By Guy Trammell
In February 1892, Margaret James Murray Washington, Booker T. Washington’s third wife and Tuskegee Institute’s Dean of Women, formed the Mother’s Clubs in central Alabama. The clubs provided child care, education, hygiene, literacy and home care for 300 colored women.
In 1895, Margaret founded the Tuskegee Women’s Club, with 13 faculty wives and female teachers meeting twice monthly. One of the members, Adella Hunt Logan,Tuskegee University’s first librarian, was the first Alabama advocate with Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage movement. Though Black, her light skin allowed her to join the movement undetected. She wrote and spoke across the country on how women’s right to vote would help stop the rape and abuse of Black women. Club members also engaged in prison reform, community hygiene, anti-lynching advocacy, and helped form local communities around Macon County.
With Jim Crow laws to keep Blacks as second-class citizens and the lynching of Black men for allegedly raping white women, a prominent voice joined in, specifically condemning Black women. James W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association, published a denouncement of all Black people and targeted Black women as “prostitutes, and all were thieves and liars.” White readers accepted his fabrications despite the legions of hard-working Black women, many among them articulate college graduates.
This led Boston’s Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, in 1895, to contact Margaret Washington to join her in co-founding the National Federation of African American Women to address nationally the false view of Black people; Margaret became the Federation’s first president. In July 1896, at a meeting in the 19th Street Baptist Church in Washington D.C. the Federation joined forces with the National League of Colored Women to create the National Association of Colored Women, and elected Mary Church Terrell as president.
By 1904, Josephine Beall Willson Bruce, editor of the National Association of Colored Women’s publication, National Notes, as well as Tuskegee Institute’s female principal, reported that they had organized young women’s clubs, married women’s clubs, musical and literary clubs, hospital and orphanage support clubs. They also raised funds to support Southern colored children’s schools, which received only one-third the state support of white schools.
By 1916, the organization operated through their 35 departments, including Legislation, Social Science, Young Women’s Work, Business, Industrial and Social Conditions, Suffrage, Civics, Juvenile Court, Rural and Railroad Conditions, Health and Hygiene. They later raised $5 million for the U.S. in World War 1, then questioned how our nation could “make the world safe for democracy” but fail to protect the rights of Black people at home.
In 1922, Margaret Washington founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, promoting Black history, Black literature in schools, and improved conditions for Haiti, Cuba and India. In Prague, in 1929, the council promoted world peace and in 1933, they prevented US intervention in Liberia.
What about you, Faithful Reader? Are you sitting back and getting upset about what is going on? Letting current issues cloud your mind? What are you going to do?? Get up! Get Started!!
By Amy Miller
When I was a kid we went to the Harmonie Club, a private men’s social club on East 60th Street. Sometimes we went for lunch, but only during the hours women and children were allowed, and sometimes we went to a kid’s event, perhaps a clown show, while the grown-ups dined.
I loved the macaroons wrapped in tissue-thin paper and being a kid at a big round table with relatives. I knew nothing of the history of the club, founded in 1852 by German Jewish immigrants in New York City who had been denied entry to an older, non-Jewish club. The fact that women could not be full members and were allowed entry only for certain meals did not faze me.
In fact, the Harmonie was considered progressive compared to other clubs meant for socializing, dining and engaging in shared interests when it broadened its rules to allow women at all meals, and then in 1986 when it invited in its first female member. In 2018 the Harmonie also hired its first female general manager, one of the first female general managers in New York City club history.
My mother grew up going to the Harmonie, attending its dances and dining there when invited. After getting married, having three kids, running the PTA, getting a doctorate degree and engaging in a successful professional life, my mom decided she deserved a club of her own. At that point she joined the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, which was founded in 1909 and describes itself as a place where women “gathered to socialize, exchange ideas and enjoy one another’s company.”
With its bright yellow home page and ornately scripted font, even the front page of the club’s website looks feminine. Although nothing on its site openly indicates the club is female only, it remains a women’s club. But, by my mom’s telling it wasn’t always open to Jews.
Typically quite unpretentious, my mom was quietly tickled by her own membership in this club on East 66th Street that had drawn such elite members as Eleanor Roosevelt, Willa Cather, Margaret Mead and Helen Hayes.
What my mother particularly liked about the “Cos Club,” though, represented a slight clash in the values of two eras. After my father died, the Club allowed my mom to take couples or men for a meal without having to grab for the check. This would save the men dining with my mom from the embarrassment of letting a woman pay. I like to think that in the next generation, my generation, that is no longer an issue.
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