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In this issue:
Jeanne Boydston
Jon Gjerde
Noel Stowe
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Jeanne Boydston
 Jeanne Boydston, the Robinson-Edwards Professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin, died on Saturday, November 1, 2008, less than six weeks after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She is survived by her partner of nearly twenty years, Joy Newmann, her brother Robert, Joy’s children, their grandchildren, a nephew and two nieces, and numerous friends. Her parents, Donnell and Juanita (Laymance) Boydston and her brother James predeceased her.
Jeanne Boydston was born on December 15, 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was educated at the University of Tennessee and Yale University. After graduating from college in 1967, she received a Master’s degree in English, writing about Edith Wharton. She became deeply engaged in the civil rights, feminist, and student movements, and spent the mid-1970s working at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, helping to implement the academic equality promised to girls by Title IX. She entered the Ph.D. program in American Studies at Yale in 1977, where she completed her degree in 1984 as Nancy F. Cott’s first advisee. She joined Wisconsin’s Department of History and Women’s Studies program in 1988, having taught at Rutgers University-Camden for several years.
Jeanne Boydston’s 1990 book, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic, transformed the study of women’s and labor history through its meticulous analysis of housework and of the rhetoric about housework’s decline as labor. She continued to engage her scholarly concern for the integrity of women’s labor and the power of gender to shape and obscure class and racial identities in articles and in several coedited or coauthored volumes, including The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (1988); Root of Bitterness: Documents in the Social History of American Women (1996); and Making a Nation, a widely-used textbook in U.S. history. Her “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” which appeared in the November 2008 issue of Gender and History, will continue to generate controversy, forcing historians to reconsider our uses of gender as a universal category for understanding the distribution of power.
No listing of Jeanne Boydston’s scholarly work, awards, and publications can effectively measure her impact as a brilliant, beloved, and much honored teacher. The books and dissertations written by an entire cohort of Wisconsin-trained historians will long reflect her ongoing influence.
Jeanne loved her work and cherished the life of the mind that scholarship and teaching could entail. But she never believed that academic life was the only thing going on. She was passionate about art, literature, and the prospect of seeing Barack Obama become president. She was a talented artist, who was captivated by the colors of the places that she and Joy visited. She loved the house she and Joy shared, where they spent many hours on the deck overlooking Lake Monona, or working in the garden.
For an essentially private person who preferred small groups to large ones, Jeanne Boydston touched the lives of an enormous number of people. On November 22, 2008, some 150 friends, family, and colleagues gathered in Madison’s Olbrich Botanical Gardens to view photos, recall her dry humor, and reflect on the conversations that will continue to influence us even as we grapple with her absence.
To support graduate students working in and researching on gender or women’s history, the University of Wisconsin Foundation has created the “Jeanne Boydston Memorial Fund—UW Foundation.” Donations may be made in Jeanne’s memory and sent to the University of Wisconsin Foundation, US Bank Lockbox, PO Box 78807, Milwaukee, WI 53278-0807.
—Lori D. Ginzberg
Penn State University
Jon Gjerde
 Jon Gjerde had been a faculty member in the history department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1985. Yet all who knew Jon understood that his love of Berkeley came second to his love of the Midwest he considered home. A native of Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa (BA, 1975) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1982), Jon became his generation’s preeminent historian of the ethnic history of that region. He authored many articles and reviews, as well as five books, including the award-winning The Minds of the West: The Ethnocultural Evolution of the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (1997) and From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West (1985). In these works and others, Jon combined a sophisticated understanding of quantitative analyses with a meticulous reading of the words and actions of the less famous to paint a layered portrait of first Norwegians, and then other European immigrants, who settled the Upper Midwest.
Over the course of nearly two and a half decades, Jon rose from assistant professor to the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History. During that time he garnered a well-deserved reputation for getting things done while getting along with everyone around. He directed the Scandinavian Studies Center, chaired the history department and was, at the time of his death, dean of the social sciences.
While his work will be a permanent record of his stature as a scholar, Jon’s humanity is what produced the stunned shrieks of “No, it can’t be true” in the hours after his death at age 55. On Sunday, October 26, as he cooled down after a workout at home, the electrical pulse to his heart simply stopped, his wife and love, Ruth, explained. Thoughtful, smart, unassuming, caring, devoted, and loving—all described a man who excelled as a scholar, administrator, leader, friend, colleague, father, brother, and husband. And those of us fortunate to have known Jon up close might add sports enthusiast, basketball junkie, and enjoyer of good wine, food, conversation, and an occasional Leinenkugel to the descriptors.
Above all things, Jon loved his family; that is his most enduring legacy. In a world where much changes, Jon’s relationship with Ruth served as a reminder to all of the power of love to endure and to grow deeper and stronger over time. In the weeks before his death he already envisioned the day he would relinquish his administrative post, finish his next book, and travel with his love. He was equally buoyant about his daughters, and the young women they had grown up to become. That sense of perspective will be missed.
Jon is survived by his wife, Ruth; daughters, Christine and Kari; brother, David; and sister, Carol Gauger; as well as family members, friends, colleagues and former students. Contributions in his honor should be sent to the Jon and Ruth Gjerde Graduate Student Endowment, history department, UC Berkeley.
—Earl Lewis
Emory University
Noel J. Stowe
 Noel J. Stowe, professor of history at Arizona State University, died on December 13, 2008. He was a lifetime member of the Organization of American Historians and participated in the work of the American Historical Association as a member of the Committee on Redefining Scholarly Work in 1992 through 1994, as a participant in the AHA’s Wingspread Group on the Future of the History Master’s Degree in 2005, and as a member of the Task Force on Public History from 2001 to 2005.
Stowe began teaching at Arizona State University in 1967, after receiving his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and teaching briefly at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. In 1978, he became the history department’s director of graduate study. In his eight years in that position, he expanded the master’s and doctoral degree programs and founded its public history program, which achieved national and international recognition under his guidance. He directed more than fifty graduate theses and dissertations. His students have gone on to direct public history programs at other universities and to work in museums, historical societies, and archives across the country.
In 1987, Stowe became assistant dean of the Graduate College at ASU, and in 1991 he became associate dean. He promoted ASU’s participation in national projects funded by the Pew Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. He was dedicated to improving the graduate experience of students throughout the university and to promoting the admission and success of minority students. After a year as interim dean, he returned to the history department, which he chaired from 1998 to 2006. Stowe was also a productive scholar, with three books and more than a dozen articles published. In total, he directed grant-funded projects of more than $1 million.
Stowe worked tirelessly on the national stage to broaden the opportunities for historians to take their scholarship beyond the walls of the university. He was a founding member of the National Council on Public History and had represented NCPH as a delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies since 2005. Stowe became active in the Oral History Association in the 1980s. He was a member of the executive board of the Southwest Oral History Asociation from 1989 to 1994 and its president in 1992 to 1993. He worked on the program committee for the American Association for State and Local History from 2002 to 2007.
Stowe’s interest in Arizona history led to contributions far beyond the ASU campus. He was a member of both the state and local boards of the Arizona Historical Society, the Arizona Historical Advisory Commission, and helped establish Friends of Arizona Archives. In August 2008, he and a team of researchers received a National Endowment for the Humanities planning grant to design and implement Becoming Arizona, an online encyclopedia of Arizona history, culture, politics, economics, and other topics as a centennial project. He worked closely with the Arizona Humanities Council, which presented him with the Friend of the Humanities Award in 2004. In June 2008, he received the Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Award.
Stowe is survived by his wife, Gwen. Their son, James, died in 2007. Donations may be made in his memory to the ASU Foundation for the Noel J. and Gwen J. Stowe Public History Endowment, c/o Department of History, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4302. The endowment will help support scholarly activities in public history in the Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe campus.
—Jannelle Warren-Findley
Arizona State University
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