Kansas City Athenaeum Clubhouse

Built in 1914, the Kansas City Athenaeum Clubhouse served as the headquarters of Kansas City's oldest and largest women's club for 101 years. The Kansas City Athenaeum organization was formed in 1894 with the goal of promoting education, helping the needy, and supporting positive social change. Athenaeum members have a long history of engaging community leaders, creating scholarships, and supporting educational opportunities, among other activities such as wartime relief and responding to disasters. After renting spaces for decades, the organization purchased this plot of land in 1913 and built this structure which included four meeting rooms, a commercial-sized kitchen, a large dining hall, and a ballroom adorned by six stained-glass windows. In 2015, the organization sold this historic building to Delta Sigma Theta's nonprofit community organization, Delta Educational and Economic Development (DEED). Both the Kansas City Anthenaeum and DEED continue to support philanthropic causes in the Kansas City area.

During the nineteenth century, middle-class women rarely worked outside the home but instead took on the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. Thus, women's clubs proliferated as a means for women to keep in touch with the world, continue educational pursuits, alleviate the isolation of their lives, and become involved in political and social projects. By 1908, more than twenty women's clubs operated in Kansas City. The Athenaeum, the oldest women's organization in Kansas City, founded in 1894, erected the Athenaeum Club House in 1914. 

In 1893, Laura Everingham Scammon served as President of the Social Science Club of Missouri and Kansas, which was disbanding. She conceived an idea of developing a more prominent women's club in Kansas City to take its place, an idea inspired by a similar situation in Chicago and St. Louis, where small clubs banded together to form larger, more influential groups. She invited six other women to discuss such an organization. The stated purpose of the new club comprised a promotion of mutual sympathy and united effort for intellectual development, the improvement of social conditions, and the higher civilization of humanity. On May 9, 1894, the women hosted a mass meeting to consider the feasibility of organizing a general women's club. Seventy women were present at the first meeting, followed by 105 women gathering for a second meeting. They agreed to create the new women's organization and chose the name Kansas City Athenaeum. 

The club initially met in rented spaces. However, a fire in 1907 to the Pepper Building, where the club met, inspired the club to purchase property and build a permanent home for Kansas City's biggest women's club. To raise the $50,000 necessary to build the Club House, members purchased $5.00 shares in the Athenaeum Club House Company. However, because the vast majority of husbands controlled the household finances, women had to be creative in obtaining money. Some sold canned vegetables, some provided needlework, and others boldly charged their husbands for household chores performed. The members raised additional funds by performing musical productions and obtaining a $20,000 loan. 

The 500 members paid architect Samuel Tarbet to design the Clubhouse on a property located near three streetcar lines. The building opened in 1915 and served as an elaborate clubhouse for the organization. The exterior exemplified the classical revival style, while the interior included 

• four meeting rooms, 
• a commercial-sized kitchen, 
• a large dining hall, 
• and a ballroom adorned by six stained-glass windows. 

The club included various study groups; members chose their department of interest: Art, Music, Science, Literature, Home Economics, Philosophy, and Polity. Members described it at the time as the informal Women's University of Kansas City, a university in the sense of a center, a forum for the assembly of sincere searches for the truth, the devotees of culture and human progress. 

Mary Harmon Weeks served as the organization's first president. In the 1890s, she introduced the kindergarten system into the Kansas City public school system, and she helped organize Missouri's first Parent-Teacher Organization in Kansas City. In 1918, she proved instrumental in organizing the Kansas City Children's Bureau, an organization involved with child health. Phoebe Jane Ess, one of the charter members of the Athenaeum Club and the club's fourth president, was a pioneer worker for women's suffrage. Ess served as a member of the Susan B. Anthony Club and also worked on behalf of prohibition. (In 1931, the Missouri League of Women Voters placed a plaque at the State Capital to honor eleven of those women, including Phoebe Ess).

The club led numerous social and political projects in the early 1900s. Some of the leading examples of these activities include the Gold Star Scholarship fund for high school students, support for a public playground at Shelley Park, pushing city leaders to appoint a physician to inspect milk in the early 1900s, leading an anti-litter campaign, supporting the creation of manual training programs in the high schools, relief efforts and entertainment options for soldiers during World War I. By 1915 the club stood as the fifth largest in the United States and, in 1919, boasted a membership of 800. By the 1920s,the socially-minded organization grew more political. In 1925, Missouri Senator James A. Reed described women active in women's clubs, notably those advocating women's suffrage) as a "band of spinsters." Indeed, he promoted the long-held notion that a woman's place was in the home. Until the 1920s, local women's clubs in Kansas City had largely focused on social causes and functioning as literary societies. However, over time, Athenaeum members grew comfortable with political activism, including publicly attacking Senator Reed in Kansas City's newspapers and during public forums. By emphasizing their roles as wives and mothers, they effectively weighed in on matters concerning family resulting in progressive reforms passed during the 1920s.

Members of the Kansas City Athenaeum met continuously in their Clubhouse for 101 years. In 2015 the club decided to sell the building to Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the largest African-American women's organization in the country, with "ATHENAEUM" permanently etched in the exterior; the new owners identified their building as the Delta Athenaeum. Kansas City Athenaeum members continue to meet semi-monthly in different parts of the Kansas City area, devoting their efforts to philanthropy and community service. Although membership has declined since the early twentieth century reflecting an overall decline in both men's and women's service clubs, the Kansas City Athenaeum continues to support more than 300 members.

The building is now home to the Delta Educational and Economic Development (DEED), an organization established in 1998 by members of the Kansas City chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. DEED has provided over a million dollars of scholarship funds to area students and similar to the Antheneum, their members support a variety of educational and community-building initiatives.

Carls, Kelsey. "The Politics Of Maternalism and the Kansas City Athenaeum Club." The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age & Great Depression (in association with the University of Kansas). Accessed September 13, 2021. https://pendergastkc.org/article/politics-maternalism-and-kansas-city-athenaeum-club."

Historic Athenaeum building changes hands – but remains a women’s organization." Midtown KC Post. Dec. 1, 2015. http://midtownkcpost.com/historic-athenaeum-building-changes-hands-but-remains-a-womens-organization/.

Piland, Sherry. "Nomination Form: Kansas City Athenaeum." National Register of Historic Places. mostateparks.com. 1979. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/KC%20Athenaeum.pdf.

"A Tradition of Study and Service." Kansas City Athenaeum Since 1894. kcathenaeum.org. Accessed September 13, 2021. https://kcathenaeum.org/history/.