“Women in the 1950s and 1960s thought they were the first–the first woman lawyers, the first woman doctors, and the first woman journalists,” says historian Rima Lunin Schultz, coeditor of a new biographical dictionary, Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990. But the precedent was set generations earlier. “They had been completely disconnected from early-19th-century history.”
“Women played a very strong reform role in society. They wanted to humanize capitalism. They wanted to protect children and women. They wanted the vote. Even privileged women were fighting for an expansion of democracy.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The idea for the book, published by Indiana University Press and cosponsored by UIC’s Center for Research on Women and Gender, was launched by the Chicago Area Women’s History Conference. The CAWHC was founded in 1971 as a research and support group for scholars “who were doing this kind of historical research but didn’t get a lot of support as students in graduate schools or as teachers,” says Schultz.
Sometimes, as with the Chinese, Mexican, and Greek communities, the history was too recent to have been written down, so they sent researchers who spoke the language into the community to record oral histories. Schultz says a Mexican-American UIC undergrad was dismayed by the lack of Latina representation on the original list and offered to canvass the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities, where she uncovered new subjects like 1970s-era Chicana activist Maria del Jesus Saucedo, social worker Maria Diaz Martinez, and singer and cultural activist Angelina Moreno Rico.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), cofounded by Evanston resident Frances Willard in 1874, was another powerful turn-of-the-century force. In addition to agitating against drink, the nationwide group also supported prison reform, women’s suffrage, and the abolition of prostitution. Willard, a socialist, tended to be more radical than millions of her followers, supporting labor and legal reform. “Women were married to men in these hopeless conditions,” says Schultz. “Drinking was part of a despair that you could not simply root out by having people take a religious pledge not to drink. You really had to attack the large social problems people found themselves in.”
Williams’s case typifies one of the book’s recurring themes: women creating their own institutions after being barred from those that already exist. Physician Mary Harris Thompson, for example, founded Woman’s Hospital Medical College as a partner to her Chicago Hospital for Women and Children in 1895 because Chicago Medical College (later Northwestern Medical School) wouldn’t admit women. Lawyer Myra Colby Bradwell was denied admission to the Illinois Bar Association in 1869 because she was a woman. She challenged the law, taking her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. After she lost, she started the Chicago Legal News, where she covered legal issues and wrote editorials about women’s suffrage. “Even though she couldn’t practice, she used those skills and training to do something else,” says Hast. (Bradwell was finally admitted to the Illinois bar in 1890.)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
