Eight customers in the sample were affiliated with the Women's City Missionary Society (founded in 1867), which continued the tradition of friendly visits to the poor in their homes into the 1930s, long after it had become an obsolete tactic in the fight against poverty. Two clients were prominent in the Ladies' Aid Association of the Homeopathic Hospital of Rhode Island: Mary Burlingame Peck, one of the Tirocchis' most faithful customers, and Mary Colt Gross, who wore Tirocchi clothes throughout the 1920s and 30s [figs. 47-48]. In short, Providence customers tended to engage social problems through long-standing organizations rooted in a tradition that was linked to small-scale, meliorist relief of individuals' poverty or to conventional charity work, rather than to the building of a regulatory welfare state that would undertake systemic reform.(9)

Despite the fact that Tirocchi customers tended to live in the same neighborhood and to belong to the same conservative social and charitable organizations, the fact remains that most members of those clubs and most residents of those neighborhoods did not frequent the Tirocchi shop. All of the factors that led women to patronize the Tirocchis will never be known, but kinship and close friendship certainly played a powerful role. In the firm's address books, especially those for the 1930s, many entries include such notations as "Mrs. Brayton's friend," "Peck's sister-in-law," "Mrs. Horton's daughter," and "Mrs. Booth her mother." Presumably, many customers and the connections among them were so well known to the Tirocchi sisters that such notations were unnecessary, and the recorded connections were but a small fraction of the total number of family relationships. This interpretation is supported by the fact that these notations most often referred to out-of-town clients, identifying those whose ties might not have been so well known as those of local customers.

A close look at the largest cluster of out-of-town clients - those from Fall River, Massachusetts (about seventeen miles to the east of Providence) - reinforces the importance of kin ties among the Tirocchi clientele. Twelve Fall River women bought clothing from the Tirocchis. Of these, nine were close kin: two mother-daughter pairs, a mother and her two daughters, and a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law. Clearly, clothes shopping was an activity with intergenerational appeal. Of the three women not linked by kinship, one lived across the street from the mother in one of the mother-daughter pairs. Once again, however, kin connections were part of a larger web of class-based links. If anything, these women were part of an even tighter economic elite than their Providence counterparts. Seven of eleven husbands whose occupations were found held powerful positions in the city's textile industry; one of the seven also led two of Fall River's largest banks. The other four husbands were a physician, a leading coal dealer, a newspaper publisher, and a retired admiral. What remains murky, however tightly linked the Fall River women may have been, is what brought them first to the Tirocchi shop. One connection may have been Adelaide Danforth of Providence, who began to frequent the shop in 1916 and who was an aunt of Dorothy Newton and a friend of Charlotte Robinson, two of the Fall River clients.(10)

Seven of the Fall River women's civic activities have left traces in the historical record. All of these belonged to the Women's Union, six were members of the Fall River Women's Club, and two were members of the Junior League. The Women's Union served the city's wage-earning women in a manner similar to a big-city YWCA, operating a residence, a store at which women's products were sold, and a center for social and educational activities. Three Tirocchi customers sat on the boards of local institutions - two served the hospital, one the children's home. The Fall River women were more engaged with the city's civic and welfare activities than their Providence counterparts, perhaps because Fall River was a smaller, single-industry city, while Providence was more populous and economically diversified.(11)