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Tag: warren wirtz

Apr 07 2016

Dottie and Jack: An Epistolary Friendship

Posted on April 7, 2016January 18, 2021 by Anna Holland
Card from Jack
Jack’s postcard to Dorothy, on her 20th Birthday in 1935.

“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

Happy Birthday, my brother.
Dorothy’s birthday card to her brother. The pianist in the sketch is probably Jack, a composer.

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.

Dottie and Jack
Dorothy (left) and Warren “Jack” Wirtz (right) as children.

“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.

Posted in From the collections, IWA Update, PeopleTagged anna tunnicliff, correspondence, dorothy wirtz, warren wirtz
Mar 23 2016

Dr. Dorothy Wirtz, PhD: A Woman “In the Profession”

Posted on March 23, 2016December 17, 2020 by Anna Holland

“Gentlemen,

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.

Wirtz4
Part of a letter from Warren “Jack” Wirtz to his sister, suggesting colleges where she could look for work, 1950.

 

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.

Posted in From the collections, In the news, IWA Update, People, Women's History MonthTagged dorothy wirtz, warren wirtz
Image of Dorothy Wirtz
Mar 03 2016

Meet Dorothy Wirtz

Posted on March 3, 2016January 18, 2021 by Anna Holland
Wirtz1
Dorothy and Warren “Jack” Wirtz, students at the University of Iowa, 1938

A few years after the Iowa Women’s Archives opened, Dr. Dorothy Wirtz [1915 – 2013] donated some pieces of her college years at the University of Iowa. Dorothy Wirtz’s 1997 gift to the IWA includes her academic articles and a selection of her poetry. However, the papers mostly concern the exploits of Wirtz and her brother, Warren, as students at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s. Both French majors, the siblings balanced classes with extracurricular activities, worried about finances, and wrote home frequently. Dorothy’s letters are especially candid about her determined penny-pinching, and reflect the struggle of affording college during the Great Depression. “Do you realize,” Dorothy wrote to her mother in 1937, “that I am going to be able to maintain myself for the entire year and also probably pay Ed back within the year? What a woman! After this, remember that I am not to be discouraged in anything I want to do.” Her letters also describe an active social life with parties for French and German students and even seeing “the much talked of Black Angel,” a statue at the local Oakland Cemetery rumored to be cursed.

Wirtz Boxes2
A portion of Wirz’s recent donation

Born in Keokuk, Iowa and a 1939 graduate of the University of Iowa, Wirtz left her home state for an impressive and lengthy academic career. She and her brother Warren “Jack” Wirtz, a composer, led lives that reflected their artistic passions. Professor of French, pianist, published poet, and deputy treasurer of the state of Arizona, Wirtz’s life was full, but her single box of papers at the Iowa Women’s Archives did not match the extent of her accomplishments. We know that the Wirtz siblings made their home together in Phoenix, Arizona from the 1950s until Warren’s death in 1972.  But after 1939, the correspondence and their collection nearly stops. Aside from a few poems, compositions, and papers, Dorothy and “Jack” Wirtz might as well have disappeared.

But thWirtz Boxes1at is about to change. Dorothy Wirtz bequeathed the IWA approximately 12 linear feet of materials: letters, diaries, and artifacts from an extraordinary life. The materials in these 16 boxes should fill in the gaps, giving a more complete picture of the lives of two incredible University of Iowa alumni. Wirtz’s gift included enough funds to hire me as the Dorothy Wirtz Graduate Research Assistant. This year, I will process these papers for researcher use and share my progress on the IWA blog and tumblr. Stay tuned for updates!

— Annie Tunnicliff, Dorothy Wirtz Graduate Research Assistant

 

Posted in From the collections, IWA Update, People, Women's History MonthTagged anna tunnicliff, dorothy wirtz, warren wirtz

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