Miss Helen Varick Boswell visited the Isthmus in the fall of 1907 and assisted the women in forming their clubs. She found them literally hungry for such activities and they responded with a will to her suggestion. The result was frequent meetings in every town in the Canal Zone and innumerable activities on the part of the women interested in club work.
The transformation was most remarkable. Where almost every woman on the Isthmus seemed to be unhappy, now everyone who needed an outlet for her mental and social instincts found it in club work. Where once they quarreled and disputed about their house furnishings, life on the Isthmus, and the general status of things on the Canal Zone, now the women seemed to take a happy and contented view of things, and became as much interested in the work of building the canal as were their husbands, their fathers, and their brothers. Looking back over the task, and realizing how much longer the married men stayed on the job, and how much more essential they were to the completion of the canal than the bachelors, the cares of the canal authorities to keep the women satisfied was a master stroke.
When the club movement was launched one of the first steps was to organize classes in Spanish. Women from every part of the Zone attended these Spanish classes and took up the work of learning the language with zeal. Comparatively few of them had any opportunity to learn Spanish, even in its most rudimentary form, from household servants, since the same lethargy that characterized the native men of Panama, and made them totally indifferent to the opportunities for work on the Canal Zone, also characterized the Panaman women, with the results that most of the American households at Panama had English-speaking Jamaican servants instead of Spanish-speaking Panamans.
The servant problem was not as serious as it is in the average American city. There was always a full supply of Jamaican negro women ready for engagement as household servants. They were polite and efficient. Almost without exception they had a deeply religious turn of mind, although they might transgress the Mosaic law far enough to substitute plain water for violet water on the boudoir table of their mistresses. Usually they were very neat of person and very careful in the manner of doing their work. The wages they commanded were approximately equal to those asked in the ordinary American city.
The greatest social diversion of the Isthmus, of course, was dancing. Every two weeks the Tivoli Club gave a dance at the Tivoli Hotel. Trains to carry visitors were run all the way across the Isthmus and no American ever needed to miss a dance at the Tivoli Hotel because of unsuitable railroad accommodations.
Each small town had its own dancing clubs and in those towns where there were Y. M. C. A. buildings, the dances were held in them. The new Hotel Washington proved a very popular rendezvous for the dancers, and in the future the big functions of this kind probably will alternate between the Tivoli at one end of the canal and the Washington at the other.
The university men maintained the University Club in the city of Panama, directly on the water front. This club frequently opened its doors to women and its functions were always regarded as events in Isthmian social history. In Colon there was organized several years ago a club known as the Stranger's Club. This club, as did the University Club at Panama, welcomed the American stranger.
The Isthmian Canal Commission always looked carefully after the religious activities of the people of the Canal Zone. Its provision of places of worship and facilities for getting to them was strictly nonsectarian, and directed solely to giving every sect and every faith opportunity to worship in its own way. Several chaplains were maintained at Government expense, and railroad and wagonette service for carrying people to their places of worship was maintained throughout the years of the American occupation.
The West Indian negroes were provided with churches and with homes for the leaders of their spiritual flocks. Church buildings were erected at every settlement, and in many cases were so constructed that the lower story could be used for a church and the second story for lodge purposes. These buildings were 70 by 36 feet, with lodge rooms 60 by 36 feet.
The women on the Canal Zone were interested in religious work from the beginning of their residence there. An Isthmian Sunday School Association maintained church extension work. When the Women's Federation of Clubs finally disbanded, in April, 1913, it presented its library to this association and its pictures to the Ancon Study Club. There was an art society at Ancon, which did much to foster art work on the Zone during the days of the canal construction. The organization of Camp Fire Girls extended its activities to Panama, and many leading women there contributed both means and time to help the girls on the Isthmus.