Clubwomen of Los Angeles

For more than a century, a group of women known as the Friday Morning Club (FMC) have met each week in Los Angeles. While few Southern Californians today have ever heard of this group, there was a time when households throughout Los Angeles would have instantly recognized its name and when some 1 million clubwomen nationwide would have known of its existence through newsletters and magazines. The FMC and similar organizations around the country, in fact, stood in the center sphere of Progressive era civic culture.

Founded in 1891, by the early 1920s the FMC had become the largest member within the nation's General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC). At its peak, close to 3,000 members supported the club, and thousands more attended its innumerable meetings, ...