20 November
The first woman to ever be hired into the department was Anna Klingenhagen. She was appointed Dean of Women and assistant professor of history in 1909. A graduate of Wellesley College with an M.A. from the University of Chicago, Klingenhagan taught courses in European History. Also hired in 1909 was Clara M. Daley, a UI graduate (B.A. 1907) who had been teaching in local high schools. Daley taught a variety of courses until her retirement in 1949. “Generations of undergraduates recorded their gratitude and affection for her lively style and genuine interest in their welfare,” writes Stow Persons. “Among them was Virgil Hancher, for whom she exemplified the presumed gulf between teaching and research.”
Bessie Louise Pierce, who received both her B.A. (1910) and Ph.D. (1923) from Iowa, was the next woman to be hired in the department. In 1916, she was appointed instructor in history and education. Walter Jessup, who became president of UI that year, believed strongly in the collaboration between the liberal arts and the College of Education in the preparation of teachers, and thus he encouraged such joint appointments. Pierce taught a course in the department on the teaching of history and several courses in history at the newly opened University High School.
Pierce left Iowa for the University of Chicago in 1929 to take up what was supposed to be a temporary appointment overseeing a History of Chicago project. Her time there lasted the next 44 years. While teaching a full load at Chicago, she published As Others See Chicago in 1933, a collection of observations and opinions of past visitors to the city. During the next fourteen years she published a meticulously researched, three-volume history of Chicago: The Beginning of a City (1937), From Town to City (1940), and The Rise of the Modern City (1947). Her work earned her recognition as “Gatekeeper to Chicago history.”
There were no women in the UI History department from 1949 to 1963, when Rosalie Colie, a scholar of comparative literature, joined the department with a joint appointment in English. “A brilliant scholar and lively personality,” writes Stow Persons, “she was outspoken in her criticism of standards in [English]. Members of the department were not prepared for critical inspection and were outraged and terrified. They proposed that Colie be transferred wholly to History. The historians informed the dean that they would be honored and delighted to have her full-time in History, but Colie, regrettably, chose to leave the university,” Colie went on to teach at Yale, Oxford, and the University of Toronto, before landing at Brown, where in 1972 she became the first woman at that university to hold a department chairmanship and the first to hold a professorship endowed for women.
When Colie left in 1967, the department had no women on the faculty again for several more years. “By my recollection there were two women entering the graduate program in the fall of 1968 and the other one quit by Thanksgiving,” remembers Bonnie Love, who received her M.A. in 1972. “It was a lonely time as a 21-year-old woman in a man’s world. No women faculty either. I don’t think college teaching would have been a good match for me but I will always wonder what if I had been offered the same fellowship 5 years later when there were more women, more women faculty and acknowledgment that women have a history.”
It should be noted that over the years there have been women connected to the University of Iowa, but not formally in the Department of History, who made important contributions to the study of History. Leola Bergman was the first student at Iowa to receive a doctorate (1942) in American Civilization (now American Studies). But because she married Dr. Gustav Bergmann, a professor of Philosophy and Psychology, the university’s rules against nepotism at the time prevented her from obtaining a faculty position there. This did not stop her, however, from pursuing historical scholarship. She published one of the first essays on African Americans in Iowa, “The Negro in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics (1948) and two books, The Story of F. Melius Christiansen and the St. Olaf Choir (1944), and Americans from Norway (1950).
Another woman whose historical contributions should not be overlooked is Mary Bennett, longtime Special Collections Coordinator at the State Historical Society, who received her B.A. and M.A. in History from UI. Author of An Iowa Album: A Photographic History, 1860-1920, Bennett has become one of the foremost authorities on the history of Iowa and an invaluable resource for students and faculty in the UI Department of History.
By the early 1970s, when Bennett was attending UI, the rise of the second wave women’s movement pressured the department to hire women again on the faculty and to acknowledge that women indeed have a history. In 1971, Linda Kerber, a student of Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University, joined the History Department as what is now termed a “partner hire.” Her husband, Richard Kerber was a cardiologist who took a faculty position in internal medicine at Iowa. Linda Kerber originally specialized in the political history of the Early Republic, but as a feminist she was eager to discover more about the history of women in the United States. She went on to become a pioneer in the field of U.S. women’s history and eventually the first May Brodbeck Chair. More on Dr. Kerber can be found in the biography and interview including in this section, and in the oral history audio.
The reputation of the University of Iowa as a place to study women’s history was further enhanced by the creation in 1992 of the Iowa Women’s Archive (IWA), founded by two prominent Des Moines women, Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith. As explained in the essay by Karen Mason, the IWA’s founding and current director, “History Through Women’s Eyes: The Iowa Women’s Archives,” Noun auctioned off one of her most prized paintings, Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait with Loose Hair,” for $1.65 million in 1991 at Christie’s in New York, to create an endowment for the archives. Possessing more than 1,100 manuscript collections that document the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities, the IWA has become a treasure of historical materials for scholars and students to study the subject of women’s history.