Posted on by Hunter Flynn

Language and education

These past two weeks, I’ve had the privilege of going back further in time than I had been before, picking up transcriptions during the 1893-1894 season. I’d previously been transcribing from the 1911-1912 season. I was able to identify some shifts in the Club’s interests, but for the most part it seems that the Club’s interests were more or less preserved during that almost twenty-year period. But it does seem to me that the Club was somewhat more academic in its earlier years.

They even had a Committee on the “Exact Study of the English Language.” I didn’t see it in the 1910s, and so can only assume it was retired. It met twice during the 1894-1895 season, and discussed everything from etymology and pronunciation to linguistically-rooted philosophy. Club member Maria Middleton even gave a talk regarding such (we think) contemporary concerns as the inexactitude of English pronouns, and the “careless use of the word ‘like,’ especially in making it do duty as a conjunction.” I can’t help but think of the neologism “juvenoia” here—defined, roughly, as the eternal tendency of older generations to worry about or criticize the youth. But maybe nothing really changes.

So what I’m finding most interesting about going back in time is seeing how social views change—or how they don’t. To me, the article that most illustrated this is the poet Lizette Woodworth Reese’s talk on “Poetry as a Means of Education,” which I found reflective of the growing tendency of humanity to regard the child as a legitimate social unit, with its unique needs and anxieties that merit extra care. Children—and specifically childhood—we think, ought to be protected.

This is the sort of notion it’s all too easy to take for granted. But really the concept of childhood is a relatively modern phenomenon in Western thought—perhaps first put forth by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and nourished, perpetuated, and elevated by the English Romantic poets. (See: concise Wordsworth and copious Wordsworth.)

In her talk, Lizette Woodworth Reese speaks of the capacity of children to appreciate poetry (for her purposes, apparently, synonymous with all forms of literature) in a uniquely childlike way. The reading of children is not vested, as that of adults. It’s innocent—maybe even enlightened. She says, “We cannot parse John Milton, and read him too.” So maybe something is lost when we analyze art. To paraphrase the words of French filmmaker Robert Bresson: “I’d rather my films be felt than understood.”

I don’t know about all that, but I see her point: maybe we can learn something from children about literature. But her concern is really what children can learn from literature. She’s interested in literature as an educational tool; the recording secretary writes, “Jack is becoming a dull boy instructed in facts and figures, and is letting his mysteries and illusions go.” Literature, she thinks, can teach “mysteries and illusions.”

In support of her theory, she cites the “Rollo” series of children’s books. I did some poking around, and found that the Rollo stories were a series of fourteen children’s books, written by American writer Jacob Abbott, that aimed to educate children, while, apparently, entertaining them. The series begins with Rollo Learning to Talk, moves onto Rollo at Play, to Rollo’s Museum, to, eventually, Rollo’s Philosophy Part IV: The Sky. Here’s the text of the first part of Rollo’s Philosophy (“Water”). As you can see, much of it takes the form of a pseudo-Socratic dialogue.

This concept is still prevalent today—probably more so. Think of Children’s shows like Baby Einstein (for people who want their children to be well-versed in Mozart and Bach) or Dora the Explorer (for people who want their children to learn Spanish at the dazzling rate of one word per episode). Abbott’s Rollo series was a precursor.

Miss Reese, as far as I know, never had any children. But she was a teacher; and maybe she saw her poetry as another outlet through which she could educate—if only subconsciously.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Team assignments

A message to the team:

You all have done a great job over the past 3 weeks collecting a huge amount of information about the club, and I think it’s time for us to start putting the bigger picture together (as best we can). To that end, I’d like to do two things this week:

  1. I’d like to give each of you a research assignment tailored to the things you’ve been transcribing or discussing; and
  2. I’d like to take a pause from the transcriptions on Thursday and maybe for the rest of the week so that you can engage in some other kinds of research at MDHS. I also encourage you to do research in our library and the Johns Hopkins Eisenhower Library (which is in walking distance for those of you living at the Guilford) during the early part of this week, especially if you want to reserve the limited amount of time we have available at MDHS time for transcription.

Here are your research assignments:

CLARA: You’ve done a great job of cataloguing the readings & music given at Club meetings. I’d like for you to put that spreadsheet to work by using it to get a better sense of Lizette Woodworth Reese’s contributions to the Club– and the Club’s contribution to the development of her career. To that end, I’d like you to do the following:

  • Based on your spreadsheet, create a list of all the poems Lizette Woodworth Reese presented at the Club meetings between 1890-1899 (I believe that’s as far as you’ve gotten, correct?). Create this list as a Google Doc or Sheet, organized chronologically.
  • Track down copies of the poems. Some poems are available at the Poetry Foundation website, but you may find others at our library or at Hopkins/Peabody. Also try searching for Reese in the American Periodical Series database (available through the library website).
  • You can also look in archives for her poems. Luckily for us, Reese’s papers are just down the street from MDHS at the Enoch Pratt Free Library (here’s a link to the finding aid, which describes what they have). You can go to the EPFL if you wish to check them out– they’re open from 10-5 every day this week. I’ll even be doing research there on Monday & Tuesday. If you want to meet up there I can show you around.
  • Make note on your list of where the poems are located, including links if you have them or copies of actual poems.
  • Choose one poem to tell us about in a blog post.

ELLEN: You mentioned Lehmann’s Hall, where the WLCB met in spring 1891. My map research has shown me that Lehmann’s Hall is at … 861 Garden St.! You mentioned doing some preliminary research on this interesting building last week. Could you flesh this out, and see if you can get a sense of how the WLCB ended up using this space, who else used it at the time, and why they stopped using it? What’s at the site now? (Note that MDHS has at least 1 photo of the original building in its collection.) And then can you encapsulate your discoveries in a blog post?

HUNTER: You ended your blog post from last week about the Woman’s College in Lutherville that the college “ought to be immortalized.” I’d like for you to see what you can do about that. What role did women’s educational institutions play in Baltimore in the 1890-1915 period? In addition to the Woman’s College in Lutherville that you wrote about, could you tell us about Goucher (note that both the wife of Goucher’s founder, and his daughter, belonged to WLBC). What kind of education was offered at these institutions? A wealth of info ought to be available– through histories of the college, histories of women’s colleges in general, or through the College’s archives. If you find good sources, add them to our bibliography. And yes, then write a blog post about it.

KATIE: By transcribing the Board of Managers minutes, you have gotten the largest historical window on Club activities. My reading of these minutes shows that the Club was undergoing a period of institutional change– in terms of changing meetings structure and so on. Could you summarize these changes and post them to the transcription summaries? In particular, what relationship develops between the WLBC and the Poe Memorial Association? And what happens during the 1907-1912 period regarding the Poe memorial & Poe Centennial? This is a great story that I’d like for you to share with the group & blog readers.

SYDNEY: You also have gotten a “big-picture” view of the Club by transcribing the membership lists. From what I see, you have a nearly complete list of members and dues payments from 1890-1893, a complete membership list from about 1903-1904, and Board of Management members from 1898-1916 (with a few gaps). This week, could you please do the following:

  • Focusing on 1903-1904 ONLY, see if you can give us a “generational snapshot” of the club members, by finding out birth and death dates for 1) Board of Management members; and 2) as many of the rest of the membership as possible. Let me know if you need help in locating this information.
  • Include all the information you are able to find next to each person’s name on your spreadsheet(s).
  • What do the relative ages of the women belonging to the Club at this time tell you about the ideological orientation(s) of the Club as a whole? individual members? Here, you may wish to consult the secondary source readings I’ve assigned– Parker & McGerr.

Please plan to post about your findings during our “off week” (July 3-10). And let’s meet at 9am at the Bun Shop on Thursday so that we can discuss the Parker & McGerr readings. If you have any questions at all before then, email me.

I hope you have fun sleuthing!

Posted on by Ellen Roussel

Club and their associations

I have completed transcribing the minutes from the first year and a half of the Woman’s Literary Club, and have been given a detailed view of the inner workings of the Club as they try to establish themselves and their methods of operating as a unit. What I do not have a good perspective on, however, is the Club as an external piece; as in, how does the Club operate within Baltimore, and how does it compare to other women’s groups during this time.

In the March 31st Board Meeting minutes, the President made the suggestion that the Club rent a house, and open it up to lodgers and the neighborhood when Club meetings were not in session. To this thought, some of the women thought that other women’s groups in Baltimore could unite with them in establishing a house that would benefit them all. This seems to suggest the Club wished to associate with other women’s societies in Baltimore.

Looking at other minutes, some of the ladies suggested that women college graduates in the city might be lonely, and that a list of their names should be kept for individuals within the Club to contact them should they feel so inclined. This seems to be an example of when the Club does not want to associate with women who are not linked to another society. I don’t know if this is because it could be risky for the reputation of the Club to associate with these non-Club women, or what, but I am interested to see the development of how the Club asserts themselves within Baltimore and how they interact with other women not in the Club.

Posted on by Katie Kazmierski

Motives behind giving

This past week, I continued working on transcribing the Board of Management meeting minutes from 1908 onwards. A lot caught my interest this week, and I found myself footnoting things with my own comments. I think I’ll write about these in a later post, but for right now, Clara’s post about philanthropy actually got me thinking about the character of the ladies of the Club– or the character they seemed to have wished to portray. As Clara puts it, they almost seemed “more concerned with crafting the image of the spirit of giving rather than the spirit itself.”

While I haven’t stumbled upon in my share of the minutes any talk of philanthropy (which, I guess, serves to prove Clara’s point even more) yet, when I read Clara’s post a particular point in the minutes stood out in my mind.

Basically, in February of 1910 a valued member of the Club, Mrs. Tait, decided to resign her membership after the death of her husband. As a parting gift to show her appreciation of the Club and the women in it, she offers them a bust of Sidney Lanier, an author and poet (who just so happened to also serve in the Confederate army). After some deliberation, the Board agrees that Tait must not know how expensive the bust is, as it’s estimated to be $25, (roughly $610 today!) so they offer to pay for it. Mrs. Tait happily accepts the Board’s offer, and the matter’s closed.

A month later in March, Mrs. Tait dies. Someone suggests that the Club send flowers to her funeral as a tribute, and after some very calculated deliberation on what is “acceptable”, it was deemed “unsuitable” to do this for “one no longer a member”. This is a month after Mrs. Wrenshall writes a lengthy poem to honor another deceased past member, Mrs. Whitney, mind you. But here’s the kicker:

It was recalled that the Board had very lately done a graceful action with regard to Mrs. Tait’s offer to give the Club her bust of Sidney Lanier,–by accepting it only with the condition of returning to her its full value; and having done so while she was living, and able to express–though only verbally–her grateful appreciation of the favor,–a floral tribute was of little consequence now.

This is where Clara’s notion of, are they doing good deeds to be good or to be perceived as good? comes in. It seems like they spent more time sitting and weighing how their actions would make them look than what the actions actually meant. Their treatment of this situation just strikes me as very inauthentic–especially the notion of “oh, well, we did this for her a month ago, so we’re good”. It makes me wonder how much of what the Club does is chosen because of how it will make them appear, not necessarily for its intrinsic value.

Regardless, it boggles my mind that they’d deemed it inappropriate to give flowers to a past member because a) she wasn’t a current member and that somehow made her unworthy and b) they had just done her a favor anyway, so basically they’re off the hook.

Not to mention, Mrs. Tait had only resigned a month before her death. I guess once you resign, you’re good as dead to the Club–they might as well have just given her a bouquet in February.

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 Hunter Flynn · 1 Comment

Halls of memory

Having lived my entire life in the same house in Baltimore County, at the age of thirteen or so I scoured the internet for whatever history I could find about my neighborhood. There wasn’t much of it at all. But I do remember two discoveries: (1) a member of the Padian family dodging the Civil War draft by running off and hiding in the woods with his sweetheart (I haven’t been able to find anything about this since, and I’m beginning to realize it probably didn’t happen at all); and (2) the burning of the woman’s college in Lutherville.

I was glad to discover I didn’t make the second one up. On the meeting of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore on Tuesday, January 31st, 1911, a mention of the disaster is made. The recording secretary (who I now know to be Lydia Crane) writes, “The President spoke of the misfortune that has befallen our member, Mrs. Gallagher and her husband, in the destructive fire at the Maryland College at Lutherville, the institution of which they are the principals and owners.” Mrs. Reese makes the motion that a “letter of sympathy and regret” be sent to the Gallaghers.

Two months later, on April 11th, the fire is mentioned once more. Now back in attendance, Mrs. Gallagher closes the meeting with an original composition—a poem entitled “The Hall of Memory,” which allegedly owes its inspiration to the fire. Crane writes, “Mrs. Gallagher was given the tribute of moist eyes and rapt attention.”

Regrettably, minutes don’t give any more details of the Lutherville fire than that. And I don’t know what kind of literary chops Mrs. Gallagher might have had, but I can’t find the poem either. I can only assume that it’s lost to time.

But stumbling upon a mention of the fire in the minutes did get me to do some of my own research.

The Maryland College for Women at Lutherville, initially the Lutherville Seminary, constructed in 1853, stood at the corner of Francke Ave and Seminary. It occupied a large estate within view of the Jones Falls and overlooking what is today the light rail (then the Northern Central Railway).

The fire broke out around midnight of January 31st—the very day the Club discussed it. According to the Baltimore Sun, the fire began when someone “threw a lighted match down the waste paper chute”—all other accounts I have read of it, however, attribute the fire to smoking. There were seventy-five women present in the building. All escaped unharmed, with one student from Boston, Ruth Keeney, having to jump out the window. Villagers reportedly threw open their doors to get them in out of the cold.

The only individual to sustain any injury of significance was Dr. G. W. Gallagher—our Club member’s husband. In an effort to save some of the rarer articles in his library, he burned two fingers. Our Club member reportedly had to pull him away from the fire, and she telephoned the teachers to wake up the girls. The Baltimore Sun reports that he was “dangerously ill. The shock of the catastrophe has given him a serious relapse and he is now at a cottage near the institution.” He was “kept under medical attention.” It is reported that everything in his library was lost.

The building was burnt beyond repair, but it was eventually reconstructed—though with little of its original grandeur. It closed its doors in the 1950s, and is presently the sight of College Manor, an assisted living facility.

Seminary avenue is one of the most frequented roads in Baltimore County, but few people realize it’s named after a ruined institution. There are no historical markers on the site—only a run-down stone gateway, choked with vines. It doesn’t seem right to me that Mrs. Gallagher’s poem should be lost; the college ought to be immortalized.

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.