Privileges, not membership

Another Bend club writes down the arrangement the Emblem Club would arrive at three years later.

This is not the Emblem Club. It is the Bend Amateur Athletic club, which spent the spring of 1917 organising itself in the Emblem Club's rooms — five meetings there between March and April, $4,000 subscribed, land promised, and D. E. Hunter, who would sell the Emblem Club its own building two years later, at the table.

It is filed because of the sentence. This archive has spent two days on when women joined the Emblem Club and as what, and has had to hold the question open because the Bulletin's usage was never consistent — lady-members, ladies, wives of members, members. Here, in the same building, three years earlier, a Bend club writes the arrangement down in so many words: a women's auxiliary; privileges granted; membership excluded.

That does not prove the Emblem Club did the same thing. It establishes that the thing the Emblem Club's women did in June 1920 — form an organisation of their own, with its own president and secretary, "merely for convenience in planning affairs of a social nature" — was the ordinary shape of it in this town, written into another club's constitution while the Emblem Club's men watched.