On Tuesday of this week, the Iowa Women’s Archives held an event for the “New in Town” Living Learning Community. We asked the question, “What was it like to be a student at Iowa 100 years ago?” Each table represented a decade from the 1910’s all the way to the 2000’s, so the group of first year students got the chance to explore the history of student life at the University of Iowa. Scrapbooks and yearbooks were a big hit!
*This post is duplicated from the Iowa Women’s Archives Tumblr.
Welcome to Women’s History Wednesday!
In 1924, the Iowa High School Athletic Association decided that organized basketball was “unhealthy” for girls and announced their decision to eliminate the girls’ state championship tournament. In response, female athletes statewide took action; that included members of the Newhall team, pictured here, who rode on horseback from farm to farm to win their neighbors’ support.
Those efforts paid off big for Newhall’s players, who in 1927 won the first-ever girls state championship under the newly-founded Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union. After a breathless night following the game remotely — it wasn’t broadcast on the radio, so fans gathered at a Newhall restaurant where the tournament plays were called out via a long-distance phone call — the whole town turned out the next morning to welcome their champions back home.
As one newspaper report described it, “The Newhall Girls of 1927 have given the town a place in the sun.”
Newhall items from the Rural Women Digital Collection
*This post is duplicated from the Iowa Women’s Archives Tumblr.
A five-year diary belonging to Gladys Conn, social worker and graduate of the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa). The first entry in the diary is dated January 1, 1932, at which time she would have been in school. It’s hard to tell what year this entry is from, but here is what Gladys wrote on November 1:
The Tragedy of Niginsky by ___
Enjoyed very much
It turns out that “The Tragedy of Nijinsky” is by Anatole Bourman and Dorothy Lyman and was first published in 1936. So it appears that Gladys did continue to use this diary, at least occasionally, over the span of a few years. And isn’t that usually the way it is with these five-year diaries?
Guide to the Gladys Conn Papers
[From: Gladys Conn Papers. Series 3: Diaries. Chronological (2 volumes). 1929-1932.]
*This post is duplicated from the Iowa Women’s Archives Tumblr.
Welcome to Women’s History Wednesday, now in our fancy new home at the Iowa Women’s Archives tumblr!
Despite our recent Mildred Wirt Benson gif-a-thon, we couldn’t resist one more post on Iowa’s most successful “ghost” for Halloween.
In a 1973 essay for our Books at Iowa journal, Benson described getting her start as a ghost writer. Soon after graduating from the University of Iowa in 1925, she was hired by Stratemeyer Syndicate as one of “a few ‘ghosts’ who accepted a brief plot outline, vanished, and returned to the office weeks later with a finished manuscript.” She eventually took on an assignment to launch the Nancy Drew series, and created a strong, independent heroine — one who “might rate as a pioneer of Women’s Lib,” according to Benson. The Syndicate was initially less than pleased:
“Mr. Stratemeyer expressed bitter disappointment when he received the first manuscript, The Secret of the Old Clock, saying the heroine was much too flip and would never be well received. On the contrary, when the first three volumes hit the market they were an immediate cash-register success for the syndicate. Over a thirty-eight-year period, the series was printed in seventeen languages and, according to a published report [from 1969], achieved sales of more than 30,000,000 copies.”
Benson then states the most blood-chilling part of her tale: “As ‘ghost’ I received $125 to $250 a story, all rights released.”
Read Benson’s “The Ghost of Ladora” essay
Browse the Mildred Wirt Benson digital collection
*This post is duplicated from the Iowa Women’s Archives Tumblr.
eras of emma: the emma goldman clinic through four decades
Laura & Earle Smith were barely out of college in 1913 when they left Moravia, Iowa, to try their hand at homesteading near Chugwater, Wyoming. Laura recounted their adventures years later in her memoir Almost Pioneers.
Historian John Fry (UI PhD, 2002) came across Almost Pioneers while doing dissertation research in the Iowa Women’s Archives and later edited it for publication. The trail to getting the book published was almost as bumpy as the Wyoming roads of 1913–but not quite. John Fry will be in town on September 19-20, 2013, to speak about the book.
A PIONEER EVENING WITH JOHN FRY
Thursday, September 19, 7:00 p.m.
Coralville Public Library
WHAT I LEARNED FROM PUBLISHING AN EDITED MANUSCRIPT
Friday, September 20, 10:00 a.m.
Iowa Women’s Archives
(3rd floor, Main Library, The University of Iowa)
Please join us!
For information, call 335-5068.
Celebrate Women’s History Month with the Iowa Women’s Archives
In collaboration with the UI Council on the Status of Women, IWA will welcome Susan Birrell for a talk and Janet Schlapkohl for a dramatic reading on Thursday, March 28 starting at 4pm in the Iowa Women’s Archives (3rd floor south of the Main Library).
University of Iowa is a recognized leader in women in sport and physical education. Four years ago, the University of Iowa Libraries celebrated that legacy by digitizing a collection of the UI Department of Physical Education for Women. Below is more information about this remarkable digital collection.
Almost 1000 historic photographs of University women’s physical education classes – from archery and synchronized swimming to basketball and dance – are now publicly available online. In celebration of Women’s History Month, the University of Iowa Libraries has released the UI Department of Physical Education for Women digital collection.
The photographs, spanning almost 100 years (1906-2004), are part of a larger manuscript collection that documents the rise of women’s athletics at Iowa from the one-member Department of Physical Culture and Athletics to the dawn of women’s intercollegiate sports. The Department of Physical Education for Women at the University of Iowa was a pioneer in the development of graduate study and professional training as well as athletic opportunities for women.
“These photographs offer a fabulous window into women’s sport—and campus life—over the past century. They’re very appealing, from the expected team portraits and sports action shots to the more surprising images of laboratory experiments, rifle enthusiasts, and slumber parties,” says Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “The digital collection provides easy access to these photos, and I hope it will inspire people to explore the equally fascinating records of the Department of PE for Women that are available in the archives.”
Intercollegiate athletics for women at The University of Iowa originated in the Department of Physical Education for Women in the late 1960s and early 1970s and maintained that association until 2000. This relationship stemmed from the philosophy of the women physical educators and the value they placed on education and women-centered and -controlled sport.
“Those two key, related notions are still at the heart of the current Department of Health and Sport Studies: that sport and physical activity should be part of a liberal arts education and that they can contribute greatly to both individual well-being and the social good,” says Catriona Parratt, Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Sport Studies. “We are delighted that the Iowa Women’s Archives digital photographic collection will make it easier for many more people to appreciate this aspect of the University’s mission.”
This historic image collection is the latest edition to the Iowa Digital Library which contains more than 225,000 digital objects, including photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents from libraries and archives at the UI and their partnering institutions as well as faculty research collections.
To explore the vast digital holdings from the Iowa Women’s Archives, a portal that allows users to browse by subject, time period or artifact type is available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa . It will be continually updated with new items drawn from the IWA’s 1100 manuscript collections, which have provided valuable primary source materials for books, articles, theses and class projects on women’s history.
For more information about the collection, contact Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, at 335-5068.
Viola Nesfield Owen papers
by Audrey Altman
Preserving the history of poor and rural women is a mission of the Iowa Women’s Archives, but it can be challenging because these women rarely leave detailed records of their lives. That’s why we were so excited to receive the papers of Viola Nesfield Owen, donated by Gary Whitehead. The collection contains dozens of letters between his grandmother, Viola Nesfield Owen, and her family, written from 1921 to 1963.
Viola was a high-spirited woman who saw her family through many hardships, and her letters give insight into how Midwestern women dealt with family, work, and financial hardships.
Viola Nesfield was born in 1896. She grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, with her father, step-mother and two younger half-sisters. In 1921, Viola planned to marry Vern Owen. Since Vern was divorced, their engagement was somewhat scandalous for Viola’s family. Yet Viola and Vern were not to be deterred. They eloped and moved to Wisconsin. This is when the collection of letters between Viola Nesfield Owen and her family begins. The first few years of letters from the Nesfields to Viola are filled with appeals to return home and anxious parental advice.
In 1924, Viola’s father wrote: “When I am at work I lots of times get worried about you. I wish you would begin to look forward for you are sure to get some rainy days. You know life is not all sunshine. Try to save all you can.” (June 20, 1924)
But Viola did not move home. Instead, she and Vern started a family. Her children are by far the most common topic of her letters. My favorite of Viola’s letters is dated August 14, 1928. It was written from her hospital bed, shortly after she delivered her first child, Robert Harrison. In big, messy letters that practically fall off the lines of the page, she wrote, “How I wish you could see him. He is so cute and ‘fat as butter.’”
It’s hard not to admire Viola, who was sometimes called “Ha! Ha!” for her unquenchable good spirits. Her daughter, Betty, nearly died of kidney disease when she was two years old. Viola made a pact with God that if He spared Betty’s life, she would never complain about her hardships. It is evident in her letters that Viola tried hard to keep this promise, even though her family experienced dire poverty through the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1927, the Owens moved into a tar paper shack in Janesville, Wisconsin, with no electricity or running water. Yet Viola’s letter bearing the news to her family reflected no bitterness. She mused, “We ought to save money here. No place to spend it.” (October 9, 1927).
During the Depression, Viola’s husband Vern struggled to hold a job. Viola worked as a pianist, piano and accordion teacher, and as a transcriber for the WPA Braille Project. Despite Viola’s contribution to the family income, they often struggled financially, and Viola’s optimistic resolve was tested. On January 13, 1933, she wrote: “I would be so glad if Vern could make a dollar a week. Now I don’t mean to complain and I always said I never would if Betty love could only get better and the rest of us keep our good health, but if I don’t write very soon you will know Vern is still jobless… Soliders and Sailors Relief are getting me a pair of shoes today. Isn’t it awful to have to depend on somebody like that but what can you do? I was walking on the ground.”
But the next month, Viola had found something to celebrate again: “I was so extravagant I ate a whole orange all by myself. Ha! Ha!” (February 2, 1933) During the 1940s, Viola found new independence. She started working for Parker Pen in Janesville, WI, and wrote excitedly about her various administrative duties at the factory. She also divorced her husband, but continued to care for him, especially after he suffered a stroke in 1948. Viola and her family continued to write each other, and the collection of letters extends to 1963.
Audrey Altman, a graduate student in the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science, processed the Viola Nesfield Owen papers while working in the Iowa Women’s Archives in 2011/2012.
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.
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 1950, Joyce Horton was a junior at the University of Iowa studying speech pathology. She was active in the Foreign Students Association, a group she really enjoyed. A few weeks before Thanksgiving she wrote a letter to the newspaper in her hometown of Osage, Iowa, suggesting that residents invite these students to spend Thanksgiving weekend in their homes, some 160 miles from Iowa City.
As Joyce later recalled, “The letter was printed. Some Osage folks liked the idea–and so did the foreign students. Twelve of them came with me to Osage that year and 44 came my senior year.”
With the support of the local Rotary International group, Osage International Weekend became a tradition.At the time of Joyce Horton Beisswenger’s death in 2002, the program was still actively inviting international members of the university community to experience the holiday in the homes of local families.
After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1952, Joyce Horton attended Yale Divinity School, where she met her future husband Don Beisswenger. They were active in the civil rights movement in Chicago in the 1960s before moving to Tennessee, where she earned a degree in social work.
A scrapbook documenting Osage International Weekend is among the papers of Joyce Horton Beisswenger (1930-2002) in the Iowa Women’s Archives.