KAREN J. BLAIR
Women's History as Local History
In 1928 a crowd of 10,000 witnessed the
unveiling in Vandalia,
Illinois, of an eighteen-foot-high
marble statue, entitled the "Madonna
of the Trail." Donated by the
Daughters of the American Revolution,
the large monument commemorated the
sacrifices of pioneer Illinois
mothers in the frontier era. But like
the role assigned, until recently, to
women in the collective historical
imagination, the statue itself was an
abstraction. "The Madonna" did
not represent an actual historical per-
sonality, but stood-significantly-on a
pedestal, while the two inscrip-
tions on the base commemorated not the
women of Illinois, but Abra-
ham Lincoln and the Cumberland Road.
The rebirth of feminism in the 1970s has
opened the way for the re-
discovery of the concrete, historic
woman, whose work, suffering and
achievements have long been ignored,
distorted or sentimentalized by
those who chronicle the past. Although
the essays and articles pre-
sented in these three works vary widely
in quality, all are products of
the new feminist outlook because of
their conscious effort to rectify the
distortions of past history and their
recognition that women have
played an independent role in society
and politics whose importance is
Books reviewed in this essay:
Women of Minnesota: Selected
Biographical Essays. Edited by Bar-
bra Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter. (St.
Paul: Minnesota Historical
Society Press, 1977. 402p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $12.00.)
The Roads They Made: Women in
Illinois History. By Adade Mitchell
Wheeler with Marlene Stein Wortman.
(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr
Publishing Company, 1977. 213 p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $10.00 cloth; $3.95 paper.)
Women in Ohio History. Edited by Marta Whitlock. Volume II of The
Ohio American Revolution Bicentennial
Conference Series. (Co-
lumbus: The Ohio Historical Society,
1976. 38p.; illustrations, notes.
$2.00.)
Karen J. Blair is an instructor in
history at California Institute of Technology.
Women's History
439
only now being fully understood.
Moreover, because women have not
made a "name" for themselves
in politics, business or the military-the
traditional categories of state and
local history-these works are neces-
sarily weighted toward social history,
toward the realm of home,
church, school and club in which women
have played so prominent a role.
The Roads They Made: Women in
Illinois History, largely by Adade
Mitchell Wheeler, is an ambitious
project which offers a panoramic
story that slights neither leisured,
working-class, black, immigrant nor
Indian women in a compact state history.
The work briefly surveys an
impressive number of prominent figures
and makes tantalizing, if some-
times frustratingly brief, references to
such diverse topics as the early
twentieth-century Parents Committee for
Birth Control, the socialist
and feminist origins of the Chicago
Teachers Federation, and the role
of women writers in the Chicago literary
renaissance of the late nine-
teenth century. Unfortunately, Wheeler's
attempt to write a compre-
hensive history of women in Illinois has
made her book an unreadable
compendium of names, dates and places, a
catalogue littered with
people and events rather than an
integrated history. While careful to
mention every notable woman in Illinois,
from settlement worker Jane
Addams to stripper Sally Rand, Wheeler
and Wortman never provide
more than a few sentences on each.
Ironically, this approach indirectly
endorses the conventional notion that
only those women who have
achieved public recognition deserve
mention in the historical record.
Part Two of The Roads They Made is
more satisfying, although less
self-consciously historical. This
section consists of a series of articles
by participants in contemporary women's
centers, labor unions and
religious, prison, health care and
political organizations. In some detail
each author explains the objectives of
her group and its operational
problems. Among the most interesting and
enjoyable of these pieces
are Charlotte Hunter Water's account of
the frustrating effort to pass
the Equal Rights Amendment through the
Illinois legislature and
Adade Wheeler's interview with Barbara
Merrill, president of the
Chicago Coalition of Labor Union Women.1
Women in Ohio History,, edited by Marta Whitlock, is more modest
in its aspirations, but also better
executed. A compilation of six papers
delivered at a 1975 conference sponsored
by the Ohio American Rev-
olution Bicentennial Commission, the
essays explore several selected,
sometimes disconnected topics.
Fortunately, three of the better pieces
1. Charlotte Hunter Waters, "The
ERA in Illinois," 180-88; Adade Wheeler, "The
Coalition of Labor Union Woman: An
Interview with Barbara Merrill, President,"
172-79.
440 OHI0 HISTORY
deal with the public schools and
demonstrate the extent to which the
battles that have swirled about the
control and staffing of this quintes-
sentially local institution have often
played such a large role in shap-
ing the status and consciousness of
women in the larger society.
Elaine S. Anderson's account of
progressive reformer Pauline
Steinem's (grandmother of Gloria)
successful campaign for the Toledo
School Board illustrates the way in
which educational issues proved a
natural bridge between the private and
public realm for many family-
oriented upper-middle-class women.2
Although Steinem's impressive
victory in the 1904 election demonstrated
the extent to which femi-
mists would soon have a greater
influence on school boards than on
most other local public institutions,
they were still incapable of single-
handedly reversing the tide of sexist
ideology that characterized pub-
lic debate in the middle decades of the
century. As Lois Scharf shows
in her excellent essay, the general
assault on married women's em-
ployment in the Great Depression put
what was left of the women's
movement on the defensive.3 Laws
prohibiting the employment of
married school teachers were staved off,
but only at a high ideological
cost. By the end of the 1930s it was
difficult to defend the married wom-
an's work in terms of its personally
liberating ideology, so women ad-
vocates in the Depression retreated to a
defense of outside employ-
ment chiefly on the grounds that it
provided additional support to the
hard pressed but traditional home and
family. This ideology, preva-
lent from the 1930s to the 1960s, made
women increasingly defense-
less against those who would subordinate
their work to that of men.
Thus Janet A. Mihok shows that women
have been long underrepre-
sented as public school administrators
in Ohio and in the decade after
1960 they were increasingly replaced by
men.4
The other essays in this collection vary
in their quality and approach.
Donna L. VanRaaphorst's fine biography
of Geralding Roberts offers
an adept use of oral history to describe
the indignities of domestic labor
and enrich the life story of the heroic
founder of the Domestic Workers
of America.5 In sharp
contrast, Lucy Webb Hayes wins recognition be-
cause she was married to a powerful man.
Emily Apt Geer provides
much information on her public life,
attention to benevolent work and
to extensive entertaining, largely
carried out to enhance her husband's
2. Elaine S. Anderson, "Pauline
Steinem, Dynamic Immigrant," 13-19.
3. Lois Scharf, "Employment of
Married Women in Ohio, 1920-1940," 19-26.
4. Janet A. Mihok, "Women in the
Leadership Role, Past and Present, in the Public
Schools of Northeastern Ohio,"
26-31.
5. Donna L. VanRaaphorst, "I Won't
Give Up, I Can't Give Up, I'll Never Give Up:
The Motto of Geraldine Roberts, Founder
of the Domestic Workers of America, 31-38.
Women's History 441 |
|
political career.6 But of her personal life there is little. On Victorian motherhood and on her careful distance from women's rights issues, we remain uninformed, without a sense of the woman alone, rather than as an appendage of Rutherford B. Hayes. Finally Diane Van- Skiver Gagel's history of the important women's rights convention at Salem in 1850 is a disappointment.7 The event itself is briefly de- scribed but the specific relationship between the early movement for women's rights and abolitionism is never directly explored, nor is the impact of the Salem meeting itself in the development of the nine- teenth-century woman's movement adequately explained. Gagel does provide sketches of J. Elizabeth Jones and Francis Dana Gage, whom she describes as the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Ohio, but the author's commentary is here obtrusive rather than enlightening. Women of Minnesota is an easily accessible collection of some six- teen biographical portraits authored by several historians and journal- 6. Emily Apt Geer, "Lucy Webb Hayes: A Governor's Wife a Century Ago," 8-12. 7. Diane VanSkiver Gagel, "Ohio Women Unite: The Salem Convention of 1850," 4-8. |
442 OHIO HISTORY
ists associated with the state. In the
tradition of the larger recent
scholarship on women we meet the most
approachable figures; most-
ly reformers and educators of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Here are an impressive number
of active women who man-
aged to make public contributions, while
juggling the demands of a
family or summoning the strength to work
on alone. Many are win-
ning portraits of vivid personalities
linked to satisfying descriptions
of state politics, educational
administration and regional belle letters.
Among the most interesting
mini-biographies are those of the journal-
ist and abolitionist Jane Grey
Swisshelm, Catholic College founder
Mary Molloy, philanthropist Alice
O'Brien, and Kate Donnelly, the
Populist Congressman's wife who
subordinated her own career to that
of her husband.8 Unfortunately
the emphasis is always on the affluent
rather than the poor, the leaders rather
than the followers. Thus we
never learn of the women who attended
the Summer House directed
by social worker Catheryne Cooke Gilman
or of the patrons who
read the books made readily available by
progressive library admin-
istrator Gratia Alta Countryman.9
Although they are industrious
researchers who bring to our atten-
tion a wide range of heretofore unknown
diary, letter, census and
periodical sources, most of the authors
represented in these three vol-
umes are somewhat intellectually timid.
The study of American women
is now in one of its most creative
phases, which provides ample
opportunity for "local"
social, family, demographic and labor histor-
ians to test, challenge and modify the
broad generalizations made
by other scholars on the national level.
But too many of these essays
accept as gospel the merely tentative
hypotheses put forward in their
popular survey texts by historians like
Eleanor Flexnor, William Chafe
and Mary Ryan. Although many of the
essays cling to a seemingly
safe biographical format, few actually
put their subjects in the rich
political and social context they
deserve. We need to know why some
women became feminists and activists,
but equally important is a dis-
cussion of why many others of virtually
identical social and economic
background did not. In what ways did the
nineteenth-century school
and voluntary organization act as a
"rite of passage" between their
accepted ideals of woman's sphere and a
more threatening, but also
liberating, belief in their own
self-esteem and independence?
8. Abigail McCarthy, "Jane Grey
Swisshelm: Marriage and Slavery," 34-54; Karen
Kennelly, "Mary Molley: Women's
College Founder," 116-35; Eileen Manning
Michels, "Alice O'Brien: Volunteer
and Philanthropist," 136-54; Gretchen Kreuter,
"Kate Donnelly; versus the Cult of
True Womanhood," 20-33.
9. Elizabeth Gilman, "Catheryne
Cooke Gilman: Social Worker," 190-207; Nancy
Freeman Rohde, "Gratia Alta
Countryman: Librarian and Reformer," 173-89.
Women's History
443
A model for future historians of women's
"local history" might
well be Nancy F. Cott's The Bonds of
Womanhood: "Woman's
Sphere" in New England,
1780-1835.10 Through a critical
appraisal of
diaries and local educational, domestic
and religious sources Cott
provides important insights on such key
questions in woman's history
as the cult of domesticity, the
glorification and devaluation of
woman's work in newly industrialized New
England, the virtually
total self-denial imposed by the ideal
of motherhood, and the meaning
of religion and sisterhood for early
nineteenth-century women. Cott's
study offers a brilliant, thorough use
of the most parochial data to
answer questions of the largest scope.
With models such as this, and
with the imaginative use of untapped
sources everywhere, one can
hope that women's local history will
prove the rich and productive field
of enquiry for which it holds such
abundant promise.
10. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of
Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England,
1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977).
KAREN J. BLAIR
Women's History as Local History
In 1928 a crowd of 10,000 witnessed the
unveiling in Vandalia,
Illinois, of an eighteen-foot-high
marble statue, entitled the "Madonna
of the Trail." Donated by the
Daughters of the American Revolution,
the large monument commemorated the
sacrifices of pioneer Illinois
mothers in the frontier era. But like
the role assigned, until recently, to
women in the collective historical
imagination, the statue itself was an
abstraction. "The Madonna" did
not represent an actual historical per-
sonality, but stood-significantly-on a
pedestal, while the two inscrip-
tions on the base commemorated not the
women of Illinois, but Abra-
ham Lincoln and the Cumberland Road.
The rebirth of feminism in the 1970s has
opened the way for the re-
discovery of the concrete, historic
woman, whose work, suffering and
achievements have long been ignored,
distorted or sentimentalized by
those who chronicle the past. Although
the essays and articles pre-
sented in these three works vary widely
in quality, all are products of
the new feminist outlook because of
their conscious effort to rectify the
distortions of past history and their
recognition that women have
played an independent role in society
and politics whose importance is
Books reviewed in this essay:
Women of Minnesota: Selected
Biographical Essays. Edited by Bar-
bra Stuhler and Gretchen Kreuter. (St.
Paul: Minnesota Historical
Society Press, 1977. 402p.;
illustrations, notes, index. $12.00.)
The Roads They Made: Women in
Illinois History. By Adade Mitchell
Wheeler with Marlene Stein Wortman.
(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr
Publishing Company, 1977. 213 p.;
illustrations, notes, bibliography,
index. $10.00 cloth; $3.95 paper.)
Women in Ohio History. Edited by Marta Whitlock. Volume II of The
Ohio American Revolution Bicentennial
Conference Series. (Co-
lumbus: The Ohio Historical Society,
1976. 38p.; illustrations, notes.
$2.00.)
Karen J. Blair is an instructor in
history at California Institute of Technology.