Her Honor: Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement

Chapter One: Among Sturdy Women

x 3 xChapter One Among Sturdy Women Rural living in America’s broad midsection in the 1920s and 1930s tempered the women who survived it. The time and place required that women of the Dust Bowl combine intelligence, adaptability, and grit to keep homes and farms functional and families intact through bad weather and worse markets, poorly understood disease, and heartbreaking loss. Rosalie Wahl spoke to all of that when she described herself as a “farm girl” who had been “raised by sturdy women.” Sara Rosalie Erwin wasn’t originally a farm girl. The third daughter of oil pipeline maintenance engineer Claude Erwin and his wife, Gertrude Patterson Erwin, of Gordon, Kansas, she was born August 27, 1924—four years and one day after American women achieved suffrage. Sisters Mary and Jeanette were, respectively, six and four years older. Little brother Claude William, called Billy, was born two years and three months later. Their father’s work took him away often, sometimes as far away as Minnesota , and the family moved several times. The Erwin relatives were either dead or scattered by the 1920s.1 Those circumstances drew the young family close to Gertrude’s family , the Pattersons. Harry and Effie Ellis Patterson farmed 160 acres and raised six children near Birch Creek, Kansas, not far from the Oklahoma border. Gertrude was their eldest child. Effie’s family, the Ellises, were originally from Ohio, then Iowa. Staunch Yankees in the Civil War, they migrated to Kansas to establish a farm alongside Birch Creek in the mid1870s . By the 1920s, Great-grandma Ellis was an elderly widow and had moved “out west” to Montana with some of her children. But the Ellis matriarch still held the title to the place where Harry and Effie raised their family. The Pattersons paid rent each year. Harry’s family had come 4 x Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement to Kansas from West Virginia, a state that seceded from the rest of Virginia in order to remain with the Union during the Civil War. They became neighbors of the Ellises. Though West Virginia came into being to be distinct from the Confederacy, Great-grandma Ellis never quite forgave her eldest daughter for marrying “a Southerner.” The little girl called Rosalie—to distinguish her from her namesake , Gertrude’s younger sister, Sara—became a farm girl at nearly age four under sad circumstances. The Erwins were living in Augusta, near­ Wichita, in 1928 when Gertrude Erwin died at the age of thirty-two. Rosa­ lie carried through life the mental picture of her bedridden mother and her two-year-old brother sitting at the sick woman’s side, trying to comfort her. A doctor was summoned, but Gertrude died before medical help arrived. The psychological scar that early loss left on young Rosalie was lasting. A 1975 poem Rosalie titled simply “Gertrude Patterson Erwin, 1896–1928,” gives haunting voice to the lingering void it caused: Let me find you So that I can say Goodbye. Hold me tight. Fill the phantom form With laughter, Flesh it out with living tissue, Break the solemn stillness Of the photographic face. Let your little girl come running. Be the child I never knew. Weep again behind the woodstove When Beth died in Little Women. I have it still—your copy— Your unknown bequest to me. And your glasses, in my hand, Funny little gold-rimmed glasses, Put them on. Weigh and measure, once again, Through those deep-set eyes, Blue, like mine. Among Sturdy Women x 5 No one told me you were dead— But I knew. Is it true? Is the sad all gone? Can I come, too?2 A family conference soon thereafter determined that the four Erwin kids would separate. Mary and Jeanette would stay with their father and share his itinerant life and eventual remarriage. Rosalie and Billy would live with the Pattersons, joining Grandpa Harry and Grandma Effie and their two youngest children, Bill and Bob, who were teenagers still at home. “I was lucky,” Rosalie often said. “I got to stay with Grandma.”3 Strong, self-reliant Effie Ellis Patterson became the central figure in Rosalie’s childhood. Born in 1877, the eldest daughter in a large family, Effie loved learning and reading but had no school to attend until she was Rosalie Erwin on the Patterson farm, 1930. Courtesy Wahl family. 6 x Rosalie Wahl and the...