By the early 1930s, Black women in Englewood—many of them employed as domestics, laundresses, cooks, and child-care workers—were organizing to protect themselves economically and to claim space in the civic life of the city. Out of that need emerged the Englewood Colored Working Women’s Club, a local institution that blended employment advocacy, racial uplift, mutual aid, and public respectability into a single organization.
The club had been organized a few years before it appears prominently in the press in the mid-1930s. According to an account in The New York Age, the organization was created to “greatly improve the industrial, social and domestic status of colored women” and to give them opportunities not otherwise available. Its leadership reflected a circle of established Black women in town. Mrs. Mary H. Stewart served as organizer and president; Mrs. D. E. Campbell was vice-president; Mrs. Belle Farrior served as secretary. The club was located at the southeast corner of Lafayette Avenue and First Street, placing it squarely within Englewood’s Black neighborhood life. (The New York Age, Aug. 22, 1936.)
One of the club’s most important initiatives was its Employment Agency. In April of that year it secured a license to operate formally. The timing is revealing: Black women in Englewood worked overwhelmingly in domestic service, often without contracts, protections, or collective leverage. By establishing an agency, the club sought to regularize hiring, improve standards, and create a measure of bargaining power. The club also envisioned training girls in domestic science, annexing a Women’s Working Exchange where Black women could display and sell goods they produced, organizing cooperative buying to reduce household expenses, and eventually operating under its own roof with a clubhouse—and even a tea room. These plans were ambitious, rooted in the Black women’s club movement tradition of economic self-help and institutional independence.
Yet the Englewood Colored Working Women’s Club was not only an employment bureau. It was a visible civic presence. Newspaper notices in The Record show the club hosting entertainment and dance programs at Lincoln School and Park Hall on William Street. Mrs. Mary H. Stewart regularly appears as general chairman, assisted by other women including Mrs. C. Barboza, Mrs. Mary Williams, and Mrs. Mary Johnson. In June 1935, for example, the club sponsored an entertainment and dance at Lincoln School auditorium. In another instance it presented a “States Wedding and Dance” program, with proceeds benefiting the Englewood Hospital Fund. (The Record, June 27, 1935; June 29, 1933.)
These events served multiple purposes. They raised funds for community causes. They built internal solidarity within Englewood’s Black community. And they demonstrated that Black women were not marginal actors but organized civic leaders capable of contributing to town institutions such as the hospital. The club also cooperated with Englewood Memorial House during the holiday season in aiding the needy and made annual contributions to the Community Chest. One account noted that these efforts were intended to “enlighten the community so that a better feeling may be created between all racial groups.” (The New York Age, Aug. 22, 1936.) That language reveals the balancing act the club performed: strengthening Black autonomy while also navigating a segregated and racially stratified civic environment.
The broader context makes the club’s existence even more significant. The same local press that reported on the club’s dances and fundraisers also ran racially marked crime headlines and covered debates about health inspections and regulations affecting domestic workers. Black women’s labor was scrutinized; their presence in white households was regulated; their reputations were vulnerable to sensational coverage. Within that atmosphere, the Englewood Colored Working Women’s Club functioned as a stabilizing institution—a space for dignity, organization, and collective strategy.
In sum, the Englewood Colored Working Women’s Club was far more than a social society. It was an organized effort by Black working women to professionalize domestic employment, cultivate economic security, provide training and mutual aid, and assert civic legitimacy in a town that often limited their access to power. Through licensed employment services, cooperative economic plans, and highly visible public events, the club embodied the ethos of the early twentieth-century Black women’s club movement at the local level—rooted in uplift, discipline, public respectability, and the determination to build institutions where none had been provided.