“No thank you, men, we will do this for ourselves.”
The year was 1976 and Millie Divine had a vision for professional
businesswomen like herself. As Divine remembers it, “I was a new trust
officer at a bank in New London. If my male boss wanted to have lunch
with me, we'd have to go to the local ‘greasy spoon’ because he was not
allowed to take me to the Thames Club, the men-only organization that
was just across State Street.”
In those days the men's clubs, if they even allowed women in the
building, usually required them to enter through the back door. Women
were not allowed to hang their coats in the main coatroom. Women were
also not allowed to join such organizations as Rotary, Lions or Kiwanis.
And while women's service organizations were trying to meet the need,
most met in the evening, not at breakfast or lunch as did the men's
clubs. It just wasn’t as convenient.
Divine remembers that her boss used to tease her about marching in
front of the Club for admittance. “One day I said to him, ‘Fred, I don't
want IN the Thames Club! What I want is the same thing as, or better
than, the Thames Club.’ He said if that’s what I wanted, I’d have to
start it myself.” And that is exactly what she did. And the Southeastern
Connecticut Women's Network was born.
She started talking with other professional women, meeting for
one-hour lunches on a monthly basis with the idea of sharing
professional experiences, setbacks, goals and hopes for the future. The
group grew quietly and slowly to approximately 40
members in 1978, which
is when the members decided to formalize and develop a purpose and
goals. After discussions over several months, the membership developed
its mission statement:
"The purpose of the Network shall be to provide its members the
opportunity to meet other professional and executive women, to
communicate and exchange general and career information, to promote
personal visibility and to develop a constituency for the purpose of
examining and speaking out on issues of concern to the membership."
Once formalized, the group met for lunch at a restaurant on State
Street. “I recall that at some point, the Thames Club invited us to use a
room downstairs,” Divine says. “Inviting us to use the ‘downstairs
room’ sounded to us like ‘second class citizens’ so we declined
graciously and continued on with our own plans.”
As the group grew, it required larger and larger facilities. Today
the Network has grown to approximately 180 members from a diverse range
of businesses and professions, and offers both women and men an
inclusive and supportive forum for networking, knowledge and education.
