The Women's Faculty Club

The independent (but university sanctioned) establishment calling itself “The Faculty Club” refused to admit women as members. Some were occasionally allowed to attend functions as guests, but they were not eligible for membership. The club’s sexual restriction might not have been noticed in 1902, when it was built as a one-room clubhouse, since no women were then on the faculty. However, by the close of the 1910s, the clubhouse had been greatly expanded and over a score of new women had been added to the faculty, so the continued bar on their membership seemed unjustifiable. Still, we might wonder what was so important about having a club.

The women were, after all, voting members of their departments as well as members of the principal faculty organization, the Academic Senate, whose power was then increasing. Indeed, the women’s desire for a club coincided exactly with the chapter in UC history known as the “Revolt of the Faculty”, in which that group as a whole took a decisive step toward enhancing their own standing in relation to the administration, especially in the matter of professorial appointments and promotions (Stadtman, 239-56). In Benjamin Ide Wheeler’s day those powers belonged to the President, with the consent of the Regents. With his resignation in 1919, the Academic Senate began campaigning for the system of shared governance that Berkeley has practiced ever since.

The simultaneity of the campaign for a Women’s Faculty Club and the general expansion of collective faculty power raises the question of possible links between the two efforts. We can’t say for sure that there was a direct connection, but what’s known about the circumstances prompts the speculation that the women leaders, whose programs had often received Wheeler’s support, might have been wondering how to proceed as the balance of power shifted toward the faculty. They thus might have been especially alert to signs of contempt on the part of male colleagues, and the record suggests that men’s Faculty Club representatives might have responded dismissively to an overture about inclusion. They were also no doubt eager to claim their share of the faculty’s growing authority.   

Within this broad context of organizational change, many other specific reasons, both practical and symbolic, made a Women’s Faculty Club seem indispensable.     

The practical reasons for a club

To begin at the simplest level, the exclusion was not only insulting but also a significant impediment to leading a comfortable and sociable campus life; it even interfered with simply having lunch. A place for all to purchase meals conveniently may sound like an obvious requirement for a growing public university, but in the late teens, the campus was still a complete food desert for women. Thus, at the simplest and most literal level, exclusion by men from the only faculty club was a bread-and-butter issue.

The university, as we’ve noticed several times in these essays, had a policy against providing living or eating facilities, so all such places had to be created by independent associations, like the ASUC and the Faculty Club, both of which were exclusively male in 1919. Thus, as an early member of the Women’s Faculty Club explained, all women on campus “who did not live close enough to walk home for lunch either carried it or went to a public restaurant off campus”. The men, in contrast, had provided themselves with two places: the ASUC lunch counter in the basement of North Hall “was sacred to the men students”; and the male faculty had their club (The Women's Faculty Club, 82). The eating restrictions illustrate once again how the university’s refusal to provide services made life particularly hard for women. They were not only constant reminders of their second-class citizenship but also sources of discomfort and inconvenience, costing them time and energy.

The faculty women thus keenly felt the need for a place to meet one another, enjoy relaxed conversation with peers, engage in social activities, hold meetings, give parties, have meals, and even find housing. And in providing one for themselves, they were following a pattern already well established at Berkeley: when women were excluded, they built separate, parallel institutions. Indeed, they had the recent example of the establishment of Senior Women’s Hall by the students in 1911. The senior men’s leadership organization, the Order of the Golden Bear, had built Senior Men’s Hall in 1905-6 as a place to hold private, informal discussions with alumni, faculty, and administrators. Not allowed to enter that hall at any time, women students soon began raising money for a clubhouse of their own. Like all the clubs, it was built on land allotted by the Regents and with the approval of the administration (Girton Hall, 7-8). Architect Julia Morgan donated her labor (Darnall, 60). Throughout the 1910s, Senior Women’s Hall was the primary assembly place for female students on campus. It did not have dining facilities but, fittingly, did have a small kitchen.  

Although partly following this earlier pattern, the building of the Women’s Faculty Club in other ways departed from it. Like earlier club builders, the women faculty sought the approval of the administration and asked the Regents to allow them to build on university land. They raised money from the sale of bonds, took out a mortgage, and they asked John Galen Howard, the primary university architect, to design the building. But the Women’s Faculty Club was a much bigger and more expensive project, built not only for meals, assembly, and recreation, but also residential purposes. It took four years to plan and build, and the leading lights of the women’s faculty (incorporated as the Building Committee) were personally involved in all stages of the process (Women’s Faculty Club HSR, 42-52). The sheer extent of their dedicated efforts indicates how much more than mere lunch was at stake in their enterprise.  

The symbolic need: public recognition of faculty status

The exclusion of women from membership in the Faculty Club was tantamount to a denial of their faculty status. And in response, the faculty women did something unprecedented: they took an action on their own behalf that differed from their earlier behavior. Previously when campus women had organized (combining with donors, alumnae, and faculty wives) they had done so for the benefit of women students. Even the first appointment of a woman to the faculty, Lucy Sprague, was supported on the grounds that the students needed an older mentor and spokeswoman. But in response to the faculty club’s exclusion, the academic women publicly banded together for the first time to advance their own interests. The 1919-20 foundation of the Women’s Faculty Club was thus a turning point in the history of women at Berkeley because it showed the rise of a new collective identity, that of women academic professionals, and it manifested a new collective determination to advance their welfare, careers, and campus status. To be sure, it also promoted the cause of gender equality, but it was specifically focused on applying that principle inside the ranks of professional academics.  

The number of women on the faculty, however, was still too small (under 5% of the total faculty) to be an adequate membership base for a substantial club housed in a building of its own. Thus, according to this 1920 description of the founding event, the plan was always to include women beyond the faculty: “On September 29, 1919, Miss Lucy Ward Stebbins, Dean of Women, called together the women of the University of California in a meeting which resulted in the organization of the Women’s Faculty Club whose active members are the women of the faculty and of the administrative staff of the University, and whose associate members are chosen from professional women and women in public service in this community, and which has for its purpose the forwarding of the professional and social interests of these groups.” (Club records, quoted in Women’s Faculty Club HSR, 29). Thus even in looking outside the faculty for members, the planners emphasized that the club was to promote women’s professional interests.

A note among the minutes of a 1920s meeting of the members further indicates that the founders were fully conscious of how different their own organization was from the many women’s clubs springing up at that time, which were dedicated to philanthropy and civic improvement programs. Discussing the possibility that a general “college women’s club” might be in the offing, they decided that “since the college women’s club is to promote social ideals and interests of a social and educational nature, while the Women’s Faculty Club is more professional, a club for contacts rather than programs, it seemed hardly possible that any duplication of effort or interest could occur” (Quoted in Women’s Faculty Club HSR, 32). This was to be a club devoted to providing professional benefits to its own members; it was not to be a service organization assisting others. Its rationale thus marks a break from the altruistic, service-oriented reasons normally given for women’s organizations. And it represents a step, like several noted in the last essay, from women’s occupational volunteerism to fully fledged professionalism.

Professionalism, as this note indicates, gave the club a way to expand without becoming simply another women’s club. But, of course, it also entailed exclusions and even occasionally created a sense of internal hierarchy. One later member, who came up through the administrative ranks, for example, reported that she’d perceived the academics as “snobby” and believed they had only offered membership to women in managerial jobs out of economic necessity (Women’s Faculty Club, p. 5). Such comments in the club’s oral histories might seem to indicate mere matters of personal attitude or behavior, but they point to a structural paradox going far beyond individual intentions and failings. Obviously, the WFC’s assertion of its members’ professional status ruled out membership for most of the campus’s women employees, and the emphasis on professionalism had socially variable implications even inside the club. The very name of the place indicates the original primacy of the academic women’s need for professional recognition, and yet the club’s survival has always depended on a much wider constituency. It was inevitable that different groups of members would sometimes see the professionalism issue from conflicting angles. Seeking the same status privilege as their male counterparts looked egalitarian to the academic members, but to others it could seem elitist.        

Another layer of complexity is added by the fact that the academics who were most deeply involved in founding the club were also those most engaged in socially and politically progressive research. The growth in female faculty numbers by 1920, as noted in the last essay, had been greatest at the points in the curriculum where the academy intersected with public service: e. g., health, nutrition, family and child welfare, education. WWI intensified these activities, and in the 1920s and 30s, the list would grow. The faculty found themselves not only educating women for new professions but also giving expert advice and serving on committees and commissions at various government levels. Thus, the more interested a faculty member was in bringing about change beyond campus, the more she would want to display her professional credentials.

Statistician Elizabeth Scott recalled how humiliating it could be for a woman to participate at such meetings in the men’s Faculty Club even as late as the 1950s. While advising a state agricultural group at the men’s club, she explained, “We hardly made any progress at all when in came a man called Mr. Smith who was a desk, a counter employee. He ordered me to leave. Because I wasn't a member, therefore, I could not be eating in this room, only members were allowed to eat in that room” (Scott, 158). Everyone at that meeting left in protest, but the incident nevertheless illustrates why being able to hold meetings and host contacts in a respectful environment seemed a necessity.