The lady-members and the men members

The archive's first original-source evidence that women were members of the Emblem Club, not guests of it.

One of this project's standing questions is when women joined the club and in what capacity. The 1913 book describes forty men and a cap on the membership. Until now the evidence on the other side was two phrases — “Ladies of the Emblem club” and “the lady members” — and both reached the archive through retrospective columns rather than originals.

This is an original, and it is a harder kind of evidence, because it uses both terms in one sentence. The lady-members are to give the men members surprises. Not the ladies and the members: the lady-members and the men members, two halves of one body. A meeting is then called of all the lady-members of the Emblem club, at the club house, at eight on a Thursday — which is a membership being convened, not an auxiliary being invited.

It does not settle everything. Nothing here says when the widening happened, whether it changed the forty-member cap, or whether the lady-members voted. But the paper of March 1920 plainly regarded them as members of the club, and this is the page that says so.

The ban is the other date-stamp on it. The dance had been set for several weeks earlier and was stopped by “the ban placed upon all social gatherings” — Bend, like the rest of Oregon, was closing public gatherings against influenza into 1920. The club's social calendar is visible here being interrupted by it.