Votes for women

The members of Teresa Mangum’s fall 2007 “Women in Literature” class joined forces with Meredith Alexander of Theatre Arts to produce a staged reading of Elizabeth Robins’ 1907 suffrage play, “Votes for Women!.”  This lively experiment in public scholarship united students in a UI English class, faculty and students in Theatre Arts, the 18th-and 19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium of International Programs, the UI Center for Human Rights, the Women’s Resource and Action Center, and the League of Women Voters.

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Iowa Women's Archives

The photo portrays Lulu Merle Johnson in the late 1920s; she would be the first African American woman in the nation to earn the PhD in history, at the University of Iowa in 1941.

The Iowa Women's Archives holds more than 1100 manuscript collections that chronicle the lives and work of Iowa women, their families, and their communities.  These personal papers and organizational records date from the nineteenth century to the present.  Together with oral histories, they document the activities of Iowa women throughout the state and beyond its borders.  Included in their collecting efforts are special projects devoted to collecting and preserving the papers of and about African American women, and the Mujeres Latinas Project, established to collect and preserve materials which document the lives and contributions of Latinas and their families to Iowa history.

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