The move to Shreveport in 1917 marked the start of the most professionally satisfying period of French’s life. The Frenches settled into a house on Jordan Street. They found old music manuscripts in the attic, which they kept; apparently French intended to keep up with her own music making. After a short period for settling in, she engaged in what was to be her longest-lasting project: the formation of the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club.8
The Woman’s Department Club of Shreveport
As previously noted, many southern women graduated from northern colleges and after returning home forged new roles for women there. Women’s clubs were a vital avenue for this endeavor in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. They were ways in which women could gather in a socially acceptable environment, share meaningful and educational experiences, and engage in efforts addressing social issues like slavery, suffrage, and temperance. While women could not yet vote, their visibility and moral influence had an impact on men’s decisions. Thus, they walked the tightrope between acceptable female roles and social activism.
White women had been banding together for various causes since the American Revolution, when thirty-seven upper-class women, led by Esther Deberdt Reed, formed the Philadelphia Ladies’ Association to raise money for the revolutionary army. Their subscription efforts included seeking donations from not only from wealthy women but also from middle- and lower-class women, intentionally bridging the class divide by including women below their class standing in their fundraising efforts. Their door-to-door solicitations were tolerated because they were acting in support of their husbands’ endeavors. In fact, they raised over $300,000 (in Continental currency) from fourteen hundred donors.9
The women’s club movement proper began in about 1830 in the North. Free black women were among the first to organize, concerning themselves with “mutual aid and self-organization.” White female societies and relief societies also formed during those years to address problems the government did not seem inclined to address, including issues concerning widows, orphans (including black orphans), and the mentally ill. Women were permitted to take part in such efforts because the matters they were working with were seen as ones of nurture, extensions of the life of the home.10
During the Civil War, women organized on both sides to help with nursing and rehabilitation of the injured. These efforts were not just accepted but welcomed, and the temporary autonomy that they provided women was tolerated. It is after the war that some of the efforts of organized women became controversial. For one thing, the infantilization of women, particularly in the South, gave white men an excuse to engage in acts of horrific violence against black men in retaliation for supposed acts of sexual depravity against innocent and helpless white women. For another, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, women’s organizations began to engage with social issues. Women’s clubs were not seen as threatening until they began questioning matters like slavery and suffrage. As long as they built schools, medical dispensaries, and shelters for the homeless, they were considered to be operating within acceptable limits. Even temperance was seen as an acceptable issue, for it was framed in terms of the home, that is, the suffering caused by alcoholic husbands. However, as Anne Firor Scott points out, once these clubs supported prison reform, sex education, minimum wage laws, and suffrage, opprobrium came down on their heads, and they were accused of trying to revolutionize the social system, subverting the relations of women and men, and threatening the sacred institution of marriage.11
Women’s clubs in the South had a later start but followed roughly the same trajectory as their northern counterparts. Barbara Smith Corrales notes that it took at least a generation for them to catch on in the South: “The role of women’s organizations was initially less significant in patriarchal southern communities that severely restricted public expression by women, but, over time, southern women’s clubs effectively loosened social restraints, permitting a broader application of the feminine gender’s ‘natural traits’ (nursing, nurturing, and moral guidance). Women utilized this new freedom to promote reforms, eventually including woman suffrage.”12
However, not all women’s clubs, North or South, promoted progressive policies and goals. In the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, used Lost Cause mythology and sentiment to promote a kinder, gentler story about the antebellum South. Chapters erected statues, established Confederate veterans’ homes, and, most importantly, in the early twentieth century used pressure from their twenty thousand members to urge textbook companies to put a pro-Confederate spin on “the War between the States.” This pleasant fiction promoted an emphasis on the states’ rights angle and painted a picture of kindly, elegant, dashing masters who loved their slaves and treated them well. It was an image that was to persist throughout the South for at least half a century and echoes still.13
Few women had a wider and longer-lasting impact on the organization and operation of any women’s club than Katherine Jackson French. Her work with the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club endures to this day; the club is still in existence and sponsors lectures, concerts, and gatherings.
Founded in 1919, the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club was an organization that initially focused, for the most part, not on politics, but on educating the city’s female residents. French and the other founders envisioned the club as a place where women could go to learn, to study, and to better themselves. This meant providing what was essentially a college-level curriculum in a variety of subjects for only the price of membership dues, or a “nominal sum.”14
The Woman’s Department Club grew out of the oldest literary club in Shreveport, the Hypatia Club. The offshoot group called a special meeting in November 1919, presided over by J. D. Wilkinson, the president of Hypatia. Plans were made for a women’s group “whose aim and objective would be to provide a center of thought and action, thereby focusing the strength and artistic growth of Shreveport and vicinity.”15 Dr. S. B. Hicks was elected president. Katherine Jackson French doubled as vice president and “Permanent Chairman of the Board.” The group resolved to seek a permanent location and establish a free reading room and library, with the goal of being open all day. Lectures, art exhibits, and music classes were to be offered. After the resolution establishing the club was passed, French and two other women rose to speak of other women’s department clubs they had been involved with or knew about. A committee adjourned briefly and came back with working bylaws. Once the bylaws were approved, eighty-eight women joined the newly formed club on the spot. French then rose to announce that she would deliver the first lecture, on behalf of the literary department one month hence, that it and all her lectures would be free of charge and open to the public, that the class would progress as fast as it wished, and that anyone could attend her lectures without preparation so that women who were too busy to do homework (and perhaps those who could not read well) could be accommodated.16
That first lecture by French, “The History of Drama,” was held a month later, in January 1920. The 125 women in attendance were too many to fit into Mrs. Cecilia Ellerbe’s living room, so the group chose the Council Chamber at City Hall as its regular meeting place. Meetings continued to be held there for five years. During that time, the group carefully raised money through bazaars, teas, and donations and hired an architect to build a permanent home.17
It is not clear whether the membership of the Woman’s Department Club of Shreveport consisted of only the city’s upper crust, but certainly its founders and administrators were from that circle, which accounts for its fund-raising success. The membership fee was $15.00 per year, which had the purchasing power of about $220 in today’s terms.18 Nonmembers paid “a nominal sum” to attend events, a fairly egalitarian practice that seemed to invite not only the wealthy but also the middle class to attend. It is extremely likely that the club was white only; I have found no pictures or any other evidence to contradict that conclusion, which is a logical one given the mores of the place and time. By the late nineteenth century, women’s clubs nationwide were made up mostly of upper-class white women who were not burdened with the menial tasks of homemaking.19 When she cofounded the club, French fit that mold; she had a servant at home, no career as of yet, and little to occupy her other than her activities at the Methodist