“They do not know how to play”: Reformers’ Expectations and Children’s Realities on the First Progressive Playgrounds of Chicago

Hines, Michael

doi:10.1353/hcy.2017.0025

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…Children on the receiving end of these reform strategies surely made their own meanings from their experiences, rather than absorbing wholesale the messages that adults attempted to impose upon them. 12 Yet reformers' ideas about air could determine the level of harm that children risked as subjects of charity. Driven by an anti-urban ideology captured in the symbology of fresh air, the Fresh Air Fund worked to uproot children from their communities in the city.…”

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confidence: 99%

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

Plater

2021

Journal of Urban History

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The Fresh Air Fund and the Floating Hospital were two charities that launched in Gilded Age New York City and flourished during the Progressive Era. Part of the fresh air charity movement, both organizations argued that impoverished children living in crowded tenement districts needed fresher air. But these reformers had strikingly different notions of what fresh air was and where to find it. The Floating Hospital cast fresh air as medicine that children could breathe in the city’s harbor, but urban air could never be fresh to the Fresh Air Fund. Using fresh air as a symbol of rural wholesomeness in contrast to urban deviance, the organization aimed to mold children into model citizens by exposing them to the countryside. Diverging ideas about cities and air impacted children’s experiences, determining whether charities treated them equally regardless of race or sex and whether reformers respected or tried to break familial bonds.

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confidence: 99%

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

Plater

2021

Journal of Urban History

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Bringing the Origins of Playgrounds into the Current Educational Debate: Jane Addams and the Kitchens of Socializing Democracy

Garrido

2022

Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences

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Revisiting the playground: Charles Wicksteed, play equipment and public spaces for children in early twentieth-century Britain

Winder

2021

Urban History

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This article offers the first detailed history of the children's playground in Britain in the early twentieth century. Despite being a common feature of towns and cities, the playground has rarely been examined by historians. In response, the article charts how changing conceptions of childhood, alternative visions of the city, technological innovation and shifting ideas about health and exercise shaped both the imagined function and material form of the playground ideal. Making visible the historical assumptions hidden in playground swings and slides helps to contextualize both existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground and present-day efforts to create more equitable urban environments.

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“They do not know how to play”: Reformers’ Expectations and Children’s Realities on the First Progressive Playgrounds of Chicago

Cited by 6 publications

References 7 publications

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

Bringing the Origins of Playgrounds into the Current Educational Debate: Jane Addams and the Kitchens of Socializing Democracy

Revisiting the playground: Charles Wicksteed, play equipment and public spaces for children in early twentieth-century Britain

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