Imagine, if you could, a light manufacturing business established to employ unskilled and semi-skilled women from the welfare rolls, creating products (toys, dolls, books, quilts, fabrics, weavings, and furniture) of such quality that art museums and eBay collectors would bid hundreds of dollars for them after they were discarded by schools, hospitals and day care centers. Such a project was created in Milwaukee County in the 1930s -- created, I might add, by a group of young college graduates and art students. One "designer-foreman" for the project's toy unit, George Burns, wryly recalls, "We were so naive and inexperienced we didn't realize we were being asked to do the impossible, so we did it."
Mary Kellogg Rice, art director for the WPA Milwaukee Handicraft Project from its inception in 1935 to 1942, has written a fascinating account of the project titled, Useful Work for Unskilled Women: A Unique Milwaukee WPA Project. Rice was a senior at Milwaukee State Teachers College during the Great Depression when her teacher Elsa Ulbricht asked her to help develop a Works Progress Administration project for women lacking skills for the other WPA projects operating in Milwaukee County. Within a few weeks Rice and her team of designer-foremen -- mostly young, unemployed art education graduates -- were training women to make products for use by children in WPA nursery schools, the county orphanage, county hospital and local schools. Eventually, their production lines were employing over a thousand women and furnishing area rugs, draperies, wall hangings and even furniture for local school offices, the Milwaukee Public Library and the University of Wisconsin student union.
Rice tells the story of the remarkable development of this project in careful, measured tones, emphasizing the importance of good design and useful work to the project's success. She understates the role she played in ensuring that every product made was of the highest possible quality. She once explained her philosophy, "It was decided that no matter how simple the article to be made or how inexpensive the materials to be used in the construction, the article would be well designed or it would not be made." The photographs in her book prove the value of the approach -- women of all ages and different races working intently on production of children's books (now in library special collections), costumes (still used in high school productions), dolls (now selling on eBay for $800-$1,000), coverlets and textile fabrics (purchased and hung in art museums). Rice also provides color photographs of products and information on the location of public collections of historic photographs and WPA products, often worn through use.
Rice's book on Useful Work for Unskilled Women: A Unique WPA Project is published by the Milwaukee County Historical Society. The soft cover book includes 130 historic black and white photographs and sketches and 34 color photos of products. It can be ordered for $24.95 from the University of Wisconsin Press. See the UWM Employment and Training Institute website for a summary of our 109 page history on Jobs for Workesr on Relief in Milwaukee County, 1930-1994.
-- Lois Quinn
Photographs at right, Mary Kellogg Rice today and in the 1930s
