Slogan
“Innocently to amuse the imagination in the dream of life is wisdom.”
On 28 April 2009, outgoing President Marian Hodges noted that the slogan, adopted in 1930, was a partial quote attributed to Anglo-Irish playwright and author Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1728-1774), best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield and his play She Stoops to Conquer.
The mission of the Æsthetic Club is to present its members with entertaining and educational programs for social enjoyment.
History
Nineteenth-century Little Rock offered few intellectual outlets for intelligent women. Cynthia Martin Polk, a 34-year-old mother of four boys, often invited her Little Rock neighbors and friends to spend the afternoon discussing the books they were reading. On 16 January 1883, two of Cynthia’s sisters-in-law, Ida Sparks Martin and Sallie Bell Martin Martin, had joined her, along with Sallie’s mother, who was visiting from Alabama. Their friends, Fannie Floyd Jabine and Jane Georgine Woodruff, also participated in the “reading club” that afternoon. The women decided to add musical performances to their regular gatherings.
The next time they met, they invited their friends Mary Eliza Feild Knapp, Gertrude O’Neale Hempstead, and Virginia Belle Seybold Hamilton, as well as Harriet Woodruff Jabine, who was Jane’s sister and Fannie’s sister-in-law. The nine Little Rock women became the Charter Members of the Æsthetic Club. All lived east of Main Street.
Mary Eliza Knapp suggested the name the club adopted. The Æsthetic Movement had taken America’s popular culture by storm, proclaiming that art’s only purpose was to be beautiful. It rejected the notion that art had to serve some higher ethical or educational purpose. In the months before the Club formed, a young Oscar Wilde had toured the United States, fanning the flames of the Æsthetic Movement in America as only he could have. According to Æsthete Hallie Jabine Sayle, the daughter of charter member Hattie Woodruff Jabine, the women deemed the name “most appropriate because Æstheticism was a brand new cult with a capital C in ’83.”
Their “reading club” attracted more and more of their friends. By 1885, they adopted bylaws limiting membership to 50 women. Within a decade, that number had doubled. Rather than meeting in members’ homes, the women would meet at Little Rock’s Arsenal Building.
The Æsthetic Club still meets twice monthly at the Arsenal Building (now the home of the Arkansas Museum of Military History). Since its beginning, the Æsthetic Club’s members have been intelligent, witty, talented women actively engaged in their community. Membership remains limited to 100 active members, although half again as many inactive members appear on the roster.
The program retains the format established in 1883: two members present papers on assigned topics, with a musical performance between them.
More information about the Æsthetic Club appears in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in the Club’s published Centennial History (available at the Arkansas State Archives and the Roberts Library), and on the club’s YouTube Channel, where videos of recent meetings remain publicly available for a short time.