WOMEN: At Hotel Astor

The lobby of the Astor Hotel, Manhattan, is a favorite haunt of professional women. But the smartly gowned and suited, busily chatting and gesticulating, brightly smiling and bowing congregation that buzzed around the Astor last week, were professional women extraordinary. They had come from far & wide for an exposition of artifacts and manufactures produced by women; to make speeches about women’s rise in the world. Many an enthusiastic clubwoman was there, too.

Actress Eva Le Gallienne spoke for her profession. Sophie Irene Loeb, able lobbyist for social welfare legislation, gave a rousing account of herself in laugh-getting colloquialisms. Mrs. William Brown Meloney of the New York Herald Tribune, “first woman reporter in the Senate gallery,”was allotted four minutes to relate the evolution of the female journalist, but she spoke so quietly, so modestly, that the chairwoman (Mrs. Oliver Harriman) had to call loudly for order before two of the minutes had passed.

Clubwomen enjoy straight-from-the-shoulder speaking. So they enjoyed perhaps most of all a characteristic chastisement from Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, who snapped: “We are too sentimental, too emotional. But if we did what we ought to do we would call together all the presidents of all women’s organizations (there must be a million of them) and, meeting in one room in private, discuss some fundamental questions. They would be: ‘Where are we at?,’ ‘How much of the work that we women do outside the home is just like a kitten chasing its tail?,’ ‘How much is duplication?’ and ‘How much attention do we pay to little troubles and not to the big ones?’

“Then we might disband 900,000 of these organizations and make the other 100,000 more intelligent and stronger than they are today. What they need is an efficiency expert in these organizations!”

*Granted admission in 1900; actually admitted a year later.