The Saturday Morning Club, established by Julia Ward Howe in 1871, is an organization for women’s community and intellectual growth in Boston, Massachusetts.
From its beginning, Howe sought a reasonable alternative to the sewing clubs and debutante balls that molded the lives of middle- and upper-class young girls.
As the Youth’s Companion stated in 1910: “The Saturday Morning Club was born of Mrs. Howe’s desire that her daughters and their friends should have wider education than the schools offered in 1870.
As the girls matured and club membership expanded to include older women, they adopted the practice of writing and presenting their own original essays on topics of interest.
From the moment of its founding, the club instituted a strict set of rules and regulations in order to maintain the high standard of the group and their work.
At the two hundred and twenty-fifth meeting it was voted ‘that all new members shall take part in one discussion, either actively or by writing a paper, within a year of their admission, or forfeit their membership’.
Should the question be asked of any of our Presidents, “what do you consider the most valuable characteristic of the Saturday Morning Club?” I feel sure each one would answer, Its loyalty, or espirit de corps.
The first of these, held at Mrs. Howe’s residence, consisted of vocal and instrumental music, an essay, and a play in two acts, all of which was followed by a “collation” prepared by the cookery group.
By the 1890s, the club had more than a hundred members who dedicated much of their time and energy to staging amateur productions of plays such as Antigone, Pride & Prejudice, and The Arabian Nights for audiences of up to 850 people.
The selection of subjects for the debates was Mrs. Howe’s perennial interest...Tendencies in literature, music, art, education, society are all studied.
Today the club may have a fervid discussion as to the industrial employment of women, and a fortnight hence they may be equally animated in their advocacy of the classics in education or of Shakespeare for the modern stage”.
[2] The Centennial Remembrance Report notes that between the first meeting on the club in 1870 and the second, Mrs. Howe was able to line up five lecturers for the coming weeks, due to her acquaintance with the Boston luminaries of her day.
Some of the most prominent thinkers to lecture to the Saturday Morning Club include: Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain; 1882) on "Mental Telegraphy," the lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis B. Brandeis on “Civil Rights of Women” (1883), the African American educator Maria Baldwin on the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1904), and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1905) on the necessity of free speech.
Some members volunteered in traditional military support efforts, as they raised money, knit, sewed, and ran drives for the Red Cross, The American Fund for French Wounded, and other organizations.
Still other members volunteered in more individualized and specific projects, such as running the Army & Navy Canteen on the Boston Common, staging amateur theatricals to support the Polish Relief Fund, and writing over 200 letters a week to soldiers abroad.
Another member was even awarded the Croix de Guerre from the French government for her work nursing and feeding wounded soldiers on the front lines, sometimes under shell fire.
[7] The modern-day Saturday Morning Club is a private organization where adult professional women can socialize and discuss intellectual ideas.
After meeting with the club’s president, each member crafts a short research paper, story, memoir, or essay on some aspect of the year’s discussion topic.