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8.C. - Page 15 of 54 <br />William Kostura, Historic Resource Evaluation of the Redwood City Woman Club <br />benefit. She was quite active in the club and became its third president, among other <br />duties. The "vicinity" proviso also allowed women of San Carlos and further north to <br />join. <br />A clubhouse needed to be built, and funds for this needed to be raised, so the club put on <br />three fundraisers, one edifying and the others entertaining. One was a lecture by Ford E. <br />Samuel on "Sights and Scenes Along the Equator." In January 1910 the club put on a <br />one -act comedy, "The Union Depot," and in April they put together a series of vaudeville <br />acts that they called "A Night at the Orpheum." The latter included a Japanese chorus by <br />Miss Gertrude Beeger, a Buster Brown chorus, Mrs. McLellan singing some popular <br />songs, someone impersonating Caruso in the last act or Rigoletto, a magic act by Dr. <br />George Compton and "Professor Vanisham," an acrobatic act, and three "farces," one of <br />which was a "screaming farce." By the beginning of June 1910 the club had a balance of <br />$504.56. <br />Mrs. Cumberson came up with the idea for an ongoing fundraiser that she called the <br />"millinery method." Members made garden hats of Chinese matting decorated with <br />cretonne, the proceeds of their sale going to the building fund. She figured the hats were <br />a "necessity" and thus would sell well, for "every one of the members and her neighbors <br />count a garden as part of Redwood City life." <br />Their next fundraiser was more ambitious. The club offered to edit and write a long <br />supplement to the July 4th edition of the Redwood City Democrat, and to print 10,000 <br />copies of it; and their offer was accepted. Along with articles about the rebuilt county <br />courthouse, and profiles of businesses and major personalities in and around Redwood <br />City, they filled a page with editorials related to their new club and included portraits of a <br />dozen club members. It was an expensive project that must have required months of <br />effort, but it did make money for the club, in part because they charged the businesses <br />and persons they wrote about fees to be included. (When Glenn Allen, the architect of <br />the courthouse, didn't pay his $25 fee, Mrs. Cumberson sued him and threatened to have <br />his name scraped off of the courthouse cornerstone.) The club realized $875 for their <br />building fund and another $100 toward the purchase of a piano. <br />The two editorials in the July 4th newspaper were frank in their language and revealed <br />more about the women's motivations for forming their club than did the articles of <br />incorporation. There was, in their tone, some pushback against men and the established <br />order of things. Both authors wrote of the need, if not the necessity, for women to get out <br />of the house. Once they do, Francis Fairchild wrote, "the monotony of house work is <br />broken.... The busy housewife who attends club meetings is refreshed, uplifted, rested <br />and inspired.... Club work is an unfailing helpfulness in smoothing the rough edges with <br />diversion; it helps to maintain unruffled amiability amid the innumerable harassments <br />that rise uppermost when one is tired of the monotony, of the same old grind week in and <br />week out; it sweetens the disposition and makes things in common worthwhile." She <br />539 <br />