Women’s Club Movement The Review Official Organ of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs 1898

Utah Federation of Women's Clubs

Ephemera and pamphlets

Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs. The Review, March 19, 1898, official organ of the statewide federation and a primary source documenting how organized women in Utah exchanged information, recorded institutional business, and maintained connections with women’s associations beyond the state. Established in 1893, the Utah Federation was created to bring women’s clubs into communication with one another so that they could compare methods of work and advance educational, industrial, and social interests. The present issue demonstrates that communication system in practice through minutes of a federation meeting, reports concerning women’s groups elsewhere in the United States and abroad, and general educational material. Its publication is especially noteworthy in 1898, only two years after Utah statehood permanently secured women’s voting rights under the state constitution, although the federation itself pursued a broader program of education, civic improvement, and organized female cooperation rather than functioning solely as a suffrage organization.

The Review: Official Organ of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs. Vol. III, No. 11. Utah, March 19, 1898. 8 pages. Approximately 12 x 9 inches. Unbound. Contents include an article addressing electricity and its potential applications, reports and updates concerning women’s organizations across the United States and internationally, and minutes from the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs’ most recent meeting. These components reveal how the federation operated through print: circulating technical and educational information alongside reports of club activity and formal records of organizational proceedings. The issue therefore provides primary-source evidence for the study of women’s associational networks, information exchange, civic participation, and the administrative practices of the late nineteenth-century women’s club movement.

The issue appeared during a period of rapid federation among American women’s clubs. Utah’s organization was formed in April 1893, and archival records show that its stated objective was to connect the state’s clubs and make them “mutually helpful”; by 1899 the federation included thirty-three clubs. Its surviving records encompass minutes, reports, publications, correspondence, and other documentation of women’s organizational activity, placing The Review within a substantial institutional record of female civic and intellectual association. Fold creases with several small tears near the edges and water staining at the upper left corner of the first and final few pages; overall good. A substantive early issue of Utah women’s organizational journalism showing the mechanisms by which clubwomen shared knowledge, reported collective activity, and sustained a statewide network at the close of the nineteenth century.

Item #16319

Price: $85.00