Rummaging in the Attic

Rummaging in the Attic

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Seneca Township, McHenry County

Right after every Thanksgiving, I enjoy the ritual of visiting the Christmas Tree Walk at the Woodstock Opera House. Every year, I notice the Seneca Ladies literary Society's Christmas tree and wonder about the nature of the society. The beautifully designed, recently compiled history of the society, "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society: Learning and Laughing Together since 1855," more than meets my curiosity. Assembling numerous documents, letters, photos, recipes, and news clippings, the book puts them into exquisite order. It is as if I had rummaged in the society's attic trunk without getting dusty or feeling confused by messy chronology.

The oldest women's literary group in the United States still in existence, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society was born in Seneca Township, McHenry County, in 1855 in response to a national outcry to save George and Martha Washington's Virginia home, Mount Vernon. With thousands of other women's groups, the society raised the down payment needed for the purchase of the mansion for its eventual restoration and preservation; their collective effort succeeded after three years.

Besides the Mount Vernon fundraising project, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society raised money for Civil War causes, sponsored a French orphan after World War One through The Fatherless Children of France, donated to Armenian Relief Work in response to the Armenian genocide, as well as contributed to local hospitals and historical and literary societies.

The society's women banded together to do good for others. In addition, the society's members pursued the goals of self-education and self-improvement, in fulfillment of the constitutional article that states, "The object of this society shall be the promotion of truth and morality and the intellectual improvement of its members."

In lieu of any available public library, the society's members assembled a private library for members to share. By 1895, the society's library catalog included 560 books, although that total included books that the society had sold to members who wanted to keep them.

Members' meetings focused on educational themes. Whether the theme was strictly literary depended on the hostess's interests, but the focus on self-improvement bound the women together.

“What I didn’t realize is how many different activities they did and what vehicles for creative expression there were,” the book's editor, Pamela A. Gerloff, has explained. “They would write these elaborate and interesting minutes, filling them with humor and commentary. They would give members an assignment to do a creative story or essay, write skits and debate on different topics. It wasn’t just reading. It was this whole array of personal expression. Each meeting is full of lightness, laughter and joy, as well as thoughtful reflection.”

As a voluntary association, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society wove a web of relationship that fostered closeness across families and among former strangers and thereby created a sense of belonging and identity crucial to the cohesion of the larger community.

In 1872, the “One Great Quarrel” threatened that closeness. Social class differences erupted, with some members wanting to include only socially prominent women, while others advocated membership for women of all social classes. The five members who seceded to form a more socially exclusive group abandoned the Seneca Ladies Literary Society to its more egalitarian members.

This crisis in the society's history reflected the strict emphasis on social class differences characteristic of much of the nineteenth-century United States. Without its socially prominent members who demanded exclusivity, the Seneca Ladies Literary Society nevertheless has maintained a certain nineteenth-century aura evoked by the society's name. As longtime member Eleanor Gerloff told a "Chicago Tribune" feature writer in 1998, she enjoyed the club's nineteenth-century  pace and charm. In fact, "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society: Learning and Laughing Together since 1855" supplies ample raw material for a novel of nineteenth-century country life.

Cranford, England

Written in the early 1850s, just before the founding of the Seneca Ladies Literary Society, Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" is a novel of nineteenth-century English country life. Set in a secluded country town in the England of the 1830s, when Victoria's uncle William IV reigned with his Queen Adelaide, "Cranford" is a  deeply appealing and lovely rendering of the commonplace and ordinary transfigured by affection. (The excellent BBC dramatization moved the setting to the early Victorian period, the 1840s, when the Queen was still young and newly married.)

As with the “One Great Quarrel” of the Seneca Ladies Literary Society, the ladies of Cranford experience social class differences that create tensions and even estrangement. But, as with the post-1872 Seneca Ladies Literary Society, long friendship and common purposes eventually outweigh whatever divisions arise.

Coastal Maine

The American "Cranford," Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Country of the Pointed Firs" depicts life in a Maine coastal town in the nineteenth century. Like "Cranford," it is narrated by an outsider. A summer visitor to a seaside country town in Maine slowly becomes absorbed into the web of small-town coastal life. Written and set in the 1890s, the novel possesses the charm of a sepia photograph suddenly come to life.

As Helen, the narrator of Jewett's "Deephaven," comments, "It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dullness." Discerning appreciation transfigures the apparently commonplace, as with Cranford and with the Seneca Ladies Literary Society.

 first published in The  Woodstock Independent

Readers can buy "The Seneca Ladies Literary Society" from Read Between the Lynes Bookstore in Woodstock, Illinois, or email slls1855@gmail.com.