Women's Clubs and Organizations

Women's Collection
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture

The Women's Collection contains photographs, letters, and pamphlets related to a wide variety of topics in women's history. Subjects covered include women in politics, women's clubs, charitable organizations, women of color, suffrage, ERA, women in the workforce, prohibition, and prostitution.

Women at Washington State University

This collection includes photographs, newspaper clippings, scrapbook items, and printed ephemera. Women from Washington State University and the surrounding community are the primary focus, including women students in the military, theater and dance, home economics, sororities, clubs, and other organizations.

WHC Image Collection
Western Washington University

The WHC Image Collection includes images documenting women's clubs, education, women's rights, community life, recreation, and work of women at Western Washington University and in Washington State.

United Daughters of the Confederacy, Seattle

The Robert E. Lee Chapter #885, United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), was chartered March 21, 1905, in Seattle, Washington. The chapter was organized at a meeting called by Confederate Veteran Judge John A. Allen at the Lincoln Hotel on February 28, 1905. Sixty-eight Southern women signed the application for a charter. The objectives of the organization are Historical, Educational, Benevolent, Memorial and Patriotic supporting service men and women of all wars. A Chapter in Pacific Northwest History records the hundred-year history of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee Chapter #885 of Seattle and its contributions to the State of Washington.

Aloha Club Meeting Minutes, 1898-1901

The Aloha Club was organized as a study club in 1892 by the wives of eastern business men who had come west. The women wanted a place to apply their interest and talents, which were limited in the new state. The club met twice a month to discuss current art and civic interest papers written by the members. View the book containing the minutes from meetings held by the Aloha Club from 1898-1902.

Club Journal of Colored Women's Federation
of Washington and Jurisdiction, 1922-1925

View the Club Journal of Colored Women's Federation of Washington and Jurisdiction, 1922-1925 . Founded in 1917, this organization was known by various names, including the Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Colored Women’s Federation of Washington and Jurisdiction and, in later years, the Washington State Association of Colored Women. Prominent members included Nettie Asberry, a founder of the Tacoma Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of the Progressive Mothers' Club of Tacoma and the Tacoma Inter-Racial Council.

100 Years 100 Women 1889-1989. Yakima County, Washington

A recent addition to the Women's History Consortium Collection is the a digital copy of the book 100 Years 100 Women 1889-1989. Yakima County, Washington . In 1984 the General Federation of Women's Clubs opened a Women's History and Resource Center in Washington D.C. to help commemorate Women's History Week. Clubs across the country were asked to contribute histories. In Yakima County, clubs, granges, community organizations and individuals were invited to nominate, with a written history, women to be honored. This book is a product of those nominations.

Organized Womanhood:
Cultural Politics in the Northwest, 1840-1920

Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Northwest, 1840-1920 by Sandra Haarsager explores how women's organizations in the Pacific Northwest acted as a social force to effect education, culture, and politics. The WHC has posted with permission a list of women's clubs that includes names, sites, and deeds not detailed in the text of a number of women's study clubs between 1875 and 1915. Categorized by state and alphabetized by city, this list reflects extant records of the more active study clubs uncovered in research for Haarsager's project.

Dr. Karen Blair on Women's Clubs

Why Women's Clubs

In this essay, Dr. Blair looks at how the study of the history of Washington State's women's organizations provides a useful vehicle for understanding women's contributions to our past. The essay outlines how women who settled in the Pacific Northwest were quick to establish voluntary associations for self-improvement, charitable work, and civic reform, especially from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s.

A History of Clubs (audio presentation)

Dr. Karen Blair, noted authority on Women's Clubs nationally and in the Northwest, gave this one hour presentation on the history of the development of women's clubs at the Washington State Capitol Museum in March of 2008. Dr. Blair's presentation is reproduced here in four segments.

The history of the AAUW stretches back to 1881. On January 27, 1927, a group of women of Washington state, at the invitation of the then AAUW Cowlitz County Branch, gathered in Longview to form a Washington Division of AAUW. The movement to form a state organization was born from the suggestion of the national organization because Washington already had more than ten active branches by 1927.

Washington State Federation of Women's Clubs

The First One Hundred Years: A Condensed History of Washington State Federation of Women's Clubs 1896-1996

This book was originally compiled and published in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Washington State Federation of Women's Clubs and distributed at the April 1996, WSFWC Convention in Tacoma. The WHC created a digitized version for use on this site with the permission of the WSFWC.

Utsalady Ladies Relief Club
Celebrated its 100th anniversary on March 8, 2008

This profile of the Utsalady Ladies Relief Club, a longtime Camano Island women's club, looks at the 100th anniversary of this organization on March 8, 2008. The Ladies Relief Club building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.