Schlesinger Library
year s
news from the
1999–2009
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Although almost 400 years old, this two-page 1617 contract is in remarkably good shape. Once unfolded and flattened, the pages measure approximately 28 inches by 25 inches.
Opening the Boxes, Revealing the Riches: The Elizabeth Blodgett Hall Papers Processing—a decidedly unglamorous term for the important work of arranging, describing, and making accessible papers that sometimes arrive in a jumble—unlocks the riches in the library’s collections. As it was processed, one large manuscript collection, the Elizabeth Blodgett Hall Papers, revealed the oldest manuscript in the Schlesinger Library: a 1617 contract on parchment, with three red, walnut-size wax seals. continued on page 4
Letter from the Director
A Focused Program
The other day, I had the pleasant experience of being accosted by my colleague Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard. She wanted to tell me about the captivating instructional session that Ellen Shea, head of public services at the Schlesinger Library, had prepared for the students in her freshman seminar, “Investigating an American Quilt.” Shea and her colleague Sarah Hutcheon regularly offer tours and instructional sessions to introduce students and researchers to the richness of possibilities in the Schlesinger Library’s holdings. Many of these are general introductions, but instructional sessions for classes are more often specifically tailored to a group’s needs. The task demands time, knowledge of the collections, and ingenuity. Shea rose to the challenge presented by Ulrich’s focus on the material culture of fabrics and needlework. For the students’ perusal, she found sewing teachers’ textbooks with samples of fabrics and stitches; a unique series of scrapbooks covered with paper in the form of quilt squares; an issue of the Ladies Home Journal from the 1920s featuring how to make patchwork quilts; and knitting samples. No wonder the students were fascinated and, according to their professor, “fired up” to return to the library. This one example could be multiplied many times. Last spring, another history colleague, Joyce Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, conducted a graduate seminar in preparation for her new undergraduate lecture course, “American Food: A Global History.” The seminar participants were introduced to a wide variety of culinary items at the Schlesinger, from advertising pamphlets and trade cards for food and kitchen products to menus, handwritten cookbooks, and scripts for Julia Child’s television shows. Faculty members in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality program also regularly call upon the talents of the public services staff to create unique instructional sessions. Harvard students are far from the only audiences for these efforts. The public services staff freely offers its help to those who ask. High school teachers, public libraries, culinary groups, and adult education programs have benefited. Hutcheon has instructed groups from Brandeis University, Lesley University, Suffolk University, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She recently offered a session for the Emerson College class of Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07 on archival research as a source of inspiration for writers. (Marshall is the author of a prize-winning triple biography of the Peabody sisters.) Radcliffe College alumnae at reunion time are treated to sessions showcasing the library’s particular treasures, along with memoryinvoking items from their college years. Researchers in the library often praise the reference staff, led by Shea and Hutcheon, for their expert and creative help at the reference desk. These instructional sessions show another dimension of their invaluable service.
The past year at the Schlesinger Library was a year of many accomplishments, and despite the months of grim economic reality, the library has a story to tell that includes great successes. We pursued a focused program with a full staff from November 2008 through June 2009, and the results are extraordinary. Record numbers of collections were processed; record numbers of materials were received; new collaborations with Harvard University Library and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences instructional programs were forged; digital collections were completed; and four successful events were launched. In terms of productivity, this was a banner year. When newly hired catalogers were added to the existing staff, book cataloging increased by nearly half, and the number of manuscript collections processed doubled that of the previous year. Processing of audio and video materials was similarly productive, increasing by more than 90 percent; photo cataloging also nearly doubled. It is particularly gratifying to see so much progress made in the audiovisual and photo area, which was previously underserved because of limited staffing. On the digital front, the library made extensive progress. I am excited to report the succesful completion of Travel Writing, Spectacle, and World History: Women’s Travel Diaries and Correspondence from the Schlesinger Library, an on-line collection. Adam Matthew Publications digitized selections from more than 50 of the library’s collections. Our current exhibit, To Know the Whole World, shows some of the original materials that are now viewable on-line and includes watercolors, photographs, diaries, and travel memorabilia. Work also began on digitizing one of our most popular holdings, the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Gilman’s birth. Scholars will find useful resources in this on-line collection for the study of the women’s movement and of 19th and early 20th century social life and customs, including courtship, marriage, and divorce. In the spring of 2009, the budget forecast for the next few years forced us to prioritize and streamline our efforts. We are now fully focused on our initiative to address our previously unprocessed collections. This initiative is intended to provide maximum access to all collections and has already resulted in some innovations in both print cataloging and manuscript processing. We continue to look for innovative ways to provide access and to satisfy the descriptive requirements of scholars. At the same time, we are exploring every possible option for continued funding, so that collections in the arts; business; culinary arts; health and reproduction, medicine, and science; law; and post-1960s activism and feminism become fully available for scholarship. (To see descriptions of unprocessed material, click on the appropriate phrase.) In this issue of the newsletter, I hope you enjoy reading about some of the collections that have, in one short year, gone from unprocessed to fully accessible.
—Nancy F. Cott Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History
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—Marilyn Dunn Executive Director
The Maximum Access Project: Uncovering the Past In the world of special collections, unprocessed manuscript materials represent the unknown, full of possibility, each collection unique. Our basic bibliographic records and container lists, created at the time of accessioning, can only hint at the overall subject matter. The actual contents remain hidden from view, intellectually as well as physically, until subjected to thorough examination, analysis, reorganization, preservation, and rehousing, followed by the creation of descriptive on-line finding aids. This is the stuff of processing and cataloging, and while it is extremely labor-, space-, and timeintensive, its rewards are great. Although a few collections arrive in the library in good condition and usable order, many arrive with hundreds of loose documents, undated letters in their original postmarked envelopes, labels falling off those folders that do exist, confidential letters mixed in among publications, large clips joining multiple documents of varying dates, fragile scrapbooks with brittle pages disintegrating, and unidentified photographs and audiovisual materials tucked in with other papers. The library, like most repositories, does not allow access to these collections because fragile materials may be irreparably damaged by handling, confidences prematurely revealed, and the only clues to an item’s source—provided by this original physical proximity—lost. The Maximum Access Project is designed to deal with those collections designated as “closed until processed,” setting priorities primarily on the basis of research demand. Beginning in November 2007, we hired an additional seven manuscript processors, two book catalogers, and one audiovisual cataloger. Since that time, nearly 50 manuscript collections have been fully processed, duplicates and materials not of permanent research value have been removed (saving both storage costs and researchers’ time) from nearly 1,200 feet of papers, and the remaining 900 feet have been arranged and described. The collections processed thus far include the papers of 37 individuals and the records of 13 organizations. Though most document the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st, a number include materials from the 18th and 19th centuries—with two of those containing items from the 1600s. The collections with the greatest chronological span tend to be family papers covering several generations. Emerging from the folded and rolled packets have been not only correspondence between parents and children, but professional and business records of family members, wartime correspondence from different countries and time periods, and descriptions of travel. Papers include those of artists and musicians, journalists, activists, nurses, educators, and other professionals. Activities of American women living and working outside the United States (in China, France, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Switzerland), along with those of women and their families who emigrated to the United States (from China, Germany, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Russia, and Syria), are also well documented in recently processed collections. The archives of organizations are an excellent source for learning more about under-documented individuals and their communities. For example, the records of the feminist periodical Sojourner include many letters from prisoners; those of the South Boston Neighborhood House document the residents and neighborhood it served; letters to Ms. magazine discuss a wide variety of issues; and letters from preteen and teenage readers to Elizabeth Winship’s “Ask Beth” column seek advice on health, relationships, and sexuality. We know that equally rich materials will be uncovered as the project moves forward, adding to the universe of documents upon which our understanding of the past is based.
Allison Platt, the first editor of Sojourner, at a rally in support of battered women, Boston City Hall Plaza, August 26, 1976. © Ellen Shub
—Katherine Gray Kraft Senior Archivist 3
Opening the Boxes, Revealing the Riches Indeed, a quick glance at the new catalog record reveals strikingly inclusive dates in the collection (1617–2006), as well as a wide variety of material: letters, to be sure, but also diaries and daguerreotypes, audiotapes and artifacts, speeches and scrapbooks, and much more. The host of people populating these papers includes generations of women and men named Blodgett, Hall, Kendrick, Movius, Rumsey, and Rector. The central figure in the papers is Elizabeth Blodgett Hall. Born in New York City in 1909, she attended the Ethical Culture School, Miss Hall’s School, and Knox College before marrying attorney Livingston Hall and moving to Massachusetts when he joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1932. She enrolled at Radcliffe College in her 30s and, in 1946, became one of the first married women with small children to graduate from the College.
Margaret Kendrick Blodgett, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall’s mother, attended the Ogontz School in Pennsylvania, which was well known for training young women in military drills. While the women in this photograph, circa 1900, are unidentified, one is almost certainly Blodgett, who delighted in the precision maneuvers.
In 1948, Hall joined the staff of Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, and in 1949, she was appointed headmistress, a position she held until her resignation in 1963. A 1969 article in Mademoiselle credited her with turning “a genteel finishing school” into “one of the most dynamic girls’ preparatory schools in the East.” She also influenced the lives of many Academy students, among them one from Virginia named Drew Gilpin—now Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard. Always an innovative educator, in 1964 Hall founded Simon’s Rock, an “early college,” at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, designing it for young women mature enough to pursue a college education after only one or two years of high school. She served as president of Simon’s Rock, now part of Bard College,
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from 1964 to 1972 and was a supporter of the college until her death in 2005. Researchers studying women’s education and education reform will be drawn to material documenting Hall’s professional life, but her personal material is equally important for what it reveals about her life and the lives of women in general. Letters, a diary, and camper reports from Camp Kineowatha in the early 1920s, for example, document girlhood and sleep-away camp for girls, which was just getting established. In later letters to her parents and others, Hall wrote about the difficulties of being a college student, a faculty wife, and the mother of four children, and, after her husband enlisted in the Army and was sent to the South Pacific, about her loneliness and fear. A remarkable group of round-robin letters exchanged by Hall and three close friends begins in the 1940s and ends in the early 1990s. These vividly document their daily lives, while also speaking of friendship, national events, religion and faith, aging, generational differences, and loss. Material by and about Hall’s family members adds to the richness of the collection. Diaries, correspondence, notebooks, and photographs of her parents and grandparents document her mother’s student years at the Ogontz School (she loved the daily military drills, and her cherished hat and sword belt are in the collection) and her grandfather’s 1893 trip to South America, when he predicted that the canal the French were building in Panama would never succeed. During the Civil War, Hall’s great-grandfather, Benjamin Rector, a major in the 4th Regiment Iowa Volunteer Cavalry, was taken prisoner and exchanged. His diaries and letters home contain earnest assurances that he was living a moral life, accounts of the immorality of others, and expressions of patriotism. He died of dysentery in 1863. The diaries and writings of several generations of Livingston Hall’s family include those of his grandmother, Mary Lovering Rumsey Movius, who wrote of her involvement in the Baha’i religion. The sweep across centuries, the variety of documentation, and the broad range of topics covered are clear now that the collection has been processed. The resulting 30-page finding aid, a detailed map of the collection’s 84 boxes and oversize folders, is on-line and searchable (http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/ oasis/deliver/~sch01248). Researchers typing in Hall’s name will easily find her collection here, but, thanks to processing and the more than two-dozen subject headings assigned to the collection, so will researchers interested in topics ranging from “adult college students” to “World War, 1939–1945” and everything—“camps for girls,” “educators,” “mothers and daughters”—in between. The Elizabeth Blodgett Hall Papers were donated by Hall’s four children—John K. Hall, Thomas L. Hall, Elizabeth Hall Richardson ’59, and Margaret Hall Whitfield—and were processed this fall by Johanna Carll with a gift from the Margaret Kendrick Blodgett Foundation. —Kathryn Allamong Jacob Johanna-Maria Fraenkel Curator of Manuscripts
Above Little Elizabeth Blodgett displayed the determination with which she set about every task as she waded with her bucket in hand around 1915. Top Right Concord Academy students would surely have loved to see this photograph from the mid-1970s of their headmistress, at far left, and her three closest friends. On the back, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall wrote that the four had been dropped off on a deserted island to sun bathe. Bottom Right Elizabeth Blodgett Hall taught by example. She didn’t hesitate to take up a hammer and climb up a ladder to work on a community building in the early 1980s.
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Diary Offers Insight on the Day-to-Day in a Philippine Internment Camp “After the children left for school, we turned on the radio about 8:15—and heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor. While listening, we heard planes and went out as usual to see them. Almost over the house, quite high, came 17 big bombers in formation. We could see them plainly and thought they were American. I remarked, ‘Well, we probably won’t be standing here looking up at planes like this much longer.’ As they passed almost opposite the house, we heard a long ripping sound like the tearing of a giant sheet and saw an enormous burst of smoke and earth near officers’ quarters at Camp John Hay— the first bombing of the Philippines before our eyes.”
The Crouter family enjoys a meal together in their temporary housing following their release from Bilibid Prison in Manila, 1946.
With those words from December 8, 1941, the letter Natalie Stark Crouter was writing to her mother became the beginnings of a diary documenting the four years she and her family—her husband, Jerry, and their two children, June and Frederick—spent interned by the Imperial Japanese Army in the Philippines. Subsequent entries detail the physical conditions and social structure in the camp, Natalie’s frustration with fellow internees, her worries about the impact imprisonment would have on her children, and the amount and type of food available. Natalie’s diary came to the library as part of a larger collection, the Stark Family Papers, which was recently made available for research. Through 41 linear feet of letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and photographs, the collection documents major events of the 20th century, including both world wars, the Great Depression, and the polio epidemic of the 1950s. A small number of documents also provide insight into life in the 18th and 19th centuries, including a 1778 letter from Daniel Preston to his brother, asking him to find someone to fulfill the remainder of his prison term on a ship in “Nuport Harbour.” The finding aid is on-line at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01240. —Johanna Carll Manuscript Cataloger
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June and Frederick Crouter, 1941
In this undated photograph, Pauli Murray (left), Sonia Pressman Fuentes (center), and Bunny Sandler share a happy moment. All three of these remarkable feminists have donated their papers to the Schlesinger Library, and all three collections are now processed.
Title IX’s Contentious History Title IX had a profound impact on women in higher education. Prior to the landmark legislation of 1972, women received only 7 percent of law degrees, 9 percent of medical degrees, and 25 percent of doctoral degrees. The recently processed records of the Project on the Status and Education of Women (PSEW)—and the papers of its founding director, Bernice (Bunny) Resnick Sandler—contain important material about the passage and implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which mandated that educational institutions receiving federal funding could not discriminate on the basis of sex, and about other issues affecting women in higher education. Founded in 1971, PSEW, created by the American Association of Colleges, served as an information clearinghouse, an informal lobbying organization, a research institute, and a speakers’ and advisory bureau focusing on improving access to and achieving equity in higher education for women. The two collections are closely interwoven. After receiving a doctorate in educational counseling in 1969, Bunny Sandler found it difficult to find a job because of her sex. She began investigating other women’s complaints of gender discrimination in educational institutions and discovered it was widespread. Under the auspices of the Women’s Equity Action League, Sandler filed administrative complaints against more than 250 colleges and universities, charging the Office of Federal Contract Compliance of the United States Department of Labor with failing to enforce gender equity in hiring. The publicity surrounding these complaints helped motivate congressional hearings on the topic of women in education and led Edith Green, a representative from Oregon, to write the legislation that eventually became Title IX.
PSEW staff worked in conjunction with congressional staff and other interested organizations on the development, passage, and implementation of Title IX. In addition to documents generated by PSEW and other coalition groups, the collection contains copies of internal memoranda from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office for Civil Rights and correspondence from educational institutions about Title IX definitions and enforcement. These documents together offer a fuller picture of the way in which the groundbreaking Title IX regulations were shaped.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 mandated that educational institutions receiving federal funding could not discriminate on the basis of sex. Processing of these collections was made possible by Bernice Resnick Sandler and the Radcliffe College Classes of 1950 and 1956. Both finding aids are available on-line, at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01193 (PSEW) and http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01194 (Sandler). —Jennifer Gotwals Manuscript Cataloger
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The library’s Maximum Access Project for print materials began with an analysis of the number of items that were “undescribed.” What we had estimated at about 8,000 volumes was instead closer to 10,000.
Hidden Collections Special collections librarians across the country are pondering how to make “hidden collections” visible. Hidden collections are the materials on library shelves waiting for processing and not yet entered in library catalogs. Rather than providing full descriptive cataloging for fewer titles, many libraries have chosen to provide minimal catalog records for all collections, so that patrons may have some access to them, however slight. This is the path we have chosen here at the Schlesinger. The library’s Maximum Access Project for print materials began with an analysis of the number of items that were “undescribed.” What we had estimated at 8,000 volumes was instead closer to 10,000. Additionally, our unpublished audiovisual material (CDs, DVDs, and audio- and videotapes) includes nearly 12,000 items, of which 7,560 are “hidden,” or undescribed. Since July 2008—when we began our backlog project—1,200 have been cataloged. Among those items now fully cataloged are notably rare cookbooks, many in foreign languages, including Azerbaijani, Chinese, Norwegian, Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Uzbek. Also processed were newsletters and other published material from organizations large and small, such as Lamaze, the Women’s Equity Action League, and Moving Violations, a women’s motorcycle club. Presently making its way through the queue is a collection of books written by Radcliffe College graduates, such as the Little Maida series, written by Inez Haynes Irwin, who attended Radcliffe from 1896 to 1898. Little Maida books show the author’s affinity for feminism and social justice. This series for girls is unusual because it was published over a period of 45 years by a single author. Fragile pamphlets on abolition, education, health, suffrage, and other topics of concern to women were also unearthed, some with exciting provenance: the title page of Sorosis—published by an eponymous woman’s professional association formed in 1868 as an alternative to maleonly clubs like the New York Press Club—bears Susan B. Anthony’s signature, revealing that she once owned the little pamphlet. —Maximum Access Project Staff
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Hidden collections are the materials on library shelves waiting for processing and not yet entered in library catalogs. . . . Among those items now fully cataloged are notably rare cookbooks, many in foreign languages, including Azerbaijani, Chinese, Norwegian, Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Uzbek.
Covers from newly processed Russian cookbooks in the library’s collections
Advice for Women Traveling Abroad In 1891—long before international travel and the guides that facilitate it were commonplace—the Women’s Rest Tour Association (WRTA) published its first travel guide for women, A Summer in England. In early September 2009, while conducting a preliminary survey of the addenda to the records of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) of Boston, catalogers at the Schlesinger Library discovered a trove of WRTA records. The WRTA was established in 1891 by Alice Brown, Maria G. Reed, Anna C. Murdock, and Louise Imogen Guiney, and its first president was Julia Ward Howe, the prominent abolitionist and social activist best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The timing of this find was particularly fortuitous because it coincided with the opening of our women and travel exhibit. By its second year, the WRTA had begun to publish The Pilgrim Scrip and the Lodging List. Additional publications included the American Lodging List, the Lodging List of the Americas, and the Foreign Lodging List. These publications offered guidance to women about sites to visit, as well as lists of safe and reputable establishments at which to stay. One piece of advice appearing in the 1896 issue of The Pilgrim Scrip, from a member identified as “H.G.,” stated, “Do warn your friends who go to the Three Tuns, Durham, that they must drink the glass of cherry brandy presented in welcome, or they will very much hurt the landlady’s feelings.” In 1955, the WRTA changed its name to the Women’s Rest Tour Association for the Interchange of Travel Information, and in 1976 it became the Traveler’s Information Exchange. Its records consist of meeting minutes, bylaws, histories, clippings, correspondence, photographs, announcements, and publications. A bit of investigation revealed that although the WEIU and the WRTA had their own distinct identities, they maintained close connections over the years, with the WEIU providing office space for the WRTA for a large portion of its existence and, for some time, sharing a board of trustees. A brief container list for the WRTA records can be viewed at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01253. The Pilgrim Scrip will be cataloged separately. —Mark Vassar Manuscript Cataloger
credits: Images on cover and pages 4 and 5 are from the Elizabeth Blodgett Hall Papers. Photo on page 7 is from the Bernice Resnick Sandler Papers. Photos from page 6 are from the Stark Family Papers. Back cover photo is from the Katharine Lane Weems Papers.
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Schlesinger Library Events, Fall 2009–Spring 2010 thursday, september 3, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “‘Dear Sharer of Many Problems’: The Correspondence of Ida M. Cannon and Richard Clarke Cabot, 1905–1939” Laura Praglin, associate professor of social work, University of Northern Iowa, and Schlesinger Library Research Support Grant recipient thursday, september 17, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “Utopian Socialism in a Transnational Context: The Fourierists and their Social Network” Megan Perle Bowman, University of California at Santa Barbara, Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant recipient wednesday, october 7, 2009 Movie Night Give the Ballot to the Mothers (1996), directed by Francie Wolff, and The Lottery (1969), produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation A discussion with Elizabeth Singer More, PhD candidate in history at Harvard University, followed the film. thursday, october 15, 2009 Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender “Historicizing Social Citizenship in the United States: Gender, Disability, and Comparative Perspectives” Felicia Kornbluh, University of Vermont, with commentary by Laura L. Frader, Northeastern University thursday, october 22, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “The Life and Work of Book Designer Bertha Stuart” Barbara Hebard, conservator, Boston College, and curator, A Fixed Rule of Design: The Book Art of Bertha Stuart, Boston Public Library, on view through December 31 friday, october 23, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “Cold Feet: Non-Marriage, Neglected Vows, and Unlawful Wedlock in the United States, 1865–1940” William Kuby, University of Pennsylvania, Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant recipient monday, november 2, 2009 Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture “Women and Health: A Comprehensive Focus for Global Health” Julio Frenk, dean, Harvard School of Public Health
tuesday, november 3, 2009 Movie Night Packing a Suitcase (1950s), produced by Shell Oil; Beautiful Japan (1918), produced by Benjamin Brodsky; and home movies from the Schlesinger Library collection, including travel footage from Nanking, China (1930s), Morocco (1976), and the Alford Lake Camp in Maine (1939) A discussion with Jeremy Blatter, PhD candidate in the history of science and film and visual studies at Harvard University, and Melissa Dollman, audiovisual cataloger at the Schlesinger Library, followed the films. friday, november 6, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “Gender-nonconforming Girls in the Papers of Miriam Van Waters and Anne Spicer Gladding” Allison Miller, Rutgers University, Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant recipient thursday, november 12, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “Unwanted in America: Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Narratives in Colorado, 1967–1974” Jennifer Holland, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant recipient friday, december 4, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “Tikkun Olam: The Life of Nancy Caroline, MD” Karen Manners Smith, Emporia State University, Schlesinger Library Research Grant recipient monday, december 7, 2009 Movie Night The Dione Lucas Cooking Show (1950s), produced by WPIX; Julia Child at Marshall Field’s (1980), from the Julia Child collection; Buying Food (1950), produced by Centron; and Seeds of Promise: The Critical Roles of Third World Women in Food Production (1987), directed by Deborah Ziska A discussion with Laura Shapiro, columnist and author of Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America and Julia Child: A Life, will follow the films. 6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library thursday, december 11, 2009 Brown Bag Lunch Talk “The Women’s History Movement in the United States: Building American Women’s History, 1945–1995” Jennifer Tomas, State University of New York at Binghamton, Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant recipient Noon, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library thursday, december 10, 2009 Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender “How Are the Daughters of Eve Punished? Rape and the American Civil War” Crystal Feimster, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with commentary by Nina Silber, Boston University 5:30 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library
wednesday, december 16, 2009 Schlesinger Library Book Sale Cookbooks and books on women’s studies 10 am–6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library wednesday, february 3, 2010 Movie Night Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (1989), directed by William Greaves, and Jeannette Rankin: The Woman Who Voted No (1982), directed by Susan Cohen Regele A discussion with Marilyn Morgan and Emilyn Brown, manuscript catalogers at the Schlesinger Library, will follow the films. 6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library wednesday, march 3, 2010 Movie Night We Dig Coal: A Portrait of Three Women (1981), directed by Geraldine Wurzburg, and We’re Here to Stay: Women in the Trades (1986), produced by Susan J. von Salis A discussion with Susan von Salis, associate curator of archives, Harvard Art Museum, will follow the film. 6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library thursday, march 18, 2010 Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender “‘Grandeurs wch I had heard of’: Women Travelers and Print Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic” Carolyn Eastman, University of Texas at Austin, with commentary by Cornelia Dayton, University of Connecticut 5:30 pm, Massachusetts Historical Society wednesday, april 7, 2010 Movie Night The American Look (1958), produced by Handy (Jam) Organization; Coney Island (1940s), from an unknown source; and films featuring Radcliffe College A discussion with Olga Touloumi, PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, will follow the film. 6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library thursday, april 22, 2010 Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender “Making ‘False Delicacy’ True: The Passions of Female Moral Reformers, 1835–1845” April Haynes, postdoctoral fellow, Massachusetts Historical Society and American Antiquarian Society, with commentary by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Smith College 5:30 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library wednesday, may 5, 2010 Movie Night Right Out of History: The Making of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1980), directed by Johanna Demetrakas A discussion with Joanne Donovan, audiovisual and photograph cataloger at the Schlesinger Library, will follow the film. 6 pm, Radcliffe Room, Schlesinger Library
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2009–2010 Schlesinger Library Research Grants Carol K. Pforzheimer Student Fellowships
lindsay hayes University of Maryland “Congressional Widowhood, Gubernatorial Surrogacy, and Spousal Sequencing: A Rhetorical History of Women’s Distinct Paths to Public Office”
julia lindpaintner ’09 “Framing the ‘Milk Problem’: ‘Milk Banks’ and ‘Milk Stations’ in Response to Infant Mortality in Boston, 1900–1920”
jennifer l. holland University of Wisconsin at Madison “Producing Life: Social Conservatism and Abortion Politics in the Four Corners States, 1970–2000”
nick navarro ’10 “The Tribute to the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”
diana ramirez jasso Harvard University “Reinventing the Garden: Childhood and Architecture, 1800–1910”
andres castro samayoa ’10 “Constructing the ‘Harvard Man’ 1909–1933: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Radcliffe College, and the Undergraduate Student Body” elyse traverse ’11 “Gender in Medicine: The Rise of Female Doctors” martabel wasserman ’10 “Feminist Politics as Art and Archive” yi wei ’10 “Social Entrepreneurship: Citizen Empowerment for Catalyzing Social Transformation”
jill jensen University of California at Santa Barbara “International Labor Standards and the Building of Two Postwar Orders, 1919–1954” william kuby University of Pennsylvania “Cold Feet: Non-Marriage, Neglected Vows, and Unlawful Wedlock in the United States, 1865–1940” cheryl lemus Northern Illinois University “The ‘Maternal Glow’: Medicine, Consumer Culture, and the Modern Twentieth-Century Pregnancy in America”
Dissertation Support Grants megan perle bowman University of California at Santa Barbara “Networking for Global Perfection: The International Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Fourierism” caitlin casey Yale University “From Beloved Community to Global Community: Transnationalism in American Social Activism, 1962–1975” jennifer donnally University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “The Politics of Abortion and the Rise of the New Right, 1967–1985”
allison miller Rutgers University “Gendered Coercion: Progressive Penology and the Troublesome Tomboy, 1920s–1940s” jennifer tomas State University of New York at Binghamton “The Women’s History Movement in the United States: Building American Women’s History, 1945–1995” haipeng zhou Emory University “Expression of Our Life Within Us: Epistolary Practice of American Women in Republican China (1912–1949)” Research Support Grants
marjorie elvin foy University of North Carolina at Greensboro “‘I have sugar and they tell me I’m bad’: Gestational Diabetes and the Labeling of Women, 1921–1990”
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amy aronson Fordham University “To Live Greatly, That Is the Thing: The Life and Times of Crystal Eastman”
katherine e. bliss Center for Strategic and International Studies “The Purpose of Exile: Lini deVries, and the Politics of Public Health in Mexico”
jonathan zimmerman New York University “States of Desire: A Global History of Sex Education” Oral History Grants
gaia caramellino Politecnico di Torino, Italy “The Women’s Presence in New York ‘Housing Discourse’ During the 1930s: Mary Simkhovitch’s Contribution to the Field of Low-Cost Public Housing” leslie midkiff de bauche University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point “Ways to Use the ‘American Girl’: How the Film, Fashion, and Advertising Industries Adopted and Adapted the Traits of the ‘American Girl’ between 1900 and 1930 as They Made, Then Sold, Movies, Clothing, Face Cream, and American National Identity” jessica enoch University of Pittsburgh “Claiming Space: Feminist Rhetorical Investigations of Educational Geographies” leslie korn and rudolph ryser Center for Traditional Medicine “Chocolate, Chilies, and Coconuts: The Culture and Cuisine of West Mexico” dean j. kotlowski Salisbury University “Heir Apparent: Paul V. McNutt and the Age of F.D.R.” sara marcus “Riot Grrrl: Culture Wars, Feminism, and Punk Rock Girl Power in the Nineties”
laura deluca University of Colorado at Boulder “Lost Girls of Sudan Find Their Voices: An Oral History of a Female African Refugee Group in the United States” kandace creel falcon University of Minnesota “‘This is our home!’: Chicanas (Story) Telling Life, Love, and Identity in the Midwest” jennifer l. holland University of Wisconsin at Madison “Producing Life: Social Conservatism and Abortion Politics in the Four Corners States, 1970–2000” meribah knight Northwestern University “Will the Circle Be Unbroken: The Oral History of Women’s Sewing Circles in America” jenna marie mellor Harvard University “From Orgasms to Organizing!: Voices of the Sex-Positive Movement from Rural Texas to the Streets of San Francisco” nicole newendorp Harvard University “The ‘Age’ of Migration: Chinese-born Elderly in the United States”
stacy russo Chapman University “June Jordan’s Activist Teaching” kathleen m. ryan Miami University “Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II” karen manners smith Emporia State University “Mother of Paramedics: The Life of Nancy L. Caroline, M.D.” justin d. spring “Willing Exiles: Five Americans in 1950s Paris”
13
fall 2009
News from the Schlesinger Library is published twice a year to inform those interested in the library about recent acquisitions, special projects, and the programs offered by the Radcliffe Institute’s research library on the history of women in the United States. The newsletter is written and edited by members of the Radcliffe Institute staff. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University 10 Garden Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Telephone: 617-495-8647 Fax: 617-496-8340 Email: slref@radcliffe.edu www.radcliffe.edu/schles
Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Katharine Lane Weems with her greyhound, Manchester, Massachusetts, ca. 1940 One of more than 1,000 photographs from the recently cataloged Katharine Lane Weems Papers. The photographs document the life and work of sculptor Katharine Lane Weems and her extended family. Many depict aspects of the social life of the family at their home in Manchester, Massachusetts. Weems was clearly a woman of means and privilege, allowing her to delay marriage and pursue her career. A recent Schlesinger Library grant recipient studied the collection for his dissertation on marriage. http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/deepLinkResults?kw1=mc406*&index1=Anywhere —Joanne Donovan Audiovisual and Photograph Cataloger