Faithful subscribers may have noted a sudden flourishing of postings to the Aperio Log. That’s because the spring semester at Loyola has begun—and at long last, so has our class on the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. The course has the auspicious number EN389 and is titled in the online course catalog, “Reading Women, Writing Women, 1890-1920: The Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.”
Our class met for the first time last night in the, shall we say, cozy seminar room in Loyola’s English Department. We had a great time discussing some stories from Anne Boyd Rioux’s wonderful anthology Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century—including Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody–who are you?,” Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Poetess” (1890) and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Miss Grief” (1880), as well as Edith Wharton’s painfully comic story about “Writing a War Story” (1919). The thought-provoking posts from Ellen, Sydney, Katie, Clara, & Hunter posted to plant seeds for our discussion give you a good idea of the range of ideas and responses.
We were also graced by a visit from our volunteer researcher and assiduous transcriber, Cynthia, whom only Clara had met before last night. Cynthia first put the WLCB papers on the radar of archivists and libraries in the 1970s when she was tasked, as a graduate student and fledgling archivist, with finding “hidden collections” of women’s writings in archives across the country. Unfortunately, no one until us had answered her clarion call for over 40 years.
Cynthia had wonderful stories to tell about her work in archives as well as some piquant observations about her recent interactions with the Club as a transcriber. One story she mentioned was about founding member Louisa C. O. Haughton’s horror when she presented the documents to incorporate the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore to the notary public, and he mistakenly read the name as the “Woman’s Liberty Club.”
“We are not seeking freedom!” she said (I think I am horribly paraphrasing and will revise this once I am reminded of what she actually said. ETA: see comments for the actual quotation.). The majority of the Club members were ambitious, but sadly, not suffragist revolutionaries.
For those of you following our activities, I have posted the course overview and syllabus to this blog (under the “About” tab). Also, check out the WLCB Archive, which Clara and I developed last semester with much appreciated assistance from folks at the Loyola/Notre Dame Library. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be introduced to the dozen or so new members of the project– new students to the EN389 course at Loyola, and a new group of 8 seniors at Friends who will be transcribing the minutes detailing the activities of the Club during World War I.
To close this post with the epigraph which began our class last night, Emily Dickinson encapsulated many of the ideas of women’s ambivalent desire to reach an audience in print, as well as women writers’ need to establish a supportive audience among one another, in the following poem. It’s emblematic, in many ways, of this group of Baltimore women who sought recognition as writers and intellects but were feared the glare of public exposure.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Since finding out about the existence of the Woman’s Literary Club half a decade ago, I’ve been wondering what members of the club thought of one of my great literary heroes (I’m not going to call her a heroine), Edith Wharton.
As a jaded grad student in the 1990s, Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth (her first, published in 1905) was the only book I read that actually brought me to tears.
It was also a novel that challenged American literary history as it was viewed at the time. Back then, when people talked about American literature of the 1890s, they talked about the “Age of Realism” and “the big three”– Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Dean Howells–who supposedly exemplified its principles.* Entire courses were titled “Twain, James, Howells,” focusing just on these three writers. During the 1990s, Wharton muscled her way into this stalwart triumvirate. Now she is usually paired off with James on American literature syllabi; both are represented as novelists of consciousness and as prose stylists who bridged the divide between realism and modernism.
What, I wondered, did the women of the Club—elite, educated, and cultured contemporaries of Wharton—think of her? Were they scandalized by the fact that she divorced her husband? Or did they admire her for abandoning her stifling society life in New York for a life among fellow intellects in Europe? Did they wish to emulate her as a stylist? Did they recognize her as one? Did they share her ironic ambivalence about what Thorstein Veblen described in 1890 as the “leisure class”? Did they share her desire to validate female independence, female intellect? So many questions.
So imagine my delight when, in the midst of transcribing the 1905-1906 minutes (and slogging through the Recording Secretary Mrs. Philip Uhler’s curlicued handwriting), I encountered a review of The House of Mirth, offered as part of the program from the Committee on Current Criticism (Mrs. Percy M. Reese, Chairman) on Feb. 13, 1906. It was reviewed by Club member Miss L. M. Kirk. Mrs. Uhler wrote,
Miss Kirk spoke of the power and strength of the book and of the interest of its conversations. We were told of a young girl, who chiefly for want of money, drops out of the pale of society, loses her courage, and even, innocently, her reputation. There is much shown of weakness, of the want of moral training and self-control. After reading it, we were reminded that we can be glad that the “Smart Set” is a small set. But Mrs Wharton’s subjects do not run away from her, as Mrs [Humphrey] Ward’s sometimes do. “The House of Mirth” is called the book of the year, and has a great sale. Miss Kirk quoted a review of it from “Life,” which considered its heroine as not well-balanced, and not a cause for tears. Miss Kirk treated “The House of Mirth” as literature, rather than as pleasing or satisfactory.
Yep– that’s it. A rather cursory review of the so-called “book of the year.” But there are a couple of interesting things to be said. One is the obvious distance Miss Kirk places between the “Smart Set” (the cosmopolitan elite centered in New York City) and the women of the Club. Based on the tone, Kirk rather dismisses this group, known in the press as “The Four Hundred” (sort of like the Fortune 500, but primarily including the social elite rather than the elite of the business world).
It’s also significant, I think, that Kirk focuses on Lily Bart’s “weakness,” her “want of moral training and self-control.” Clearly, Miss Kirk did not read Lily’s demise as the result of societal forces, as the novel is predominantly read now. Kirk faults Lily for her demise; she finds nothing wrong with society itself. This complacency is in keeping with what we’ve seen with the Club throughout its early years.
But most of all, I’m intrigued by Miss Kirk’s judgment of the novel “as literature, rather than pleasing or satisfactory.” These distinctions– between literature, pleasure, and satisfaction– are ones that continue to differentiate those who consider themselves scholars, and those we might call “lay readers,” people who read for fun. Clearly, this Club saw themselves as litterateurs, not dabblers or pleasure readers.
And—based on her comments—it looks like The House of Mirth may have made Miss Kirk cry, too.
(As a side note, which may become the subject of a future post, the 38th annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association was occurring just a few blocks away at exactly the same hour that the Club was meeting, but they made no mention of it in the minutes.)
* Note. In retrospect, it seems to me that the only reason why Twain was classified as a realist at all is because he was held up as one by his good friend Howells. Howells, too, was never able to fully adhere to realist principles, even though he played a large part in defining them.
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.
The intrepid Summer 2017 Aperio team celebrated in style last Tuesday, commemorating the regular meeting day for the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore with a cold (but very classy) supper of relishes, salmon in aspic, a salad, chocolate and raspberry pie, and a cheese plate adorned with fresh figs and almonds. Chin-chin!
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What did we accomplish? Over 10 weeks this summer:
1700 pages of minutes transcribed
5 notebooks of membership dues and lists, covering the entire 30 years of club existence, deciphered and organized into a spreadsheet showing who belonged when and where they lived;
650+ programs (of ~1000) transcribed and entered into spreadsheet;
Domiciles of members from 1890-1895 plotted onto a huge 7’ x 7’ map recreated from the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps;
42 blog posts, ranging from a few hundred to 2000 words each
A partial map of Baltimore in 1901, affectionately known as the “Big Ass Map.” For scale, the red thing in the lower part of the image is a computer mouse, placed at the Washington Monument. All the little red-orange dots are locations of members’ residences. I had to cut the map in two (down Charles St.) in order to get it into my car (rolled up).
It’s quite a body of work. But I won’t lie– we were a bit dismayed when we realized how much work is left to be done.
For one thing, we need to organize and put into a reasonably readable form all of the transcriptions we compiled this summer. For another, we need to make these documents accessible to the spring 2018 class that will be reading, editing, and analyzing these documents. Luckily, Clara will be doing an independent study with me this fall to do just that!
But the biggest body of work is to transcribe the remaining minutes— about 2400 pages’ worth. Based on the rate at which the team members were able to transcribe this summer (3 of the 5 team members spent the majority of their time transcribing minutes, while two focused on programs and the membership logs), we have somewhere in the neighborhood of another 800 hours of transcription left to go. If we can divvy up this labor among more hands, it will go faster.
Luckily, Friends School has come to the rescue! During both the fall and spring semesters, history teacher Josh Carlin’s senior seminar will be joining the team, transcribing documents and (I hope) continuing to blog about their discoveries. Clara, Hunter, and I met Elizabeth, Alex, and Sanny at Friends School last week and they have already started transcribing. We’ve created a special transcription site (https://loyolanotredamelib.org/Aperio/WLCB/)where you can see what the minutes actually look like– as well as some of the finished transcriptions. We’ll be continuing to populate the site throughout the year with more things to transcribe and more completed transcriptions. And if you’d like to join us in this, let us know and we can add you to the team.
Hunter, Clara, & I met Sanny (pictured), Elizabeth, & Alex, our fall transcribers, at Friends School last week. They’re all in Josh Carlin’s senior seminar on archival transcription.
We are planning a crowd-transcription session at the Bmore Historic Unconference on Friday, Sept. 29. We’ll probably be there during at least the morning sessions if not all day. If you’re interested in Baltimore history, historic preservation, or museums, you should come. We’d love to see you there!
As Sydney’s posts have documented, one of the challenges we’ve faced is the difficulty of finding even super-basic information– like, names–of the members of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.
Today, I happened to stumble upon a treasure trove of a document that had passed under the radar of our summer researchers. I was checking and verifying the names and addresses of the membership, which Sydney has painstakingly transcribed over about half of the summer. Names, we have all discovered, are very difficult to transcribe.
In the middle of a large, mostly empty, unlabeled book in the “Memberships” box of the WLCB, I ran across a few pages where the WLCB Constitution had been painstakingly copied, followed by an undated pledge signed by the membership.
Pledge signed by officers, Board of Management, and members, probably 1898. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.
We’ve been trying to find some of these names for some time. Mrs. George K. McGaw (Margaret!). Mrs. R. K. Cautley (Lucy!). If we had realized how momentous this document was when we’d run our eyes across it earlier in the summer, we’d have saved ourselves a lot of work– many of the most active members of the Club, unsurprisingly, appear on this list.
Page 2 of signatures. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.
I was able to date this document tentatively to the 1898-1899 season. Part of my logic was that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall (Letitia!) took over the presidency of the Club from Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (Francese!). I also referred to the lists of officers and Board of Management that Sydney & Clara have compiled this summer– and while the signatories here most closely resemble those listed in the programs for 1898-1899, they don’t match exactly.
So, an answer raises more questions: how stable was the Board of Management in the Club? Did people switch in and out after being elected? But for now, I am very happy that we now have first names for about 15% of the Club.
It is one of the few “public” documents of the Club in which the women made a concerted effort to use their first names. Now that I’ve become more familiar with the documents, I’m seeing first names scattered about here and there, including in the title page of the membership dues book from 1890 (which lists Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin as treasurer). They also sign their first names when elections are being held (They are the ones voting, after all, not their husbands!) Their first names also appear in the minutes, perhaps because those are more “private” documents.
On this pledge, there are only 2 or 3 instances where a signee has used her “married” name (Mrs. Thomas Hill), or used initials rather than writing out their full names. I find these hesitations both sad and touching.
If only they had written their names. With their names, we can start fleshing out their histories.
One thing that has surprised me about the members of the WLCB is that so many were published authors. As I’ve been reviewing the transcription of the minutes taken by the indefatigable Lydia Crane, I’ve looked up members here and there to see what became of the works they read during the club meetings, to see if they had a life outside of the club.
Today I found an interesting connection between Club members’ writings and Hunter’s research on the Lutherville Female Seminary.
The minutes for April 10, 1900 relate that a Club member named Miss Laura de Valin read two of her poems, “In the Heyday,” and “A Sonnet.” A quick initial Google search for “Laura de Valin” uncovered this interesting document held in the Johns Hopkins University Library Special Collections, a piece of sheet music titled “A Parting Ode” written by Miss de Valin for the Lutherville Female Seminary in 1859!
The music has a frontispiece for the school which corresponds closely to the image Hunter included in his post.
Front cover of “Parting Ode” by Laura de Valin, 1859.
I am leaping to the conclusion that this Laura de Valin is the same as the one who belonged to the WLCB because their names are so unusual– additional genealogical research would be necessary to confirm that this is true.
Assuming it is, then finding this sheet music tells us something about the age of Miss de Valin, and also links her with the Lutherville Female Seminary. Based on the amateurish quality of the verse, I would guess that de Valin may have been a student at the Seminary when she wrote this “ode,” which would make her about 60 years old at the time of the Club meeting where she read her poems.
That would mean that she would have been a young woman during the Civil War, which perhaps explains why she remained unmarried. Membership records show that she lived at 1214 Madison Ave., just a few blocks west of where I live now. She joined in 1899-1900, and left the club (or passed away) sometime before the 1904-1905 season. So her tenure in the club was brief.
Miss de Valin, I discovered, also was a playwright– a “Bibliography of Plays by Marylanders, 1870-1916” published in the Spring 1972 issue of the Maryland Historical Magazine lists two plays by a Laura V. de Valin: The Chaperon; A Comic Opera in Three Acts, from 1892, and Elisa, A Drama in Five Acts, from the same year.
In search of copies of the plays, I checked the MD Historical Society catalog (MDHS publishes the Maryland Historical Magazine, so I thought perhaps the bibliography of plays was based on manuscripts in their collection). I didn’t find the plays there, but I did find out that she edited a journal titled The New Pedagogue: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Public School Interest of Baltimore, right around the time she belonged to the club. So that tells you that she was a teacher. Perhaps she was a teacher, rather than a student, at Luther Female Seminary. (Again, I am assuming that all of these Laura de Valins are the same person.)
It all makes you wonder: who was Laura V. de Valin? What kind of life did she lead? Did she crave a theatrical life, or was she committed to her work as a teacher? Did she live alone, or with family? What was she like? And what were her dreams?
Only further research will be able to answer these questions about this member of the Club–and we will probably never know about her dreams. But this little tidbit of information points to the ambition and wide-ranging intellect and interests of even the most obscure Club members.
