Women’s Clubs Struggle to Revive Membership

Clarice Conley recalls that, when she joined the Ebell Club of Highland Park almost 40 years ago, hats and gloves were mandatory and those without proper social credentials need not have applied.

“It was a very, very snooty club,” said the 72-year-old Conley, gazing at the faded oval portraits of former Ebell presidents. From the old clubhouse walls, the faces gazed back: tight-lipped Victorian women with big bosoms, ethereal dreamers clutching books, sloe-eyed flappers with bobbed hair.

Back then, 200 women met weekly at the Ebell Club on Figueroa Street to debate universal suffrage, read literature and plan social work. But heels rarely clatter along the old hardwood floors anymore, and the faithful now number about 47, mostly women in their 70s and 80s.

“We’re not as popular as we once were,” said club president Laura Johnson, who worries that her club may die with its last member. The clubhouse fell into disrepair when the caretaker died about 20 years ago, and the Ebell Junior Club--which admitted women from 18 to 42--folded about the same time. Finances were a mess until recently, when a local management company took over day-to-day operations, Johnson said.

Traditional women’s clubs in Northeast Los Angeles and Glendale--and nationwide--today face serious problems. Ruth Schermitzler, president of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, said traditional philanthropic women’s clubs are confronted with dwindling membership, an aging core group and rising costs of clubhouses, insurance and taxes. Members agree that, with the majority of women now in the work force, the era of the genteel club woman with time on her hands is, for the most part, a dim memory.

But, for years, women’s clubs were the only game in town. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were beehives of activity as women founded kindergartens, built libraries and playgrounds, campaigned for hot school lunches and lobbied for child-labor laws.

At the Ebell Club--named for Dr. Adrian Ebell, a 19th-Century European reformer who traveled to the United States--the women founded what would become the Arroyo Seco branch of Los Angeles Public Library and helped start the Northeast Symphony. The Tuesday Afternoon Club founded Glendale’s first local public library.

Some say women’s clubs succeeded too well.

“They did themselves out of a job,” said Victoria Brown, a women’s studies teacher and historian at San Diego State University. With government taking over many tasks that club women once considered their turf, clubs by the 1930s turned increasingly to fund raising and social activities, a trend that continues today.

Rising Costs Cited

Meanwhile, escalating costs took their toll. Some clubs located on valuable real estate chose to cut losses and sell. In Glendale, the Tuesday Afternoon Club was forced out of a Spanish Colonial Revival building, built in the 1920s on Central Avenue and Lexington Drive, to make way for redevelopment. It settled one block away in a smaller, newer building.

“A lot of those clubs are sitting on pretty significant pieces of property,” said Lynda Griffith, a professor at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women.

A number of clubs without clubhouses rent halls. Others, especially junior clubs throughout the country, have called it quits.

“It’s very difficult these days to attract younger members . . . It’s terrible,” said 67-year-old Jill Earnshaw, president of the Women’s Club of South Pasadena.

Said Patty DeDominic, former president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners: “I just don’t believe you’ll find a lot of upwardly mobile career women active in traditional women’s clubs.”

Women still join clubs, “but only where they’ll get specific, tangible benefits back to themselves--like work advancement or equality in the job market,” DeDominic said. She owns a personnel agency and belongs to a political club that raises funds for women’s issues.

About 500,000 women are members of 11,000 traditional women’s clubs nationwide, said Jeri Winger, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a nationwide group. The federation does not have figures for previous years. Neither does it know the average member’s age, Winger said. But she said declining enrollment may be bottoming out.

Gary Sue Goodman, director of special programs at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, has a more glum prognosis. “If they can’t adapt to the changing needs of women, they will die,” Goodman said, noting the success of groups that have changed with the times. Those include the PTA and the League of Women Voters, she said.

“People have the notion that women’s clubs are these biddies that sit around and play bridge, and that’s what they became,” Brown said.

Not so, said Earnshaw of South Pasadena.

“We’re not just a bunch of polyester old fuddy-duddies,” she said, repeating a refrain heard from many members.

At clubs throughout Los Angeles, women campaign for programs to combat sexual abuse of children, run homes for battered wives and pregnant teen-agers and debate international relations, members say. At a recent forum in South Pasadena, for example, the women’s club discussed U. S.-Israeli relations, international terrorism and Third World development.

At its annual state convention this week in Anaheim, the federation will adopt resolutions opposing the skyrocketing costs of liability insurance and asking the federal government to take action on hazardous waste. To keep women informed, there is a national club magazine and a local version called California Clubwoman.

There are traditional activities, such as knitting afghans for hospital patients, holding rummage sales and hearing lectures about local history or botany. But members worry about passing their heritage to a new generation that seems to have no interest in traditional club activities. Membership in the Tuesday Afternoon Club hit 1,200 during World War II but stands at 200 today--mostly retirees, according to Sue Foster, club president.

Some new members do join, but death claims many more each year. “They’re dropping off like flies,” one member said.

Bernice Lucas, who oversees 17 clubs from Sunland to Monrovia, said many clubs have membership problems. But her district, which includes clubs in Glendale, Northeast Los Angeles and La Crescenta, last year showed a 4% increase, she said.

Membership statistics may not be reliable, cautioned Karen J. Blair, a women’s studies professor at the University of Washington. Blair, author of “The Clubwoman as Feminist,” said leaders of some clubs exaggerate membership.

Like a number of traditional women’s clubs, the Ebell Club, Eagle Rock 20th Century Club and South Pasadena Club still have all-white membership.

“You don’t need to print that, though. It’s not done on purpose,” one club member told a reporter.

“We’d be delighted to have people from other ethnic backgrounds,” said Earnshaw, of the South Pasadena Women’s Club.

Clubs today attract recently retired women as well as those who once considered clubs too exclusive.

“In the early years, I never dreamed I would have been a member,” said Johnson, who has lived in Highland Park since 1920. She didn’t join the Ebell Club until she retired in 1975.

Palm Tree Lectures

At the Women’s 20th Century Club one recent morning, 29 members heard a lecture on the history of palm trees in California.

President Dorothy Moore says members range in age from 35 to 91, but on this day the turnout was all older women. The Junior Club folded last year.

Founded in 1903 when Eagle Rock was mostly lemon and orange groves and open hillsides, the club meets weekly in a large clubhouse on Colorado Street built in the once-popular California craftsman style.

Perched on a small hill, the clubhouse, built by the members’ husbands in 1914, has a panoramic view of the community. A large painting done by a member depicts the landmark for which Eagle Rock is named.

The club earns much of its annual $25,000 budget from renting its hall for parties and weddings, Moore said. But expenses gobble up an increasingly large chunk that formerly went to charity.

Earnings Go to Upkeep

Between maintenance, taxes and insurance, “It doesn’t leave much time to do what we were designed to do, which is raise money for donations,” Schermitzler said.

Said Earnshaw: “A lot of our fund raising that used to go to charity now goes to keep up the clubhouse. It’s $75 to $100 every time we open our doors” because of rising utility bills. Liability insurance, which has jumped 300% in two years, is another big concern.

A number of clubs have sold their clubhouses because of escalating costs, Winger said, but the federation keeps no figures.

In Los Angeles, the Friday Morning Club, founded in 1891 by California social reformer Madame Severance, moved last year from a five-story, neo-Italian Renaissance structure on South Figueroa Street to an high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Why sell the cherished old building where poet William Butler Yeats once read and novelist Hugh Walpole once spoke?

“It needed a lot of things done to it. We didn’t need that much building,” said Pauline Dendy, club secretary. Indeed, membership that topped 2,000 in the 1920s now holds steady at about 200--half of which is inactive. Sold to the Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts, which faces financial problems of its own in keeping the building open, the former clubhouse has been designated a local historic monument and is listed in the National Registry of Historical Places.

The Ebell Club is trying a more innovative route.

Three years ago, a group of area residents who feared the historic clubhouse might decay beyond help formed an improvement association to renovate the building. They created a management company that leases the building from the women and handles party rentals, day-to-day operations and maintenance.

Before the management company took over, club members were often fleeced by unscrupulous tradesmen and renters who failed to pay their bills, said Charline Abernathy, a longtime resident active in the renovation.

“Generally, they’re just not astute about these things . . . they’ve got too much dignity,” she said.

Members say the budget is in order today, although more than half of all income is still spent on maintenance. The building was declared a Los Angeles cultural heritage monument in 1984.

But the fear remains that the club may one day go the way of the dinosaur. A number of women recall that their mothers and grandmothers belonged to clubs. Most of their daughters do not.

“That was the only social and cultural outlet they had back then,” Schermitzler said.

Added Conley, “It was something to do.”