ORGANIZATIONS: Sex O’Clock

After it was all over, the perspiring lost & found committee measured its take: 50 pairs of gloves, dozens of handkerchiefs, four coats, five umbrellas, a Shriner’s button. It was not excessive, considering the number of women (3,000) and the length of their stay (five days).

It had been a long, tiring, but fascinating week. Every morning the delegates rose briskly at seven, descended to the basement coffee shop of Chicago’s Stevens Hotel. Promptly at nine the meetings began. For its 55th annual convention, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs had prepared a gruelling agenda.

They listened approvingly to experts on everything. Indefatigable Harold Stassen* was there to talk about world cooperation. Fiery Fiorello LaGuardia made a moving plea for UNRRA. Physicist Harold C. Urey and Major General Leslie Groves, Grand Panjandrum of atomic energy, explained nuclear fission.

But the speech they liked the best was by red-haired Novelist Fannie Hurst, who rose majestically in a black cartwheel hat, a slinky black dress and an egg-sized, green-stoned ring. Her topic: “Politics and the Sleeping Beauty.” Women, said she, “regulate their lives according to the male’s ideas of the ideal of women’s status … according to a clock which does not move forward but eternally marks the hour—sex o’clock. . . .” She advised them to “gain dignity” by taking part in politics, running for Congress, etc.

“Please Shut Up!” The off-hour activities were almost as arduous as the business sessions. Bellboys rushed velvet, satin or brocade evening gowns to & from the cleaners (average tip: 10¢); elevator operators coped with breathless indecision. There was a barn dance and a moonlight boat ride to Waukegan.

When it came time to prepare resolutions, frazzled nerves began to pop. In the white-hot debate over OPA, one speaker shouted: “I used to be able to buy underwear with long legs and short sleeves for my husband, but manufacturers have stopped making such garments because of OPA.”

In the hubbub of balloting, all discipline was lost. Cried Club President Mrs. LaFell Dickinson: “Ladies, will you please shut up!” There was even a dark suspicion that some of the alternates were voting illegally. Admonished the chairman: “I know that none of our women would cheat but some might be excited and forget.”

By week’s end the ladies had signified their approval of: UNRRA, OPA, war veterans, a national psychiatric program, universal military training. They disapproved of: child labor, a world calendar, racial discrimination.

When they had finished, President Dickinson admitted she couldn’t tell the delegates where the next convention would be. Said she with some asperity: “It seems like no one wants us.”

*Since his discharge from the Navy in November, presidential aspirant Stassen has made more than 100 speeches in 21 states and the District of Columbia, from the Lumbermen’s Convention in New York to the Junior Chamber of Commerce in San Angelo, Tex., from Harvard’s Godkin lectures to tiny Principia College in Elsah, Ill., before veterans, Rotarians, Kiwanians, the FBI. At fees ranging from nothing to $1,000, a conservative estimate of his gross so far: $25,000.