Bachelor Girls Club, Davenport, Iowa, 1903

(The end of ?) The Bachelor Girls Club, Davenport, Iowa, 1895 to 1903.

One suspects that this picture documents the end of the Bachelor Girls Club or, at least, the end of membership for one or more of its members. In the picture, Amy Paulson stands on the left, while Nellie Paulson is seated on the far left. The two other women and the man are unidentified. The ladies are clad in an assortment of men’s and women’s clothing.  A sign in the picture reads “Bachelor Girls Club, 1895 to 1903.”

In 1894, Century Company published “The Bachelor Maid” by Constance Cary Harrison.  Soon there after “Bachelor Maids” and Bachelor Girls” clubs began to be formed across the country. The change from “old maid” to “bachelor girl” was a shift in more than semantics. This was the age of the “new woman”. Young women in the rising middle class were heading out to work in greater and greater numbers. Armed with their own money and a new sense of independence, young women seemed increasingly reluctant to marry. Writing in 1902 in the local Sunday Republican newspaper, Davenport journalist, Mrs. E.G. Bushnel Hamlin explained 

“Sweet submissiveness and child-like dependence may be considered very beautiful from a literary or fictitious point of view, but when reduced to cold facts become very unpleasant” 

This is perhaps why, as Beth Israel notes in her book “Bachelor Girl,”  from 1880 to 1915 the marriage rate hit its lowest point in American history.

In 1895, just a year after Harrison’s “The Bachelor Maid” was published, the Paulson family returned to middle class life on Belle Avenue in Davenport, Iowa from their two years in rural Olivia, Texas. In Davenport, if the date in this picture is accurate, the Paulson daughters and their friends immediately established their own “Bachelor Girls Club”.

Over the next seventeen years, the Paulson girls, like other bachelor girls of their time, found paid work. They pursued careers and spent their free time on photography, church activities and apparently in travel (considering the number of later pictures from Olivia, Texas.) They did not marry. They were, in fact, typical of their time and class. They were the “new women”, bachelor girls.

Nellie Paulson appears to have been especially industrious.  The 1900 census shows her working in a candy factory along with her brother. Graduating from Brown’s Business School, she took a job first with the Wool Mill and then with Western Flour Company where she worked as a clerk/stenographer. Amy is shown working as a “domestic” in the 1901 city directory and then later (1909) working at a photographic supply company. Their younger sister, Edna, joined her sister, Nellie, at the Western Flour Company.

           

Independence in the Paulson family only went “so far.”  The Paulson girls continued to live with their parents, Elina and Paul Paulson. When their parents left Davenport around 1912, the unmarried daughters gave up their jobs, and went with their parents.

Identifiers

Negative:  Paulson071 (1200 tiff resized to 400 jpg)

People: 

    Amy Paulson (10 Dec 1881 to 18 Oct 1918, married Carl August Anderson, 1912)

    Nellie Paulson (15 Feb 1883 to 28 Mar 1958, married Arthur Hawkinson , 1915)

Date:  1903

Place:  Davenport, Scott County, Iowa

Sources:

Israel, Beth. Bachelor Girl: The secret history of single women in the twentieth century. William Morrow: 2002

Topics in Chronicling America: "Bachelor Girls"  (This bibliography from Library of Congress gives links to a number of late 1800s, early 1900s newspaper articles discussing this phenomenon.)

Bushnel-Hamlin, Mrs. E.G.  “Why don’t they marry?” Sunday Republican, 21 Dec 1902, Davenport, Iowa

Harrison, Constance Cary. Bachelor Maid.  Century, 1894.  (This book can be downloaded free in digitized version from numerous places.

1900 Federal Census, Davenport Iowa.

Davenport City Directories.  1900 -1912.