Blanket

52.206

Happy International Women's Day and Women's History Month! We wanted to celebrate by sharing an unexpected connection between our collections and the first woman appointed as a United States ambassador. Ruth Baird Bryan Leavitt Owen Rohde achieved a number of firsts in her political career: Florida's first woman Representative (which also made her the southern region's first woman Representative) and the first woman to serve of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. She also became the US's first female ambassador when Franklin D. Roosevelt posted her to Denmark and Iceland in 1933. We are confident that this is where she acquired this feathery baby blanket (52.206). The small (68 cm x 37 cm) blanket from chilly Greenland (part of Denmark) is softer than soft and made of loon pelts and feathers. The Inuit woman who crafted the blanket covered the top in white down, the sea birds' fine, fluffy layer of warming under feathers. The bold black and white striped rectangle in the center is made of glossy waterproof neck feathers. The reverse of the blanket is covered entirely in down. As a craft item emblematic of Greenland, the blanket may have been presented to Rhode as a diplomatic gift. She passed it on to Stanford in 1952.

W–49.5 L–71.5 D–3 cm

Organic/Animal/Feather

North America; Greenland

Anthropology; North America; Arctic/Subarctic