The club originally planned to spend their meetings sipping tea and eating small cucumber sandwiches while talking about lady things. But so far, they haven’t yet been able to coordinate having both food and drink at the same meeting.
The club has also been attempting to come up with a unified club attire. Club president, Sarah Perry, has pushed for the club to wear pink dresses and tea hats with feathers on the days when the club meets, but so far this endeavor has also met with problems in its execution.
“We really want to buy hats,” said Reynolds. “We don’t want to spend money in a frivolous manner, and we want to be mature young ladies who think of others and do the right thing, but at the same time, we really want those hats.”
So far the club has refrained from spending its money on frivolous things such as hats, and has donated all of its money to the Green Tree Shelter for the homeless, but the desire for hats seems to be a growing lure that might become unbearable.
The Green Tree Shelter in Bethesda “serves as a transitional home for homeless families, primarily children with single mothers,” according to the National Center for Children and Families.
“We are interested in the needs of women and children,” said Reynolds.
“We’ve made sandwiches for a homeless shelter,” said sophomore Catherine Maloney. “We’ve done a few fundraisers and we sold hot chocolate in January.”
Although the club only consists of young ladies, it is open to both genders.
“[A young gentleman] would be welcome with open arms,” said Reynolds. “We’re not going to change our club name though.”
Reynolds would also like to see the club cooperate more with the Society for Sophisticated Young Gentlemen (The Gentleman’s Club)
“We don’t interact, but I think we should at some point have a joint meeting to see how we get along, maybe do some match-making,” said Reynolds. “It seems like we have similar interests and similar values.”
Unfortunately, the two clubs may be closer to hostilities than cooperation.
“I have heard the young ladies start to say unkind things about the Gentleman’s Club in a competitive way, and I try to redirect their negative energy to helping others,” said Reynolds. “They make slighting remarks about the gentleman’s club.”
Reynolds and the sponsor of the Gentleman’sClub, English teacher Jerry Webster, try their best to keep their club business out of the workplace.
“We try to maintain a civil relationship even though we are both aware of the superior status of my Ladies Club,” said Reynolds.
Sophomore Gentleman’s Club member Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina disagrees.
“The Ladies Club was a copy of our Gentleman’s Club,” he said. “We came first, and they were just a reaction to us.”
Ladies club secretary Ginger Mayhew has something to say about that.
“I would say that we wouldn’t have copied [them] if [they had] let us be in [their] club in the first place. Besides… [they] copied our name and we’re more popular,” said Mayhew.
If the Gentleman’s Club can delight overcoming first, the Ladies Club can have the satisfaction in knowing that their club is the one more likely to become a lasting facet of WJ, given that the Gentleman’s Club is slowly dying due to disorganization and neglect.