‘Epilogue’ Reveals Ignorance Club’s Evolution, Tells Of The Women Who Shaped It

In the fall of 1904, years before they had the right to vote, 20 women gathered in a Lexington home to form a “neighborhood study and social organization.” They defined themselves as a literary society and called it the Ignorance Club “in a spirit of fun.”

Those well-read women — wives and daughters of college professors and of local professional men, and a small number of women who were professionals in their own right — had few outlets for their intellectual interests. By discussing papers which each of them in her turn prepared on a given topic, they found a way to share their knowledge and creativity with others of like mind.

The club’s minutes, past programs and photos are housed in Washington and Lee University’s Leyburn Library. In 1989, Laura Moore Stearns mined those archives, interviewed members and wrote and presented the Ignorance Club’s history to the group. Her paper, “Ignorance Is Bliss,” illustrated with Michael Miley photographs of several of the club’s founding members, has now been published in the online history series “Rockbridge Epilogues.”

Stearns’s lively, engaging paper tells not only the history of the club, but of its indomitable members –women who wore hats and gloves to every meeting well into the 1960s and addressed one another formally as Miss or Mrs.; who tackled such weighty topics as “Commemorating the Bicentennial of the Settlement of the Valley and the Sesquicentennial of Rockbridge County”; and who confidently showed themselves far from ignorant.

“Ignorance Is Bliss” is freely available at www.HistoricRockbridge. org. It is the 48th in the six-year-old series, which is endorsed by both Historic Lexington Foundation and the Rockbridge Historical Society. “Rockbridge Epilogues” presents significant essays of local interest that are not otherwise available in print.

Laura Moore Stearns, descendant of one of the founding families of Rockbridge, is the author of the definitive history of the Ignorance Club, published in a new “Rockbridge Epilogue.” It tells the organization’s story to outsiders for the first time. Photo courtesy of Southern Seminary Junior College.