OMEN’S LUNCH CLUBS

New Zealand Mail, 22 January 1902, Page 29

OMEN’S LUNCH CLUBS

Business men are not the only New Yorkers who enjoy the privilege of lunching on the top floors of sky-scrap-ing office buildings. In the opening article in the “Century,” Cleveland Moffet thus explains the circumstance: The mid-air clubs all have accommodation for ladies; this, too, is significant in our changing city life. While women are not yet members of these lofty clubs, excepting one of their own, provision is nearly always made for them in the shape of a ladies’ dining room, a ladies’ reception room, and trim lady’smaid in cap and apron always in attendance. So that, virtually, ladies may enjoy, and as a matter of fact are every day enjoying, all the privileges of these mid-air clubs on the simple condition that they be the wives, sisters, daughters, or friends of members. They use the clubs as they please, order what they please, give luncheon partie.s, dinner parties, tea parties, anything they like, and at the end it is is merely necessary that some of them sign an authorised name for the expense incurred. Needless to add that tne

FAMILIAR PRESENCE OF LADIES in these mid-air resorts gives a charm and colour never found in clubs that are merely masculine. I may add that a step beyond this has been taken—a pioneer step, we may be sure—by a club of wage-earning women who have secured as their very own the fourteenth floor, quite at t-lie top of the tall Downing Building on Fulton street. This is the Business Woman’s Club, and lias the same fine view, the same advantages, and general arrangements found in the mid-air clubs for men, except that the furnishing is less pretentious; for everything here, from the annual rent of 2500 dollars down to the piano and plants in the reception room, is paid for by the women themselves. And I am glad to say that this club does not owe a dollar, and has a membership of nearly three hundred, although it has been in existence only a little over a year. It may encourage other working women to know that this fine success has grown from the efforts of one young lady, a stenographer, who in the spring of 1900 mado up her mind that women accustomed to nice houses should have, even if they are poor, better luncheon places than the noisy, stifling ones in the streets, where agressive waiters everlastingly cry, “Sinkers for two and draw one !”