Not Tantamount To Rarity: Fifty Years of Collecting

Material for the study of women is included in many sections of the Department guide and this exhibit. Holdings include personal papers and oral history interviews of and about women in a variety of walks of life.
Other sources include: the Children's Book Collection, part of which illustrates women's cultural roles and daily life; the Sadleir collection, which contains published work of many women writers in the 19th century and which continues to be supplemented with their manuscripts, letters, and diaries; and the Japanese American Research Project, which includes sociological surveys of Issei, Nisei, and Sansei women.

Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs, 1813 - 1897. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by herself. Edited by L. Maria Child. Boston: Pub. for the author, 1861. Special Collections SRLF

As might be imagined, this work shown here in its first edition is one of the most reprinted and more needed and requested works for Women's Studies. It forms a part of the Dept.'s Spingarn Collection. Other examples from the collection are shown throughout the exhibit.

Florence Yoch. Letter to Mrs. Francis [Myrtle Shepherd Francis]. Los Angeles, March 18, 1916. In: Shepherd, Theodosia Burr. Papers, ca. 1900 - 1940. Collection 123. Box 1
California architect Myron Hunt noted in his introduction to Winifred Starr Dobyns's California Gardens (1931) the number of women working as landscape architects. This letterhead shows that Florence Yoch established her practice early in downtown Los Angeles.
The first address printed on her writing paper was in the Hollinger Building but is crossed out to add the address of the I. H. Van Nuys Building, a fashionable office building of the time, designed by Morgan and Walls, architects, 1911. She is writing to Myrtle Shepherd Francis, Theodosia Burr Shepherd's daughter, who carried on her mother's business in Ventura, as "Large Growers of Small Seeds." Shepherd specialized in California native plants, particularly in the saving and propagating of the Matilija poppy.

Anaïs Nin. "Mon Journal and notebook. From October 20, 1931 to Feb. 1, 1932. Book II -- June. Louveciennes [Paris] and Switzerland." 1931 - 1932. Holograph entries in purchased bound volume with tipped in clippings, photographs laid in, etc. In: Nin, Anaïs, 1903 - 1977. Papers, ca. 1910 - 1977. Collection 2066. Box 16

The writer Anaïs Nin lived in Paris with her husband Hugo Guiler (Ian Hugo) in the 1930s and there fell in love with Henry Miller and with his then wife June Mansfield Miller. The relationship with June was probably not consummated, but June appeared in these diaries and in Nin's work. Oddly, since most persons at that time attempted to hide their same sex relationships from others, Nin seems to have exaggerated her physical relationship with June Miller (who did have physical lesbian relationships) -- both at the time of writing the diaries in the 1930s and then later when rearranging them for publication. When Nin met June, she wrote: "Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt distinctly that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. [Henry] Miller faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness" [from v.32].
Nin was revered especially by women readers during the first phases of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s until her death. Her husband, Rupert Pole, who edited Henry & June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), wrote in the UCLA copy: "Finally the real story [of] the missing Anaïs -- the passionate woman."

U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Office memorandum [sample copy of FBI surveillance sheets of Alice McGrath, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act]. November 21, 1952. In: McGrath, Alice Greenfield, 1917 - . Papers, 1943 - 1990. Collection 1490. Box 2 f.3
In addition to these for Alice McGrath, there is a collection given by Los Angeles Communist party leader Dorothy Healey. Ms. McGrath was pleased that the FBI noted: "Subject has no known weaknesses." This is to indicate there was no way the FBI could readily "blackmail" or coerce her. But reading further in these notes, the FBI gives a way to embarrass her husband at that time, poet and educator Thomas McGrath, who was "reported to be somewhat of an intellectual and idealist." The "outline of approach" to him is blacked out by law (since not pertaining directly to Alice McGrath.) Another sheet states "In 1944 she was a member of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, a Communist front group," which it was not, although she was a communist.
Alice McGrath was interviewed by the UCLA Oral History Program.

Dorothy Healey. Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party. By Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Special Collections SRLF

Like McGrath, Healey was an activist in the Communist Party. Healey began earlier and remained longer than did McGrath, although Healey broke with the Party after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969. She remained a Marxist. She drew upon her reminiscences in her UCLA Oral History when writing this volume, completed after her death by Isserman. Healey gave copies of her FBI surveillance files to UCLA and elsewhere; her papers were purchased by California State University Long Beach.

Travel & Exploration
References Women
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