Women's Church or Civic Group Portrait, Brick Parish Hall, 1950s

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Women's Church or Civic Group Portrait, Brick Parish Hall, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Women's Church or Civic Group Portrait, Brick Parish Hall, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-DAD4FE

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Sometime in the 1950s, roughly thirty women assembled outside a brick church hall and arranged themselves into three tidy rows for posterity, which is to say they did exactly what women's church auxiliaries and civic leagues had been doing since the invention of the box camera. The front row got chairs. Everyone else stood. The distribution of seating was not random — it tracked age and rank with the precision of a military parade, the founding members up front, the newer recruits standing in the back where they had not yet earned the right to sit.

The hats are doing considerable work here. In the 1950s a woman attending any daytime gathering of consequence wore a hat, and the varieties on display — straw brims, small pillbox styles, dark structured caps — function as a kind of social autobiography. The woman in the bright orange dress near the back is the only one who appears to have dressed for a different occasion, which suggests either confidence or a scheduling conflict.

One man stands at the far right edge of the frame in a suit, slightly behind everyone else, with the expression of someone who drove a wife to this event and has been waiting for it to end ever since. He is the only person present who does not appear to belong to the organization, which is almost certainly the organization's point.

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