Our final woman of the month is one who made a major impact on student research at Cornell.  Mary Byerly worked as a librarian at Cornell College for twenty-eight years, maintaining an impeccable card catalog and serving as assistant director and interim director of the library during her time at Cornell.

Byerly graduated from Cornell in 1941 with a BA in English and moved to Chicago, where she worked for Encyclopedia Britannica.  She returned to Cornell in 1949 as a Recorder, and this time stayed through 1953.  After leaving Cornell again, she attended the University of Illinois and graduated with a Master’s in Library Science in 1956.  Three years later Byerly returned to Cornell, this time as the catalog librarian.  As the catalog librarian, Byerly was responsible for maintaining the card catalog–which was the key to finding materials for students and faculty.  Byerly kept the whole catalog up to date as terminology–and the world at large–changed.  Byerly also set the stage for the online catalog we use today when she began converting records to machine readable format retrospectively in the late 1970′s.  Her worked maintained equal access to materials for all students to library materials and reflected the changing times in which she worked.

Byerly was appointed Assistant Director in 1973 and began serving as the interim director of the library in 1975.  The next year she was honored with an Award of Merit, an award for alumni who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in their careers or professions, and whose work has contributed to the betterment of their community and its citizens, and whose commitment to the college has remained strong for many years.  Mary Byerly retired from Cornell in 1988, having spent parts of six decades at the school.

Geneva Meers took pride in her role as an educator and took her job very seriously.  When a former student of hers, Allan J. Ruter , took a job as a high school English teacher her advice for him was to “always remember that the third best thing a student can say about you is that you’re friendly; the second best is that you’re fair; and the very best is that you’re hard.”  Meers concentrated on helping her students to improve in the most effective ways possible, which is clear from her article Use a Rifle, Not a Shotgun, which appeared in College Composition and Communication in 1959.

An Illinois native, Geneva Meers attended Illinois State Normal University and graduated with a Bachelor of Education in 1942.  She received her Master’s at Northwestern University in 1945 and then completed her Ph.D. there in 1953.  She taught high school in Illinois between 1942 and 1950, and began her career at Cornell in 1953.

Meers was an active member of the academic community at Cornell, and served thrice as department chair of English and sixteen years on Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, including two as its president.  Meers placed a high value on equality in higher education and after an incident involving Winifred Van Etten, kept a close eye on discrepancies in salary between the sexes.  During her time as chair of the English department, Van Etten had discovered she was being paid less than newly hired faculty members.  When other members of the department–including Meers–confronted the Dean about the discrepancy, he replied that “I thought Mrs. Van Etten was teaching for the joy of it.”  Meers vowed never to let a dean believe she was teaching only for the joy of it, and during her tenure saw salaries between men and women begin to equalize .  In a report to the AAUP during her sixteenth year of service to the organization, she reported that the salaries of women had drastically improved, and had become equal with the salaries of their male counterparts.

This brief portrait of Meers cannot do justice her steadfast support of women’s rights and equality on campus.  Meers passed away in 2004.

Winifred Mayne Van Etten spent much of her life at Cornell.  She was born in Emmetsberg, Iowa, and attended Cornell as an undergraduate.  She studied English under professor Clyde “Toppy” Tull, who encouraged her as a writer.  She published several pieces in Cornell’s literary magazine of the time, The Husk.  Van Etten graduated in 1925 and earned her Master’s degree from Columbia University.    She returned to Cornell in 1928 as a professor in the English department.

In 1933, Dean Alice Betts called Winifred Mayne into her office to discuss Mayne’s impending nuptials to Bernard Van Etten.  Betts referred to him as the “college Casanova” and the discussion left Winifred hoping that she would be able to keep her job through the end of the academic year.  After her marriage to Bernard around Thanksgiving 1933, Winifred was fired in May of 1934.  College administrators, at this point during the depression, felt that the employment of a married women whose husband was salaried was unethical, and married women such as the new Mrs. Van Etten were replaced by single women.

Van Etten used this forced retirement to work on a novel, with the encouragement of Toppy Tull.  She submitted it to the Atlantic Monthly as an entry into a contest jointly hosted by the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company.  Van Etten’s book, I am the Fox, was selected as the winner, and was noted as the “most interesting and distinctive contribution to their annual contest” and she received a $10,000 prize.  I am the Fox was published in August of 1936, and Van Etten was subsequently re-hired by Cornell to teach in the English department.

In a radio broadcast from Chicago over the NBC Blue Network in 1936, Van Etten stated that she chose a female subject for I am the Fox, because, to Van Etten, a woman seemed to make a more interesting character in modern novel.  Van Etten felt that the modern woman was caught in a struggle between the desire for career and family.  ”The kind of work a first rate career requires–the concentration, almost consecration that any ambitious man puts into it–eliminates the child for the woman.  Or the child eliminates the career.  She feels, either way, maimed, deprived of the full and complete expression of herself.  The old-fashioned woman accepted it as a woman’s lot.  The modern woman fights it.”

Cornell honored Van Etten with an honorary degree, the Doctor of Letters, in 1976.

For more information about Van Etten, stop by the Library Gallery, where the exhibit The Art of the Book at Cornell has a section on Van Etten, along with a pair of gloves and a purse belonging to her on display.

To read an excerpt from I am the Fox, please click here.

The following is an except from I am the Fox by Winifred Mayne Van Etten.

“We’d better be getting back to the house,” said Gardner Heath.  ”It’s getting cold.”

Selma was reluctant.  She had toiled up the steep sloped of the hill and the exertion had made her gasp.  But now as she paused for breath the cold air wrapped itself about her.  It defined her body, lay like a chill damp mould upon its warm contours, so that she was aware of herself, of her shape, sculptured by chill beneath her thick jacket and skirt.

“I suppose,” she agreed unwillingly.

It was beautiful on the hilltop.  The sun brushed the autumn leaves with a cold gilding.  Below them rolled lesser hills, russet and bronze billows of woods, and frost-dulled coasts of grass, falling away against a sky brilliant with the blue of an October morning.

“I suppose we should,” she murmured again as the wind touched her.

Gardner Heath rested an arm across her shoulders.  ”It’s an almost perfect day, Selma.  If only…”

The girl’s shoulders grew taut under his arm.  ”What’s that?”

A distant rhythm clouded the air and throbbed along the ground.  Through the soles of their feet it came to them, and upon pulsations of the air that seemed to beat, not inward to them, but outward from their quickened hearts.  It rolled in, an ominous undercurrent of sound beneath a soaring clamor, faint, but feverish with excitement.

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Harriette J. Cooke began her career at Cornell in 1857, as a teacher of Latin, Drawing and Painting.  Born in New Hampshire and educated in New England, Cooke was invited to Cornell by Susan Hale, a former classmate.  Hale was the preceptress of the college, a role in which she governed the female students of the college.  In 1865, Hale left the school and Cooke became preceptress, a position which she held until 1890.  Cooke was described by President King as “strong of will” and by Ada Sherman, daughter of one of Cornell’s first trustees, as “emotional, decided in her opinions and free to express them.”  Cooke was unafraid of expressing her opinions, and, in fact, insisted upon a salary equal to that of her male counterparts when she was appointed a full professor in German and History.  She was the first woman in the United States to receive such a position with equal pay to male professors, and was the first female full professor at Cornell.

After her appointment to full professor, she spent a year in Europe.  Upon her return, she founded the Cornell Association for the Education of Women, an organization which sought to improve Cornell’s dedication to its female students.  Among the goals of the organization were the creation of a “Lady Professorship in a Chair of English Literature” and the construction of an all-female dorm.  Cooke also sought equal treatment and educational opportunities for students; upon her return from Europe, the men were participating in calisthenics and drill.  She immediately pressed for women’s calisthenics, establishing a gymnastics drill for the female students, which was flourishing by May of 1875.  Cooke’s work at Cornell helped to positively impact the rights of and opportunities for female students; Cornell was a campus which saw women participating in scientific courses of study and other activities which were stereotypically male.  Perhaps the strongest example from Cooke’s era was the creation of the Ladies’ Battalion; a group of female students who drilled (and were provided with guns) as Cornell’s male battalion drilled during the 1880′s.

Cooke also traveled extensively, and spoke out for women in higher education at every opportunity.  She was very well-known in Iowa and respected as an educator.  When she left Cornell in 1890, she went first to a school in London–Mildmay Deaconess House–and then accepted an invitation from E.J. Helms (a Cornell alum and the founder of Goodwill Industries) to serve as superintendent of the Women’s Department of University Settlement in Boston, Massachusetts.  There Cooke organized medical aid and the organization soon outgrew the two rooms in which it began.  Cooke lectured about the institution regularly to keep its activities in the public eye and due to her efforts the mission was adopted by the Woman’s Home Missionary, a national organization, in 1897 and became known as the North End Medical Mission of Boston.

March is Women’s History Month.  This year’s theme, Our History is Our Strength, pays tribute to the women who have taken action to create a better world for their contemporaries and for future generations.  This year, the National Women’s History Project has not designated any national honorees and instead would like local communities to honor and recognize women within their community.  Cole Library will be profiling a new woman in Cornell history each week on the Library blog, and we also have some great online resources available through the library and on the open web below.

For more information on women’s history, stop by the Women’s History Month display on the third floor of Cole Library.  For help researching women’s history, stop by the Cole Library reference desk.

Sources from Cole Library

Women Writers Online contains more than 300 works by pre-Victorian women from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.  Part of the Women Writers Project, WWO seeks to make available materials that are rare or inaccessible.

Creedo Reference is a database containing over 300 reference titles, including:

• A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists
• An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930
• Notable American Women: 1607-1950
• Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century
• Notable American Women: The Modern Period
• The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women’s Biography
• The Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women, the Encyclopedia
• The Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers
• The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History
• Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia
• The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English
• Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography
• Encyclopedia of Women’s Health
• The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health
• Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender
• Women’s History as Scientists: A Guide to the Debates
• Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Men and Women in the World’s Cultures
• From Suffrage to the Senate: America’s Political Women

Cole Library also subscribes to several journals focusing on women’s issues, including:

• Emily Dickinson Journal
• Bitch
• Feminist Studies
• Journal of Women’s History
• Signs

Sources from the Open Web

The Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame seeks to honor the contributions of Iowa women to society.

The Friends of the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women is an organization which seeks to explore and support the role of women in Iowa.

The Women’s History 2011 Gazette is a short publication from the National Women’s History Project which explores the theme Our History is Our Strength.

Pioneer Women Legislators, an online exhibit from the Nation Women’s History Museum, explores the women who paved the way for female legislators in all 50 states.

The National Women’s History Museum has several online exhibits which explore a wide range of topics, from women in early film to women printers, publishers and journalists.