The Washoe Club Women

The tearoom occupied the ground floor of a building two doors south of the Riverside Hotel, and at ten o'clock on a Thursday morning in March it smelled of lemon oil and the particular mustiness of rooms used mostly by women.

Nora Gaines was fifty-five years old and had been president of the Washoe Women's Civic Association for three years, which meant she had spent three years sitting at the head of a table watching twelve women disagree about things that were less disagreeable than they appeared.

Today's meeting had begun, as it always began, with the minutes from last month. Margaret Hollis read them aloud in a voice that implied that any criticism of the minutes would be taken personally. There were no criticisms. There were never criticisms of the minutes. The minutes said what the minutes said.

The agenda was short. A resolution regarding spitting on the public sidewalks of Virginia Street, which the club had been attempting to formalize for two years without success. A discussion of the proposed library site. And the matter that Nora had been putting off for three months.

The eastern women.

They had been coming to Reno for divorces for three years now, in increasing numbers, and they were everywhere. At the Riverside Hotel, which had been rebuilt so beautifully two years prior and now seemed to exist primarily as a waiting room for women from Philadelphia and New York and Boston. At the courthouse, filing papers, emerging with the particular expression of people who have just done something irrevocable and are not yet sure how to feel about it. In the tearoom itself -- two of them were there now, at the corner table, eating sandwiches and talking quietly and clearly not from here.

The question the association had been avoiding, because it was a question with no clean answer, was: what do we do about them?

Harriet Dixon was the first to say what several of the women had been thinking. "They are not," she said, carefully, "of this community."

"They bring money," said Clara Booth, who owned the bakery on Fourth Street and had noticed that the eastern women tended to spend freely. "Whatever else they bring, they bring money."

"They bring scandal," said Margaret.

"The scandal stays on the East Coast," said Clara. "They come here because out here it isn't one."

Nora let them talk. She had learned, over three years of presidenting, that the most useful thing she could do in a meeting was wait. Women who were well-raised enough to join a civic association were also well-raised enough to disagree in complete sentences, and if she waited long enough, the complete sentences would eventually produce something resembling a conclusion.

The eastern women, the talking established, were a fact. They were not going away. Nevada's legislature had reduced the residency requirement to six months in 1906, and there was already talk of it going shorter, and if it went shorter the numbers would grow, and if the numbers grew, Reno would have to decide what kind of town it was going to be.

"What I don't understand," said a younger woman named Alice -- who had joined the association six months ago and still occasionally said what she meant without calculating the effects -- "is why it's our business at all. They're here to file papers. They go home. What are we supposed to do, form a committee?"

Nora looked at her, and Alice sat back slightly, and Nora said: "That is more or less exactly what I'm proposing."

Not a committee to oppose them. She made that clear. Not a petition or a resolution or a letter to the city council. What Nora was proposing was something the association had never tried, because there had never been a reason to try it -- because the women of Reno had never before found themselves in the same town as two hundred women from the East Coast who were bored and restless and had money and nothing particular to do for six months.

They could be invited.

Not all of them. Not to every meeting. But the association had a speaker program and a lecture series that had been limping along for two years on insufficient attendance, and a fundraiser for the proposed Carnegie library that had stalled. The eastern women, some of them, were educated. Some of them would welcome something to do other than walk along the Truckee and wait.

"You want to use them," said Harriet.

"I want to include them," Nora said. "There is a difference."

There was a silence that was not agreement and was not disagreement but was the sound of twelve women revising their positions without admitting it.

The vote was eight to four in favor of sending an inquiry to the Riverside Hotel. Whether this was a civic achievement or a practical one, Nora declined to specify. She was fifty-five years old and she had been in Reno her entire life and she understood that the distinction between civic and practical was mostly useful for keeping meetings short.

After the vote, Margaret folded her hands and looked at the corner table, where the eastern women had finished their sandwiches and were putting on their coats.

"I still think," Margaret said, "that the library is a more pressing matter."

"It always is," Nora said. "We'll get to it."

The eastern women left. The door closed behind them with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence nobody had finished writing. The Washoe Women's Civic Association moved on to the matter of spitting on sidewalks, which produced considerably more debate than anything else on the agenda, as it always did, because in Reno in 1909 there were things people would argue about and things people would only whisper about, and the line between the two shifted depending on who was in the room.

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