The members of the Wiscasset Female Charitable Society take a humble approach to charity. While the group has helped countless women and children in the 200 years since its founding, it has refrained from boasting about its accomplishments.
“We’re not a secret group, but we’re low key,” FCS Historian Marie Reinhardt said. “We don’t like to say who we helped and what we did.”
While the group refrains from touting its work to the public, they remain deeply proud of their work, history, and traditions.
Two hundred and six years ago, on Nov. 18, 1805, 31 women from Wiscasset gathered at Tempe Lee’s High Street home and inaugurated the Female Society of Wiscasset. At their first meeting, those present made a commitment to form “a society for benevolent purposes,” and to that end they collected $76 to help local women in need.
Within a few months, the new club had already invested a portion of their startup funds by purchasing a share in a local bank. The profits from the investment, it was stipulated, were to be “devoted to the relief of widows and female orphans.”
The Wiscasset Female Charitable Society has had its named changed several times over the last few centuries, but its commitment to helping the less fortunate has not. Each year, the FCS provides money, heating oil, food, school supplies and clothing to women in Wiscasset and the five surrounding towns.
Those in need of assistance are referred to the FCS by individuals, members, and communities.
The FCS has provided the same manner of assistance since it’s founding: According to Reinhardt, the group’s first act of charity was to loan a dress to a woman who needed clothes for church.
The FCS is unique among local charities in that it combines grassroots aid with a proud, deep- seated sense of tradition. It still maintains that in order to receive assistance, a woman must not be living with or dependent upon a man. This rule is rarely broken and has been in place since the group’s founding.
Until 1973, the Treasurer could not be a married woman. The reasoning behind the statute, according to Society Presidentess Gail Swanton, was to prevent a man from inheriting the Society’s valuables.
“Women didn’t own a thing back then,” Swanton said of the time of the FCS’ founding.
This love of tradition has translated into a blend of pomp and ritual. Every summer at their annual membership meeting, members dress in formal attire for a high-class tea party complete with silver tea and coffee sets.
At this meeting, the general membership elects its Board of Directresses and Presidentess, the group’s governing body that largely chooses where and how the FCS distributes its funds.
In one particular ceremony, the host of the event is given a small purse with a quarter, a symbolic and historic gesture ‘reimbursing’ them for the cost of the party.
On the 200th anniversary of the group’s founding in 2005, the Society held a special annual party: Members dressed in period costume and performed a skit reenacting various events in the charity’s storied history. Minutes from all past meetings were recited to the membership by members in white gloves.
This dedication to tradition sometimes leaves the FCS with difficult choices. The group has sometimes referred a woman in need who has a husband or a male in the household to another agency.
While the Board of Directresses has donated to food banks that will ultimately help all women, they are so far determined not to change the rules set down at the society’s founding.
While the question sometimes comes up at board meetings, Swanton said its members are determined to hold on to their traditions.
“We’ve talked about the changing times and how to address it, but at this point we haven’t bent the rules,” Swanton said.
