Mother's Club

A group of African American women (names unknown), identified as a 'Mother's Club' circa 1890.

From 1890 to 1920 there were over 150 African-American women's clubs in Chicago. Although this time period is typically characterized as the "women's club era," that does not serve as an adequate explanation for why so many clubs developed in the African-American neighborhoods of Chicago. Why did African-American women create so many clubs? What political and social purposes did they serve? Which women joined these clubs? And how might we assess their contributions today?

The first African-American women's club, the Ida B. Wells Club, was created in 1893. The need for its establishment arose from several circumstances. First, during the 1890s, there was an emergent middle-class African-American population to which most club women belonged. Ida B. Wells was indicative of such social-class standing. A former schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells had married a prominent African-American lawyer, Ferdinand Barnett. Like other middle-class African-Americans, Wells subscribed to W. E. B DuBois's model of leadership, which called for the "talented tenth," those few African Americans who had the relative privilege of education and comparative wealth to assist those less fortunate. As early as 1893, Wells perceived the need for a kindergarten for African-American children and so established a club which, in turn, sponsored a kindergarten. Although some African Americans criticized her as a segregationist, Wells was swift in her rebuttal: If African-American children had been admitted to other kindergartens, there would have been no need to create a separate one.

Given the increased segregation of African-American communities in the early twentieth century, African-American club women created not only kindergartens but day nurseries, social settlements, reading rooms, youth clubs, and children's camps, as well as homes for dependent and orphaned children, for the elderly and infirm, and for young working women. Club members also studied literature, art, drama, and municipal reform. Working in conjunction with other African-American community institutions, club women were deeply involved in politics, advocating for suffrage, fighting discrimination in movie theatres and other public facilities, and promoting the passage of an anti-lynching law. They also raised much-needed monies to support those community institutions by sponsoring debates, theatre and musical presentations, picnics and raffles, and extravagant charity balls, dances, and promenades. These occasions served two ends: to assist the poor and disenfranchised and to demonstrate the club women's own status and prestige. These ends were not contradictory but instead pointed to the richness and complexity of the club women's lives. Additionally, for their grand balls and dances, club women supported African-American milliners, dressmakers, hairdressers, and manicurists. This in itself was significant because employment was quite limited for African-American women.

Sources: Anne Meis Knupfer, Historical Research and Narrative; ebay