THIS WEEK: Warming Trend! From deep midwinter, enjoy summer in Michigan on Thursday when visiting historian Mary Jane Doerr whisks us into the past and up north.
Gathering for Change:
The GR&I Railroad, Reform, and the Women of Bay View
Mary Jane Doerr, Bay View Associationand author of Bay View: An American Idea
Thursday, January 13, 2011
303 Pearl St NW
Ten years after the 1875 founding of Bay View as a Methodist resort near Petoskey, this camp meeting merged with the burgeoning chautauqua movement and became a national gathering place for intellectual luminaries and the discussion of exciting new ideas. Local boats and trains carried 75,000 people north each month, ensuring that Bay View became a crystallizing site for early reform movements. Were women on those trains? Certainly; some from Grand Rapids. Until recently, however, the presence at Bay View of enormous audiences for nearly 200 nationally significant women speakers has been virtually ignored or reported with gross inaccuracy.
Documenting these events and understanding why the nineteenth-century women's movement valued this stop in northern Michigan sent Mary Jane Doerr back to primary sources. Before she could determine the scope and importance of Bay View in the national women's movement, however, she had to work through layer upon layer of mistaken assumptions based on erroneous conclusions. Finally, the significance of women as key players in the history of Bay View as well as the role of Bay View in the emerging women's movement have been clarified. Doerr's efforts illustrate once again that engaged local historians play an important role in ferreting out data for their professional colleagues to work into still larger scenarios.
The inheritor of a family Bay View tradition since 1911, Mary Jane Doerr was especially well prepared to write the first comprehensive social history of the Association. Her new book, Bay View: An American Idea, both situates Bay View in the main currents of nineteenth-century movements and distinguishes its unique contributions-adding in those of women for the first time.
Co-sponsored with the Grand Rapids Historical Society and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Free and open to the public.
Doerr will sign her book on Saturday, January 15, 1-2 pm, at Schuler Books on 28th Street.
NEXT WEEK:
History Detectives at the GRPL
Saturday, January 22, 2011
9:30 AM - 4 PM
Its a day filled with local history! Pick and choose or stay all day. The GGRWHC-sponsored presentation will be an overview of Grand Rapids as an important Michigan suffrage center. Other talks will focus on Ramona Park, Heritage Hill, transportation in Grand Rapids, and the Civil War in Michigan. Lunch is $6.00 and must be ordered in advance (988-5400 or rsvp@grpl.org).
3:00-3:45 PM - Building a Case: Grand Rapids as an Important Suffrage Center
In the fifty years preceding the accomplishment of universal suffrage in 1920, Grand Rapids women did it all. In the 1890s alone they lobbied in Lansing, lectured at the Chicago World's Fair, hosted national conferences, and addressed the U.S. congressional Judicial Committee. Over the movement's last decade, beginning in 1910, Grand Rapids activists paraded, published a special edition of the Grand Rapids Press, and mailed six tons of literature during one single year's referendum campaign.
Jo Ellyn Clarey, GGRWHC Board Member, will share images of local suffrage paraphernalia - telegrams, badges, and floats - and celebrate major players and events; as well as the full story about how we lost and rediscovered this significant piece of Grand Rapids history.
