The Saturday Evening Girls: A Progressive Era Library Club and the Intellectual Life of Working Class and Immigrant Girls in Turn-of-the-Century Boston

Abstract

Originally established in 1899 to provide intellectual and social stimulation on Saturday evenings to poor, young Jewish and Italian working women and girls living in the North End of Boston, the Saturday Evening Girls' Club successfully expanded into seven additional library clubs over the next twenty years. By the 1910s, the clubs were supporting approximately 250 members, publishing a newspaper called the S.E.G. News, and operating an acclaimed art pottery, the Paul Revere Pottery. Under the tutelage of Edith Guerrier, a librarian, her partner Edith Brown, an artist, and Helen Osborne Storrow, their financial patron, the clubs' meetings focused on weekly discussions of literature, economics, politics, music, art, and employment opportunities. Participation in these clubs enabled some of the members to pursue higher education at a significantly greater rate than their cohort, and indeed even that of native-born white women of the time period. Using rarely available primary documents, I examine the role clubs and social reform organizations played in advancing educational and economic agendas, and provide a rare look at the intellectual life of immigrant and working-class women.