“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier”: American Women’s Responses to World War I

The United States went to war against Germany at a time when more and more doors were opening for women, especially in the West. Montana’s Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, promoted women’s suffrage and the growing women’s peace movement. Ironically, however, many women peace advocates ended up supporting the war. In this slide presentation, Kuhlman explains how and why these women pacifists changed their minds.

An Idaho/Oxford Romance: The Letters of Ludwig Gerlough and Margaret Lauder, 1900-1914

Moscow schoolteacher Ludwig Gerlough became Idaho’s second Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in October 1911. In April 1911, former President Theodore Roosevelt had delivered a dramatic speech in his inimitable style to Moscow’s residents assembled in front of the UI Administration Building. Caught up in the excited revelry of the visit, Gerlough and his girlfriend, UI graduate Margaret Lauder, became engaged that day, five months before Gerlough departed for Oxford.

Kuhlman presents her research of their correspondence in this illustrated talk. The Gerlough/Lauder correspondence reveals the courtship practices of an early 20th century Idaho couple, the experiences of a young Idaho man at Oxford, and the emotional and intellectual life of a couple attempting to preserve their love despite the continent and ocean that separated them until Gerlough fled England on the eve of World War I.