Woodlawn Woman’s Club Records

During the late winter months of 1895, Mrs. Corrine S. Brown, inspired by the spirit of “get-together-ness” engendered by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, began planning for an organization for women in the Woodlawn community. A preliminary meeting was held February 4, 1895 in the parlor of Dr. Katherine Clapp’s home on Woodlawn Avenue. Forty interested women attended this meeting and resolved that, “for the promotion of sympathetic unity of feeling and purpose, closer association, and the power of cooperating successfully, we favor the organization of a Women’s Club in Woodlawn.”

Two weeks later, four hundred attended the Woodlawn’s Woman’s Club inaugural meeting held at the Colonial Hotel on February 18, 1895. By the end of its first year, The Woodlawn Woman’s Club (WWC) had incorporated with the State of Illinois, associated with the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, and recruited over two hundred and fifty members.

The WWC adopted as its objectives, “mutual counsel and sympathy, unity of action in case of need, and a promotion of higher social, moral, and educational conditions.” Implementing these goals required the customary division of labor. The WWC formed seven sections to carry out its ambitious program: home, literature and science, art and music, education, reform, philanthropy and recreation. By 1954, the last year for which records exist for this collection, WWC membership had dropped to approximately fifty members. The reasons for this decline in WWC membership and the date of WWC’s subsequent dissolution are not readily discernible from the available evidence.