Maggy Simony wanted to write a book about sociable bridge and she has done just that! She explains her motivation: a subterranean sisterhood, existing by word of mouth — no structure or organization — almost no paper trail except in women’s magazines and cookbooks.”

Maggy wanted a book that put a spotlight on the vast majority of players whom she feels are responsible for the growth of the game. Helen and Robert Lynd, in their book MIDDLETOWN IN TRANSITION, have this to say about bridge: “It is conceivable that bridge never would have been anything but the sport of an esoteric few, had its growth depended entirely on the male world. Its development, however, has been primarily in the hands of women.”

Maggy would agree. Her book, BRIDGE TABLE or What’s Trump Anyway, is an informal “herstory” of notes, quotes, anecdotes, menus, recipes, and trivia.

“Learning to play bridge for daughters was like a rite of passage. If they didn’t learn to play bridge at home, they learned at college. Bridge was rampant in dorms and sororities.” Maggy points out that bridge was more than just a game: “Women referred to their get-togethers for bridge and lunch as ‘my bridge club’—without the formalities of a true club. Perhaps calling it a club was a way to legitimize what was essentially a frivolous activity, providing a better excuse for getting out of the house. Ladies-only-at-home-bridge—and lunch— clubs typically have no rules, no president, no minutes, only a pattern  of rituals acquired over the years."

Bridge has been a century-old tradition which “grew steadily from 1900 through 1920, exponentially as a fad in the 20s and 30s, thrived and survived during the 40s to become an icon of the 50s and 60s.” It fell in popularity for a few years, so much so that some thought the game would become extinct.

Yet bridge is back in the early years of this century! Maggy feels that this is a very good thing. “It deserves to last amongst women another hundred years. For a long mentally alert life, and a happy old age, science is telling us these days it’s better to have played bridge badly than never to have played at all.”

The players who kept the game alive for so many decades in the last century did so in spite of the criticism. “Kitchen Bridge was described as the lowest form of the game. The ‘ladies only’ bridge club has been put down by the culinary establishment and by moral critics who took them to task for wasting time on bridge in the first place.”

It didn’t matter; women of all ages kept playing bridge. Maggy writes, “The survival of sociable bridge depends upon our boomer daughters taking up their mom’s favorite game so that it doesn’t die with my generation of bridge-playing old ladies from the 50s and 60s.”

Another woman writer, Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields, also felt the sociable women’s bridge club deserved a voice. Her play, THIRTEEN HANDS, is about a whole generation of women often overlooked. The book cover explains: “The women in THIRTEEN HANDS welcome a once-a-week gathering at a bridge club as a time to momentarily suspend feelings of loneliness, isolation and fear, and begin to indulge, reveal and celebrate in the wonderful intimacy they form. An intimacy that gets passed on, like an exquisite heirloom, to the next generation of bridge players.” Carol writes, “Something important goes on around a bridge table, a place where many women have felt most brilliantly alive.”

Bridge has often been played at the White House. Maggy tells this story. In 1946 Bess Truman invited her entire bridge club to stay at the White House for a long weekend of bridge and a round of activities. THE TIMES covered the arrival by plane of five of he ladies, all wearing new hats. There they are in the AP wire photo, standing by a TWA plane, waving  goodbye to their husbands, as they fly off to Washington “where they have an engagement with Mrs. Harry S. Truman.”

The flying half of the Tuesday Bridge Club of Independence (the rest drove), were met by a dozen reporters, half a dozen photographers, two chauffeured White House limousines, and one man from the Secret Service. THE TIMES reported that Mr. Truman would follow the pattern of many a good husband when the bridge club meets at his house. “He’ll be away...”

Carl Anthony, the historian of the National First Ladies’ Library, records an interesting snapshot of bridge at the White House. According to him, Jackie did not, despite the best efforts of her regular playing mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, play bridge.

Even in the first months after her marriage, when Senator Kennedy sometimes played a hand with his new mother-in-law and her friends, Jackie would read a book or paint instead. Anthony says that one White House visitor recalled this astonishing bridge foursome: Jackie’s mother and a friend, and Jackie’s mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, with Aristotle Onassis as a fourth.