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 church. Her name and the names of the other founders frequently appeared in local newspapers as hosting teas and dinners. She was included in the top tier of Shreveport society, though she and her husband were, apparently, never really wealthy. Her pedigree and education probably account for a good deal of that, her faithful activities with the Methodist church for more, and her well-developed social skills for the rest. As women’s clubs tiptoed societal lines of gender, French bridged lines of class with apparent ease.
One cannot read the notes from the early meetings without noticing the steady presence and guiding hand of French. When a chair quits, which happened four times in the first year, she moved that a committee be formed to find a replacement. She recruited the first guest speaker for the club, Judge Ben Lindsay. She gave instructions on how to behave during the Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar’s recital (“absolute silence”). It was her suggestion to get a lawyer to apply for a state charter, and she made many suggestions to amend the group’s bylaws. Every time the group encountered a problem, whenever something needed to be done or addressed, French was there to do it. She emerges from this mass of club minutiae as a capable, dedicated, insightful, practical, knowledgeable, and tireless woman.20
The gorgeous Georgian mansion that became the permanent home of the Woman’s Department Club was finished in 1925. The first lecture given in the new hall was French’s closing lecture of the 1924–1925 season. As seats had not yet been installed, audience members perched themselves on boxes that the construction workers had left behind. This worked out well, as the discomfort prompted each member to pledge “the price of one opera chair” for the new auditorium.21
Woman’s Department Club, Shreveport, interior. Photograph by Elizabeth DiSavino.
French stayed on as board chair until 1928 and continued teaching English literature every Friday for free long after that. She taught in her regalia, linking her students’ fledgling efforts with her own impressive academic achievements, and focused on her area of expertise: English and classical literature. Her lesson plans were detailed. She did not talk down to her students but expected them to keep up. A typical year of lectures covered the miracle plays, the morality plays, the early comedies, the early tragedies, Elizabethan drama, and Jacobean drama.22 But French’s goals were not only to educate the minds of the women of Shreveport but also to enlighten their spirits:
This course of lectures is presented this year, not so much to increase your knowledge in the abstract sense and develop dramatists, as to heighten your desire for more learning, until it becomes a yearning, an obsession for deeper truths, more lasting beauty, and more eternal good … to promote a great spiritual bond for all humanity…. This larger outlook that comes from books and work, brings with it a freedom, an emancipation from what is small and petty, with a contempt for wealth as wealth, and a contempt for power as power, and a contempt for society as society, and gives one instead interests and influences which should soften the hard places and make life brighter for many in reach…. Men may grow mighty of heart and mighty of mind, magnanimous, which is to be great in life, to have made progress in living. It is not to have more trappings, more public honours, more fortune, more footmen. He only is advancing in life whose heart is softer, whose blood is warmer, whose brain is quicker, whose soul is more personal, whose spirit is entering into living peace. This sheds an inward light and can vouchsafe an inward lustre that shall survive the undaunted quest, until the mind becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which its possessor lives. This looking for beauty, with an open mind and open heart, will bring a greatness of thought, and consciously and unconsciously crowd back the evil, the unrest, the bitter, the hate, and show infinite values and final accumulation of all good. Let us determine to study more constantly every aspect of real knowledge, fill our minds only with things of permanent value, hoping some day to grasp deeper knowledge, to realize more exquisite beauty, more genuine good, and after all is said, that is Truth and that is Eternal.23
By 1920, the club had taken stands on several social issues, including a minimum wage for women, an eight-hour day for female industrial workers, and the stance that “part of a prisoner’s wages should be paid to his family.” These were relatively progressive positions for a southern women’s club to take. The fact that French held great influence in the Woman’s Department Club may hint at her own views on these issues.24
French took a few absences from the club during the time she was involved with it. She went home to Kentucky in 1920 to be with her mother during her final illness. Letters attest to the fact that her students appreciated her and fervently
