In the wake of 2020, the GGRWHC celebrates the new year for its possibilities. Beginning with our first board meeting of 2021, we will take an entirely appropriate backward glance and rededicate ourselves to remembering and acting on the lessons of the past year.

Anti-Racism Statement of the Board of Directors of the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council:  Several tragedies throughout 2020 clearly exposed the effects of systemic racism in American society. Minorities have endured disproportionately the unequal effects of COVID-19, unemployment, poverty, and incidents of police brutality and injustice. This is especially true for African American communities. We recognize that the Black Lives Matter movement has led the way in bringing attention to these inequities, and we stand with them.

We, the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council (GGRWHC), condemn the killing of George Floyd, and we mourn the many other lives that have been lost as a result of individual and systemic racism. We support and stand with Black Lives Matter and the protest of those who demonstrate to call out systemic racism and unjust practices in our communities. We denounce white supremacy and all forms of racism, discrimination and injustice.

GGRWHC commits to enabling diversity and equity, and we welcome people of all backgrounds who want to share the impact of women in our history. We will recruit and support people of color on our board. We will continue to research and share the stories of people of color in our community. We commit to continuous learning to advance our knowledge of personal biases while also learning ways to build anti-racist systems.

Join us on Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 7:00pm at the Grand Rapids Public Library where Julia Bouwkamp will present From Managerial Void to the Medical Mile: The Evolving Roles of Women and the Enduring Presence of History. 

Known for its thriving medical institutions, Grand Rapids today soars above its past, having forgotten whole chapters of an early medical history where government played virtually no role in providing civil services. Early “managerial voids” were commonly filled by the efforts of voluntary associations–associations most often led by women.

On October 10^th,  Bouwkamp will unfold the history of Grand Rapids medical institutions growing out of the efforts of hard-working, charitable nineteenth-century women. Early women citizens are rarely heralded as community builders, and Bouwkamp will reveal a story often obscured by sentimentalized assumptions that women were not seriously involved in “public” works, even in the organization of institutions that cared for the sick, the elderly, and orphaned children.

In fact, these early citizens impacted our community to a remarkable degree. Fleshing out the specific history of women founders of early Grand Rapids medical institutions, Bouwkamp will reveal a pattern where they were pushed from the centers of organizations they had created into the more feminine realm of nursing–where once again their hard work and creativity revolutionized a struggling profession by “raising standards and giving scientific value to the business of being a woman.”

Balancing benevolence and business sense, they understood that the “intelligent saints” in the caring professions should be honored for their skills and with a living wage.

The national impact of one Grand Rapids reformer:  Minnie Cumnock Blodgett

Upon U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, a nursing shortage loomed. A prominent local advocate of health public reform, Minnie Cumnock Blodgett, proposed an intensive training camp at her alma mater Vassar College, where the theoretical education of nurses could be undertaken outside a hospital setting. Bouwkamp will elaborate the long-term national effect of this successful experiment from the summer of 1918 on the nation’s nursing education and the betterment of the nursing profession.

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Julia Bouwkamp

Julia Bouwkamp has put her degree in history from Calvin College to work ever since her graduation in 2015. She has worked as a historical interpreter at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, for AmeriCorps VISTA in historic preservation, and as a researcher, speaker, and archivist with the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council and Froebel USA. Besides having recently finished curating a digital exhibit on women’s suffrage for the GGRWHC, she has published entries on local historical women in Women’s Lifestyle Magazine and a substantive article on Dutch women during World War I in Origins, Calvin College’s historical magazine. Bouwkamp is currently applying to graduate programs in material culture and public history. 

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During 2019 the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council celebrated over thirty years of recruiting and training researchers, encouraging donations to local archives, distributing bibliographies on area women’s history, digitizing materials for broader dissemination, and developing creative programming to spread information about the early accomplishments of female scientists, politicians, journalists, even reformed courtesans. Six years ago at a quarter century, it took stock and published a brief summary history, which you can find on its website:  https://www.ggrwhc.org/our-history

In January 2020 the GGRWHC will launch a year’s celebration of the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment, culminating on August 26^th at St. Cecilia Society, the site in 1899 of the only meeting in Michigan of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Co-sponsored by the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council, the Grand Rapids Historical Society, and the Grand Rapids Public Library

Join us on Wednesday, March 27 at 5pm for our Reception & Annual meeting! Enjoy a glass of wine, light appetizers, and catching up with friends! Then, settle in to hear our year-in-review, elect new directors (read more about each of them below), and learn about and celebrate the work behind the now-digitized Kent County collection of WWI Council of National Defense women’s registration cards. Let us know you plan to come! Click here to RSVP! 

Here are 2019 Slate of Candidates for the Board of Directors:

Susan Coombes

Grand Rapids native Susan Johnson Coombes majored in Communications at Michigan State University before working in local radio and moving abroad to spend time in Europe, Africa and Asia. While resident in Nigeria, she was a member, then president, of the International Women’s Association. During two years in the Netherlands, she worked as an information specialist on the Eastern Scheld Works (a storm surge barrier on an artificial island); and her fourteen years in Asia were divided between Singapore and Hong Kong, where she worked in the international public relations/communications industry. Back in the US, Coombes lived for thirteen years near Seattle and served two terms as an Arts Commissioner for the of City of Issaquah. Currently, she is retail manager for the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Coombes was first elected to the GGRWHS board in 2013 and served for four years in communications and special projects.

Jayson Otto

Jayson Otto is a professor of anthropology and food studies at Aquinas College and Grand Valley State University. He became active in local history with the Neighborhood Improvement Committee of the Midtown Neighborhood Association and while managing the Fulton Street Farmers Markets for three seasons between 2005 and 2007. His research continued during graduate work on Ecological Food and Farming Systems at Michigan State University. There, Otto dug deeper into the origins of the Fulton Street Farmers Market, and he uncovered the prominent roles played by Progressive Era women in Grand Rapids food politics. Jayson has represented the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council with programming in women’s history, farmers markets, and urban farming at the national Agricultural History Society, the Midwestern History Association, GVSU’s Great Lakes History Conference, GRPL’s History Detectives and at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. Some of his research on Grand Rapids women, farmers markets, and school gardens can be read in a chapter of the book Cities of Farmers: Problems, Possibilities, and Processes of Producing Food in Cities from the University of Iowa Press. Jayson hopes to extend his research on the civic work of Progressive Era women around food production to other cities and towns across the state.

Kelly Otto

Kelly Otto is a genealogical researcher who, between 2001 and 2015, was employed as  executive director of Grand Rapids’s Midtown Neighborhood Association. During her fourteen years working alongside neighbors and local businesses promoting community engagement, she emphasized their investment in the neighborhood’s local history. She advocated for the creation of two historic preservation study groups to investigate the potential designation of historic districts within the Ashby Row and Brikyaat areas of Midtown. With for-profit and non-profit stakeholders she worked to ensure a historically sensitive renovation of Houseman Field. To  encourage Midtown residents to investigate their own “house histories,” she took residents to the Grand Rapids Public Library and Grand Rapids City Archive to teach them how to utilize resources available there. We endorse Otto’s belief in “building connections between the past to better understand the present and how we arrived here.”

On Thursday, November 8 at 6:15pm in the Vander Veen Center at the Main Library (before Janet Sheeres’s program at 7:00 pm), the Board of Directors of the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council asks that dues-paying members meet to conduct the agreeable business of electing new directors.

Here are 2018 Slate of Candidates for the Board of Directors:

SOPHIA WARD BREWER

A Master of Library and Information Science from Wayne State University,Sophia Ward Brewer began as a page at the Grand Rapids Public Library in 1991 and by 2014 had become Head of Programming. Her career trajectory at GRPL now includes its Board of Library Commissioners, for which she ran in 2016 and on which she still serves, securing her place in our elective history of women in Grand Rapids! Currently, Sophia is the Collections Development Librarian at Grand Rapids Community College, where she also teaches information literacy and works on MI-ACE, Campus Climate, and Equality and Inclusion. She is researching the early history of African American women in Grand Rapids and for GGRWHC will present in January at History Detectives.

MATTHEW ELLIS

Since graduation from Aquinas College in 2015, Matthew Ellis has been Assistant Archivist for the City of Grand Rapids, where he does conservation work and document repair when he is not indexing municipal records and retrieving materials for researchers and city departments. He has also organized archival materials for Mary Free Bed, created a finding aid for their use, and helped plan a wall of history for display at the hospital. Outside work duties, Matt has exercised his planning and promotional skills by volunteering for the Event Committee of the Eastown Community Association and developing programming for History Detectives, a consortium of local historical groups. Also as a Trustee of the Grand Rapids Historical Society, Matt will become an important local history liaison.

LIBBY VANDERPLOEG

KATELYN BOSCH VERMERRIS

Katelyn Bosch VerMerris steeped herself in local history during undergraduate work at Calvin College, when she interned with the Lowell Area Historical Museum and Fallasburg Historical Society. Then she met the GGRWHC during her study for a master’s degree in Public History at West Virginia University, where she focused her thesis research on the home front work of Grand Rapids women during World War I, supplementing GGRWHC projects in this area. Katelyn will also coordinate with us to develop the website presentation of this important work. Building on her undergraduate study of history and strategic communications at Calvin College, Katelyn has been undertaking projects with historical museums in Saugatuck-Douglas and Holland.