Study the golden speech of silentness.
XI
ON WOMEN’S CLUBS
It has been the fashion, and is still with a certain class of people, to disparage the woman’s club. They say the club is a place where gossip and backbiting flourish, and the virtues of love and charity and tolerance are chiefly conspicuous by their absence. I have even known a brilliant lecturer, who depends for her audiences on these same women’s clubs, to refuse to lend a hand in any active work, saying she “did not believe in women’s clubs, because the members are selfish, self-seeking and trivial; because the club women are all envious and uncharitable.”
Now, isn’t this sweeping accusation rather unjust? When we look about and see what women have accomplished for their own sex since the clubs were established; when we look about and see what the clubs are really doing to-day for their communities; when we count up the libraries, the improved sanitary conditions of towns and cities, the increased educational advantages; when we realize the increased average intelligence of the average woman who belongs to current events classes and literary clubs; when, in short, we note the broadening of character in the average individual club woman, is this a fair statement?
To be sure, there are narrow-minded, envious women in clubs. Alas! we all know them. One such woman is enough to injure seriously the work of a small club; half a dozen of her can give a large club a bad name—a reputation for backbiting and all uncharitableness. Half a dozen such women can keep a club in a chronic quarrelsome state, and by spreading evil reports outside can destroy all its usefulness in a community. But in the most notorious of such affairs the trouble is caused by a mere handful of narrow-minded women, while nine-tenths of the membership sit sadly by in shamed silence. Shall they be condemned because of the quarrelsome few?
But in the vast majority of clubs the spirit of petty rivalry and self-seeking which is sometimes noticeable in individual cases is fast disappearing, or has never materialized. There is such a great and splendid work for the women’s clubs to do that the earnest, noble, unselfish woman becomes absorbed in something beyond self-seeking. She ceases to care whether her name stands first on the list of committees, or, indeed, whether it is there at all. She ceases to mind if she is left off the list of after-dinner speakers at the annual banquet. She ceases to suffer an envious pang because her enemy is asked to write the club poem, for the simple reason that she has ceased to be conscious of an enemy.
She has ceased to feel the slights which may have grieved her in the past, because she has ceased to “wear a chip on her shoulder.” She has come to rejoice and be glad in any good thing that may befall any good woman because she has grown broad-minded enough to recognize that honor and glory falling to one woman mean honor and glory for the cause of all women; that in these days the advancement of woman and the glory of womanhood comes to all and for all and through all of us. For such is the real sisterhood of woman. The club movement was never more serious, perhaps never so earnest as it is to-day. It may be because women are finding how much better it is to do than to talk, to be than to vainly imagine. As one bright woman said: “It doesn’t always mean that a woman is growing because she talks a great deal.”
The ordinary club woman who is a busy wife and mother seeks her club as a rest and a change from the activities of home; the friendships she forms there make an added interest to her life and help to get her out of the treadmill of her daily existence. The ordinary wife and mother has plenty to do in her own family, to be sure, but she can do that plenty ten times as well for the change that is afforded by an hour or two at the club each week; for there she is transported to a different environment, sees through another pair of eyes and comes in contact with another set of minds. She goes home rested, refreshed and stimulated through her club friendships. She has not belittled herself with club gossip, but she has enlarged her sympathies and taken a fresh outlook on life.
If this is true of the woman who has her days crowded full with home ties and home interests, how much more is it true of the woman who has no home ties; and unfortunately we have hundreds, yes, thousands of such women in this country. In the club memberships there are not only many unmarried women, but there are widows who have been bereft of their families, and a goodly proportion of comfortable matrons whose children have grown up and left home, either to establish nests of their own or to go into business for themselves. The club has been the salvation of all these women and has prevented their growing old before their time. “There are no old women nowadays,” says some one, and it is largely because we have women’s clubs, where women keep young without thinking about it.