Possibly influenced in some measure by such plaints as these, the early clubs devoted themselves for the most part to study, and their range of activities was strictly limited and defined. This, however, could not last. The Doctor used to say, "You may as well refuse to let out the growing boy's trousers as refuse larger and larger liberty to his growing individuality!" Even so the club petticoats had to be lengthened and amplified.
Our mother, with all her love of study, realized that no individual or group of individuals must neglect the present with its living issues for any past, however beautiful. She threw her energies into widening the club horizon. "Don't tie too many nots in your constitution!" she would say to a young club; and then she would tell how Florence Nightingale cut the Gordian knots of red tape in the Crimea.
Did the constitution enforce such and such limits? Ah! but committees were not thus limited; let a committee be appointed, to do what the club could not! (This was what the Doctor called "whipping the devil round the stump!")
Many and many a reform had its beginning in one of those quiet Park Street rooms of the "N. E. W. C." "When I want anything in Boston remedied," said Edward Everett Hale, "I go down to the New England Woman's Club!"
When the General Federation of Women's Clubs was formed in 1892, our mother served on the board of directors for four years, and was then made an honorary vice-president. She was also president of the Massachusetts State Federation from 1893 to 1898, and thereafter honorary president.
Dr. Holmes once said to her, "Mrs. Howe, I consider you eminently clubable"; and he added that he himself was not. He told us why, when he adopted the title of "Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table." The most brilliant of talkers, he did not care to listen, as a good club member must. Now, she too loved talking, but perhaps she loved listening even more. No one who knew her in her later years can forget how intently she listened, how joyously she received information of any and every kind. She never was tired; she always wanted more. All human experience thrilled her; the choreman, the dressmaker, the postman, the caller; one and all, she hung on their words. After a half-hour with her, seeing her face alight with sympathy, her delicate lips often actually forming the words as he spoke them, the dullest person might go away on air, feeling himself a born raconteur. What she said once of Mr. Emerson, "He always came into a room as if he expected to receive more than he gave!" was true of herself.
To return to the clubs! At a biennial meeting of the General Federation in Philadelphia, she said: "What did the club life give me? Understanding of my own sex; faith in its moral and intellectual growth. Like so many others, I saw the cruel wrongs and vexed problems of our social life, but I did not know that hidden away in its own midst was a reserve force destined to give precious aid in the righting of wrongs, and in the solution of discords. In the women's clubs I found the immense power which sympathy exercises in bringing out the best aspirations of the woman nature.... To guard against dangers, we must do our utmost to uphold and keep in view the high object which has, in the first instance, called us together; and let this be no mere party catchword or cry, as East against West, or North against South. We can afford to meet as citizens of one common country, and to love and serve the whole as one."
She believed firmly in maintaining the privacy of club life. "The club is a larger home," she said, "and we wish to have the immunities and defences of home; therefore we do not wish the public present, even by its attorney, the reporter."
The three following years were important ones to the Howe family.
Lawton's Valley was sold, to our great and lasting grief: and—after a summer spent at Stevens Cottage near Newport—the Doctor bought the place now known as "Oak Glen," scarce half a mile from the Valley; a place to become only less dear to the family. No. 19 Boylston Place was also sold, and he bought No. 32 Mount Vernon Street, a sunny, pleasant house whose spacious rooms and tall windows recalled the Chestnut Street house, always regretted.