A Moment in Time/What Kind of Legacy?
Clara Love, July 18, 2017
This week, I began transcribing my first set of minutes. Previously, I had been working on the typed programs, so working with the handwritten, far more detailed minutes has been an exciting and interesting shift, especially since I’m getting more information about talks and readings whose titles I’ve already seen on the programs.
I’m transcribing the minutes for the 1899-1900 season, a season chosen because of its potential for discussion about the turn of a new century and what that could mean for the club, for women, or for the world. The women do take note of this important moment in time, but not quite in the way we had hoped. An excerpt from the minutes of the Club’s January 2nd, 1900 meeting reads,
The President then made a few remarks as to where we do, or do not stand, with regard to the Burning question, “Is this the 19th or 20th Century?” and read from the Sun of Jan. 2nd a short notice of Flammarion the astronomer’s decision, that we are in the closing year of the nineteenth century.
There is no further discussion on the topic beyond this brief mention, either in this meeting or subsequent ones. It seems that the Club members do not see their present moment as a significant change-over. Maybe the minutes of the 1900-1901 season contain the kind of declarations of intention and importance regarding a new century that these minutes, unfortunately, do not.
Despite my disappointment on that front, there is still a great deal of fascinating content in these minutes. I’ve transcribed through the meeting of February 6th, so I still have a couple of months left, but even in the incomplete season I’ve read so far, I’ve noticed what seems to be a great frequency of race-centric presentations that I didn’t quite catch on to when I was only working with the programs. A lot of this type of programming sounds, as you’d guess, unsettling at best.
The first talk that caught my eye was part of the October 7th, 1899 meeting. The Club welcomed a series of “Book Notes,” or individual members’ reviews of books they’ve read on their own. Miss Ellen Duvall presents on two books, one of which is titled Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, by Edmond Demolins, published that year. Miss Duvall says of the book,
The treatment of this question in this book from a French point of view, is, she said, something almost miraculous,–and there is a sweet a reasonableness in it also.
After some cursory research, this book (originally published, as Duvall mentions, in French) seems to focus on the “originality and superiority” of Anglo-Saxon-based society in England and America. A full-text version of this book can be found here.
Later, a talk by Miss Anne Weston Whitney on the “Art in Doll-Making” at the January 7th, 1900 meeting also makes a point of highlighting how dolls not specifically modeled after the “Anglo-Saxon type” are undesirable.
The final piece of programming in this vein (that I’ve seen so far) is a talk by Mrs. Walter Bullock on January 23rd, 1900, titled “Anglo-Saxon Character,” which gives “a clean and comprehensive account of the two most prominent theories with regard to the origin of the Aryan race,” and uses some very particular language that I find very, how do I put this? Indicative of someone with what I’d in our current day call white-supremacist leanings. Mrs. Bullock says in her talk,
There, it has been said, was the white race first found in its greatest purity.
I guess reading about Mrs. Bullock’s talk about when and where the white race came to be its “purest” isn’t totally surprising given all our recent discussion and concern with how to reconcile the legacy of this club with Confederate legacies and the brutal racism that accompanies them, as well as non-Confederate-specific racist conceptions and attitudes of the time. But even in that context, this kind of programming being shared among the elite and powerful is…Not Good. At the end of this particular talk, Miss Brent proposes that it be type-written and placed in the Club library so others can read and revisit it. Again, these attitudes aren’t shocking in context, but this kind of content is still something that we have to process and/or expose as part of the Club’s legacy, whatever that legacy may be.
This content was migrated from the The WLCB log: Documenting the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore 1890-1941