The Alice Marshall Women's History Collection

Alice K. Marshall

The Alice Marshall Women’s History collection, acquired by the Penn State Harrisburg Library in 1991, and now part of the library’s Archives and Special Collections, is a vast, wide-ranging, eclectic compilation of visual, literary, and manuscript materials covering over 300 years of women’s history, with its major concentration from the 18th- through mid-20th centuries.

Examples of materials include:

Decorative advertising trade cards from businesses owned by women
Hand-colored fashion plates (with the elaborate images still in their original vivid hues, despite the passage of centuries)

WWI recruiting poster

Personal letters of literary women
About 1,000 newspapers, including scattered issues of many Pennsylvania titles
Magazines (bound and unbound)
Romance comic books from the 1950’s and ‘60’s
Many hundreds of loose 19th- and 20th-century magazine ads depicting women in stereotypical roles
Campaign and social-issues buttons
Valentines
Large recruiting posters from both World Wars
Over 1,000 pieces of sheet music from the 19th- and 20th- centuries
Over 7,000 early 20th- century picture postcards, many portraying negative stereotypes of women
More than 7,000 pamphlets and books (including a large number of 19th-century titles by women who wrote about their travels through the US and abroad)

Alice Kahler Marshall (1923-1997), of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, a journalist, magazine editor, speechwriter, researcher, compiler, and passionate, inveterate collector for over 50 years, raised her various collections and her four children in a modest home that she filled from top to bottom (including the stairs!) with her acquisitions. Her collecting obsession began with old newspapers. But during the 1970’s women’s movement, she noticed that women were rarely mentioned in the old papers, and so was born her women’s history collection.

19th-century hand-colored fashion plate

Initially her collecting reflected her fascination with the contradictions between the realities of women’s lives and the stereotypes of women’s behavior, but as time went on, she widened her focus to include basically anything and everything about, by, and for women. (She could only collect what was available, of course, so there are many materials on some subjects, and just a tantalizing few about others.)

In a 1990 Harrisburg (PA) Patriot News interview, Mrs. Marshall mentioned how busy she was during each year’s Women’s History Month, fielding numerous requests for loans of her materials. “Despite the tedium that goes along with the 31 days in March, deep down Marshall enjoys the recognition because it gives her a sense that she has rescued some of women’s history from oblivion. ‘Some days I think I just want to stop this,’ she said. ‘But then someone will call me and tell me about something they’ve found, and I say, I have to have that.’”

Alice Marshall was the author of an illustrated book, Pen Names of Women Writers, in which she compiled and cross-referenced 2650 pen names of 4,000 women writers from 1600-1895. She also wrote articles on women’s history, and presented illustrated lectures culled from her collection. Over the years she also assembled an extensive and detailed finding aid (currently in three large notebooks, but eventually it will also be accessible electronically), which presently constitutes the collection guide. Cataloging is ongoing, and an updated collection inventory is underway.

The collection has proven to be a valuable source of ideas for student papers and projects, and historians periodically make contact for assistance with their research. In addition, beginning with the summer of 2008, the library’s Archives and Special Collections has been awarding annual travel grants to graduate students, faculty and independent scholars whose research would benefit from an extended visit to the collection.

The curator of the collection is Martha Sachs, a Penn State Harrisburg librarian. For further information about the collection’s holdings, current hours, or for more details about the travel and research grants, please call 717-948-6280, or e-mail: mss206@psu.edu, and visit the website: www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/harrisburg/asc/amwhc.html. Individual names in the collection can be viewed at this URL: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/harrisburg/asc/amwhc/namefiles.html