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Black women have been no stranger to organizing since America’s earliest inception. But it would be during the Reconstruction era that Black women were able to elevate their messaging and form their own group called the Women’s Club.
Focused on holding America to its founding principles, women across the country gathered to highlight injustices like lynching. The success of these meetings led to the formation of the National Association of Colored Women, where the group’s scope widened to include issues, such as voting rights, housing, and other race-related matters. Despite many male figures protesting women as they utilized their voices, the Women’s Club movement became a vital part in supporting women and their right to speak and organize.
In this episode of Black History in Two Minutes or So hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. — with additional commentary from Daina Ramey Berry of the University of Texas, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham of Harvard University and Imani Perry of Princeton University — we look at how women uplifted one another as they climbed their way to the top.
Black History in Two Minutes (or so) is a 4x Webby Award winning series.
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Archival Materials Courtesy of: • Eartha M. M. White Collection, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida • Library of Congress
• The New York Public Library
Additional Archival Material Courtesy of: • The Appeal • The Chicago Tribune • The Crisis
• The Gazette
Executive Producers: • Robert F. Smith • Henry Louis Gates Jr. • Dyllan McGee
• Deon Taylor
Senior Producer:
• William Ventura
Series Producers: • Chinisha Scott
• William Ventura
Executive in Charge of Production:
• Robert L. Yacyshyn
Post Production Supervisor:
• Veronica Leib
Post Production Coordinator:
• Katherine Swiatek
Written By:
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Additional Writing: • Kevin Burke • Kelsi Lindus • Chinisha Scott
• William Ventura
Editors: • Margaret Metzger
• Anne Yao
Producer:
• Kevin Burke
Archival Producer:
• Megan Graham
Research:
• Zoë Smith
Assistant Editors: • Patrice Bowman
• Nicholas Mastrangelo
Director of Photography: • Nikki Bramley • Nausheen Dadabhoy
• Stephen McCarthy
Graphic Design:
• Anthony Kraus
Special Thanks: • Daina Ramey Berry • Sam Hartley • Elyssa Hess • Stacey Holman • Hasan Jeffries • Peniel Joseph
• Imani Perry
Music By:
• Oovra Music
Be Woke presents is brought to you by Robert F. Smith and Deon Taylor.
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The woman's club movement was a social movement that took place throughout the United States. While women's organizations had always been a part of United States history, it was not until the Progressive era that it came to be considered a "movement." The first wave of the club movement during the Progressive era was started by white, middle-class, Protestant women and a second phase by African-American women. These clubs, most of which had started out as social and literary gatherings, eventually became a source of reform for various issues in the U.S.
Five officers of the Women's League in Newport, Rhode Island, 1899. Library of Congress.
Both African-American and white women's clubs were involved with issues surrounding education, temperance, child labor, juvenile justice, legal reform, environmental protection, library creation and more. Women's clubs helped start many initiatives such as kindergartens and juvenile court systems. Later, women's clubs tackled issues like women's suffrage, lynching and family planning. The clubs allowed women, who had little political standing at the time, to gain greater influence in their communities. Such clubs often accomplished their goals in town councils through sheer persistence and determination—a remarkable achievement considering that, prior to enfranchisement, women had no sanctioned political voice. By the time women won the vote in 1920, however, the club movement had lost much of its momentum, as new avenues for change opened to women.
- Club Movement, Britannica
- Woman’s Club Movement, Wikipedia
150 years ago, Americans believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Bright, curious, and ambitious women found few other places to display their talents. After household care, benevolent work at church and patriotic fundraising for Civil War soldiers were the only outlets that permitted women to contribute to shaping the public world. Education and career opportunities were few. Skill-building, beyond needlework, was deemed unnecessary. Political activism, civic reform, and community involvement were regarded as outside the realm of big-hearted mothers and wives who should focus on loving their families and providing a good example of moral behavior.
A few brave women in New York and Boston challenged these constraints in the late 1860s and soon persuaded the general population of middle-class American women to form voluntary organizations in their neighborhoods to defy custom, undertake serious study of intellectual topics and current events, and organize for social reforms at the local, state, and national levels. All this well before they saw the right to vote to effect change at the ballot box!
In the years between the 1870s and 1920s, women’s clubs became the major vehicle by which American women could exercise their developing talents to shape the world beyond their homes. Although the twentieth century would deliver increasing educational, professional, and business venues for women to make use of their intellect, training, and creativity, hundreds of clubs continued to function in this country into modern times, providing members with regular meetings in order to network, learn about social issues, identify civic problems, and devise solutions through volunteer power.
It was journalist Jane “Jennie June” Croly in New York and anti-slavery advocate Julia Ward Howe in Boston who first brought together their peers, in 1868, to usher in the women’s club movement that would sweep the nation by the turn of the century. These women decided to ignore customary restrictions and insisted on developing their minds and communities by meeting regularly in order to learn about the great ideas of the past and contemporary urban problems together. In particular, they came to target limitations on the lives of women and children and sought to do something about them. They valued education and called for women’s admittance to institutions of higher learning, but they also addressed the abysmal conditions of working girls in factories and appealed for the amelioration of workplace abuses.
Soon women throughout the United States, in small towns and large cities, embraced the club format to bolster their association with like-minded neighbors. Some enjoyed the long overdue study of literature, history, and geography. Others stressed reform and initiated scholarships for girls, improved street lighting, environmental protections, and free milk clinics for impoverished mothers. By 1890, a General Federation of Women’s Clubs was founded to assist the nation’s clubwomen in benefitting from the experiences of other clubs. The organization, which still exists in Washington, DC, provided publications and regular conventions for members to swap success stories about the educational and reform projects that they had attempted. Jane Croly’s massive book The History of Women’s Clubs in America, published in 1898, attests to the impressive number of clubs and staggering ambition of members in the era before the twentieth century. By 1910, membership totaled 800,000 women, and the numbers would rise until 1926.
At first, club membership tended to be exclusive. In general, white, Protestant women of comfortable means, with husbands in positions of local prominence and servants who carried out domestic tasks, tended to form and join clubs. Once their youngest children were in school, mothers felt free to hold meetings once or twice a month, September through June. Gradually, the club idea grew among excluded populations, including religious, racial, and ethnic minorities and wage-earning women, who founded clubs of their own. Small groups held meetings in members’ homes. Larger and more affluent groups built clubhouses with posh facilities to host meetings, classes, and events for members as well as the community. The two largest clubs in the nation in the 1920s were located in Los Angeles. The Friday Morning Club and Wilshire Ebell, each with an enrollment of over two thousand members, could therefore marshal significant pressure on government officials to improve local parks, playgrounds, libraries, workplace safety, clean water, and a wide range of other reforms for the community. Our entire nation is dotted with grand clubhouses that represent the heyday of women’s organizational efforts in our past: the Woman’s University Club and Woman’s Century Club in Seattle, Ebell in Los Angeles, Worcester (Massachusetts) Women’s Club, Baton Rouge (Louisiana) Women’s Club, Victoria (Texas) Women’s Club, Barnesville (Georgia) Women’s Club, to name but a few. Their histories are replete with major and minor improvements instigated by the members through their clubs.
As modern women pushed to break more and more glass ceilings in business, politics, and the professions, clubs ceased to remain key venues for women to develop and spend their organizational skills. Club work did continue, meeting community needs as they arose, notably through charitable efforts during the Great Depression of the 1930s, war relief efforts during World War II in the 1940s, and suburban community building in the 1950s. But clubs did not continue to attract the numbers of women that they had prior to the 1920s. Recent years have seen the closure of many once-esteemed women’s clubs, but others are enjoying revitalization through interest from today’s women, eager to reconnect with peers and enrich their lives by advancing the livability of their communities.
Originally published in Volume 19 of A Different Point of View.