Summer Reading: "The Club"
- Gloria Diliberto
- Aug 29
- 2 min read
Looking for a great read? The review seen in The Wall Street Journal speaks to the life and times at The American Girls Club in Paris. It offered a perch for young women who came to the Belle Époque France to study art and delves into the adventures and inspirations that they encountered.
Self Portrait (1923), by Francis Cranmer Greenman Credit: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Of all the roadblocks facing an American girl who aspired to become an artist in the late 19th century, perhaps none was more daunting than nationality itself. In the United States, women were barred from attending the best art academies and denied admission to life-drawing classes with nude models—a basic and essential element of an artist’s education. What’s more, when American women married, convention expected them to abandon professional pursuits and devote themselves to domesticity. To become “great creators of art,” Jennifer Dasal writes in her lively history, “The Club,” they had to go to Paris.
The City of Light was more hospitable than America to male artists, too, but men had the advantage of, well, being men. To counter this prejudice, Elisabeth Mills Reid, a New York philanthropist and the wife of Whitelaw Reid, America’s ambassador to France, opened the American Girls’ Club in Paris in a sprawling former boarding school at 4 Rue de Chevreuse, in the heart of the Latin Quarter’s bustling art scene.
From 1893 to its closing in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, the Club, as it was known to residents, harbored “a large and continually rotating community of independent, talented, and driven young women who were among the first to actively seek professionalization in the visual arts,” writes Ms. Dasal. These pioneers paved the way for the next generation of women artists who, in the years after World War II, helped transform America into the center of the art world, surpassing France. And yet the Club’s artists have largely been erased from history’s canvas. Their names are mostly forgotten.
Ms. Dasal, a former curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the host of the podcast “ArtCurious” (which is also the title of her previous book), rescues from oblivion such talented artists as Anne Goldthwaite, Anna McNulty Lester and Meta Vaux Warrick, whose associations with the Club nourished their ambitions at pivotal moments in their lives.
The Belle Époque was an age of innocence, undisturbed by global war, Freud or the pill. Still, American parents worried about their daughters living in what they saw as a decadent and corrupting neighborhood of Paris. When Frances Cranmer (later Greenman) arrived in France in 1911 as a 21-year-old, she was met at the pier by a “protector” who escorted her to the Club, ensuring, as she recalled, “that I would, at least, be a virgin until I got under its portals.”
Book Review. Read the full article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on August 9, 2025.
The Club by Jennifer Dasai. Published by Bloomsbury Press.
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