To celebrate Women's History Month, we offer stories of four twentieth-century women: Georgie Anne Geyer, Hazel MacDonald, Kay Ashton Stevens, and Emily Hahn. Alert archivists discovered Hazel MacDonald and Kay Ashton Stevens' papers when processing their husbands' records. Emily Hahn's papers were found in her brother-in-law's, and Georgie Anne Geyer's are part of a large collection, the Field Enterprise Records.
Their papers reveal stories of personal and professional struggle in a context of gender inequality that is recognizable, if not experienced in the same way by most women today. Three women--MacDonald, Stevens, and Hahn--made their marks before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (1963) or co-founded NOW (1966), two defining moments in the modern women's movement in the United States. All four women supported themselves long before employers imagined, much less worried about, sex discrimination, as documents here reveal with startling clarity. Far from criminal, segregation and subordination based on gender ordered the worlds of business and politics. More Americans then than now shared the idea that sexual difference privileged women. It kept them off juries and sheltered them from the rigors of the workplace and market competition. And of course, special treatment protected women from independent wealth and from wielding much political power.
Although the first successful sex discrimination case (argued by a very young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1971) was still in the future, papers on display here foreshadow later legal and social battles over equal treatment. All four women faced institutional and social obstacles that most women today will not.
Related Public Programs
Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl's Best Friend and Other Things You May Not Know about American History
Saturday, March 7, 11 am
SPEAKER: Linda K. Kerber, The University of Iowa
Collecting Histories: Preserving and Cultivating African American and Women's Histories
Saturday, March 14 11:00 am
PANELISTS: Christine Stansell, University of Chicago (moderator); Martha Briggs, The Newberry Library; Tamar Evangelistia-Dougherty, Black Metropolis Research Consortium; Mary Ann Johnson, Chicago Area Women's History Council
Object List
Georgie Anne Geyer
"Our Man at the Summit is a Girl," Editor and Publisher, December 27, 1969
Business card, ca. 1968
Georgie Anne Geyer to Milton Freudenheim, October 29, 1968
Staff photo, Chicago Daily News, ca. 1974
Newberry Library: Midwest MS Field Enterprises
Gift of Field Enterprises via Herman Kogan, 1984
Hazel MacDonald
"I'll See You at the Disaster," Chicago Daily Times, January 19, 1940
"Hazel at Front Sees Efficient Death Machine," Chicago Daily Times, January 19, 1940
Hazel MacDonald, US passports; one open to March 1, 1940
Hazel MacDonald, photograph, 1920s
Hazel MacDonald, photograph as war correspondent in military uniform, ca. 1940
Exhibitor's press book for the film "After the Show," 1921
Newberry Library: Midwest MS MacDonald
Gift of Hazel MacDonald, 1963
Kay Ashton Stevens
Kay Ashton Stevens, hand-tinted photograph, 1920s
Kay Ashton Stevens, publicity photograph from WBBM radio program, "Chats Across the Table," 1942
Sterling "Red" Quinlan to Kay Ashton Stevens, 1953
Kay Ashton Stevens vs. the American Broadcasting Company and Tom Duggan, suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court, May 25,
1953
"The Kay Ashton-Stevens Show," WBBM radio program on reel-to-reel audiotape, November 7, 1952
"Free for All," WBKB television program on reel-to-reel audiotape, May 24, 1953
Newberry Library: Midwest MS Stevens K
Bequest of Kay Ashton Stevens, 1982
Emily Hahn
Emily Hahn to Mitchell Dawson and family, August 8, 1942
Emily Hahn to Mitchell Dawson, January 15, 1944
Advertisement for Hahn's book, Times and Places, in Book World, 1970
Emily Hahn, photograph, 1940s
Emily Hahn, photograph of Hahn in China with daughter Carola, 1940s
Newberry Library: Midwest MS Mitchell Dawson
Gift of Hilary Beckett Schlessiger, Jill Metzger, and Gregory Dawson, 1988