Posted on by Sydney Johnson · 1 Comment

Who is in the Club?

This past week I was put in charge of looking into who the members were and where they lived and also when they paid their dues to the Club. The notebook that we found was in box seven and contained a lot of different notebooks of various shapes and sizes. The one that I began to look at was kept by the treasurer and documented in alphabetical order where the members lived and the date that they paid their dues.

I found this task interesting but also somewhat mundane. After a day or so of doing this I started to rummage through box seven looking at the other notebooks that I had mostly skipped over. In the box I found a notebook that was simply the names and address of the different members in various “seasons” dating from 1898-1899 to 1915-1916. Although  there are some years missing, it is interesting to see the development of the members of the Club and to see some of the key members in the founding of the Club begin to resign.

The addresses are enough to make this type of transcribing engaging, I found myself keeping a mental track record of the ladies and where they lived. Many of them lived in the same areas, which makes sense. But talking to Hunter (a local Marylander) it is surprising to learn that many of these areas have gone through great transformation from the elite upperclass women that resided there during the turn of the century and early 1900s to the families that live there today.

An interesting aspect of this new notebook that was found is that it gives the Board of Management for each year. In this case throughout the years I can see certain members moving up from being just directors to secretaries and then some become vice presidents. All the while Mrs. Wrenshall remains the president for many years.

Another notebook that was found documents just the year of 1912-1913, even though this year is documented in the other notebook with many of the other years. I am curious to try and find out through reading the minutes of the meetings why there was the same information kept in two separate notebooks.

Something interesting about this notebook is that for certain years there is a list of the members signatures for when there was an election. I assume that this was just a roll for who was there and who was voting but it is interesting to see each members’ unique signature. It almost helps to make them seem like real people—not just names on a page.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Let’s not go this route

I thought I’d do a little digging on “Mrs. Wrenshall,” the longtime President of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore, and found out that Mrs. Wrenshall’s husband, John C. Wrenshall, served as an engineer for the Confederate Army; and that the Wrenshalls had lived in Atlanta (remember Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind– “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again”?) for some years before the decimation of the South during the war forced them north– apparently to Baltimore.

So, yes, the connection between this Club and Confederate sympathies is not only present– I think we will need to address it in a substantive way. Focusing on gender issues and empowerment of women represented by these women’s organizing around intellectual activities should not be a smokescreen for troubling and, speaking frankly, damnable attitudes some? many? all? of these women had about racial minorities, as well as other marginalized groups.

However we decide to present their work, let’s not employ the strategy that Sofia Coppola apparently has adopted in her just-released film about “Confederate wives” during the Civil War, The Beguiled: make it “just about gender.” As I said in our meeting last week, the difficulty will be in doing justice to the entirety of the history, the people, popular/cultural memory, and helping to bend the arc of history toward justice.

Posted on by Katie Kazmierski

The Club’s Arithmetic: An Overwhelming Flow of Additions and Resignations

On Thursday I started transcribing the minutes of the Board of Management of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore from 1907-1908. Here’s what has caught my attention so far, besides the delightful phrases “dainty refreshments” and “queen of an afternoon”:

It’s hard to keep up sometimes with the amount of women who apply for membership in the Club, are suggested by current members to join, or resign. It feels like for every member who wants to join, another member is resigning—whether it’s because she’s sick, her husband is sick, or simply “too busy” to devote the time and energy required to be an active member. Both the additions to the Club and the resignations are fascinating. Whenever a current member suggests a woman she thinks should join, she is expected to vouch for the candidate’s credibility in several different avenues. Has she sat in on a Club meeting? What did she think of it? Does she write or make music or make any contribution to the arts? While these are all valid questions, it makes me wonder about the seriousness of the society. These women are certainly not playing around. They’ve taken something that seems like it can be casual and have made it very formal and exclusive. I wonder why.

Which leads me to the resignations… why are so many women resigning so frequently? Why was the Club and its duties so exhausting that it caused so many women, month after month, to resign? It makes sense to me that Board members would resign occasionally because seemingly a lot more work was done on the Board, but even so, that happened so often that there was what feels like a constant game of musical chairs on the board of directors. It leaves me wondering what these positions meant to the women who held them and what exactly pushed them away—whether it was a heavy workload or something beyond that.

It’s also worth mentioning that they’re constantly debating whether a past member should become an “honorary member” or not. Well, debating not so much as making unanimous decisions that the lady in question should be an honorary member without a doubt (they often will pose questions only to come to a unanimous positive decision regardless—above anything, these women are agreeable). Regardless, what is an honorary member? Does she attend meetings when she wants to? Does she contribute to the Club? Or is this simply a title, nothing else? I hope to find out more about what being an honorary member entails; maybe the Constitution says something about it.

In the mean time, I can’t wait to see who resigns next. This is better than reality TV.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Forming Their Identity

The first day I spent most of my time transcribing the Constitution and By-Laws which focus on what the club is and how it is run. The main point that I found of intrigue was concerning who are considered residential, non-residential and honorary members.

In the article of the Constitution that addresses members and their responsibilities and functions there is a section that defines the different types of members that are in the Club: residential, non-residential and honorary. The ladies defined residential to be those who resided within a ten mile radius of Baltimore City. Those living outside of this ten mile radius were considered non-residential and then they did not define the stipulations for who was an honorary member.

The section of this article did not go into detail about why there was this distinction of why it was a ten miles compared to a different distance. They also did not determine where the ten mile radius started. Going along this point, when the Constitution got to the section about the dues that the members would have to pay, the residential members had to pay ten dollars per year, while the non-resident members and honorary members had to pay five dollars per year. Non-resident and honorary members also were not eligible to hold a leadership position or to vote in the Club. I am curious why there is such a distinction of the members of the Club.

My guess is that the founding members and all members of wealthy or powerful families lived within the ten miles of the City and wanted to keep the power of the Club within these confines. It will be interesting to be able to see the log of the members and their addresses and also if the ladies kept track of who was a residential, non-residential and honorary member of the Club.