Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Junior League president Margaret Nanda leaves a meeting at the organization's headquarters, the Farrington House, in the Willow Glen section of San Jose, and heads for her San Jose law office.

Coming of Age

Local Junior League started out as the Service League 50 years ago

By Sandy Sims

For many people the name Junior League still conjures up images of very young, wealthy women, the leisure class, rich do-gooders, white gloves, teas, charity balls and debutantes--images from the volunteer organization's wealthy beginnings. Though the images persist, the reality has changed. Margaret Nanda, a Los Gatos resident and the current president of the Junior League of San Jose, is over 40, carries a briefcase to her San Jose law firm, Matteoni, Saxe, and Nanda, and comes from middle-class Southern California parents. The contrast brings home the change in times as well as in women's roles.

When the league was formed in New York in 1901, none of its members worked. Today some 75 percent of league members are employed outside the home in a range of professions. While the league's activities were originally fodder for the society pages, today its work has become integral to building strong community. This April marks 50 years since the Service League of San Jose, the provisional organization for the Junior League of San Jose, began.

The year 2001 will mark 100 years since the Junior League started. At that time women were fighting for the right to vote, and precious few entered professional life. Those few who did become professionals would forego marriage and children. Most jobs available for women were in servant and support roles.

It was also a time of no income tax and the extravagant wealthy, the upper crust, the Fairchilds, the Astors, the Fords, the du Ponts. These were the American blue bloods, our version of royalty. During those years women gained or kept status through marriage or birthright.

From these ranks, the Junior League was born. Mary Harriman, debutante and daughter of E.H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, had received many dozens of roses at her coming-out party, according to a story in The Saturday Evening Post. She and a few of her debutante friends decided that instead of letting their numerous bouquets of flowers go to waste, they would distribute them to various hospitals. This action stirred an idea in the young debutantes. They would form an organization and do this sort of thing as volunteers. Until then, volunteerism had been reserved for the middle-aged grand dames of society. So the young women called their new volunteer group the Junior League.

Their first project was a New York settlement house for women immigrants. Because of their social standing, the young leaguers were well connected in the community with politicians, the wealthy, charity organizations and big business. This enabled them to bring together resources for work, food, clothes and even child care for the women in the settlement house. And this means of pulling together existing community resources to meet a community need continues to be a main tenet of the league today. Eleanor Roosevelt was an early member. Perhaps this is where her beginnings as one of our consummate volunteers lay.

The idea caught on in other cities. By 1912 there were seven Junior Leagues around the country. By 1923 there were 63 groups, a national association of Junior Leagues in New York and a national league magazine that even included some fiction and poetry. According to an old handbook, the early league not only was involved in "welfare" work but also became involved in public action. One New York member claims the league was active in the women's suffrage movement.

Because of its blue-blood heritage, league membership became a mark of social standing, and Junior League members were spread all over the society pages of America. Some women joined smaller leagues with the idea of transferring to more prestigious groups. This certainly muddied the motives of the league. They even built an extravagant New York clubhouse in 1929 for $1,200,000. It boasted 50 offices and bedrooms, a swimming pool, two squash courts, a hair salon, a formal ballroom, a snack bar, a cocktail bar, two dining rooms, a library and a theater-ticket agency. Hardly modest accommodations for what leaguers called welfare work. Certainly this is where the old images come from.

It really wasn't till the '40s that the league began to deal with its "rich do-gooders" image. It was after WWII, after Rosie the Riveter, after women had controlled their own money while the men were off at war. It was after men had returned home from war, and because the men needed the jobs, women returned to home and hearth. Men no longer patted their wives on the head and called them "the little woman." The women were changed.

In 1948, here in what was once known as the Valley of Heart's Delight, Peggy Stuart, a fourth-generation Los Gatos native and a Saratoga resident, and her friend Betty Bocks from Sunnyvale were in their early 20s. They were homemakers with small children. They were giving their time to auxiliaries in the county, and as they were young volunteers, they took their orders from senior board members. "That wasn't enough for us," Stuart recalls.

"We wanted to make our own decisions about where and how we volunteered," Bocks adds.

Stuart and Bocks read an article in the Feb.7, 1948, edition of The Saturday Evening Post titled "Junior League Gets Tough." Though the article had a somewhat condescending tone, the two women liked what the league was trying to do. The article explained that league members were asking to be taken off the society pages and put in the news sections. They sold the opulent New York clubhouse for a loss. They were making tougher guidelines for new Junior League affiliates, and the guidelines focused on quality community work.

While the league still carried the luster of high society, it defined a compelling purpose for young women. It saw itself as a training school for young women who would take their place as community leaders through volunteerism. It compelled provisional league members to learn about what was available in their own community so that they could work effectively in partnership with existing agencies to improve the community. There was a dual purpose. The volunteer work would serve both to train the leaguer in volunteering and to improve the services available in the community.

Bocks and Stuart got to work on their new organization. They found five friends to join them. The seven women did their planning on Bocks' living room floor and used Stuart's son's Playskool mallet for a gavel. They easily found enough women to make up 30 members. Two restrictions set by the national Junior League affected membership--a new member had to be sponsored by an existing member, and the age limit for membership was 40, after which a member became inactive.

Before they could call themselves a Junior League, they would have to prove themselves valuable to the community here. They called themselves the Service League of San Jose, and Bocks was the first president. "We decided to keep it a secret," recalls Stuart, "until we really got things going. We wanted to be taken seriously."

Among these first service leaguers appeared some longtime Santa Clara Valley names--Hart, Cheim, Hicks and many more. This meant leaguers were well connected to community leaders. "We got a lot of help from the businessmen," Bocks recalls. "We held our meetings in Hart's department store auditorium." People from different agencies in the county spoke to them about what was available and what was needed in the community.

They began to volunteer in places like the Y and the TB Association. They set up the Volunteer Service Bureau, a clearinghouse for matching up agencies with community volunteers. They started a library program for getting books to hospitals, and they provided recreational activities for children in the County Receiving Home, where children waited for foster homes.

The leaguers started a newsletter, and the old "Newsettes" reveal a well-educated bunch who attended such schools as Stanford, Berkeley and San Jose State and whose first priority was to be wives and mothers. To quote Bocks, "Career? Why, it's my family!"

The Service League became effective very quickly, and by 1949 the members introduced their organization to the San Jose Mercury-News. They got an impressive spread in--yes--the society section. "We couldn't get off the society page until the society page died," Stuart recalls.

By the end of 1951 when Stuart was finishing her term as president, the league was 60 strong. It took three tries and 19 years for the Service League to be officially accepted into affiliation with the Junior League International in 1967--a testament to the tough standards of the league and to the persistence of the Service League, and a far cry from the easy membership of the early Junior Leagues.

Today's Junior League of San Jose boasts more than 300 active members and almost 500 sustaining members. "It's big business," Stuart says.

At the League's annual volunteer luncheon April 3, 65 provisional members became active. They had just completed the rigorous provisional training. Today, instead of reaching out to the men for professional guidance, the league has its own long-term experience and resources among its rank and file.

The league works closely with community agencies to find and fill gaps in service. The idea is to complement, not duplicate, existing services, and often the league works in collaboration with an existing agency. For example, in about 1990 the league, in collaboration with InnVision, a nonprofit organization serving the homeless, set up the Georgia Travis Center. This is a place for homeless mothers to go during the day when the shelters are closed. The center also provides career counseling, medical services and referral to other agencies. The league provided money and volunteers as well as brainstorming and planning for the center. After four years, when the center was established, the league followed its policy of turning the program over to the community. The center is doing well today.

There are many other such successful projects, including the current Legal Advocates for Children and Youth (LACY), the Volunteer Exchange and the Nonprofit Development Center, which trains staff and volunteers for skills they need in nonprofit organizations--including board development. The league helped design and finance the San Jose Children's Discovery Museum's "Streets of San Jose" exhibit and the graphic design for the museum's newsletter. "We still use the same graphic today," says Sally Osberg, the museum's executive director. Junior Leaguers have contributed to Christmas programs and school playgrounds. They have contributed equipment such as an infant blood-pressure monitor to the San Jose Medical Center, and a computer to the Medical Resource Center at the Community Hospital of Los Gatos. The list is endless.

"It's not all work," says Los Gatos resident and attorney Leslie Beemer, who chairs the LACY project. "We still have fun, but women have to be committed to be members of the league."

In the current San Jose League's newsletter, "The Flair," Los Gatan Chris Lamson, a real estate agent who is the public relations and marketing co-chairwoman for the league, published a profile of the current San Jose leaguer:

"She is married and has two children [average] age 5. She is 34 years old and has a bachelor's degree. While working full or part time outside the home, she manages not only to volunteer time with Junior League but also to spend an additional 10 hours per month volunteering at her children's school, for family, church or synagogue. In her spare time she travels, occasionally for business but mostly for pleasure, an average of two times each year."

Interestingly, the average age of mothers with young children is about 10 years older than the mothers of 50 years ago. "Our San Jose league did away with sponsorship five years ago, and last year we voted to be age-silent," says president Nanda. Any woman of any age can apply for membership and can stay active forever.

Though the times and the women's roles have changed, it seems that the league's goals of training women to be volunteer leaders and pulling together existing resources to address unmet needs in the community are very much the same as those set up almost 100 years ago. Dare we say it's possible that a debutante could have a vision beyond her white gloves and social standing? Well, yes. Eleanor came from that same stock.

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