“The urgency of our work has not diminished. There has never been a more critical time for women to lead in New York.” – Jeri Powell
The Junior League, New York’s original members club, turns 125 this year. JANET MERCEL dives into its century-plus of women-powered influence.
A tuxedoed man races back and forth across the ballroom at Casa Cipriani, holding a Chanel purse aloft. He weaves between plumes of peacock feathers at each table. The blonde auctioneer scolds the crowd of about a thousand dinner guests. “We scared you away at six thousand?” she chastens. Paddles start flying. “Is that a bid or are you just waving? No? Ma’am, you almost just owned a Chanel.”
The Chanel bag goes for $9,500. The live auction plows on. A trip to The Ranch Malibu. A private experience at The Met Opera for you and eleven of your closest friends. An Hermès Birkin from What Goes Around Comes Around pulls a cool $26,000. After that, people start throwing money in the pot with cash donations at random increments. Ultimately, the 74th annual Winter Ball on February 28th raises a record $1 million.
After dinner, after the La Bohème serenade, doors open for cocktails, dessert and dancing. The final auction items—facialist and money manager sessions, diamond suites, signed first editions—sit alongside student artworks from Covenant House NY. The women on the Winter Ball Committee, like those on similar committees for the Thanksgiving Eve Ball, the league’s second-largest fundraiser, work hard for those vendor donations. They know people have paid a premium ticket price for their biggest night of the year, and they’re proud to deliver.
“The party feels like a top-tier prom, or perhaps the dance floor at Brooklyn Beckham’s wedding, if such footage existed.”
The party feels like a top-tier prom, or perhaps the dance floor at Brooklyn Beckham’s wedding, if such footage existed. Enough sequins to fill a dozen Bob Mackie showrooms, guests from eighteen to octogenarian navigate between the many bars, floating on just the right amount of sparkling white negroni sbagliatos.
One of the first-time ball-goers is a family friend we’ll call “T,” a full-fledged member for two years. “A couple of years ago when I was 27, I didn’t think I could make another friend,” T tells me. “I thought my friend group was closed. I was constantly toggling back and forth between work and a social life, and it started to feel like something was missing. I was itching for something more fulfilling. The Junior League is all that.”
This year’s ball happens to fall on the 125th anniversary year of the New York Junior League, which makes a huge money-maker charity event even more electric. The Gilded Age theme is a direct homage to the legacy of Mary Harriman, the Barnard student who founded the league in 1901. As one of the oldest established examples of women helping women in America, there are now nearly 300 Junior Leagues across the country and abroad.
“The city is rife with influencer-driven members clubs running the length of Manhattan, and upwardly mobile young women have never had more options. So why the Junior League?”
Through two world wars, Prohibition, the women’s suffrage movement, and the Great Depression, the NYJL has aided the first women into political power positions and the legislation to match. Early days brought shelters for unhoused babies and children, advocacy for green space and playgrounds, radio broadcasts and libraries and performances for hospitalized or homebound kids.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a dance teacher for young girls at the Lower East Side Settlement House when she joined as a 19-year-old in 1903. She courted her future husband and the future president, Franklin, over their stints volunteering at downtown tenement housing.
The history reads like a succinct, if heartbreaking, time machine across a century of women’s and family crises– if the two can be separated. In the 1950s and 60s, it was immigrant assimilation, international social services for border-separated families, women in the workforce.
In the 1970s, it was behavioral health, drug dependency, the growing population of women at Rikers, domestic violence and rape awareness. Members served alongside a young Jesse Jackson on the education priorities panel.
In the 1980s, Alzheimer’s and the public school system.
The 1990s brought AIDS efforts, healthcare access, the anti-stalking act.
In the mid-aughts, human trafficking, toxic cleaning products in public schools, Hurricane Sandy relief. You can watch the landscape of social consciousness unfold generation by generation through the NYJL’s causes. According to President Jeri Powell, it’s still the place for the city’s women who want to make an impact. “The urgency of our work has not diminished. There has never been a more critical time for women to lead in New York.”
A day after the ball, one of my dinner partners limps her way through Astor House on East 80th Street. Her knees have given out (this is a young person). The culprit was the dancing, but also her 2 AM contribution to the cleanup crew. With a committee and a cause for everyone, the commitment goes far beyond dues. “A typical volunteer will spend several evenings a week receiving leadership training, completing a service project or meeting with fellow volunteers,” says Powell. “We work hard and we have fun doing it.”
Astor House, Vincent Astor’s Neo-Classical former manse, has been the league’s headquarters since 1950. My leaguer points to the crimson sofa next to the floor-to-ceiling wood paneled fireplace in the evergreen-walled Pine Room. “I met one of my best friends sitting right there,” T says. The bartender at his mirrored post looks genuinely let down when I decline a cocktail.
“The Pine Room is the social room,” T says. “I’ll come an hour or two before a meeting and have a glass of wine with a group of girls.” Members can co-work on weekdays, hold committee meetings throughout the house, and invite non-member friends to events.
You can drop $250 each on an omakase seating, or you can spend it dancing until your knees give out surrounded by historical beauty, your friends and a good cause. “They go crazy with decorations, there’s a great turnout, I invite my other girlfriends to buy tickets,” T tells me. “It’s not a go-crazy, party vibe, more like, let’s get dressed up and drink champagne together and take beautiful pictures.” The math isn’t complicated.
