By Frances Stebbins
{Frances Stebbins has been writing of faith communities in western Virginia since 1953. She lives in Salem.}
Age – not of the Wednesday History Club itself at 105 years but of its members – has brought to an end a Roanoke Valley women’s group.
The decision to disband was hastened by the COVID Pandemic which canceled the monthly gatherings. They had brought enjoyment and intellectual stimulation to the dozen women who had attended over the years and followed carefully the club’s constitution and bylaws.
Carolyn Sublette Meredith of southwest Roanoke County has served as president of the club for the past eight years. Like others in the club she is no longer able to drive herself although she remains independent in her home with the help of relatives and a grocery delivery service. With the deaths of two sister cats, she’s reluctantly had to put pets out of her life.
Considering the club’s future, Vice President Gail Trussell–listed as “Mrs. Millard Trussell” in the club’s yearbook, remarked candidly, “We’re all just too old.” Indeed, over the years the club’s membership has decreased with only a handful of elderly women now able to consider coming to its meetings.
I was invited to join in 2004 by one of its late members, a church friend, Elizabeth Ruffin Hancock. About the same time, the former organist and choir director at my church, Rose Ann Burgess, also suggested that I might be a good fit for the venerable group. I was much enjoying her musical leadership at our parish.
A great deal has changed even since that time, but it is as nothing when one considers how life has been altered for women since the club came into being at the beginning of 1918. Those with an interest in history know that was a war year for America –the conflict with Germany now recalled as World War I.
Wars have a way of altering society, and when the American soldiers returned from the trenches of northern France, their women who had stayed behind were feeling the need for liberation also. The war had also been coupled, as recalled over the past two years, by a pandemic of a respiratory illness capable of killing fast or leaving permanent brain damage.
A movement was coming to fruition to allow women to vote. (How incredible it seems now that this was not always so, but my mother as a young adult of the time, registered and to my remembrance never failed to take a keen interest in both national and local politics.) At 21, engaged to be married and starting my newspaper career, I was eager to vote also.
The Wednesday History Club was born out of that world. Women wanted to learn about both the past and the present. Though higher education was less common than for men, many women were well read and some enjoyed history enough to consider getting together monthly in their homes, serve refreshments to their guests and learn more about a specific topic chosen in advance by a planning committee.
The customs of 1917 were adhered to by the club’s members. Detailed records of the meetings were kept by the woman chosen as the secretary; these were read at each meeting. The treasurer also kept meticulous records, and each year a donation was made to a worthy charity. I recall the West End Center for low-income children was often a recipient. Dues, in my time at least, were $10 per year. Membership was not to exceed 20, but in recent years scarcely a half dozen got to the meetings which began at 2:15 p.m. and adjourned at 4. Several years earlier, the home gatherings were dropped in favor of using a nearby retirement home with the refreshments supplied as part of the fee.
Another service the club provided was, upon the death of a member, a book on a topic preferably related to her interests would be bought for donation to the Roanoke City Public Library. In the 13 years I attended the meetings I served as president for the two-year period and on the planning committee which chose such topics as female heads of state. I learned of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Members could choose their topic from a slate presented by the committee.
And now the remaining few of us, who most recently had been learning of the Virginia women of history whose statues have been added to the monuments in Richmond’s Capitol Square, consign our Wednesday History Club to history.
