A trip to the Iowa Women's Archive at the University of Iowa

It is such a wonderful moment when you design a project and all of the parts begin to fall into place. Kristin and I spent time at the Iowa Women's Archive last week and this week gathering materials for the women to read and taking photographs of photographs for them to use in their portraits.

In some ways it is overwhelming to open a box and see the whole of a person's life cataloged, labeled, and filed. It is amazing having their entire life history at your fingertips.Some of the memoirs were smaller or came without photographs. One was a collection of sprawled handwriting on spiral bound notebook paper clipped together with a safety pin. The content was really interesting. The archives also contained books published by women about their lives. These I ordered instead of copied. We hope to donate them to the library at ICIW.

Janet Weaver is the Associate Curator at the Iowa Womens' Archive. A historian by trade she was tremendously helpful in locating items in the archive that were intriguing, unusual, and exciting. Among some of the things she found was an oral history she recorded with Adella Martinez, Lupe Serrano, and Julio Serrano. It is filled with funny stories about these women and their experience growing up.

We also looked at the information about Ivory Winston, a famous singer from Ottumwa and Edna Griffin a Civil Rights Activist who was even followed by the FBI.
The Iowa Women's Archives is such an exciting place filled with treasures.