Gioia Diliberto, author of FIREBRANDS: The Untold Story of Four Women who Made and Unmade Prohibition wrote the review which appeared in the August 8th edition of the paper:
Of all the roadblocks facing an American girl who aspired to become an artist in the late 19th century, perhaps none was more daunting than nationality itself. In the United States, women were barred from attending the best art academies and denied admission to life-drawing classes with nude models—a basic and essential element of an artist’s education. What’s more, when American women married, convention expected them to abandon professional pursuits and devote themselves to domesticity. To become “great creators of art,” Jennifer Dasal writes in her lively history, “The Club,” they had to go to Paris.
The City of Light was more hospitable than America to male artists, too, but men had the advantage of, well, being men. To counter this prejudice, Elisabeth Mills Reid, a New York philanthropist and the wife of Whitelaw Reid, America’s ambassador to France, opened the American Girls’ Club in Paris in a sprawling former boarding school at 4 Rue de Chevreuse, in the heart of the Latin Quarter’s bustling art scene.
From 1893 to its closing in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, the Club, as it was known to residents, harbored “a large and continually rotating community of independent, talented, and driven young women who were among the first to actively seek professionalization in the visual arts,” writes Ms. Dasal. These pioneers paved the way for the next generation of women artists who, in the years after World War II, helped transform America into the center of the art world, surpassing France. And yet the Club’s artists have largely been erased from history’s canvas. Their names are mostly forgotten.
Ms. Dasal, a former curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the host of the podcast “ArtCurious” (which is also the title of her previous book), rescues from oblivion such talented artists as Anne Goldthwaite, Anna McNulty Lester and Meta Vaux Warrick, whose associations with the Club nourished their ambitions at pivotal moments in their lives.
The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris by Jennifer Dasal was published in the English language by Bloomsbury in July 2025.
Jennifer Dasal is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, which has been featured in multiple local and national publications and websites, including O, the Oprah Magazine, PC Magazine, ArtDaily, NPR, Salon and more. She is also the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Notre Dame and a BA in art history from the University of California, Davis. Dasal is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, where she worked for thirteen years. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally. Dasal lives in Wendell, North Carolina with her family.