architect.15 The legislature cut short the innovation by refusing to allocate funds for construction. Concerned that corrupt county officials would spend the money on other projects, legislators decided instead to distribute money for relief directly to voluntary societies.16 The strategy made good sense to the wealthy real estate brokers, merchants, bankers, lawyers, and doctors, who with their wives founded the Oakland Benevolent Society. Many lived in the elegant residential districts then developing at the northern edge of the city, near Fourteenth Street and Lake Merritt and within walking distance of Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, and Episcopal churches. Men were active in these churches (serving as trustees, deacons, and Sunday school instructors), and in the area’s civic life (launching public schools and the Oakland Public Library) and urban politics. Working in concert with women, they gave food and clothing to families in need and located work for men when jobs could be found. Success came quickly. The society announced in the city’s first street directory that eight destitute families had been helped and that two others were being assisted. It also issued an appeal for contributions. “The design of [the] Society is to suppress street begging by relieving those really worthy of charity,” the notice advised. “If the people of Oakland contribute to its fund, they will be free from any moral obligation to give alms to paupers.”17 To discourage begging in Oakland, the benevolent society turned to a new theory of charity, known as scientific or organized charity. By the 1850s, charity workers in Eastern cities questioned individualistic explanations of poverty offered by moral reformers earlier in the century. Their expressed interest in so-called scientific inquiry and physical properties of the urban environment made them the first in the United States to advocate for organized charity. They counseled scientific assessment of requests for relief, with the intentional humiliation intended to deter charlatans, weed out the worthy, and direct them to the appropriate charities.18 As demeaning as the practice was, coupling individual inspection with environmental explanations of poverty helped to secularize charity in the United States. On the East Coast, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (NYAICP) expected that “a great science of charity” governed by universal principles would eradicate begging; it also directed attention to the built environment.19 In addition to scrutinizing individuals, the NYAICP investigated buildings, exposing tenement house conditions and other matters deemed at great risk to public health. Its dedication to environmentalism did not eclipse concern with moral shortcomings,

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but rather led to the formulation of a “pietist science of poverty” based on the assumption of intrinsic moral properties in the urban environment.20 The claim that ordinary landscapes, everyday activities, and common things held moral properties rested on Protestant values, and the New Testament’s instruction that good works be performed in the world encouraged charities to link philanthropy with environmental and moral reform.21 Most members of the benevolent society (and of other inaugural charities in Oakland) belonged to the Protestant congregations that typically took charge of urban philanthropy during westward expansion.22 Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians shared an interest in making moral convictions tangible, in giving a public face to ethical beliefs, and in offering relief in an ordered landscape.23 The spatial practices of poor immigrant families also alarmed champions of organized charity, just as they had dismayed moral reformers earlier in the century. Activities like begging, sleeping, and playing in city streets defied middle-class conventions and were thought to be especially dangerous for women and children.24 Evidently, the destitute had made their needs known in public spaces by the late 1860s, or so the formation of the Oakland Benevolent Society would suggest. Not much is known about the eight families who received aid in 1869, the year this charity began to distribute relief. No personal details were published in the city’s directory, and most of the organization’s records are lost to history. But its focus on destitute families implies that women and children needed help, with some soliciting in public. The specified agenda—investigating families, promoting public morality, and controlling begging—indicates that the charity grounded its program in the environmental arguments of scientific charity, as well as in the pietistic moralism of antebellum reform. At first the philanthropic aims of the two sexes aligned in the new charity, but not for long. In older cities, advocates of organized charity, usually men, dismissed the efficacy of moral reformers, very often women.25 Gender did not so divide the membership of the benevolent society in Oakland, but two years after that charity was formed, three of its members, Lucy Dam, Kate Fisher, and A. C. Potter, joined other wealthy women to set up a singlesex charity, the Ladies’ Relief Society. It is not surprising that the two groups began by working in concert to help destitute families, linked as they were by family, class, religion, race, and the shared project of spreading American culture in the West. From the get-go, however, these women knew that the strategies taken thus far to organize the charitable landscape did not meet the needs of their sex. “There are two classes of needy women who are especially helpless,” one member argued; “viz., those who, compelled to earn a

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subsistence, find their hands tied up with little children, and those who are so aged as to depend for support upon others.”26 The answer was to open the first benevolent institution in Oakland—an asylum for elderly women and indigent children.

The Ladies’ Relief Society: “Sprung from the Ashes of a Sister City” In October 1871 the new charity sprang phoenix-like, “from the ashes of a sister city,” after the telegraph delivered news of destruction wreaked on Chicago by the great fire. As in San Francisco, women in Oakland organized to help survivors left homeless, “shivering” on the shores of Lake Michigan (figure 3.2).27 In the face of an urban crisis, they retooled the sewing circle to garner material resources for others in need. Offered in church pulpits and the press, the call for seamstresses reached women in the city and near suburbs, extending west to West Oakland and Oakland Point, east to Brooklyn and Fruitvale, and north toward Temescal and Berkeley. Sewing machines were set up in Brayton Hall, and within a week, women decided to form a permanent association. Kate Fisher, the new charity’s recording secretary, wrote in its first annual report, “Thoughts, purposes, and desires, which had been lying hidden in many hearts, coming into contact, were kindled into life.”28 Appropriating public space in nineteenth-century cities heightened a disenfranchised group’s sense of its social identity and hence its political potential, as Mary Ryan has argued; this judgment is borne out by the events in Oakland.29 According to Fisher, assembly in a public place rather than a private home created a common ground by muting religious and class differences. In the previous spring, the women had met in Mary Cole’s elegant home in West Oakland, but they changed the venue to a church basement after the Chicago fire galvanized group action.30 By June 1872, Mrs. C. C. Curtis, Lucy Dam, Cornelie Dwinelle, Martha Moore, and Ida Spear joined Fisher to incorporate the charity—a legal step needed to secure common ownership of real property. Thirty women signed on as members, with the six married women just mentioned making up the charity’s executive committee and the balance its board of lady managers.31 Endorsing in the name of charity the progressive goals of religious inclusion and class bridging, the founders wrote into their constitution the central premise, “This Society is and shall remain wholly non-sectarian.” The charity may have had no ties to a denominational creed or dogma, but there were tacit limits to the undertaking. In the early 1870s, it was taken as a matter of course that white women

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Figure 3.2.  “The Chicago Fire—Ladies Distributing Clothing to the Sufferers of Both Sexes—From a Sketch by Joseph Becker,” 1871. The pointed arch windows, sketched in the background, suggest that the Chicago relief effort was located in a church hall. Even if this could be described as a mixed-sex endeavor, women run the show, distributing clothing to other women and children. The barefoot girl in the foreground holds a pair of shoes, important for her to have not only as protection from impending cold weather, but as a sign that she is respectable. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Nov. 4, 1871. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum, ICHi-02894.

would be members, that white clients would receive outdoor relief, and that elderly clients (although not children) would be Protestant.32 Fisher claimed that the charity’s membership reached across social scale, but for the most part the founders were wealthy, white, married women who knew one another from religious services, society occasions, and other gatherings at Protestant churches. Most were mothers with children, ser­ vants, and an occasional boarder at home; one was widowed; another was employed as a teacher. Their husbands (merchants, attorneys, doctors, politicians, a professor, and a military officer) earned respectable salaries; many had arrived during or after the Gold Rush and some had become very wealthy, owning as much as $50,000, $20,000, even $200,000 in real property. Aware that its project would require expertise in architecture, finance, and law, the charity formed a male advisory board and invited to sit on it Moore’s husband, J. Preston, a merchant; Alexander Campbell, a

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lawyer and judge; G. W. Potter, a civil engineer; J. B. Woolsey, a former city council member; and Elijah Bigelow, the aforementioned real estate broker. Bigelow’s wife declined to join, but Potter’s wife was a manager of the charity and Campbell’s daughter, Jessie, single and wealthy, became a manager within a year and an officer shortly thereafter.33 The charity had in mind to erect a new asylum with separate wings for women and children, a building that would marry splendid design with feminized civic purpose. “Looking not many years into the future, we see the walls of our Home arising, fair in aspect, ample in proportions, commodious in design; sheltering under its protecting roof the homeless, the fatherless, the friendless, the weary and waytorn travelers in life’s journey,” Fisher wrote.34 The need for institutions of this sort was paramount in railroad towns in the West, where elderly women and children in need lacked extended family networks for support.35 Homes for both groups, built by women across the bay in San Francisco, likely proved inspirational, as did a grand new building on the outskirts of town. Commissioned in 1870 by the Christian missionaries Cyrus and Susan Mills, the Young Ladies’ Seminary was the first women’s college erected west of the Mississippi River (fig­ure 3.3).36 Samuel C. Bugbee, who arrived in San Francisco in 1854,

Figure 3.3.  Mills Hall, Mills College, Oakland, Samuel Bugbee, architect, 1870. Originally called the Young Ladies’ Seminary, this building held all the functions of the college when it opened in 1870. Photograph by the author, 2002.

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designed the impressive, three-story, wood-frame building, decorated in the fashionable Second Empire style and similar in organization to the home built by the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society in San Francisco (see figure 2.10). This kind of commission helped Bugbee to advance his career on the West Coast, especially given that he had started as a carpenter. He went on to build a successful architectural practice that included commissions for the Stanford and Crocker mansions on Nob Hill in San Francisco.37 As wealthy as many were, the women of the Ladies’ Relief Society did not have the financial wherewithal to marry their altruism with the desired architectural outcome. The hope was to hire an architect who would design “an architectural ornament to our city, and a monument to the liberality of her citizens.”38 The members used social advantages, accrued from class, religion, and race, to form a single-sex association in which the female sex could set the benevolent agenda. However, these privileges, even when asserted for the public good, did not override the blunt facts of gender inequality. “We must have money,” Fisher stated, “and we must also bring ourselves before the public to make known our designs and our necessities.”39 This was the paradox of their position: these women could not be isolated in a separate sphere for the building plan to succeed; they also needed to defer to the ideology of domestic femininity to win support for their charity. The first step was to divide responsibility for the charitable landscape with the Oakland Benevolent Society. The strategy chosen, institution building, took heed of the prevailing sensibility that the two sexes held unlike capacities for civic action and thus should exercise them differently in the public realm. To begin with, the Ladies’ Relief Society had acted as if it were a charity organization society; women paid rent, gave out fuel, food, and clothes, and found work for poor families; the Oakland Benevolent Society did the same. When women decided to open an asylum, they claimed institution building to be a female task and ceded responsibility for charity organization to the only other nonsectarian charity in town. “Our purpose hereafter is to adhere strictly to our original design, viz: To provide a Home for destitute women and children,” Fisher wrote. “We are in no sense a rival society, but design to fill a space which, from the nature of things, they cannot occupy.” She promised that her charity would cooperate “heartily” with the Oakland Benevolent Society—“neither of us trenching on the other’s ground.”40 Fisher made clear that women of this charity recognized the symbolic significance of claiming urban space and the implicit limits to their actions in the public sphere. Her insights from the 1870s are in line with contem-

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porary political theory. As Henri Lefebvre has argued, appropriating urban space has an emancipatory potential in liberal capitalist democracies; appropriated spaces also replicate power relations in the dominant society. In Oakland, opening a separate institution for women and children highlighted the feminization of poverty and the devastating outcomes both for women and children; underscoring the word “Home” emphasized ties to family life; invoking other spatial metaphors (space, ground) deferred to the ideology of separate spheres. Even if the charity embraced separatism, the building project secured a foothold for them in urban public culture. It also facilitated the spread of American culture in the West, first as a benevolent intervention on behalf of elderly women, unable to care for themselves and children made destitute through no fault of their own; and second as a racially segregated site, a place for whites only.41 The next step, acquiring property, brought women face-to-face with the exigencies of building in a nineteenth-century American city. Physical barriers (infrastructure, buildings, and patterns of land use), friction between competing interests, and the need for upfront financing impeded urban improvements across the United States. The effect of these obstructions on large cities like New York and Chicago is known, but these obstacles also hindered urban improvements in a small city like Oakland—especially for a project that depended on environmental change, like the one envisioned by the Ladies’ Relief Society.42 Raising money took pride of place on the charity’s agenda, and the managers turned to methods that women had used since the Renaissance to fund urban charities for children. They grounded the high-minded ethos of their society in the customary practices of a barter economy, soliciting subscriptions and accepting donations of clothing, food, bedding, and even some cash, for the most part from other women.43 Historically, fines collected from beggars and prostitutes had supported urban charities, but the Ladies’ Relief Society refused to countenance money tainted by even a hint of imprudence or impropriety. It declined at first to take on debt or request state funds. “No brand of shame may mark them as pauper recipients of the public bounty,” one member vowed, conveying her hopes for children who would call an institution home. Rather, “a spirit of Christian love and charity shall ever preside over the Home and dwell in the hearts of all in authority.”44 With plenty of convictions but not much cash on hand, the managers realized they could not afford to erect a new building. The need for a pragmatic solution became obvious in April 1872, after the society organized a benefit festival to raise funds. The event had captivated the charitable public. “Who will Give us a site?” one woman asked in the Daily Transcript as

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the benefit drew to a close. “The results of the Festival, as yet, have proved that the Home we plan will be no Chateau en Espagne, but a house, not yet ‘made with hands,’ but already building in the hearts and minds of a generous people.”45 On the last day, Elijah Bigelow, advisor to the charity and president of the Oakland Benevolent Society, conferred one-quarter of a city block in honor of his wife, Emma. The in-town site was quickly exchanged for property on the outskirts of town. A building design was proposed, but the charity could not afford the six-thousand-dollar price tag even though architects and carpenters offered services and materials gratis.46 Undeterred, the managers rented a small house outside of town. The decision to rent a house on a suburban site was logical. Although purpose-built institutions had been erected for children in San Francisco, public agencies and private associations also repurposed buildings for charities. New regulatory authorities in California, most importantly the state board of health, criticized the informal building practice; the board insisted that state-run institutions made in this manner were physically inferior to new construction.47 Nonetheless, adaptive reuse appealed to officials who needed affordable sites for county hospitals and to women who struggled to fund projects for children. The Orphan Asylum Society rented cottages and the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society boarded children before each charity opened its own purpose-built institution in San Francisco. Even in a city like Oakland, with unimproved lots to spare, the Young Women’s Christian Association rented a dwelling before deciding to build.48 The strategy seemed reasonable to wealthy women in Oakland who competed with men for public space. Even as social forms and physical spaces became rationalized across urbanizing landscapes, women built on the past, making incremental changes to the city fabric as they raised the funds needed to erect entirely new institutions. Custom also sanctioned the choice of a site at the edge of the city, where large tracts were available at some distance, but not too far, from urban life. Squalor and the temptation of the central city had to be avoided, but not at the cost of easy access to downtown. In urbanizing California it made sense to build an institution like the Young Ladies’ Seminary close to the city limits if not quite within them. Women relied on extended social networks to raise funds, procure supplies, and find staff. Clients also had to be able to reach institutions, and charities needed clients as they came to rely on state subsidies to pay bills. Charities for children had to be especially accessible. This assured visibility to parents and helped youngsters to bridge the gap to independent living in nearby communities, where many would live and work as adults.

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Land parcels in West Oakland met these criteria, and members of the Ladies’ Relief Society either lived or had friends who resided in elegant homes north of Eighth Street (see figures 1.7 and 1.8). However, the charity preferred to locate north of the city, close to the Berkeley Railroad and near the anticipated building site for the future asylum. It rented first one then another house near the railroad. In rapid succession the houses proved too small, filled to overflowing with children as the economic crisis started to unfold in the mid-1870s.49 In need of more space and without enough money to build, the charity sold the property and used the proceeds to purchase a farm from George Beckwith in Temescal, between Berkeley and Oakland (see figure 1.14, site 1). Even if rural in feel, development was under way in this part of Alameda County, with communication networks and water service in place, the latter thanks to the enterprising hydraulic mining engineer Anthony Chabot. Soon to be benefactor of the Ladies’ Relief Society, Chabot not only incorporated the Oakland Water Company in 1866 but also dammed the Temescal Creek to ensure a monopoly on fresh water service to Oakland. Josiah Lusk built a cannery on the banks of the creek and supplied it with produce from four hundred acres of fruit and vegetable gardens that he also owned in Temescal. In the 1881 season the J. Lusk Canning Company, one of the biggest in the West, packed 150,000 cases of fruit, including 60,000 of tomatoes—roughly 3,600 tons.50 Perhaps George Beckwith decided to sell his farm because he saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps he learned at a meeting of the Oakland Benevolent Society that the charity was looking to buy. In any event, and as hard times worsened, he received a handsome sum: sixteen thousand dollars for his home and ten-acre farm off of Telegraph Avenue. The charity swallowed its doubts about debt and agreed to a mortgage on the portion of the purchase price that it could not pay in cash.51 The site offered the benefits of town and country—easy access, water, orchards, plenty of room for vegetable gardens and outdoor play—and a sizeable house.52 To begin with, women and children lived under one roof, but soon enough white boys and girls, mostly from immigrant families, became the main recipients of relief in Temescal.

The Children’s Home, Repurposed in Temescal First by exercising their power to name the building, then by altering it, the Ladies’ Relief Society turned the Beckwith farmhouse into an orphanage. To begin with, the institution was called an asylum and a home, although

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the name “Children’s Home” came to prevail. The term “asylum,” one historian argues, suggested a temporary refuge in the mid-nineteenth century, a place that helped to keep families intact by supporting children in a time of crisis through care in congregate facility.53 The directors of congregate charities did not take a child to be an independent person with autonomous needs, and they expected parents to work to maintain children in institutions. The Ladies’ Relief Society endorsed those values, so the name change from “asylum” to “home” was likely related to another trend. Charities used the name “children’s home” to counter the impression that a facility housed only orphans, since many, including those in Temescal, also cared for half-orphans and abandoned children.54 As age consciousness and the sense that childhood was a special stage in life spread in the United States, the name also suggested the cohort in residence—youngsters between two and twelve years old.55 White working-class families, shrewd consumers of philanthropic ser­ vices, sought help from a charity like the Ladies’ Relief  Society. When illness, disability, death, loss of a job, or another misfortune disrupted family life, the survival strategy of a loving parent could include placing a child in an institution.56 This could have been the fate of the young Elizabeth Watt in New Hampshire if she had not moved to live with the Leightons in Pennsylvania. Virtually all admission records have been lost for the Temescal charity, and were probably burned in one of the fires that periodically swept through the place, but parents acted in Oakland as they did elsewhere and made calculated judgments about need and survival, about costs and benefits. For many reasons the decision to place a child was difficult, but this fact stands out. Death claimed frailer residents in orphanages, where high mortality rates matched those in working class communities.57 To mitigate exposure, children under two were not admitted in Temescal. This rule contained illness; it also contained costs. Infants and toddlers, too young to help out about the place, needed more care than older children. The Oakland orphanage, the only one in town in the 1870s, was a quasipublic place. As at the Protestant and Catholic orphanages in San Francisco, the managers applied the metaphor of an extended family and a family home in Temescal, insisting that they would meet more than physical needs for shelter, food, and clothing. In line with the prevailing social construction of working-class childhood, poor children were seen as trainable and were expected to work; they were also seen as savable, deserving of some aspects of a good childhood. The latter goal was in keeping with philanthropic ideals, which were changing in the 1870s as interest in environmentalism and concern for child protection swept through reform circles.58

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Figure 3.4. The Children’s Home (formerly George Beckwith’s house) in Temescal, 1883. The orphanage is shown after the Beckwith house had been renovated and enlarged. Children are sitting on the porch and stairs and standing in the garden, and the front door is open, with matron visible just inside it—all to suggest that there is nothing to hide. This photograph illustrated the 1883 annual report of the charity and was reprinted in W. W. Elliott, Oakland and Surroundings; Illustrated and Described, Showing Its Advantages for Residences and Businesses (Oakland, 1885), plate facing p.152. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

As a physical artifact, through social relations, and by symbolic meanings, the former Beckwith house made evident the charity’s goals. The building resembled the neo-Georgian plan, being two rooms deep, organized around a central hall, and more than two stories high. This type of dwelling spread through the United States as it became an emblem of the middleclass white Protestant family.59 A photograph taken after the orphanage was renovated in 1878 communicates the sense that this node in the charitable landscape was intended to be a safe haven for the sixty or so kids in residence (figure 3.4). The building looks like the large middle-class house it once was; it is surrounded by a verdant garden, and children seem to be at ease in the place. However idyllic setting appears to have been, the charity also used it to socialize inmates, as children in residence were called. Fisher called the process “home training,” and she assured donors that when kids left the institution they would be ready for work and other responsibilities. Another officer wrote, “It is far the better policy to prevent the growth of evil in our midst, by securing, as far as possible, to all vagrant children a useful and moral education, thus fitting them for honest self-support and for worthy citizenship.”60

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Figure 3.5.  “Prayer Time in the Nursery, Five Points House of Industry,” New York City. Photograph by Jacob A. Riis, c. 1880. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, the Jacob A. Riis Collection, 90.13.1.127.

Other charities counted on material culture to shape childhood. The pious women who set up Protestant missions in Eastern cities used everyday artifacts to condition their charges. When the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society opened an orphanage in New York City’s Five Points, the charity enveloped Irish Catholic boys and girls in a frugal iteration of Protestant culture. In an altered loft building, youngsters slept in age-graded dormitories (figure 3.5).61 Utilitarian metal bedsteads, set in straight lines on a sparsely furnished floor, embodied congregate ideals as effectively if not as generously as at the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum later in the century (see figure 2.8). In New York, the matron stood at the back of the dormitory to face Jacob Riis as he photographed children with hands folded in prayer at bedtime. Clean sheets, white nightgowns, and cropped hair indicated scrupulous attention to health and cleanliness, in theory if not always in fact. The likeness to cherubs—the suggestion that angelic innocence has been restored to immigrant toddlers who have been damaged

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by life on tough city streets—was not an accident. Neither was the prurience implicit in this eroticized invasion of a child’s private world.62 In what sense was an orphanage an emancipatory site for a woman who managed the charity, if not always for the children? The managers visited Temescal at least once a month during the summer for meetings, and reported that they were changed by their experiences at the charity. Volunteer work added purpose to lives confined by gendered social conventions when wealthy women met children from circumstances different than their own. “There are nobler objects to engage woman’s mind than the latest Paris fashions,” Fisher wrote.63 Conceptualizing charity as a virtue may have indicated the limits to her participation in the public sphere, but by referring to fashion, she made clear that she wanted more from daily life than the orchestration of consumption. The managers, white women of privilege, set the terms for their work about the place. They applied management skills learned in their households to run the institution, and acted at the charity as they did at home when they hired servants and expected them to follow instructions.64 A widowed English immigrant, Isabella Perkins, a commanding, motherly figure, took charge of daily life, assisted by her daughter Belle, a teacher. Other employees reported to her: a divorced Swedish nurse, a widow from Ohio, and the Irish cook and gardener.65 With all debt cleared, the charity declared the Temescal home “a public institution of Oakland” in 1876.66 It added six managers to its board, divided the city into thirty districts, and assigned each woman responsibility for canvassing one of them. Across the nation, charities organized fund-raising in this manner, in spite of condemning poorer people for acting similarly. “America stands aghast to-day before her army of tramps,” Sarah E. Henshaw wrote in 1878, one year after the sandlot rebellion and as tens of thousands of destitute men and women poured into the Bay Area looking for work. “We must all beware how we give, lest we intensify the pauper spirit, and so precipitate upon ourselves an army of communists.”67 Henshaw, who replaced Fisher as recording secretary, may have fretted about tramps, but she nonetheless walked the streets of Oakland with her colleagues. In that context the petitions, a form of urban begging, testified to her piety, humility, and respectability rather than staining her character. The managers must have developed an astute mental map of the city’s social geography as they knocked on doors in the late 1870s. “Hard times and the ‘Sand Lot Agitation’ were at their worst,” one woman lamented.68 The effort paid off. The charity raised enough money to erect an entirely

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new building, but set aside the project due to concerns about the street layout adjacent to its property. This is an example of the frictions encountered in building for children; in the end it made sense to renovate the home, making it as comfortable as the situation allowed.69 After the improvements were finished, the society could not pay its bills. “The Home was full and the Treasury empty,” one woman stated, hard times having exacted a toll on finances.70 Pressed by these circumstances, the managers reassessed the taint of shame, presumed to have stemmed from government funding. Their request for support stirred debate, but in the end the city council and the state legislature agreed to the subsidy. Worth about $2,100 a year, the funds, collected from police fines, steadied the charity’s finances.71 The renovated and enlarged dwelling in Temescal still looked like the capacious middle-class dwelling it had once been (figures 3.6 and 3.7). This was intentional; in writing about the place, women were just as likely to call the orphanage a house as a home. The farmhouse had been lifted, raised one story, to create a full basement with enough room for a dining room and kitchen. Upstairs, the retained domestic features included the central

Ground Floor Plan

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Figure 3.6. The Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and upper floor plans. Key: (1) parlor; (2) schoolroom; (3) staff; (4) infirmary; (5) girls’ dormitory; (6) matron’s room; (7) toilet and bathroom. The reconstruction is based on “Ladies’ Relief Annual,” Oakland Daily Times, May 3, 1878; “Rest for the Weary,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, July 22, 1882; Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, c. 1882; California State Board of Health, Eighth Annual Report, 1884, 113; Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 13, 15.

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Figure 3.7. The Children’s Home, reconstructed building section, c. 1878. Key: (1) kitchen; (2) dining room; (3) schoolroom; (4) parlor; (5) matron’s room; (6) girls’ dormitory; (7) nurse’s room; (8) boys’ dormitory. For sources, see the caption to figure 3.6.

hall, a shared main stair, and the expected divisions between public and private spaces, adult and children’s spaces, and served and service spaces.72 The parlor, on the entry floor, worked like one in an elegant hotel, offering a meeting place and a reception room to the women of the charity.73 Every Friday afternoon, neatly dressed children gathered to sing songs and play games in the parlor, which was otherwise off-limits to them. Visitors were invited to view their performances. This kind of ceremony was crucial to the construction of middle-class identity, but an orphanage kid was not likely to have access to that status or use of that space after leaving the facility.74 At best, a girl would be hired to clean a parlor, not to sing in it. This suggests what was in fact the case: the expanded orphanage continued to facilitate the “home training” of children. The renovation simplified supervision and reinforced the asymmetry of power relations that was always operative in orphanages.75 Placed symmetrically about the hall, the parlor and the infirmary gave a clear view of who entered and left the facility. Upstairs, boys and girls slept in supervised dormitories on different floors. The matron’s bedroom was next to the girls’ dormitory on the second floor; the nurse’s was next to the boys’ on the third. Separate bedrooms for the sexes were common in middle-class homes by the 1870s, although not necessarily in working-class houses. The single-sex dormitories in Temescal were praised because they were well ventilated, with bathrooms and other

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conveniences at hand. They were also crowded (about thirty square feet per child and fifteen beds in a room). Kids of the same sex did not share beds, although the practice was common in other charities and workingclass homes.76 What kind of childhood did boys and girls have in Temescal? In all likelihood, the construction of space in all its manifestations astonished children. In the early 1880s, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish children made up most of the charity’s extended family. The building was packed: 120 children moved through in one year, along with a few elderly women. In a city described as 68 percent native-born and 92.5 percent white in the 1880 US Census, almost every child in the orphanage was either an immigrant or the son or daughter of one. That was typical. The State Board of Examiners reported in 1881 that four out of five children in asylums had foreign-born parents.77 Not every child was welcome in Temescal. Most hailed from Ireland, Scotland, Australia, or Germany; a few were from Austria, Italy, Sweden, France, or Portugal; and all were described as white. Most children had at least one sibling also present at the orphanage; many had two or more.78 Orphanage children sat down to regular meals, received medical care, attended school, and received love and affection, if published accounts are taken at face value. They also experienced firsthand socialization through religious practice. Even if the charity hoped to be “wholly nonsectarian,” it obliged all of its residents to attend daily prayers and weekly services, offered only under the auspices of Protestant churches, and made Sunday school mandatory for children. As at the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society in San Francisco, kids of different faiths lived at the charity, and elderly women had to be Protestant.79 All capable residents, even elderly women, were expected to work. Fearing that children would learn to assume that relief was a right, rather than dread dependence as a misfortune, the managers did all they could to instill respect for hard work. They also knew the orphanage would be a way station, a transition point rather than a lasting home. Boys and girls moved in and out of orphanages, taking jobs as better times returned and rejoining their birth families as need be.80 In Temescal this mobility added purpose to their work about the place, with the managers and kids mindful that apprenticeship, employment, or the rare placement with a foster family depended on a child’s docility, dexterity, and strength. Using children for domestic and farm chores was common, so it is not surprising that a dollar value was not assigned to child labor even if the charity accrued sizeable economic benefit from it. Similarly, the managers did not set an economic

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value on their own volunteer work, likely seeing it as a kind of “housewifery” and thus noneconomic activity, although in fact it was not.81 When the children were twelve years old they had to move on, now too old to qualify for support by the public weal. Their work about the orphanage had readied them for the different futures that awaited them in the adult world. Boys worked in gardens, orchards, and barns; cultivating food and caring for animals at the orphanage would have prepared them for similar work as young men, although probably most found work in factories, canneries, and the building trades. Girls worked inside the building, learning to respect the “worthiness and womanliness of domestic duties.”82 The goal of this technical education was to prepare a girl not only for motherhood but also for work as a seamstress or servant. In California she would compete with Asian men, including in the managers’ homes where Chinese servants were employed. The struggle between white women and Chinese men for low-paying domestic jobs not wanted by white men fueled the explosive mix of gender, ethnic, and class politics in California during the late 1870s. White working girls took to the streets to march with the Workingman’s Party and defend their right to this work. The party wrote their claim into its platform, but revealed an ambivalent stance on gender equality by embracing the ideal of the family wage. The goal was for a male breadwinner to earn enough to support his family without needing a contribution from either his wife or his daughters.83

A “Home for the Childhood of Age” All of these conflicts and more came to the forefront of the benevolent agenda in 1881 when the Ladies’ Relief Society resurrected its plan to erect an entirely new institution. A decade earlier, the group had proposed to care for elderly women and children in one building. The impracticality of that scheme became apparent when both groups lived together in Temescal. “The old people wanted quiet and the children wanted amusement, the old people were too much disturbed by the children, and the children were too much restricted by the old people,” Henshaw stated. The time had come to move forward, and not only because women and children could not get along. “The present civilization of California took root here only thirty years ago; ten years ago there were scarcely any old people in the state,” Henshaw wrote, referring to white residents. “But now the number is increasing, and an Old Ladies’ Home is needed.”84 The charity launched a fundraising campaign, and one year later it opened the grandiose home for aged women (figure 3.8).

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Figure 3.8. The Home for Aged Women in Temescal; B. McDougall & Son, Architects; A. Herbst, builder; erected in 1882, photographed in 1898. This view emphasizes the front wing of the building, home to the elderly women who are shown sitting under the portico and standing on the front lawn. The horse and buggy may be delivering a new client and, as at the Children’s Home, the door is open. It is hard to fathom how elderly women managed to climb the steep stair. From Lucy E. Dam, “Brief History of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland,” Mariposa Magazine (1898): 104.

The new state constitution, adopted in 1879 after the Workingman’s Party provoked a constitutional convention, made it imperative to build such an imposing structure. The new charter preserved aid to indigent children, but changed the delivery of relief to the elderly by prohibiting cash grants to voluntary societies. Instead, it authorized aid to groups that owned buildings similar to the one the Ladies’ Relief Society had wanted to erect since 1871. The new state constitution demanded that a “uniform rule” govern the distribution of aid in proportion to the number of inmates. In 1883 the legislature declared that it would subsidize the care of dependent adults: one hundred dollars a year for each person over sixty years old. This subsidy, more generous than those offered by many other states, would be granted only if these specific criteria were met. A charity needed to own real property worth at least fifteen thousand dollar and house at least ten people in a facility used only by men or women. In other words, the state offered aid to charities that managed specialized institutions and owned sizeable amounts of real estate.85 The shift in priorities held clear consequences for the Ladies’ Relief Society. Broadly speaking, the new constitution invited an addition to the Te-

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mescal site of a new structure more specialized than an altered building was ever likely to be. However, the legislature did not subsidize capital expenses, and the Oakland group did not have enough cash to pay for a new building. Once again, women organized a fund-raising benefit, and in 1881 with Virginie de Fremery in the lead, the drive succeeded. The longtime Oakland resident had been a manager of the charity since incorporation in 1872; her husband, James, a wealthy banker, diplomat, and trader, witnessed the signing of the charter. During the festivities at Masonic Hall, women pressed husbands, brothers, other male relatives, and family friends to contribute to the home for the “childhood of age.” As in San Francisco, connections with male elites proved necessary to alter the public sphere. One evening, Samuel Merritt, a landowner, physician, and former mayor, declared he would donate one thousand dollars to the building fund if nine others joined in. James de Fremery, Anthony Chabot, owner of the water company and a patron of the society, and George Perkins, the governor, answered in kind, as did Charles Crocker, a director of the Central Pacific Railroad. Impressed with the governor’s pledge, the railroad magnate and his wife, Mary, promised a double donation on the spot. By the end of the week, more than $21,300, the estimated cost of construction, was in hand. De Fremery deposited the cash in the San Francisco Savings Union, her husband’s bank.86 In short order, de Fremery and others hired McDougall & Son, an upand-coming architectural firm, to design the new building, and Antoine Herbst, an up-and-coming builder, to construct it. Like Samuel Bugbee, who designed the Young Ladies’ Seminary, Barnett McDougall had trained as a carpenter on the East Coast and practiced as an architect in San Francisco. The Oakland commission lent prestige to his practice and weight to the vision of architect-led urban improvement in the West. In the 1880s McDougall designed straightforward buildings, although he would go on to produce more imposing structures, including the Fine Arts Building for the Midwinter International Exposition of 1894.87 A founding member of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects, McDougall made it his business to promote the professionalization of architecture in the West. The California Architect and Building Review (later News) also took up the cause, having been founded by James E. Wolfe in 1879 for the express purpose (figure 3.9).88 Another carpenter turned architect, the editor invited builders, contractors, mechanics, and architects to subscribe, and proceeded to scold them for the “cheap building” that marred San Francisco.89 In other cities, architects reprimanded ordinary builders, especially carpenters who were Irish Catholic immigrants, for

Figure 3.9.  California Architect and Building News, May 1883, front cover. In 1877, working men camped in front of the construction site for the San Francisco City Hall, depicted on the left, to protest the hiring of Chinese builders. James Wolfe, builder-architect and editor of this journal, endorsed the sandlot campaign, convinced of the merits of both restricting Chinese immigration and excluding Asian carpenters from practice. The advertisements give some sense of the extent of the building trades active in the Bay Area in the early 1880s. Courtesy of  The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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shoddy craftsmanship and unscrupulous practices.90 In northern California, Wolfe tied “cheapness” to race, castigating Asian carpenters with especially virulent language. Building quality would improve, he insisted, as white architects assumed control and assigned contracts to white laborers.91 Bitter struggles for white supremacy in the workplace fueled this racist attack on carpenter competence. Even though the serious competition among white and Asian men was in the cigar and tobacco industries, the ruthless pressure to drive down wages in the 1870s and 1880s did not leave the building trades untouched.92 Anger about being asked to work hard for less pay, as well as outright racism, galvanized the support of white construction workers for nativism and exclusion. The male contest for control of the jobsite and the female need for the best price would have an impact on the node in the charitable landscape at Temescal. For the time being racial solidarity prevailed, and the charity hired white workers to build the new home. After masons completed the brick foundation, the Ladies’ Relief Society invited the people of Oakland to celebrate the placement of the cornerstone. More than one thousand people arrived on July 22, 1882, making the grounds in Temescal “resplendent with an array of wealth and poverty,” according to the Daily Tribune.93 As refreshments were served, a ceremony tied architecture to gender, munificence, and white privilege. Herbst invited the president to lay the stone and promised to build a structure that would “be an honor to your society and a blessing to our race.”94 Margaret Perine called to the stage four young women who handed her a small reliquary. Containing the New Testament, it gave the new home a literal foundation in Protestant Christianity as well as a spiritual one. As she set the casket in place, Perine declared, “In the name of Purity, of Love, and of Hope, and in the name of Benevolence and Charity, I lay this corner-stone, earnestly praying that as it is firmly fixed in this solid foundation, so may the constant practice of these cardinal virtues in our lives bring full fruition to all the hopes we have builded here.”95 Governor Perkins delivered the speech that brought the festivities to a close. The financial stability of the charity, he insisted, depended on the good will of men and the volunteer work of self-sacrificing women. This pitch for contributions made no mention of the considerable economic benefit that the new building would deliver to the charity. As important as private donations were, public dollars helped build the addition to the node in the charitable landscape at Temescal. When completed, the Home met the new rules before the legislature had written them into law. Perhaps the managers had learned that changes in public policy were under consideration. After all, the governor, a former mayor, and a

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director of the transcontinental railroad had endorsed their building program. Knowledge that additional subsidies would be contingent upon building design and investment in real property would have been useful, as plans were made to expand. Soon enough, the state legislature distributed more than six thousand dollars a year to the charity. Amounting to between one-third and one-quarter of the annual budget, this subsidy was the largest single contribution received, far exceeding funds raised from other sources.96 As carpenters nailed together the wood frame, the new building started to rise out of the ground in Temescal. A “marvel of architectural beauty,” enthused a reporter for the Tribune, singling out the fashionable eclecticism that promised to add stylish cachet to the entry facade. As was usual, the architect looked to national currents to guide the design, rather than to local culture. “The architecture is composite,” the reporter exaggerated, “including specimens of Doric, Roman, and Corinthian,” albeit with details fabricated from redwood rather than stone.97 The steep pitch to the roof and the central pavilion, topped with a tower that looked like a church steeple, made the new home look like a religious as well as a civic building. From the reporter’s vantage point, in front of the Home for Aged Women, the building spoke to the single use in accord with the name emblazoned above the front door. A central pavilion flanked symmetrically by thin wings, a main floor raised a full story above grade, and a large porch with an imposing stair added to the grandeur expected of this kind of structure. Because it was also a home, it made sense to give an institution of this kind a palatial exterior and domestic interior with wide halls, parlors, and other comfortable rooms, as Carla Yanni has argued. A reassuring language of civility and domesticity suited buildings designed for the elderly, the sick, the insane, or otherwise incapacitated.98 Inside the home, elderly women found the reception rooms and the main stair arrayed symmetrically and to each side of the vestibule and foyer. On both first and second floors, each woman slept in her own bedroom, with a built-in closet, and shared bathrooms at either end of the corridor. All the chambers were about the same size, but in all likelihood a room located at the front of the building cost more to secure than one at the back. The hierarchical assembly of architectural space suggests this was the desired outcome for a building promised to be a tribute to women of the white race: to separate women from children, age from youth, native-born from immigrant, whites from Mexicans, Indians, and any other person of color, Protestants from Catholics and Jews, and wealth from poverty. But the focus on the single use, so emphasized in the press, ignored the insti-

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Figure 3.10.  View of the Home for Aged Women, 1882. This perspective view shows the dining room and kitchen extending from the back of the home, and the dedicated entry to the dining room for elderly women. This drawing served as frontispiece to the 1883 annual report of the Ladies’ Relief Society, and was reprinted in W. W. Elliott, Oakland and Surroundings: Illustrated and Described, Showing Its Advantages for Residences and Businesses (Oakland, 1885), plate facing p. 67. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

tution in its entirety. The charity continued to invoke the metaphor of an extended family, in spite of reservations about mixing age groups. The decision to offer some space in the new building to children is explained in the annual report published in 1883, illustrated with a view of the new Home for Aged Women and a photograph of the renovated Children’s Home (figure 3.10; see also figure 3.4). The valuable feature of this plan lies in a kitchen and dining rooms, which serve for both houses. Besides the economic value of this arrangement, it preserves the unity of plan and labor, which is the beauty of the Ladies’ Relief Society, by uniting both houses and both classes of inmates around a common center and under a common management. “Crabbed old age and youth cannot dwell together,” says the poet, but they do dwell under the fostering care of this Society.99

The architectural execution of the mandate “to dwell together” addressed cultural anxiety about the proximity of “both classes of inmates” (fig­ ures 3.11 and 3.12). An asymmetry of interior use countered the symmetry

Figure 3.11. The Home for Aged Women, B. McDougall & Son, Architects, first and second floor plans, 1882. Elderly women used the front portion of the building; space was made for children in the service wing. Elderly women entered the dining room along the central axis; children entered from the side. Courtesy of  The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Figure 3.11.  continued

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Figure 3.12. The Home for Aged Women, B. McDougall & Son, Architects, longitudinal and transverse cross-sections, 1882. The long section shows the entry vestibule, hallway, dining room, and kitchen. With an ingenious economy of means, the architect used the transverse (short) section to summarize the massing, roof heights, and framing for the entire building. Courtesy of  The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

of exterior expression in the Home for Aged Women. In effect, the new institution was made up of two wood-frame buildings: the broad, large, three-story residential section for aged women, attached to a narrower and smaller two-story service wing. It was typical in the later nineteenth century to separate food-related functions from other uses in this manner; Bugbee took pretty much the same strategy at Mills College, where the dining room and kitchen also extend from the back of the building (see figure 3.3).100 In Temescal the architect went one step further to separate the paths of old age and youth inside the institution. Women and children ate in different dining rooms on the main floor, divided not only by a partition but also by a hallway and dedicated entries, each with its own back porch. From the outside the dining wing looked and worked like the house that in fact it was: laundry and drying room in the basement, dining room on the main floor, with kitchen and storage out the back and an attic fitted out with separate dormitories for boys and girls. Children had their own vestibule and a private stair but, sad to say, this part of the Home for Aged Women did not have toilets or bathrooms. The Children’s Home, however, was equipped with both.

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This architectural solution, which graded space and amenity by age and privilege in the new old age home, called on structures familiar to all involved. In a middle-class house, kids knew they belonged upstairs, if not also in back; in a working-class house, they knew intimately shared sleeping spaces (and the indignities of outhouse use). In other institutions, from orphanages to schools, age grading had become a common practice. This large, complicated new building in Temescal replicated the inequalities of social relationships in the world at large, as it reinforced the message that each group deserved its own place. Does this mean that the design obviated the desired common center? Perhaps, but it allowed the charity to improve this node for children before it was able to take on the next big project: to construct an entirely new building for them. The site was also modified in light of these goals. A site plan, probably commissioned to assist in fundraising, gives some sense of the political clout of this ambitious group of women (figure 3.13). They preserved the outline

Figure 3.13.  Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1882. It’s likely that the charity’s architect, Barnett McDougall, delineated this unsigned drawing, beautifully rendered in watercolor. He accurately outlined the entire parcel owned by the Ladies’ Relief Society, showing it with an orientation different from that of the new street grid proposed for Temescal. In anticipation that these new streets would be put in place, McDougall positioned the new Home for Aged Women so that the front entry would face one of them. The proposed pattern was not platted, and the main vehicular entry to the complex continued to be from Linden Lane, along the driveway that led to the Children’s Home. Author’s collection.

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of their ten-acre parcel, which was skewed from the new grid, proposed for new streets in Temescal. Previously, the charity had taken steps to protect the water supply, digging a well about 40 rods (660 feet) from the creek at the southern edge of the property.101 The group also hedged its bets: oriented north and south, the front of the new home would have faced a new street if the plat had been executed as drawn. It wasn’t. In the end, the back wing of the new building pointed haphazardly at the side of the altered house and the old entrance on Linden Lane. In due course driveways, paved paths, and a covered walkway between the two houses were added.102 Within a stone’s throw of each other stood the two homes of the Ladies’ Relief Society: a repurposed house for children rendered needy through no fault of their own, and a purpose-built institution for women with the wherewithal to pay for their own care. In the irregular space between these structures, benevolent women encountered immigrant children, elderly ladies, the matron, her daughter, and others who worked on the grounds. Imag­ine a well-dressed, well-coifed young woman, a volunteer, greeting an orphaned girl dressed in a plain cotton smock with hair shorn to reduce lice infestation. Yet the availability of service and the physical proximity of caretakers did not obliterate privilege or render authority meaningless. To live in the Home for Aged Women, one was required to pay a hefty fee, to live in the facility on a trial basis, to agree to investigation, to help on occasion with child care, and to be Protestant.103 No one wanted to leave, Henshaw reported in 1886, because the “home is an indulgent and kind one.”104 However, the threat of expulsion for misbehavior was in place, and free room and board were provided only if an inmate assigned all her assets to the charity and did not prove difficult to care for.105 As that caveat suggests, clients did not always behave in the expected manner, in spite of the house rules.

Conflict and Conflagration in Temescal The balance struck between architectural space and cultural authority quickly unraveled in Temescal, as strikes, boycotts, and riots swelled into the mid-1880s labor unrest known as the Great Upheaval. In California, this protest became embroiled in escalated agitation against Asian immigrants that did not leave the Ladies’ Relief Society unscathed. But the charity also culled some advantages from these charged circumstances as it made inroads into the male realm of philanthropic action. The charity, praised as having formed the “mother of all charities of Oakland,” with “an assured present and a prosperous future,” won a place in the

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newly organized Associated Charities. As labor unrest spread on the West Coast, civic leaders proposed in 1884 to organize a new umbrella group.106 They modeled it on others formed to centralize the distribution of relief and suppress all visible expressions of poverty and indigence after the Civil War. Influenced by the thinking of Charles Darwin, these groups wanted to replace outdoor relief entirely with scientific charity. As Josephine Shaw, organizer of the Charity Organization Society of New York City, wrote, “Even our love to our neighbor must be guided through organized channels, or it will lose its life giving powers and become a source of moral disease and death.”107 Although led in Oakland by John Knox McLean, the powerful pastor of the First Congregational Church, it took four years for the Associated Charities to get up and running. Like its counterparts elsewhere, including the Charity Organization Society in New York City, the Oakland group did not dispense aid. Rather, after investigating and vetting a candidate for relief, it directed that person to one of several appropriate charities, including the Oakland Benevolent Society and the Ladies’ Relief Society. In addition to evaluation and referral, the Associated Charities distributed to private charities the public funds that it received from the government. The few women on its executive committee included the president of the Ladies’ Relief Society.108 Other boundaries proved too difficult for women to cross for children in California. The Exclusion Act had begun to accomplish its intended effect, reducing the number of Chinese immigrants while the white population soared in the mid-1880s.109 However, white workers stepped up their effort to keep Chinese workers, an “alien race,” from competing with them. This agitation touched ground in Temescal, where a branch of the Nonpartisan Anti-Chinese League was organized in 1885. The word “nonpartisan” did not mean neutral or disinterested; it had been used since the Constitutional Convention of 1878 to indicate that Democrats and Republicans, not the Workingman’s Party, dominated a faction or group. In this case, the League targeted organizations that, like the Ladies’ Relief Society, had decided to hire Chinese workers.110 The Temescal charity gave the League clear reason to do so during the hard winter of 1884–85. About twenty women lived in the Home for Aged Women, while the population of the orphanage had swelled to more than one hundred children. In the face of these sobering facts, the Ladies’ Relief Society decided to add dormitories to the Children’s Home and to remodel the basement of the Home for Aged Women. Its new dining room wasn’t large enough for all the kids that came to Temescal (and the former one in the orphanage had been turned into a chapel). Abandoning its experiment

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in sharing space on the same floor, the society turned its basement laundry into a kitchen, a dining room for children, and offices.111 The improvements cost more than five thousand dollars and the frugal Building Committee, ever pressed for funds, hired Chinese carpenters to do the work. The Ladies’ Relief Society was not alone in seeking to strike a deal beneficial to its bottom line. The Lusk Canning Company also opened its door to Chinese workers. When the Anti-Chinese League protested this decision and threatened a boycott, the company explained that no white workers were available. When the League countered by stating that hundreds of women, boys, and girls were idle, Lusk responded by issuing a circular that offered them jobs. One reporter suggested that the League extend its boycott to C. W. Moore, the local postmaster, who sold Chinese canners goods from his store. “It is just such men that destroy all the good moral effect there is in the anti-Chinese movement,” he insisted.112 Like the managers of the cannery, the managers of the Ladies’ Relief Society bowed to this pressure. It fired Chinese carpenters and hired white workers in their stead. As the charity wrote: “In the great labor crisis, now upon this coast, the ladies of the board have gone forth to meet the situation. Chinese labor has been discontinued by the Society, and white labor has been substituted for it. It seemed fitting that when the whole people were groaning and travailing together for deliverance, the ‘Homes’ should bear their portion of the burden.”113 In short order the constitution was amended to read, “The Society is, and shall remain, Protestant and wholly non-sectarian.”114 In 1872, “non-sectarian” sufficiently identified religious affiliation. The Ladies’ Relief Society set aside the earlier more capacious understanding of religious affiliation to emphasize instead its Protestant and explicitly white base. Shortly afterwards, the Ladies’ Relief Society opened an infant department, after a new subsidy from the state government made it feasible. “All needy infants in Alameda County could find fostering care at the Children’s Home,” the society announced.115 I. L. Requa, whose wife sat on the society’s board of managers, built the new shelter for infants as an addition to the Children’s Home. It opened in 1888, as did the Chabot Schools—a kindergarten, kitchen garden, sewing school, and ungraded primary school. The schools’ name honored the patron and advisory board member Anthony Chabot, whose legacy made it possible to take what was described as a first step towards industrial education. The Ladies’ Relief Society justified the withdrawal of children from public school because it had adopted a new curriculum that integrated the teaching and practice of workplace skills. “The injustice of sending children out to earn their living ignorant

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Figure 3.14. The Children’s Home, Howard Burns, architect, Herbert Jones, builder, 1894 (photographed in 1898). The arcade, extending south from the porte-cochère toward the Home for Aged Women, offered protection in inclement weather. From Lucy E. Dam, “Brief History of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland,” Mariposa Magazine (1898): 103.

of any way in which their living can be earned is obvious,” Henshaw argued.116 The next step was to replace the Children’s Home. As early as 1884, the Ladies’ Relief Society announced that it hoped to do so, but it took a decade for the project to come to fruition. In the midst of the worst economic crisis yet to hit the United States, the former Beckwith house burned down, leaving 125 children without shelter in 1894.117 The fire destroyed the windmill and the tank, but the Home for Aged Women narrowly escaped destruction. With no way to access water on the site, the Oakland Fire Department laid a one-thousand-foot line from Telegraph Avenue. Afterwards, the number of children in residence at the Children’s Home plummeted; about seventy were cared for in temporary “rough board buildings” until the new buildings were finished.118 Two new congregate institutions were ready at the end of 1894: the onestory, wood-frame De Fremery Nursery, designed by C. M. Cook, an Oakland architect, and the much larger two-story brick-and-wood Children’s Home, designed by Howard Burns, also an Oakland architect (figure 3.14). Since a bequest from Virginia de Fremery had funded the new home for babies and toddlers, it was named in her honor. No single gift had made the new orphanage possible, so its name remained “Children’s Home.”119 By the end of the nineteenth century, the node in the charitable landscape in Temescal had been modernized according to accepted norms, with

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educational and hygienic purposes built into the Home for Aged Women, the De Fremery Nursery, and the Children’s Home (figure 3.15). Distinguished by design and purpose, these three institutions enunciated the benevolent ambitions of women and worked like machines to register human differences in the charitable landscape, separating babies, children, and elderly women in Temescal. These institutions remained racially segregated as a matter of course, although on occasion children of color would be ad­ mitted and Asian immigrants would be hired as servants. These minimal gestures toward inclusion would be abandoned after the turn of the century, when the Ladies’ Relief Society ever more tightly defined the contours of its moral authority in the charitable landscape for children. After a bitter debate, the charity revised its rules for children to exclude African American and Asian American boys and girls. This racial restriction headed the list, followed by one refusing admission to “idiots” and “children having conta­ gious diseases.”120 Already, African Americans had taken steps to redress the deleterious effects of this race prejudice on the charitable landscape. A decade after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the political climate improved for blacks in California; they had won the demands for civil rights that had been put forth at the Colored Conventions in the 1850s and 1860s. Men exercised the right to vote, guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution; public schools were racially integrated (although not for Native American or Asian American children); men were permitted to participate in court cases.121 African Americans also organized a variety of political and cultural associations, including one established in Oakland when in 1897 a group of black women, aided by a white businessman and his wife, built the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People south of the city proper.122 Usually old age homes took first priority in the institution building of African Americans, and the community in Oakland had clear reason to respect that practice, given its exclusion from the home in Temescal. The women who ran the Ladies’ Relief Society may have intended the Temescal node as an example of a white woman’s space. Yet the society offered elite women more than a means to assert class status and cement racial hierarchies.123 It thrust them into the political arena as they claimed a place in California’s mixed economy of social welfare and demonstrated the needs of children to a larger urban public. In 1885, as confrontation and crisis spread throughout the state, Rebecca McWade, a dressmaker in East Oakland, decided to do the same. However, her purpose (to shelter illegitimate boys and girls) and her location (her own home) put McWade and her charity closer to clients in need than would ever be possible in Temescal.

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Figure 3.15. The Ladies’ Relief Society, site plan, 1911–12. Key: (1) Children’s Home; (2) Home for Aged Women; (3) De Fremery Nursery; (4) covered walkway; (5) water tank; (6) shed; (7) wash house; (8) coal and wood shed; (9) stables. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1912–13), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

four

The West Oakland Home: The “Noble Work for a Life Saving” of Rebecca McWade

In 1885, dressmaker Rebecca McWade opened in her family home a refuge for abandoned children and illegitimate babies. Described by McWade as “a Noble work for a life Saving,” the Little Workers’ Home grew from an East Oakland cottage into the purpose-built West Oakland Home. This institution, the second orphanage in Alameda County and the first to be built in town, sat in the shadow of the railroad near Oakland Point. Like her colleagues at the Ladies’ Relief Society, McWade recognized the value of repurposed and purpose-built architecture to women, children, and public culture. However, McWade, who called on sisterly cooperation between women and girls to run a nonsectarian charity, placed the orphanage closer to children in need than the Ladies’ Relief Society could ever be in Temescal. In due course, women rendered very wealthy by the transcontinental railroad joined this cause. Donations from Mary Crocker, the elderly wife of the aging railroad baron, and Ethel Crocker, her daughter-in-law, made the orphanage a fixture in the charitable landscape, supported by the Associated Charities. Upper-class white Protestant women, who deferred to virtuous white motherhood in the multicultural urbanizing West, broke with pre­ cedent to support a racially integrated charity for illegitimate children.1 It’s clear that from the start McWade intended to chart a different course than that of the Ladies’ Relief Society. The predecessor group, the “mother of all charities in Oakland,” tightened its admission rules in the mid-1880s as the economy took a downward turn and labor strife spread up and down the West Coast. Certainly because of her religious convictions, and perhaps because the Ladies’ Relief Society did not yet accept children under two years old, McWade offered shelter to them. In the 1880s, private charities routinely turned away infants. At great risk for disease, an unwanted baby was a liability—costly to care for and unlikely to be adopted or placed in

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a foster home, especially if illegitimate and not white.2 The plight of these infants and of deserted and street children horrified the dressmaker, as did the quandary of widows and single mothers. Whether she was a respectable widow or a disreputable single parent, a mother without a male breadwinner at home needed children in order to survive, because children contributed to the income of a household. On the other hand, the high cost of raising children drained resources from the family economy until a child was old enough to contribute to it.3 McWade charged a mother only a small fee for child care, thus hoping to ease her financial predicament and to dissuade her from abandonment or infanticide. To that end, she created a haven for single mothers, erstwhile transgressors of Victorian standards for female sexuality, and their babies. A woman sexually active outside of marriage, the “fallen woman” familiar from popular fiction, looked to a charity like McWade’s not only for child care but also for respectability—to rehabilitate her reputation and to shield her child from disgrace. McWade moved the orphanage from place to place until the Crockers helped her to buy a large house on Campbell Street in West Oakland and to erect first one dormitory addition in the 1890s and then another after the turn of the century. The congregate model was applied in both cases, even though by then this kind of institution was roundly criticized for its form (large, shared rooms, especially for sleeping), its healthfulness (disease and overcrowding), its rigid routines, and the quality of its care. Because many listless youngsters died, and because their care cost the state a great deal of money, child savers on the West Coast looked for alternatives. Home finding (foster care), promoted by the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in New York City, was one such alternative. Not only childhood but also motherhood was at stake. Reformers, who distrusted working-class childrearing practices, castigated a mother who abandoned her child to a large-scale institution, suspecting neglect, greed, and selfishness as the cause. “The asylum thus offers a premium to child-desertion,” Milicent W. Shinn, the San Francisco reformer, wrote.4 As birthrate declined in the later nineteenth century, a woman became the target for scathing criticism if she set aside her primary sacred duty as a caregiver or helped another woman to do the same.5 This discussion of the transformation of the Little Workers’ Home into the West Oakland Home follows the lead of historians who challenge prejudices that are derived from reform portraits of orphanages and working-class family life.6 Critics of orphanages rightfully directed attention to overcrowded, dilapidated, isolated buildings where children could be beaten, taken sick, poorly dressed, and ill-fed. Such extremes could be found in California, especially in new state reform schools which opened in the early

The West Oakland Home / 111

Figure 4.1.  The Whittier State School, Whittier, California, R. B. Young, architect, 1890. Although touted as reform architecture, the new state school shared features with its predecessor, the Industrial School in San Francisco: forbidding stone buildings, a semirural site where agricultural work was possible (an orchard is visible in the background), service by the railroad, and a fenced perimeter. The five large buildings facing the entry courtyard and flanking the central administration building were called cottages, but their design did not meet reform objectives. From the Report of the Board of Trustees of the Reform School for Juvenile Offenders, Located at Whittier, Los Angeles, California (Sacramento, 1890), frontispiece. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

1890s (figure 4.1).7 A smaller private charity in a city could offer children a different childhood than would be found in a large institution, which was purposely grim in form and removed from city life. Parents also made calculated choices about care. Historians of childhood use the terms “family strategy” and “parental invention” to describe the judgments made by a widowed father with children, a mother without a male breadwinner at home, or a married couple with many kids to feed.8 They placed children in institutions and abandoned them for the same reasons: to find help in a crisis and to secure education and job training at little or no cost. From this perspective, the decision to place a child in an orphanage, where compulsory education laws were respected, helped to engineer a downward redistribution of wealth because a child received material and cultural resources from the upper classes. The training on offer, though, almost always directed children to class-, gender-, and race-specific futures.9 In full view of and accessible to working-class, immigrant, and migrant families, the West Oakland Home facilitated this kind of parental invention. In that sense, this orphanage was similar to the Roman Catholic Orphan

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Asylum in San Francisco. Although infants and mothers were separated and moralistic programs were in use, the choice of site eased movement in and out of the facility. Short stays were common, medical care was available, and children attended public school through the eighth grade. The womanrun philanthropy was also made visible, put in the public eye because of its physical proximity to neighborhood churches and schools. To McWade’s credit, she forged ties that were more than institutional. The core of the city’s African American community lived in her neighborhood, near the railroad yards where many men worked as Pullman porters. When families had need for care, she welcomed their children to her charity.

The Little Workers of East and West Oakland This endeavor had an auspicious if modest start. Early in 1883, McWade decided to instruct her daughter and some of her friends in the merits of Christian charity. It made sense for the dressmaker to turn to a tool that called on her recognized skills and talents; she invited the girls to form a sewing circle, “The Little Workers of East and West Oakland.” Born in Indiana, she had married David McWade in 1871; he was a Southern Pacific railroad engineer who, like Rebecca, had migrated to California in the late 1850s (figure 4.2). From the outset, the pious pragmatist with munificent intentions intended that her sewing circle would be a Christian charity without ties to any Protestant denomination. She made this goal clear in the “Record of the Foundling Home,” her personal account of the charity. In this and other quotations from the notebook, her spelling and grammar are retained: Mrs. Rebecca S. McWade called a Society of little girls together in the beggining of March 1883, to work for poor children, having children for officers, being herself the director of all the work. We were not to give any thing for Chinese or Foreign Missions, but met once a weak to sew and do fancy work, the object to have a fair to raise means, to assist poor children and destitute children in our city.10

McWade did not explain why she decided to call little girls together to assist poor children, but one probable cause is that a baby girl had been abandoned on her porch stoop two years after her youngest child, Arthur, had died (figure 4.3; see also figure 1.14, site 2).11 The sewing circle went to work inside her East Oakland home, making clothes for the infant (who probably died) and other indigent children. Rebecca’s daughter, Ada McWade, was named president of the sewing circle; Kittie Thompson, the family’s

The West Oakland Home / 113

Figure 4.2. Rebecca McWade, undated photograph. From Ann Rogers et al., eds., “Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook,” vol. 1. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

young cook, became vice president; and Jennie Wheaton, a student at the California Kindergarten Training School, was treasurer. Two sisters, Susie and Dolly Ough, were assigned secretarial duties.12 McWade brought habits of mind from her former Midwestern home to this benevolent project. Denied formal entry to the public sphere, women in the San Francisco Bay Area were using sewing circles to establish a kernel for larger, more ambitious charities. One clubwoman in San Francisco wrote, “To the sewing circle we can look as the stepping stone to the cooperative organizations that echo to more voices than any other.”13 Even if the women were confined by the ideology of domestic femininity to working at home, their civic contribution was impressive: by meeting to sew in each other’s homes, women produced clothes and bedding, organized fundraising, and otherwise helped poor families. The activity met their social needs, as well as mitigating absences in service that were due to limits

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Figure 4.3. Rebecca McWade’s house, 1549 (1277) Twelfth Avenue, Oakland. The porch and stair railings have been changed and security gates added to the windows, but otherwise the building looks very much as it did in the mid-1880s, when the McWade family was in residence. Photograph by the author, 2001.

imposed by the electorate on government. In frontier Chicago, philanthropic work allowed women to take a break from chores, to meet one another, and to share companionship.14 McWade and her colleagues could find in their city a model for this kind of benevolent organization; they did not need to call on geographically remote examples. The Ladies’ Relief Society also developed from a sewing circle formed in 1871 to aid victims of the Chicago fire. In the McWade parlor, girls learned to cooperate across class lines as well as to do good on behalf of poor children. The model of sisterly cooperation did not last for long. The girls carried on in a pleasant manner until a neighbor tried to turn the sewing circle into a “foreign missionary body as well as a home work.” The dressmaker recorded her anger at this action, depicting the interloper as “a wolf in the shape of Mrs. Sumner Euterd [illegible] the wife of the Principal of Franklin School” in East Oakland.15 Sumner’s goal, to use charity to advance conversion to the Protestant religion at home and abroad, was in line with the objectives of the city’s Protestant churches.16 In insisting that the charity remain nonsectarian and focused on children in Oakland, McWade made an argument that other activists had offered before her time. The critic Mat-

The West Oakland Home / 115

thew Carey complained in the 1820s that money raised for charity in Philadelphia was diverted to foreign missionary societies while needs closer to home, especially those of working girls, were ignored.17 “We found many to oppose our work even in the Church,” McWade admitted in Oakland, “but our work was not to be Sectarian but to be conducted in a christian manner by the presiding officers.”18 The dressmaker countered the threat from her neighbor with a tool from civil society: she incorporated the charity to ensure that her goals prevailed.19 The young officers stepped aside in 1884 to make way for the new Board of Lady Managers. Six white Protestant women, with children and ser­ vants at home, elected the dressmaker president. Belle Cobbledick, married to a salesman who dealt in lumber and carriages, became vice president; Camilla Thompson, the wife of a carpenter, was secretary; and Eliza Learn, married to a dentist, became treasurer. Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Laws also sat on the board; Lennox’s husband owned a wood and coal yard in East Oakland that he managed with their son, and Laws’s husband was a marine engineer who worked in San Francisco.20 Without a male advisory board, gifts from the managers and their families, especially their spouses, would sustain the charity. The McWades had some money to share: the railroad engineer earned a respectable salary (five dollars a day); the dressmaker also worked after her marriage.21 The foundling home opened late in 1885 without any fanfare or public celebration. McWade simply noted in her record book: “The First Baby came to the Residence of Mrs. Rebecca S. McWade in December 1885 his name George McGuire.”22 Presumably the baby slept upstairs with other children in the family. By then the McWade family had moved to a dwelling on Taylor Street, around the corner from what would become the chief building site for the West Oakland Home. There was plenty of room inside this house, but very quickly the dressmaker needed more space. As requests for shelter escalated, she rented for the Little Workers’ Home first a small cottage in East Oakland, then others in West Oakland, and made note of the reason in her record book. “In January 1886 the second Baby came She was Crisend Maggie Sulivan then the Society rented a building 1322-12th Street hoping to Stop the Murder of Babies in our City asking God to Help us cary on the Noble work of a life Saving.”23 The word “murder” could have referred to abortion, abandonment, put­ ting out (deserting a newborn baby), or outright infanticide. The historian Sherri Broder has described in haunting detail the extent of these practices in Philadelphia, showing the difficult choices that single mothers faced during the later nineteenth century, especially if they were Irish or German

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immigrants or were African American. Although abortion had become expensive and illegal by the 1880s, abandonment and infanticide were two sides of the same coin for a single mother who struggled to restore her reputation and to take care of her family.24 Illegitimate mothers also faced the hazard of giving birth in public hospitals, where at best rudimentary care was available. These circumstances give some sense of the extraordinary challenges faced by McWade’s first clients. One baby, a two-month old foundling, had been deserted by his “intemperate,” probably unmarried Irish parents; another, a newborn, was orphaned at Alameda County Hospital, where her immigrant mother, also “intemperate” and Irish, had died. The father was nowhere to be found.25 Unsurprisingly, the spread of disease frustrated the “Noble work of a life Saving.” The infants who died in the McWade home on Taylor Street included Maggie Sullivan, who expired of tuberculosis shortly after her arrival. The McWades legally adopted (unusual in the nineteenth century) Georgie McGuire, one of the survivors.26 The domestic settings selected by the dressmaker for this charity could have been cause for serious misunderstanding. In the later nineteenth century, working-class women could find care for infants and young children in home-based commercial enterprises, derogatively called baby farms. Many caretakers, always female and usually middle-aged, offered reputable, affordable service in their homes; baby farms belonged to an extensive network of reciprocal aid in working-class neighborhoods.27 Even so, critics labeled them “dens of inequity” and charged proprietors with purposeful poor maintenance, with polluting by monetizing the sacred task of childcare, with allowing a mother to avoid maternal responsibilities by making it possible for her to work outside the home, and in extreme cases with facilitating infanticide. The disputes catch the complexity of the charitable landscape as it was being formed. The character of the economic transaction and the quality of architecture were at stake, as were maternity, childhood, and parent-child relations. McWade, who charged a modest fee for home-based care, made clear she intended to combat, not facilitate, infanticide. This is made clear by the different names used for the orphanage: “The Little Workers’ Home for Foundlings and Destitute Children of Oakland, Alameda County, California” and “The Foundling Home & Hospital and Refuge for Destitute Children & Indigent Women.”28 Women in San Francisco had already started to pair institutions in the manner suggested by the second title of the Little Workers’ Home. The hope was that coupling a foundling home with a refuge for indigent women would help to avert desertion and infanticide. A pregnant woman without a husband knew she could give birth at the Magdalen Asylum; her baby

The West Oakland Home / 117

would be sent to St. Joseph’s Infant Orphan Asylum, if the child survived the first days of life. In 1875, after the state agreed to pay for the care of abandoned infants, the San Francisco Lying-in and Foundling Hospital was divided in two: a maternity hospital for single women and a foundling asylum for illegitimate children.29 The 1876 report of the State Board of Health admitted that while many babies died at St. Joseph’s Asylum from malnutrition, diarrhea, syphilis, and the like, California’s cities needed more infant and rescue homes. Survival rates would be improved by these practical, albeit costly measures: increased cubic space in dormitories, isolation of sick kids, improved indoor plumbing, separation of cesspools from the water supply and backyards (where children played), attention to nourishment (prohibiting adulterated milk and restricting starchy foods), and access to fresh air.30 It took decades to make these reasonable suggestions law. A different premise structured spaces inside the Little Workers’ Home. Mothers and children lived together in one of the charity’s houses, rather than in separate purpose-built institutions. This flexible admissions policy, like geographic mobility, met the goal of child protection, even if in the end babies died of disease or malnutrition. Women who ran the Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants in Philadelphia, a racially integrated charity, required mothers to board with newborns. They counted on this “redemptive maternity” not only to reform wayward clients, but also to reduce infant mortality. Death closely followed the use of bottle feeding in institutions, and children’s illnesses also put caretakers at risk. It was especially important for African American mothers to remain with their babies. Black infants had a harder time than white babies at the Philadelphia charity because white mothers refused to breast-feed them.31 The Little Workers affirmed the virtue of sisterly cooperation, even if giving charity asserted one woman’s privilege and accepting it accentuated another’s dependence. All the buildings used by the Little Workers have been erased from the charitable landscape, with the exception of the McWade family house in East Oakland (see figure 4.3). Across the street from a church and close to Franklin Grammar School, the wood-frame dwelling offered a modicum of respectability. Raised a half story off the ground, the porch, decorated with picturesque Italianate details (fabricated in wood and typical of homes in the Bay Area in the 1880s), promised shelter to a baby and anonymity to the mother. How did a woman learn she could find help at this house? Or at another cottage used by the Little Workers? How did a child? Albeit legally defined, the charity belonged to a caregiving network that was invisible to most people. It became known—it was made visible—through word of mouth,

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through use, through the actions of women and children cast as, but not at all, powerless. The concept of “hidden transcripts”—of the stories behind the “public transcript,” the official story—is useful in understanding the ties of space to power in this charity. As James C. Scott has written, “the frontier between the public and the hidden transcripts is a zone of constant struggle between dominant and subordinate.” It is “not a solid wall.”32 The point of contact was the front door, opened by the dressmaker or her daughter to greet women and children who had fallen outside the family economy. Imagine the conversations that took place at the threshold, where a small portico offered desperate women and hungry children some relief from the hot summer sun or the chill of a winter downpour. The women included mothers who had been widowed or deserted by wage-earning husbands; single women, pregnant and about to give birth; and occasionally an elderly woman with no place to live. “Mrs. Oto came with her three children Oct the 20th,” McWade noted. “Mrs. Spear came with her four children Oct the 14th [and] Mrs. Demming came Oct 15 1886 with Annie Madding.” She welcomed them to her house, which, even if small and overcrowded, was likely more commodious than the one each woman had left behind. McWade found work for several of these women; two other children were adopted, and one girl went home with her father.33 Boys and girls from newborn to the age of fourteen without known parents also walked across the threshold. As they did on the streets of their East Oakland and West Oakland neighborhoods, immigrant children, mostly from northern and central Europe, mixed with children called “American” (meaning white kids born in the United States) and with African American or Asian American parents. Defining a child in terms of ethnicity, race, or country of origin may have underscored social differences, but the admissions policy did not accentuate them at the Little Workers’ Home. The Ladies’ Relief Society made different choices, limiting access to the Temescal charity as tough times descended on the nation during the mid-1880s.

Redemptive Domesticity on Campbell Street In declining health, and facing more children than she could manage to care for in her home on Taylor Street, McWade changed course in 1887. She purchased more commodious quarters on Campbell Street, a few doors to the east of her family’s house, and hired a matron to run the orphanage (figures 4.4 and 4.5; see also figure 1.14, site 3).34 Almost all the lots on the block had been built out, with smaller cottages interspersed among larger dwellings. The charity obtained one of the latter: an ample, two-story

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Figure 4.4.  West Oakland Home, 1883–1904. Key: (1) McWade family home on Twelfth Street in East Oakland; (2) McWade family home on Taylor Street in West Oakland; (3) Roseberry house on Campbell Street; (4) West Oakland Home, with the addition to the Roseberry house; (5) Cottage for Babies and Toddlers; (6) West Oakland Home after the Roseberry house was replaced by a new dormitory addition. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1882–1901, 1889, 1902–3), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

4

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Taylor Street (9th Street)

Campbell Street

1912

0

25

50

75

100 ft

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Figure 4.5.  The West Oakland Home, 907 (973) Campbell Street, Oakland, 1891. This photograph captures the orphanage when it was served by repurposed and purpose-built architecture. On the right is the Roseberry house, which was used as an orphanage starting in the mid-1880s. On the left is the dormitory addition, designed by William T. Kirk and dedicated on January 7, 1891. The matrons are standing in the large open room on the second story, which was used as a sleeping porch, and all the windows are double-hung with transoms to facilitate ventilation. Two American flags are displayed, suggesting that this picture was taken on Independence Day or another holiday; and the group of boys and girls gathered around the building is racially integrated. From Ann Rogers, et. al., ed., “Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook,” vol. 1. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

wood-frame house (about 2,300 square feet), erected in the 1870s, with water, sewer, and gas service. McWade bought the property from Emma Roseberry, a widow whose husband had owned a milling company in San Francisco. A plumber, also with a business in San Francisco, lived down the street, as did another widow with male relatives who were Southern Pacific Railroad engineers. McWade did not explain why she zeroed in on the Roseberry house, but the obvious reasons are physical size, architectural character, and proximity to schools and churches. This is the first example of what became a durable pattern in the charitable landscape: the decision not only to repurpose and thus render public a private building, but also to select one that was close to structures that were already important in community life. Politically speaking, this strategic use of siting publicized the activities of women as they struggled to raise funds for charities, and as the battle for full citizenship rights escalated in the later nineteenth century. This clustering also eased

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the delivery of social services in neighborhoods as Oakland modernized. I have already pointed out that as citizenship came to occupy more than one sphere in the nineteenth century, the problems of children were understood to be social problems, subject to conditioning by the state, the church, and the family.35 Practically speaking, this process depended on physical places that were near one another: churches, schools, charities, and in due course playgrounds. Children had plenty of reasons to come to the intersection of Campbell Street and Taylor Street, which was within walking distance of the commercial center of Oakland Point and the Wood Street station stop on Railroad Avenue. The orphanage was located across the street from the Prescott Grammar School and the Prescott Primary School, later called the “Melting Pot School” (figure 4.6).36 Orphanage children attended the schools and made use of other buildings that testify to the diversity of this neighborhood. Just to the north, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church (opened in 1877), a convent, St. Joseph’s Institute, and two other Catholic schools took up about one-quarter of a city block (see figure 8.3). These structures, used

Figure 4.6.  The Prescott Grammar School, 920 (900) Campbell Street, Oakland, 1893. Orphanage children attended this school, which faced the West Oakland Home from directly across Campbell Street. Although designed to serve a different purpose than the orphanage, the public school was also lifted half a story above grade. It had a fenced front yard, and students walked up a big stair to enter the building through a grand entry. There were six classrooms on each floor. New utilities, new sidewalks, and paved streets indicate that the modernization of infrastructure was ongoing in this neighborhood. From Alameda County World’s Fair Association, Columbian Exposition Souvenir of Alameda County, California (Oakland, 1893), n.p. Courtesy of the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library.

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in the main by Irish immigrants, could be seen from the orphanage, as could the Norwegian and Danish Methodist Episcopal Church (soon to house the African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregation) and the Second Congregational Church, the latter with a 120-foot spire rising above the fabric. The Chester Street Methodist Church was in construction nearby, on Ninth Street.37 In a community like this one, it made sense to adhere to the policy of inclusion. This was a racially integrated neighborhood, and the Little Workers responded in kind, welcoming children of color to the repurposed Roseberry house. However, the charity pulled back from offering shelter to any woman who asked for it. No reason was offered for the shift in policy, although this new restriction may have been a condition of the gift that made it possible to purchase the Roseberry property. Perhaps Mary Crocker and Ethel Crocker insisted on limiting admissions when they helped Rebecca McWade buy the house. The charitable landscape in Oakland had also expanded to include the Woman’s Sheltering and Protection Home, run by the Women’s Christian Association, and a rescue home, run by the Salvation Army in a rented house on Magnolia Street, not too far from the Little Workers’ Home.38 The circumstances of one fourteen-year-old orphan girl give some sense of the multipositioned belongings of street children; if “rescued” one year earlier, the young prostitute could have been sent to the Little Workers’ Home rather than where she ended up—at the Woman’s Sheltering and Protection Home. It may be difficult for us to judge the difference in outcomes, but it is reasonable to suggest that former was a more appropriate place than the latter for this youngster to live.39 For the time being, the urban orphanage was less crowded than its suburban counterpart in Temescal. In the late 1880s, when about forty children lived on Campbell Street, each child was allocated about sixty square feet of space. This was considerably more room than was offered in the Children’s Home in Temescal. The State Board of Health complained about overcrowding in charities for children, but the tangible benefits—more space, indoor plumbing, central heat, ventilation, and so forth—appealed to workingclass families who also welcomed the amenities of medical care, food, and education. Comparatively good conditions made an orphanage attractive to working-class families; so much so that critics complained that the quality of care encouraged abandonment and the destruction of the family.40 The Little Workers’ Home may be a case in point. A reporter from the Enquirer visited in 1888 and insisted that the children there enjoyed some semblance of a good childhood. He alluded to the power of redemptive domesticity on Campbell Street when he reported that the children, tainted

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by maternal disgrace, were made respectable through loving care in a proper house. While they were at play in a generous garden, “their faces beamed with as much pleasure as did the faces of the blooming flowers which served as a frame to the picture.”41 The description had an element of truth as much as it was influenced by the fashion for descriptions of incorrigible children redeemed by nature. The matron said the charity was open to visitors. “We have no visiting days, but we welcome the public to call and see our work every day in the week,” Mrs. Brown declared, implying that the charity had no unattractive features to hide.42 The low picket fence around the garden and the physical porosity of the dwelling, with a bay window and porches, gave physical substance to her stated intention. Evidently the reporter agreed. Children were all over this house and its grounds. A parlor with a cheerful bay window and a spacious dining room seemed to obviate institutional purposes. Dormitories for boys and girls were neatly furnished; beds were covered with patchwork quilts; and the well-stocked kitchen had enough food to tempt the appetites of children. Meat or fish may have been served daily, but the matron admitted to the reporter that the menu depended on donations from local merchants. Perhaps she hoped to elicit more from them.43 That said, children didn’t find a benign institution inside the former Roseberry house. In times of family crisis, boys and girls had been asked to live in an unfamiliar place—one different in design and purpose from their homes. Just as important, the orphanage sorted and processed people; in this temple to paragon virtue, the Little Workers identified women and children in relationship to dyed-in-the-wool moral categories. The building helped the charity to execute the social power that comes from knowledge, to act on the subject, and to define the sense of self from within.44 The consequences were brutal. As the worlds of adults and children became separated in the nineteenth century, the process was made visible at the Little Workers’ Home. Women were accepted only in cases of extreme need, and a mother was separated from her newborn baby (or older children) as a condition of entry. As Broder has argued for Philadelphia, the institution in Oakland “reinforced the category of illegitimacy and the conse­ quences of illicit maternity” even as it helped illegitimate children and single mothers.45 The reporter for the Enquirer viewed the practice as realistic, not inhumane. The Little Workers’ Home “covers a ground not touched by any other of our numerous and well supported charitable institutions,” in Alameda County, he pointed out. “So long as the state of society is such that the unfortunate fallen woman prefers to abandon her offspring forever to

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Figure 4.7.  “Cradle of  Tragedy—Substitute for European Revolving Cradle,” San Francisco Babies’ Aid, San Francisco, 1916. The sign states, “Receptacle—Foundlings,” and the healthy baby in the carriage, smiling in the sunshine on the terrace, suggests that this will be the happy outcome for any infant left here. A similar receptacle was used at the Little Workers’ Home. From William Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California (New York, 1916), plate facing p. 86.

enduring the disgrace heaped upon mother and child by a cold and heartless world,” he wrote, “just so long must the little foundlings be cared for and given a name and place in the world.”46 Gaining a “name and place in the world” would take some time for most of the thirty-seven children in residence during the summer of 1888. Eight were infants less than two months old. The front porch, visible and accessible from Campbell Street, facilitated quick, anonymous exchange. “ ‘I must show you the box in which our babies come,’ ” Mrs. Brown told the reporter. The bottom half of a wood trunk equipped wth blankets sat on the porch, a few feet from the front gate (figure 4.7).47 Each morning the matron carried babies who had survived the night air in the informal crib to a dormitory where cradles were arranged in neat rows. Most of the older kids there also had been abandoned, making them candidates for adoption too. The term “adopt” referred to various sorts of placement, since legal adoption was rare. Prospective parents usually waited past a child’s infancy to take the child, and in this charity girl babies were more readily adopted than boys,

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since girls were assumed to be easier to care for. Many adults seeking children were well off, McWade insisted, and every effort was made to reduce the disadvantages stemming from the circumstances of birth. With all ties to birth parents erased, the charity insisted that it forged a new identity for youngsters—one that was believed to promise the child a surer route to a healthy and productive future in the adult world.48 Some children fared better than others. More than thirty left the orphanage in 1888. Five were adopted, almost all girls. What happened next for these boys and girls is not known, but many orphanage children were treated as little better than indentured servants in their new homes. Three boys ran away from the home on Taylor Street, nine went back to their original homes, four left for unnamed destinations, and fourteen died, almost all infants.49 In California, the infant mortality rate in orphanages ran from 50 to 75 percent at the turn of the century. This is a very disturbing figure, but it is lower than the national average of 85 to 90 percent. At the latter rate, babies consigned to orphanages died as readily as those put out on city streets.50

Routes to Child Saving The sobering statistics raised serious questions about the effect of institutional architecture on outcast children. The realization that something was dreadfully wrong started with infants. By 1850 it was known that many babies died when housed in large dormitories; the cause wasn’t poor food or infection per se, but rather the absence of one-on-one care. High death rates proved the obvious: that a baby needed human interaction, handling, and attention in order to thrive. These dire consequences gave Charles Loring Brace one reason to form the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in New York City in 1853; another reason was the plight of street children. With the CAS in the lead, critics attacked congregate institutions, insisting that these buildings damaged children of all ages. In The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, Brace argued that the oldfashioned, impractical institutions were unpopular with kids, and that they also served as sources of moral contagion rather than uplift and reform. “In large buildings where a magnitude of children are gathered together, the bad corrupt the good, and the good are not educated in the virtues of real life. The machinery, too, which is so necessary in such large institutions, unfits a poor boy or girl for practical handwork,” he wrote in 1872.51 The rigidity of routine damaged childhood and, because it thwarted the drive to

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success, compromised adult life. Lazy workers, immoral parents, and poor citizens were sure to be the outcome. The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant prejudice in this critique was explicit. When the charity reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell joined in the denunciation, she highlighted Catholic orphanages and insisted that institutionalization made immigrant children unqualified for citizenship in a democracy.52 Jacob Riis went one step further and castigated any working-class parent who placed a child in an institution. He claimed that parents imagined an orphanage to be a boarding school, where privileges abound.53 The class bias was clear: it was perfectly fine for a wealthy boy to live away from home while attending school, perhaps even sleeping in a dormitory. That was not the case for a poor one who didn’t have a home to go to. Riis welcomed the alternative put forth by Brace in 1854: to find homes for waifs and strays through organized emigration west on railroad trains. Brace, the minister-cum-evangelical reformer, proposed to send street children not to smaller orphanages but to family farms, first in upstate New York and the Midwest and then farther afield, after farmers enthusiastically embraced the idea. One reason for the widespread success of this plan was that the CAS favored placing first Protestant, then Catholic boys; for the most part, the society didn’t extend a helping hand to children of color or to Jews.54 The frontispiece to the 1873 annual report of the Children’s Aid Society, also published in Harper’s New Monthly magazine, outlined the rescue scenario for “little laborers” in New York City (figure 4.8). Even if the home finding program was based on a child’s economic utility, the CAS appealed to the romantic construction of the good childhood as one embedded in nature. The agent, the friendly child saver, who looks very much like Brace, rescues a homeless boy from his dissolute companions (one a shoeless girl dressed in rags, on her way to becoming a prostitute if not already one) and delivers him to the train that will carry a group of orphaned boys to points west. The steam given off by the orphan train is incorporated in the branches of the tree, implicitly of life, that anchors the image and the childsaving narrative. The suggestion is that the boy will thrive on a Protestant homestead, redeemed by honest labor, domesticity, and affection, including that from his adopted sister. No toys, no games are in sight. If play became a defining characteristic of childhood for middle-class children in the nineteenth century, the CAS reaffirmed the necessity of work for the less privileged. Doing a hard day’s work on a farm, rather than idling at night on a city street, would form the kind of citizen needed in a democracy: manly, courteous, white, and rooted in virtuous nature.

Figure 4.8.  “Little Laborers of New York—Work of the Children’s Aid Society,” 1873. From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1873. Courtesy of the Collection of  The New-York Historical Society, negative #80315d.

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The reality was much more complex for the two hundred thousand children sent to “free family farms” from the start of the program until its end in the 1930s. Brace, who supervised about ninety thousand of them, adopted a specific strategy to save children from the lures of city streets and corruption by dissolute parents. He avoided the formal—that is, contractual—ties of indenture in the hope that poor white kids would be welcomed as family members rather than exploited as cheap labor.55 This was not always the case. Family ties persisted even though Brace hoped to dissolve them. In letters sent home, children assessed their experiences realistically. They valued being able to attend school and having plenty of food and fresh air; they also spoke of inclusion in and exclusion from farm families. Most importantly, they insisted that they should be able to play, knowing full well that farm kids could do so, thanks to their (unpaid) labor. Having time for play, Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued, emerged as an authoritative indicator of class identity in this period of American history, as a child’s need and right to play became part of the good childhood.56 Plus, not all kids were rescued, and most were not fully orphaned. Children came of their own volition to the CAS, orphanages sent them, and parents delivered them. In fact, parents turned to the CAS—that is, elected to have their children emigrate—for exactly the same reasons that they turned to orphanages: to find care in a crisis and to secure job training for a child. Sons rather than daughters were preferred, even though both sexes were recruited. A girl’s parents may have feared for her sexual exploitation or needed her to continue work (including the minding of younger children) in her urban home. She may have had distaste for domestic service in a distant farmhouse. Older boys sought placement independently from their parents, seeing the opportunity as valuable job training; they preferred to work for wages rather than to seek a family relationship, and moved from farm to farm as better jobs turned up.57 The success of the orphan train program and the popularity of The Dangerous Classes of New York, a manifesto for home finding, sparked the formation of societies similar to the CAS across the country. The East Coast examples in Boston, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia are better known than the West Coast equivalents. Protestant child savers in San Francisco modeled the nonsectarian Boys and Girls Aid Society on New York’s CAS; it opened in 1874, one year after its Eastern counterpart. Angered by the perceived Protestant “theft” of their children, Catholics in San Francisco responded by organizing the parallel Youth Directory. In addition to finding homes for younger kids, the Catholic charity targeted older boys. It provided tempo-

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rary shelter for a “street Arab” or “lad out of work,” and help in finding him a permanent one. Other home finding societies included the one set up in Oakland in the 1890s.58 However widespread the call for home finding, however popular the CAS version of indenture (or placing out), congregate orphanages did not disappear from the charitable landscape in California. To the contrary, institutional care of children by women spread during the 1880s and 1890s. The Massachusetts State Board of Charities began to subsidize boarding homes in the 1860s by paying women to take care of abandoned or orphaned children at home. Brace and other reformers vehemently opposed the policy, arguing that paid maternity in a private home turned care into a cash transaction, regardless of the source of the money.59 Nevertheless, the CAS and the Boys and Girls Aid Society turned to boarding when in need of it—in New York by opening lodging houses for newsboys, in San Francisco by setting up a home for children down on their luck. In 1888 the California courts endorsed the kind of boarding Brace and his colleagues opposed, ruling that the private home could be defined as an extension of the institution. The decision made it possible for orphans and half-orphans living in a private house to receive state aid through county authorities. The new subsidy reduced the mortality of very young children as it opened the door to regulation of women’s home-based work by male authorities.60 It also rendered a congregate orphanage more appealing to families by resolving the care of the most vulnerable children in residence. Architectural alternatives were known in the 1880s: the smaller buildings, called cottages, that the designers of insane asylums had experimented with since the 1850s.61 But it would take at least another decade for urban charities to embrace this solution and introduce it to orphaned children. The reasons included cost, the press on space, and the desire for efficiency and control. In fact, it has been argued that in this period of great social unrest, when workers struggled to win control of economic and political change in the new industrial order, elites continued to build huge congregate facilities expressly to dominate working-class family life.62 There is some merit in the argument. Even though cottages could be grim places, the dedication to nurturing family values was difficult to discern in a congregate orphanage of enormous scale that bore no relationship to the scale of a child or a family home. In the 1890s at the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland, for example, ninety children slept in a single ward. The vast scale of rooms, coupled with strict gender divisions and rigid daily routines, made for a grim childhood indeed.63 This forbidding institution justified the derogatory label “barracks.”

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As repressive as a large orphanage could be, any family and any child could grasp that congregate living in a city was an entirely different proposition from group living in a reform school in the country. In 1889 the California state legislature authorized the establishment of a new school for juvenile offenders; two years later, the state school opened in Whittier, California, at that time a thinly developed suburb of Los Angeles (see fig­ ure 4.1). By virtue of geographical location and architectural design, the state’s determination to separate dependent from delinquent youth became even clearer in 1894, when Preston School of Industry opened in Ione, California, about fifty miles southeast of Sacramento. In the school’s first report the term “cottage” appeared, though the usage was specious, not least because large-scale dormitories were in common use. In this first report, the superintendent pressed for and received funding to build a “double cottage,” because it was cheaper to construct and maintain than two separate buildings.64 The buildings, which opened in the late 1890s, bore no resemblance to middle-class domestic architecture or the house-like buildings that dotted an insane asylum campus (figure 4.9). The design of the double cottages and the central administration building, which were like a castle in appearance, and the isolation in Amador County were in line with the national shift in values for young offenders, as reformers claimed the value of “rural purity” and the “family plan” in disciplining delinquent youth.65 In California, authorities embraced this anti-urban ideology and used the term “families” for the groups housed in each wing of the new building at Preston. The inhabitants were all boys, delivered from San Quentin Prison.66 Notwithstanding the demonstrated interest in social control, charities also built congregate facilities because working people were willing to use them. The distinction drawn between dominated and appropriated spaces in discussing the Ladies’ Relief Society is useful in this context. From the perspective of a parent and perhaps a child, the orphanage, as an appropriated space, had an emancipatory potential even though the power relations of the dominant society were reproduced within the institution.67 Most important, a congregate orphanage offered an inexpensive solution to childcare, however overcrowded it may have been, and however preoccupied the managers may have been with discipline, order, and routine. A short stay was usual. The reasons for the stay, which should be familiar by now, were that a parent was ill, had died, was unemployed, or had disappeared from family life and no help could be found within the extended family or among friends. In Oakland the Little Workers charged as little as ten cents a day for room and board, and allowed a single mother to pay only as much as she could afford for child care. The modest fee stood in sharp contrast

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Figure 4.9.  The West Cottage at the Preston School of Industry, Ione, California, 1916. The separate front “stoops” led into the different sections of the double cottage, with each section housing a “family” of fifty boys. The building looked more like a prison than a family home, though it was called a “cottage.” From William Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California (New York, 1916), plate facing p. 7.

to the fifty dollars charged by an unscrupulous baby farmer to take and dispose of an unwanted baby. Organized charity was even more expensive. The CAS charged a mother twice as much as a baby farmer to place her illegitimate child.68 Often, no fees were received at all in the Oakland charity, and survival was common when a child was past infancy.69 In fact the orphanage records indicate that humanitarian goals motivated the Little Workers as much as any other objective. During the late 1880s, the Little Workers kept two accounts of children entering and leaving the charity: McWade’s notebook, “Record of the Foundling Home,” and an official register. County authorities required the latter, even though the charity did not yet receive public funding. The sense of daily life and lived experiences gleaned from the notebook is very different than what one finds in official documents. McWade recorded in an ad hoc manner who entered and who left the orphanage each month, and she repeated information in disorganized notes scattered through the volume. “Received in the Home one girl Baby,” she wrote in 1888. “Spanish and American By birth. Named Sarah Templeton.”70 The official record—bound in oversize volumes, with ruled pages neatly divided into predetermined categories—attempted to

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classify children, parents, and problems according to prescribed criteria. Here, too, the regular movement of children in and out of the facility is apparent throughout ledger pages. But factual questions were mixed with moralistic assessments and interpretive comments that stressed the troubled state of clientele. The register included notes about illegitimacy, prostitution, and “habits of sobriety,” and linked the attributes with race, religion, and ethnicity. McWade ignored most of that information and presented in a more empathetic manner the trials faced by children like Georgie McGuire, Maggie Sullivan, and Sarah Templeton. More often than not, her notes emphasize the pressing needs that brought a parent to surrender a child, and the tenacity of family ties that persisted after placement. In one case she describes a widower with five kids at home who brought one of the younger children to the orphanage. When the father took his son home, he brought one of his daughters in his stead. In the official register, children were dehumanized, scarcely recognized as people. The personal facts of a brief life were summarily recorded, tersely evaluated in relationship to official categories, and assessed with comments that are permeated with a moralistic racism. When an African American father brought his two biracial sons to the orphanage in 1888, McWade recorded the parent’s ancestry. The author of the entry in the official register noted the father was “colored,” claimed the mother was a German prostitute “with intemperate habits,” and subsequently deemed the children incorrigible.71

The Crockers Intervene In due course the two ordering systems used to organize orphanage records had built analogues at the Taylor Street node in the charitable landscape. The unsteady handwriting in the “Record of Foundling Home” testifies to the rapid decline in McWade’s health in the late 1880s. Suffering from breast cancer and mourning the death of another child, she relinquished control of the orphanage to Mary Crocker, the elderly wife of the railroad magnate, and Ethel Crocker, who became the principal patron after Mary, her mother-in-law, died in 1889. With their money footing the bill for capital improvements, the interest in discipline and authority implicit in the Alameda County register became apparent in the physical form of the institution. In describing this phase of the charity’s history, the deferential words written by another member of the charity suggest that the Crockers’ munificence equaled the public interest and produced an unquestioned good.72 However, the Crockers’ improvements to the charitable landscape took

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place on personally defined, strictly proscribed terms. The directors of the Southern Pacific Railroad rejected the means used by paternalistic owners of other large corporations who invested in community building at a grand scale, albeit for authoritarian and antidemocratic reasons.73 The models are familiar, especially the company town built by George Pullman, south of the Chicago city limits and adjacent to the Illinois Central railroad tracks. The president of the Pullman Palace Car Company, as imperious a man as his California counterparts, had named the town after himself and included in it handsome edifices, among them a library, school, church, hotel, market hall, and arcade.74 Not so in Oakland. When the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a small reading room in the railroad yards, the interior was “furnished with literature furnished by the employees who have contributed for that purpose,” the Tribune noted. “The enterprise is a most commendable one.”75 Even if not a company town in the Pullman sense of the term, traces of railroad capital became visible in Oakland during the late 1880s. The directors of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who accumulated immense personal fortunes from company profits, donated to private charities in the San Francisco Bay Area, in part because women in their families pressed them to do so. The gendered associations did not necessarily render these investments “safe” politically. Mary Crocker was involved in missionary work among Chinese immigrants, including helping to subsidize Sunday school picnics. In 1877 the Workingman’s Party staged a skit poking fun at the domestic habits of the elite, with “Miss Croaker” as a leading character. More seriously, it staged a riot outside the Presbyterian Mission Home, in protest of help given to Chinese prostitutes.76 Crocker gifts also made it possible for charities to build. Mary Crocker’s husband, Charles Crocker, helped the Boys and Girls Aid Society buy land for its home, and after his death Mary Crocker commissioned A. Page Brown to design an old age home in San Francisco, built as a memorial to her husband. She died one year later, and her children, Harriet, William, George, and Frederick, set up the Mary A. Crocker Charitable Trust in honor of their mother’s philanthropy.77 Somehow, Rebecca McWade figured out a way to win Crocker interest and tap Crocker wealth for orphans in Oakland. One thought is that because her husband, David, worked at the Southern Pacific Railroad, she was able to become friendly with William Crocker. The son of the railroad baron may have introduced her to his wife, Ethel, who with his parents contributed to the orphanage. The initial grant of one thousand dollars, from Charles in 1888, helped to kick-start a fund-raising campaign for the rest of the money needed to buy the Campbell Street property (worth about

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eight thousand dollars in 1887).78 Enough people subscribed so that the charity was able to buy the corner parcel and the rear half of an adjacent house lot without debt. It’s worth putting this gift, touted as generous, in perspective: Charles Crocker’s estate is estimated to have been worth from $300 to $400 million. If so inclined, the family could have bought the property outright. After the deed was secured, Ethel Crocker joined McWade, Belle Cobbledick, Eliza Learn, and other women in incorporating a new charity. Crocker became president of the West Oakland Home for Foundlings and Needy Children, with McWade serving as vice president. This time the charity added an advisory board, headed by Crocker’s husband, William. Within the year, the new corporation absorbed the Little Workers’ charity, purchasing for one dollar its real property. Thereafter, the orphanage would be known as the West Oakland Home, and in short order it joined the Associated Charities and received state funding.79 In April 1889 someone, perhaps McWade, tried to formalize the notes in the record book, using categories that were recognized by county officials.80 One year later, the charity’s founder retired. “The cause of the change is the failing health of Mrs. McWade, which is the result of too close application to the work of the institution,” the Enquirer reported.81 In less than two years, the number of kids in residence had almost doubled. During 1890, eighty to ninety children crowded into the former Roseberry house. The density of inhabitation (thirty square feet per child) was altogether inadequate in the eyes of the directors.82 Shortly before Mary Crocker died, she and Ethel took the lead in raising funds for an addition, with each woman giving one thousand dollars to the building fund. The charity’s directors selected the architect William T. Kirk, who was married to Mary T. Kirk, the charity’s treasurer; the new building cost ten thousand dollars when finished.83 The new dormitory opened in January 1891, having been built quickly by Herbst and McLeod, now expert in executing this kind of commission. As in Temescal, the dedication ceremony validated the benefits of nonsectarian Christian giving to a charitable public that was predisposed in its favor. Henry H. Rice, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, who was active in the temperance movement, opened the service with a blessing, and orphanage children joined him in singing the Lord’s Prayer. Reverend John Knox McLean, pastor of the First Congregational Church and president of the Associated Charities, also addressed the crowd. Several women sang, and other luminaries endorsed the charity’s mission, offering prayers

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for success. Together, the three-story dormitory and the two-story house housed more than one hundred children.84 The substance of that triumph must have pleased the ailing Rebecca McWade, who was well enough to attend the ceremony. When she died a few months later, her funeral was held nearby, at the Chester Street Methodist Church, and several orphanage children joined the service.85 The new building changed the relationship of the West Oakland Home to the city. As in Temescal, an altered house and a purpose-built institution standing side by side defined a node in the charitable landscape. However, the West Oakland Home sat on a much smaller lot than the ten-acre site in Temescal, and the dimensions of the corner parcel defined the contours of the expansion. The new building, T-shaped in plan, created a U-shaped entry court facing Campbell Street. A three-story entryway linked the two buildings, and the double pediment projecting from the western facade marked the official threshold of the reconstituted institution (see figure 8.8). Almost always, a prospective client who entered an orphanage through the front door faced a humiliating interrogation by the matron or her assistant. In West Oakland, other routes remained available. An unwanted baby could still be dropped off on the front porch of the old Roseberry house. During the later nineteenth century, the directors of urban orphanages continued to favor congregate designs even though critics argued that the institutional architecture served children poorly.86 The women who ran the Oakland charity, no exception, were in favor of this economical, efficient, and appropriate solution. The approximately fifty-five-foot long building sat tight against the Taylor Street property line, taking up most of the frontage along the residential street. Kirk’s drawings have been lost to history, but photographs, maps, and other evidence suggest at least two dormitories on each floor, with public spaces and vertical circulation in the central pavilion. The plan dimensions of the new building, the number of stories, the regularity of the massing, and the grandeur of the intersecting gable roofs announced the institution’s purpose. So too did the arrangement of the windows, with the regular placement facilitating orderly layout of beds in dormitories. From the perspective of all involved, the congregate design eased discipline within the institution. During the early 1890s the Associated Charities directed indigent children to the orphanage on Campbell Street, county authorities referred abused ones, and parents continued to bring children for short-term and long-term care. The matron could observe children inside large dormitory rooms more readily than in the former Roseberry house.

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The increased size also made it possible to grade children, meaning to separate them by age as well as sex. “We will also be enabled to have, what has been heretofore impossible, separate accommodations for the different grades,” one official told the Enquirer shortly after construction began.87 Educators eagerly applied the concept to public schools, but reformers questioned the suitability for institutional life. They argued that grading created an artificial distance between groups of children and made it hard for them to adjust to life outside the institution. The space, like the care, had been too impersonal. In West Oakland, steps were taken to remediate impersonality. With wealthy women footing the bill, the charity was not forced to erect an inexpensive, strictly utilitarian addition. The new building celebrated the place of women and children in Oakland’s public culture, with the name of the institution prominently displayed across the gable end, facing Campbell Street. Detail and expression on the facade also gave dignity to the occupants and showed awareness of critiques of institutional architecture. The sleeping porch on the second floor opened the building to the community; it and the reasonably sized dormitories, lit by large windows, addressed the concerns about public health that intensified during the 1890s. The orphanage also reached out to families in the neighborhood by opening a kindergarten in 1891. By way of social service, the kindergarten echoed the architectural gesture of the porch that opened east, toward the grammar school across the street. Orphanage children attended the Prescott schools, and making the kindergarten available to any child in the neighborhood complemented the public school curriculum; it also answered the need for child care. Due to the high cost of the child-centered pedagogy, school boards in California refused to open kindergartens, and charities stepped in to fill the gap in service and run these schools.88

Reforming Olive Plants, Sown in Sin As desired as a kindergarten may have been, this hint of progressivism in the orphanage’s program did not register with every visitor to the West Oakland Home. H. A. Redfield, a reporter for the Enquirer, came to the charity early in 1894 and for other reasons lavished praise on the institution. His intent was to publicize the charity and to build support for it during the devastating national depression which began in 1893, lasted five years, and wreaked havoc on the local economy. State aid was slow to arrive, and other contributions were on the wane in this time of economic turmoil and political crisis. Children were well cared

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for at the West Oakland Home, Redfield insisted, even though the charity was strapped for cash. Expenses mounted to $12,500 in 1892, about twice as much as the subsidy offered by the state.89 “It was a merry, motley mob of children that trooped across Campbell street from the Prescott school to the West Oakland Home . . . when the big gong sounded the longed for hour of noon,” he wrote. “Here were swarthy lads and senoritas of ebon locks, fair Gretchens and rosy-cheeked Irish damsels and more than all others the compromise [sic] American of both sexes, all over-flowing with the keen zest of childhood.” Redfield thought the sight of eighty happy children would make donations flow from the stingiest of misers. These “olive plants sown in sin, children of misery baptized in tears,” were “gathered together and gently nourished in a home as good as that which shelters those born in [a] happier environment.”90 His language is telling—and not only because it demonstrates the taste for essentializing descriptions of poor immigrant children. If Milicent Shinn, the reformer, had testified to the “necessary antagonism” between supporters of orphan asylums and supporters of aid societies, this reporter did not admit that the child’s relationship to the state was in transition.91 Sentiment aside, he asserted that institutionalization would tame immigrant children and illegitimate boys and girls who lived in the orphanage in great numbers. The hope was not only to capture and contain illicit sexuality, but also to shape citizenship and to reconstruct the character of these future members of the American polity. In addition to the matron an assis­ tant matron, kindergarten nurse, kindergarten teacher, housekeeper, cook, and two laundresses worked at the charity. The charity’s staff counted on the physical experience of the setting to transform children, as Redfield made clear. His article focused on the 1891 addition, ignoring altogether the former Roseberry house. At the West Oakland Home scrupulous cleanliness prevailed; neatness was conspicuous everywhere; the large attic playroom, orderly dormitories, central heating, and up-to-date sanitary facilities also elicited praise from the journalist. “Most interesting are the dormitories with their trim iron bedsteads, pretty coverlets and walls decorated with children’s fancies and the bathrooms, where each boy and girl is scrubbed to shining purity of scalp and skin every Saturday.” All of these features plus excellent plumbing and “severe rules of sanitation” made it possible to regulate a child’s daily life; to render a child’s body clean and behavior orderly; and to impart the value of economy, teamwork, and clock time (skills crucial for future employment). The bells ensured that “discipline prevails” from the rising chime to the one marking bedtime.92

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The insistence on cleanliness had a pragmatic dimension as well as a didactic purpose. Epidemics periodically ran through the facility, with measles, typhoid fever, and other diseases the cause of multiple deaths. Aside from the emotional toll, caring for dying babies and sick children drained financial resources. This situation led the charity to invite several physicians and their wives to join the board. Dr. E. Bingham-Uth cared for children during a measles epidemic in 1892 when eighteen children died, four of them infants. The record improved the next year, when another board member, Mrs. Dr. L. J. Kellogg-Lane, directed nursing care during a typhoid outbreak. Forty children were infected, but only one infant died.93 The improvement may have been due to the fact that babies boarded at remote sites (made possible by the changes to state policy enacted in 1888). In 1894 the West Oakland Home sent twenty-five babies, “the front door step crop,” to live in foster homes in Fruitvale, south of the city. Six infants lived in each home; they would return to the orphanage at thirty months if not yet placed with a family. Disease wasn’t the only obstacle to care. The reconstruction of compromised children did not always advance easily, Redfield admitted. The fault lay not with institutional practice, but rather with inherited character traits that interfered with the process of reconstruction. “Nearly fifty per cent are in the incorrigible class,” he claimed, mixing moralistic environmental determinism with fashionable social Darwinism. “Truth is foreign to their constitution; thievery is second nature and bodily and moral uncleanliness their habitual garment.” To achieve the desired ends, the matron rewarded good behavior and applied corporal punishment. Redfield endorsed both strategies, for they ensured the desired results. “Never has the home failed to reconstruct such children and to send them forth into the world . . . with a reverence for and practiced in truth, with good manners and morals,” he stated.94 The claim was contested. The same newspaper reported accusations of cruelty (denied by the charity); it also indicated that the home was used to shelter children from parental abuse.95 The latter sense, that this orphanage remained a place of rescue and refuge, stands out in photographs of the charity made at about the time of Redfield’s visit. His description of spatial discipline inside the institution should not be accepted as definitive, although it is an apt description of other orphanage interiors (see figures 2.8 and 3.5). In Oakland a casual pose prevails in photographs from the 1890s, which were taken outdoors to show boys and girls gathered together on the street or in front of the backyard fence. In figure 4.10 the grouping is not structured; in figure 4.5 age grading is accepted but not interpreted rigidly. Boys stand next to girls

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Figure 4.10.  Boys and girls in front of the backyard fence at the West Oakland Home, 1890s. From Ann Rogers et al., eds., “Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook,” vol. 1. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

in lines that are not all that regular. Like the kids themselves, the ordering system is ragged at the edges. The children are not dressed uniformly, but rather wear all sorts of clothes; some are dressed in smocks, some in overalls, some in short pants, some with hats and some without them. Almost every child wears shoes or boots; to be without them was a sign of poverty of the worst sort (see figure 2.7). Much of the footwear, like most of the clothing, looks to be secondhand; the kids are not sparkling clean, although almost every one sports the short haircut that was routinely used in institutions to control lice infestation. Even more to the point, the photograph offers telltale signs of interest in the good childhood: a few kids are smiling and appear to be relaxed; they are standing in a space used for play (the backyard space was allocated, if not purposefully designed, for that purpose), and the racially integrated orphanage is depicted as such. The managers saw no reason to mask the diversity that was documented in admission records and described by visitors. This was a tough time in the United States to embrace such a liberal stance: nativism was advancing in concert with dreams of imperial expansion, and the Supreme Court had rendered segregation legal. The charity did not retrench, but remained racially integrated in all age groups.

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In large measure, the depiction of children and of the place stands as a tribute to Rebecca McWade. She defined the noble cause of lifesaving as one that applied to any child in need, without regard to circumstances of birth. Drawing on antebellum models of sisterly interaction, the dressmaker turned her house into a rescue home for women and children who had fallen outside the family economy. The informal architectural means should not mask the services rendered or her affirmation of cross-class and intergenerational cooperation among her sex. After taking abandoned babies into her home, the first known racially integrated charity in Oakland, McWade set foot in another realm by opening an orphanage in a separate house. Hereafter, the construction of this charity proceeded as a building project as well as a cultural, economic, and legal proposition. Once McWade won the support of wealthy female patrons, she secured a firmer place for the foundling home in the charitable landscape. In large measure, the munificence of the Crocker women made possible extensive institution building at the Taylor Street node in the charitable landscape. Later in this book, we will see that in the Progressive Era this site lost any resemblance to the charity that McWade had envisioned. Grim dormitories, also funded by the Crockers, reinforced the categories of illegitimacy and illicit maternity; the charity was also racially segregated, open only to white children. In the meantime, the emotional toll and financial cost of orphanage care continued to raise the ire of California elites, if not that of families who continued to count on the charities for child care. Although the state government did not run public orphanages for dependent children, the cost of subsidizing private institutions soared in the 1880s and 1890s. The expenses in California were among the highest in the nation. One popular explanation was that an orphan asylum offered a premium on child desertion to irresponsible parents and dissolute single mothers; it rewarded with entitlement irresponsible and capricious parental behavior. The fact that the parents were usually immigrants or the children of immigrants only added insult to the sense of class injury. Home finding and foster care seemed more attractive solutions to those in charge. As Milicent Shinn, the advocate for children, wrote, “Nature herself pointed to the home as the only place for them.”96 The social referent was children; the physical referent was the middle-class family home, not an institutional one. While debates raged about the merits of institutional life for children, wealthy women added a new cause to their philanthropic portfolios. “The kindergartens get more of a public hearing now, and arouse more enthusiasm,” Shinn wrote in 1890, even though orphan asylums remained the “oldest, most popular, and most prosperous” of children’s charities in the

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nation.97 The interest in the kindergarten, “with its pretty occupations,” and the orphan, the “most helpless creature in the community,” engendered a taste for experimentation in the charitable landscape. The West Oakland Home was not alone in opening a kindergarten; the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Baltimore also did so.98 In San Francisco alone, Shinn recorded more than half a dozen of these schools in child-saving institutions: two in Roman Catholic orphanages, one in the Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society, another at the Protestant Orphan Asylum, and yet others at the Congregational Church, Cogswell Industrial School, and Young Women’s Christian Association. With Jews actively leading the free kindergarten movement in this city, the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum preferred to send children to a public (free) kindergarten, rather than to set one up within the parent institution.99 This multiplicity of examples is one reason why Shinn the child saver described San Francisco as a city that was “almost completely netted with means for caring for children as far as they go.”100 As she emphasized, free kindergartens took pride of place in the net. “This is the favorite charity of San Francisco—the San Francisco specialty in charity, one might say,” she insisted, referring to the free kindergarten system and the women who had launched and funded it.101 One example mentioned by Shinn is especially important to this story. When Harriet Crocker brought this cause to the attention of her parents, she convinced them to support the California Kindergarten Training School on Silver Street in San Francisco, where Elizabeth Betts went to school.

five

The Saloon That Became a School: Free Kindergartens in Northern California

When Elizabeth Betts opened a free kindergarten in Oakland Point, she selected a building to repurpose that was sure to call attention to her ambitions for childhood in this working-class neighborhood. By the mid1880s, kindergartners on both sides of the San Francisco Bay were eager to make known to the charitable public that they had transformed public schools, church basements, and meeting halls into these free schools for young children. The decision to rent a saloon facing a main entry to the railroad yards told a story about architecture, gender, and childhood that would captivate the charitable public for years to come (see figure 1.14, site 4). “Into this miserable neglected region of Oakland,” an admirer wrote in Overland Monthly, “a teacher fearlessly took her way in the summer of 1886 to beckon the children before it should be too late to influence their lives. A free kindergarten, numbering thirty children, was opened in a little wooden building, the former premises of a liquor-saloon.” The author, the Berkeley reformer Eva Carlin, underscored all that could be achieved when a woman used the built environment to link kindergartning with temperance. She cited this advice: “Plant a free kindergarten,” Richard Watson Gilder, the New York reformer, wrote, “and you have begun then and there the work of making better lives, better homes, better citizens, and a better city.”1 Women in northern California had acted on this conviction since the late 1870s, when they began to set up free kindergartens in repurposed buildings. They imagined that the spaces of these schools would make manifest and thus put into effect their goals for children, not simply reflect them. Kindergartners balanced altruism and self-interest: asserting the right to childhood, they argued that working-class children deserved to learn through play in a special school with special toys; they also expected to

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socialize students in middle-class values. The growing recognition of the vulnerability of children in the late nineteenth century forced a redefinition of parental roles to stress duties rather than rights. Faced with the ingrained tradition of parental control, kindergartners turned to children, and to education, to reform the working-class family. They hoped to challenge immigrant authority and contain the menace to the future by revamping childhood.2 Architecture mattered for these reasons. Almost always, women made a free kindergarten into a physical wedge—the first imprint of a multi­ purpose reform complex—that they used to expand the public culture of their sex as well as to educate and socialize children in need.3 To secure this foothold in working-class communities, women paid close attention not only to architecture but also to urban geography and politics. I start when they did—in 1878. After labor unrest erupted on the sandlots of San Francisco, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Betts’s teacher at the California Kindergarten Training School, repurposed a grammar school in Tar Flat, a gritty working-class district south of Market Street. Betts (the “Miss Lizzie” whom we met in chapter 1) took action in a similar neighborhood in Oakland as the temperance campaign took off in the mid-1880s. To begin with, she turned a saloon, a disreputable male preserve, into a reform outpost for immigrant children and the wealthier women who taught them (see fig­ ure 1.1). Her followers erased in 1894 any remaining physical trace of the saloon and made the previously dark masculine interior into a light feminized space (figure 5.1). They raised funds for this alteration in the midst of the devastating economic depression of the mid-1890s, as the Pullman strike strained social relationships to the breaking point in Oakland. The events and the Women’s Congress, planned by the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, probably inspired the renovation. At the Women’s Congress, Nora Smith, Wiggin’s sister, and Sarah B. Cooper, her colleague, spoke about the sacred right of all children to childhood and kindergarten education. However, choices mattered. Wiggin and Smith, but by no means all kindergartners, experimented with tolerance during the fractious 1870s and 1880s when they admitted children of color to their nonsectarian school. Like her teachers, Betts opened her kindergarten to boys and girls regardless of color or faith, as religious and racial antagonisms stepped up in the 1890s.4 Even if they were not immune to bigotry, Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, the settlement house in Chicago, made similar choices when they integrated free kindergartens into their respective organizations.

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Figure 5.1.  Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 341 (757) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1895. Two teachers supervise more than sixty children in this light-filled, feminized classroom. No obvious evidence of its previous use by men as a saloon is apparent. Like the neighborhood, the kindergarten was racially integrated. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

These decisions placed the unity of women and children on the reform agenda as a new mood began to unfold in American politics during the 1890s. Even if this mood would flower into the ambitious, democratizing reforms of the Progressive Era, the construction of childhood in free kindergartens was not rendered in fully liberal terms. As much as kindergartners agreed that childhood ought to be a time for play, they used play to direct their students to class—and to gender-specific futures. The social construction of the economically worthless child may have been largely complete in the urban middle class in the 1890s, but the situation remained fluid for other children, whether male or female, white or black, Catholic or Protes­ tant, native-born “American” or Chinese immigrant. The long popular tradition of work for children persisted on farms and in cities, even as elites tried to reorganize a child’s time toward education and recreation and away from wage labor.5 While Betts and her colleagues at the free school in Oakland Point embraced the sentimental value of children, they also capitalized on the benefit of play in industrial education and asked children to play

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games that taught them habits of mind which prepared them for domestic service and industrial work.

California Kindergartens, a Part of Global Culture Betts learned to marry ideology, childhood, and architectural space at the California Kindergarten Training School (CKTS), where she studied with Wiggin and Smith, and the Silver Street Free Kindergarten, where she was a student teacher. The success of both schools depended on connections between women in reform circles that stretched along the Pacific Coast to southern California, east across the continent to New England, and even further across the Atlantic Ocean to Germany. Wiggin was one of the first to benefit from these connections (figure 5.2). Like those of so many women in this book, her story is shaped by migration and crisis in childhood. Born in Philadelphia in 1856, she was raised in Maine, where her mother had moved after the death of her first husband. After graduating in 1873 from a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, she relocated with her family to southern California. Her mother had remarried, and the hope was that sun and fresh air would ameliorate her new husband’s declining health. That did not come to pass, and after her stepfather passed away, Wiggin supported her widowed mother by teaching kindergarten in San Francisco. She found this job thanks to the ties of Caroline Severance, her teacher in Los Angeles, with Elizabeth Peabody, the Boston reformer, and Emma Marwedel in Germany, a follower of Friedrich Froebel.6 Invented by Froebel during the 1830s, kindergarten formalized for boys and girls between three and six the step between home and school. Albeit based on an idealized view of motherhood, childhood, and the motherchild relationship, the child-centered pedagogy challenged the status quo. Froebel insisted that trained teachers, each one educated, paid, and female, should use play and games to educate young children outside the home. Although kindergartens were controversial and banned in Prussia after the 1848 revolution, refugees opened them on arrival in the United States. Elizabeth Peabody adopted the cause after meeting one of them, Margarethe Meyer Schurz, who opened a school for German-speaking children in Wisconsin.7 Peabody followed suit in Boston in 1860 (classes were held in English) and quickly became the de facto leader of the movement in the United States. Friend to Ralph Waldo Emerson, assistant to Bronson Alcott, sister-in-law to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann, Peabody accepted the Romantic view of children as innocent and uncorrupted rather than

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Figure 5.2.  “The Author in Her Kindergartening Days,” undated photograph. Kate Douglas Wiggin selected this picture to illustrate her autobiography, presenting herself as a progressive kindergartner, a modestly dressed but clearly not impoverished teacher. From Kate Douglas Wiggin, My Garden of Memory (New York, 1923), plate facing p. 116.

inherently depraved. She saw in kindergarten pedagogy an alternative to the strict Calvinist program of instruction used in antebellum infant and dame schools.8 Like Froebel, she believed that an inherent maternal nature qualified a woman to teach children outside her home. Properly applied, female virtue cultivated citizenship. In a kindergarten, “a republic,” her sister Mary Peabody Mann wrote, children learned to balance freedom and responsibility.9 Having met Marwedel in Germany in 1867, Peabody convinced her to move to the United States and offered her an introduction to Caroline Severance, abolitionist, feminist, and founder of the New England Women’s Club in Boston.10 When Severance moved with her banker husband to Los Angeles in 1875, she continued to back a bevy of reform causes important to her sex, including suffrage and kindergartens. Even though some

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Californians took exception to German teachers and curriculum (and to paying fees to educate young children through play), the schools caught on quickly in the Golden State.11 Eight years after Schurz in Wisconsin and three years after Peabody in Massachusetts, the first private kindergarten opened in San Francisco. Two more appeared in Oakland in 1870, supported by liberal Protestants and German Jews. Severance followed suit in Los Angeles: she opened a kindergarten and a teachers’ training school, hired Marwedel, and convinced Wiggin to enroll. Marwedel insisted that children had a sacred right to childhood; mothers also had responsibilities to children, best met through learning kindergarten techniques. Like her teachers, Wiggin argued that motherhood should be conscious and that all children, including “other people’s children,” had a right to childhood and thus to a kindergarten education.12 Severance and Marwedel taught Wiggin that kindergartening was a woman’s moral responsibility—her sacred vocation—rather than a mere trade. The teaching profession was in transition during the second half of the nineteenth century as public school boards began to hire men and women from immigrant and working-class backgrounds to teach. School organization also changed as principals and superintendents took control and applied to education lessons learned from industrial management. Kindergarten teachers resisted institutionalization and defined their teaching as a female vocation to differentiate their work from the “new hands” in public schools (an intentional reference to industrial workers).13 Peabody insisted that a kindergarten teacher should be female and adequately paid; she should also have quasireligious aims for herself and the children, and be “sufficiently free from other obligations” to give herself “the privilege and luxury of working with God, on the paradisical ground of childhood.”14 School boards obliged. In California, officials were more than willing to defer to the private sector the high cost of kindergarten education, especially the free schools that in the late 1870s women started to add to the charitable landscape. At that time, kindergartners with conscience found it hard to ignore the deleterious effects of rapid industrialization and extreme deprivation on poor children in cities.15 Wiggin was one such teacher, Nora Smith another, and Sarah B. Cooper yet another. These women, initiators of free kindergartens in the West, agreed with Froebel and Marwedel on this point: they expected that a kindergarten education would counter negative home influences, including those that came from poor mothering.16 Enhancing the inner life of a child would have social outcomes because it shaped consciousness. They also knew they would have to expand the Froebelean focus

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on the spirit if they were to succeed in revamping the childhoods of the children who flocked to their schools.

The Right to Childhood in Tar Flat Right after graduation, Wiggin moved to San Francisco to run the experiment touted by its advocates as “the first free kindergarten west of the Rocky Mountains.” Early in 1878, Felix Adler, idealist reformer and German Jew, arrived in the city and told the middle class that it must take decisive steps to ameliorate class conflict—that it must face the devastation wreaked by the economic depression. His actions had included opening a free kindergarten in New York City, and two years after the centennial celebration in Philadelphia where visitors thronged the kindergarten exhibition, he urged San Franciscans to set up a nonsectarian charity school for young children, who were plainly in need.17 The call for public action appealed to beliefs about childhood and the environment that motivated women in Oakland to open the Children’s Home at about the same time. Adults may have defined childhood as innocent, but the category was capacious enough to admit other sentiments and projects that made children part of public culture.18 Like women who backed orphanages, kindergartners understood children to be malleable and capable of change, and the built environment to be active, a shaper of consciousness and thus of childhood. For those reasons and more, the proposal attracted supporters even though a charity school could not begin to contain the political turmoil of the late 1870s. The liberal backers included German immigrants (among them many Jews) who organized the Public Kindergarten Society and invited Marwedel to join the board of directors. “It was their wish, from the beginning, to interest the general public and not to fetter their work with any narrow distinctions of class or sect,” Wiggin wrote.19 Marwedel suggested hiring Wiggin to run the school; in the same year she opened a private kindergarten in Oakland, which would be remembered by a former student, Mary McLean Olney, to have been “one of the very first in this part of the country.”20 Both teachers embraced Froebel’s egalitarian pedagogy. By insisting that education follow in logical sequence mental, physical, and spiritual development, Froebel translated into a practical program the Romantic argument that adults were obliged to help children discover their inner nature. The goal was “to act upon the soul of the child through the experiences of the body,” one historian has written.21 Songs, dances, gymnastics, and games

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with toys, offered as gifts, developed manual dexterity, stimulated the intellect, and helped a child feel the universal spirit—the moral reason behind things. By 1869, Milton Bradley had found a ready market for the special toys (the gifts) that he manufactured for use in kindergartens.22 Middle-class families had also begun to accept the concept that children could be taught through and how to play, and educators agreed that play should be orchestrated, or choreographed, to achieve pedagogical goals.23 Rich or poor, male or female, Protestant or not, learning began with exactly the same suggestive first gift. A soft, brightly colored yarn ball dangled from a string representing the self and unity. As Froebel wrote, “In the first plays with the ball the life of the child makes itself known, and the outer world makes itself known to the child in unity.”24 The gift also challenged the imagination and introduced beauty into play. Nineteen gifts followed that engaged the senses of touch, sight, sound, and smell, that made movement part of the school day, and that integrated mathematics (through geometry, pattern making, and counting) into learning. Children also explored nature—a goal in synch with the Romantic definition of childhood as innocent, natural, and free. As suggested by their name, kindergarten gardens were attached to the German schools. Children tended individual and communal plots where they grew vegetables and flowers and were encouraged to give the surplus to needy families. Through those uses and its geometrically regular design, the garden symbolized unity.25 Later in the century, the Swiss educator Caroline Progler proposed tying together indoor and outdoor spaces. Furnished with tables for work with blocks, textiles, and other materials, the workrooms overlooked garden plots, which opened onto a large garden, shaded with trees and equipped with bathrooms.26 With subscribers pressed for cash in 1878, the Public Kindergarten Society could not afford to buy a building with an expansive garden, even in a working-class neighborhood like Tar Flat, the place of choice.27 Formerly known as Happy Valley, this part of the city had undergone dramatic change since 1850, when Protestant churchwomen rented a house for the first orphan asylum in San Francisco. Tar Flat was on the way to becoming a center for heavy industry on the West Coast. Adjacent to the bay, all sorts of industrial pollutants contaminated the mudflats, starting with the tar that gave the neighborhood its name. Although not solely working-class or immigrant, by the late 1870s industrial workers, casual laborers, seamstresses, tradespeople, and owners of small businesses lived in Tar Flat, and many were hard hit by the depression.28 The Public Kindergarten Society rented two rooms on the second floor

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Figure 5.3.  The Silver Street Free Kindergarten and Training School, 64 Silver Street, San Francisco, c. 1880. Children sit on the front stoop, on the porch, and in many of the windows of this building, which had formerly been used as an academy and a public school. A low picket fence invites a passerby to look at the kindergarten’s garden while a high board fence (with some graffiti scrawled on it) screens the side yard from the street and divides the porch and stoop, separating the service spaces from the main entry to the school. Three signs, “Silver Str. Kindergartens,” “California Kindergarten Training School, 1880,” and “Boys Free Reading Room” (above the door on the lower right), make clear several of the services offered inside this establishment. The caption on the back of the print reads, “Kate Douglass [sic] Wiggin and her sister Nora Archibald Smith taught kindergarten here and kindergarten training.” The key identifies rooms within the building: the Peabody Room (end, upper left, with shutters), the Crocker Room (end, middle left), the training school (two bay windows), and the caretaking family rooms (bottom row). Another room was called the Eaton Room. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN 08725.

of a building on Silver Street. This decision is an example of my point that, whether in a rented space, a repurposed building, or a purpose-made setting, kindergartners counted on architecture to create new forms of identity for children. The Public Kindergarten Society’s building, already a part of women’s public culture, had been erected for the California Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in 1861 and later became an annex to an overcrowded grammar school (figure 5.3).29 With four classrooms across the front, three floors, many windows (including two generous bays), and fenced yards, the wood frame building had plenty of room for the school to grow. At the

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main entry, a high partition separated children from adults who used other programs in the building and service workers who maintained it. When Wiggin arrived, she added a stove, tables, benches, and a piano to the rented rooms and then proceeded to make the space attractive, homelike, and friendly. Her intervention is an example of what became a durable pattern in the charitable landscape: making places suited to and expressive of the scale of a child. Furniture was the medium of choice on Silver Street. The use of material culture expressly distinguished this schoolroom from one in a public school, where equipment literally fixed pupils in place. Schoolroom desks, bolted to the floor in straight lines, assured that students faced the teacher and the blackboard as they recited lessons. At Silver Street, kids found small, movable red tables (with patterns inscribed on their tops, for use in Froebel games), matching chairs with red cushions, plants, a canary in a cage, a fishbowl, pictures, and closets stuffed with toys.30 The preferred arrangement of the furniture (in accordance with Froebel’s and Pestalozzi’s theories) was a circle, to express the unity of children. Believing children malleable, Wiggin imported a middle-class model for childhood to the Tar Flat classroom. The hope was to educate and socialize children by offering a new world full of sensory experiences different from those found at home or on the streets outside school. “Inspiration to cleanliness and courtesy, by furnishing an atmosphere of beauty and shining neatness everywhere, was my thought,” Wiggin wrote.31 There would be no shouts, nasty smells, dirt, disorderly street play, or garbage. Rather, clean boys and girls (for whom washing up in the side yard was mandatory) would listen to music, experiment with sand and water, and play with colorful toys. “The kindergarten provides a room, more or less attractive, quantities of pictures and objects of interest, growing plants and vines, vases of flowers, and plenty of light, air, and sunshine,” she wrote in The Relation of the Kindergarten to Social Reform. “It is a pretty, pleasant, domestic interior, charming and grateful to the senses.”32 This charity was cost-effective, she insisted, because it was preventive. Why build reform schools, penitentiaries, and poorhouses when investing in spaces for education offered a surer, less expensive route to citizenship? Wiggin’s point still holds today. Wiggin also put the battle against alcohol consumption high on the school’s agenda. This goal allied her program with the WCTU, although she did not enroll as a member. Coincidentally, women organized a California branch union in 1879, the year after the Silver Street kindergarten opened. “In spite of children going hungry, dirty, and half-clothed; in spite of houses bare of every comfort,” parents “still contrive, with their scanty means, to spend money on liquor with most discouraging and appalling

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recklessness,” Wiggin wrote in 1883. The impact on children appalled the young reformer. “Drink is the worst and most unconquerable foe of parents and children,” she wrote. It horrified her that alcohol entered children’s play at school, with kids serving beer and whiskey as refreshments in their imaginary parties.33 Families hesitated, perhaps suspecting the kindergarten to be little more than a blunt exercise of class privilege. They had reason to pause. Wiggin called Tar Flat her “kingdom”—a “strange, puzzling, foreign community,” home to a “big mass of poverty-stricken, intemperate, overworked, lazy, extravagant, ill-assorted humanity leavened here and there by a God-fearing, thrifty, respectable family.”34 Even so, the school quickly became a fixture in the Tar Flat community. Wiggin made herself a part of daily life; dressed in white (expressive of purity and cleanliness), she visited families and selected pupils, looking for kids who could be “regenerated” and who could make obvious the benefits of this education. The hundred or so children who lined up on the first day suggest that her strategy worked. At the very least, free child care was a boon to mothers and older sisters, who could attend public school when freed of child-minding responsibilities.35 Wiggin also opened the doors to all children in the neighborhood. She made this astonishing decision as the arguments of the Workingman’s Party for racial exclusion gained ground in California politics. The children of Irish, German, English, Scandinavian, Scottish, French, and Portuguese immigrants mixed in her school with American (meaning white and nativeborn), African American, Mexican American, and Asian American children.36 Wiggin described the constellation in The Story of Patsy, the sentimental novella based on her experiences in her school.37 This case shows that it is useful to compare her discourse, which objectified children in racist and other derogatory terms, with her practice. Racial integration in a private charity was unusual in California, and inclusion of Asian children was extraordinary. When pressed by Asian parents, the San Francisco school board opened in 1859 a segregated school for Chinese children; the next year, the legislature amended state law to exclude African American, Native American, and “Mongolian” children from public schools and to deny funding to any district that did not respect the rule. Later, the law changed to allow school boards to open separate schools for children of color; segregated, underfunded public schools remained a reality for Chinese children into the twentieth century.38 By 1880, and after parting ways with the Public Kindergarten Society, Wiggin had transformed the building on Silver Street into a multipurpose institution. Her pride in this achievement is seen in a photograph of the

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building, where children are displayed on the front steps, two porches, and inside the building—in at least six windows (see figure 5.3). This is an early example of the duality of purpose that came to be commonplace: the use of children to promote free kindergartens and the use of the school as a physical wedge, an architectural intervention that served as a springboard for reform in the industrial city. The former academy now contained a free library and an apartment for caretakers; rooms were named to honor funders and reformers. Wiggin’s sister had also joined her, and together they opened the training school in the same building. With the New Silver Street Kindergarten as the instructional site, the training school amplified the charity’s civic presence; it also made it possible to cut expenses. A student cost less to hire than a trained teacher, as Severance realized when she invited Wiggin to join her Los Angeles experiment in early childhood education. Although financially pressed at the start, the kindergarten did not lack resources for long. “The charity is probably the easiest of all to interest people in, if once they are brought to see the schoolrooms and the children,” Milicent Shinn wrote in Overland Monthly. “Their pretty occupations, the pretty bright rooms, the sweet-mannered, devoted girls who train them, all bring about the whole work an atmosphere at once attractive and touching, which readily takes hold on people.”39 She mentioned one person who came to the kindergarten in its first year. “I shall never forget my first visit to a Free Kindergarten,” Sarah B. Cooper wrote. “Such a sight as that could not fail to act as a propelling power on the track of increased work in the same direction.”40 Cooper opened a school on Jackson Street and joined Wiggin and Smith as leaders of this cause. The three worked together to spread the word, to form associations (the California Froebel Society was one), and to publish pamphlets that explained their achievements. The extent of their effort to engage the public is clear in “Free Kindergarten Work of the Pacific Coast,” a five-volume scrapbook that Smith put together after becoming director of both the kindergarten and the training school.41 Like all other women who taught school in the United States, Wiggin resigned her positions after her marriage. The scrapbooks made clear that women capitalized on gender relations to forge alliances with wealthy families. Women spoke to women to raise money for free kindergartens in postbellum California—a different situation than when men had spoken for women to raise money for orphanages in San Francisco before the Civil War. In fact, Smith cautioned kindergartners to avoid the male sex altogether, while her sister advised that benefits were to be had from the exercise of feminine power over masculine pocketbooks.

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“An earnest little letter, setting forth the exact state of affairs, was sent to the daughter of one of our wealthiest citizens,” Wiggin wrote. “It was sent intentionally to the daughter, and coming straight from the wistful heart of another woman who saw the need, it chanced to fall into the heart of another who was willing to respond to that need.”42 The fashionable sentimental language, coupled with savvy pragmatism, achieved the desired effect. The recipient, Harriet Crocker, daughter of the railroad magnate, requested an interview with Wiggin and Smith, and then made a donation—the first of many that facilitated architectural improvements.43 Her mother, Mary, also gave, as did Jane Stanford, Miranda Lux, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, and other women from other families made enormously wealthy from railroads and mining.44 With this network, women made the San Francisco Bay Area a center of the free kindergarten movement in the United States. By 1893, forty kindergarten classes were offered in the city, attended by 3,588 children, and hundreds of women had graduated from the training schools.45 Elizabeth Betts was among them, as were Winnie McFarland and Jennie Wheaton, who attended the CKTS in the 1880s and worked in West Oakland charities in the 1890s. The young women may have met at school or gatherings organized to promote the kindergarten cause. McFarland and Wheaton, for example, served as officers in the California Froebel Society, as did Wiggin and Smith.46 Regardless, the shared career trajectory brought the CKTS graduates to Oakland and to the free kindergarten that Betts opened right after she finished school.

By the time Betts signed the lease on her kindergarten, West Oakland occupied a discrete place in mental maps of the city, historically suggested by geographic location and delineated by ongoing social change. In 1890 about 48,600 people lived in Oakland, which was still predominantly Yankee and northern European in social character. For example, of the 15,232 school-age children reported in the city in 1890, 13,569 were described as native-born and white in the federal census, 1,522 as foreignborn and white, and 345 as colored. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, successive waves of migration began to make the city a more complicated place than it already was socially, especially in Oakland Point. A small community of African Americans continued to live near the railroad, as did some Chinese and Japanese Americans. When Portuguese, Italian, and Slavic immigrants started to move to West Oakland, they changed the social makeup of a place dominated by Anglo-Americans and British,

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Figure 5.4. View of Pine Street near the corner of Chase Street, Oakland, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934. This streetscape is similar to neighborhoods where charities were located in West Oakland. Use courtesy of the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, Community and Economic Development Agency, City of Oakland.

German, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants. The new arrivals—who were often poor and uneducated, didn’t speak English, were not all Protestant, and had darker skins—were only nominally defined as white.47 They lived close to the bay and the railroad yards, in neighborhoods that were more socially heterogeneous and more densely settled than wealthier residential districts further north and east (figure 5.4).48 Kindergartners followed Wiggin’s lead to argue that this kind of mixeduse urban neighborhood was antithetical to a good childhood. In line with the moralism that continued to tinge environmentalist thinking, they singled out poverty and parental neglect, almost always by immigrants; they also faulted the proximity of dwellings to saloons and offered the free kindergarten as cure. “Poverty,” Mary Bamford wrote in Overland Monthly, “is the least of the evils to be met. Drunkenness is something worse.”49 By 1884, two free schools served children in Oakland and CKTS graduates taught in both of them: Oakland Free Kindergarten No. 1, affiliated with the First Presbyterian Church, was located in a mission on Broadway near the docks; Oakland Free Kindergarten No. 2, organized at the First Congre-

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gational Church, met in the chapel of the new church on Market Street in West Oakland.50 Teachers counted on place and pedagogy to express their reform convictions. Nellie Barnard, a classmate of Jennie Wheaton at the CKTS, ran the Market Street kindergarten and was remembered to have been a gifted instructor, “a genius with children.”51 Nonetheless, the program underscored obedience and diligence rather than the unity of children through play. “They did establish this free kindergarten to prevent the little children getting into mischief, and also to teach them things, chiefly to do with their hands,” Mary McLean Olney, the minister’s daughter, recalled.52 In 1884, forty-five children came to school during the week and the class expanded to include as many as one hundred on Saturday afternoon. The Women’s Christian Association ran a free sewing school, mostly for immigrant girls and some boys from Spain, Germany, France, Ireland, and Portugal, as well as some African Americans. Ignorant children came with ripped coats and missing buttons, Bamford pointed out. She took the condition of their clothes to mean that an overworked mother had not properly cared for the child in a “poor untidy little place called ‘home.’ ”53 The practical solution to defective domesticity was to couple religious education with sewing lessons. The repetitive method of instruction was more reminiscent of public school education than of Froebel games in a republic of childhood. Boys and girls as young as three sewed patchwork pieces and listened to a Bible lesson until the quality of their handwork satisfied their teachers. A prize rewarded completion of the first course. “The children may choose whatever garments they want, and a ticket having on it a Bible verse is given to each little one to be learned and recited before receiving the garment on the next Saturday,” Bamford wrote.54 After older girls quilted the patches, the charity sent the finished blankets to the Ladies’ Relief Society in Temescal—an example of the weight given to forging ties between people and things in the charitable landscape for children. Did Betts visit the sewing school in the Market Street Congregational Church? Perhaps, if only to greet Winnie McFarland, who had been hired as a student teacher just before her graduation from the CKTS.55 Regardless, Betts’s choice of building suggests that she, too, imagined that the space of a kindergarten would implement her goals for children, not simply reflect them. She also upped the ante by insisting that the school be nonsectarian and putting it in a former saloon, near the heart of the industrial machine. Like her teachers, Betts did not join the WCTU, but surely the temperance activism of the mid-1880s shaped her decision to use the school as a tool for temperance, if not also for temperance education.

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A Tool for Temperance When “Miss Lizzie” rented a sunny room in the wood-frame building facing the railroad yards, she made the first imprint in the charitable landscape south of Seventh Street (figure 5.5). Assessed at eight hundred dollars, this structure in a neighborhood full of saloons previously had been used as a saloon itself, according to women sympathetic to Betts’s project. “She opened a free kindergarten in an old building that had been used a saloon,” Madge Moore wrote in the Sunday Magazine of the San Francisco Call. Moore, along with Eva Carlin, praised the selection of this site, and not only because it was less costly to acquire than a prime lot on a commercial street. Creating new places in lower-rent spaces put charities and charity workers in close proximity to the targets of reform attention. As Moore pointed out, Betts could have opened a school in a part of the city that was familiar to her, but she elected instead to set one up in “the quarters of the poorest of Oakland’s poor.”56 No other sources mention the prior use of this building as a saloon, but the claim seems accurate. Typically, a proprietor preferred to build a licensed saloon on a prominent street corner; that was the case with the building that Betts selected. James Davidson would make the same decision in 1888 for the saloon and lodging house that he constructed at the corner of Peralta and Fifth Streets (figure 5.6). The English carpenter served as barkeep at the establishment, where liquor was bought and sold almost exclusively by men. To begin with, Betts made no major changes to the former saloon, as much as her teachers insisted that a child should find a new world of sight and sound in a kindergarten. She had trouble paying for daily expenses, to say nothing of architectural alterations, even though her father, William Betts, the wealthy English immigrant, could have easily footed the bill. Limited by her access to capital, the teacher took advantage of other resources at her disposal: most importantly, the power to name.57 Betts’s predecessors in Oakland had also shown the power of language when they gave new names to places turned into charities for children. In Betts’s case the linguistic change (from saloon to school) coupled with the material challenge (a middle-class woman claiming the sanctuary of working-class men) intensified the symbolic clout of her intervention. The decision to transform the saloon into a kindergarten catapulted it from one gender culture into another. By the 1880s, saloons had become fixtures in the daily life of men in working-class neighborhoods. In 1883, when Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, visited Oakland on a

West Seventh Street

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Figure 5.5.  West Oakland Free Kindergarten context map, 1889. Key: (1) West Oakland Free Kindergarten; (2) West Oakland Settlement; (3) saloons; (4) Portuguese Social Hall. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, NewYork, 1889), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

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Figure 5.6.  Davidson/Patterson saloon and rooming house, southwest corner of Fifth and Peralta Streets, Oakland. Although stripped of most of its Italianate decoration today, this building retains its prominence on Peralta Street. In the late 1880s a canopy would have shaded the corner entry into the saloon; the two smaller doors open onto, respectively, the kitchen in back of the bar and the entry to the rooms for rent upstairs. James Davidson, the proprietor, lived upstairs, probably in the large room with the bay window over the saloon entry. Photograph by the author, 1997.

campaign, her supporters counted two hundred—one for every ninety men in the city. The high number was not unusual. The Nineteenth Ward (the location of Hull House) in Chicago had 255 saloons, one for every 28 voters in the early 1890s.58 Off-limits to respectable women, the saloon, a center for working-class male sociality, and saloon culture, based on traditions of reciprocity and mutuality, nurtured a class-based definition of manhood. Saloons shaped working-class masculinity; they appealed to workingmen who stressed honor, strength, and courage rather than the self-discipline and economic success valued by middle-class men. Workingmen came to stylish barrooms to eat, drink, and socialize; there they also met union organizers, politicians, brokers, and other men who offered aid. A barkeep, almost always male, stood behind a long, polished hardwood counter to serve a workingman who expected to stand up to drink. Typically, the saloon’s interior was embellished with features symbolic of and important to manly culture: bottles displayed behind the bar, a mirror reflecting gaslight, shiny brass handrails, footrails, and cuspidors, and sawdust on the floor (figure 5.7).59

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The historical record is silent about who came to drink at Davidson’s saloon and other buildings used for public drinking near the kindergarten. Presumably ethnicity shaped patronage. In fact, patterns of ownership and tenancy hint at the impact of new immigrants on social life near the school. In 1889, John and Jeremiah Driscoll, laborers on the Southern Pacific Railroad and probably Irish American, rented the ground floor of their home to Thomas Baptista, a Portuguese immigrant who opened a saloon and grocery store directly across the street from the kindergarten. Nancy Rodriguez, also a Portuguese immigrant, owned another building made into a saloon at Pacific and Campbell Streets. Further west on Pacific Street, a Portuguese social hall likely served alcohol; Irish Americans and their associations, including the Hibernia Savings and Loan Association, owned adjacent properties.60 Saloons were not off-limits to children, although they were full of adult men and evidence of maleness. This intergenerational use illustrates my point that the worlds of children and adults were not yet segregated in working-class neighborhoods. Parents sent children, usually boys, to buy a growler (a bucket of beer); newsboys sold papers; and adolescent boys sauntered in, eager to learn how adult men conducted themselves.61 Jack

Figure 5.7.  The Mint Saloon, Seventh and Pine Streets, Oakland, undated photograph. This is a typical saloon, designed so that men could stand up to drink at the bar. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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London, who became a regular at a saloon near the Oakland docks when he was a teenager, explained the appeal. “In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness,” he wrote. “What healthy boy wouldn’t give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?”62 This physical proximity infuriated reformers because it tempted children. As Jacob Riis noted, “From the moment when, almost a baby, the boy is sent to the saloon to carry thence the beer and whiskey for his parents, he is never out its reach, and the two form a partnership that lasts through life.”63 Children also came to find absent fathers and bring them home—to childhoods that child protectors argued had been sullied by parental affection for alcohol. Riis believed that new regulations were required to restrict the access of kids to immoral public spaces like dancehalls and saloons. This solution was embraced, but only in part, by women in the kindergarten, temperance, and child protection movements.64 The ties of kindergartners to temperance women and child savers were informal in California, although women in all of these groups underscored the vulnerability of children and childhood to drink. Organized in 1874 to defend white Christian homes from alcohol abuse, the WCTU argued that alcoholism hurt children by damaging their homes, bodies, and souls. It also counted on children to drive home the point, representing them as moral agents and capitalizing on innocence destroyed in homes invaded by drink.65 The WCTU elected Willard president in 1879, and under her magnetic leadership it became the most influential women’s group in the nation. She allied the national union with the fight for suffrage, insisting that because of her superior moral compass a woman would use the vote to make the public world “homelike,” not only for adults but also for children.66 Well before winning the vote or organizing a state union, women in California took steps to protect children from alcohol consumption. In Alameda County, where the wine industry added clout to the liquor lobby, women insisted in the 1874 election that “the traffic in strong drink must stop.” The city won control of saloon licensing and set up a statue in City Hall Park to honor the triumph. Although the law regulating licensing was later declared unconstitutional, the “Goddess of Liberty” remained in place. She sat on a pedestal equipped with fountains so that anyone, including a child, could have a drink of water without walking into a saloon. After chartering the union, the WCTU opened reading rooms and coffee houses and erected more drinking fountains across the state.67

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The state union also seized on education, seeing in it an effective tool for organizing women and protecting children. After enthusiastic crowds greeted Willard during her visit to California in 1883, the union pressed for obligatory temperance education in public schools; legislators passed the law in 1887.68 Flush with success, women listened to Willard’s call for tolerance. The vision of a worldwide organization prompted the state union to work among immigrants in the 1880s; immigrant women, including those from China and Japan, also formed unions.69 The success in bringing women from all over the United States into one group came at no small cost. Although the WCTU was not entirely white, it tolerated racially segregated unions, and Willard was accused of seeming to excuse, if not condone, lynching—a charge she vehemently denied.70 In short order, the expectation that women would “do everything” for temperance altered the charitable landscape for children. The call came from the top when Willard decided to expand the WCTU’s focus from home protection to social action. At the organization’s 1891 national meeting, she declared that the “mighty realm of philanthropy encroaches each day upon sin, disease, misery.”71 Children’s unions were organized; dinners were made for street kids; shelters for homeless kids were opened. Willard also hailed the kindergarten movement, calling it “the greatest theme, next to salvation by faith, that can engage a woman’s heart and brain.”72 In San Francisco the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association opened a free school for the WCTU; in Berkeley a CKTS graduate taught in a temperance kindergarten; in Oakland the WCTU opened a home for women and backed a temperance project of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU).73 The WEIU project is of interest because this group, a local branch of the national organization of the same name, adopted an architectural strategy similar to the one taken by Betts a few years earlier.74 Targeting Hansen’s Hall, at the corner of Eighth and Goss streets, the WEIU announced in 1889 that it intended to open an Athenaeum with a kindergarten in the mixeduse building (see figure 1.14, site 5). The building contained a private residence and commercial space, including a saloon, on its ground floor and rooms for rent and a large public hall on the second floor. Asmus and Wilhelmina Hansen, the proprietors, rented the hall to the Masonic lodge and other similar groups for their meetings.75 The female challenge to the gender divide—women renting space for children on the second floor of a commercial building used by men—was not without precedent. In other Western towns, women rented upper-story rooms in male-owned commercial

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blocks for libraries.76 The lodgers’ rooms and the saloon in Hansen’s Hall, however, made that building especially appropriate for reform attention in Oakland. Reformers opened a kindergarten and organized other programs directed at older boys and young men who roamed the streets in Oakland Point until late at night and made Hansen’s Hall a favorite gathering place. Here was an apt spot to locate alternative activities—explicitly without alcohol. “The Athenaeum will embrace a gymnasium, reading room, and educational school,” the Enquirer noted. “The gymnasium is to be in the larger hall while the two adjoining rooms will be used as a reception room and library, respectively. All of the rooms have been cleaned and painted and the library has been neatly fitted up with tables and chairs.”77 The WEIU planned to open the library once a week—run by Mrs. Harris, who would also direct the kindergarten. With support from Mary Crocker and Phoebe Hearst, the WEIU raised the cash needed to open the Athenaeum. At first the project, “West Oakland’s pride,” met with success. The kindergarten was flourishing in May, and temperance meetings were planned.78 But in the end, only the gymnasium flourished. After the Athenaeum closed, the gym passed into commercial ownership and the hall became known as “one of toughest spots in the state.” The West Oakland Athletic Club took over management in 1896, ejecting the “tough guys” and making the hall into a respectable place where men and women enjoyed dancing, boxing, skating, and other popular amusements.79 Entertainment replaced edification at Hansen’s Hall. Betts’s kindergarten endured. Like her teachers, the kindergartner ran a two-part program: she taught in the morning and visited families in the afternoon, believing that success depended on neighborhood outreach. Some home visits may have been perceived as intrusive, as “false neighborliness,” but the overall strategy worked.80 In the fall of 1886, thirty children were enrolled in the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, a place that at least some of those children likely had visited in its former state. Rather than picking up jugs of beer in a dark bar filled with cigar smoke, the kids sang songs and played games in a sunny classroom filled with toys. “Day by day,” Miss Lizzie “watched the little minds expand and grow and she tried to instill into them those teachings that remain with one the whole life long,” Moore wrote.81 Apparently, parents found merit in the program. As in Tar Flat, enrollment rapidly increased; families needed the social services on offer, even though community gain was shaped in class-conscious terms. Families acted as if they were willing to negotiate the rules, rather than as if they construed the intervention to be a win-or-lose proposition.82

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Women also organized to help Betts meet expenses. Mary Simpson paid the kindergarten’s rent the first year, and early in 1888 she joined Mrs. Henry H. Rice to convince more women to support the school. Rice—who was married to a temperance activist, the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church on Union Street—invited friends to her elegant West Oakland home and, while dispensing tea, told them that their spare time would be improved by supporting the school. Then and there, they formed the West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association. The five officers selected for the association were Presbyterians—one example of how social networks formed through church membership and temperance convictions informed the public work of women on behalf of children. Julia Lindsley, the president, was married to an eminent Presbyterian minister; Elizabeth Watt, who joined the association’s board of lady managers, worshipped at Presbyterian churches in other cities, although she joined the First Congregational Church in Oakland.83 The decision to form an association to support the school was typical for wealthy California women, and it was on the way to becoming the national norm. By 1890, Americans had formed 115 free kindergarten associations, supporting 223 schools.84 In the short run, the association secured a firmer financial footing for the school. Fund-raisers and subscriptions enabled it to offer Betts a salary and hire assistant teachers.85 “The West Oakland Free Kindergarten . . . is no longer an experiment, but a recognized power for good in that part of the city,” the Enquirer stated in 1892. Almost three hundred sought tutelage from 1886 to 1890; seventy-five enrolled in 1892, with the average attendance about fifty-six students. “A larger building and better facilities for carrying on the work are much needed,” the Enquirer insisted. Even before the economic crisis hit, students had been refused due to lack of room, and irregular funding had made it difficult to meet expenses.86 Afterward, talk of expansion came to a halt, but only for the time being.

New Ideas during Hard Times The economic depression, which began in 1893 and intensified in 1894, resulted in up to 25 percent unemployment in major cities. “Never before in the history of the United States were so many people out of work; factories were closed, or running with reduced forces; railroad employees were dismissed, or wages cut down; all crafts dependent on finding work in the building trades were inactive,” Carlin recalled in Overland Monthly.87 The impact was immediate on charities like the West Oakland Free Kindergarten as, one by one, subscribers canceled pledges of support. “Every institution

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supported by the public has keenly felt the stringency of the times,” the Enquirer reported, as the effects of the nationwide depression spread across Alameda County.88 Old answers won favor among men in the business class, a familiar theme in American politics. “How can public charity be bestowed so that it shall benefit the worthy without being abused by the shiftless and the creation of a dependent class?” A. A. Denison asked. The attorney estimated that $120,000 had been given to about four thousand recipients of public charity during the previous year. “The aggregate of relief must be appalling to the student of social problems, and who can but ask ‘whither are we drifting?’” he wrote in the Enquirer, suggesting that tougher scrutiny was in order.89 Public petitions from the hungry and insistent demands for jobs forced elected officials to take action. No friend to labor, the mayor, George C. Pardee, assisted by his protégé, Frank Mott, distributed ax handles to colleagues who used them to threaten the unemployed.90 Pardee also appointed a Citizens’ Relief Committee to supervise a municipal wood yard and a modest public works program. Eleven men, of the professional and business class, decided to couple relief with grueling physical labor to secure improvements to parks, sewers, and roads.91 Key was the refusal to pay prevailing wages. One worker pointed out the injustice in a letter sent to the Enquirer and signed “A Laborer”: “Who is best able to lose that 75 cents—the wealthy city of Oakland or the poor laborer whose children are crying for bread? The city should not stand back now. Her wealth has been nearly all produced by her labor, much of which is suffering today. Let our Council be men.”92 The worker’s advice—to link manhood to citizenship, virtue, and independence, regardless of social class—was ignored. When construction delays caused by heavy winter rains stirred discontent early in 1894, the Citizens’ Relief Committee accepted a school principal’s proposal that children from across the city collect food, supplies, coal, and clothing for the needy and unemployed. With the help of  volunteers, more than one hundred destitute families benefited from the children’s bounty. Each applicant received a week’s supply after having been scrutinized by an adult for worthiness.93 The Citizens’ Relief Committee thanked the children, who were also praised at the First Universalist Church. “The noble army of school children” learned the “divinest of object lessons,” to practice the golden rule, Reverend Simon Goodenough preached. Alas, the pastor did not embrace the Biblical stricture “to love thy neighbor as thyself.”94 This supporter of the People’s (Populist) Party backed immigration restriction; he argued that this tactic, pioneered to exclude Chinese workers from the West Coast la-

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bor pool, should be applied across the nation. “Undoubtedly the American stomach is a strong one, but its capacity to digest this incongruous material may be questioned,” he wrote in 1893. New immigrants—Italians, Poles, Russians, Slavs, Bohemians, and “mixed races” from Austria—were foes of American labor in the 1890s, as their Asian counterparts had been in the 1870s and 1880s.95 Others shared the pastor’s prejudices. A soup kitchen proposed by a priest and endorsed by the Citizens’ Relief Committee aroused the suspicions of neighbors who were convinced that it would be turned into a Chinese lodging house.96 In this winter of deep discontent, middle-class women looked for new paradigms. In retrospect it is clear that this time of intensified class conflict sparked change in political vision, crucial to shaping the reform discourse that flowered among women in the Progressive Era. This decade, one historian has argued, “inaugurated a period of almost frenzied reform activities, programs for participation and efficiency in every area of American life.”97 The Pacific Coast Alumnae Association opened debate in the Bay Area by inviting Jane Addams to speak. The Chicago reformer, on a fund-raising trip, arrived in Oakland a few days after the Citizens’ Relief Committee had thanked children for feeding the needy. She told the story of Hull House to large audiences at the First Congregational Church in Oakland, where every pew was full, and to a packed house at the University of California in Berkeley.98 The sense of the new mood emerging in middle-class life is embedded in Addams’s speeches. She evinced a frame of mind that would be of great consequence for women, children, and the charitable landscape when she explained that settlement work based on Christian fellowship was an example of social democracy in action, not condescension or philanthropy. “I do not believe the world should be divided into classes, but that every part has something it can give the other part if they will know each other,” she argued.99 The Enquirer lavished praise on the reformer, singling out not only her effective speech but also her modest demeanor, suited to a single woman speaking in public. The newspaper explained that her accomplishments in Chicago included opening a kindergarten in order to “widen the child’s life and give back to infancy its birthright,” building a playground, and welcoming immigrants to the settlement house. Addams relied on repurposing in ways that would have been familiar to women in her audiences. In addition to turning the former Hull mansion into a settlement house, she had rented a saloon and made it a gymnasium.100 This idealism, this hope for a new commonweal built by men and women, would be tested later that year. When workers at the Pullman

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Palace Car Company walked off the job in June to protest a 30 percent wage cut, Addams supported the strikers and was bitterly attacked for having done so. The American Railway Union called a boycott in July that halted all train travel and mail delivery across the nation. Federal marshals repressed this strike in Oakland Point with the same brutal force exercised in the rest of the country.101 Other women questioned the relationship between economics, childhood, and the home. Reverend John Knox McLean opened the First Congregational Church to discussion and debate of pressing issues from the standpoint of women. He welcomed not only Addams but also Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman), who had moved to Oakland in 1892. Perkins shocked middle-class Americans by divorcing her first husband and leaving her children in his care, but at the church she attracted a full house, about two-thirds of whom were women. She discussed housework, alluding to her controversial life story, as she argued that domestic drudgery deprived children of quality care by keeping a mother from personal and intellectual development. Applause greeted the comment “Children should not be brought up in a workshop, but should have a place adapted to their requirements, under the wisest care and the best direction.”102 It has been argued that Gilman’s feminism helped to launch a pluralist liberalism based on a normative politics of needs, but the project had political limitations.103 Gilman insisted that the subordination of women disadvantaged the white race; she claimed that race progress depended on separating housework and child care so that (white, Protestant, and not immigrant) mothers could give needed attention to raising (superior) white children. She would develop her arguments in Women and Economics and other writings, linking gender equality and material feminism with the good childhood and, sadly, white supremacy.104 The discussions, which followed in churches and universities, set the stage for the Women’s Congress, held in the spring of 1894. Sponsored by the Women’s Press Association and held during the California Midwinter International Exhibition, the congress was modeled on a similar gathering at the World’s Columbian Exposition and organized to advance women’s public culture. Gilman and Helen Campbell, who also moved to the Bay Area and wrote Household Economics, were among the planners and attended preliminary sessions in Oakland in early April.105 When the congress convened one month later in San Francisco, the hundred women in attendance heard “the woman’s view . . . on every issue affecting humanity—on the Home, the Church, the State, and her own function in these institutions.” Gilman, Campbell, Sarah Cooper, Nora Smith, and Dr. C. Annette Buckel,

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Figure 5.8.  The directors of the Woman’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, San Francisco, 1895, photograph by Louis Thors. Sarah Cooper is seated in the ornate chair at the center; Charlotte Perkins Stetson is to her left, looking at her. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN-26999, Cecile M. Sorbier Estate.

physician at the West Oakland Home, were among the speakers. From the get-go, women put children and childhood on the table. The very first session assessed models for kindergarten education: Cooper discussed manual training and Smith the art of storytelling in her school.106 The groundswell of enthusiasm led the women to adjourn to Oakland after the meeting officially closed. Gathering at the Unitarian Church, they formed the Alameda County branch of the Women’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, and set plans in place for the even more successful second congress in 1895 (figure 5.8).107 One focus of the second congress was suffrage, which had been put on the California ballot that year. That campaign would be lost, and after the debacle, organized women pressed forward to advance other work in public culture.108 Elizabeth Watt was one such woman, and her focus was children. She had met and admired Addams; she had helped to plan the Women’s Congress, serving as a vice president of the auxiliary; and she attended at least its first meeting. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association had also elected her president, and under her leadership it decided to expand

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the school.109 No record was left of the decision-making process, but the members of this group surely knew that other women in Oakland had stepped up to the plate in hard times and raised the funds needed to improve the charitable landscape for children. The Ladies’ Relief Society built a new orphanage, the West Oakland Home added a dormitory, the Ladies’ Cooperative Aid Society opened a shelter, and the Humane Society proposed a day nursery where women could find care for young children.110 All of that institution building, coupled with the flowering of women’s public culture during the depression, surely had an impact on the decision to build in Oakland Point.

The New Mood in Oakland Point With Watt in the lead, the West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association began to augment the heretofore singular purpose of the school in Oakland Point. The charity also suffered an unwelcome change of personnel: Elizabeth Betts resigned at the end of 1893, due to her upcoming marriage. “Resolved, that with deep regret we sever the pleasant relation sustained between us, having found in Miss Betts an able kindergartner,” the managers declared. “In this resolution of regret at separation, the mothers of the school children will unite, for many of them have testified to the great improvement in the morals and manners of their children under Miss Betts’s loving care and kindness.”111 The resignation was described as voluntary, but Betts, like Wiggin, had no choice in the matter. After Betts departed, Watt hired Winnie McFarland to run the school. The employment of a CKTS graduate promised continuity in pedagogy, and this teacher knew the neighborhood, having worked at the Market Street kindergarten. Nonetheless, the board faced a distressing challenge to the school’s direction. “There was an effort made to make this work denominational, but the board voted to keep it unsectarian, a policy, the wisdom of which time has justified, and which is still pursued,” one woman wrote.112 As McWade had done with the Little Workers’ sewing circle, the board president affirmed the nonsectarian mandate. Elizabeth Watt, very wealthy and equally strong-minded, also endorsed in principle and with cash the decision to launch new programs. Watt started with a sewing school. Its method of instruction resembled that used by the Women’s Christian Association at the Market Street kindergarten, but with key changes in purpose. In her memoir, Watt credits Betts with the sewing school, stating that the idea had come to her as a solution to domestic violence. Upper-class women, responding viscerally to child

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abuse, formed charities for child protection beginning in the 1870s. By the end of the century, the sense that all people, including children, deserved freedom from intentionally produced pain fed the belief that physical abuse denied the right to childhood. Dramatic stories about maltreatment and cruelty to immigrant and working-class children won support for making legal protection from violence integral to child saving.113 To fight cruelty, women in Oakland turned to a sewing school rather than to the law. During a home visit, Betts saw an older girl roughly treating a younger sister who was enrolled in the kindergarten. When queried as to cause, the older girl responded that violence was common in her home and community. Parents beat older children, who then hit their younger siblings. It occurred to Betts that a sewing school could offer a refuge to abused girls as well as a place to learn a useful skill. This was not a radical proposition—women had integrated sewing instruction with charity since the Renaissance— and the managers backed the proposal, with Watt making this school her special cause. Young children publicized the program, as had been the case in Tar Flat. “The message,” Watt recalled, “was sent by the Kindergarten children to their sisters, and forty little girls appeared for the first meeting. The second week the number was doubled, and the room was filled to overflowing.”114 Evidently, girls had some use for the new school, too—another example of the ways in which children and families interacted with reform programs rather than responding to them passively. These new ties in the charitable landscape, between people and things, spoke to important changes in the philosophy of the kindergarten movement. The shift was underway—from offering children a nurturing spirit in school to imagining the child as a subject of social solidarity. “There is a steady stream of influence that flows back into families which tells for good, no matter how wretched and degraded the household may be,” Cooper asserted. “The parents come to feel that their children are of some value, and they treat them with more consideration and kindness. The children feel that some one loves them, and they unfold like plants in the sunshine.”115 The virtue surmised to flow from school through the bodies of young children would alter families and neighborhoods; just as important, the orderly sequence of manual exercises nourished habits of the mind, eye, and hand that prepared girls for domestic labor and boys for industrial work. “The kindergarten was the only true foundation for industrial education,” Cooper claimed, because “it was the only means to set in motion the machinery of a little child’s mind.” The schooling concerned itself “with things and not with words.”116 The first generation of kindergartners may have disdained training in practical skills, but Cooper spoke for many

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when she insisted that that aspect of the Froebelean program needed to be changed.117 At first the sewing school met inside the kindergarten building. In 1894, thanks to Watt’s support, the charity rented two rooms with large windows and turned them into light-filled, feminized spaces, without any seeming trace of their prior masculine use. As Wiggin advised, it helped to expedite physical improvements when one woman asked another (very wealthy) woman for funds. The new decoration of the schoolroom completed the transfer from one gender culture to another, launched by Betts; it was also an example of how calls to improve childhood interacted with changes in architecture culture in the 1890s. To make a public place expressive of the new progressive mood, the managers avoided the overstuffed rooms of Victorian architecture and turned to other strategies instead. The transnational network used to set up free kindergartens in California in the 1870s reappeared as a structuring force in the charitable landscape at the end of the nineteenth century. This time international ties became apparent through the embrace of design reform ideologies that would grow to include the Arts and Crafts movement. Starting in the 1850s and 1860s, William Morris and other left-wing architects and designers in England proposed to unify art and labor, which had been split asunder by the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and unregulated capitalist expansion. Morris envisioned the artisan as a worker, artist, and intellectual—the figure around whom a humane socialist society could be built.118 Experimental architects, determined to show that San Francisco was no longer a provincial outpost, organized the Guild for Arts and Crafts in 1894 and went on to use the style to challenge Victorian conventions in building design and decoration.119 Women joined in, arguing not only that the new style could work as a force for change, but that it would also present the San Francisco Bay Area as a center of a vital, innovative reform culture. The California Club (of which Watt was a member) mounted an exhibition, and Gilman endorsed the Arts and Crafts style at the second meeting of the Woman’s Congress of the Pacific Coast, where she spoke in favor of simplified home decoration.120 The interest in design reform had an impact on the free kindergarten in Oakland Point, but only up to a point. During the depression, and under Watt’s leadership, frugality seems to have been as important as emphasizing art, craft, and femininity in design. For all her enthusiasm for the kindergarten and the sewing school, Watt did not invest much money in the renovation in 1894. She did not explain her decision, but limited access to her husband’s considerable financial resources may have been one reason;

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Figure 5.9.  Classroom at the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 341 (757) Peralta Street, Oakland, c. 1894. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

she may also have not wanted to make the charity too pleasant, for fear of encouraging pauperism among needy families in hard times. Minimal changes were made to the exterior of the building, and the classrooms were renovated with practical materials that invoked familiar codes of domesticity and femininity (figure 5.9; see also figures 1.1 and 5.1). Even though it was not common to use wallpaper in schools, Watt selected one with a popular pattern; the abstraction of the floral repeat may have been inspired by Arts and Crafts experiments, but this pattern was not avant-garde in the 1890s. Students looked at sentimental portraits of idealized children emphasizing innocence, pictures of birds in flight, one picture of a candle, and a reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite painting with a Madonna-like figure at its center. Images of the Madonna, common in free kindergartens, called attention to the ideal of motherhood and the importance of home and family. Schoolteachers also used reproductions of the Madonna in the picture study program in public schools.121 The insistence on economy is strikingly apparent in the photographs of kindergarten classrooms. In those photos the carpet is worn; bare plaster and wood flooring stand out; the gas lighting is perfunctory, some pictures are not framed; and the indoor sink, with a splash protector, is common institutional equipment. The simplified window trim and wood wainscot with a high dado may have echoed Arts and Crafts ideas, but it is also possible that this decoration was retained from the prior use. Most importantly, the classrooms are crowded with children, with a few teachers supervising large groups of students.

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Did these boys and girls find a new world of sight and sound? A place to enjoy the right to childhood? Even if they were not gathered in a circle, the spatial analogue of Froebelean idealism, the photographs show them in unity—not segregated by sex, race, or ethnicity. In that sense they record the effect of egalitarian, if not democratic, principles in action on the ground in West Oakland. The photos also emphasize the attention given to the scale of the child and the pedagogical focus on play. The pets (a dog) and toys (dolls, a high chair, and a cradle) were familiar to neighborhood children, who sat at movable round tables and played with Froebel blocks. Shown in disarray, the furnishings make very clear that this space is a kindergarten classroom, not one in a primary school. The unequal power relations between teachers, students, and families are also in plain view. In the photographs of children inside and outside the school, schoolteachers supervise boys and girls who are arranged in orderly straight lines and seem to have been sorted by age. Scrubbed clean, neatly coiffed, and carefully dressed, the bodies of children display the ambition and the success of the reform program. They are depicted without ripped coats, dirty faces, or any other sign of the defective domesticity that had troubled Mary Bamford at Oakland Free Kindergartens No. 1 and No. 2 a decade earlier. At least one girl wears a smock to protect her clothes while at school. The desire to use this place and these children as a steppingstone into working-class family life is also made manifest. In the photograph of children playing with Froebel blocks, graphic symbols on the calendar drawn in chalk on the portable blackboard make explicit the activities for each day of the week (figure 5.9). In this republic of childhood, children are taught how to behave outside of school. Trip to saloons to help out their families are not on offer. Instead, a church is shown on Sunday; a spigot, sink, and bucket on Tuesday; thread, scissors, and cloth on Wednesday; a teapot, ser­ vice, and a table on Thursday; a dustpan and broom on Friday; and a rolling pin and dough on Saturday. Monday is free. The expectations were twofold: that children would carry these lessons home, where these routines would reform the working-class family, and that children would learn habits of mind needed for domestic and industrial work. The multiple messages are not surprising. Betts, McFarland, and their colleagues in the West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association carried two visions of childhood to this neighborhood and used them to choreograph education and play in the 1890s. On the one hand, the kindergarten made middle-class definitions of childhood palpable and suggested that children could become emotional assets to their parents. As Shinn wrote in Overland

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Monthly, “The value placed on the children by the kindergartens seems to arouse in the parents the new idea that they are of some value.”122 On the other hand, Betts and McFarland rendered working-class children useful in economic terms and directed them toward gender- and class-specific futures. In rooms decorated to celebrate domesticity and reform, boys and girls were trained to become better workers, and the immigrants among them were Americanized. The renovation of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten was the first step in a spirited program of institution building on Peralta Street: one in which women continued to count on repurposed buildings to implement their goals for children, not simply to reflect them. “From this grain of mustardseed in Oakland has grown a good-sized tree, nourished by the personal, friendly influence of one woman,” Carlin wrote in 1900, referring to Elizabeth Watt, president of the charity.123 There was substance to Carlin’s use of Biblical metaphors. With Watt in the lead, the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, the “mustard-seed,” handily survived the depression to become the core of a bigger, more enduring work. In 1894 Watt hired a settlement worker who carried on work for a few months.124 After her departure the free kindergarten took over the entire building, and the settlement moved into a cottage that Watt rented directly across the street from Davidson’s saloon. In short order, the free school had spawned a larger, more ambitious charity: the settlement house that absorbed Watt’s attention during her later years.

six

The Art and Craft of Settlement Work in Oakland Point

As the new progressive mood took hold in California, Elizabeth Watt led the expansion of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten into a larger and more enduring work: the class-bridging charity that was first called the West Oakland Settlement and later known as the New Century Club. In 1895 she found a suitable place to rent, across Peralta Street from Davidson’s saloon: a cottage where the group could meet and host programs for children (figure 6.1; see also figure 1.14, site 6). “The neighbors are Italian, Spanish, Mexican, French, English, Portuguese, Negroes, Irish, German, Scandinavian,” one club member pointed out.1 The affluent women, who with Watt remade a plain working-class building into a feminized space, took a course of action very much like that taken by other women of like mind. In an institution made to look like an artistic home, they set out to mend the divide between social classes by helping mothers, teaching housekeeping and other domestic skills, and organizing the leisure time of children. Their support of racial integration was exceptional in a time when most women’s clubs and settlement houses were segregated in the United States. Even so, the Berkeley reformer Eva Carlin touched lightly on race relations when describing the reasons why privileged white women should open charities of fine design for children in Oakland Point. Even if “it is a district of great ugliness,” she wrote in Overland Monthly, “on the whole, it is a law abiding, workingman’s district, settled chiefly by hard-working foreigners, with a fair sprinkling of Americans, attracted thither by the exigencies of their occupation or the cheapness of the rents.”2 The material evidence cited as cause of their deprivation, and thus of class conflict, included small, crowded wood-frame houses where families lived close to jobs in factories and the railroad yards; scarce civic amenities, meaning churches, clubs, libraries, gymnasiums, playgrounds, and parks; industrial

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Figure 6.1.  Garment class, West Oakland Settlement, 401 (801) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1900. The teacher, Josephine Paleki, is standing at the back of the classroom, where both industrious students and the array of garments attest to the efficacy of her instruction. Only the instructor stares directly at the camera, while the girls modestly look toward their handwork. The feminized decor is complemented by concern with durability and hygiene, as in other classrooms in the building. The front door of the settlement house is at the far right, shielded by a partition and a small vestibule. This photograph shows the class to be racially integrated, as do many others. From New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1910 (Oakland, 1910), 19. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California.

pollution; and too many saloons. All told, Oakland Point was “an unsavory spot in moral and material aspects” in Carlin’s view. She insisted that it “gives weight to the sense that the modern city is a constant confession of social failure. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine the city sitting in the center and judging all the inhabitants, placing the fortunate, the powerful and the prosperous on its right hand among all things desirable, and saying to others, ‘Sit thou on my left.’” Jane Addams described similar conditions in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago when she outlined the value of social settlement houses to American democracy.3 Addams had high hopes for the settlement houses, the residential social service facilities that women like herself set up in working-class neighborhoods in American cities. For women, Addams expected that living in a settlement house and joining in its programs would foster “a new kind of female citizenship in action.”4 These women, usually single, college-educated, and middle-class, would take charge of the public realm and intervene in urban politics while retaining their moral purpose, especially in their re-

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form work on behalf of other women and children.5 The activist concept of female citizenship accepted the usual argument for women’s suffrage: a woman’s special ethical nature, rooted in her biological makeup, made her the best advocate for good government. Watt and her colleagues, mostly married women with children, called on nineteenth-century reform practices of another sort. They placed space at the heart of their vision for a better city for children, and used architectural strategies already rendered successful in improving the urban landscape for kids. They repurposed everyday buildings and located settlement houses near existing institutions for children as they came to appreciate that a nineteenth-century charity, especially a free kindergarten, could be a springboard for reform in a twentieth-century city. In this way, women set in place a framework for community building that other reformers extended and expanded for both children and adults.6 Amalie Hofer, a kindergarten teacher, wrote in 1895: The social settlement and the kindergarten are sister movements. To the latter has long been yielded the place of mediator between the home and the school, a stepping-stone between the family and institutional life. It is now seen to be reaching in another direction in its work of bringing together human interests, and is not infrequently the channel through which philanthropies widen into more conventional and permanent social institutions.7

Carlin made a similar point when she described the free kindergarten in Oakland Point as ”this grain of mustard-seed.”8 Biblical allusion aside, the metaphor credited the school as being the kernel of the West Oakland Settlement, launched by Watt in the mid-1890s and expanded by her in the 1900s into the New Century Club, a multipurpose neighborhood center. All that sounds well and good—illustrative of the democratizing effects argued to come from social experiments launched by women in the Progressive Era.9 Using as examples the West Oakland Settlement, the Manse Polytechnic (another settlement house in Oakland Point), and the Oakland Club (a woman’s club active in West Oakland), I show that the message was less clear when it came to children. Privileged women placed a high value on using architecture to shape working-class childhood. They argued that boys and girls would be valued as children in an artistic, homelike charity run by women; they also expected to teach skills that set kids on a path to a predictable working-class future, a respectable adulthood structured by traditional gender roles. Architectural solutions were also compromised by disputes about racial exclusion, which exploded in the 1890s, fracturing the

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women’s club movement and prompting black women across the nation, including those in Oakland, to propose parallel institutions for themselves and their children.10 The importance of the racial dispute to the charitable landscape stands out in the quarrel of the West Oakland Settlement with the Oakland Club. Women in both groups embraced Americanization and deferred to white privilege, if not using child saving outright to assert Anglo-Saxon superiority. Carlin wrote in Overland Monthly that twenty-one nationalities lived in Oakland Point, “the most conspicuous types being the Italians and Portuguese, low-browed and ill-favored, who look with surliness on visitors.” Not unusually for a California progressive, Carlin evinced support for racial hierarchies and employed physiognomy to typify ethnicity and present ethnic difference as racial distinction. She also tied moral laxity and intellectual deficiency with racial inferiority, with this comment: “As a class, they are more anxious for what they can get than what they can learn.”11 That said, white clubwomen were not of one mind about racial segregation. The Oakland Club equivocated, but the West Oakland Settlement, with Watt in the lead, welcomed all as neighbors, regardless of race or ethnicity.

“What Manner of Woman”: Elizabeth Watt and Women’s Public Culture in California Elizabeth Watt was a likely candidate to guide the expansion of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten into the West Oakland Settlement, a larger, more ambitious charity. Like other middle-class white clubwomen in California, Watt moved with ease in urban public culture in the 1890s, offering ample evidence in My Long Life, her memoir, that she was secure in class and race privilege. She also told the story of an aging woman’s engagement with the public culture of her sex and a gender-defined agenda focused on architecture for children. Elite clubwomen, eager to merge moral and benevolent concerns with public culture, endorsed programs of interest to Watt— programs that other women tied to radical reform in California. By the 1890s, Caroline Severance, the Los Angeles feminist, and others of a like mind had inserted women into the state’s sex-segregated political culture: they opened women’s clubs, ran free kindergartens, and campaigned for a host of political reforms, including suffrage. They democratized politics in California, the state where the Progressive Party was formed. George Mowry, the historian who scrutinized the origins of the party, ignored women in The California Progressives even though his influential definition of these West Coast reformers describes Severance or Watt, with the ex-

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ception of her sex.12 The well-known chapter “What Manner of Men: The Progressive Mind,” could easily be called “What Manner of  Women,” with regard to them. The “long religious hand of New England” rested heavily on Watt; she had a “north-European name,” came “of old American stock,” was married with grown children, and lived in a city.13 Her husband, a successful businessman and a Mason, worked for a governor who confronted railroad interests in the 1860s; he did the same in the 1890s when he helped to launch the Valley Railroad, another challenge to Southern Pacific hegemony.14 Elizabeth Watt may not have been plagued with anxiety about her social status. This emotional condition, Richard Hofstadter argued in The Age of Reform, fueled Progressive politics as an agrarian nation urbanized, immigrants took charge of urban politics, and big business dominated commerce. But fundamentally, this high-handed California progressive was a moderate conservative, along the lines argued by both Mowry and Hofstadter.15 Watt’s story supports my point, also made by other historians, that a broad perspective is needed to bring women into the political history of the Progressive Era.16 It also underscores the ways in which class blinders, ethical compromises, and personal circumstances shaped the public work of women for children. Watt never lost faith in paternalistic uplift or shed her self-interest—the wealthy clubwoman was on the lookout for servants—as she embarked on community building in West Oakland. Organized womanhood was a critical first step for older women, like Watt, who used club membership to make up for limited higher education. In effect, clubs became a kind of college for them, introducing new ideas and sorts of responsibilities in the 1870s and 1880s.17 Watt, who was home-educated, took the first steps in San Rafael, running a bazaar to raise money for churches and joining a theatrical club. After her move to Oakland in 1888, she became more venturesome, with a voluntary landscape full of alternatives for her: the Ebell Society (an arts and cultural organization), church associations, charities, missions, temperance societies, and even a cooking school.18 Watt started with charity. She did not work for women’s suffrage or belong to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; she expressed no sympathy for labor unions or any of the other movements for radical political and social change that were prevalent in the state at the time.19 Rather, she subscribed to the Ladies’ Relief Society (one of her daughters married its attorney), volunteered at Fabiola Hospital (founded by a member of the Ladies’ Relief Society), and joined the West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association. “Among my earliest callers in Oakland was a dear, sweet old lady, dressed all in black,” Watt wrote. Mrs. L. L. Baker, involved with public school reform in San Francisco, invited her to

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join the kindergarten association, indicating that funds were sorely needed for the teacher’s salary. Watt “immediately” gave her name as a member and attended meetings and fund-raising events, but did not engage in other activities to support the school.20 Unlike Betts, founder of the kindergarten, and Rice, organizer and trea­ surer of the association, Watt did not live in West Oakland. Rather, she and her husband rented a large home in a residential district west and north of Lake Merritt, developed by Samuel Merritt (see figure 1.13). The mayor turned land speculator lived across the street, and other friends were close by. In this city of about sixty-seven thousand people, the US Census Bureau reported in 1900 that about 25 percent of residents were “foreign born”; another 35 percent were “native white, foreign parents”; and 3 percent were of “color.” Their labor, coupled with Oakland’s rapid growth as an industrial center, made it possible for Watt and her friends to live with ease in elegant homes. By 1900 an industrial belt stretched along the waterfront from the railroad yards in Oakland Point through West Oakland and downtown to Brooklyn and Fruitvale in East Oakland. Amidst machine shops, lumberyards, tanneries, shipyards, and sawmills stood very big factories, like California Cotton in East Oakland. Industrial development also spilled west across the estuary to Alameda Island, where the streetcar magnate, Francis Marion “Borax” Smith, located his works for manufacturing the cleanser 20 Mule Team Borax; and to the north, along a railroad spur and the Temescal Creek, stood Judson Steel and the enormous Lusk Cannery. After the turn of century, food processing took pride of place in the Bay Area economy.21 This industrial world may have been physically distant from Watt’s home, but it (and the migration it caused) touched her daily life in direct ways. When Watt hired Josephine Palecki to sew her daughter’s wedding dress, the Czech immigrant used cotton thread spun in an Oakland factory by working girls from Portugal. Watt and her friends rode on trains served by African American Pullman porters; they hired Irish servant girls and Chinese cooks; they served vegetables grown on small farms by Japanese immigrants and fruit picked on larger ones by Mexican workers; their homes were built from timber harvested by Scandinavian lumberjacks in northern California and cut into lumber by other men toiling in mills along the waterfront. Even so, Watt could not grasp the challenges faced by immigrants, because social class so deeply stratified the geography of residence and work in her city. She needed another kind of knowledge to awaken her social conscience and prompt her to action—to see, hear, smell, and otherwise engage in the daily life of unfamiliar people and places.

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That opportunity presented itself in 1891, and for a tragic reason: the death of her oldest son, Jamie. When Jamie was thirteen years old, a fall from a horse injured his head and he never recovered. His death came about a dozen years later, from addiction to the drug chloroform, while he was living in New York City. Watt turned to public work to assuage the devastating loss. The activity of my life took an entirely new turn. I was led, almost pushed, (the impulse was so strong) to work among the poor families in West Oakland. The harvest truly was plenteous and the laborers few. There I found plenty to engage my mind, heart, and soul, and with my hands I worked as never before in my own sphere of life. My previous interest in the neighborhood was the wedge that opened the way for me to enlarge the work in the neighborhood.22

Watt sought guidance from the most important models for women in American public culture. With one daughter she visited the Woman’s Pavilion and the Children’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Among the many displays celebrating the achievements of women and promoting various child saving causes, Watt found at least one program that she decided to introduce in West Oakland. Even more important was her first meeting with Jane Addams. It happened not in Chicago, but in San Francisco at the Occidental Hotel, where the Woman’s Congress was also convened. Addams invited women to discuss child labor, and her compelling presentation motivated Watt to action. One estimate is that about one million children moved into the labor force between 1870 and 1900.23 In the hotel parlor, the emblem of Victorian propriety, a privileged woman came to grips with the political import of another woman’s powerful voice and began to formulate a new role for herself, focused on saving children. Conversing with Addams “elucidated the great power that she had over all the nationalities, and how willing and receptive they were,” Watt wrote. “Then and there the first seeds were sown for what developed later into an all-absorbing life work”—the West Oakland Settlement.24 That may sound dramatic, but Addams effectively used the tools of public culture to promote her beliefs. She inspired women to want to act as she did to counter rampant individualism, materialism, and competition, with the mutuality and cooperation of the settlement movement. She lectured, wrote, engaged the press, met with supporters, and otherwise promoted her ideas to a literate urban public. In the early 1890s ten settlement houses

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opened in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago; by 1900 more than two hundred were in place across the United States, and many were run by women, including most in the San Francisco Bay Area.25 During her visit in 1894, Addams prodded women in the Bay Area to take action as they confronted political unrest and economic deprivation in very hard times. The South Park Settlement opened in San Francisco in 1895, and other settlements appeared quickly in Oakland. The Manse Polytechnic and the West Oakland Settlement were among them.26

An Open House at the Manse Polytechnic Just around the corner from Hansen’s Hall, Frank Hinckley, a minister, and Mary Norton, his colleague, opened the Manse Polytechnic (see figure 1.14, site 5). Its stated goals of “mutual helpfulness” and “civil, industrial, and individual justice and peace” made sense to these charity workers in 1895, with the railroad strike in recent memory and the effects of the economic depression ingrained in daily life.27 “In this locality live a large proportion of the working population of our city,” a supporter wrote, “and yet, just here, as often happens in similar places elsewhere, are the fewest advantages offered for those who want, or ought to want, in the limited time and with the limited means at their disposal, to improve themselves.”28 Like Addams in Chicago, women in California faced significant challenges in setting up class-bridging projects for children in cities. No state subsidy helped foot the bill for a settlement house, or for a free kindergarten for that matter. Using repurposed buildings made sense to women eager to add social service facilities to the charitable landscape. As they blended the Chicago reformer’s program with others important in public culture, they convinced prominent women to help pay for them. The petitions, sent from woman to woman, won contributions from families with huge fortunes made possible by unrelenting capitalist expansion and extraction of natural resources in the West.29 The local sources were welcome, but the taint to the funds, especially from the exploitation of labor, bothered some, as it did Addams when she was faced with similar donations from Chicago industrialists. Women in Oakland followed her example to swallow their objections and put the money to work. The cultural capital of a female patron added value to her gift because it drew attention to the charity from the press, other charities, and other women. The Manse is a case in point. Hinckley and Norton moved the Manse from house to house on Eighth Street, renting one home after the other (figure 6.2).30 The minister ran the charity for about a year, after which Nor-

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Figure 6.2.  Almira Huntington’s house, 1746 (1730) West Eighth Street, Oakland. The Manse Polytechnic rented this two-story wood-frame house from Almira Huntington. The projecting cornice, Italianate decoration, substantial front porch, and bay window made the small building an emblem of respectability, suited to the reform effort. Photograph by the author, 1997.

ton took charge; she enlisted aid from women, inviting Sarah Horton to participate. Single, college-educated, and founder of a private girls’ school in Oakland, Horton presided over the Manse Settlement Association, the auxiliary group handling finances.31 It took to heart the settlement idea, as Elsie Lee, the secretary, explained in 1897. “It is not a charity; it is not an institution; it is a home,” where all are welcomed as friends.32 Clubs and classes at the Manse focused on cultural uplift, as they did at Hull House. The program included offerings for young people of both sexes; singing classes, a sewing club, and a reading circle for young women; drawing and music classes for young men; sewing and cooking classes

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(attended by girls from the West Oakland Home); a mothers’ club; and a club for boys. For boys who were reluctant to participate in the main activity of cleaning up around the settlement, woodworking and carpentry classes were added along with a library, kindergarten, and lecture series.33 With volunteers and funding scarce, the settlement turned to the press to make its needs known to the charitable public. “The Manse must have more money at once, especially because just now an additional resident is sorely needed,” Lee wrote in the Enquirer in 1897. “Then, too, more workers are needed so that the present classes may be handled more effectively and new ones formed.” She invited her readers to come visit and experience settlement life. “This home should be looked upon as a center from which may emanate the best influences possible; and these influences can be exerted only through men and women who care personally for their brother man.”34 The article was included under the heading “Work of Women in Oakland. Some of the Many Clubs, Societies and Charitable Institutions Conducted by Them—A Very Creditable Showing,” and published in a special edition of the newspaper, issued on Christmas Eve. Finances at the Manse stabilized in 1897, thanks to a donation from Martha Alexander, new member of the board of directors. Her husband, Samuel T. Alexander, who like his wife had grown up in Hawaii, led the industrialization of sugar production on those islands. Later in life the sugar baron returned with his family to Oakland, living in one of the wealthier neighborhoods.35 Profits won from the family’s sugar plantations funded Mary Alexander’s gift, which came with conditions: incorporation; a name change, to the Oakland Social Settlement; and relocation to a new site south of Seventh Street (see figure 7.12).36

The Touch of Class at the West Oakland Settlement The West Oakland Settlement also started modestly. With Watt in the lead, the group rented a small building that with alterations made explicit the scope of female ambition in the sex-segregated public sphere. Allen B. Pond, lead architect for Hull House, questioned adaptive reuse, claiming that a purpose-built complex more clearly expressed aesthetic ambitions and social intentions than one made of repurposed buildings. “Hull House is plainly rather an aggregation of partially related units than a logical organism,” Pond wrote in The Brickbuilder in 1902 (figure 6.3). Still, he suggested that the settlement’s directors had succeeded in giving physical substance to their reform ideals even when repurposing buildings. “The spirit and methods of Hull House are distinctively those of the social settlement,” the

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Figure 6.3.  Hull House, Chicago, original mansion and addition, 1891. The aggregation of partially related units, noted by the Hull House architect, Allen B. Pond, is clear. Courtesy of the Jane Addams Hull-House Photographs, JAMC.0000.0132.2603, University of Illinois at Chicago, Special Collections.

architect wrote. “When adding to its buildings, it has measurably succeeded in avoiding an institutional and formal aspect.” As Pond admitted, a nexus of factors caused his clients to turn away from purpose-built construction: availability of sites, conditions of ownership, and difficulty in raising funds. “Rigor of judgment,” he wrote, must “be somewhat abated for a building or a group of buildings that has grown by a long series of wholly unforeseeable accretions to an original accidental unit.”37 Whether in Chicago or Oakland, the siting of the original unit was not accidental. Watt selected the Kenney cottage on Peralta Street, one block north of the kindergarten and about halfway between the commercial vitality of Seventh Street and the noise and grime of the railroad yards. By virtue of proximity, the cottage called attention to the settlement’s tie to the free kindergarten—a bond intended to show the new charity as a woman’s place and to disseminate reform models to families in the neighborhood. Women also made clear their allegiance to paternalistic uplift and temperance, not the least because the Kenny cottage was right across the street from Davidson’s saloon. “There is little in heredity that can not be overcome by training and example,” one reformer declared, linking Christian sentiment with environmental determinism and social Darwinism. “Those who

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have given their time and means for the betterment of humanity are led to this one conclusion: we must reach the home life of those we would help upward.”38 The Kenney cottage offered a vehicle, albeit one without the generosity of genteel space that Addams had found so promising in the shabby Hull mansion. A one-story dwelling initially, the main section of the Kenny cottage had been erected in the early 1880s, likely with a four-room plan, popular with neighborhood carpenters (see figures 1.11 and 1.12). In 1895, before the settlement moved in, the cottage had been raised to two stories; the firstfloor plan was replicated on the second floor and an exterior stair added in front of the addition in the side yard. This house lacked features critical to middle-class identity, meaning a parlor, a dining room, separate rooms for children, an interior stair, and an indoor toilet; so it is not surprising that it was altered as the complex expanded (figure 6.4). A photograph from about 1900 shows the cottage in transition but not yet fully transformed: a porch and a second exterior stair were added, and a new door, bay window, and trim with artistic details smartened up the exterior (figure 6.5). The high hopes held by the West Oakland Settlement did not include making the cottage a place suited for privileged women to live in. At Hull House, Addams fractured Victorian domestic conventions by making “this ingenious invention, a woman’s live-work space.”39 Watt and her friends volunteered but did not live at the settlement; they hired teachers, club leaders, and a caretaker. To start off, a classroom was created on the first floor and two rooms on the second were joined to make a multipurpose space used for sewing classes and meetings. “The upper rooms, with the aid of carpenters and painters, were transformed into the sweetest and brightest of settlement homes,” Watt wrote.40 Material culture added a touch of class. The goal, in addition to teaching children, was to create a suitable place for bourgeois women to gather, and to offer a compelling example of middle-class domesticity to workingclass families. Settlement workers were known for wanting to inspire “the ideal of the middle-class home and community in the city’s slum areas,” as one historian points out.41 With ideals in flux at the end of the nineteenth century and at least some emblems of Victorian propriety continuing to appeal to Watt and her colleagues, the amalgam of styles included features from the Colonial Revival, the House Beautiful, the Aesthetic Movement, and Arts and Crafts design. The decoration made clear that this building was a woman’s place and hinted at the interest in affirming art, culture, cleanliness, and openness in family life. In that sense the renovated cottage showed these settlement workers beginning to embrace progressivism in

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Figure 6.4.  West Oakland Settlement and New Century Club, 1895–1910. Key: (1) Kenney cottage; (2) renovated main building; (3) entry to the boys’ club and yard; (4) Little Housekeeper’s Cottage; (5) cooking school (later library); (6) clubhouse after alteration by the New Century Club; (7) new rear shed; (8) new gymnasium. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1889, 1902–3, 1911–12), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

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Figure 6.5.  View of the West Oakland Settlement, looking toward Peralta and Atlantic Streets, 1900. Watt launched this charity in 1896 by renting space in the two-story working-class house on the right. By 1900, she added two buildings to the complex: the small house in the center, used for housekeeping classes, and the shedlike building at the left, purpose-built as a cooking school and subsequently turned into a library and sewing school. Both boys and girls are gathered in front of the settlement and on the stairs and porch, but inside the building they attended classes and enrolled in clubs aimed at either sex. From New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1902 (Oakland, 1902), frontispiece. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

architecture, albeit not ready to lead widespread political reform.42 Like Ad­ dams, they hoped to make art and culture available to everyone regardless of need, and they understood art to be a curative force in modern society; they also continued to see the home as a source of female moral authority, retaining features of the ideology of domestic femininity. They used the cottage, as they made it an institution, to shape character rather than only to express personality.43 Even if Watt invested more time, energy, and cash in this renovation than at the kindergarten, she monitored the scope of work in a building that she did not yet own. The economical means employed to execute change ranged from second-hand furniture (some chairs and tables had turned legs, indicative of the Colonial Revival) to contrasting wallpapers, portieres, framed pictures, plants, and banners. Taken together, all of this stuff underscored the obvious—the value of femin­ inity, domesticity, and frugality—to immigrant children and their families. The decor also fabricated the fiction of a shared Anglo-Saxon past. One historian has argued that this backward glance, typical in settlements, showed

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their intention to be the absorption of unruly workers rather than the construction of an egalitarian present and the setting in place of the structure for a more democratic future. Material culture was also used to achieve the goal of Americanization. Windsor chairs and other accessories of the Colonial Revival were made manifest to teach immigrants the history of their new land.44 In contrast to Addams at the Hull House Labor Museum, Watt and her colleagues at the West Oakland Settlement did not take steps to preserve the handicraft skills used by immigrant women, especially spinning and weaving, or to demonstrate to young factory workers the importance of older forms of labor and industry.45 Recasting the architecture of everyday life may have been high on the agenda, but this goal did not have an impact on immigrant homes. The need to recycle goods and balance consumer desire with cost was not new news in Oakland Point; working-class men, women, and children were also avid consumers, buying a wide range of material goods and replacing them with different ones as needs and preferences changed.46 As for the middle classes, working-class houses were in transition, too. Women in Oakland Point did not allocate space in their homes for the Colonial Revival, the House Beautiful, and Arts and Crafts design, even though they may have admired some artifacts. Rather, they preferred to deploy objects that expressed diverse cultural heritages and indicated social status within a diverse community—a teapot from another country, a more expensive set of china than one’s neighbor, or the tools of a trade.47 One program at the West Oakland Settlement succeeded beyond expectations, perhaps because it called on working-class practices, albeit inadver­ tently. Watt’s class blinders were firmly in place when she made explicit the metaphor of recovery in the Salvage Bureau, a recycling program run in conjunction with a weekly meeting for neighborhood mothers. Carlin teased out the meanings suggested by the word “salvage”—“the property saved, the impending danger, and the voluntary effort toward rescue”—and claimed that the Salvation Army and the People’s Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, had developed the model for the program during the recent depression.48 She made no mention of the importance recycling goods had held in the global economy since the consumer revolution began in the eighteenth century, and the place working-class women and children claimed in this system of exchange by repairing and selling secondhand clothes and other items.49 The tie to the building method—repurposed building, recycled clothes—was also not explored. Watt took charge of this practice to raise money for the settlement. She convinced her friends to join her in sewing denim bags, using them to

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collect cast-off items, and selling them at the Salvage Bureau. Each article was wrapped to give the transaction the appearance of a store purchase. Watt insisted that she started the program to bring her into closer personal relations with women in the neighborhood, but her pecuniary and moralizing goals were clear at the start. Selling poor people secondhand goods “is better than giving them the things outright, for it teaches them self respect and the true value of money,” she wrote.50 Others agreed that monetary exchange could teach character as it generated profit for a charity; philanthropic loan societies endorsed similar values. The purpose was not to remove the purchase of secondhand goods from the working-class family economy, but rather to control how and to whom such transactions were made. Elites wanted to regulate consumption in a society where the freedom to buy blurred class distinctions, which were customarily marked by possession and display of material things.51 Those objectives did not deter mothers who came to the weekly meeting, almost always with babies and young children in tow. While sipping a “friendly social cup of tea” with the head of the settlement, women could examine any number of items that were for sale. They included more than old clothes and shoes which had been mended, polished, and given new laces. “There are eager purchasers of old carpet and matting, bedding and curtains, children’s outgrown clothing (it will fit some child), pots, pans, and kettles, bags, baskets, and buckets, dishes, lamps, hats, shoes, gloves, ribbons, icecream freezer, stovepipe, chairs, and garden tools,—in fact everything that may be used in the domestic economy,” Carlin noted.52 A woman may have been attracted by the prospect of buying high-quality goods at an excellent price, or perhaps she was eager to press class boundaries by using artifacts made for people wealthier than she was. The Salvage Bureau also lessened the need to visit the Associated Charities and plead for help (inevitably the prompt for a humiliating investigation). Regardless of motivation, the decision to meet pressing needs by selling recycled consumer goods helped prospective donors grasp the ease with which meaningful improvements could be achieved in Oakland Point. “Who would not be willing to aid in this beautiful alchemy—the turning of waste material into schools, libraries, gardens, baths, clubs, and other helpful agencies?” one appeal queried. “It is another and a better way to help the poor than the giving of money. May we send you a bag?”53 Other women questioned the meaning of the resounding financial success. The Salvage Bureau opened in 1898, and within two years it was reported to have raised thousands of dollars for the charity. The high value would lead one woman to declare that seemingly by accident a strategy had

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been invented to make the poor pay for all the charity given to them. In her view, the success illustrated the comparative wealth of the poorer classes in Oakland, proving that the city did not have a pauper class.54 Her logic defies the imagination, given the high demand for services on offer in the West Oakland Settlement.

Children in this House Children were first in line, and the settlement was chock full of them. They came for many reasons, including the sewing school, a recreation club for working girls, and a boys’ club. A working-class cottage did not lend itself to sorting children by age or sex, but in a late Victorian middle-class house, children used specialized rooms in specific parts of a building: upstairs for sleeping and attics for play. Around the turn of the century, adults began to think that children’s spaces should also be made visually unique, and that material culture should emphasize the difference of children’s spaces from each other and from other rooms in a house. They invented a “visual code of childishness” that underscored innocence and expressed gender difference, especially for older boys and girls.55 Since boys and girls used rooms throughout the settlement house, decoration helped define the different spaces made for them, as did concern with durability, wear and tear, and hygiene. We know this to have been the case because someone, likely Watt, realized that photographs would be useful in promoting the settlement’s work with children; she hired a photographer to record them in action. The pictures, published in Overland Monthly, the settlement’s annual greeting, and Domestic Science Monthly (copublished with the Oakland Club), record the range of classes that were on offer. They show ties to the kindergarten, the “springboard for reform,” and document the continuation of racially integrated programs directly after “separate and equal” had been declared the law of the land. The number of children of color shown—one or two in groups of ten or so children—makes sense given the neighborhood demographics. The settlement house was located in the Sixth Ward, where children made up at least 30 percent of the population in 1900. The US Census Bureau reported 3,383 people between five and twenty years of age in the ward; 4 percent were Negro (105) or persons of another color (37).56 Social class mattered as much as it did in the free kindergarten, and gender even more. Surrounded by Colonial Revival furniture, reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and plants and flowers (durable symbols of femininity), boys and girls learned skills that directed them to the

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separate life worlds that they would inhabit as adults. Obedience, respectability, and the gender division of labor were highlighted rather than class mobility, as younger girls learned to sew, older girls were protected from vice, and boys practiced citizenship. A child had access to technical knowledge similar to that on offer in new manual training programs in public schools, but art and culture counted for more in the settlement than in a public institution, because the intent was to school the children’s taste as well as regulate their behavior.57 By depicting the orderly arrangement of people and things, by showing clean, industrious (not idle) children supervised by adults, the photographs suggest acquiescence to this socialization, but settlement workers quickly learned that children negotiated terms with them, their parents, and among themselves. Girls came in droves to the sewing school, set up at least in part to offer a refuge from domestic violence.58 Forty girls enrolled when the school opened in 1894; by 1900, one hundred or so attended classes each week.59 The high level of interest is not surprising, as facility with sewing, a marketable skill, was in high demand among young women in the late 1890s. Girls learned sewing and other practical skills in the feminized spaces of a middle-class house, intended as a refuge from the male workplace; at the settlement, all involved welcomed the expected commercial benefit of sewing instruction.60 The large number of seamstresses living in Oakland Point and dressmakers working in San Francisco indicate not only that women dominated these trades but also that the industrial manufacture of women’s clothing was not yet complete. At least for dressmakers, this sex segregation came with clear benefits: skilled women were paid high wages for their work, which was in some measure creative, and the most successful women won economic independence and could set the terms and conditions of their employment.61 This is one reason why Phoebe Apperson Hearst set up the Hearst Domestic Industries for women enrolled at the University of California in Berkeley. The school opened in 1900 and offered instruction in sewing, among other domestic skills, to women who needed to work during college. To qualify, a college student had to be of “good moral character” and in “need of self-help.”62 The West Oakland Settlement targeted a different audience: workingclass girls rather than college-bound young women. Mothers may have urged or even required their daughters to take advantage of the sewing program at the settlement; regardless, many girls learned to sew in classrooms on both floors of the settlement house. Upstairs Watt, Hannah Whitehouse, and other volunteers taught young girls to stitch on cardboard cards and

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Figure 6.6.  Elizabeth Watt and the Mizpah Sewing Class at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900. Watt, at the center of the room, is sitting next to an African American girl, presumably by intention. Like the rest of the students, the girl displays the card that beginners used to practice stitches. This classroom, also used for meetings, was made by combining two small bedrooms on the second floor of the Kenny cottage. From Domestic Science Monthly 1 (October 1900): 185.

small pieces of cloth (figure 6.6). Even though the settlement defended its nonsectarian origins, Protestant sentiments and Biblical themes permeated its programs. The Ladies’ Aid Society of the First Congregational Church donated the cards, and Watt called the group the Mizpah Sewing Class. She may have intended the Biblical allusion to avow emotional ties with her son after his untimely death.63 Girls marched into class singing this poem to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Here we come with gladness To our Sewing School, Knowing well that kindness Is the only rule.

To close the lesson, children sang a hymn, read a prayer, and marched home.64 After completing the preliminary course, girls moved downstairs to enroll in the garment class taught by Josephine Palecki, Watt’s dressmaker (see figure 6.1). They practiced hand sewing, cut patterns, worked on donated cloth, and used sewing machines in a classroom decorated with

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inspirational sayings and examples of their hard work. Albeit full of feminized accouterments, both this and the Mizpah classroom conceded to the requisites of teaching and maintenance, with floral wallpaper (which perhaps was washable) received by a practical high wood wainscot, linoleum on the floor, and artificial lighting. The settlement charged girls for their finished products, asking ten or fifteen cents for a garment. The fees paid the sewing school’s expenses, making it a self-sustaining entity rather than a charity per se. As at the Salvage Bureau, self-help was encouraged; something needed to be given in exchange for services received. “The sewing-hour is a pretty scene,” Carlin noted. “The room on the lower floor of the Settlement House is bright with flowers. There is a piano, and a few good pictures . . . significant of the intimate relation with the children that Sunshine Corner maintains, thereby influencing the homes.”65 Her words recall the kindergarten setting described by Wiggin, and the high hopes she held for its effect on the neighborhood. The club for working girls capitalized on another national reform movement, the effort to organize the recreation of immigrant children in cities.66 Reformers in Oakland realized what working girls already knew to be the case: Americans, with unprecedented leisure time at the turn of the century, turned to movie theatres, dance halls, and other forms of popular culture for entertainment. “They are clerks or cash-girls in candy-stores and printing-offices; they work in the cotton-mills and shoddy-mills. There are girls who make things, girls who sew things, and girls who sell things,” Carlin wrote. “They dress in ‘the style,’ following its extreme vagaries, and generally boast of a ‘steady’ to escort them to the cheap theaters and the frequent dances held in town.”67 By taking charge of their free time, settlement workers intended to protect the virtue of young women during their adolescence. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who divided childhood into developmental stages, invented the term “adolescence” to describe this turbulent time in human life, even if the association of passion, turmoil, and distress with the transition from childhood to adulthood had been on the table since the eighteenth century. Hall emphasized the attendant perils, and counseled shielding youth, especially young men, from adult obligations.68 Extending childhood—that is, dependence—into adolescence also protected young women; child savers used the scientific rationale to build support for writing new legal protections into law.69 In Oakland Point, reformers counted on the built environment. Cultivating a taste for art, culture, and domesticity was a matter of concern in addition to being a way to control consumer desire and police sexuality. The settlement offered immigrant girls a spacious, light-filled room on

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Figure 6.7.  “A Quiet Hour” at the Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 1900. The telling emblems of middle-class domesticity include a rocking chair and a fireplace, where the sculpture on the mantelpiece intimates interest in arts and crafts design. After the club closed, the women who ran the settlement house made the sitting room their own. The faces of young women all in repose are obscured in keeping with the interest in decorum, propriety, and femininity. From Domestic Science Monthly 1 (May 1900): 30.

the second floor of the building (figure 6.7). Modeled on the sitting room or back parlor in a middle-class house, not on a classroom, it was set up for reading, writing, and other casual uses rather than to greet guests or entertain young men (figure 6–8).70 This kind of room was absent from working-class cottages in Oakland Point, where families tended to socialize in kitchens. The hope was that modestly dressed young women would come to the club, engage in uplifting activities, and carry forth the benefits to the community at large. The vision failed. The Working Girls’ Recreation Club put forth selfbetterment as the route to improvement, not empowerment. Girls did not run the club, but instead had activities organized for them, in a manner analogous to the choreography of play in a kindergarten. Reformers wanted a club like this one to offer an alternative to dance halls, where questionable practices such as “treating” (a working girl granting sexual favors to augment her meager salary) took place. In the late nineteenth century, lurid stories about the sale of white girls into prostitution also fed middle-class anxieties about working class and immigrant morality and prompted new

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Figure 6.8.  “The Living-Room: Much in Little Space,” 1881. From Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools, and Candlesticks (New York, 1881), 108.

legislation regulating their sexual activity.71 The club offered other options. “The girls are welcome every evening they choose to come. Here they find a teacher of fancy sewing, books, magazines, rest and comfort,” Carlin wrote, explaining that the girls were able to “enjoy, personally conducted, travel eve­ nings as well as those devoted to music and social enjoyment.”72 Without doubt, the chaperones avoided Seventh Street and popular spots such as Hansen’s Hall, just a few blocks away. The recreation club quickly closed—a victim of its sponsors’ moralistic expectations and its members’ enthusiasm for popular entertainment.73 Boys entered their club through the Atlantic Street gate, walking into the backyard, where facilities to clean up were in plain view (figure 6.9). This program, too, had precedent in East Coast cities. In Oakland Point the first visitors were drunk and dirty, and used language “filthy beyond description,” Jennie Wheaton, the director, reported. They also destroyed the club interior, ripping down curtains and smashing plates until order

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was restored.74 Wheaton was familiar with neighborhood children, having joined Rebecca McWade at the Little Workers’ Home, studied at the California Kindergarten Training School, and taught in other neighborhood kindergartens. Wheaton’s assessment provides the context for understanding a remarkable photograph of the club (figure 6.9). Lined up in front of the Atlantic Street gate, boys are shown dressed in tattered clothes suited for work as much as for play. Their informal dress and causal stance suggests that the reformers had their job cut out for them; the inclusion of one lighthearted African American child among them is telling in that regard. In the late nineteenth century, artists often depicted laughing black boys in urban street scenes; their jocularity was taken to be evidence of their interest in street culture, their distaste for decorum, and thus their racial inferiority.75 After several months, the boys’ deportment changed. “How they scrub!” Carlin wrote. “Soon below the collar, beyond the wrist-band, and at length they wash for the sake of being clean.”76 A different photograph shows an orderly group of boys (all white) safely ensconced inside the settlement house (figure 6.10). Cleaned up, dressed in middle-class clothes, seated on Colonial Revival chairs, they are gathered at a table to play board games.77 By virtue of activity and design, the clubroom addressed anxieties not only about childhood but also about male identity and sexuality. A shift in

Figure 6.9.  The Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900. From Domestic Science Monthly 1 (August 1900): 119.

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Figure 6.10.  The Boys’ Club at the West Oakland Settlement, 1900. Spare decoration—the plaster walls are without wallpaper—was deemed suitable for rooms used by boys. Even so, this room has a plant, the durable symbol of femininity in the nineteenth century; artistic objects are displayed above the door; and the working-class boys are shown as reformed by feminine influence because they are clean and well dressed, busy playing a board game. As in the classrooms used by girls, the wood wainscot and linoleum on the floor suggest concern about ease of maintenance. From New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1912 (Oakland, 1912): 14.

values was in process, away from manly self-restraint and toward aggressive masculinity.78 Carlin described a feminized setting decorated in blue and white, with china and a mirror on display and thus in synch with the visual culture of childishness. The photograph records a different decor, one that with its august appearance expressed masculine tastes in the home. This kind of place was expected to appeal to the male sex, thus sustaining a family life based on companionship and deterring men from saloons and other places threatening to domestic life.79 Manly restraint was on offer in the clubhouse, rather than masculine aggression. Boys worked on arts and crafts projects, practiced military drills, and learned principles of good government in a room decorated with portraits of role models, including George Washington.80 In West Oakland, organized play promoted gender- and class-specific ideals of citizenship; the boys elected leaders to learn to discount corrupt machine politics. Even so, several boys stuffed the ballot box during elections, according to Carlin. She

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construed the event to be clear evidence of the damage the neighborhood environment exerted on them, although she praised the manner in which they executed justice. The boys’ conduct had “a spontaneity that recalls the childhood of the human race,” she wrote. Her praise was couched in terms that G. Stanley Hall would have found appropriate, as much as he opposed educating even very young boys in woman-run settings.81 Hall argued that kindergartens ruined boys, although he endorsed in principle the need for early childhood education. Invoking a pernicious form of social Darwinism, the psychologist claimed that woman-run schools destroyed the male aggression that was needed to sustain white racial superiority and advance Western civilization.82 He ascribed to recapitulation theory, meaning that children needed to experience and struggle through stages of evolution—savagism, barbarism, and civilization—to move human culture forward. In short, docile (white) boys restricted (white) race progress. The claim resonated with Theodore Roosevelt, who had no patience with male gentility. In 1899 he denounced “the soft spirit of the cloistered life” and demanded that men “boldly face the life of strife . . . for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.” The appeal to strength and aggression as the basis of nationalism resonated on the West Coast; civic leaders looked with enthusiasm on US victories in the SpanishAmerican War and lauded the advance of imperial expansion.83 Almost seventy youngsters had joined the Boys’ Club by 1900. The high number was taken as proof of the club’s success, but even so, new programs were deemed to be in order. Carlin urged that a gymnasium be built, insisting that organized play would reinforce behaviors of value to employers. Physical activities would be structured to train the mind through disciplining the eye, hand, and body. She also proposed that a man “of strength and truth” be hired to teach—“strong that he may guide them along the difficult path of self-help; true, that he may be to the boys what his high ideal has in mind for them to become.”84 The boys needed an exemplary figure because they were not easy to reach and were disinterested in the thorny route to self-improvement. In due course her suggested changes were made, but for the time being other needs took priority.

The Next Step: Adding Housekeeping and Cooking Classes Between 1898 and 1900, the West Oakland Settlement expanded its physical plant to make room for new classes in domestic arts. Watt rented a tiny two-room cottage on Atlantic Street for housekeeping classes, and erected

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a much larger building, a cooking school, at the corner of Atlantic and Campbell Streets.85 The Oakland Club cosponsored the cooking school, and the overlap in membership included Watt. The new structure, called the Oakland School of Domestic Science, sparked a debate among the West Oakland Settlement and the Oakland Club about charity and domestic science. The latter term referred to cooking instruction as well as to changes in housework, household organization, and design that had been prompted by new technologies.86 In planning its expansion, the West Oakland Settlement adopted a strategy that matched Hull House in spirit, if not in expanse, and in materials and methods of construction. Three wood-frame buildings stretched across Atlantic Street—a house, a cottage, and a school—and the manner of the aggregation created informal places that marked the threshold between institution and street. Stairs, picket fences, garden gates, side yards, and doors provided different entry points into the complex. The informal site planning, however, belied the explicit social intent and analogous spatial order of the new program spaces. The decision to aim them at young women and girls did not indicate that settlement workers had lost interest in the male sex; rather, it expressed concern with declining interest in domestic service among working-class girls.87 Women faced an arduous double shift in Oakland Point. During the day, mothers worked at factories and canneries; toiled as seamstresses, washerwomen, and cooks; and returned home to cook, clean, care for children, and look after roomers. Settlement workers took exception to this construction of the family economy, and worried about the effects of long working hours on home life and the perceived “moral laxity” in this neighborhood. “Is it any wonder that some grow distressed and careless?” Carlin wrote. “That sometimes they stand on the steps and sidewalks, over-worked, weak, ill-tempered, and turn their backs on the dreariness within? . . . They are ignorant of science and its immutable laws; all lack the knowledge which in any form, ‘transmutes existence into life.’” The fact that industrial employment drastically reduced the ranks of servants also distressed reformers who relied on them to take care of their homes. “The girls of the neighborhood are not ‘in service,’” Carlin protested, adding that “they all seem to have a feeling of self-satisfaction at escaping from the monotonous drudgery of the home.”88 The West Oakland Settlement responded to the multiple demands on a mother’s time—and to her daughter’s disinterest in domestic service—by proposing to alleviate housework. The fact that children toiled in factories

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may have appalled Watt, but she accepted as a matter of course that children worked for wages in elite homes. To train household workers, the settlement adopted a program modeled on curricula used in specialized kindergartens and training schools. Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, women opened the training schools for working-class girls and women, inspired by industrial education and the professionalization of housework. The schools offered classes in domestic economy, cooking, cleaning, and laundry skills, intent on producing effective household managers and better servants. Although housework was known to be an onerous burden, schools did not attract working-class women; they had little time to spare for instruction and no desire to answer the intrusive queries of instructors.89 Watt focused on little girls. In the Atlantic Street cottage she placed the equipment needed for the kitchen garden course developed by Emily Huntington in a New York City mission. During the 1870s Huntington had imported kindergarten techniques, using songs and games to teach housekeeping to girls as young as five.90 This proscriptive use of play would have appalled Froebel, but it intrigued Watt. She learned about Huntington’s program at the World’s Columbian Exposition, where the kitchen garden exhibit at the Children’s Building caught her attention. “These classes were so fascinating, and had such power over me,” Watt wrote, “that I was not satisfied until I had bought an entire outfit from the store in New York. The board with twenty four little red chairs came safely to our West Oakland club, and we were fortunate enough that our settlement worker knew how to teach the system.”91 She called the school the Little Housekeepers’ Cottage. The word “cottage” referred to a common housing type, but the decision to include it in the name of the school was provocative. It alluded to reform discourse that posited a cottage as a primitive national form evocative of national character.92 In the tiny house, the settlement placed new labor-saving devices in classrooms that were decorated to express childishness and designed to introduce children to new household technologies. One room used to teach housekeeping was equipped with tools and equipment sized for young pupils. Sentimental decor, attractive colors, and medallions on the wallpaper illustrating the phases of a child’s life were used to draw girls to the program. The second room was an educational laundry, complete with a new washing machine.93 Watt divided the kitchen garden course in Oakland into six occupations, in line with Huntington’s goals. While singing, playing games, marching, and using toy appliances, girls learned to kindle fires, answer the door,

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make beds, launder clothes, scrub floors, set and serve tables, and sweep, dust, and arrange rooms. The goal was for “the children to acquire the order, precision, and neatness essential to household service,” Watt wrote.94 In a neighborhood where boys and girls were expected to contribute to the family economy, adults used play to teach them to be better workers, rather than to offer them an ideal childhood. As they practiced serving tables, girls sang “The Little Waitress Song,” to the tune of “Little Buttercup.” I’m called a good waitress, a very good waitress, I am sure that you can always tell why; I’ve been taught to step lightly, to have all things sightly, And watch every want to supply. I try to be able to watch all at table, And this you will readily see, Makes every one pleasant, restful and comfortable; And so they depend on me. I’ve learned at Kitchen School, where they all work by rule, Which side to pass with a tray, In regular order to take tea-cup and saucer, And quietly go on my way.95

Girls learned different routines at the School of Domestic Science after it opened in 1899. Domestic science, the technocratic take on housework taught at the school, swept through reform movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Inspired by the time and motion studies of factory workers pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, women argued that housekeeping should be rationalized by basing it on industrial efficiency, business management, and science. Kitchens and cooking fascinated professionalizers of housework, who saw the place and the activity as likely sites to experiment with systematizing the modern home.96 The Oakland Club cosponsored the School of Domestic Science with the West Oakland Settlement. This fact is ignored in all accounts of the settlement’s history, including Watt’s memoir (probably due to the ensuing dispute). Still, Watt claimed a leadership role in Oakland Club for a short time, and newspapers report her as active in it, starting in 1899. The club grew out of an association formed to set up vacation schools for workingclass children. Carlin praised the program, writing that because of it, the “Oakland child is slowly coming to his rights.” By that she meant effective compulsory education, manual training, and access to public playgrounds

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as well as summer schools.97 The Oakland Club did not meet in West Oakland, but rather rented rooms on Jefferson Street, downtown. Modeled on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the club was organized in four departments, in this case focused on literature, philanthropy, domestic science, and playgrounds.98 It secured the appointment of the first matron in the city prison and campaigned for playgrounds, as well as sponsoring the cooking school. Watt launched two programs that helped middle-class women realize their ambition to study cooking. As business manager and chair of the club’s Domestic Science Department, she organized the new school and the new journal, Domestic Science Monthly (modeled on the New England Kitchen edited by Ellen Richards, the domestic reformer).99 She furnished the rooms where the journal was edited, paid for the school, and arranged for the Oakland Gas, Light, and Heating Company to donate gas stoves. Her husband, Robert, and her son-in-law, C. O. G. Miller, had financial interests in the company; the gift was an example of the way in which women like Watt made use of the economic clout of male relatives to further their public work.100 In West Oakland the cooking school, a large, bland structure, looked nothing like the cottage for little housekeepers. Inside, the model kitchen was configured like the new cooking laboratories in middle-class homes: compact, brightly lit, equipped with new stoves, and served by running water, gas, and electricity—the utilities that redefined the home.101 Photographs of the school published in Domestic Science Monthly highlight new equipment, modern services (gas lines are prominent), and the laboratorylike decor. Watt hired a graduate of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia to run the kitchen, and used the new journal to argue that professionalization of housework was essential to public culture (figure 6.11).102 “Without doubt, the first requisition for good home-making is, that women should study the subject as a science,” Domestic Science Monthly proclaimed, adding that in all households, “food should be adapted to the climate, to the age, to the occupation and the special needs of the individual. This calls for knowledge and training, [as] ‘out of homes are builded Municipalities, States, and Nations.’ ”103 The tribute to homemaking notwithstanding, the club anticipated that other, less altruistic changes would result from the scientific study of cooking. The course of study included some scientific analysis, but principally, students learned to cook food that suited elite tastes and budgets and did not figure in the diets of working-class families.104 Photographs also show

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Figure 6.11.  “Practice Class in the Oakland Cooking School,” 1900. Young women students, dressed as if they were servants, practice cooking on gas stoves in a hygienic, antiseptic room that looks like a laboratory. From Domestic Science Monthly 1 (April 1900): 2.

that young women were made to look and act like servants; dressed in white caps and ruffled aprons, they practiced new skills under the watchful eye of their female instructor. The expectation was that Taylorization would make domestic service more appealing to young white working women by defusing the differences between household work and factory labor. An education based on the scientific method would turn untrained students into skilled workers who followed predictable routines in their (domestic) workplaces and thus enjoyed the higher salaries and social status of factory employees.105 The expectation defied common knowledge. It was not low pay that dissuaded young women from domestic service; live-in servants usually earned as much as women employed in factories, laundries, and canneries. But other problems kept women from domestic service: grueling work, long hours, condescending employers, demands for sexual favors, and the connotation of servitude.106 The Oakland school did not address these complaints, and in fact the domestic focus of the curriculum further emphasized the already obvious use of institutional space to mark class distinctions. Elite women crossed the divide of social class to organize classes in cooking, cleaning, and laundry for women whom they hoped to hire as servants. The

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labor of one woman made it possible for the other to leave her home and make her mark on urban public culture.107 Nativism also left an ugly stain on servant education, at the school and in the community. Asian men worked as servants and ran commercial laundries, one of the few business venues open to them in northern California. Photographs published in Domestic Science Monthly show only white women and girls in the Oakland school’s cooking classes, although African Americans were made welcome on occasion. When one child, “a brightfaced negro lad” [sic], asked to attend, instructors granted permission.108 The doors did not open to Asian immigrants. Charlotte Perkins Gilman concurred with this discrimination, arguing that domestic service should be reserved for white working-class girls. In 1894 she discussed a proposal to set up a laundry in Oakland that would employ women at a reasonable salary. “It would come into competition with no one except the Chinese,” she emphasized, before a sympathetic audience at the First Congregational Church. “If they don’t like it, why, then they can go home.”109 After the cooking school opened, the two groups began to quarrel—first about purpose, and then about property and politics. The West Oakland Settlement intended the school to be a charity, directed toward local residents. The Oakland Club expected that teaching cooking in a practical, scientific manner would prepare the great majority of girls for their life work, making and keeping a home. It invited women of all ages and classes to attend, even though the expectation that elite women would come to a workingclass neighborhood for cooking lessons defied standard practice. Since the Oakland Club also wanted the school to be self-sustaining, it charged for instruction, expecting that the students’ employers would pay the fees. The directors of the Oakland Club asserted that the city was overburdened with charities and did not need any more, although the club promised to offer scholarships and free classes, should an endowment be formed.110

The Color Line in California Women’s Clubs This disagreement soon exploded into public conflict, with each group of women using buildings to demonstrate its claim in public culture. Tensions were evident in April 1900 when the editors of Domestic Science Monthly insisted that the school was the Oakland Club’s project, distinct from the settlement (although its tie to the West Oakland Free Kindergarten was recognized).111 The lead article in this issue indicated that the Oakland Club intended to establish a new home, as soon as funds permitted. Early in October, the San Francisco Call reported that Watt had quit the club:

208 / Chapter Six When the Oakland Club refused to assume the responsibility of the improvements made by Mrs. Watt in this very work and for the construction of these very buildings, and then claimed that her management of the Domestic Science Monthly was not careful and asked her to resign, the storm broke that culminated in many a withdrawal from the Oakland Club.112

Watt paid outstanding bills and ceded control of the journal to her former colleagues; the club responded with a vote of confidence in her man­ agement. The matter seemed settled, but Watt was not one to suffer an insult quietly. She ordered her furniture removed and sent to West Oakland; she claimed the cooking school building as her own property, which it was; and she announced that she and her friends, all former members of the Oakland Club, would open a new charity for children. The Oakland Club responded in kind. Declaring a change of staff in the magazine and the cooking school, this club moved the kitchen equipment to Franklin Street. Phoebe Apperson Hearst made a handsome donation to the school, and magazine sales helped to support it.113 Early in December, Elizabeth Watt, Mary Goodcell (former chair of the Playground Department at the Oakland Club), Jennie Wheaton, and two other women incorporated a new club, which they called the New Century Club after first trying out another name, the Peralta Park Club. It had made clear one purpose, which was also included in its articles of incorporation: to campaign for parks, open space, and playgrounds in Oakland Point. “The Club was duly incorporated for it was necessary to buy land and buildings,” Watt wrote, and indeed, the first Annual Greeting opened with a request for donations. Profusely illustrated, filled with stories, aphorisms, and charming drawings, and supported with advertising solicited by Watt, the first Annual Greeting looked more like a fashionable women’s magazine than the official report required of a corporation.114 Its design and content suggested that disagreements about purpose as well as battles over turf and funding sparked the fracture of one club into two. The New Century Club and the Oakland Club shared an interest in making poor people self-supporting members of society. Like her colleagues at the Oakland Club, Watt believed in self-help and other traditional understandings of charity. “The poor must be taught the value of money,” she wrote, “and if they are to be made good citizens, must be helped to help themselves, not made driveling paupers.”115 She also valued institutional ties: the New Century Club affiliated with the California Federation of Women’s Clubs after it formed in 1900, and Watt also chaired the

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federation’s Household Economics Committee.116 But she refused to join the Associated Charities. In the November issue of Domestic Science Monthly, the Oakland Club did exactly that and explained that relations between the philanthropic department, headed by Dr. Susan Fenton, and the Associated Charities offered “a fair example of the impersonal character of the highest philanthropic work.”117 Like Elizabeth Betts, Eva Carlin, Jane Addams, and other women who were concerned about urban childhood, Elizabeth Watt believed that women of privilege needed to cross the boundaries of social class and work with children in poor communities. Lacking faith in charity that was dispensed at a distance from people in need, Watt proposed to create, not fracture, geographic ties between women in different social classes. In her view, an effective club needed to be located within a working-class community—in a feminized, homelike setting—and run by exemplary women. “We, of this Club, believe that teaching by precept or proverb is not sufficient, there must be illustration—the power of example,” she insisted. 118 She and her colleagues followed through by placing the meeting rooms of the New Century Club inside the Oakland Point settlement house. There are obvious parallels with older charities, where women had met in orphanage parlors, but not with newer ones. In 1900 clubwomen, especially affluent married women with children, did not elect to meet in the heart of ethnically mixed, racially integrated working-class communities. The New Century Club also refused to honor the color line in a state where rapid changes to the face of inequality fueled race prejudice in clubs and charities.119 For children, the club replicated the social composition of the neighborhood, as McWade had done in the West Oakland Home, Wiggin and Betts in free kindergartens, and Addams at Hull House. Other white clubwomen acted differently, finding in bigotry a route to white unity, race pride, and victory in the battle for suffrage. In the mid-1890s, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin organized a club for middle-class black women in Boston; women from the Beth Eden Baptist Church in Oakland followed her lead in 1899 and formed the Fanny Jackson Coppin Club—the first art and cultural club for African American women in California. A visitor had brought news “of the splendid work that was being done by clubwomen in other parts of the country” and urged local women to do the same.120 The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GWFC), organized in 1890, refused in 1900 to accept Ruffin’s request for membership. Two years later, the new California Federation of Women’s Clubs spearheaded the campaign to exclude African Americans from the state and national federations. That year, when the GWFC met in Los Angeles, Clara Burdette, its state president, led it to

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endorse racial exclusion, arguing that Southern clubs would otherwise desert the group and reduce its effectiveness in the battle for suffrage.121 Watt disagreed. She took a public stand in favor of racial integration while Alice Bunnell, president of the Oakland Club, and Caroline Severance, a Christian socialist and former abolitionist, acquiesced to segregation. “It is not what’s right, but what’s expedient,” Bunnell stated. “If the colored women’s clubs were to be taken into the federation, almost every club of white women in the South would leave it. I don’t see why there should be any question of it.”122 Watt defended inclusion in practice and in print. “This Club has ever tried to keep free from a spirit of prejudice,” she wrote in 1901. “Children of all races and religions are received into the classes, while the colored woman and her children are received and made welcome as those of fairer skin.”123 Her eloquent words second my point that a broad perspective—one that includes urban institution building for children—is needed to bring women into the political history of the Progressive Era. In 1900, this political moderate set in place policies that challenged prevailing philanthropic practice. She embraced tolerance and defended the practice in print, perhaps because she had learned its value by working in a place and among people who were unfamiliar to her.124 Even so, Watt went only so far. She simplified social relations in a state with a complicated history of conquests and migrations. No woman’s club, not even Watt’s, admitted Asian members, except as servants. In southern California white clubwomen, who pandered to exclusion, welcomed Hispanic members as white, so long as they were wealthy; the goal was to make the Spanish past part of the Anglo present, and to win for the West a touch of distinction delivered by the brush with elite European culture.125 Other women in northern California resigned from the segregated state federation; the New Century Club affiliated with it and accepted new members by nomination only. The club’s membership lists do not include women who lived in Oakland Point, although their children used the club’s facility. Racial and ethnic stereotyping also runs through Watt’s writing, and later in life she moved to Presidio Terrace in San Francisco. The geography of residence in this elite neighborhood, coupled with the high cost of its land and its restrictive covenants, assured that only wealthy, white Protestant Americans would be her neighbors. All of these issues and more would come to the fore after the turn of the new century—as women added more places for children to the charitable landscape. Watt continued her work in Oakland Point, mixing familiar methods of construction with progressive trends in design; Alexander paid for an elegant new facility at the Oakland Social Settlement; and the

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Oakland Club opened new playgrounds in West Oakland. At each place, a gender-defined agenda furthered a reform vision for childhood that would be defined in inclusive terms as women intervened in municipal politics to ensure that all children in West Oakland, including African Americans, had public places to play.

seven

“The Ground Must Belong to the City”: Playgrounds and Recreation Centers in Oakland’s Neighborhoods The secretary of the California State Federation of Women’s Clubs found much to admire in the charitable landscape of West Oakland in the first decade of the new century. “How alive and progressive you are!” she wrote to the New Century Club, referring to news it had shared in a recent annual greeting.1 The praise was not misplaced. Without doubt, impressive architectural changes, made by women in the name of progressive reform for children, stood out in the charitable landscape. Elizabeth Watt invested in the New Century Club, Mary Alexander did the same at the Oakland Social Settlement, and soon enough, boys and girls filled elegant new clubhouses, reading rooms, and gymnasiums. However, no intervention caught the attention of children (or the charitable public) more than the new public spaces made by women for children to play in (figure 7.1). The Oakland Club led the drive. In the face of municipal neglect, women from this club set up playgrounds in West Oakland schoolyards and demanded a place in city government to assure that these sites would become publicly owned and operated for city children. This process, the “municipalization” so important to recreation reformers, appealed to Watt and Alexander.2 Each woman proposed to the municipality that it acquire her settlement house, and each woman set in place the same condition for the transfer of property: that each settlement house become a public recreation or community center, open to the community at large. These actions, impressive for their public spirit even in reform-minded times, give some sense of the direction that women wanted to give to the charitable landscape in Oakland during the Progressive Era. That landscape was in transition for children at the turn of the century—a momentous time in the Golden State, as reform politicians swept to victory and women won

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Figure 7.1.  The playground at Tompkins Grammar School, Fifth and Linden Streets, Oakland, 1910. Boys and girls of different ages are playing on wooden seesaws, privately built by the Oakland Club, on a public school yard. A man and a woman supervise the children; the tall iron fence keeps the kids from wandering into the street. The school is on the left. From City of Oakland, The Park System of Oakland (Oakland, 1910).

the right to vote. The suffrage victory in 1911, the first in a large urbanized state, came with high hopes that women would participate fully in urban affairs, solving a host of problems that included the provision of social ser­ vices.3 In Los Angeles, Estelle Lawton Lindsey, a journalist and socialist, fulfilled the expectation in 1915. Elected to the city council, she forged alliances to make the state a leader in guaranteeing at least some delivery of public welfare for women and children.4 Clubwomen joined in, arguing that children deserved new opportunities for play and education, and they capitalized on the asymmetry of gender relations to build support for reform legislation. “The great law of dualism,” Hattie Crane wrote in Overland Monthly in 1912, persisted even if woman had won her rightful “place in the government and conduct of society.” Crane noted that “while man has been wondering whether she should or should not leave the home, woman all quietly and unobserved, has builded institutions, the good result of which will be manifest in the future citizens of this locality.”5 Crane corrected male misapprehension with a long list of achievements that appeared to be comprehensive, but in fact directed attention to specific actors. She made no mention of the Mothers’ Charity Club in Oakland, organized by black women who took exception to racially segregated institutions for children run by the Associated Charities (figure 7.2). Rather, her text honored, and highlighted with illustrations, affluent white women

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who in the campaign for increased state responsibility convinced legislators to regulate tenement houses and child labor, and to set up juvenile courts. These women also continued to run established charities and open new ones for children. Oakland figured in the last regard. “No city in the State during the last few years has devoted more attention to the playground work or has achieved better results, according to the commercial growth and increase in population, than Oakland,” Crane stated.6 Cited as advocates for children, not as adversaries, were the Oakland Club for playgrounds and the New Century Club for neighborhood improvement. The assessments were on the mark. A building boom took off in Oakland as business and industry expanded, and massive in-migrations transformed the city during the first decade of the century. In 1910, just over 150,000 people lived in Oakland (more than twice as many as a decade before), and the incorporated area increased to sixty-three square miles

Figure 7.2.  The Mothers’ Charity Club, Oakland, undated photograph. The African American women who organized this club are gathered in front of a building that likely was home to one of them. Perhaps she is the woman standing in front, flanked by two girls who may be her daughters. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

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(thanks to the annexation of suburbs to the north, south, and east). New regional transit, the electrified Key Route in 1903, eased commuting. With Oakland still touted as the “city of homes,” tens of thousands moved across the bay in 1906 after the great earthquake and fire left them homeless in San Francisco.7 A new mayor, Frank K. Mott, welcomed them to Oakland. Elected in 1905 with bipartisan support, Mott is an excellent example of the elusive meaning of the term “California progressive.” During his ten-year tenure, Mott—the axe-wielding protégé of George Pardee, the antilabor, antiimmigrant, pro-business Republican governor—led the city to revise its charter twice; he also reorganized city agencies and wrestled control of the harbor from the railroad. Waterfront improvements, critical after the Panama Canal opened in 1914, generated commercial and industrial expansion and put Oakland in a position to compete with urban rivals up and down the West Coast. New successes, above all in shipping, fed dreams of regional dominance—of once and for all surpassing the competitor across the bay, after the earthquake left it in ruins.8 The vision came to naught, but the mayor proposed that a comprehensive urban plan be made as San Francisco, phoenix-like, began to spring back to life across the bay. The question of organizing urban expansion in Oakland wasn’t a new one. It started in the 1860s, after the founders of Mountain View Cemetery invited the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to plan the site. When Olmsted arrived in Oakland, he emphasized the importance of procuring private property and using it for public parks—advice the city council ignored.9 About this time, and in anticipation of growth to come, the banker James de Fremery tried to convince property owners in West Oakland to do the same—to remove private property from speculative development and turn it into a public park. His proposal failed, much to his chagrin.10 A new picturesque park, designed in the Olmstedian manner to encourage contemplation of nature along leisurely promenades, would have increased the value of de Fremery’s holdings, in addition to embellishing the public realm. In 1907, after charter revision and de Fremery’s death, the city bought his estate and opened a public park and playground; the house became one of the first public recreation centers in the city.11 To develop a plan for Oakland, Mott could have turned for guidance to the obvious choice: Daniel Burnham, author of the new comprehensive plan for San Francisco, an exemplar of City Beautiful principles.12 But with the execution of the Burnham proposal stalled across the bay, Mott hired another expert in 1906: Charles Mulford Robinson, another City Beautiful advocate and a playground activist.13 “You have to plan for a great city,

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and for a population that to a peculiar extent will need parks and pleasure grounds,” Robinson counseled in A Plan of Civic Improvement. To fulfill its reputation as a city of homes, meaning a place for families to live and nurture children, the city of Oakland should take advantage of its temperate climate and plentiful undeveloped land to make places that invite children to play outdoors all year round. “If these reservations are not chosen now,” Robinson cautioned, “the cost and general difficulties of securing them will grow much more rapidly than will your ability to meet them” (more or less the point made by Olmsted, although the design ideologies of park planners had changed). Robinson, an advocate for the reform park, to be used for active recreation and not passive contemplation, urged the city to acquire land for two large parks, many smaller ones, and even more playgrounds, especially for children in industrial districts. They “do not, and cannot, for both physical and financial reasons, journey frequently at considerable distance to a park.”14 One year later, voters approved a $992,000 bond issue to buy sites recommended by Robinson; the city organized a park commission and a playground commission. The mayor put Alice Bunnell, Cora Jones, and Ethel Moore from the Oakland Club in charge of the latter commission, as he was aware of their previous accomplishments in securing places for kids to play, and expected more of the same.

The Battle for Public Ground to Play The women of the Oakland Club had begun to make the case for public places for children to play in about a decade earlier—soon after the first public playground in California opened in 1898. The California Club launched this experiment in San Francisco; it made sense that clubwomen took this initiative in the largest city in the American West, one where reformers kept an eye on examples set by colleagues back east and in the Midwest. In 1886, the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association opened the first playground in the United States, at the behest of the physician Marie E. Zakrzewska, who suggested for Boston an innovation she’d seen in Berlin, where children, rich and poor, played on heaps of sand in public parks. The hygiene association agreed that “playing in the dirt is the royalty of childhood, but poverty infringes on that right, especially in the North End.” In the summer it delivered a pile of sand to the yard of the Children’s Mission, where small children happily “dug in the sand with their little wooden shovels and made countless sand-pies, which were re-made the next day with amazing alacrity.” The experiment was off and running. The next summer the city opened eleven sand gardens—ten in tenement

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Figure 7.3.  “Presenting the Extreme of International Adjustment,” the Vacation School at the Tompkins Grammar School, 1900. During the summer of 1899, immigrant children practiced sewing skills in this public school classroom, as they sewed the flags draped over the piano. For women who ran the vacation school (at least three of whom are shown) and their sponsors in the Oakland Club, manual training and organized play helped in Americanization. The prominent display of the clock is intentional. From Domestic Science Monthly 1 (Sept. 1900): 152.

courts and one in a schoolyard for a vacation school.15 In the 1890s, Jane Addams set the stage in Chicago by opening a playground at Hull House; the Outdoor Recreation League did the same for New York City by putting playgrounds in DeWitt Clinton Park in Hell’s Kitchen and Seward Park on the Lower East Side.16 The Oakland Club followed suit. In the summer of 1899, with Mary Goodcell as chair of its playground department, the club decided to open vacation schools at Tompkins Grammar School and Garfield Grammar School in West and East Oakland respectively (see figure 1.14, sites 7 and 8). The goal of this new program was “constructive” and “preventive” philanthropy, according to Joseph Lee, the wealthy recreation reformer from Boston. Vacation schools, Lee noted, grew out of the “perception of evils arising from the idleness and emptiness of the long summer vacation” and the desire to provide “something attractive for the children to do.”17 Typically the program included a kindergarten, manual training, nature study, and a focus on Americanization (figure 7.3). In Oakland it quickly became

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apparent that indoor activities could not hold the attention of children; boys especially wanted to play games and run around outside during the summer. The first challenge was to find a public space big enough for play. In Boston and Chicago schoolyards provided a likely locus, being publicly owned and familiar to children. The Oakland Club adopted the same strategy in West Oakland; in effect, it forged a public-private partnership by building a playground in the public schoolyard of Tompkins Grammar School. As Mary McClees, secretary of the club, told the Tribune, “There was ground in that vicinity, but it was felt and found that for this important public use the ground must belong to the city.”18 The repetition of the word “ground” alluded to different meanings: an open space, privately or publicly owned; the foundation or basis on which a belief or action rests; a reason or a cause. There was good reason for concern about the geography of play. A photograph from 1884 offers a rare glimpse of boys playing outdoors in the unfinished, developing city (figure 7.4). The focus is “our pond”—in a muddy, open corner lot and surrounded by broken carts, trash, tents, and shacks (although polite houses and new street trees are visible across the street, in

Figure 7.4.  “Our Pond, Oakland, Cal.,” at the northeast corner of  Tenth and Washington Streets, 1884. A close look reveals the dirt path worn into the hillside that leads from the street to the muddy pond where the boys are playing. This neighborhood is in transition, with wood-frame single-family residences and a rooming house on one side of the street, and a masonry commercial structure on the other. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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the background). All of the people in the photograph are male, from the eleven boys of various ages standing around the edge of the pond to the two adult men, offering them lackadaisical supervision at best. Boys made this space themselves; adults didn’t give it to them. By the turn of the century, reformers deemed this kind of informal space problematic for recreation—unhealthy, ungraded, informal, and not at all suited for the organized games that nourished citizenship in a democratic society. A vacant lot in West Oakland did not look as messy as its counterpart in a more congested city where overcrowding fueled demand for orga­ nized play and municipal playgrounds. In 1899, however, undeveloped lots were becoming harder to find in Oakland as speculators bought them up and built housing on them. Streets didn’t offer a reasonable alternative, as vehicular traffic rendered them dangerous for kids. Without romance about playing amidst manure, mud, carts, and cars, clubwomen demanded the municipality take action. McClees added a regional twist to the usual environmental determinism of the reform argument when she stated, “This need is the more imperative because our climate tempts them out of doors and away from their homes all through the year.”19 The Oakland Club made gender equity part of its play platform, and the referent in this instance was to boys. That wasn’t surprising because a moral panic about street culture, especially of working-class youth, was sweeping through American and European cities at the end of the nineteenth century, and Oakland was no exception.20 Also, a kernel of selfinterest motivated reformers who built playgrounds (as it did reformers who established domestic science classes). By removing rowdy boys from city streets, playgrounds helped make streets “safe” (more orderly, more pleasant) for middle-class adults. Additionally, and like domestic science classes, play was seen as preparation for work. The bodily control and coordinated movements taught on the playground served industrial and domestic workers well. However, McClees had more on her mind than the regulation of male play. The Oakland Club made the case for playgrounds as a right of childhood during a dispute about land use that rocked the city in the fall of 1899. Andrew Carnegie had promised funds for a new library, and the handsome gift of fifty thousand dollars from the industrialist’s philanthropy was contingent on the city’s acquisition of a piece of property suitable for such an important civic institution (see figure 1.14, site 9).21 The proposed site, one of four public squares downtown, caused an outcry including and especially among clubwomen. They countered with these suggestions to the city: one,

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that it should allocate funds to buy the needed site for the library; and two, that it should open playgrounds on publicly owned open spaces. By no means should the latter be obliterated with new buildings. “Do not rob the little children,” the Oakland Club stated, meaning of their right to play in public space. McClees elaborated: “I deplore anything that looks like robbing the children of rights that are only just becoming recognized. We hope that the city will perceive how vital to the moral wellbeing of our boys and girls the provisions of playgrounds for them is.”22 By unanimous vote, the club directed its secretary to deliver to the city council its protest against using the public plaza for the library. The Ebell Society offered to fund-raise for another site, and in three months $21,000 was in hand. The council accepted the gift, more than enough to buy the targeted property, and the purchase was made. Even so, male legislators begrudged female success, and afterwards the library board refused to involve women in the building’s design. When queried as to why, gender was cited as cause. The Ebell Society was told it could furnish the children’s reading room if it raised more funds. It proceeded to do so.23 In the midst of this heated dispute about gender, space, power, and childhood, the Oakland Club asked the charitable public to think about playground design. It hired a gardener, George Hansen, to make a plan for a playground, and invited him to present it at a public meeting chaired by Goodcell. The designated site, one of the city’s public squares, required a design with room for older pastoral visions of park use as well as newer ones of active recreation. Hansen obliged, offering a central space with a bandstand, seats for attendants, separate play areas for girls and boys, open space, and trees. The importance of gender to these clubwomen—of separate and equal access to public space—came through loud and clear. The club highlighted its offer to girls of one ground for active play and the benefit of another separate one for boys. As McClees stated, “It has been shown that the playground is the real character-forming portion of the boys’ education. He there learns to be fair and manly as well as gentle in tone and speech.” A fan of G. Stanley Hall would have questioned the assertion that a public space planned by women provided the best route to manhood, but those concerns did not matter to McClees. She advised the council to take note of female ambition for children. “For these reasons I should consider it a vast injury now if our City Council should take any step calculated to give a backseat to this important movement, which so many of our earnest women and other citizens had just begun to appreciate and support.”24 It’s worth thinking about the playground design in relation to childhood

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and play, even though this proposal to municipalize recreation in Oakland came to naught in 1899. As the sheltered model of childhood took hold among the urban middle classes, child savers inserted themselves into the play culture of working-class children; they were determined to direct, control, and contain it—to draw a physical boundary around play as they drew a social boundary around childhood. But although the recreation reformers were heralded as innovators, they called on concepts that had been in place since at least the kindergarten revolution: that play was the work of childhood, that children needed to learn to play, that adults should direct their play with age-appropriate toys and activities, and that nature was needed for a good childhood. In the Progressive Era, Luther H. Gulick Jr., who began his career at the YMCA, Henry S. Curtis, a psychologist trained by G. Stanley Hall, and Joseph Lee, the wealthy Boston lawyer and philanthropist, added new ingredients to the Froebelian mix—the intent to age-grade play and circumscribe it in specific places. These objectives, coupled with child saving and child study, escalated the use of play as a tool for socialization and education among working-class children at the century’s turn.25 The inventors of the child study movement, Gulick and his mentor Hall, forged a provocative link between physical education and child development. Like Hall, Gulick absorbed ideas from Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Sigmund Freud to argue that each human being recapitulated the stages of evolution, with one fundamental impulse being to play. This supposedly innate drive to play had been confounded in the industrial age, which, because it denied access to outdoor activity deprived children of the ability to develop physically and morally; motor behavior and morality developed from instinct. Physical education was viewed as key to racial advance and socialization—Gulick targeted specific muscles for the development of specific moral faculties—and adult guidance as critical, especially through the tortuous stage of adolescence. Boys and girls also needed different physical challenges, since their biological (and thus ethical) makeup differed.26 The sexism and racism in these claims are obvious, as is the need for space for play. Gulick and his wife, Charlotte, founded the Camp Fire Girls organization, which worked consistently to maintain gender distinctions even as it embraced new ideals of femininity. Gulick, who also became director of physical education for New York City public schools, formed, with Lee and Curtis, the Playground Association of America in 1906. The municipalization of recreation was a stated goal, as was the determination of elites to reorganize the time and play of immigrant children.27 The anticipated outcome—more public play space in rapidly growing

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cities, control of rambunctious children, and Americanization of immigrants—was not a given in California. The state had expressed interest in the bodies of children for some time (e.g., requiring physical education in public schools since the 1860s), but women had to fight for land and equipment for kids to play. Fight they did, succeeding first in Los Angeles, then in San Francisco and Oakland. Since they targeted working-class neighborhoods, they faced city governments unwilling to allocate cash for immigrant kids, no matter how pious the espousal of child-centered ideals by male legislators.28 The Oakland Club continued to run the vacation playground at Tompkins Grammar School, and in 1907 Jones, Moore, and Bunnell requested public money to make it permanent and to open another playground at Prescott Grammar School, across the street from the West Oakland Home (see figure 1.14, site 10). When the city council ignored this request, the club put in place shady, gravel-covered, and fenced play spaces with slides, seesaws, swings, sandboxes and a merry-go-round.29 Clubwomen paid for equipment, built quickly from roughly finished timbers to meet the opening date, and hired a supervisor for each school (see figure 7.1). Their goal was to deter “juvenile delinquency and other youthful mischief,” to teach children “to play healthfully, enjoyably and with unselfish fairness toward each other,” and to build “youthful character.” Hundreds of boys and girls came every day for six weeks, and in the next summer they “stood in line waiting for their allotted time.”30 The implication of success was clear, although the terms depend on one’s point of view. A clubwoman saw at-risk children who came to a space dedicated to play rather than spending time at the nickelodeon, hanging out on the street, or just doing nothing. From the children’s point of view, here was one more place to play, while the street continued to appeal at least to some of them.31 The Oakland Club asked the mayor for more. Mott, who sought and won female support for charter revision and the comprehensive city plan, returned the favor in kind. The Ebell Society, which had raised all of the money needed to purchase the site for the new Carnegie library, joined other clubwomen to plant street trees, serve on the board of health and the board of education, and in other ways influence municipal affairs.32 As the suffrage battle heated up, the city council followed the example of Los Angeles and San Francisco in setting up a playground commission. In 1908 Mott named Moore, Jones, and Bunnell to the five-member agency and, by virtue of number, ensured that women would run the show; Moore was also named president. Her colleagues deserved the appointment, Moore argued

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in The American City, because they had “faithfully provided for the children, season after season.”33 The sentimental wording should not obscure the scope of her ambition; the commission hired a supervisor and proposed four more playgrounds. The sites were parks advised by the Robinson report (two in West Oakland: one on the former de Fremery estate, the other near the railroad station). Legislators balked at the request for ten thousand dollars, but then allocated the funds when they realized that the public—voters, soon to include women—backed this cause.34 The 1911 charter revision cemented the victory for children in public space and women in city politics. This is an example of what one historian calls “municipalism” being the successful “legacy of localism.”35 When making the commission a bona fide department, the charter required that “not more than three [members] shall be of the same sex,” with the sex understood to be female.36 To apply terms from Crane, the rule granted the “rightful place” of women in “the government and conduct of society” and showed the advantage that could be mined from the “great law of dualism.” Affluent women won a place in government and used it to improve their city for immigrant children. In 1917, Henry Curtis praised the organization of facilities for recreation in Oakland as just about the best in the United States, citing the outreach to children, the coordination of physical training and recreation work, and the extent and beauty of the grounds.37 In the Progressive Era, a privileged woman like Moore joined government to make the case for a unique reform agenda—based on the socialization of her gender toward charity and child care and the growing taste among both sexes for activist government that guaranteed social welfare. The praise of the female dominion in reform, as one historian puts it, is on the mark, as is criticism of the class blinders, racial biases, and other prejudices that shaped public policy for children.38 Still, the focus on legislation (and the emphasis on control, including that of play) misses insights about space that women carried from philanthropy to government. It isn’t surprising that playground commissioners in Oakland acted like settlement house workers when they added playgrounds to schoolyards, to grand estates given to the city for use as parks, and to other nodes in the charitable landscape. Women had thought about neighborhood improvement in this physical way since the 1870s. The decision paid off in midst of a building boom: in 1910 ten playgrounds were opened; by 1915 the playground board ran thirty-nine playgrounds (about half in cooperation with the school board). The budget for the playgrounds was almost $97,000, with annual attendance recorded at 1.3 million, for the most part children.39 These public places, physical testimony of the right to childhood, enriched the charitable landscape for

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children. Demanded by cross-class constituencies for intergenerational use, citizens made playgrounds (as well as settlement houses and social centers) into democratizing spaces in this period of American history.40 Looking back on the experiment at Tompkins School, the city’s recreation department credited the Oakland Club, the “progressive organization of women,” for the early success in the municipalization of recreation. It estimated that “more than a thousand children were kept off the streets, taught the gospel of fair play and team work and given a wholesome leisure hour interest” during the summer of 1907.41 Recreation reformers expected directed play in an age-graded, supervised playground to produce the upright, moral, and industrious citizens needed in a democratic society. “The sand pile for the small child, the playground for the middle-sized child, the athletic field for the boy and the girl in the teens—these are fundamental conditions without which democracy cannot continue,” Gulick wrote in Lippincott’s Magazine. “Upon them rests the development of that selfcontrol which is related to an appreciation of the needs of the rest of the group and of the corporate conscience that is rendered necessary by the complex interdependence of modern life.”42 The Tompkins School playground showed that space, society, and play had some bearing on democracy, but not according to the terms put forth by Gulick. This playground differed from the model espoused by recreation reformers, even though children played in a dedicated place that was differentiated from the street and supervised by adults. Photographs taken by the playground commission in 1910 showed that strict grading of space and play by age and sex did not necessarily apply in this place. A sandbox and slides were placed in the same space, boys and girls of different ages were shown on the same equipment, and the site was racially integrated, counter to the explicit advice of recreation reformers. The suggestion was that this was a public place for boys and girls in a working-class neighborhood—one where children knew they had a right to childhood because they had a public space to play.

Property and Play at the New Century Club Property and play were on the mind of Elizabeth Watt when she quit the Oakland Club in 1900 and, with her followers, formed the New Century Club. The first title offered for the new organization, the Peralta Park Club, clearly indicates that Watt intended to make organized recreation the cause of the new club too.43 The name may have changed, but not the goal of securing a public park and playground in the vicinity of the West Oakland

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Settlement. Mary Goodcell said as much in a letter to editor of the Tribune, sent during the library dispute: “The ladies are so much in earnest about this matter of the reading rooms and playgrounds, that they are already arranging to equip the ground on Fifth and Peralta. . . . Soon there will be such a scene enacted on that little block as will ‘cause a broad smile on the face of many of our citizens.’”44 The critical element was property. Watt and Goodcell had their eyes on the triangular block (also called a gore lot), directly west of the settlement house (see figure 6.4). This was precisely the kind of site that Robinson targeted for neighborhood parks. “The narrow triangle can never have much value for building purposes,” he wrote, “and yet the beauty of grass and flowers and shrubs would have wide effect because at the confluence of streets.” The expected donations of property did not play out, and without a schoolyard nearby, Watt had no place to build.45 Even if Watt was frustrated in her attempt to execute the playground, this California progressive did not stop thinking about neighborhood improvement in physical ways. At incorporation, standard for a women’s club in 1900, she set in place a life course for the New Century Club that assured that it would become publicly owned and operated. The dispute with the Oakland Club left her in charge of several buildings: she owned the cooking school and paid the rent for the Peralta Street house and the Atlantic Street cottage (see figure 6.5). In line with state law, the articles of incorporation prohibited what was effectively a nonprofit organization from earning dividends, but recognized that the club would accrue assets, especially in real estate. Like other women who ran charitable organizations, Watt grappled with nonprofit entrepreneurship.46 In case of dissolution or lapse, these material resources would have to be given to another institution. Watt set this default destination: the board of library trustees in Oakland, with all assets to be used “for the benefit of the public Library.”47 By law an end point had to be set; the club was required to disband in fifty years, not of much importance in 1900. With Watt as president of the New Century Club and chair of the house and home committee, the club started to build. Repurposing remained the strategy of choice. The club turned the School of Domestic Science into a free library, and opened a new cooking school in the Peralta Street house. “The Oakland New Century Club has no attractive social features to offer its members, neither does it at its monthly meetings tax their time with long papers,” Watt wrote in 1902. Instead, “it invites them to come in and help in doing good to others, by developing and making most effective:

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Cooking Classes for young women, Sewing Schools for beginners, and Garment Makers, Boys’ Clubs, Mothers’ Meetings, and Working Girls’ Clubs. It is work worth doing and absorbingly interesting.”48 Notwithstanding the avowed pride in the club’s breadth of purpose, the text gives some sense of its rivalry with other clubs, including those for wealthy members. The mention of attractive social features and long meetings is a not-so-subtle dig at the exclusive Ebell Society. Watt did not belong to it, perhaps by choice, perhaps for lack of invitation. All were welcome at the New Century Club, visitors and volunteers alike. The club counted on volunteers even though other urban philanthropies endorsed professionalism, almost always at the expense of the autonomy of volunteers who very often were women.49 As Watt recalled, “The work demanded an organization to run it, and it was like a harness quickly put on, and it was equipped to perform arduous duties. Its active members (and there could be no others) found no time to sit idly by, with folded hands, and leave the brunt of the work for others to perform.”50 All the women shared experiences that made class bridging possible. “Like Love, housewifery levels all ranks; it is a common ground whereon all women, be they high or low, rich or poor, must meet,” Watt wrote in 1902. “The only aristocracy it admits being based on excellence.”51 On-the-ground philanthropic practice, however, abrogated the appeal to cross-class commonality and gender solidarity. Clubwomen wanted working-class children to have a better childhood, enriched with cultural activities; they also expected to educate them—to “promote in any and all ways the proper care, education, and training of the young.”52 The chosen strategies indicate that class blinders (and interest) remained firmly in place. Clubwomen counted on the renovated house to mold character and to school taste, and they used programs to at least try to direct children to gender- and class-specific futures. Not every effort met with success. The library is a case in point. Since the 1870s the City of Oakland had rented rooms for branch libraries in West Oakland, most recently in Alcatraz Hall, a Masonic lodge on Seventh Street. In spite of high demand, the library board threatened to close the branch as a cost-saving measure.53 To address working-class need and to secure a place for their sex in the reading public, American women made library provision part of reform culture. The Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition included a reading room, at the insistence of this building’s board of lady managers (it was designed by Candace Wheeler, a leading interior designer); temperance women opened reading rooms; and more than a decade earlier, Jane

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Addams had offered to let the Chicago Public Library set up a branch reading room at Hull House.54 During the battle over the site for the Carnegie library in Oakland, clubwomen insisted that children needed reading rooms. In her letter to the Tribune, Goodcell replied to another writer who had deprecated the presence of children in public libraries, and who hoped that the trustees would “not introduce the new fad of kindergarten” and ruin the reading room for adult readers. The clubwoman disagreed. “They are established for citizens of this republic,” Goodcell insisted, referring to libraries. “Children are our worthiest and best citizens; they are the hope of the future, the promise of the present.” In poor neighborhoods, she wrote, children did not have access to books or newspapers, the known sources of “intelligence, liberality, and sound principle” in the American republic. “To shut off these from reading rooms would be a worse disgrace than to lock them up or graduate them from the gutter as many of them are now.”55 Three years later, Mary Olney (chair of the library committee), Jennie Wheaton, Watt, and others turned the School of Domestic Science into a free reading room. Goodcell would have pitched in, but she had moved to southern California with her family. “This proved no small task, requiring both thought and much money to convert the plain, barn-like structure into a comfortable, attractive place,” Watt wrote.56 Early American furniture indicated a continued interest in lessons presumed to have been learned from the Colonial Revival, but other aspects attested to growing interest in the Arts and Crafts movement at the settlement and in northern California. In this time and especially in this place, a new taste for simplification became noticeable inside middle-class houses. Plain walls, light colors, painted stencils, and simplified wood furniture and paneling (usually made of redwood in northern California) were deemed suitable for display in bourgeois homes.57 When the renovation was complete, “the committee complacently folded its arms, to admire the beautiful room, made attractive as well as comfortable,” Watt wrote. A fireplace made of rough clinker bricks was added, paneling on the walls was painted soft green, box seats left a natural redwood finish, and patterned linoleum was put on floors. Pictures and plate racks were hung, and “a perfect treasure of an old clock” and simple vessels (ceramic or copper) were set on the fireplace.58 The decor, also deliberately masculinized, spoke to an explicit gendered agenda (figure 7.5).59 “In a bright spacious room, the floors of which are hard wood, with rugs here and there, a number of men with their wives and children have gathered,” read a story in the first Annual Greeting. “The men are not quite at their ease, for this is their first visit to this place with

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Figure 7.5.  The Boys’ Club using the free library at the New Century Club, corner of Atlantic and Campbell Streets, Oakland, 1902. This reading room evokes multiple associations, from a gentleman’s club to the design reform of the Arts and Crafts movement, and here working-class boys, dressed as if they were not working-class, played board games and read edifying texts under adult supervision. Reformers believed that the built environment acted on the consciousness of children—in this case, shown to be for the better. In addition to secondhand furniture, affordable, everyday building materials (bead board and linoleum) were used to transform the former cooking school into a library and meeting room. From New Century Club, Second Annual Greeting (Oakland, 1902), 25. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

which their wives seem perfectly familiar.” A lady enters, looks at the brick fireplace, and hands a poker to “the most sullen-looking of the men.” She asks him to tend the fire, and from that moment a new feeling seizes all the men. “This, then, was their property, their club-room and home,” and they are persuaded by “the soft coloring of the wall,” “books from the book cases,” “tables filled with monthly magazines and periodicals,” and “inviting chairs and couches.” Encircled by “pure home-like happiness,” they forget any longing for the saloon.60 This was a “fancy picture,” the author admitted, and the strategy did not work as envisioned, even though the club hired a male librarian to run the reading room. With Olney’s help the collection increased to four hundred volumes in the first year.61 In short order the library doubled as a large classroom for the sewing school and a meeting place for the Boys’ Club; Christmas parties for the free kindergarten were also held there.

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Figure 7.6.  “The Cooking School of the New Century Club,” 401 (801) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1902. The plaque on the far wall, also displayed in the first cooking school, offered this advice to students: “After much meditation and experience, I have divined that it takes as much sense and refinement to cook a dinner, wash and wipe a disk, make a bed as it should be made, dust a room as it should be dusted, as goes to writing a novel or shining in high society.” From Eva Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” Overland Monthly n.s. 36 (1900): 255, with a caption that read: “It is as important to learn the art of cooking and the value of foodstuffs, as it is to learn the English language.”

Another program targeted young women. A new teaching kitchen opened in the Peralta Street house, made to be a pleasant space rather than an impersonal laboratory (figure 7.6). With cheerful wallpaper, brightly colored linoleum, pictures, and plants, the decor intimated that feminine socializing was as welcome in this classroom as in the colorful kitchen of an immigrant family.62 However, even if these clubwomen viewed professionalization with suspicion, they wanted to hire expert help, familiar with new technologies. Jessie Harding Jones, trained in domestic science, taught young women to cook in this space, serviced with modern utilities and thus equipped with gas stoves and artificial lighting as well as sinks, dishes, pots and pans, and a clock. The expected outcomes of expert instruction were better servants (many are shown in the Annual Greeting), excellent meals for club meetings, and immigrant assimilation. “Nowhere is there to be found more extravagance and ignorance than in the kitchen of the working-man,” Watt wrote. “Not only is much food wasted, but that which he gets does not yield the force he needs for sustained effort.”63 She insisted that this kitchen

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set standards for the city’s public schools, where efforts to Americanize immigrants through cooking instruction lasted into the 1920s.64 Other class markers appeared in the Peralta Street house, where the club, more than thirty women, took three rooms for its own use.65 It did have “attractive social features,” despite Watt’s claim to the contrary: the club’s own sitting room (made thus after the Working Girls’ Recreation Club abandoned it), the lunchroom (with meals served by Jones’s students), and the committee room (figure 7.7; see also figure 6.7). The preference for stylistic eclecticism persisted in small spaces that were decorated to the hilt. Curtains, cushions, tablecloths, carpets, plants, and upholstered furniture provided amenities that evoked the comfort of a clubwoman’s home. The club also started to think about buying property. “Our chief ambition for the coming year is the purchase of the lot on which our commodious building is located,” Anna Sangster, the club’s secretary, wrote in 1902. “The owner is willing to sell at a reasonable figure, and it is of the greatest

Figure 7.7.  The New Century Club’s “Committee Room,” 401 (801) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1902. Decorated in a manner similar to that of the sitting room for working girls (with the same wallpaper and carpet), the committee room recalled a parlor in a middle-class house. Removed from the hustle and bustle of the settlement house, a member of the club relaxes in a rocking chair, an enduring symbol of middle-class domesticity, and two other women sit at the desk, presumably busy at committee work. Potted ferns, plants, a basket, pictures, and a sofa (covered with a swirly pattern, inspired by the Aesthetic movement) feminize the space. From New Century Club, Second Annual Greeting (Oakland, 1902), 12. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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importance that we should own the property. We are not what would be termed a rich corporation, so it will be necessary to appeal to our friends for aid.”66 In short order the club owned the building and, after yet another tragedy shattered Watt’s personal life, it executed an ambitious renovation with funds given by its generous president.

A “New” Clubhouse and Gymnasium in Oakland Point Momentous events in the Bay Area—the 1906 earthquake and fire—put a hold on plans, but not for long. Watt, who moved to San Francisco one week before disaster struck, witnessed the destruction of her new home and the city; her husband died soon after. While she recovered from these losses (and took charge of her inheritance), the Ebell Society erected a new clubhouse in Oakland (figure 7.8). The Tudor Revival building, “one of the handsomest structures in the city,” made clear what members of the New Century Club knew to be the case: the new taste of clubwomen for elegant meeting places, expressive of their power in public culture.67 Beginning in the 1890s, as membership became a sign of status, clubwomen across the United States abandoned rented rooms and renovated houses and built handsome, large, expensive new clubhouses. The historian Gayle Gullett has argued that these buildings did more than offer the many spaces (libraries, auditoriums, meeting rooms, and banquet halls) needed for club functions. The new structures showed off female business acumen and, in their authoritative architectural presence, represented the “inextricable link” between gender, elite class standing, and race privilege in the Progressive Era.68 Clubwomen in California were not shy, least of all those in Oakland. The gender-integrated Home Club, designed by Walter Mathews, opened in East Oakland in 1904; Mayor Mott visited it several times to win support for his comprehensive plan for Oakland. The Ebell Society moved into the Tudor-style building just mentioned, which was designed by A. W. Smith in 1906.69 The Oakland Club discussed putting up a building, but could not agree on a site; it met in rented rooms until a site was finally selected, and then a new clubhouse, also designed by Smith, opened.70 The New Century Club stayed put in Oakland Point. “It was deemed best to bring ourselves to the people we wanted to uplift in their own neighborhood,” Watt recalled, pointing out the importance of geographic location to class bridging.71 The choice, albeit astonishing to some, elicited praise from one colleague in the California State Federation of  Women’s Clubs. Dorothea Moore, physician, advocate for juvenile justice, and chair of the

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Figure 7.8.  The Ebell Society, 1440 Harrison Street, Oakland, A. W. Shaw, architect, after 1906. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

federation’s civics committee, wrote, “One club has done wonderful work through its sewing schools, cooking schools and summer schools,—all conducted in the club house.”72 By 1907 the Peralta Street house had been remodeled and made to seem as if it were a new building (figure 7.9). It seems certain that this ambitious project benefited from the change in Watt’s personal circumstances that put her in full charge of family finances. The fac¸ ade was clad in new shingles and new windows were installed; the roof was raised and its shape changed; the building size increased; and a new fireplace, chimney, upper story porch, and interior stairs were added. Watt donated a new flagpole and American flag; displayed above the new canopy and recessed front door, they helped differentiate the main entry from the service entry.73 The renovation did more than make manifest the taste of clubwomen for Arts and Crafts design. The decision to remake the clubhouse grew out of liberal reform discourse among architects in northern California. The

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Figure 7.9.  “Home of the New Century Club,” 401 (801) Peralta Street, Oakland, after 1906. The West Oakland Free Kindergarten is gathered in front of the New Century Club, shortly after the renovation that rendered the exterior an exemplar of Arts and Crafts design. The display of the American flag suggests that this photograph was taken either on a holiday or at the dedication of the settlement. From New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1910 (Oakland, 1910), 27. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California.

architects Ernest Coxhead and Willis Polk began to experiment in San Francisco with the design of small urban buildings during the 1890s, seeking to cultivate a rustic ideal that showed sensitivity to setting, nature, and cost. The desire for attachment to this region would also inspire architects to mine the state’s Hispanic past; to begin with, architects turned to local materials (unstained redwood was especially appealing) and opened buildings to the environment in an expansive way a temperate climate made possible.74 By the turn of the century, the ambition for regional expression had taken hold among architects in Berkeley who were affiliated with the liberal Hillside Club and inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement. One was Bernard Maybeck, who, like the architect of the New Century Club, experimented with these objectives in prestigious commissions. Another was Julia Morgan—a resident of Oakland, a protégé of Maybeck, and the first woman to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, licensed in 1904 to practice architecture in California.75 The architect of this renovation of the New Century Club is not known, but it is obvious that a very skillful designer was at work. Speculation is in order not only because of the high quality of the work, but also because

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of the importance of the Arts and Crafts movement to the women’s movement, and of this club to women’s public culture in Oakland.76 The New Century Club building looks as though Julia Morgan may have had a hand in the design: the massing, scale, articulated rough carpentry, modest classic elements, spare window treatment (with small square panes), and generous porches are reminiscent of her work. Morgan’s practice depended on commissions from influential women for homes, apartment houses, schools, colleges, orphanages, clubs, and other projects. Phoebe Apperson Hearst was one such client, and Elizabeth Watt was another. Watt hired Morgan to design her house in San Francisco at Presidio Terrace. Morgan went through several iterations, including at least one in the manner of an Arts and Crafts building, before Watt decided that her house should resemble the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Morgan obliged.77 Regardless of the identity of its architect, the New Century Club answered Watt’s ambitions for herself, her club, and the Oakland Point community. With its elegant new facade, clubrooms with middle-class pretensions, many classrooms, new circulation, and modern building systems, the clubhouse gave no hint of its working-class origins. In later years, children who used the facility and cherished its architectural quality believed it to have been originally purpose-built.78 Even so, its siting and its program undermined the liberal idealism of the Arts and Crafts ethos in northern California. The renovation, which added civic distinction to an ordinary house, suggested that the setting had become the semiprivate outpost of wealthy clubwomen. Perhaps these reformers embraced simplified forms in order to highlight their distance from working-class families who had begun to imitate the ornate trappings of domesticity that had been common in middle-class Victorian homes.79 However splendid the transformation, the complex was incomplete without a gymnasium and a playground. They were desired not only as a sign of progressivism, but also to attract adolescent boys, feared to be at great risk of juvenile delinquency. With the building fund depleted, the Boys’ Club refurbished spaces to accommodate the kinds of programs that Eva Carlin had promoted a decade earlier. It equipped the shed for woodworking classes and the attic of the clubhouse for gymnastics classes (the garret being a traditional site in a house for kids to play).80 The published images of these spaces show the influence of new ideals for adolescent manhood, stressing strength and power rather than decorum and restraint (fig­ ure 7.10). Apparently, the programs had some appeal. “One can best judge of  its popularity by the list of boys waiting for a vacancy,” the director wrote, “and the tenacity with which such membership is held.”81

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Figure 7.10.  Gymnastics class at the New Century Club, 401 (801) Peralta Street, Oakland, 1910. The settlement published this picture, of stalwart boys exercising in a crowded unfinished garret, to raise funds to build a gymnasium. Masculine strength, order, and companionship are on display in the racially integrated class, showing prospective donors the benefits of organized recreation. Virility as key to masculinity is acknowledged, but otherwise sexuality is downplayed. The couple in the background, the club’s leaders, acted as supervisors. From New Century Club, Annual Greeting 1910 (Oakland, 1910), 20. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California.

In short order, plans to build a gymnasium took shape. For the first time, the club tore down buildings and incurred debt to erect a coordinated complex, with the gym as the highlight (see figure 6.4). The mortgage troubled some members, who continued to preach the virtue of thrift to workingclass families. “What if it is not all paid for?” one woman asked. “We have faith, we have trust, and are not afraid to work so that in due time it will all be ours.” Watt paid off the loan.82 The “big shingled building,” the Enquirer reported, was “fitted with everything dear to the heart of a boy—acting bars, dumb bells, and hot and cold shower baths.” A smaller structure held wood shops and rooms for girls’ classes and meetings.83 After the athletic facility opened in 1910, one clubwoman called on a familiar metaphor to dissect the intended effect of the building on the male sex. “And this year we find the new bed planted last year growing a bed not of frail blossoms, but sturdy oaks, growing upward, their branches spread-

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ing in many directions,” she wrote. “We look with pride at the new gymnasium, which means so much to the boys.”84 Her language, which couched young athletes as the club’s children, married pride in their nurture with the benefits of organized recreation. She also mentioned a building material, oak, that had long been tied to rugged masculinity by literary and decorative conventions.85 The recreation director chimed in to underscore the goal of reconstruction, of bending rambunctious working-class boys to stable middle-class norms. “It is through this channel that we get the greatest hold upon them,” he wrote.86 In the Progressive Era, when nativists called on athletics to forge a powerful manly civilization, they linked racial superiority to virile white manhood; in West Oakland men and women aimed to perfect the bodies of all neighborhood children, regardless of race or ethnic background.87 The playground was the only place missing from the complex, in spite of demonstrated need. In West Oakland adolescent boys created alternatives to playing on the street: they set up an athletic field on a vacant lot before clubwomen delivered organized recreation to this part of the city. The playground lasted a few years, until property owners cut a street through it and developed adjacent lots into houses.88 Alternatively, well after the gym was completed, immigrant boys played “kick the can” on Goss Street, with thirty or forty joining the game; they also played tackle football on a field behind a factory on Twelfth and Poplar Streets.89 Repeatedly, clubwomen made the case for more play space—in 1910, 1912, and 1915. “We entertained the Mayor and the Playground Commission to tell them of our needs in this part of the city,” a member wrote in 1915, “and we feel certain they will use their influence in getting us a playground for the children there.90 The city refused to buy and so did Watt, perhaps because the owners refused to sell. With no action forthcoming on Peralta Street, the New Century Club helped run the playground at Prescott School. This district, recreation officials reported, “may be likened to that reached by Tompkins except that there is a predominance of the negro [sic] population in attendance.”91 Watt also commissioned a design for the coveted gore lot, based on the pleasure ground model of the urban park. “We feasted our eager eyes on every item so beautifully depicted:—public baths, bath stand, seats in the shade for the aged, pools of limpid water with an imaginary duck or two swimming in it, and all sorts of contrivances for pleasurable surprise walks, with flower beds to enhance the eye,” she wrote.92 She set aside the design, and that turned out to be a prudent choice. When a similar plan was installed at Seward Park in New York City,

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excited users trampled the flower gardens on opening day. They were not replanted. By the 1920s, the settlement house had followed national trends in becoming a full-fledged social service center and hiring a manager to coordinate its programs. Unusually, however, the club insisted that this person be a woman and that she live in the facility. The New Century Club is a “clearing house for all the remedial civic agencies in Alameda County,” a member wrote in 1923. By that she meant it belonged to the new social welfare network made of public schools, probation officers, visiting nurses, the public library, police, the Public Welfare League, the Associated Charities, and the State Employment Bureau. The objective was to bring “the mass of the people of this thickly settled neighborhood into working relations with the constructive operations of government.”93 The New Century Club endorsed the objective emphatically in 1923. It gave the complex—worth about $25,000—to the Department of Recreation free of charge. “It was time to retire,” explained Watt, who was almost eighty years old. The gift met the conditions she had set at incorporation; the shrewd woman also leveraged her gift to complete the physical setting that she had imagined in 1899. The city agreed to build a playground on the gore lot and to return the property to its former owners should it be used for any purpose other than recreation.94 Ironically, the former saloon once rented by Elizabeth Betts for the West Oakland Free Kindergarten was among the buildings demolished to make way for the play space—equipped with a small baseball diamond, a sandbox, and other up-to-date play equipment. Watt attended the dedication ceremony for the playground, the new springboard for reform in Oakland Point, and accepted the seat of honor next to Mayor John Davie. As Davie expressed surprise at the number of children present, Watt jogged his memory, reminding him of the deaf ears his employees had turned to her prior requests. “Several times I had called at his office to tell him the need of a Playground here,” she wrote. “At last, after this long delay, the children were coming into their own” (figure 7.11).95 The New Century Club retained the right to meet at the center. “The problem of the young who are just budding into manhood and womanhood is one to stagger the most optimistic and make faint-hearted the most indefatigable worker,” one member admitted, “and yet we know that we must not falter—we must go on.”96 Soon enough, an addition to Prescott Grammar School opened near the recreation center. Watt, who died in 1925, the year it opened, would have been pleased to learn that domestic science was part of its curriculum.

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Figure 7.11.  The playground at the New Century Club Recreation Center, photograph by Wilson Ellis, 1934. A rare image of the public playground and its setting in the neighborhood. Use courtesy of the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, Community and Economic Development Agency, City of Oakland.

The New Century Recreation Center, along with the playground and public school, formed the physical nucleus for community building in Oakland Point during the interwar years. “Re-creation through recreation” is “accomplished in the capacious and homelike building, which is the center of community activities in West Oakland,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1927.97 Its origins in working-class architecture had slipped from memory, but no matter. The reporter grasped the importance of this physical place to everyday life in the neighborhood. This point would have resonated with activist thinkers like Charles Zueblin, Frederic Howe, and Mary Parker Follett, who examined the problem of democracy in innovative, place-based ways during the Progressive Era. They favored the institutionalization of neighborhood social centers to allow “urban citizens from all walks of life to come together for political discussion and debate.”98 Watt had recognized the importance of architectural quality and the public culture of children in the mix. At the height of the Great Depression, the more than one hundred thousand people who used the three community centers in Oakland would have found merit in her argument. All the centers were located in former

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settlement houses and operated with resident directors, with the Oakland Point facility taking pride of place among neighborhood children.99

A Thatched Home on Third Street The Oakland Social Settlement was one of the other community centers. When the Manse Polytechnic left the commercial center of Oakland Point in 1899, the charity moved to a less expensive neighborhood, near Tompkins Grammar School (see figure 1.14, site 11). Because this part of  West Oakland was rapidly industrializing, it had already won attention from the Oakland Club and others concerned about urban childhood. In the mid1890s, faculty at the University of California in Berkeley persuaded the Oakland Board of Education to set programs in public health and the first public kindergarten at Tompkins Grammar School, one of the largest schools in the city.100 The Southern Pacific railroad yard was also close by, and a large tidal marshland sat to the west of it, separating this part of West Oakland from Oakland Point proper. Within a few years, industrialists would erect factories and warehouses along the railroad tracks and on top of the landfill, transforming the wetlands into ground suitable for large-scale, heavy-duty construction.101 To begin with, the ties between the Oakland Social Settlement, formerly the Manse Polytechnic, and the public school were implicit. “The selection of a proper location is a matter of primary importance by the people entering upon this work,” J. W. Walsh wrote in the Enquirer in 1899.102 “Our neighbors are hard-working people, mostly Italian and Irish,” the settlement’s head resident wrote a few years later. “The Italians are bootblacks, scavengers, vegetable and fruit dealers; the Irish and other nationalities are carpenters, painters, railroad men, masters, plasterers, a few clerks in grocery and dry goods stores, while many of the women work in the canneries.”103 Within the year, the settlement rented two buildings at the corner of Third and Linden Streets and renovated both of them. The larger, a two-story structure and a former private residence, became “a comfortable and tastefully furnished habitation for those in charge of the work,” and the smaller, a shed in the backyard, was equipped for gymnastics and other forms of exercise.104 A new head resident, Alice Coburn, moved from Chicago to take charge, and others from Oakland helped with programs.105 Construction of a new building for the settlement was underway across the street by 1900.106 At this time, adaptive reuse was abandoned and a double lot purchased on the same block as the public school (figure 7.12). “The settlement house is the most pretentious that Oakland boasts of,” Madge

Fifth

Street

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5 4

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Figure 7.12.  Tompkins Grammar School and the Oakland Social Settlement, site plan, 1910. Key: (1) Tompkins Grammar School; (2) washroom, toilets and sinks; (3) annex; (4) house rented for the settlement; (5) purpose-built structure; (6) playground, sponsored by the Oakland Club. The small site plan shows the city block in the early 1950s, after a new school had been built and most of the houses cleared to make space for a large playground. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1903–10), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

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Moore wrote in the Sunday Call Magazine, crediting the patrons but not the architect. “Mr. and Mrs. S. T. Alexander took an interest in the children, and soon after a new thatched home stood on the corner of Third and Linden Streets.”107 The power of the domestic imagery notwithstanding, the charity had discarded one of the most powerful components of the settlement idea, as Arnold Toynbee and Jane Addams had defined the concept in the 1880s. Moore reported that the settlement no longer expected to create a “community home” in West Oakland. The new spacious building did not resolve the dilemma of finding men and women willing to live in a mixedsex facility—an issue since the settlement had opened on West Eighth Street in 1895. Women changed the terms of class bridging to focus on programs for children. “Its purpose is now more for the good of the neighborhood children than anything else,” Moore remarked. In addition to two resident workers, about thirty volunteers visited the site, almost all of whom were women. They helped in the kindergarten, assisted in clubs and classes for older boys and girls, and worked in the gym and library. Mothers also gathered once a week to sew for families in need. “They have adopted a splendid notion,” Moore wrote. “While chatting, they sew. For instance, if a new baby is in need of clothing all make garments for him and the burden is taken off the busy mother’s shoulders. When all the homilies are served up . . . these workers do not fold their hands and idly gossip. Someone reads aloud from a new book and the rest of them make suits for charitable purposes for they know full well that it will be only a matter of time when a call for help will be sent.”108 The paternalistic tone, common in this kind of reportage, should not obscure her insight about vital caregiving networks among immigrant women. Carlin also praised women in the neighborhood, calling attention to “the generosity and helpfulness” extended to one another “even at much self-sacrifice.”109 The playground—set up by the Oakland Club in 1907 and municipalized in 1910—added the missing component of public outdoor space. It expressed ambitions in line with those of Jessie Stoddart, secretary to the Los Angeles Playground Commission. Stoddart insisted that a playground was democratizing in the way that a settlement house was because it served as the physical locus for social services and public health, as well as for art, music, culture, and play.110 Resident workers at this settlement began to talk of the need “to exchange for the music of isolated voices the volume and strength of the chorus” and to “make better the civic conditions of our city, and help solve the industrial problems of the day.”111 One concrete

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example was the free medical clinic set up in 1909. This prime location, inside the settlement house, eased the work of the city nurse, the Associated Charities reported. “The foreign parents, also, were more willing to have the children attend Clinic where they felt at home, as they do in the Settlement.”112 The municipalization of recreation and hope of aid from an activist state paid off, but only at first. By 1920, Oakland’s recreation department complained about poor equipment, not enough space, and the challenge of supervising play in “the city’s Ghetto.” The intimation was that Americanization was an ongoing project because even with a playground, immi­ grant kids still thronged the streets, joined gangs, and indulged in rowdy behavior—annoying to residents and destructive of property. No mention was made of the rambler roses, honeysuckle, English ivy, flower gardens, and magnificent live oak and eucalyptus trees that Henry Curtis admired at other playgrounds in the city. Rather, the report noted the playground was temporarily closed. Overcrowding at the school required construction of temporary schoolrooms in the play space, and no funds were available to put the correct surface on the athletic field.113 When the Department of Recreation took over the settlement house in 1922, it changed its name to the Alexander Community Center, in honor of the woman who had helped make it possible.114 With a caretaker and her family living on the premises, the gendered gaze of civic authority remained evident in the public place, as it had been when it was privately administered. The caretaker’s presence, the center’s proximity to Tompkins School, and ties between the school and the community center (which shared staff ) simplified the observation and regulation of children. So, too did the huge paved yard that stretched for some four hundred feet through the city block. The western facade of the school had been visible from the back of the settlement house since 1912, when most houses on this city block were cleared for a baseball field. That project, with others, made way for a bigger school, more play space for children, and new buildings, which were used for En­ glish classes and a day care center. The extent of this ensemble, imagined by affluent women for immigrant children and enlarged through state-sponsored slum clearance, raises questions about the effect of reform intentions on children and play in the charitable landscape. The points made in discussing the Ladies’ Relief Society are pertinent: appropriated spaces are emancipatory in a democratic society; public spaces also replicate power relationships. The exercise of state power, the imprint of social class, and the application of discipline in the

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playground, public school, and community center inculcated the “wholesome message of play,” nurtured ideals of citizenship, and perfected the young bodies of new Americans. Immigrant boys and girls also learned that they had a right to be children in the public spaces of their new city. As much as this ensemble resulted from a desire for social order, the setting offered children a physical place in urban public culture: off the streets, away from home, and capable of appropriation, at least to some degree. The testimony from oral history is powerful on both counts: of discipline and freedom as part of modern childhood. Kids came to play when they had some time after school, without work or household duties on a particular afternoon. We “just went to play after school, so we wouldn’t be in the streets, or whatever,” Angela Volpe Cosy recalled.115 Cosy’s family moved to West Oakland in 1914 after emigrating from Italy, and the ten-year-old girl occasionally visited the settlement house while a student at Tompkins Grammar School. “We used to go and play in this big house” with many “different rooms,” she recalled. “We had books, and crayons, and blackboards. . . . Kids’ stuff.” After her family moved to another house in the neighborhood she stopped attending the community center, even though she still lived nearby. “I couldn’t! I had my sisters to take care of. . . . I was home doing . . . the work at home, watching kids there, washing clothes.” Her childhood ended at thirteen, when she started to work full-time at one of the canneries that dominated industrial production in Alameda County. “After I got older then I didn’t go anymore.” Ben Albanese, her son, who also attended Tompkins Grammar School, came to the Alexander Community Center in the early 1930s, with classmates. They played basketball, learned crafts, bathed (their homes lacked bathtubs), put on dramatic plays, and participated in other activities after school.

Varieties in the Experience of California Progressivism The Oakland Social Settlement, the New Century Club, and the playground at Tompkins Grammar School resulted from an exchange of ideologies and practices that took place in the Progressive Era as women campaigned for the right to vote and shaped public policy in the emerging welfare state. While these political victories are rightfully celebrated and the effects of the competing gender ideologies are debated, the place making and institution building of women in West Oakland point to other equally significant accomplishments. During the Progressive Era, women in Oakland accu­ mu­lated reserves of public space as they removed private property from

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market-driven development and improved it for public purposes, especially for play. They also created physical overlap between these nodes in the charitable landscape and bona fide public settings. In West Oakland racially integrated, ethnically diverse settlement houses and playgrounds became the core of public recreation centers that proved to be key elements to community building through the New Deal. In any city, the architectural history of a charity is connected to a wider dynamic landscape that is threaded with the effects of power relations and reform ideologies. In West Oakland, the drive to create places that would enable the public culture of women intersected with the expectation that rectified personal virtue in the charitable landscape would assure the community’s well-being. These competing goals endowed West Oakland with settings that held multiple, even ambiguous meanings. The architectural design of settlement houses, where in one case an artful new facade wrapped a renovated residential core and in the other a great thatched roof covered a new building, expressed not only the aspirations but also the limitations of class-driven reform ideals. These ideals were that middle-class cultural artifacts could Americanize immigrants, that the domestic realm was the appropriate milieu for working-class women (no matter how much the activism of female sponsors belied such conclusions), and that working-class children would embrace middle-class culture even as they learned to accepted the centrality of wage work, and thus class relationships, in their adult lives. Clearly, the reformers did not fabricate domesticated Americanized subjects, in spite of their faith in the power of municipalized recreation. Cultural authorities “always aim at installing an order,” the historian Roger Chartier has written; yet invariably this order is “multifaceted” and not as “all-powerful” as authorities anticipate.116 Annual reports, oral histories, and newspaper accounts hint at a complex pattern of acceptance, appropriation, and rejection—of appreciation for architectural quality and of the selective use of social programs. Children came to play; women came to organize, to find after-school programs for their children, and to procure some of the amenities of modern life: a hot bath, a cup of tea, or even a glass of pure milk (figure 7.13).117 Changes at other nodes in the charitable landscape ongoing in the Progressive Era throw into sharp relief the humanitarian impulses and egalitarian successes at settlement houses and playgrounds. For women and children, there was variety in the experience of the architecture of California progressivism. Although the women were in agreement that boys and girls

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Figure 7.13.  Women distributing pure milk in front of the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, c. 1912. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

deserved special places in the modern city, they used dissimilar strategies to differentiate the charitable landscape for them. A different, much nastier story unfolded at the city’s orphanages, where families learned that some boys and girls benefited from private munificence and state largesse while others did not, especially if they happened to be of color.

eight

Orphaned in Oakland: Institutional Life during the Progressive Era

On September 7, 1905, Arthur J. Pillsbury left California for a trip east. At the request of the governor, George C. Pardee, he planned to visit more than eighty institutions housing orphaned, sick, handicapped, unruly, and otherwise needy boys and girls in the Midwest and the Northeast. Among the organizers of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the reform wing of the state’s Republican Party, Pillsbury and Pardee were as determined as any California progressive to free state government from the undue influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad. For Pillsbury, at least, that step was necessary to activate the “New England conscience in government.”1 Another pressing matter also sent him east, one as important to reformers as redeeming government from corporate domination. A political crisis was brewing. The governor faced public outcry about child welfare, with special outrage directed at two separate issues that became intertwined in state politics: the soaring cost to taxpayers of caring for children in private orphanages, and the rampant physical abuse of kids held in state-run reform schools.2 To divert attention from the scandal and toward reform, the progressive cohort in Sacramento sent Pillsbury on this fact-finding mission, to find better models for philanthropic practice elsewhere in the nation. The governor’s envoy came with useful credentials. Executive secretary to the State Board of Examiners, Pillsbury was born in New Hampshire in 1854; his father, an abolitionist, moved his family to “bleeding” Kansas later that year to join the campaign to make the territory a free state. The younger Pillsbury studied law and, although admitted to the bar, turned to journalism after moving with his wife to California in 1881.3 Since the state’s board of examiners audited the Orphan Fund of California, Pillsbury grasped the central role of government in the state’s mixed economy of social welfare:

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the board allocated state aid to forty-four orphanages and fifty-eight county boards of supervisors. In 1905 it sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to 7,301 children: 5,283 in orphanages and 2,018 through county supervisors. Another 1,230 children also lived in the state’s orphanages without support from the state government.4 Mindful of the pledge to safeguard children that had been written into the state constitution during the 1879 convention, Pillsbury reminded the public of that responsibility. During his trip he sent the governor informal reports which were polished into press releases and sent to obliging editors who published them in newspapers across the state.5 One year later, Pillsbury summed up his findings in Institutional Life: Its Relations to the State and to the Wards of the State. “In California, dependent childhood is mainly a state problem, as it should be,” he wrote, alluding to the historic pattern of care in the state and the new Progressive ideal of the state as parent.6 Like other reformers, he was willing to abrogate a parent’s traditional right to determine the course of childhood when faced with neglect, abuse, inadequate care, or evasion of compulsory education. “The state is the ultimate guardian of every child in the state,” Pillsbury insisted, since child welfare was “everybody’s business.”7 More centralization, not less, would resolve concerns about abuse and cost in institutions. Poor care resulted not only from lax supervision and corruption, but also from too little coordination between the state government, county supervisors, and the charitable public. Pillsbury referred to changes already underway in California that would transform the charitable landscape during the Progressive Era. The actors included college-educated women—in the main, graduates of the University of California in Berkeley—who crossed the public-private divide to win places in government as advocates for children. One by one they assumed lead positions in the new agencies that forged public policy. Katherine Felton (BA 1895), director of the Associated Charities in Oakland and San Francisco, revived the drive to instigate the State Board of Charities and Corrections (SBCC); it was set up in 1903 and Jessica Peixotto (BA 1894, PhD 1900) joined it in 1912. To cleanse government of corruption, the Board of Examiners was reorganized into the Board of Control in 1911; a children’s department was added to it in 1913, and Amy Steinhart (BA 1900) and two other women were hired as children’s agents. With the SBCC empowered to supervise and the Children’s Department authorized to enforce, women targeted orphanages for change.8 The public agencies’ stated goal was the same as that put forth by progressive reformers across the nation: to remove boys and girls from orphanages

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and place them in family homes, preferably those of their own families; and if not, then foster homes. In the long run, reformers dismantled the network of orphanages women had built in California, including those in Oakland. In the short run, the Children’s Department and the SBCC mandated modernization of outdated physical plants. Both agencies preferred the kind of building called a cottage—intended to be smaller than a congregate dormitory and modeled on a family home, but not repurposed from one. Since such buildings were expensive both to build and to operate, the solution was applied selectively, and charities compensated by renovating older buildings to bring them in line with new regulations. Both the Children’s Department and the SBCC also expanded the use of institutions to register human differences among children. Racial segregation went hand in hand with modernization in California during the Progressive Era, as did the use of orphanages to sort children by other criteria in addition to race, including their qualification for state aid. The censure of congregate institutions unleashed turmoil in the charitable landscape as providers, parents, and children struggled to cope with demands for change. The critique rested on the supposition that the physical condition of an institution determined the emotional consciousness of children. The public record is full of documents that testify as to cause, with photographs offering powerful testimony of the high value placed on classification, order, and hierarchy in congregate orphanages (figure 8.1). The presumptive viewpoint assumes success in the use of space to transmit ideology: children are shown explicitly sorted by age and sex, implicitly by race; they are enclosed in rooms, within defined, rectangular fields, and organized to suggest that the individual has been melded into the mass. These physical conditions and this emphasis on conformity became suspect because they denied a child the right to childhood as constructions emphasizing emotional health and individualism took hold in American society. But condition is not of necessity consciousness; all sorts of people invent mechanisms, some public, some hidden, to come to terms with power and authority. To make the point in another way, attendance in a charity did not mean acceptance of its values.9 It’s worth considering William Saroyan’s account of the Fred Finch Orphanage in East Oakland. Set up in 1891 by a shipping magnate in memory of his deceased son, and run by the Methodist Episcopal Church, this orphanage housed about 150 boys and girls in the second decade of the twentieth century. The usual cause, a family crisis, prompted the placement of the four Saroyan children in the institution in 1911. In this case the crisis was tragic: the death of their father, Armenak, from appendicitis while en route to the hospital. William, the youngest

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Figure 8.1.  “Little Girls at Dumbbell-Exercise,” City Hospital and Orphanage (under the direction of the Grey Nuns of the Cross), Ogdensburg, New York, 1903. This is a rare photograph of an orphanage interior, one that may have been commissioned to show the high quality of care offered in this congregate institution. Reformers, opposed to institutionalization, criticized the expression of congregate ideals, because it melded the individual child into the mass. In this sparsely furnished room, neatly dressed young girls stand in straight lines as they exercise indoors. A close look reveals the dumbbells, held in each youngster’s hand, and the religious objects and pictures that make clear that this is a Catholic orphanage. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum Collection, 3.2002.113.1 Imaging Department © President and Fellows at Harvard College.

child, was just about to turn three years old, his older sister, Cozette, was twelve, and Zabe and Henry nine and six respectively.10 The Saroyan siblings, half-orphans with a mother unable to care for them, stayed at the orphanage for five years. “Everybody who lived there and was subject to the rules and regulations of that place either hated or pretended to hate it,” William Saroyan recounted in a radio interview. “I hated the place.” He lived in the nursery, where eight or nine kids were in residence, and his siblings were sent to wards for older children. As much as Saroyan disliked the orphanage, it helped him to have his siblings living nearby, and the conditions of everyday life were tolerable. “I was hardly [in] what could be called anything like the abandoned lonely orphans of most

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kids in such places. Or of legend and law as in Oliver Twist.” When the children left the institution in 1916, a standoff took place at the train station at the moment of exchange, because the orphanage’s childless superintendent and his wife had counted on William’s older sister for free labor.11 In the end, the family unit prevailed; the kids went to live with their mother and her relatives in Fresno. As this reminiscence suggests, space counted for children (and children counted on space) in congregate orphanages in more ways than is presented in the public transcript. For Oakland in the interwar years, the evidence includes photographs, letters, and, most unusually, recollections, including those of two sisters who lived in the Children’s Home in Temescal. They were not orphans, but rather white working-class girls who needed to live someplace other than at home. Even if their memories differ and may have changed over time, Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer didn’t diminish the affective power of institutional architecture, although they cautioned against interpreting institutional life in one-dimensional terms.12 Like Saroyan, they stressed that, while congregate facilities embodied discipline and authority, collective spaces could also empower children. These adult memories of institutional childhoods cast doubt on the environmental determinism of reformers as at the same time they affirm the importance of place in the construction of modern childhood.

The Progressive Tide: Home Finding for Children Tens of thousands of children lived in adopted homes at the beginning of the twentieth century. This term, “adopted homes,” is the catchall phrase that reformers used to describe the homes of boys and girls when they were cared for by someone other than a parent. Prompted by escalating concerns about this group of kids, Theodore Roosevelt convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children as the tide of progressive reform swept the nation. Eager to spark public debate about home finding and other alternatives to institutionalization, the president invited more than two hundred delegates to the 1909 meeting. Katherine Felton, from the Associated Charities, joined the five delegates from California. Like their colleagues from across the nation, the Californians came with expertise in child welfare won from on-the-ground philanthropic practice, and an agenda conditioned by the mounting national anxiety about institutionalized children.13 The Census Bureau reported that 93,000 children lived in orphanages in 1904, and estimates placed another 50,000 with foster parents and 25,000

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in reform schools or other punitive institutions.14 In a thoughtful analysis of the Albany Orphan Asylum, Judith Dulberger explains that congregate institutions proliferated as the nineteenth century drew to a close.15 The restriction of outdoor relief prompted parents to seek alternate sources of care for children and, as state subsidies increased, they found reasonable alternatives in orphanages. Many families were able to turn to their own ends the care offered in these institutions. California was near the top of the list, even though state-run institutions for dependent children were hard to find in 1900. The state had not built an orphanage for them since it entered the union in 1850, and only two counties filled the gap, building public orphanages in Fresno and San Bernardino. The government continued to make grants, substantial ones, to private institutions. The subsidy exceeded that offered by most other states, and with no central authority supervising admission or expenditure, institutionalization soared during the first decade of the twentieth century.16 Only one state had a higher percentage of its children in institutions than California in 1910. New York, also without a state orphanage, also employing the same subsidy system, witnessed an explosion in institution building among all providers.17 In California, aid to children living in private institutions and family homes in 1911 mounted to nearly $700,000.18 Most boys and girls resided in congregate institutions. Pillsbury was more circumspect than most reformers about the disadvantages of institutional life, although he agreed that living in “an ordinarily good American home” was preferable for most children, and essential for babies. Their physical survival depended on personal care. He pointed out, however, that congregate institutions cost less to run than smaller buildings and had some merit for orphaned or abandoned children who were old enough to live in a large dormitory. “A little of institutionalism is not a bad thing, especially for a child who has been a bit delinquent, as most dependent children have been,” he wrote.19 Others took exception. Calling upon criticism made of all congregate institutions, not only of orphanages, since the Gilded Age, these critics presumed that the physical condition of a building shaped the consciousness of inhabitants. Emil G. Hirsch, the rabbi who presided over the National Conference of Jewish Charities, compared institutional and home life at the 1909 White House conference. He insisted that in a congregate orphanage “the inmates are of necessaity trimmed and turned into automatons,” especially when they were housed in very large facilities with enormous dormitories and dining rooms. In this kind of institution, he said, boys and girls were segregated by sex and age and deprived of maternal care,

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privacy, freedom, and spontaneity. Rather than averting delinquency or dependency, institutional living cultivated it. It was taken to create the “institutional type,” a child who “is marked by repression if not atrophy of the impulse to act independently.”20 Rabbi Hirsch gave voice to prevailing sentiments in the child welfare community by insisting that care be subsidized at home through the policy known as a widows’ or mothers’ pension. He meant that a worthy mother (meaning sober and moral) without resources (the usual reason being the death of her breadwinner husband) should receive aid at home rather than be forced to put her children in an institution or to work for wages outside the home. “The family is the structural cell,” he stated. “In the long run, pensioning mothers is cheaper than building almshouses and jails and reformatories.” In his view, a dependent child should live in an institution only in an emergency, and the design of that place should stress the family unit by following the cottage plan. This meant that the building should house no more than twenty-five children. With a housemother in charge, the adopted home would recall a middle-class home in all other aspects, even if it were bigger than the typical one.21 The conference emphatically endorsed home care. “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization,” President Roosevelt declared. “Parents of good character suffering from temporary misfortune, and above all deserving mothers fairly well able to work but deprived of the support of the normal breadwinner, should be given such aid as may be necessary to enable them to maintain suitable homes for the rearing of their children.”22 The proposal did not become a cornerstone of federal welfare policy until the New Deal, but states experimented. California was one such state, and its delegates helped to cement support for mothers’ pensions at the 1909 conference because Felton delivered firsthand knowledge of success of their use after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Forced by this emergency to act, San Francisco began to work out a system of public aid to kids living at home; in 1909 a liberal interpretation of state laws dating from the 1880s made this aid standard policy.23 Wealthy and conservative, Felton was an unlikely candidate to back a progressive take on relief. Her colleague, the suffragist and economist Valeska Bary, described her as old-fashioned, with ideals set by the mentality of the Associated Charities. Felton understood charity to be a privilege, and expected a woman to volunteer her services rather be paid for her work in social service, even when she was professionally trained.24 The other women delegates (thirty, all told) thought differently. Among them were Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Julia Lathrop,

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all of whom came to the White House to win support for a new federal agency for children.25 The social activists already had the backing of the president, and after intense debate about the relationship in government between objective research (“data-gathering”) and partisan advocacy (“lobbying”), they convinced their male colleagues of the need to blend both in the new agency. After Congress approved the proposal to create the federal Children’s Bureau in 1912, and agreed with President Taft to appoint Lathrop its director, the new agency started to advocate for children.26 Even though she was confronted by an unrelenting conservative challenge, Lathrop inspired women in California to act similarly on behalf of children and their right to childhood. They included Bary, who was hired to work at the new federal agency, and women who worked at its closest equivalent in California: the Children’s Department of the Board of Control.

The State Invests in Childhood in California The delegates to the 1909 White House conference returned to California eager to apply its recommendations. They found a supporter in the new governor, Hiram Johnson. Having run for office as a member of the LincolnRoosevelt League, with its staunch anti-Southern Pacific platform, Johnson was another example of the contradictory meanings of the term “California progressive.” He swept to victory in 1910, supported women’s suffrage in 1911, and implemented a host of other precedent-setting reforms. They included direct election of senators; initiative, referendum, and recall; and the setting up of commissions on immigration and housing, industrial welfare, and industrial accidents. In line with the long-standing taste in state politics for Asian discrimination, the governor also supported the racist Alien Land Law of 1913. Since Asian immigrants were not allowed to become citizens, the new law prohibited them from owning land; it especially targeted Japanese farmers, since they competed with whites to dominate the booming agricultural economy.27 Johnson joined Roosevelt (another fan of jingoism) in challenging the two-party structure of American politics. They formed the Progressive Party, and Johnson ran with Roosevelt as vice presidential candidate on the Progressive ticket in the 1912 national election. Although defeated in the threeway contest for president, progressives won the state of California. With social welfare front and center on the political agenda, women, empowered by the suffrage victory the previous year, pushed the governor to invest in childhood.

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Doors opened in Sacramento—a considerable achievement, even for white women of means with impressive educational and professional qualifications. Although resistant to women’s suffrage at the start, Johnson, a progressive with populist roots, grasped the new cast to electoral politics and made strategic appointments of women, Jews, and Catholics to state agencies. They included Jessica Peixotto, the Jewish sociologist and economist already mentioned, to the SBCC; John Francis Neylan, a Catholic newspaperman and close confident, to the Board of Control as director; and the children’s agents, selected by Neylan. At the Children’s Department of the Board of Control, Amy Steinhart joined Lillian R. Matthews, possessor of a doctorate in economics from the University of California in Berkeley, and Clara D. Baker, president of the Los Angeles Children’s Home. When asked in oral history interviews why a child welfare department had developed within the Board of Control, Neylan claimed the idea as his own, but Steinhart offered a different reason: while the SBCC may have been unwilling to force the issue of inspection, “in due course women of the state of California asked to have some supervision of the aid fund other than a mere checking up of the financial outgo.” A progressive group presented the idea to the governor and urged him to create the positions of children’s agents.28 Since the Board of Control held the power of the purse (auditing expenses and authorizing reimbursements), its agents would command more respect for new regulations than the SBCC was able (or willing) to achieve. Steinhart came with impeccable credentials (figure 8.2). She held a college degree and private sector experience, came from a family with roots in pioneer culture and ties to liberal politics, and did not shy away from stating her own political opinions. She was not an enthusiast for aggressive imperialism, despite her brother’s role in the 1912 Roosevelt campaign. Even though she had volunteered for years at charities on both coasts, her application for the government post caused uproar in her wealthy Jewish family. “I decided that I wanted to do this work on a professional basis,” she recalled. “It was as much an innovation in my family as my going to college was.” Her mother worried about disgrace (as if it might seem as though her family could not support her); her friends chastised her for taking a job from a woman who needed the income; and Steinhart, single and in her early thirties, did not relish the prospect of leaving the elegant family home in San Francisco to live in a small hotel room in the state capital.29 Government work won out. The agents earned a monthly salary of $175 (the highest paid in the state to a social worker) and received an allowance for travel expenses.30 With this privilege came responsibility for a vast

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Figure 8.2  Amy Steinhardt, photograph by Arnold Genthe, c. 1905. The elegant portrait of Steinhardt, which emphasizes her femininity, does not at all convey her professional ambition or considerable political accomplishments. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

terrain—the charitable landscape of the entire state. The immediate charge was to inspect forty-four orphanages, visit fifty-eight county boards of supervisors, and set criteria for change. In principle, all parties in the public sector worked toward a common goal. The attitude had been that needy kids should be cared for in private orphanages. That idea was changing, with Felton and Peixotto at the SBCC leading proponents of mothers’ pensions and foster care. The Russell Sage Foundation also chimed in, hiring a special agent in the Department of Child-Saving to survey the charitable landscape in the state. The agent’s written report, issued in 1915, argued that there were too many charitable institutions in California, and that because they were too accessible, they produced too many dependent children.31 Steinhart made it clear that her supervisors, the men who ran the Board of Control, agreed with the children’s agents, women who crafted public

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policy at the Children’s Department. The children’s agents’ purpose was not to slash aid or necessarily to shut down institutions, but rather to monitor expenses and to improve care. Uniting advocacy with investigation, the children’s agents forced charities to modernize. The first step was to inventory children. Previously, the Board of Control had audited claims from private orphanages and county supervisors. But, as Steinhardt pointed out, it had no means to check the veracity of those claims, because it had no central records of children and no system for organizing them. In 1913, it took ten days of intensive work to compile the index cards—one for each child who was identified as a beneficiary of the state subsidy. Then the audit began, county by county. This was the scenario: Each agent, a professional woman, met with five, ten, or maybe more county supervisors. She asked these elected officials, likely to be beneficiaries of corrupt county politics, to hand over the record books so that she could inspect them. Everyone knew what was on the table: restricting the use of relief as a plum tool for political patronage, and directing it instead to indigent kids. The agent made exactly the same demand of private charities.32 The “terror” (Steinhart’s word) was palpable at the start, as was stiff resistance to change, especially at Catholic orphanages. The demands were understood to be “scare tactics” aimed at closing immigrant-run institutions.33 Johnson’s appointments of Catholics and Jews to regulatory agencies helped to counter charges of intentional bias, and the tone shifted to grudging respect as women inspected sites, listened to stories, and enforced changes in policy regardless of religious affiliation. They insisted that upgrades be made to the physical plants and that children receive adequate food, health care, and clothing. In principle, forty children no longer would be allowed to sleep in one room; each would have a clean bed and would be quarantined when sick.34 Steinhart, promoted to chief agent in 1915, added a psychologist and registered nurses to increase the staff of the Children’s Department to ten women. Geneva S. Orcutt took charge of orphanages, and began by visiting thirty of them in ten months, spending between one hour to six weeks at each. She defended the right of orphanage children to childhood, bolstering her point with arguments made by the Child Welfare League of America: “ ‘What dependent children need is exactly what all children need’: understanding, family life, friends, community participation, and education.”35 As successes accrued, hopes developed among women in California that they would be able to set up a children’s bureau modeled on the federal agency. Steinhart led the fight at the Board of Control, backed by the

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Federation of Women’s Clubs from northern California. The proposal died—defeated by entrenched service groups unwilling to cede authority to a central agency.36 Although stymied on that count, Steinhart succeeded in others. The normalizing gaze of the state became omniscient when the Children’s Department issued standard accounting forms and health reports, made medical inspections mandatory, and compiled casework. The objectification of children and quantification of their needs, verified with maps, charts, tables, and graphs, guided ensuing calculations of aid, whether for a mothers’ pension, a subsidy to a foster family, or aid to a child in an orphanage.37 As the Children’s Department expanded its purview, the State Board of Charities and Corrections toughened its stance. Permitted at first to advise and supervise in a minimal way, the state board’s authority increased by 1913. One tool it had was to investigate. Three years after Lewis B. Terman was appointed professor of educational psychology at Stanford University, the SBCC hired him in 1913 to survey “mental deviation” in prisons, schools, and orphanages. The project would be extended to include the Whittier State School, put under the direction of the reformer Fred C. Nelles after the child abuse scandals rocked the Pardee administration. Although Nelles was the author of innovative reforms, he agreed with Terman that the state in its role as parent could and should employ eugenics to discipline youth. The targeted subjects were Mexican, Mexican American, and African American boys. As the historian Miroslava Chávez-García has shown, boys deemed mentally defective or criminally inclined were sent to state hospitals, where they were isolated from white kids and where some of them were sterilized. This extreme punishment, rendered to youth of color, transformed Whittier State School into a racially segregated reform school, a site for white kids only.38 The SBCC would go on to address the problems of handicapped children (critical after the devastating polio epidemic of 1916) and children with other disabilities.39 The SBCC also held the power to license all private charities and any facility receiving state or county relief. Every such institution had to be licensed; for dependent children the list grew to include foster homes, childplacing agencies, maternity homes and hospitals, and day nurseries, as well as children’s institutions. The SBCC distinguished an orphanage, which received aid for orphans, half-orphans, and abandoned children, from a children’s home, which housed more than ten children who did not receive state funds, and a family home, which housed fewer than ten children not related to its owners. However, familiar habits died hard. The West Oakland Home and the Ladies’ Relief Society received licenses to run orphanages

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that they continued to call “homes” even though the buildings each held considerably more than ten children. Other demands were harder to avoid. At the Fred Finch Home in East Oakland, “officials were everywhere [with] tape measures, and notebooks, and test tubes.”40 The rules would only become more stringent after World War I as the children’s agents monitored construction (since they were suspicious of additions suggesting expansion); the SBCC reviewed architectural plans and reminded charities to consult the Housing Act, the Board of Health, and local laws before launching a building project.41 When the SBCC and the Children’s Department fused to become first the Department of Public Welfare (in 1925) and then the Department of Social Welfare in 1927, the repurposing of everyday buildings fell out of favor, although not completely out of use. Predictably, the public record underscores success; agency reports show fewer children in institutions and more at home (with foster parents). The argument was that the shift saved the public a great deal of money: for obvious reasons, it cost less for a foster mother to look after a child in her home than for a charity to run an orphanage. Institutions were expensive to operate, with taxpayers covering about half of the operating cost and the balance coming from other sources, including parents.42 That said, aid to children didn’t decrease; to the contrary, state legislators, prodded by activists, increased the subsidy rate, raised the age limit, extended aid to children of parents hurt by industrial accidents, and opened special homes for infants and children with tuberculosis.43 “A continued battle must be waged against the great causes of dependency—poor economic conditions, unemployment, lack of training of parent, and disease,” Steinhart wrote in 1923. “It is through careful supervision, through continued county and state cooperation and through an emphasis on the child as a valuable asset that eventually the state shall receive its return for the moneys invested for childhood by its aid fund.”44 The economic calculus makes sense in the context of Steinhart’s job (the Board of Control had been renamed the Department of Finance); it is also a reminder that the value of working-class children continued to be appraised in monetary terms.

Registering Human Differences among Children Steinhardt’s hopes to the contrary, the state government did not treat each child as a social asset of equal value. Few orphanages closed in the 1910s and 1920s, even though by 1928 only 6.2 percent of children receiving state aid lived in one. In 1914, sixty-nine institutions dotted the charitable

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landscape, with capacity for 8,685 kids; in 1928 there were sixty-four, with 6,639 spaces.45 The overall figures obscure the sites of exceptional change: Catholic charities, forced to close by state authorities, and racially segregated orphanages for children of color, made to open by the same. In children’s institutions—as in women’s clubs and recreation centers—architecture signified the clear ties between gender, class standing, and race privilege in the Progressive Era. Catholic orphanages became emptied of children in a state called home by Catholic immigrants from southern and central Europe and Mexico. In fourteen years the number of institutions shrank from twenty-one to thirteen, and available spaces fell by just over 40 percent. In some cases, run-down buildings needed to be closed, as was also necessary at some Protestant and Jewish charities. But when welfare officials conceded that the outstanding change was to Catholic institutions, they alluded to endemic prejudice in singling out causes. The eighteenth amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1919, prohibited alcohol consumption, and supposedly led to better parenting; the US Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration, so that there were fewer people.46 Steinhart made clear at the start that Catholic orphanages were suspect, especially those run by German and Italian nuns. The women of these “foreign orders” may have personified kindness, but reformers questioned their emphasis on conformity, even if their coordination of dress and movement could have been understood as means of putting the individual in service to a higher cause (see figure 8.1). Since nuns also used orphanages to preserve immigrant culture rather than to Americanize children, they confounded an explicit goal of the modernization program. The agents pressured them to let Catholic children attend public school rather than be educated within orphanages. Here, too, the agents invoked the goal of assimilation: the effort to smooth out, if not fully erase, ethnic differences among white children.47 Other decisions accentuated racial difference. While Catholic charities closed, public agencies heightened historic patterns of racial segregation by making it possible for new segregated orphanages to open. First the SBCC and then the Departments of Public Welfare and Social Welfare required new charitable institutions to make evident their benefit to the community by demonstrating that “some special group of children” needed their services.48 Welfare officials welcomed orphanages for African American, Mexican American, Japanese American, and Chinese American boys and girls because they served children who were deemed “difficult” to place. At the same time, officials denigrated ethnic attachment in charities run by immigrants with a different skin color. If Catholic orphanages defeated

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Americanization, then segregation aided white privilege—whether at charities restricted to white children or at those made for children of color. To complicate matters even further, county supervisors made decisions about welfare that escaped the purview of state inspectors. The children’s agents learned early on that supervisors had money other than the funds received from the state government to spend on relief. Supervisors used these additional monies to care for kids who did not qualify for state aid but who still needed help because their parents shirked responsibility or were deemed unfit to take care of them. Social workers labeled families “broken”—torn apart by “disease, desertion, unfitness, illness, or some other cause” (divorce)—and the children psychologically damaged.49 Almost always, counties assigned these children to older congregate orphanages. In the flush 1920s, local, county-run welfare agencies charged with protecting endangered children suspected that unscrupulous parents were institutionalizing their kids to cheat the government. “It is the child who is the victim of marital discord or discontent who is most often shifted into these so-called orphan asylums—sometimes only for a short period,” one report insisted.50 The turmoil unleashed by these regulators transformed the charitable landscape across the state. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the charities, which constructed new buildings and repurposed others in the teens and twenties, registered differences among children. The Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum in San Francisco was cited as a model of the progressive plan of child care.51 The Presbyterian Mission opened the Ming Quong Home for Chinese American Girls in 1915 as part of its missionary work in Oakland; Julia Morgan won the commission to design a new building for it in 1925. In Alameda County, other racially segregated institutions included the Children’s Home and Day Nursery in Oakland, run by the Northern Federation of California Colored Women’s Clubs, and the Chung Mei Home for Chinese Boys in El Cerrito. All of these institutions received public funds, with one glaring exception: charities for Asian children. The government refused to subsidize the care of Asian children, and the Community Chest acted similarly. The Oakland branch of the Community Chest was formed in 1923 to coordinate fund-raising and encourage efficient, businesslike management practices in charities. It did not extend the benefit of its expertise or its largesse to Asian children.52 Older charities struggled to keep up with the demands for modernization in all aspects of practice. Alameda County was especially hard hit. In 1928 this county ranked third in the state in number and percentage of children on aid.53 As some children left the Ladies Relief Society and

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Figure 8.3. The West Oakland Home, Oakland, context map, 1910. Key: (1) West Oakland Home, main building; (2) Cottage for Babies and Small Children; (3) Cooper AME Church; (4) Prescott Grammar School; (5) St. Joseph’s School and Convent; (6) West Oakland Auditorium; (7) St. Patrick’s Church; (8) Second Congregational Church; (9) pastor’s house; (10) priest’s dwelling; (11) 1215 (1111) Peralta Street (future site of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery); (12) 1048 (1026) Peralta Street (future site of the Black Panther Party Central Headquarters). From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1903–10), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

the West Oakland Home for foster care, others moved into those institutions who did not qualify for state aid but still needed a home. Placement tagged a working-class girl or boy in multiple ways: as damaged, because her parents were divorced or for some other reason were not around; as disadvantaged, because of his poverty and being deprived of family life in a

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“normal” American home; and as privileged, because of race. In both these orphanages, nearly every resident was white. During World War I the Ladies’ Relief Society amended, without any explanation, the rules of the Children’s Home to make explicit its long-standing policy of exclusion. Its new “Rule One” read: “Children of the colored or Asiatic races are not eligible for admission in the Home.”54 The change was profound at the West Oakland Home, which had been racially integrated in the 1880s and 1890s and, after the turn of the century, a neighbor to new black residents and black institutions, most importantly the Cooper Zion (African Methodist Episcopal) Church (figure 8.3). As the Great Migration began in earnest, delivering more African Americans to live and work in Oakland Point, racial exclusion became a matter of course at the orphanage on Campbell Street.

Selective Accommodation at the West Oakland Home With orphanages continuing to serve children, the question of design in relationship to childhood became paramount. The children’s agents and the SBCC agreed with the child welfare community that replacing congregate institutions with cottages met the goal of home finding; these buildings also facilitated a better childhood, because in theory children had more personal care, freedom, and room to play.55 The architectural objective proved elusive, and the reason was cost. Cottages were expensive, requiring more buildings, staff, and land, preferably on a suburban site. That did not stop charities from experimenting with them, including those in Oakland. The West Oakland Home was one such charity. It considered moving to the urban outskirts in the 1890s, but set aside the proposal after failing to find suitable quarters.56 The managers revived the modernization project after 1900, when they put in place some reform concepts but not the full progressive platform. Without much room to build, the West Oakland Home added a new cottage for babies and toddlers (1903) and replaced the old-fashioned Roseberry House with new congregate dormitories for older children (1904). The strategy of “selective accommodation,” as Kenneth Cmiel has argued, was common at older urban charities, including the Chicago Half-Orphan Asylum, where the lady managers also faced demands for change.57 When the California state legislature finally formed the State Board of Charities and Corrections in 1903, the Oakland orphanage came under the purview of the new agency, but the decision to add a cottage was taken in advance of rules advocating the construction of these buildings. Another project, the Mary R. Smith’s Trust, may have been inspirational. In 1901 Mary Smith endowed the trust with money and land given by her

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Figure 8.4. The Home Club and Smith Cottages, Park Boulevard near Cottage Avenue, Oakland, undated photograph. The Home Club is the grand neoclassical building near the top of the hill; the smaller buildings are cottages for “friendless girls.” A grand stair descends down to the hill to the streetcar line owned by Borax Smith; the initial source of his considerable fortune, it is visible on the lower right. Arbor Villa, the Smith mansion, is nearby but not visible in this photograph. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

wealthy husband, Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. She established “a Christian home for orphan or other helpless girls” near Arbor Villa, their East Oakland estate (figure 8.4; see also figure 1.14, site 12).58 The trust hired progressive architects from the Bay Area associated with the Arts and Crafts movement to design eleven cottages. Bernard Maybeck took charge of the first cottage, a fifteen-room house, and George W. Flick, Walter J. Mathews, and Julia Morgan followed with others. Each freestanding cottage, named after a Smith family member, differed “in style of architecture and arrangement,” according to the wishes of Mary Smith. Scattered across the hillside, the gracious suburban houses did not in any way recall a congregate orphanage—or a working class cottage for that matter—but rather delivered the promise of reform architecture to impoverished white Protestant girls. Ideally, those girls had came from well-to-do families who had fallen on hard times. Smith hoped they

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would become respectable, self-supporting women under the influence of her reform program. After a trial period, a girl moved into a cottage, a “true home,” to live with a small, age-mixed group, her new family, and a housemother, usually a widow. With a large roof, shingled walls, a big chimney, bay windows, and even a turret or two, the dwelling stood for the family unit. Smith rewarded refined behavior and encouraged the girls to experiment in running small businesses, while offering the domestic privileges of middle-class childhood: a private bedroom, elegant clothes, toys, and space to play (figure 8.5).59 The Smith cottages received extensive publicity, thanks to the status of the patrons (who lived close by), the prestige of the architects, and highquality design and construction. Mary Smith also went to great lengths to promote this work. Founding the Home Club was one tool; its purposes included serving as settlement house for the orphanage.60 In addition to

Figure 8.5.  Florence Cottage, Oakland, Walter J. Mathews, architect, 1902. The house mother and her charges are gathered on the front steps of a building that in size, scale, and elegance of appointment recalled an upper-middle-class house. All of the girls, albeit dressed in the same color, white, are shown as individuals, enjoying family life in a “true” cottage home. Probably the “house mother” is the tall woman standing to the left of the group, with her hand on her hip. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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Figure 8.6. The Cottage for Babies and Small Children, 1666 Taylor (Ninth) Street, Oakland, Walter J. Mathews, architect, 1903 (photograph, 1916). The charity built this cottage so that it could care for babies and small children in a different building than the one used for older boys and girls. Although the building is modeled on a middle-class bungalow, its institutional purposes are clear from the large sleeping porches, noticeable from the corner of Campbell and Taylor Streets, to the small, supervised entry. Visible in the background are the 1890s dormitory for older children and the charity’s water tank, with windmill. From William Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California (New York, 1916), plate facing p. 79.

her daughters, she invited women active in the charitable public (Sarah McLean, Mary Alexander, Ethel Moore, Annette Buckel) to serve as trust officers, and sponsored a garden party to raise money for charities. As much as old-fashioned ideals of true womanhood shaped the affair, its practical results were irrefutable: thousands of dollars were raised from sales, and the cottages entered the consciousness of the charitable public as a paradigm of philanthropic practice.61 As the Smith cottages opened, the West Oakland Home decided to expand. Like the Smith Trust, this charity invoked the middle-class family as the best social model for philanthropy. The ideal, manifested earlier as a congregate institution, still remained the same. Even though the Crocker family continued to support the charity, Grace Trevor, the director, needed

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to mortgage the orphanage to build.62 Walter Mathews designed the Cottage for Babies and Small Children at about the same time as the Florence Cottage, and the differences between the two cottages were telling, even if both buildings were equipped “with all the modern improvements.”63 Up to twenty-five children lived in the three-story wood-frame building on Taylor Street that looked like a modest bungalow in a middle-class neighborhood rather than an expansive, expensive, upper middle-class house (figures 8.6 and 8.7). The matron, Margaret Ely, an English immigrant, and three nurses made up the staff. Children played on a small playground in an urban backyard, not a suburban estate; sleeping porches and large windows answered the call for light and air. They also made it possible to keep an eye on applicants for aid. The applicants continued to come from all walks of life, both by day and at night. One winter evening, the Enquirer reported, a gust of wind greeted Miss Ely as she answered the doorbell to find a “wee baby girl” in a

Figure 8.7.  Playground for toddlers at the West Oakland Home, after 1904. This small play space was located in the backyard of the Cottage for Babies and Small Children. Smiling children are playing on the swing, and one boy stands next to the sandbox. In contrast to the 1890s, the children, in an age-graded group, wear more or less the same clothing: rompers, shoes, socks, and hats. The dormitory for older children is visible over the board fence, as is Prescott Grammar School. From Ann Rogers, ed., “Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook,” vol. 1. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

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basket. “This little mite of humanity is being cared for, loved and made part of a great family of orphan tots whose only home is the big institution on Campbell Street,” the reporter assured readers.64 The story could also have a different ending. One summer evening Walter Larson left his newborn son on the doorstep, explaining his reasons in a note addressed to the “Ma­ dame” of the Home. As I am out of work and my wife is not very well and know of no other way I leave my child whom my wife and I love most Dearly at your door and in your keeping for the present until we are able to care of him as we should. Hoping that you will not think us unjust to our child for it is for the best. . . . His name is Howard Larson. As soon as we get settled we will call and get him and do what is right by you for what you have done for us.

The letter closed with thanks and hopes for the best, but the words were not prophetic. The infant died in the Cottage for Babies and Small Children a few months later.65 When the new dormitories opened in 1904, they evinced no rethinking of institutional architecture. There is little information to be had other than the utilitarian readings that prevail in the few images of this grim building (figure 8.8). Isabelle Piller, the matron (an Irish immigrant), supervised a small staff: one attendant and three servants, one of whom was Chinese. Older children were graded by age and sex and separated from one another, including siblings—standard practice in institutions like these. Ironically, the expansion took place as changes in state policy began to empty orphanages. The Russell Sage Foundation noted an oversupply of beds, with about 25 percent of space unused in California in 1915. The West Oakland Home is a case in point. It could house up to 150 children; there were some fiftyfive older kids and twenty-five younger ones in residence there in the 1910s, and less than fifty children all told by the 1920s.66 “Receives dependents of both sexes from infants to children fourteen years of age, and a few mild delinquents,” one report stated. The Associated Charities, formed to organize relief in the 1880s, had become the representative of the SBCC in Alameda County; it sent only white kids to the orphanage. In 1910, most of these children had been born in California, though their parents had migrated from other parts of the United States, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Denmark.67 Plenty of black kids in the area needed a home, but the charity closed its doors to them—in keeping with the long-standing policy of the Associated Charities to ensure racial segregation in the city’s charities. The strategy of selective accommodation could deliver different out-

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Figure 8.8. The West Oakland Home, 907 (973) Campbell Street, Oakland, 1916. The enormity of the new congregate dormitory, built to replace the Roseberry house in 1904, is clear. From William Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California (New York, 1916), plate facing p. 79.

comes. Donations made it possible to open a summer camp, a signature space of modern childhood—first in Trestle Glen (1916) and then in Crow Canyon (1923).68 The Department of Public Welfare praised institutions that opened camps for orphanage kids, all the while inspecting the sites to ensure that they were up to snuff.69 Snapshots of children, at camp four miles south of downtown in the foothills and at home in West Oakland, show them playing under the affectionate care of the head matron, Martha M. Lawrence (figures 8.9 and 8.10). Lawrence came to the attention of a newspaper reporter who praised her for eliminating “the institutional flavor” and making “the place as much as possible a real home where brothers and sisters can enjoy the closest approach to family life.”70 One former resident recalled “a nice warm bed, good warm meals, and caring people.” Another remembered play with neighborhood children.71 Despite Lawrence’s best efforts, the managers became embroiled in heated controversies in the mid-1920s as they faced charges of egregious child abuse and poor maintenance.72 The physical decay evident in snapshots was a sign not only of disinvestment but also of ineffective inspection by state inspectors. This was not the last time that welfare agencies would fail to protect kids in this part of town. The city condemned the complex after it was ravaged by fires; the orphanage closed the site in 1926 and used the endowment created by Grace Trevor to buy seven-and-onehalf acres of “sloping hill land . . . for a dream home of the future” (see fig­ ure 1.14, site 13).73 The orphanage’s new name, the Lincoln Home, referred

Figure 8.9.  Matron and children at the West Oakland Home, facing Campbell Street, Oakland, 1920s. Martha M. Lawrence is probably the woman sitting on the front stoop, surrounded by “home children.” Such a casual picture of institutionalized children is very unusual and lends credence to reports of Lawrence’s loving care. The number of kids depicted suggests that a staff member was the photographer; a parent would have focused on one or two children rather than many. While all the children have short hair, clothing differentiates each sex, with girls wearing smocks and boys dressed in coveralls. The snapshot is in an untitled photo album. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

Figure 8.10.  Campers from the West Oakland Home at Crow’s Canyon, California, 1920s. The snapshot is in an untitled photo album. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

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Figure 8.11. The Mary Crocker Cottage, 4368 Lincoln Avenue, Oakland, Reed & Corlett, Architects, 1930. From Ann Rogers, ed., “Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook,” vol. 1. Courtesy of the Lincoln Child Center.

to the location on Lincoln Avenue in Fruitvale, a white neighborhood in East Oakland. The managers of this orphanage were not alone in abandoning a nineteenth-century setting; other charities left heterogeneous urban neighborhoods that were in physical decline, in order to reopen in homogeneous suburbs. In Oakland, the West Oakland Home moved out (and shed one place-based name for another) as more and more African Americans called the western part of the city home. The new buildings at the Lincoln Home met government recommendations. As early as 1912, the SBCC urged charities to adopt a plan “where the cottages are each independent units and house not more than twenty children.”74 However, a charity rarely could afford to adopt the single or double bedroom as a model for design, and so it turned to small dormitories, also called cottages. With the high cost of operation having forced the Smith Trust to close most cottages, the charity took the prudent course of action in Fruitvale.75 Designed by Reed & Corlett, the Mary Crocker Cottage and Grace Trevor Cottage opened in 1930 (figure 8.11). About twenty boys and girls lived in each two-story residential block, where the generosity of space and attention to detail made it seem as if no expense was spared. Even if the institutional use was clear, the taste of upper-class women for the Mission style prevailed inside and out. The spatial organization mimicked

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a private home to give working-class children living rooms, dining rooms, playrooms, bedrooms (three or four kids to a room), bathrooms, and other amenities of middle-class childhood. Their privileges came at some cost. By way of decoration, buildings evoked an attachment to the state’s Hispanic past, yet the romantic reading of a rich architectural history simplified the historic complexities of identity, conquest, religious faith, and building practice in the American West. At this charity, the embrace of Anglo-Saxon dominance rendered fictive the idealistic rendition of inclusion in the present. The charity segregated the orphanage, welcoming white children only, Protestants preferred.76

New Buildings in Temescal In this charitable landscape ingrained with inequality and exclusion, the Ladies’ Relief Society struggled to sustain child-saving ideals. It decided to stay put in Temescal, where it owned three aging institutions—the Home for Aged Women (1882), the De Fremery Nursery (1888), and the Children’s Home (1894, rebuilt in 1906)—and had managed to hold on to most of its property, which was fenced, gated, and closed to new streets, as it had been in the nineteenth century. As the charity’s prestige declined and government agencies withheld support, the group contemplated a name change (the term “relief” seemed especially old-fashioned) and went into debt, even though Matilda Brown had assumed a leadership role. Brown, who was single and had been made very wealthy by an inheritance from the Delger coffee fortune, became president in 1906 and held the position until her death in 1935.77 Galvanizing change proved a challenge even for Brown. “We have neglected to repair our buildings to the needed extent,” Frances Weston, the recording secretary, wrote in 1919, “and the necessity for doing so is getting more and more insistent, and it takes renewed effort, and appeals to the charitable public to carry us through the coming year.”78 Pressure to modernize escalated as the neighborhood was urbanized, largely by workingclass Italian immigrants, and two handsome, modern public schools opened—in part to lure development to this part of Oakland (figure 8.12).79 Having high-quality architecture for children nearby made it even harder for the charity to ignore the obvious—that its aging structures were “in crying need of repair.”80 Exasperated by male apathy and faced with mounting debt, the charity voted to close the Children’s Home in 1920. “We seem to have been forgotten by our men friends, whose active support we so sadly need, for they think in large figures,” one woman wrote, “and we find our-

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Figure 8.12. The Oakland Technical High School, photograph by Harry Courtright, c. 1917. The old age home is visible in the background, and new houses and streets, without plantings, indicate the unfinished state of the neighborhood. Graduating high school students stand on or close to property once owned by the Ladies’ Relief Society. Courtesy of the Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Herrington & Olson.

selves with our precious freight drifting with the dread sound of breakers in our ears.”81 The threat worked, almost as if by magic. The charity rescinded the resolution to shut down the orphanage, as donations poured in. It formed a Junior Branch to recruit younger members, and joined the Community Chest as a charter member in 1923—a sure sign that finances had stabilized. Even if welcome, the relationship did not relieve women of the arduous ordeal of fund-raising—of “personally begging from everyone for our wants.” The Community Chest didn’t organize capital campaigns, but insisted on approving budgets for building improvements.82 Forced to upgrade, but without enough cash to build, Brown formed a building committee and convinced the charity to capitalize on its most valuable asset, urban real estate. The hope was that the sale of several acres to the board of education would generate enough capital to replace all three

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institutions with attractive, fireproof buildings. Architectural plans were commissioned for all of them, but the charity could afford to construct only two, and it decided to build a new nursery for babies and a new home for elderly women (figures 8.13 and 8.14).83 Matilda Brown laid the cornerstone for the new Children’s Nursery on June 13, 1925, and the ceremony was modeled on the dedication of the Home for Aged Women in 1882. After Brown read the contract to the master builder and he accepted it, she invited three colleagues from the charity to join her in christening the cornerstone first with water representing purity, then with pansies for love, and finally with grain for hope.84 The new nursery opened later that year, and the new home for elderly women in 1928. Designed by Hugh T. White, the new institutions were generous of space and equipment and pleasing to look at, but not adventuresome in any way. The charity had previously hired male architects, but the decision to do so again in the 1920s seems remarkable given the female expertise on hand by that time: both Julia Morgan in Oakland and Hazel Wood Waterman in San Diego were expert in concrete-frame construction and the design of institutions for children.85 Not a cottage was in sight. Even though the charity had plenty of space to build them, even though some of the wealthiest women in the city supported the organization, even though the Department of Public Welfare reviewed architectural plans for these buildings, the Ladies’ Relief Society rejected the expensive solution.86 It built a congregate institution for babies and toddlers, the cohort known to be at the greatest risk from this physical arrangement. At the De Fremery Nursery they slept in dormitories, permitted to do so by state agencies as long as rooms were relatively small, with no more than twenty beds, and provided with plenty of sunlight and fresh air. “The new nursery is conceded to be one of the most modern and completely equipped buildings of its kind on the west coast,” the Tribune boasted. “The building is an example of the Latin type of architecture with plastered walls and tile roof. It has been constructed with reinforced concrete walls, floors, and stairs throughout, and with all the interior partitions of fireproof materials. It is the particular aim of those in charge of the living conditions and supervision of the children to make the atmosphere of the place as much like that of a home as they can possibly do in an institution.”87 As at the Lincoln Home, the stylistic gesture toward inclusion in the past did not translate into social practice in the present. The charity was segregated, open to whites only, although on occasion, the matron admitted Asian babies even if prohibited from doing so by the charity’s bylaws and discouraged by legislators who refused to pay for the care of “Oriental” children.

Figure 8.13.  Oakland Technical High School, 47th Street and Broadway, seen from the air, undated photograph by Harry Courtright with detail below. The charity’s buildings and plot stand out in the neighborhood, as do two public schools: Oakland Technical High School and the Emerson Elementary School. The detail shows, from left to right, the Home for Aged Women (1882), the new De Fremery Nursery (1925), and the renovated Children’s Home (1906). The curving walkway follows the path of the arcades erected in the 1880s. Courtesy of the Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Herrington & Olson.

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Figure 8.14.  Ladies’ Relief Society, Oakland, site plan, 1928. Key: (1) Children’s Home; (2) De Fremery Nursery; (3) Home for Aged Women; (4) terrace on the site of the former nursery; (5) water tower; (6) shed. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1911–30), using information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

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“Home Children” at the Ladies’ Relief Society The Cooley sisters were among the many children whose parents knocked on the door of the De Fremery Nursery in the 1920s. Like almost every other child in residence at the Ladies’ Relief Society, they came to the charity because life at home had for one or another reason become untenable. In this case a dysfunctional marriage prompted placement: the sisters’ father, an alcoholic who worked for the railroad, had married their mother, his second wife, when he was forty years old and she was sixteen. At least five children were born in quick succession. As one daughter said in an interview, “Can you see [this] marriage working out? No, it didn’t work.” After the divorce in 1925, one parent, probably their mother, brought the sisters to the charity. The De Fremery Nursery, just opened, appealed to her. It would allow the youngest sisters to sleep in a brand new building, in bedrooms full of light and air and equipped with modern services, even if shared with other children. Berta Lee was eighteen months old, Mollie was three, Belva was five, and Lois seven years old (figures 8.15 and 8.16). All told, the girls spent seven years at the charity. At the beginning they were dispersed: the younger girls went to the nursery and the older ones to the Children’s Home, where their younger sisters joined them a few years later.88 The Cooley sisters moved into the oldest building on the site—one that had been rebuilt in 1906 after yet another fire had ravaged the place (figure 8.17). The conflagration had taken its toll exactly one week before the great earthquake and fire devastated San Francisco. With orphanages across the bay having sustained serious damage and a flood of refugees having arrived in Oakland, the charity needed to take quick action in Temescal. Gifts from the Butcher’s Exchange, “an orphan,” “a friend to children,” and many women made it possible to rebuild rapidly.89 Because speed was of the essence and some of the building was intact, the builder retained the plan, the basic massing, and the brick and shingle facade of the 1894 building (figure 8.18). In due course smaller dormitories, better bathrooms, and fire escapes met state regulations, as did infirmaries, playrooms, and playgrounds. Not much attention was given to humanistic detail, and in 1924 the chair of the house and home committee lauded Frances Powell, the head matron, for mitigating some of the less appealing features. She wrote that Powell’s “whole heart is in her work, and she is as deeply interested in the Home and its environment as if it were her own private home. She is constantly thinking of something that can be done to give it a more cozy, cheery atmosphere.”90 Even so, the home retained the look and feel of an

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Figure 8.15.  Mollie and Berta Lee Cooley outside the De Fremery Nursery, 1925. Dressed in smocks and with short hair, the toddlers are clearly institutionalized children. This is one of several snapshots taken by a relative during a visit, showing the girls outdoors and thus seconding reports that relatives were not welcome inside the orphanage after children had been placed there. Author’s collection, gift from Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer.

old-fashioned congregate orphanage—the kind of place that was castigated for damaging children. The new head matron, Myra J. Ward, hired after Powell’s death, offered ample reason for such censure. There is not much information to be had about Ward, other than a few references in reports and the accounts of Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer. In addition to Ward, the staff included matrons (nurses) assigned to the dormitories, a cook, and a gardener, the sole male employee. “Miss Ward” was a single woman who “dedicated her life to running this place,” Fisher stated. “She was law. She was rule. Everybody jumped. You had to have that. She had a lot of people working for her.” Expressing no interest in new constructions of childhood valuing emotional health, individualism, and freedom, especially to play, Ward demanded conformity and obedience to authority. These were values

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made manifest in the congregate building even as Steinhart, Orcutt, and other liberal advocates insisted that they be set aside, and younger members of the charity hinted at concerns about old-fashioned practices. They invited the people of Oakland to visit and learn “that we are no longer living in the time of Dickens, that our children bear no brand of ‘Orphanage’ upon them.”91 Unfortunately, the exact reverse proved to be the case. Everyone—children, charity, and staff—called the facility an orphanage and referred to residents as orphans, even if all involved grasped the term to be a source of shame, especially for kids with living parents. “Our older children in the Children’s Home dislike being called children from the Orphanage,” one woman wrote, “for be it said very few are orphans, or half orphans, for they come from broken homes; so they always call themselves ‘Home Children.’ ”92 In that way and others, this charity registered differences among children. Full of about seventy kids, five to twelve years old, the Children’s Home was a diverse place, even if racially segregated. “French, Spanish, Austrian, Grecian, Irish, Indian, Italian, Hawaiian, Swedish, Esquimaux, Portuguese, Russian, German, Scots-Canadian, part Chinese, part American, and American Indian” children were in residence in the 1920s.93

Figure 8.16.  Lois and Belva Cooley outside the Children’s Home, 1926. The orphanage for older children is visible in the background; to the left is the boys’ playground. The smocks and haircuts made clear to schoolmates that these girls lived in the orphanage. Author’s collection, gift from Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer.

Figure 8.17.  Studio One Art Center, formerly the Children’s Home, 365 45th Street, Oakland. The building looked like this in the 1930s, when the Cooley sisters were in residence, except for the access ramp. Photograph by the author, 2001.

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Figure 8.18. The Children’s Home, reconstructed ground and second floor plans, 1930. Key: (1) entry; (2) parlor; (3) head matron’s office; (4) boys’ playroom; (5) kitchen; (6) dining room; (7) girls’ playroom; (8) cellar entry; (9) service entry and storage; (10) laundry and showers; (11) toilets; (12) staff room; (13) linens; (14) dressing rooms; (15) boys’ infirmary; (16) boys’ clothes closet; (17) older boys’ dormitory; (18) matrons’ (nurses’) space; (19) younger boys’ dormitory; (20) younger girls’ dormitory; (21) older girls’ dormitory; (22) girls’ clothes closet; (23) head matron’s suite; (24) classroom; (25) girls’ infirmary; (26) staff room.

Orphaned in Oakland / 281

In this institution, the social and biological condition of a child determined where he could go, how she would move, and when he or she could do so. If a child’s class and race set conditions for entry, gender divided the orphanage in practice. Boys and girls intimately knew one part of the building, and had little or no familiarity with sections used by the other sex. This strict gender segregation, common in nineteenth-century institutions, was probably put in place in the Oakland orphanage in the 1890s and retained when it was rebuilt after the 1906 fire.94 Ward adhered to the homosocial ideal as a heterosocial world was becoming the norm, and under her tenure an imaginary line divided the building in half, consigning boys to one side and girls to the other. Boys and girls ate and played in separate rooms. They used separate bath and toilet rooms, received medical care in separate spaces, and slept in separate dormitories. At Ward’s direction, boys and girls even marched in separate lines across the street to Emerson Elementary School, where their appearance revealed their situation to other children in the school. “It is gratifying to hear it said by a school principal, ‘Your children have nothing of an institutional look or manner about them,’ ” one woman wrote, but they were known nonetheless as “home children.”95 Inside the institution, the location of rooms, stairs, and doors coupled specific places with different groups of people. The symmetrical building held within it intersecting asymmetrical landscapes that were attached to specific social groups and used to limit contact between them.96 The members of the Ladies’ Relief Society used the front entry, the parlor, and the main stair. Thus, it is not surprising that children perceived “the ladies bountiful” as distant and uninvolved in their world. In this case, the privileges atten­ dant to social class rather than any hope for an ideal childhood sanctioned the physical separation of adults from children. When relatives visited a child, most often they remained outside, except when visiting a child in the infirmary. Children were not allowed to walk on the main central stair, and they entered the parlor on rare occasions—to celebrate holidays or to greet a parent. To move between the first and the second floor, boys and girls used separate exterior stairs on opposite sides of the dormitory wings. This architectural strategy, the preoccupation with using circulation to separate and objectify children, wasn’t new to the women of this charity. It had been tested on a building that stood on this property from 1882 until 1928. Remember, separate exterior stairs delivered children to the foyer of the dining room, with dormitories above, in the Home for Aged Women (see figures 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12). The twentieth-century iteration, a roughly finished wood-frame, open-riser stair, was cruder and less refined than its nineteenth-century antecedent.97 On the second floor, a door from each

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sex-segregated dormitory opened onto the exterior stair landing, which was also roughly finished and without shelter in inclement weather. Imagine standing on this landing on a cold, rainy day in February. At mealtime, boys and girls lined up outside the dining room, entered through doors on opposite sides of the building, and sat in different parts of the room, which were defined by a line of columns. Spaces assigned to staff were off limits, especially the rooms used by Ward. Children did not come into contact with the head matron or her grim demeanor on a daily basis. Rather, her reputation and the rigor of the institution’s organization commanded respect for rules and demands for conformity—an example of the normalizing power of the gaze if ever there was one. One charged site was Ward’s personal suite. Located upstairs on the girls’ side of the building, it facilitated supervision of older girls. Ward entered their dormitory each night, appearing almost like a ghost through a small door that led from her quarters. Otherwise, Ward shrouded her personal life in secrecy. “It was totally secret,” Fisher recalled. “Her whole life was total secrecy.” Another charged site was the main office on the ground floor. This is where the head matron doled out chores to older children. Much as her nineteenth-century predecessors had done, Ward made assignments to test the children’s character, as well as to complete needed tasks at no cost to the charity. Dusting the parlor was an honored duty, usually asked of older girls. In Fisher’s case, Ward called her to the office to introduce the job at hand, without hinting at the extent of the test. Before a girl dusted the parlor, Ward adopted a strategy that employers used to train servants and test their honesty. A woman would hide a small object, like a needle or a coin, under a carpet, and after the servant had cleaned the room, she would check to see whether the needle had been removed, evidence of a job well done, or whether the coin remained, proof of trustworthiness. To test Mollie, Ward put an Easter bag full of candy eggs in the parlor and counted the pieces that remained after the job was done.98 After seven months, Fisher caved in. Now and again, she ate a piece of candy—a rare treat—rationalizing the action by telling herself it was going stale. She didn’t think to ask Ward for permission. “No, you never spoke up to her. She was like a Hitler. You didn’t speak up to her,” Fisher recalled. Soon after, Ward confronted the child. She let me know that it was a bad thing to do it. I hated to admit, but I couldn’t lie at the same time because she was right. . . . I didn’t want to be a liar too. I kind of rationalized that [taking candy] in my head. So, I let her

Orphaned in Oakland / 283 know. She said, “OK, that’s fine.” The job was finished. Everybody that took from that basket, the job was finished. But, see, we didn’t know that until we experienced that. Which was kind of a good policy. I mean she was learning about us through that. . . . Boy, I’ll tell you one thing. I never in my life took anything after that. Without asking first. I mean it was a huge lesson to me.

Fisher believes that the temptation was made to assess her personality, just before she left the orphanage. “Even though Ward was like that, and that’s the only tangle we had, I liked her. She was fair and right. . . . That was just her little game that she played to find out.” Regular misbehavior was punished by loss of privileges. “They had rules here. And we abided by them,” Fisher recalled. “We [wanted to be] a good kid because we didn’t want the consequences. And we were good kids.” Even so, she broke the rules on occasion, climbing a fruit tree near the nursery to eat some fruit and sleeping with a few treasured belongings.99 The Department of Social Welfare wanted children to have personal possessions, counting on them to help develop personal pride through ownership. Since that privilege was not granted at the Ladies’ Relief Society, kids invented substitutes; Fisher’s were a mechanical pencil received as a Christmas gift and a piece of polished glass picked up outdoors and used in hopscotch. The need to play and possess toys figured as a powerful site of identity formation among American children, regardless of social class, site, or situation. In Oakland, these needs survived a drastic relocation, in this case to an orphanage.100

Condition and Consciousness in Congregate Charities These stories seem to substantiate the reform critique that congregate spaces, coupled with rigid routines, assimilated the child to the mass. At the Ladies’ Relief Society, women also used space to underscore dependency and emphasize hierarchy and rank in institutions. But did condition mean consciousness? Did attendance mean acceptance? The Children’s Home may seem to have been unified topographically, but children invented placespecific strategies to contest power and authority and define their right to childhood, even if it was childhood of an institutional sort. The dining room figured prominently in the Cooley sisters’ stories. There are no historical photos of the dining room in the Oakland orphanage, but the Cooley sisters suggested that the room looked like others in institutions, with neatly arranged tables and benches, set in straight lines, and repetitive table settings (figure 8.19). Their viewpoint assumes success in repressing

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Figure 8.19.  Boys’ dining room at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900. This bare-boned dining room is reminiscent of the one at the Children’s Home in Temescal, including the plain wood wainscot (for durability) and exposed utilities. The emphasis is not only on order but also on cleanliness and hygiene, for both children and food service. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum Collection, 3.2002.2624.2. Imaging Department © President and Fellows at Harvard College.

individuality and forcing children to conform. However, oral history makes it clear that this was not the case in Oakland: the smell of food cooking and its delivery from kitchen to the kids disrupted homogeneity. So did taste, the visceral response to food—in very special ways for Mollie Cooley. Children were required to eat all the food served to them, and each matron kept a close watch on her charges during mealtime to ensure that this hard-andfast-rule was obeyed. Every Friday evening codfish was served at the Ladies’ Relief Society, and every Friday evening Mollie vomited the meal, with a matron standing by her seat to help her to reach the bathroom. How could I forget it? Cod! It was codfish. I couldn’t stand it. It would catch my throat and so, and I’d tell Mrs. Miriam, I said, I can’t eat this, I can’t swallow it because it was so strong, it was awful. And so, I had to at least take one

Orphaned in Oakland / 285 bite . . . [she] would take me up from the table, it was ritual every Friday . . . [she] would hurry me into the rest room to throw up . . . She always got me to a toilet quick so I could throw up this fish.

This awful story can be interpreted as an example in the extreme of success in conforming to congregate ideals. It can also been seen as an example of failure. Mollie’s physical response may have been involuntary, but in a charity, where the daily routine imprinted the desire for order on children’s bodies, she regularly used her own body to make known her objection in front of other children. Is it possible, in the context of congregate orphanage space, that the other kids interpreted her performance as a hidden transcript of contested power? This story underscores the point that visual and textual documents tell only so much about human experience inside buildings. A dining room, Bernard Herman has argued, defines “a topography of unequal access and authority.” The details of who sits next to whom, what food is served, and how diners consume it set objects as well as people “in social motion.”101 In Oakland, Fisher understood the rules of material discourse at the orphanage’s dining table, and challenged them each Friday evening. What about private spaces? In this building, as in other congregate institutions, dormitories were segregated by age as well as sex (figure 8.20). Older and younger girls slept in different rooms, each of whch was furnished with about twenty iron bedsteads, painted white and lined up in neat rows. Periodically, inspectors arrived with measuring sticks to check spacing.102 Each wing consisted of three bedrooms that were used by younger children, the matrons, and older children entering puberty. Girls moved from one room to another as their bodies started to change. “They didn’t have us totally apart. Just kind of blended apart,” Fisher recalled. Still, kids figured out ways to use dormitories to create a collective identity for themselves as children, even though they didn’t spend much time in these spaces. The recognition that young people construct cultural spaces for themselves in institutions runs through stories told by Mollie, Belva, and others of children in places where they were closely watched by adults. The point that physical distance from the center of authority enables an individual to act has relevance here. The Cooley sisters did not have much anxiety about lack of privacy; the dorm was relatively small, and living in close quarters was a fact of life in working-class households, where children of the same sex continued to share beds in the 1920s.103 To the contrary, the girls liked sharing space with other girls, with whom they could confide and share problems. Accounts of other orphanages second the point; shared

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Figure 8.20. Girls’ dormitory at St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua (New Hampshire State Charitable and Correctional Institutions), c. 1900. The Cooley sisters slept in a congregate dormitory very much like this one, although without Catholic religious imagery. State regulations governed the number of beds and the spacing between them, and concern with cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene was paramount. Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum Collection, 3.2002.2624.5. Imaging Department © President and Fellows at Harvard College.

spaces helped children create substitute families for themselves as they struggled to overcome the social stigma of being orphanage children.104 Even so, the focus on conformity and uniformity was deeply disliked, especially by girls. Children shared clothes and shoes despite explicit prohibition by state regulations, and they were not allowed to dress in their own clothes, except during parental visits.105 Every child also received a bowlshaped haircut, given in public and upon entry to the institution. Although justified as a tool to restrict lice infestation, the physical marking had been used since the Renaissance to de-sex institutionalized girls and make it more difficult for them to run away. “At school, everyone knew we were from the Home because we all had the same haircuts,” Mollie stated. “Everyone always knew we were orphanage kids.”106 At the same time, the haircut ritual forged bonds between kids. When a new girl arrived with long curly hair,

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girls cried as they watched a matron cut off her braids. The girl whose braids were cut had a different reaction: smiling, she turned around, faced her new community, and stated that she was one of them. Shorn, she now belonged to the group. Still, the demand for uniformity took its toll, even on children as adaptable as the Cooley sisters. In effect, the charity tried to shield the entire group from “the outside world” as it tried to separate boys from girls and younger from older children.107 They could not leave the premises without an adult, and the courtyard was off-limits except when they were walking to and from school. Adults walked them to school and church, and accompanied them on outings (figure 8.21). Otherwise, the girls had no experience with ordinary daily life. In 1932, when their mother took the older Cooley sisters home, she taught them how to enter a store and select and purchase goods, and let them step outside at night for the first time (figure 8.22). The younger sisters had a similar experience in foster care. As Mollie recalled: “I’ll tell you what, because we were so overly protected here and never got out and saw darkness, never saw the stars and the moon, the first month we were at our foster home, every single night, we cried ourselves to sleep. We wanted to come back to the Home. Isn’t that interesting?”

Figure 8.21. The Cooley sisters and their father at Mosswood Park, Oakland, 1929. This excursion took place during a rare parental visit. Author’s collection, gift from Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer.

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Figure 8.22. The Cooley sisters in front of the De Fremery Nursery, 1932. Dressed in street clothes, the sisters are ready to leave the institution. The two older girls, Lois and Belva, went to live with their mother; the younger sisters, Mollie and Berta Lee, were sent to foster care. Author’s collection, gift from Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer.

Why this reaction? At the Children’s Home, the Cooley sisters welcomed living with children like themselves and with women who were for the most part dedicated caregivers. This was very important to girls who deeply felt the absence of their parents, especially of their mother. Fisher shared her loving memories of one woman who worked in the dormitories. “Mrs. Miriam was old, perhaps a widow. Her job was to work at the Children’s Home. She needed work as a single woman.” Like other orphanage children, Mollie formed attachments to her caretakers, who returned the sentiments in kind.108 “We were their children,” she stated. Children also knew that the institution offered key resources—food, clothing, shelter, and medical care—as much as they disliked the rigid routines of their institutional life. “Those in charge were very responsible. We were well-sheltered, well-cared-

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for; we had plenty of food; no one was mean,” Fisher stated; her judgment is seconded by reports that the charity upheld standards even in hard times.109 “It was like a private boarding school,” she insisted, using an analogy historically invoked by supporters (and critics) of orphanages.110 Those expectations, threaded with hopes for the future, were cut short at exit from the orphanage. Two years after the older girls moved in with their mother, Ward drove Mollie and Berta Lee to a foster home in San Jose. State law required adolescent children to leave orphanages, to live either with relatives or with foster families. The goal was to facilitate a smooth transition to independent living, but regardless of motive the practice had come to be treated as little less than indenture. True to form, the children’s foster parents exploited them.111 The Cooley sisters scrubbed floors, cleaned toilets, and washed and ironed clothes in San Jose; they had also been expected to work at the orphanage, but not at all of those kinds of menial tasks. Although household chores were routine for children, the demands grated because the girls knew that their foster parents, who lacked children of their own, had been paid to take care of them. “That was the only reason they took us in,” Fisher recalled. “They got a salary. She took us for that reason. She didn’t want to go to work. She volunteered . . . Red Cross work.” The girls missed the care and support they had found at the orphanage. Living in a suburban house proved isolating and frightening. The girls were denied parental visits; when their mother figured out where they had been sent and came to visit, she was turned away, with the door literally slammed shut in her face. The girls could not share their experiences with other children, and they did not live in a place that made their needs known to the public. Mollie ran away, but could not figure out how to live on her own. Although faced with certain physical punishment, she returned to live with her foster family until she finished high school.112 Ward left the orphanage shortly after the Cooley sisters moved out. During the Great Depression its enrollment plummeted by about 35 percent. The ready availability of relief for families from New Deal programs rendered the institution less necessary, and the actions of the head matron may have been a factor too. In 1932, the Junior Branch charged Ward with enforcing “ ‘surprising and barbarous’ disciplinary methods,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, and twenty women, one the daughter of the governor, resigned from the charity in protest.113 New mothers themselves, these wealthy young women deplored Ward’s refusal to comfort crying children. The imperious Matilda Brown denied the charge of barbarity. “The younger women appear to have a different idea of correct discipline than the older

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members,” she told the Chronicle, making it clear that she expected them only to help raise money. It took two years for Ward to be granted an indefinite leave of absence; and a few months later, Brown passed away.114 Freed of that domineering partnership, the charity began to think about change. In 1936, with the nation in the throes of political turmoil and economic strife, women drew analogies with other challenges they had faced in the past and present. Here in our organization we have seen changes but we have not gone back; we have pushed on. We have not torn down; we have built for the future. We are not lost in the dense fog of uncertainty, we are striding along the highway of accomplishment. As a group, we are not radicals, we are progressives. At no time have we forgotten that we are organized to serve the best interests of our charges.115

One improvement was that the Junior Branch took charge of the orphanage’s nursery, achieving “a far-reaching benefit” in care. Presumably, crying babies were comforted. Another improvement came from a generous member who donated funds to renovate the playroom for older boys in the orphanage. The “eyesore” was made as “attractive, bright, and cheerful as any public school auditorium.”116 Yet another came from the new head matron, Janette M. Taylor, who allowed boys and girls to walk to school together. In these modest ways, the women who ran the oldest charity in Alameda County redefined the care of dependent children, with the right to childhood in mind. They refused to address another pressing matter: the use of their charity to register racial differences. Erasure of the color line was not on the table in Temescal, although elsewhere in Oakland other women took steps to counter the devastating effects of race prejudice on California’s children in hard times.

nine

Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland: Day Nurseries during the Interwar Years In 1918, the Northern Federation of California Colored Women’s Clubs acquired a plain wood-frame house in West Oakland. Angered at the whitesonly policy in Bay Area institutions for children, the federation raised the $1,200 needed to buy the building on Peralta Street and turn it into the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (figure 9.1; see also fig­ ure 1.14, site 14).1 This decision did more than express the club’s commitment to racial uplift and self-betterment, an ideology that members shared with clubwomen of color in other cities. With this facility, the only orphanage and day care center open to black children in Alameda County, the clubwomen spelled out a new democratizing order for the charitable landscape as the Great Migration transformed Oakland. They selected a visible building around the corner from the West Oakland Home to counter de facto racial segregation and to offer child care in a community where most women worked for wages (see figure 8.3). The use of repurposed architecture—to expose racial injustice and to redress its effects on children—became even more pointed in 1928. The federation moved the orphanage and day home to Linden Street, selecting a stately house that was more expressive of uplift ideology than the plain building on Peralta Street. The federation also chose a building that was near other black-run institutions and on the same city block as another day care center, St. Vincent’s Day Home. Like the Northern Federation, the Sisters of the Holy Family had repurposed a house to offer day care to working class children.2 This charity also faced suspicion from welfare officials, who were wary of Catholic charities in general, of repurposed buildings used as institutions, and of any intervention that made it easier for a mother to work outside her home. Even so, physical and social differences set one facility apart

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Figure 9.1.  The Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, 1215 (1111) Peralta Street, Oakland. This plain, two-story wood-frame building was the first that black clubwomen purchased for the orphanage and day nursery. Photograph by the author, 2001.

from the other. St. Vincent’s Day Home, occupying a larger, more expensive building than the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, was racially segregated; like almost every Catholic day home in the United States, it accepted white children only.3 As a matter of principle, the Northern Federation welcomed any child in need; in practice it served African American boys and girls. By placing their charity, which was segregated by circumstance, back-to-back with another which was segregated by choice, the clubwomen showed that black children had the right to play on the same physical ground as white children, even if it was in two backyards separated from each other by a wooden fence. It would take more than thirty years for black and white children to be able to play together inside the same building. The women of the Northern Federation, adamant supporters of both racial integration and autonomous cultural institutions, took a calculated risk when they insisted that black children have access to this new node

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in the charitable landscape. African American elites had some measure of freedom in Oakland—more so than in Southern cities, where black leaders were prime targets for white violence. But, even in a small, racially integrated community with some fair-minded white neighbors, the claims of white supremacists could not be put out of mind. In the 1920s the resurgent Ku Klux Klan brazenly organized out in the open in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.4 Racial integration already had been abandoned in orphanages in West Oakland, and it would be attacked in social settlement houses, free kindergartens, and playgrounds during the interwar years. This move to exclude black children on the basis of race was sanctioned by historic practice in woman-run charities elsewhere in the city and reinforced by the Associated Charities in Oakland, the Alameda County Welfare Council, and the California State Department of Social Welfare (CSDSW).5 As all levels of government acted to segregate the charitable landscape, the Northern Federation counted on a repurposed building to do more than take up the slack. Black clubwomen, who called the Fannie Wall Children’s Home a monument, counted on it to resist race and gender subordination.6 In Oakland, women reproduced some gender stereotypes in the day home, linking femininity with maternity, domesticity, and purity; but they challenged others, especially submission, as they organized to further the cause of racial equality. Faced with any number of pressing matters, they put a better childhood for black children at the top of their list.

The Church of the Poor To give substance to their goals for children, the Northern Federation drew on the same architectural strategy as the Sisters of the Holy Family. As social welfare policy tilted toward mothers’ pensions, these groups elected to reinforce rather than to dismember the institutional safety net for working-class children. Each added a day nursery (or home) to a charitable landscape that by the mid-1920s also included twelve other institutions in Alameda County: four orphanages for white Protestant children, one for Chinese boys, one for Chinese girls, and one for Catholic children, as well as two rescue homes, two shelters for delinquent children, and another day nursery.7 This institution, the newest architectural addendum to the charitable landscape, may have been named after the room in an elite house where nursemaids took care of babies, but the charitable iteration of the nursery housed another group: working-class children of mothers who worked during the day.8 A day nursery was like an orphanage in many ways (including reliance on repurposed houses), but it differed from an orphanage in an important

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respect: a mother dropped her children off there on her way to work, paid a small fee, and took her kids home each evening.9 This allowed a mother, when employed outside the home, to keep her children rather than to abandon them or rely on older siblings or an orphanage for their care. Controversy dogged the commonsensical solution, and not only because the child care was sometimes of poor quality. A day home raised questions about the relationship of charity to maternal work, family life, and childhood. In California, Valeska Bary, Amy Steinhart, and other liberal policy makers praised the day nursery as innovative and practical—a crucial first step toward organized day care for children and the economic indepen­ dence of women. Others were more circumspect. Starting in 1913, when the State Board of Charities and Corrections (SBCC) required licensure, welfare officials contended that a day nursery allowed and even encouraged a mother to shirk her maternal responsibility for care, and thus to deprive her children of a good childhood. “A day nursery is in a sense a confession of failure on the part of the community to give its children their just due—the full-time care and attention of their own mother in the home,” the SBCC insisted in 1920.10 Even if the agency pitted the interests of mothers and children against each other, California became the most progressive state in the nation with respect to day care in the 1920s: cities offered it in public schools and industries on site; private charities also intervened.11 Catholic women led the way—a point missed in histories that elide California children from the history of childhood and Catholic institutions from the history of children’s charities. Quite literally, the Sisters of Charity made room for day boarders inside the first Roman Catholic orphanage in San Francisco. Starting in the mid-1850s, mothers, almost all born in Ireland, dropped off their children on the way to work and picked them up at the end of the day. When the archdiocese prodded the order to sell the Market Street property in 1872 and to relocate the orphanage to South San Francisco, John J. Prendergast, a socially minded priest, persuaded Elizabeth Armer, the foster daughter of a wealthy Irish Catholic family, to take up the slack and dedicate her life to service as a religious woman. Armer organized an entirely new religious order, the Sisters of the Holy Family, with this express purpose in mind: to minister to the poor, especially children, with friendly visits and other sorts of care. Historical accounts stress Prendergast’s respect for Armer’s faith as his prime motivator, but less exalted factors came into play. Armer’s foster father, Richard Tobin, the attorney who had set up the Hibernia Savings and Loan Association in 1859, counted as close friends Prendergast and his archbishop, Joseph Alemany, and he advised both men on financial matters. In all likelihood the sale of the or-

Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland / 295

phanage property, promised to produce a healthy profit for the church, was one such concern.12 Armer’s immediate challenge was to set up a convent for what was at first an informally organized religious community, knowing that the church would not underwrite any of its expense. Church rhetoric stressed the autonomy of Catholic institutions, but Armer counted on exactly the same strategies that Protestant women used to overcome similar obstacles. She volunteered, she repurposed buildings, and she turned to her family and the charitable public for help. In 1872, Mary Tobin, her foster mother, rented a row house for the convent on Pine Street; in 1874 her foster father rented another, also on Pine, where Ellen O’Connor joined Armer in this service. Two years later, Armer and O’Connor moved across the street, started to take in children, and welcomed other women to the convent. In 1878, the year the Silver Street Kindergarten opened, Archbishop Alemany invited the order to set up a day home with a full-day program for babies and toddlers and afterschool programs for older children. He also insisted that Armer and O’Connor undertake formal religious training. They concurred, and in 1881 the two nuns opened St. Francis Day Home in a repurposed stone house on Powell Street. The Hibernia Savings Bank offered generous terms on the five-thousand-dollar mortgage, and the nuns raised the cash needed to pay it off. Carpenters, plumbers, painters, and bricklayers, many with Irish last names, volunteered services and building materials to keep costs in line.13 Armer (Mother Dolores, after taking her vows) and O’Connor (Sister Teresa, after doing the same) offered more than care: they wanted to control cultural reproduction through childhood. “It is consoling to note how often the Catholic mother gladly and bravely chooses to take her children to a poor, bare, crowded little Catholic institution rather than to any other if only she can find one to go to,” one advocate wrote.14 In San Francisco the Sisters of the Holy Family more than answered the requirement for religious instruction, extending it to kids from families that could not afford parish school tuition. They also protected children from Protestant proselytizers by becoming certified kindergarten teachers. Starting in the early 1880s, Froebel blocks (and other products sold by the Milton Bradley Corporation) filled the Holy Family’s day home classrooms. Since more than the sentimental model for childhood was on offer at this charity, the order also ran sewing schools and other vocational programs, including ones modeled on the kitchen garden.15 Protestant women also took up the day home cause. The goals were similar to those of the Sisters of the Holy Family: to help mothers find legitimate

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work, to prevent dependence on charity, and to set the course for childhood. They set up the Nursery for the Children of Poor Women in New York (1856), the Day Nursery in Philadelphia (1863), the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum (1869), and the Infant Shelter in San Francisco (1871). These places offered child care to abandoned wives, widows, single mothers, and other women who needed to work because their husbands had disappeared, were sick, or for other reasons were without income. At first their intent was rescue and reform for mothers and children, but the focus shifted over the years to children and early childhood education. Even so, the Protestant charities remained mired in controversy. Mothers working for wages at home did not qualify for this sort of help, and other women deliberately avoided the centers, put off by the dull buildings, regimented instruction, intrusive inspections, bored kids, and stigma of charity.16 To upper-class advocates of day homes, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago offered the perfect vehicle to change public opinion for the better. Determined to present a “living” example of up-to-date methods of child care, Josephine Jewell Dodge, a wealthy philanthropist who had founded two day nurseries in New York City, worked with Maria Love, supervisor of a crèche and training school in Buffalo, to put together a model nursery exhibit for the fair’s Children’s Building.17 Since Love and Dodge wanted to exhibit an actual working facility, they used two rooms on the first floor to display the components: a training school for caretakers, a kindergarten class, and the nursery itself, where fair visitors could leave their children It was “equipped with everything necessary to carry on the work properly—dainty wire swinging cradles, cribs, swinging chairs, a pound in which the little ones who can walk are placed with toys to amuse them.”18 Trained caretakers, dressed like nurses in striped uniforms, included black women; this made the day nursery one of the few places at the fair where women of color were welcome (figure 9.2). High-quality design, a low fee, and visibility added to the appeal. “The nursery was the tired mother’s paradise,” an onlooker wrote. “Here she could leave her little ones, feeling that they were safe. . . . It was crowded every day . . . and sometimes children were turned away. . . . Before the windows in front of this department a constant stream of visitors passed or stood during the day, watching the gambols of the little ones inside.”19 More than seven thousand children used the nursery, and more would have come, had there been room and staff to care for them. Catholic women also made the case for day nurseries at the fair. Alice Timmons Toomy, California delegate to the Catholic Women’s Congress, brought up the topic during an impassioned debate about public culture in

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Figure 9.2.  Day nursery at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum, ICHi-02232.

Catholic life. Toomy sharply disagreed with her fellow panelists in insisting that Catholic women had a public sphere, with charity at its core. “The truth is that ours is the church of the poor, and as manifold as is the charity work of the religious and benevolent societies, a vast amount has to go undone because there is no one to attend to it.” She urged her sex to take charge of day nurseries, free kindergartens, and homes for working girls. “The mercifulness of these day nurseries is only appreciated by those who realize what it is for a poor mother to leave her unweaned babe all day in the care of her other mere infants, in order to eke out the father’s wages in behalf of their increasing family,” Toomy said. Although she was criticized for her embrace of causes taken to be Protestant at heart, she stressed the benefit to children of care in Catholic institutions, citing their receipt of “Catholic habits and traditions” and “Catholic opinion on all matters instead of a worldly one.”20 The Catholic educational exhibit in the fair’s Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building displayed an example of such success: an award-winning display of children’s artwork from the day homes run by the Sisters of the Holy Family on the West Coast.21

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Delegates to the Jewish Women’s Congress also lent support. Carrie S. Benjamin, a delegate from Colorado, defined charity as the brightest jewel in a woman’s crown. She called on all Jewish women to be good citizens, but echoed Jane Addams in especially targeting the “unoccupied” woman of the leisure class. “No matter what her walk in life may be, a woman can take up arms in the cause of charity,” Benjamin declared. “She can find ample scope for her energies in this work.” She meant day homes, kindergartens, and other charities for children.22 Seizing on this triumph, women built a framework for a national day nursery movement, with organizations divided along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Dodge organized the Association of Day Nurseries in New York in 1895 and the National Federation of Day Nurseries in 1898; the latter organization was racially segregated and, because nominally Protestant, not of interest to Catholic women.23 Toomey made the case for day nurseries at the National League of Catholic Women, set up in Chicago with fellow delegate Ellen Allen Starr. The National Council of Jewish Women, an outgrowth of the Jewish Women’s Congress, acted in kind after the turn of the century, as did the National Association of Colored Women.24 This division between organizations may have ingrained ethnic, religious, and racial separation in day homes, but it did not inhibit their spread. As the number of married women working for wages increased (to 25 percent by 1920), so too did the number of day nurseries, from less than one hundred in 1892 to the more than seven hundred recorded by the national federation in 1916. These statistics did not include facilities housing African American children, and the federation ignored Catholic charities even after they were represented by the Association of Catholic Day Nurseries. By the 1920s the Catholic Church ran about half of the day nurseries affiliated with religious institutions.25

An Oakland Home for the Holy Family The church-sponsored charities included the community-based daycare centers run by the Sisters of the Holy Family in Northern California. An invitation to set up one of these centers in Oakland came in 1895, but the order declined to do so until after the turn of the century.26 Archbishop Patrick William Riordan offered in 1911 a house owned by the church, and Mother Teresa (Dolores had just died) turned him down, making very clear her preference for another: the Haven house on Eighth Street (figure 9.3, see also figure 1.14, site 15). It sat amidst dwellings of people who either had been born in California or had migrated from New England, Canada, or northern Europe; some lived in large homes, others rented flats, and still

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Figure 9.3.  The St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1086 (1076) Eighth Street, Oakland. The Sisters of the Holy Family set up the day nursery in this grand house in 1911. Photograph by the author, 1996.

others took in boarders. Although almost all these families were Protestant, the house on offer was around the corner from St. Joseph’s Church, dedicated to the patron saint of the Sisters of the Holy Family. “St. Joseph had found a most desirable house in a good location,” Mother Teresa is reported to have told the archbishop.27 When this parish was proposed in the early 1890s, Irish American church leaders swallowed their objection to “foreign” religious leaders and recruited Portuguese and Italian priests to run a church where most of the congregation would not speak English. The steeple was visible from the front door of the Haven home. Teresa’s choice made sense for more than religious reasons. The dwelling, erected in the 1860s and expanded in the 1890s to hold fourteen rooms, could easily absorb a convent plus offer separate, age-graded spaces to children. The spacious grounds, filled with lavish plantings, also promised plenty of room for outdoor play (key in the construction of modern childhood). The archbishop agreed to the price of ten thousand dollars (nine times the cost of the first Fannie Wall Children’s Home, for a building about three times the size). In effect, Riordan floated a loan; the nuns paid down the mortgage, as was expected. They succeeded in three months by soliciting (begging) from house to house for donations. It took only modest

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alterations to turn their house into a multipurpose institution. Inside, on the first floor, the parlor was made into a chapel and the library a community room; rooms on the second floor were turned into classrooms and other spaces useful for children; the attic became a dormitory for the nuns. Outside, the side yard was used for play and a statue of St. Vincent de Paul was placed on the front lawn. Whether with a renovated house or purposebuilt facility, the display of religious symbols made clear that the day home was a Catholic institution, a place where religious education was on offer. The Sisters of the Holy Family coupled that goal with social service, early childhood education, and after-school programs. They put this multipurpose program in place in all of the day homes, including one that had also opened in San Jose. Catholic day homes, Overland Monthly noted, were “practical institutions combining the advantages of the modern settlement, the training school, kindergarten and nursery for the infants left to the gentle care of the Sisters while mothers labored so that their children might have bread.”28 Nuns trained in kindergarten methods stuck with the Froebel pedagogy even though it had come to seem old-fashioned to other early childhood educators. At the day homes kids played with Froebel blocks and filled books with cut paper patterns and sewing samples; some designs depicted religious themes and others interest in Americanization.29 St. Vincent’s Day Home opened in October 1911 with Sister Ursula in charge. In short order the facility would be filled to capacity: one hundred kids in all, from eighteen months of age through ten years for boys and fourteen for girls. The after-school program started on October 16; the nursery opened the next day, and fourteen children enrolled within a week. “The first children for the Day Home were received today,” the convent’s annals noted. “Twin boys of three and one-half years. The father, a Catholic sick in the Hospital. The mother, a Protestant employed in the City. The children are baptized Catholics.”30 Thirty girls came to the sewing school on opening day; eighty-two joined by the first day of November. The new use of the Haven house quickly attracted notice from the charitable public. A college student dropped by, interested in this charity and the Oakland Social Settlement (a few blocks to the south); a physician visited with a tuberculosis nurse, and both “were surprised at the conveniences of the house and the charity of the work” in a facility run by and for Catholics.31 They learned that nuns accepted a child regardless of religion or nationality and set fees by a parent’s ability to pay. Some families paid nothing at all. “The nationality of the parents of the children varies,” a nun wrote in 1911. “Irish, German, American, Italian, Portuguese, Slavonian, Spanish, French,

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Swedish, Scotch, etc. Several of the children attending are Protestant—one Jewish—and one Chinese.”32 No child was turned away because a parent could not afford a Catholic education—a policy not popular with some families. Three months after the day home opened, a nun hinted at the extent of this bias in the Catholic community. “The greater number attend the Public Schools in the neighborhood, namely The Prescott, Tompkins, Cole, Lafayette, and Campbell. Some of the girls from the Convent Schools would like to take advantage of the Sewing Classes but they will not be encouraged to come.”33 Catholic parents didn’t want their children to mix with “other” kids—meaning poorer kids, kids without a Catholic education, or immigrant kids with darker skins who spoke languages other than English. Nonetheless, the nuns made plans to expand. Kids packed the home, especially during the summer when schools were closed and mothers put in long hours at canneries. “Our Home accommodations have been greatly taxed,” a nun wrote in July 1912. “From forty to forty-five children have been received every day and the ingenuity of the Sisters suggested ways and means to provide for the little ones comfortably, especially at the dinner hour.”34 The Sisters of the Holy Family took the first step as World War I loomed on the horizon. The order bought two adjacent parcels, believing that a new building was needed, and used a gift from the Tobin family to help pay the bill.35 The decision to expand was in keeping with national trends: church support for Catholic day homes was taking off as more married women joined the paid labor force during the war and afterwards, in the 1920s. As the number of facilities swelled in California, the SBCC mandated licensure in 1913 and set standards in 1918.36 In the end, the nuns’ decision was not to replace the house, but rather to divide and conquer. The order decided in 1922 to buy for the convent a large dwelling in Piedmont, a wealthy white neighborhood, and to affiliate the day home with the Community Chest. Two years later a two-story addition, with a kindergarten, dining room, and recreation rooms, made it possible for the nuns to care for two hundred children.37 Designed by J. J. Power, a church architect, separate rooms for sleeping, dining, and play and a dedicated playground anticipated the new (stiffer) state requirements for licensure issued in 1925. The implicit preference was for a purpose-built structure—to facilitate age grading and assure attention to hygiene, health, and sanitation. The DSW demanded extensive recordkeeping and asked that trained personnel, from nurses to caretakers, be hired.38 The stylistic conservatism of the new building addition distinguished

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the Oakland day nursery from others for Bay Area children. The Berkeley Day Nursery opened in 1908 and was called a “Protestant charity” by the Sisters of the Holy Family even though it had been fully funded by the municipality. It hired Ernest Coxhead and Walter Ratcliff to design impressive complexes in 1912 and 1927.39 These architects, involved with the arts and crafts movement, were known for their progressive outlook on design, as was Willis Polk, who designed a day home in San Francisco for the Sisters (to replace one of the three lost during the 1906 earthquake and fire). But even if the architectural styles of these Protestant and Catholic charities differed, the consistent quality of their amenities stood in sharp contrast to that in other facilities. In Oakland, the Western Paper Box Company and the Pacific Coast Canning Company offered seasonal care in the 1920s. At seasonal nurseries, an investigator noted, conditions varied from “the up-to-date fully equipped nursery with playground and kindergarten” to “an unequipped enclosure, where the children were ‘herded’ by an unskilled and untrained attendant.”40 These detrimental conditions added to the suspicion of day homes that was growing in the 1920s. Critics continued to claim that day homes prompted mothers to work outside the home and weakened support for mothers’ pensions and living-wage campaigns (predicated on female homemakers and male bread-winners). In California, the bias against Catholic institutions seeped into the critique. “Experience has taught that in many cases the day nursery is only a public subsidy to low wages,” the CSDSW advised early in 1929. “The mother who has three or more children in the day nursery commonly costs the community more than she earns, and socially and financially she would better be assisted to remain at home.” The mother referred to was Catholic. In a census of day nurseries, made the previous fall, the agency learned that 1,700 kids had received care in twenty-eight licensed facilities. It pointed out that biggest facilities were the Catholic day homes, holding one hundred or more kids. These charities, implicitly charged with warehousing immigrant children, served the large families of industrial workers. The free labor of nuns lowered the cost considerably, the DSW pointed out.41 In addition, since 1918 the CSDSW had encouraged all day homes to affiliate with the National Federation of Day Nurseries, regardless of each charity’s religious character. Alternatives to the federation were not mentioned, including the Catholic association. In the face of this prejudice, others pointed to the value of assistance. St. Vincent’s Day Home “helps in keeping broken homes together by making it possible for self-supporting mothers to keep their children with them

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instead of sending them to live permanently at orphanages or other institutions,” the San Francisco Chronicle insisted in 1923.42 Ethyll M. Dooley, executive secretary of the Association of Catholic Day Nurseries, came to the point. “The day nursery is no longer an agency of doubtful value, but has taken its place in the field of child-welfare,” she insisted. “So long as the mother is the support of the family . . . so long will day nurseries be necessary.”43 That continued to be the case in Oakland. Although centers had been set up in factories and public schools, parents still used St. Vincent’s Day Home. They included Joseph Cumbelich’s mother, who worked with his older sisters at the Pacific Coast Cannery during the summer. “I don’t know that she enjoyed it, but she contributed to the family,” Cumbelich recalled, referring to his mother’s job. “She was remarkable. Her fingers were all cut up because everything was done by hand . . . she’d rip off two peaches today, and two peaches [the next day], take them home in her bag . . . Until she’d amass enough so she could can fruit for the wintertime . . . later it would be pears . . . still later the spinach.” Cumbelich did not attend the day home, but remembered others who did. “There was a day home that the girls used to go in the summertime, young girls to learn how to [do] embroidery or sew . . . crochet . . . and make a dress and that kind of thing.” Even if it was not mentioned by Cumbelich, boys learned to sew too—a point of pride for the women who ran this charity.44 The progressive goals went only so far. A photograph from the early 1920s shows neatly dressed boys and girl, separated by sex and seated in chairs arranged in a semicircle on the day home’s front lawn (figure 9.4). The image suggests the preoccupation with order, cleanliness, and obedience in childhood that was typical of a Catholic day home and encouraged by state welfare officials.45 The photo also seconds what other records indicate to have been the case. Although at first St. Vincent’s Day Home accepted a few children of color, it was racially segregated by 1926. “White race only,” the state welfare agency indicated.46 This phrase simplified the social construction of race in a state where historical circumstances rendered it very complex, but segregation prevailed in Catholic day homes. When criticized for it, the church opened charities for black children in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and New York City’s Harlem, but not in the San Francisco Bay Area.47 In West Oakland, African Americans and their institutions were in plain sight of St. Vincent’s Day Home. Mother Teresa had selected a building around the corner from the Beth Eden Baptist Church, known as the

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“Mother Church,” because it was home to black civic and cultural leaders. Organized as a small prayer group in 1889, the Beth Eden congregation rented space until 1901, when it purchased a building from the Swedish Mission Congregational Church on Filbert Street (figure 9.5). This choice placed the church east of Adeline Street, the western limit to residence set by the railroad for employees in the later nineteenth century.48 Beth Eden anchored the expansion of the black community and in more ways than one. Middle-class women in the congregation took the lead in organizing charities, clubs, and social services for African Americans: the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People and the Fanny Jackson Coppin Club at the end of the nineteenth century; and the Mothers’ Charity Club, the Art and Industrial Club, and other clubs at the beginning of the twentieth.49 Their mandate was to build race pride and redress their exclusion from charities and clubs run by white women. As a notice in the East Bay Colored Directory explained, “The race, in attempting to adapt itself to its environment, developed certain institutions. Restricted by segregation and discrimination from the full enjoyment of the existing order of things, it was compelled to erect an order of its own.”50

Figure 9.4.  Children gathered on the lawn in front of St. Vincent’s Day Home, 1922. Boys and girls are organized in a circle, an example of the enduring impact of Friedrich Froebel’s ideals. In this charity, however, they are separated by sex. The lavish plantings in generous front yards indicate the upper-middle-class origins of this neighborhood, as do the large houses set back from the street on wide lots. From Donald Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters of San Francisco (San Francisco, 1922), plate facing p. 194.

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Figure 9.5. Easter Sunday at Beth Eden Baptist Church, 721 (861) Filbert Street, Oakland, c. 1901. The “talented tenth” of Oakland’s black community are gathered in front of their elegant church building shortly after the congregation bought it. With their dress and deportment the men, women, and children show the importance of respectability to this community. The congregation moved in 1925 to another church nearby. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

A Philanthropic Order of Their Own Black clubwomen acted on this conviction—that they needed to construct an order of their own—as demographic change exacerbated white racism. In the late nineteenth century, African Americans began to leave San Francisco, the center of the black community, and move to Oakland, where more jobs and less expensive housing could be found. The geographic shift escalated in 1906 with the exodus prompted by the earthquake and fire. By 1910 more African Americans lived in Oakland than across the bay (and even more in Los Angeles).51 Racial tensions, between whites and blacks, and class conflict, between newcomers and old-timers in this community, would only increase as the black population soared during the Great Migration. In 1920, 5,500 African Americans lived in Oakland—a small number, given the 216,000 in the city overall. However, the number of African Americans increased by five times between 1910 and 1920—a hint of the magnitude of change to come as migrants from the Deep South poured into the city, looking for work and demanding equality.

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During the interwar years, longtime residents, men and women who had been born and spent their childhoods in the Bay Area, would look back on the pre-migrant period as one of relative ease in race relations. Even if their backward glance was touched by nostalgia, black clubwomen in Oakland did enjoy privileges that stemmed from California residence. They voted without challenge (after 1911), they owned or were married to men who owned real property, they lived in ethnically mixed neighborhoods, and they garnered enough resources to set up impressive, autonomous self-help organizations.52 In this era of state-mandated segregation, they also put up with all sorts of discrimination after the Supreme Court made “separate and equal” the law of the land in 1896. The indicators of inequity in Oakland grew to include segregated jobs, housing, schools, and unions; racially restricted facilities from hospitals to restaurants and swimming pools; and poor public services, including police and fire protection. As Ida Jackson, the first African American hired to teach in Oakland public schools, recalled, “The average white man at that time just didn’t think in terms of blacks ever being a part of the mainstream of things.”53 All levels of government put up with even more glaring iterations of the radical racism that grew during the 1890s to include lynching and other egregious displays of claims to white supremacy. Northern California was not immune. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan organized in Oakland and became so bold as to join Independence Day parades in Richmond (figure 9.6).54 In this situation it is understandable that when black elites faced systems of power that were backed by violence, their resistance to subordination could take understated or compromised forms.55 After the turn of the century, women in the network of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “better class of Negroes” began to intervene, including in California. Across the United States, middle-class black women developed a female vision of racial uplift, defining leadership by their gender as vital to race progress. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW), organized in 1896, called on traditions dating from the days of slavery to take a leading role.56 One task was to fight racial bias in women’s clubs—an issue in Oakland, where white clubwomen refused to admit black women even after eminent black leaders spoke to their organizations.57 The mean spirit in that exclusion, not singular to California, rankled, as did segregated charities and pervasive racist stereotypes of black women as promiscuous, dirty, and tolerant of a family life marred by instability and impurity. The NACW attacked these problems by promoting respectability in all of its activities, including charities opened for women and children. Taking as its motto “Lifting as we climb,” the NCAW used the call to underscore a

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Figure 9.6.  The Ku Klux Klan marching in the Independence Day parade, Richmond, California, 1924. The Richmond Independent reported on the fifth of July that about 750 Klan members had joined the parade, and insisted that they had come from San Francisco, Oakland, Vallejo, and San Jose, but not Richmond. The Klan had hoped to march in Oakland but was refused permission. Men and women marched in full regalia, but without masks. Courtesy of the Richmond Museum of History Collection, P-1538-20.

class-based definition of true womanhood that infused its programs. As the NACW’s president, Mary Church Terrell, pointed out, a clubwoman of color ought to extend a hand to help a less fortunate woman of her race even if she deemed that woman impure. “In no way could we live up to such a sentiment, better than by coming into closer touch with the masses of our women, by whom, whether we will or not, the world will always judge the womanhood of the race,” Terrell wrote, referring to the NACW motto. “Even though we wish to shun them, and hold ourselves entirely aloof from them, we cannot escape the consequences of their acts.” NACW leaders ascribed the lack of moral compass and the resulting openness to sexual exploitation to the legacy of slavery, and to judge its presence they called on material and social indicators: dirty faces, tattered dresses, disorderly households, and rambunctious children.58 With the objective of nurturing respectability, the NACW supported all sorts of charities, from residences for single women who migrated to cities in search of work, to orphanages and day homes for children. Terrell made clear that the day home was high on the list when she stated in 1901 that this was “a charity of which there is an imperative need” in the black community.59 This collective awareness of and response to the need for child

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care may have been a legacy from “other mothering,” a cultural practice of slavery. Black women also realized that mothers needed to work, and in fact more than three-quarters of the NACW membership had been employed themselves at some time. As Sonya Michel notes, “Black clubwomen accepted maternal employment as natural or at least inevitable. They knew that for the low-income mothers of their race, wage-earning labor was not a stopgap but a permanent fact of life.”60 Repurposing was the association’s building strategy of choice. The photographs of charities affiliated with the NACW that illustrate Lifting As They Climb, the first history of the association, indicate that clubwomen used repurposed dwellings for virtually every charity. For example, in 1907 the Phyllis Wheatley Club turned a substantial Chicago row house into a home for single working-class women of color. One year later, the Southern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs opened the Sojourner Truth Home in Los Angeles, in this case setting up a day home within a spacious house. By 1913, the Northern Federation of California Colored Women’s Clubs had been formed, representing clubs in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Stockton as well as Oakland. Clearly, the call to organize had taken hold in northern California. Addie Hunton, writing in The Crisis in 1912, admired the “divine fire of the California organization” and the “large number of intelligent black women” tied to the NACW.61 Elizabeth Brown, first president of the Northern Federation, led it to join with the Southern Federation and establish the California State Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. Seeking to promote race women from Oakland, Brown won the election for president of the state association in 1915; Hettie Tilghman, also from Oakland, succeeded her in 1917. In due course the California group affiliated with the NACW.62 Brown and Tilghman joined Tribune columnist Delilah Beasley, Fanny Wall, and other women to accentuate gender in racial uplift and selfbetterment (figure 9.7). They sought to improve the perception of black women in the white mind through elevating the place of the home, art, and culture in African American urban life.63 Hunton made the point in The Crisis while admiring the liberal cast to social life for women of color in the Bay Area. “In Oakland and San Francisco, two of the most cosmopolitan of American cities, where Mexican, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish women are freely mixed with their American sisters, we are told that colored women stand out as representatives of a culture which manifests itself most of all in their beautiful home life.”64 The physical proximity of poorer and wealthier women, a consequence of discrimination, also made it difficult to forget that the race problem was also one of poverty. A

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Figure 9.7.  Fanny Wall and Lucinda B. Tilghman, undated photographs. These portraits depict each woman’s interpretation of respectability as applied to dress. Wall and Tilghman helped to establish the day home and nursery for black children in West Oakland. From Deliah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail-Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919), 112, 166.

meaningful solution required political action and philanthropic intervention, not only cultural improvement. The Northern Federation appreciated that situation, adding to the NACW motto, “Lifting as we climb,” the phrase “Service deeds not words.”65 The immediate challenge was to care for children in a community where most mothers worked for wages. By 1912, the Mothers’ Charity Club had a building in hand. “Oakland has several wide-awake clubs,” Hunton explained. “The Mothers’ Club has been the resource of needy mothers and children, and has maintained a children’s home at great sacrifice to themselves.”66 The success of the Sojourner Truth Home, along with endemic discrimination by welfare agencies, may have prompted the club to take action. As one member recalled, the “far-sighted club women” recognized “the lack of services rendered minority groups, particularly the Negro child by the Associated Charities.”67 Hunton did not identify the building, but it’s likely that her colleagues had already rented the house on the Peralta Street to care for kids. Wall and Tilghman took the lead in fund-raising after the Northern Federation decided to buy this house. “Dear Co-Workers,” they wrote to the Mothers’ Charity Club in 1916. “It is the desire of the Association that all clubs

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make an effort to hand in as much money as possible. . . . Thanking you in advance for your much needed assistance.”68 Initially called the Northern Federation Home and Day Nursery, the home was later renamed to honor Mrs. Wall, first manager of the charity.69 Was this building an example of the “culture of dissemblance?” That phrase, coined by Darlene Clark Hine, describes the need of black women to adopt circumspect behavior and bearing so as to deflect white attention from their public work.70 The federation staked multiple claims on public space, even if the small size of the black population (and Klan activity) encouraged deference to whites in Oakland. “Whenever a community or a people begin to advance materially and intellectually,” the real estate broker and race leader, E. B. Gray, wrote in the Western American, “rarely, if ever, does that community give much thought to the physical and intellectual development of its women, particularly our group.” Gray praised the Art and Industrial Club for raising funds to build a home. “Consider what an advantage it would be, therefore, to have for our women a club building, adequately equipped with all the modern facilities of education and recreation,” he wrote. “Such a building would be a new stimulus to their development.” In time, that effort succeeded.71 Remember also that the Mothers’ Charity Club did not hide the day home. It selected a visible building on a main street, and announced its purpose with a large sign. The Northern Federation construed all affiliate institutions to be exemplars of black women’s public culture, regardless of the physical method used to make them. Starting in the 1920s, clubwomen proudly called the Fannie Wall Children’s Home a monument. Like the physical structure, the linguistic marker enunciated the intent to build race pride and provide social services in the black community. “Monuments:—Something erected to perpetuate the memory of a person or event,” Mary Netherland explained. “A notable structure or deed worthy to be considered as a memorial of some event or person.” She went on to elaborate that clubwomen had made “Deeds not words” realistic by establishing the Sojourner Truth Home; the East Side Shelter, also in Los Angeles; the Mme. C. J. Walker Home for Young Women, in San Francisco; and the Fannie Wall Children’s Home. Netherland observed that the Fannie Wall building, “the third monument” set up by the state association, was “the outcome of the very great need found to exist in this community for a home for our needy children.” She reminded women of their duty to support the institutions. “These are your Monuments, each Club women [sic] is part owner, as such, each Club has the responsibility of helping to maintain these by observing the Anniversary of these your Monuments.”72

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Her counsel alluded to the pervasive racial discrimination in welfare agencies. In 1923 the Fannie Wall Children’s Home joined the Community Chest as a charter member, as did St. Vincent’s Day Home, the Ladies’ Relief Society, and the West Oakland Home. The Community Chest partially funded operating costs for charities and required that the balance be raised privately. In a newsletter ostensibly published by children who were its beneficiaries, it described both day homes in these similar terms: Then there are other little children whose mothers have to work in the daytime to earn money for them. If they have no one to leave the children with they can take them to one of the Day Nurseries of the Community Chest like the Children’s Day Home and Nursery that the Sisters of the Holy Family run or the Fanny Wall Children’s Day Home and Nursery for colored children.73

Niceties aside, the contributions to each day home were decidedly unequal, as were the institutional budgets. St. Vincent’s received 86 percent of its operating budget ($15, 674) from the Community Chest in 1924; the Fannie Wall Home took in 41 percent of its budget ($3,676).74 Between 1918 and 1923 the Community Chest reported that 4,385 children resided in the orphanage or attended the day care center. That translates to an average of about 875 children each year. About 600 kids used the St. Vincent’s Day Home in 1923. The Northern Federation struggled to compensate for the skew in allocation, which was especially egregious given the disparity in the number of children in residence, and pressed the Community Chest to increase its contribution. “On the home staff are four paid workers. It is costing about five or six thousand dollars to run this institution and state requirements are becoming more rigid and exacting yearly thus increasing expenditures,” Esther Jones Lee wrote in the Independent. “The needs are great and the cause praiseworthy. If the Community Chest could give the Board one half of this amount yearly, it would make the burden lighter on the women and save the president . . . and her board many a sleepless night.” Black clubwomen ran fundraisers for the Community Chest through the 1930s, even though the group did not amend its discriminatory policies.75 Why did the Northern Federation work with the Community Chest when faced with ample evidence that it was rife with racism? It put up with these practices not only because of its need for funds, but also because membership in the Community Chest added a stamp of approval to its philanthropic endeavor. This was necessary in the Bay Area, where white professionals dominated welfare agencies. Because they favored mothers’

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pensions administered by trained social workers, those agencies suspected any volunteer organization of offering inferior care to children. Imagine the challenges black women faced! The Northern Federation hired a registered nurse, as required by the CSDSW, and added a trained social worker to its staff; it was the first children’s agency of the Community Chest to do so in the East Bay.76 In some measure the strategy of accommodation worked. As the Bay Area’s black population began to soar in the 1920s, child welfare agencies from Alameda, San Francisco, and Solano counties referred black children to the home. Soon enough, the building, licensed in 1924 to hold no more than fifteen children, was overflowing.77 Faced with the force of entrenched racism and the swelling population at their home, the clubwomen had limited options, to say the least. Welfare agencies claimed that black kids needed to be institutionalized because not enough “qualified” black families could be found to care them.78 Where else to go? Not to the West Oakland Home. Its managers refused to admit black children, even as its number of white children dwindled. Furthermore, the building had been condemned. Once again, clubwomen decided to repurpose a dwelling.

Racial Uplift on Linden Street Flush with success after having hosted the 1926 national NACW convention in Oakland, the Northern Federation selected a handsome house on Linden Street for the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (see figure 1.14, site 15). Charles Mau, a German-American architect, designed the building in the 1880s: an upper-middle-class residence in form, size, and detail by any group’s standard. In the early 1880s Francis Reichling, a Prussian-born gold assayer who worked in San Francisco, subdivided his property at the corner of Linden and Eighth Streets. At the time of the subdivision, Reichling lived on the site, but that did not prevent him from erecting five more buildings, to the north facing Linden Street. The largest, a two-story wood-frame house, became the family’s new home, while the smaller dwellings served as rental properties.79 Purchased in 1928 for five thousand dollars, the former Reichling rental property offered a refined architectural setting to middle-class black women, suited to their cultural aspirations (figure 9.8). More polished than the plainer building on Peralta Street, tangible emblems of gentility—bay windows, a fanlight, and recessed front door and porch—embellished the facade and expressed the goal of racial uplift and advancement. In short order, the building would be packed full of kids ranging from three to four-

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Figure 9.8.  Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, 815 (909) Linden Street, Oakland, undated photograph. This, the second site of the charity, had been built in the 1890s. It was an upper-middle class home by any standard. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

teen years old. The orphanage held as many as twenty children, and the day care center fifteen. There is no record of how the spaces were differentiated, but it’s likely that the charity separated two uses informally: the orphanage and day care center shared the entry and playground; the day care center used the first floor; and the orphanage used the bedrooms upstairs. This strategy, which capitalized on the typical organization of a middleclass house, would have made sense to Wall and her colleagues. In addition to making day homes centers for “other mothering,” black clubwomen aimed to provide “other homes”—places that promoted the middle-class home and family and made the benefit of self-help evident in everyday life.80 The surviving photographs of the Oakland day home do not show institutional austerity, but rather speak to the charity’s interest in comfort, maternalism, and domesticity—in making a “home-like atmosphere” inside the building, as one clubwoman avowed.81 The photos also make clear the shift in ideals for the good childhood in the interwar years. They depict

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Figure 9.9.  Birthday party at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 815 (909) Linden Street, Oakland, 1940s. When this illustration was used for a fundraising brochure, the caption read: “Shown here are youngsters of the Fannie Wall Home who enjoyed the birthday party given in November for children whose birthdays fall within the fall quarter. These are youngsters who will be benefitted by the 1946 Charity Ball of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery.” From Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Charity Ball—Building Fund—Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (Oakland, 1946). Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

gender-integrated settings, children at play (and equipment for it), and holiday celebrations (figure 9.9). The home is also presented as a safe haven—a place to protect needy children from the lures of city streets and to disseminate middle-class notions of propriety and decorum. The concerns about sexuality, which were ingrained in uplift ideology, prompted the promotion of purity and chastity in all NACW charities, including those for children.82 Black elites asserted that this course of action was part and parcel of the struggle to win power in a racially segregated society and to set the stage for far-reaching democratizing reforms. During the interwar years, however, the cultural values of uplifters became suspect to black men and women of another mind. Working-class women in Oakland accused clubwomen of mirroring, not challenging, white privilege, and in some measure the charge was correct. Social class, coupled with implicit biases about skin color, dic-

Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland / 315

tated decisions about membership.83 The Mothers’ Charity Club welcomed relatively privileged women like Hettie Tilghman, Fanny Wall, and Chlora Hayes Sledge, who, because they were married to professionals and businessmen, could focus on volunteer work and community building projects. The State Association and the Northern Federation also made a place for college-educated women even if they were also migrants who worked for a living. Tarea Hall Pittman, born in California, and Frances Albrier, from Alabama, joined Ida Jackson, from Mississippi, to break ingrained racial barriers in social work and union jobs in the East Bay. Albrier, for example, integrated the Richmond shipyards during World War II. East Bay clubs gave working-class women a harder time than the strongminded race leaders active in the local branch of the National Association for Colored People (NAACP). The Northern Federation may have accepted employment as a fact of maternal life, but it disapproved of migrant women who preferred industrial jobs to service work, and balked at admitting them as members. According to the US Census, more than 80 percent of black women employed in Oakland worked in domestic service in 1930—a category that included child care.84 The Fanny Jackson Coppin Club diligently policed the boundaries of membership to exclude that sort of black woman. It set a woman’s pioneer heritage as a condition for membership, but refused to let her join if she worked for a living. Mary Netherland was one such woman who overcame the objection to her membership in the Northern Federation (figure 9.10). Born in West Oakland, the granddaughter of an escaped slave, she volunteered at the children’s home and in time became president of the Mothers’ Charity Club and a superintendent of the state association.85 It is a commonplace that this sort of intraracial conflict confounded racial congregation; less known is that it also obscured shared values. Because the spatial dimensions of institution building expose the dynamics of power and culture in any community, a close reading in Oakland suggests that black clubwomen had in mind more radical purposes than the classdriven goals of uplift and assimilation.86 In this sense, their work on the ground for kids in Oakland belongs to the long civil rights movement; their activism in the 1920s and 1930s anticipated the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, here shown to have had northern and urban roots as well as southern and rural ones.87 St. Vincent’s Day Home and the Fannie Wall Children’s Home sat on the same city block. The properties abutted each other, separated only by the wood fence between their back yards (figure 9.11). After the African American day home opened, black and white children shared this node of

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Figure 9.10.  Mary C. Jackson Netherland at her house, 714 (860) Pine Street, Oakland, taken in the 1940s. Netherland, who had been born in this house in 1876, is standing on its back porch, dressed in clothes that she probably wore to work. Although her offer to help at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home was initially refused, it was later accepted, and she volunteered there for many years. Courtesy of Charlotta Bass / California Eagle Photograph Collection, Southern California Library, Los Angeles, scl-m0286.

the charitable landscape. The provocative claim to urban space, made by middle-class black women, put black children at the forefront of the battle for racial equality. Their decision, to insist that children of different races play in the same place, hinted at the scope of democratizing changes to come. The architectural form of the buildings verified the consequences for children of the sharp difference in access to resources. White kids came to a large, elegant building on a prominent crosstown street. They had much more room to play in that building’s more substantially planted and developed grounds than black kids did at the day nursery for colored children. Putting the Fannie Wall Children’s Home on Linden Street also fortified the node of black cultural institutions emerging in West Oakland. Imagine the import of this cluster in African American public culture, keeping in mind that access to public space is key to political power, even if dominated by class, gender, or racial subordination.88 Straddling Seventh Street, the center of black-owned businesses and entertainment, the Beth Eden Church was one block south of the day home, and the Linden Branch of the YWCA, known as the “Colored Y,” was across Linden Street (figure 9.12; see also figure 1.14, site 16). With Hettie Tilghman and Ida Jackson in the lead, race women brought the YW project to fruition in 1920.89 Like black women in other cities, they decided to repurpose an upscale house, after the decision

Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland / 317

of the national board to segregate led to the formation of branches across the country. At the Linden YW, which was as “hyperdomestic” as any other during the interwar years, educated women protected their position as race leaders and power brokers. They also offered affordable housing and programs of interest to working women employed in white-collar jobs.90 In short order, black men followed their lead and added another imprint to this node in the charitable landscape—a node that also articulated the black public sphere. In 1927, Rev. L. A. Brown of the First AME Church organized the Market Street branch of the YMCA; the director, W. E. Watkins, an attorney, moved it to West Oakland in the mid-1930s. One site was next door to the Fannie Wall Children’s Home; another was around the corner.91 Rev. A. M. Ward, an elder of the AME Zion Church, and his wife, Lydia, lived on Linden Street, three doors north of the day home. Taken together, the day home, the colored branches of the YWCA and YMCA, and Beth Eden Church are the physical evidence for this important point: Black women made a place for themselves in public culture as they

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Figure 9.11.  St. Vincent’s Day Home and Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Oakland, site plan, 1951. Key: (1) St. Vincent’s Day Home; (2) Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery; (3) Linden Street Branch YWCA; (4) building rented by Market Street Branch YMCA; (5) Mexican Baptist Church, formerly Beth Eden Baptist Church; (6) St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, formerly St. Marcus Church (German Evangelical Lutheran) and also used as a synagogue in the 1930s; (7) Church of God in Christ; (8) St. Joseph’s Portuguese Church; (9) St. John Bosco Center for Catholic Youth. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1951), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

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Figure 9.12.  The Linden Street (“Colored”) Branch of the YWCA, Oakland, undated photograph. This building is one of several that made up the node of black cultural institutions in the charitable landscape. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

fought racial segregation. “Most black women in this network used separate institution-building and anti-segregation tactics at the same time,” Linda Gordon has argued.92 Did the decision to put a black daycare center in close proximity to a white one indicate interest in interracial cooperation? Possibly, because black and white women were beginning to collaborate in Oakland. After the 1926 NACW convention publicized the accomplishments of middle-class black women, white counterparts began to lend a hand. The Independent made the point in 1929 when it praised Wall’s triumph in setting up the charity: “The successful operation of the Home has been a source of comfort and joy to those good men and women, both white and colored, who assisted through the years to establish this home.”93 White mothers also used the Fannie Wall Home. “It was the only home in the Bay Area that did that,” Frances Albrier stated, referring to the open door policy.94 Pamela Augustine McMullen stayed in the child care center in the late 1940s and early 1950s while her mother recovered from polio. For

Childhood on the Color Line in West Oakland / 319

all sorts of reasons, including the fact that Pamela was of Irish heritage, the logical site for her placement would have been St. Vincent’s Day Home, but her parents, who were avowed atheists, wanted nothing to do with a Catholic charity. According to Sara McMullen, the care offered to her sister at the Fannie Wall Home made it possible for her mother to not only give attention to restoring her own health but also keep her job as a legal secretary. “Her work helped her to regain her mental balance, self-worth,” McMullen recalled, “and she was able to be financially self-sufficient, too.” When the president of the NACW, Mrs. William W. Stewart, visited the Oakland facility in 1951, the Oakland Tribune illustrated the story with a photo of her standing with boys and girls in the playground. One of the youngsters is Pamela McMullen, hanging in the play structure.95 Race women demanded action on other urgent matters that were especially important to their sex and for their kids. Delilah Beasley underscored progress in defeating the use of racial stereotypes in print when she wrote a letter to the editor of the Western American that congratulated the African American journalist on his successful launch of the city’s newest “colored weekly” newspaper. She reminded him that she wrote the column “Activities among Negroes” for the Oakland Tribune, a newspaper run by whites, “to try to create a better understanding between the races,” and that she had convinced her editors to reduce, if not cease, the printing of racial epithets.96 Clubwomen held leadership positions in the NAACP and the Alameda County League of Voters, and forged alliances with other groups. In 1931 the California State Association of Colored Women’s Clubs organized to defeat legislation that would have legalized racial discrimination in public playgrounds and swimming pools by setting aside “certain hours of the day” for African American children to use them. The Oakland Council of Church Women (a white group) met in the downtown YWCA to condemn the legislation as an “un-Christian and backward step” in race relations.97 As much as Beasley praised the group’s resolution, and as much as the YW took the lead in forging interracial cooperation, the choice of meeting place must have tried her patience. The YW barred blacks from using the indoor pool, renting a meeting room, or rooming at the facility.98 To add insult to injury, the elegant building had been designed by a woman—Julia Morgan, the leading female architect in the Bay Area. The hope for interracial cooperation continued during World War II. The federal government built many new child care centers in the Bay Area during the war, and perhaps because of this innovation, the California Council of Negro Women, with Pittman as president, joined forces with the Council of Church Women and the California Federation of Women to campaign

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for more centers after peace was declared. The Alameda County Welfare Commission also studied child-care needs and concluded that women working outside the home preferred to place their children in affordable, high-quality facilities even though federally funded facilities were not enrolled to capacity. Black and white women traveled together to Sacramento to meet with elected representatives, starting with the governor, and make the case for child care. Pittman echoed NACW arguments to point out that the need was especially pressing in the black community because most mothers worked.99

Congregation and Conflict: “Fannie Wall is Calling” Even with interracial cooperation, even with political activism, institution building by clubwomen for disadvantaged children proved to be a doubleedged sword during the Great Migration. The embrace of uplift ideology, infused with the rhetoric of respectability, true womanhood, and personal virtue, seemed arrogant and self-serving to working-class women of color. They included migrants who, as World War II loomed on the horizon, left economically depressed Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana to look for work in the shipyards of Oakland and Richmond, California. About 7,500 African Americans lived in Oakland in 1930, 8,460 in 1940, and 47,560 in 1950. Overall, the population increased to 384,575 in 1950. By that time migrants outnumbered longtime residents by four to one.100 At that historical moment, when it seemed that industrial employment and mass mobilization would meet hopes for race advancement, intraracial differences exploded concerning the place of autonomous black institutions in community life.101 Labor militancy in the 1930s and the general strike in Oakland in 1946 only added fuel to this fire. Young migrant women who became industrial workers had little use for assimilationist constructions of respectability, self-help, and female purpose; and black elites, including clubwomen, castigated their cultural practices. As the historian Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo has argued, “Established residents and white migrants held on to the myth of cultural inferiority [of black migrants] and used it to justify racial discrimination and economic exploitation, preserve real or illusory group privileges, and help one group attain insider status.”102 Seen in that light, the decision to promote middle-class tastes in food, music, dress, deportment, and habits of worship inside the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and the Linden Street YWCA worked to exacerbate the differences rather than to build solidarity.

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However, black clubwomen interpreted the politics of respectability in Oakland with a flexibility that echoed the fluidity in other cities. Women created a public place where their voices could be heard, without deference to men; they insisted that women had a right to work and that their children’s needs should be met in public rather than at home; they also worked with men in trade unions and the entertainment business to raise money for the Fannie Wall Children’s Home.103 This dexterity, especially the formation of cross-class coalitions, points not only to the flexibility in their social imagination but also to the precarious standing in the era of racial segregation for even the most advantaged blacks.104 As migrant women and children poured into West Oakland, the Northern Federation realized that it needed to refurbish the Fannie Wall Children’s Home.105 The Federation’s goal, replacing the repurposed house on Linden Street with a new building, would have been a challenge at any time, but it proved especially daunting in the 1930s and 1940s. The need to build became apparent as the cultural condescension of clubwomen fueled suspicions about management practices and admission policies in the charity. The black press published charges that Wall had absconded with the deed; other reports suggested intentional racial segregation. The building was also thought to have been condemned. In hindsight the charges seem disingenuous, given the hardships that all charities for children faced during the Great Depression.106 “For many years, the home struggled, and did not have enough room for the children, that the mothers needed—to give them care while they were employed,” Albrier recalled.107 Or, as Sledge explained in the late 1940s, “This area has a large Negro population; for this reason the clients are primarily from the Negro race.”108 Conversely, others charged that racial bias prompted public agencies to enforce building regulations selectively—that is, to target a black-run institution for black children. NAACP leader Tarea Hall Pittman, who worked at the home as a social worker, disputed the allegation. “I knew that it was being run like somebody’s private home, and not according to standards,” she recalled. “The women that I was working with seemed to feel that they were being put upon because it was a Negro institution. It wasn’t that at all. There was a state manual, which called for standards of so many children per room, fire escapes, and certain definite physical things, which a person had to have to operate an agency like this.” Pittman praised the demand for enforcement, because black kids deserved high-quality care in a safe place. “There were government people, who were conscientious, and they weren’t just winking their eyes and saying, ‘Now these are some poor old colored

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Figure 9.13.  The board of directors of the Fannie Wall Home, undated photograph. Chlora Hayes Sledge, president, is second from left. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

ladies.’ They were saying, ‘You must follow the standards that are required in homes of this kind; you must bring it up to standard!’ ”109 To make that happen, to advance the reconditioning program, the charity needed to reorganize. Chlora Hayes Sledge, president of the Northern Federation and the children’s home, formed an advisory committee during the war and incorporated the home as an independent entity, although the Northern Federation continued to hold title to the Linden Street property (figure 9.13).110 The Works Progress Administration made some playground improvements during the New Deal, but lack of funds and high demand for child care at this facility made it difficult to put other changes in place. Child care centers opened under the Lanham Act for children of women working in war-related industries may have been underenrolled in the East Bay, but the Fannie Wall Home was full.111 The home needed $17,150 to operate in 1945; the Community Chest offered $7,500, and Sledge extracted an additional $3,200 for repairs. It was possible to build escape stairs, improve bathrooms, protect against pests, and otherwise to ameliorate conditions until a new home could be built. “Our program for 1945 emphasizes ‘Expansion,’” she told donors, emphasizing the benefit of a modern fireproof building.112

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After the war, the campaign for a new building revived in earnest. A few miles to the north stood stellar examples—the sleek, modernist child care centers opened during the war to help women working at the Richmond shipyards. In postwar Oakland, however, the Northern Federation couldn’t count on the help that Henry J. Kaiser had received from the federal government during the global conflict. The Maritime Commission paid in full for the Maritime and Pullman child development facilities.113 Here the point about the need for flexibility in the politics of respectability comes into play. The charity welcomed assistance from the Dining Car Cooks and Waiters Union. Like the Pullman Porters Union, this union, because it was organized by blacks, welcomed black members; it also had an active ladies’ auxiliary.114 Starting in the early 1930s, Henderson Davis and Charles Johnson, who worked at the Southern Pacific commissary, “played the roles of ex-officio Santa Clauses and fairy godfathers” at the Fannie Wall Home and delivered treats to children at Christmas, Easter, and other holidays.115 Johnson also answered the charity’s appeal for funds, “Fannie Wall is calling” by organizing in 1946 the first of several charity balls.116 This and other affairs that followed helped to augment the building fund (figure 9.14). “Contrary to popular opinion, the Fannie Wall Home building has never been condemned,” Sledge noted in a program. Rather, welfare authorities and the fire marshal made it clear that the home did not satisfy state standards or the city building code. She explained that to qualify in every physical respect as a children’s home and day nursery, the building should be fireproof, should have doors of iron and its sleeping quarters on the first floor. Because of inadequate floor space, it is not feasible to have the sleeping quarters on the first floor, and although the building is in good shape and will be standing when many others have fallen, it is not fireproof and cannot be made so, without an outlay of more expense than the entire plant is actually worth.117

The lack of ample playground space and overcrowding in all aspects of the home’s work also made a new building necessary. Starting in 1946 and continuing through the late 1940s, men and women from the “talented tenth” turned out to support the building fund, as did African Americans with other cultural proclivities. Slim Jenkins, who owned a popular nightclub on Seventh Street, and Charles E. “Raincoat” Jones, a gambler and another important figure in the Seventh Street entertainment business, contributed to the project. Middle-class women of color had no trouble accepting their donations, but in the end the story is a familiar one:

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Figure 9.14.  Ceremony at the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, 1948. Henderson Davis, from the Dining Car Cooks and Waiters Union, is handing a check to Ira B. Johnson, executive director of the home, and Ruth Watts, housemother. From Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Third Annual Charity Ball—Building Fund—Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (Oakland, 1948), 16. Courtesy of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).

they lacked the money they needed to build. With the estimated cost of construction at a hefty $150,000, the clubwomen could not overcome structural inequalities to amend the charitable landscape.118 The home fell into disrepair, as West Oakland became poorer and volunteer work fell out of favor with women. Disagreements between newcomers and old-timers didn’t help. Migrant women looked to industrial work as their source of cultural and economic authority, not to volunteer work. They also resented the superior social stance of clubwomen who counted on the class-driven rhetoric of domestic femininity to absorb cultural differences. “Always, the Woman of every family is the one to make decisions and guidance,” one club in Richmond stated in 1945. Expecting mothers to serve as a “civilizing” force in a diverse community, the club proposed to help their new neighbors “to overcome restrictions and handicaps imbedded in them from the Southern way of living, Social and Political.”119 Sledge and Genevieve McCalla—the superin-

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tendent of the orphanage, who was also a registered social worker—raised related themes when they referred to the charity as a “ ‘port in a storm’ for scores of working parents and a home to many an orphaned tot.”120 At this critical juncture, race leaders withdrew their support for black cultural institutions like the Fannie Wall Home. In 1946 Marguerite Williams suggested to the YWCA that it open a branch in Richmond. She thought it should be modeled on the Linden Street branch, which she had used when living in West Oakland. The NAACP vehemently opposed the project, and visited Williams to tell her so. “I had a delegation from the NAACP tell me that I was trying to promote racism,” she said. “I didn’t see it like that.” Setting up a new YW in a black neighborhood would have compromised the push to integrate the all-white facility downtown. The new branch wasn’t built, and Williams resented the outcome. “When we went to the ‘Y’ in Oakland we never thought [that] we were being discriminated against,” she stated. “We never thought about that.” Following a shift in national policy, the Linden Street YW was racially integrated in 1944 and the name changed to the West Oakland Center.121 Other circumstances forced other changes in the early 1950s. New legislation restricted the size and use of dormitories in children’s institutions, and as foster care became the principal solution for the care of orphaned and abused children, the Community Chest refused to fund old-fashioned dormitory-style orphanages.122 The orphanage and day nursery closed, and the purpose of the Fannie Wall Home shifted. Like the Lincoln Home, it became a residential service center for troubled children, and was run by professionals. Unlike the Lincoln Home, it continued a physical decline. “The pressure on the facility is increased by the heterogeneity of the population,” one woman explained in 1957. “The Home is located in a neighborhood, which is deteriorated and neglected,” with “a dearth of suitable recreational and social facilities nearby.” The Fannie Wall Children’s Home lost Community Chest funding in 1957, it stopped accepting boys the next year, and its directors accepted a purchase offer of almost $34,000 from the Oakland Redevelopment Authority in 1962.123 In short order, they bought another house in West Oakland and reopened as a day care center. Soon this home would be run under the auspices of Head Start, the federal program launched by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.

A Hopeful Symbol of Tomorrow To make way for public housing, the Oakland Redevelopment Authority demolished the house on Linden Street along with the Beth Eden Church,

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the Linden Street Branch YWCA, the several buildings used for the Market Street branch of the YMCA, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, and hundreds of other structures. Even if Thomas C. Bell, executive director of the city’s redevelopment authority, praised several institutions as “community corner-stones,” they did not escape the wreckers’ ball.124 Soon enough, a new housing project covered almost every lot on every block near the former site of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery. One parcel escaped: St. Vincent’s Day Home (figures 9.15 and 9.16). Enlarged and racially integrated, this was the only cornerstone in this community to benefit from the urban renewal programs that in the name of reform eradicated every other cultural institution near it, including the Fannie Wall Children’s Home.125 As the neighborhood changed, the Sisters of the Holy Family revised their admission policy to welcome children of color. Before the Second Vatican Council mandated this kind of liberalization, the Sisters erased the color line at the day home, as did nuns who worked with disadvantaged

Figure 9.15.  St Vincent’s Day Home after clearance for the Acorn Redevelopment Project, 1960s. The day home stands alone, surrounded by a chain link fence, and with many other indicators of poverty visible. The tall palm trees, along with the size and grandeur of the house, are all that remain of the upper-middle-class neighborhood built in the second half of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Sisters of the Holy Family.

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Figure 9.16.  St. Vincent’s Day Home, Oakland, site plan, 1972. The day home is the shaded building. It is surrounded by new housing built as part of the Acorn Redevelopment Project. From Sanborn Map Co., “Insurance Map for Oakland, California” (Pelham, New York, 1972), and information culled from city directories, tax records, and fieldwork.

children in black neighborhoods in other American cities. The enduring ties of all of these women and their charity to a specific physical place worked as a force for progressive change.126 By 1961 the intent to integrate was clear in the West Oakland facility. A brochure celebrating the institution’s fiftieth anniversary was the first of many to include images of children of color.127 As plans for the Acorn Redevelopment Project took shape, the Sisters were able to summon resources from the Catholic Church and win support from ambitious political figures. Ronald Reagan, who had aspirations to move to the national stage, was one. “Silhouetted against the barrenness of the level redevelopment project Acorn in West Oakland, there stands a hopeful symbol of tomorrow,” the Montclarion reported in 1965. “St. Vincent’s Day Home remains in all its Victorian splendor as a link between the past and the future. Within its richly paneled walls there lives such an essential spirit to the success of Acorn that it was never even considered a possible victim of the demolition ball.”128 In due course, the Haven house was refurbished and handsome new additions were made, designed by Sanford Hirshen in the 1970s and Michael Pyatok in the 2000s (figure 9.17). Here stands a day care center where children “would feel truly as their own” and be treated “not as things to be

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Figure 9.17.  Addition to St. Vincent’s Day Home, designed by Sanford Hirschen, architects, 1978. This is the sole survivor of the charitable landscape for children built by women in West Oakland. Photograph by the author, 1995.

molded, but people to be unfolded,” Allan Temko, a prize-winning journalist, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978, after the Hirschen addition was completed. The derogatory words that follow give some sense of the entrenched racism and intractable challenges that African Americans faced in West Oakland. “To come upon such a beautiful, well-ordered and altogether loving environment in the depths of a poverty-racked, filth littered ghetto, where it stands as an island of hope amid the vandalized, burnt out wreckage of the six-year-old Acorn project, is little short of a revelation,” Temko wrote. An “ugly cyclone fence” separated an “oasis of civility” from the “barbarism of the surrounding slum.”129 Temko underscored the obvious when he contrasted the success of St. Vincent’s Day Home, renovated and expanded at modest cost, with the very expensive, colossal catastrophe next door. An architectural vision grounded in repurposing and incremental growth had triumphed while purpose-built construction dependent on erasure had resoundingly failed. Temko also singled out for praise two remarkable young nuns, Sister Ann Maureen and Sister Corinne Marie, who had reconceived and rebuilt the day home as a racially integrated institution serving mostly black and Vietnamese children from predominantly single-parent homes.130 However, he

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did not mention that the Hirshen addition sat directly on top of the AfricanAmerican day home. After the ORA purchase, a powerful friend of the Catholic charity, an “angel,” convinced the city to turn over the cleared parcel to St. Vincent’s Day Home.131 No physical trace of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery remains on the property. St. Vincent’s, a vital child care center, stands alone as the sole surviving imprint of the charitable landscape that women initiated for children in West Oakland more than a century ago. This situation is due in part to the fact that the state disenfranchised a black institution to the benefit of a white one. This sobering story is all too familiar in American urban history, but even so, it underscores the frailty of singular interpretations of the urban experience, especially ones that highlight the overarching devastating effects of state power on blacks in postwar cities. That the Fannie Wall Home may have been under siege for most of its existence should not obscure other important lessons embedded in the history of this place. In the face of confirmed need, African American women integrated missing social services into the fine grain of their community. Thinking strategically, they repurposed buildings, calling them monuments and making them exemplars of their organization’s determination to provide “Deeds not words.” These structures spoke to conservative, class-bound goals of racial uplift through self-betterment, and other more radical beliefs. Certainly the effects of class privilege infused the landscape of their charity—at its creation and through its use, again at its destruction, and later at its re-creation. Yet, like the white women who were their neighbors for more than thirty years, black clubwomen recognized the spatial component of political power, which was especially important when improving cities for children. That their cultural goals were discounted as assimilationist does not reduce the importance of their architectural additions to the charitable landscape for children. The repurposed buildings inscribed in West Oakland potent, if fragile, examples of the power of black women’s public culture, of a woman’s right to work, and of any child’s right to day care outside the home.

Epilogue

Let’s return to where we started in West Oakland: Peralta Street, early in the morning on a late summer day. This time it’s 1960, when Annie Mae Dugger Patterson woke up to a shocking sight and an even worse sound: a Sherman tank rolling down her street, primed to start clearing buildings (figure E.1). The wrecking contractor, Aldo S. Allen, had taken a calculated risk when he offered the US Army two thousand dollars for this huge piece of surplus war materiel. In the end his decision to invest in a 73,000-pound machine proved worthwhile. The proposal to use an army tank, more efficient than the usual instrument of destruction, a derrick-operated claw scoop, and the consequent low bid, ten thousand dollars, won Allen a plum prize: the demolition contract for Project Gateway, a multimillion dollar urban renewal project in West Oakland.1 It took Allen ten minutes to knock down a small “ancient” house; in due course the tank scraped clean twelve city blocks, some twenty acres in all. This was one reason why government officials touted Project Gateway as an exemplar of the efficacy of top-down urban planning; another was the cooperation between city and federal agencies, made possible by the 1949 and 1954 US housing acts.2 All too quickly, residents had good reason to doubt the government’s prediction of success. Speedy construction did not follow speedy demolition in this part of the city, where most of the African American community lived.3 Rather, it took about a decade for the centerpiece of Project Gateway to open: an enormous postal sorting facility that in the end cost taxpayers twenty-five million dollars. To add insult to injury, racially segregated construction crews built the 500,000-square-foot building—fortress-like, massive, framed and clad in concrete, and equipped with electronic mail handling equipment that broke down almost immediately

Figure E.1. In 1960 the Oakland Tribune published a sequence of five photographs recording the use of a surplus army tank to demolish houses for the postal center. Two are shown here. The captions read, in order: “A tank prepares to attack first house in new post office site clearance plan”; “Wham! The Old West Oakland structure shudders as the huge tank bites into it!”; “Barely visible now, the big tank eats its way into the heart of the old home”; “Its doom sealed, the frame structure begins to fall as the tank pushes through”; “Dust debris and splintered wood are all that’s left of the ancient dwelling.” Since the original photos have been lost, all that remains of this important record is a photocopy of the original article and the photographs made from microfilm. From “Wrecker Uses Sherman Tank to Blitz Old Homes,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 16, 1960, 13.

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(figure E.2). The decision, to hire whites only to build, belied solemn guarantees made during the planning process. To win local—that is, black—support for Project Gateway, white politicians promised underemployed men in this poverty-stricken neighborhood that plenty of high-paying construction jobs would be on offer. Needless to say, the men’s anger ran deep when the jobs program, like their houses, evaporated into thin air.4 I expect that Annie Patterson stood in front of her house on Peralta Street and watched with mixed emotions as demolition started on that August morning. She felt horror because she knew that the tank’s actions, described by the Tribune as “attack,” “gunning,” “eats its way,” and “blitz,” would displace about one thousand people and cost some three hundred families their homes; their kids would also lose their neighborhood school, their recreation center, and their playground (see figures 7.9 and 7.11).5 She felt relief because she knew her family’s home would be spared (see figures 1.11 and 1.12). She felt pride because she knew that her outrage—and the opposition that she had organized to the orchestrated federal taking of property—ensured an architectural outcome that would be favorable to her family and friends, men and women who in the face of entrenched racism had garnered the resources needed to buy property in this

Figure E.2. US Post Office Sorting Facility, Oakland. Seen from the elevated platform at the West Oakland stop of the BART train, the historic residential fabric to the west stands in stark contrast to the enormous public building. Photograph by the author, 1997.

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Figure E.3. Arthur Patterson standing on the second floor of the lodging house that was built by James Davidson in the late 1880s and bought by his family after World War II. Photograph by the author, 1995.

neighborhood. “Mama wouldn’t move!” her son, Arthur Patterson, told me (figure E.3). “And all of these neighbors around here wouldn’t move, that’s why it stopped where it is. They would have taken the whole thing.” Patterson punched the air for emphasis. “Mama wouldn’t move! All of this was in dispute. So they stopped . . . the line was right there. Everything on that side of Peralta was demolished. And everything on this side of Peralta they left.”6 Erasure didn’t make sense to a woman like Annie Patterson, even if she lived in a physically declining neighborhood—one designated “blighted” by the City Planning Commission in 1949.7 Like other African Americans of her generation, she arrived in California during the Great Migration, the diasporic movement of a disenfranchised people north “to reap” what one historian has called “the fruits of liberty.”8 Mrs. Patterson had been a schoolteacher in Mississippi before she married a sharecropper and moved with him to rural Arkansas. She especially did not want her children to grow

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up in an “environment as hopeless as Arkansas” was for black people in the 1930s. Her evidence for the hopelessness included having to send her five-year-old son to hide under the bed during a nighttime raid of the Ku Klux Klan. On arrival in Oakland in 1939, she rented a room in the lodging house built by James Davidson in 1888 and probably owned by John Fretas when she and her family moved in (see figure 5.6). Soon after, the landlord hired her to run the establishment. Auspiciously, during an acute housing shortage, the job came with a place to live: a large room behind the grocery store that first Fretas and then the Pattersons set up in the former saloon. During and after the war, African Americans crowded into small houses in West Oakland, forced there by loss of housing units (one study puts the number of lost units at thirty thousand), racial segregation, and high rents elsewhere in the city. The Pattersons’ situation was extreme. The entire family—Arthur, his parents, his siblings, and finally his grandfather—lived in one room for years.9 No longer a multiracial port of entry, West Oakland was “on a steep path to total racial segregation” by the late 1940s, the historian Robert Self notes.10 Job loss, housing loss, and population loss sent this part of the city on a tragic trajectory, as Arthur Patterson knew intimately. During the wartime boom his father worked in the shipyards; jobs were plentiful as the federal government invested in defense industries, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt acquiesced to demands for fair employment put on the table by black union leaders. Afterwards, the sharecropper-turned-industrial-worker could only find a job as a janitor, as the urban economy deindustrialized. Yet this family won a leg up on the economic ladder by other means. The Pattersons took advantage of the depressed property values that with racial bias, new tax policies, and a host of other factors encouraged white neighbors to flee to the suburbs. Their first purchase was the rooming house, with the property transfer recorded on a brown paper bag. Even if they had desired a bank loan, it would not have been possible, given endemic and widespread redlining. By 1945 the Pattersons owned all of the buildings that James Davidson had constructed, as well as four other lots that were vacant at purchase.11 Old-timers in Oakland insisted that Southern migrants needed uplift, that black newcomers needed to be taught how to accommodate to Northern life and customs. This assertion has been disputed for migrant women who became industrial workers in the 1940s, as it also should be for a migrant woman like Annie Patterson, who became a domestic worker in the 1930s. Other historians have amplified the point, showing that middleclass blacks, who were not so far removed from migration themselves,

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exaggerated social and cultural differences to protect hard-won advantages.12 All were under siege by 1960. It’s no wonder that Annie Patterson and her neighbors fought the government to protect their property. Homeownership, coupled with a historically varied rental housing culture, allowed migrant women of color to extract economic opportunity from the urban landscape as they also created a measure of liberty in their new Northern lives. A better childhood was high on their agenda—even if the advantages to black children of living in a distressed neighborhood were not evident to white social workers, city planners, and architects. For Arthur Patterson, the benefits of the urban North were clear, although he lived in a racially segregated neighborhood with high rates of unemployment and poverty, poor public schools, and escalating police brutality that targeted black male youth.13 Bottom line: there was no need for a little boy to hide under the bed from the Klan. Prescott Elementary School was within walking distance; the New Century Recreation Center and playground were across the street from his home, as was the McFeeley annex to the elementary school. These places may have become battered and bruised over the years, and they may have lost their stylish appeal as architectural fashion changed, but they continued to deliver the promise of a better childhood to kids. They demonstrated a child’s right to childhood and the sense that the child had become a subject of social solidarity, with citizenship rights. These included the right to learn and to play in public places purposefully made for a young person. For young migrants, these sorts of spaces had the added benefit of helping them learn to navigate the urban world that had become their new home. For Arthur Patterson, this negotiation began early in childhood when he walked across Peralta Street to play marbles at the recreation center (knowing all the while that his mother kept an eye on him from a rooming house window). The architectural pattern given to this nucleus—a multipurpose neighborhood center made up of repurposed and purpose-made buildings— had become typical in Oakland. It resulted from the way in which women elected to modernize this city for children. Remember that starting in the 1880s, women realized that it made sense to locate additions to the charitable landscape close to existing public buildings. Women who navigated the worlds of social difference to build a landscape for charity for children created an armature that worked as seed crystals might in another context. It provided a physical framework for community building, linked with the emerging welfare state. Starting in the 1920s, city agencies in Oakland applied the same insight when they opened public schools, recreation centers, and playgrounds close to charities that women had established and which

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were later absorbed by the city. As women in the private sector had done before them, public employees used the strategies of incremental building and adaptive reuse to add new components to the nodes in the charitable landscape. Bona fide public places, owned and operated by the City of Oakland, continued to meet and to demonstrate the needs of children to a larger urban public. The New Century Recreation Center is especially a telling example of the democratizing effects of this transition on kids. After Elizabeth Watt died, the New Century Club continued to meet in the New Century Recreation Center and to sponsor programs that had been of interest to women in this organization since 1900. The club also adopted new projects. One was to run a day nursery at the Prescott Elementary School during the Great Depression.14 The open-door policy also continued as the Great Migration changed this part of the city. Greg Kosmos (born in Greece) and Josephine Jimenez (whose parents were Mexican) used the center; he played games, and she helped her parents to set up a Hispanic heritage club.15 Arthur Patterson fondly remembered the time he spent at the complex, especially during the summer. “People in this area were economically, basically in the same boat,” he recalled. “And when people of the same economic level get together, they’re colorblind. We both are struggling to survive. And we both do whatever it takes.”16 Patterson worked in the family grocery store after school, but during vacations he walked across Peralta Street to take art and music classes at the fieldhouse and to play basketball in the playground. Without places for ordinary encounters, Jane Jacobs insists in Death and Life of Great American Cities, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with necessary people—and no practice or ease in applying the most ordinary techniques of public life at lowly levels.”17 Jacobs cites sidewalks as examples of such public spaces, but her point can also be taken to include a place like the New Century Recreation Center. If the center had survived, it would show that in a just, plural society the urban neighborhood is put at the center of community building. To survive, communities need more than decent housing; locally based and run institutions are critical, as is philanthropy, to establishing and reviving communities. An urban fabric pixelated with small-scale works like New Century Recreation Center would challenge the repressive politics as well as the spatial territories that adhere to interventions of enormous scale, like the post office sorting facility in West Oakland. It would also show that infrastructure means more than transportation, and that kids need to be constructed as central actors in the building of better, more equitable cities and communities.18

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Erased Landscapes However, the relations between an urban setting and larger worlds are not fixed at the time of construction. A node in a charitable landscape, like other cultural landscapes, “is not the product of a collective mind but of many minds working within established, although discontinuous, arenas of power,” as the architectural historian Dell Upton has written.19 Because of the manner of their making, because of whom they served, and because of egregious state action, the nodes in the charitable landscape for children proved especially vulnerable to state-sponsored slum clearance in the middle of the twentieth century. African American leaders embraced urban renewal in the 1930s, determined to win a fair share of New Deal programs for their community and a more democratic future for Oakland. By the 1960s, urban renewal no longer embodied progressive politics, but rather reeked of entrenched state and thus white authority, of actions that worked to ingrain the color line rather than to dismember its inequalities. The first telltale indicators of fragility in the charitable landscape for children were already apparent during the Great Depression—to anyone who cared to have a look. For instance, on February 14, 1936, Fabio Gregory in­ spected a house on Eighth Street near the corner of Wood Street in West Oakland. Along with other unemployed men, Gregory had been hired by the new City Planning Commission to complete the Real Property Survey, a housing inventory underwritten by the Works Progress Administration.20 The dwelling schedule, the card on which surveyors wrote notes, directed them to judge the physical condition of a structure and to assess the salient features of each dwelling unit and its occupants. To Gregory, the two-story, two-family building appeared unremarkable. It was just an old-fashioned wooden house surrounded by other buildings in varying states of physical decline. At the time of the survey, the upper-story flat had been empty for two years, not unusual in West Oakland during the 1930s, and an unemployed African American laborer, two other adults, and a young child lived in the apartment on the first floor. Four people lived in four small rooms, each paying fifteen dollars a month in rent. Although the aging building needed some repairs, each apartment contained modern conveniences (an icebox, a hookup for a gas stove, electric lighting, and indoor plumbing) and access to a garage. It’s not surprising that Gregory missed the significance of the house on Eighth Street. It was the Huntington house, the first site of the Manse Polytechnic (see figure 6.2). His colleagues also did not realize the importance of the Kester house, another building rented on Eighth Street for the Manse

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Polytechnic, and the Suhl house on Peralta Street, the first site of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery (see figure 9.1). The houses, imprints in the historic network of public places for children, offered a model for neighborhood improvement that stood in stark contrast to the top-down vision of the City Planning Commission. Within a year or two of the completion of the Real Property Survey, John G. Maar, the chief engineer of the commission, culled facts and figures from the surveyors’ notes to justify the slum clearance needed to construct New Deal public housing projects. Ostensibly in the name of modernization and civic improvement, ostensibly in the name of children and a better childhood, Maar led architects and planners—who valorized technical exper­ tise, functional differentiation, and modernization at all costs—to unleash an especially virulent gale of creative destruction in the urban landscape. Based on the belief that slum clearance would work to stabilize neighborhoods in decline, the Maar Report included maps that set out the argument for erasure by documenting disease, crime (including juvenile delinquency), and dilapidated housing. The equation of the same with “homes owned by Negroes,” at the rate of 50 percent in some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, spoke to other pernicious habits of mind.21 C. L. Dellums, the union leader, pointed out that the Oakland Housing Authority didn’t choose to erase the worst or the most dilapidated housing for the two low-income housing projects it launched in West Oakland in 1938. The black community resisted this government taking (as it would others), but the OHA won the long court battle over the exercise of eminent domain. The first site from the charitable landscape to be removed was the West Oakland Home, cleared to make way for Campbell Village (figure E.4). The United States Housing Authority funded this and Peralta Villa, the other public housing project in West Oakland.22 The OHA hired Carl I. Warnecke, John Donovan, Frederick Reimers, H. A. Minton, and Hugh C. White to design both projects. Influenced by New Deal social ideals, German experiments with housing design, and modernist planning concepts, the architects proposed a superblock plan with long, low-slung bars of obviously modernist housing, oriented for sun exposure and surrounded by open space, imagined to be a park. The urban grid was history, as was a variegated streetscape made up of modest wood-frame houses and small yards. So, too, were homeownership and the opportunity to rent a room to a lodger, historically important in this community’s vibrant and variegated rental housing culture.23 After Peralta Villa and Campbell Village opened, the architectural press touted their advantages, including the play space set aside for children,

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Figure E.4. Campbell Village, Oakland, in construction c. 1940. Seen from the roof of Prescott School toward the corner of Campbell and Ninth (Taylor) Streets, the former site of the West Oakland Home is visible to the west, covered with construction material. The Methodist Episcopal Church on the adjacent block (used by the Cooper AME Zion and other congregations) has yet to been torn down. The framing for one housing block is finished, with three others under construction. When the project opened in 1941, nineteen buildings stood on the superblock complex, providing low-rent housing for 154 families. The Oakland port is visible in the background. Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

which also served as an experiment in racial integration (figure E.5). Dellums, who fought for integration from the get-go, won the right for blacks to rent at Peralta Villa, which initially had been conceived as a white-only project. “Integrated segregation” was mandated at Campbell Village, meaning that buildings were checkerboarded (one white, one black).24 As the historian Marilyn Johnston has pointed out, Katherine Legge, who managed tenant selection at the housing authority, indicated that this strategy succeeded. “Given the opportunity, Negroes and white people get along without any friction,” she said in 1942, and “not once have we had the slightest indication of difficulty.” One year later, the OHA implemented racial segregation—to defuse racial tension and limit interracial contact as southern migrants, white and black, continued to pour into the city.25

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After World War II, changes in the zoning resolution, which slated this part of the city for heavy industrial use, sanctioned a quickened pace and escalated scale of destruction. Hundreds of buildings were torn down to make way for more large tracts of subsidized public housing, elevated highways, and, over the years, rapid transit and industrial infrastructure, as well as the mammoth mail sorting facility. As house after house was razed and thousands of people were displaced, the places that made up the charitable landscape in West Oakland fell to the wrecker’s ball. The Huntington, Kester, and Suhl houses escaped, but the Oakland Social Settlement, the successor to the Manse Polytechnic, was torn down to make way for factories and warehouses. Hansen’s Hall, the site of the West Oakland Athenaeum, was razed, as were the Fannie Wall Children’s Home, the Linden Branch YWCA, and every other structure that had once made up the node in the charitable landscape aimed at black children and youth (see figures 9.5, 9.8, and 9.12).

Figure E.5. Campbell Village, Oakland, with a racially integrated playground in 1941. According to Oakland Housing Authority records, Mayor John Slavich, Eleanor van Ahlias, C. M. Walker, and the city manager are inspecting the low-rent housing development. The children are described as “having a thoughtful moment.” Courtesy of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room.

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The Oakland Redevelopment Agency coordinated this demolition when in 1959 it proposed a ten-year scheme for West Oakland called the General Neighborhood Renewal Plan. Arguing that 1,100 acres of new industrial land were needed for Oakland to retain its economic viability in the region, the ORA designated West Oakland, already defined as blighted, as the prime site for slum clearance.26 This plan provided the policy backbone for Project Gateway, the Acorn Redevelopment Project, and the construction of the BART—the widely admired Bay Area Regional Transit system that facilitated metropolitan development but devastated West Oakland. “Industry and housing can’t live together,” Thomas Bart, director of the Oakland Redevelopment Authority, stated in the early 1960s. “There is no question that this area is a slum,” and “we can redesign a good and sound neighborhood far better than what preceded the [Acorn] project.”27 Adjacent to Acorn, the St. Vincent’s Day Home was preserved, thanks to the political clout of the Catholic Church and the recognition of planning officials that this charity was a “community cornerstone” even though it was housed in an old building (see figure 9.2). The rapid decline of Acorn, one of the most troubled public housing projects in the nation in the late twentieth century, necessitated a defensive action by the day home: the addition of barbed wire to the top of the chain link fence that surrounded the property. As egregious as the destruction was, it pales beside the means used to raze the New Century Recreation Center, one of the “most revered landmarks” in this part of the city.28 In 1959, this center was condemned—to make way for the enormous mail sorting facility mentioned above; the federal government called on the zoning resolution, which slated this part of the city for heavy industrial use, to justify the finding.29 As a prescient if ultimately ineffective action, Elizabeth Watt had insisted that this stipulation be written into the deed of the New Century Club in 1900: The fieldhouse must revert to the original owners should any change of use occur. Even if civic authorities had wanted to honor the restrictions of the deed, the club had long since disbanded and dispersed its considerable assets to charities in other neighborhoods.30 The surplus army tank that rolled into West Oakland in 1960 took down the recreation center, the playground, and a public school.31 As might be expected, significant community protest greeted the decision to demolish these public buildings, even if they were already doomed because of the decline in enrollment due to industrial encroachment. About half of the three hundred families facing relocation challenged their assessed property values in court, most of them unsuccessfully. “They drove this tank through these houses, just blocks,” Arthur Patterson recalled. “They would go down

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one row and come up another row. . . . Out of the hundreds and hundreds of homes there, you’d come back, a month, or a month and a half, two months later and as far as you can see, is level.”32 In the heat of battles about the taking, the City of Oakland and the Oakland Unified School District, owners of the public facilities in question, petitioned for funds from the federal government to replace the razed center with a new, modern multipurpose facility.33 According to the plaintiffs, the twenty to twenty-five thousand people who used the New Century Recreation Center could not be accommodated at the alternative offered: the existing, overused facilities at Prescott Elementary School. Oakland Point, they insisted, needed a new community center because it remained a residential community in spite of the zoning designation and the assertion of the federal government that heavy industrial uses predominated. The government agreed, and yet, more than fifty years later, the center is not built.

Usable Pasts This sobering fact is cause for reflection about making judgments, architectural and otherwise, in our own time. “As a community, we Americans have always had an infirm sense of history: to us, the past is simply the immediate precursor of the present,” Lewis Mumford wrote in 1925. “It has taken us a long time to assimilate the notion by which every real culture lives and flourishes—that the past is a state to conserve, that it is a reservoir from which we can replenish our own emptiness, that, so far from being the ever-vanishing moment, it is the abiding heritage in a community’s life.”34 Claiming their rightful place in urban public culture, women pressed the state to improve cities for working-class children, and created in California a physical infrastructure to deliver social services to these kids and their families. From the beginning, they relied on the spatial practice of repurposing—of making the past usable. They started with changing uses, by making minimal and inexpensive physical alterations; they forged constituencies around benefits; and after building coalitions around the demand for change, they invested in bigger, more elaborate, and more beautiful architectural improvements. They also understood the importance of networks and nodes—of piggybacking improvements and using additions to reinforce existing physical and social systems.35 Their architectural strategies for investing in childhood set in place tools that some used to make postwar Oakland into a place for hope about the future rather than despair about the injustices of the present. In West

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Oakland, first the rise of the industrial workforce and then the spread of the black power movement shattered the ethos of clubwomen and their cultural claims.36 But community-based institutions, historically built by women for children in this underserved community, set a model for continued social action on the ground, even if sharp differences in ideology have obscured this relationship between actors in the radical social movements that engulfed West Oakland in the middle of the twentieth century, and their moderate predecessors. One of the most important examples comes from the Black Panther Party. It made a plain house into one of its party headquarters and coordinated with Beth Eden Church and St. Augustine’s Church the delivery of breakfast, child care, and other social services to children in need (figure E.6; see also figure 8.3). The location of the house, 1048 Peralta Street, is significant. Two blocks south of the first site of the Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, this location put the party headquarters around the corner from Campbell Village and directly up the street from the detested post office project—with its mammoth scale, broken promises of job training, and unresolved relocation problems. The nodes in the charitable landscape have been erased from this neighborhood, but these three buildings put their lessons in plain view. Within walking distance of one another, they stand as examples of two different routes taken toward improving the modern city: one rooted in enhancing the techniques of public life in everyday situations, the other not at all. In other parts of the city, children’s institutions built by white women’s organizations survived in what were once white working-class neighborhoods, but are now communities full of the people who make Oakland a plural and diverse city. The Lincoln Home, the name taken by the West Oakland Home when it moved to a white neighborhood, became a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. Across the United States, women who ran orphanages made similar decisions in the postwar period, as they looked for ways to continue to operate child-saving institutions, especially if their charities held considerable investments in real property.37 In Oakland women met the historic mandate of the Lincoln Home as the definition of children’s needs changed. Renamed the Lincoln Child Center, the racially integrated charity takes care of at-risk children, with care subsidized by county and state agencies, and the organization’s largely female membership continues to raise money and volunteer at the establishment. Children also live in buildings called “cottages,” where they each share a room with one other child at most. A day treatment program is offered to emotionally disturbed children. Recently, in an interesting turn of events, the Lincoln Child Center an-

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Figure E.6. 1048 (1026) Peralta Street, Oakland. The Black Panther Party used this building as its central headquarters from 1971 to 1972. Photograph by the author, 2012.

nounced that it has decided to leave its campus in the Oakland hills and return to renovated premises on the West Oakland flatlands. Ronit Tulloch shared the reasoning with me by e-mail: “Like Rebecca McWade, we have come to realize that we should be working with our clients in their own neighborhood. It makes for an interesting full circle doesn’t it?”38 The center’s renovated building, a former warehouse, is on Fourteenth Street between Union and Poplar Streets—that is, near where the Miller family home once stood—and one block south of de Fremery Park (see figures 1.7 and 1.8). When the renovation is complete, as is anticipated by 2015, the building will be used primarily as office space, since much of the center’s programming now takes place in the community. As Tulloch explained, The trend in mental health programs for children has undergone a sea change from the orphanage and institution concept to one of trying to keep children within their communities and families as much as is possible. Our work now

346 / Epilogue takes us out into communities, families, and schools. We will create some therapeutic spaces as time goes on and also hope to be able to provide library and computer training facilities for local youth.39

The property on Lincoln Avenue will be transferred to the Head Royce School, across the street from the treatment center. Pressed for space, the directors of this independent school were more than happy to make a purchase that allowed it to expand. When the Ladies’ Relief Society lost its affiliation with the Community Chest after World War II, it decided to close the two orphanages, sell the properties, and retain the old age home (the name had been changed to the Matilda Brown Home in the late 1930s).40 These decisions severed the tie of the Ladies’ Relief Society with one of its historic reasons for being: taking care of children. Another reason persisted: taking care of elderly women. The charity changed its name to the Ladies’ Home Society and used the money raised from its property sale to upgrade the old age home into a facility for assisted living. It kept the home open for elderly women until 2010. At that time, the organization, facing challenges similiar to those of the Lincoln Child Center, decided to focus on providing service rather than housing; it sold the home and used the proceeds to fund assistance to the elderly. The Park Day School, the progressive independent school that purchased the de Fremery Nursery in the 1960s, added the Matilda Brown Home (and the adjacent lavish, elegant gardens) to its campus in North Oakland. The former Children’s Home continues to serve the children of Oakland, but in a way different from that of the private school. When the charity put the orphanage and an adjacent playground up for sale, residents of the North Oakland area organized to purchase the building. The orphanage, used to house troops during World War II, had become a treasured community resource. Building on the property’s historic ties to this neighborhood, the North Oakland Area Council, “composed of progressive and civic-minded men of the Temescal area,” organized to raise the $22,500 needed to buy it.41 The goal was to give the full package to the city so that it could become a “public recreation center,” mainly of use to children but also to other groups.42 The recreation department gladly accepted the offer in 1947.43 Aware of the precedent set by the acquisition of the New Century Club and the Oakland Social Settlement in the 1920s, reformers in the department wanted to open a new community center that incorporated the “service to neighborhoods and people orientation of the Settlement House movement.”44 The department also hoped to build a swimming pool and pool house close to

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the Oakland Technical High School. Using the gift from the North Oakland Area Council as the nucleus of the scheme, the recreation department transformed the Children’s Home into a public arts and recreation center, and built the pool complex on the boys’ playground. “The entire inside of the building has been remodeled in a modern design,” Jane Grey wrote in the Oakland Tribune when the new recreation center opened in September 1949. She lauded the renovation, praising the “mammoth fireplace,” “excellent equipment,” and “the color scheme . . . delightfully cheery and gay.”45 Grey insisted that the project, conceived in the optimism of the post– World War II period, fulfilled the democratizing goals of Progressive Era reformers. She cited Joseph Lee, the advocate of organized play, to give substance to the claim. “There is no happier family than the one that plays together,” Lee had maintained several decades earlier, “and no more peaceful neighborhood than one in which play areas are used to the mutual advantage of all, in the spirit of community interest.”46 The paternalism in Lee’s statement infused the Temescal project at the same time as the North Oakland Recreation Center recalled other, more praiseworthy aspects of prewar reform in Oakland. To bring the recreation center to life, the recreation department rejuvenated building methods embraced earlier in the century: adaptive reuse, piggybacking (i.e., opportunistic siting strategies), and a gift of real property. The City of Oakland decided to offer two components: one focused on recreation, and the other on the arts and thus in line with the new postwar emphasis on the creative child.47 The Studio One Arts Center began in another facility and moved to the recreation center when it opened in 1949. The YWCA rented an upstairs room for a branch office, other groups used the “agency room” free of charge, and food was cooked for local day camps in the orphanage’s former kitchen. Game rooms for table tennis, pool, and badminton, clubrooms for boys and girls, and programs for senior citizens were also present in the place. In addition, the staff coordinated arts instruction at playgrounds and recreation centers across the city.48 In due course the arts program took center stage in the former orphanage, and the recreation component moved elsewhere. Studio One hired eminent local artists to deliver instruction in the visual arts to children and their families. A drama program was added, and at times child care was on offer; the center also became racially integrated. It served children from the entire city, and African Americans were hired to run the place.49 In its drama productions, teachers assigned roles based on artistic merit and without regard to race. “The center was strong in being able to do that,” Johnette Jones Morton, the director, told me in 2001. Morton, who is African

348 / Epilogue

Figure E.7. Studio One Art Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland, rehabilitation designed by Shah Kawasaki Architects. The restored building opened on May 1, 2007. A music ensemble called the Crane and the Crow performs in the courtyard on September 22, 2012, led by renowned East Bay music teacher Jenny Holland, with children and families joining the performance. Alan H. Woo, who photographed the concert, wrote in a Facebook post: “This part of Oakland is an example of what America promises.” Photograph by Alan H. Woo, 2012. Courtesy Alan H. Woo.

American, pointed out that in the later twentieth century no other community center made the same commitment to integrating dramatic perfor­ mances in Oakland.50 The recreation department endorsed other democratizing goals with respect to the arts, but the budget shortfall, provoked by the national urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and exaggerated in California by Proposition 13, frustrated implementation. The agency envisioned establishing an arts center in every neighborhood in the city, but was able to open only one other facility, the aptly named Studio Two. It closed in 1978 and a fire later destroyed the building.51 After the Loma Prieta earthquake severely damaged Studio One, an unreinforced masonry building, in 1989, the city declared it structurally unsafe and commissioned a feasibility study for renovation (it had also suffered from deferred maintenance for decades).52 Eventually,

Epilogue / 349

the renovation was realized after the Friends of Studio One galvanized the Oakland Studio Arts Association, another advisory group, into action. “Except for a short period of time during World War II when the Army leased it, the building has continuously functioned to provide essential community services to the citizens of Oakland,” the Friends of Studio One insisted.53 This claim irked some who questioned investing in a building whose doors had once been closed to black children, but the project moved forward. One event helped. In 2001 the Cooley sisters decided to return for the first time to the building where they had been housed as children. Their stories, reported by a photography teacher in a local newspaper, helped win support for a successful nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2002 the electorate approved in 2002 a ten-million-dollar city bond issue dedicated to repairing the building (figure E.7).54 Studio One reopened in 2008, winning acclaim for the design and showing that once again Oakland has been remade through repurposing buildings for children.

Oral Histories and Interviews

C o n d u c t e d b y t h e A u t ho r

Mollie Cooley Fisher and Belva Cooley Heer, 2001 Sally Gorham, 2001 Roberta White McBride and Robert White, 2002 Sister Corinne Marie Mohrmann, 1995 Johnette Jones Morton, 2001 Sister Michaela O’Connor, 1995 Arthur Patterson, 1995 (for ASC/SSU) Di Starr, 2001 Sandy Strehlou and Jeff Norman, 2001 A n t h r opo l og i c a l S t u d i e s C e n t e r , So n om a S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y

Rose Armelli Cava and Anna Armelli Mroczko, 1996 Angela Volpe Albanese Cosy and Ben Albanese, 1995 Joseph Cumbelich and Sophia Psihos Cumbelich, 1996 Greg Kosmos, 1995 Andrew Mousalimas and Mary Kumarelas Mousalimas, 1996 Audrey Robinson, 1995 O a k l a n d N e i gh b o r hoo d H i s t o r y P r oj e c t

Josephine Jimenez, 1981 Mary C. Netherland, 1971 Bernice Rydman, 1981 Royal Edward Towns, 1981

352 / Oral Histories and Interviews R e g i o n a l O r a l H i s t o r y O ff i c e , Th e B a n c r of t L i b r a r y , U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i fo r n i a , B e r k e l e y

Frances Mary Albrier, 1979 Helen Valeska Bary, 1965 Amy Steinhart Braden, 1965 Ida Louise Jackson, 1990 C. L. (Cottrell Laurence) Dellums, 1973 Mary McLean Olney, 1963 John Francis Neylan, 1961 Tarea Hall Pittman, 1974

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

ASC/SSU

Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University

AAMLO

African American Museum and Library at Oakland

BL/UCB

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

CABN CSACWC

California Architect and Building News California State Association of Colored Women’s Clubs

CSBH

California State Board of Health

CSBC

California State Board of Control

CSBCC

California State Board of Charities and Corrections

CSBE

California State Board of Examiners

CSDF

California State Department of Finance

CSDPW

California State Department of Public Welfare

CSDSW

California State Department of Social Welfare

DSM

Domestic Science Monthly

LCC

Lincoln Child Center

LRS

Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California

NYAICP OBE

New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor Oakland Board of Education

OCHS

Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, Building and Planning Services, Community and Economic Development Agency, City of Oakland

ONCC

Oakland New Century Club

OHR/OPL

Oakland History Room/Oakland Public Library

354 / Abbreviations ROHO SHF

Regional Oral History Office Sisters of the Holy Family

SHRI

State Historic Resources Inventory Form

WCA

Women’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast

WMBJ

West of Market Boys’ Journal

WOH

West Oakland Home

Notes

Chapter one

1.

Frank Bilger, “Seventh Street,” West of Market Boys’ Journal [WMBJ h/a] 14, no. 3 (March 1949): 9. 2. “West Oakland Free Kindergarten, a Little of Its History and also of Its Coming Benefit,” Oakland Enquirer, April 13, 1891, 2; Eva V. Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” Overland Monthly n.s. 36, no. 9 (September 1900): 248 quote. 3. Madge Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools—Deeds of Real Charity in Helping Those Who Help Themselves, Where Young and Old Are Given Instruction of Practical Value,” Sunday Call Magazine, March 2, 1902, 6 (my thanks to Gray Brechin for sharing the clipping). 4. Michael Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood’: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003), 217. 5. Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–31. 6. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1893; repr., 1962), 1, 9, 38. 7. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1949); Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 6. 8. Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 126–30; Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 26, 33–34. 9. McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 82. 10. Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Oakland: Oakland Heritage Alliance, 1982; repr., 1994), 10. For more information on the Peralta family, see “Peralta Family History,” Peralta Hacienda Family Park, http://www.peraltahacienda.org/pages/main .php?pageid=69&pagecategory=3. The Peralta family contested the claim in court and won the case, but lost most of their land to settlers. For the legal status of Mexican land titles, see W. W. Robinson, Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 53.

356 / Notes to Chapter One 11. Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 35. 12. Joseph E. Baker, ed. Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 355; James de Fremery, “West Oakland Streets, an Account of Their Origin and Naming by an Old Resident,” Oakland Enquirer, March 30, 1896, 6. 13. De Fremery, “West Oakland Streets,” 6. I do not know when the term “West of Market” came into common use in Oakland; the reference to San Francisco’s “South of Market” is clear. 14. Bagwell, Oakland, 38. 15. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). For discussion, Marta Gutman, “The Physical Spaces of Childhood,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Routledge, 2012), 249–65. 16. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 187; and more generally, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 17. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, “Good to Think With: History, Space, and Modern Childhood,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 1–7. For islands, Helga Zeiher, “Children’s Islands in Space and Time: The Impact of Spatial Differentiation on Children’s Ways of Shaping Social Life,” in Childhood in Europe, ed. M. du Bois-Reymond, H. Sünker, and H.-H. Krüger (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 139–59; John Gillis, “The Islanding of Children: Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood,” in Designing Modern Childhoods, ed. Gutman and de Coninck-Smith, 316–19. 18. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Disclocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7 quote; for discussion, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). For dependency in Western political culture, Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993); Joan C. Tronto, “Care as a Political Concept,” in Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 139–56. 19. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 20. For example, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Children’s Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 1–24; for discussion, Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 101–9, 133–36. See also John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 8, 20, 42–43, 101, 187; Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 103–10. 21. Catherine Burke and Helena Ribeiro de Castro, “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild,” History of Education 36,

Notes to Chapter One / 357 no. 2 (March 2007): 213–26; Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxxii–xxxiii; Raphael Samuel, “The Eye of History,” in his Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso Books, 1994), 1: 329; Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 17, 175; and more generally, Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Use of Historical Images as Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 22. Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood,’” 216–17. 23. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 179–81. 24. Rebecca Yamin, “Children’s Strikes, Parents’ Rights: Paterson and Five Points,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 114; Suzanne Howard-Carter, “Playing Hard in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University Academic Foundation Inc. [ASC/SSU h/a], 2004), 177–79. 25. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104. 26. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), xviii; Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). 27. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 28. For “attendance” versus “acceptance,” see Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s–1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992). For parental intervention, see Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children; Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For critique of the social control thesis, see Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood,’” 213–14; Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless, 7. 29. William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1994), 25; for railroad fatalities, Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 46. Gates were installed on Railroad Avenue in 1895, according to Walter Gallagher, “Do You Remember (Concluded from Last Month)?,” WMBJ 4, no.1 (January 1939): 13. 30. In 1871, the railroad charged commuters three dollars a month for services. Editors of the Oakland Daily Transcript, Information Concerning the Terminus of the Railroad System of the Pacific Coast (Oakland: Daily Transcript Printing Office, 1871), 43. 31. J. Ross Browne, Letter from J. Ross Browne (San Francisco: Excelsior Press, 1869), 14; cited by Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 24; Birdseye, “Errors of Comparison,” Oakland Daily Transcript, Jan. 14, 1869, 1. 32. Henry George, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” Overland Monthly 1, no. 10 (October 1868): 303. 33. George described the experience in a letter to his wife, published in Henry George, Jr., The Life of Henry George (New York: Doubleday and McLure Company, 1900), 210. For the significance of the trip, see Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 20–21, 186n41; John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and

358 / Notes to Chapter One the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 48–52; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 136. 34. Proceedings of a Meeting of Taxpayers of Oakland, Held at Dietz Hall, April 1st, 1876 (San Francisco: Winterburn and Company, 1876), 25. 35. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, 1860–1890, 7 vols. (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 7: 687. 36. Ed. H. Anthony, “A Sightseeing Tour of West Oakland in the Late Eighties and Early Nineties,” WMBJ 5, no. 2 (February 1940): 16; John L. Zunino, “Do You Remember?,” WMBJ 8, no. 3 (March 1943): 14. 37. Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey [OCHS h/a], “West Oakland Survey: South Prescott Neighborhood” (Oakland: State Historic Resources Inventory Forms on Historic Districts and Individual Buildings [SHRI h/a], vol. 26, 1988), 6–7; OCHS, “West Oakland Survey—Oakland Point District” (Oakland: SHRI, vol. 28A, 1990), 18–20. 38. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 14. 39. OCHS, “West Oakland Survey: Oakland Point District,” 33–39; Edgar J. Hinkel and William E. McCann, eds., Oakland 1852–1938. Some Phases of the Social, Political, and Economic History of Oakland, California (Oakland: Oakland Public Library under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, 1939), 366. For the importance of home ownership, Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 762. 40. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, 12–24; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1900 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 196–97; Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). 41. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, 134, 142–47, 205, 239; Marta Gutman, “The Tilghman Family and Race Work in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 283. 42. Adam S. Eterovich, ed. Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1855; repr., 1969); Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1856; repr., 1969). 43. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California, 239–40; Gutman, “Tilghman Family and Race Work,” 283–84. Taney is cited in Lapp, 20; for the exodus, see Lapp, chap. 10. 44. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 201–2; Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland: Northern California Center for Afro-American History and Life, 1989), 9–10, 13. 45. Gutman, “Tilghman Family and Race Work,” 282–87. 46. Christine Hancock, “Memories,” WMBJ 7, no. 4 (April 1942): 15. 47. This description is drawn from West of Market Boys’ Journal and Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 33–34. 48. “West Oakland, Events of the Day in the Bay Precincts,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 11, 1887, 3. 49. Gallagher, “Do You Remember?,” 13. See also Zunino, “Reminiscing,” WMBJ 8, no. 5 (May 1943): 9; Ed. H. Anthony, “A Sightseeing Tour of West Oakland in the Late

Notes to Chapter One / 359 Eighties and Early Nineties,” WMBJ 6, no. 9 (September 1941): 13; “West Oakland, Events of the Day,” 3. 50. G. F. Allardt, Report of the Board of Engineers on the Grades, Streets, and Sewerage of the City of Oakland, 1869 (Oakland: Oakland News Steam Book and Job Presses, 1869), 11; R. H. Fallmer, “My Boyhood Days in West Oakland,” WMBJ 9, no. 9 (September 1944): 7; US Census Office, “Oakland in 1880,” in Report on the Social Statistics of Cities; Part II: The Southern and the Western States, ed. George E. Waring Jr. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887), 786. 51. D. M. Bishop and Co., Bishop’s Oakland Directory for 1878–9 (Oakland: W. B. Hardy, 1878), 10; cited in OCHS, “West Oakland Survey: Oakland Point District,” 17. 52. See McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 83–88; Lisabeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 175; Paul Groth and Marta Gutman, “Workers’ Houses in West Oakland,” in Sites and Sounds: Essays in Celebration of West Oakland, ed. Suzanne Stewart and Mary Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: ASC/SSU, 1997), 85–112; Richard Walker, “Landscape and City Life: Four Ecologies of Residence in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Ecumene 2, no. 1 (1995): 33–64. 53. OCHS, “West Oakland Survey: Oakland Point District,” 19. For comparison, see Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 186n51; Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), chap. 4. 54. Marta Gutman, “Five Buildings on One Corner and Their Change over Time,” in Sites and Sounds, ed. Stewart and Praetzellis, 113–30. 55. Elizabeth D. Watt, “My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch,” (San Francisco, 1925, typed manuscript; on file, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [BL/UCB h/a]). 56. For comparison see Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–29. 57. Watt, “My Long Life,” 3 quote; “Mrs. E. D. Watt, California Pioneer, Dead,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 16, 1928, 6. The reference is to George Dewey, US admiral in the Spanish-American War. 58. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 14–15; Isenberg, Mining California, 23–36. 59. Flanagan, America Reformed, 42. 60. Bailey Millard, History of the San Francisco Bay Region, 3 vols. (San Francisco: American Historical Society, Inc., 1924), 1:136; R. D. Thomas, “Men of  To-Day, 1905–1906,” in Modern San Francisco and the Men of To-Day (San Francisco: Western Press Association, 1906), n.p. Robert Watt and his brother, William, named Grass Valley after a favorite town in Scotland. 61. The victory speech was printed in the Alta California, Sept. 6, 1867, and is cited in Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 91. 62. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 9, 92, 101; Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 29–30. 63. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 4. 64. Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 69; cited by Martha Mabie Gardner, “Working on White Womanhood: White Working Women in the San Francisco Anti-Chinese Movement,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 77, 88n13. 65. Josi Ward, “‘Dreams of Oriental Romance’: Reinventing Chinatown in 1930s Los Angeles,” Buildings & Landscapes 20, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 30–31.

360 / Notes to Chapter One 66. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 161 quote; Mary P. Ryan, “‘A Laudable Pride in the Whole of Us’: City Halls and Civic Materialism,” American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (October 2000): 1168–69. 67. “Anti-Chinese Club in Oakland,” Alta California, Aug. 26, 1876. 68. Washburne R. Andrus, Annual Message of Mayor Andrus, January 30, 1879 (Oakland: Press of the Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 1879), n.p. See also M. W. Wood and J. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Alameda County, California (Oakland: M. W. Wood, 1883), 280; Mary McLean Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880–1895; Interview Conducted by Willa Klug Baum” (Berkeley: University of California Regional Oral History Office [ROHO h/a], 1963), 51, 52; Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, 1:378. 69. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 16. 70. For an overview, see Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 1–2, 144–45, 199–200. 71. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 6. 72. Watt, “My Long Life,” 67; “More About Candidates,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 25, 1882. 73. Ryan, Women in Public, 174; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 1 (2002): 25–48; and, more generally, Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 74. R. J. Morris, “Structure, Culture and Society in British Towns,” in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 399. 75. This phrasing is inspired by Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities. 76. Linda Gordon, “Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 76. 77. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 72–78. 78. William Novack, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72. 79. Donna Murch, Living in the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 80. For the activist scholar, Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3; Bryan D. Palmer, E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (New York: Verso, 1994), 99. 81. All historians of West Oakland are deeply indebted to Betty Marvin, director of the Oakland Cultural Heritage Survey, and to Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis,

Notes to Chapter One / 361 directors of the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project for CAL-TRANS district 4. Their research is cited throughout this book. Otherwise, the most recent survey is Beth Bagwell’s excellent Oakland: The Story of a City, along with scattered references in Scott, San Francisco Bay Area; John W. Reps, Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 82. Abigail A. Van Slyck, “Review of Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood,” Winterthur Portfolio 39, no. 1 (2004): 71. I make similar points in Gutman, “The Physical Spaces of Childhood,” 249–65. 83. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, xv. 84. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 85. The Churchill quote is cited by James Borchert, “Alley Landscapes of Washington,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 281–82. 86. Francesca Guerra-Pearson, “Organizational Forms and Architectural Space: Building Meaning in Charitable Organizations in New York City, 1770–1920,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 27, no. 4 (December 1998): 459–87; Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 81–84. 87. Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 128–34; Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 20–27; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Hull House as Women’s Space,” Chicago History 12 (1983–84): 40–55. 88. Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–21; Edward Grazda and Jerrilynn S. Dodds, New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City (New York: PowerKids Press, 2002); Catherine C. Lavoie, “Reunified, Rebuilt, Enlarged, or Rehabilitated: Deciphering Friends’ Complex Attitudes toward Their Meeting Houses,” Buildings & Landscapes 19, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 20–52. 89. Lee M. A. Simpson, Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 15. 90. Juliet Kinchin, “Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and the ‘Feminine’ Room,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 12–29; Carolyn Steedman, “What a Rag Rug Means,” in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 112–41. 91. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 45–46; and for comment, Ryan, Women in Public, 10–13, 130–32, 176; Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14–16. 92. For timber, James Michael Buckley, “Building the Redwood Region: The Redwood Lumber Company and the Landscape of Northern California, 1850–1929” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000); for alterations, Walker, “Landscape and City Life,” 33–64; Groth and Gutman, “Workers’ Houses,” 85–112. 93. Philip Hone, Diary, 1828–1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Dodd Mead, 1936), 729–30.

362 / Notes to Chapter Two 94. For the theory of “creative destruction,” Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York: McGrawHill, 1939). Chapter two

1.

For women’s public culture, Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 17; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825– 1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 3–18; and for the gap between the city as imagined and as lived, Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1916 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiii–xix. 2. For the state, Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936); William H. Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California: A Study of Agencies and Institutions (New York: Department of Child Helping, Russell Sage Foundation, 1916); for Oakland, Joseph E. Baker, ed. Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 247–62; for San Francisco, M. W. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” Overland Monthly 15, no. 1 (Janu­ ary 1890): 78–101. 3. For changing structure in the gender order, Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For women in California politics, Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Sewell, Women and the Everyday City, 127–67. 4. The maternalist argument is made in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and debated in Linda Gordon, “Gender, State, and Society: A Debate with Theda Skocpol,” Contention 2, no. 4 (1993): 139–56; Theda Skocpol, “Soldiers, Workers, and Mothers: Gendered Identities in Early U. S. Social Policy,” Contention 2, no. 3 (1993): 157–89. 5. Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 159. 6. The great concern about homeless children is emphasized by Mary Ann Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good’: The Politics of Benevolence, Welfare, and Gender in San Francisco, 1850–1880,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 3 (August 1999): 394; Ruth Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation: ‘Child-saving’ Institutions and the Children of the Underclass in San Francisco, 1850–1910” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 290. I am indebted to both historians and call on their research in the following discussion of architecture and urbanism. I agree with Irwin that the California case study demonstrates the limits of the “domestication of politics” argument in Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 620–47. 7. For comparative costs, see Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 387–91. For “free” female labor in Catholic charities, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23; Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic

Notes to Chapter Two / 363 Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 5ff; Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 20–24. 8. For the concept, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique, no. 3 (Autumn 1974): 49–55. The feminist critiques are legion; I call on Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 5, 29, 97–98; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42; Ryan, Women in Public, 10–11, 12–13, 130–37, 176. 9. The point is mentioned briefly in Edith Sparks, Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 180–81. The California state constitution adopted a community property system, but married women did not win legal guardianship of children, even after the suffrage bill passed in 1911. See Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14; Alice Park, California Women Under the Laws of 1912 (Palo Alto, CA, 1912). 10. The contribution of women through charity to urban public culture in San Francisco during the 1850s and 1860s is missed in Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The criticism is echoed in Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 367. For a similar problem, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 89. 11. For similar points, see Francesca Guerra-Pearson, “Organizational Forms and Architectural Space: Building Meaning in Charitable Organizations in New York City, 1770–1920,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 27, no. 4 (December 1998): 465. 12. For examples in the Northeast, see Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Rick Beard, ed. On Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1987); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). The comparison also calls on US Bureau of the Census, Report on Crime, Pauperism, and Benevolence in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892); US Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905); US Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913). 13. For Italy, see Nicholas Terpstra, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 14. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 136 quote; Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 137–40; Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s–1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 26–31. 15. For groups other than children, see Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public

364 / Notes to Chapter Two Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 78–84. 16. For effects on daily life, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 56–63. 17. For the term “mixed economy,” Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 47. 18. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 78–79. For comment, Ryan, Civic Wars, 88; Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 370, 371; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 290–92. 19. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 165. See also Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, part 1 (Summer 1966): 151–74; Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds,” 9–39; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 67–97. 20. Ryan, Civic Wars, 250–51. 21. This point draws on arguments made by Rose, Governing the Soul; Ethington, Public City; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). See also Joan C. Tronto, “Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgments,” Hypathia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 141–49. 22 Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, xiii–xiv. 23. In the 1880s, the commissioner of charities called for a state board of charities and correction to be set up in California, but it was not established until 1903. See Edmond T. Dooley, Report of the State of California to the Fifteenth National Conference of Charities and Correction in Buffalo, July 7, 1888 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1888), 8–9, 10–11; W. Almont Gates, “State Boards of Charities and Corrections,” paper read before the Third Annual Conference of Charities and Corrections, held in San Francisco, February 21–23, 1904. 24. Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 94–100. For eradication of the Mexican way of life, Lisabeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004). 25. For population figures, Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 287–88; for spectacular growth, William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 13–18; Roger Lotchin, San Francisco 1846–1856: From Hamlet to City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 3–30; for ethnic enclaves, Bradford Luckingham, “Immigrant Life in Emergent San Francisco,” Journal of the West 12, no. 4 (Octo­ ber 1973): 600–603. 26. Peter Decker, Fortunes and Failures: White Collar Mobility in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 23–24, 32–34. 27. Ryan, Civic Wars, 99. 28. Respectively, Ryan, Civic Wars, 75; Lotchin, San Francisco 1846–1856, 323–24. 29. Frederick Billings, An Address Delivered at the Fifth Anniversary of the Orphan Asylum Society of San Francisco (San Francisco: San Francisco Orphan Asylum Society, 1856), 15; San Francisco Industrial School Dept., First Annual Report of the Board of Managers

Notes to Chapter Two / 365 of the Industrial School Department of the City and County of San Francisco (San Francisco: Towne & Bacon, 1859), 11–12. 30. Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 7; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 16–20; Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 114–19. 31. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 85–89, 188–93; Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 463–93. 32. As cited by Christine Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 322, 333n46. 33. Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets,” 322; Ralph da Costa Nunez and Ethan G. Sribnick, The Poor among Us: A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City (New York: White Tiger Press, 2013), 56. 34. Elliott West, Growing Up in the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 15; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 294–95. 35. Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. 36. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 196. 37. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932, 19; Ryan, Civic Wars, 137, 139–51. 38. For an overview, Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932, 17–18. 39. The wording of the 1852 law is cited in Luckingham, “Immigrant Life in Emergent San Francisco,” 613; see also John Swett, History of the Public School System of California (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1876). 40. Nellie Stow, The Story of the San Francisco Protestant Orphanage: A Tale of Seventy-three Years, 1851–1924 (San Francisco: 1924), 3, 4 quote; Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 374. 41. Anne B. Bloomfield, “A History of the California Historical Society’s New Mission Street Neighborhood,” California History 74, no. 4 (Winter 1995/1996): 374; Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 9–11, 108. 42. As cited in Luckingham, “Immigrant Life in Emergent San Francisco,” 614. 43. R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 10. 44. Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 10–11; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 311–13; “Angels of the Barbary Coast,” accessed July 11, 2011, Catholic San Francisco Online Edition (2010), http://catholic-sf.org/news_select.php?newsid=23 &id=57639. 45. For this point, but without discussion of its relationship to architecture, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 202; Schneider, In the Web of Class, 111–19. 46. Lotchin, San Francisco 1846–1856, 324. 47. For the suggestion that Hispanic children resided in Irish Catholic institutions, see Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 10–11. The comment of the Chilean journalist is cited in Luckingham, “Immigrant Life in Emergent San Francisco,” 601; it was published in a Valparaiso newspaper. 48. Mark L. Brack, “Domestic Architecture in Hispanic California: The Monterey Style Reconsidered,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 4, ed. Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 163–73.

366 / Notes to Chapter Two 49. For the English poor law, see J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1964). For adaptation of British practice to the United States, see Nunez and Sribnick, The Poor among Us, 7–17; Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 13–26, 37–43. 50. Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 10. Katz uses the concept to describe the crises that engulfed working-class life; it is also helpful in interpreting the charitable landscape. See also Amy Drew Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1992): 1272. 51. Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 10–11; Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets,” 309–36; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850–1900,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 853–82. 52. E. P. Thompson, “History and Anthropology,” in Making History: Writings on History and Culture, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 1994), 217. 53. The term is used in Monique Bourque et al., “The Development of the Charitable Landscape: The Construction of the Lancaster County Almshouse in Regional Context,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 102–3 (Summer-Fall 2000): 114–34. 54. Nunez and Sribnick, Poor among Us, 67; Beard, On Being Homeless. 55. For example, see Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 56–59; Lu Ann De Cunzo, “On Reforming the ‘Fallen’ and Beyond: Transforming Continuity at the Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, 1845–1916,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5, no. 1 (March 2001): 19–44; and Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 28. 56. Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (New York: Routledge, 1993), 101. See also Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 239–41. 57. Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 88. 58. Homer Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children (New York: Macmillan Company, 1902), 72–81. See also Joan Underhill Hannon, “Poverty in the Antebellum Northeast: The View from New York State’s Relief Rolls,” Journal of Economic History 44, no. 4 (1984): 1014; Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 287–90; Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 72–89. 59. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 141–45. For the Alameda County Poor Farm (later hospital), see Margaret F. Sirch and Stuart A. Queen, “Report on Alameda County Hospital and Infirmary” (San Francisco: Typed report issued by the State Board of Charities and Corrections, 1917); M. W. Wood and J. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Alameda County, California (Oakland: M. W. Wood, Publisher, 1883), 212–13. 60. Schneider, In the Web of Class, 26; Rose, Governing the Soul, 156; Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1989), 17–18. 61. For the general point, Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 34–35; for an excellent case study, Schneider, In the Web of Class. 62. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 35–36, 40–42, 336. 63. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 26–28; Philip Gavit, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The

Notes to Chapter Two / 367 Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410–1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Nicholas Terpstra, “The Qualita of Mercy: (Re)building Confraternal Charities in Renaissance Bologna,” in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in the Renaissance: Ritual, Spectacle, Image, ed. Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 122–24. 64. Folks, Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, 52–55; and Robert Bremner, ed. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, 1600—1865, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 2: 655. 65. Hugh Cunningham, “Childhood in One Country,” Review of Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, H-Childhood, H-Net Reviews, February 2006 (accessed February 26, 2006), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev .php?id=11410. 66. For comparison, Guerra-Pearson, “Organizational Forms and Architectural Space,” 474; Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12. 67. San Francisco Industrial School Dept., First Annual Report, 14. 68. Starting in the 1890s and continuing through the 1930s, Jesse Brown Cook, a San Francisco policeman, collected images of crime, criminals, and various street scenes and pasted them into scrapbooks; volume 21 includes a photograph of Bob Durkin clipped from the “Rogue’s Gallery.” The boy is described as follows: “Bob Durkin alias Frank Russell alias John Reed No. 15252 was the first prisoner sent to the Industrial School in this city in the early days. Then on Feb 16th 1865 he was sent to San Quentin from Sacramento County for burglary. On June 21 1869 he was again sent over to S.Q. from El Dorado Co. for 3 years. July 25th 1874 he broke jail in this city amd [sic] was afterwards captured and sent to S.Q. for 2 years for breaking and injuring jail. Jan 29th 1877 was sent over to S.Q. from Butte County for 5 years Burglary. Fenruary [sic] 21st 1893 was sent again to S.Q. for 7 years from Kern County for Burglary. After coming out he was picked up at San Jose in 1897 and charged with Vagrancy and sent to jail there from whence he made his escape but was latter [sic] picked up and served out his time.” See “Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement,” vol. 21, BL/UCB. 69. Theodor Kytka, “The First Rogue Gallery in the World,” Camera Craft: A Photographic Monthly 2, no. 5 (March 1901): 380. For access online, see http://archive.org/stream /cameracraft1219001901phot#page/n495/mode/2up. My thanks to Dee Dee Kramer for this information. 70. Kytka, “First Rogue Gallery,” 383. See also Sandra S. Phillips, Mark Haworth-Booth, and Carol Squiers, Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Chronicle Books, 1997); Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 39–40. 71. San Francisco Industrial School Dept., First Annual Report, 5, 6; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 46; J. M. Hutchings, “Sites Around San Francisco,” Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: J. M. Hutchings and Co., 1862), chap. 9, accessed June 11, 2013, at http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/scenes_of _wonder_and_curiosity/san_francisco.html. The Board of Supervisors allocated one thousand dollars per month for operating costs. 72. San Francisco Industrial School Dept., Specifications for the Industrial School Building of San Francisco (San Francisco: Sterett & Butler, 185?); Hutchings, “Sites Around San Francisco.” The characterization of this space as congregate dormitories is incorrect

368 / Notes to Chapter Two in Daniel Macallair, “The San Francisco Industrial School and the Origins of Juvenile Justice in California: A Glance at the Great Reformation,” UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy 7, no. 1 (2003): 1–60. For the national importance of the New York model, see Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815–1857 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969); Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 209, 213, 215, 223–26, 230–34; David Schneider and Albert Deutsch, The History of Public Welfare in New York State, 1867–1940, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 2: 317–25; Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825–1940 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1973). 73. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 38. See also Dell Upton, “Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Republic,” in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins (New York and Winterthur, DE: Norton and Winterthur Museum, 1994), 90. 74. Hutchings, “Sites around San Francisco.” See also Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 30. 75. J. C. (Joseph C.) Morrill, The Industrial School Investigation, with a Glance at the Great Reformation and Its Results (San Francisco: 1872), 2–3. 76. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 351; Michael Hennessey, “The Ingleside Jail: A Narrated Timeline,” chap. 4 in “The History of the San Francisco Sheriff  Department,” accessed June 11, 2013, http://sfsdhistory.com /The%20Ingleside%20Jail.htm. The California superintendent of public instruc­ tion documented the overcrowding in the first biennial report (1863–65) of the department. 77. See Durkin and Brown photos in the “Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement,” vol. 21, BL/UCB. 78. Similar strategies were employed in mixed-sex institutions for delinquent children in the Northeast. Schneider, In the Web of Class, 41–45. 79. Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 93; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 317–18; Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 20–21. 80. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Cynthia Imogen Hammond, Architects, Angels, Activists, and the City of Bath, 1765–1965: Engaging with Women’s Spatial Interventions in Buildings and Landscapes (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2012), chap. 5. 81. Shackelford suggests the scandal was not about money, but success at converting Protestants to Catholicism. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 316, 359–60; Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 93. 82. The interview with Kathleen Norris (ROHO, BL/UCB) is cited by Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 377, emphasis in original. 83. Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 29; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 48–50. The state opened two other facilities for children in the 1860s and 1870s: the State Reform School in Marysville (1861–68) and a “training school” (really a prison) on the ship Jamestown (1876–79). 84. After the San Francisco Industrial School closed, the building continued to be used for correctional purposes; it was turned into the city jail for women. 85. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 53–56, 114–15, 126, 143–44; Folks, Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, 225; Arthur J. Pillsbury, Institutional Life: Its Relations to the State and to the Wards of the State (Sacramento: State Printing Office,

Notes to Chapter Two / 369 1906), 75–76, and for the Magdalen Asylum, Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 380–81. The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum and the California Home for the Training of Feeble-Minded Children were run by private societies, initially. Outside of San Francisco, delinquent children, eight years and older, were imprisoned in local jails until the state built the new reform schools and introduced a separate system of juvenile courts. 86. Billings, Address, 17. 87. Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 375–76. See also Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 88. 88. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 78; Bloomfield, “A History of the California Historical Society’s New Mission Street Neighborhood,” 374. 89. Stow, Story of the San Francisco Protestant Orphanage, 2–3; Mrs. W. A. Haight, Some Reminiscences of My Connection with the Board of Management of the San Francisco Protestant Orphan Asylum for the Past Forty-Seven Years (San Francisco: 1900), n.p.; Dolores Waldorf, “Gentleman from Vermont: Royal H. Waller,” California Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1943): 112. 90. Stow, Story of the San Francisco Protestant Orphanage, 4–5. 91. Irwin, “‘Going About Doing Good,’” 380; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 319–21. 92. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 210–12. 93. Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 29, 337n50 citing the testimony of Sarah Grimke as quoted in Barbara L. Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston, 1670–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 45–46. 94. Billings, Address, 17–18. 95. Billings, Address, 15. For duty and middle-class manhood, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 20–22, 102–6; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10–15. 96. Billings, Address, 19 quote, 22. 97. Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 38, 83, 174. 98. Billings, Address, 22. 99. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 9–11, 13; Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 10–11. 100. The figures come from Lotchin, San Francisco 1846–1856, 334. 101. Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 88. 102. Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 29–30. 103. The 1857 report of the trustees of the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum is cited in Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 313. See also Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 113. 104. Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 158–61; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 301–5. For comparison with New York and Chicago, see Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion; Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us; Hoy, Good Hearts. 105. Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 3–4. For the move to a national church, Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition. 106. Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion, 84–98. 107. James Flamant, “Child-Saving Charities in This Big Town,” San Francisco Morning Call, May 28, 1893, 18. 108. For comparison, Schneider, In the Web of Class, 119; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 202.

370 / Notes to Chapter Two 109. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, “Conclusion,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 535. 110. Rowena Beans, “Inasmuch . . .”: The One Hundred Year History of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society (San Francisco: The Society, 1953), 1–12, 13–31; San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Annual Reports of the Managers and Trustees of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui and Company, 1869), 10–16; Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 79–80. 111. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 325, 327. 112. By the end of the nineteenth century, four systems of aid were used for dependent children: (1) the state school and placing out system, (2) the county children’s home system, (3) the boarding-out and placing-out systems, and (4) the plan of supporting children in private institutions. Folks, Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, chap. 5, 6, 7, 8. 113. US Bureau of the Census, Eleventh Census of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1890), 3: 321–22. The first federal census of benevolent institutions, published in 1892, occasioned widespread criticism of the cost of congregate orphanages, including that in California. See Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 42–43, 144; Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 85–86. 114. See Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California; Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 78–101. 115. Peggy Pascoe, “Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of Mission-Educated Chinese American Women, 1874–1939,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 631–52; Wendy Rouse Jorae, The Children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 147–54. 116. Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 15–17; Ryan, Civic Wars, 294. 117. In the 1870s, the Sisters of Charity ran schools for working-class children and orphan asylums; the Sisters of Notre Dame and Sisters of the Presentation ran schools for middle-class and wealthy girls; the Sisters of Mercy ran hospitals and maternity homes. D. J. Kavanagh, The Holy Family Sisters of San Francisco: A Sketch of Their First Fifty Years (San Francisco: Gilmartin Company, 1922), 29, 129; Ellen Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood: Immigrants and the American Kindergarten” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004), 276–77. 118. As quoted in Marguerite Dupree, “The Provision of Social Services,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 353. 119. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones, introduction to Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State, ed. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11. 120. In 1870, private orphan asylums received fifty dollars per year for a full orphan and twenty-five dollars for a half-orphan; there was no residence requirement. In 1873 and 1874 the grant was extended to abandoned children and increased the next year to one hundred dollars per orphan and seventy-five dollars per half-orphan. The aid remained at that level for the balance of the century. In 1888 counties as well as private and state-run institutions were permitted to receive state aid. The “indigent aged” received state aid, starting in 1883 and lasting until 1895, when the legislature

Notes to Chapter Three / 371 terminated the assistance. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, xvi, 1–2, 4, 11, 143–45, 365, table 1. For New York, Folks, Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children, 116–19. The Children’s Law of 1875 formalized the per capita system in New York State. Nunez and Sribnick, Poor among Us, 98, 99. 121. W. S. Melick, “Some Points Regarding California’s Aid to Dependent Children,” in Proceedings of the Third Annual California State Conference of Charities and Corrections, Held at San Francisco, February 21–23, 1904 (Ione, CA: State of California, 1904), 145. 122. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, xvi, 137, 170–71. 123. Ibid., 144. 124. William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 23; US Census Office, “Oakland in 1880,” in Report on the Social Statistics of Cities; Part II: The Southern and the Western States, ed. George E. Waring Jr. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887), 784. 125. Joshua D. Wolff, “‘The Great Monopoly’: Western Union and the American Telegraph, 1845–1893” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2008); Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). Chapter three

1.

“West Oakland Free Kindergarten, A Little of Its History and Also of Its Coming Benefit,” Oakland Enquirer, April 13, 1891, 2. 2. “Work of Women in Oakland, Some of the Many Clubs, Societies and Charitable Institutions Conducted by Them: A Very Credible Showing,” Oakland Enquirer, Dec. 24, 1897, 15 quote; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, vol. 2 (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). The feminist critiques of de Tocque­ ville include Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (June 1988): 10; Nancy A. Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History 10, no. 3 (October 1985): 299–321. 3. Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5 no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 512–15. 4. “Our Appeal,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 24, 1872, 4. 5. Joseph E. Baker, ed. Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 247–62; “Work of Women in Oakland,” 15. 6. Sarah Sawtelle Weston, “Ladies’ Relief Annual, Corresponding Secretary’s Report,” Oakland Daily Times, May 3, 1878, 3. 7. Weston, “Ladies’ Relief Annual,” 3. 8. Theodor Kytka, “The First Rogue Gallery in the World,” Camera Craft: A Photographic Monthly 2, no. 5 (March 1901): 383. 9. Cook & Miller, Directory of the City of Oakland and County of Alameda for the Year 1870 (Oakland: Cook & Miller, 1870), 52–53. 10. George Mooar, God’s Highways Exalted: A Discourse on the Completion of the Pacific Railroad (Oakland: Oakland Daily Transcript, 1869), cited in William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 23 quote, 24–25. 11. The 1880 census reported 18,117 men and 16, 438 women lived in Oakland. US Census Office, “Oakland in 1880,” in Report on the Social Statistics of Cities; Part II: The

372 / Notes to Chapter Three Southern and the Western States, ed. George E. Waring Jr. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887), 783. 12. Cook & Miller, Directory, 48–54. In addition to thirteen fraternal lodges, the directory lists the Fenian Circle (1864), Turn Verein (1866), Hebrew Benevolent Society (1862), St. Joseph’s Benevolent Society (1867), Lincoln Lyceum (1865), and Mutual Provident Association of Oakland (1869). The Independent Order of Good Templars established a temperance lodge in 1867, called the “Athens Lodge.” 13. Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Oakland: Oakland Heritage Alliance, 1982; repr., 1994), 61. 14. Oakland City Council, General Municipal Ordinances in Effect January 1, 1918; Classified, Compiled, and Published by the Mayor of the City of Oakland and by Authority of the City Council; John L. Davie, Mayor of Oakland (Oakland: Oakland Enquirer Publishing Co., 1918), 11. For the appeal of cities to the unemployed, see Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 183; Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 4–10; Amy Drew Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1992): 1265–93. 15. Thomas M. Logan, “Hospitals, Asylums, Public Institutions, Etc.,” in Third Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California for the Years 1874 and 1875 (Sacramento: G. H. Springer, 1875), 51–55; F. W. Hatch, “Report,” in Sixth Report of the State Board of Health of California for the Year Ending June 30, 1880 (Sacramento: J. D. Young, 1880), 21–23. 16. Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 143, 199; California State Controller, Biennial Report for 1869–71, Statement 3 (Sacramento: State Printer’s Office, 1871), 47, 67. 17. Cook & Miller, Directory, 52–53 quote; Bagwell, Oakland, 146–47. 18. Peter Dobkin Hall, “‘A Bridge Founded upon Justice and Human Hearts’: Reflections on Religion and Philanthropy,” in Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 119; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 143–61. 19. New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor [NYAICP h/a], Eleventh Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York: John F. Trow, 1854), 4. 20. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 200; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 273. 21. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 214, 222. 22. Hall, “Inventing the Nonprofit Sector,” 32–33 citing Charles I. Foster, “An Errand of Mercy”: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). 23. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin Hyman, 1930), 2; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 211–33; Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), xvii.

Notes to Chapter Three / 373 24. Stansell, City of Women, 202–3. 25. Ibid., 197, 202. 26. Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Society, Annual Reports of the Officers, Good Work Done But More Help Required,” Oakland Daily Times, May 18, 1881, 3 quote; Laura S. Abrams and Laura Curran, “Between Women: Gender and Social Work in Historical Perspective,” Social Service Review 78, no. 3 (September 2004): 437; Emily K. Abel, “Valuing Care: Turn-of-the-Century Conflicts between Charity Workers and Women Clients,” Journal of Women’s History 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 32–52. 27. “Old Ladies’ Home, Ceremonies of Laying the Corner-Stone at Temescal, the Crowning Work of the Ladies’ Relief Society” (Oakland: Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, Calif., 1882; repr., from the Oakland Times, July 24, 1882), 6. For San Francisco women, see Chicago Relief and Aid Society, Subscriptions to the Chicago Relief Fund by Citizens and Associations of California. Received by the Treasurer, in San Francisco from October 11, 1871 to January 31, 1872 (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui and Company, 1872); for Chicago, Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 110–19; Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of a Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13–30. 28. Kate Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary for the Year 1871–2,” in First and Second Annual Reports of the Board of Managers of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California (San Francisco: Frank Eastman, 1873), 5. 29. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 92–93. 30. The group met at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church to elect officers, adopt a constitution, and select the board of managers. Mrs. Frank K. Mott, “A Brief Summary of the Outstanding Events and Transactions of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California, From the Time of Its Foundation, 1871, to the Current Year” (Oakland, 1935, typed manuscript; archives of the Ladies’ Home Society), B, 1; Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California [LRS h/a], Forty-ninth Annual Report, Year Ending December 31, 1920 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1921), 8–9. 31. Usually the treasurer was single, to protect assets. Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 37; F. Ellen Netting and Mary Katherine O’Connor, “Lady Boards of Managers: Subjugated Legacies of Governance and Administration,” Affilia 20, no. 4 (2005): 459. 32. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 23; Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 5. For lady managers in charities, see Netting and O’Connor, “Lady Boards of Managers,” 448–64. 33. This information has been culled from city directories, the US decennial census, charity reports, and church manuals. The property values mentioned are assessed values; the cash value of a piece of real estate could exceed the assessed value reported to the census enumerator. For example, the Beckwith home, discussed below, was assessed at two thousand dollars in the 1870 decennial census; the Ladies’ Relief Society paid sixteen thousand for it in 1873. 34. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 10. 35. Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 49. 36. Zoe A. Battu, “Historical and Architectural Highlights of Mills College,” Pacific Coast Architect 33, no. 11 (November 1928): 11–12, 30; Karen McNeill, “Building the

374 / Notes to Chapter Three California Women’s Movement: Architecture, Space, and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan” (PhD dissertation, University of California, 2006), 106–7. 37. Harold Kirker, California’s Architectural Frontier: Style and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, 3rd. ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith and Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), 51, 90, 94, 205. 38. Kate Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 15. 39. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 6. 40. Ibid., 7, 8; emphasis in the original. The importance of these distinctions is echoed in Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers,” 1265–93. 41. For dominant and appropriated spaces, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 73, 164, 165; Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 88–89. For representation of the feminization of poverty in women’s charities, see Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 25. 42. Christine Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6, 12. 43. For comparison, see Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). In 1873, 120 people subscribed to the Ladies’ Relief Society, with most making contributions of less than ten dollars; all but fifteen donations came from women. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 9, 11, 20–21. In the mid-1870s, donations included three cows, the occasional pig, chickens, fruit, and clothes. The First Congregational Church offered a meeting space in the winter and raised money for the charity at the Thanksgiving dinner (as did other congregations). Anthony Chabot, director of the Contra Costa Water Company, donated a year’s supply of water, after which a well was dug in the Oakland hills and pipes laid to bring the water to the site. LRS, Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth Annual Reports, Years Ending December 31, 1936 and 1937 (Oakland: The Society, 1938), 7–8. 44. Mrs. C. C. Curtis, “Report of the Corresponding Secretary of the O.L.R.S. for the Year 1871–2,” in First and Second Annual Reports, 11. 45. “Who Will Give Us a Site?,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 26, 1872, 2. For the benefit fair, see Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 6–7; Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Society, Annual Reports of the Officers,” 1. For newspaper reports: “Where to Apply,” Oakland Daily Transcript, Jan. 15, 1872, 3; “Ladies’ Relief Society,” Oakland Daily Transcript, March 30, 1872, 2; “A Benevolent Society’s Festival,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 6, 1872, 3; “Grand Festival,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 16, 1872, 3; “Ladies’ Relief Festival,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 20, 1872, 3; “Ladies’ Festival,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 24, 1872, 3; “Our Appeal,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 24, 1872, 2; “A Grand Success, Fourth Night of the Fair, Beauty and Fashion; Liberality of Our Citizens; Turn Out To-Night,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 26, 1872, 3; “A Splendid Night,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 26, 1872, 2; “Our Appeal,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 26, 1872, 2; “Our Farewell,” Oakland Daily Transcript, April 27, 1872, 2. 46. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 15. Ball & Day offered architectural services; Pearson and Sims promised millwork; Boardman surveyed the Bigelow lot. 47. Logan, “Hospitals, Asylums, Public Institutions,” 49–50; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 141–42.

Notes to Chapter Three / 375 48. San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Annual Reports of the Managers and Trustees of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui and Company, 1869), 3; Rowena Beans, “Inasmuch . . .”: The One Hundred Year History of the San Francisco Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society (San Francisco: The Society, 1953), 3–4, 9, 13; Children’s Home Finding Society of California, Homes for Homeless Children (San Francisco: The Society, 1900); Bishop Armitage Church Orphanage of California, Third Annual Report (San Francisco: The Society, 1891). 49. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 15. 50. Richard Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” in Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe, ed. Robert D. Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 111–13; John S. Hittell, Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Co., 1882), 241. 51. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 4; W. W. Elliott, Oakland and Surroundings, Illustrated and Described, Showing Its Advantages for Residences and Businesses (Oakland: W. W. Elliott and Company, 1885), 90; Rev. Max Clark, “Social Service Organizations of Oakland” (Oakland: Works Progress Administration, 1939, typed manuscript; on file, Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library [OHR/OPL h/a), 42. 52. The property is described in Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1871–2,” 7; Henry G. Langley, A Directory of the City of Oakland and Its Environs (Oakland: Strickland, 1878), 62; Directory Publishing Co., Bishop’s Oakland Directory, 1880–81 (Oakland: W. B. Hardy, 1880), 70. See also Thompson & West, Official and Historical Atlas Map of Alameda County, California (Oakland and Philadelphia: Thomas Hunter, 1878), 97; California State Board of Health [CSB h/a], Eighth Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years of 1882 and 1883 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1884), 113. 53. Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14–15, 18. 54. A. J. S. Maddison, “Refuges and Homes for Children,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Third International Congress for the Welfare and Protection of Children, ed. William Chance (London: P. S. King and Son, 1902), 300–302; Ruth Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation: ‘Child-Saving’ Institutions and the Children of the Underclass in San Francisco, 1850–1910” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 35–36. 55. Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 56. For calculated use in the United States, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 31; Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 15, 17–19; Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chap. 2; Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 4, 7; Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 40–41; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 177; Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988); Sandra Enos, “The Emergence of Child Welfare at the State Home and School, Rhode Island’s Public Orphanage,” Rhode Island History 65 (2007): 71. For Europe, Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the

376 / Notes to Chapter Three Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 57. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 14; Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 23, 25; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 51–52. 58. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, 32–37; Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 14–16, 89–99. 59. Dell Upton, “The Traditional House and Its Enemies,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 77, 78; Dell Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in America, 1800–1860,” Winterthur Portfolio 19, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1984): 105–50; and also Clifford E. Clark, Jr., “Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840–1870,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7, no. 1 (Summer 1976): 49–53. 60. Curtis, “Report of the Corresponding Secretary, 1871–2,” 11 quote; Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” 13–14. For a similar emphasis on citizenship, Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, 7–8, 11, 57–61. 61. For the use of material culture at the Five Points charities, Ryan, Women in Public, 39–40; Robert K. Fitts, “The Rhetoric of Reform: The Five Points Missions and the Cult of Domesticity,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 115–32; SmithRosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 226–35; Rick Beard, ed. On Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1987), 136–37; Rebecca Yamin, “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology 32, no. 1 (1998): 74–85. 62. James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 63. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” 9 quote; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 32–33. 64. For this point, Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 64; Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 31; and the discussion of the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital in Virginia A. Metaxas Quiroga, Poor Mothers and Babies: A Social History of Childbirth and Child Care Hospitals in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Garland Publishers, 1989), 69. 65. For the matron’s maternal role, Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” 15. The theme repeats in later years, influencing rules and regulations in the Home for Aged Women, reprinted in LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, For the Two Years Ending May 1, 1886 (Oakland: Pacific Press Printing, 1886), 34. 66. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 6. 67. Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Annual, Recording Secretary’s Report,” Oakland Daily Times, May 3, 1878, 3. For comparison, NYAICP, Eleventh Annual Report, 8–9; Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City, 247–49; Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 16; Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s–1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 138. 68. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 6, 7 quote; Clark, “Social Service Organizations,” 42. 69. Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Annual,” 3. 70. Subscriptions fell from $150 to $50 a month. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 7.

Notes to Chapter Three / 377 71. Weston, “Ladies’ Relief Annual,” 3; LRS, Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth Annual Reports, 7; Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 7. The police collected fines from “drunkards and vagabonds,” and upon petition, the state legislature permitted the Ladies’ Relief Society and the Oakland Benevolent Society to share some of the money. The city council had supported the proposal, but the mayor vetoed the ordinance because the charities were not required to explain how the money had been spent. See Washburne R. Andrus, Annual Message of Mayor Andrus, January 30, 1879 (Oakland: Press of the Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 1879), n.p. 72. LRS, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Reports of the Board of Managers (Oakland: The Society, 1883), 12. 73. Carolyn Brucken, “In the Public Eye: Women and the American Luxury Hotel,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 203–20; A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 171–72. 74. Weston, “Ladies’ Relief Annual,” 3. For parlors in women’s charities, see Lu Ann De Cunzo, “Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions; the Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Special issue),” Historical Archaeology 29, no. 3 (1995): 1–168; Lu Ann De Cunzo, “On Reforming the ‘Fallen’ and Beyond: Transforming Continuity at the Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, 1845–1916,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5, no. 1 (March 2001): 19–44. For parlors at home Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Katherine C. Grier, “Imagining the Parlor, 1830–1880,” in Perspectives on American Furniture, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward (New York and Winterthur: W. W. Norton and the Winterthur Museum, 1988), 205–39. 75. Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 22–23; Howard Goldstein, The Home on Gorham Street and the Voices of its Children (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 28–32. 76. “Rest for the Weary, A Home For the Tired and a Respite From Labor, One of Oakland’s Noble Charities—A New Building Erected—The Laying of the Corner Stone,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, July 22, 1882, 1; CSBH, Eighth Biennial Report, 112. For close quarters of working-class homes, Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 47–52; Elizabeth Collins Cromley, “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms, 1890– 1930,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 120–61; Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 763. 77. California State Board of Examiners [CSBE h/a], Report of the Board of Examiners, January 1, 1881 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1881), 9. 78. These figures are collated from the manuscript census and a few surviving record books. See US Census Office, “Oakland in 1880,” 783; LRS, “Inmates of the Home” (Oakland, 1885–1920); LRS, “Admission of Children” (Oakland, 1890–1912). 79. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 7, 14. The managers opened meetings with the Lord’s Prayer and scripture readings. 80. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” 13; for comparison, Enos, “Emergence of Child Welfare,” 70. For mobility, see David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little,

378 / Notes to Chapter Three Brown, 1971), 24; Katz, Shadow of the Poorhouse, 94, 108; Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 22. 81. Nina E. Lerman, “‘Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life’: Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid-19th-Century Philadelphia,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 39–40. 82. Fisher, “Report of the Recording Secretary, 1872–3,” 14 quote; for comparison, Lerman, “‘Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life,’” 37–40, 49–50. 83. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 290–93; Martha Mabie Gardner, “Working on White Womanhood: White Working Women in the San Francisco Anti-Chinese Movement,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 73–95. 84. Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Society, Annual Reports of the Officers,” 3. For comparison, see Wood, Freedom of the Streets, 48–50. 85. For changes in financing, see Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 143, 145. 86. Captain J. C. Ainsworth, A. K. P. Harmon, Sr., and Captain Simpson also donated. “Old Ladies’ Home, Ceremonies of Laying the Corner-Stone at Temescal,” 7; Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, Eleventh Annual Report of the Society’s Condition,” Oakland Daily Times, May 17, 1882, 3; Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 9–10. 87. Henry F. Withey and Elsie Rathburn Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (Deceased) (Los Angeles: New Age Publishing, 1956), 405. 88. When publication began in 1879, Wolfe called the journal the Quarterly Architectural Review. Withey and Withey, Biographical Dictionary, 668–69; “Do You Remember?,” Pacific Coast Architect 31, no. 2 (February 1927): 23. Wolfe was a founding member of the Pacific Society of Architects, which became the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1882. 89. The Builder, “Buying vs. Building,” California Architect and Building Review [CABR h/a] 4, no. 4 (1883): 64; James E. Wolfe, “Building Cheaply,” CABR 2, no. 4 (1881): 31. 90. Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 149–54; Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism,” 105–50. 91. See, for example, James E. Wolfe, “The Chinese Question,” CABR 1, no. 4 (1880): 34; James E. Wolfe, “The Aggressive Chinaman,” CABR 2, no. 3 (1881): 24. 92. Ryan, Civic Wars, 292–93; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 167–71. 93. “Rest for the Weary,” 1. 94. “Old Ladies’ Home, Ceremonies of Laying the Corner-Stone at Temescal,” 9. 95. Ibid., 11. The casket also included annual reports, lists of officers and building committee members, the names of subscribers to the building fund, the program of the dedication ceremony, a street directory, a photograph of the Children’s Home, and newspaper articles discussing the ceremony. 96. “Old Ladies’ Home, Ceremonies of Laying the Corner-Stone at Temescal,” 8; “Rest for the Weary,” 1. The first appropriation was duly noted in Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Sweet Charity, Annual Report of the Ladies’ Relief Society,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, May 1, 1884, 3. See also LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 12, 13. 97. “Rest for the Weary,” 1.

Notes to Chapter Three / 379 98. Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 54, 55, 62. 99. LRS, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Reports, 12. 100. Elizabeth Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis,” Material History Review 44 (Fall 1996): 8–22. 101. “Rest for the Weary,” 1; CSBH, Eighth Biennial Report, 113; and for comparison with similar demands in the Progressive Era, Lee M. A. Simpson, Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 97. 102. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 12–13. 103. An applicant also needed to have been a resident of California for ten years (or of Alameda County for five). The society accepted paying boarders at the directors’ discretion, and agreed to overlook the residence requirement if petitioned by a church. See “By-Laws of the Home for Aged Women,” LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 32; and “Rules and Regulations of the Home for Aged Women, Matron, Leaflet No. 1”; “Rules and Regulations of the Home for Aged Women, Inmates, Leaflet No. 2,” in the same report, 34–37. 104. Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Fifteenth Annual Report and Election of Officers,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, May 7, 1886, 3. 105. LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 6. 106. “Ladies’ Relief Society, History of a Leading Charitable Institution,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune (special number), Jan. 20, 1887, 23 quote; Associated Charities of Oakland, Proposed Constitution (Oakland: The Association, 1884); Associated Charities of Oakland, Principles, Objects, and By-Laws (Oakland: The Association, 1889). 107. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1884), 100; cited by Ralph da Costa Nunez and Ethan G. Sribnick, The Poor among Us: A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City (New York: White Tiger Press, 2013), 110. 108. Associated Charities, Proposed Constitution, back page of leaflet; Associated Charities, Principles, Objects, and By-Laws, back page of leaflet. By 1890, Oakland’s city council contributed $1,700 a year to the Associated Charities. In due course, the Alameda County’s board of supervisors would also contribute, giving $4,800 to “investigate indigents” in 1920. Roland W. Snow, First Annual Report of the Auditor of the City of Oakland, Cal., for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1890 (Oakland: City of Oakland, 1890), 3; Alameda County Auditor Controller (E. F. Garrison), Annual Financial Report, Board of Supervisors, County of Alameda, State of California, June 30, 1920 (Oakland: County Board of Supervisors, 1920), 20. 109. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 210. 110. M. W. Wood and J. P. Munro-Fraser, History of Alameda County, California (Oakland: M. W. Wood, 1883), 396. 111. LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 7. 112. “Be Consistent,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 8, 1886, 4 quote; Wood and MunroFraser, History of Alameda County, 396. 113. LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 7. See also James E. Wolfe, “The Chinese Infliction,” CABN 5, no. 10 (October 1885): 172; James E. Wolfe, “Anti-Chinese Demonstration,” CABN 5, no. 11 (November 1885): 182; James E. Wolfe, “A New Phase in this Chinese Question,” CABN 5, no. 11 (November 1885): 193. 114. LRS, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Annual Reports, 29. For the renovation, see CSBH, Eighth Biennial Report, 113.

380 / Notes to Chapter Four 115. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 15. 116. Sarah Edwards Henshaw, “Year of Benevolence, Annual Report to the Ladies’ Relief Society,” Oakland Enquirer, May 3, 1888, 4 quote; “Temescal, A Pretty Suburb within Easy Access of this City,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, Jan. 25, 1890, 3. The charity opened the school temporarily to protect children and staff from a smallpox epidemic; its success convinced the charity to make the school part of the Chabot experiment, although the decision to remove children from public school was subsequently rescinded. For the spread of industrial education in orphanages in the 1880s, see Gary Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868–1924 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 33–38. 117. Henshaw, “Sweet Charity,” 3; LRS, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report (Oakland: The Society, 1895), 15. The fire was covered extensively in the press: “The Home, Its Annual Business Meeting Held To-day,” Oakland Enquirer, May 3, 1894, 1; “A Big Fire,” Oakland Tribune, May 1, 1894, 1; “At the Home, the Ladies Will Discuss Replacing the Burned Building Tomorrow,” Oakland Enquirer, May 2, 1894, 1; “Children’s Home, Efforts of the Ladies’ Relief Society to Rebuild It,” Oakland Enquirer, June 5, 1894, 3. 118. LRS, First and Second Annual Reports, 14–15. 119. Mott, “A Brief Summary,” 18, 19; “The Children’s Home, Rebuilt and Is Now Ready for Public Inspection, A Grand Work Being Done by the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 14, 1894, 5. 120. LRS, Forty-fourth Annual Report, Year Ending December 31, 1915 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1916), 27; LRS, Forty-fifth Annual Report, Year Ending December 31, 1916 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth Co., 1917), 30. 121. Marta Gutman, “The Tilghman Family and Race Work in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland. Cypress Interpretive Report No. 2, I-880 Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: ASC/SSU, 2004), 284; Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 122. Donald Hausler, “Old Folks’ Home,” Oakland Heritage Alliance News 5, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 1–2; “Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People,” Oakland Independent, Dec. 14, 1929, 3; Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland: Northern California Center for Afro-American History and Life, 1989), 14. 123. Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 31. Chapter four

1.

2.

For biases against illegitimate children and African Americans, Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Late Nineteenth-century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), esp. 152–53; Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 89; Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 40–41. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 173–74.

Notes to Chapter Four / 381 3.

John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 42–53, 58–61; Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 168–69. 4. M. W. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” Overland Monthly 15, no. 1 (January 1890): 85. 5. Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 191–93. See also Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 46–49; Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), 43–45, 51. 6. Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind; Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child; Judith Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best”: Correspondence of a Nineteenth-Century Orphan Asylum (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). For emphasis on isolation and segregation, Gary Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868–1924 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). 7. For an overview, Miroslava Chávez-García, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). For overcrowded buildings, Whittier State School, Report of the Board of Trustees of the Reform School for Juvenile Offenders, Located at Whittier, Los Angeles County (Sacramento: State Office, J. D. Young, Superintendent, 1890), 3; Preston School of Industry, Tenth Biennial Report of the Board of Trustees, 1910–1912 (Ione, CA: The School, 1912), 39. For excessive discipline, see the discussion of Whittier State School in vol. 7 (“Charities and Corrections”) of George C. Pardee, “Scrapbooks” (58 vol., v.d., on file, BL/UCB). For dilapidated facilities, see discussion of the Glen Ellen Home for Feeble-Minded Children in CSBH, Thirteenth Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Fiscal Years From June 30, 1892, to June 30, 1894 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1894), 24–25. 8. For family strategy and parental invention, Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 13–14; Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 7–8, 122–24, 169–70; Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 40–41, 43–46; Ruth Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation: ‘Child-Saving’ Institutions and the Children of the Underclass in San Francisco, 1850–1910” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1991), 176–77. Michel argues mothers turned orphanages into sites of “maternal invention”; in Oakland, fathers also used the facilities for emergency childcare. For one example, “Sad Poverty, It Should Appeal to Every One with a Heart, You Can Help a Little,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 1, 1893, 1. 9. Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 136–40; Nina E. Lerman, “‘Preparing for the Duties and Practical Business of Life’: Technological Knowledge and Social Structure in Mid19th-Century Philadelphia,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 31–59. 10. Rebecca McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home” (Oakland, 1885–1892), 1. Subsequently, the managers of the West Oakland Home changed the name of McWade’s notebook to “1st Record Book of Children—starting 1885,” and the title was altered

382 / Notes to Chapter Four once again to volume 8 of the West Oakland Home’s record books. McWade’s title is used throughout. The record books are in the Oakland History Room, Oakland Public Library. 11. Ann Rogers et al., “Rebecca Ball McWade,” in “The Lincoln Child Center, 1883–1983, Centennial Scrapbook” (Oakland, 1983; on file, archives of the Lincoln Child Center [LCC h/a]). No other sources, including McWade, collaborate this information. 12. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 1; California Froebel Society, California Froebel Society (San Francisco: The Society, c. 1887), 1, 5. 13. Emma Fox, “Reciprocity Among Clubs,” Club Life 12 (March 1904): 13. 14. Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6, 7. See also Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 212. 15. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 1. 16. For example, Mary McLean Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880–1895, Interview conducted by Willa Klug Baum” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1963), 40–41; First Congregational Church of Oakland, A Directory Giving Names and Residences of Members of the First Congregational Church of Oakland (Oakland: Butler and Bowman, 1876); California First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, Yearbook of the First Presbyterian Church, Oakland, California, 1883 (San Francisco: Torras and Freeman, 1883). 17. Matthew Carey’s point is discussed in Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 79. 18. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 1. McWade, who described herself as a Christian, did not mention her church, although she may have attended services at the Episcopal Church of the Advent, across the street from her East Oakland home. 19. Ibid., 2. Other records put the incorporation date at March 1885. See West Oakland Home [WOH h/a], “Record Book of Children: The Little Workers’ Home For Foundlings and Destitute Children of Oakland, Alameda Co., Cal.,” (Oakland, 1885–96), 101; Joseph E. Baker, ed. Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 252. 20. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 28; L. M. McKenney and Co., McKenney’s Oakland City Directory (Oakland: The Company, 1884), 329, 333; L. M. McKenney and Co., McKenney’s Oakland City Directory (Oakland: The Company, 1885), 251, 355. 21. Rogers and et al., “Rebecca Ball McWade.” For fund-raising, see “Foundlings and Destitute Children,” Oakland Enquirer, March 19, 1887, n.p. (clipping); “West Oakland,” Oakland Enquirer, April 2, 1887, 5; “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 1, 1888, 4. 22. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 2, 28 quote. 23. Ibid., 28. 24. Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 161, 166, 169; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 173. 25. West Oakland Home, “Record Book of Children,” 1. 26. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 4. For adoption, Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 187; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 169–207; Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

Notes to Chapter Four / 383 27. For baby farms as mutual aid, Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 157–99; Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 6, 42, 47, 57; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 169–84. 28. WOH, “Record Book of Children”; McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 28. 29. Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 361–66, 413–14. 30. CSBH, Fourth Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1876 and 1877 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1877), 34–36. 31. Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 152, 179–80. See also E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 46–58. 32. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 14. For the historical invisibility of women’s voluntary activity, Anne Firor Scott, “On Seeing and Not Seeing: A Case of Historical Invisibility,” The Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (June 1984): 7–21. 33. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 3. 34. Ibid., 2; WOH, Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the West Oakland Home (Oakland: Horwinski Company, 1914), 4. 35. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), xviii. 36. Prescott Grammar School opened in 1869, replacing a one-room school. Oakland Board of Education [OBE h/a], Oakland Public Schools: Third Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools for the School Year Ending June 30th 1873 (Oakland: J. S. Butler and Company, 1873), 30, 37–38. 37. “The Churches, The History of Oakland’s Religious Bodies,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune (special number), Jan. 20, 1887, 33–36; Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, 1:250. 38. This building would be called the Chabot Home in honor of its most important donor. “The Sheltering Home: The Work and Aims of a Useful Institution,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune (Special Number), Jan. 20, 1887, 23; The Chabot Home: The Woman’s Sheltering and Protection Home of Oakland (Oakland: The Home, 1895). 39. “A Rescue Home, The Best Side of the Salvation Army Work,” Oakland Enquirer, March 15, 1888, 3. 40. For the appeal, Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered, 72; for abdication of responsibility, Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 174–75. 41. “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” 4. For a similar description, Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 23; Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 134. 42. “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” 4. 43. Ibid.; “West Oakland Home, Vague Rumors of Cruelty and Starvation Afloat, A Visit to the Institution Does Not Confirm the Stories—It Seems to be Well Managed,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 4, 1891, 5. 44. Dell Upton, “Lancasterian Schools, Republican Citizenship, and the Spatial Imagination in Early Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 3 (September 1996): 243. 45. Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 155. 46. “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” 4. 47. Ibid. (quote). The trunk was a version of the revolving cradle, a device invented in France to prevent infanticide. The cradle made it possible to drop off children at

384 / Notes to Chapter Four an institution without coming into contact with authorities. James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 83; Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 26–28. 48. “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” 4. 49. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 51. 50. Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 14; Arthur J. Pillsbury, Institutional Life: Its Relations to the State and to the Wards of the State (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1906), 70–71. 51. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1872), 225. 52. Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 16, 25; Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 169–71. For Lowell and the COS, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Public Relief and Private Charity (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1884). 53. Jacob A. Riis, Children of the Poor (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1905), 280; cited in Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 175. 54. Stephen O’Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 209–15. 55. Clay Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children’s Aid Society,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 120; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 172–73. 56. For play, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in NineteenthCentury American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 179–81; and Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 149. For family ties, Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City,” 134–37. 57. Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City,” 126–31; Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays,” 131–33, 139–40. 58. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 81 (quote)–85; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 23; Shackelford, “To Shield Them from Temptation,” 429, 430. For East Coast examples, Gish, “Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City,” 122. 59. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 184–89. 60. In this instance, outdoor relief referred to food, clothing, and money given for use in private homes (outside of institutions). After 1900, the State Board of Examiners allowed foster mothers to be paid directly for taking care of infants less than eighteen months of age at home. The women were seen to be “an extension of institutional service” and were paid $12.50 a month to care for a child less than thirty months old. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 4, 14, 20–22; Pillsbury, Institutional Life, 71. 61. Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), chap. 3, especially 79, 84. 62. Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). For empirical evidence, US Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 24–30. 63. Polster, Inside Looking Out, 47–48.

Notes to Chapter Four / 385 64. Preston School of Industry, Biennial Report of the Board of Trustees, 1892/94 (Ione, CA: The School, 1894), 11; Preston School of Industry, Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Trustees, 1898–1900 (Ione, CA: The School, 1900), 4; William H. Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California: A Study of Agencies and Institutions (New York: Department of Child Helping, Russell Sage Foundation, 1916), 43. The board of trustees, chaired by E. M. Preston, was established in 1889, but waited until July 1893 to take over the operation of this school from the board of prison directors. 65. Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 61, 65. 66. Preston School of Industry, Fourth Biennial Report, 4, 7. 67. Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 15, 17–18, 38. For a similar point, Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered, 7–8, 181, 185; Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best,” 9–13. 68. Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, 190; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 172. 69. “Little Waifs, How They Are Cared for at the Little Workers’ Home,” 2, 4. For survival rates, McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home”; WOH, “Record Book of Children.” 70. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 8. 71. WOH, “Record Book of Children,” 4. 72. WOH, Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 4. 73. For the Southern Pacific’s interests and spread of “railroad antagonism” in the state, William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 74. For Pullman, Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Richard T. Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” Harper’s Monthly 70 (1885): 452–66. For company towns in California, James Michael Buckley, “A Factory without a Roof: The Company Town in the Redwood Lumber Industry,” in Exploring Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 7, ed. Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurray (Knoxville: University of  Tennessee Press 1997), 75–92. 75. “The West End, Improvements—R. R. Reading Rooms—Social Party—The Artesian and Other Wells,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, Nov. 9, 1874, 3, emphasis added. 76. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 293–94. 77. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 83; Richard W. Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 83, 86. For the Mary A. Crocker Trust, see http://mactrust.org/home.html. 78. WOH, Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 4. The assessed value of the property was three thousand dollars, according to the city tax assessor’s block books. 79. “A Home Incorporated,” Oakland Enquirer, April 10, 1888, 7; “Incorporated,” Enquirer, April 24, 1889, 3; “Reincorporation,” Oakland Enquirer, June 19, 1889, 4; Associated Charities of Oakland, Principles, Objects, and By-Laws (Oakland: The Association, 1889), 2. 80. McWade, “Record of the Foundling Home,” 66. 81. “Mrs. McWade Retires as Manager of the West Oakland Home,” Oakland Enquirer, March 19, 1890, 3. After McWade retired, the Pacific Rescue Association took over the management of facility for a short period. 82. W.O.H., Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 4. 83. “Mrs. McWade Retires as Manager of the West Oakland Home,” 3; WOH,

386 / Notes to Chapter Four Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 4; “Poor Little Waifs, Two a Day Received at the West Oakland Home, Formal Opening of the New Building of This Home Erected by Large Hearted Philanthropists,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 7, 1891, 3. The Union Savings Bank held the mortgage for the balance. With costs rising, parent donations scarce, and state aid wholly inadequate (twenty cents per day, and only for foundlings), Ethel Crocker gave $2,000 for daily expenses and her mother-in-law’s estate contributed $1,500 a year. 84. “Poor Little Waifs, Two a Day Received at the West Oakland Home,” 3. See also Reverend Max Clark, “Social Service Organizations of Oakland” (Oakland: Works Progress Administration, 1939, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL), 58; Aicha Woods, “The Women’s Domestic Reform Movement in Oakland, 1880–1910,” in West Oakland: “A Place to Start From.” Research Design and Treatment Plan Cypress I-880 Replacement Project, Volume 1: Historical Archaeology, ed. Mary Praetzellis (Rohnert Park and Oakland, Calif.: ASC/SSU, 1994), 189–90. 85. McWade’s death on April 25, 1891 is noted in F. M. Husted, Husted’s Directory of Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, and Alameda County (San Francisco: F. M. Husted, 1892), 355. See also “Tokens of Respect,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, April 27, 1891; “Tokens of Respect, The Funeral of Mrs. Rebecca S. McWade at Chester Street Church,” Oakland Enquirer, April 28, 1891; “Charity Was Her Motto, The Useful Life of Rebecca S. McWade,” Oakland Morning Times, April 26, 1891. For the charity’s use of Chester Street Methodist Church, see “West Oakland Home, Annual Meeting of a Worthy Charity,” Oakland Enquirer 1896, n.p. (clipping in LCC scrapbook). 86. Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 38–42. 87. “Mrs. McWade Retires as Manager of the West Oakland Home,” 3. 88. The first published reference to the kindergarten is in the Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 4, 1891. Also see “West Oakland Home, Annual Meeting of a Worthy Charity.” 89. “West Oakland Home,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 16, 1892. The state government gave a private charity a subsidy of one hundred dollars per year for each full orphan (about twenty-seven cents a day), and of seventy-five dollars per year for each halforphan and abandoned child (about twenty cents a day). 90. H. A. Redfield, “Good Work, That Being Done at the West Oakland Home, A Charity Which Appeals to All Who Love the Little Ones,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 21, 1894, 3. 91. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 85. 92. Redfield, “Good Work,” 3. For similar points, see Polster, Inside Looking Out. 93. “The West End, Measles Break Out in the West Oakland Home,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 25, 1892, 3; Managers of the West Oakland Home, “Hearty Thanks Returned to Those Who Have Aided the Home,” Oakland Enquirer, Oct. 25, 1893, 3; Redfield, “Good Work,” 3. 94. Redfield, “Good Work,” 3. 95. “West Oakland Home, Vague Rumors of Cruelty and Starvation Afloat, A Visit to the Institution Does Not Confirm the Stories,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 4, 1891, 4; A Teacher, “A Merry Time, The Little Ones of the West Oakland Home Enjoy a Picnic,” Oakland Enquirer, June 25, 1893; “Cruelty to a Child, A Three-year Old Girl Brutally Beated by Her Parents,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 4, 1896; “Man and Wife Arrested as a Result of the Treatment of the Little Girl,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 6, 1896; “Guilty of Cruelty,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 9, 1891; “The Child Beater,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 10, 1894, 3. 96. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 85. 97. Ibid., 78 quote; Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 46.

Notes to Chapter Five / 387 98. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 78 quote, 93 quote; Ellen Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood: Immigrants and the American Kindergarten” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004), 231–32; Polster, Inside Looking Out, 36–39; Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered, 99. 99. Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood,” 232. 100. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 100. 101. Ibid., 93. C h a p t e r fiv e

1. Eva V. Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” Overland Monthly n.s. 36, no. 9 (September 1900): 248. 2. Michael Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood’: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003), 216; Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 182. 3. For use of the term “wedge,” Elizabeth D. Watt, “My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch” (San Francisco, 1925, typed manuscript; on file, BL/UCB), 140; for discussion of it, Michael Steven Shapiro, Child’s Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 100. 4. Ellen Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood: Immigrants and the American Kindergarten” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004), 186–90; Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 107–9; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 102. 5. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5, 11. 6. Lois Rather, Miss Kate: Kate Douglas Wiggin in San Francisco (Oakland: Rather Press, 1980); Doyce B. Nunis, “Kate Douglas Wiggin: Pioneer in California Kindergarten Education,” California Historical Society Quarterly 41, no. 4 (December 1962): 291–307. Both authors draw heavily on Kate Douglas Wiggin, My Garden of Memory: An Autobiography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923). 7. Ann Taylor Allen, “‘Let Us Live with Our Children’: Kindergarten Movements in Germany and the United States, 1840–1914,” History of Education Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 23–48. Margarethe Meyer was Jewish; her husband, Carl Schurz, was a Christian free thinker; her sister, Bertha Meyer Ronge, opened a kindergarten in 1851, when exiled to England. Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 53; Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood,” 222; Susan Herrington, “Kindergartens: Shaping Childhood from Bad Blankenburg to Boston,” Die Gartenkunst 18, no. 1 (2006): 87. 8. Allen, “‘Let Us Live with Our Children,’” 35–36. For comparison with antebellum infant schools, Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 20–37; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 26–30. 9. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Moral Culture of Infancy, and Kindergarten Guide: With Music for the Plays (New York: J. W. Schermerhorn & Co., 1869), 14; cited in Allen, “‘Let Us Live with Our Children,’” 30. 10. Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 23–24,

388 / Notes to Chapter Five 29; Judith Raftery, “Los Angeles Club Women and Progressive Reform,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 147–53; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1860–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1980), 31–33, 42, 44. 11. Raftery, “Los Angeles Club Women,” 149–50; William Warren Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California, 1846–1936 (Berkeley: Sather Gate Book Shop, 1937), 163. 12. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Children’s Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 221–35 quote; Emma Marwedel, Conscious Motherhood, or the Earliest Unfolding of the Child in the Cradle, Nursery, and Kindergarten (Boston: Heath, 1889). 13. Barbara Beatty, “‘A Vocation from on High’: Kindergartening as an Occupation for American Women,” in Changing Education: Women as Radicals and Conservators, ed. Joyce Antler and Sari Knopp Biklen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 40. For public schools and the industrial model, David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Marvin Lazerson, The Origins of the Urban School (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); David B. Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 14. Elizabeth Peabody, “Kindergarten Intelligence,” Kindergarten Messenger 3, no. 6 (June 1875): 132; cited in Beatty, “‘A Vocation from on High,’” 40. 15. Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 85–106; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 72–100; Allen, “‘Let Us Live with Our Children,’” 29–30. 16. Carol Marie Roland, “The California Kindergarten Movement: A Study in Class and Social Feminism” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 1980), 107–12; M. W. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” Overland Monthly 15, no. 1 (January 1890): 93–98. 17. Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 107 quote; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 86–87, 90. 18. This point calls on Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xix. 19. New Silver Street Kindergarten Society, The Free Kindergarten Work of the Pacific Coast, Kate D. S. Wiggin, Supt. Silver Street K. (San Francisco: The Society, 1883), 7. 20. Mary McLean Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California, 1880– 1895, Interview Conducted by Willa Klug Baum” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1963), 77. 21. Rose, Governing the Soul, 183, 184 quote; Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 30–39; Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 21. 22. Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 68–69; Evelyn Weber, “Play Materials in the Curriculum of Early Childhood,” in Educational Toys in America, 1800 to the Present, ed. Karen Hewett and Louis Roomet (Burlington, VT: Robert Hull Fleming, 1979), 27–29. Brad­ ley learned about kindergartens from Edward Wiebé, a disciple of Froebel, who after he emigrated to the United States wrote a manual describing kindergarten music and games. See Edward Wiebé, The Golden Jubilee Edition of the Paradise of Childhood: A Practical Guide to Kindergartners (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Company, 1910); Milton Bradley, “A Reminiscence of Miss Peabody,” Kindergarten News 4 (February 1894): 39–40. 23. Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 68–69. 24. Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten; or, His Ideas Concerning the Play and Playthings of the Child, trans. Josephine Jarvis, vol. 30, International Education Series

Notes to Chapter Five / 389 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1907), 60; cited in Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, 42. 25. Susan Herrington, “The Garden in Froebel’s Kindergarten: Beyond the Metaphor,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 18 (1998): 330. 26. Caroline Progler, “Kindergarten Buildings and Grounds,” in Kindergarten and Culture Papers: Papers on Froebel’s Kindergarten, with Suggestions on Principles and Methods of Child Culture in Different Countries, ed. Henry Barnard (Hartford: Office of Barnard’s American Journal of Education, 1890), 769–74. 27. Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 107; M. W. Shinn, “Poverty and Charity in San Francisco, I,” Overland Monthly 14, no. 11 (November 1889): 540–42. 28. Robert Douglass, “A Brief History of the South of Market,” in South of Market: Historical Archaeology of Three San Francisco Neighborhoods, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park and Oakland, CA: ASC/SSU, 2009), 53–57; Anne E. Yentsch, “Tracing Immigrant Women and Their Household Possessions in 19thCentury San Francisco,” in South of Market, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 137–87. 29. Annita Waghorn, “‘On the Outside Looking In’: Institutions and Community,” in South of Market, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 65–66, 68, 69–73. The building burned down in the 1906 earthquake and fire; historical archaeologists excavated the site in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 30. Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 113–14. 31. Ibid., 110 quote; for discussion, Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 99. 32. Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Relation of the Kindergarten to Social Reform (San Francisco: California Froebel Society, c. 1884), 12–13. 33. New Silver Street Kindergarten Society, Free Kindergarten Work, 25 quote; “W.C.T.U. Column,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 5, 1889, 4. 34. Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 111. 35. Ibid., 110–14, 116–17. For figures, Roland, “California Kindergarten Movement,” 78–83; for comparison, Anna Davin, “When Is a Child Not a Child?” in Politics of Everyday Life: Continuity and Change in Work and Family, ed. Helen Corr and Lynn Jamieson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 37–61. 36. Barbara Beatty, “‘The Letter Killeth’: Americanization and Education in Kindergartens in the United States, 1856–1920,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 52. 37. Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Story of Patsy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889). A handicapped Irish boy comes to the kindergarten, befriends the teacher, and dies in her arms—asking at his deathbed for her, rather than for the priest. Wiggin wrote the story in 1882, sold it to benefit the kindergarten, and published an expanded, booklength version in 1890. For the marketing of sentiment, see Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 38. Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 133– 44; Wendy Rouse Jorae, The Children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 110–11. 39. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 93. Shinn became editor of the Overland Monthly after graduating from the University of California in Berkeley; she returned in the 1890s to study child psychology, winning the first doctorate awarded by the university to a woman.

390 / Notes to Chapter Five 40. As cited in Anna Irene Jenkins, “California,” in History of the Kindergarten Movement in the Western States and Hawaii and Alaska, ed. Barbara Greenwood and Lucy Wheelock (Washington: Association for Childhood Education, 1940), 15. See also Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, 1879–1979 (San Francisco: The Association, 1979). Cooper became a close friend of Wiggin, who testified on her behalf in an infamous heresy trial. The Presbyterian Church initiated the trial because Cooper refused to teach strict doctrine in her kindergarten’s Bible class. After her acquittal, Cooper moved the school to the First Congregational Church. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 93. 41. Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, “Free Kindergarten Work of the Pacific Coast” (San Francisco, 1878–1915; 5 vols. on file, BL/UCB). For scrapbooks, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 42. New Silver Street Kindergarten Society, Free Kindergarten Work, 10. 43. Silver Street Kindergarten Society, Fifth Annual Statement, for the Year Ending December 31st, 1886 (San Francisco: C. A. Murdock and Co., 1887), 5. 44. In 1902, Phoebe Hearst paid for an elegant school on Union Street, run by the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association (destroyed during the 1906 earthquake and fire). Hearst Free Kindergarten of San Francisco, Portfolio of Drawings and Specifications (San Francisco: 1902); Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 97; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 98–99. 45. Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, Sixteenth Annual Report (San Francisco: George Spaulding and Company, 1895), 17; cited by Roland, “California Kindergarten Movement,” 1. 46. Winnie McFarland, Class of 1883, Jennie Wheaton, Class of 1884, and Elizabeth Betts, Class of 1886, according to the California Froebel Society, California Froebel Society (San Francisco, The Society, c. 1887), 5–6. 47. For this point, Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. For statistics, OCHS, “West Oakland Survey: Oakland Point District,” (Oakland: SHRI, vol. 28A, 1990), 33. 48. “West Oakland, Events of the Day in the Bay Precincts,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 11, 1887, 3; “West Oakland, Point Pickings,” Oakland Enquirer, July 8, 1887, 3. 49. Mary E. Bamford, “Free Kindergartens of Oakland,” Overland Monthly n.s. 3, no. 1 (January 1884): 55. 50. Ibid., 57. See also Joseph E. Baker, ed., Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 251, 252; New Silver Street Kindergarten Society, Free Kindergarten Work, 8–9. 51. Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California,” 80 quote; Bamford, “Free Kindergartens,” 57; California Froebel Society, California Froebel Society, 5. 52. Olney, “Oakland, Berkeley, and the University of California,” 79. 53. Bamford, “Free Kindergartens,” 57. 54. Ibid., 58. 55. New Silver Street Kindergarten Society, Free Kindergarten Work, 8–9. 56. Madge Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools—Deeds of Real Charity in Helping Those Who Help Themselves, Where Young and Old Are Given Instruction of Practical Value,” Sunday Call Magazine, March 2, 1902, 6 quote. The site is described in “West Oakland Free Kindergarten, A Little of Its History and Also of Its Coming Benefit,” Oakland Enquirer, April 13, 1891, 2. Carlin and Moore may have meant a

Notes to Chapter Five / 391 building later rented for the free kindergarten and also used as a saloon, at 329–331 (713) Campbell Street. However, insurance maps and city directories indicate that the kindergarten moved in after 1900. By that time, the first site had been turned into a grocery store; such stores were often used as informal saloons. For a description of one such establishment, Waghorn, “Center of the Neighborhood: Community and the Knoche Store,” 91–95. For memories of the Mint Saloon on Seventh Street (figure 5.7), see Ed. H. Anthony, “A Sightseeing Tour along Seventh Street in the Late Eighties and Early Nineties,” WMBJ 4, no. 11 (November 1939): 6. 57. Allan Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Stockholm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 58. Baker, Past and Present Alameda County, California, 1:251–52; Jane Addams, “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” The Forum (October 1892): 228. 59. Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Law and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 16–18, 29–31, 155. See also Jon M. Kingsdale, “The “Poor Man’s Club”: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,” American Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1973): 472–89. 60. This information comes from studies of block books, the US Census, and Oakland city directories. 61. Powers, Faces Along the Bar, 36–41. 62. Jack London, John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1913; repr., 1989), 74–75; cited in Powers, Faces Along the Bar, 35. 63. Jacob Riis is cited by Eva V. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School: An Oakland Experiment,” Overland Monthly n.s. 35, no. 5 (May 1900): 430. 64. Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 93–94. 65. Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 637. For childhood and temperance, Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, chap. 2; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60–61, 62–63, 93–117. 66. For home protection and the ballot, Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873–1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 105; Bordin, Women and Temperance, 55–59; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 17–18. 67. Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, 1:247–48 quote; “The Temperance Groundswell, Temperance and Winter,” Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, Nov. 11, 1874, 1; No License, “Reasons Why Saloons Should Be Closed,” Oakland Daily News, May 28, 1874, 1; Mrs. Dorcas James Spencer, A History of the Women’s Temperance Movement of Northern and Central California (Oakland: West Coast Printing Corporation, 1911), 117–21. 68. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 20–21; Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 165. 69. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 21; Rumi Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 39–40, 126–30. 70. Bordin, Women and Temperance, 82–85; Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women

392 / Notes to Chapter Five and Men through American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 189, 193. 71. Willard made this statement in her 1891 presidential address, cited in Bordin, Women and Temperance, 55. 72. This comment was published in the Union Signal, March 27 1890, 8, and it is cited by Bordin, Women and Temperance, 102. 73. Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, 1: 252; California Froebel Society, California Froebel Society, 5; “Temperance Home,” Oakland Enquirer, June 19, 1889, 4; Bordin, Women and Temperance, 102. 74. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 47–51. 75. “Very Extensive, The Aims and Objects of the New Educational Union,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 5, 1889, 6; Aicha Woods, “Hotels and Lodging Houses along Seventh Street,” in West Oakland: “A Place to Start From.” Research Design and Treatment Plan Cypress I-880 Replacement Project; Volume 1: Historical Archaeology, ed. Mary Praetzellis (Rohnert Park and Oakland, CA: ASC/SSU, 1994), 151–52. 76. Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 130. 77. “Very Extensive, the Aims and Objects of the New Educational Union,” 6. 78. “West Oakland’s Pride, The New Athenaeum and Its Formal Opening,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 15, 1889, 4; Associated Charities of Oakland, Principles, Objects, and By-Laws (Oakland: The Association, 1889), 2; Julia A. Wilson, “West Oakland Temperance, Second Meeting of the Blue Ribbon Club on Monday Evening,” Oakland Enquirer, May 14, 1889, 2; Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, 1:255. 79. George W. Simpson, “Remember the Old Days?,” WMBJ 3, no. 8 (August 1939): 26; Ed. H. Anthony, “A Sightseeing Tour of West Oakland in the Late Eighties and Early Nineties,” WMBJ 5, no. 2 (February 1940): 15. 80. Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 115, 116. For Froebel and home visits, Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 99–101; Beatty, Preschool Education in America, 94. For false neighborliness, Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood,” 103–5; Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 47–48. 81. Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools,” 6. 82. For the intersection of “top-down” demands for reform with “bottom-up” pressures for social services, Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 128–36. 83. Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools,” 6; “West Oakland Free Kindergarten, A Little of Its History and Also of Its Coming Benefit,” 2. The first meeting took place on February 6, 1888; the constitution and bylaws were adopted on March 12. Hannah M. Whitehouse, “History of the Work,” in A New Century Greeting (Oakland: New Century Club, 1901), n.p. 84. Shapiro, Child’s Garden, 97, 98. 85. Lily Stetson was one such assistant teacher, and Ida Wilkin another. Stetson trained at the Normal Training School in San Francisco, organized with the help of Marwedel. Wilkin’s mother owned the kindergarten building. 86. “The Kindergarten, The Annual Meeting of the Lady Managers, A Noble Work for the Little Ones That Is Undenominational and Sustained by Subscriptions,” Oakland Enquirer, March 14, 1890, 3; “A Great Success, West Oakland Free Kindergarten on Peralta Street,” Oakland Enquirer, March 13, 1892, 2 quote. 87. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 255.

Notes to Chapter Five / 393 88. “Annual Meeting, Free Kindergarten Association of West Oakland,” Oakland Enquirer, March 12, 1894, 3. 89. A. A. Denison, “Cost of Poverty, An Array of Figures That Furnish Food for Thought, The Annual Bill of Expense in Alameda County for Poor Relief,” Oakland Enquirer, April 28, 1894, 3. 90. Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Oakland: Oakland Heritage Alliance, 1982; repr., 1994), 182. 91. “Mass Meeting, Civic Improvements Proposed,” Oakland Enquirer, Oct. 26, 1893, 3; “Appointed, Mayor Pardee Names His Committee,” Oakland Enquirer, Dec. 30, 1893, 1. 92. A Laborer, “A Laborer’s Views, He Thinks the City Should Not Hire at $1.25 a Day,” Oakland Enquirer, Sept. 11, 1893, 4 quote; J. D. Lyon, “The Unemployed,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 16, 1894, 4. See also “They’re Hungry, So They Call Upon the Supervisors in Force,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 1, 1894, 1. 93. “All Gone, The Provisions Donated by the Children, Over Twelve Hundred Hungry People Received a Week’s Supplies,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 2, 1894, 3; “The School Children,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 29, 1894, 3. 94. Ed. H. Anthony, “A Sightseeing Tour of West Oakland in the Late Eighties and Early Nineties,” WMBJ 5, no. 2 (February 1940): 15. 95. Rev. S. Goodenough, “Foes of Labor; The Chinese and Other Foes of American Labor,” California Review 1, no. 1 (October 1893): 35. 96. “With Him, Relief Committee Endorses His Course, He Was the Spokesman,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 3, 1894, 1. 97. Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 106 quote, 107; Van Slyck, Free to All, 44. See also Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 305; John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 73–102; Edwards, New Spirits, 225–53. 98. Knight, Citizen, 306–8. The Oakland newspapers indicate that other groups extended invitations: the Normal School in San Jose, the Rockford Seminary Association and Century Club in San Francisco, and the Ebell Society in Oakland. 99. Jane Addams, “The Lady from Chicago Speaks at Berkeley,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 7, 1894, 3. 100. “Social Uplift, The Work of Hull House Described by Miss Jane Addams,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 12, 1894, 3 quote; “Jane Addams, The Founder of Hull House Will Visit Oakland,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 29, 1894, 3; “Social Democracy,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 30, 1894, 4. For the repurposed saloon, Addams, “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” 232. 101. For the Pullman strike, Knight, Citizen, 309–25; Janice L. Reiff, “A Modern Lear and His Daughters: Gender in the Model Town of Pullman,” Journal of Urban History 23, no. 3 (March 1997): 316–41; Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), chaps. 9–12. 102. “Woman’s Work,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 2, 1894, 1. 103. Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 345. 104. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 122.

394 / Notes to Chapter Five 105. “Fingers and Faculties,” Oakland Enquirer, April 21, 1894, 5; “Woman’s Congress. Arrangements for the Meeting on Friday,” Oakland Enquirer, April 5, 1894, 2; “The Coming Congress,” Oakland Enquirer, May 8, 1894, 8. For the Congress, Gullett, Becoming Citi­zens, 65, 74–75, 78; Ethington, Public City, 355–58. For the exposition, Richard W. Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 226–29, 270–72. 106. The Woman’s Congress, The Woman’s Congress. Auxiliary to the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (San Francisco: The Congress, 1894), 5 quote; “Women in Congress, Beginning of a Great Six Days’ Gathering,” Oakland Enquirer, April 30, 1894, 1. 107. “Adjourned to Oakland,” Oakland Enquirer, May 7, 1894, 1; “Woman’s Congress: The Oakland Session Starts with a Good Attendance,” Oakland Enquirer, May 10, 1894, 1; “Eager Interest Displayed in the Woman’s Congress,” Oakland Enquirer, May 11, 1894, 1. For activities, “Practical Projects; Women of the Congress Embarrassed with Riches,” Oakland Enquirer, August 2, 1894, 4; “Woman’s Congress; The Alameda County Branch Now in Session,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 1, 1894, 1. 108. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 86. 109. The Woman’s Congress, The Woman’s Congress; “Annual Meeting, Free Kindergarten Association of West Oakland,” 3; Watt, “My Long Life,” 113. 110. Mrs. L. E. Drake, “Work for Ladies,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 8, 1893, 3; Mrs. L. E. Drake, “Helping the Needy,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 1, 1893, 3; Mrs. R. A. Loomis and Mrs. L. E. Drake, “Aiding the Needy,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 12, 1894, 3; Mrs. R. A. Loomis and Mrs. L. E. Drake, “One Month, What the Ladies’ Cooperative Aid Society Found to Do,” Oakland Oakland Enquirer, Dec. 5, 1893, 1; “Much Needed, Who Will Co-operate in Establishing a Day Nursery for Children?,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 31, 1894, 1; “The Day Nursery, It Can Be Started if Enough Mothers Apply,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 7, 1894, 6. 111. “Miss Betts’s Resignation,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 25, 1894, 8; Whitehouse, “History of the Work,” n.p. 112. Whitehouse, “History of the Work,” n.p. 113. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), 32–37; Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood,’” 220–21. See also James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1; Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 463–93. 114. Watt, “My Long Life,” 112. For sewing and charity, Nicholas Terpstra, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 115. Cooper’s comments are cited in “West Oakland Free Kindergarten, A Little of Its History and Also of Its Coming Benefit,” 2. 116. “Women in Congress, Beginning of a Great Six Days’ Gathering,” 1. For other examples, Wiggin, “Relation of the Kindergarten to Social Reform,” 11–12; Sarah B. Cooper, “The Kindergarten in Its Bearings Upon Crime, Pauperism, and Insanity,” California Review 1 (October 1893): 1–7; Sarah B. Cooper, “California,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, Twenty-second Annual Session.

Notes to Chapter Six / 395 Held in New Haven, Conn., ed. Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1895), 326. 117. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 93–96. For ties of free kindergartens to manual training, see Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, 98–100; California State Bureau of Labor Statistics, Third Biennial Report (Sacramento: J. D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1888), 258–61; US Department of Labor, “Industrial Education,” in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1892), ed. Carroll D. Wright (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 589–98. 118. Amy F. Ogata, Art Nouveau and the Social Version of Modern Living: Belgian Artists Living in a European Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58. For the United States, Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Wendy Kaplan, “The Art That is Life”: The Arts and Crafts in America, 1875–1920 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts and Little Brown, 1987). 119. Longstreth, On the Edge of the World, 232–33. See also Kenneth R. Trapp, The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life (Oakland and New York: Oakland Museum and Abbeville Press, 1993); Kaplan, “The Art That is Life.” 120. Dorothea Moore, “The Work of the Women’s Clubs in California,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 28 (1906): 59. The 1895 meeting focused on the home; Gilman presented two papers, one in the session on aesthetics, the other in the session on economics. The Woman’s Congress and the Women’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, Second Annual Meeting (San Francisco: The Congress, 1895), n.p. 121. Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood,” 257–59; Herrington, “Garden in Froebel’s Kindergarten,” 336; Katharine Martinez, “Civilizing Young Minds and Bodies: Picture Study and the Schoolroom Decoration Movement,” paper presented at Home, School, Work, Play: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children (Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, 2009). See also Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 17, 19, 30, 39–46. 122. Shinn, “Charities for Children,” 96, emphasis in original. 123. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 248. 124. Watt, “My Long Life,” 111; Whitehouse, “History of the Work,” n.p. Chapter six

1. Oakland New Century Club [ONCC h/a], “The Oakland New Century Club,” in Annual Greeting 1912 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth Co., 1912), 5. A similar description is in Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., The Handbook of Settlements (New York: Charities Publication Committee, Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 13–14. 2. Eva V. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School: An Oakland Experiment,” Overland Monthly n.s. 35, no. 5 (May 1900): 425. 3. Eva V. Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” Overland Monthly n.s. 36, no. 9 (September 1900): 247 quote; Jane Addams, “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” The Forum (October 1892): 228–29. 4. Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 268. 5. Ibid., 220, 255–57; Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women and Men through

396 / Notes to Chapter Six American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 147–49, 162–63, 174–75. 6. Gwendolyn Wright, USA: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 71. 7. Amalie Hofer, “The Social Settlement and the Kindergarten,” Kindergarten Magazine 8, no. 1 (1895): 47. 8. Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” 248. 9. Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of a Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Robert D. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 1 (January 2002): 68–92. The clearest summary of the historiography is Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–32. 10. For radical racism, Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237–44; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 11. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 247. The analysis draws on Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 12. George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Judith Raftery, “Los Angeles Club Women and Progressive Reform,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 145. 13. Mowry, California Progressives, 87–88. 14. The Valley Road (Illustrated) (San Francisco: Wheeler Publishing Co., 1896), 16; Hans C. Palmer, “The Valley Road: The San Francisco and San Joaquin Valley Railway, 1895–1896” (Oakland, June 1955, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL), 82; William Deverell, “The Varieties of Progressive Experience,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1–11. 15. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers, 1956), 131. 16. Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 1 (2002): 40; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890– 1945,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 572; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 150; for excellent analysis, Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era,” 68–92. 17. Bertha Damaris Knobe, “Club Houses Owned by American Women,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 1908, 61; Mary I. Wood, The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, for the First Twenty-two Years of its Organization (New York: History Department, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1912), 26. For discussion, Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 47; Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women’s Groups and the Transforma-

Notes to Chapter Six / 397 tion of U.S. Politics, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 4 (January 1993): 783. 18. Elizabeth D. Watt, “My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch” (San Francisco, 1925, typed manuscript; on file, BL/UCB), 56, 95; Joseph E. Baker, ed. Past and Present of Alameda County, California, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 1: 250–51; C. Annette Buckel, “The Cooking School,” Oakland Enquirer, April 28, 1891. 19. Sherry J. Katz, “Socialist Women and Progressive Reform,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 118. 20. Watt, “My Long Life,” 111 quote; Matilda E. Barber, “The Origin of the Kitchen Garden in Oakland,” Domestic Science Monthly [DSM h/a] 1, no. 2 (May 1900): 27. Baker was president of the Committee of One Hundred, which ran the Public School Reform Association in San Francisco and was in some measure hostile to racial bigotry. Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 43, 46. 21. Richard Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” in Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe, ed. Robert D. Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 111–13. The population data is drawn from the twelfth decennial census of the United States, taken in 1900. 22. Watt, “My Long Life,” 67–69, 140 quote; “Chloroform Craze, It Was the Cause of Poor James Watt’s Death,” Oakland Enquirer, March 24, 1891, 3. For comparison, see the discussion of Candace Wheeler in Catherine W. Zipf, Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement (Knoxville: University of Tenneseee Press, 2007), 38. 23. Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19. 24. Watt, “My Long Life,” 113. 25. For statistics, John Palmer Gavit, ed., Bibliography of College, Social, and University Settlements (Cambridge, MA: College Settlements Association and Co-operative Press, 1897); for discussion, Ryan, Mysteries of Sex, 167–68; Knight, Citizen, 248. For San Francisco, Fannie W. McLean, “South Park Settlement: Characteristic Work in a San Francisco Neighborhood,” The Commons 14 (June 1897): 2; Katherine Coman, “The South Park Settlement, San Francisco,” The Commons 8 (August 1903), 7–9; for discussion, Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 353; Ann Marie Wilson, “‘Neutral Territory’: The Politics of Settlement Work in San Francisco, 1894–1906,” in California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression, ed. Robert W. Cherny, Mary Ann Irwin, and Ann Marie Wilson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 97–121. 26. At the end of the 1890s the charitable landscape also included the People’s Palace in San Francisco, the West Berkeley College Settlement, and the East End Social Settlement in Oakland. 27. “A California Settlement,” Chicago Commons 1 (July 1896): 13. 28. Elsie B. Lee, “The Manse: A Good Example of Social Settlement Work in Cities,” Oakland Enquirer, Dec. 24, 1897, 15. 29. The best analysis is in Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

398 / Notes to Chapter Six 30. The settlement house was also called the Manse and the West Oakland Manse. City directories locate the settlement in three houses on Eighth Street. Almira Huntington owned one of them; she inherited several houses in the neighborhood and lived in another for the duration of the charity’s lease on her property at the corner of Wood Street. 31. For Horton and her school, Ellis A. Davis, “Sarah Horton,” in Davis’ Commercial Encyclopedia of the Pacific Southwest (Berkeley, CA: Ellis A. Davis, 1914), 389. 32. Lee, “The Manse,” 15. 33. Ibid., “A California Settlement,” 13; “West Oakland Home, Annual Meeting of a Worthy Charity,” Oakland Enquirer, 1896, n.p. (clipping in LCC scrapbook). 34. Lee, “The Manse,” 5. 35. James McKinney Alexander, Mission Life in Hawaii: Memoir of Rev. William P. Alexander (Oakland: Pacific Press, 1888); Bailey Millard, “Wallace McKinnley Alexander,” in History of the San Francisco Bay Region (San Francisco: American Historical Society, 1924), 249–51; Allen L. Chickering, “Mrs. Wallace M. Alexander,” California Historical Society Quarterly 34 (June 1955): 184–85. 36. J. W. Walsh, “Oakland’s Social Settlement: A Practical Organized Effort to Solve Problems in Sociology,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 16, 1899, 4; “Initial Reception, Handsome New Building of the Social Settlement Will Be Open to Visitors Thursday,” Oakland Enquirer, May 23, 1900, 2. 37. Allen B. Pond, “The ‘Settlement House’ III,” The Brickbuilder 11 (September 1902): 183. 38. ONCC, “Mission of the New-Century Club,” in A New Century Greeting (Oakland: The Club, 1901), n.p. quote; “Good Work of a Quiet Social Settlement in Oakland,” Sunday Call Magazine, May 13, 1900, 8. 39. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex, 168. 40. Watt, “My Long Life,” 112 quote; Elizabeth D. Watt, “Mrs. Robert Watt, President of the Oakland Club, Outlines the Work,” Sunday Call Magazine, May 13, 1900, 8. For comparison, Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Who Funded Hull House?,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power, ed. Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 94–115. 41. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873–1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 115. 42. I am drawing on a point made by Karen J. Weitze, “Utopian Place Making: The Built Environment in Arts and Crafts California,” in The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life, ed. Richard R. Trapp (Oakland and New York: Oakland Museum of California and Abbeville Press, 1993), 55. 43. Candace M. Voltz, “The Modern Look of Early-Twentieth Century Houses: A Mirror of Changing Lifestyles,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 31; Karen Halttunen, “From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality,” in Consuming Visions, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1989), 172. 44. T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 91; Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 128; William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 344–47.

Notes to Chapter Six / 399 45. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1910; repr. 1990), chap. 11; Jane Addams, “Labor Museum at Hull House,” Commons 47 (June 1900): 1–4; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 47–48. 46. Adrian Praetzellis, “Consumerism, Living Conditions, and Material Well-Being,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland. Cypress Interpretive Report No. 2, I-880 Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, Calif.: ASC/SSU, 2004), 49; Marta Gutman, “‘Busy as Bees’: Women, Work, and Material Culture in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 173–206. 47. For a telling scene, Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 273–73. For analysis, Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 758–61, 770–71. 48. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 246. 49. For recycling as means to survival, Carolyn Steedman, “What A Rag Rug Means,” in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 112–41; Agnes and Kate Walker, “Starting With Rag Rugs: The Aesthetics of Survival,” in Women and Craft, ed. G. Elinor, et al. (London: Virago, 1987), 27–30. For England, Beverly Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes,” The Journal of British Studies 27, no. 1 (1988): 1–24. For the United States, Nancy Page Fernandez, “‘If a Woman Had Taste . . .’: Home Sewing and the Making of Fashion, 1850–1910” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1987), 9–10, 105, 114–21; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999); for West Oakland, Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis, “Outside the Marketplace: Adaptive Strategies and Self-Reliance Making It and Making Do,” in Putting the “There” There, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 162–66; Sunshine Psota, “Strutting Your Stuff: Fashion Strategies of the Frugal of West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There, ed. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, 161–62. For children, Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 92–95. 50. Watt, “My Long Life,” 114 quote; Elizabeth D. Watt, “Salvage Bureau,” in Second Annual Greeting (Oakland: Press of the Oakland Enquirer, 1902), 26; Madge Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools: Deeds of Real Charity in Helping Those Who Help Themselves, Where Young and Old Are Given Instruction of Practical Value,” Sunday Call Magazine, March 2, 1902, 6. 51. Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chaps. 4 and 6, especially 112–13, 154. 52. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 256 quote (emphasis in original); “Do You Remember?” WMBJ 13, no. 9 (September 1948): 11. 53. Taken from a leaflet published in 1912, the quote is a paraphrase of a statement Eva Carlin used in 1900. 54. “[News Item],” DSM 2, no. 3 (June 1901): 69. 55. Karin Calvert, “Children in the House, 1890 to 1930,” in American Home Life, 1880– 1930, ed. Foy and Schlereth, 86 quote; Juliet Kinchin, “Interiors: Nineteenth-Century

400 / Notes to Chapter Six Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and the ‘Feminine’ Room,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 20. 56. US Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), I: 75, 211, 212, 609, 610. 57. By the end of the 1890s, two public schools offered manual training programs, starting in ninth grade. OBE, Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City of Oakland (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener Press, 1898), 71–80; OBE, Course of Study of the Public Schools of the City of Oakland of the Year Ending June 30th, 1898 (Oakland: 1899), 83– 114. For the national trend, Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 85–98; Nina E. Lerman, “Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (October 2010): 916–17. 58. Watt, “My Long Life,” 140. 59. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 249–50; “Good Work of a Quiet Social Settlement in Oakland.” 60. Kinchin, “Interiors,” 19. 61. Wendy Gamber, “‘Reduced to Science’: Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860–1910,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 3 (1995): 455–57; Fernandez, “‘If a Woman Had Taste,’” 3–12; Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), chap. 3. For California, Edith Sparks, Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Praetzellis and Praetzellis, “Outside the Marketplace,” 158–62. 62. As cited by Alexandra M. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s “Gospel of Wealth,” 1883–1901,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 4 (2002): 597. See also Victoria E. (Kimball) Stewart, “Victoria E. Kimball Sewing Book” (Berkeley, CA: Hearst Domestic Industries, c. 1902); Winifred Black Bonfils, The Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (San Francisco: John Henry Nash for William Randolph Hearst, 1928), 111–12. 63. From Genesis 31:49: “And Mizpah; for he said, the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” 64. Watt, “My Long Life,” 141. For Protestant religious beliefs, Spearheads for Reform, 27; Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 7, 117. 65. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 249–50 quote. The name “Sunshine Corner” called on a description of Hull House by the dean of Ely Cathedral in England as “a bright sunshiny center of friendship in a weary wilderness of mean streets.” Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 247. 66. A prime example is Jane Addams, who hoped that edifying entertainment would counter the lure of popular culture. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1909; repr., 1972). 67. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School,” 426. For the new economy of pleasure, Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-ofthe-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), chap. 4, esp. 117; for an example, London, Valley of the Moon, chap. 2, 3. 68. John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770 to the Present (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 117–18.

Notes to Chapter Six / 401 69. Michael Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood’: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003), 226; G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Pyschology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904). For discussion, Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66–72; Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 16–20; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 100–10, 119–20. 70. Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 70. 71. Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood,’” 224–28. See also William T. Stead, “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon,” Pall Mall Gazette, July 4, 1885; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 70–82; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 52–55, 108–14. 72. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 250 quote; “The Girl’s Recreation Club,” in A New Century Greeting, n.p. 73. Working girls resented patronizing attitudes, and reform clubs could not compete with commercial culture. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 171–78; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 145; Priscilla Murolo, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs, 1884–1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change,” 787–88. 74. J. P. Wheaton, “A Sketch of the West Oakland Boys’ Club of [the] New Century Club,” in A New Century Greeting, n.p. For comparison, Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 149–253. 75. Jennifer A. Greenhill, “The Plague of Jocularity: Contesting Humor in American Art and Culture, 1863–1893” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2007); Jennifer A. Greenhill, “‘Too Noisy for an Art Exhibition’: Childish Jocularity and the Emerging Culture of Art in the 1870s,” paper presented at Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2008). 76. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 251. 77. For children’s clothing as markers of gender and class identities, Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988), 36; Jo B. Paoletti and Carol L. Kregloh, “The Children’s Department,” in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, ed. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 22–41. 78. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, chap. 1; Boris, Art and Labor, 76; Lears, No Place of Grace, chap. 3. 79. For the crisis in masculinity as it related to children, Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 8–10. For the companionate family, Margaret

402 / Notes to Chapter Six Marsh, “From Separation to Togetherness: The Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Suburbs, 1840–1915,” Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (September 1989): 506–27. 80. Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s– 1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 113–33. The author argues that the reformatory was the source of the interest in settlement houses in manual training, vocational education, and, for boys, military drill. 81. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 251–52. For similar programs in the Bay Area, West Berkeley College Settlement, Annual Report for 1900–1901 (Berkeley, CA: The Association, 1901), 10; “The College Settlement at West Berkeley,” DSM 1, no. 6 (September 1900): 154–55. For Hall’s recapitulation theory and threats to boyhood, Abigail A. Van Slyck, “Kitchen Technologies and Mealtime Rituals: Interpreting the Food Axis at American Summer Camps, 1890–1950,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 4 (October 2002): 671–73; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 92–101. 82. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 10–15; Donald Mrozek, “The Natural Limits of Unstructured Play, 1880–1914,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 210–26; Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, 10, 44. 83. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1900), 8, 20–21 quote; cited by John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 78; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876– 1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 221–60; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 75, 107. 84. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 252. For the antimodern thrust of the primitive in outdoor recreation, Higham, “Reorientation of American Culture,” 77–82; Lears, No Place of Grace, 107–17, 44–49; Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, 99, 182. For rationalization, Americanization, respect for teamwork, order, and rules, and public health, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. 5; Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 65–68. 85. Both buildings sat on the same lot, owned by the Bruning family. This meant that Watt constructed the cooking school on rented property, unusual in American building practice. 86. “New Club Formed By Leading Oakland Women,” Oakland Enquirer, Aug. 21, 1899, 5; “[News Item],” DSM 1, no. 2 (May 1900): 36–37. 87. David M. Katzman, Seven Days A Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 6; Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Daniel E. Sutherland, “Modernizing Domestic Service,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930, ed. Foy and Schlereth, 242–65. Anxiety about declining interest in domestic service was present in Oakland in the late 1890s even though the actual numbers of the servants increased on the West Coast between 1880 and 1900. 88. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School,” 426 quote; ONCC, “The Oakland New Century Club,” in Annual Greeting 1912, 5.

Notes to Chapter Six / 403 89. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 55– 63, 124–25; Katzman, Seven Days A Week, 244–50. 90. Barber, “Origin of the Kitchen Garden,” 28; Elizabeth D. Watt, “Kitchen Garden, or Teaching Housework with Toys,” DSM 1, no. 3 (June 1900): 57–61; Emily Huntington, How to Teach Kitchen Garden; or, Object Lessons in Household Work Including Songs, Plays, Exercises, and Games Illustrating Household Occupations (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1906). For discussion, Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, 125–26; Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 320n2; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1860–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1980), 88; Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 101–2. The Ladies’ Relief Society and the WCTU also sponsored kitchen gardens. 91. Watt, “My Long Life,” 112. 92. Amy F. Ogata, Art Nouveau and the Social Version of Modern Living: Belgian Artists Living in a European Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24, 67, 68, 86; Abigail A. Van Slyck, “The Spatial Practice of Privilege,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (June 2011): 226–34. 93. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 255. A washing machine offered relief from doing laundry, a tedious and arduous task, but this expensive consumer item was not within the purchasing power of women living in the vicinity of the settlement. For commercial laundries as an alternative to private laundering, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981), 105–7; Arwen Palmer Mohun, “Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 97–120. However, horrific conditions in commercial establishments should give pause to a quick endorsement of this alternative. For a description, London, Valley of the Moon, 3–5; Jack London, Martin Eden (London: Bodley Head, 1909; repr., 1965), 150–70. 94. Watt, “Kitchen Garden,” 60. 95. “The Little Waitress’s Song,” DSM 1, no. 2 (May 1900): 50. 96. Elizabeth Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis,” Material History Review 44 (Fall 1996): 14–15. See also Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986); Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, 284–85; Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 235–40; Ellen Lupton and J. Abbot Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), 41–63. 97. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School,” 425, 431–33, 434 quote. 98. “New Club Formed By Leading Oakland Women,” 5; Barbara Lee Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 123–25. 99. A. B. (Alice Bunnell), “Women’s Clubs and What They Are Doing,” DSM 1, no. 8 (No­ vember 1900): 219; “Oakland Club Ladies Publish a Magazine,” San Francisco Call, May 18, 1900, 9; Emily Remsen-Scaddan, “What the Women of the Oakland Club Are Doing,” Oakland Enquirer, March 22, 1900, 6. The New England Cooking School published the New England Kitchen. 100. “The Oakland School of Domestic Science,” DSM 1, no. 1 (April 1900): 2; Charles

404 / Notes to Chapter Six Coleman, P. G. and E. of California: The Centennial Story of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 1852–1952 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), 47–48. 101. Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 234–40. 102. For Voorhees, see A. B. (Alice Bunnell), “Women’s Clubs,” 219. 103. “The Oakland School of Domestic Science,” 1. 104. “Instruction Given in the School of Domestic Science,” DSM 1, no. 3 (June 1900): 68–69; “Practical Work in the Oakland Cooking School,” DSM 1, no. 3 (June 1900): 70–71. For the working-class diet, see Praetzellis and Praetzellis, eds., Putting the “There” There, 72–82, 146–56, 220–34. 105. Advocates of Taylorization counseled the use of uniforms to further professionalize housework. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis,” 15; “The Oakland School of Domestic Science,” 1. 106. The Oakland Club reported that weekly wages ranged from twenty to twenty-five dollars; Watt estimated that her “girls” were worth that much, but would work for fifteen dollars. Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools,” 6; “[News Item],” 217. For widespread antipathy to domestic service, Katzman, Seven Days A Week, chap. 6; Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work, 210; Sutherland, “Modernizing Domestic Service,” 242–65. 107. Even at Hull House, Addams and her colleagues claimed a public role for themselves while urging working-class mothers to remain at home. The point is made throughout Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 108. Carlin, “Salvage Bureau,” 255. 109. “Wages, Meaning Those Paid to Working Women, Some Facts and Figures,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 19, 1894, 1; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 543; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, chap. 4. 110. “The Oakland School of Domestic Science,” 1, 3, 4. For class differentiation in training programs, Katzman, Seven Days A Week, 244–45. 111. “The Oakland School of Domestic Science,” 4. 112. “Supported By Followers, Mrs. Watt Organizes a New Philanthropic Body,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 3, 1900, 9. 113. News item in the November 1900 issue of DSM, 216 and A. B. (Alice Bunnell), “Women’s Clubs,” 219. 114. Watt, “My Long Life,” 153 quote; Elizabeth D. Watt, “The Oakland New-Century Club,” in A New Century Greeting, n.p.; “Harmony Restored In Oakland Club,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 11, 1900, 11; “Supported By Followers, Mrs. Watt Organizes a New Philanthropic Body,” 9. The source of the club’s name may have been the New Century Club in Philadelphia (1877), discussed in Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work, 73–74. Initially “New-Century” was hyphenated, but not for long. For graphic design in women’s publications, Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 109–17. 115. Elizabeth D. Watt, “Mothers’ Meeting,” in Annual Greeting 1912, 27; ONCC, “The Oakland New Century Club,” leaflet published by the club, 1912, 3–4. 116. Elizabeth D. Watt, “Household Economics,” in California Federation of Women’s Clubs, Year Book, 1904/05 (San Francisco: The Federation, 1905), 43–44. 117. A. B. (Alice Bunnell), “Women’s Clubs,” 219. 118. ONCC, “Mission,” n.p. 119. For the phrasing and the comparison, see Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Notes to Chapter Seven / 405 120. Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting As They Climb (Washington: National Association of Colored Women, 1933), 116 quote, 117; Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland: Northern California Center for Afro-American History and Life, 1989), 14–15; Tarea Hall Pittman, “NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker; Interview Conducted by Joyce Henderson” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1974), 53a. 121. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 3–4, 120–23. See also Raftery, “Los Angeles Club Women,” 145, 166–67n4; Mary S. Gibson, A Record of Twenty-five Years of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1900–1925 (San Francisco[?]: California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1927), 1: 3; Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist, 34, 55; Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 127, 129. 122. Cited in Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 121–22. 123. Elizabeth D. Watt, “Report,” in Second Annual Greeting, 8 quote; Mrs. John Blakewell, “Women’s Clubs and What They Are Doing; A Club and Federation Discussion; How Southern Women See the Color Question,” DSM 2, no. 4 (July 1901): 110; Mrs. M. L. Wakeman-Curtis, “A Protest and a Plea,” DSM 2, no. 4 (July 1901): 111–12. For dis­ cussion, Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 126. 124. Philip J. Ethington, “Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era,” Social Science History 16, no. 2 (1992): 305–06. 125. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 122–23, 128. Chapter seven

1. Edna Kaar, “Letter to Jenny Wheaton, 1905,” in ONCC, Annual Greeting 1915 (Oakland: The Club, 1915), 33. 2. Henry S. Curtis, “Playground Progress and Tendencies of the Year,” Charities and the Commons, Aug. 3, 1907, 26. For discussion, Robin Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 148–49. 3. For progressivisms, William Deverell, “The Varieties of Progressive Experience,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1–11. For suffrage, Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), chap. 4. For services, Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of a Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9. For organizational innovation, Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women’s Groups and the Transformation of U.S. Politics, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 4 (January 1993): 755–98. 4. Sherry J. Katz, “Redefining the ‘Political’: Socialist Women and Party Politics, 1900– 1920,” in We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960, ed. Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 23–32; Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130. 5. Hattie Elliott Crane, “Woman’s Place in the Government and Conduct of Society,” Overland Monthly n.s. 59, no. 4 (April 1912): 360, 365 quote; Dorothea Moore, “The

406 / Notes to Chapter Seven Work of the Women’s Clubs in California,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 28 (1906): 60. 6. Crane, “Woman’s Place,” 362. 7. Richard Walker, “Industry Builds Out the City: The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940,” in Manufacturing Suburbs: Building Work and Home on the Metropolitan Fringe, ed. Robert D. Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 111–13; Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Oakland: Oakland Heritage Alliance, 1982; repr., 1994), 178–89. 8. Bagwell, Oakland, 182–84. 9. Ibid., 139. 10. James de Fremery, “West Oakland Streets, An Account of Their Origin and Naming by an Old Resident,” Oakland Enquirer, March 30, 1896, 6. For similar controversies in Chicago, Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 27–29. 11. “Oakland Loses Good Citizen, the Life of James de Fremery Was One of Great Activity,” Oakland Tribune, May 30, 1899, 2; “J. L. de Fremery Dies across the Bay; Head of Oakland’s Pioneer Family is the Victim of Acute Pneumonia,” Oakland Tribune, Oct. 24, 1911, 19. 12. Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Report on a Plan for San Francisco (San Francisco, 1905); Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and Planning on the Pacific Coast (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 31–52; Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 2009), 174–96. 13. Charles Mulford Robinson, A Plan for the Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland (Oakland: Oakland Enquirer Publishing Co., 1906). For discussion, Blackford, Lost Dream, 64–84; Lee M. A. Simpson, Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 99–100; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 131–33, 134, 137, 139. 14. Robinson, A Plan for the Civic Improvement, 3 quote, 4, 13 quote. For the reform park, Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 62; Thomas J. Campanella, “Playground of the Century: A Political and Design History of New York’s Greatest Unbuilt Park,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, no. 2 (June 2013): 197. 15. Kate Gannett Wells, “Report of the Executive Committee,” in Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, Second Annual Report (Boston: The Association, May 1886), 12 quote; Joseph Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1902), 125. 16. Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 23; Bachin, Building the South Side, 147–48; Marie Warsh, “‘Cultivating Citizens’: The Children’s School Farm in New York City, 1902–1931,” Buildings & Landscapes 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 64–89. 17. Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, 112 quote. For Oakland, “Vacation Schools Do Much for Children of the Poor,” San Francisco Call, June 13, 1900, 9; Eva V. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School: An Oakland Experiment,” Overland Monthly n.s. 35, no. 5 (May 1900): 425, 31–33; “The Vacation School,” DSM 1, no. 3 (June 1900): 65; Alice Bunnell, “Vacation Schools,” DSM 1, no. 4 (July 1900): 87–90. For comparison, Sadie American, “The Movement for Vacation Schools,” American Journal of Sociology 4, no. 3 (November 1898): 309–25; Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticat-

Notes to Chapter Seven / 407 ing the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 157–62. 18. “Do Not Rob the Little Children, Miss Mary McClees Makes a Strong Plea for a Proper Playground,” Oakland Tribune, Sept. 17, 1899. Clipping in the Oakland Public Library, “Scrapbooks for All Matter Pertaining to Libraries,” 1890–1907. For the Chicago example, Charles Zueblin, “Municipal Playgrounds in Chicago,” American Journal of Sociology 4, no. 2 (September 1898): 146–48; Sadie American, “The Movement for Small Playgrounds,” American Journal of Sociology 4, no. 2 (September 1898): 159. 19. “Do Not Rob the Little Children, Miss Mary McClees Makes a Strong Plea for a Proper Playground,” quote; Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 107–11; Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, 153–57; Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 215. 20. For the invention of the term “moral panic,” see Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (St. Albans: Paladin, 1973). For discussion in relationship to youth culture at the turn of the twentieth century, see Ning de Coninck-Smith, “Where Should Children Play? City Planning Seen from KneeHeight, Copenhagen, 1870–1920,” Children’s Environments Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1990): 54–61; Ning de Coninck-Smith, “‘Danger is Looming Here’: Moral Panic and Urban Children’s and Youth Culture in Denmark, 1890–1914,” Paedagogica Historica 35, no. 3 (1999): 643–64; Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 132–40. For street games, Chudacoff, Children at Play, 108–10; David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), chap. 2. 21. Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 80, 111–12. 22. “Do Not Rob the Little Children, Miss Mary McClees Makes a Strong Plea for a Proper Playground,” quote; “Ladies at the Library Meeting,” Oakland Tribune, Sept. 18, 1899; “Lincoln Square to Be Selected,” Oakland Tribune, Sept. 14, 1899. Clippings in the Oakland Public Library, “Scrapbooks for All Matter Pertaining to Libraries,” 1890–1907. 23. “Ladies of the Ebell to Secure a Library Site,” Oakland Enquirer, November 13, 1899; “Saved a Library and a Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 1899; “ToMorrow Night Will Be a Jubilee, Citizens Will Celebrate the Success of the Ebell Ladies’ Effort,” Oakland Enquirer, December 13, 1899; “The Ebell Society’s Site Accepted by the Council,” Oakland Enquirer, December 19, 1899. Clippings in the Oakland Public Library, “Scrapbooks for All Matter Pertaining to Libraries,” 1890–1907. See also Crane, “Woman’s Place,” 363–64. 24. “Do Not Rob the Little Children, Miss Mary McClees Makes a Strong Plea for a Proper Playground,” quote; “Don’t Rob the Children Say the Ladies of the Oakland Club, Lincoln Park Must Not Be Diverted from Its Purposes as a Playground,” Oakland Enquirer, Sept. 14, 1899. 25. Chudacoff, Children at Play, 99, 107–16; Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 43–48. 26. Benjamin G. Rader, “The Recapitulation Theory of Play: Motor Behaviour, Moral Reflexes, and Manly Attitudes in Urban America, 1880–1920,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and

408 / Notes to Chapter Seven James Walvin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 123–34; Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 72–78; Donald Mrozek, “The Natural Limits of Unstructured Play, 1880–1914,” in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 210–26. 27. Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, 235; Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, 13, 46–47. 28. California required physical education in public schools, starting in 1866. Betty Spears and Richard A. Swanson, History of Sport and Physical Activity in the United States, 2nd ed. (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers, 1978, 1983), 119–24; Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 72–73. For municipalization of playgrounds in California, Everett C. Beach, “The Playground Movement in California,” Sunset Magazine, May 1911, 521–26; Ethel Moore, “Playground Development in California,” American City 6 (June 1912): 851–52; Bessie D. Stoddart, “Recreative Centers of Los Angeles, California,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 35, no. 2 (1910): 210–19. 29. “History of the Oakland Recreation Department” (Oakland, c. 1920, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL), 1–2; George E. Dickie, “Report of the Playground Commission,” in The Park System of Oakland, California (Oakland: Press of Carruth and Carruth, (1910), 125. 30. Dewitt Jones, ed. Oakland Parks and Playgrounds (Oakland: Oakland Parks and Recreation Departments and the State Emergency Relief Corporation, 1936), 200, 204, 206. 31. For continued concern with temptations of the street, California Superintendent of Public Instruction (Edward Hyatt), “The Cigarette Boy,” Conservation of Health Bulletin, no. 1 (1909), n.p. 32. The points are made in the Oakland Enquirer, August 22, 1908, cited by Simpson, Selling the City, 104. For women and the City Beautiful movement, Mary Ritter Beard, Woman’s Work in Municipalities (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915); Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 2; Bonj Szczygiel, “‘City Beautiful’ Revisited: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Civic Improvement Efforts,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 2 (December 2003): 107–32. 33. Moore, “Playground Development in California,” 852. 34. Jones, Oakland Parks and Playgrounds, 208; Dickie, “Report of the Playground Commission,” 125. 35. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), chap. 8. Kohn stresses the importance of broad networks of physical spaces and community-based organizing in radical politics. 36. Cited in Moore, “Playground Development in California,” 852. For discussion, Simpson, Selling the City, 120–21; Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 139–41, 154–55. 37. Henry S. Curtis, The Play Movement and its Significance (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917), 75, 76. 38. For the argument, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988).

Notes to Chapter Seven / 409 39. “History of the Oakland Recreation Department,” 1, 2; Oakland Board of Playground Commissioners, “Report of the Board of Playground Directors, Fiscal Year 1914–15” (Oakland, June 30, 1915, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL). 40. Sarah Jo Peterson, “Voting for Play: The Democratic Potential of Progressive Era Playgrounds,” Journal of the Society of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3, no. 2 (April 2004): 145–75. For working-class demand, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 139–40, 147, 151; Stephen Hardy, How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation, and Community, 1865–1915 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982), 98–99, 102; Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, 160, 266. 41. “History of the Oakland Recreation Department,” 1, 2. 42. Luther H. Gulick Jr., “Athletics for School Children,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, August 1911, 201, cited in Rader, “Recapitulation Theory of Play,” 131. See also Joseph Lee, “The Three Age Periods of Child Play,” in American Playgrounds, ed. Everett Bird Mero (Washington: McGrath Publishing Co. and National Recreation and Park Association, 1909; repr., 1973), 237–38; Chudacoff, How Old Are You?, 76. 43. “Supported By Followers, Mrs. Watt Organizes a New Philanthropic Body,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 3, 1900, 9. 44. Mary Goodcell, “Letter to the Editor: She Pleads for the Children, Mrs. Goodcell Gives Her Views on Reading Room,” Oakland Tribune, October 13, 1899. Clipping in the Oakland Public Library, “Scrapbooks for All Matter Pertaining to Libraries,” 1890–1907. 45. Robinson, A Plan for the Civic Improvement for the City of Oakland, 12 quote; Goodcell, “Letter to the Editor.” 46. Cynthia V. A. Schaffner and Lori Zabar, “The Founding and Design of William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art and Art Village,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 313. 47. ONCC, Second Annual Greeting (Oakland: Press of the Oakland Enquirer, 1902), 33–34. 48. Elizabeth D. Watt, “Report,” in Second Annual Greeting, 8. 49. Van Slyck, Free to All, 133–35; also Don S. Kirschner, The Paradox of Professionalism: Reform and Public Service in Urban America, 1900–1940 (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Judith Ann Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement House Movement to Neighborhood Centers, 1886 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 23–24, 26, 49–67. 50. Elizabeth D. Watt, “My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch” (San Francisco, 1925, typed manuscript; on file, BL/UCB), 153. 51. Watt, “Report,” 8; emphasis in original. 52. ONCC, Second Annual Greeting, 33. 53. “Throwing a Bombshell, Proposition to Abolish Outside Reading Rooms,” Oakland Daily Times, Nov. 4, 1891; “An Important Question, The Movement to Abolish the Reading Rooms, Public Sentiment Against It,” Oakland Daily Times, Nov. 9, 1891; Many Mothers, “A Hornet’s Nest and the Library Trustees Are Getting Stung,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 8, 1891; “A Popular Protest against Closing the Free Reading Rooms,” Oakland Enquirer, Sept. 28, 1901; “Protests Pour in Against Closing the Reading Rooms,” Oakland Times, Oct. 2, 1901. Clippings in the Oakland Public Library, “Scrapbooks for All Matter Pertaining to Libraries,” 1890–1907. 54. Linda M. Kruger, “Home Libraries: Special Spaces, Reading Places,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J.

410 / Notes to Chapter Seven Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 94; Catherine W. Zipf, Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement (Knoxville: University of Tenneseee Press, 2007), 105–6; Jane Addams, “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” The Forum (October 1892): 234. 55. Goodcell, “She Pleads for the Children.” 56. Watt, “House and Home,” 14. 57. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873–1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 241. 58. Watt, “House and Home,” 14. 59. Juliet Kinchin, “Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the ‘Masculine’ and the ‘Feminine’ Room,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 13–14. 60. ONCC, “The New Century Greeting,” in A New Century Greeting (Oakland: The Club, 1901), n.p. 61. ONCC, Second Annual Greeting, 6; Mary Olney, “Library,” in Second Annual Greeting, 16. Lacking attendance records, I am interpreting published references; for example, Eva V. Carlin, “A Salvage Bureau,” Overland Monthly n.s. 36, no. 9 (September 1900): 256–57. At Hull House, the elegant Arts and Crafts interior of the coffee house “intimidated” clients. George M. R. Twose, “The Coffee-Room at Hull House,” House Beautiful 7, no. 2 (January 1900): 107–9; Dorothea Moore, “A Day at Hull-House,” American Journal of Sociology 2, no. 5 (March 1897): 634. 62. Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 756, 763–64. 63. Watt, “Report,” 7 quote. The desire to alter immigrant food ways is well known, as is the hostility of immigrants towards the practice. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Hull House as Women’s Space,” Chicago History 12 (Winter 1983–84): 48. 64. ONCC, “The Oakland New Century Club,” in Annual Greeting 1912, 5; ONCC, “Retrospection,” in Annual Greeting 1915, 11. In 1906, Oakland’s public schools adopted a formal curriculum in domestic science. OBE, Course of Study, Public Schools (Oakland, 1906), 100–105. For Americanization, Adele S. Jaffa, “A Standard Dietary for an Orphanage Written for the State Board of Charities and Corrections” (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1914), 26; Americanization Club, Technical Evening High School of Oakland California, “Favorite Dishes of Twenty-five Countries” (Oakland, 1927, typed manuscript; on file OHR/OPL); David George Herman, “Neighbors on the Golden Mountain: The Americanization of Immigrants in California; Public Instruction as an Agency of Ethnic Assimilation, 1850–1933” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1981). 65. Watt, “House and Home,” 14; ONCC, Second Annual Greeting, 6; ONCC, Annual Greeting 1915, 7. On the 1902 Sanborn map, the clubhouse is identified as “flats” and the library is called a “school.” 66. Anna Sangster, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” in Second Annual Greeting, 10. In 1902, the value of the library/cooking school was assessed at two hundred dollars; the Little Housekeeper’s Cottage at fifty dollars. The value of the clubhouse kept increasing: in 1902, assessed at three hundred dollars, in 1905 at six hundred (after the club acquired it), and in 1907 the assessor noted that it “ought to be $1,500, at least.” 67. “Magnificent New Home of the Ebell Society to Open Soon,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 9, 1907, 14.

Notes to Chapter Seven / 411 68. Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 117–19; Simpson, Selling the City, 30–31, 118; also Bertha Damaris Knobe, “Club Houses Owned by American Women,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 1908, 790–96. 69. “Women’s Clubhouses,” Club Woman 5 (January 1900): 153; “Women’s Clubhouses,” Club Woman 10 (October 1902): 40–41. “Ladies to Have New Home,” Oak­ land Tribune, April 14, 1906, 1; “Magnificent New Home of the Ebell Society to Open Soon,” 14; “Home Club Is Dedicated,” Oakland Tribune, March 25, 1904, 3; “Splendid New Structure Is Consecrated to Uplifting and Glorifying of Homes,” Oakland Herald, March 25, 1904, 2. 70. The Oakland Club bought the lot in 1918; Alfred Olson was the builder. OCHS, “Oakland Club (Casa Romana and Capela)” (Oakland, 1986, typed manuscript and research materials; use courtesy of Betty Marvin), 1, 2; Simpson, Selling the City, 30. The Oakland Women’s City Club, the Berkeley Women’s City Club, and the Women’s Athletic Club erected new buildings in the 1920s. 71. Watt, “My Long Life,” 153, emphasis in original. 72. Moore, “Work of Women’s Clubs,” 61. For Moore’s biography, Gullett, Becoming Citizens, 140–43. 73. Watt gave the flag in honor of George Washington’s birthday. E. Marwedel, “Report of the Civic Committee,” in Annual Greeting 1915, 23. 74. The best discussion is Richard W. Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). See also Karen J. Weitze, “Utopian Place Making: The Built Environment in Arts and Crafts California,” in The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life, ed. Richard R. Trapp (Oakland and New York: Oakland Museum of California and Abbeville Press, 1993), 63; Robert Winter, ed. Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of Northern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 75. Karen McNeill, “Building the California Women’s Movement: Architecture, Space, and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan” (PhD dissertation, University of California, 2006), 229–67; Karen McNeill, “Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Profressional Style,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 2 (2007): 229–67. For comparison, with Hazel Wood Waterman, Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 30–49. 76. Zipf, Professional Pursuits, 16. 77. Watt, “My Long Life,” 223. After her husband’s death Watt took a lengthy trip to Europe, and on her return she commissioned Julia Morgan to design her house in San Francisco. Patrick McGrew, The Historic Houses of Presidio Terrace and the People Who Built Them (San Francisco: Friends of the Presidio Terrace Association, 1995), 80–81; Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan, Architect, rev. ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 121–27. 78. Arthur Patterson, “Taped interview by author, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Oakland, 1995), 14, 15, 35–38, 44–45; Arthur Patterson, “Personal conversation with author,” Oakland, 1995. 79. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor,” 752–75. 80. Shaw’s comments are cited in Pauline R. Bird, “Kindergarten,” in Annual Greeting 1915, 18. 81. Mrs. L. V. Shaw, “Superintendent’s Report, Boys’ Club,” in Annual Greeting 1910, 21. 82. Charles Ingerson applied for a permit on September 7, 1910. See Oakland Permit Ledgers, “Permit Ledger 7” (June 14, 1910, to June 13, 1911). The building cost about three thousand dollars. “Support the Settlement,” Oakland Observer,

412 / Notes to Chapter Seven September 30, 1911, 8–9; Lillian R. Stratton, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” in Annual Greeting 1912, 8.. 83. Gladys Adams, “Oakland Women Build Fine New Gymnasium for West Oakland Youngsters,” Oakland Enquirer, Nov. 28, 1910, 12 quote; Stratton, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” 8; Mrs. William T. Blackburn, “Treasurer’s Report,” in Annual Greeting 1912, 10–11. 84. Stratton, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” 8. 85. Kinchin, “Interiors,” 15. 86. Shaw’s comments are cited by Bird, “Kindergarten,” 19. 87. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For examples, see the proceedings of the Playground Association of America, Second Annual Playground Congress (New York, 1908) and Third Annual Playground Congress (Pittsburgh, 1909). 88. Jones, Oakland Parks and Playgrounds, 199–203. The informal playground was constructed on vacant land between Sixteenth, Eighteenth, Myrtle, and Market Streets. For a similar example in Worcester, Massachusetts, Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 144. 89. Andrew Mousalimas and Mary Kumarelas Mousalimas, “Taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Oakland, 1996), 20, 40–41. 90. Leontine C. L. Janssen, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” in Annual Greeting 1915, 8 quote; Dickie, “Report of the Playground Commission,” 136. 91. “History of the Oakland Recreation Department,” 13. 92. Watt, “My Long Life,” 153. 93. Recording Secretary’s “Report” from the 1923 Annual Greeting; cited in Watt, “My Long Life,” 149. The settlement house benefited from new supporters, receiving funding from the Community Chest in 1923 (until the city took over the facility). Community Chest of Oakland, “It’s Everybody’s Job”: A Report to the Shareholders in a Great Human Enterprise; An Appeal to Every Oaklander Who is Not in Need of Charity (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener, 1924). For discussion, Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change, 127–28. 94. “Clubhouse Given to Oakland for Recreation Use,” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 16, 1923, 19. 95. Watt, “My Long Life,” 154. 96. Recording Secretary’s “Report” from the 1923 Annual Greeting; cited in Watt, “My Long Life,” 149; Watt, “My Long Life,” 151; “Fine Playground for Children of Oakland Opened,” Oakland Tribune, March 16, 1923, 31; “City Throws Open New Recreation Park,” Oakland Tribune, March 16, 1923, 31. 97. “Recreational Work Assists Young, Old,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 27, 1927, East Bay Section, 2. 98. Robert D. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 1 (January 2002): 88 quote. See also Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Ronald Hayduk and Kevin Mattson, ed., Democracy’s Moment: Reforming the American Political System for the 21st Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002).

Notes to Chapter Seven / 413 99. Jones, Oakland Parks and Playgrounds, 215–16; Patterson, “Taped interview,” 14, 16, 35, 38. Jones stresses the diversity of programs in the facilities and argues that the “arrangements” of the community houses made them “attractive” to individuals and to families. 100. Elmer E. Brown, Tompkins School Monographs. No. 1—The School (Oakland: Board of Education, Public School Report, 1895–96), 1; OBE, Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City of Oakland for the Year Ending June 30th 1898 (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener Press, 1898), 41–49. 101. George W. Dow, “Do You Remember When—,” WMBJ 2, no. 2 (February 1937): 11; R. H. Fallmer, “My Boyhood Days in West Oakland,” WMBJ 10, no. 1 (January 1945): 11. 102. J. W. Walsh, “Oakland’s Social Settlement: A Practical Organized Effort to Solve Problems in Sociology,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 16, 1899, 4. 103. The report is cited in Caroline Williamson Montgomery, ed. Bibliography of College, Social, University, and Church Settlements (Chicago: College Settlements Association/ Blakely Press, 1905), 19. 104. Walsh, “Oakland’s Social Settlement,” 4. The new staff included Miss Morgan, a social worker, who taught woodworking; Ben Kurtz, a gymnastics teacher; Pearl Knox, a music instructor; and Leontine Janssen, who directed the boys’ club and also worked at the New Century Club. The settlement also worked with other charities in the city, among them the Friendly Hour Mothers’ Club, the Good Will Boys’ Club, and the Good Will Kindergarten. Mrs. John Richardson, their supporter for nine years, decided to move the Boys’ Club to the settlement, believing that it would find more success in West Oakland. Her optimism proved correct, with the gym, library, and athletic club adding appeal. 105. Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., The Handbook of Settlements (New York: Charities Publication Committee, Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), 14; Walsh, “Oakland’s Social Settlement,” 4. 106. “The Work of the Oakland Social Settlement Association,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 15, 1900, 8; “Initial Reception, Handsome New Building of the Social Settlement Will Be Open to Visitors Thursday,” Oakland Enquirer, May 23, 1900, 2. Construction began in February 1900 and was completed by the end of May. In 1899, city tax assessors set the value of 709 (301) Linden Street at three hundred dollars; in 1901 they set it at two thousand dollars, a clear indication that the building was finished. 107. Madge Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools: Deeds of Real Charity in Helping Those Who Help Themselves, Where Young and Old Are Given Instruction of Practical Value,” Sunday Call Magazine, March 2, 1902, 6. 108. Moore, “Oakland’s Philanthropic Schools,” 6. 109. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School,” 428. Oral histories also speak to demands for public space by immigrant parents for daughters and by mothers for themselves. Carlin, “California’s First Vacation School,” 428; Rose Armelli Cava and Anna Armelli Mroczko, “Taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Oakland, 1996), 19; Joseph Cumbelich and Sophia Psihos Cumbelich, “Taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Concord, CA, 1996), 20; Mousalimas and Mousalimas, “Taped interview,” 21, 34. 110. Stoddart, “Recreative Centers of Los Angeles, California,” 210. 111. Woods and Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements, 14.

414 / Notes to Chapter Eight 112. Associated Charities of Oakland, California, Annual Report, From September 1, 1908 to September 1, 1909 (Oakland: The Association, 1909), 11. 113. “History of the Oakland Recreation Department,” 13 quote; Curtis, The Play Movement and its Significance, 75, 76. 114. “Third and Linden Playground Site Given to City,” Oakland Tribune, May 12, 1922, 21. The property was worth twenty-five thousand dollars. 115. Angela Volpe Albanese Cosy and Ben Albanese, “Taped interview by Karana HattersleyDrayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (San Leandro, CA, 1995), 45–48, 52–55. 116. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. Lydia D. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), viii. 117. For similar points, Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 224. Also see scattered references in the West of Market Boys’ Journal: Cosy and Albanese, “Taped interview,” 45; Greg Kosmos, “Taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Oakland, 1995), 14; Patterson, “Taped interview,” 14, 16, 35–38; Bernice Rydman, “Taped interview by Pamela Morton for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project” (Oakland, 1981), 11. C h a p t e r e ig h t

1.

Cited in George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 97. In Pillsbury’s view, the exemplar of the New England conscience in government was Theodore Roosevelt. For sharp criticism, William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 156–61, 171. 2. For the controversy, see “‘Beaten Till I Fainted,’ Declares Whittier Girl; Shorn of Hair Like Convict, She Says,” Los Angeles Examiner, Dec. 7, 1905; “Should Have Excluded Men,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15, 1905; “Deny Cruelty At Whittier,” Los Angeles Express, Dec. 7, 1905; “Girl’s Charges Proved,” Los Angeles Express, Dec. 15, 1905; “Whittier Report Sent to Governor Pardee,” Los Angeles Express, Dec. 23, 1905. These clippings are pasted into “Charities and Corrections,” vol. 7 of George C. Pardee, “Scrapbooks” (58 vol., v.d., on file, BL/UCB). For discussion, see Miroslava Chávez-García, “Intelligence Testing at Whittier School, 1890–1920,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 2 (2007): 193–228. 3. Frank C. Jordan, California Blue Book, or State Roster, 1911 (Sacramento, California: State Printer, 1913), 460; Kevin J. Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 235, 255–57. 4. Arthur J. Pillsbury, Institutional Life: Its Relations to the State and to the Wards of the State (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1906), 65–66. By 1905 the board’s supervision of institutions had become social as well as financial. Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 12–13. 5. All of these clippings may be found in the Pardee scrapbook, cited in note 2. 6. Pillsbury, Institutional Life, 65; Michael Grossberg, “‘A Protected Childhood’: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003), 213–39; David J. Rothman, Conscience

Notes to Chapter Eight / 415 and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). 7. Pillsbury, Institutional Life, 60. 8. For an overview, James Leiby, “State Welfare Administration in California, 1879– 1929,” Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1972): 169–87. 9. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 1. 10. William Saroyan, Growing Up in Fresno: Reminiscences of the Renowned Author (Fresno, CA: Author, 1976), n.p; William H. Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California: A Study of Agencies and Institutions (New York: Department of Child Helping, Russell Sage Foundation, 1916), 97. 11. Saroyan, Growing Up in Fresno, n.p. 12. For similar points, Howard Goldstein, The Home on Gorham Street and the Voices of its Children (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 35–36. 13. “Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children; Held at Washington, D.C., January 25, 26, 1909,” in U.S. Senate 721, ed. 60th Cong. 2nd sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 42–43; Leiby, “State Welfare Administration in California, 1879–1929,” 176. 14. “Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children,” 5; US Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 11–12. 15. Judith Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best”: Correspondence of a Nineteenth-Century Orphan Asylum (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 10. 16. The legislature increased the annual rate of subsidy in 1907: an orphan received $100; a half-orphan or abandoned child $75; a foundling infant $150, up to 18 months. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, table 1, p. 2. 17. Homer Folks, The Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children (New York: Macmillan Company, 1902), 131–34; Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 86; Ralph da Costa Nunez and Ethan G. Sribnick, The Poor among Us: A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City (New York: White Tiger Press, 2013), chap. 5. 18. The ratio for California and New York respectively was 381 and 531 per 100,000. Hastings H. Hart, introduction to Child Welfare Work in California; A Study of Agencies and Institutions, ed. William H. Slingerland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1916), 8–11. See also California State Department of Social Welfare [CSDSW h/a], Third Biennial Report of the State Department of Social Welfare (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1932), 32; Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California, 146– 47; US Bureau of the Census, Benevolent Institutions 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 86–90. 19. Pillsbury, Institutional Life, 77, 78. Pillsbury argued that half-orphans should receive subsidized care at their own homes, not in institutions, and that foster homes were appropriate for orphans and foundlings if their parents could not be found. 20. Emil G. Hirsch, “The Home Versus the Institution,” in U.S. Senate 721, ed. 60 Cong. 2 sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), 87; for a child’s response, Gary Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868–1924 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990), 47–48, 135–37. 21. Hirsch, “Home Versus the Institution,” 88, 90 quote; Hastings H. Hart, Cottage and

416 / Notes to Chapter Eight Congregate Institutions for Children (New York: Charities Publication Committee and Russell Sage Foundation, 1910). 22. “Proceedings of the Conference on the Care of Dependent Children,” 5–6. 23. CSDSW, First Biennial Report of the State Department of Social Welfare of the State of California, 1927–28 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1929), 49; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 13–14, 21. 24. Helen Valeska Bary, “Labor Administration and Social Security: A Woman’s Life. An Interview Conducted by Jacqueline K. Parker” (Berkeley, CA: ROHO, 1965), 151; Amy Steinhart Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service. An Interview Conducted by Edna Tartaul Daniel” (Berkeley, CA: ROHO, 1965), 84-b. 25. This paragraph draws on the excellent analysis in Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 43–50. 26. Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 27. Spencer C. Olin, Jr., “European Immigrant and Oriental Alien: Acceptance and Rejection by the California Legislature of 1913,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 3 (1966): 303–15; Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). 28. Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 112, 114 quote; John Francis Neylan, “Politics, Law, and the University of California. An Interview Conducted by Dr. Corinne L. Gilb and Professor Walton E. Bean” (Berkeley, CA: ROHO, 1961), 59–60. 29. Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 97–98. 30. Ibid., 107. 31. California State Board of Control [CSBC h/a], Report of the Children’s Department, State Board of Control, for the period beginning July 1, 1916, and ending July 1, 1918 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1919), 43; CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 19; Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California. 32. Ibid., 123; Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 109, 111, 153, 155. 33. Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 121. 34. Neylan, “Politics, Law, and the University of California,” 61–66; Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 121A–26. 35. Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 130, 137. Orcutt’s reports are published in CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department, State Board of Control for the Period Beginning July 1, 1915, and Ending July 1, 1916 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1916), 55–59; California State Department of Finance [CSDF h/a], Report of the Bureau of Children’s Aid, State Department of Finance, for the Period Beginning July 1, 1920, and Ending July 1, 1922 (Sacramento, CA: State Printing Office, 1923), 36–37 quote. 36. Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 151–52. 37. CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1916, to July 1, 1918), 25; for stan­ dardized diets, see CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1915, to July 1, 1916), 33–36; CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department, State Board of Control, for the period beginning, July 1, 1918, and ending July 1, 1920 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1921), 241–47; Adele S. Jaffa, “A Standard Dietary for an Orphanage Written for the State Board of Charities and Corrections” (Sacramento: California

Notes to Chapter Eight / 417 State Printing Office, 1914). The dietary standards showed that orphanages could reduce expenses while offering balanced meals. 38. Lewis M. Terman, Surveys in Mental Deviation in Prisons, Public Schools, and Orphanages in California (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1913); Miro­slava ChávezGarcía, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), chap. 2, esp. 49–50. 39. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, chap. 3. 40. Reginald R. Stuart and Grace D. Stuart, A History of the Fred Finch Home: Oldest Methodist Home for Children in California, 1891–1955 (Oakland: Fred Finch Children’s Home, 1955), 31 quote; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 16, 17; CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 44–48; CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1916, to July 1, 1918), 56. 41. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 16, 17; CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 44–48; CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1916, to July 1, 1918), 56. After 1913, the SBCC required that local building codes be met as a condition for licensure; in 1920, the board began to review architectural plans to check compliance with regulations. California State Board of Charities and Corrections [CSBCC h/a], Sixth Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the State of California from July 1, 1912, to June 30, 1914 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1914), 196–98; CSBCC, Ninth Biennial Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1920), 64; California State Department of Public Welfare [CSDPW h/a], Biennial Report of the State Department of Public Welfare of the State of California, from July 1, 1924, to June 30, 1926, with additional data from July 1, 1922, to June 30, 1924 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1926), 95. 42. CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 20. 43. In 1917 the age limit was extended from twelve to fifteen, but state aid ceased at age fourteen. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 22, 67. 44. CSDF, Report of the Bureau of Children’s Aid (July 1, 1920, to July 1, 1922), 27. 45. CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 19–22. 46. Ibid. Decline in state aid and a successful home finding bureau were also mentioned. 47. Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 142–43. 48. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 19 quote; CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1915, to July 1, 1916), 12–13; CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 19–22. 49. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 14–15 quote; Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 138–39. 50. CSDPW, Biennial Report, 79 quote; Esther De Turbeville, “Outrelief and Family Desertion Problems in Alameda County, California” (Oakland: Alameda County Board of Supervisors, County Welfare Council, 1926, typed manuscript), 10–11; Leiby, “State Welfare Administration in California, 1879–1929,” 177. 51. CSDF, Report of the Bureau of Children’s Aid (July 1, 1920, to July 1, 1922), 31. 52. Reverend Max Clark, “Social Service Organizations of Oakland” (Oakland: Works Progress Administration, 1939, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL), 45; Community Chest of Oakland, “It’s Everybody’s Job”: A Report to the Shareholders in a Great Human Enterprise; An Appeal to Every Oaklander Who is Not in Need of Charity (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener, 1924); Community Chest of Oakland, “Let’s Dig Deep”: Oakland Community Chest Appeal, April 8th to 27th (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener, 1923). For business models in philanthropies, Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, “Making Charity Modern: Business and the Reform of Charities in Indianapolis, 1879–1930,” in Proceedings

418 / Notes to Chapter Eight of the Business History Conference (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1984), 158–70; Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 220–23. 53. CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 65. 54. LRS, Forty-fifth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1916 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1917), 30. Initially, the revised rule read, “Only children of Anglo-Saxon parentage shall be eligible for admission into the Home.” In the copy of the Fortyfourth Annual Report that is in the collection of the Bancroft Library, a member of the charity used her fountain pen, filled with blue ink, to cross out the proposed text and note the new wording. See LRS, Forty-fourth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1915 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1916), 37. 55. CSBC, Report of the Children’s Department (July 1, 1916, to July 1, 1918), 28; Braden, “Child Welfare and Community Service,” 125, 127, 201. 56. “West Oakland Home, Annual Meeting of a Worthy Charity,” Oakland Enquirer, 1896, n.p. (clipping in LCC scrapbooks). 57. Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62, 67–72. 58. Mary R. Smith, “Report of the President,” in First Annual Report of the Mary R. Smith’s Cottages for the Year Ending February 12, 1903 (East Oakland, CA: Fox Press, 1903), 1. See also Ethel M. Tinnemann, “The Mary R. Smith’s Trust Cottages,” Oakland Heri­ tage Alliance News 5, no. 1 (winter 1985): 1–4; Trustees of the Mary R. Smith’s Trusts, “History of Cottages,” (East Oakland, CA, n.d.). 59. Smith, “Report,” 1. 60. Mollie Conners, “Pioneer Women of Alameda County,” Oakland Enquirer, May 4, 1921, 6; “Splendid New Structure Is Consecrated to Uplifting and Glorifying of Homes,” Oakland Herald, March 25, 1904, 2; “Home Club Is Dedicated,” Oakland Tri­bune, March 25, 1904, 3. 61. Trustees of the Mary R. Smith’s Trusts, Garden Concert, “Bataille des Fleurs,” 8th Annual Souvenir Program (East Oakland, CA: Josephine Cottage Publishing Co., 1904). 62. A $15,000 mortgage allowed the purchase of two lots on Taylor Street. Ethel Crocker, honorary president, donated $2,500 to help clear the debt. Trevor started an endowment fund in 1910 and became president of the charity the next year. W.O.H., Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the West Oakland Home (Oakland: Enquirer Publishing Co., 1911), 5–6. 63. WOH, Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 5, 6. 64. “Army of Earnest Women to Sell Tags for the Home,” Oakland Enquirer, May 14, 1912, 1. 65. Larson’s letter is in WOH, “Record of Children” (Oakland, January 1907 to Febru­ ary 1914), clipped to p. 196. The baby’s death is recorded in the same place. 66. CSDSW, First Biennial Report, 19; and WOH, Twenty-eighth Annual Report of the West Oakland Home (Oakland: Horwinski Company, 1914), 12; WOH, Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 11; WOH, Forty-second Annual Report of the West Oakland Home (Oakland: Horwinski Company, 1928), 14. 67. Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California, 81 quote. The information about ethnic background comes from the 1910 US Census. 68. “Snapshot Album, West Oakland Home” (Oakland, 1920s; archives of the Lincoln Child Center). See also Mrs. Emil Fritsch, “Summer Camp Report,” in WOH, Fortysecond Annual Report, 15–16; “Outing Trip Brings Joy to Little Folk: Fifty Boys and Girls Provided with Food, Clothing, and Schooling, under Matron’s Care, Kindhearted

Notes to Chapter Eight / 419 Women Give Time and Work to Supervision,” Oct. 21, 1923 (clipping in OPL/OHR files; newspaper not indicated). The details of campsite developments are recorded in the board of directors’ meeting minutes, archives of the Lincoln Child Center. For summer camps, Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); for camps at other orphanages, Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 87–88. 69. CSDPW, Biennial Report, 81. 70. “Outing Trip Brings Joy to Little Folk.” 71. Rose Armelli Cava and Anna Armelli Mroczko, “Taped Interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project” (Oakland, 1996), 35. 72. For example, WOH, “Secretary’s Minute Book” (Oakland, 1903–10), 116. 73. WOH, Forty-fourth Annual Report of the West Oakland Home (Oakland: Horwinski Company, 1930), 6. 74. CSBCC, Fifth Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the State of California from July 1, 1910, to June 30, 1912 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1912), 36–37. 75. Tinnemann, “Mary R. Smith’s Trust Cottages,” 1–4. For high cost, Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind, 61–63; Hart, Cottage and Congregate Institutions, 18, 29. 76. CSDPW, Biennial Report, table 42. For discussion, Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 118–19, 124–28. 77. For Brown, LRS, Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Annual Reports; Years Ending April 30, 1905–06 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1906), 3–9; LRS, Sixty-third Annual Report; YearEnding December 31, 1934 (Oakland, CA: Oakland Tribune Press, 1935), 12–13; “Aid Society Calls for New Name: Ladies Relief Society Offers Prize of $25 for the Best Title Submitted to the Contest Committee,” Oakland Tribune, March 12, 1924 (clipping files, OHR/OPL); for questions about purpose, “Charity Work Kept Up for Half Century, Activity in Behalf of Humanity Carried on under Difficulties,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1923, 1; Eva V. Carlin, “Along the Open Road,” Domestic Science Monthly 4, no. 3 (December 1901): 78–79. 78. Frances L. Weston, “Recording Secretary’s Annual Report,” in LRS, Forty-eighth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1919 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1920), 12–13. 79. For the Temescal schools, “Light and Ventilation of School Rooms,” Pacific Coast Architect 8, no. 3 (September 1914): 119; “A Perfect Window for Schools and Open Air Classrooms,” Pacific Coast Architect 10, no. 3 (September 1915): 134; “Oakland Technical High School, Oakland, Cal.,” Pacific Coast Architect 10, no. 3 (September 1915): 6 plates, not numbered; “Emerson Elementary School, Oakland, Cal.,” Pacific Coast Architect 14, no. 4 (October 1917): pl. 64; “Oakland Technical High School, Oakland, Cal.,” Pacific Coast Architect 14, no. 4 (October 1917): 209, 221, 255, 261, pl. 59–61. For Donovan, see John J. Donovan, et al., ed. School Architecture: Principles and Practices (New Haven: Macmillan Company, 1921). 80. Weston, “Recording Secretary’s Report,” 12–13. 81. LRS, Forty-ninth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1920 (Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1921), 15. 82. LRS, Fiftieth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1921 (Oakland: Carruth and

420 / Notes to Chapter Eight Carruth, 1922), 8–10, 25; LRS, Fifty-second Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1923 (Oakland: Carruth and Adamson, 1924), 8, quote; Community Chest of Oakland, “It’s Everybody’s Job,” n.p.; “Community Chest Gives Needed Aid: Working at the Ladies’ Relief Home Takes in Old Folk and Children,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1924 (clipping files, OHR/OPL). 83. This included property sales made to the city, which it used to enlarge the grounds of the Technical High School. LRS, Fifty-first Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1922 (Oakland: Carruth and Adamson, 1923), 8; LRS, Fifty-second Annual Report, 9. 84. Mrs. Frank K. Mott, “A Brief Summary of the Outstanding Events and Transactions of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, California. From the Time of Its Foundation, 1871, to the Current Year” (Oakland: typed manuscript, 1935), 72. 85. For Waterman’s Home for Babies, see Catherine W. Zipf, Professional Pursuits: Women and the American Arts and Crafts Movement (Knoxville: University of Tenneseee Press, 2007), 45; Sally Bullard Thorton, Daring to Dream: The Life of Hazel Wood Waterman (San Diego: San Diego Historical Society, 1987), 90–93, 101. Morgan’s work for children included several exceptional orphanages for Chinese children. Karen McNeill, “The Ming Quong Home and Mills College: A Case Study of Gender, Ethnicity, and Urban Planning in Oakland, California,” paper presented at the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, Oakland, 2009. 86. CSDPW, Biennial Report, 81, 83. 87. “Babies’ New Home Ready by Saturday, Ladies’ Relief Society’s Nursery on Forty-fifth Street to Be Dedicated for Fifty Little Children,” Oakland Tribune, Dec. 3, 1925, 1. 88. Mollie Fisher and Belva Heer, taped interview, Oakland, 2001. I learned about the Cooley sisters through Di Starr, “Orphanage Now an Art Center,” Montclarion, Nov. 24, 2000, A-5, A-12; Laurie Grossman, “Mollie Fisher Comes Home,” Park Central, Spring 2000, 4. Quotations are from my interviews unless noted otherwise. 89. LRS, Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Annual Reports, 3–9, 17–18. See also “Ladies to Have New Home,” Oakland Tribune, April 14, 1906, 1; “Fierce Flames Rage Unchecked in Main Building of Children’s Home, Heroines Work in Cloud of Fire and Smoke,” Oakland Herald, April 13, 1906, 1; “Fund Started to Repair Children’s Home,” Oakland Tribune, April 14, 1906, 4; “The Ladies’ Relief Society Is Grateful to Public,” Oakland Enquirer, April 16, 1906, 2. 90. Lillian Brown Everts, “Report of the House and Home Committee for 1924,” LRS, Fifty-third Annual Report: Year Ending December 31, 1924 (Oakland: Carruth and Adamson, 1925), 19. 91. LRS, Fifty-seventh Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1928 (Oakland: Dowdle Printers, 1929), 11. For support of Ward, LRS, Fifty-sixth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1927 (Oakland: Carruth and Adamson, 1928), 10. 92. LRS, Fifty-eighth Annual Report; Year Ending December 31, 1929 (Oakland: Dowdle Printers, 1930), 8. For stigma, see also Goldstein, Home on Gorham Street, 131–38; Roberta White McBride and Robert White, taped interview, Berkeley, CA, 2002. 93. LRS, Fiftieth Annual Report, 18. 94. Sanborn Map Company, “Insurance Map for Oakland, California,” (Pelham, NY: Sanborn Map Co., 1903–10), pl. 293; Sanborn Map Company, “Insurance Map for Oakland, California,” (Pelham, NY: Sanborn Map Co., 1911–30), pl. 338; Joseph H. DeFreitas, “Childhood Memories, 8 to 12 Years Old (1924–1927)” (Oakland, 1991, typed manuscript), 5. For comparison, Goldstein, Home on Gorham Street, 12–13; Polster, Inside Looking Out, 47, 150–54.

Notes to Chapter Eight / 421 95. LRS, Fifty-sixth Annual Report, 11. 96. For comparison, Dell Upton, “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. Robert B. St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 357. 97. For comparison, Catherine W. Bishir, “Urban Slavery at Work: The Bellamy Mansion Compound in Wilmington, North Carolina,” Buildings & Landscapes 17, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 13–22. 98. David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 17. 99. Grossman, “Mollie Fisher Comes Home,” 4. 100. CSBCC, Ninth Biennial Report, 65; CSDP, Biennial Report, 96. For toys and play, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 180. 101. Bernard L. Herman, Townhouse: Architecture and Material Culture in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 72. 102. CSDPW, Biennial Report, 95, 96. 103. For congested quarters, Elizabeth Collins Cromley, “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms, 1890–1930,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 124; Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 49–51. For orphanages as an alternative to crowded homes, Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 75. 104. For a fictional account, Gail Carson Levine, Dave at Night (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999). 105. CSDPW. Biennial Report, 95, 96. 106. “‘Beaten Till I Fainted,’ Declares Whittier Girl”; Grossman, “Mollie Fisher Comes Home,” 4. For comparison, see Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered, 87. 107. See also Goldstein, Home on Gorham Street, 5–8; Polster, Inside Looking Out, 39. 108. Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best,” 114. See also Goldstein, Home on Gorham Street, 47–48, 128–29, 204–6. 109. Grossman, “Mollie Fisher Comes Home,” 4 quote; LRS, Sixty-third Annual Report, 8, 10; and also Campanile and Rojeski, “West Oakland Home”; DeFreitas, “Childhood Memories”; McBride and White, taped interview. 110. For orphanages as boarding schools for poor children, Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best,” 11, 187; Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 140. 111. Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 22–23. For comparison, Sandra Enos, “The Emergence of Child Welfare at the State Home and School, Rhode Island’s Public Orphanage,” Rhode Island History 65 (2007): 77. 112. For comparison, Dulberger, “Mother Donit fore the Best,” 139–41. 113. “Women Revolt at ‘Barbarity’ in Children’s Home; Oakland Group, Including Rolph’s Daughter, Quits Society,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 1932, 4. 114. LRS, Sixty-third Annual Report, 10. 115. LRS, Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth Annual Reports; Years Ending December 31, 1936 and 1937 (Oakland, 1938), 7. 116. LRS, Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth Annual Reports, 8.

422 / Notes to Chapter Nine C h a p t e r nin e

1. A. W. Hunton, “The Club Movement in California,” The Crisis 12 (1912): 90; Rev. Max Clark, “Social Service Organizations of Oakland” (Oakland: Works Progress Administration, 1939, typed manuscript; on file, OHR/OPL), 35. For social history, see Donald Hausler, “The Fannie Wall Children’s Home,” Oakland Heritage Alliance News 6, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1–4; Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay AfroAmerican Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland: Northern California Center for AfroAmerican History and Life, 1989), 23, 36. The Peralta Street site is documented in OCHS, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home (Christian and Anna Suhl House)” (Oakland, 1989, typed manuscript and research materials; use courtesy of Betty Marvin). 2. For the national movement, Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104, 126–28. For the Oakland site, OCHS, “St. Vincent’s Day Home (Charles and Laura Haven House)” (Oakland, 1992, typed manuscript and research materials; use courtesy of Betty Marvin); Mike McGrath, “Seventy-five Years of Childcare,” East Bay Express, June 5, 1987, 3, 10. 3. For this pervasive racial segregation, Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 104, 127. 4. Chris Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics: The 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Oakland, California,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 39–55. 5. Clark, “Social Service Organizations,” 45; CSDPW, Biennial Report of the State Department of Public Welfare of the State of California, from July 1, 1924, to June 30, 1926, with additional data from July 1, 1922, to June 30, 1924 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1926), 90–95, table 26; US Bureau of the Census, Children Under Institutional Care 1923 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1927), 50–51, 170. 6. Mary C. Netherland, “Program, State and National Monuments, California State Association of Colored Women, Inc., 1946–1947” (Oakland, 1947 (?), typed manuscript; Folder 7, Box 3, California State Association of Colored Women’s Clubs [CSACWC h/a], African American Museum and Library at Oakland [AAMLO h/a]), 1. 7. CSDPW, Biennial Report, 90. 8. Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17–24; Abigail A. Van Slyck, “The Spatial Practice of Privilege,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (June 2011): 218. 9. Rose, Mother’s Job, 14, 18, 32. 10. CSBCC, Ninth Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the State of California from July 1, 1918, to June 30, 1920 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1920), 61. 11. Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary, Welfare Activities of Federal, State, and Local Governments in California, 1850–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 34– 35; Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 329n21. 12. For the orphanage, James Flamant, “Child-Saving Charities in This Big Town,” San Francisco Morning Call, May 28, 1893, 18; for Armer, D. J. Kavanagh, The Holy Family Sisters of San Francisco: A Sketch of Their First Fifty Years (San Francisco: Gilmartin Company, 1922), 23, 27–30, 129.

Notes to Chapter Nine / 423 13. Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 84–86; R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848– 1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 51, 88–90. 14. Mrs. Thomas Hughes Kelly, “Day Nurseries,” in Proceedings of the First National Conference of Catholic Charities (Washington: 1910), 337; Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 126–27. A member of the Committee on Day Nurseries of the New York Association of Catholic Charities, Kelly offered her remarks at the first meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities (1910). 15. Ellen Berg, “Citizens in the Republic of Childhood: Immigrants and the American Kindergarten” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004), 276–77; Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 130; Sister Michaela O’Connor, taped follow-up interview with Karana Hattersley-Drayton and Marta Gutman (San Francisco, 1995). 16. Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 31–35. 17. Ibid., 50–52; Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), 346–52. 18. “The Children’s Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition” (Chicago, 1893), 23; cited in Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 50. 19. J. B. Campbell, Campbell’s Illustrated History of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: J. B. Campbell, 1894), vol. 2, 578; cited in Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 52. 20. Alice Timmons Toomy, “There Is a Public Sphere for Catholic Women,” Catholic World 57, no. 341 (August 1893): 674–77 quote; Mary J. Oates, The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 80. 21. Rev. Brother Maurelian, The Catholic Educational Exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Chicago: J. S Hyland, 1894), 62. The Awards Committee of the Catholic Educational Exhibit and the Board of Lady Managers of the fair awarded the prizes. Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 130–31. 22. Carrie Shevelson Benjamin, “Woman’s Place in Charitable Work: What It Is and What It Should Be,” in Papers of Jewish Women’s Congress, Held at Chicago, September 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1893, ed. Jewish Women’s Congress (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America 1894; reprinted in Joyce Antler, Nina Schwartz, and Claire B. Uziel, eds., How Did the First Jewish Women’s Movement’s Roots in Both Progressive Women’s Activism and Jewish Tradition Shape Its Activism, 1893–1936? (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2005), 155. Both posted on Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, “Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000,” accessed June 9, 2011 through Morris Raphael Cohen Library at the City College of New York, http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/library/. 23. Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 35–40, 54, 67–71. 24. Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 80; and for examples, Maria Lopez, “Day Nurseries,” St. Vincent de Paul Quarterly 4, no. 6 (1899): 232–37; Susan L. Porter, “Irene Rothschild Guggenheim,” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia; accessed March 1, 2009, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/guggenheim-irene -rothschild. 25. Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 54; Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 126. 26. Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 185; Community Chest of Oakland, ”It’s Everybody’s Job”: A Report to the Shareholders in a Great Human Enterprise. An Appeal to Every Oaklander Who is Not in Need of Charity (Oakland: R. S. Kitchener, 1924), n.p. Protestant

424 / Notes to Chapter Nine women also discussed the need for a day nursery in Oakland during the 1893 depression; the West Oakland Home may have run one. See “Much Needed, Who Will Co-operate in Establishing a Day Nursery for Children?,” Oakland Enquirer, Jan. 31, 1894, 1; “The Day Nursery, It Can Be Started if Enough Mothers Apply,” Oakland Enquirer, Feb. 7, 1894, 6. 27. Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 186; OCHS, “St. Vincent’s Day Home.” 28. Katherine M. Nesfield, “‘Unto the Least of These,’” Overland Monthly 50, no. 6 (December 1907): 549–50. 29. Examples are in the archives of the Sisters of the Holy Family (SHF) in Fremont, CA. 30. SHF, “St. Vincent’s Day Home Memoirs, from 1911 to December 1919, Gleaned from Convent Annals,” 1 (n.d., typed manuscripts; on file, SHF Mother House, Fremont, CA). 31. Ibid., 2. 32. Ibid., 3. 33. Ibid., 3 quote; Sister Michaela O’Connor, taped interview by Karana HattersleyDrayton and Marta Gutman, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (San Francisco, 1995); Rose Armelli Cava and Anna Armelli Mroczko, taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (Oakland, CA, 1996). 34. SHF, “St. Vincent’s Day Home Memoirs,” 4. 35. Ibid., 8, 9, 15–19; O’Connor, interview and follow-up interview. 36. Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 128; Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 35– 37; CSBCC, Eighth Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the State of California from July 1, 1916, to June 30, 1918 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1918), 42–43. In 1913, the CSBCC required private day nurseries to be licensed; nurseries run by public schools, canneries, and factories were exempt because they were supervised by other agencies. The number of day homes peaked at sixty in 1920, but then it dropped when industries closed on-site care facilities, probably because they were faced with stiffer regulations. In 1932, thirty-seven facilities were licensed, housing 2,113 children. 37. “Tots Receive Loving Care in Day Home,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 9, 1923 (ORH/OPL clipping files). The addition was granted permit no. 90176 on March 29, 1924. OCHS, “St. Vincent’s Day Home.” 38. CSDPW, Day Nursery Standards (Sacramento: California State Printer, 1925); CSDPW, Bien­nial Report, 134–38. For the influence of national standards, Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 56–57; Glenn Steele, Care of Children in Day Nurseries (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932, for the Children’s Bureau, US Department of Labor); Ethel S. Beer, The Day Nursery (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943). 39. SHF, “St. Vincent’s Day Home Memoirs,” 2 quote; Brian Horrigan, “Berkeley’s Heri­ tage: Early Day Care Center,” Independent and Gazette, Feb. 21, 1978 (ORH/OPL clipping files); Kavanagh, Holy Family Sisters, 137, 140. 40. The report is cited in Cahn and Bary, Welfare Activities, 35. For on-site daycare, OCHS, “St. Vincent’s Day Home,” 5. 41. CSDSW, First Biennial Report of the State Department of Social Welfare of the State of California, 1927–28 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1929), 75 (quote)–83. 42. “Tots Receive Loving Care in Day Home.”

Notes to Chapter Nine / 425 43. Ethyll M. Dooley, “The Day Nursery as a Social Agency,” in Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference of Catholic Charities (Philadelphia: 1923), 127; cited in Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 126. 44. Joseph Cumbelich and Sophia Psihos Cumbelich, taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (Concord, CA, 1996); O’Connor, interview and follow-up interview. 45. For the national case, Rose, Mother’s Job, 36; for California, see SBCC and DPW stan­ dards cited above, notes 36 and 38. 46. SHF, “St. Vincent’s Day Home Memoirs,” 3; CSBCC, Ninth Biennial Report, 103; CSDPW, Biennial Report, Table 42. 47. Brown and McKeown, Poor Belong to Us, 127; CSDPW, Biennial Report, Table 42. 48. Crouchett, Bunch, and Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow, 10; Beth Eden Baptist Church, “A History of Beth Eden Church: The Legacy,” accessed July 15, 2013 at http://www.betheden.com/pages/mission-history. In 1925 the church moved to another building, also in West Oakland. 49. Donald Hausler, “Old Folks’ Home,” Oakland Heritage Alliance News 5, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 1–2; Willi Coleman, “African American Women and Community Development in California, 1848–1900,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graff, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles and Seattle: Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of Washington Press, 2001), 112; Crouchett, Bunch, and Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow, 8, 14–15; Martha Kendall Winnacker, “Oakland, California, Black Women’s Clubs,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1993), 895–97. 50. The notice, published in 1930, is cited by Donald Hausler, “The Black Y’s of Oakland,” Oakland Heritage Alliance News 7, no. 1 (Winter 1987–88), 8. 51. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1900 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 201–2. 52. Crouchett, Bunch, and Winnacker, Visions Toward Tomorrow, 23; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “‘Your Life is Really Not Just Your Own’: African American Women in Twentieth-Century California,” in Seeking El Dorado, ed. de Graff, Mulroy, and Taylor, 216. 53. For firsthand accounts, Ida Louise Jackson, “Overcoming Barriers in Education: Interview Conducted by Gabrielle Morris” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1990), 38 quote, 39; Tarea Hall Pittman, “NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker; Interview Conducted by Joyce Henderson “ (Berkeley: ROHO, 1974); Frances Mary Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality: Interview Conducted by Malca Chall” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1979). For analysis, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 73; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 51–59; Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 54. Rhomberg, “White Nativism and Urban Politics,” 39–55; Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 25; Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). For the parade, see “Klan Threatens Action in Oakland,” Richmond Independent, July 5, 1924; “Y.M.I. Declines Parade Invite,” Richmond Independent, July 1, 1924; “Twenty Thousand See Parade Celebrating Fourth of July,”

426 / Notes to Chapter Nine Richmond Independent, July 5, 1924 (clipping files, Richmond Museum of History). For discussion in the black press, “Kluxers Busy Again in California,” Western American, Feb. 4, 1927, 1; “Klan as Menace,” Western American, Dec. 14, 1928, 2; Hester Anderson, “Third Baptist Church Happenings,” Western American, March 9, 1928. 55. This point calls on Kevin Gaines, “Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885- 1941,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (1997): 378. 56. Stephanie J. Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 10–25; Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4. 57. Lawrence B. de Graaf, “Race, Sex, and Region: Black Women in the American West, 1850–1920,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May 1980): 293. 58. Mary Church Terrell, “The Duty of the National Association of Colored Women to the Race,” A.M.E. Church Review, January 1900, 340–54; cited by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 206–7. See also Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 71; Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 22–27. 59. Mary Church Terrell, “Club Work of Colored Women,” Southern Workman 30 (August 1901): 436–37; cited in Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 67; Rose, Mother’s Job, 37–38. 60. Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 35–36 quote, 67. 61. A. W. Hunton, “Club Movement in California,” 90 quote; Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the Y.W.C.A., 1906–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), chap. 2. 62. Winnacker, “Oakland, California, Black Women’s Clubs,” 895–97; Marta Gutman, “The Tilghman Family and Race Work in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland. Cypress Interpretive Report No. 2, I-880 Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: ASC/SSU, 2004), 282–87. 63. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 127; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 152–53, 170. 64. Hunton, “Club Movement in California,” 90 quote; Esther Jones Lee, “Women’s Clubs and Their Doings,” Oakland Independent, Dec. 14, 1929, 7. 65. Netherland, “Program,” 2; Charles F. Tilghman Jr., ed. Colored Directory of the Leading Cities of Northern California (Oakland, CA: Tilghman Printing Co., 1916–17), 14, 44. 66. Hunton, “Club Movement in California,” 90. 67. Bertha Allen, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery Inc.” (Oakland, 1959, typed manuscript; Folder 10, Box 3, CSACWC, AAMLO), 1. 68. Fanny Wall and Hettie Tilghman, “To the Mother’s Charity Club” (Oakland, 1916, typed letter; Folder 10, Box 3, CSACWC, AAMLO). The Woman’s Art and Industrial Club made a donation. National Association of Colored Women, “History of the Art and Industrial Club,” National Notes 60, no. 9 (Summer 1952): 9.

Notes to Chapter Nine / 427 69. Hausler, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home,” 2; E. H. N., “The Fanny Wall Home,” Oakland Independent, December 14, 1929, 3; Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (San Francisco: San Francisco Negro Historical and Cultural Society, 1919), 228. At first the name of the home was spelled the same as that of is namesake, Fanny Wall; but over time it changed to Fannie Wall. I use the latter for purposes of consistency. 70. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Unequal Sisters, A Multi­ cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 292–97. See also Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 5–9; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 194. 71. E. B. Gray, “Art and Industrial Club,” Western American, March 18, 1927, 8 quote; Jackson, “Overcoming Barriers in Education,” 12. For deference, Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 74–76. 72. Netherland, “Program,” 1, 2, 3. See also Lee, “Women’s Clubs and Their Doings,” 7. 73. Community Chest of Oakland, The Story of Our Community Chest (Published by the Children of the Community for the 1927 Appeal for Understanding) (Oakland: 1927), n.p. 74. Community Chest of Oakland, “It’s Everybody’s Job”, n.p. 75. Lee, “Women’s Clubs and Their Doings,” 7. For fund-raisers, see Delilah Beasley’s columns in the Oakland Tribune. 76. Chlora Hayes Sledge and Genevieve McCalla, “‘And A Little Child Shall Lead Them,’” in Charity Ball; Building Fund: Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland Auditorium, Mon., December 9, 1946 (Oakland: Tilghman Press, 1946), 4. 77. Hausler, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home,” 2; Sledge and McCalla, “‘And A Little Child,’” 4; CSDPW, Biennial Report, 78, table 42. 78. Pittman, “NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker,” 49. 79. “Building Intelligence,” CABN 8, no. 8 (August 1883): 140; Frank Merritt, “Charles F. Mau,” in History of Alameda County, California (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1914), 87–88; M. J. Keller, Album of Oakland, California (Oakland: Pacific Press, 1893). 80. Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward A Tenderer Humanity and Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 19–20, 160n3. 81. Chlora Hayes Sledge and Genevieve McCalla, “Fannie Wall Home and Day Nursery Cited for Service and Progressiveness,” in Third Annual Charity Ball; Building Fund: Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland Auditorium, Monday, January 19, 1948 (Oakland: Tilghman Press, 1948), 7. 82. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 12, 135–37; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 579; White, Too Heavy a Load, 69–72. 83. For comparison, Amber N. Wiley, “The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African American Cultural Heritage,” Buildings & Landscapes 20, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 95–128; Audrey Elisa Kerr, The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C. (Knoxville: University of Tenneseee Press, 2006). 84. Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 75–76; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 224; Moore, “‘Your Life is Really Not Just Your Own,’” 213. 85. Mary C. Netherland, taped interview, interviewer not known (Oakland: African American Museum and Library at Oakland, 1971); cited by Michael B. Knight,

428 / Notes to Chapter Nine “Deeds Not Words: The Story of Mary C. Netherland and the NCFCWC, 1876–1973” (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 1995), 6. Netherland helped organize the Native Daughters of the California after being excluded from the Native Daughters of the Golden West. See Ruth Lasartemay and Esther L. Warner, “California Native Daughters,” Yearly Journal (1957): 18; Almena Lomax, “A Black Pioneer in Early California,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, March 29, 1970, B-7. 86. For this point I am indebted to Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” in The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 67. 87. Sara A. Butler, “Ground Breaking in New Deal Washington, D.C.: Art, Patronage, and Race at the Recorder of Deeds Building,” Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 279–81; and also Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 330–33. 88. See the discussion of the Ladies’ Relief Society, and also Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 13–14. 89. Hausler, “Black Y’s of Oakland,” 9; Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 40–41. See also Jackson, “Overcoming Barriers in Education,” 23; Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality,” 219–21. 90. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 193; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 68–72. For inferior facilities given to black women to use as YWCAs, Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times, 41. 91. Hausler, “Black Y’s of Oakland,” 9. For the importance of this node in black cultural life, Audrey Robinson, taped interview by Willie Collins, for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (Oakland, 1995), 4; Eleanor Edwards, “Memories of West Oakland,” Montclarion, July 7, 1982, 10. 92. Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 581; Moore, “‘Your Life is Really Not Just Your Own,’” 216. 93. E. H. N., “The Fanny Wall Home,” 3. 94. Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality,” 230. A certificate honoring Albrier’s contribution to the charity may be found in Frances Mary Albrier, “Scrapbook of Clippings” (Berkeley, n.d; on file, BL/UCB). 95. “Visitor This Week,” Oakland Tribune, August 19, 1951, S-9; e-mail exchange with Sara McMullen-Krueger, March 17–18, 2012. 96. Delilah L. Beasley, “What Others Say,” Western American, June 25, 1926, 8. See also “Both Races Suffer by Prejudice,” Western American, Oct. 12, 1928, 1; “Vital Matters Brought Up at Dinner,” Western American, March 25, 1927, 1. 97. Delilah L. Beasley, “Activities Among Negroes,” Oakland Tribune, January 18, 1931, n.p. (clipping file, OHR/OPL). 98. Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times, 40–41; Jackson, “Overcoming Barriers in Education,” 23; Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the Y.W.C.A., 91, 117, 122, 150. 99. Pittman, “NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker,” 56–62; Alameda County Welfare Commission, “Child Care Survey” (Oakland, 1943, typed manuscript). For wartime childcare centers on the West Coast, see Margaret Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks, and the Struggle for Public Housing,” in World War II and the American Dream, ed. Donald Albrecht (Washington and Cambridge,

Notes to Chapter Nine / 429 MA: National Building Museum and MIT Press, 1995), 90–143; Johnson, Second Gold Rush, 125–27, 193–94. 100. Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 77. 101. This point calls on the argument in Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 8–9. 102. Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 77. 103. For independence from men, Eileen Boris, “The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the ‘Political,’” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 218; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 151, 189; for cooperation, Brown and Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” 102. 104. Gaines, “Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality,” 385; Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (1997): 340–77. 105. A parallel project emerged at the Linden Branch YWCA. “$2,000 Given for New Building to Linden Branch Y.W.C.A.,” Western American, Dec. 14, 1928, 1; “Successful Meeting Held,” California Voice, Jan. 25, 1929, 1; Linden Branch YWCA, Oakland, “Sixth Annual Meeting and Membership Dinner” (Oakland, CA: 1929), 8. 106. For example, “Club Women Deny Fanny Wall Rumor,” Spokesman, Dec. 7, 1934; Sledge and McCalla, “‘And A Little Child,’” 4; Kriste Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 41. 107. Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality,” 230. 108. Sledge and McCalla, “Fannie Wall Home and Day Nursery Cited for Service,” 11. 109. Pittman, “NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker,” 48, 49. She probably referred to CSDPW, Day Nursery Standards. 110. Allen, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home”; Chlora Hayes Sledge and Genevieve McCalla, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Incorporated,” Woman’s Journal (1944): 10. 111. Johnson, Second Gold Rush, 125–26. 112. Chlora Hayes Sledge and Genevieve McCalla, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery,” Woman’s Journal (1945): 6 quote; Chlora Hayes Sledge, “Dear CoWorker,” (Oakland, 1945, typed letter; Folder 10, Box 3, CSACWC, AAMLO), 1. For tributes offered to Sledge after her death in 1956, see the pamphlet published by the National Association of Colored Women, “National Association of Colored Women, Inc., 1896–1952” (1952 (?), Folder 1, Box 1, National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, AAMLO), 79, 83; “Chlora Hayes Sledge,” Yearly Journal (1957): 17; Steven Lavoie, “‘Social Clubs’ Turn the Corner,” Oakland Tribune, March 6, 1994, A-20. 113. Johnson, Second Gold Rush, 125–27; Amina Hassan, “Rosie Re-riveted in Public Memory: A Rhetorical Study of WWII Shipyard Childcare in Richmond, California, and the 1946–1957 Campaign to Preserve Public-Supported Childcare” (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 2005). 114. Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality,” 98–99; Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 97. Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 82–84; White, Too Heavy a Load, 160–73. 115. Sledge and McCalla, “‘And A Little Child,’” 5 quote; Sledge and McCalla, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home (1944),” 6; Sledge and McCalla, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Inc. (1945),” 10; Clark, “Social Service Organizations,” 33.

430 / Notes to the Epilogue 116. Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Charity Ball; Building Fund: Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland Auditorium, Mon., December 9, 1946 (Oakland: Tilghman Press, 1946); Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Third Annual Charity Ball; Building Fund: Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, Oakland Auditorium, Monday, January 19, 1948 (Oakland: Tilghman Press, 1948). 117. Sledge and McCalla, “‘And A Little Child,’” 5. 118. Sledge, “Dear Co-Worker”; Fannie Wall Children’s Home, Third Annual Charity Ball. 119. Ruby M. Armstrong, Mattie Huson, and Margaret M. Nottage, “Chlora Hayes Sledge Club of Richmond, California” (Richmond, CA, 1945, typed manuscript; Folder 10, Box 3, CSACWC, AAMLO). 120. Sledge and McCalla, “Fannie Wall Home and Day Nursery Cited for Service,” 7. 121. Harry and Marguerite Williams, “Reflections of a Longtime Black Family in Richmond; Interview Conducted by Judith K. Dunning” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1985), 169–70; Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage, 166–67; Hausler, “Black Y’s of Oak­ land,” 9. 122. CSDSW, “Standards for Children’s Institutions in California; Adopted by the Social Welfare Board on May 27, 1949,” (Sacramento, 1949), 13. 123. Fannie Wall Children’s Home, “Summary Report on Fanny Wall Children’s Home, December 17, 1957” (Oakland, 1957, typed manuscript; on file, OPL/OHR), 2; Hausler, “Fannie Wall Children’s Home,” 4; Albrier, “Determined Advocate for Racial Equality,” 230. The exact figure was $33,730. 124. Ed Salzman, “Views of N.Y. Housing Expert on City Blight Challenged,” n.d. (OHR/ OPL clipping files). 125. “Visitor Astonished at Work Accomplished by Day Nursery,” Oakland Tribune, July 18, 1941 (OHR/OPL clipping files). 126. Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 8, 9, chap. 6. 127. SHF, Fifty Years of Service: St. Vincent’s Day Home (Oakland: Creative Lithography, 1961); SHF, Saint Vincent’s Day Home (Oakland: Mastercraft Press, 1986). 128. “Link With Past in Acorn Project,” Montclarion, June 9, 1965, 19. For the Acorn Redevelopment Project, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 141, 144–45, 150; Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 127–31. 129. Allan Temko, “A Mansion for Inner-City Children,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1978, 4 quote; “Day Care Home is Warm, Miniature World,” Oakland Tribune, July 29, 1978, 12-E; Joseph Pereira, “Sisters’ Dream Comes True for Children’s Home,” Catholic Voice, May 29, 1978, 1. 130. Temko, “A Mansion for Inner-City Children,” 4. 131. Sister Corinne Marie Mohrmann, conversation with author, Oakland, 1995; SHF, Fifty Years of Service. E p il o gu e

1. Elaine-Maryse Solari, “The Making of an Archaeological Site and the Unmaking of a Community in West Oakland, California,” in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, ed. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22; “12 Blocks Cleared for Postal Center,” Oakland Tribune, Nov. 30, 1960, 19; “Wrecker Uses Sherman Tank to Blitz Old Homes,” Oakland Tri­ bune, Aug. 16, 1960, 13.

Notes to the Epilogue / 431 2. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 137, 142. 3. In 1950, 85 percent of the black community in the city—about 40,500 people—lived in West Oakland. Solari, “Making of an Archaeological Site,” 25. 4. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization, Urban Poverty, and African American Community Mobilization in Oakland, 1945 through the 1990s,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graff, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles and Seattle: Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of Washington Press, 2001), 343–76; see also Self, American Babylon, 46–60, 137–49, 170–76. 5. “Wrecker Uses Sherman Tank to Blitz Old Homes,” 13. 6. Arthur Patterson, taped interview by author for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (Oakland, 1995), 50, 51. 7. Self, American Babylon, 139; Solari, “Making of an Archaeological Site,” 25. 8. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 5. 9. Patterson, taped interview; OCHS, “362–364 Peralta Street (formerly 742 Peralta Street)” (Oakland, 1992, typed manuscript and research materials; use courtesy of Betty Marvin); Solari, “Making of an Archaeological Site,” 25. 10. Self, American Babylon, 142. 11. Marta Gutman, “Five Buildings on One Corner and Their Change Over Time,” in Sites and Sounds: Essays in Celebration of West Oakland, ed. Suzanne Stewart and Mary Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: ASC/SSU, 1997), 113–30. 12. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 74–77, 133–35, 166–67; Donna Murch, Living in the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 30. 13. Murch, Living in the City, 38–39, 46–49. 14. “Day Nursery Projected by Century Club,” San Francisco Examiner, June 3, 1931, 8. 15. Greg Kosmos, taped interview by Karana Hattersley-Drayton for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project (Oakland, 1995); Josephine Jimenez, taped interview for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project by Eleanor Swent (Oakland, 1981). 16. Patterson, taped interview, 15–16. See also “Graduation Day at New Century Recreation Center,” California Voice, Feb. 22, 1952, 16. 17. This particular passage from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961) is cited by Malcolm Gladwell, “Designs for Working,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2000, 60. 18. These points draw on arguments made by the architect Teddy Cruz. 19. Dell Upton, “Another City: The Urban Cultural Landscape in the Early Republic,” in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine E. Hutchins (New York and Winterthur, DE: Norton and Winterthur Museum, 1994), 63. 20. The file cards of the Oakland Real Property Survey are on file in the City of Oakland’s Office of Planning and Building. 21. John G. Maar, “Need for a Low-Rent Housing Project in Oakland, Calif.; Preliminary Report of the Oakland City Planning Commission to the City Council” (Oakland, CA: City Planning Commission, April 5, 1938), 11; John G. Maar, “Statistical and Graphical Analysis of a Specific Housing Area; Project Area Number One; 8th— 12th—Cypress—Adeline,” (Oakland: City Planning Commission, c. 1938).

432 / Notes to the Epilogue 22. OCHS, “Peralta Villa and Campbell Village” (Oakland, 1990, typed manuscript and research materials; use courtesy of Betty Marvin); C. L. (Cottrell Laurence) Dellums, “International President of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Civil Rights Leader; Interview Conducted by Joyce Henderson” (Berkeley: ROHO, 1973), 71, 72. 23. OCHS, “Peralta Villa and Campbell Village”; for a glimpse of what was lost, Marta Gutman, “The Landscape(s) of Lodging in West Oakland,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland. Cypress Interpretive Report No. 2, I-880 Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, ed. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (Rohnert Park, CA: ASC/SSU, 2004), 264–78. 24. OCHS, “Peralta Villa and Campbell Village”; Dellums, “International President of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters” 71, 72; John Zunnio, “Oakland,” WMBJ 6, no. 12 (December 1941): 14. 25. Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 105–6. 26. Self, American Babylon, 140–41, 144, 150. 27. Ed Salzman, “Views of N.Y. Housing Expert on City Blight Challenged” (OHR/ OPL clipping file). For rapid decline of the Acorn Redevelopment Project, see Allan Temko, “A Mansion for Inner-City Children,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1978, 4. 28. “Graduation Day at New Century Recreation Center,” 2; “New Century Club Will Disband at Lunch Meet,” Oakland Tribune, Feb. 3, 1954, 36. 29. “Mail Center Brings Home Problems,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 28, 1959, 1, 3. 30. “New Century Club Will Disband at Lunch Meet,” 36. 31. In addition to sources cited above, “Super Post Office Will be Built Here,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 26, 1959, 1; “Summerfield at Mail Site, ‘Favor’ for West Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 1960, 7. 32. Patterson, taped interview, 51, 52. 33. James E. Jefferis, United States of America, Plaintiff, v. Certain Lands in the City of Oakland, County of Alameda, State of California; Annettie Cooney; City of Oakland, Oakland School District of Alameda County, a municipal corporation; et al. Amended Pre-Trial Agenda for Tracts 103, 104 and 105 (Oakland, 1962), 5, 6. See also Solari, “Making of an Archaeological Site,” 32–33; Patterson, taped interview, 50–51. 34. Lewis Mumford, “The Emergence of a Past,” New Republic, Nov. 25, 1925, 19. 35. These points draw on arguments offered by Janette Sandik-Kahn, the New York City transportation commissioner, when she delivered the Lewis Mumford lecture at the City College of New York in April 2012. 36. Murch, Living in the City; see also Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 37. Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 123–22. 38. Ronit Tulloch, e-mail message to the author, January 28, 2013. 39. Ronit Tulloch, e-mail message to the author, May 11, 2013. 40. During World War II, when the Children’s Home was used to house troops, the charity moved the remaining children into the De Fremery Nursery. After the war they were sent to the Lincoln Home and the Community Chest took over the nursery building, operating it as an “emergency” shelter for endangered children. See the pamphlet published by the Ladies’ Home Society of Oakland, The Ladies’ Home

Notes to the Epilogue / 433 Society of Oakland (Oakland, n.d.; on file, OHR/OPL); “The Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland was founded . . .” (Oakland, n.d.); California Committee on Temporary Child Care, California Children in Detention and Shelter Care (Los Angeles: Governor’s Advisory Committee on Children and Youth, 1955). 41. “Who Owns $113,000 Swimming Pool? City May Lose Out on Legal Technicality,” Oakland Post-Enquirer, April 12 1949, 4. 42. Jane Grey, “North Oakland Recreation Center Opened to Public,” Oakland Tribune, Sept. 19, 1949, D7. 43. “Architects Engaged to Draw Up Plans for Five Swimming Pools,” Oakland Tribune, Aug. 2 1946, 17. 44. Terry Hatcher and Carole Pulcifer, “Studio One Arts Center: A Brief History” (Oakland, 1989, typed manuscript), n.p. 45. Grey, “North Oakland Recreation Center,” D7. 46. Lee as cited by Grey, “North Oakland Recreation Center,” D7. 47. Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xx–xxii. 48. Lisa Drostova, “Community Center’s 50th Birthday May Be Its Last,” East Bay Express, February 9 1999, 4–5; Grey, “North Oakland Recreation Center,” D7; Hatcher and Pulcifer, “Studio One Art Center.” 49. Jeff Norman, Temescal Memories: Narratives of Change from a North Oakland Neighborhood (Oakland: Shared Ground, 2006), 15. 50. Johnette Jones Morton, interview conducted by the author (Oakland, 2001). 51. Hatcher and Pulcifer, “Studio One Art Center”; Morton, interview. 52. Norman, Temescal Memories, 15. 53. Friends of Studio One, “Four Easy Ways to Help Save Studio One” (Oakland: typed letter, on file OCHS, Community and Economic Development Agency; use courtesy Betty Marvin, 1998), quote; Friends of Studio One, 1998. 54. Di Starr, “Orphanage Now an Art Center,” Montclarion, Nov. 24, 2000, A-5, A-12; “Our Story,” Studio One Art Center, http://www.studiooneartcenter.net, accessed July 15, 2013.

index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abortion, 115–16 Acorn Redevelopment Project, 327–28, 327, 342 Addams, Jane: and culture, 190, 400n66; influence of, 169, 183–84, 298; and libraries, 227–28; and playgrounds, 218; and repurposing, 25, 167; and the settlement movement, 144, 167, 178, 183–84, 191, 209, 242; support of railroad strike, 168; at White House conference, 253; and working mothers, 404n107. See also Hull House Adeline Street, Oakland, 6, 15, 304 Adler, Felix, 149 admissions policies: for day nurseries, 300, 327; for elder care, 102, 379n103; for orphanages, 24, 48, 66, 90, 106, 117, 118, 122, 123, 264, 272, 418n54. See also racial integration; racial segregation adobe construction, 45 adolescence, 196, 222 adopted homes, 251 adoption, 124–25 Aesthetic Movement, 188 African Americans: artists’ depictions of, 199; black churches, 73, 122, 263, 303–4, 305, 317, 340; black power movement, 28, 344; civil rights movement, 315; and class, 314–15, 320–21, 324–25, 329; day nurseries for, 291–93, 307–29; Dred Scott decision, 15; elder care for, 106, 304; and homeownership,

335–36; migration to Oakland, 15, 263, 271, 305–6, 320, 334–35; mortality of infants, 117; orphanages for, 45, 268, 291, 307, 309–29; political advances of, 106; in railroad employment, 6, 15, 112; in reform schools, 258; in San Francisco, 15, 305; and unions, 323; and urban renewal, 27–28, 331–43; and urban space, 316–18, 329; women’s clubs for, 106, 180, 209, 214, 215, 291– 93, 304–25; and YWCAs, 26, 316–17, 318, 320, 325. See also racial integration; racial segregation; slavery African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 122, 263, 317, 340 Age of Reform, The (Hofstadter), 181 Akin, Elizabeth Cox, 58–59, 58 Alameda County League of Voters, 319 Alameda County Welfare Commission, 320 Alameda County Welfare Council, 293 Albanese, Ben, 244 Albany Orphan Asylum, 252 Albrier, Frances, 315, 318, 321 Alcatraz Hall, 227 Alcott, Bronson, 146 Alemany, Joseph Sadoc, 45, 294, 295 Alexander, Mary, 186, 210, 213, 242, 266 Alexander, Samuel T., 186, 242 Alexander Community Center, 243 Alien Land Law, 254 Allen, Aldo S., 331 “Alms House, Blackwell’s Island” (Leslie), 47

436 / Index almshouses, 46–47 Alta California, 3, 40 American Institute of Architects, 93 Americanization, 9, 218, 223, 231, 243, 245, 260–61. See also citizenship American Railway Union, 168 Andrus, Washburne, 24 architecture: adobe construction, 45; of day nurseries, 301–2, 312–13; of elder care facilities, 96–102; and kindergartens, 144, 151–52, 154; of orphanages, 85, 88–89, 97–102, 135–36, 263–77, 312–13; professionalization of, 93–95; of reform schools, 52–53, 130; regional expression, 233–34; of settlement houses, 186–91. See also interior design; repurposed buildings; urban space Armer, Elizabeth, 67, 294–95. See also Mother Dolores Argonauts, 40 Art and Industrial Club, 304, 310 Arts and Crafts movement, 172, 173, 188, 191, 228, 229, 233, 234–35, 234, 264, 302 arts programs, 347–49 Asians: as agricultural workers, 74; Alien Land Law, 254; charity for prostitutes, 67; Chinese Exclusion Act, 103; churches for, 73; in domestic service, 14, 207; in kindergartens, 153; and labor issues, 23–24, 91, 94, 94, 102–4, 166–67; as laundry workers, 23, 207; and orphanages, 45, 261, 274; racism against, 22–24, 44, 66, 94, 94, 103, 104, 106, 133, 153, 166–67, 210, 254; as railroad workers, 23; sinophobia, 22­­–23 Associated Charities of Alameda County, 103, 109, 134, 135, 192, 209, 214, 238, 243, 248, 251, 253, 268, 293, 309, 379n108 Association of Catholic Day Nurseries, 298, 303 Association of Day Nurseries, 298 associations, voluntary. See voluntary associations Athenaeum, 26, 163–64, 341 Atlantic Street, Oakland, 190, 199, 201–2, 226, 229 baby farms, 116 Baker, Clara D., 255

Baker, L. L., Mrs., 181–82 Baltimore, Hebrew Orphan Asylum in, 141 Bamford, Mary, 156, 157, 174 Bancroft, H. H., 11 Baptista, Thomas, 161 Barnard, Nellie, 157 BART, 342 Bart, Thomas, 342 Bary, Valeska, 253, 254, 294 Bay Street, Oakland, 17, 17 Beasley, Delilah, 308, 319 Becker, Joseph, 78 Beckwith, George, 83 begging, 75, 76 Bell, Thomas C., 326 Benjamin, Carrie S., 298 Berkeley: Berkeley Day Nursery, 302; Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum, 73; Hillside Club, 234; kindergartens in, 163. See also University of California, Berkeley Berkeley Day Nursery, 302 Beth Eden Baptist Church, 303–4, 305, 316, 317, 325, 344 Betts, Elizabeth: and public/private spheres, 35; resignation of, 170; and sewing classes, 171; training of, 141, 146, 155; and the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 1–2, 8, 9, 20, 143, 144, 155, 158, 164–65, 174, 182 Betts, Sarah, 1 Betts, William, 1, 158 Bigelow, Elijah, 73, 79, 82 Bigelow, Emma McLachlan, 73, 82 Big Four, 5 Billings, Frederick, 41, 55, 59–61 Bingham-Uth, E., 138 Black Panther Party, 28, 344, 345 black power movement, 28, 344 Blackwell’s Island, 46, 47 boarding homes, 129, 384n60 Board of Control. See California State Board of Control Board of Examiners. See California State Board of Examiners Board of Health. See California State Board of Health borax, 182 Boston, 184, 217–18 boys: classes and clubs for in settlement houses, 198–201, 199, 200, 229, 229, 235; daily life of in orphanages, 89–91,

Index / 437 122–23, 137–39; gymnasiums for, 235– 37; on the orphan trains, 126–29; and play, 16–17, 222, 237; and playgrounds, 219–20, 221 Boys and Girls Aid Society, 128, 129, 133 Boys’ Club, 198–201, 199, 200, 229, 229, 235 Brace, Charles Loring, 42, 125–29 Bradley, Milton, 150, 295, 388n22. See also Milton Bradley Corporation Brickbuilder, The, 186 Broadway, Oakland, 5, 5, 74 Broder, Sherri, 115, 123 Brown, A. Page, 133 Brown, Elizabeth, 308 Brown, L. A., 317 Brown, Matilda, 272, 274, 289–90 Buckel, C. Annette, 168–69, 266 Bugbee, Samuel C., 79–80, 93, 100 Bunnell, Alice, 210, 217, 223 Burdette, Clara, 209–10 Burnham, Daniel, 216 Burns, Howard, 105 Burns, James, 54 California: admission to the Union, 4, 44; attractions of, 3–4; Gold Rush, 3–4, 22, 40–41; migration to, 40–41; racism in, 44; sex ratio in, 68; state constitution, 92–93; urbanization in, 4 California Architect and Building News, 93, 94 California Club, 172 California Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies, 151 California Cotton, 182 California Council of Negro Women, 319 California Federation of Women, 319 California Federation of Women’s Clubs, 208–9 California Froebel Society, 154, 155 California Home for the Training of FeebleMinded Children, 369n85 California Kindergarten Training School (CKTS), 1, 141, 144, 146, 151, 155, 199 California Midwinter International Exhibition, 168 California Progressives, The (Mowry), 180–81 California State Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 308, 315, 319 California State Board of Charities and Corrections (SBCC), 248, 249, 255, 256,

258, 259, 260, 263, 268, 271, 294, 301, 364n23, 424n36 California State Board of Control, 248, 254, 255, 256, 257–58 California State Board of Examiners, 90, 248 California State Board of Health, 82, 117, 122 California State Department of Public Welfare (CSDPW), 259, 260 California State Department of Social Welfare (CSDSW), 260, 283, 293, 301, 302 California State Federation of Women’s Clubs, 213, 232 Californios, 4, 355n10 Camera Craft, 52 Campbell, Alexander, 78–79 Campbell, Helen: Household Economics, 168 Campbell, Jessie, 79 Campbell Street, Oakland, 16, 110, 118–24, 119, 120, 121, 135–36, 161, 202, 229, 269, 270, 340 Campbell Village, 339–40, 340, 341, 344 Camp Fire Girls, 222 canneries, 83, 104, 182, 202, 240, 244, 301, 302, 303 Carey, Matthew, 114–15 Carlin, Eva, 143, 158, 165, 175, 177–78, 179, 180, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 209, 230, 235, 242 Carnegie, Andrew, 220, 223 Carpentier, Horace, 4–5 CAS. See Children’s Aid Society (CAS) Catholicism: Catholics in public office, 255; competition with Protestants for children, 27, 37, 39, 44–45, 66; and social welfare for children, 44–45 Catholic nuns: and day nurseries, 62–63, 64, 291–95, 297, 298–303, 299, 326–29; and orphanages, 257, 260–61; and reform schools, 54–55; Sisters of Charity, 36, 45, 61–64, 370n117; Sisters of Mercy, 54, 55, 370n117; Sisters of Notre Dame, 370n117; Sisters of the Holy Family, 67, 291, 293, 294–95, 297, 298–303; Sisters of the Presentation, 370n117; and social welfare for children, 36–37, 61–64 Catholic women: and day nurseries, 296–97; public voice of, 37; and social welfare for children, 39

438 / Index Catholic Women’s Congress, 296 Cedar Street, Oakland, 10 Centennial House, 10 Center Street, Oakland, 12, 17 Chabot, Anthony, 83, 93, 104, 374n43 Chabot Schools, 104, 380n116 charitable landscape: in New York City, 46; nodes, 27; in Oakland, 25, 26, 71–72; in San Francisco, 35–45, 50–69; and sorting of people, 46–47; and urbanization, 67–68; and urban renewal, 338–43; visibility of buildings, 37–38. See also location; urban space charity: and environmentalism, 75, 84; female dominion in, 39, 71, 224; incorporation of charities, 115; indoor relief, 46, 66; and moral reform, 75; nonsectarian policies, 77, 90; outdoor relief, 46, 66, 103; regulation of charities, 40, 258–59; and religion, 36–37, 55–66, 291–95, 298–305; scientific theory of, 75–76, 103. See also location; names of individual charities Charity Organization Society of New York City, 103 Chartier, Roger, 245 Chase Street, Oakland, 156 Chávez-García, Miroslava, 258 Cheek, Maud, 2 Chester Street Methodist Church, 122 Chestnut Street, Oakland, 12 Chicago: Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, 59, 60, 86, 263, 296; fire of 1871, 77, 78, 114; Hull House, 25, 144, 160, 167, 185, 186–87, 187, 188, 202, 209, 218, 228, 400n65, 404n107; libraries in, 228; orphanages in, 59, 60, 86, 263, 296; Phyllis Wheatley Club, 308; playgrounds in, 218; saloons in, 160; settlement movement in, 25, 144, 160, 167, 178, 184, 185, 186–87, 202, 209, 218, 228, 400n65, 404n107; World’s Columbian Exposition, 183, 227, 296–97, 297 Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Asylum, 59, 60, 86, 263, 296 child abuse, 170–71, 247, 258, 269 child care. See day nurseries child development, 222 childhood: adolescence, 196, 222; good, 1, 7, 11, 38, 63, 84, 122, 126, 128, 139,

156, 168, 222, 294, 313; middle class, 9, 145, 265, 272; parental rights, 144, 248; right to, 143, 148–49, 171, 174, 224–25, 249, 254, 283, 290, 336; sacral­ ization of, 7; state as guardian of, 248; theories of, 6–9, 48, 58–59, 84, 149, 221–22, 249; working class, 84, 110, 179 child labor, 84, 90–91, 126–28, 145–46, 183, 202–3, 215, 282 children: abandonment of, 123–24, 267–68, 383n47; control of, 220, 222–23, 282–85; with disabilities, 258; and female philanthropy, 35–37; and housework, 168; illegitimate, 109–10, 123; and libraries, 228; and material culture, 29, 152, 193–94; and poverty, 41–42, 43; and rights, 128, 244, 292, 336; in saloons, 161–62; and the settlement movement, 193–205, 242; sorting of, 27, 38, 46–55, 123, 135–36, 249, 259–63; street children, 38, 42, 110, 125; and urban space, 3, 6–8, 29, 33, 243–44, 251, 283–85; wayward girls, 54–55. See also boys; class; day nurseries; girls; kindergartens; orphanages; reform schools children’s agents, 255–59 Children’s Aid Society (CAS), 42, 110, 125–29 Children’s Bureau, 254 Children’s Department of the California State Board of Control, 248, 249, 254, 255, 256, 257–58 Children’s Home of the Ladies’ Relief Society, 85, 88, 89, 105, 275, 276, 280; admissions policy at, 84, 418n54; discipline at, 282–83; ethnic diversity at, 279; exit policy of, 91; fire at, 105, 277; food at, 283–85; founding of, 83–91, 149; funding of, 87, 272–73; gender segregation at, 281–82, 285; later use of, 346–47; living conditions in, 89–90, 100, 277–78, 282–89; personal recollections of, 277, 278, 282–89; racial exclusion at, 263, 418n54; racial segregation at, 106, 274, 279, 290; rebuilding of, 105–6; during World War II, 432n40. See also De Fremery Nursery Children’s Mission, 217 child saving, 125–29, 222 Child Welfare League of America, 257

Index / 439 Chinese. See Asians Chinese Exclusion Act, 24, 103 cholera, 44, 45 Chung Mei Home for Chinese Boys, 261 churches, 41, 73, 75, 122, 303–4, 305. See also religion; names of individual churches Churchill, Winston, 29 citizenship: for African Americans, 14, 44; for children, 8, 85, 126, 137, 147, 152, 194, 200, 220, 225, 244, 336; for women, 36, 40, 120–21, 179. See also Americanization Citizen’s Relief Committee, 166, 167 City Beautiful principles, 216 City Hospital and Orphanage, 250 City Planning Commission, 334, 338–39 civil rights movement, 315 civil society, 37, 41, 73. See also women’s clubs Civil War, 22 CKTS. See California Kindergarten Training School (CKTS) Clarke, Reuben, 52 class: among African Americans, 314–15, 320–21, 324–25, 329; attempts to reform the working-class, 30–31, 144, 245; and childhood, 9, 84, 110, 145, 179, 265, 272; crossing of class lines, 18, 209, 223; and domestic service, 206–7; and interior design, 231; and saloons, 30–31; and the settlement movement, 193 classification. See sorting Cleveland, Jewish Orphan Asylum in, 129, 141 clubhouses, 232–35, 411n70 clubs, women’s. See women’s clubs Cmiel, Kenneth, 263 Cobbledick, Belle, 115, 134 Coburn, Alice, 240 Cogswell Industrial School, 141 Cole, Mary, 77 Cole, R. E., 15 Cole family, 11 Colonial Revival, 188, 190, 191, 193, 199, 228 Colored Conventions, 15, 106 Community Chest, 261, 273, 301, 311, 315, 346, 412n93 condition and consciousness, 9, 249, 252, 283–90

Congregational Church, 141 Cook, C. M., 105 Cook, Clarence: The House Beautiful, 188, 191, 198 Cook, Jesse Brown, 367n68 cooking classes, 201–7, 206, 226–27, 230–31, 230 Cooley sisters, 251, 277, 278, 282–89, 287, 288, 349; Belva, 277, 278, 279; Berta Lee, 277, 278, 289; Lois, 277, 279; Mollie, 277, 278, 278, 282–83, 284–85, 286, 287, 288–89 Cooper, Sarah B., 144, 148, 154, 168–69, 169, 171–72, 390n40 Cooper Zion Church, 263 Cosy, Angela Volpe, 244 Cottage Avenue, Oakland, 264 Cottage for Babies and Small Children, 263, 266, 267–68, 267 Coxhead, Ernest, 234, 302 Crane, Hattie, 214–15, 224 Crane and the Crow, 348 creative destruction, 33 Crisis, The, 308 Crocker, Charles, 4–5, 22, 23, 93, 133–34 Crocker, Ethel, 109, 122, 132, 133, 134, 386, 418n62 Crocker, Harriet, 141, 155 Crocker, Mary, 93, 109, 122, 132, 133, 134, 155, 164; Mary Crocker Cottage, 271, 271 Crocker, William, 133, 134 Crocker family, 80, 110, 140, 266 Crow Canyon, 269, 270 CSDSW. See California State Department of Social Welfare (CSDSW) culture of dissemblance, 310 Cumbelich, Joseph, 303 Curtis, C. C., Mrs., 77 Curtis, Henry, 224, 243 Daily Transcript. See Oakland Daily Transcript Daily Tribune. See Oakland Daily Tribune Dam, Lucy, 77 Dangerous Classes of New York, The, 128 Darwin, Charles, 103, 222 Davidson, James, 18–20, 25, 158, 160, 335 Davidson/Patterson cottages, 18–19, 18, 19 Davidson/Patterson saloon, 25, 160, 175, 177, 187, 335

440 / Index Davie, John, 238 Davis, Henderson, 323, 324 day homes. See day nurseries day nurseries: admissions policies, 300, 327; for African Americans, 291–93, 307–29; architecture of, 301–2, 312–13; baby farms, 116; diversity of children at, 300–301; fees for, 130–31; funding for, 295, 299–300, 309–12, 322–24; gender segregation in, 304; at Little Workers’ Home, 110, 116, 130–31; in New York City, 296; personal recol­ lections of, 303, 319; in Philadelphia, 296; and Protestant women, 295–96; racial integration in, 318–19, 327; racial segregation in, 298, 303; regulation of, 301, 302, 321–22, 424n36; run by Catholic nuns, 62–63, 64, 291–95, 297, 298–303, 299, 326–29; run by New Century Club, 337; in San Francisco, 62–63, 64, 294–95, 302; seasonal, 302; use of repurposed buildings, 298–300, 312–13; at World’s Columbian Exposition, 296–97, 297. See also Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery; St. Vincent’s Day Home Day Nursery, Philadelphia, 296 Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum, 73, 369n85 Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 30, 337 de Coninck-Smith, Ning, xvii “Deeds not words,” 309, 310, 329 de Fremery, James, 6, 93, 216 de Fremery, Virginie, 6, 93, 105 de Fremery family, 11 De Fremery Nursery, 105, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 288, 346 delinquent children. See reform schools Dellums, C. L., 339 democratic participation, 40. See also citizenship Democratic Party, 22, 42 demographics: of Oakland, 10, 13–15, 155–56, 177, 180, 182, 193, 215, 240, 271, 305–6, 320; of orphanages, 251–52 Denison, A. A., 166 Department of Public Welfare. See California State Department of Public Welfare (CSDPW)

Department of Social Welfare. See California State Department of Social Welfare (CSDSW) depressions, economic. See economic depressions Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children (Gutman and de Coninck-Smith), xvii Dewey, George, 20, 359n57 Dewey, Sophronia, 20 DeWitt Clinton Park, 218 Dining Car Cooks and Waiters Union, 323 dining rooms in orphanages, 283–85, 284 Dodge, Josephine Jewell, 296, 298 domestic femininity, 36, 37, 56, 61, 71, 80, 113, 190 domestic science classes, 201–7, 226–27, 230–31. See also cooking classes; sewing classes Domestic Science Monthly, 193, 205, 207, 208, 209 domestic service, 202–4, 206–7, 315, 402n87, 404n106 domestic violence, 170–71, 194 Donzelot, Jacques, 8 Dooley, Ethyll M., 303 Doran, Nicholas, 13 Dred Scott decision, 15 drinking fountains, 162 Driscoll, Jeremiah, 161 Driscoll, John, 161 Du Bois, W. E. B., 306 Dulberger, Judith, 252 Durkin, Bob, 50–52, 51, 54, 72, 367n68 Dwinelle, Cornelie, 77 earthquake of 1906, 216, 232, 253, 302, 305 East Bay Colored Directory, 304 East Side Shelter, 310 Eaton, James Frederick, 21 Ebell Society, 181, 221, 223, 227, 232, 233 economic depressions: in 1870s, 23, 83; in 1880s, 102, 109; in 1890s, 25, 144, 165–70; Great Depression, 239, 289, 337, 338 economy of Oakland, 74, 182, 215–16, 342 educational psychology, 258 Eighth Street, Oakland, 6, 11, 12, 163, 185, 298, 299, 312, 338–39

Index / 441 El Cerrito, 261 elder care: admissions policies, 102, 379n103; exit policies for, 102; Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People, 106, 304; Home for Aged Women, 91–102, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 272, 274, 275, 276, 281; state aid for, 68 Ely, Margaret, 267 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 146 Emerson Elementary School, 275, 281 England, social welfare in, 38 Enquirer. See Oakland Enquirer environmental determinism, 187, 220, 251 Etyinge, Sol: “The Hearth-Stone of the Poor—Waste Steam not Wasted,” 43 eugenics, 258 Europe, orphanages in, 38 exit policies, 48, 91, 102 Fabiola Hospital, 181 family economy, 9, 42, 110, 118, 140, 192, 202, 204 Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery, 26, 291–93, 292, 309–29, 313, 314, 322, 324, 339, 341, 344; site plan, 317 Fanny Jackson Coppin Club, 209, 304, 315 farms, children on, 126–28, 127 Federation of Women’s Clubs, 258 Felton, Katherine, 248, 251, 253, 256 Female Charitable Asylum, 57–59 femininity, 190, 193, 222, 293 feminism, 168 Fenton, Susan, 209 Fifth Street, Oakland, 15, 16, 18, 20, 158, 160, 214, 226 Fike, Cordelia, 13 Filbert Street, Oakland, 305 First African Methodist Episcopal Church, 317 First Congregational Church, Oakland, 156–57, 165, 167, 168, 207, 374n43 First Presbyterian Church, Oakland, 156 First Universalist Church, Oakland, 166 Fisher, Kate, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 87 Fish Gang, 17 Flick, George W., 264 Follett, Mary Parker, 239 food in orphanages, 283–85 foster care, 110, 140, 249, 251–52, 256, 259, 262, 289, 315

Foucault, Michel, 8 Fourteenth Street, Oakland, 11, 13, 75, 345 Franklin Grammar School, 117 Franklin Street, Oakland, 208 Franklin Street, San Francisco, 65 Fred Finch Orphanage, 249–51, 259 free kindergartens. See kindergartens Free Soil Party, 4 Fretas, John, 335 Freud, Sigmund, 222 Friends of Studio One, 349 Froebel, Friedrich, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 157, 174, 203, 222, 295, 300 Fugitive Slave Act, 15 funding: of boarding homes, 129, 384n60; of day nurseries, 295, 299–300, 309–12, 322–24; of kindergartens, 154–55, 165, 172; of Ladies’ Relief Society, 80, 81–82, 83, 87–88, 92–93, 95–96, 272–73, 374n43, 377n71; low cost of female philanthropy, 68, 72, 91; of orphanages, 68, 132–34, 136–37, 247–48, 252, 259, 261–62, 273, 325, 370n120, 386n83, 386n89, 418n62; of settlement houses, 184, 186, 191–92, 205, 412n93. See also public-private partnerships gangs, 17 Garfield Grammar School, 26, 218 gender: asymmetry of relations, 36, 68, 214; inequality, 36, 80; and libraries, 229–29; and play, 222; and playgrounds, 221; and public/private spheres, 30–31, 35, 37, 39; and relations between the sexes, 20, 154; and saloons, 158–62; segregation by, 281–82, 285, 304; sex ratio in California, 68; and theories of charity, 76–77. See also women General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GWFC), 209 General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, 342 George, Henry, 10, 22–23 Gilder, Richard Watson, 143 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 168, 169, 172, 207; Women and Economics, 168 girls: classes and clubs for in settlement houses, 185–86, 193–98, 201–3; daily life of in orphanages, 89–91, 277–90; and play, 222; wayward, 54–55; Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 196–98, 197, 231. See also Cooley sisters

442 / Index Gleason’s Pictorial, 47 Goat Island, 11 Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, 163, 390n44 Gold Rush, 3–4, 22, 40–41 Goodcell, Mary, 208, 218, 221, 226, 228 Goodenough, Simon, 166–67 Gordon, Linda, 318 Goss Street, Oakland, 163, 237 governmentality, 8 Grace Trevor Cottage, 271 Grass Valley, 22, 359n60 Gray, E. B., 310 Great Depression, 239, 289, 337, 338 Gregory, Fabio, 338 Grey, Jane, 347 Grimké, Angelina, 59 Grimké, Sarah, 59 Guild for Arts and Crafts, 172 Gulick, Charlotte, 222 Gulick, Luther H. Jr., 222, 225 Gullett, Gayle, 232 gymnasiums, 235–37 Habermas, Jürgen, 30 Haight, Anna, 23, 56 Haight, Henry H., 22, 23, 56 Hall, G. Stanley, 196, 201, 221, 222 handicraft skills, 191 Hansen, Asmus, 163 Hansen, George, 221 Hansen, Wilhelmina, 163 Hansen’s Hall, 26, 163–64, 184, 198, 341 Happy Valley, 44–45, 61. See also Tar Flat Harper’s New Monthly, 126 Harper’s Weekly, 43 Harrison Street, Oakland, 233 Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants, 117 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 146 Head Royce School, 346 Head Start, 326 Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 155, 164, 194, 208, 235, 390n44 Hearst Domestic Industries, 194 “Hearth-Stone of the Poor—Waste Steam not Wasted, The” (Etyinge), 43 Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 141 Henshaw, Sarah E., 87, 91, 102, 105 Herbst, Antoine, 93, 95, 134 Herman, Bernard, 285

Hibernia Savings and Loan Association, 161, 294 hidden transcripts, 9, 118 Hillside Club, 234 Hinckley, Frank, 184–85 Hine, Darlene Clark, 310 Hirsch, Emil G., 252–53 Hirshen, Sanford, 327 Hispanics, 210 Hofer, Amalie, 179 Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform, 181 Holland, Jenny, 348 Home Club, 26, 232, 264, 265 Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People, 106, 304 Home for Aged Women, 91–102, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 272, 274, 275, 276, 281 homeownership, 13, 335–36 home visits, 164 Hone, Philip, 33 Hopkins, Mark, 4–5 Horton, Sarah, 185 hospitals, maternity, 117 House Beautiful, The (Cook), 188, 191, 198 Household Economics (Campbell), 168 housekeeping classes. See domestic science classes house lifting, 31 House of Refuge, 53. See also Industrial School housework, 168, 202–7, 404n105 Howard, William, 44 Howe, Frederic, 239 Hull House, 25, 144, 160, 167, 185, 186–87, 187, 188, 202, 209, 218, 228, 400n65, 404n107 Hull House Labor Museum, 191 Humane Society, 170 Huntington, Almira, 185, 398n30 Huntington, Collis P., 4–5 Huntington, Emily, 203 Hunton, Addie, 308 Immigration Act of 1924, 260 incorporation of charities, 226 Independent, 311 indoor relief, 46, 66 industrial education, 104, 171 Industrial School, 36, 50–55, 53, 65, 72, 111, 368n84

Index / 443 infanticide, 115, 116 infants: care of in orphanages, 104, 109–10, 274; mortality rates of, 117, 125, 129; remaining with mothers, 117; separation from mothers, 123. See also day nurseries Infant Shelter, San Francisco, 296 Institutional Life (Pillsbury), 248 interior design: of libraries, 228–29, 229; of New Century Club, 231, 231; of settlement houses, 188–91, 193–94, 228–29. See also Arts and Crafts movement; Colonial Revival; material culture Irish Catholics, 42, 63–64. See also Catholicism Irwin, Mary Ann, 56 Jackson, Ida, 306, 315, 316 Jackson Street, Oakland, 21 Jackson Street, San Francisco, 154 Jacobs, Jane: Death and Life of Great American Cities, 30, 337 Japanese, 254. See also Asians Jefferson Street, Oakland, 205 Jenkins, Slim, 323 Jewish organizations, 73, 129, 141, 252, 298 Jewish Orphan Asylum, Cleveland, 129, 141 Jewish Women’s Congress, 298 Jews: exclusion of, 126; Jewish organizations, 73, 129, 141, 252, 298; and kindergartens, 149; orphanages for, 129, 141, 261; in public office, 255 Jimenez, Josephine, 337 Johnson, Charles, 323 Johnson, Hiram, 254–55, 257 Johnson, Lyndon B., 326 Johnston, Marilyn, 340 Jones, Charles E. “Raincoat,” 323 Jones, Cora, 217, 223 Jones, Edna, 2 Jones, Jessie Harding, 230 Judson Steel, 182 juvenile courts, 215 Kaiser, Henry J., 323 Kearney, Denis, 24 Kellersberger, Julius, 5, 5 Kelley, Florence, 253 Kellogg-Lane, L. J., 138

Kenney, Ellen, 13, 25 Kenney cottage, 187–88 Key Route, 216 kindergartens: aims of, 143–44, 146–53; and architecture, 144, 151–52, 154; in Berkeley, 163; funding of, 154–55, 165, 172; and global culture, 149–49; invention of, 146; location of, 2, 150–51, 156, 158; and masculinity, 201; and material culture, 152; non-sectarian, 20, 144, 157, 170; in orphanages, 136, 140–41; racial integration in, 8, 144, 145, 153; racial segregation in, 153; reform through, 143–45, 152; religious education in, 157, 390n40; in repurposed buildings, 2, 143–44, 158, 175; and the right to childhood, 149–50; role of play, 8, 145–46, 150; in San Francisco, 141, 144, 146, 149–55, 163; and the settlement movement, 179, 187, 193; sewing lessons in, 157; as a “springboard for reform,” 154, 179, 193, 238; and the temperance movement, 143, 144, 152–53, 157, 158–65; training schools for teachers, 141, 144, 146, 151, 154, 155. See also Silver Street Free Kindergarten; West Oakland Free Kindergarten Kirk, Mary T., 134 Kirk, William T., 120, 134, 135 kitchen gardens, 104, 203, 295 Know Nothing Party, 65–66 Kosmos, Greg, 337 Ku Klux Klan, 293, 306, 307, 335 Kytka, Theodore, 52 labor issues, 23–24, 91, 94, 95, 102–4, 166–67. See also sandlot rebellions Ladies’ Cooperative Aid Society, 170 Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, 86 Ladies’ Home Society, 346. See also Ladies’ Relief Society Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society, 64–66, 65, 80, 82, 90, 141 Ladies’ Relief Society: admissions policy of, 109, 118; building projects of, 272–76; Children’s Home, 83–91, 85, 88, 89, 97, 100, 104–6, 105, 170, 272–73, 274, 275, 276, 277–90, 280, 432n40; and Community Chest, 311, 346; De Fremery Nursery, 105, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 288; formation of, 69, 71, 72,

444 / Index Ladies’ Relief Society (cont.) 77–79, 114; funding for, 80, 81–82, 83, 87–88, 92–93, 95–96, 272–73, 374n43, 377n71; Home for Aged Women, 91–102, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 272, 274, 275, 276, 281; and labor issues, 102–4; licensing of, 258–59; Matilda Brown Home, 346; name change to Ladies’ Home Society, 346; racial policies of, 106; role of sewing circle, 77, 114; site acquisition, 79–83; site plan of, 26, 107, 276 Laguna Street, San Francisco, 56, 57 Lake Merritt, 21, 24, 75, 182 land speculation, 9–11, 12 Lanham Act, 322 Larson, Howard, 268 Larson, Walter, 268 Lathrop, Julia, 253, 254 Latinos, 45, 258 laundry, 203, 207, 403n93 Lawrence, Martha M., 269, 270 Laws, Mrs., 115 Learn, Eliza, 115, 134 Lee, Elsie, 185, 186 Lee, Esther Jones, 311 Lee, Joseph, 218, 222, 347 Lees, Isaiah, W., 50–51 Lefebvre, Henri, 29, 81 Legge, Katherine, 340 Leighton, Elizabeth, 21 Leighton, John, 21 Leighton family, 84 Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen, 320 Lennox, Mrs., 115 Leslie, Frank: “Alms House, Blackwell’s Island,” 47 libraries, 30, 75, 220–21, 223, 226, 227– 29, 229; and reading rooms, 17,133 Lifting As They Climb (Davis), 308 “Lifting as we climb,” 306, 309 Lincoln, Abraham, 22 Lincoln Avenue, Oakland, 271 Lincoln Child Center, 26, 344–46 Lincoln Home, 269–72, 271, 325, 344. See also West Oakland Home Lincoln-Roosevelt League, 247, 254 Linden Lane, Oakland, 101, 102 Linden Street, Oakland, 214, 240, 241, 291, 312–29, 313, 314 Lindsey, Estelle Lawton, 214

Lindsley, Julia, 165 Lippincott’s Magazine, 225 Little Housekeepers’ Cottage, 203 Little Laborers of New York, 127 Little Sisters’ Infant Shelter, 67 Little Workers’ Home: absorbed by West Oakland Home, 110, 134; admissions policy of, 117, 118, 122, 123; child care at, 109–10, 116, 130–31; expansion of, 118–24; founding of, 109–10, 112–15; incorporation of, 115; and infanticide, 110, 116; living conditions in, 115, 117–18, 122–23; as non-sectarian, 114–15, 170; public knowledge of, 117–18; racial integration in, 112, 118, 122; record keeping of, 131–32; role of sewing circle, 112–14, 170; site plan of, 26. See also West Oakland Home Little York, 22 living-wage campaigns, 302 location: of charitable services, 2–3, 64, 82–83, 336–37, 345; of kindergartens, 2, 150–51, 156, 158; of orphanages, 109, 111–12, 120–21, 271; of settlement houses, 30, 177, 179, 184, 187–88, 209, 232–33, 398n30 Locke, John, 29 Logan, Thomas, 74–75 London, Jack, 161–62 Long Wharf, Oakland, 5, 9, 11 Loomis, Pascal: “Views of California Schools and Colleges,” 53 Los Angeles, 214; East Side Shelter, 310; Los Angeles Children’s Home, 255; Los Angeles Playground Commission, 242; Sojourner Truth Home, 308, 309, 310 Los Angeles Children’s Home, 255 Los Angeles Playground Commission, 242 Love, Maria, 296 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 126 Lusk, Josiah, 83 Lusk Canning Company, 83, 104, 182 Lux, Miranda, 155 Maar, John G., 339 Magdalen Asylum, 54, 55, 63, 116 Magnolia Street, Oakland, 122 Mann, Horace, 146 Mann, Mary Peabody, 147 Manse Polytechnic, 179, 184–86, 185, 240, 338–39

Index / 445 Manse Settlement Association, 185 Maritime Commission, 323 Market Street, Oakland, 5, 6, 10, 157 Market Street, San Francisco, 45, 56, 61, 294 Marshall, James, 40 Marvin, Betty, 11–13 Marwedel, Emma, 146, 147, 148, 149 Mary Crocker Cottage, 271, 271 masculinity, 31, 158–62, 199–200, 201, 221, 235–37 Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, 217 Massachusetts State Board of Charities, 129 material culture, 29, 152, 188–91, 193–94, 199–200. See also interior design Mathews, Walter, 232, 264, 266, 267 Matilda Brown Home, 346 Matsell, George W., 42 Matthews, Lillian R., 255 Mau, Charles, 312 Maybeck, Bernard, 234, 264 McCalla, Genevieve, 325 McClees, Mary, 219, 220, 221 McDermott, Charles, 12 McDougall, Barnett, 93, 101 McFarland, Winnie, 2, 155, 157, 170, 174 McGuire, George, 115, 116, 132 McLean, John Knox, 103, 134, 168 McLean, Sarah, 266 McMullen, Pamela Augustine, 318–19 McMullen, Sara, 319 McWade, Ada, 112 McWade, David, 112, 133 McWade, Rebecca: and the Campbell Street site of the West Oakland Home, 118–20; and the Crocker money, 133–34; death of, 135; as dressmaker, 106, 112; founding of Little Workers’ Home, 20, 106, 109–10, 112–15, 120, 345; ill-health of, 118, 132, 134; legacy of, 140, 345; photograph of, 113; record keeping of, 131–32; religion of, 382n18; residences of, 114, 117; use of repurposed buildings, 25. See also Little Workers’ Home; West Oakland Home measles, 138 membership certificate for the Female Charitable Asylum, 58 Merritt, Samuel, 93, 182 Methodist Episcopal Church, 249, 340 Methodist Episcopal Oriental Home, 67

Mexican-American War, 3–4, 40 Mexicans. See Latinos Michel, Sonya, 308 migration: to California, 40–41; to Oakland, 15, 25–27, 33–34, 263, 291, 305–6, 320, 334–35, 340 milk distribution at West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 246 Miller, Albert, 11, 13, 14, 345 Miller, C. O. G., 14, 205 Mills, Cyrus, 79 Mills, Susan, 79 Mills College, 79, 79, 100. See also Young Ladies’ Seminary Milton Bradley Corporation, 295 Ming Quong Home for Chinese American Girls, 261 Mint Saloon, 161 Mission style, 271 Miwok people, 4 Montclarion, 327 Moore, C. W., 104 Moore, Dorothea, 232–33 Moore, Ethel, 217, 223–24, 266 Moore, Madge, 2, 158, 164, 240–42 Moore, Martha, 77 moral reform, 75–76, 138 Morgan, Julia, 234–35, 261, 264, 319, 411n77 Morris, R. J., 25, 67 Morris, William, 172 Morton, Johnette Jones, 347–48 Mother Dolores, 295, 298 Mothers’ Charity Club, 214, 215, 304, 309–10, 315 mothers’ pensions, 253, 256, 293, 302, 311–12 Mott, Frank K., 166, 216, 223, 232 Mountain View Cemetery, 216 Mount St. Joseph’s Infant Orphan Asylum, 63 Mowry, George: The California Progressives, 180–81 municipalism, 211, 213, 222; and the legacy of localism, 224 Mumford, Lewis, 343 My Long Life (Watt), 20, 180 Myrtle Street, Oakland, 2 National Association for Colored People (NAACP), 315, 319, 325

446 / Index National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 298, 306–9, 312, 318, 319, 320 National Conference of Jewish Charities, 252 National Council of Jewish Women, 298 National Federation of Day Nurseries, 298, 302 nationalism, 42, 201; and transcontinental railroad, 69; and transcontinental telegraph, 69; and xenophobia, 38 National League of Catholic Women, 298 National Register of Historic Places, 349 Native Americans: Miwok people, 4; orphanages for, 45; racial segregation in schools, 153 nativism, 45, 63, 64, 65–66, 95, 139, 207, 237 nature for children, 150, 222 Nelles, Fred C., 258 Netherland, Mary C. Jackson, 310–11, 315, 316, 427n85 Newburyport: Female Charitable Asylum, 57 New Century Club: cooking classes at, 226–27, 230–31, 230; day nursery run by, 337; founding of, 208–10; gymnasium at, 235–37, 236; incorporation of, 226, 342; interior design of members’ rooms, 231, 231; library at, 226, 227–29, 229; location of, 26, 232–33; maps of, 26, 189; and playgrounds, 208, 225–26, 237–39; praise for, 213, 215; and property, 226, 231–32; property values of, 410n66; renovation of, 233–38, 234; sewing classes at, 227; as a social service center, 238. See also West Oakland Settlement New Century Club Recreation Center, 239–40, 239, 336, 337, 342, 343 New Deal, 27, 253, 322, 338, 339 New England Kitchen, 205 New England Women’s Club, 147 New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (NYAICP), 75–76 New York City: Blackwell’s Island, 46, 47; charitable landscape in, 46; Children’s Aid Society, 42, 110, 125–29; day nurseries in, 296; House of Refuge, 53; Nursery for the Children of Poor Women, 296; orphanages in, 86, 86;

Orphan Asylum in Bloomingdale, 49; playgrounds in, 218; purpose-built construction in, 33; settlement movement in, 184; street children in, 42 New York System, 66 Neylan, John Francis, 255 Ninth Street, Oakland, 12, 122, 266, 340. See also Taylor Street, Oakland nodes, 27 Nonpartisan Anti-Chinese League, 103, 104 non-sectarianism, 20, 25, 77, 90, 104, 114–15, 144, 157, 170 Northern Federation of California Colored Women’s Clubs, 261, 291–93, 308–12, 315, 321, 322. See also Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery North Oakland Area Council, 347 North Oakland Recreation Center, 346–47 Norton, Mary, 184–85 Norwegian and Danish Episcopal Church, 122 Nursery for the Children of Poor Women, 296 Oakland: arts programs in, 347–49; Big Four, 5, 23; charitable landscape in, 25, 26, 71–72; churches in, 73, 75, 122, 303–4, 305; commuters to San Francisco, 9, 10–11; demographics of, 10, 13–15, 155–56, 177, 180, 182, 193, 215, 240, 271, 305–6, 320; economy of, 74, 165–66, 182, 215–16, 342; harbor, 4–5, 216; landrights in, 4–5, 355n10; land speculation in, 9–11, 12; libraries in, 75, 220–21, 223, 226, 227–29, 229; migration to, 15, 25–27, 33–34, 263, 291, 305–6, 320, 334–35, 340; parks in, 216, 217, 224, 237; platting of, 4–6, 5, 6; public housing in, 339–41; riparian rights in, 5; sewers and drains in, 17; transit system in, 216; urban renewal in, 27–28, 331–43, 338–43; US Post Office Sorting Facility, 331–33, 333, 337, 341, 342, 344; waterfront in, 216; wetlands in, 240 Oakland Benevolent Society, 69, 71, 72–77, 80, 82, 83, 377n71 Oakland Club: clubhouse of, 232; domestic science school at, 202, 204–5, 207–8; and playgrounds, 211, 213, 214, 215,

Index / 447 217, 218–21, 223–25, 242; racial policies of, 179–80, 210 Oakland Council of Church Women, 319 Oakland Daily Transcript, 72, 81 Oakland Daily Tribune, 95 Oakland Enquirer, 71, 122–24, 134, 136, 164, 165, 166, 167, 186, 236, 240, 267 Oakland Free Kindergarten No. 1, 156, 174 Oakland Free Kindergarten No. 2, 156–57, 174 Oakland Gas, Light, and Heating Company, 205 Oakland Housing Authority (OHA), 339, 340 Oakland Mole, 5, 9 Oakland New Century Club. See New Century Club Oakland Point, 1–3, 6, 8, 9, 109, 121, 155, 170–75. See also New Century Club; West Oakland Free Kindergarten; West Oakland Settlement Oakland Public Library, 26, 220–21, 226, 227–29 Oakland Redevelopment Agency, 325, 326, 342 Oakland School of Domestic Science, 202–7 Oakland Social Settlement, 26, 28, 186, 210, 213, 240–44, 241, 341, 413n104, 413n106. See also Manse Polytechnic Oakland Studio Arts Association, 349 Oakland Technical High School, 273, 275, 347 Oakland Tribune, 133, 219, 226, 228, 274, 319, 332, 333, 347 Oakland Water Company, 83 O’Connor, Ellen, 295, 298–99. See also Sister Teresa OHA. See Oakland Housing Authority (OHA) Olmsted, Frederick Law, 216, 217 Olney, Mary McLean, 149, 157, 228, 229 Olney & Company, 12 oral history, 244. See also personal recollections Orcutt, Geneva S., 257, 279 orphanages: admissions policies, 24, 48, 66, 90, 106, 117, 118, 122, 123, 264, 272, 418n54; adoption from, 124–25; for African Americans, 45, 291, 307, 309–29; for American Indians, 45;

architecture of, 88–89, 135–36, 263–77, 312–13; for Asians, 45; Catholic, 257, 260–61; in Chicago, 59, 60, 86, 263; child abuse at, 269; child labor in, 84, 90–91, 282; congregate care in, 57, 59, 60, 84, 86, 86, 110, 129–30, 135, 249– 53, 268, 269, 274, 278–79; cottage-style care in, 129, 249, 253, 263–68, 271–72; criticism of, 110–11, 125–26; dining rooms in, 283–85, 284; discipline at, 282–83, 289–90; disease in, 138; dormitories in, 86–87, 86, 89–90, 285–86, 286; in Europe, 38; exit policies of, 48, 91; food in, 283–85; funding of, 68, 132–34, 136–37, 247–48, 252, 259, 261–62, 273, 325, 370n120, 386n83, 386n89, 418n62; gender segregation at, 281–82, 285; haircuts of children, 279, 286–87; living conditions in, 89–90, 110, 115, 117–18, 122–23, 137–39; location of, 64, 111–12, 271; for Mexicans, 45; in New York City, 49, 86, 86; New York System, 66; number of children in, 251–52; personal possessions in, 283; personal recollections of, 249–51, 282–89; racial integration in, 109, 112, 118, 120, 122, 139, 140, 318–19; racial segregation in, 27, 106, 140, 249, 260–63, 268, 272, 274, 279, 290, 291–93, 312, 418n54; recordkeeping at, 257; reform of, 247–59, 415n19; regulation of, 255–61, 321–22, 417n41; religious instruction in, 90; in San Francisco, 36–37, 44–45, 50, 56, 57, 61–64, 62, 67, 82, 111–12, 117, 261; schools in, 104, 136, 140–41, 380n116; socialization of children in, 85, 89; stigma for children at, 279; summer camps, 269, 270; surrendering of babies, 124; and transformation of children, 137, 138; use of material culture in, 86; use of repurposed buildings, 30, 82–85, 120, 291, 312–13; visits from family members, 281. See also Children’s Home of the Ladies’ Relief Society; Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery; Little Workers’ Home; West Oakland Home Orphan Asylum in Bloomingdale, 49 Orphan Asylum Society. See Protestant Orphan Asylum Society

448 / Index Orphan Fund of California, 247–48 other mothering, 308, 313 Ough, Dolly, 113 Outdoor Recreation League, 218 outdoor relief, 46, 66, 103, 252 Overland Monthly, 143, 154, 156, 165, 174–75, 177, 180, 193, 214, 300 overturn, overturn, 33 Pacific Coast Alumnae Association, 167 Pacific Coast Canning Company, 302, 303 Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association, 144, 168 Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 14 Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 141, 261 Pacific Street, Oakland, 161 Palace Hotel, San Francisco, 64 Paleki, Josephine, 178, 195 Panama Canal, 216 Pardee, George C., 166, 216, 247, 258 parental autonomy, 7 parental invention, 111–12 Park Boulevard, Oakland, 264 Park Day School, 346 parks, 216, 217, 224, 237. See also playgrounds Patterson, Annie Mae Dugger, 331, 333–36 Patterson, Arthur, 334, 334, 335, 336, 342–43 Peabody, Elizabeth, 146–48 Peixotto, Jessica, 248, 255, 256 People’s Church, 191 People’s Party, 166 Peralta, Luís María, 4 Peralta family, 355n10 Peralta Street, Oakland, 2, 13, 17, 18, 18, 19, 20, 25, 158, 160, 177, 178, 187, 190, 226, 230, 230, 234, 262, 291, 292, 309, 312, 331, 333–34, 344, 345 Peralta Villa, 339–40 Perine, Margaret, 95 Perkins, George, 93, 95 Perkins, Isabella, 87 personal recollections: of day nurseries, 303, 319; of New Century Recreation Center, 337; of orphanages, 249–51, 277, 282–89 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 152 Philadelphia, 115, 123, 184, 296; Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants, 117 philanthropy. See charity

Phyllis Wheatley Club, 308 physical education, 222–23, 250 physical space. See urban space Piller, Isabelle, 268 Pillsbury, Arthur J., 247–48, 252, 415n19; Institutional Life, 248 Pine Street, Oakland, 156, 161, 316 Pine Street, San Francisco, 295 pioneer status: and African Americans, 315; as a tool to claim race privilege, 13 Pittman, Tarea Hall, 315, 319, 320, 321 Placerville, 22 Plan of Civic Improvement, A (Robinson), 217 play, 8, 16, 16, 128, 145–46, 150, 203–4, 222. See also playgrounds; recreation Playground Association of America, 222 playground commissions, 223–25, 242 playgrounds: in Boston, 217–18; and boys, 219–20; in Chicago, 218; and citizenship, 225; design of, 221–22; and gender, 221, 225; and the New Century Club, 208, 225–26, 237–39; in New York City, 218; in Oakland, 27, 213, 214, 215, 216–17, 218–27, 237– 39, 239, 242–45, 267; and the Oakland Club, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218–21, 223–25, 242; as preparation for work, 220; and public-private partnerships, 219; racial integration at, 225; racial segregation in, 319; in San Francisco, 217. See also parks Polk, William, 234 Polk, Willis, 302 Pond, Allen B., 186–87 Poor Law of 1855, 61, 66 Poplar Street, Oakland, 237, 345 popular culture, 196–98, 220, 400n66, 401n73 Potter, G. W., 79 poverty, 36, 41–42, 43, 75–76, 81, 308–9; feminization of, 36, 41, 81; and removal of children from city streets, 42, 128–29 Powell, Frances, 277 Powell Street, San Francisco, 295 Power, J. J., 301 Prairo, John, 13 “Prayer Time in the Nursery” (Riis), 86 Prendergast, John J., 294 Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home, 67 Presbyterian Mission, 261

Index / 449 Prescott Elementary School, 336, 337, 343 Prescott Grammar School, 16, 26, 121, 121, 223, 237, 238, 267 Prescott Primary School, 121 Presidio Terrace, San Francisco, 210, 235 Preston, J., 78 Preston School of Industry, 55, 130, 131 Progler, Caroline, 150 Progressive Era, 25, 27, 180–81, 213–14, 224, 232, 244–46, 247–59 Progressive Party, 27, 180, 254 prohibition, 260 Project Gateway, 331–33, 342 prostitution, 55, 67, 197 Protestantism: anti-Catholic rhetoric, 126; competition with Catholics for children, 27, 37, 39, 44–45, 66; and human perfectibility, 39; missionary role in, 114– 15; morality and the environment, 76; religious instruction in orphanages, 90 Protestant Orphan Asylum, 50, 56, 57, 65, 141 Protestant Orphan Asylum Society, 36, 41, 44–45, 55, 59–61, 82 Protestant women: and day nurseries, 295–96; motivations for, 56; public voice of, 37; and social welfare for children, 36–37, 39, 44, 55–61 public health, 117, 138, 240 public housing, 339–41 Public Kindergarten Society, 149, 150–51, 153 public-private partnerships, 37, 39–45, 48, 66–69, 92–93, 95–96, 219, 252, 370n120, 379n108 public/private spheres, 30–31, 77, 80–81, 113, 214, 248 public space. See urban space Pullman, George, 133 Pullman Palace Car Company, 6, 15, 112, 133, 144, 167–68 Pullman Porters Union, 323 Pyatok, Michael, 327 race: and Irish Catholics, 64; and labor issues, 91, 94, 95, 102–4; and physicality, 237; and poverty, 308–9; and the settlement movement, 179–80; and social welfare for children, 38 racial integration: in the arts, 347–48; in day nurseries, 318–19, 327; in

kindergartens, 8, 144, 145, 153; in orphanages, 66, 109, 112, 118, 120, 122, 139, 140, 318–19; at playgrounds, 225; in public housing, 340, 341; in reform schools, 38; in the settlement movement, 25, 177, 193, 199, 236, 245; and the temperance movement, 163; and voluntary associations, 209–10; at YWCAs racial segregation: in construction jobs, 331–33; in day nurseries, 298, 303; in kindergartens, 153; in orphanages, 27, 38, 45, 106, 140, 249, 260–63, 268, 272, 274, 279, 290, 291–93, 312, 418n54; in playgrounds, 319; in public housing, 340; in reform schools, 258; in schools, 44, 153; “separate but equal” doctrine, 8, 306; and the settlement movement, 207; in swimming pools, 319; and women’s clubs, 179–80, 209–10, 214–15, 306 railroad, 10; African American workers on, 6, 15, 112; Chinese workers on, 23; and community building, 133; dangers of, 9; as heart of the industrial machine, 1–2, 157; Pullman Palace Car Company, 6, 15, 112, 133, 144, 167–68; Southern Pacific Railroad, 2, 9–10, 69, 133, 181, 240, 247, 254; strikes, 23, 168; transcontinental, 5, 10, 23, 69, 73–74 Railroad Avenue, Oakland, 9, 121. See also Seventh Street, Oakland Railroad Exchange Hotel, 17 Ratcliff, Walter, 302 Reagan, Ronald, 327 Real Property Survey, 338–39 recreation: New Century Club Recreation Center, 239–40, 239, 336, 337, 342, 343; North Oakland Recreation Center, 346–47; popular culture, 196–98. See also parks; playgrounds recycling programs, 191–93 Red Dog, 22 Redfield, H. A., 136–38 Reed & Corlett, 271 reform schools: architecture of, 52–53, 130; child abuse at, 247, 258; conditions in, 110–11; failure of, 72; Industrial School, 36, 50–55, 53, 65, 72, 111, 368n84; Magdalen Asylum, 54, 55; number of children in, 251–52; Preston School of

450 / Index reform schools (cont.) Industry, 55, 130, 131; racial integration in, 38; racial segregation in, 258; in San Francisco, 50–55, 53, 72; Whittier State School, 55, 111, 130, 258 regional expression, 233–34 regulation: of day nurseries, 301, 302, 321– 22, 424n36; of orphanages, 255–61, 321–22, 417n41; of social welfare, 40, 255–61 Reichling, Francis, 312 religion: competition between Protestants and Catholics for children, 27, 37, 39, 44–45, 63, 66; non-sectarianism, 25, 77, 90, 104, 114–15, 144, 157; and politics, 42; religious education in kindergartens, 157, 390n40; religious education in orphanages, 90; segregation by, 264; and the settlement movement, 195. See also Catholicism; Catholic nuns; churches; Protestantism; Protestant women repurposed buildings, 30–33, 343; for African American women’s clubs, 298–300, 308; for arts programs, 348–49; for day nurseries, 298–300, 312–13; decline in use of, 259; house lifting, 31; for kindergartens, 2, 143–44, 158, 175; for libraries, 30; for orphanages, 30, 82–85, 120, 291, 312–13; for recreation programs, 346–47; for settlement houses, 25, 167, 179, 184, 186–87, 226 Requa, I. L., 104 respectability, 305, 309, 320–21, 323 revolving cradles, 124, 383n47 Rice, Henry H., 134 Rice, Henry H., Mrs., 165, 182 Richards, Ellen, 205 Richmond shipyards, 323 Riis, Jacob A., 86, 86, 88, 126, 162 Riordan, Patrick William, 298, 299 Robinson, Charles Mulford, 216–17, 226; A Plan of Civic Improvement, 217 Rodriguez, Nancy, 161 Rogues’ Gallery, 50–52, 51, 54, 367n68 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum and Free School Society, 44, 50, 61–64, 62, 111–12 Ronge, Bertha Meyer, 387n7 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 335 Roosevelt, Theodore, 201, 251, 253, 254

Rose, Nikolas, 8 Roseberry, Emma, 120 Roseberry House, 120, 122, 263 Ross, Ira B., 324 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 209 Russell Sage Foundation, 256, 268 Ryan, Mary, 40, 77 Sacramento, 23 saloons: and children, 20, 161–62; Da­ vidson/Patterson saloon, 25, 160, 175, 177, 187, 335; and masculinity, 31, 158–62; Mint Saloon, 161; number of in West Oakland, 17; repurposing of, 30–31, 143, 144, 158 Salvation Army, 12, 191 San Antonio Creek, 5 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 128 sandlot rebellions, 23–24, 65, 87, 94, 144 San Francisco: African Americans in, 15, 305; charitable landscape in, 35–45, 50–69; child saving in, 128–29; churches in, 41; civil society in, 41; commuting to, 9, 10–11; day nurseries in, 62–63, 64, 294–95, 302; earthquake of 1906, 216, 232, 253, 302, 305; Industrial School, 36, 50–55, 53, 65, 72, 111, 368n84; intertwining of religion and politics in, 42; Irish Catholics in, 42, 63–64; kindergartens in, 141, 144, 146, 149–55, 163; Ladies’ Protection and Relief Society, 64–66, 65, 80, 82, 90; Magdalen Asylum, 54, 55, 63; Mexicans and their way of life, 40, 45, 64, 153, 308; migration to, 40–41; Mount St. Joseph’s Infant Orphan Asylum, 63; orphanages in, 36–37, 44–45, 50, 56, 57, 61–64, 62, 67, 82, 111–12, 117, 261; playgrounds in, 217; Preston School of Industry, 55; Protestant Orphan Asylum, 50, 56, 57, 65; rapid growth of associations in, 41; reform schools in, 36, 50–55, 53, 65, 72, 111, 368n84; Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum and Free School Society, 44, 50, 61–64, 62; sandlot rebellions, 23–24, 65, 87, 94, 144; settlement movement in, 184; St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum, 63; taxation in, 42 San Francisco Babies’ Aid, 124 San Francisco Call, 2, 158, 207, 242

Index / 451 San Francisco Chronicle, 239, 289–90, 303, 328 San Francisco Lying-in and Foundling Hospital, 117 San Francisco Music Hall, 60 Sangster, Anna, 231 Sanitary Commission, 22 San Pablo Avenue, Oakland, 5, 5 San Rafael, 24 Saroyan family, 249–51 SBCC. See California State Board of Charities and Corrections (SBCC) schools: in orphanages, 104, 136, 140–41, 380n116; racial segregation in, 44, 153; vacation schools, 218–19, 218, 223, 225. See also kindergartens; reform schools; names of individual schools Schumpeter, Joseph, 33 Schurz, Carl, 387n7 Schurz, Margarethe Meyer, 146, 148, 387n7 Scott, James C., 9, 118 Second Congregational Church, 122 Second Presbyterian Church, Oakland, 165 selective accommodation, 263 Self, Robert, 335 self-help, 208, 313 settlement movement: aims of, 188–90; in Boston, 184; in Chicago, 25, 144, 160, 167, 178, 184, 185, 186–87, 202; cooking classes at, 230–31, 230; funding of, 184, 186, 191–92, 205, 412n93; interior design of houses, 188–91, 193–94, 228–29; and kindergartens, 179, 187, 193; location of houses, 30, 177, 179, 184, 187–88, 209, 232–33, 398n30; and material culture, 188–91, 193–94, 199–200; medical clinics in, 243; in New York, 184; in Philadelphia, 184; programs offered at settlement houses, 185–86, 193–211, 226–27, 230–31, 235–37; and race, 179–80; racial integration in, 25, 177, 193, 199, 236, 245; racial segregation in, 207; recycling programs, 191–93; and religion, 195; in San Francisco, 184; sewing classes, 178, 185–86, 188; as social service centers, 238; transfer of property to the city, 213, 243; use of repurposed buildings, 25, 179, 184, 186–87, 226. See also Hull House; Manse Polytechnic; New Cen-

tury Club; Oakland Social Settlement; West Oakland Settlement Seventh Street, Oakland, 9, 10, 11, 15, 17, 17, 32, 161, 186, 187, 198, 227, 316, 323 Severance, Caroline, 146, 147, 148, 154, 180, 210 Seward Park, 218, 237–38 sewers and drains, 17 sewing circles, 112–14, 242 sewing classes, 157, 170–72, 178, 185–86, 188, 194–96, 195, 218, 227, 229 sexuality, 196, 197–98, 199, 314 Shackelford, Ruth, 55 Shaw, Josephine, 103 Shinn, Milicent W., 110, 137, 140–41, 154, 174–75, 389n39 sidewalks, 337 Silver Street Free Kindergarten, 146, 150–55, 151, 295 Simpson, Mary, 165 Sister Anne Maureen, 329 Sister Maurine Marie, 329 Sister Teresa, 295, 298, 299, 303 single mothers, 110, 115–18, 123 Sisters of Charity, 36, 45, 61–64, 370n117 Sisters of Mercy, 54, 55, 370n117 Sisters of Notre Dame, 370n117 Sisters of the Holy Family, 67, 292, 293, 294–95, 297, 298–303 Sisters of the Presentation, 370n117 slavery, 4, 15 Slavich, John, 341 Sledge, Chlora Hayes, 315, 321, 322, 322, 325 slum clearance. See urban renewal Smith, A. W., 232 Smith, Francis Marion, “Borax,” 182, 264 Smith, Mary R., 263–66, 271 Smith, Nora, 144, 146, 148, 154, 168–69 social Darwinism, 187 social networks, 37, 41, 56, 82, 154–55, 165 social welfare: in England, 38; mixed economy of, 39–40, 61, 66, 106, 247–48; professionalization of, 227, 255–59, 311–12, 325; regulation of, 40, 255–61; and volunteers, 27, 68, 87, 91, 95, 227, 253, 312, 324; and women, 35–37, 55–64, 68. See also publicprivate partnerships

452 / Index Sojourner Truth Home, 308, 309, 310 sorting: of children, 27, 38, 46–55, 123, 135–36, 249, 259–63; of people, 96, 106. See also racial segregation Southern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, 308 Southern Pacific Railroad, 2, 9–10, 69, 133, 181, 240, 247, 254 South Park Settlement, 184 space. See urban space Spear, Ida, 77 Spencer, Herbert, 222 Stanford, Jane, 155 Stanford, Leland, 4–5, 22 Stanford family, 23, 80 Starr, Ellen Allen, 298 State Board of Charities and Corrections. See California State Board of Charities and Corrections (SBCC) state power, 28 St. Augustine’s Church, 344 Steinhardt, Amy, 255–59, 256, 259, 260, 279, 294 Stetson, Charlotte Perkins. See Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Lily, 392n85 Stewart, William W., Mrs., 319 St. Francis Day Home, 295 St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 326 St. Joseph’s Infant Orphan Asylum, 117 St. Joseph’s Orphanage, Nashua, 284, 286 Stoddart, Jessie, 242 Story of Patsy, The (Wiggin), 153, 389n37 street children, 38, 42, 110, 125, 126–28, 127 Studio One Arts Center, 347–49, 348 Studio Two, 348 St. Vincent’s Day Home, 291–92, 298–303, 299, 304, 311, 315–16, 317, 319, 326–29, 326, 327, 328, 342 St. Vincent’s Orphan Asylum, 63 suffrage, 25, 36, 71, 162, 169, 179, 180, 214, 244, 254–55 Sullivan, Maggie, 115, 116, 132 summer camps, 269, 270 Sunday Call Magazine. See San Francisco Call Swedish Mission Congregational Church, 304 Swett, John: “Views of California Schools and Colleges,” 53 swimming pools, 319

Taft, William Howard, 254 Taney, Roger B., 15 Tar Flat, 144, 150–55. See also Happy Valley taxation, 42 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 204 Taylor, Janette M., 290 Taylor, Zachary, 4 Taylor Street, Oakland, 115, 119, 135, 266, 267. See also Ninth Street, Oakland Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, 5, 5 Temko, Allan, 328–29 temperance movement, 20, 143, 144, 152–53, 157, 158–65, 227 Templeton, Sarah, 131, 132 tenement houses, 75, 215 Tenth Street, Oakland, 15, 219 Terman, Lewis B., 258 Terrell, Mary Church, 307 Third Street, Oakland, 240, 241 Thirteenth Street, Oakland, 74 Thompson, Camilla, 115 Thompson, Kittie, 112 Tilghman, Hettie, 15, 25, 308, 309–10, 309, 315, 316 Tilghman, Lucinda, 15 Tilghman, Robert, 15 Tobin, Mary, 295 Tobin, Richard, 294, 295 Tompkins Grammar School, 16, 26, 214, 218–19, 218, 223, 225, 240, 241, 244 Toomey, Alice Timmons, 296–97, 298 Toynbee, Arnold, 242 transit system, 216 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 3–4 Trestle Glen, 269 Trevor, Grace, 266, 269; Grace Trevor Cottage, 271 Tribune. See Oakland Tribune Tulloch, Ronit, 345–46 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 3 Twelfth Avenue, Oakland, 114, 119 Twelfth Street, Oakland, 237 20 Mule Team Borax, 182 typhoid fever, 138 unemployment, 165. See also economic depressions unions, 323 Union Street, Oakland, 11, 13, 15, 165, 345

Index / 453 Unitarian Church, Oakland, 169 United States Housing Authority, 339 University of California, Berkeley, 6, 73, 167, 194, 240, 248, 255 Upton, Dell, 338 urbanization, 4, 67–68 urban renewal, 27–28, 331–43, 338–43 urban space: for African Americans, 316–18, 329; for children, 3, 6–8, 29, 33, 243–44, 245, 251, 283–85; and community, 337; significance of, 80–81. See also location; parks; playgrounds US Post Office Sorting Facility, 331–33, 333, 337, 341, 342, 344 vacation schools, 218–19, 218, 223, 225 Valley Railroad, 181 van Ahlias, Eleanor, 341 Van Slyck, Abigail A., 29 “Views of California Schools and Colleges” (Loomis and Swett), 53 visibility of buildings, 37–38. See also location voluntary associations, 73, 372n12. See also women’s clubs Wald, Lillian, 253 Walker, C. M., 341 Walker, Mme. C. J., Home for Young Women, 310 Wall, Fanny, 308, 309–10, 309, 313, 315, 318, 321. See also Fannie Wall Children’s Home and Day Nursery Waller, Elizabeth, 56 Waller, Royal A., 56 Walsh, J. W., 240 Ward, Myra J., 278, 281, 282–83, 289–90 washing machines, 203, 403n93 Washington, George, 200 Washington Street, Oakland, 219 water supply, 83, 102, 105 Watkins, W. E., 317 Watt, Elizabeth Dewey, 195; death of son, 183; and domestic science classes, 201–7, 230–31; family background of, 20–24, 35, 84, 181; and libraries, 228; motivations of, 183; My Long Life, 20, 180; and the Oakland Club, 204, 207–8, 225; and playgrounds, 225–26; residences of, 24, 182, 210, 232, 235, 411n77; retirement of, 238; and the

settlement movement, 14, 25, 177, 180–83, 186, 188, 190–96, 201–11, 213, 225–27, 232–38, 342; and sewing classes, 170–71, 172, 194–95; support of racial integration, 177, 180, 193, 210; and the West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 25, 165, 169–70, 172–73, 175, 177, 180, 181–82 Watt, Janet McAlpin, 14 Watt, Mary Merrill, 21 Watt, Robert, 22, 24, 205, 359n60 Watts, Ruth, 324 WCTU. See Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) WEIU. See Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) Western American, 319 Western Paper Box Company, 302 West Oakland Athletic Club, 164 West Oakland Center, 315 West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 2, 7–9, 26, 145, 159, 173; demolition of building, 238; during economic depression, 165–66; expansion of, 169–75; founding of, 1–3, 143, 144, 155, 158, 164; funding of, 165, 172; interior decoration of, 173–74; and libraries, 229; links with West Oakland Settlement, 179, 180; milk distribution at, 246; nonsectarianism at, 20; racial integration at, 8, 144 West Oakland Free Kindergarten Association, 20, 25, 165, 169–70, 181–82 West Oakland Home, 120, 139, 269, 270; architecture of, 263, 266–72; building projects of, 134–35, 170; child abuse at, 269; and Community Chest, 311; Cottage for Babies and Small Children, 263, 266, 267–68, 267; demolition of, 339, 340; disease in, 138; founding of, 20, 134; funding of, 132–34, 136–37, 386n83, 386n89, 418n62; kindergarten at, 136; licensing of, 258–59; links with settlement houses, 186; living conditions in, 137–39; location of, 16, 26; maps of, 26, 119, 262; and parental invention, 111; racial integration at, 139, 140, 209; racial segregation at, 263, 291, 312; summer camps, 269, 270. See also Lincoln Home; Little Workers’ Home

454 / Index West Oakland Settlement, 186–211; Boys’ Club, 198–201, 199, 200; funding of, 191–92, 205; housekeeping and cooking classes at, 201–7, 206; links with West Oakland Free Kindergarten, 179, 180; location of, 177, 187–88, 190; maps of, 189; and playgrounds, 225–26; and race, 179–80; recycling program, 191–93; sewing classes at, 178, 194–96, 195; Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 196–98, 197. See also New Century Club Weston, Frances, 272 Weston, Sarah Sawtelle, 72 wetlands, 240 What Cheer Hotel, 21–22 Wheaton, Jennie, 113, 155, 157, 198–99, 208, 228 Wheeler, Candace, 227 Whitcher, Jeremiah E., 6 Whitehouse, Hannah M., 194 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, 251, 253–54 white supremacy, 201, 293, 306 Whittier State School, 55, 111, 130, 258 widows’ pensions, 253 Wiebé, Edward, 388n22 Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152–55, 156, 170, 172, 196, 209; The Story of Patsy, 153, 389n37 Wilkin, Ida, 392n85 Willard, Frances, 144, 158–60, 162, 163 Williams, Marguerite, 325 Wolfe, James E., 93–95 Woman’s Congress, 183 Woman’s Sheltering and Protection Home, 122 women: charity work as form of emancipation for, 87; and democratic participation, 40; education for, 181; and housework, 168; and inequality, 36, 80; as kindergarten teachers, 146, 147, 148; low cost of female philanthropy, 68, 72, 91; and poverty, 36, 41–42, 43, 81; in the Progressive Era, 180–81, 213–14, 224, 232, 244–46; in public office, 214, 223–24, 248, 255; in public/private spheres, 30–31, 35, 37, 39, 77, 80–81, 113, 214, 248; social needs of, 113–14; and social welfare, 35–37, 39–40, 55–64, 68, 71–72; suffrage for, 25, 36, 71, 162, 169, 179, 180, 214, 244, 254–55; use

of social networks, 82, 154–55, 165. See also women’s clubs; working mothers Women and Economics (Gilman), 168 Women’s Christian Association, 122, 157, 170 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 20, 144, 157, 158, 162–63, 205 women’s clubs, 3, 71; for African Americans, 106, 180, 209, 214, 215, 291–93, 304–25; clubhouses, 232–35; and racial segregation, 179–80, 209–10, 306. See also names of individual clubs Women’s Congress, 144, 168, 169 Women’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, 169, 169, 172 Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), 163–64 Woo, Alan H., 348 Wood Street, Oakland, 18, 338 woodworking classes, 235 Woolsey, J. B., 79 Working Girls’ Recreation Club, 196–98, 197, 231 Workingman’s Party, 9, 23–24, 65, 67, 91, 103, 133, 153 working mothers, 293–94, 296, 298, 302–3, 308, 309, 320, 404n107 Works Progress Administration, 322, 338 World’s Columbian Exposition, 183, 227, 296–97, 297; Children’s Building, 183: day nursery, 296–97, 297; kitchen garden class, 203; Women’s Pavilion, 203, 227 World War II, 323, 335, 432n40 Yanni, Carla, 96 Yerba Buena Island. See Goat Island Young Ladies’ Seminary, 79, 79, 82, 93. See also Mills College Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 30; Market Street branch, 317, 326 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 30, 82, 141, 347; Linden Branch, 26, 316–17, 318, 320, 325, 326, 341 youth culture, 220 Youth Directory, 128–29 Zakrzewska, Marie E., 217 Zelizer, Viviana A., 7 Ziegenbein, John, 12 Zueblin, Charles, 239

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

Series titles, continued from front matter puerto rican citizen: history and political identity in twentiethcentury new york city by Lorrin Thomas staying italian: urban change and ethnic life in postwar toronto and philadelphia by Jordan Stanger-Ross new york undercover: private surveillance in the progressive era by Jennifer Fronc

african american urban history since world war ii edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter

blueprint for disaster: the unraveling of chicago public housing by D. Bradford Hunt

alien neighbors, foreign friends: asian americans, housing, and the transformation of urban california by Charlotte Brooks

the problem of jobs: liberalism, race, and deindustrialization in philadelphia by Guian A. McKee chicago made: factory networks in the industrial metropolis by Robert Lewis the flash press: sporting male weeklies in 1840s new york by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society

the new suburban history edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue

millennium park: creating a chicago landmark by Timothy J. Gilfoyle city of american dreams: a history of home ownership and housing reform in chicago, 1871–1919 by Margaret Garb chicagoland: city and suburbs in the railroad age by Ann Durkin Keating the elusive ideal: equal educational opportunity and the federal role in boston’s public schools, 1950–1985 by Adam R. Nelson

block by block: neighborhoods and public policy on chicago’s west side by Amanda I. Seligman

downtown america: a history of the place and the people who made it by Alison Isenberg

places of their own: african american suburbanization in the twentieth century by Andrew Wiese building the south side: urban space and civic culture in chicago, 1890–1919 by Robin F. Bachin

in the shadow of slavery: african americans in new york city, 1626–1863 by Leslie M. Harris

slumming: sexual and racial encounters in american nightlife,

my blue heaven: life and politics in the working-class suburbs of los angeles, 1920–1965 by Becky M. Nicolaides

colored property: state policy and white racial politics in suburban america by David M. P. Freund

brownsville, brooklyn: blacks, jews, and the changing face of the ghetto

selling the race: culture, community, and black chicago, 1940–1955

the creative destruction of manhattan, 1900–1940 by Max Page

1885–1940 by Chad Heap

by Adam Green

by Wendell Pritchett

streets, railroads, and the great strike of 1877 by David O. Stowell

smoldering city: chicagoans and the great fire, 1871–1874 by Karen Sawislak

faces along the bar: lore and order in the workingman’s saloon, 1870–1920

modern housing for america: policy struggles in the new deal era

making the second ghetto: race and housing in chicago, 1940–1960

parish boundaries: the catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban north

by Madelon Powers

by Arnold R. Hirsch

by Gail Radford

by John T. McGreevy