Archiving Women’s History in Iowa City
Between 1976 and 1978, Grace and Rubies, a women’s-only restaurant, stood boldly on N Linn St. in Iowa City. A lifetime membership cost 50 cents for the chance to eat, socialize, and learn with fellow women, or maybe even actress Lily Tomlin, who happened to be a member.
Author T.C. Boyle wrote of Grace and Rubies in his short story “The Women’s Restaurant” about a male narrator longing to intrude the space, writing, “A women’s restaurant. The injustice of it, the snobbery, the savory dark mothering mystery: what do they do in there?”
Long gone from the roster of Iowa City businesses, the impact of a space like Grace and Rubies could easily be lost to time. Instead, the restaurant is still alive through its old bylaws and meeting minutes—all preserved at The University of Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA), a library collection solely dedicated to the importance of women telling their own stories.
“I would say historically, women have been really underrepresented in archival collections. Most archivists have been men, and most of the people whose papers were taken into archives have been men,” IWA Women in Politics Archivist Kate Orazem said.
IWA started in 1992, when Iowan women and founders Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith realized the lack of primary sources by women. Though an archive of women across Iowa, its existence in Iowa allowed the many feminist spaces in Iowa City, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, to be preserved and shared.
The Archives
Nestled on the third floor of the University of Iowa library, the archives house rows of gray archive boxes across three separate spaces within the building, with additional older materials stored in an annex “on the edge of town.”
“Well, we do have over 1300 collections,” IWA Associate Curator Anna Holland said while pulling out boxes.
IWA had just gotten a new archive addition that day of Iowa high school 6-on-6 girls’ basketball games from the 1940s to 1970s. The footage consisted of large film reel canisters, filling two full library carts and a long table, belted down with heavy-duty straps. Holland took a picture of IWA staff posed next to the reel stacks for the archive’s Facebook page.
According to Holland, digitizing and processing the new materials from the day will likely take months.
“It’s sort of like if all of these disparate papers and artifacts were a book, we’re trying to make the table of contents,” Holland said. “Historians love to steal valor from this thing. They discovered things nicely folded in a box.”
For Holland, when she began work at IWA in 2015, even the subtle difference of she/her pronouns in the archival processing manual was new and meaningful.
“So often growing up, it was male pronouns, and just to feel those little things where women are first in here, and that’s something that people of the male persuasion get all the time. I didn’t even realize what that would feel like,” Holland said.
A dedicated archival space for women’s history is rare, according to Orazem, calling the archive “a jewel of Iowa.”
“I think it’s not a coincidence that it’s here in this town where there were so many other dedicated women’s spaces,” Orazem said.
Event flyers that were pinned on the bulletin board at Iowa City’s Women’s Coffeehouse, another women-only club in the early 80s on Gilbert St. and a part of IWA’s extensive archives of Iowa City spaces, captures this well.
“A reading of works by lesbians,” a concert from a local female blues singer, and a slide carousel night of guest’s old photos (“bring photographs of your past lives, the more embarrassing, the better,” the flier reads) are only a handful of community happenings, now preserved in storage boxes.
“There were all these really cool spaces in Iowa City, and most of them don’t exist anymore. One of the roles the archive is preserving that,” Orazem said. “So even if those spaces weren’t able to keep that foothold over time, we know about them, in part because we do have their records here. And as you kind of walk around the city, you can still maybe sort of see some of those buildings.”
Many of IWA’s collections are organized by the women who collected and donated their old papers and artifacts. To Orazem, women giving away personal records is vital for Iowa women to control their own narrative, but it’s also “brave and generous.”
“It’s really hard not to go up to them and be like, hey, I’ve read your diary,” Holland said. “I’m a little in awe sometimes, especially the feminists from the 70s whose papers I love so much. And I just look at them. I’m like, where did you find the time to start all these things?”
The Laurie Haag Papers
In a 1971 archived copy of an Iowa City women’s newspaper, there’s an advertisement for the newly opened Women’s Resource and Action Center (WRAC) with a crude drawing of a house and swirly handwriting that reads: “Sisters, there’s a women’s center in Iowa City! On 3 East Market Street. Too new to even have a phone yet. Needs painting and furnishing now—will need people and ideas after that. (Needs people for painting part too.)”
Since WRAC’s humble beginnings, the center is now a part of The University of Iowa providing counseling, violence prevention, and women leadership workshops.
“I think it’s a very inspiring story to imagine that there was a group of women who looked around and said, here are the ways our community’s needs are not being met, and then just figured out how to meet them,” WRAC Program Developer Laurie Haag said.
Haag has one folder of papers at the archives regarding her involvement in WRAC since 1988. For Haag, an important aspect of documenting women’s spaces, particularly one still in existence, provides historical perspective on progress.
“I think a lot of times people don’t have a sense of that struggle or that change or how bad things used to be or in some cases, that in 50 years, nothing has changed. You could have gone to a Take Back the Night rally in 1978 and heard exactly the same stories that you would hear this coming spring when we hold again, having gone to them for several decades now,” Haag said. “Understanding that kind of historical perspective of how things have changed and how they have not, I think is really important.”
The first-hand stories Haag sees with an active effort to archive WRAC also breathes life into old, flattened history.
“It’s one thing to say, oh, you know, a bunch of crazy feminists started WRAC in 1971, instead of then also hearing the stories of how they did it and what they were up against,” Haag said.
As a drummer herself, Haag also created new spaces for women through founding the Iowa Women’s Festival in 1994, an annual celebration with all-female performers.
“It’s creating an intentional space for, in our case, women and queer-identified folks to have a space where they’re safe to do the things that they want to do and get the encouragement and the tools to do it,” Haag said.
The question Haag gets asked the most having a women-exclusive festival is “What about men?”
“It’s not about men. And that’s the thing, it’s not that we hate men and it’s not that they’re not welcome. It’s just that on this one day a year, it’s not about them,” Haag said. “It’s about somebody else, and that should be okay.”
The Linda Yanney Papers
Iowa City activist and scholar Linda Yanney heard similar questions when she worked at the women-only restaurant Grace and Rubies in the late ‘70s.
“I did a good amount of the cooking. They discovered I didn’t really mind boning the chicken,” Yanney said.
Having a women’s-only space was an effort to minimize harassment as well as an important space for lesbians in Iowa City, including Yanney.
“It was still a time when it was really hard for women to go alone to places, or even in groups. You’d go to a restaurant and men would just assume they could just come up and start talking to you,” Yanney said.
But many took issue with the private club, including the city who lodged a complaint. According to Yanney, even some women didn’t like the idea of exclusion.
“It’s not that we were excluding people, because we were in power, but we were excluding people because we were not. To own a restaurant ourselves and to manage a restaurant ourselves was important,” Yanney said.
Yanney has a prolific collection of papers at the women’s archives, filling eight boxes with women’s poetry readings, daycare provider artifacts, and copies of local 70s magazine “Better Homes and Dykes.”
“Well, I’m quite a packrat,” Yanney said.
Yanney does her own work documenting women in Iowa City, most recently on the city’s lesbian communities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and as far back as her PhD dissertation in the 80s on Iowa City feminist communities.
“At the most basic level, it’s a belief in documenting small communities, mine happened to be the community I was a part of. Those histories are so often lost,” Yanney said.
As a student, Yanney saw a period of rediscovery around women suffragettes and abolitionists in the history programs, but they often lacked good documentation.
“If the histories of the suffragettes and abolitionists could be lost, ours could be lost,” Yanney said. “And what could we do?”
A Space for Women, Archived
In the Iowa Women’s Archive reading room, Holland pulled out a box of Iowa City feminist newspaper editions of Ain’t I a Woman?, part of the bustling local women’s press scene in the ‘70s. Right behind the table loomed a reproduction of Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait with Loose Hair,” a nod to the original painting IWA co-founder Louise Noun owned and sold for $1.5 million, raising enough money to open the archives.
With Frida’s piercing eyes watching over, Holland located a 1971 issue and pointed out a note on the first page, “This was to be a twelve-page paper with four pages of medical self-help material on menstrual extraction. However, we couldn’t get them printed. The regular printer said it was pornographic.”
The issue featured a photographed how-to guide on menstrual extraction. Though a form of menstrual relief, it also served as an early abortion technique.
“They couldn’t get it printed, but they found somebody else to do it and they had a four-page medical supplement,” Holland said. “And after this experience they said, we need women to do this. We can’t be relying on men who decide what is and isn’t pornographic.”
That sentiment echoed in all forms when it came to both the need for women’s spaces, and archiving women’s voices.
Before Orazem joined the IWA staff, she did her undergraduate thesis on women’s roles in the Kenyan uprising Mau Mau but struggled to find women sources in the Kenyan National Archives.
“That just made a big impression on me that there were these really fascinating histories that were hard to find in archives that was more focused on men’s history and mostly organized by male names and all of that kind of stuff that sat in my mind for a long time,” Orazem said.
Another publication during the peak of Iowa City Women’s Press sits in the archives, titled The Greasy Thumb, a women’s car manual.
In a letter introducing the book to the community, the book’s author Barb Wyatt wrote in 1976, “I wrote this book for a couple reasons. One is that I was real tired of trying to use the available auto mechanic manual—written by men for men—for information on how to do repairs on my car…I feel that women teaching other women what they know is real important to our present and future survival in this world.”
Elisabeth Oster 