ABSTRACT
Well, we still played ball. We’d go to the show for ten cents. Th e girls played house. We sewed. We made quilt blocks or dolls. Some kids had roller skates, I didn’t have any ... oh a lot of times grandma would make biscuits and give us the last nickel she had to go buy candy. I can remember that, during the Depression. You’d get one pair of shoes and as soon as it got summer, you went barefoot, except when you went somewhere. We were happy and we didn’t know what we were missing. (Oral history by Betty Robling, a Depression era child, in Th ompson and MacAustin, 2001, unnumbered.)
Th e child-saving movement beginning around the turn of the twentieth century was a broad-based, integrated movement encompassing many leaders and actions intended to improve conditions in the slums of America’s great citiesconditions appropriately called “the shame of the cities.” Th e agony of the cities eventually brought together a small army of charitable workers who formed the unprecedented child-saving movement described in Chapter 3. Th is movement spilled over into organized eff orts to create opportunities for children’s play and spaces for their urban play environments nationwide, as discussed in Chapter 4. Th en, in Chapter 5, the burgeoning professional and scientifi c communities took up the challenge and broadened the movement to improve conditions even further, changing the very nature of education from strict authoritarian rule and rigid subject matter to educating through a developmental approach focusing on the whole child. But just as the future was looking brighter, a new crisis, the Great Depression, brought slum-like conditions down upon the entire nation. We pick up the story there.
