Ernest and Estefania Rodriguez’s father, Norberto, migrated to the United States from the state of Jalisco, Mexico in 1910. He met their mother, Muggie Adams, an African-American woman from Alabama in Iowa. The Rodriguez family lived in Holy City, a box car community in Bettendorf, Iowa for several years, and Ernest and Estefania both worked in the onion fields in nearby Pleasant Valley. As adults, both siblings were active in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Council 10 in Davenport and Ernest promoted civil rights through his work with the Davenport Human Relations Commission and the Quad City Grape Boycott Committee.
Maritza Lopez-Campos is a senior at the University of Iowa majoring in social work. She began working at the Iowa Women’s Archives last spring. Since then, she has read oral history interviews and delved into the collections that make up the Mujeres Latinas project. She connected with the stories of immigrants and their families that she found and recently shared some of these in a presentation at Muscatine Community College. Here, Lopez-Campos explains what working with the Mujeres Latinas project has meant to her:
As a student worker at the Iowa Women’s Archives, I have had the pleasure of working on a project that speaks to me, the Mujeres Latinas in Iowa. Through this, I have realized the
Maritza Lopez-Campos, senior, University of Iowa
commonalities I have with the women who contributed their oral interviews. The celebrations of la Virgen de Guadalupe, strict parents, not knowing English when beginning school, and the experience of discrimination told within them, I have also experienced. Perhaps the stories that most inspire me are the ones of growing up with non-English speaking, immigrant parents who spend their entire lives working so their children can have better lives. As a daughter of immigrant parents, their resiliency (perhaps the most common theme of the Mujeres Latinas project) is contagious; this makes me able to navigate being a proud Latina in the United States. These are not only stories of Latinx people immigrating to Iowa, but of living lives worthy of admiration, respect, and celebration.
Evelyn Birkby began her decades-long careers as a radio homemaker in 1950. Her program, “Down a Country Lane,” focused on her life in rural Iowa. She continued to broadcast as a part of Kitchen-Klatter, a program with listeners in six states. She has written a weekly column for the local paper since 1949 and never misses a week. Her collection of radio homemaker materials in the Iowa Women’s Archives includes magazines, recipes, and audio recordings related to Kitchen-Klatter and other radio homemaker programs. Besides professional papers, the collection also has some of Birkby’s personal scrapbooks containing her correspondence with soldiers during World War II when she was working for the Methodist Church. Students in Matt Gilchrist’s rhetoric classes could see themselves in these personal pieces of Birkby’s life. Gilchrist, a senior lecturer in rhetoric and director of Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning at the University of Iowa, described how his students used Birkby’s papers in the classroom:
My Rhetoric students and I enjoyed so much our exploration of the Evelyn Birkby World War II Scrapbook, a part of the Iowa Women’s Archives. Students were fascinated by the correspondence Evelyn kept with soldiers fighting overseas and awaiting deployment in Stateside camps. Through the letters these soldiers sent back to Evelyn, students felt connected to the experiences of people their own age—in their early 20s—at a time of war many decades ago. The hopes, concerns, and emotions in these letters were similar to my students’ hopes, concerns, and
Matthew Gilchrist, University of Iowa
emotions. They read about dances and concerts, world events, visits home, plans for the future, and daily life as a soldier. Evelyn was a remarkable correspondent, keeping in regular contact with several young soldiers who always answered her letters. We could see friendships and courtships in the letters, and students were so curious to know more about the writers that they went out of their way to learn about Evelyn and the men to whom she wrote. They discovered Evelyn’s life story, including her career as a columnist and radio broadcaster. Through Evelyn’s website and Facebook page, students reached out to her, letting her know they were enjoying her letters in the Iowa Women’s Archives. We scheduled a phone call, and the whole class was enthralled by our conversation with Mrs. Birkby, who was then 94 and living in Sidney, Iowa. Students wrote papers and gave a speech about their explorations in the Archives. They also composed short videos that animated the letters and their research—you can watch one here: http://ir.uiowa.edu/ideal_archivesalive/30/.
I still hear from Evelyn, now 97, who shares her writing and recipes in The Valley News of Shenandoah, Iowa.
Smith speaking at Republican Women’s Conference, 1968.
Today, at the Iowa Women’s Archives commemorate one of our founders, Mary Louise Smith! Smith was born Mary Louise Epperson on October 6th, 1914 in Eddyville, Iowa. She became involved with the Republican Party in the 1950s and quickly rose through the ranks. In 1974, just after Watergate, she was appointed as the first woman to lead the Republican National Committee. Among her many accomplishments, we’re most grateful for Smith’s part in establishing the Iowa Women’s Archives. Her papers, documenting a long political career, were among the first on IWA’s shelves.
Catherine Rymph was one of the first student hired to work in the Iowa Women’s Archives when it was established in 1992. Rymph earned her PhD in history at the University of Iowa in 1998 and is now a professor of history and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri. Her experience processing the papers of Mary Louise Smith had a profound impact on her:
The Mary Louise Smith papers and the Iowa Women’s Archives changed my life!—or at least they changed my career.
Catherine Rymph, professor of history, University of Missouri
In the summer of 1992, while a graduate student in History at the University of Iowa, I took an extra job working at the IWA (before the archive even opened). I spent the next year and a half processing collections what at the time were the nearly empty stacks. By far the largest collection I worked on was the papers of Mary Louise Smith, one of the IWA’s prescient founders. The collection is rich in correspondence and other documentation of Smith’s many years as a Republican Party official and as an active participant in the 1970s women’s movement. Through the process of sorting through and organizing Smith’s papers, I became
Rymph’s book Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right
particularly fascinated by her self-identification as a Republican feminist. So fascinated, in fact, that I switched my Ph.D. research focus from the 19th to 20th centuries and wrote a dissertation on women in the Republican Party. I later published Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), which was the basis of my early career as a historian. Although I visited a number of other archives for my research, I never would have landed on the topic at all without that formative experience in Smith’s papers.
Ruth Salzmann Becker’s papers represent several common themes found in IWA’s collections, including Jewish women in Iowa, German immigration, and feminist activism. Elizabeth Heineman, professor and chair of the University of Iowa’s history department, has used Becker’s papers in her classes. She shared with us why she finds the Ruth Salzmann Becker papers so engaging:
Elizabeth Heineman, professor, University of Iowa
“One of my favorite collections at the IWA is the Ruth Salzmann Becker papers. Ruth was born in Berlin to a Jewish Socialist family; both of her parents were medical professionals. With the rise of Nazism, the family fled, though they couldn’t all get visas together. Ruth went to England, and her parents and younger sister Eva sailed to Cuba. In 1940 they regrouped in New York, where Ruth got a degree in nursing. Somewhere along the line she met Samuel Becker, who later founded Communication Studies at UI. They married, settled in Iowa City, and raised three children. Ruth became an activist for disabled children, racial justice, and feminist causes.
Just two of the many political buttons in the Ruth Salzmann Becker papers.
One of the wonderful things about this collection is how it shows the blending of cultures that occurs with immigration. For example, Ruth started a recipe book in Germany, perhaps as part of a Home Economics class. The book traveled with her to England, then New York, and finally Iowa. Over the years, the recipes changed, from German classics like Sauerbraten to my personal favorite: marshmallow salad. Ruth switched from German to English, from grams to ounces – even her handwriting changed, from an angular Germanic script to rounded American letters. When we displayed items from the collection in a recent exhibit called “German Iowa and the Global Midwest,” visitors could see how the family tradition of political engagement evolved: from her father’s membership book in the German Social Democratic party to Ruth’s collection of pins from the 1970s, with slogans like “My consciousness is fine – it’s my pay that needs raising!” My only regret in using the collection is that I didn’t do it early enough to meet Ruth herself!”
— Elizabeth Heineman, University of Iowa, June 2017
The Iowa Women’s Archives is turning 25! As a part of our celebration, we’re presenting an exhibit, 25 Collections for 25 Years: Selections from the Iowa Women’s Archives, in the Main Library Gallery. Through December 29th, visitors to the library can see selections from a wide array of our collections accompanied by comments from researchers who have used them. Although these comments were edited for the exhibit, we’ll be posting them in full right here on our blog for the rest of the year!
A letter to Catherine from her cousin, Annie, 1860. “I answered your letter the very next day after I received it and Mother happened to find it and read it and wouldn’t let me send it because I said something about two young men.”
For our first post, we’ll be looking at the Catherine Snedeker Hill Papers, one of the oldest collections in the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA). Before Snedeker Hill moved to Mt. Pleasant, Iowa in 1870, she attended the Monticello Female Seminary in Monticello, Illinois. Her letters home provide a look into her daily life during the Civil War era.
Susan Stanfield is a professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and earned her PhD from the University of Iowa in 2013. Stanfield had this to say about the Catherine Snedeker Hill Papers:
This was the first collection I worked with at the IWA. I was a new graduate student and visiting the archive was part of an assignment for Leslie Schwalm’s 19th Century U.S. Race and Gender course.
I selected this collection because it is one of the earliest in the archive. Although the collection goes beyond her school days, I was initially interested in the education of an antebellum woman from the Midwest. Instead of being sent ‘back East’ to be educated, Catherine Snedeker attended the Monticello Female Seminary in Illinois. The Snedeker Hill papers include a large number of letters written to Catherine while she was attending school. Her senior year at Monticello was 1862, which coincided with the Civil War. It is particularly interesting to see the Civil War through the eyes of a young woman and her family, away from the conflict.
One of the things that has made this collection so memorable to me is the chance to see Catherine’s life through that liminal time between being a schoolgirl and being a wife and mother. For Catherine Snedeker that liminal moment spanned almost a decade. For me, it clarified the tenuous position many young women were in—those that left school with no defined role for themselves.
I feel fortunate to have used the Archives as both a student and as an instructor. I used a few collections (unfortunately, not the Catherine Snedeker Hill Papers) in my dissertation. My students in two different classes wrote their final papers from collections found in the IWA. It was exciting to see them work with archival material for the first time. I believe that this project not only introduced them to the practical skills of the historian, but also important critical thinking skills, as they constructed an argument from the various letters, diaries, photographs and other artifacts they encountered.
— Susan Stanfield, University of Texas at El Paso, June 2017
July 12th was the kickoff for the 2016 National LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) convention. Janet, assistant curator here at the IWA, attended the conference to promote “Migration is Beautiful,” a new website featuring vignettes, oral history interview clips, memoirs, letters, and photographs from the IWA’s Mujeres Latinas Project.
The new website highlights the experiences and contributions Latinas and Latinos have made to the state of Iowa. It also hosts an interactive map that shows the migration of Latinos through Iowa during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Recently, Hola Iowa, a news outlet focusing on Latinos in the Midwest, featured a vignette and photos from the Migration is Beautiful website.
We are very proud of Janet, and can’t wait to hear more about the convention when she returns!
By Christine Vivian, SLIS student and IWA student assistant
One of the lovely surprises of The Iowa Women’s Archives is the number of collections which contain holiday cards, such as the Shirley Briggs Papers. Briggs, an artist and naturalist, created a new hand-drawn card every year for over 50 years. Receiving one of these works of art year after year must have been a wonderful tradition for her friends and family. To carry on this tradition, we share some of those cards with you here, with our hopes for a happy holiday season.
Card showing Briggs hanging a Chrismas banner near the U.S. Capitol, 1948.
Evergreen tree reflected in the ocean by sea creatures. Note Shirley Briggs’ tiny self-portrait.
Tiny Shirley Briggs atop the Washington Monument, undated.
Mockingbird in holly, 1955.
To see an exhibit about Shirley Briggs’ work and her friendship with Rachel Carson, please stop by the University of Iowa Sciences Library before January 7th.
In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Iowa Women’s Archives, we have mounted an exhibit in the North Exhibition Hall of the University of Iowa’s Main Library. The inspiration for this exhibit came from the many visits made to the archives by families and friends of donors. Earlier this year, Sam Becker brought his grandchildren to the archives to look at the papers of their grandmother, Ruth Salzmann Becker. As they learned of her narrow escape from Nazi Germany in 1938, Ruth Salzmann’s story became one of the migration paths featured in the exhibit.
“Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives” seeks to acknowledge the donors of the precious letters, photos, diaries, and memoirs that make up the collections preserved in the Iowa Women’s Archives. At the same time, it seeks to re-frame our understanding of Iowa history. Beginning with the migration path of Iowa’s first people, the Meskwaki, it integrates the familiar story of European settlement with a lesser known history of African American and Mexican migration in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
LULAC women share their stories, Davenport, 2007.
For the past seven years, through its Mujeres Latinas Project, the archives has worked to preserve the early history of Mexican migration to Iowa. We chose to highlight these materials in this exhibit because it is a history that has been hidden for too long. The Iowa Women’s Archives wishes to thank all of those who shared their stories with the Iowa Women’s Archives. A special thanks goes to the members of the Davenport League of United Latin American Citizens – LULAC Council 10 – who have done so much to preserve and bring to light the rich history of Iowa Latinas, their families, and organizations, and donated their records to the Iowa Women’s Archives so that others could learn this important history.
Join Iowa Women’s Archives Curator Kären Mason, Assistant Curator Janet Weaver, and faculty members Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Claire Fox for a brown-bag discussion of Latina history in Iowa at the opening of the newest exhibit at the UI Main Library.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 12:00- 1:00 p.m.
University of Iowa Main Library, North Exhibition Hall
“Pathways to Iowa: Migration Stories from the Iowa Women’s Archives” explores a theme common to many of the collections: migration. Since its founding, the Iowa Women’s Archives has gathered documents, photos, and oral histories that illuminate the lives of diverse Iowa women. Through the day-to-day work of the Archives and projects to preserve Latina, African-American, and rural women’s history, the Archives has opened up new avenues of research and laid the foundation for a more complete history of Iowa, the Midwest, and the nation.
Bring your lunch. Cookies and iced tea will be served.
The exhibition is free and open to the public during regular Main Library hours through November 30, 2012.
PLEASE NOTE: The South entrance to the UI Main Library is closed; you will need to use the North entrance.
The Iowa Women’s Archives and University of Iowa Libraries marked Women’s Equality Day—August 26th—by unveiling a new digital collection documenting the decades-long campaign by Iowa women to gain the right to vote. The Women’s Suffrage in Iowa Digital Collection is the culmination of a yearlong project to select and scan photographs, letters, and other primary sources from the University Libraries, the State Historical Society of Iowa, and Iowa State University’s Special Collections Department. This collection is now available through the Iowa Digital Library and can be found here.It offers researchers, teachers, students, historians, and genealogists a centralized starting point for further investigation into this significant period in Iowa’s history.
“This is a great example of the power of digitization. “Women’s Suffrage in Iowa” brings together documents scattered through collections in the Iowa Women’s Archives and at other institutions and makes them available to a wide audience within and beyond the borders of Iowa,” said IWA curator Kären Mason. “We hope the digital collection will entice Iowans to visit the Iowa Women’s Archives, the State Historical Society, or Iowa State. Since we were only able to include a fraction of the rich suffrage collections in Iowa there are many treasures yet to be uncovered.”
In addition, the Iowa Women’s Archives has created an online exhibit that provides a brief introduction to Iowa’s suffrage history and points to local and state suffrage resources including websites, print materials, personal collections, newspaper archives, and contacts in various counties. The exhibit “Iowa’s Suffrage Scrapbook: 1854-1920” is accessible at http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/exhibits/suffrage/. Among the digitized items is sheet music for a song written by Helen Cowles LeCron as Iowa geared up for a statewide referendum on women’s suffrage in 1916:
When suffrage takes the Hawkeye State, Hurrah! Hurrah!
The world will call us wise and great, Hurrah! Hurrah! So lend your smiles and best applause, Hurrah! Hurrah!
To help the worthy Suffrage Cause, Hurrah! Hurrah!
“When Suffrage Takes the Hawkeye State” by Helen Cowles LeCron
Alas, the optimism of these lyrics was not borne out. The suffragists’ hopes were dashed in what was generally viewed as a corrupt election, heavily influenced by the liquor interests that feared a female electorate would bring about prohibition. Iowa women had to wait another four years to vote, until the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 26, 1920. A map showing “irregularities” in the 1916 referendum and hundreds of other documents are now available online, thanks to a grant from the State Historical Society, Inc.
“By presenting the exhibit in the form of a scrapbook, we tried to evoke the feeling of doing historical research, paging through an old volume looking for clues to what people thought and did as they fought for the vote,” said Christine Mastalio, a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science who created the exhibit and digital collection with another SLIS student, Kayla Pollock.
The Iowa Women’s Archivesholds manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities. These personal papers and organizational records date from the nineteenth century to the present. Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders. The Iowa Women’s Archives is open to the public and located on the third floor of the University of Iowa’s Main Library. Questions may be directed to lib-women@uiowa.edu or to staff at 319-335-5068. Or find the Archives on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#!/IowaWomensArchives
