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.
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.
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.
