Public and Private Worlds

• Mary Walker
• Gertrude Stein and
  Alice B. Toklas
• Barbara Gittings

Photographer Unknown
Dr. Mary Walker, c.1863
Gelatin silver print
BARBARA GRIER AND DONNA MCBRIDE/NAIAD PRESS COLLECTION

Who we are and what we do in our private lives may sometimes be at odds with how we live in the world, and vice versa. Imagine Dr. Mary Walker, who, at her 1856 wedding to another surgeon, wore trousers and a man’s coat and kept her own name. After being appointed assistant surgeon during the American Civil War, Walker made herself a slightly modified officer’s uniform to wear, in response to the demands of traveling with the soldiers and working in field hospitals. In 1865 she was the only woman ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest military award given by the United States. When Congress revised the standards in 1917, Walker refused to give back her Medal of Honor, wearing it every day until her death in 1919. Or consider the intimate relationship of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a relationship that is increasingly celebrated as information about it becomes more public. There are a myriad of thought-provoking stories acknowledging the boundaries between private and public.

Mary Walker

Unknown
Boots worn by Dr. Mary Walker
c.1863
Leather, wood
BARBARA GRIER AND DONNA MCBRIDE/NAIAD PRESS COLLECTION

A pair of worn leather boots, an old photograph, a postcard, and a newspaper clipping tell the story of a unique nineteenth-century figure, Dr. Mary Walker. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) was the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army, a humanitarian and early advocate for women’s rights, including dress reform. During the Civil War, she risked her life in her devotion to the care of the sick and wounded. Her image and life story spark the contemporary imagination, and resonated with Barbara Grier, editor of the Ladder and founder of Naiad Press, who collected these objects and donated them to the Hormel Center archives.

Helaine Victoria Enterprises
Postcard of Dr. Mary Walker
Postmarked 1975

Walker was born in rural New York into an abolitionist family. In 1855 she became one of the earliest female physicians upon graduation from Syracuse Medical College. Wearing trousers and a dress-coat, she married another physician, Albert Miller, in a ceremony that did not include a promise to obey. Throughout her marriage she was known as Mary Walker, foregoing the tradition of taking her husband’s name. She and her husband set up a joint medical practice but the public was not ready to accept a woman physician, and the practice failed. Their marriage lasted thirteen years, ending in divorce.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Helaine Victoria Press
Postcard of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
Postmarked 1977
BARBARA GRIER AND DONNA MCBRIDE/NAIAD PRESS COLLECTION

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) have iconic status in the history of both twentieth-century literature and lesbian culture. Raised in Oakland and San Francisco respectively, the two women met in Paris in 1907. Stein sought to revitalize language and connect it with inner experience, to articulate consciousness through abstract, repetitive, rhythmical texts evoking “the excitingness of pure being.” With her brother Leo Stein, she amassed one of the first collections of avant-garde painting, with an emphasis on Cubism. By the 1920s, Stein and Toklas’ home at 27 Rue de Fleurus became the site of a salon frequented by the most significant artists and writers of the time, notably Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Marsden Hartley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Bowles. The resonance between Stein’s writing and the experiments of the Cubist painters was at the heart of the convivial, intellectually vibrant gatherings. Stein coined the term “the lost generation” to describe some of the writers, and her judgments on art and literature were profoundly influential. While Stein held forth among the men, Toklas, known for her culinary skills, led the women away to chat about food and fashion.

Gertrude Stein
A Book Concluding With As a Wife Has a Cow
Barton, Vt.: Something Else Press
Re-printed in 1973 with facsimilies of original lithographs by Juan Gris
Originally published in 1926
SCHMULOWITZ COLLECTION OF WIT & HUMOR, BOOK ARTS & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Toklas managed the couple’s domestic life and meticulously proofread and typed all of Stein’s manuscripts. Several rare Stein works are housed in the library’s Book Arts & Special Collections Center. Two Poems is a fine-press book printed posthumously in 1948 (with copyright by Alice B. Toklas). A Book Concluding With As a Wife Has a Cow is a [limited] edition facsimile of a book published in France in 1926. It was reissued in 1973, with facsimiles of the original lithographs by Juan Gris. An example of Toklas’ delicate handwriting is seen in the letter to Donald H. Frank, the son of a childhood friend. The postcard, showing Gertrude and Alice at home together amidst their paintings, was sent by the poet Elsa Gidlow to her publisher Barbara Grier, of Naiad Press, in 1977.

Barbara Gittings

A pioneer of the lesbian and gay rights movement since 1958, Barbara Gittings (1932-2007) is recognized for her daring, innovative strategies and inspired activism. Her groundbreaking work as an advocate for the inclusion of gay and lesbian works in public libraries is her greatest legacy.

Aware that she was “different,” Gittings left her home in Wilmington, Delaware, at the age of seventeen. Socially isolated as so many young gay people are, Gittings discovered clues to her identity through library books. She ventured west to San Francisco in 1956 and became involved with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first known lesbian organization in the United States, which had been founded the previous year. In 1958, DOB encouraged Gittings to establish an East Coast chapter in Philadelphia. She did so and marched in the first gay rights demonstrations in the early 1960s, on the Fourth of July in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and later at the Pentagon in Washington.

Barbara Gittings
Gays in Library Land:
The Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Library Association: The First Sixteen Years,
Philadelphia, PA: B. Gittings, 1990

Officially, the DOB had opposed picketing. “It was risky, and we were scared. Picketing was not a popular tactic at the time, and our cause seemed outlandish even to most gay people.” From 1963 to 1966, Gittings served as editor of the organization’s newsletter, the Ladder, and under her leadership it became the first movement publication to champion social protest. Gittings subtitled her publication “A Lesbian Review,” and introduced photographs of gay women on the covers—bold innovations in the fight against the pervasive invisibility of gays.

In the 1970s, Gittings was in the forefront of the challenge to the American Psychiatric Association’s now discredited view of homosexuality. Though not a librarian, her energy and vision became focused on libraries. From 1971 to 1986 she headed the Gay Task Force of the American Library Association (ALA), the first gay task force in any professional organization. Gittings edited “A Gay Bibliography” and gay reading lists for the task force, and recounted its history in the pamphlet “Gays in Library Land.” She “starred” in the first gay kissing booth, created for the 1971 ALA conference in Dallas in order to draw attention to gay literature—and gay librarians. A media uproar ensued at the conference.

From 1998 to 2002, Gittings served on the Hormel Endowment Committee for the Hormel Center. In 2001, following the example of the Hormel Center collection, the Free Library of Philadelphia established a Gay and Lesbian collection of circulating materials at its Independence branch, and named it for Barbara Gittings—an apt tribute. And in 2003, Gittings was recognized for her contributions to libraries and librarianship with the prestigious ALA Honorary Membership, its highest honor.