Betty MacDowell Memorial, Oct. 14, 2012
I cannot remember when I first met Betty, I know that it was in 1987 that she joined the board of the Michigan Women’s Studies Association. That was the year we opened the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame. She served on the board until 2001, fourteen years. In the beginning our members were working together to get the operations of the museum underway. Our goal was to change what is taught and thought about women in history and it was an exciting time just thinking about all that the future held for women’s history. We established the Friends Society, the collection policy, and the accession policy. Betty became chair of the accession committee and her group decided to concentrate on the contemporary honorees, who had been inducted into the Hall of Fame since 1983. The first gifts were from Mary Coleman, Elly Peterson, Rosa Slade Gragg, and Martha Griffiths.
Another board member, Rachel Brett Harley, began to help the committee by doing research on papers and documents of historic honorees. Rachel was from the Music Department and Women’s Studies Program at Eastern Michigan University. This was the beginning of an amazing, fun, productive partnership between Betty and Rachel. Their enthusiasm was obvious as they spun out their projects. I could tell it was fun by the twinkle in Betty’s eye as she would explain to the board the latest evolution of their work. One of the problems in those years was that so little was known about Michigan women’s history that every time we wanted to do a new project or activity we had to start from scratch gathering information. One place to begin the search was in the files of the honorees and the applications for the Hall of Fame. Betty and Rachel recognized that many of the women were firsts, or founders in their field, or both. They decided to produce a publication of Michigan women first and founders to honor the achievements and contributions of Michigan women. They contacted all the local history societies in the state and I remember turning over more than one crate of the replies, a gold mine of firsts and founders.
They also saw that this was an excellent research tool and so the project began to grow. They created an index by name, followed by a chronological listing of significant dates in the history of American women and Michigan women in particular to allow readers to more clearly see the relationship between women’s experiences and social progress. But they didn’t stop there. They divided the entries into fifty categories to cover the various fields of activity represented by the women included in the book. This way teachers, researchers, and readers in general could locate women in particular fields in the categorical index. They also included photographs of honorees in the center of the book. All of this was accomplished at the end of 1992, in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Michigan Women’s Studies Association in 1993.
But even as this publication was going to Betty and Rachel were discovering many more women they felt should be recognized. In 1995 they published a second volume of Michigan Women First and Founders, just in time for the 75th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. This book incorporated fourteen photos related to the Michigan struggle for women’s suffrage. This was part of another of their projects, to contact local history societies and other sources for photos relating to women’s history. But this wasn’t all. We were collecting the names of Michigan suffragists as I was preparing an exhibit on the history of women’s suffrage in Michigan. We compiled over 3,000 names which they arranged by county at the end of the book. They were so excited about it that they wanted to include it in the exhibit. We created a sort of clothes line with pages and pages of the names by county. Visitors loved checking out their county. It illustrates how Betty tended to enhance whatever we were doing.
My fondest memories of Betty are not so much about what she did but how she was. I think we are all struck by her kindness, her patience, her good humor, her intelligence. We may not think about her energy, her feminism, and her scholarly productivity. She led a meaningful life. Her contributions to women’s studies, the feminist movement, and the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame are just one part. We all recognize what a privilege it was to know her.
Elizabeth Homer