Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Recalling a long-ago safe haven for creative ladies.?
A few months ago, the New York Times published a piece titled “Pack Lightly, Learn the Customs, Join a Tour: Tips for Solo Women Travelers,” advising single females to limit where they go, where they stay, what they do and where they dine. Days later, a letter to the editor bemoaned the necessity of such an article in 2025, that even now, unaccompanied women need to “be aware of surroundings and be sure your whereabouts are known to others at all times.”?
If only today’s solitary adventurers had access to “the Club” of yesteryear, where American women artists traveling on their own found elegant refuge in Belle Époque Paris. That era — 1871 to 1914 — represented the peacetime years between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, known as La Belle Époque (The Beautiful Era). Those years were renowned for enlightenment, economic prosperity and cultural innovations, with Paris as the portal to it all, particularly for Americans.?
For ambitious young women unable to vote in the U.S. or be taken seriously as artists, there was a stately residence at 4 rue de Chevreuse in the 6th Arrondissement, officially known as the American Girls’ Club, but lovingly called the Club and open only to American ladies studying the arts, primarily painting and sculpture.?
Jennifer Dasal, host of the North Carolina-based “ArtCurious” podcast, has unearthed records of some of the women who left the U.S. in the early 20th century to pursue their creative ambitions in France. Entitled “The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris,” her book purports to tell the story of an artistic nunnery that housed students on their junior year abroad, but it’s more of a paean to the philanthropist who made it all possible.?
Elisabeth Mills Reid, the wife of Whitelaw Reid, who owned the New York Tribune, decided to underwrite construction of the Club when her husband was posted to Paris as President Benjamin Harrison’s ambassador to France (1889-1892).
Her personal fortune far exceeded her husband’s, and, with a sense of?noblesse oblige, she set about recreating her own student experience in Paris for other young women. She found four buildings in the heart of what was then known as the “American corner of Montparnasse” and upgraded each to provide a cultivated environment that would shield her students from the bohemian demimonde. As she wrote to a friend, she longed to provide “women … their chance in life at my club.”?
Dasal writes about the prejudice against American female artists and their “pretty little paintings,” citing the diaries and letters of some of the women who lived in one of the 40 rooms available in the Club. (With its tearoom, library and exhibition hall, the place was certainly more palace than?pensione.) But not all women were welcome — only white ones. In fact, the most gifted artist of those cited in Dasal’s book was Meta Vaux Warrick, an African American from Philadelphia who was denied admission to the Club. She found a champion, however, in Auguste Rodin, the greatest sculptor of the age.?
Dasal frequently punctuates her chatty text with burbling asides. “And?mon dieu, what amazing works were on view at the 1900 exposition,” she writes of the Paris World’s Fair. “Quelle horreur!” she exclaims a few pages later, poking fun at a judge for denying an award to a female artist. Describing the glass dome designed in the 1870s by Gustave Eiffel, she informs readers, “(yes,?that?Eiffel).”?
“[A]lmost all the women associated with the Club are unlikely to be familiar names to readers,” Dasal admits, citing the major weakness of her book, which documents two decades that the Club offered sanctuary to aspiring artists. None of those women achieved the fame or professional regard accorded to male artists of the era, such as John Singer Sargent, Paul Gauguin and Alphonse Mucha.?
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the Club emptied as Americans scurried to find passage home. Elisabeth Mills Reid offered her domain to the American Red Cross to care for wounded officers. Many years later, the Club was renamed Reid Hall and still exists today, housing Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.?
One wishes Dasal had enlarged her canvas to tell the life story of Reid, whose philanthropies, not mentioned in?”The Club,” included supporting the New York Tribune and the Paris Herald after her husband’s death, as well as underwriting a sanitarium at Saranac Lake; financing St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco, plus another hospital in San Mateo to honor her parents; donating a stained-glass window in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and establishing a London settlement house and an Episcopal residence in Manila.
When Reid died in 1931 at the age of 73, Time “mourned the death of one of America’s authentically great ladies.”?
A worthy subject awaits an appreciative biographer.?
Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times Best Seller biographies, including “Nancy Reagan,” “Jackie Oh!” and “Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star.”?She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.?