Administrative/Biographical History
The Mutual Improvement Club was an Oberlin community-based club for black women organized and federated in 1913. At meetings, members discussed topics such as home economics and improvement, sanitation, education of children, bettering social conditions, and improvement of the race. The officers for both years recorded here were Mrs. Philip (Gertrude) Anderson, Mrs. John (Kitty) Berry, Miss Frankie Robinson (1866-1936) of the Class of 1891, and Miss Annie Heavener (Cowan), a Conservatory of Music student from 1910 to 1914.
The club’s motto, “Hand in hand, not one before the other,” attests to the women’s commitment to learn by working together. In many ways this organization modeled itself on the growing number of women’s clubs formed during the “Progressive Era.”
The activities of the Mutual Improvement Club illustrate a combined interest in practical matters of the home and in improving the situation of all in the community, as well as a desire to discuss matters of political and historical significance. Typical of this sentiment is a quote within the yearbook, which reads, “No race can rise any higher than its women.” In 1913 and 1914, the club held debates in which the women resolved in the affirmative “that women Should Vote” and “that Lincoln was the colored man’s best friend.” Perhaps the best example of the combination of home economics and politics occurs at the end of the 1914 yearbook, which states “The Club will meet for sewing on the third Thursday of each month from two to four. At these meetings chapters from Dr. [Henry Churchill] King’s ‘Rational Living’ [1905] and Kelley Miller’s ‘Race Adjustment’ [1909] will be read and discussed.”
The Mutual Improvement Club was probably affiliated with the Oberlin Council of Colored Women, which formed in 1916 with the object of “cooperation and social uplift.” Additionally some of the older women of the Mutual Improvement Club were, or had been, members of First Congregational Church, Oberlin.
The records in this modest collection consist of two yearbooks printed in 1913 and 1914. No other documenting material is extant for this club.
Sources consulted:
Roland M. Baumann, editor, Guide to Women’s History Sources in the Oberlin College Archives (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1990).
William E. Bigglestone, They Stopped in Oberlin: Black Residents and Visitors of the Nineteenth Century (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 2002 edition).
“Mothers to Organize for Civic Betterment: Oberlin Council of Colored Women to be Formed Here Soon,” Oberlin News Tribune, April 5, 1916, 1.
Author: Marian Schlotterbeck Administrative InformationWomen’s Progressive Club 31/6/13
For additional information on the Mutual Improvement Club’s members and their families, see William E. Bigglestone’s They Stopped in Oberlin: Black Residents and Visitors of the Nineteenth Century (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 2002 edition).
Phillips, Wilbur H. Oberlin Colony: The Story of a Century (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1933).
