unit--the completed
type of the mother-woman, working with all as well as for all.

The Advantages of a General Federation of Women's Clubs[1]

_Address by Mrs. Croly to the First Meeting of the First Federation of
Women's Clubs, Held in Brooklyn, N.Y., April 23, 1890_

The growth of the woman's club is one of the marvels of the last
twenty-five years, so fruitful in the development of mental and
material resources. What it was destined to become was, perhaps, far
from the minds of those who aided its inception, but all the
possibilities of the future lay in the germ that was thus planted, for
it was formed by the marriage of two great elements--freedom and
unity.

[Footnote 1: _The Cycle._]

The club has been called the "school of the middle-aged woman." It is
so in a very broad sense. It begins by gratifying her desire for
fellowship, her thirst for knowledge; by training her in business and
parliamentary methods; and gradually develops in her the power of
expressing her own ideas, of concentrating her faculties and focusing
them upon the object to be attained, the purpose to be accomplished.
At the same time she finds that a more subtle process has been going
on in her own mind. An insensible alchemy has been widening her
horizon, getting rid of prejudice, obliterating old, narrow lines,
leaving in their place a willingness to see the good in Nazareth as
well as in Galilee.

This result shows that she is a clubable woman, for it is emphatically
the club spirit. It is in this respect that the club differs from
those societies that are devoted to a single purpose; which demand
subscription to an idea, an opinion, a dogma, a belief, a single basis
or principle, and do not admit of fellowship on any other terms.
Doubtless those have their uses--they are the necessary and often
powerful expression of an advancing public opinion; but they have
always existed, usually and in past times, under the leadership of
men, even when composed of women. But it remained for the nineteenth
century to develop a moral, social, and intellectual force, made up of
every shade of opinion and belief, of every degree of rank and
scholastic attainment, of every kind of disposition and habit of
thought, all moulded into form,--and though as yet only the promise of
what will be, furnishing an outline of that beautiful united womanhood
which was the dream with which the club was started, and has been the
guiding star to its develop