Women's club

“ The club does not want and will not keep such women as leaders. To-day the club leader must have a higher aim and a broader culture, and, added unto these, a genuine desire to help humanity to better things than the superficial woman who “must stand in the full glare of the footlights at any cost.”
More than that, the woman who sees in the club movement of to-day nothing beyond that very primitive stage when women wrote papers from encyclopediac notes, or when they begged or hired some other person to write them, has not passed the a b c class of the women’s clubs. ”

“ Of women’s clubs there is literally no end, and they are yet in their vigorous youth. We have literary clubs, and art clubs, and musical clubs; clubs for science, and clubs for philanthropy; parliamentary clubs, and suffrage clubs, and anti-suffrage clubs—clubs of every variety and every grade, from the luncheon club, with its dilettante menu, and the more pretentious chartered club, that aims at mastering a scheme of the world, to the simple working-girls’ club, which is content with something less: and all in the sacred name of culture. ”

“ Among the thousands of members of the women's clubs, that to-day are spread broadcast over the country, we find very few working women; yet to working women belongs the credit of having organized the first woman's literary club in America. This first literary club, the Improvement Circle of the Lowell mill girls, gave its members an opportunity for intellectual development and expression that was entirely new to all of them, and some girls who in later life became famous women owed much of their early inspiration and encouragement to that working girls' club. ”

“ Almost every one of the five thousand clubs has taken up some measure of active interest. The subject of home economics has been one of the principal issues for club work throughout the United States. Perhaps no other organization in the country represents a greater force for good than the General Federation of Women's Clubs. ”

“ The woman's club movement has always had her support. She is one of the original promoters of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, an organization numbering at least two-hundred women's clubs, representing more than thirty-thousand members in all parts of the United States, and she was the member for Massachusetts on its first advisory board. ”

“ Many women’s clubs become important factors in municipal legislation along the lines most amenable to feminine influence. Through such clubs women have helped to solve educational questions, have influenced public sentiment in the direction of cleaning and beautifying the streets, and in many other ways have helped to promote law and order. The literary club is, however, the form most often taken by feminine organizations. ”

“ To-day, no clubs anywhere are more perfect in appointment or better run than the representative women's clubs. In fact, some of the men's clubs have been forced to follow the lead of the foremost of them and to realize that a club in which members merely sit about and look out of the window is a pretty dull place to the type of younger members they most want to attract, and that the combination of the comfort and smartness of a perfectly run private house with every equipment for athletics, is becoming the ideal in club-life and club-building to-day. ”

“ Women, too, use their influence at the Club, and women's influence is never negligible. The Club is the real heart of the station's life, and if a man do not belong to it he is outside the organism, so to speak. ”

“ Croly wrote in her "History of Clubs" thirty years later: "At this period no one of those connected with the undertaking had ever heard of a woman's club, or of any secular organization composed entirely of women for the purpose of bringing all kinds of women together to work out their objects in their own way." And then again: "When the history of the nineteenth century comes to be written women will appear as organizers and leaders of great organized movements among their own sex for the first time in the history of the world." ”

“ Letters have come from the Far West, from Nova Scotia, from remote districts in the South, and from ranches in Canada asking much the same question: "Is it possible to carry on a women's club when we are far away from any public library and have few books, if any, in the community?" ”

“ The first women's club in Oregon. "The Thursday Afternoon Club," of Pendleton, was organized in 1893, the members devoting their time to literature. After twelve years this club is still in existence and doing good work. It has been a characteristic of women's clubs that, once started, they steadily grow: no going back or disbanding. ”

“ CRAVEN. That didn't do Jo any harm: but it took away my Julia's character.
JULIA (outraged) . Daddy!
CHARTERIS. Not at the Ibsen club, quite the contrary. After all, what can we do? You know what breaks up most clubs for men and women. There's a quarrel—a scandal—cherchez la femme—always a woman at the bottom of it. Well, we knew this when we founded the club; but we noticed that the woman at the bottom of it was always a womanly woman. The unwomanly women who work for their living and know how to take care of themselves never give any trouble. ”

“ She had been writing for women for many years, and through her mission had acquired instinctive knowledge of their needs; and so when the affront was put upon her by her male colleagues of the press she conceived the idea of a club for women. It should be one that would manage its own affairs, represent as far as possible the active interests of women, and create a bond of fellowship between them, which many women as well as men thought at that time would be impossible of accomplishment. ”

“ The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now the work would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's clubs.
The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt, how difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. ”

“ The club has two unique features: first, it has no officers, but is managed by a committee of five ladies, all mothers of high school students. The girls are willing to help at all times, but those who know girls realize that most clubs are "officered" to death. Another unique feature is that there are no dues. There are many minor expenses, such as printing and traveling expenses of the guests, and the first three years the Woman's Club met these, but later the Girls' Club became self-supporting. ”

“ Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an unusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman. The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical. She has not, like the progressive German and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or of family reconstruction. What she desires, what ideals she has formed, I think must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass of women of the twentieth century. ”

“ That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States. Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics. The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public institution—and the public sometimes finds this out before the club suspects it. ”

“ They are poorer, but are more generous in giving invitations to tea or a meal. Men’s clubs are full of old women, and women’s clubs full of young men, nowadays.
A club is also a boon to the married woman, for there are days when country relations arrive in town, when, for instance, the sweep has been ordered at home; then the country or foreign friends can be taken to the club, and need not know that their hostess’s small household cannot tackle a luncheon because of the advent of the sweep. ”

“ It is, if thought desirable, simply to address a circular letter to women's clubs on record, wherever they may be known to exist, proposing a basis of federated affiliation, and inviting them to unite in forming a grand Federation of organized bodies of women capable of realizing any purpose upon which they might bring their united forces to bear. ”

“ There has never been an opportunity for community work like that offered to-day, offered especially to those women who have been made capable by their training in their own little study clubs to cope with questions of hygiene, of tenement house wrongs and immigrants' problems; they have the widest scope for their energies. If they are wise, they will accept the opportunity of using the woman's club and make it a center of social service. ”

“ The movement which has resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to educate boards of education and city councils in their favor. ”

“ This club movement, becoming so universal, is not the result of one central thought, as in the churches and fraternities, but the marshaling upon a common plain of all the forces for good that have their indwelling in the heart of woman. ”

“ But they lack self-confidence; speaking in public is absolutely impossible; even to lift a voice in a club discussion is a serious matter.
Now the perfect club takes cognizance of these three classes of women and provides for them all. It offers to the first group an opportunity for study; and surely no woman ever grows beyond the place where she still has something to learn. There are always fresh fields of poetry and travel, of music and art which unfold with the years and tempt one on.
And then it offers training to the timid woman who fears to hear her own voice. ”

“ I believe in clubs for women. It is so heavenly to get away from an ordinary dinner. It is really a holiday to have a chop or a fried sole, that one has not ordered hours beforehand. Besides, at the club one sometimes learns new dishes, and certainly new ideas from the newspapers and magazines, all of which one could not afford to take in at home independently.
For the unmarried woman the club is absolutely indispensable. It gives her a place where she can receive her friends, and let it be known that women are more hospitable than men. ”

“ Each woman actually has something to contribute, if only in a very quiet way, and a good chairman of a program can find out what this is; the little talent may take shape in a paper, or a talk, or a part in a discussion, or some music, or only a quotation or a reading. But a club is worth just as much to a member as she puts into it, and no more. Any woman who is not willing to do something in the way of real work should drop out and give some one else the place which she occupies but does not fill. ”

“ When we look about and see what women have accomplished for their own sex since the clubs were established; when we look about and see what the clubs are really doing to-day for [116] their communities; when we count up the libraries, the improved sanitary conditions of towns and cities, the increased educational advantages; when we realize the increased average intelligence of the average woman who belongs to current events classes and literary clubs; when, in short, we note the broadening of character in the average individual club woman, is this a fair statement? ”

“ And they had nothing more to begin with than any group of women has under similar conditions. Any woman who feels the need of a club can start one, and once started it will grow of its own volition and justify its existence.
II—HOW TO START A RURAL CLUB
Let us suppose that some country woman decides to start a club. She is not quite sure what steps to take, but she invites some of her neighbors to meet with her and talk it over. Probably they will agree to begin very simply, merely meeting once a week or so and reading aloud—feeling their way to other things. ”

“ A woman's club is an ideal social center from which this work may grow. It is an excellent plan to enlist all the clubs in town, if that is possible. They may carry on other work besides, but each club may also have some particular line of study on the common theme, and at monthly meetings all the women may meet and discuss the one topic of community improvement. ”

“ The Club Movement among Women.—All over the country women's societies and clubs were started to advance this or that reform or merely to study literature, art, and science. In time these women's organizations of all kinds were federated into city, state, and national associations and drawn into the consideration of public questions. ”

“ From the first, Women's Clubs have differed in aim and utility from those for men, to whom they signify a place for rest, ease or recreation; for women they imply a source of inspiration, a place for work. They make women better talkers, better listeners, better hostesses, better guests, better companions. ”