Cosmopolitan Club

The Cosmopolitan Club of Philadelphia, a private club for socially prominent women, was established in 1928 and housed in an Art Deco building on 16th and Latimer Streets designed by architect Edmund Gilchrist and interior designer Jules Buoy. In 1941, Oakley, who was a member, composed a bookplate for the club with a nocturnal view of the city’s skyline from the Schuylkill River. The Philadelphia Museum of Art can be seen on the acropolis to the left, and the PSFS building and City Hall tower are visible at right. The club is represented by three contemporary women gathered around a large terrestrial globe. One woman sketching and another in an academic robe portray women’s professional participation in arts and letters. Cosmopolitanism is symbolized by the third woman who caresses the globe with one hand and raises the other in a rhetorical gesture as if to say the whole world is now “woman’s sphere.”