Scottsdale’s official story is a story about men. A chaplain founds a colony, a merchant opens a store, a blacksmith lights a forge, and in 1951 a five-member town council takes office. This site profiles the Charros, the Jaycees, Rotary and the Thunderbirds, all of them founded as men’s clubs. Read the town’s own newspaper columns from the 1900s through the 1920s and a different picture comes through. The organizations that met every week, raised the money and kept the calendar full were mostly run by women.
The City of Scottsdale’s historic context for the town’s arts-colony years puts it in a single sentence: “Local matrons played an important role, forming a sewing circle in 1909, a Parent-Teacher Association in 1917, the Scottsdale Women’s Club, and, in the late 1920s, the Women’s Republican Club.” This note fills in that sentence from the Scottsdale columns of the Arizona Republican, as digitized by the Library of Congress, and says where the record runs out.
The sewing circle, 1909
The circle is in print by December 1909. Under a December 17 dateline, the Scottsdale column reported: “The Ladies Sewing Circle met at Mrs. Scott’s Saturday and spent a pleasant afternoon. Light refreshments were served and a short program rendered.” The column doesn’t give Mrs. Scott’s first name. Helen Scott, the founder’s wife, is the obvious candidate, but the item doesn’t say so, and we won’t either.
The same column notes that work on “the new school house” had stalled over a misunderstanding between the contractors and the architect. That building was the Little Red Schoolhouse. The women’s clubs and the school grew up together, and for the next twenty years the schoolhouse was where most of them met.
The Literary Club and the Farm Improvement Association
By January 1912 there was a Scottsdale Literary Club. Its first meeting of the season was at the home of Mrs. E. L. Graves, whose family ran the Graves Ranch for health seekers (see our note on the health seekers). The members voted to meet weekly “instead of every two weeks as before,” which means the club was older than 1912, and chose “The History of Arizona” as the year’s subject. The territory was weeks away from statehood. In the same weeks the painter Marjorie Thomas started a small painting class in Scottsdale, Tuesdays and Saturdays.
The Farm Improvement Association, in the columns by 1916, was a mixed group, but women ran its entertainments. Its “Old Maids’ Convention” at the schoolhouse on Washington’s Birthday in 1916 was “a success from both a dramatic and a financial standpoint.” Marjorie Thomas sang “Little Grey Home in the West.” Several of the girls on that program had organized a branch of the Camp Fire Girls earlier the same month. In March the column reported that the girls had taken a name it spelled “Cheaf Sewik,” said to come from the Pima name for Camelback Mountain. That spelling is the column’s; we haven’t confirmed it against an O’odham source.
The Parent-Teacher Association, 1917
The PTA’s origin shows up almost in real time. In February 1917 the Farm Improvement Association’s social evening, hosted by a committee of women, featured a talk by Professor Fike of Tempe Normal on “the Parent-Teacher Association and its work.” By April 1917 the column was announcing that “the Parent-Teachers’ association will meet at the schoolhouse on Friday afternoon,” to hear Miss McNulty of Tempe Normal on “Children’s Books.” That fits the city’s 1917 date.
The PTA’s first officers we found in print were elected in March 1918: Mrs. Verner A. Vanderhoof, president; Mrs. Guy Loomis, vice president; Mrs. Morton Kimsey, secretary-treasurer. The program that afternoon was wartime home economics, a talk on “Meat Substitutes, and the Use of Milo Maize Flour,” with samples.
What the PTA did over the next few years is a list of small, practical jobs. It ran a food booth at a 1921 rodeo, selling pies, doughnuts and sandwiches, and took in $20. A Creighton church group gave a play at the schoolhouse in September 1921 with the proceeds going to the Scottsdale PTA. The PTA’s own play, Aaron Slick from Punkin Creek, did well enough at home that it was restaged at the Madison Improvement Club in January 1922. And the PTA ran hot lunches at the school until February 1922, when it decided to stop “due to conditions that does not make it self supporting.” The PTA, in other words, was running the school lunch.
The war years: the ladies’ committee
When the country went to war in 1917, Scottsdale’s money drives leaned on women. An October 1918 column, reporting that the town had beaten its $19,000 quota in the Fourth Liberty Loan, named Mrs. Morton Kimsey as co-leader of the drive with chairman Charles Miller. Looking back at the Third Liberty Loan, when Scottsdale doubled its quota, it listed the team captains. Mrs. Kimsey was “chairman of ladies’ committee,” and Mrs. E. L. Graves ($5,100) and Mrs. Lena M. Loomis ($4,600) turned in the two largest team totals after the committee’s own.
In November “fifteen girls and women picked cotton at the ranch of E. L. Smith, Friday and on Saturday nine more,” and used the earnings to rent sewing machines for the Red Cross. In the influenza winter that followed, women did most of the nursing. Our health seekers note tells about a Tucson woman who died after nursing her sister-in-law, and about another woman who went from house to house “with a husband in France and two small children.”
The Woman’s Club
The Scottsdale Woman’s Club (the papers also write “Women’s club”) is in the columns by early 1922. In February its “applied education department” held a program. In March members met at the home of Mrs. Y. C. White, where “plans were made for useful work of the club.” In April they met at the home of their president, Mrs. Grosse. In May Mr. and Mrs. Phil Harder gave the members a party of checkers, dominoes and homemade ice cream, with husbands invited, and the club held an open house at the home of Mrs. Walter B. Smith.
We could not find its founding date. Our earliest mention is 1922, and the free digitized run of the Arizona Republican ends that same year, so the 1920s records that would settle it, including the late-1920s Women’s Republican Club in the city’s context, are on microfilm and not online. We also found no evidence that the club ever had a clubhouse. The Phoenix Woman’s Club had one in those years. Scottsdale’s, like the Osborn club’s, met in living rooms.
The women the columns left out
These were Anglo clubs, written up in an Anglo paper. The Mexican-American women of the barrio organized too, and their monument is still standing. When the town’s Catholic families built the Old Adobe Mission between the late 1920s and 1933, the mission’s own history says the women of the community organized the advertising and the fundraising and fed the men working on site. Doña Dolores Rivera de Ochoa, treasurer of the Catholic Society, kept the building fund. In 1945, according to Salt River Stories, Guadalupe Dominguez gave the parish a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. (Parish accounts describe her gift differently; our parish note sorts through them.) In 1953 the parish formed the Sodality of Our Lady, and the women of the parish made the banners, costumes and sets for the Miracle of the Roses pageant. Our note on Our Lady of Perpetual Help carries that story forward.
Yaqui and O’odham women don’t appear in this record at all. That says something about the record, not about them.
The line runs on into the boom years. The town’s best-known group of young women in the 1950s, the Howdy Dudettes, were high school girls the Chamber of Commerce recruited to greet visitors from the late 1950s. That was a later and more commercial Scottsdale than the one where women rented sewing machines with cotton money.
Where the rest of the record lives
- The Arizona Republican and the Arizona Gazette, 1909–1930. The years up to 1922 are searchable free at the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site. Search “Scottsdale” with “club,” “circle” and “association,” and expect OCR errors. Later years are on microfilm at the Arizona State Library and the Civic Center Library.
- The Arizona Federation of Women’s Clubs records, at the Arizona State Archives and the Arizona Historical Society, would show when a Scottsdale club affiliated and who its officers were.
- The Arizona Congress of Parents and Teachers, for the Scottsdale PTA’s charter date.
- The Scottsdale Historical Society and the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library, for programs, minutes and photographs. If your grandmother’s club yearbook is in a drawer, that is where it belongs.
- Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish, for the Catholic Society, the Sodality and the women who ran the mission fund.