College Women’s Club of Pasadena Marks 100 Years

The College Woman’s Club of Pasadena plans to mark a century of service to the community with a Centennial Tea celebration, as well as the debut of a video highlighting the club’s efforts to promote women’s education over the past 100 years.

Members of the club and their guests will gather Nov. 7 at the Altadena Town & Country Club to observe the occasion, CWC President Rozanne Child said.

“It’s really amazing that we’ve reached this milestone,” she said. “We’ve been in operation for a hundred years… and now here we are, a hundred years later, and we’re still offering scholarships to young women. We offer friendship to our members and we encourage education.”

The primary purpose of the organization is to raise and distribute funds to distribute scholarships, said Child, who has been a member of the organization since 2013.

“The most heartwarming meetings that we have and the best thing that we do is to provide scholarships for young women to continue their education,” she said. “Some of the stories have just been amazing.”

Child recalled one young woman who was homeless, but managed to attend UC Berkeley with the help of the CWC. She also pointed out that not all of the recipients are young.

Scholarship recipients will be honored during the celebration, she added.

In addition to the 12-minute video presentation, the upcoming Centennial Tea will feature door prizes and a commemorative program describing the organization’s long history, CWC Social Media Chair Kathy LaRussa said.

The club has seen a great deal of change during its 100 years, she said.

“It began in 1921. Wives of Caltech professors put this club together because these women wanted to continue to learn and educate themselves about a variety of subjects, including travel, child psychology, mathematics and science,” LaRussa said. “They began with a fund of $100 to award scholarships to young women. And this $100 fund has now grown to over $2 million.”

The success has been possible with the support of the Pasadena Community Foundation, she added.

The club’s archived newsletters and other documents provide a historic record of the lives of women in Pasadena over the past century, LaRussa said.

“When the club began, women had just received the right to vote. They were still listed in the club under their husband’s name and they still couldn’t get their own credit cards,” she said. “So we’ve progressed quite a bit in the last hundred years and we want to celebrate that.”

La Russa said she was also looking forward to meeting with fellow club members in person once again.

“We’re going to reconnect because we haven’t met in person in a year-and-a-half, like most clubs, due to COVID,” she said. “I think that it’s really going to be lovely.”

More information on the College Women’s Club of Pasadena can be found on the group’s website at cwcpasadena.org.