An ongoing challenge here at Archive Project HQ is finding out who our club members were in the most basic sense. As in, their very names.

I call it Invisible Woman Syndrome. In many club records, it’s rare to find a woman listed by her own first name, unless she was never married. Married members of the Montclair Women’s Club, along with widows, simply did not exist publicly under their own names. For example: Jessie [Alexander] Ropes, the club’s first president, is “Mrs. W.T. Ropes” on her portrait that hangs in our clubhouse gallery,  and in many contemporary press references as well.

Early obituaries often would list a woman only as the wife of Mr. John Smith. Around the era of World War One, obituaries finally began tossing in married women’s given and maiden names — i.e., “Mrs. John Smith, born Mary Jones.”

Fun fact: Not even divorce could get you your full name back, at least according to the etiquette books. Divorced women were supposed to use “Mrs.”, followed by their maiden name and ex-husband’s name: “Mrs. Jones Smith.”

Invisible Woman Syndrome wasn’t confined to the Victorians. It was common in all sorts of newspaper stories in the first half of the 20th century. It persisted right up into the 1960s and 1970s, which can make it hard to identify many club members, particularly in the early decades.

Fortunately, in the age of the database search, we can get around this problem a lot more easily than ever before. We can:

• Search newspaper databases under the member’s husband’s name in hopes of  articles that give the woman’s first name.
• Search the husband’s name in census records at Ancestry.com, which will tell us more about other family members — whom we can then search under their first and last names in Ancestry for other clues.
• Google. It’s amazing what comes up in a plain old Google search — news articles, directory entries, even photos.

As work in the archives continues, more and more members from our past are becoming a bit more visible. It’s about time!