Spring 2010 Schlesinger Library Newsletter - Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Schlesinger Library news from the

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This 1938 photograph, by an unknown photographer, is from a Rockport Lodge album called “Cruises.”

The records of Rockport Lodge were recently processed with a bequest from Clara Schiffer.

The Legacy of Radcliffe Alumna Clara Schiffer: Inspiring Stories about Working Women When Clara Goldberg Schiffer was diagnosed with heart disease in her 70s, she immediately joined a gym and changed her diet, determined to remain active and healthy because she had a great deal more to do. She was still exercising regularly and remained committed to social justice at the time of her death, in May 2009 at age 97. Although she supported many organizations with both time and money, the Schlesinger Library embodies all that she held dear.

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spring 2010

Letter from the Director This year’s crop of applications for the Schlesinger Library’s small grants have recently arrived, delightfully reminding me of the wide variety of subjects for which we have unique resources. Researchers want to come to the library to investigate almost every topic imaginable, from recreation to war, from health care to immigration, from journalism to midwifery, from higher education to the Cold War, from marriage counseling to scientific careers, from literacy to prostitution, from international agreements to religion, poetry, television, and dance. The culinary collection increasingly draws academic scholars as well as chefs. The periodicals collection is perennially attractive, and we have been adding ’zines, other contemporary “niche” magazines, and on-line magazines to keep up with serials today. Our holdings of papers of African American women—especially Pauli Murray, June Jordan, Florynce Kennedy, Dorothy West, and Shirley Graham DuBois—have seen especially frequent use lately.

Harvard undergraduates consult the holdings of the Schlesinger to write about all sorts of topics. This spring, Mia Walker ’10 was inspired to write a play based on the diaries of a Radcliffe student of the 1950s. Katherine Walecka ’11 revised her interpretation of June Jordan’s political impact because the library’s holdings enabled her to view videotapes of Jordan’s speeches at certain political rallies. The mysterious writings on slates received during seances by Spiritualist women in the 19th century, female entrepreneurs making headway during the Great Depression, the International Women’s Year conference in 1977 in Houston, and the paradoxical life and career of the founder of Parents magazine are some other recent undergraduate topics I recall. Current PhD candidates writing dissertations have mined the library’s collections to write about subjects including the beginnings of international human rights activism more than a century ago, the views of the National Organization for Women on the working mother, and the role that defense of birth control played in the start of the American Civil Liberties Union. The questions being pursued by the researchers sitting in our reading room are not predictable!

The more various the topics, the better, it seems to me. We want to send the news far and wide that whatever you are interested in, chances are the Schlesinger Library has something valuable to offer.

—Nancy F. Cott Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History

The Schlesinger Looks Back and Plans Ahead A survey of Harvard University Library manuscripts recently confirmed what many of us have thought for some time: that even within the University, the Schlesinger Library is extraordinary in the extent, number, and diversity of its manuscript collections.

Among the 50-plus repositories, the Schlesinger ranks third in linear feet, behind only the Harvard University Archives and the Historical Collections at Baker Library. And for breadth of subject matter, the Schlesinger cannot be beat: politics, travel and internationalism, family history, science and health, professions, and work all fall within its scope.

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, it’s worth reflecting on the work of the library—both what we have accomplished and what’s on the horizon. Central to the Institute’s mission is a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender, and society, and the Schlesinger has advanced that mission in multiple ways during the past 10 years. Since the turn of the century, the library has added approximately 2,500 collections in about 4,500 linear feet, untold numbers of photographs, and thousands of audiovisual materials.

Among these remarkable collections are the papers of Anna Chennault, June Jordan, and Catharine MacKinnon, leaders in feminism, literature, business diplomacy, and law in the 20th century.

The greatest challenge that lies ahead is to ensure that these materials become available to researchers within a reasonable time frame. Once the collections are processed, researchers will continue to create and rewrite history, as so many have already done. From the library’s collections emerged distinguished titles such as Alice Kessler-Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America, Eileen McDonough’s Playing with the Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports, Patricia Sullivan’s edited Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, and many more.

As we enter the second decade of the century and the second decade of the Institute, the library must expand its capacity to acquire and describe unique digital material. Electronic mail; digital publication of monographs and journal articles; digital audio, video, and photography; and Web publications of all types will shortly outpace paper-based collections. The Schlesinger Library, acting within the wider Harvard University Library environment, is well poised for this transition—even though the issue of scale remains daunting. As we anticipate users’ expectations, other complicated questions arise. For instance, how much of our analog material must be digitally reformatted to match the evolving tools of research in this century?

—Marilyn Dunn Executive Director

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Whereas my Husband Ephraim Shelden has Enterred himself Into his Majesties Service and has Left me with three Children and nothing to Support us with . . . I therefore Desire you to bind out one of my Children Namely Godfrey Shelden . . . till 21 Years old to learn him the Trade of a weaver and to teach him to Read write and Cypher . . .

—Rebeckah Shelden, Swansea, Massachusetts, 1746

“One Good Cow”: Indenture Documents at the Schlesinger Library Although laboring men, women, and children don’t often leave written documents that shed light on the texture and conditions of their everyday lives, we can catch glimpses of their life challenges in formal records such as indentures or apprenticeship bonds. The library has recently acquired a small collection of these documents; in the earliest, excerpted above, we see Rebeckah Shelden of Swansea, Massachusetts, trying to cope in her husband’s absence during the French and Indian Wars.

Most of the indentures in this collection typically end at age 18 and require the master to provide some schooling in addition to teaching a trade and supplying meat, drink, lodging, and clothing. Many of them bind over children under the signatures (or, in some cases, marks) of almshouse managers or overseers of the poor. One from 1834 in Union County, Indiana, binds out: “Sarah Randels, a poor girl aged nine years three months and twenty-eight days, daughter of Phebe Randels of Said township who is unable to support her said child as the said Samuel Randels the father . . . has absented himself from these parts without leaving anything to support the Said Child.”

It also spells out the master’s obligation to teach Sarah the “mystery of sewing and spinning and housekeeping” and requires him, at the end of the apprenticeship, to provide “a good bed and Beding and one flax spinning wheel and one good cow.”

Twelve dollars, however, was the only reward at the end of an entire childhood of service for Lucy and Edey Randolph Valentine, aged four and one respectively, “two femail children of coular born of Sally Valentine,” who were bound out in 1823 by overseers of the poor to learn “the art of farming.”

The man to whom the girls were apprenticed, Samuel Hubbard, was illiterate and signed with his mark.

For more information about these tantalizing pieces of young people’s lives, see http://discovery.lib.harvard.edu// ?itemid=%7clibrary%2fm%2faleph%7c012190052 or come to the library and consult the collection itself.

This indenture document from 1820 binds over Abigail Edwards, resident of the Almshouse and House of Employment in Philadelphia, to learn the “art and mystery of housewifery” until the age of 18.

—Anne Englehart Head of Collection Services 3

The Legacy of Radcliffe Alumna Clara Schiffer: Inspiring Stories about Working Women Born in Brockton, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrants, Schiffer was following a clerical track in high school when an observant teacher urged her to consider college. She was accepted to Radcliffe and graduated cum laude in 1932. A loyal alum, she last visited Cambridge for her 75th class reunion, in 2007. The jobs Schiffer held to pay her way through Radcliffe shaped her lifelong commitment to bettering the lives of working women.

When she graduated, Schiffer went to Washington, where the New Deal was opening professional opportunities for women, and took the first of many positions in the federal government focused on women, children, work, and health.

Clara Schiffer’s decades-long support for the library centered on these issues. From her suggestions (backed by research making her case) of women and organizations whose papers she felt should be housed here to her support for the library’s film series (she even made themed snacks, such as peanuts and Cracker Jack for A League of Their Own, possible), she worked behind the scenes to strengthen the library. More visible is her gift of several hundred 19th-century prints depicting women at work. Images such as “Strawberry Culture, New Jersey—Pickers in the Field,” from Harper’s Weekly in 1869, offer compelling visual documentation of women’s labor history.

A recent generous bequest from Schiffer’s estate will fund important work that we feel certain would please her: the processing of four collections that highlight the lives of working women. Together the records of Fernside (see Fall 2006 newsletter); Rockport Lodge; 9to5, National Association of Working Women; and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers will document a century of American labor history.

Fernside, a rambling boardinghouse on Mount Wachusett in Massachusetts, became in 1890 the Girls’ Vacation House Association, under the auspices of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, whose records are also at the library.

Established for “the benefit of women wage-earners,” Fernside for more than 80 years beckoned Boston’s shopgirls and secretaries to enjoy a week or two of fun and camaraderie in the mountain air. The Fernside records include a wealth of information documenting weeks full of poetry, plays, songfests, and berry picking, all for $4 a week in 1900 and $65 a week in the 1970s.

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In 1906, a similar vacation house, a Fernside-with-salt-water, opened by the sea. The Massachusetts Association of Women Workers established Rockport Lodge for working women of low and moderate income. A theater, tennis courts, and a “smoke house” (where the women went to smoke) added to the appeal of the lodge, where guests all pitched in to do chores. Lodge rule books, administrative records, scrapbooks, and photograph albums describe summers at this respite from city life that operated until 2002. Many researchers, including author Anita Diamant, whose next novel will include Rockport Lodge, are eager to dive in.

The records of 9to5 move the story of working women ahead several decades. Founded in Boston in 1972, 9to5 (it’s ok to sing the Dolly Parton song now) drew women together against sexual harassment and pay inequality, issues that hadn’t yet been named. Although the organization has grown and modified its name several times, its commitment to improving the lives of women wage earners—much like those who enjoyed Fernside and Rockport Lodge— has never changed. The records of 9to5, the first of which were processed with a gift from Schiffer in 1992 (many cartons have been added since then), document how the organization has worked to improve conditions for women in the workplace through affirmative-action, age-discrimination, and equal-pay campaigns; job and wage surveys; and publicity.

The records of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) bring the story of women and work even closer to home. They document the 15-year struggle by a small group of women and a few men to form a union representing a largely female staff of 3,500 secretaries, library workers, laboratory assistants, medical workers, and other employees at Harvard. Their success in 1988 marked the beginning of a decade of organizing in higher education. Growing out of the women’s movement of the early 1970s, the HUCTW developed innovative methods of organizing and representing workers based on the values and priorities of working women, with the goal of creating a community built on respect and compassion.

All four collections are rich in important materials about women’s lives and women’s work. Processing them will enable researchers in a variety of fields to enhance our understanding of a broad range of issues affecting women across the 20th century. We look forward to hosting a conference, after processing is complete, that will focus on these collections and issues, which we hope will stimulate research on the topics about which Clara Schiffer cared so deeply. That would be a most fitting tribute to this remarkable woman who was committed to bettering the lives of all women.

—Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Johanna-Maria Fraenkel Curator of Manuscripts

Top left: This 1988 photograph, by Marilyn Humphries, shows an HUCTW rally at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. The records of the HUCTW were recently processed with a bequest from Schiffer.

Top right: An undated, midcareer portrait of Clara Goldberg Schiffer ’32 Bottom left: This undated folio photograph, by an unknown photographer, shows a woman at work. The records of 9to5, National Association of Working Women were recently processed with a bequest from Schiffer.

Memories of Clara

Facing page: This photograph, taken by Marilyn Humphries around 1988, shows students and workers rallying in support of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers.

Clara Schiffer was well on in years when I first knew her, yet her active, far-roving, keen intelligence impressed me at once. Her sharp insights were combined with a deep spiritual sense and blended with a great deal of common sense.

“Common sense is the least common of all senses,” wrote Lord David Cecil; he should have known Clara.

At our monthly luncheons, she roamed widely over current events, viewing them through the lens of her many jobs and life experiences decades before. Her acumen was so much more extensive and sharper than mine that our discussions were decidedly an unequal exchange. She shared her experiences generously and lovingly.

From Clara, I learned the story of how she borrowed money for a bus ride into Cambridge from her home to take the examination for entrance into Radcliffe. Not having studied Latin at her public school, she worked at it all summer and then passed the exam in the fall, allowing her to enter the Class of 1932. Never, ever, did Radcliffe make a better admissions decision. Just as our meetings gave me so much more than I ever gave her, so Radcliffe received a gift of solicitude and caring far beyond the four years of learning that it provided Clara.

Clara enriched my life as she did countless others’. Toward the end of her life, her cardiologist, realizing her great worth, asked her to talk about graceful aging to a hospital group. Her comments, aired in 2009 on NBC, were rebroadcast on Valentine’s Day in 2010. Valentine’s Day was a fine choice. Clara’s whole life was “graceful living and giving.”

Those of us who knew her well will be forever in her debt.

—Joan R. Challinor, PhD Historian and Member of the Schlesinger Library Council

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Library Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), considered the foremost intellectual leader of the women’s movement from the 1890s through the 1920s, remains a compelling figure. Her insistence that women needed economic independence and freedom from domestic burdens as well as suffrage, her utopian fiction presenting a society free of men, and her promotion of physical fitness and unconfining dress were just a few components of her thoroughgoing re-envisioning of society, which continues to invite critical appraisal and to inspire feminists.

Although today Gilman is perhaps best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper” (published in 1892), a short story based on her experience of postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, she reached wide audiences in her day with her first poetry volume, In This Our World (1893), revised and expanded twice in subsequent years, and her influential treatises Women and Economics (1898), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Human Work (1904), and The Man-Made World (1911). Her fiction included the utopian novel Herland, The Crux, and What Diantha Did, all serialized in her self-published literary magazine, The Forerunner. She spent decades traveling in the United States and abroad as a lecturer, and early in her life she also designed trade cards, having studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Schlesinger’s extensive collection of Gilman’s papers—which includes her diaries, correspondence, writings, and lectures; a complete run of The Forerunner; photographs of Gilman; and examples of her artwork— has long been here and is currently being digitized. This effort will soon provide unprecedented access on the Internet to the records of her work housed here, and the Schlesinger will celebrate the 150th anniversary of her birth with a comprehensive exhibition in October 2010.

Now, Gilman’s personal library is also coming to the Schlesinger. The first installment of 60 books, received from Gilman’s descendants in January 2010, includes works that had a deep impact on her thinking; many are annotated, inscribed, or autographed. These include books on literature, politics, sociology, philosophy, and dress reform, along with books she read as a youth, and they illuminate the breadth of her interests. Gilman’s decendants are committed to preserving this intellectual portrait of an early feminist and her family; they hope to send further items from Gilman’s library to the Schlesinger in the near future.

—Marylène Altieri, Curator of Books and Printed Materials

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At right: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca.1909–1915.

Below: This copy of The Practical Phrenologist is annotated with Gilman’s phrenological profile, taken in 1876 when she was 16, by the author, O. S. Fowler.

Charles Edward Stowe pasted a letter to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, his cousin, inside a copy of his biography of his mother, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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“Uncle Sam . . . Does Not Permit Us to Write a Very Interesting Letter.” A Young Nurse’s Letters from World War I, and Other Notable Accessions priorities and seeks to influence public policy for the enhancement of women’s health, donated their records this past year, as did the League of Women Voters of Boston, Girls’ Latin School (now Boston Latin Academy), and the Women and Food Information Network.

—Jenny Gotwals, Manuscript Cataloger

In September 1918, Mabel Esther Borden, an excited young nurse with the US Army Nurse Corps, crossed the Atlantic to serve in World War I. She wrote her father all about her journey, and the kinds and numbers of nurses and troops on her boat. Her father never got that information: An army censor cut it out before sending the letter along to him. It was not long before Mabel realized what kinds of information she should avoid writing. On October 3, she wrote again to her father, worrying that her earlier letter had been censored in full: “Uncle Sam is taking good care of us in every way, but he does not permit us to write a very interesting letter.”

Borden’s letters to her family—along with letters sent to her in France detailing her brother’s bout with influenza in November 1918 and how her hometown of Sheffield, Pennsylvania, was affected by the pandemic—are among recent accessions at the library. Material documenting American women living and working throughout the world continues to be a focus of collecting.

Letters from Ruth Williams Hooper describe her experiences living and teaching in the Philippines just before World War II: In 1939, she and her husband were interned at the Santo Tomas prison camp. The papers of civic activists Ernesta Drinker Ballard, Miriam Jay Wurts Andrus, and Eloise Bittel Cohen richly document women’s lives and local political activism in mid-20th-century Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. The papers of feminist musicians Marcia Deihl and Rhiannon have come recently, as have the papers of journalist Ellen Willis, who wrote frequently about popular music in addition to other feminist topics, and Carla DeSantis, who founded ROCKRGRL magazine.

In addition to the papers of individual women, we continue to collect organizational records. The Silent Spring Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit research organization that studies how environmental toxins affect women’s health (focusing primarily on breast cancer), and the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, which identifies research

This letter from Mabel Borden to her father details her day-to-day existence on a military boat during World War I. 8

Schlesinger Library Events List, Spring 2010 Wednesday, February 3, 2009 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, followed the films.

Thursday, March 25, 2010 Brown Bag Lunch Talk Marilyn Morgan, manuscript archivist at the Schlesinger Library, spoke about the life of Jeannette Rankin. A brief clip from Jeannette Rankin: The Woman Who Voted No (1982), directed by Susan Cohen Regele, followed the talk.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Movie Night The American Look (1958), produced by Handy (Jam) Organization; Coney Island (1940s), by unknown source; and films featuring Radcliffe College A discussion with Olga Touloumi, PhD candidate in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, followed the film.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 Brown Bag Lunch Talk Maura Marx, executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons, spoke about her work at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.

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 at Harvard University, followed the film.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Brown Bag Lunch Talk Jennifer Donnally, a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant recipient, discussed her recent research on her dissertation topic, the politics of abortion and the rise of the new right.

Thursday, March 11, 2010 Brown Bag Lunch Talk Kirstin Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins (Nan A. Talese, 2009), discussed researching her book at the Schlesinger.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 Brown Bag Lunch Talk Emilyn Brown, manuscript archivist at the Schlesinger Library, spoke about the life of Ida B. Wells. A brief clip from Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (1989), directed by William Greaves, followed the talk.

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 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, followed the film.

March 8–October 5, 2010 Schlesinger Library Exhibition Inside/Out: The Geography of Gendered Space In conjunction with the conference “Inside/Out: Exploring Gender and Space in Life, Culture, and Art,” the Schlesinger Library pre sents this exhibition of items from the library’s collections. The exhibit explores various types of space in relation to the domestic, urban, political, and artistic landscapes and is organized into four sections: private, public, political, and artistic.

June 6–11, 2010 Seminar “Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach,” taught by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, honorary curator of the culinary collection at the Schlesinger Library —Susan Landry Administrative Assistant

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spring 2010

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 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

A detail from the illustration “American Sketches: The Ladies’ Window at the New York Post Office,”

by Henry Linton, from the Illustrated London News, 1875

credits: The following images are from the Schlesinger Library collections: The photograph on the front page is from the Rockport Lodge Records. The indenture document on page 3 is from the Indentures Collection. The photograph on page 4 is from the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers Records. On page 5, the photograph at top left is from the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers Records; the photograph at top right, from the Radcliffe Archives; and the photograph at bottom left, from the 9to5, National Association of Working Women Additional Records, 1972–1985. The photograph and scanned page on page 6 are both from the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Collection. The scanned letter on page 7 is also from the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Collection. The scanned items on page 8 are from the Mabel Esther Borden Collection. The detail on the back cover is from the Clara Goldberg Schiffer Collection, 1983–1994.