"Tis the best joy that anyone can ask": progressive era women's clubs in Tacoma, Washington

Sarah Beth Gumm

Despite being referred to as "ladies of leisure," middle-class married women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were decidedly restricted in the type of leisure activities available to them. While societal norms officially confined middle-class women's entertainment to their parlors, there was a proliferation of public entertainments halls available to their working-class sisters. But how did middle-class women engage in leisure beyond the home, while socially barred from public entertainment? We know that an array of women's clubs with civic, benevolent, and educational foci gained in popularity during this time, influenced especially by the cultural pressures of the Progressive Era. Such clubs allowed women to practice social and political agency, couched in terms that did not transgress the accepted cultural norms of the day. The benevolent elements of their work in these clubs helped protect them from criticism aimed at women who seemed to have "abandoned" their domestic duties. Additionally, these clubs allowed women to engage in something of a more public life through entertainment. These clubs helped to fill a public leisure niche for middle-class women. Reform, civic, and self-betterment clubs served as bridges between private and public v life, allowing middle-class women a socially acceptable way to engage in the latter and expand the forms of entertainment available to them. The literary clubs centralized in this thesis are the Aurora Club and Altrua Club. Both had a similar simple purpose that did not defy the socially accepted limitations on activities allowed to middle-class women. The realities of their activities were somewhat different. Bounded closely in time as they are, I examine the Altrua and Aurora clubs to elucidate the point that both ultimately reached beyond their stated purposes and in the process increasingly exposed their members to a more public world, whether in the Altrua's long-term acts of benevolence or the Aurora's engagement with literature and current events. In doing so, they engaged with complex ideas, but always under the guise of acceptable fun and entertainment. It additionally examines the original writing created by Aurora Club members for their socially progressive proto-political elements, calling these publications a quiet revolution.

"Tis the best joy that anyone can ask": progressive era women's clubs in Tacoma, Washington

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