By Mary I. Wood

Manager Bureau of Information, General Federation of Women's

I

Clubs.

N May of this present year there convened at Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the largest and most representative bodies of women which the world has ever known. In very truth all roads, for American women at least, led this year not to Rome but to the enterprising city on the banks of the Ohio: from village and hamlet, from city and town, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian provinces to the Isthmus of Panama, and even from a few foreign ports, regularly appointed and accredited delegates came, representing an organized body of eight hundred thousand women who comprise the membership of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

The name of the organization is admitted by all to be an unfortunate one since the word "club" as applied to a body of individuals has come to mean, in the common acceptance of the term, an organization which exists largely for purposes of entertainment and amusement. The term as applied to men's clubs, whist clubs, country clubs and the countless other clubs which exist in every locality is in no wise applicable in the same sense to the women's clubs. The latter, in contradistinction to the former, exist not at all for entertainment but rather for the mental, moral and social improvement of the members and their several communities. The Women's Club is one of the few active organizations which is neither constructive nor destructive, which exists neither to inaugurate some notable reform nor to demolish an existing evil. The Women's Club has no policy, no creed. Its one watchword is "Service" and in this one word lies the whole interpretation of its meaning, its sole reason for existence.

A PHASE OF EVOLUTION

The club movement has been of rapid growth, so rapid, indeed, that it has been difficult for the public to keep pace

with it. It has been looked upon as a fad, a harmless but pretentious fad to be thrown aside whenever the newness shall have worn away. Indeed, there have been good women, themselves members of active clubs, who have failed to catch the full significance of the great movement which teems with possibilities and with power. There have been those outside the membership who have thought that the movement signified a banding together of women who desired power and position or social prestige. But the club movement is in reality none of these things. It is a simple phase of the whole scheme of evolution, a natural result of the readjustment necessary to the great economic and moral awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The germ of its existence may be found as far back as that period of awakening known to history as the Renaissance, which placed the first emphasis upon the value of the individual. There were a few women of leisure, even then, who yearned to be of real value to civilization, women who willingly gave up the pursuit of purely personal pleasure for the sake of culture.

It may be well to note, in passing, that the Women's Club as a feature of civilization is an organization which is in harmony with the part which seems to have been marked out for women in the great scheme of evolution. If we look backward over the ages and note the relation of the sexes to each other and the relation of each sex to the affairs of the world, we shall see that the distinction and differentiation of the sexes is not a difference of labor nor of recreation wholly, but rather a difference of function. The hard and fast lines with which the conservative people of the present day seek to surround what they are pleased to term. woman's sphere, seem to melt away when differences of time and place are taken into consideration. In America today, man ploughs the field and tills the soil, but one need not go far among the peasant people in Europe to find that this masculine occupation in America is a feminine one in many countries abroad. With the common people of

our own country, cooking is a feminine art but it becomes a distinctly masculine accomplishment in the hands of the French chef of the great hotel or restaurant. Playing upon the piano is a masculine or feminine accomplishment according merely to whether the artist be Paderewski or Mme. Samaroff. Such examples as these might be given ad infinitum, from the beginning of history down to the present time, examples which would prove conclusively that the occupation of man and woman now and in the past and in the future, is ever a matter of expediency, both of time and place and attendant conditions.

But a study of the race demonstrates another fact which maintains throughout the ages with but slight deviation. There are certain functions of man and certain functions of woman which may with safety be relied upon. Women are not creators: they are not discoverers: they are not inventors: they are not warriors. The function of man seems to embrace the creative, inventive, exploring and fighting qualities. But whenever man has entered new fields, either of country or of thought, he has brought woman with him to conserve and preserve the good of the new life into which he himself has entered. In all times and ages, this high calling of conserver and preserver has belonged almost exclusively to woman.

It is upon this fundamentally true basis that the Woman's Club movement is founded: there was no great scheme of distinct and separate work laid down by the founders of the club movement nor do we find today, after the organization has been in existence almost fifty years, a desire or an effort, on the part of the leaders, to accomplish any great work which shall be apart from that of other forces which are working toward the same end, namely, a higher and better civilization.

A SIGNIFICANT DATE

Although the exact date of the formation of the first club, or even the exact fact of which was that first club is still a matter of some difference of opinion, it is safe to

state that the club movement, as it is understood today, took tangible shape not far from the year 1866. This is a significant date, since it marked the settling down of the country after the fierce struggle which, in North and South alike, had wrought havoc in the hearts of the American people. Previous to the war between the states there had been heard the voices of women asking for greater advantages and privileges. Fichte, Goethe and the entire German school which advocated individual sovereignty found in Mary Wollstonecraft a great woman exponent. Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and other women had also worked for the broadening of educational opportunities for women early in the century.

There was at that time everywhere an awakening of a communal spirit and a growing appreciation of the value of the individual in the community, as well as the right of each to the possession and use of individual thought and action. The nineteenth century will go down in history forever stamped with the mark of an aroused conscience which moralized and humanized all nature. It demanded a broader human sympathy and a clearer recognition of the rights of one's fellow-men. It was also an era of unprecedented inventive and industrial activity which completely revolutionized the economic world. It developed new duties and new responsibilities for woman as well as man. Perhaps no picture shows more plainly the great change which the inventive, industrial period of the middle of the nineteenth century wrought in the life of woman than to glance at the home life of the women of the first quarter of the century and compare it with that of the last quarter.

REVOLUTION IN FAMILY CONDITIONS

It might be well to look at a pioneer family of New England as they sit at their evening meal. At the table are the father, mother, and a large family of children. Under their feet the carpet, if they are so fortunate as to possess one, is the work of the housewife. She it is who has torn and sewed those rags and braided them into rugs or, at the

great loom under the rafters of the upper room, woven them into the breadths of carpeting which cover the floor. From the huge timbers overhead hang every kind of dried fruit and berry, while from rafters and beams of still other rooms, or deeply hidden away in barrels, are great cuts of meat; all conserved and preserved by her untiring energy. Every article of food upon the table is the result of her labor. Every article of clothing which is worn by the good man of the house and by each of his children, unless the shoes be excepted, is the result of her handiwork. A little later, as they retire for the night, they sleep upon beds, the feathers for which were plucked and the ticks made and filled by this same active woman; they sleep also between sheets and under blankets, patchwork quilt and coverlid, which are the work of her hands. The doorway of that early cottage was the gateway between the kingdom of man and that of woman. Beyond that doorway man toiled, tending the flocks and tilling the soil and bringing to that gateway the raw material which woman received and straightway, within the home, converted into the finished product. She carded and spun, wove, cut, fashioned and sewed, until the sheep's fleece became clothing for the entire family. She brewed, baked, preserved and cured until the berries of the field, the yield of the earth, and the patient animals themselves became food for those dependent upon her.

Into this active, restricted, but altogether useful life of woman came a new factor which was to revolutionize that life. Nor is it without significance that that factor came not as a result of her own unrest or dissatisfaction, but as a result of that ever-inventive and resourceful mind of man, which was alert both to the financial and economic advantage of his own ability to bring about marvelous changes in the established order of things. It was the invasion of her home industries by such labor saving devices as the sewing machine, the knitting machine, the carder, the spooler, the spinning jenny and the loom, driven by motive power within the walls of great factories, that turned the