WATERBURY, Conn. (AP) - Holly Leone flipped through the pages of a small notebook, its pages turned a light sepia over the course of a century and a half.
It was Wednesday, Jan. 15, and exactly 150 years prior, seven women had written their names down in that book in perfect, elegant cursive at the first meeting of what would become Girls Inc.
“By Jan. 30, they had a group of 23 girls here,” said Leone, fund development manager for Girls Inc. of Southwestern Connecticut. “Who would have thought 150 years later, we’d still be going strong and doing basically the same thing?”
In 1864, the Civil War had been raging three years, and those seven prominent Waterbury society women grew concerned for the city’s young girls. They decided to create a place for them to learn and recreate.
Part charm school, part domestic training and part social education, it was essentially a place to learn how to be supportive and subordinate to the male-dominated mores of the time.
“It was a lot of how to take care of someone,” Executive Director Donna Maglio said. “It was empowering the girls to be what society thought they should be anyway.”
That was true right on through the 1950s, until the sexual revolution and women’s rights movements led to a focus shift at what was then called the Girls Club (it later changed its name to Girls Inc. when the Boys Club became the Boys and Girls Club).
“The difference today is girls are taught to be who they are, to find their voice,” Maglio said, adding that’s true whether they want to be a CEO or a stay-at-home mom. “We inspire them to be whoever they want to be.”
The club inspired Josephine Galullo to pursue an uncommon role as a scientist and as a volunteer who taught sewing to the destitute in Mexico.
“I wouldn’t have had that experience if I hadn’t come here to learn how to sew,” said Galullo, who attended the club from 1947 to 1954. She was one of several alumnae to return to the club recently for the 150th anniversary of the first meeting.
“I took a leadership course here; I think that definitely helped,” she said. “And being able to have my very own cooking class Saturday mornings - that made a difference as far as confidence went.”
Peggy Shove Columb was attended the club as a young girl in the 1960s and ’70s. The sewing class she took, she said, “instilled in me perfection,” to such a degree that she won a national sewing contest.
“This was my home away from home,” she said, and she enjoyed the experience so much that she sent her daughters to Girls Inc. decades later.
Maureen Quirk Coughlin, 83, who attended the club during World War II., also sent her daughters later.
“It absolutely made the most wonderful benefits and was such a strong influence on my life,” she said. “It gave me independence. It gave me surety of myself, it taught me that this is a big world and we should all be helping in it.”
In that sense, Maglio said, the organization really hasn’t changed much since those seven women formed it in 1864.
Today, the Waterbury office of Girls Inc. services more than 1,000 children in Greater Waterbury, New Haven County, Fairfield County and all the way to Greenwich. Its budget of about $600,000 supports programs like college and career planning, health and fitness classes like dance and Zumba, self-esteem and life skills sessions and just plain fun things like movie nights in their pajamas.
One of its programs, called GirlStart, is funded by the United Way of Greater Waterbury. An after-school educational enrichment program, it provides homework help, tutoring and a healthy snack to dozens of girls, many of them from low-income and single-parent households.
The organization’s growth was so successful it was used as a model to establish Girls Inc. locations in every state in the nation.
The Waterbury location, built in 1964 for the organization’s centennial, includes a room devoted to reinforcing skills and interest in science and math. It has a gymnasium, dance room and computer training room. It’s attached to a historic home that served as the company’s base in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
One of the girls’ most recent projects is to calculate how many steps they would need to travel if they were to walk to Hawaii - reinforcing math and geography skills, Leone said.
And though society no longer requires women to have cooking and sewing skills, those programs will return soon, by popular request, Leone said.
Graduates of the organization have gone on to become executives, entrepreneurs and successful parents.
“The people who have come here have done amazing things. We have exceptional women who have come through this building,” Maglio said. “When we find them and they tell us about it, it’s amazing what this place meant to them.”
Girls Inc. will celebrate its 150th anniversary with an open house Jan. 30 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. The public is invited.
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Information from: Republican-American, https://www.rep-am.com
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