In response to COVID-19, the Iowa Women’s Archives’ reading room will closed for the time being.
We encourage faculty, students, and the public to contact us by e-mail at lib-women@uiowa.edu, although reference services will be limited.
For more information on the University of Iowa’s response to COVID-19, please visit: https://coronavirus.uiowa.edu/.
This post by IWA Graduate Research Assistant Heather Cooper is the third installment in our series highlighting African American history in the Iowa Women’s Archives collection. The series will continue weekly during Black History Month, and monthly for the remainder of 2020.
If you’re looking for a local history of civil rights activism, look no further than The Iowa Women’s Archives, where our stacks are filled with the papers and records of remarkable individuals and organizations devoted to the ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice – the Virginia Harper papers are one such collection. Harper was born in Fort Madison, Iowa in 1929. She studied at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) and was one of five African American women to integrate the first residence hall on campus (Currier Hall) in 1946. Harper worked as an x-ray technician and medical assistant in her family’s Fort Madison clinic and was actively engaged in her community, serving on the state Board of Public Instruction, the Iowa Board of Parole, and as Secretary and then President of the Fort Madison branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1960s through the 1990s.
As NAACP Secretary, Virginia Harper took on local issues with national import. Beginning in 1967, the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) and Iowa State Highway Commission endorsed a plan to improve U.S. 61 in Fort Madison by re-routing the highway through the southwest corner of the city. These plans were meant to improve traffic conditions and ease of access to the city, but at the expense of the effected neighborhood, whose residents would be forced to relocate. The area in question represented what Virginia Harper called “the only truly multi-ethnic area in the city,” home to a significant number of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and low-income whites. Acting as Secretary of the Fort Madison branch of the NAACP, Harper filed a legal complaint against the project, alleging that it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because a disproportionate number of those who would be displaced were members of the minority population. This was the beginning of a struggle that went on for several years as Harper and others joined forces with leaders of the Mexican-American community to protest the plan, gather signatures for multiple petition campaigns, and correspond with various government agencies and national civil rights groups.
At the heart of Harper’s analysis was a critique of the racist and classist views which deemed this area of the city worth sacrificing. In a letter to the Department of Transportation on June 30, 1970, Harper outlined fourteen reasons why the relocation plan was objectionable. She wrote, “The corridor which has been chosen for the Highway relocation, follows the tradition of disrupting minority group neighborhoods. … Chosen because it is the ‘cheapest’ area of the town, it is this way because the citizens of this area have been systematically denied the privilege of living in other areas of the community.” In a letter to the editor of the Evening Democrat, Harper added, “This is not quite the time for sitting back and telling minority group members and lower income whites that they must sacrifice for the good of society. They’ve been sacrificing all their lives and are accustomed to being used.”
Part of a larger series on “Iowa Racial Issues,” the Highway 61 material in Virginia Harper’s papers provides insight into historic patterns and practices of redlining and defacto segregation in Iowa. Come to the archives to learn more about Harper and civil rights struggles in the state.
For more information on this topic, check out Kara Mollano’s article about Highway 61 in the Annals of Iowa: “Race, Roads, and Right-of-Way: A Campaign to Block Highway Construction in Fort Madison, 1967-1976.” The Annals of Iowa, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer 2009): 255-297.
This post by IWA Assistant Curator Janet Weaver and Graduate Research Assistant Heather Cooper is the second installment in our series highlighting African American history in the Iowa Women’s Archives’ collections. The series will continue weekly during Black History month, and monthly throughout 2020.
The Iowa Women’s Archives is honored to be the repository for a collection of oral history interviews recorded with southern African American women who worked as maids for white families and later migrated to Waterloo, Iowa. These women were interviewed for the 2012 book, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestic Workers and White Families in the Jim Crow South, written by Katherine van Wormer, David W. Jackson III, and Charletta Sudduth. The Maid Narratives collection at IWA includes nineteen of the original audio interviews (now digitized) and abridged transcripts of several of the interviews included in the book. In the oral histories, women engage with topics such as education, family, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, sexual assault, and the civil rights movement.
Mamie Johnson was born outside Jackson, Mississippi in 1922 and spoke to David W. Jackson about growing up on a sharecropped farm and working for whites from a young age, just as her mother had. “I started working for white people when I was just big enough and old enough to do the dishes, and that was about seven or eight.” Speaking about the Tates, the first family she worked for, Johnson recalled having to learn and navigate the racial etiquette of the household.
You had to go to the back door. It was just a rule and you knowed it! And when the children got to be teenagers, it was Mister or Miss. When I’d be working in the house, they would show me what to say. They would tell me, ‘When you clean up Mr. David’s room, do this or fix his so-and-so, or don’t do so-and so.’ When they said, ‘Mister,’ that is for you to say it—‘Mister.’ And you know them little children and the teenagers—they loved it for you to say that! Yeah, they loved for you to say Mr. So-and-So. You know one thing, I was so glad when the time come around when black people would talk to white people to say what they thought. Now you talking about a shouting time, I felt just like shouting when black people stopped having to say Mr. So-and-So. And they would say it just for you to say it.
A keen observer of human behavior, Johnson also spoke about the terrible consequences of not understanding the social deference that was expected and demanded of African Americans in the South. She vividly remembered the details of Emmett Till’s murder and watching the trial unfold over three short weeks. “The boy just whistled at the woman, you know, didn’t know the danger he was in.” What she remembered most from the trial was the accused murderers “kissing their wives, hugging their wives, and rejoicing” when they were found not guilty. This stood in stark contrast to the image of Emmett Till, whose funeral service she also watched on TV. The interviews included in this collection are a testament to these women’s work, family ties, humor, and survival.
This March we will celebrate Women’s History Month by learning more about these remarkable women whose lives were shaped by domestic service in white households in the Jim Crow South. Recently described in a Time Magazine article as a “landmark collection of oral histories,” the interviews conducted by Charletta Sudduth and David Jackson III shine a light on the daily lives, struggles, and courage of the thousands of African American women who labored as domestic servants in the South but about whom relatively little is known.
Join us at the Iowa City Public Library on March 3 for a conversation with historians, social workers, and civil rights activists who are tied to this history:
What: Iowa Women of the Great Migration: The Maid Narratives
When: Tuesday, March 3, 4:00pm to 5:30pm (Reception at 3:30pm)
Where: Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A
Co-sponsors – Iowa City Public Library, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (University of Iowa)
This post by IWA Graduate Assistant, Heather Cooper, is the first of a series highlighting African American history in the Iowa Women’s Archives’ collections. The series will continue weekly during Black History month, and monthly throughout 2020.
The Grace Morris Allen Jones collection at the Iowa Women’s Archives consists of only one folder, but inside it you will find the history of three generations of remarkable African American women. Jones was born in Keokuk, Iowa in 1876 and grew up in Burlington, where she would later establish the Grace M. Allen Industrial School for African American students. After her marriage to Dr. Laurence Clifton Jones in 1912, the couple moved to Piney Woods, Mississippi, where together they built and taught at the Piney Woods Country Life School. Jones maintained contact with family and friends in Iowa and, in 1927, she wrote and published an article about her family history in The Palimpsest, a magazine published by the State Historical Society of Iowa.
In “The Desire for Freedom,” Jones tells the story of her family’s journey from slavery to freedom in the 1850s. Jones’ grandmother, Charlotta Pyles, was enslaved by the Gordon family on a large plantation in Kentucky, along with her twelve children. Her husband, Harry Pyles, was a free man, but under the laws of slavery he had no legal authority to protect his own wife and children. When she was fifty-four years old, Pyles was granted her freedom, along with most of her kin, and they made the arduous journey from Kentucky to free territory just as winter set in. The group, which ultimately settled in Keokuk, Iowa, included Charlotta and Harry Pyles, eleven of their children, and five of their grandchildren. The family lived in a large brick house, built by Harry Pyles, and belonged to the First Baptist Church of Keokuk. It was there that Charlotta and Harry Pyles were legally married in 1857, a right denied to them under slavery, where husbands, wives, and children could be separated at the whim of slave owners and traders.
But, as Jones describes, freedom did not bring an end to heartache, for Charlotta Pyles was forced to leave behind one of her sons, Benjamin, and two of her sons-in-law. Pyles was determined to purchase the freedom of her sons-in-law, who had wives and children that needed them. Clearly aware of the antislavery movement and fugitive slave activists like Frederick Douglass who wrote and spoke publicly about their experience, Pyles traveled to the East Coast to engage audiences and raise the necessary money. Speaking in major cities like Philadelphia and New York, she gained the attention of prominent figures like Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucretia Mott. Immensely proud of her grandmother’s bravery and commitment, Grace Morris Allen Jones wrote,
It was a difficult task for a poor, ignorant woman, who had never had a day’s schooling in her life, to travel thousands of miles in a strange country and stand up night after night and day after day before crowds of men and women, pleading for those back in slavery. So well did she plead, however, that in about six months she had raised the necessary three thousand dollars, returned to Iowa, thence to Kentucky where she bought the two men from their owners, and reunited them with their families.
Jones rightly noted that “the spirit of Charlotta Pyles found worthy expression in her children and grandchildren,” who made their own remarkable impacts on Iowa and the nation. The Pyles family is a reminder of the long history of African American settlement, community-building, and activism in the Hawkeye state. Check out the Grace Morris Allen Jones papers to learn more about the family, as well as Jones’ work in Piney Woods
In addition to the Grace Morris Allen Jones papers, this post references Betty DeRamus, Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from the Underground Railroad (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 109-123. A copy is available at Iowa Women’s Archives.
Taryn D. Jordan was researching Ella Fitzgerald at the Schlesinger Library in the Radcliffe Institute when she first encountered the papers that would bring her to the Iowa Women’s Archives. Jordan is a doctoral candidate in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Emory University and an ACLS Mellon Dissertation Completion fellow who has been researching in the papers of Aldeen Davis this December.
Her dissertation, A Peculiar Sense: Feminist Genealogy of Soul is drawn from her interest in the domestic work black women did in their homes and how this created “soul,” which Jordan defines as “black collective feeling.” Soul provided a space of respite from racism and anti-blackness and helped to articulate a philosophy of endurance within black communities.
Jordan’s dissertation initially only touched on the concept of soul broadly, but after receiving an e-mail from a friend of friend she was inspired to dig deeper. The Ella Fitzgerald papers at the Schlesinger Library contained a number of cookbooks, the friend said, that complemented Jordan’s work. Although her prospectus was complete, Jordan arranged for a trip to Massachusetts to see these books and the three folders donated with them. Within one of these folders was a draft of ‘Miss Aldeen’s cookbook,’ by Muscatine, Iowa woman, Aldeen Davis. It captivated Jordan because unlike so many of the other cookbooks about black cooking that she had encountered, it treated cooking as more about feel than measurements, something that came from the soul. Jordan tracked down a published copy of the book, now titled Soul Food for Thought, at the University of Alabama but discovered that it had radically changed from the draft in Ella Fitzgerald’s papers that had been so captivating. Why were the books so different? This was the question that drove Jordan to the IWA and the Aldeen Davis papers.
Aldeen Davis, the author of Soul Food for Thought was a writer and community activist who moved to Muscatine, Iowa in the 1940s. She became thoroughly involved in Muscatine and its black community, serving on the Muscatine Human Rights Committee and the Equity Committee of the school board, and published articles in The Iowa Bystander, an African American owned newspaper. Her book was based on her long running column “Soul Food and Thought,” that combined recipes with African American history and descriptions of daily life.
In the late 1990s, Davis donated scrapbooks of her columns along with personal papers that recorded her community involvement in numerous causes and women’s clubs to the Iowa Women’s Archives. In these papers, Jordan found the answer to the question that had brought her to Iowa. The published book substantially changed from its draft, but not because Davis had changed her mind about it. In fact, she had written the draft in response to a soul food cookbook that she didn’t like because it was too precise. But the publishing world wouldn’t print a cookbook that measured by feel. Davis was forced to re-write. Soul, Food for Thought was published in 1984.
After spending a week immersed in Davis’ papers, it’s an open question how much of this will find a place in Jordan’s final dissertation. But she says the trip to Iowa has been worth it, to get to know Aldeen and her work. It’s “like she found me,” Jordan said, “I feel like we’re talking to each other across time.”
Shirley Briggs had a lot of toys. As a very little girl in the early 1920s, Shirley had dozens of pictures taken of her ensconced in an oversized chair with children’s book, playing in a wheel barrow, sitting in the sun, all with a coterie of stuffed animals and dolls. The most frequent companion, and perhaps the most cherished, was Bunty, a baby doll in a bunny-like suit. Of all her toys, only Bunty made it into Briggs’ papers at the Iowa Women’s Archives. Today, you can clearly see that Bunty was a well-loved doll, with re-stitching around its face and a felt suit obviously different from its original clothes. You can see Bunty and a number of other dolls from IWA collections in our latest exhibit: Playing, Pretending, Becoming: Iowa Girls and Their Dolls, on display in the corridor cases on the third floor of the Main Library.
Playing, Pretending, Becoming invites visitors to connect these Iowa girls to the women they would become. Looking at an image of Briggs sitting outside with her line of stuffed animals, you can see the beginnings of a life-long love of nature. Briggs studied art, art history and botany at the State University of Iowa, earning a B.A. in 1939. While working as an Information Specialist/Illustrator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Briggs met and befriended Rachel Carson, the future author of the conservation classic Silent Spring. Later, Briggs would paint backgrounds for dioramas at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service.
Naomi Novick, another woman whose toys are on display, was mayor of Iowa City from 1996 – 1997. She served on the City Council from 1990 – 1997. Her papers reflect her years in politics and her commitment to organizations like the League of Women Voters. But tucked away in the artifacts is a book of paper doll cutouts. “Betty” the doll in the book, looks like a perfect example of 1930s beauty and fashion. She has outfits and accessories for activities in every season and a wedding dress at the end of the book. Before she got into politics, Novick had a brief career in fashion, standardizing bra and girdle sizes for the Formfit company.
Novick and Briggs are just two of the women whose artifacts you can see in Playing, Pretending, Becoming: Iowa Girls and their Dolls. We invite you to see the exhibit in the cases outside of the Iowa Women’s Archives between now and October and to consider the girl at play behind every woman’s mind at work.
Kären Mason, Iowa Women’s Archives curator, traveled to Tokyo in November to speak at Rikkyo University. Sixty library students, archivists, and others attended her lecture, entitled “Archives for All: Creating More Inclusive Archives in the United States.” Kären was invited by Ellen Hammond, former Japanese Studies librarian at Iowa and then at Yale, now living in Tokyo and teaching library courses at Rikkyo.
Among the highlights of her trip: glimpsing Mt Fuji from her hotel window, eating lots of delicious ramen and tempura, and visiting the National Women’s Education Center and its Women’s Archives Center in Saitama Prefecture, an hour’s train ride from Tokyo. See below a few more memories from Kären’s exciting trip!
Ellen Hammond and Kären Mason with National Women’s Education Center staff.
A treasure from the Women’s Archives Center: a sign carried by members of the Shufu Rengokai (Housewives’ Association), founded in 1948. The sign says: The Children of Japan are Commercial Addicts! The character depicted was a popular cartoon figure called Fuku-chan (“Little Fuku”) used in advertising aimed at kids in the postwar period.
Kären and friend take a look at the stacks in the Women’s Archives Center, Saitama Prefecture.
Guest post by Lupita Larios
Have you ever heard a story that your grandparents, for example, told you and you were so fascinated to hear the story that you still remember it? With oral histories, a person is able to travel through time and imagine all the events and experiences that the narrator was living in those years. My name is Lupita Larios. I am an undergraduate student double majoring in Portuguese and International Studies with a track in Latin American Studies. I have been working at the Iowa Women’s Archives for almost two years, transcribing the Mujeres Latinas oral histories. I have really enjoyed listening to and transcribing the interviews. I have learned about the Mexican-American culture, the Mexican society of the 20th century, the transitions that a person has to face to belong to a new society, and how the Mexican-American community tries to put in practice their version of Mexican traditions.
I am fluent in Spanish and am able to understand most of the Mexican slang and Mexican colloquial language in the interviews. On occasion, I had to search for the meaning of some Mexican regionalisms like bolillo or words that are used in other countries like cipota, used in Honduras. Many of these interviews address issues such as migration and race. Some of the interviewees talk about the Mexican Revolution, discrimination, sexual assault, sense of community, LULAC, bilingual education, college experiences, and Mexico’s earthquake of 1985. My favorite parts of this project are the stories of how interviewees’ parents met or how they met their loved one, stories that made me laugh, or made me feel empathy for the person experiencing a difficult event in their life. Here are a few of my favorites:
Irene and Jose Guzman’s story
They are husband and wife residing in Des Moines, IA. Irene was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Jose was born in Kennedy, Texas, both with Mexican ancestors. What I liked about this oral history is that they were involved in the Migrant Action Program. This organization advocated for the rights of the Latinx migrants especially farmers, to have better housing, childcare and medical assistance. Most importantly, to let them know that they had rights and that they employers could not ignore them. I also appreciate listening to their stories of success and advocacy with the Latinx community through this program.
Berta Murillo’s story
Berta was born in Mexico City in the metropolitan area of Coyoacán in 1946. What is fascinating about this story is that her descriptions of the streets of Mexico City transported me there. I was able pass the Hernan Cortez headquarters on her way to school; she described museums, baroque churches, and the Casa Azul, which is the Frida Kahlo Museum. In addition, it was very interesting to learn that her grandfather, Mardonio Magaña, was an important sculptor in the Mexican arts that gained the respect and support of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. When Berta and her brother visited some family in Des Moines, she met Eddie. Eddie was learning Spanish and Berta was learning English. They kept in touch through letters to practice until their friendship grew into romance and they married.
Ana Ahern’s story
Ana was born in San Buenaventura, Honduras in 1929 where she grew up on a farm. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to go to school in Honduras, because her father was afraid that she would run away if she fell in love. However, she still wanted to learn how to read and write, so she paid a teacher until her father found out and prohibited her from studying. After she moved to the United States, most of her employers abused of their power by making her work long hours without liberty or benefits. One employer even took her passport so that she could not look for other jobs or go back to Honduras. After she had saved enough money to open a convenience store in Honduras, she decided to go back. The most heartbreaking part of her story is that when she returned, she discovered that her sister wasn’t taking care of her children like she had promised. The most devastating thing Ana recalled was that her daughter was living in rags and her ex-husband had taken their son to the banana plantations. Ana had to pay three hundred dollars to her brother in law to get her son back.
These are just a few stories that I had worked on, but I always find something that is very interesting and that as Latina I can identify with. Even if people are not doing research for a paper, or looking for primary sources, I recommend that they take some time to come and read a little bit about the lives of some Latinas that arrived in Iowa. Read about the hardships and stigmas they faced, the new changes that they had to make, the racism they faced, their education and employment experiences, and their communities. Enjoy the ride and visit Iowa Women’s Archives!
Lupita Larios, student worker in the Iowa Women’s Archives
In 1916, a young doctor by the name of Myrtle Hinkhouse stepped onto a ship heading toward China. Years earlier, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions appointed her to serve in Tengchoufu and, after studying at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, she was ready to begin her work. Hinkhouse worked in China for three decades, helping patients, training nurses, and teaching at medical academies before returning to family in West Liberty, Iowa. Her great-niece, Ann, grew up listening to her stories.
I met Ann while working as the director of an ESL program at a local church. She contacted me with the hope of meeting my students from China. She thought they would like to see and even keep some of the items Myrtle brought back from her travels. I set a meeting up with her and about five students, not really thinking anything of it. I assumed, mistakenly, Ann mostly had art or jewelry, maybe a fan or two. I was astonished when she instead pulled out folders of hand-written letters, photographs, and a journal. This wasn’t pieces of art. This was a history collection.
Feeling sick, I watched the students pick out which papers to keep. I knew once the collection was separated, it would be almost worthless. “Ann,” I said, “have you considered donating this to an archive?” She told me she had asked a local historical society, but they weren’t interested. She didn’t think anyone else would be, either. “Ann,” I repeated, “did you ask the University?” The University of Iowa was only a couple blocks away. That fall, I had started the School of Library and Information Science graduate program. Nestled in the same hallway as my classes sat the Iowa Women’s Archives. It seemed if Myrtle’s papers belonged anywhere, it was there, kept together, and accessible to everyone. The challenge was convincing Ann of that.
I’ll spare you the details of how I begged Ann to leave the collection with me, the time spent relocating the items given away in that first meeting, or my devastation upon learning that one student went back to China with most of the photos, even after promising them to me. It was that last event that prompted me to run to IWA, clutching what I did have of the collection. I knew what I had was important; I didn’t know what to do with it, and I was afraid of losing more. But it all worked out. Ann visited IWA later and agreed to donate the collection. I volunteered to process it myself, determined to learn and to see the project through. Around the time I was hired as a student worker, Ann discovered a travel trunk full of Myrtle’s papers. I spent a year piecing through those items, adding the new material into what had already been organized.
Over one hundred years after Myrtle’s departure for China, I’m glad to announce the Hinkhouse collection is finally processed. The finding aid has been published and researchers finally have access to her letters, books, and photographs. As happy as I am, though, the moment is bittersweet. Processors, I think, always feel a connection to the people whose collections they are organizing. It’s hard not to, especially after delving through diaries, letters, childhood essays and recent memoirs. With Myrtle Hinkhouse, though, it was always more than that. She feels like an old friend, one I’ve cared deeply about and worried over, one that brought me Ann’s companionship, and one that pushed me into a new (and happy) path at the IWA during my graduate career. I can only hope she’ll inspire the students and researchers who study her collection as much as she inspired me.
— Rachel Black, IWA Graduate Assistant
In the window of the Main Library Gallery sit two bags, a trunk, an Army uniform, and the navy nurse’s cape that Evelyn Crary Bacon wore as a student at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa.) What do all of these items have in common? They belonged to members of “The Greatest Generation,” a cohort of Americans that came of age during the Great Depression and rose to the occasion of World War II. The Gallery’s current exhibition, “Stories Worth Telling: Marking 20 Years of “The Greatest Generation,” commemorates the bestselling book by Tom Brokaw as well as members of the generation that inspired it.
The exhibit is centered on a massive ceiling to floor art installation made from copies of enthusiastic letters Brokaw received from fans of the book. It is as if a bag filled with stories is being poured out onto the floor. Around this are cases filled with the stories of individual Iowans, including many women (and one man!) whose materials reside in the Iowa Women’s Archives. Here are just some of our collections you’ll see represented when you visit:
Evelyn Crary Bacon
Born in 1916 in Grundy Center, Iowa, Evelyn Crary Bacon made her mark in Europe where she participated in the invasion of Normandy as a captain in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. After the war, Bacon embarked on a teaching career. She held positions in nursing colleges from California to Virginia. Besides her nurse’s cape, a WWII military helmet and a canteen from her papers are present in the exhibition.
Dick Hayashi
During World War II, Dick Hayashi’s family was sent to live in Japanese internment camps while he spent the war as a member of the Armed Forces. As a soldier, Hayashi met Evelyn Corrie, an Iowa woman who would go on to become columnist and radio homemaker Evelyn Birkby. A photograph of Hayashi and a letter he wrote to her survived in one of her scrapbooks and are now on display.
Blanca Vasquez Gaines
Vasquez was born in Puerto Rico in 1918, but military service took her to Iowa. She joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and trained at Fort Des Moines just south of the state’s capital. There, she met her husband, Harold Gaines. Blanca Vasquez Gaines and her husband lived in Iowa until 1956 when she returned to Puerto Rico to teach English and American Literature at the University of Puerto Rico.
All in all, “Stories Worth Telling” has materials from nine IWA collections and much more from the University of Iowa’s Special Collections & University Archives, and the African American Museum of Iowa. You can see the exhibition in the Main Library Gallery until January 4, 2019.