When the women of the Civic Club of Carlisle purchased a new Studebaker Street Sprinkler in May 1903 to keep the streets of Carlisle clean, the club was not only embarking on new territory but also continuing an already impressive, albeit short, civic track record.
Prior to this purchase in 1903, the club had already formed a League of Good Citizenship in the borough schools, joined the Federation of Women's Clubs, awarded prizes for tree planting in the community, wrote a column that appeared weekly in a local newspaper, and helped to orchestrate an agreement between the water company and borough council to lay pipe in alleys to homes with no plumbing.
Historians today recognize the significance of such women’s clubs. “During the progressive era,” writes Nancy Woloch in her book, Women and the American Experience, “the ranks of women’s organizations exploded. Women were enemies of vice, filth, corruption, ugliness, ignorance, and exploitation. Their special concerns were anything involving children, home, family, education, health, hygiene, food, sanitation, and other women.”
Woloch notes what one progressive wrote in a university bulletin in 1915: “A women’s place is in the home. But to-day would she serve the home, she must go beyond the home.”
A passage from the Club Women’s Creed printed in the Civic Club of Carlisle’s 1904-1905 yearbook clearly illustrates that club women in Cumberland County were acting on this sentiment nearly a decade earlier. In part, the creed reads: “I believe that woman has no right to undertake any work whatsoever outside of the home, along the lines of philanthropy, church, temperance or club life, that does not emanate from the home and in its final and best results return to the home. Home must always be the center, but not the limit of woman’s life.”
Encouraging women to win a place outside of the home by using domestic credentials was, ironically, an extension of the Victorian doctrine known as the cult of domesticity, which was related to the ideology of separate spheres for women and men. According to this ideology, a woman’s natural sphere was her home, where it was her duty to use her natural, inherent qualities of nurturing, compassion, piety and understanding to maintain and provide for the comfort and happiness of her family. Also believed to possess a special gift for religion and morality, woman was deemed man’s moral superior and was responsible for the spiritual welfare of her husband and children. The cult of domesticity surely kept many women at home, but a woman could also use that same ideology to justify acting “domestically” outside the home, and this is what we see in these women’s clubs.
According to Karen J. Blair in her book, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914, Jane Cunningham Croly was the single most important figure in the women’s club movement. When this pioneering female journalist was denied admittance to a men’s-only reception for Charles Dickens sponsored by the New York Press Club in 1868, she responded by founding Sorosis, a women’s club, and later, the Women’s Press Club of New York City in 1889. She insisted that “Women’s work in the home should neither be scorned nor abandoned; it should be elevated. And women should use their domestically nurturing talents to influence the world outside the home.”
One hundred years ago, in its first major projection of military power overseas, the United States was marshalling the force that President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed would “make the world safe for democracy.” Eventually, some two million Americans would enter combat in the “Great War” in Europe, helping to break a four-year stalemate and drive the Allied cause to victory.