Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Hurrah for volunteers!

We have a volunteer!

Cynthia contacted me about a month ago and asked if she could help us transcribe the WLCB records. (I said yes.) Though she’s retired now, she’s been volunteering at the Loyola/Notre Dame archives, and she heard about our project through Loyola’s archivist. It turns out that she was a curator at the Maryland Historical Society and processed the WLCB collection way back in 1975. That’s right: 1975!

Crazy how history moves in circles and repetitions … no?

Since we’ve gotten her set up, Cynthia’s been plugging away, transcribing the minutes from the 1901-1902 season. And her archivist brain has been leading her to sources that help confirm or elucidate what she’s been transcribing, which she’s been passing along to the team. It’s all been quite exciting.

This week, Cynthia sent me a link to the 1905-1906 Baltimore Blue Book (aka the “Society Visiting List”), which she noticed happens to include the complete WLCB officer & membership list. It did not even occur to me that the Blue Book would publish such a thing.

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One question we’ve been asked repeatedly about the Club is how many women belonged. Based on this list, the WLCB had 71 members during the 1905-06 season, and 15 honorary members (most of these were published authors). We also have wondered how the WLCB cultivated its membership and brought in new members. The fact that the entire membership list was published in the Blue Book shows that yes, belonging to the Club was seen as a worthy attainment for the upper crust—and those who aspired to rise to their level.

Perhaps most interesting to me, though, is what appears a few pages after the WLCB listing: the listing for the Daughters of the Confederacy—Maryland chapter.

1905-06 Society Visiting List, pages 456-457.

As several of the team members’ posts testified this summer, the white supremacist sentiments expressed by some of the members of the Club were a source of concern and dismay. We harbor suspicions verging on certainty that members of the WLCB were also members of the Daughters of the Confederacy, since many of them were born during the Civil War or in the years immediately surrounding it—but we have not had the chance to look into the DotC records (also at MDHS) to find out.

The Blue Book confirms that Mrs. Francis Dammann, a teacher at Boys’ Latin School and an active member of the WLCB during the early years of its existence, also belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Not only that, she was an officer.

The Blue Book also provides an answer to another question that came up over the summer. At several points, the minutes mention another Baltimore literary society for women, the Arundell Club. We hadn’t had a chance to look into the history of this club, but the Blue Book brought the history to my eyes. A few pages before the WLCB entry, the Arundell Club also has a listing—which shows a much larger membership that includes many names I recognized from the early years of the WLCB. Most of them now belonged to the Arundell Club instead.

The numbers imply that the Arundell Club surpassed the WLCB in social cachet, at least. But were they actually in direct competition? I recalled reading in the minutes that the WLCB expressed the desire for both clubs to co-exist and thrive together, so I wondered if the two clubs defined themselves differently—carved out different niches for themselves, as it were.

I did a quick Google search and found an online copy of Jane Cunningham Croly’s History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (1898), a vast compendium of information about women’s clubs in the 19th century. And there, I discovered that Croly described both the Arundell Club and the WLCB in some detail.

If we’d only known in June when we started this project! Alas, this is so often how research goes—you find the source you need after you’ve figured out (mostly) what you wanted to know.

Croly tells us that the WLCB was founded before the Arundell Club, and so had the advantage of precedence. However, neither club had been in existence for more than a few years when Croly wrote her book.

Croly distinguishes between the two Clubs, highlighting the literary aims of the WLCB and the social, cultural, and philanthropic aims of the Arundell Club. She quotes at length from a June 1896 address from Francese Litchfield Turnbull—a real find, since the minutes book from 1896 has been lost. (In fact, we are missing minutes from the entire 1896-1899 period, so Croly’s book is especially valuable.)

Turnbull’s speech succinctly characterizes the aims and goals of the Club, at least as I’ve seen it reflected in the hundreds of pages of documents I’ve now read. She begins by reflecting on the name of the Club—the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore—which, we know, was decided after a great deal of deliberation. She asks:

“Does our title hold any hint that we are to strive tacitly, if not specifically, for some special good to woman in our literary work; that we are, in some sense, to uphold those qualities which are essentially womanly—not necessarily attributes of women only, nor sought for as differentiating them from men, but that we are to emphasize, as opportunity may offer here, those gifts and qualities which conduce to a nobler womanhood?”

She does not wait for an answer before continuing. “Then,” she says, “as a Woman’s Literary Club, this purpose should fix our point of view in our contact with literature.”

Croly then includes the following, verbatim:

The “modern need of the ideal” — that’s a nice turn of phrase. The need, in modern times, of the lofty aspirations of the past; and the need to apply the modern “precision of method” and “carefulness of study which realism has introduced into art” to bring hazy idealism into the sharp focus of the present. And the womanly attention to morality, beauty, and truth—coming out of the 19th-century Cult of Domesticity—governing all.

In contrast, the Arundell Club (whose president, Miss Elizabeth King, is pictured above) seemed to be a less “idealistic” organization, at least in Turnbull’s characterization of the word. They focused on philanthropy and social reform, on the one hand, and social activities, on the other. While the Arundell Club’s 300 members more than tripled the membership of the WLCB in 1898, Croly notes that the Literary Committee had just 25 members. So perhaps they ceded the literary ground to the WLBC. We should find out for sure, of course.

Regardless of the Arundell Club’s activities, Turnbull’s speech and the characterization of the WLBC in Croly’s book confirms for me what I and the rest of the Aperio team discovered this summer: the WLCB was, at least in its early years, a serious literary organization, not a social club. It was the kind of book club where the members actually read the books—and also wrote them.

And knowing that the Arundell Club took on the more social and philanthropic roles expected of women’s clubs of the time, I’m now willing to give the WLCB a bit of a pass on their decisions not to engage directly with “causes.” I wonder if the rest of the Aperio team will agree.

In the meantime, thanks to Cynthia for helping us—me, anyway!—answer some questions. She’s passed along lots of other discoveries, but I’ll save them for future posts.

Posted on by Clara Love

Peaceful Politics?

As I continue to work on the 1900-1901 season surrounding the January 8th meeting I discussed in my last post, I’m still on the lookout for hints of reflection or change with regards to the turn of the century. The most notable minutes I came across the week before our Omeka workshop in the context of this particular concern were more about the state of the nation than the state of the Club.

The November 27th, 1900 meeting of the Club, led by the Committee on Current Topics, opened with an article by Mrs. Frederick Tyson on the 1900 presidential election. This presentation begins with some brief, pointed remarks on the progress made in America, and the world, in the closing century. She told the Club that reports about current events of this season in particular should be more comprehensive than they’ve ever been in the past, because now,

Events pass quickly, and we hear of them immediately. People know more, see more, travel far more rapidly and care for more things than they ever did before. In the olden times people going on what are now insignificant journeys, made their wills, and then took leave of their friends as if they did not expect to see them again.

While this is not the explicit declaration of change I was still holding out for, it’s at least something. It’s also reflective of the priorities and interests of the Club members–namely, travel advances, and being able to learn and see more through the collection of shared knowledge created by members with the privilege to travel (so, all of them).

These remarks led into Mrs. Franklin’s “comprehensive” breakdown of the recent US election, which was between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Her main focus was on how peacefully the election results (McKinley as victor) were accepted by the general public.

She thought that considering the excited feeling and intense interest that preceded it, it was gratifying to know that there was almost no disorder or trouble on the eventful day itself; and that the result was calmly accepted by both parties as the will of the people.

Again, this brief quotation reflects the ideals of the Club, and what aspects of current events they are interested in: consistency. McKinley entered his second term as President after this election, and that kind of calm retention of old power as the new century rolled in mirrors the Club’s own apparent attitudes. The rest of the article, instead of mentioning any kind of campaign or platform details, touched on how both candidates were “good Christian men” in their private lives. Mrs. Tyson closed her presentation on the election by mentioning the changes of the Democratic party; she said that though it used to be pro-expansion, in recent years it had become anti-expansionist, the most explicitly political statement in her entire speech.

While I’m sure the women of the Club had their own particular political leanings and opinions, Mrs. Tyson’s speech, despite touching upon major developments in information sharing, travel, and the presidency, seems fairly disinterested in actual politics. I’m wondering if this lack of discussion of election specifics during an allegedly “comprehensive” presentation has to do with the fact that these women could not vote. We’ve been talking a lot about the governing body of the Club recently, specifically about the idea that they were “practicing” governing and voting in their own setting since women of their time couldn’t vote or really participate in politics outside of the spaces they created for themselves. With that in mind, it’s odd to me that a segment of time set aside specifically to talk about current politics would not contain more in-depth discussion. So much of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore’s work seems to be about establishing and proving themselves as capable, well-read, literary women with a solid governing body, so I would expect their political discussions to try to do the same work.

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.

Posted on by Ellen Roussel

Early grapplings

I must admit I came into this project with some preconceived notions about the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. After an entire semester taking a class called American Feminist Public Intellectuals, in which we thoroughly grappled with the ideas of authority and identity and how these are influenced by gender, race, education level, and even appearance, I found myself resenting the Woman’s Literary Club. After all, it is a group of primarily (totally??) middle- to upper-class, educated, white women gathering to assert their literary prowess and celebrate their intellectual accomplishments. To me, some of the cluckings of the Club seem rather frivolous when considered against the social and historical background of this time period. Some women, primarily black women, do not have the same advantages during this time period, and I find it difficult not to resent a club that claims to promote the intellectual development amongst women of “similar tastes.” Were there any black women in the Club at this time? Would an educated black woman even be allowed in? What are these “similar tastes” in regards to, and who determines if they are enough to let an individual into the Club? I do realize that I have a rather cynical view of the Club. For me, my personal challenge with this project will be to set aside my own initial views and opinions, and approach the Club with an open mind so as not to belittle their grand-scheme accomplishments. After spending some time with the 1890 minutes written by Eliza Ridgely, the first secretary of the Club, I don’t know that I can say that I have done a complete 180 in terms of this sour taste in my mouth in regards to the Club. However, I will say that it is a pretty grand and significant thing to be able to interact with these women in this medium. I look forward to continuing to peer through this window in history as the Club takes its form in the early years of its development.