Starting next week, members of the WLCB research team will be posting profiles of the various published authors who were members of the Club. We’ve been collecting their works and discovering that this was a pretty interesting group of women– more interesting, in fact, than the Club meeting minutes made them seem. While the minutes are fascinating in their own right, the varied and sometimes adventurous lives of the actual Club members made us realize that the Club’s desire to appear orderly and unified under the ideals of Southern womanhood imposed a staid– or at least studied– propriety on the entire group.

In this post, I actually want to celebrate the work of our own team members. Yesterday, the Maryland Historical Society published an article by Sydney on one Club member, “Miss Henrietta Szold: A Jewish Idealist in the WLCB.” Sydney encountered “Miss Szold” in the team’s work in the archives last summer. In her piece, she gives us a glimpse into her brief tenure into the Club in the early 1890s, and reflects on the importance of discovering her presence in the Club in the wake of racialized violence and anti-Semitism today.

And the publication of Sydney’s piece also gives me a chance to share with our new team members and followers of the blog the team’s first publication, which appeared last fall: Hunter’s evocative ruminations about the Club’s response– or lack of one– to one of the most momentous events in Baltimore history, the “Great Fire” of 1904.

Both of these essays were published in the Maryland Historical Society’s Underbelly blog, which claims to limn “the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library.” In future weeks and months, we’ll be seeking other ways to get our own works into print– here on this blog, on Wikipedia, in the book we will be publishing that will collect some of the Club members’ works, and who knows where else?