The Founding Twelve: How a Dozen Women Started Something Extraordinary

Every big story has to start somewhere small, and ours started with twelve women in a little community called Lamanda Park who decided the neighborhood needed something it didn't have: an organized way for women to get things done.

It was 1912. Woodrow Wilson hadn't even been elected president yet. Women in California had only just won the right to vote two years earlier, in 1911, and wouldn't have it nationally for another eight years. Against that backdrop, a group of civic-minded women in Lamanda Park — then a distinct little community on the eastern edge of what would become Pasadena — banded together to form the Auxiliary of the Board of Trade. It was, in essence, the ladies' answer to the men's business association: if the Board of Trade was going to shape the town's commerce and infrastructure, these women wanted a hand in shaping its character.

Leading the charge was founding president Mrs. Averill Daniells, alongside officers Mrs. Ralph White, Mrs. J.Q. Adams, and Mrs. L. Birdsey. We don't have a photograph of that very first meeting, but it isn't hard to imagine: parlor chairs pulled into a circle, a pot of coffee, a stack of handwritten notes, and a room full of women who had almost certainly been told, at some point in their lives, that this sort of thing wasn't really their place. They did it anyway.

The Auxiliary didn't stay small or stay put. It quickly rebranded as the Lamanda Park Women's Club, reflecting an ambition that went beyond simply supporting the Board of Trade — these women wanted their own agenda: literacy, civic beautification, education, and support for families in need. As Lamanda Park's identity merged into greater Pasadena over the following years, the club evolved right along with it, eventually taking the name we carry proudly today: the Pasadena Women's Club.

What's remarkable, looking back from more than a century later, is how quickly the club plugged itself into something bigger. In 1917, just five years after that first meeting in Lamanda Park — the club joined the General Federation of Women's Clubs, linking arms with a national network of women's organizations that, at the time, represented one of the largest civic movements in American history. Nationally, the General Federation was already deep into advocacy for public libraries, pure food laws, child labor protections, and public health reform. Our small local club had, almost overnight, become part of something with real national muscle behind it.

Then in 1946, the club joined the California Federation of Women's Clubs, tightening the connection to a statewide web of clubwomen working on everything from forestry conservation to scholarship funds. By then, the Pasadena Women's Club had been meeting, organizing, fundraising, and quietly getting things done in this city for over three decades.

It's worth pausing on just how much change those founding twelve lived through. They started the club before women could vote nationally. They watched Pasadena transform from a citrus-grove town serviced by electric streetcars into a bustling city with its own skyline. They lived through two world wars, the Depression, and the birth of the Rose Bowl as a national institution. Through all of it, the club kept meeting. Kept organizing. Kept insisting that women had both the right and the responsibility to shape their community — not from the sidelines, but from the table.

There's a particular kind of courage in founding an organization from nothing. No blueprint, no guarantee anyone else would show up to the second meeting, no way of knowing whether "the Lamanda Park Women's Club" would last five years or, as it turns out, well over a hundred. Mrs. Daniells and her fellow officers weren't trying to build a legacy, they were trying to solve problems in front of them: a school that needed supplies, a park that needed benches, neighbors who needed help. The legacy came later, as a byproduct of just showing up, year after year.

That's really the thread that connects those founding twelve to the members walking through our doors today. The specific problems have changed — we're not exactly fighting for streetlights on unpaved roads anymore, but the basic model hasn't: women deciding, together, that they're not going to wait for permission to make their community better.

So the next time you're at a club meeting, sipping coffee in a room full of chairs pulled into a circle, take a second to think about those twelve women in Lamanda Park in 1912. They didn't have Robert's Rules memorized. They didn't have a website. What they had was each other, a sense of purpose, and the nerve to start something. A hundred-plus years later, we're still here because of it.

If their story resonates with you, if you like the idea of being part of something that started with twelve determined women and a folding chair , we'd love to have you at a meeting. Membership details are on our website, and there's always room for one more chair in the circle.