Membership Plunge : Women Find Their Clubs in Jeopardy

Theda Woodworth recalls when 300 pairs of heels clattered regularly along the hardwood floors of the Santa Paula Ebell Club, a women’s club where ladies of leisure gathered 30 years ago to appreciate sonnets and piano music.

Membership was highly coveted, and those without hats and gloves need not apply.

Attire is the least of the club’s worries today, and carpenters’ hammers drown out the click of heels.

With membership down to 130 women, mostly in their 60s and up, the Santa Paula Ebell Club recently began sharing its historic California Craftsman-style clubhouse with a theater group that is renovating the building as its new headquarters.

Faded Portraits

Faded portraits of tight-lipped Victorian women and sloe-eyed flappers are in storage. Upstairs rooms have become offices.

“It’s hard for some of the members who have been there for some time,” Woodworth said with a sigh. “Change is always difficult.”

Throughout the country traditional women’s clubs face dwindling enrollment, rising costs and a lack of young members, said Ruth Schermitzler, president of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Some members fear they will go the way of the dinosaur and that their clubhouses--ornate repositories of a more genteel past--will be torn down to make way for condos and office buildings.

Clubs that used to boast 2,000 members typically now have 200. In most cases the aging members must devote an increasing amount of time and money to keeping the club afloat.

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

Some clubs have shut down completely, victims of changing life styles and women’s wholesale entry into the work force.

Trying to Survive

“We’re all struggling to stay alive,” said Laura Johnson, former president of the Highland Park Ebell Club, where most members are in their 70s and 80s.

In Philadelphia’s affluent Mainline area, the Woman’s Club of Ardmore disbanded in 1986 after 92 years of philanthropy.

“Our members were all older,” said its last president, Adele Wilson. “The clubhouse was getting old, and we as a club were financially not able to keep it up.”

A number of Junior Clubs, adjuncts for women 18 to 42, have also called it quits.

“With so many ladies working, it’s difficult to attract younger members,” said Edna Shelton, president of the Women’s 20th Century Club of Eagle Rock.

The women’s clubs that survive and thrive seem to be those in older, more affluent communities and those that accommodate working women with evening meetings.

Prestigious volunteer groups like the Assistance League and the Blue Ribbon, a fund-raising organization for the Music Center, continue to raise millions each year for Southland charities. But traditional women’s clubs do not always have such an aura of glamour and affluence, and observers say the big organizations receive a lot of helpful publicity.

Most women’s clubs are part charity, part self-improvement, part leisure. A day at the Women’s 20th Century Club of Eagle Rock might see 30 members at a lecture on how to distinguish the Canary Islands date palm from the Mexican fan palm. Guest speakers discuss everything from travel to battered wives. Meetings adjourn with lunch, served in a sunny dining room on mint green plates.

Clubhouse Leased

The Eagle Rock club’s airy Craftsman-style clubhouse is ringed with flowers and greenery. It is filled with Art Deco furniture and Oriental carpets. Members lease it out for weddings, dances and parties. That helps pay expenses and leaves some money left for scholarships, gifts to Occidental College and donations to Boy Scout and Girl Scout groups.

Many young professionals say they prefer job-oriented groups.

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

DeDominic said women today are more likely to join clubs that contribute to tangible benefits such as career advancement. Some young professionals have started their own charities, adding to the competition for traditional clubs.

Nationwide about 1,300 junior clubs and 9,518 women’s clubs claim 400,000 members, whose average age is 64, said Leigh Wintz, executive director of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the national umbrella group.

That represents a sharp decline from a couple of generations ago.

After the turn of the century, clubs boomed as restless upper-class women founded kindergartens, built libraries and playgrounds and campaigned for temperance, universal suffrage, child labor laws and hot school lunches.

For the first time women were accepted as social reformers. Clubs were prestigious, membership desirable. It was a Golden Age.

During World War I most clubs invested patriotically in Liberty Bonds. After 1918, with the nation flush in post-war prosperity, they cashed in the bonds and built monuments to their new influence.

In the 1920s women’s club membership topped 2.2 million, said Karen J. Blair, a women’s studies professor at Central Washington University and author of “The Clubwoman as Feminist.”

Blair said clubs often commissioned well-known architects who imported marble and stone from Italy, built courtyards and fountains and constructed clubhouses in the style of Renaissance villas.

The houses became their private turf, a retreat from men and family where women could meet freely to discuss everything from Russian literature to recipes.

Many of the reforms they championed became law, and their volunteer work became institutionalized as government social work. As a result, clubs in the 1930s and 1940s turned from politics to social activities and philanthropy, a trend that continues today, Blair said.

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.

Gary Sue Goodman, a consultant with the Women’s Resources and Research Center at UC Davis, said women’s clubs will die unless they change. The PTA and the League of Women Voters are two groups that have made the transition successfully, she said.

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

That view is sharply disputed by Jill Earnshaw, a member of the South Pasadena Woman’s Club.

“We’re not just a bunch of polyester old fuddy-duddies,” she said.

She pointed out that women’s clubs run homes for battered women, hold seminars on terrorism and raise money for charity.

Members of traditional women’s clubs say success depends on a core of dedicated members who find new ways to raise money and make the clubs appeal to younger members.

Some hold fancy debutante balls. Others start side businesses. Members of the Assistance League of Long Beach don aprons and chef hats each week to cater private parties at the clubhouse. This pays for maintenance on the clubhouse, which doubles as a museum of Oriental furnishings.

Most rent out their clubhouses for weddings and banquets. “We had to open it to the public,” said Ruth Gerry of the Wilshire Ebell Club in Hancock Park. “It costs us $40,000 to $45,000 a month to operate the club.”

On a recent day a TV production company was filming a commercial amid the antique furniture, panelled rooms and art-laden walls of the sprawling villa on Wilshire Boulevard.

Club members have also become more savvy, enlisting the help of government agencies and local residents.

Highland Park’s Ebell Club has been declared a Los Angeles cultural heritage monument, which makes it more difficult to demolish. A management company handles party rentals and maintenance.

Joining is easier these days. “In the early years I never dreamed I would have been a member. It was a very, very snooty club,” said Laura Johnson of the Highland Park club. Johnson has lived in northeast Los Angeles since 1920, but it was not until she retired from a clerical job in 1975 that she joined the club. She is one of 47 members, most of them elderly. The junior club folded about 20 years ago.

Clubs are still almost exclusively white, although there are black, Filipino and Latino clubs that date from the days when minorities were not permitted to join all-white clubs. Clubs have loosened their membership rules of years ago, and today’s clubs say they welcome all ethnic groups.

Clubhouses Sold

For some, the ultimate fund-raiser is to sell the clubhouse and set aside the money for operations. The Friday Morning Club of Los Angeles in 1985 sold its Renaissance-style structure on South Figueroa Street to the Variety Arts Center. It rents a high-rise office for meetings of its 200 members, one-tenth as many as it had in the 1920s.

The death or decline of a women’s club can mean the end of a historic building.

In Glendale, a 1920s Spanish Colonial revival-style building owned by the Tuesday Afternoon Club was demolished to make way for redevelopment. The club settled a block away in a smaller, newer building.

A number of aging members say their mothers and grandmothers belonged to the same clubs but their daughters, for the most part, do not.

“It’s very hard to find younger members,” said Earnshaw of the Woman’s Club of South Pasadena. “I just hope we’re not becoming obsolete.”