news from the
schlesinger library
spring 2011
now online:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
inside:
The Family Papers of Megan Marshall Annette Gordon-Reed on Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
Letter from the Director Change is under way at the Radcliffe Institute. As many of you know, Barbara Grosz ends her term as dean at the end of June. Dean Grosz has strongly supported the Schlesinger Library in all its endeavors and has been especially attentive to our digital projects. We will miss her encouragement of our efforts, her special alertness to collections on women in science (beginning in the years she spent as dean of science under Drew Faust’s leadership), and her creativity in envisioning possible contributions of computer technology to the library’s business. Her dedication to the library’s and the Institute’s well-being is truly appreciated, and we hope that her return to scholarly pursuits will be very rewarding. The appointment of Professor Lizabeth Cohen to serve as interim dean of the Institute during 2011–2012 (while a search takes place) is also good news for the Schlesinger. Professor Cohen, an eminent historian of the 20th-century United States, is quite familiar with manuscripts and archives. She understands the importance of special collections, and because her work has focused on US social and cultural history, the subject coverage of our library is of great interest to her. She used several of the library’s wonderful collections—including the papers of Esther Peterson and the records of the National Organization for Women—in the research for her most recent book, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. I know Liz Cohen well as a colleague in the history department, which she chaired from 2008 to 2010. In her many previous roles at Harvard, as teacher and mentor, as department citizen and chair, and as a leading member of more than one faculty group or committee, she has dispatched multiple responsibilities with remarkable conscientiousness, fairness, and effectiveness— always aiming to steer a clear course while also responding to the demands of the various constituencies she served. I feel sure that the Institute as a whole and the library in particular will benefit from her term as interim dean. Another change worthy of note is the addition of Susan Ware, a longtime supporter and user of the library, to the Schlesinger Library Council. Editor of the fifth volume of Notable American Women and author of many other estimable works of history and biography researched at the library—including Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism and, very recently, Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports—she will bring additional wisdom along with enthusiasm to the endeavors of the council. The full membership of the council is included in this newsletter, which marks our return to a print as well as an online version.
A Collection Highlight from the Library’s Executive Director The first woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, Edith Nourse Rogers served for 35 years and chaired the Veterans’ Affairs Committee. A Republican, Rogers was an advocate for disabled veterans and was particularly valuable in assessing overseas medical care for veterans during both world wars. She is widely known and admired for having had a major role in writing and enacting the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the G.I. Bill. Many people believe this act was among the most transformative pieces of legislation of the 20th century. Rogers was the first proponent of the Women’s Army Corps and enjoyed the longest congressional career of any woman to date. —Marilyn Dunn Executive Director and Radcliffe Institute Librarian
With best wishes for a relaxing summer, —Nancy F. Cott Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History 1
Edith Rogers in a procession with Mexican pilot Emilio Carranza and other military men, 1925–1927.
Angela Ards RI ’11 Angela Ards is no stranger to a good story: she has told many in her 15 years as a journalist. Having also forged an academic career, Ards—the 2010–2011 William BentinckSmith Fellow—is now turning to others’ stories to address the political and moral questions of the post–civil rights era. In her book-in-progress, she examines how contemporary black women writers use their autobiographical writings to engage public debate about their history, identity, and agency. Ards has found a valuable resource in the Schlesinger Library, where she’s mining the riches of the June Jordan Papers. “Her archives are incredibly extensive and delightful—and overwhelming,” says Ards. All those papers, videos, and photographs, she says, have given her “wonderful insights into Jordan as a writer.”
Photo by Webb Chappell 2
megan marshall Donating Family Archives to Schlesinger Library It started with the paper dolls: the small green box filled with astonishingly detailed, subtly hued, three-inch-long dresses that fit precisely, anchored by tiny foldable tabs, onto the forms of several five-inch-tall paper girls clad in lace-edged slips and pantaloons. Hand-cut and hand-painted during the Great Depression by my mother’s aunt Euphemia (“Fame” for short)—a woman with many sons and no daughters who had welcomed my mother’s family into her home during the lean years—the dolls had been an endless source of amusement to my mother as a child. I imagine her sorting through the dozens of outfits with their striped and polkadotted fabrics; embroidered hems and collars; and dropped, cinched, or high waists at ages seven, eight, and nine—years when she was suddenly without much of a wardrobe herself or even, sometimes, enough food in the chaotic household of boy cousins and one older brother. I imagine her learning from Aunt Fame what a woman could do with a paintbrush and black ink. My mother let my sister and me play with the dolls in our childhood in the early 1960s. But by the time my own daughters were born, in 1984 and 1990, I had decided the paper girls and their extravagant dresses and accessories (hats and fans and parasols) were too precious to be handled. Last year, facing a move from a large house to a small apartment, what was I to do with the paper dolls? Did it make sense for them to stay shut up in their green box, only to be moved from one house to the next, never played with and rarely viewed? They were only the beginning. For the 20 years I’d lived in the big house, I’d also been researching and writing a biography of three 19th-century New England sisters: Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody. Word spread among my family members that I cared about old things, old papers in particular. My house became the family archive as well as the archive of my work on the Peabody family. In cardboard 3
boxes at the backs of closets I stored one grandmother’s Paris diary recording the early years of her marriage to my grandfather, an officer in the Army Press Corps during World War I, and my other grandmother’s love letters to her young husband, a sonar operator in the Navy during the same years. There were my mother’s letters to her parents from summer camp in the 1930s, and my father’s courtship letters to my mother, posted from South American ports on shore leave when he served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. The days spent playing with Aunt Fame’s paper dolls had their payoff: my mother became a watercolor landscape painter and, later, a book designer. I had her sketches, business correspondence, and the books themselves. There were my own letters home, written as a college student in the 1970s and saved by my mother. With my daughters in college and communicating with me only by text and e-mail, I suddenly saw my own girlish scrawls as rarities too. I’d used the Schlesinger Library in my research on the Peabody sisters—locating key documents from the century before my own family archive began. I’d brought my graduate students in creative writing to the library, where they became entranced with the past and began to incorporate historical themes and personages into their poems, stories, and nonfiction narratives. I knew the extraordinary range of the collection and its singular value to scholars, writers, and artists of all sorts interested in re-creating American women’s lives. Would my family papers—and paper dolls—find a place there? When the answer was yes, I could not have been more thrilled. A year ago, as I packed up my cardboard boxes to take to the library for processing, I realized it wasn’t just my mother’s career that began with those paper dolls—my own did as well. My engagement with the past through the paper documents that keep history alive started with those early
years of quiet play and vivid imagining—an experience that the Schlesinger Library offers anyone who enters its reading room, fills out a call slip, and receives an archival box, its contents ripe for discovery. Megan Marshall ’77, RI ’07 is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005), which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. She teaches narrative nonfiction writing and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College.
Above right: Elva Jean Marshall with her children (left to right) Megan, Amy, and Woody Jr., Christmas 1955. Right: Watercolor of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard by Elva Jean Marshall. Below: Woodcut by Elva Jean Marshall.
All images are from the Marshall-Spiess Family Papers. 4
First Behind the Camera: Photojournalist jessie tarbox beals Before Annie Leibovitz and Margaret Bourke-White, there was Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942). A pioneer of photojournalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Beals is recognized as the first woman photographer hired on a newspaper staff. In 1902, after she had proved herself as an accomplished freelance photographer (and taught her husband the trade), Beals joined the staff of the Buffalo Inquirer. But she didn’t stay long. She left her post at the paper after 18 months to attend the St. Louis World’s Fair with her husband, Alfred. Beals had to push officials at the fair to give her a photography permit, and once she had it, she became an accredited photographer for the New York Herald and other papers. During her six
months at the fair, she took pictures of luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and his oldest son, Theodore Jr., becoming something of a celebrity herself. Following her success in St. Louis, Beals was ready to take on New York. In 1905, she and her husband moved to Manhattan and eventually set up their own studio; she took pictures, while Alfred managed the business. Hustling for clients, Beals went so far as to write to prominent people who were listed in the Social Register and offer to take their portraits without charge. Her labor paid off. The business survived, and in 1906, she and other women photographers were featured in a group show sponsored by the Camera Club of Hartford, Connecticut. In the show’s announcement, Beals was singled out for special recognition. But not all was well on the home front. Although Beals enjoyed the bohemian life in Greenwich Village—where she was friendly with Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and other artists—her husband was more reclusive. They began to lead separate lives, and when Beals gave birth to her daughter, Nanette, in 1911, there was some dispute about whether Alfred was the child’s father, though he doted on her throughout his life. In an era when most women chose children or careers, Beals managed both, however imperfectly. Nanette was often cared for by friends or shipped off to boarding school, and mother and daughter didn’t live together until Nanette was 17. Ultimately, though, the daughter was loyal to her mother, publicizing her work and arranging for posthumous exhibitions and publications. Beginning in 1982, Nanette Beals Brainerd gave all her mother’s papers and pictures to the Schlesinger Library, where they are available today to scholars and others interested in women’s history. Jenny Gotwals, lead manuscript cataloger at the Schlesinger, who processed Beals’s papers and photographs, points out that unlike most photographers, Beals didn’t specialize in one area but took news photos, interior portraits, street scenes, and garden and house pictures. In Gotwals’s view, the photographer was indomitable: “She just soldiered on and did what she needed to do. That’s how she was able to accomplish so much.” —Pat Harrison Publications Manager
Photo from the Jessie Tarbox Beals Papers at the Schlesinger Library.
The Continuing Fascination of Jefferson and Hemings Issues of history and race played an important part in Annette Gordon-Reed’s young life. In the early 1960s, at age six, she enrolled in an all-white elementary school as the only black student. Later, after reading biographies of Thomas Jefferson, she found herself drawn to the nation’s third president, in part because of his passion for books (much like her own), his insatiable curiosity, and his claim to believe in human equality even though he owned slaves. Those early experiences may have helped to inspire Gordon-Reed, now a Harvard Law School professor, a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, to write two seminal books that have been credited with redefining the nature of scholarship on Jefferson. In Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), she explored the relationship between the Revolutionary War leader and his slave, the half sister of his wife, presenting the controversial case that Jefferson fathered several children with Hemings after his wife’s death. Her work was later validated by DNA evidence that Hemings’s descendants came from Jefferson’s line. Building on that work, Gordon-Reed published The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family in 2008. The book won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award, and she won a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The Pulitzer board called her book “a painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson.” During a talk at the Schlesinger Library that was part of the Boston Seminar on the History of Women and Gender— a collaboration between the library and the Massachusetts Historical Society—Gordon-Reed discussed her plans for another volume that will follow Sally Hemings and her descendants from 1830 through the early 20th century. Her research has taken her to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Hemings and her extended family lived after Jefferson’s death. Exploring the history along with the social and cultural dynamics of that southern city, Gordon-Reed was trying, she said, to “re-create the world of Charlottesville and the Hemingses, and to go deeper than people had done up until this point.” Gordon-Reed’s research explores the complicated dynamics between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons. For example, Madison Hemings, one of Jefferson’s sons with Sally, did carpentry for Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Angry at not being paid, he wrote a testy note
Annette Gordon-Reed; photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times/Redux to Jefferson demanding the money owed for a job he had completed. The document, said Gordon-Reed, offers insight into the “tangled relationships” that continued between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons “after everything has fallen apart and is destroyed at Monticello.” Much of her work has involved examining records in which census takers from Virginia determined and listed people’s race. Gordon-Reed noted that members of the Hemings family were variously described by the census, some as white, others as mulatto, still others as Negro. Sally Hemings herself was listed as a free white woman in 1830, but said Gordon-Reed: “This family is skirting the boundaries here of race and of even freedom. . . . Sally was never formally freed; she was informally freed by Jefferson.” Noted author and historian Nell Irvin Painter—the Edwards Professor of American History emerita at Princeton University, a former Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, and currently a graduate student in art at the Rhode Island School of Design—provided commentary about Gordon-Reed’s work, including the statement “This is not simply black history, African American history—it’s very much American history.” —Colleen Walsh Adapted from her article for the Harvard Gazette
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Update on digital initiatives The Radcliffe Bulletin, published from 1906 to 1916, is now available online, as are the Radcliffe Quarterly and the yearbook. The student handbook, and several Radcliffe newspapers will be online this summer. These materials from the Radcliffe College Archives were digitized with a gift from the Radcliffe Class of 1954. Not only can researchers now read these publications online, but they can search for specific words, names, and phrases. In addition to making more of Radcliffe’s history available, the library is converting paper collections to digital format with the goals of both increasing use and preserving the original materials. Preparations are under way to digitize selected library materials relating to the Civil War to mark its 150th anniversary. Among the collections scheduled for digitization is the Beecher Stowe Family Collection. Using Harvard University’s Web Archive Collection Service, or WAX, the library has expanded its collections of online content. WAX can take a snapshot of content that is currently available on the Web—much of it seemingly ephemeral—and preserve it for the future. This year, the library developed a collection of Web sites of organizations and people whose physical collections it holds, complementing them with information that is increasingly available only online. This SL Sites collection joins the library’s existing collection Capturing Women’s Voices on the Web, which began as a pilot project directed by the University’s Office for Information Systems. In line with the library’s strategic plan to diversify its materials, staff members have selected voices of conservative, black, and Latina women for inclusion in the collection. Both these Web archive collections will continue to grow, building a base of material the library hopes will be valuable to future researchers. Perhaps the major challenge facing archives today is the increase in born-digital materials included in incoming collections. Born-digital materials are files created on a computer, such as Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, databases, and PDF files, many of which have never existed on paper. The category of born-digital material that looms largest is e-mail. Electronic messages have taken the place of most paper correspondence, and archives must find a way to review, process, preserve, and eventually provide access to this vast quantity of material. Harvard University recognizes the challenges involved in handling e-mail and is in the final stages of developing a system to import and manage e-mail in University collections. The system will provide archivists with tools that will allow them to process the tens of thousands
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of messages that may make up just one collection. The Schlesinger Library is participating in the University’s project and contributing to its development. The Library expects the new system to be ready for testing in the fall of 2011. —Amy Benson Librarian/Archivist for Digital Initiatives
An announcement on Radio Radcliffe; photo by Peter Solmssen, from the Radcliffe College Archives, currently being digitized. Facing page: Issues of the Radcliffe Quarterly, now available online.
To explore library materials about Radcliffe College or other topics, visit http://hollis.harvard.edu. 8
cynthia green colin: The Donor Behind the Digitizing of Gilman’s Papers
Photo by Brian Smith The woman who made possible the Schlesinger Library’s landmark digitization of the papers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is, like Gilman herself, pretty remarkable. Cynthia Green Colin ’54 is a vice president of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and a longtime supporter of Radcliffe College and the Radcliffe Institute. In the early days of the Institute, she established a fund dedicated to using technology to spread its resources to a larger public. When the Institute’s leaders told her about the need to digitize Gilman’s papers, Colin was enthusiastic. “It was a great opportunity to get materials to people who wouldn’t ordinarily see them,” she says. Gilman’s papers, most of which were given to the library in 1971 and 1972 by her daughter, include correspondence, news clippings, writings, drawings, notebooks, diaries, and hundreds of photographs, all stored in 19 cartons. Almost 40,000 images were digitized. Now scholars throughout
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the world have access to the collection, a development that is likely to strengthen and speed up scholarship about this intellectual giant of the women’s movement. In her work at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, where she puts in long hours, Colin stares constantly at two computer monitors. When she’s not at work, though, she’s more oriented to print than digital materials. “I’m usually reading three or four books at a time,” she says. Colin’s mother, Evelyn Green Davis, was also an avid reader and a hard worker. Although she didn’t go to college (she went to work right out of high school), she could hold her own in discussions of politics, history, literature, and fine arts. Colin memorialized her mother by establishing the Evelyn Green Davis Fellowship, the first endowed fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute. The fellowship has been held by writers Catherine Allgor RI ’03 and Susan Faludi ’81, RI ’09, among others. Colin is thrilled that her college has evolved into the Radcliffe Institute. “It expresses some of the highest aspirations we had as a class,” she says. For their 55th reunion, Colin and her classmates made a gift to the Schlesinger Library to help process the Radcliffe College Archives, which are currently being digitized. In addition to her full-time job as an investment advisor, Colin serves on the board of Mt. Sinai Hospital and has held leadership positions in the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the United Jewish Appeal Campaign, and the Business and Professional Women’s Division of the United Jewish Appeal. Asked whether she has any plans to retire, Colin, at 78, says, “Absolutely none. I love my clients, my job is endlessly interesting, and I learn something new every day.” —Pat Harrison Publications Manager
to explore schlesinger materials online, including the papers of charlotte perkins gilman, please go to http://hollis.harvard.edu/
Show Your Support Gifts from friends of the Schlesinger Library help underwrite the following programs: Maximum Access. Through this important program, the library makes previously unprocessed collections available to researchers and scholars. Great progress has been made, but dozens of important collections remain unprocessed. Digitization. The Schlesinger is a leader among special collections libraries in new technologies and digitization, which ensures online access to researchers and scholars throughout the world. Acquisition. The Schlesinger adds depth to its holdings by acquiring significant collections. Recent acquisitions include the papers of Catharine MacKinnon. Preservation. The library restores and preserves fragile historical and cultural materials to make them available to researchers and scholars.
julia child
amelia earhart
Own a Picture of History from the Schlesinger Library Iconic images from the Schlesinger Library are available for purchase online, and proceeds from the sale of these images benefit the library. Recipients of this newsletter can receive a 20 percent discount by entering the coupon code SchlesingerLibrary at checkout when making purchases at www.i-concepts.org.
It’s easy to give online: www.radcliffe.edu/giving/credit.aspx. For more information about giving to the Schlesinger Library, please contact Joan Moynagh, director of development, at 617-496-1350. With your gift, you can help maintain the Schlesinger Library’s reputation as the premier repository of unique materials documenting the lives and work of American women. Thank you.
The Schlesinger Library was founded in 1943 at Radcliffe College, where its original name was the Radcliffe Women’s Archives. Today the library encompasses more than 100,000 volumes, 3,200 manuscript collections, 90,000 photos, and 12,000 unpublished audio- and videotapes. The library served nearly 7,500 researchers in 2010.
Dean’s Advisory Council
Schlesinger Library Council
Nancy P. Aronson RoAnn Costin Catherine A. Gellert Susan L. Graham Perrin Moorhead Grayson David A. Jackson Ralph M. James Sidney R. Knafel George M. Lovejoy Jr. Suzanne Young Murray Diana L. Nelson Melanie Mason Niemiec Nancy-Beth Gordon Sheerr Prudence Linder Steiner Deborah Fiedler Stiles Susan S. Wallach
Caroline Minot Bell Terrie F. Bloom Joan Challinor Phyllis Trustman Gelfman Alice Geller Marilynn Wood Hill John Wright Ingraham Ralph M. James Priscilla Fierman Kauff Barbara Newman Kravitz Diana M. Meehan Paula J. Omansky Elizabeth Fleischner Rosenman Susan D. Ware
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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 © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Artwork from the Marshall-Spiess Family Papers.
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Front cover: Photo of and sketch by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are from the Gilman papers at the Schlesinger Library.
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