The Part Taken by Women in American History/Home Culture Clubs
The Home Culture Clubs.
Fifteen years ago the university extension movement aroused institutions everywhere to send their teachers out among the people to direct their reading and help them in every way toward mental advancement. Three years before the unversity extension movement, there was organized in Philadelphia an experiment which had its beginning in western Massachusetts. This is what is known as The Home Culture Club. Northampton offered an unusual setting for this enterprise, being a long established New England town, dignified, and always ready for anything in the line of education. Its location especially offered this, being within a radius of a few miles of the best educational institutions of the country—Smith College, said to be the largest woman's college in the world; Mount Holyoke with a long and honorable history; Amherst, one of the best of the smaller colleges; Williston Seminary; the Byrnham School; the Clark Institute for Deaf Mutes, and the New Agricultural College of Northampton. Here Mr. George W. Cable found a most favorable environment when he came from the South to make his home in the North in 1885. With his well-known reputation in literature and intense interest in social and industrial problems, he began to look about for what was most needed in his new neighborhood. He concluded that what had been most detrimental to the rapid progress of democracy was class distinction. In any private effort to elevate the masses of this country, at least, class treatment is out of the question. In breaking down these class distinctions, Mr. Cable proposed to call the home into immediate requisition, and he repeatedly said, "The private home is the public hope," and it was his idea to make the home the beginning and the end of his philosophy of popular education. In the autumn of 1887 he brought a few of his friends together and submitted for discussion a scheme for the organization of a Home Culture Club in every home that would consent, the club to consist of the members of the family and of such neighbors as would come to a weekly meeting in one home or another to read and talk together. From discussion, he went to action, and during the first year there were twenty of these clubs in successful operation in Northampton. A public reading room was opened at a central point to give men and boys habitually on the street a glimpse, at least, of a rudimentary home. Casual reading began to turn into serious study, and classes were formed under direction of the Smith College students, who have always been Mr. Cable's constant helpers. These clubs multiplied throughout the state, and in 1898 they numbered throughout the land ninety-one, and the membership was six hundred and fifty, with a total attendance of nearly fifteen thousand. Since then they have been rapidly increased. Some of them are self-supporting, and some have been the recipients of generous donations from philanthropic people.
Both in the business and educational conduct of the Northampton clubs, Mr. Cable has had almost from the first the valuable help of Mrs. Adelaide Moffatt, the general secretary. At least once a year she visits all the club members in their homes, takes a personal interest in their attendance and keeping up their interest in the work. She has been assisted by a great number of women from Smith College and a council of one hundred and twenty-five women residents of Northampton. Mr. Carnegie generously donated fifty thousand dollars toward the erection of the club house for this work. But while these substantial gifts have come from men, the actual carrying on of this splendid work has been entirely done by women, largely college women, throughout the country, and is only another of the many different avenues of work along educational lines being conducted in this country by our women.