Ruth Shain Touches Grass

The near constant gloom of a Birmingham winter can be a lot for anyone. On her first winter in Birmingham in 1918, Ruth recalled “I just felt I couldn’t live-maybe I’d just die, because the winter was so hard”. But she lived, and threw herself into civic projects to keep the blues at bay. The projects she undertook changed Birmingham forever and we are still reaping the rewards.

To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.

For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

Ruth Shain Touches Grass

                Mental health has come up a few times on previous episodes, but this is going to be one where the individual themselves made a very clear connection between their mental health and some of the remarkable things they did. Ruth Shain was born in Southeastern Michigan but moved to sunny California for a few years and upon moving back to Michigan and to Birmingham said of the winter “I just felt I couldn’t live-maybe I’d just die, because the winter was so hard”. Today, she might be diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder and there are supplements and prescriptions that could have alleviated her symptoms. But in the 1910s and ‘20s there was really only one way-to work through it and keep herself distracted. And Birmingham became the better for it.

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

                If you don’t live in Birmingham, you may think that maybe Ruth was being a little dramatic. And listen, I envy you if you think that. As I write this script right now, it’s winter and the light inside my office can hardly compete with the gloom outside at 10:30 am. On average, this area get 180 sunny days per year, with the majority of those days being from May to October. The national average of sunny days is 205.

                For comparison, Ruth spent several years teaching in Boulder, Montana and Corvina, California. Boulder gets 188 sunny days a year on average and Corvina gets 288 plus the average low temperature in January in Corvina is 43 degrees Fahrenheit while it is 22 degrees in Birmingham. 

                Many folks, myself included who struggle with the gray and gloom,  can feel better with a vitamin D supplement in the winter but get more relief from light or phototherapy or even antidepressant medication to help them through the winter. 

                But let’s start at the beginning to see why Ruth was in California and why she came back.

                [break]

Laila Ruth Edgar was born in about 1884, a fact we do not learn from her oral history because she refused to state what year she was born. We’ve mentioned the oral histories from the 1970s before in our podcast. This was a time when oral histories were incredibly structured, with the same questions asked to all participants in the same order with no real deviation. This was considered best practices at the time, whereas today we don’t have that same emphasis on the structure or asking identical questions. But as frustrating as those oral histories can be sometimes for researchers today (check out our last episode on Edward Crawford for an example), they can give us a good look at the personalities of the participants.

                Some folks roll with it, like the member of the Jewish Levinson family who good naturedly answers about how they celebrated Christmas as a child. Some folks, like Florence Crawford Watkins, snuck what they really wanted to talk about in their answers. And then there are some, like Ruth Shain, who looked Dr Pat Piling right in the eye and told her that she wasn’t going to answer that, or that her question was too boring to answer or even snapping at her a bit when she felt like Dr Pilling had interrupted her.

                And, just to be clear here, although she was born “Laila Ruth Edgar”, as an adult she appears to have gone only by Ruth, so that’s what we’ll be calling her throughout this episode. We’ve done quite a bit of digging and we haven’t found anything about why Ruth decided on Ruth. But a woman strong willed enough to change Birmingham forever is also strong willed enough to name herself.

                Since Ruth didn’t grow up in Birmingham and we have a lot to talk about when it comes to her later life, we’ll only give the highlights of her childhood. We’ll have the transcript of her oral history on our website, if you’d like more info.

                Both of Ruth’s parents were born on the same day, one mile apart. Ruth was born in 1884. She had a brother who was ten years older than her, so he was maybe less a brother and more of one extra annoying adult. Her dad was a Livingston County judge and she practiced her writing skills by copying his court documents. When she was 9, her family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for her dad’s job and she attended high school in town and then went on to graduate from the University of Michigan in 1907, where she majored in English and History.

                As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, graduating high school in the late 1800s and early 1900s was already pretty rare. But then to go on to college was rarer still. And as a woman? Even more rare but becoming increasingly common in the new Progressive Era of the late 1800s in the United States.

                The first colleges in the United States, like Harvard (established in 1636) and William and Mary (1693), were established as institutions to train the clergy. And as most Protestant denominations at the time didn’t ordain women, they had no need to admit women (shout out to the Quakers who did allow women to speak and pray publically in their meetings but they had neither ordained clergy or college training programs for those non-existent clergy). Later, many of those first colleges had programs geared towards law and medicine-two professions that were barred to women initially. 

                In 1837, Oberlin in Ohio became the first college in the country to admit women. They were also the first to admit African Americans in 1835. And I think that’s the first nice thing we’ve ever said about Ohio on this podcast. And it’ll probably be the last. 

                The mid-1800s saw more and more women, of all races, push into male dominated fields like medicine, the sciences and the humanities. But there was still resistance to women seeking higher education- and this resistance came from both men and women. Some argued that a woman’s fragile mind just couldn’t take learning so many new things in a short amount of time, or that the assignments and deadlines would cause their nervous systems to go haywire (as if we are all Mrs Bennett from Pride and Prejudice going on about our poor nerves 24/7). A very popular medical myth put forward throughout the 1800s postulated that a college education impaired a woman’s fertility… this was an era when “trust me, bro” was all the proof one needed in a paper, evidently. These arguments were also trotted out by those who wanted to deny women the right to vote as well- because walking into a voting booth and selecting candidates is so mentally and physically taxing. 

                But women were not going to be deterred, and were determined to prove that their nervous systems and ovaries were just fine, even if they did have to study for midterms, thank you very much. By 1900, there were 85,338 women enrolled in colleges and universities, both public and private, all over the country. By 1940 that number jumped to over 600,000 and today more women than men are enrolled in higher ed and get more degrees than men do. 

                In 1870, The University of Michigan admitted it’s first female student, and by the next year 34 additional women were admitted. At the time, the total number of students at the University was about 1,200. That year, only 30% of colleges were co-educational, making the UofM a destination for women from all over the country. Black and Asian women were also represented among the student body in late 1800s.

                The UofM’s online archives has first hand accounts from the women who attended the University of Michigan from the 1870s-1920s. In the 1920s, a UofM women’s group sent out a survey to past female grads. The survey responses are fascinating and give a glimpse into what young women felt about themselves and their education at the time.

                Ruth Edgar doesn’t appear in the archives. Maybe she never got the survey or didn’t send in a response but we can put together what her college life may have looked like from her classmates’ responses. For starters, when Ruth arrived in Ann Arbor, she wasn’t assigned a dorm room because there were no dorms. The YWCA helped women find housing in rooming or boarding houses. These homes were often co-ed and the female students lived under the same roof with male students. One former female student wrote: “The intermingling of boys and girls in the same home brought about a democratic and broadminded outlook on life, as well as mutual understanding between the sexes.”

                Most women described their interactions with their male counterparts in positive terms. But living with other men and women in the same building that they may have not known was not the only completely new experience.  There was also the city itself. Some respondents describe the city of Ann Arbor as a “cosmopolitan experience” that gave them “absolute freedom” for the first time in their lives. Many white students from smaller or segregated towns and cities expressed surprise at the diversity of the student body and reported positive experiences with working and studying with students from different backgrounds and said that it helped them later in life.

                The last few years of the 1800s saw a women’s gymnasium open and a dean of women added to the staff. In 1907, the year Ruth graduated, she had the option to be in the senior women’s play, vote on a class song, participate in the senior breakfast and join a variety of clubs and sororities. 

                One of the biggest complaints female grads had, according to the survey, was that many of the professors, while praising their work, refused to help them find internships or jobs. Thanks for your money and hard work ladies, but the dudes are more deserving of professional opportunities.

Unfortunately, we don’t have many details about Ruth’s perspective of her college experience, but we do know about her years teaching afterwards. 

[break]

Her first job was here in Birmingham at the Hill School teaching 9-12 grades, and it was also her first exposure to the village. She roomed with a Mrs Bray on Woodward Avenue. I looked into it. This is probably 38 year old Polly Parks Bray, who is listed on the 1910 census as living on Woodward Avenue with her husband and three children. The Parks family are one of those Birmingham families involved in many businesses in the late 1800s and early 1900s and who married into pretty much every other family in Birmingham. Polly’s husband worked with her brother in the meat business in the village, bringing animals into the butcher shop and then selling the meat at market.

Ruth was only in Birmingham for 9 months, or one school year, and she recounts in her oral history one memorable incident with a senior student named Harry Rogers who was the ringleader of the trouble makers in her class. Unfortunately we don’t know what subject this was but she majored in English and History…so those are good guesses. She asked Harry to leave the class after a disruption and he refused. She then treated him as if he wasn’t there for the rest of the semester, leading Harry to fail because he only had a 20% participation grade. 

She went on to say “…the class seemed very avid to learn, and very teachable, and there was never any question or discipline after that one thing had been settled.” I think most teachers would consider it a good year to only have one problem student whether it is 1908 or 2025. And if your great grandpa was Harry Rogers, let us know if he managed to pass his senior year.

Ruth describes that class as having 14 or 15 students, which sounds like a lot for a small village in the early 1900s, but Hill School didn’t serve students just from Birmingham. It was the first public 1-12 grade school in the village, but students from other nearby communities could pay tuition to attend. At the time, secondary, or what we think of as high school, wasn’t a requirement and few students went beyond 8th grade (only about 13% of adults in 1910 had a high school diploma), many communities didn’t even bother building the facilities or hiring the teaching staff for those grades. 

But Birmingham has always been progressive. In 1869, the voters in Birmingham passed a milage to build a new brick 1-12 grade school. Originally called Union School, it was later renamed Hill School after a beloved educator, Samuel Hill. We’ve got a virtual exhibit on our website with a timeline of the Birmingham Public Schools that we’ll link to in our shownotes.

One other significant thing happened while Ruth was living and teaching in Birmingham, she met a man named Charles Shain. We sadly don’t have any details about their first meeting, but the village was small and everybody knew everybody, so it would have been unlikely for them to have not crossed paths at least once in the 9 months Ruth was here. Charles had just graduated Pharmacy school at what is now Ferris State University, in Big Rapids Michigan. He’s gonna have his own episode but we’re just going to talk about one aspect of his personality here: he seems to have loved a strong willed and educated woman.

Which comes as no surprise when you realize that his mom’s best friend was Martha Baldwin, a force of nature who has her episode about how she basically shaped Birmingham into the community that she wanted it to be. Charles was mentored by Martha, who helped pay for his pharmacy degree. So it stands to reason that Charles would also encourage and worked with the first licensed female pharmacist in Oakland County, Ethel Basset, and even co-owned his pharmacy with her for decades. Some men of his era were trying to convince themselves and others that a woman’s place was in the domestic sphere and that too much education was dangerous for them in response to the feminist movement that was demanding greater legal rights (voting being chief among them). Charles though, seems to be supportive of the Progressive Era feminist movement at the time, or at least wasn’t threatened by it.

Did sparks fly between Ruth and Charles in 1908? We don’t know for sure because after the school year ended, Ruth took a teaching job in Cadillac, Michigan; then a job in Montana and finally a few years in Corvina, California, outside of Los Angeles. Charles, meanwhile, got married to a local girl, Catherine Berz. Unfortunately, Catherine died unexpectedly in 1917. And I know what you are thinking, was it an early case of the 1918 flu? It was not, which possibly made her death even more shocking and unexpected. After some time, it was in California that Ruth and Charles appear to have reconnected as Charles’ mother and her friends spent their winters in sunny Riverside, California. 

In 1918, they married and moved to Birmingham. Charles owned Shain’s drugstore and already seemed to have political aspirations. But, we’re still in an era where single women were let go from their teaching positions if they married. So, we meet Ruth back where the episode started: cold and miserable. And without a meaningful role.

Back in California, Ruth had been a member of the American Association of University Women and had made a lot of friends and connections there. The AAUW started in 1881 to help women find greater opportunities to use their education as well as promoting higher education and assisting other women in getting degrees. They even published a paper refuting the idea that post-secondary education harmed a woman’s fertility. Notably, in 1919, the association raised $156,413 to purchase a gram of Radium for Marie Curie’s ongoing research. The organization still exists and boasts about 170,000 members.

 Over a card game in 1920, Ruth decided to start a chapter in Birmingham. At their first meeting on October 20, 1920, 16 area women showed up and Ruth was elected president. Within a few years, the group, through fundraising efforts, was supporting ten graduates from Birmingham High in their education and held a luncheon every January for senior girls to encourage them to consider and seek out further education. The fundraisers for the group quickly took over the village’s social scene. But Ruth wasn’t done yet.

During the same time period, in 1923, a frame building at the corner of Bates and Maple was dedicated as Birmingham’s Community House, the brainchild of Ruth Shain and other local women. The Community House was a place for folks in the community to take in art, participate in classes, join new clubs and groups and organize charitable giving.  The first public event held at the Community House was an art exhibit sponsored by the Birmingham Women’s Literary Club. At first, only women were on the board of the Community House, but that changed in the following decades. 

In addition to the classes, workshops and civic meetings, a new group formed at the Community House-The Village Players. In 1923 they put on their first play, “The Maker of Dreams” at the Community House and became the third oldest community theatre group in Michigan! In 1926, they moved from their makeshift stage at the Community House and into a custom built playhouse designed by the architect Wallace Frost that still exists at 34660 Woodward Avenue. If you get a chance to go see the Village Players, I can’t recommend it enough.

Volunteers at the Community House put together holiday baskets and other aid for their neighbors in need as well. Famous reformer Jane Addams even visited and praised the Community House in 1928.

And much more of that charitable action and mutual aid was needed in the next decade as the Great Depression impacted the people of Birmingham. These programs took place in a physically bigger Community House that modern day Birmingham residents and visitors know well. Ruth Shain laid the first brick for the “new” Community House in early 1930. In 1934, the Birmingham Eccentric reported that 76 families were getting a food basket for Christmas from the Community House, and that number rose over the next several years.

In June of 1930, Ruth stepped down from president of the Community House citing ill health and the increased workload of planning and coordinating the new Community House. The Birmingham Eccentric reported that it was possible that, for the first time, a man or men might be elected to the board and that their yearly fundraising efforts totaled a little over $18,000., Ruth continued to teach her class on International Affairs at the Community House, a class she taught for over 40 years and evidently was passionate about. 

During the 1920s, in addition to founding a chapter of the AAUW, the Community house and the village players, Ruth co-chaired the Birmingham Rotary Club and helped her husband complete a very ambitious civic project-Birmingham’s downtown Civic center. Anyone would need a little self-care after what Ruth had done in the previous decade, even if their mental health didn’t suffer during the long, gray winters. 

Nowadays, Shain Park, named for Charles and Ruth, is the gem at the heart of Birmingham. A large park that incorporates play structures, a fountain, several pieces of public art and historical monuments as well as an area for concerts and events. It connects the Municipal Building to the Library and Community House. But in the 1920s, this 3 1/2 block area was a neighborhood and the idea of moving all those folks out to build the Municipal building, park and library was quite unpopular. Ruth recounts that folks crossed the street to avoid Charles because of it. This probably affected Ruth’s popularity as well, but she didn’t let that stop her. She retained her membership at the Community House and with the clubs and groups she helped organize. 

But Ruth was not alone, she was helped by a new generation of Birmingham women who were becoming leaders in the community. Women like Hope Lewis Ferguson and Mary Utter were using their new rights to seek and gain political office, as well as working in and with non-political groups to leave their mark on the community. 

At her death in 1980 at the age of 96, Ruth was one of the most prominent and well known figures in Birmingham. Her legacy- especially that of the Community House- lives on. 

So, should you who suffer from our gloomy winters forego modern medicine, throw out your doctor’s orders and just start a bunch of civic groups and organizations instead? Absolutely not, we are not one of those podcasts. But, there are worse coping mechanisms out there. Especially when you consider that in 1918, the year Ruth moved to Birmingham, vitamin D, a key component of wellness that can drop precipitously during the winter months, had just been identified and science was still working to understand all that it did to keep us physically and mentally healthy. Our knowledge of mental health and how to treat seasonal depression was still in it’s infancy. Ruth found a way to make it through the dark and gloom of a southeast Michigan winter, and we are all reaping the rewards of that effort decades later. 

Join us next time as we talk about one of Birmingham’s Peabodies. And no, its not about the restaurant or the fruit market that preceded it because there were two Peabody families in Birmingham and one owned a general store in town that started a sensation in the village in 1885 when he imported a case of Japanese tea. I mean, what else could possibly be going on in 1885?

And now, I’m going to go and try to shake the last of these winter blues with my current obsession: Irish hip hop. Don’t ask, I don’t even know. Wherever you are, we hope you are doing the same.  

 I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to Ruth Shain, check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.