Author: Kirsten Delegard

grand jury abortion indictment, theresa solie

“An Illegal Operation”: The Case of Theresa Solie, part 2

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 24, 2014 by Derek Waller

Today’s guest blogger is Derek Waller, a senior from St. Olaf College who interned with the Historyapolis Project for his January term. A history major with a minor in gender studies, Waller explores the history of abortion in Minneapolis in this two-part post.

Shortly after Theresa Solie died from a botched abortion, the Minneapolis Tribune reported “2 Face Arraignment In Illegal Operation.” An inconspicuous piece on page 20, the article gave the names and addresses of the doctor and Martin Schmidt, reporting that the men were put on trial for performing the operation. The doctor, R.J.C. Brown, was an African-American who had operated a small practice in the Near North side for over a decade.

The average cost of an abortion in the 1930s was $67; Solie paid less than half that amount for her abortion. This probably indicates that Brown was catering to a less affluent group of women. We have no way to know whether he specialized in abortions or merely began to offer this service as a way for making up for the income that many physicians lost in the economic collapse of the Great Depression.

At the trial, Dr. Brown was represented by Lena Olive Smith, a prominent civil rights pioneer and Minnesota’s first female African-American attorney. Smith called on only two witnesses at the trial, Dorothy Johnson and Marie Schmidt. Dorothy, a friend of Theresa’s, testified that she was working as a prostitute, and Mrs. Schmidt’s testimony supported this claim. She said that Theresa was rarely home in the evening, and was unemployed. Mrs. Schmidt testified further that Theresa had received a package with medication to induce an abortion. However, the court refused to admit the pillbox as evidence, which was found among Theresa’s belongings. At every turn during the trial, the court ruled against Brown and Schmidt, admitting all the testimony for the prosecution while blocking evidence and testimony from the defense.

The court charged Brown and Schmidt with first degree manslaughter, sentencing both to prison. Schmidt was released after a year, while Brown served nearly 10 years; racism was almost certainly a factor in this outcome. Whether either of these men were responsible for Theresa’s death, we will likely never know. What does seem likely is that Theresa was a sex worker. No records of employment or testimony from an employer surfaced during the trial. Under desperate circumstances, Theresa had few connections in Minneapolis, and did not really have other options. Given the economic climate of 1938, many women ended up working as sex workers. Without the money or support system to raise a child, Theresa had to terminate her pregnancy. An unregulated and non-standardized practice in 1938, abortion was more likely to lead to death than it is today.  The state found two men to blame for Theresa’s death, but did not recognize the material circumstances that caused it.

Thanks to William Mitchell law professor Ann Juergens, who shared this case and her other research on Lena Olive Smith with Historyapolis.

 

photo for solie abortion post, 6th avenue north and 7th avenue north, 1936, from the streetcar museum

“An Illegal Operation”: The Case of Theresa Solie

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 24, 2014 by Derek Waller

Today’s guest blogger is Derek Waller, a senior from St. Olaf College who interned with the Historyapolis Project for his January term. A history major with a minor in gender studies, Waller explores the history of abortion in Minneapolis in this two-part post.

When Theresa Solie arrived in Minneapolis in 1938, she hoped to find more opportunities than she had in her hometown of Cornell, Wisconsin. A high school graduate with a degree from a business college in Wausaw, Theresa had strong credentials for a young woman seeking employment.

But given the economic climate of the time, it’s not surprising that Theresa was unable to put her training to use. In 1938, the city was still mired in the Great Depression. The previous winter had been miserable; only a huge infusion of federal aid had kept the community afloat. Labor conflicts, escalating racial tensions and intensifying Anti-Semitism had fed the dark mood of the city.

During her first few weeks in the city, Theresa stayed with a distant relative, Clara Leines. She then found domestic work with various families around the near North side, which meant that she had food and a place to stay. Eventually, she got a job as a waitress and began renting her own room. At least this is the story she told Clara.

A year later, Theresa died a few days after undergoing an illegal abortion. On her deathbed, she identified the doctor who had performed the procedure. She also reported that her landlord, Mr. Martin Schmidt, gave her $25 to pay for the procedure. When a policewoman questioned her further, she said that Schmidt was also responsible for her pregnancy.

Abortion had been outlawed in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century. The procedure was legalized in 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision. Solie died from a botched termination in the middle of this long century. The safety of illegal abortions varied according to the race and class of the patient. And from all indications Solie had no economic resources and little in the way of family support.

The criminalization of abortions never stopped women from seeing this procedure. Particularly during the Depression, women were desperate to control their fertility. Birth control became widely accepted. And a growing number of women sought abortions. The economic environment forced committed couples to delay marriage and put off child-bearing. Some families placed their children in orphanages, since they had money for neither food nor clothing. An unplanned pregnancy could bring economic catastrophe to a single woman.

Every city had doctors—like Dr. R.J.C. Brown—who were known to perform this procedure. In Minneapolis, Brown was probably well-known as an abortion provider, maintaining an office on 6th Avenue North, a main thoroughfare shown in this photo from 1936. This section of the near North side was known for its tippling houses and shabby brothels, a magnet for those seeking cheap liquor and illicit sex.

Despite the shifting landscape of reproductive rights, abortion was still considered a serious crime with severe legal consequences for doctors. And when Solie died, the state pressed charges against the doctor and Schmidt. When the defendants appealed for a retrial, the case went before the Minnesota Supreme Court nearly a year after Theresa’s death. The testimony before the court and the aftermath of court’s decision complicated Theresa’s story, shedding light onto a darker history that Minneapolitans of the time preferred to overlook.

This 1936 photo is of the intersection of 6th Avenue North and 7th Avenue in Minneapolis. It comes from the Streetcar Museum via the Digital Public Library of America. Thanks to William Mitchell law professor Ann Juergens, who shared this case and her other research on Lena Olive Smith with Historyapolis.

 

plan for lake street elevation, 1938, from the Minneapolis city archives

Lake Calhoun Expressway

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 9, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard

More dispatches from the Minneapolis City Archives. This watercolor from 1938 shows a proposal to elevate Lake Street as it runs along Lake Calhoun in front of the Calhoun Beach Club. If this plan had been realized, the intersection of Lake Street and Excelsior Boulevard would have become a highway cloverleaf, with high speed entrance and exit ramps.

The city never moved forward on this plan. Lake Street remained a ground level and was slowed by the installation of regular traffic lights. But I’m thinking that this never-realized plan might have still influenced the development of this area. Lake Street drives like a high-speed thruway. And the stretch shown here is one of the most dangerous areas in the city for pedestrians. In recent months, a woman was killed while she was trying to cross the road.

Watercolor from the Minneapolis City Archives, City Hall.

oak lake park, august 5, 1936, from city archives, before redevelopment

Images from Oak Lake Park

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 8, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard

Yesterday I wrote about the lost neighborhood of Oak Lake Park and the unexplored terrain of the Minneapolis City Archives. In my first foray into the city’s attic, as I have come to think of it, I discovered a thick scrapbook of photos collection by an employee in the city planning department. It contains snapshots from all the redevelopment projects undertaken in the 1930s, when the city launched what would stretch into a three decade campaign to eliminate “blight” from the community. The Near North Side–Oak Lake Park and the area that would become Sumner Field Homes– was the first target of this effort. The most racially mixed corner of the city at the time, this area of once-spectacular Victorian homes had deteriorated into what observers of the time viewed as an intolerable slum.

oak lake park, family on stoop, 1936, from city archives

Family on stoop, Oak Lake Park, 1936.

The corner of Sixth and Lyndale evolved from a Jewish commercial district at the beginning of the twentieth century to a commercial center for new African American migrants to the city by the 1920s. By the time Gordon Parks was playing the piano along the Avenue, this neighborhood was a rough area, known for its tippling houses, pool halls, brothels, poor sanitation services and crime.  It’s been described in vivid terms by Parks, journalist Harrison Salisbury, activist Nelson Peery and social investigators who were horrified by the vice and filth they encountered. But it was the subject of little photography. Which is what makes this set of photographs invaluable. Right before the bulldozers moved in, this city employee documented Oak Lake Park in its twilight moments and then collected the images into a brag book that contains hundreds of black-and-white snapshots.

 

Oak lake park redevelopment map, city archives, fixed, 4-6-2014

Lost neighborhoods and forgotten archives

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 7, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard

It’s map Monday.  Today we have a map from the Minneapolis City Archives, a little known repository of our community history.

This map shows plans to destroy Oak Lake Park,  an upscale Victorian neighborhood that had its glory years when Minneapolis was in its infancy. Today there is no trace of its curving streets and gingerbread-ornamented wooden homes. This diagram from the 1930s illuminates how the once-wealthy subdivision would soon be bulldozed to make way for a new farmer’s market on the edge of downtown.

This plan is one of the thousands of treasures stored in the clock tower of our Romanesque-style City Hall. Few Minneapolitans are aware that a nineteenth century library looms above downtown, squeezed into a narrow space above the city offices and  below the city hall clock. This is the attic of our city government. Crammed into this space is a century of records; it’s an eclectic collection of correspondence, ledgers, maps, surveys and photos that few researchers have examined.

M0146, minneapolis city hall soon after completion, hclib photo collection

Minneapolis City Hall shortly after its completion. From the Minneapolis photo collection, Hennepin County Central Library.

These records are an invaluable community legacy. Far more than the official record of city government, these holdings make it possible to see the dark complexity of our community and its struggles as it developed. Its archival cartons and map drawers hold glimpses of the past. We can see grandiose and unrealized redevelopment plans. We can document people and activities that were never recorded in any official histories, published documents or even newspaper reports.

M2017, TERRITORIAL RECORDS STORED ON THE 4TH FLOOR OF THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY HALL, 1936, tribune, hclib

Records on the fourth floor of Minneapolis City Hall, 1936. Photo is from the Minneapolis photo collection, Hennepin County Special Collections.

For the rest of this month, Historyapolis is going to bring you some of the highlights from this collection. Only a handful of people are familiar with these holdings, which should be recognized as an important community asset.

The Minneapolis City Archives are particularly critical for understanding our community’s history of urban redevelopment, which started, in earnest, with Oak Lake Park. When it was first developed in the 1870s, this neighborhood was home to some of the city’s most affluent residents. These were not the grand mansions of Park Avenue but rather than homes of successful professionals, like Dr. Augustus Harrison Salisbury, whose grandson Harrison Salisbury would grow up to become a world-famous foreign correspondent.

Residents of the leafy subdivision established the city’s first neighborhood association, which built a small bandstand next to the tiny Oak Lake. And they created the city’s second park, after Murphy Square. But the idyllic neighborhood was quickly overwhelmed by the growing city. Bordered by a growing network of railroads and an increasingly filthy Bassett Creek, Oak Lake Park rapidly fell from grace. People with means were pulled east by Loring Park, which had been designed in the 1880s by nationally-renowned landscape architect Horace Cleveland.  By the first decade of the twentieth century, the neighborhood on the edge of downtown had become, in the words of Harrison Salisbury, “the most alien corner of that most Middle Western city of Minneapolis.”

Salisbury grew up in his grandfather’s house at 107 Royalston Avenue, when the neighborhood had lost the patina of prosperity. The budding journalist loved the racial and economic diversity of the Near North Side, later reflecting that this environment prepared him perfectly for his career as a foreign correspondent, especially his years in Soviet Russia. The corner of Sixth and Lyndale—shown on the bottom left of this map—was the center for Eastern-European Jewish life in the city while Salisbury was a boy. By the time he was in high school, the center of gravity for Jews had shifted north. This corner became the commercial and entertainment hub for the growing African American community in the city.

By the 1930s, the city had condemned Oak Lake Park as a slum. This neighborhood was the first target of a three-decade long urban renewal campaign in Minneapolis that would obliterate much of the city’s historic streetscape. Think about Oak Lake next time you visit the downtown Farmer’s Market. It lies buried under the concrete expanse, invisible to modern view.

minneapolis maternity hospital 2, no date, mhs

“The Duty of Not Keeping Silent”: Martha Ripley and Minneapolis Maternity Hospital

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 24, 2014 by Jacqueline deVries

Guest blogger today is Jacqueline deVries, Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Augsburg College. deVries is writing a book on women’s health care in Britain and its empire.

To modern eyes, there is nothing revolutionary about this sweet image of babies in nursery baskets. But these babies were wards of the Minneapolis Maternity Hospital, a radical institution that defied many social conventions of its time when it was founded by activist physician Dr. Martha G. Ripley in 1887.

Long before the Boston Women’s Health Collective published its path-breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1971, Ripley was practicing feminist medicine. She established the Minneapolis Maternity Hospital for “the confinement of married women who are without mean or suitable abode and care at the time of child-birth” and “girls who have previously borne a good character, but who, under promise of marriage, have been led astray.” In other words, Ripley cared for the women on the margins of Minneapolis society, working to ensure safe and healthy childbirths for women who were largely ignored by the mainstream medical community.

Martha Ripley (1843-1912) moved to Minneapolis in 1883 after her husband was injured and lost his managerial job in a Massachusetts’ textile mill and she became the sole breadwinner for their three daughters.

Feminist politics and women’s medicine were Ripley’s twin passions. Shortly after her arrival in Minneapolis, Ripley was elected president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association, a new affiliate of the American Women Suffrage Association (AWSA) led by Ripley’s Massachusetts friends, Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone.  Drawing on her Boston connections, she brought the seventeenth annual convention of the AWSA to Minneapolis in 1885.

Ripley’s medical career had begun when she volunteered as a nurse in Lawrence, Massachusetts, providing palliative treatment to women textile workers and their families. After an infant died in her care, she vowed to gain more expertise.  Inspired by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman medical doctor in the United States and sister of family friend, Henry B. Blackwell, she enrolled at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), one of the few medical schools in the United States that accepted women.

Popular attitudes toward professional medicine were not uniformly positive in the nineteenth century.  Allopathic medicine – the drug-based treatment we now equate with medicine — competed with other theories of healing.  Homeopathic medicine, an approach that emphasized the use of herbs, regular bathing, good ventilation, daily exercise, and a vegetarian diet, was taught by many of the nation’s medical schools, including BUSM.  Homeopathy appealed to women as traditional healers — a third of Ripley’s graduating class were women.

She brought a sense of activism to her medical work. Brushing aside Victorian conventions, she tackled “delicate subjects” like prostitution and the age of consent, set at ten years of age in 1858 when Minnesota became a state.  She dismissed the popular belief that men needed sexual intercourse for health.  And she braved criticism by providing medical services to unwed mothers. Her unfashionably short haircut (picture) signaled her independent attitude.

martha ripley, 1900 hclib

Recognizing a need for better maternity services in Minneapolis, she rented a small house on Fifteenth Street and hired a nurse in 1886.  Within a year, the Maternity Hospital was incorporated as a homeopathic lying-in hospital. By 1896, the hospital moved to a five-acre tract at the corner of Western and Penn Avenue North, pictured here.

minneapolis maternity hospital 1, ripley, from mhs

The Maternity Hospital’s track record was remarkably successful.  Dr. Ripley insisted on aseptic practices and a cottage system (picture) in which babies were cared for in domestic settings.  Not one child was lost during actual birth in the first eleven years, and for the decade ending in 1937 the maternal death rate was 1.35 per thousand as compared to a state-wide average of 4.5.

A new building for the Maternity Hospital was constructed shortly after Ripley’s death in 1912. This building still stands at 2215 Western Avenue, though the hospital was shuttered in 1956. A bronze memorial plaque in her honor was dedicated in the State Capitol rotunda in 1939.

Notes:  Material for this post is taken from Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth:  Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Harvard, 1992), Mary Wittenbreer, A Woman’s Woman / A Woman’s Physician:  The Life and Career of Dr. Martha G. Ripley (M.A. Thesis, Hamline University, 1999), and Winton U. Solberg, “Martha G. Ripley:  Pioneer Doctor and Social Reformer,” Minnesota History 39:1 (Spring 1964): 1-17.

The photo of Martha Ripley is from the Minneapolis photo collection at Hennepin County Special Collections. The photos of the Minneapolis Maternity Hospital are from the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.

copy desk, star and tribune, photo 1, side 1

The Old Copy Desk of the Star and Tribune

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 3, 2014 by Kirsten Delegard

News that local businessman Glen Taylor would like to buy the Star Tribune has many Minnesotans breathing easier. Taylor has declared that he believes the newspaper to be an important community institution. And he thinks that local ownership is important to ensuring that the newspaper make the decisions and investments it needs to remain viable and vigorous as a media organization in the future.

This critical local institution has a storied history and a national significance. The Cowles family purchased the Star in 1935. The family used the former Non Partisan League newspaper as the base for a national media empire that had grown to 26 magazines and several television stations by 1998, when the Star Tribune was sold to the McClatchy Company for a record-breaking 1.2 billion dollars. According to the city planning department, which recently studied the architectural significance of the Star Tribune building in light of plans for its demolition for a new stadium, the Cowles family ” revolutionized how Minneapolitans produced and viewed print media. They believed in impartiality, limiting opinions to the editorial page, and presenting diverse views. They also printed reader’s opposing views and they prominently corrected errors. As commonplace as it seems today, these innovations were revolutionary for Minneapolis at that time. News in the 1920s was regularly partisan and frequently scandalous.”

The report continues: “Through newspaper consolidation, journalistic ethics, and sound business practices the Cowles family reversed this disturbing trend in an extremely rapid manner, consolidating Minneapolis’ three largest newspapers in less than six years. Their leadership was recognized nationally. Between 1939 and 1968, Star (as the Journal was then known after its merger) and Tribune employees won 1,500 awards, to include four Pulitzer prizes, under the new leadership of the Cowles family. Time magazine even named the Tribune one of the nation’s top ten daily newspapers in 1964.”

This photo shows the old copy desk of the Star and Tribune. The date on the back reads 1949, though I would guess that it actually was taken earlier. In 1949, the Cowles family did a major expansion and renovation of the building on Portland Avenue. I’m wondering whether this photo was published at that time, to show how far the newspaper had come since the more primitive days of the 1930s. Or maybe it’s just that print journalists are usually delayed a decade, fashion-wise.

Photo is from the newspaper morgue files at Hennepin County Special Collections. It was located and digitized by Rita Yeada, fantastic citizen-researcher for Historyapolis. Report is from the Heritage Preservation Commission, city of Minneapolis.

 

eloise butler 80thbday

Working from the Margins: Eloise Butler and Her Wildflower Garden

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published April 2, 2014 by Sara Strozok

Guest blogger today is Sara Strzok, a medical writer and editor based in Minneapolis.

Like so many women of her era, Eloise Butler (1851-1933) worked on the margins – in her case, both socially and geographically – to get what she wanted.  In 1907, she joined the ranks of Minneapolis Park Board visionaries like Theodore Wirth and Charles Loring when she saw the fruition of her plan to create and preserve the first wildflower garden in the nation. What’s now called the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Native Bird Sanctuary  is a microcosm of Minnesota meadow, hills and bog flora at what was then the edge of town. Her teaching career and her campaign for this invaluable wild space at the margins of the city foreshadow the concerns of educators and environmentalists today.

Though a keen and observant scientist who made significant contributions to the field of natural history (three species of algae she discovered are named in her honor), barriers common to women in academia at the time kept her from advanced training and a career as a research scientist.  Instead, she supported herself through teaching.  As Butler pointed out in a brief autobiographical sketch, “at that time and place no other career than teaching was thought of for a studious girl.” A native of Maine, Butler was educated at teacher colleges in the east and moved west with her family to teach in Indiana.  She moved on her own to Minneapolis when the well-paid teaching positions in modern, comfortable  buildings advertised by the growing city appealed to her more than the onerous life of a one-room schoolhouse teacher. She taught at several schools, including Central and South high schools.

During her 38-year career, she coped with the same issues that face Minneapolis educators today. Overcrowding forced schools to use stairwells as makeshift classrooms; school days were conducted in shifts while the school board debated building new facilities.  Many of her students were immigrants who did not yet speak English.  In her writings, Butler described her summer research trips to Jamaica, Woods Hole, and a short-lived University of Minnesota marine research center on Vancouver Island as bright spots in the round of drudgery that was teaching. She put the “sounds of the schoolroom” at the top of a list titled “My Hates” and noted that “In my next incarnation I shall not be a teacher.”

Despite this problematic relationship with her career, Butler was a popular, effective and influential science teacher. She was passionate about connecting children to nature in a way that foreshadows the current farm to fork trend in education of groups like Youth Farm, which cultivates summer gardening programs for children. Butler judged the summer garden she ran at Rosedale Elementary School (43rd Street and Wentworth Avenue) a success when children told her that their harvest “tasted much nicer than any that could be bought of the grocer.” Butler advocated for greenhouses connected to schools (a dream realized at Central High School’s new building after her retirement) and for her wild garden, saying, “knowledge of the soil and its products … would do much toward shielding young people from the temptations of artificial and unhealthful amusements of city life and lead them back to nature where the mind and body could develop in a healthful and sane way.”

Though Butler used typically feminine modesty and language in her campaign for the wildflower garden (all work done at the garden by female botany teachers was conducted, of course, “under the direction” of park work men), she was opinionated and uncompromising in her advocacy for saving wild spaces from thoughtless development, using language that sounds familiar to us today.  In fact, she objected to the term “wildflower garden,” preferring instead “native plant reserve.” Her screed against suburban gardeners could come from today’s headlines about battles between environmentalists and lawn-proud lake dwellers:

Cottagers on the suburban lakes have fettered ideas of planting that are more appropriate for city grounds, and condemn their neighbors, for a lack of neatness in not using a lawn mower … apparently dissatisfied until the wilderness is reduced to a dead level of monotonous, songless tameness.

When she retired from teaching, the Minneapolis Park Board hired as the first curator of the native plant reserve she founded at a salary of $50 per month, less than most groundskeepers made. She held this position until her death in 1933. She described these retirement years as the most professionally fulfilling of her life – but again, most of her work was done on the margins of the professional research world. She paid out of her own pocket to fence the grounds to protect specimens from collectors and vandals.  She was unable to get University of Minnesota sponsorship and funding for the truly groundbreaking collection of native plants she curated because she lacked professional credentials.  Instead, she relied on her own efforts and those of her friends and fellow amateur botanists. While it has less biodiversity than in Butler’s time, the garden still hosts more than 500 plant species and 130 bird species in woodland, wetland and prairie areas

At my last visit to the wildflower garden, I found myself ruefully wondering how different the landscape of Minneapolis might look if Eloise Butler had a professional scientific career, instead of exercising her passion on the margins.  Would this garden exist?

Material from this post is taken from the Friends of Eloise Butler website; M. E. Hellander, The Wild Gardener: the life and selected writings of Eloise Butler; and E Butler, “Back to Nature: A little patch of God’s creations in connection with school studies,” The Labor Digest (1908).

The photo shows Eloise on her 80th birthday with a group of friends. It is from the Hennepin County Libraries Special Collections.

 

 

st. anthony falls by Martha washburn allit, from stillwater library and bill wittenbreer

Want proof that Minnesota is cosmopolitan? “Ford or ankle out to the Minneapolis Art Institute”

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published March 27, 2014 by Bill Wittenbreer

Today’s guest blogger is Bill Wittenbreer, a founding member of the Historyapolis Lab at Augsburg College. In 2002-3, Bill co-curated an exhibition at Minnesota Museum of American Art called An Artist’s Paradise: Minnesota Landscape Painters 1840-1940. Here he profiles Martha Washburn Allin, a painter and watercolorist who made art in Minneapolis from 1926 to 1946.

Martha Washburn Allin was not related to the Washburns of milling fame in Minneapolis; if she were, we probably would know about her today.  During her lifetime, Martha was probably a fairly well known artist in Minneapolis art circles because she frequently exhibited her paintings in shows at the State Fair, University of Minnesota and the Art Institute.  These venues were popular with amateur artists like Martha. With the exceptions of Frances Cranmer Greenman and Jo Lutz Rollins, there were very few women in Minneapolis who were considered to be professional artists.

Martha was born in Minneapolis in December, 1888.  Her father was head of the University of Minnesota’s Entomology department from 1902-1918.  Martha graduated from East High School in 1906 and attended the University of Minnesota for a year before she transferred to Smith College and graduated in 1913.  Martha returned to Minneapolis after graduation. In 1917, she married Cephas Daniel Allin, a professor of Political Science at the university. Martha and Cephas had three children; Vincent, Roger, and Frances.

In 1924, Martha began her art studies.  She studied with Professor Samuel C. Burton at the University of Minnesota.  Burton was head of the studio arts department and professor of fine arts and architecture.  Burton was a painter himself and impressionism was his preferred style.  Martha must have been a quick study.  Two years after her first lesson, Martha had a piece included the 12th Annual Exhibition of Minnesota Artists at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  Martha’s piece was called A Gray Day. Gray Day was a view of the lake in Loring Park with church steeples in the background.  Martha did not win any awards at this exhibition, but it was her first exhibition of many.

And this exhibit became fodder for the public relations campaign waged after Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt, a scathing novel the portrayed Minnesota as a backwater of hopeless provincialism. A writer in the University of Minnesota Alumni Weekly asserted that this collection of art work challenged Lewis’s characterization of the Midwest. “Minnesotans Provincial?  It’s a charge that has been brought against us when one of our most red-headed novelists selects Minneapolis as the native haunt of Babbitt,” the magazine ruefully admitted on October 30, 1926. ” If you, too, are smarting a little under the sting of this accusation, we suggest that you Ford or ankle out to the Minneapolis Art Institute where the Twelfth Annual exhibit of work by Minnesota artists is on display.”

Martha continued to paint and exhibit until her death in 1946.   She entered her work in the Fine Art Exhibition at the State Fair nine times. Her work was included in four exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and several shows at the University of Minnesota.  Judging from the titles of her work, she preferred landscape and painted in oil or watercolor.  In the 1940s, the State Fair Exhibition had a special section on St. Croix Landscapes and it included paintings by Martha.

Little of Martha’s work is extant, but one of Martha’s paintings, St. Anthony Falls, is in the collection of the Stillwater Public library. This painting–shown here– suggests that Martha was quite comfortable with the techniques of impressionism: the quick, sketchy brushwork; the forms that are blurred; and her use of light to reflect off the water and the splash from the Falls.

The image comes from the Stillwater Public Library. And the material for this post came from  The Minnesota Alumni Weekly October 30, 1926 No 6 and Rena Neumann Coen, Minnesota Impressionists (Afton, MN: Afton Historical Society Press, 1996).

myrtle cain, voter card, side one, hclib vertical files

Myrtle A. Cain: “indorsed by the Working People’s Political League”

Published by Kirsten Delegard

Published March 25, 2014 by Anna Romskog

Today’s blogger is Anna Romskog is a junior history major at Augsburg College. She will be a regular presence here during 2014, when she will be working as one of the student researchers for the Historyapolis Project.

This card–from 1922–urges voters in the 28th district of Minneapolis to vote for Myrtle A. Cain, a candidate for the Minnesota State Legislature who was “indorsed by the Working People’s Political League.” Cain was one of the pioneering political women who immediately sought public office after American women were granted the vote by the Nineteenth Amendment.

In 1922, Cain was one of four women to win seats in the Minnesota state legislature. When she went to St. Paul, she represented a constituency in Northeast Minneapolis that was dominated by immigrants and labor activists like herself.

Before running for office, Cain developed her leadership skills in the labor movement. Cain organized a strike of “Hello Girls” or telephone operators that started in November of 1918, just a few days after the Armistice ended World War I. Under Cain’s leadership, the strikers demanded significant wage increases and better working hours, mounting a bold though ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the local business elite.

At the same time Cain pledged her support to the National Woman’s Party, a radical feminist group organized in 1917 to win full equality for women.  The NWP staged dramatic, non-violent protests to demand the immediate enfranchisement of women; after the Nineteenth Amendment it launched a campaign for a measure it called the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment that would mandate equal treatment for both sexes under the law.

Cain’s activist history shaped her legislative priorities when was took her seat at the State Capitol. She was one of a handful of legislators to support the Granting Equal Rights, Privileges, and Immunities to both Sexes bill. The bill, supported by Cain and six male legislators was not a popular one and was opposed by the three other women who were legislators during the 1923-24 session, including well-known suffragist Clara Ueland. The other three women worried that Cain’s bill was too radical and would erode the political gains just won by women. The vote on the bill was postponed indefinitely. Cain detailed the rest of her agenda on the back of her campaign card: 

myrtle cain, voter card, side 2, hclib vertical files

 

Much to the relief of more conservative female legislators like Mabeth Hurd Paige, Cain did not win her bid for re-election in 1924. She lost by just 39 votes to John F. Bowers, also of the Farmer-Labor Party.

This set-back did little to dampen her conviction that women deserved equal protection under the law. In 1973–when Minnesota was considering whether to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment–Cain returned to the State Capitol to speak in favor of the measure.

Cain’s voter card is from the vertical files at the Minneapolis Collection, Hennepin County Central Library. Material for this post is taken from Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Men, Women, and the Labor Movements in Minneapolis, 1915-1945, (University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Mary Pruitt, Myrtle Cain (1894-1980) in The Privilege for Which We Struggled: Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Minnesota, ed. Heidi Bauer, (St. Paul:Upper Midwest Women’s History Center, 1999); Darragh Aldrich, Lady in Law: A Biography of Mabeth Hurd Paige (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1950).