Women's Clubs Research Articles

Immigrant women’s clubs in a health-promotion perspective

To gain a deeper understanding of the conditions for and perceived benefits of regular participation in an immigrant women's club, with special focus on the women's wellbeing and the club's potential for health promotion. A qualitative research approach was applied, including semi-structured interviews, which were analysed using the constructivist Grounded Theory method. Individual interviews of 15 women aged 40-59 years and from various ethnic backgrounds were conducted in 2010/2011. Four categories were identified during the analysis. These were labelled "Forming a place for coping with loneliness" (core category), "Learning the rules", "Social bonding and support", and "A space for wellbeing and health". The categories describe how the members deal with the club's status as a municipal association, the structure of the meetings, and the informants' perceptions of being members of a club, as well as the effects of the membership. Immigrant women may find support and perceive increased wellbeing from gathering in clubs with women from a similar background. In addition, the clubs may provide society an opportunity and a space for adapted health-promotion initiatives.

Victory Garden: Ruth Page's Danced Poems in the Time of World War II

During the years 1943–1946, the Chicago choreographer and ballet director Ruth Page created a compact, innovative vehicle for touring, a concert she called Dances with Words and Music. The programme consisted of solo dances accompanied by the poems of Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, e. e. cummings, Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, Hilaire Belloc, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others. Page performed her danced poems, speaking the words herself and dialoguing with them in dance, in New York and Chicago, and at Jacob's Pillow. She also toured extensively to smaller cities scattered throughout the Midwest and South, sponsored by colleges and universities, as well as civic associations, independent producers, women's clubs, and USOs. I argue that Page's marriage of poetry and dance was not just a stopgap measure designed to keep her choreographic footing during the lean years when male dancers were enlisted. It was a deliberate strategy to position herself as a front-runner on the American scene – an architect of the American ballet with a sensitive ‘vernacular ear,’ a worldview, and, crucially, a perspective sympathetic to the psyches of young women and children.

One writer's garden: Eudora Welty's home place

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden-and the friends who remembered it-had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called my mother's garden. By the time Eudora died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history--and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century-with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

Don't Forget Solidarity

A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George's bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. That arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and tremendous influence in the nation as a whole. When leftists won elections in New York and other northern states, whether as Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or Progressives, their influence was constrained severely by the disenfranchisement of working-class voters and the weakness of organized labor in the "Solid South." Not until a coalition of civil rights organizations, interracial unions, women's clubs, and left-wing groups set out to "re-align" the Democratic Party during the Second World War did the Left begin to transcend the legacy of 1877.

A band of noble women: racial politics in the women's peace movement

A Band of Noble Women brings together the histories of the women's peace movement and the black women's club and social reform movement in a story of community and consciousness building between the world wars. Believing that achievement of improved race relations was a central step in establishing world peace, African American and white women initiated new political alliances that challenged the practices of Jim Crow segregation and promoted the leadership of women in transnational politics. Under the auspices of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), they united the artistic agenda of the Harlem Renaissance, suffrage-era organizing tactics, and contemporary debates on race in their efforts to expand women's influence on the politics of war and peace. Plastas shows how WILPF espoused middle-class values and employed gendered forms of organization building, educating thousands of people on issues ranging from U.S. policies in Haiti and Liberia to the need for global disarmament. Highlighting WILPF chapters in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore, the author examines the successes of this interracial movement as well as its failures. A Band of Noble Women enables us to examine more fully the history of race in U.S. women's movements and illuminates the role of the women's peace movement in setting the foundation for the civil rights movement.

California women and politics: from the gold rush to the Great Depression

Forward and Acknowledgements Introduction: California Women and Politics from the Gold Rush to the Great Depression 1. I Do Not Like the White Man ... He is a Liar and a Thief: Testimonios and the Politics of Resistance, Linda Heidenreich 2. Going About and Doing Good: The Lady Managers of San Francisco, 1850-1880, Mary Ann Irwin 3. Woman is Everywhere the Purifier: The Politics of Temperance, 1878-1900, Joshua Paddison 4. Continually Doing Good: The Philanthropy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 1862-1919, Mildred Nichols Hamilton 5. Neutral Territory: The Politics of Settlement Work in San Francisco, 1894-1906, Ann Marie Wilson 6. Citizen Bird: California Women and Bird Protection, 1890-1920, Michelle Kleehammer 7. Saving Redwoods: Clubwomen and Conservation, 1900-1924, Cameron Binkley 8. The Civitas of Women's Political Culture: The Twentieth Century Club of Berkeley, 1904-1929, Sandra L. Henderson 9. We Want the Ballot for Very Different Reasons: Clubwomen, Union Women, and the Internal Politics of the Suffrage Movement, 1896-1911, Susan Englander 10. Awed by the Women's Clubs: Women Voters and Moral Reform, 1913-1914, Teresa Hurley and Jarrod Harrison 11. We Are Not Keen about a Minimum Wage: Union Women, Clubwomen, and the Legislated Minimum Wage, 1913-1931, Rebecca Mead 12. No Undue Familiarity: Gender, Vice, and the Campaign to Regulate Dance Halls, 1911-1921, Mark Hopkins 13. Hearts Brimming with Patriotism: Katherine Edson, Alice Park, and the Politics of War and Peace, 1914-1921, Eunice Eichelberger 14. Historians, Politics, and California Women, Mary Ann Irwin Contributors Index

The price of sexual services in nightclubs and massage parlors of San José, Costa Rica: biological and anthropological interpretations

Los humanos y otros primates intercambian sexo por recursos. En el caso de los humanos, este intercambio incluye el trabajo sexual. Existen pocos estudios sobre los precios del trabajo sexual en Costa Rica. Estudiamos el precio del trabajo sexual femenino en clubes nocturnos y salas de masaje mediante entrevistas a trabajadoras y dueños, y llamadas telefónicas, entre 1994 y 2010. Los precios van desde US$6 para un baile erótico a US$300 para el coito y tomando en cuenta la inflación, no han aumentado mucho en los últimos diez años. Los precios por hora puede llegar a 125 veces el salario mínimo por hora vigente en el país. En comparación con el trabajo sexual independiente hecho en las calles, las mujeres de clubes y salas se benefician de la infraestructura asociada, el acceso a los clientes, y la seguridad que ofrecen estos sitios, y reciben el 40-50% de la cuota pagada por los clientes por servicios directos (bailes, actividad sexual), por lo que no hay indicios de explotación de una u otra parte. La ganancia neta de los clubes es de un 30%. Estos servicios sexuales son relativamente caros, pero los hombres les pagan porque están biológicamente y socialmente predispuestos a querer a estos servicios.

Ima Hogg and an Experiment in Audience Education: The Rice Lectureship in Music (1923–33)

AbstractDuring the 1920s, in a bid to elevate musical taste in Houston, Texas, arts patron Ima Hogg anonymously underwrote a series of public lectures on music at the Rice Institute, now Rice University. A trained musician who had spent considerable time in New York and Europe, Hogg recommended potential lecturers for the series, and her collaborator, the music-loving president of the Institute, Edgar Odell Lovett, worked to engage them. Not all of Hogg's candidates were available, and Lovett used his own contacts to supplement them. The resulting slate of lecturers was a diverse mix of musicians and scholars: Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, John Powell, Harold Morris, George Birkhoff, and Henry Hadow. Their lectures survive in printed form in a scholarly journal published by Rice; they provide some of the most important statements about music by their authors. Hogg's patronage was made possible by an increase in her family's wealth, but her goal of public enlightenment was inspired by her family's tradition of public service (her father had been the governor of Texas) and by her longtime involvement in women's music clubs. Her model for the lectures may have been the didactic music club meeting; Lovett's was the university extension lecture directed toward a community audience. This article details and contextualizes Hogg's patronage in light of contemporary views of women's involvement in the support of music.

Disunity in Diversity: The Controversy Over the Admission of Black Women to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, 1900–1902

From 1900 to 1902, the General Federation of Women's Clubs' official commitment to "unity in diversity" was tested to the limits when an explosive debate over the admission of African American women's clubs deeply, and in some cases irreparably, divided individual clubs and state federations and nearly resulted in the loss of half of the organization's burgeoning membership. The controversy reveals a captivating, complicated, and at times bizarre struggle between Northern and Southern white members of the General Federation to defend their particular views of race and, in many cases, to obfuscate their own deep-seated racial prejudices. Most members ultimately sacrificed principle for the sake of federation unity, albeit a unity without racial diversity, and thus squandered the opportunity to combine the talents and energies of all organized women in an effort toward social justice and humanitarian reform.

Duct tape and WD-40: The information worlds of female investors

Using an everyday life information-seeking (ELIS) perspective, this ethnographic study describes the information-seeking behaviors of women's investment club members. It identifies three general motivations for interest in investing and club membership, and ties those motivations to distinct variations in information behavior. Study findings identify gaps between information needs and use, and highlight potential areas for improving the abilities of female investors to locate, evaluate, and use information for investment decision-making.

Women's Reform Organizations and Wartime Mobilization in World War I-Era Los Angeles

During World War I, the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense served as an intermediary between the federal government and women's voluntary associations. This study of white middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen in Los Angeles, California reveals ways in which local women pursued twin goals of aiding the war effort while pursuing their own, pre-existing agendas. Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women's suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.

Arranging society with flowers: the rise and fall of flower shows in Gympie, 1880–2004

This article analyses the rise and fall of flower shows in Gympie during the period 1880 to 2004. A number of key changes occurred during this time. Originally, flower shows were part of the agricultural show movement, both ideologically and organisationally, meaning they were tied to the colonial project of cultivating the land and taking ownership of it. Over time, this role changed to better reflect the conservative values of those organising flower shows, church women's guilds and service clubs like the Red Cross. By the 1950s and 1960s, flower shows had become significant events on the Gympie events calendar, with fourteen annual events held during this period. However, this article outlines the factors that led to their disappearance, including an ageing population, an inability to attract new members due to the increasing number of women in the workforce and the changing aspirations of women themselves, as they sought to move away from their traditional, gender-prescribed roles into more active positions in society. This paper demonstrates the impact of social change on rural communities and their festivals – dramatically demonstrated by the decline of flower shows in Gympie.

Not Gone with the Wind: Libraries in Oklahoma in the 1930s

Oklahoma in the 1930s dealt with severe depression and drought, both of which affected the development of the state's public libraries. While the libraries experienced growth at the beginning of the century, helped along by the contributions of women's clubs, the establishment of a state library association and agency, and funding legislation, leaner times appeared in the middle years of the 1930s. Oklahoma's libraries began to rejuvenate by the end of the decade, with an increase in services and facilities, and avoided being "gone with the wind" of the Great Depression.

A Good Social Work: Women's Clubs, Libraries, and the Construction of a Secular Society in Utah, 1890-1920

After the renunciation of polygamy, Mormon women formed secular women's clubs as a means of collaborating with non-Mormon women in the construction of a shared secular society. Their common goal was the establishment and maintenance of the mainstream American social order. Activity in these clubs extended women's sphere into the public realm through socially acceptable public activities such as the temperance cause, civic improvements, political reform movements, and child welfare. The women campaigned for public support of libraries as institutions that would construct, preserve, and transmit American culture, educate the young, strengthen the home and family, and reform society.

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers": Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers"Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South Thomas C. Henthorn (bio) In the first decades of the twentieth century Houston, Texas, underwent profound economic and social changes resulting from oil strikes on the Texas Gulf Coast and a subsequent population explosion. In response a unified coalition of reform-minded city builders, yearning for a more orderly community, implemented a host of bureaucratic solutions to ameliorate the dynamics of urbanization. The realization of this community, known universally among reformers as the New South, depended on the effective regulation of the economy, but also control of the social environment in which this new economy would operate.1 It was within this larger commitment to Southern progress that the modernization of social services and charity developed within Houston. Armed with an unequivocal commitment to New South ideology, a core coalition of reformers—elite boosters, club women, and educated urban clergy—embarked on an ambitious social uplift scheme to bring the city in line with national standards in health, education, and social services. To progressives in Houston social uplift encompassed a number of health and welfare policies included as part of city builders' vision to build Houston into a grand metropolis of the New South. An overriding consideration by reformers as they modernized and centralized social services was guarding family life against the ravages of the city. Within this context Southern progressives premised their policies on the belief that building a great city and redeeming Southern society depended on a patriarchal hierarchy of healthy children, dedicated mothers, and hardworking fathers. The discussions that emerged among the coalition of reformers flowed from a decidedly class-bound vision of families. Central to these discussions were representations of women and their contributions to civic life. These representations drew upon middle-class discourses that articulated a racialized version of femininity in which the ideal civic function for women was motherhood. The result was a set of welfare practices that defined working-class [End Page 71] men and women's public civic capacity by their private paternal and maternal roles. Such representations had real social and economic effects on the lives of working-class women and their families. These gendered concepts of the civic form allowed reformers to set the terms of the debate about the proper place of men and women in a rapidly changing urban society. Hence, as city builders erected the built environment, they wished to construct, simultaneously, good mothers and good fathers as means of mediating the unwieldy dynamics of urbanization. Constructing representations of motherhood as a way to influence the distribution of limited social welfare resources also constituted a particularly intense struggle around race. As residents of a Southern city, Houston's city builders saw maintaining racial hierarchies amid changing social and economic circumstances as fundamental to the New South's civic culture. Southern views on race emphasized the differences between black and white. But at the dawn of the twentieth century the lines between race and what Americans refer to as ethnicity were not clear. This fluidity in racial thinking was due to large numbers of foreign-born immigrants who had been streaming into American cities for the past several decades. And this fluidity complicated the overly simplistic view of race in Houston. Even though reformers characterized some of their efforts as "immigrant work," when it came to uplifting families, charity workers only seldom racialized their gendered representations of the family in a manner that distinguished foreign-born women from native-born whites. Rather, a shared racial identity between foreign-born and native-born white women crystallized poignantly the necessity, reformers believed, to impress upon all newcomers normative Anglo middle-class ideals—religious faith, good citizenship, an appreciation for hard work, and moral strictness.2 Charity workers, however, consistently reproduced racialized narratives about the fitness of Mexican, and especially black, families in social policies that addressed health and hygiene, child care, and settlement work. Progressive economic and social uplift policies in the New South were foremost predicated on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Jim Crow laws and the traditions of a segregated society meant that any social service provided to African Americans would be...

"The Secret to a Successful Farm Organization": Township Farm Bureau Women's Clubs in Iowa, 1945–1970

"The Secret to a Successful Farm Organization": Township Farm Bureau Women's Clubs in Iowa, 1945–1970

The Postwar Black Women's Club Movement: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and American Political Development, 1940–1960

This article examines the intersection of race, gender, and American political development in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in the mid-twentieth century. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the NACW was one of the last remaining autonomous Black organizations that could truly be called “civic.” Membership was decentralized, active, and widespread among female citizens who might not otherwise be engaged in public affairs. Political change and subsequent developments in African American and women's organizations in the mid-twentiethh century encouraged NACW leaders to begin considering new approaches to organizing Black womanhood. The collective identity that defined NACW clubwomen's public activism as local, nonpolitical, and nonpartisan eventually gave way to more deliberately nationalized, partisan, and political forms. This article argues that NACW clubwomen worked in solidarity and shared common goals with other African American and civil rights organizations, but faced a transformation unique to women's clubs, one that involved questions not only about who would participate in public life, but also about how and through what kinds of organizations. The struggles of the NACW to integrate the collective identities that defined their race and their gender, on the one hand, with forms, and, on the other hand with strategies of organization are particularly useful for thinking and theorizing about contemporary forms of intersectionality.

Julia Lathrop and the Children's Bureau

“WITH A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING of the importance of immunization and moral support from an older student, each child finds the process an interesting one.” So reads the caption on this photograph, one of a collection of some 160 photographs at the National Library of Medicine originally assembled by the Children's Bureau. Once part of the US Department of Labor and now an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Children's Bureau was the first US agency devoted to the condition and welfare of the nation's children. It was also the first US agency to be headed by a woman. Julia Lathrop (1858–1932) was appointed the first director in 1912, years before women achieved the right to vote. She held the position during the formative first years of the Bureau, until 1921, and then devoted herself to international efforts on children's health and welfare. Lathrop was one of a remarkable cohort of activist women at the turn of the century. Born in Rockford, Illinois, and her father one of the founders of the Republican Party, Lathrop graduated from Vassar in 1880. She then worked in her father's law firm before moving to Hull House in 1890, joining Jane Addams in the effort to document and address the living conditions of the poor. This led to her appointment in 1892 to the Illinois State Board of Charities, and a decade later, to heading the Children's Bureau. Image originally produced by the Georgia State Department of Public Health, currently part of the Children's Bureau Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. Lathrop embraced the traditionally female topic of infant and maternal care and mortality with a distinctive program.1 She strongly promoted the use of metrics, notably compilations of birth and death data; she mounted a coordinated program of producing authoritative brochures on infant care and advertised them through “Baby Weeks”; and she emphasized social justice: “The Children's Bureau is an expression of the nation's sense of justice, and the justice of today is born of yesterday's pity.”2(p32) Throughout, Lathrop maintained strong connections to the women of the country, recruiting a vast pool of volunteers from women's clubs to help her underfunded agency. Perhaps the greatest success engineered by Lathrop and her compatriots came in 1921, just as she was leaving office: the passage of the Sheppard–Towner Act. The act provided matching funding to states to help reduce infant and maternal mortality—with the funds administered by the Children's Bureau. In effect, the Sheppard–Towner Act extended the work of the Children's Bureau to the states, and it was the first time that the federal government provided direct support for social welfare. But the act fell afoul of changing political and economic conditions, and it was allowed to lapse in 1929. Some of its provisions did make their way into the Social Security Act of 1935.3 By that time, the moment had passed. Lathrop's conjoining of metrics and justice had begun to pull apart: scientific sociology did not see her statistical work as sufficiently rigorous, and the new discipline downplayed the passionate concern for social justice that motivated Lathrop and her colleagues. More significantly, it began to seem anomalous that women should be confined to a traditionally female part of the government. In 1933, Frances Perkins, a generation younger than Lathrop, became the first woman US cabinet secretary as head of the Department of Labor, where the Children's Bureau was located. But few believed that her gender should limit her mission.

Gender differences in expatriate adjustment

Women are still underrepresented in expatriate assignments. This study investigates whether there are any gender differences in expatriate adjustment that could help account for the low share of female expatriates. The study replicates the analysis of Selmer and Leung's (2003) exploratory research. It confirms their findings and adds further detail to the understanding of gender differences in expatriate adjustment. The study is based on a cross-sectional survey, mainly of employed members in UK and US women's clubs in Frankfurt and Madrid and their partners. This study shows that women tend to be better adjusted than men overall. They are ahead especially in important areas such as the building and maintaining of relationships. The paper provides important insight into the differences in adjustment among female and male expatriate employees. It provides an instrument that can be used in the further study of these differences. The study supplies further evidence that companies err if they fail to send women on assignments abroad.

Melba Porter Hay . Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and the Battle for a New South. Foreword by MarjorieJulianSpruill. (Topics in Kentucky History.) Lexington : University Press of Kentucky . 2009 . Pp. xiv, 353. $40.00.

Madeline McDowell Breckinridge was a critical figure in Kentucky Progressivism and the woman suffrage movement. Although her sister-in-law, the scholar and reformer Sophonisba Breckinridge, published her biography in 1921, scholars of southern women and Progressivism will be grateful to Melba Porter Hay for producing a new, thoroughly researched, and well-written biography that will draw much-deserved attention to Breckinridge. Breckinridge was a founder and leader of the Lexington Associated Charities and the Civic League as well as an active force in the Fortnightly Woman's Club (later the Woman's Club of Central Kentucky). While she supported numerous social reforms in a plethora of areas, she was most dedicated to tuberculosis work, the establishment of Lincoln model school and playground, the promotion of scientific charity, and the woman suffrage movement. Hay suggests that her accomplishments were even more extraordinary considering that Breckinridge suffered from tuberculosis and often had to leave Lexington to seek a rest cure for her illness. Hay also suggests that the support of her husband Desha Breckinridge was critical to her success. As editor and publisher of the Lexington Herald, Desha provided much more than moral support. The newspaper became a forum for Madeline to air her views and persuade Lexington's (and Kentucky's) citizens of the wisdom of Progressive reform. Eventually Desha fully supported woman suffrage, and the two used the newspaper to try to persuade their readers to champion the Nineteenth Amendment.