A Room of One's Own

Radcliffe College tends to keep its glories hidden.

This attitude, perhaps deriving from the modesty which preserved the college during years of Harvard hostility to educating women, has left any number of current female undergraduates wondering both what Radcliffe does for them and what its existence does for women's education in general. Responses to the first query seem debatable, but the latter question does have answers buried under Radcliffe's apparent coyness.

One of Radcliffe's major contributions to the world of learning is the "Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library for the History of Women," a major research institution as low-key and invisible to the average undergraduate as its century-old mother sometimes is.

The Schlesinger Library is, simply, this country's best collection of documents on the history of American women. Smith College's Sophia Smith collection is the only comparable library, but it does not approach the Schlesinger in either size or variety. Much of the material rejected by conventional book collections because it seemed concerned only with minor facets of social history is now housed at Schlesinger.

Over the years the library has quietly increased its collection with a strong sense of purpose unrewarded by large numbers of library users. With the recent advent of women's studies' relative respectability, the Schlesinger has finally come into its own.

Patricia King, director of the Schlesinger, says records of library usage have not been kept until recently; the growth of the library's popularity, however, is indicated by the increase in visits from 3200 in 1976-77 to 3900 in 1977-78.

King says the library was rarely used until the rise of the women's movement in the late 1960 s. At present, 80 to 85 per cent of the visitors are women, although King, herself a social historian, notes an increase in use by male social history researchers.

There are about 400 document collections in the red brick building in Radcliffe Yard. It is difficult to give an exact number because of the nature of the collections, which range in size from half a file box to 188 linear feet and in subject from a very extensive collection of etiquette and cook books to the letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Betty Friedan.

Like so much else at Radcliffe, the Schlesinger snuck into existence without anybody at Harvard really noticing. In 1943, Maud Wood Park '98, a former women's suffrage advocate and the first president of the League of Women's Voters, gave her collection of documents from the suffrage movement to Radcliffe to form the basis of a women's rights collection.

By 1949, others had added to the new collection, and Radcliffe president Wilbur K. Jordan appointed Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., father of the present historian and then a well known Harvard history professor, to direct the library's advisory board.

Unlike many institutions, which are named in honor of their founders or endowers, the library was named in 1965 for the history professor. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. later said his mother was responsible for convincing the elder Schlesinger of the importance of women's history. Fittingly, the library also bears her name.

The library was not named for its endower because it has no endowment of its own. Radcliffe supports Schlesinger its projects, and a 13 person staff at a cost of approximately $300,000 a year.

King believes the reason this unusual institution was founded without any difficulties is that Harvard didn't know about it, probably." The library originated in a single locked room in Longfellow Hall. Its collection continued to grow, and eventually moved to Byerly Hall. The Schlesinger ended up in its present building in 1967 when the Radcliffe Libary moved to the newly-built Hilles.

King remarks that at the time, the library staff thought they had plenty of "growth space." However, the current building is filling up much more quickly than had been anticipated.

She says space has become a factor in deciding whether to solicit and accept new collections. "Now that we're well enough known that people come to us with material, we have to be more selective than we used to be. We're acutely aware of space problems, and often have to direct the collections elsewhere," she comments. However, she adds, the library has not become crowded enough to necessitate another building.

Methods of solicitation vary. King says the staff uses information from scholars, reads obituaries, writes letters and calls on people. Often, collections come in 20 or 30 years after the initial contact has been made.

An air of cool gentility seems to prevail in the library. Carpeting, large, airy rooms, and nineteenth-century portraits of women signal how far one is from Lamont.

Despite the tea-party atmosphere, though, the library takes itself very seriously as a women's institution. The emphasis of the collection, as befits its origins, is still very much on feminism and specialized in the suffrage movement, professional women, and social welfare. The library also tries to keep its magazine collection comprehensive, with periodicals ranging from the nineteenth-century Godey's Lady's Book, with recipes and fashions to today's Black Belt Woman.

King says the library is trying to improve its collection of minority materials. One of the library's current projects involves interviewing black women for an oral history collection. Researchers have already interviewed over 70 women.

The focus of the library will probably change as the history of women is incorporated into general history, King remarks. Social history will become more important to the Schlesinger. "We're not all that different from other social history libraries," she observes. "They've just been neglecting the women's part in social history" and the Schlesinger tries to compensate for it.

The Schlesinger also has its lighter side. One of the library's most enjoyable sections is the etiquette and cook book collection. The library does not buy any of these books--all are donations. Julia Child, for example, gives to the Schlesinger many of the books she receives as gifts, and will probably bequeath her personal collection. Barbara Solomon, King's predecessor as director of the library, persuaded Widener to donate to Schlesinger its sundry etiquette books. Some useful bits of information contained in the older books include handling servants and curing a husband's baldness.

One of the etiquette book authors, Joseph P. Lyman, was very clear in his sexual attitudes in his Philosophy of Housekeeping, from 1867:

The fate of man is sterner (than that of women). He, with superior strength and superior courage, breasts nature in her ruggedness, and wrings from her silent bosom, with the sweat of his brow the raw material...by which the long contest with death is made possible.

The Schlesinger goes beyond mere prose in its quest for a complete women's collection. A group of suffrage posters hang in the light, uncrowded reading room. One, which indicates that even suffragettes were class conscious, shows a neatly dressed young woman listening to a large, dirty, drunken man in a worker's cloth cap tell her, "Wot do you wimmin want the vote for? You ain't fit for it!" A large banner of the "Harvard League for Women's Suffrage" is prominently displayed nearby.

King's office itself is part of the non-literary side of the collection. A bust of Longfellow by a black woman sculptor graces her bookcase, and a stained glass window by Sarah Lyman Whitman, the first woman stained glass designer, is behindKing's desk.

Most of the documents are stored in a special basement room which can be reached only by elevator. The room is kept between 62 and 65 degrees Farenheit and a constant 50 per cent humidity to protect the documents from disintegration.

The largest collection in the documents room is that of the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company, a nineteenth century New England pharmaceutical firm, founded by a woman, whose successful cure-all elixir may have consisted largely of alcohol. The papers of Sarah Perkins Gilman, after whom the current Radcliffe lecture series is named, are nearby. She was the first woman to write about economic discrimination, King says. To eliminate such discrimination, she advocated kitchenless homes and the subcontracting of all cooking and other kitchen work.

Students who work at the Schlesinger all say the library is unusually relaxed and friendly. The library is open to anyone who has a reason to use it, King says, although half the actual users have Harvard affiliations.

King feels the Library would be an excellent resource for undergraduates should the recent agitation for a women's studies program be realized. She realizes the irony of Harvard's lack of a women's studies curriculum when it has one of the world's best women's collection. even though many undergraduates may not know it.