Women's Club Movement

Women's Club Movement. As social conventions prescribed increasingly separate roles for men and women in early and mid‐nineteenth‐century America, middle‐class women often found themselves isolated in the home, excluded from the civic arena. Rather than acquiesce, many women won a voice in the public sphere by forming societies and clubs for self‐improvement and community reform. In the early 1800s, women organized to address church, temperance, missionary, benevolence, antislavery, and even voting issues. During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate women created associations to support the soldiers and facilitate patriotic activities. In the Gilded Age, women established local groups devoted to family, health, educational, and municipal concerns. Clubwomen organized study groups, raised funds, and focused public attention on such diverse issues as collegiate education for women; homes for unwed mothers; pensions for widows with dependents; protection of industrial workers; child‐labor laws; maternal and infant‐care clinics; and such civic projects as libraries, streetlights, parks and playgrounds, services for immigrants, and housing reform.

The club movement attracted mainly white, Protestant, middle‐class wives of successful professional and businessmen, although career women, especially educators, writers, physicians, and other professionals also joined. African‐American women, unwelcome in most clubs, formed separate societies to pursue similar projects. Many local groups united with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (1873), the General Federation of Women's Clubs (1890), and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (1896). Among the early leaders of women's voluntary activism were Frances Willard, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jane Cunningham Croly in New York City, Julia Ward Howe of Boston, and Caroline Severance of Boston and Los Angeles. By the turn of the century, specialized clubs in many towns and cities were linking up with like‐minded groups in other cities through such national associations as the National Council of Jewish Women, Drama League of America, National Federation of Music Clubs, National Congress of Mothers (later the Parent‐Teacher Association), Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women), the National Federation of Business and Professional Women, National Consumers’ League, League of Women Voters, Junior League of America, Daughters of the American Revolution, National American Woman Suffrage Association, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Garden Club of America, and women's auxiliaries to masonic orders and other fraternal organizations.

The women's club movement, threatening the social convention that “women's place is in the home,” initially engendered criticism. Newspaper editorials deplored clubwomen's intrusion into the public sphere and their alleged neglect of child care and household responsibilities. Members persevered, however, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, over a million clubwomen had won respect for their tenacity in demanding needed reforms. The enfranchisement of women in 1920, coupled with increasing opportunities for modern women, drained the club movement of members and resources. While many clubs survived into the late twentieth century, the movement lacked the size or influence it had enjoyed in its heyday.
See also Consumer Movement; Feminism; Gender; Missionary Movement; Parks, Urban; Progressive Era; Temperance and Prohibition; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Anne Firor Scott , Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History, 1991.
Anne Ruggles Gere , Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880–1920, 1997.

Karen J. Blair