Coffee klatch

Recently, on a wintry Sunday, some 2,500 white Chicago area residents embarked on a strange safari across the city, determined to do what most of them had never done before—visit a Negro home. Eager to purge themselves of ignorance about the city's "other half," they were participants in Interracial Home Visit Day, a "Coffee Klatsch" co-sponsored by local Catholic, Jewish and Protestant groups in an effort to eliminate racial bigotry and hate.

Gossip seems to manifest itself in its purest form in the coffee-klatsch. From everyday experience a coffee-klatsch is typically a circle of acquaintances who—either in a café or at home in a living room—gather for coffee and cake and unburdened by pressing obligations, turn their attention to one thing: the discussion of the flaws and actions of their absent acquaintances and endless talk about things that do not concern them.

Coffee also connects me to my girlfriends. You may think of a coffee klatch as old-fashioned or outmoded, a bunch of housewives gossiping in a suburban breakfast nook, but a klatch is what you make it.

A coffee klatch (or klatsch) is a small, informal discussion with a group of people in a private home, usually with light refreshments. Originally the term simply meant people getting together for coffee and conversation. But for public participation purposes, a coffee klatch is more like the coffees scheduled by politicians during a campaign. There is usually a short presentation, followed by questions, answers, and discussion. The fact that a coffee klatch is held in a private home changes the dynamic considerably from a public meeting, as participants are usually on their best behavior because they are guests in a home. […] Because the number of people who can meet in a private home is limited, you may need to hold a series of coffee klatches to reach more people.

Some sources suggest that coffee klatch was coined by husbands who, expressing their inherent displeasure of being excluded from the inner female coffee sanctum, used the term as a disparaging reference to their coffee-drinking wives. In the postwar baby boom years of American suburbia, the coffee klatch served as a means for the stay-at-home mother and nonworking married woman to build relationships and communicate with other women, thus easing the sense of isolation for some. The term may have returned along with GIs formerly stationed in Europe. German immigrants seeking the familiar continued to practice the custom by inviting their newfound neighbors.

[I]f a person was to talk about an issue one way in her morning coffee klatch and yet another way in response to a telephone interviewer later in the day, which one is her real opinion? Both are real and both have importance.

The upshot of this incessant meeting and dining and coffee klatching is that women are in great demand.

Hotel workers were busy setting up for morning meetings and men and women in business suits sat coffee-klatching in various corners of the floor.