From October 24th – 27th Trudy Huskamp Peterson, the former Acting Archivist of the United States, and Jane E. Schultz, Professor of English and Medical Humanities at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, will visit the University of Iowa.
A longtime friend of the Iowa Women’s Archives, Trudy Huskamp Peterson has made an international career of archives and human rights. Besides serving as the United States’ Acting Archivist, Peterson has consulted with truth commissions in South Africa and Honduras and worked for three years with the police archives in Guatemala. She is currently the chair of the International Council on Archives’ Human Rights Working.
On Monday the 24th Peterson will host an archival workshop for graduate students and researchers from 4:00 – 5:30 in 302 SH Commons. She will follow this on Tuesday the 25th with a public lecture entitled “What Every Citizen and Historian Should Know: How Governments Shape Archives.” The lecture will take place in 302 SH Commons from 12:30 – 1:45 and will include a light lunch.
Finally, on Thursday the 27th, the Universty of Iowa History of Medicine Society and the Iowa Women’s Archives will jointly present Jane E. Schultz. Schultz, a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, formerly consulted for the PBS miniseries “Mercy Street” and has written extensively about women and the Civil War. Her lecture “Civility on Trial: Nurses, Surgeons, and Medical Extremity in Civil War Hospitals will take place in the Medical Education Research Facility (MERF) 2117 from 5:30 – 6:30.
The Iowa Women’s Archives is approaching its 25th Anniversary in 2017. In preparation, through a series of fundraisers our donors have helped make it possible to update the Reading Room with new paint, tables, and technology. Most everything is place though some finishing touches like hanging artwork still remain. Sincere thanks to all of our supporters. Be sure to stop by and see our new look.
Below you can see a live video from just when the new furniture was put into place:
Dr. Annessa Babic, coordinator of interdisciplinary studies at the New York Institute of Technology and Dr. Tanfer Tunç of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey are the most recent recipients of a research grant from the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund for Research in the Iowa Women’s Archives, a grant that helps researchers travel to the Iowa Women’s Archives.
Collaborators since 2008, Tunç and Babic met in graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook where each produced feminist scholarship. In 2008, the pair co-edited The Globetrotting Shopaholic: Consumer Products, Spaces, and Their Cultural Places. Since then they have continued to produce articles together and apart examining consumerism, nationalism, and Wonder Woman, among other subjects. Although the two collaborators had planned to travel to Iowa City together, the political unrest in Turkey stifled Tunç’s plans at the last minute. Nevertheless, Dr. Babic had a fruitful week in the archives hunting for places where feminism and food activism collide.
Tunç and Babic’s current project will extend “common discussions concerning food waste, overabundance, and safety by connecting food activism to consumer activism and social and civil rights, particularly the environmental and women’s movements.” Babic believes that movements surrounding food safety and packaging are gendered due to the heavy marketing of food products to women. She and Tunç hope to explore the parallels they see between the environmental and women’s movements of the late twentieth century. Although this project is in its early stages, Babic and Tunç expect that it will result in an article that will put food activism in the cultural context of the United States from 1970 – 1990.
The duo were drawn to the Iowa Women’s Archives by its diverse holdings about grassroots movements as well as its collections of oral histories. Additionally, they were interested in exploring resources of the Midwest, a region less studied than the American coasts. Babic, who is also a travel writer, confessed that she had never been to Iowa before, and expects to produce work about the trip itself as well as the resources she found in the archives.
While here, Babic looked at the papers of farm activists such as Denise O’Brien, Carol Hodne, Ericka Peterson-Dana, and Janette Ryan-Busch, as well as the records of food activist organizations like the Mothers for Natural Law and the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. What was her favorite collection? With three days of research behind her, Babic said she most enjoyed reading oral histories from Voices From the Land, a collection produced as part of the Iowa Women’s Archives’ Rural Women’s Project. It includes interviews with rural women who were politically active in the 1980s farm crisis. Babic said she found the farm women’s take on that era interesting and refreshing. We look forward to finding both qualities in the future work of Tunç and Babic.
While these two fabulous ladies aren’t brand new to IWA, they both recently accepted positions as graduate assistants for the up-coming semesters.
Rachel Black grew up in the southwestern corner of Iowa in a tiny town that had more ponies than people. Now living in the Iowa City area, she hopes to graduate with a MLIS this December.
Her archives journey began last summer as a volunteer working on the Myrtle Hinkhouse papers. She is excited to tackle more collections this fall.
Outside of the archives, Rachel can be found knitting poorly constructed hand towels, messing up her kitchen while baking, losing arrows on the archery range, and just generally enjoying her life.
Katie Gandhi still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up, but she does know she loves libraries, history, people, and archives. Other past-times include hiking, painting, weaving, and playing cello.
Since being hired in January, her primary focus has been helping Janet prepare content for the IWA’s “Migration is Beautiful” project Omeka site, which went live on July 5th.
Katie just finished an M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning and will be working to complete her M.A. in Library and Information Science this year.
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!
Last week, the Iowa Women’s Archives welcomes Lauren Feldman, a doctoral candidate in history from Johns Hopkins University. Lauren is the latest recipient of the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund for Research in the Iowa Women’s Archives, a $1000 travel grant to bring researchers to the IWA.
In her research, Lauren looks at the changing conceptions of marital engagement in the 19th century. She argues Americans worried about the future of marriage as divorce rates rose. She believes that in response to this fear engagement increased in importance and became a trial period for the marriages that would follow. Lauren wants to expand the scope of her research to include minorities, rural women, and sources outside of the Eastern United States. After finding the Kerber Grant on H-Net, she felt the IWA’s Kerber Fund would be a good fit for her research.
When asked at the beginning of her week here what her favorite documents were so far she admitted that she hadn’t had much time to read them yet. However, she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into Van Voorhis White’s and Riggs Cosson’s courtship correspondences with the men who they would marry. It isn’t common to have both sides of a correspondence and, as Lauren says, “that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”
We were so happy to have Lauren visit us for the week as a Kerber Fund recipient, and cannot wait to hear about the scholarship she produces.
“Schöner Bruder,” “Ma Chère Petite,” “Sonny Boy,” Honey Child,” these are just a few of the salutations used by Dorothy and Warren “Jack” Wirtz in their letters to each other. Although their greetings may have been somewhat tongue in cheek, Dorothy and Jack’s correspondence reveals a relationship full of common interests, good humor, and affection. What helps make this so immediately apparent is that Wirtz kept her family correspondence separate from the rest. Additionally, she transcribed over 1000 pages of it, ensuring its legibility. In fact, the order of and attention Dorothy paid to her correspondence gives insight into how she prioritized her relationships and organized her life.
When I began to process this collection, I conducted a quick survey of its boxes and determined that Wirtz’s correspondence and diaries comprised over half of it. Normally, processing these portions of collections for use would involve a straightforward, chronological order. But, Wirtz was a little more complicated than that. She kept letters from her parents and her brother separate from her letters from friends and colleagues, and kept correspondence with students in a box on its own. Additionally, she kept postcards from her family distinct from all other correspondence.
Although the original letters remained, Wirtz also transcribed many of them, occasionally editorializing. After Jack’s “Hello. Hawaii?” she explained, “This must have been a greeting heard frequently on radio.” In a 1934 letter she had written to her brother about the notorious bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd, “At last you are in no immediate danger. ‘Pretty
Boy’ Floyd has been killed.” Next to her transcription of that letter she wrote in red pen “Mother worried about him being at large while Jack hitchhiked to various places.”
Recognizing Wirtz’s arrangement of her letters as intentional, I chose not reorganize them, but instead followed the archival principle of original order. Except in cases where letters are misfiled, I maintained Wirtz’s order rather than imposing an artificial one. Not only is this simpler for me as a processor, but it gives future researchers the benefit of seeing Wirtz’s correspondence as she did, with the spheres of her life distinct from each other. Dr. Wirtz, professor of French is stern, incisive, and businesslike. But the letters of “Dot” to her family are more playful. It’s a delight to see her brother play right along without interruption. The siblings sprinkled their letters with French and German, closed them with phrases like “all agog” and “d’amour,” and generally infused their prose with a mock formality.
“Would it derange you at all if we drop in on Sunday?” Dorothy asked her brother one September while he was living in Grinnell.
“Derange me?” he responded the next day, “Why I should say not. I’ll be tickled to have you come.”
Born one year apart, the siblings were as close in age as they were in everything else. Both pursued higher education, wrote poetry, spoke multiple languages, and traveled abroad. Dorothy outlived her brother by over 40 years. But you can conjure up parts of their relationship by traversing their correspondence, just as Dorothy might have each time she sat down to transcribe one of their letters.
As you had hoped, I have found your questionnaire interesting to answer. However, I cannot refrain from expressing my resentment at the phrasing of certain statements, which seem to me to reflect discrimination on the basis of sex.”
So begins Dr. Dorothy Wirtz’s 1969 letter to The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. She followed her opening statement by citing precisely when the Commission assumed that the professors they surveyed would be men. She told them, quite directly, that “Women are people, too, and even manage to exist in the profession.” By 1969, Wirtz knew about existing in “the profession” as a woman, and had been a professor of French at Arizona State University for 10 years.
Dorothy Wirtz had been an outstanding student with a talent for writing and linguistics. While still an undergraduate at Culver-Stockton College, she won the Vachel Lindsay prize in poetry. After transferring to the University of Iowa, her letters home displayed focus and diligence concerning her studies in French and German. She packed her bags for the University of Wisconsin almost immediately upon graduation. There, after writing a dissertation on Flaubert, she received both a Master’s and a PhD in French by 1944.
The path from school girl in Keokuk, Iowa to doctoral candidate in Madison, Wisconsin was exceedingly unusual for a woman in the 1940s. According to a National Science Foundation report from 2006, women received only 27% of doctorate degrees from 1920 – 1999, and 43% of those were issued in the 1990s. As an aspiring professor of French in a field dominated by men, Wirtz must have known she did not exactly meet prospective employers’ expectations.
This fact was made clear when, after a few years at the University of Minnesota, she tried to join her parents and brother in Arizona. In 1950, Wirtz’s brother, Warren, sent her a list of colleges where she could apply including two Catholic institutions, jokingly adding “if you’d buy a rosary.” Dorothy noted her progress on the job search in pencil with check marks, but had no luck. A friend of Warren’s made inquiries on Dorothy’s behalf but confessed in a letter “The trouble was simply (with some question about ‘research’) that there was not a position open in the upper brackets to a woman. I doubt very much that they would appoint a woman assistant professor in our department. She probably knows this.” He went on to suggest that she try “various junior colleges” in Los Angeles. The job market wasn’t just tight. It was practically impassable.
Without a job offer and only vague plans to teach, Dorothy Wirtz moved to Arizona. For several years she worked outside of academia, eventually serving as the Deputy State Treasurer of Arizona. But the tenacious Wirtz never gave up and in 1959, she secured a position at Arizona State University. She was four years from retirement when the Carnegie Commission sent her their biased survey. Although she did not shy away from making a political point in her letter, true to her field of study, she ended her letter by suggesting that the impersonal pronoun would have been the best choice linguistically and wished them well in their survey.
Thurgood, Lori, Golladay, Mary J., and Hill, Susan T. “U.S. Doctorates in the 20th Century.” National Science Foundation Special Report (2006). http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/pdf/nsf06319.pdf.
A talk by Jeannette Gabriel, Graduate Research Assistant, Jewish Women in Iowa Project, Iowa Women’s Archives
Join us to hear the untold stories of Jewish women’s involvement in community activities throughout Iowa history, whether in cities with robust Jewish populations or in small towns where only one or two Jewish families lived.
Thursday, March 24, 2016 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Iowa Women’s Archives, 3rd Floor, Main Library, University of Iowa
Reception at 4:00 p.m. — Talk will begin at 4:30 p.m.
Save this event to your profile on the University of Iowa Calendar of Events.
Presented by the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries in celebration of Women’s History Month.
Jeannette Gabriel is a PhD candidate in the department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education. Her dissertation is ‘I Don’t See Race’: Examining History Teachers’ Use of Images through the Teaching Amerian History (TAH) Grant to Study African-American History”. The Jewish Women in Iowa Project has helped develop her understanding of historical memory and consciousness. Jeannette is deeply grateful and appreciative for the warmth and graciousness with which I have been received by the Jewish families and communities that have become part of this project.
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