Charlotte Woman's Club

Meeting in the homes of its members, the Charlotte women renamed their group the Charlotte Woman’s Club in 1901 and invited twenty-five additional women to join. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, social mores and customs dictated that wealthier, more educated females should restrict their activities to the home. Participation in public affairs was viewed as unfeminine. The emergence of the woman’s club movement on the national scene in the late 1800s signaled the beginning of the end for that way of thinking. While retaining the refinement and grace associated with womanhood, the members of such organizations committed themselves to public advocacy. The Charlotte Woman’s Club built a significant record of social engagement over the years. Its members organized Charlotte’s YWCA, PTA, League of Women Voters, and Traveler’s Aid Society, as well as the North Carolina Federation of Music Clubs. The club established the city’s first kindergarten, helped create the Domestic Relations Court, created the home economics program in public schools, and brought the first public health nurses to Charlotte. It provided vital support for the public library and was instrumental in the creation of the Mint Museum of Art.

By 1905, the Charlotte Woman’s Club had eighty-six members. Given the increased membership, the group held its twice-monthly meetings at the Carnegie Library on North Tryon Street. The club expanded to more than 500 members by the early 1920s, prompting its members to secure their first clubhouse. In December 1920 the Woman’s Club purchased the A. J. Draper home on Elizabeth Avenue, northwest from its intersection with Hawthorne Lane. After three years, the club sold that property and used the proceeds of the sale to build the East Morehead Street clubhouse. In the interim, general meetings were held in the ballroom of the Selwyn Hotel on West Trade Street.

The Charlotte Woman’s Club hired prominent local architect Charles Christian Hook (1870-1938) to design its stuccoed Regency Revival styled clubhouse. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Hook was the first architect to live in Charlotte. He originally moved to the city in 1891 to teach mechanical drawing in the Charlotte Graded School, but soon became Charlotte’s first fulltime professional architect when he was hired to design houses for Edward Dilworth Latta’s Dilworth suburb. Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, Charlotte City Hall, the Carolina Theater, three local fire stations, and several buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, and N.C. State, Duke, and Queens Universities). He also designed James B. Duke’s Myers Park mansion.