california history - California Historical Society

The “Mother of Clubs”In Boston, Caroline had known and admiredElizabeth Peabody, the founder of the first kindergartenin the United States (and the sister-in-lawof Horace Mann, the creator of Massachusetts’scommon-school system). The first civic projectCaroline undertook in Los Angeles was theestablishment of a kindergarten. Before leavingBoston, she had persuaded Emma Marwedel, aleader of the German kindergarten movementthat had inspired Peabody, to come west to setup a private preschool. Marwedel launched herschool with twenty-five pupils, recruited by Caroline,in a house with a garden to accommodateplaytime, which Caroline had located. Althoughthe school itself was not a success and closedafter two years, the graduates of the trainingschool for kindergarten teachers that the indefatigableMrs. Severance simultaneously startedspread the value of early-childhood educationthroughout the state. By the early 1890s, publicschool officials in Los Angeles had embraced theconcept; kindergartens in eighteen elementaryschools marked the beginning of progressivereform of public schooling in that city. 53To satisfy their spiritual needs, the Severancesinvited a Unitarian minister of their acquaintancefrom Massachusetts to help found a congregationin Los Angeles. His first worship servicetook place in Red Roof’s front parlor in 1877.Ten years on, the Severances’ cohort of “religiousradicals” had grown large enough to build a formalsanctuary, the predecessor of the extant FirstUnitarian Church of Los Angeles. The Severancesalso hosted a neighborhood book club, anearly attempt to enhance their adopted city’s culturallife and one that would inspire the creationof cultural organizations of greater importance,such as the Ruskin Art Club, founded in 1888 topromote appreciation of engravings and etchings,and the Severance Club, a conversation groupestablished in 1906 and named in honor of CarolineSeverance, who in 1878 had invited a smallgroup of friends to help her launch Los Angeles’sfirst women’s club. 54The women’s club was “an innovation,” Carolinelater recalled, “whose very name was an offenseto the established order of things.” Conservativewomen disparaged its secular orientation andlack of exclusivity. The first draft of the club’sconstitution had opened membership to any“respectable” female resident of Los Angeles;Caroline persuaded the draft writers to deleteeven that qualifier on the grounds that it waselitist. She was just getting started. During herpresidency, the organization continued to rattlethe powers that be, mounting a protest againstmunicipal plans that would have entailed thedestruction of shade trees and lobbying (on oneor two occasions, successfully) for the appointmentof women to important educational andcultural positions. 55During one of Caroline’s periodic visits to Boston,the women’s club disintegrated. Five years later,in 1891, she organized a new forum to encouragewomen to discuss and act on critical issues.As the first president of the Friday MorningClub, Caroline favored programs on women’srights, suffrage, and economic independence,interspersed with lighter fare about diet andfashion designed to attract uninitiated women,who could then be gently nudged into takingpublic action. (For example, liberation from “ConstrictingCorsets” was the focus of a December1891 gathering.) The strategy worked. The clubwomen’s promotion of child labor regulation, fairemployment practices, and consumer protectioninfluenced the platform of California’s ProgressiveParty. With a membership that had swelled tomore than three hundred by the turn of the century,the Friday Morning Club built a handsomemission-style headquarters at Ninth and Figueroastreets. Still growing twenty-five years later, theclub erected an even larger structure that boastedan art gallery, a library, and a dining room for fivehundred, in addition to meeting rooms. 56