This article connects the work of one woman (Josephine Dows Randall, 1885–1968), the larger Progressive Era recreation movement, and its local application in San Francisco in the first half of the twentieth century. In early twentieth-century San Francisco, as in cities across the United States, civic leaders and social reformers embraced playgrounds and children’s recreation, in particular, as avenues through which to alleviate concerns about modernity—namely, juvenile delinquency—and to foster good citizenship in the growing urban environment. The city’s adoption of the recreation movement played into concerns about Americanizing an immigrant population, but also highlighted the limitations of racial equality. However, in the City by the Bay, recovery from the 1906 earthquake both intensified the pressures of urban growth and created greater leeway to reimagine physical space for residents. San Francisco residents also benefited from the talents of Randall, the city’s first superintendent of recreation, whose creativity and connections to national recreation organizations helped put Fog City on the map as a hub for public recreation. Despite her groundbreaking leadership as a woman in San Francisco government (1926–51), Randall and her efforts to reshape the city’s recreation remain largely forgotten due to the consolidation of the recreation department with the park department in 1949, and her own retirement several years later. Randall’s professional rise and later obscurity also mirror a national trend in the increasingly professionalized recreation movement, in which women—and their work—became less visible in postwar America.
Amanda Tewes (Thu,) studied this question.