Women's History Resources in Archives and Special Collections

While industrialists were building the great rubber factories, cereal mills, and potteries, Akron women were weaving together the cultural and moral fabric of the city. Women established churches, hospitals, schools, and cultural institutions, even as they nurtured their families and worked in the city's factories, stores, and offices. Even though they were busy holding the fabric of Akron life together, they still found time to enjoy the city's wonderful entertainment and recreational attributes. Akron Women captures the rich diversity, determination, spirit, courage, and energy of this extraordinary population of women through the use of historic photos, rare advertising, and supporting commentary.

While the men of Akron busied themselves laying the economic, legal, and industrial foundations, their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters were equally busy weaving the benevolent and cultural fabric of the growing city. It was a pattern replicated in scores of industrial centers across the nation. This is the story of how it happened in Akron, Ohio. Akron's "Better Half": Women's Clubs and the Humanization of the City, 1825-1925 looks at how women brought much-needed services to the city, created health institutions that continue today, and built Akron's cultural and literary foundations. Akron's women seldom acted alone; they preferred to work with like-minded women through clubs, organizations, and societies, some of which still survive today. This book covers the first 100 years of Akron's history, a time of enormous growth and change in the city. It was also a time of enormous energy and activism on the part of the women's clubs. It is a different perspective on the city, its history, and its institutions.

In this richly illustrated book Kathleen L. Endres examines the lives of women working in the rubber industry in World War II.Endres points out that women were not new to the factories of Akron. Years before the war, many women had been balancing their home lives with working in these factories. And while the war did offer new opportunities to such groups as African Americans, women had been present in the rubber industry for decades, relegated to the lower paid "less skilled" jobs, which often required more manual dexterity than the jobs left for the "skilled" labor of men.Drawing upon heretofore unavailable archival materials and oral histories, Rosie the Rubber Worker offers readers a personal as well as scholarly account of the era and highlights the important role many women played in wartime production and how their work affected their lives during the war and after.

Chronicle of womens' involvement and contributions to Summit County politics.

this is the story, in her own words, of an adventurous young woman. Coming from divorced grandparents and parents, she struck out from Akron, Ohio, after high school, modeling shoes in St. Louis and performing in a show on a boat on the Ohio River. She found love at twenty-one and, just after turning twenty-two, married in time to leave Ohio to venture with her husband, raised on an Ohio farm, into the jungles of Sumatra. She went around the world, raised a family in the Philippines, and succeeded against great odds in keeping her family alive in Japanese prison camps during World War II. A strong woman, she demonstrated management capability and great social skills with people at all levels. With only a high school education, she homeschooled her three children, each of whom earned two degrees from well-known universities. Near the end, she used her excellent storytelling skills to dictate her entertaining, humorous, and unselfconscious story to a young neighbor girl. Her son has added family and newspaper photos and provided a setting for her story. The book takes us back to the time of weeks-long ocean voyages on large ships across the Pacific Ocean, face-to-face socializing before social media, and when a college degree was not considered a necessity for success-a time that enchants and instructs.

I am not ambitious, I seek only to please for the present moment, leaving the glory of posthumous fame, to the thousand little celebrities of the day, writes Lizzie, one of the regular contributors to The Akron Offering, a literary magazine of mid-nineteenth century Northeast Ohio. I feel perfectly willing to let Posterity take care of itself, she continues. If I succeed in beguiling one sorrowing heart from its cares, even for a few moments, I shall count myself far happier than those, whose names are recorded upon the register of fame. Posterity gazes back at Lizzie and many more like-minded contributors in this complete edition of creative writings by and for the women of Akron, Ohio, then a booming canal town on the verge of even greater prosperity. By turns religious, comic, romantic, and political, this extraordinary collection of early midwestern creative literature expresses a wide range of sometimes contradictory opinions on both the important questions of its day and the important questions of today: historical events such as the California Gold Rush and the 1848 revolutions in Europe are considered alongside more timeless contemplations on truth, justice, and beauty. Comprehensively annotated and explained, this unprecedented critical edition of the complete run of an antebellum literary magazine has much to offer those interested in the histories of Akron, of Ohio, of the American Midwest, and of American literature.