Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/181

 vants' institutions, homes, and such-like, promoted from outside their own ranks. But the woman's club, so far as it was the full counterpart to that of the other sex, belongs properly to the twentieth century, in which, indeed, it took a prominent and widely useful part. There was this difference, however, in the two cases, that whereas club life, with the stronger sex, began as an upper-class feature, with the other sex it began in quite the opposite direction. The first attempt at what was properly the woman's club was on behalf of the great class of domestic servants, and had chiefly in view at first the sure provision of an independent and comfortable home for the later life of its members. But the club was also largely available for Sundays or holidays, and for intervals between engagements; and it was ever, with its protecting respectabilities, a resource and shelter, more especially to the young and the stranger who were first entering life in the large towns. At first only the simpler arrangements were attempted, by which, in exchange for small but regular contributions spread over the earlier years, an independent home was secured towards the end of life. But in after years, when women's club institutions, made applicable to female vocations in general, became universal, and upon a scale previously quite undreamt of, they were enabled, by a kind of affiliation to one or other of the great general insurance companies of those times, or to some section of the Government insurance system, to secure any special arrangement that more exactly suited the endless variety in the wants of a well-nigh countless membership.