Lunch at the Waldorf

A COLUMNIST, in one of those flip phrases that brand decades, called this "a woman's era." The tag seemed particularly apt from the floor of the Grand Ballroom in New York's ultra-plush Waldorf Astoria last Monday, April 1, where the National Council of Women of the United States lunched 650 women at 25 dollars a plate to commemorate its eightieth anniversary.

The affair was billed as a "First Ladies Luncheon." Seated at more than 62 tables in the sumptuous red-gold-blue Grand Ballroom were prominent doctors, musicians, presidents of department stores, architects, and lawyers, ambassadors and ambassadors' wives, wives of governors, women housing commissioners, women officials in local, state, and federal government, women in life insurance, women in publishing, and the first woman member of the New York Stock Exchange. There were elegant ones, and dowdy ones, and young ones, and black ones, and behatted ones. The ladies were fed on seagull soup, delicate chicken breasts with green noodles and pickled apricots, and multi-colored ice-cream in the shape of cellos, tubas, or clarinets. The lady to my left, small and pleasant, began to talk of her daughter. "...And she went to Wellesley. But she grew a bit too fond of all the boys' schools around, so she didn't finish. Now she is working with 'Up With People.'" The mother turned to me, dropped her voice a few earnest notes, "And what do you think about all this? Isn't it terrible? People must develop Character, then they wouldn't do such things."

THE coffee cups were whisked away. Mrs. Belle Spafford, President of the Relief Society of the Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints rose up on the dias to give the first speech--a history of the women's movement in the United States. She spoke with much intensity, very close to the microphone. 'The first women's group, an abolitionist group--they called themselves Females Against Slavery--met in Philadelphia during the 1830's. It was an outrage then that women should meet thus together for some political matter. Few attended the gatherings. Their first meeting," and here her voice, hard, almost metallic, paused. She waited, then thrusting her steely-grey head forward, she went on, "At the first meeting there was a screaming mob outside the building. After the meeting the building was burnt down....People said that women," Mrs. Spafford told, "had weak feminine brains incapable of serious thinking." She received a generous round of laughter from the ballroom.

Across the table from me two ladies, bored, were now comparing shopping lists, their nieces, and their grandchildren.

Mrs. Spafford had come to the 1848 public declaration of independence for women, the Declaration of Women's Rights set forth in Seneca Falls, New York. She skimmed on to the present. Here Dr. Bennetta B. Washington, wife of Washington, D.C.'s Negro mayor, took over: "Women--Today and Tomorrow." She was now speaking to a bored and increasingly restless audience. The more bold slipped out.

For them, the battle cry of women's rights was only a musty echo from the past. Yet, 120 years after the Seneca Falls declaration, women's clubs are still holding "First Ladies Luncheons." And last week in New York a prominent female correspondent was barred from a press luncheon with British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins. The gathering took place in a men's club.

It was a sad and funny luncheon at the Waldorf April 1 of this year.