Attic Club Records

Special Collections, Boston Athenæum

Contact Information:

Reference Department

Boston Athenæum

10 ½ Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108

617.227.0270

Appointment Form

Processed by:					Stephen Nonack
Date Completed:					September 6, 1985
Encoded by:					Lisa Starzyk-Weldon

© 2001 Boston Athenæum.

Descriptive Summary

	Attic Club Records (1879-1954)
	Attic Club
	Two boxes.
	Boston Athenaeum. Reference Department.
	The Attic Club was a private Boston woman's literary discussion group founded in 1879 and disbanded by its members in 1954. Records include books of minutes and membership lists, a guest register, manuscript poems and plays, letters and photographs and other material spanning the years 1879-1954.

Acquisition Information:

Gift of the Attic Club, May 12, 1953.

Mss. L422

Related Materials:

Constitution and by-laws. [n.p., 1900], 1 v.

Administrative History:

The Attic Club was founded in 1879 by two teenaged girls, Kate Osborn and Maria Forbush, in a room of the Prince School on Newbury St. in Boston; it was consciously patterned on the type of women's literary association or book discussion group their mothers belonged to, and which saw such popularity in the Gilded Age. The origin of the name is uncertain, though the classical allusion was played upon in Club writings; one elderly member years later wrote of the irony of holding meetings in the Hampshire House bar when once, as girls, they had met in the attic. The teenagers married and became the comfortable matrons (or spinsters) of Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the affluent suburbs, and seemed unwilling, as the years went by, to accept much younger members into the group. Consequently, the organization was never very large, having no more than twenty members in its peak years, but it was congenial and intimate according to the tastes of the members, who met monthly, Fall, Winter and Spring to read original poetry, act out plays, and to discuss works of literature or current events based on a predetermined agenda. Guest lecturers were occasionally invited to speak. The Club was presumably dissolved by the nine remaining members in 1954, the 75th anniversary of the Club.

Scope and Content Note:

Records include books of minutes and membership lists, a guest register, manuscript poems and plays, letters and photographs and other material spanning the years 1879-1954.

The papers of the Attic Club fully describe the intellectual proclivities of the members, their reading habits, likes and dislikes, and may serve to represent the tastes of at least two generations of Boston women of a certain social class for whom politics and social issues were also of interest. Generally, these were women of leisure who had sharp, active minds and few outlets. The records span the suffrage era and show how genteel pre-suffrage women's groups, such as the Attic Club, served as an important forum for the circulation of ideas; a forum which the attainment of full citizenship and entry of women into the workforce gradually made obsolete.

Information may be found on the activities of members such as Alice Brown, the author, and Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, the composer. Guest lecturers included Kate Gannett Wells, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edwin D. Mead, Nathan Haskell Dole and Curtis Guild, Jr.

Local Catalog Headings:

Beach, H. H. A., Mrs., 1867-1944

Brown, Alice, 1857-1948

Wells, Kate Gannett, 1838-1911

Clubs--Massachusetts--Boston

Women--Societies and clubs.

Container List: