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January 2006
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Radcliffe Institute Fellows’ Presentation Series
“Martyrs in Rivalry: Interactions between Christians and Jews
during the Twelfth Century”
Eva Haverkamp, Rice University
Acquisitions Enrich Schlesinger’s Collections
It’s a measure of the Schlesinger Library’s prominence as the leading
repository of papers on American women’s history that gifts
continue accruing to the library from a variety of sources.
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt AM ’32 was living in post–World War II
Berlin when many of the city’s residents were selling their possessions
in order to survive. She purchased thirty-three volumes of
the French fashion magazine La Mode Illustrée for her young
daughter, who liked to use the patterns in the magazines to make
clothes for her dolls. Years later, when the daughter, Elizabeth
(Betsy) Holt Muench, was living in Lexington, Massachusetts, and
considering a move to a retirement community, she contacted the
Schlesinger to ask whether the library would be interested in
acquiring her beloved magazine collection. The bound volumes,
spanning 1860 to 1896, make up the longest known run of this
periodical in any American library and perhaps the largest holding
in any library outside France.
A related acquisition was two rare bound volumes of nineteenthcentury
American periodicals: Mrs. Whittlesey’s Magazine for Mothers
for 1855 and The American Ladies’ Magazine, edited by Sarah
Josepha Hall, for 1835, both donated by Marion Hall Hunt ’63.
These acquisitions are significant additions to the library’s rich
collections of women’s periodicals. The Izola Forrester Collection
and Sally Fox Collection are two other important acquisitions this
past year.
Among the papers of feminist leaders that the library acquired are
those of Susan Schechter, a pioneer in the movement to prevent
domestic violence. Schechter’s husband, Allen Steinberg, arranged
for the papers of his late wife to come to the Schlesinger.
Perhaps the most significant gift the library received this year was
the papers of Marjorie Henderson Buell, creator of “Little Lulu,”
the feisty girl who was featured in newspaper and magazine comics
from 1935 through 1944. The Marge Papers were given to the
library by the cartoonist’s sons, Lawrence Buell, the Powell M.
Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard, and Frederick
Buell, professor of English at Queens College at the City University
of New York. “The Schlesinger is incomparably the best place at
which to do research into the life and work of the first woman cartoonist
to achieve international fame,” said Lawrence Buell. “We
are certain that ‘Marge’ herself would have approved our choice
enthusiastically.”
Marjorie Henderson Buell, who died in 1993, imagined in Little
Lulu a self-reliant role model for girls. The eldest of three artistic
sisters, Buell was born in 1904 and grew up in Philadelphia. Her
mother was an amateur cartoonist, and her father, a lawyer, was a
raconteur who home-schooled his daughters through the fourth
grade. At the age of eight, Buell was selling drawings to her friends,
and in high school she worked out of her studio in a converted
chicken coop and sold cartoons to the Philadelphia Ledger. By 1929,
she had two syndicated strips, “The Boy Friend” and “Dashing
Dot,” published under the name “Marge” and featuring worldlywise
young flappers with sleek bobs, long legs, and short skirts.
Today, all aspects of Marjorie Henderson Buell’s long career are
represented in her papers housed at the library.
Class of ’56 Makes Reunion Gift to Library
Like the classes of 1954 and 1955, the Class of 1956 earmarked
its fiftieth-reunion gift for the Schlesinger Library. The drive was led
by Phyllis (Patty) Trustman Gelfman ’56 and Rosemary Fenech
Enthoven ’56. The class asked to have its gift of more than
$410,000 used for purchasing, processing, and digitizing papers of
women of the 1950s. “I was looking around for something that
everybody could agree on,” says Gelfman. “I presented the idea of
the Schlesinger Library, and everybody thought it was a terrific idea,
so we moved forward.” Gelfman, who serves on the Schlesinger
Library Council, proudly points out that at least two members of
the Class of 1956 will be represented in the Schlesinger Library’s
papers of 1950s women. Poet Jean Valentine ’56 gave her papers to
the Schlesinger in 2005, and businesswoman Marina von Neuman
Whitman ’56 plans to donate hers as well.
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