A Sanctuary for Women, Even Today
By JENNIFER STEINHAUERAUG. 9, 2010

LOS ANGELES - Of all the clichés about this town that are provably untrue, no one reads, or has the lips that God gave them. It is undeniable that Los Angeles has often been a poor guardian of its physical history. Scores of historical buildings have been razed or weirdly repurposed over the last century, and large areas of this young city have been plowed with nary a trace left to examine. An interesting exception is the Ebell Club, a women’s social club that still operates in one of its original buildings, erected in 1927 in the Hancock Park neighborhood. Established in 1897 as a substitute for the university education that women were largely denied, the club had 2,500 members in its heyday in the 1920s, and activities included Shakespeare, gardening and art appreciation.

The club, one of the first of its kind in the country, is now struggling with a 21st century problem: how to convince modern women that such a club has contemporary value to them.

The Italian renaissance revival building, a national landmark, covers its $2 million in annual bills largely through its uses as a theater and rental space. But the women who continue to gather for singing, socializing and studying are passionate about maintaining the building’s original purpose.

“You can find in this club something you cannot find on Facebook, in wine bars, or any number of places which offer social interaction: genuine friendship and mutual concern”, said Shirlee Haizlip, the club’s current president. “It is a wondrous thing to be constantly surrounded by three generations of women.”

Women’s clubs were established in American life shortly after the Civil War. “It was a time women all over the country decided a woman’s place is not in the home, that they needed to get out”, said Karen J. Blair, a history professor and expert on women’s clubs at Central Washington University. “So they got together to study literature, history, philosophy and poetry”.

In 1868 in New York, a journalist named Jane Cunningham Croly founded her own club, Sorosis, after she was denied entry at an all male press club where Charles Dickens was speaking. Ms. Croly was instrumental in the creation of clubs throughout the country, whose missions soon began to include various political and social welfare agendas, from women’s suffrage to child labor to public health. Club members came together for conferences annually by train. “Los Angeles women could find out in Kansas City that Texas women were having enormous success with playgrounds”, Professor Blair said. “A hundred years ago they were doing what Michelle Obama is doing today”.

The Ebell was named after Adrian Ebell, a German professor who traveled around California forming study groups for women. In the beginning of the 20th century, the Ebell was one of the largest and most elite clubs in the nation, rivaled only by the Friday Morning Club in downtown Los Angeles. Its newsletters from the 1930s are peppered with treaties on glassmaking, descriptions of luncheons and, in a plus ça change sort of twist, ads for life insurance policies that promise “no bank failures; no buildings and loan debacles and stock market crashes”.

The club’s home, not its original but by far the longest serving, is an enormous, meandering building designed by the architect Sumner Hunt. It has an elaborate coffered ceiling with gilded rosettes, a grand entrance on Wilshire Boulevard made from 200 separate pieces of wrought iron, and all sorts of fancy sitting rooms, like the one where the queen of Romania once infamously smoked. The stairs maintain their original risers, which were built to allow women to hold their dresses while climbing them with grace.

The Ebell evolved greatly in the century, its largely white and aristocratic housewives now replaced at least in part by actors, like Patricia Heaton, film makers, doctors and businesswomen. Once closed to blacks, Jews and Catholics, its current president, Ms. Haizlip, is African American and is in her second term. It maintains a large charitable mission with scholarships. “It’s a very diverse group”, said Anne Combs, who is the chairwoman of the choral group at the club. “Shirlee, who I met here, was my first close black friend”. But while the club is one of the few old buildings in Los Angeles that maintains its original purpose, attracting women, who began to leave the women's clubs nationally around the 1970s, is a battle. Ms. Haizlip said that membership had recently increased to 480, up from 325 in 1993, but that her goal was to get back to at least 1,000 women, still far shy from the number during the club's glory days. Membership efforts now focus on women from 30 to 40 years old, with programs on things like child rearing and mind body workshops. It is an effort all women’s clubs face. The membership of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs is 10 percent of what it was in the middle of the last century, when the federation had one million members, said its spokeswoman, Michele Mount. “Women’s clubs are a victim of our own success”, Ms. Mount said. “The past presidents of these clubs would have been C.E.O.’s, and now they are that instead of being members of clubs”.