A Memory of Stevie Wolf – Michael Zuckerman

There are hundreds of Stevie stories. Let me tell you one.

1973 was not a good year to finish a doctoral dissertation in early American history. The market was dismal enough for the great majority of newly minted Ph.D.s, young men who’d gone straight from college to graduate school and were then in their later twenties and mobile enough to go wherever a job offered. It was much worse for women, and worse still for women who’d gone back to graduate school while raising a family of five children and were therefore confined to opportunities close to home.

I’d become friendly with Stevie while she was working on her dissertation, and I’d invited her to join my little seminar on the strength of it. I’d gathered a gang of ten or a dozen faculty and graduate students from Penn, Temple, and a couple of the Quaker colleges – historians, American Civilization people, anthropologists, whomever – and organized our monthly meetings. We had no money and didn’t really need any. We met in each other’s apartments or houses, usually in my place, and we talked among ourselves, sometimes about an issue of the day or a shared reading, occasionally about someone’s work in progress.

I wasn’t an early Americanist then. (I was barely a historian then.) I was hired to teach late-nineteenth-century, and I never taught colonial. That was Richard Dunn’s turf, and he was jealous of it. I did teach a course on American communities, and community was the organizing thread on which our little seminar hung. Stevie was a natural for our group, not because she weas working in the eighteenth century but because she was working on Germantown.

Figure 1. Philadelphia bicentennial logo from the year 1976. Philadelphia Encyclopedia.

I was delighted to invite Stevie into our company, both because I’d already come to adore her and because the invitation gave her a sliver of recognition and a shard of academic mooring at a time when she had neither and was unsure of ever having either. She was outlandishly grateful at the time and grew even more outlandishly grateful as time went by. And we were grateful to have her company, because she soon became one of the indispensable stalwarts of the seminar. In those sexist days, no one was going to offer a middle-aged woman a tenure-track position. But in 1975, Penn did offer her a two-year post as director of its Bicentennial College.

Penn hadn’t a clue what the Bicentennial College was. Penn just wanted a little piece of the Bicentennial, at a moment when no one yet had any idea what a flop the Bicentennial was going to be. There were fantasies of attracting squadrons of students from afar to spend a junior year in Philadelphia in 1976, and there was not much else. It was up to Stevie to give some substance to a “college” that was primarily a PR ploy.

Stevie did in fact come up with more than enough substance to save Penn from the embarrassment it deserved. She wrought so brilliantly that the University of Delaware took notice and hired her to direct the Winterthur Program in Material Culture. But that was the beginning of other Stevie stories. My Stevie story changed my life.

With her newfound resources, Stevie was determined to do something to thank me for bringing her into my little seminar. After considerable cogitation, she came up with a scheme that transformed that little seminar and more. If I would turn our topic from community studies to the Revolution, she could justify throwing a fair chunk of Penn money my way. We could invite guests from afar instead of just generating our work from within our own company. We could bring the leading figures in the field to Philadelphia to spend an evening with us. We could cover their expenses and even feed them (and ourselves) on her tab. She would have a gaudy guest list to show the higher-ups, and we would up our game exponentially.

I thought why not, and my little group spent a splendid year thinking about the Revolution rather than about community life. More than that, we got spoiled. We now had a template for a very different sort of seminar. As it happened, Richard Dunn and Rick Beeman were hatching their plans for the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now McNeil Center) by then. It was a no-brainer to turn the seminar from the Revolution to early America, where it has stayed for half a century since. And where the seminar went, so did I. Stevie gifted me not just a new direction for my Salon (as George Boudreau renamed the seminar many years later) but also a willing return to my old direction as an early Americanist. She had a knack for touching and even transforming lives that way.

Michael Zuckerman

Michael Zuckerman is professor emeritus of history at Penn. He started teaching there in 1965, and he’s teaching there still, sixty years later. A book he co-edited, Community-Engaged Scholarship: Reflections from Netter Center Alumni, is coming out this spring.