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Organized 11 March 1911 · 290 members in 1921
The club: The city's women's club stands in the 1921 directory at full roster strength: "Mishawaka Women's Club — organized March 11, 1911. Membership, 290. General and department meetings held in the new library, 1st and Hill" — a member of the Indiana Federation of Clubs and of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, with Mrs. J. G. Bostwick as president, Helen Miller recording secretary and Bertha Marter treasurer. Two hundred ninety members in a town of fourteen thousand made it one of the largest club bodies in Mishawaka, and its meeting place is its character: the woman's club met in the public library, the institution its generation of clubwomen had campaigned into being across Indiana, and worked in departments — the study-club form of the federation era. Howard's 1907 roster, four years before the club's organizing, carries the city's other women's bodies at the size he gave them — the Rebekah lodge, the Eastern Star chapter, the two Maccabee hives, the Woodmen's ladies' circle, the Catholic Foresters' women's court — and the standalone literary club Howard could not list, because it did not yet exist, is this one. The club's later course — its clubhouse question, its present state — is not documented in the records reached; the settling sources are the Indiana Federation of Women's Clubs' yearbooks and the Enterprise's run, and the gap is named rather than filled.
Sources:
- R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921, Mishawaka section, "Clubs" — the organization date, membership, meeting place, federation memberships and officers, quoted in the entry; read first-hand.
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), p. 345 — the women's bodies of the 1907 roster.