For Women Only

Delmonico’s, a restaurant in the Financial District, appears in New York City Firsts because it was the first restaurant in America. The Delmonico steak and possibly other dishes originated at this fine eating establishment. I recently discovered another first associated with Delmonico’s.

Take a close look at this picture of people enjoying a meal at Delmonico’s more than a century ago. You won’t find women dining without men. Going out in public without a proper male escort was taboo for women in the nineteenth century—until Jane Cunningham Croly took a bold step.

Croly already had ventured into alien territory. She was an established journalist—at a time when few women had careers or worked outside the home.

After Croly was denied a seat at a dinner honoring Charles Dickens simply because she was a woman, she approached Lorenzo Delmonico about having a luncheon for women only. Perhaps embarrassed because the Dickens dinner was at his restaurant, Delmonico agreed.

On April 20, 1868, a group of women gathered at Delmonico’s for lunch. All the ladies were from the higher strata of society, and some, like Croly, also were career women. Delmonico’s again made history as the first restaurant that admitted unaccompanied women to its main dining room.

This luncheon was the initial meeting of the first women’s club in America. Men’s clubs, where upper-class gentlemen or professional colleagues gathered, had been common in New York since the 1830s. Croly dubbed her group Sorosis, a name that might derive from the Latin word for sister; some sources state it stems from a Greek botanical word. By the late nineteenth century, there were dozens of women’s clubs in the country.