Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Wrap-up . . . and launch

So long, summer! Hello, fall!

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
Big Ass Map
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!

Posted on by Clara Love

Publication

I ran into Dr. Cole on campus this week, and we had a brief chat regarding my upcoming assignment, which is to track how Lizette Woodworth Reese’s poetic career grew and was shaped over the course of her experience with the Club. One thing we touched upon was how determined many members of the Club were to get their works published, or at least to share their own original works with their peers. In thinking about the work I’ve done so far with the Club programs, I’m pleasantly surprised at how frequently these women brought their own literary and artistic talents to the table right alongside readings and discussions of established works of (men’s) literature. Whether they read or presented their own works or had a fellow club member do so for them, I have come across hundreds of instances of original writing and art being given a platform at club meetings.

Reading Sydney’s post about searching for information about Club members when we often have only a husband’s name to work with made me similarly frustrated. Especially in the context of producing original content, it’s a little disheartening to reflect on how little I know or would be able to know about a married woman who wrote something still under her husband’s name. This issue is further complicated in my corner by the fact that very often, the actual titles of the women’s original work is not listed on programs. Instead, title of the reading or presentation was often just something like “A Story,” “Two Poems,” or “A Sketch,” with no further clues as to what it might be about. Sometimes however, this was not so, and I am fortunate to have some actual titles on record. In fact, some readings of original works have titles that include the title of an actual upcoming published volume, particularly Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese, who alongside Miss Virginia Woodward Cloud and a few others, I have noticed reading most frequently.

I’m still curious as to how much of a collaborative process these public readings of original work were, particularly the ones that come from or led to publication. Are the works just labeled “Story,” or “Poem,” works in progress? Did these women provide feedback for each other like a writing workshop, or were they simply enjoying one another’s pieces? I hope to find out more this week as I delve into this topic through the lens of Lizette.

Posted on by Clara Love

Programs, Revisited

This past week, I spent more time with the nine years’ worth of programs I transcribed during our first week, fitting the information into a spreadsheet in the hopes of making it all more easily sortable and searchable. As I reread all of the programs, I kept our conversations from our coffeeshop meeting in mind. One part of the Club that I paid special attention to this time around was the rise and development of their meetings and committee dedicated to philanthropy. By 1900, the most recent year of programs I transcribed, the Club had a ‘Committee on Modern Philanthropy,’ led by Mrs. John M. Carter, which would lead meetings consisting of a few talks and presentations. Sometimes, these meetings would have talks dedicated to what seem to be causes these women deemed worthy of donation in the spirit of philanthropy, such as a meeting in January of 1896 that contained presentations such as “Children of the State” and “For Suffering Humanity.” However, more frequent amongst the programs than these sorts of pointed topics are far more generalized talks and mentions of philanthropy, such as “Philanthropy–Its History and Methods,” “Some Phases of Philanthropy,” “The Higher Education of Women applied to Philanthropy,” and “What is Philanthropy?” to name a few from across the span of 1890-1900. Occasionally the Club would host debates, which I mentioned in my post from last week, that sometimes had to do with one of the aforementioned ‘worthy causes,’ however, as I believe we discussed at our meeting, these debates do not seem to result in any direct action, they just look like an intellectual exercise performed on the backs of people in need. This emphasis on philanthropy as a concept instead of an action with direction and effect on the world, to me, goes hand in hand with conversations and questions raised at our meeting–what were these elite women actually doing with their platform? It seems to me, having primarily interacted with programs that provide little detail or summary of the talks and presentations, that these women are more concerned with crafting the image of the spirit of giving rather than the spirit itself. Again, the higher frequency of discussion of philanthropy in general instead of how to best allocate any real funds to those in need just seems like an intellectual exercise, or even a brag, done at the expense of others these women would deem unworthy of Club membership. I’m curious as to how much of their funds from dues, etc., were used for actual philanthropy, since they have a whole committee dedicated to it but no programs mentioning neither donation nor public activism and/or volunteer work (or anything of the sort).

Posted on by Clara Love

Snippets from Nine Years of Club Programs

Over the past week, I’ve transcribed programs from the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore spanning from October of 1890 to June of 1899. While it’s often been difficult to glean more than surface-level information from these documents, like names and general topics, a few things that I’ve noticed have piqued my interest. For instance, I’ve made note of each time a woman with a doctorate spoke to the club, or was listed on a program–so far, nine times in nine years. There have also been a handful of non-doctor professors or instructors who have been noted as such. Many women appear to be sharing their own written works, like short stories or poems, with the club, or reading aloud the projects of their peers. There are also meetings dedicated entirely to music performed by club members. I think this sharing of personal accomplishments amongst the presentations and discussions with loftier, academic titles is lovely–though I don’t have any more information from the program itself beyond the fact that a woman is sharing her work, it’s clear that these women gather to both spread knowledge and support each other in creative endeavors.

It’s also been interesting just to see how little the formatting of the programs themselves has changed over almost a decade. There are small discrepancies in phrasing from each to the next, but overall the largest change I’ve noticed has been the design of the decorative trim. Every program is printed in purple, and I’ve seen a handwritten note on stationary stamped with the club’s crest, also in purple, and I wonder why that specific aesthetic choice was made from the very beginning.  Later on in the years I’ve transcribed, though, there have been some programs that do stand out from the rest. A handful of programs document a club debate, and list the topic, key question, and who will argue for each side, and also note that after such debates, the entire rest of the club was invited to share their own thoughts. Another part of this that I found notable was the rigor with which these debates were laid out; in some programs, it’s specified that a member of the general body of the club will have a maximum of two minutes to speak.

The instance when I received the most personal information about members of the club occurred while reading the the ‘program’ for October 30, 1894. There is no program for this date, just a handwritten note that was likely posted on a door to the meeting-place announcing that there would be no meeting that day since a woman who had been a member since the club’s conception, Mrs. Easter, had died, and encouraging club members to attend her funeral instead. A few weeks later, the club had an entire meeting dedicated to memorializing Mrs. Easter, with a eulogy of sorts and readings from her poems and critiques. It was so nice to see within these seemingly straightforward programs the kind of care that goes on behind the scenes of this organization, and I’m looking forward to similar types of revelations.