High Noon for Women's Clubs

By Nancy R. Gibbs

When Clarice Conley was nine years old, her mother and grandmother began the initiation. Dressed in her finest, shoes shiny, gloves pristine, she was allowed to follow them through the heavy oak doors of the Highland Park Ebell Club in the hills of northeastern Los Angeles. In the cavernous main hall, surrounded by distinguished ladies with brows aloft, she listened to dramatic readings, or speeches on art or tropical Brazil. The children even had a dining room all their own.

More than a half-century later, Conley is president of the club. But the hub of cultural and social activity that flourished in 1922 has only 40 members left. It leases space to help pay expenses. Conley, who at 74 is one of the younger members, realizes that an era has passed. "It's not that the women have changed," she says. "There's still a need for contact with people. It's the life-style that's changed."

Conley's club is not alone. Across the U.S., the traditional women's club has become an endangered species, with a steadily aging membership. The number of club members has dropped by more than half since 1957, to fewer than half a million. Now that more jobs, organizations and opportunities are open to women of all ages, the clubs seem to be less attractive; many are faced with either making major changes or closing down. "We're in steady decline," admits Leigh Wintz, executive director of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, "and it's a difficult process to reverse."

The search for a fresh vision is most evident in the Junior League, that onetime bastion of society ladies that has gradually emerged as a powerful force for social change. At its annual meeting three weeks ago in Chicago, some 900 delegates voted to standardize admissions procedures, pulling down, in effect, some of the blood-test barriers that for years preserved the league as a high Wasp domain. The vote, said incoming President Maridel Moulton, "will signal to the world that we really are an organization that wishes to be open to any woman who wants to make a commitment to volunteerism."

In recent years leagues in many cities have spent less time on cotillions and cookbooks and more energy on women's alcoholism, battered wives' shelters, rape-crisis centers and teen pregnancy. Many have also worked to make the growing membership more representative, but old pedigrees die hard. "We've stood on our heads to make people aware that Junior League is not a society organization," says Maria Trozzi, of Boston's Junior League, which has dropped virtually all barriers to admission, "but that image is hard to change."

Hard to change, in part, because the image of women's clubs is so tightly tied to the bone-china days of yore. Most clubs were born in the era following the Civil War as a makeshift laboratory for women's consciousness. The Industrial Revolution had freed women's time, reduced their chores, increased their mobility and introduced that cherished female institution, the free afternoon.

Yet from the beginning, there were clubwomen with a more ambitious agenda -- to reform not only themselves but society. Over the years they provided the leadership for the suffragist movement, child-labor reform, conservation, temperance and civil rights. "You have to remember," says Karen Blair, assistant professor of history at Central Washington University, "that until 1920 women didn't have the vote, and this was their only way to have a public voice outside the home."

In one sense the clubs have become victims of their own success: by realizing their mission, they invite their demise. As access has opened up to government, the workplace and the courts, women's clubs are no longer the primary path to fulfillment or power. Where they once provided an invaluable network of contacts and company, they must now compete with single-issue organizations, professional groups and even men's clubs.

Many young professionals have launched their own charitable groups. As women master the most advanced fund-raising techniques, they lose their patience with the labor-intensive traditions of club charity work. "Women's philanthropy is becoming much more sophisticated," says Los Angeles Businesswoman Patty DeDominic. "Why have twelve committee meetings to raise $4,000 when, with the right contacts and planning, you can have one event at someone's home and raise $25,000?"

Those women's clubs that have taken on more challenging projects seem to find members more willing to devote their time and energy to the cause. Other organizations will have to adapt their programs, schedules and rules in order * to survive. "I think we're waking up and deciding something needs to be done," says Carol Silvus, president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs. Some groups are holding more events at night and on weekends and trying to broaden their membership base. The Virginia federation has established an organization for deaf women, while New Jersey has formed a group for the mentally retarded. All are working hard to attract younger members. Ironically, many hard-pressed clubs may find that a return to the activist spirit of the past holds the greatest promise for the future.

With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles, with other bureaus