and to the day of her death, its only president. It started (as she
tells us in the large quarto volume relating to clubs--which was the
closing, if not the crowning, effort of her busy pen) with an
invitation sent out by herself in November, 1889, to forty women, a
number of whom were then engaged upon the press in New York City, to
meet at her residence, and consider the advisability of forming a
Woman's Press Club. It was eminently fitting that one who had been
stirred in former years by the absence of social recognition in
journalism as within woman's province, on the part of the men of the
press, and moved to take a prominent part in the formation of Sorosis,
should organize a club of women writers--women journalists
especially--which should be known everywhere as distinctly a Woman's
Press Club.

The response to her call was most gratifying. Her ability as an
organizer, and her social qualities which could attract and hold women
together in strong bonds of mutual esteem and fellowship, were again
evident, and on November 19, 1889, the organization was effected and a
provisional constitution adopted.

At first the literary features of the new club were considered
secondary to the social and beneficiary, but gradually they grew to
their present importance.

In its early days, like most clubs this one was migratory, and its
work incidental. Gradually it came to have a more permanent home, and
its monthly programmes which, as Mrs. Croly herself stated, "are more
in the form of a symposium than of a question for debate," came to be
so attractive and varied, and in every way so excellent, that they are
often declared to be unsurpassed in interest by any woman's club. This