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I came here hoping to find out if the women's clubs I was familiar with in the U.S. in the fifties and sixties are still around. I don't know if those clubs, quite common in the Mid-West, were a art of the WCM, and the article doesn't seem to help. The clubs I knew were social, with the women meeting maybe once a week or month or so to quatch and play cards. Many of them were very exclusive in that their numbers were limited, and they had long waiting lists for entry, which was usually only granted when someone died or moved away. Can anyone say whether those clubs were an outgrowth of the WCM or not, and to what extent they still exist. 213.109.221.183 (talk) 10:36, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The key difference is socialization and entertainment of those later clubs vs. the mission of social change for the 19th c. women's clubs. Those earlier clubs were essentially nonprofit work at a time when affluent women were not allowed to seek employment. The clubs you mention had an opposite role, serving a leisure and sometimes educational function. The 1950s and 1960s were a huge time for social and educational clubs in the U.S., from gardening to history to card playing. The post-war prosperity brought appliances and other advances to the average household, creating more leisure time or the middle class housewives. Clubs for socialization, entertainment, and education filled the gap. I think the connection between the earlier club movement and this era is that middle class women were modeling the behavior of wealthy clubwomen but lacked the wealth to distribute to the poor, for example. Note than many women's social clubs hold annual fundraisers to make a modest donation to some cause.
However, as more women entered the workforce and television brought education and entertainment into individual households, membership and participation in social clubs declined. By the 1990s, many clubs struggled to find members and supporters. As I work on articles about women's organizations, I find chapter merges and closures throughout the 1980s and 1990s, leaving many organization only a fraction of their original size today. Rublamb (talk) 17:41, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
