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= The Saturday Morning Club=

The Saturday Morning Club is a Boston social and intellectual club for women intended to “promote culture and social intercourse.” It was founded in 1871 by Julia Ward Howe to provide an educational outlet for her teenage daughters and other young women of the Boston social elite. Still active today, it has since evolved into a club for adult women willing to write and present one academic paper a year, on the subject of their choosing within certain set themes.

Founding of the Saturday Morning Club
The Saturday Morning Club was founded in 1871 by Julia Ward Howe, a leading abolitionist, activist, and prominent member of Boston society. According to her youngest daughter, Maud Howe Elliot, Howe was inspired to found the Club when Maud complained about how much time her mother “wasted” on “old women” at meetings and societies, adding “Now if you were doing something for girls there might be some sense in it.” While Maud only intended to be “saucy,” it inspired her mother, who felt thatMaud and her peers needed something in their lives more challenging than sewing circles and debutante balls. While most institutes of higher education remained closed to women, she felt her daughters would benefit from contemplating the issues of the day and engaging with intellectual pursuits, just as the members of her many clubs for adult women did. Thus inspired, Julia Ward Howe asked Maud to draw up a list of young female friends to invite, and the Saturday Morning Club was born.

Early Years (1871-1914)
In these early years, the young women of the Saturday Morning Club would gather at Howe’s home to hear a lecture from a noteworthy Boston intellectual or activist one Saturday and then assemble again the following week for a members-only discussion of the ideas and arguments presented in the lecture the week prior. The Club’s early lecturers were a remarkably prestigious group, including luminaries such as Amos Bronson Alcott, Thomas Sterry Hunt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain. After speaking before the girls, Emerson raved of the Club’s excellence as an audience, telling The Boston Post that the Saturday Morning Club was “the keenest in perception, and the most appreciative of good things, of any audience he ever spoke before,” and that he “begged the privilege of reading his new papers to them before they were read elsewhere, because he wanted to test them by the effect they had on these girls.”

In the post-lecture discussion groups, however, success varied from week to week. According to Club records, for example, after hearing Thomas Sterry Hunt lecture on the subject of “Nebular Hypothesis,” the Club met the following week hoping to discuss “The History of the Solar System in Relation to the Mind of Man and the Immortality of the Soul,” but a “dead silence prevailed” until the conversation gradually drifted into less lofty subjects. At a subsequent meeting, however, when the subject “The Relation of Women to Dress” was addressed, a “lively discussion” on the “unsuitableness and untidiness of wearing long dresses with hoops and bustles in dirty streets” ensued, culminating in a resolution that “short dresses are better and more comfortable in the streets” being carried by a large majority.

To these collective intellectual pursuits, Howe and the girls also added special groups devoted to cookery, botany, mathematics, political economy, reading Dante in English and Italian, art, and drama. These special groups flourished to varying degrees—while the cooking, botany, and literary groups were immediately and lastingly popular, the groups devoted to political economy and mathematics soon dissolved without Julia Ward Howe’s close supervision.

In 1874, the Club’s list of activities expanded further still, adding evening entertainments “literary and musical” to their repertoire. The first, held at Julia Ward Howe’s home, consisted of Club members performing vocal and instrumental music, one delivering a prepared essay, a play in two acts, and a light meal, prepared by the cookery group. The expenditure necessary to support these entertainments led the Saturday Morning Club to raise its annual “subscription fee” from $1.50 to $1.75 and form a finance committee.

From this point on, the Saturday Morning Club grew rapidly in size. While limited to just 40 members in 1871, by 1887 its roster had swelled to include 191 young women. In addition to their traditional academic pursuits and private entertainments, they also began to host public performances and charity concerts. In March of 1890, they staged an amateur production of Sophocles’s Antigone, which ran for four nights and raised a total of $2,230 which the Club donated to various local charities. In February of 1895, they staged a 4-night run of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale at Copley Hall, in front of an audience of 850 people. This performance received warm praise from The Boston Transcript, which wrote that the Saturday Morning Club performed with “a genuine Shakespearean spirit, and with distinction worthy of the difficult task attempted.” In 1904, the Club mounted a public, all-female production of Pride and Prejudice and, in 1913, they finally allowed men to join them on the stage in an adaptation of The Arabian Nights, once again in Copley Hall. (photos of productions here: http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/fullRecordDisplay?_collection=via&inoID=799980&recordNumber=13&fullgridwidth=5&method=view&recordViewFormat=grid_)

Along with social engagements and their regular Saturday lectures, these amateur theatricals came to define the period just before World War I, when the Saturday Morning Club was at the peak of its size and popularity.

Service During World War I
Shortly after World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, the members of the Saturday Morning Club gathered to discuss what role the Club should play in the coming crisis. Although they felt the weight of President Woodrow Wilson’s plea for Americans to remain neutral “in thought and deed,” the members of the Saturday Morning Club also felt it was their responsibility to follow Julia Ward Howe’s active, principled example from the Civil War and “show their stern resentment at the misery brought so unjustly into the world, and to help the alleviation of suffering.”  They decided, however, to pursue this goal as individuals rather than devoting the Saturday Morning Club as an organization to the cause. However, as individuals, their contributions to the war effort were substantial, and give some idea of the type of women whom the Club counted as members.

At the Saturday Morning Club’s first annual meeting after Armistice, on April 12, 1919, club member Helen G. Means presented a full account of the Saturday Morning Club members’ volunteer activities during the war, providing only the activities but not the names of the members who performed them. As a result, we know that the 66 Saturday Morning Club members who shared their experiences performed 43 different kinds of service to the war effort. Volunteering for the Red Cross, both at home and abroad, was the most common service rendered, with over 30 members participating, including three who devoted themselves to its work full-time. The next most popular recipient of the Saturday Morning Club’s energies was the American Fund for French Wounded, where 25 members provided service, including one who worked “all day, every day” for nearly two years packing crates of donated goods to be sent to France. Another unsurprisingly pervasive activity was fundraising. Saturday Morning Club members’ time and energy enriched the coffers of the Lafayette Club, the Italian Relief Fund, the British Relief Fund, and the Polish Relief Fund—where some of the Club members’ theatrical experiences were put to good use staging and costuming several Polish plays.

Manufacturing bandages and other medical supplies was also a popular activity. Three members, together with Boston’s Civic Federation, created and ran a workroom staffed by unemployed women (including a few additional members of the Club) to make surgical dressings. Yet another member of the Saturday Morning Club ran another surgical dressing workroom at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital). While this one was less bustling than that of the Civic Federation, it was quite popular with Club members, as a total of 17 volunteered there throughout the war.

In addition to these common pursuits, some members took on quite distinctive projects. For example, one member, together with her husband, planned, built, and ran the large Army and Navy Canteen on Boston Common, where other members volunteered as food servers, hostesses, and even as dishwashers. Four members were a part of Boston’s Special Aid Society, including two who, as part of that society’s Active Corps, taught themselves how to read Braille type in order to assist returning soldiers blinded by exposure to poison gas. One member, a self-identified “lover of England,” became a part of the Lonely Soldier Mission, which paired lonely soldiers abroad with cheerful pen pals back home. Through this service, she wrote 14 letters a week to soldiers all over the globe, composing more than 200 such letters before the war made reaching her correspondents impossible. Two other members personally undertook and secured the adoption of French children orphaned by the war. One member, by participating in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force’s Radio School, achieved the rank of Yeoman (F.) in active service. And, perhaps most impressive, one member was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for her work nursing and feeding wounded soldiers on the front lines in France, sometimes under shell fire. In these efforts and many others, the members of the Saturday Morning Club truly honored the spirit of Julia Ward Howe, the erstwhile “Queen of Clubs.”

World War I – Present
This “strenuous and exhausting” flurry of wartime volunteering, however, brought to the Saturday Morning Club members “a desire for relaxation” and “little taste for the planning and carrying out of any extensive entertainments or dramatic enterprises.” The Club’s older members had gotten their fill of “dramatic doings” in their younger years with the Club, and its new, young members “had little time at their disposal to devote to Club activities beyond that precious hour on Saturday.”   Unlike its early years, the Saturday Morning Club was no longer the only organization catering to the needs and interests of well-bred young women—what had been “a unique and almost starting occurrence” in 1871 when Howe founded the Club was now a mission embraced by “so many clubs and organizations…that the demands on everyone are almost overwhelming.” As a result of these pressures, the Club began to recognize that it was no longer a “young girl’s organization,” but instead “a group of older women…valiantly upholding early traditions.”  Similarly, high-quality lecturers were more in demand and the Club could no longer secure their services with “love and a modest floral tribute,” as they had in the Saturday Morning Club’s early years. These large changes led the Club to shift its emphasis from the consumption of other people’s erudite opinions to the production and refinement of their own, a focus that has continued to guide the Club’s output all the way through to the present day.

To facilitate this new direction, the Saturday Morning Club created a discussion committee whose membership changes from year to year, responsible for drawing up a list of topics to focus on at each meeting of the season. These topics are sent out to the Club’s members in May of each year. Members are then responsible for looking over the season’s topics, selecting their top three subjects, and sending their slip back to the Club president. The president then assigns each member a topic and each member commits to presenting an academic paper on any subject related to that topic—the topics are generally broad which allows the members to pursue their individual interests while keeping a uniform theme for the Club’s efforts. The Saturday Morning Club’s “season” lasts from October through April and consists of about twelve Saturday morning meetings; the number fluctuates based on the number of active members presenting papers each season. At each meeting, two members present their papers, each taking about fifteen minutes, the Club discusses their papers, and, after about an hour, they adjourn to lunch. The papers are then added to the Saturday Morning Club’s archive at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, where they have been housed since the 1960s.