Schlesinger Library

Today is National Library’s Workers Day — a part of the American Library Association’s 2012 National Library Week (April 8-14).

To celebrate librarians, we are highlighting the papers of Jane Maud Campbell (MC 382) available for research at the Schlesinger Library. The small collection is available entirely online through Harvard’s open collections program.

• Read a biography of Jane Maud Campbell
• See some documents from the collection

Who was Jane Maud Campbell?

Jane Maud Campbell was born in Liverpool, England, one of seven children of George and Jane Cameron Campbell. When she was twelve, the family moved to the United States, and she attended a private school in Richmond, Virginia. Returning to Great Britain, Campbell graduated in 1886 from the Ladies’ College of Edinburgh University and the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy.

After graduation, she returned to the United States and worked as an assistant at the Free Public Library in Newark, New Jersey. In 1902 she was made head of public libraries in Passaic, New Jersey, and became increasingly concerned with the plight of newly arrived immigrants.

In 1910 she left the Passaic Free Library to join the North American Civic League in New York City, where she taught immigrants about naturalization and their prospects for employment as American citizens. In 1913 she was appointed Educational Director for Work with Aliens of the Massachusetts Library Commission, the first such post in the United States.

In 1922 Campbell left Massachusetts to be closer to her family, securing a position as head librarian of the Jones Memorial Library in Lynchburg, Virginia. She died in Lynchburg in April 1947.

Some documents from the collection

Please note: click on any image of a letter to see a larger (more readable) version. To return to this post, click on your browser’s back button.

Document #1: Campbell’s Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy bursar’s report card with course listings such as knitting and darning, cleaning and scullery work, and practical dressmaking (page #359)

1901 photograph of Campbell at the reference desk at the Free Public Library in Newark, New Jersey

Document #2: A handwritten draft letter to the Editor of the Daily News, circa 1912, extolling the praises of the card catalog (pages #688-689)

Document #3: Campbell’s handwritten speech, circa 1913, relating how librarians (“modest people [who] have to be satisfied with a knowledge that if our efforts entitle us to our reward, it is postponed…”) can assist immigrants in becoming library patrons (pages #1139-1140)

Document #4: A typewritten draft letter to Jones Memorial Library in Lynchburg, Virginia with a detailed description of Campbell’s professional career as a librarian (pages #713-716)

While working on collections at the Schlesinger Library, archivists often get to experience the life journey a person or family takes as they go from birth to death with all that happens in between.

One of the most enjoyable items to work with is the love letter. Written from the heart, these letters can tell tales of heartfelt love, worry, or despair. Conducting a search of the Schlesinger Library’s collections in HOLLIS for “love letters” and “courtship” will result in a wide range of collections where these letters reside.

(Doris Stevens Papers)

Here are a sample of some of the lesser known love letters at the Schlesinger Library:

• BOYFRIEND LOSES TO FUTURE HUSBAND
• FIRST HUSBAND/SECOND HUSBAND
• WORDS TO AN ALMOST-FIANCEE ON THE BRINK OF HER ACCEPTANCE
• A FIRST LOVE

Enjoy and have a Happy Valentines’ Day!

Please note: click on any image to see a larger (more readable) version. To return to this post, click on your browser’s back button.

BOYFRIEND LOSES TO FUTURE HUSBAND
(Miriam Jay Wurts Andrus Papers)

Miriam Jay Wurts was a young woman in the summer of 1932 when she took a vacation with her best friend to a dude ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There she met E. Cowles Andrus, an up-and-coming medical doctor who was teaching at John Hopkins University. In this letter, written August 24, 1932, Miriam’s most persistent boyfriend, Thornton “Floyd” Lorentzen, petulantly states, “So the doctor is interesting and attractive? I’m terribly jealous. I hope he is married and has a flock of kids. I think I even hate him.” Miriam became engaged to Andrus in December of that year, and the two were married June 1933.

FIRST HUSBAND/SECOND HUSBAND
(Doris Stevens Papers)

Suffragist and international women’s rights advocate, Doris Stevens, was lucky enough to find love twice in her life. From 1921-1929 she was married to lawyer Dudley Field Malone. In 1935 she married journalist Jonathan Mitchell, whom she had known for over ten years. Both men were passionate in expressing their feelings through their letters to Stevens.

Dudley Field Malone

Malone closed this letter dated July 3, 1918, with this heartfelt statement: “I have so passionately longed for you yesterday and to-day… as if it had been weeks since I held you warm and close in my arms. But you, wonderful blessed, are so given by God Himself to me that I love you, love you, love you with a love and passion such as in my Irish boy-heart, I never even dreamed in all the long years gone by and I will love you, my own sweetness, with the deepest love and constant devotion.”

Jonathan Mitchell

In this letter from February 6, 1928 (a year before her divorce to Malone was finalized), Mitchell shows his immense love and pride for Stevens’s accomplishments as an international women’s rights advocate:
“I know what a speech it will be. I know the stuff that’s in you. You’ll bring tears and make hearts pound against the ribs, and make people cheer and yell in storms of emotions. Tomorrow night every girl in the new world will have reason to be grateful you were born and lived. Nothing as exciting as this I guess has ever happened in my life. Nothing except knowing and loving you, and this is a beautiful part of you.”

WORDS TO AN ALMOST-FIANCEE ON THE BRINK OF HER ACCEPTANCE
(Nolen Family Papers)

City planner and landscape architect John Nolen met his future wife, Barbara Schatte in 1889 at a meeting of a Sunday reading group. They were engaged to be married October 1894, right around the time John wrote this letter to his future wife: “Each day makes me realize that I didn’t know half the value of the love I sought just two weeks ago to-night… I love you with my whole heart, and long for your love in return. I realize that it is right for you to have time to think it over, and I do not want to do anything to unduly influence you, but if you find that your heart is mine, I will be the happiest man in the world.”

A FIRST LOVE
(Louise Walker McCannel Papers)

Louise Walker, whose grandfather’s art collection started the well-known Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a student at Smith College when she started a correspondence with John Savage, a friend of her brother. The two exchanged letters, sometimes daily, from 1935-1938. Savage hoped to marry Louise, but she had reservations that being someone’s wife would constrict her freedom and ruin what love remained.

In this letter dated February 11, 1938, Savage writes to Louise knowing she will receive his letter on Valentine’s Day. Although reserved in his prose, he proves he still wants a relationship, despite her obvious hesitations:
“For the time being, won’t you be my Valentine (F&W* says this means sweetheart).“

* Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia

Out of the blue, in March, came a call from the great-granddaughter of Edna Lamprey Stantial. Stantial was for many years archivist of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her name is familiar to those who study that era, but there is no significant collection of her papers anywhere.  That made the answer to the question of whether Schlesinger Library would be interested in Stantial’s papers easy – yes!

When the cartons arrived in June, it became clear just what a gift—to the library and to scholarship—the Stantial papers are.  There are dozens of letters among the leading American suffragists, including Alice Stone Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Maud Wood Park (Radcliffe ’98), whose gift in 1943 of women’s materials to her alma mater became the nucleus of the Women’s Archives, later the Schlesinger Library. Additionally, the collection contains articles, photographs, clippings, and rare ephemera.

Most importantly, the papers continue the story of the struggle for women’s rights into the decades beyond the passage of the 19^th amendment, offering  insight into the issues with which women wrestled, the strategies they employed, and the relationships they forged into the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.

Among the exciting finds in the Stantial papers are these stirring words to “Woman’s America,” sung to the tune of “America” as well as programs for suffrage pageants and parades, like this one in Connecticut in 1914. The programs often included photographs of the movement’s leaders with their children, making the point that they were young, beautiful, married, and mothers.

While the collection is closed until processed, general information is available from the HOLLIS record at http://tinyurl.com/3rca72q .

Lyrics to Woman's America

Mrs. Thomas Hepburn, President of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and Chairman of the Parade Committee

Radcliffe student carrying on in Hopper’s footsteps with a later version of the Mark computer

Grace Murray Hopper (“Amazing Grace”) was interviewed in Schlesinger Library’s Women in the Federal Government Oral History Project. Hopper relates in the interview that as a child she loved taking things like clocks apart and trying to put them back together. She went on to get her PhD from Yale in 1934 and to teach mathematics at Vassar until 1943, when, wanting to make a direct contribution to the war effort, she joined the Naval Reserve. She had a short bit of training—“thirty days to learn how to take orders, and thirty days to learn how to give orders.” Hopper was then commissioned and sent to Harvard to work with Commander Howard Aiken, a pioneer in computing and the conceptual designer behind Mark I, the first large-scale digital computer. (A piece of it is on display in the Science Center.) There were no distinctions as to which jobs were for men and which for women. Hopper became a programmer. In 1949, she went to work for Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and worked on designing UNIVAC. The company was in an old mill building with a junkyard on one side and a graveyard on the other, and the talk was “if UNIVAC didn’t work, we’d throw it out one side and we’d jump out the other.” Hopper stayed with the company until 1971. Her memo “Layette for a Computer,” described the software that should come with the delivery of a computer. She was involved in the development of FLOW-MATIC, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), and many other computer languages and compilers. In 1966 she retired from the Naval Reserve, but was recalled a year later for six months. Six months became many years, and she worked for the Naval Data Automation Command until 1986, finally retiring as a Rear Admiral. In 1969 she received the first Computer Science Man-of-the-Year Award. The Navy has a guided missile destroyer named for her, the USS Hopper, commissioned in 1997.

One of the most powerful documents to come across the Schlesinger Library conservation bench is this single-leaf manuscript from the recently processed Additional Papers of the Poor Family. The document is the manumission for “Elisabeth, a negro woman,” dated 1778. It has been folded into eighths, resulting in some wear and loss of ink along the folds. The verso of the document shows some calculations, possibly relating to the terms of the manumission, and a faded notation, “Negro Bet” – most likely Elisabeth’s diminutive name. It is easy to imagine that this important document was kept carefully in a drawer or wooden box, which could explain the square of discoloration on the back. Conservation treatment will entail: testing the ink for solubility; careful washing; and subtle mending so that the document can be handled safely, without further loss to the text. This manumission has held together for over 200 years and as stewards of this historical document, it is the Library’s job to see that it lasts even longer to convey its powerful message for generations to come.

Transcript of the manumission text:
These certify, whome it doth or may concern: that in consequence of thirty eight pound, seven shilling and six pence in continental bills & twelves weeks labour in the winter season, rec’d of Elisabeth a negro woman wich I lately bo’t of Charls Putman have thot fit by & with the advice & concent of the selectmen of Plainfield: to emancipate & make free the said Elisabeth & I do hereby for my self my heirs & [assigns?] make free set at liberty & forever discharge the said Elisabeth from serving me or my heirs &cetera. But it is to be understood that I gave to said Putman my note of hand for one hundred Spanish [ ?] milled silver dollers & that in case said Putman shall obtain more of me on said note than the consideration above mentioned as he now refuses to receive continental money in pament therefor in that case said Elisabeth is to make good all damages that I shall sustain on that account.
In testimony whereof I have hearunto set my hand and seal: done in Plainfield this 28th day of September 1778
-Sam’l Fox

Text of the manumission

The reverse side of the manumission showing calculations and text "Negro Bet"

This is Schlesinger Library’s first post.