Celebrate Women’s History Month with an auditorium talk by historian Pat Farr on "New Mexico Women’s Clubs: Civic Pioneers," at 6 pm on Friday, March 6. Learn how women at the turn of the last century helped the state make strides in "municipal housekeeping" chores, though their contributions went largely ignored. A Free First Friday event. Museum admission is free to everyone from 5 to 8 pm.
Pat Farr is an independent scholar, retired college teacher and member of Los Compadres del Palacio. For the past several years, she has researched the life and times of former First Lady Mary Catharine Bradford Prince during New Mexico’s late Territorial period.
The women’s club movement began, nationally, with Sorosis, the first all-women’s study club, founded in New York City in the late 1860s. It became a model copied by thousands of “unexceptional” middle-aged, middle-class American women who found both their voice and public influence through organized group effort. The movement hurled itself across the nation and, by 1906, over 5,000 local organizations had joined the General Foundation of Women’s Clubs.
Farr will provide an overview of that phenomena and show how, after 1880, New Mexico women shaped it to meet what they perceived as their own personal needs and sense of civic responsibility. Those clubs are very much still with us. Many early groups morphed into respected community and state organizations that lend weight and management to health, educational and governmental institutions.
As one example, the Women’s Board of Trade in Santa Fe epitomizes the “municipal housekeeping” chores undertaken by a small group of women who accompanied entrepreneurial American men who came to the territory in hopes of finding fortune. Their wives and daughters also impacted the community, but their names and accomplishments are rarely, if ever, found in the historical record. Rather, their efforts survive in the civic organizations they created in small towns along the western frontier.
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