The following is Guild Past President Judy Bentley’s press release about Karen Blair.
For more than 40 years, Dr. Karen J. Blair has nurtured the field of women’s history in the Pacific Northwest and been a career-long mainstay and inspiration for other scholars.
Karen Blair taught at the University of Washington from 1979 to 1987, then joined the faculty of Central Washington University and retired from that position in 2014, after decades of research, writing, and teaching. She also served on countless committees for the promotion of regional history, including being one of the founders of the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild and a longtime board member of the Kittitas County Historical Museum. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from SUNY/Buffalo.
Blair is best known for her work on women’s clubs and their impact on the communities where they engaged in both cultural and civic activities. She has published six books, including The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined 1868-1914, a book that challenges the now-popular slogan that “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”; The Torchbearers: Women and their Amateur Arts Organizations; and Women in Pacific Northwest History, a collection of essays for which she was organizer and editor. She was twice honored by the American Library Association for the Best Bibliography in History for Northwest Women in 1998 and for Women’s Voluntary Associations in 1990.
In addition to her scholarly work, Karen Blair is known for her guidance and influence on other scholars. According to Dr. Lorraine McConaghy, retired public historian at MOHAI, Dr. Blair “showed me – and gently taught me – how to see things differently, how to see ordinary things with new eyes. Many years ago, she read and studied the meeting minutes of a number of women’s clubs, which other scholars had ignored as dull, self-congratulatory, and elitist, and drew from her research a vivid setof understandings about women’s worlds in the Pacific Northwest. Those understandings had been hidden from view; Karen brought them front and center, exploring politics, education, culture, social activism, and women’s shaping of their own experience.”
It is particularly appropriate to honor her in this centennial of ratification of the nineteenth amendment for women’s suffrage. Blair served on the statewide Women’s History Consortium that planned the 2010 Washington Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemoration.
The following is Karen Blair’s acceptance letter for her Pacific Northwest Historians Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.
Thank you so much for the honor of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild! When I moved to this region in 1979, I was so impressed with the willingness of this community to form a group that welcomed historians of all kinds. I am proud of all this organization has accomplished over the years.
I have been asked to reflect on my academic career tonight. I realize my forty-year enthusiasm for women’s history remained steady because the topic met my personal goals as well as my intellectual ones. I attended college and graduate school in the 1970s, when the women’s rights movement was in the headlines daily. The fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, the passage of Roe v. Wade, the formation of the National Organization for Women, and the 59 cent campaign for pay equity between working men and women were all subjects receiving serious attention. I realized the demonstrators in the streets sought inspiration from their forebears. While Susan B. Anthony became widely celebrated for her fight for suffrage, feminists of my era could benefit if historians located additional reformers who had turned the tide before our times.I, like many young women entering the historical profession, met the call to contribute to the modern movement.
But what aspect of women’s history could I wed to another of my interests — the arts? I had studied classical piano seriously as a child and my mom, an amateur painter, visited art museums regularly, with me in tow. Both of my parents were big readers so the house was full of books, magazines, and newspapers. An appreciation for the arts was a mainstay of my upbringing. Was there a topic in American history that united my two priorities of women’s rights and culture?
It turns out there was. I stumbled on a gigantic stash of materials on a largely forgotten but once-robust movement of women’s clubs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women in cities and towns, east and west, had come together in small groups to discuss books, study the fine arts, and support drama and music. Something like the book clubs that are popular again today, they started reading classics but moved on to discuss contemporary problems. Their new collective awareness of social injustice led them to add activism to their studies. When rebuffed for their intrusion into men’s world, they mastered the organizational skills required to demand solutions to the problems they had identified. They decided their communities needed access to arts and social services: libraries, playgrounds, expanded school programs, free concerts, public art, and parks. By the late nineteenth century, they had expanded their call, for clean water, unadulterated milk, day care for working mothers, factory inspections to improve working conditions, better salaries for teachers, scholarships for girls, and, not surprisingly, the vote to effect the changes that government officials were unwilling to institute.
Now I’d found the women in history who revered both the arts and activism. I could devote my doctoral research to the century-ago American women who valued study and cultural enrichment for themselves and their entire communities, women so determined that they challenged “woman’s place in the home,” to act in the arena outside the domestic sphere, shaping the public world that men had monopolized.
Nowadays, my 1970s research path looks primitive indeed. Without the internet, I had to read old newspapers on microfilm machines. I wrote hundreds of letters to public libraries, colleges and historical societies, trying to locate minutes of club meetings, correspondence, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings that documented women’s activities on the “Social” pages. Once I identified the libraries that owned materials I could examine, I traveled widely and took notes on 4×6 notecards. Soon I’d filled shoeboxes with the information I’d gleaned. Sometimes, I’d learn that an active club had never donated its records to an accessible venue. They remained under the bed of the current president! In those cases, I visited households of members to examine the historical documents and sometimes I persuaded the club to offer the materials to an institution open to all researchers. Among my proudest achievements is my success at transporting old club records in the trunk of my car to various historical associations in each vicinity.
These research expeditions were a delight, allowing me to mix business with pleasure. I spent a dozen summers at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, studying California clubwomen by day and housesitting in the palacial residences nearby. High temperatures in the region drove the 1% away during my summer vacation from teaching so I could reside in luxury and devote myself to collecting research material, as long as I fed the cat and made sure the pool cleaning service came weekly. My research plan brought grants that subsidized sabbaticals: at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art in Washington,D.C., where I had access to the amazing warehouses of treasures they’ve collected; the Dupont Estate in Delaware, where I was loaned the gardener’s charming cottage while using the Winterthur and Hagley archives; in Manhattan in the weeks after 9-11, observing a city just bruised by the attack on the Twin Towers. The expeditions to collect material made adventures of my summers and sabbaticals, delivering me to new places full of sights, people and experiences I savored.
In my classroom, I felt the women’s histories I’d collected were valuable to emerging adults. Young women, especially, could be empowered by the courses I offered. At Caltech in 1979, a school with 2500 undergraduates, only 18 of them women, I opted to teach a course in U.S. Women’s History. My dean declined to pay me for the effort but permitted me to add it to my load if I was so determined. When all 18 enrolled, my hunch was confirmed. Young women needed the stories of their forebears to cope with the challenges of modern inequities.
I so enjoyed the hunt for women’s stories that I routinely assigned my students a research paper topic on a local women’s group or woman leader, assuming they’d similarly embrace my delight. I escorted my classes to the school library for acquaintance with the New York Times Index, Readers Guide, and microfilm room, and urged students to find a woman’s society that had never been investigated before. Many sought to explore their mother’s League of Women Voters chapter, or PTA, and proudly assembled accounts of heretofore neglected topics. Hundreds of these original student papers now reside in the University of Washington and Central Washington University libraries, for others to use. Once, when the topic of “students who purchase papers rather than do their own assignments” arose, someone in my class observed, “You sure can’t buy a paper on the Tukwila Girl Scouts!” Yes, my students were building new histories, not rehashing tired topics, and understood the value of their investigations.
My publications have been varied. My discoveries turned up in two monographs, two bibliographies, a reference guide to voluntary organizations, two editions of collected essays, and many encyclopedia articles, journal articles, convention papers and public addresses. These have enabled me to share with members of my profession and beyond. My generation of scholars, enthused by the prospect of unveiling historical research relevant to today’s world, has eagerly exchanged excavations into women’s past. This has made an impact, not only on academic discourse and school textbooks, but on the general public’s appreciation of women’s history. This is particularly evident in 2020, as our nation celebrates the centennial of the nineteenth amendment for woman suffrage.
For decades, I have been honored to share my research on women’s accomplishments. I didn’t intend, when I began, to devote my academic career to the histories of women’s societies, but wherever I lived and taught, the records emerged and sustained me and my students. It has been satisfying to bring the story to wider attention and recognition.