The report on the feeble-minded in New York generally was made for the Public Education Association by Dr. Anne Moore and published by the State Charities Aid Association’s Special Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded. This report includes a study of feeble-minded children in the public schools.
In several cities, women have been active in the study and solution of this problem. The Civic Club of Philadelphia started the first class for backward delinquent children. The city saw its value and incorporated the plan into its school system. Philadelphia now has seventy-five such classes.
Dr. C. Annette Buckel, of Oakland, California, was a director in the Mary R. Smith Trust for delinquent children from its beginning and took a personal interest in each little girl in the cottage homes. So keen was her concern for handicapped children that at her death she gave her home that the proceeds might help in promoting special training for them.
Knowing that venereal diseases are responsible for a certain amount of feeble-mindedness in children, women have backed the legislation in several states for health certificates for marriage, for one thing. The prohibition of the marriage of the unfit or feeble-minded adults is a measure in which they are also interested as well as in proposals and practices that deal with sterilization and compulsory commitment to institutions.
Colored children, although in general they are only slightly behind white children, are now beginning to receive some of that special attention which they so much need and deserve. In addition to the investigation of mentally defective children, a study is being made by Frances Blascoer of the living conditions of colored children in New York City whose school progress has been retarded.
Blind children in New York City receive education from their earliest years as a result of the agitation and legislative work carried on by Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden of the International Sunshine Society and others. This last winter similar educational care of the blind children of the state was secured through the efforts of Mrs. Alden and the personal appeal to the legislators by a little blind girl, Rachel Askenas. Hitherto children under eight years of age had not been admitted to institutions for the blind. Now during those most receptive years they will get the necessary foundation for impressions which play so vital a part in the lives of normal children.