Dante's Not Dead: New York Women's Clubs and the Local, 1910–22

Modern historians have pointed to GFWC President Decker’s declaration that "Dante is dead" and that women's clubs should "drop the study of his ‘Inferno’ and proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order" as a tangible turning point, writing that the study and social movement in women’s clubs largely died out by the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, President Decker, and her quoters, spoke aspirationally. No such turn occurred. Women continued to use clubs for study, but more importantly as spaces to “do things for themselves alone” by seeking their own and their sex’s collective self-betterment. Certainly many women did engage in large-scale work, but far more women engaged in what I will term “local-impact clubs.” These were social and philanthropic clubs, most often centered on individual neighborhoods, which aspired to create what other historians have described as “women’s culture,” or a materialization of women’s sphere outside of domestic space, a building of female institutions. For many women these clubs were a space to engage in themselves and with other women in a way which was deeply rooted in place. As much as women could and did go far beyond their domestic sphere to engage in city, state, and national politics, they continued to study, put on concerts, and engage in self-interested work in their neighborhoods and on themselves, building not one more local version of the public sphere, but many. Taking the view that there was not one public sphere but rather many helps us to dismantle the false binary between the public and domestic spheres. These were public spheres largely built by and for women where social life was defined less by conversations on a city-wide scale than on that of the neighborhood and individual. Collectively, the women’s clubs represented a significant, if not mass, movement both culturally and politically, towards an expression of women’s culture. But individually they each connected themselves to their own specific neighborhoods and made many micro-cultures each with their own influence. In this poster, I explore those neighborhoods by mapping the residential addresses of these women and their various club memberships. I take these addresses from two years of an annual directory of women’s clubs in New York, which listed all the clubs in the city and their members. I demonstrate the ways in which women operated within their neighborhoods and experienced them as more than the abstract space of streets, and rather as emotionally defined places. They each had their own place-based goals and practices. As a result, these local-impact clubs developed the many micro-publics which made up a larger expression of women's culture.