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Friday Morning Club records

 Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: 7007

Scope and Contents

The collection is comprised of agreements between Allison and Allison (architects) and the Friday Morning Club, 1922-1924; invoices and receipts between the Friday Morning Club and the contractors; 1976-77 membership directory; ephemera of the Variety Arts Center (The Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts); 1991 newspaper clippings regarding the Friday Morning Club's centennial; architectural floor plans of the building, photographs.

Dates

  • Creation: 1891-1991

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE: Advance notice required for access.

Conditions Governing Use

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Manuscripts Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

Historical Background

The Friday Morning Club was founded by abolitionist, suffragist, mother, and Los Angeles homemaker Caroline Severance in 1891, with 87 other women in the reading room of the Hollenbeck Hotel, then located at Second and Broadway. It became the largest women's club in California, with membership of over 1,800 women by the 1920s.

Women's clubs were a mainstay of middle-class women's social and intellectual life across America from the end of the Civil War until the middle of the 20th century, when their numbers declined as opportunities increased for women's equal participation in mainstream business, educational, and social institutions.

Caroline Severance had founded one of the first such clubs in the nation, the New England Women's Club of Boston, in 1868, and her known political associations gave the FMC a (deserved) reputation as a politically active powerhouse for community improvement in Los Angeles. In order to meet their goals of self-improvement; study of the arts, literature and culture; and the political and social advancement of women; the women's clubs built or renovated a building to serve as their club house as soon as they could raise the money. To protect the club and its assets in an era of less-than-solid property rights for married women, clubs routinely formed a stock corporation to raise and invest money for a clubhouse campaign, and usually recruited unmarried member to serve as secretary or treasurer of the club's finances.

The FMC's first clubhouse was at the same location, and was a Mission Revival style 2-story building that cost $25,000 to build in 1900.

When World War I swelled their numbers far beyond the capacity of that building, they dismantled it, sold it with its furnishings to the Catholic Woman's Club, and built the current 6-story Italian Renaissance Revival style structure in 1923 on its site at 940 S. Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was designed by architects Allison and Allison and built in 1923. Its two auditoriums and seating for almost 2,000 made it suitable to the Friday Morning Club's popular arts and theater programs in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Figueroa Hotel was built directly across the street from the Friday Morning Club in 1925. It was also financed and run by women, to meet the needs of business, professional, and traveling women in Los Angeles. The two are a microcosm of the increasingly important and complex roles women were playing in American society in the 1920s.



The club sold the building's title in 1977 to the Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts, who used the Variety Arts Theater auditorium for live plays, cabarets, meals and revivals of early stage and radio dramas, and for filming and special events rentals. The Society also displayed many unique and extensive collections in the field of theater arts in the building. The SPVA Library is open as a research facility to serious students of the theater arts.

The Friday Morning Club's members continued to meet and serve the community, from the leased back 5th floor and later rented quarters on Wilshire Boulevard, until the 1990s. Today, the Ebell of Los Angeles is the largest functioning woman's club in the city, with around 400 members and a large 1927 clubhouse in the Hancock Park district.





The Friday Morning Club building is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, meeting the criteria for both social history and architectural significance.



[Information from Wikipedia]

Extent

4 Linear Feet (2 boxes)

Language of Materials

English

Collection Status

The collection is unprocessed.

Title
Finding Aid of the Friday Morning Club records
Status
Completed
Author
Jacqueline Morin
Date
2018 May
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Repository Details

Part of the USC Libraries Special Collections Repository

Contact:
Doheny Memorial Library 206
3550 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles California 90089-0189 United States