Susan Groag Bell

Susan Groag Bell (25 January 1926 – 24 June 2015) was a Czech-American pioneer in Women's Studies. At a time when there were no academic courses nor textbooks, offered in women's history, Bell compiled images of women's participation in society from artworks and began presenting lectures to present roles women had held in society. In 1971, a year after the first women's studies course was offered in the United States, Bell taught her own class on the subject and prepared a reading guide for the course which would become one of the first textbooks to treat women's history from an academic perspective. She taught and researched for more than four decades as an independent scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Posthumously, a conference named in her honor was held at Stanford and a plaque recognizing her contributions to women's history was dedicated by the history department of Stanford University.

Susan Groag Bell
Born	Susan E. M. Groag (1926-01-25)25 January 1926 Opava, Czechoslovakia
Died	24 June 2015(2015-06-24) (aged 89) Palo Alto, California
Nationality	Czechoslovakian American
Other names	Susan Barrington, Susan Bell
Occupation	historian, women's history pioneer
Years active	1970-2014
Known for	creating one of the first women's history textbooks in the United States
Spouse(s)	Robert Bell

Early life

Susan Groag was born on 25 January 1926 in Troppau[1] (now known as Opava),[2] in the German-speaking Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. Her father was a lawyer and both of her parents had Jewish heritage,[1] though they converted to Lutheranism.[3] In 1938, when the Germans annexed Sudetenland, Groag was no longer allowed to go to school. To protect his wife and daughter, Groag's father arranged a visa for his wife to work as a domestic in England, and dispatched them via train from Prague in January 1939.[1] While her mother worked as a maid, they tried to arrange a visa for Groag's father, but were unsuccessful.[4] He was unable to leave Czechoslovakia and was one of the victims of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.[1]

Groag attended a boarding school in Haywards Heath and upon graduating in 1943, she moved to Wales where she attended a high school program developed by the Czech government-in-exile.[1][3] The curricula was designed to train students to help rebuild their homeland. When the war ended in 1945, Groag returned to Czechoslovakia with her classmates.[1] Unable to reconcile her memories with the post-war reality, or identify with the nationalist aims of the country, within a year, Groag returned to London, where her mother had remained.[1][3] Sidelined until 1950 by illness,[1] in the second half of that year Groag married Alfred E. Barrington in Chelsea and moved to the United States in October.[5][6][7] After a few years, the Barringtons divorced and in 1960, Groag married Ronald Bell, a physicist who lived in Woodside, California.[1][8]

Career

Proximity to Stanford University, led Bell to pursue a long-held dream to earn a university education and she graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts in history.[1][5] She applied for Stanford's PhD program but was denied entry because she was too old and instead earned a master's degree in history from Santa Clara University in 1970.[5] Her dissertation focused on the lives of Elizabeth Gaskell, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, and Frances Trollope, four women whose careers began later in their lives and who succeeded without formal education.[1] During her studies, in the late 1960s, Bell began presenting lectures for the speaker's bureau, Women Perspectives. The lectures focused on women as depicted as subjects of western art over the previous two millennia.[5] Centering her talks around images she had organized into a slide projection show, Bell's lectures used a wide range of source materials from medieval manuscript illuminations to gardening imagery[9] to demonstrate women's work, status, and roles in society over time.[10]

The socio-political events of the late 1960s including the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, and women's liberation movement led to pressure on academic institutions to add courses on women's studies which rejected the notion that women were second class citizens.[11][12] The first academic treatment of women's experiences as a field of study in the United States was launched at San Diego State University in 1970.[13] The following year, Bell developed a women's studies course for Cañada College. Lacking textbooks, she prepared a reading guide which was published as a textbook, Women, from the Greeks to the French Revolution, in 1973 and reprinted in 1980.[1] She lectured in the history department of Santa Clara University and traveled throughout the country presenting women's history lectures from Bryn Mawr College to the University of New Mexico.[9][10]

In the late 1970s, Bell joined with other scholars at Stanford's Center for Research on Women (CROW), now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research,[5] to form a network of independent women scholars. She was one of the first affiliated scholars of CROW and later was appointed as a permanent senior scholar.[1] In 1982, Bell published Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture in Signs. In the article, she argued that noble women in medieval society, operating within their own socially defined roles became catalysts for cultural change, through their relationship to books.[14] Teaching their children and commissioning books for them; influencing devotional publishers to write Books of Hours in vernacular languages rather than Latin; and bringing their books with them to new courts upon marriage were all ways in which women participated in cultural exchange.[15] The book became widely influential and inspired other scholars to analyze how women were obscured in historical records.[16]

For more than four decades, Bell worked as an independent scholar at the Clayman Institute.[17] In addition to her own publishing, she collaborated on such works as Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in the Documents: 1750-1950 with Karen Offen.[1] Published in 1983, the work presented translated documents related to the debates that occurred in the period on whether women should lead public or traditional lives.[18] On the basis of its scholarship, Bell and Offen created training seminars for Stanford and Bell and Barbara Gelpi taught a Stanford/Oxford seminar series focused on British gender depictions. In 1986 she co-edited with Marilyn Yalom, Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender[1] and in 1991, wrote her own memoir, Between Worlds: Czechoslovakia, England, and America.[4] Her final major published work, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies (2004) traced the journey to unsuccessfully locate tapestries owned by various European royal houses which depicted imagery from Christine de Pizan's Le Livre de la cité des dames and how the tapestries survived even when Pizan's writing had fallen into obscurity.[19][20]

Death and legacy

Bell died on 24 June 2015 at her home in Palo Alto, California.[1] In January 2016, a conference was hosted by the Clayman Institute to pay homage to her contributions to women's history and in June 2016 a plaque was dedicated by the history department of Stanford University in her honor.[17] Part of Bell's papers (1978-1982) are housed in the special collections of the Stanford University Libraries.[21] In 2017, the Association of Art Historians hosted a conference in the UK at Loughborough University to evaluate the legacy of Bell's Medieval Women Book Owners, thirty-five years after its initial publication.[22] That same year, Stanford University Press launched the Susan Groag Bell Publication Fund in Women's History to support the "publication of outstanding books in the field of women’s history".[23][24]

References

Citations

1. Palo Alto Weekly 2015.
2. Rechcigl Jr. 2016, p. 468.
3. Stromswold 1991, p. 33.
4. Kirkus Reviews 1991.
5. Mayhall 2017, p. 186.
6. Marriage Registry 1950.
7. Passenger Lists 1950.
8. Marriage Records 1960.
9. The San Mateo Times 1976, p. 11.
10. The Albuquerque Journal 1977, p. 14.
11. Boxer 2002, p. 43.
12. Jaschik 2009.
13. Gardiner & Thayer 2011, p. 499.
14. Griffiths 2017, p. 208.
15. Griffiths 2017, pp. 209-210.
16. Griffiths 2017, p. 211.
17. Mayhall 2017, p. 187.
18. Strauss 1986, p. 361.
19. Pearson 2005.
20. Ninan 2004.
21. Online Archive of California 1997.
22. International Center of Medieval Art 2017.
23. Jordan 2017.
24. Stanford University Press 2017.

Bibliography

• Boxer, Marilyn J. (Winter 2002). "Women's Studies as Women's History". Women's Studies Quarterly. New York, New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 30 (3–4): 42–51. ISSN 0732-1562. JSTOR 40003241.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Gardiner, Judith; Thayer, Millie (Fall 2011). "Preface" (PDF). Feminist Studies. College Park, Maryland: Feminist Studies, Inc. 37 (3): 495–501. ISSN 0046-3663. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 March 2016. Retrieved 11 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Griffiths, Fiona J. (Fall 2017). "Susan Groag Bell's "Medieval Women Book Owners" After 35 Years". Journal of Women's History. Johns Hopkins University Press. 29 (3): 208–213. ISSN 1042-7961. Retrieved 13 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) – via Project MUSE (subscription required)
• Jaschik, Scott (27 March 2009). "'The Evolution of American Women's Studies'". Washington, D.C.: Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on 11 April 2019. Retrieved 11 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Jordan, David A. (February 2017). "The Susan Groag Bell Publication Fund in Women's History". ReMix. Stanford, California: Stanford University Libraries. 109. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (Fall 2017). "Remembering Susan Groag Bell". Journal of Women's History. Johns Hopkins University Press. 29 (3): 186–189. doi:10.1353/jowh.2017.0040. ISSN 1042-7961.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Ninan, Claire Le (2004). "Reviewed books: Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies. Christine de Pizan's Renaissance Legacy". Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes (in French). 11. ISSN 2115-6360. Retrieved 14 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Pearson, Andrea G. (19 October 2005). "Review: Susan Groag Bell The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan's Renaissance Legacy". College Art Association Reviews. New York, New York. doi:10.3202/caa.reviews.2005.55. Retrieved 14 April 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Rechcigl Jr., Miloslav (2016). "Susan Groag Bell (1926-)". Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography. II. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse. p. 468. ISBN 978-1-5246-2069-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Strauss, Sylvia (April 1986). "Reviewed Works: Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents. Volume 1, 1750-1880; volume 2, 1880-1950 by Susan Groag Bell, Karen M. Offen". The American Historical Review. 91 (2): 360–362. doi:10.2307/1858144. ISSN 0002-8762. JSTOR 1858144.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Stromswold, Dorothy (4 August 1991). "Czech historian says you can't go home". South Bend, Indiana: The South Bend Tribune. p. 33. Retrieved 10 April 2019 – via Newspapers.com.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• "Between Worlds: In Czechoslovakia, England and America, by Susan Groag Bell". Kirkus Reviews. New York City, New York: Kirkus Media, LLC. 15 May 1991. ISSN 1948-7428. Archived from the original on 9 April 2019. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
• "California Marriage Records: Ronald L Bell/Susan E Groag". FamilySearch. Sacramento, California: California Department of Health Services. 8 November 1960. Santa Clara, California Indices. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
• "England and Wales Marriage Registration Index: Alfred E Barrington/Susan E M Groag". FamilySearch. Southport, England: General Register Office. 1950. 3rd Quarter 1950, vol. 5C, p. 705. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
• "Eons of Women in the Garden". The San Mateo Times. San Mateo, California. 18 May 1976. p. 11. Retrieved 11 April 2019 – via Newspaperarchive.com.
• "Guide to the Susan G. Bell Papers" (PDF). oac.cdlib.org. Stanford, California: Online Archive of California. 1997. Call Number: SC0555. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 September 2015. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
• "ICMA at the 2017 AAH Conference". medievalart.org. New York, New York: International Center of Medieval Art. 31 March 2017. Archived from the original on 1 July 2017. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
• "New York Passenger lists". FamilySearch. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. 26 October 1950. NARA microfilm series T715, Roll 7907. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
• "Memorial: Susan Groag Bell". Palo Alto Weekly. Palo Alto, California. June 2015. Archived from the original on 4 December 2015. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
• "Stanford University Press announces new fund to honor Susan Groag Bell". Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 12 April 2017. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2019.
• "Women Topic of History Talk". The Albuquerque Journal. Albuquerque, New Mexico. 29 November 1977. p. 14. Retrieved 11 April 2019 – via Newspaperarchive.com.