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The Women’s League

The Women’s League

Rich men built the Jekyll Island Club; Female members broke down barriers.

By MARY LOGAN BIKOFF
Photos Courtesy Mosaic, Jekyll Island Museum

When Kate Allerton Papin, a wealthy widow, inherited her father’s Jekyll Island Club membership in 1893, she might well have been the first woman to gain full entry into a very prestigious, very private men’s club. It was big news at the time. A headline in The New York Times read “Women May Become Members; The Jekyl Island Club [that’s how the island’s name was often spelled then] Decides to Open Its Doors to Them.” The article stated that membership would grant women “all the club rights and privileges accorded to men.”

In Victorian America, men and women were typically channeled into separate spheres of life. Social clubs were for either men or women, rarely for both. But from the formation of the Jekyll Island Club in 1886, it stood apart. “It is not intended that it shall be a selfish and exclusive ‘man’s’ club. On the contrary, ladies will constitute an attractive element and will be freely admitted to all the privileges to which their husbands, fathers, and brothers are entitled,” the Times reported. “They can fish, shoot, ride on horseback, bathe, camp out, and enjoy themselves.”

And enjoy themselves they did, in nearly every aspect of Club life.

Florence Crane (right), and Florence Higinbotham (left, her cousin), 1929

“From the get-go, it was intended to be a family club,” says Emily Robertson, lead interpreter at Mosaic, Jekyll Island Museum. “Jekyll stood alone; it was unique in that regard.”

Still, all 53 of the original members of the Club were men. Papin broke down the membership door in 1893, and in ‘97 Frances Baker became the first full-fledged woman member without having inherited a spot from a man. In 1901, the Club’s bylaws were adapted to formally and officially admit both male and female members.

In those early years, despite the inclusionary vision, the men of Jekyll sometimes found themselves frustrated by how much Club women embraced their freedoms. When Papin attempted to buy an apartment at Sans Souci, the Club’s 1896 Victorian apartment building, she was turned down specifically because of her sex. (The apartment ended up in the hands of J.P. Morgan.)

Helen Hartley Jenkins ca. 1920-1930

The women’s welcome into the clubhouse, the inner sanctum of the Jekyll Island Club, was a little bumpy, too. The clubhouse had been built with a separate ladies’ parlor, and it was expected women would use it. Futile attempts were made to keep them out of the main parlor where, the Times reported, “the ladies play billiards in the common billiard hall and go anywhere they choose.”

Though exceedingly luxurious by most standards, Jekyll Island was considered a rustic retreat for the upper-crust members from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other big cities. The Victorian
women of the Club found it to be a place where they could let down their tightly pinned hair and seize their chance to take part in activities like hunting, sharpshooting, bicycling, golf, and horseback riding.
In some instances, they were able to compete against men, with favorable results.

Charlotte Maurice

Jean Struthers Sears, whose family owned one of the country’s largest marble firms, was active in several Club activities and had a reputation for moxie and athletic prowess. “She definitely took advantage of all Jekyll had to offer,” says Robertson, who portrays Sears in a living history tour of Moss Cottage, which the Sears family
built in 1896.

Sears was a known sharpshooter and avid bicyclist. Records indicate that on at least one occasion, she took the prize for the 100-yard bicycle spoon-and-egg race. Another time, she beat out men and women in a clay pigeon shooting match. She once clobbered J.P. Morgan in a shooting competition. He was so upset about losing to a woman that he took it up with the Club president at the time. “He basically told [Morgan] he was a sore loser and needed to get over it,” says Robertson.

According to Sears’s great-great grandson, David Lodge, who has a home on Jekyll today, Sears was such a dynamo that once she was teaching Sunday school on Jekyll when an alligator approached. She whipped out a pistol and shot it.

The women of Jekyll also became the foundation of the community, organizing social events for members, taking part in Club committees, and supporting the employees and their families, all duties that had been overlooked by male members. 

Club member Frances Baker found a schoolteacher for the employees’ children in 1901 and supervised the building of the island’s first school. She continued to buy supplies and finance the maintenance of the school, even matching the teacher’s salary. Later, she joined a cohort of Club women, including Florence Higinbotham Crane, in spearheading a “welfare committee” to aid the employees’ families, and organized a library for them in 1927. Charlotte Maurice was known as a spiritual influence at the Club and, as the consummate host, invited not only members to her home but also locals and clergy, both Black and white.

These women were leaders back home, too, great benefactors and advocates for social change and enrichment. Edith Macy organized programs to help poor children in New York and furthered the expansion of the Girl Scouts, serving as chair of its national board of directors from 1919 until her death in 1925. Annie DeCamp Hegeman Porter was a founder of Shinnecock Hills Art Academy on Long Island, New York, one of the country’s first open-air painting schools. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge was known for the grand New Jersey estate where she bred and raised show dogs. She founded an animal welfare society and supported a seeing-eye-dog school still in operation today. (In 1933 she was the first woman invited to judge Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club.) Dodge’s foundation, still active today, has distributed nearly $500 million in support of nonprofits. Alva Vanderbilt championed the rights of women and was a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage. Helen Hartley Jenkins was known both for her polarizing personality (she dripped with diamonds and was described by one friend as an enfant terrible) and her philanthropy (she founded the School of Nursing at Teachers College at Columbia University and was a steadfast supporter of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor).

As men’s involvement on the island dwindled in the 1930s during the Great Depression, women stepped into leadership roles. By the end of the decade, women owned seven cottages outright and headed up half of the committees. Women’s Club membership peaked in that decade at 25 percent. By the end of the Club Era in the 1940s, 31 women had enjoyed full Club membership, amounting to 10 percent of the membership over the Club’s history. As women rose on Jekyll, so did they rise across America.

Helen Hartley Jenkins (left) and guest, 1926

The Ladies Rough Riding Obstacle Bicycle Society

In the 1890s, America went wild for the bicycle. Riding became a fashionable leisure activity and proved to be freeing for women across the country, providing independence, mobility, and (not insignificantly) a more practical wardrobe. Corsets got looser and skirts became less cumbersome. Even bloomers came into play.

The bicycle was embraced by the women of  the Jekyll Island Club. Jean Struthers Sears, a well-known sportswoman, was part of a group that formed the Ladies Rough Riding Obstacle Bicycle Society, which attempted daring feats on two wheels and flew freely about the island.

Some in high society might have considered the sport unladylike. But the fact that it was so popular on Jekyll Island sheds light on the sort  of groundbreaking place the island was during the Club Era. In fact, the elite women who took  up sports (including bicycling, tennis, croquet, and shooting) in places like Jekyll at the turn of the century may have helped usher in the acceptance of women in sports across the country. It might have even inspired some men, too. William Rockefeller reported that his son, Percy, was spurred to take up bicycle riding on Jekyll because so many of his female friends enjoyed it. 

This article first appeared in Volume 7 Number 2 of 31•81, the Magazine of Jekyll Island.

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