Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Meeting the Members—Henrietta Szold.

Over the past weeks, I have been looking at the members of the Club—who they are, where the lived—and finally I am able to say what some of them look like.

With the help of the Maryland Historical Society and their Portrait Vertical File Collection,  I have been able to find some images of the women from this club. For this blog post I wanted to focus on one in particular, Henrietta Szold.

Miss Szold was a member of the Club from 1890-1894. The picture below was taken while she was still a member of the Club in 1893. Born in 1860 to Rabbi Benjamin Szold, Miss Szold was the only Jewish member of the club, making her, to our knowledge, one of the only—if not the only—member who was non-christian.

Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.
Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.

Miss Szold’s wikipedia page (which I linked above) talks about her legacy as a Jewish Zionist and the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. It also talks about the many different roles she played in the Jewish community from Jewish education and being the first editor for the Jewish Publication Society. In 1933 Miss Szold emigrated to Palestine and was a part of Youth Aliyah, an organization that helped to rescue more then 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany.

In 1945 Miss Szold passed away in one of the hospitals that she helped to found in Jerusalem. She is remembered around the world for the work that she did.

In the entire Wikipedia article about Miss Szold, it does not mention once that she was a member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. I think that because she was a member for such a short period of time, there was no mention of her membership. In general I think it is astounding that the ladies of the club let someone like Miss Szold in. These are women who have been known to hold discussions on why the Anglo-Saxon race is superior, as mentioned in Clara’s post. So the question must be posed, did Miss Szold leave once she realized the nature of the majority of the women in the Club, or was she asked to leave because of her religion?

Women like Miss Szold are few and far between in the Club, but it is important to try to find them and tell their story and also try to figure out their involvement in the Club. Miss Szold is remembered as a world renowned leader and activist but not as a member of the Woman’s Literary Club. We can only hope to bring recognition to the Club with the help of members such as Miss Szold.

Posted on by Clara Love

A Moment in Time/What Kind of Legacy?

This week, I began transcribing my first set of minutes. Previously, I had been working on the typed programs, so working with the handwritten, far more detailed minutes has been an exciting and interesting shift, especially since I’m getting more information about talks and readings whose titles I’ve already seen on the programs.

I’m transcribing the minutes for the 1899-1900 season, a season chosen because of its potential for discussion about the turn of a new century and what that could mean for the club, for women, or for the world. The women do take note of this important moment in time, but not quite in the way we had hoped. An excerpt from the minutes of the Club’s January 2nd, 1900 meeting reads,

The President then made a few remarks as to where we do, or do not stand, with regard to the Burning question, “Is this the 19th or 20th Century?” and read from the Sun of Jan. 2nd a short notice of Flammarion the astronomer’s decision, that we are in the closing year of the nineteenth century.

There is no further discussion on the topic beyond this brief mention, either in this meeting or subsequent ones. It seems that the Club members do not see their present moment as a significant change-over. Maybe the minutes of the 1900-1901 season contain the kind of declarations of intention and importance regarding a new century that these minutes, unfortunately, do not.

Despite my disappointment on that front, there is still a great deal of fascinating content in these minutes. I’ve transcribed through the meeting of February 6th, so I still have a couple of months left, but even in the incomplete season I’ve read so far, I’ve noticed what seems to be a great frequency of race-centric presentations that I didn’t quite catch on to when I was only working with the programs. A lot of this type of programming sounds, as you’d guess, unsettling at best.

The first talk that caught my eye was part of the October 7th, 1899 meeting. The Club welcomed a series of “Book Notes,” or individual members’ reviews of books they’ve read on their own. Miss Ellen Duvall presents on two books, one of which is titled Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, by Edmond Demolins, published that year. Miss Duvall says of the book,

The treatment of this question in this book from a French point of view, is, she said, something almost miraculous,–and there is a sweet a reasonableness in it also.

After some cursory research, this book (originally published, as Duvall mentions, in French) seems to focus on the “originality and superiority” of Anglo-Saxon-based society in England and America. A full-text version of this book can be found here.

Later, a talk by Miss Anne Weston Whitney on the “Art in Doll-Making” at the January 7th, 1900 meeting also makes a point of highlighting how dolls not specifically modeled after the “Anglo-Saxon type” are undesirable.

The final piece of programming in this vein (that I’ve seen so far) is a talk by Mrs. Walter Bullock on January 23rd, 1900, titled “Anglo-Saxon Character,” which gives “a clean and comprehensive account of the two most prominent theories with regard to the origin of the Aryan race,” and uses some very particular language that I find very, how do I put this? Indicative of someone with what I’d in our current day call white-supremacist leanings. Mrs. Bullock says in her talk,

There, it has been said, was the white race first found in its greatest purity.

I guess reading about Mrs. Bullock’s talk about when and where the white race came to be its “purest” isn’t totally surprising given all our recent discussion and concern with how to reconcile the legacy of this club with Confederate legacies and the brutal racism that accompanies them, as well as non-Confederate-specific racist conceptions and attitudes of the time.  But even in that context, this kind of programming being shared among the elite and powerful is…Not Good. At the end of this particular talk, Miss Brent proposes that it be type-written and placed in the Club library so others can read and revisit it. Again, these attitudes aren’t shocking in context, but this kind of content is still something that we have to process and/or expose as part of the Club’s legacy, whatever that legacy may be.