I came across this obituary tonight while researching something else entirely. She was so young - and changed the lives of so many women of all colors, in Milwaukee, during the Great Depression. I salute you, Mary Kellogg Rice. What wonderful things you did. You empowered people through the greatest way possible - you helped them discover the wonderful things they could do themselves and for themselves.
I didn't know anything about you or what you did but now, thanks to the power of the internet, many people who read here will learn about you and the program you ran.
Amid Depression, Rice helped women find work through art
WPA project gave work, respect to thousands of Milwaukee's poor
e-mail print By Amy Rabideau Silvers of the Journal Sentinel
Jan. 17, 2011
In those dark, desperate days of the Great Depression, thousands of women found employment and hope through a Works Progress Administration project.
Mary Kellogg Rice, then a senior studying art at the Milwaukee State Teachers College, was asked to serve as art director for a handicraft project. Hundreds of women showed up that first day in 1935, reporting to a vacant building at Jackson and Wells streets downtown.
They were the poorest of the poor. Many were middle-age. Many had never worked or were considered to have no skills. Some could not read or speak much English. All were on relief and ordered into the program because there was no "able-bodied man" in the household for other WPA work.
"They were undernourished and miserable, that's all I can say," Rice later told the Journal Sentinel. "They looked as if they'd been through an awful lot. They'd been assigned work, but they didn't know what it was. Some of them had walked all the way across Milwaukee to get there."
The project flourished, becoming a model for programs elsewhere. More than 1,300 women were sometimes involved at one time, with a total of 5,000-plus women by the time it closed in 1943.
More than half a century later, as more modern-day politicians debated welfare reform, Rice decided to write a book about the Depression-era project. Her handwritten manuscript - "Useful Work for Unskilled Women / A Unique Milwaukee WPA Project" - was later published in 2003.
"It was a gift to Milwaukee to say, look what these women did," said Lois Quinn, researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Employment and Training Institute.
"It's totally a Milwaukee story," Quinn said.
Rice died of natural causes Jan. 6 in Tiburon, Calif. She turned 100 last month.
For her part, Rice always credited Elsa Ulbricht, one of her teachers at the teachers college, for the program's direction and success. A well-known art educator, Ulbricht was asked about what a program might do.
Ulbricht insisted that women should produce both useful and well-designed goods. And she tapped Rice to run it.
The young art student worked with art school grads - both women and men - to design production items and supervise the work. As art director, she approved every design.
The goal was to make high-quality items that could be used by public institutions.
"They went to the county orphanage to see what was needed, and they were shocked by the conditions there," Quinn said. "So they made educational toys, curtains, rugs and quilted coverlets for the beds."
They created dolls and fabrics, wall hangings and furniture. They re-bound books for schools and libraries, and designed costumes for high school productions. Other clients included hospitals, nursery schools and the University of Wisconsin.
"Very shortly, after they had their first paycheck, you could see it," Rice said. "What was interesting to me was that they couldn't buy much, but they could get a white collar and wear it. And then they could have a permanent wave. The change was really just dramatic. They knew they were doing useful work, and they knew they could do it."
The women began to find work with other WPA projects.
"They sent women from the handicraft project to the World's Fair, where they demonstrated how to make the items," Quinn said. "Other states began to copy the program.
"Eleanor Roosevelt visited and wrote about it in her 'My Day' column," she said. "One of their wall hangings was in her house when she died."
The project was groundbreaking in yet another way.
Although only 2% of Milwaukee's population was then black, the number in the handicraft project was 25%.
"The county sent the African-American women they hadn't allowed to work on other projects," Quinn said. "And they already had a separate facility where they wanted them to work."
That, declared young Rice, wasn't going to happen.
"We were furious and vowed not to have a segregated workplace," she wrote in her book. "The idea that race should determine where and when one worked offended our sense of fairness."
Such integration was just the beginning.
"There were supervisors who were African-American," Quinn said. "They had skills that many of the white women didn't have, and they made them supervisors."
Mary Kellogg married Edward E. Rice late in 1942. He was from Milwaukee and a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service. They spent their first married years apart, while he served in China during the war.
They spent much of their married life overseas. Odd things sometimes happened when she tried to pursue her own art. In the Philippines, someone saw her weaving and she was soon working under the auspices of the United Nations and the Philippine government, organizing work projects for local women.
The couple later retired to the San Francisco area. Rice finally began to find time for art, first weaving until back problems developed, then experimenting with a fabric-dyeing technique called shibori.
"That led to collaboration on a book, 'Shibori: The Art of Japanese Resist Dyeing,' published in Japan in 1983," said Margaret Serrano, a lawyer who became a close friend. "It is considered a classic on the subject and is still in print."
But Rice's roots went back to Milwaukee and unfinished business with the old WPA project. She thought that someone should write about what it meant to the women and families, the young teachers and a Depression-weary community.
"She remained intensely interested in public policy, particularly policy affecting women and children," Quinn said. "Her vision was what could be done and what had happened in the past. She was a remarkable woman, remarkable throughout her life."
A private service is planned.
