21/10/2026
Go those women!
In 1891, four young women on Staten Island formed a friendship so independent that the neighborhood men reportedly gave them a mocking nickname. They called them "The Darned Club," irritated that the women preferred one another's company and refused to include them.
The women were Alice Austen, Trude Eccleston, Julia Marsh, and Sue Ripley. They gathered to sew, play tennis, ride bicycles, and take photographs. But behind the respectable appearance of their Victorian social circle, they were quietly challenging the rules governing women's lives.
Austen, an extraordinarily talented photographer, documented their private world. Her photographs captured women embracing, dressing in men's clothing, wearing false mustaches, and smoking ci**rs. At a time when respectable women were expected to behave with rigid propriety, these friends delighted in turning convention upside down.
Their photographs were not intended for public exhibition. They were intimate records of women enjoying freedoms that society rarely encouraged.
Austen's own life was even more unconventional. She shared a loving relationship with Gertrude Tate that lasted more than 50 years. Together they built a home and a life, although their relationship existed in a society that offered them no legal recognition as a couple.
Then came financial disaster. Austen lost her family home, fell into poverty, and eventually entered a public poorhouse. She and Tate were separated in their final years.
Today, the photographs survive as extraordinary evidence of women who created their own world, long before society was prepared to accept it.
The men called them "The Darned Club." More than a century later, the women are the ones history remembers.
