In honor of National Women’s History Month, this week’s Dispatch celebrates the Woods Hole Woman’s Club and its contributions to our community. It draws upon over a century of the organization’s papers, which are carefully preserved in the Historical Collection’s archives.

Before passage in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote, American women had few means to affect change whether outside the home or in the nation. As a result, Progressive Era women across the country founded volunteer associations dedicated to, among other topics, education, self-improvement, women’s rights, temperance, child labor reform, and public health. The Woods Hole Woman’s Club, established in the village during the winter months of 1914, empowered the community’s wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters to extend their influence toward concerns with lasting impact on the region.

“Woods Hole,” Announcement of Patriotic Meeting, Falmouth Enterprise, 26 May 1917

 Lena Slawson Drew (1865-1946), the Club’s initiator, charter member, and first president

Literature, art, theater, musical performance, and guest lectures by scientists, social reformers and politicians, among others, provide the means by which Club women into the twenty-first century have taught each other to think critically about the world as informed participants of a modern nation. 

Working to improve the quality of life in the village, members have advocated for and initiated a variety of measures that present-day residents may take for granted. Among these highlights include organizing village-wide trash pick-up before municipal management took over in later years, securing a District nurse to help implement local public health measures that ultimately became the acclaimed Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod, and initiating coordinated home front relief work for World War I and II, subsequently under the auspices of the American Red Cross.

In 1933, the Club urged the Town of Falmouth’s Parks Department to build a tennis court at the ball park in Woods Hole, and in 1959 the Club again worked with the Town to assign numbers to all homes, thus establishing house-to-house mail delivery in the village. In each instance, the Club’s membership perceived a need in the community, identified a solution, and filled the void with practical contributions that have created beauty, necessary resources, and an improved quality of life.

In appreciation of the Woods Hole Library’s encouragement of life-long learning, the Club has supported many of this institution’s endeavors, from cash for its operations, to outdoor landscaping, the purchase of a stone bench, and bookshelves for its children’s room. Beginning in 1944, the Club established a program to honor its deceased members with the donation of a book in their memory, a tradition that has survived into the twenty-first century. As a repository of tribute books, the Library thus serves as a cultural monument to these women who have served the community and as a gift for future generations who benefit from these commemorative volumes.

Through voluntary association for more than a century, these women have forged a group consciousness empowered through collective education, crusaded as agents of progress for their families and the Woods Hole community, lobbied on behalf of educational objectives, and in the process cultivated life-long friendships. During National Women’s History Month, the Woods Hole Historical Collection & Museum is honored to celebrate this organization’s contributions!

All photographs are from the institution’s archives; all newspaper articles are from the Falmouth Enterprise. To learn more about this organization and its history, see Charlotte Emans Moore, “The Ladies of Woods Hole Never Do Things by Halves”: The Woods Hole Woman’s Club, Self-Improvement, Community Service, and Fellowship, 1914-2014, (2015), available for purchase in our Museum Shop, and through our website here

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