Talk:Dagmar Wilson

Brief Biography of Dagmar Wilson (1916-2011)

Dagmar Wilson (talk) 20:53, 4 January 2017 (UTC)Dagmar Wilson was born in New York City on January 25, 1916. In 1919, her parents, Cesar and Marion Searchinger, moved to Berlin, Germany, for her father's job as a news correspondent and music critic. When World War I erupted in Europe, the family moved to England which became their home base and where Dagmar spent the rest of her childhood. Because her parents travelled frequently, Dagmar was sent to live with her aunt and uncle, Viola, Marion’s younger sister, and her husband Henry Selson. Dagmar was educated along with her cousins in the progressive school the Selsons founded in England. (Dagmar’s brother, Eugene, was born in England in 1922. He later moved to the U.S. and graduated from Columbia University. He went on to become an award-winning documentary filmmaker as Gene Searchinger, Equinox Films and Ways of Knowing, New York, NY.)

“From my earliest years I was surrounded by musicians,” Dagmar writes February 1, 1955, “but the more my father looked for signs of musical talent in me, the more I sought to show him how well I could draw. By the age of eight I had won the battle. My parents had to admit that I would never be a musician. Instead, they gave me all the paper and crayons I wanted and sent me to ‘progressive’ schools.” 

Dagmar graduated from the Slade School of Art, London University, in 1937. “At ‘The Slade’ I was very successful. I received almost every prize that the school had to offer and was given a scholarship which enabled me to stay on for a post-graduate year…. This gave me the experience I needed in the field of applied art while I continued to study life and landscape painting. I also taught art to elementary school children [at Burgess Hill] in London” (Dagmar Wilson, Feb. 1, 1955). There she met Christopher Wilson, who was teaching math at Burgess Hill, whom she later married.

In 1939, Dagmar and Christopher travelled to the United States to visit her parents who were vacationing that summer in Maine. “…I returned to the land of my birth, seeing the United States for the first time since infancy, seeing it with eyes almost as British as those of my husband.” Her father persuaded them to stay in the U.S. because of the imminent threat of a German invasion of England. They did so and later learned that the street they had lived on in London was bombed as World War II ensued.

The newlyweds settled in New York City where Dagmar taught art at the Lincoln School of Teachers’ College (later part of Columbia University) and also designed for well-known textile company, Greeff Fabrics, Inc. However, the couple soon moved to St. Louis, Missouri, so that Christopher could attend medical school at Washington University. The following year, expecting their first child, they returned to New York City where Dagmar’s parents had settled. Dr. Benjamin Spock, a New York pediatrician, was to have been their baby’s doctor. Ironically, over two decades later, in 1967, Dagmar and Ben Spock marched side by side in a demonstration at the Pentagon, opposing the arms race and the escalating war in Vietnam.

In 1942, plans changed again when Christopher took a job with the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. They moved into a town house in Georgetown where they lived for the next 30 years. Their first daughter, Sally Marion Wilson, was born on May 27. The family grew to three daughters (Anna Clare, born July 11, 1946, and Jessica, born March 2, 1949).

From 1943 to 1945, Dagmar worked in the graphics department for the U.S. government (in the office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs). She continued to paint and exhibit in Washington, D.C. In 1947, she was elected a Fellow of the Phillips Gallery, where she took master classes with noted abstract expressionist Karl Knathes. After leaving the government, she went to work as a display designer for the Hecht Company, a local department store. She subsequently joined Presentation Inc. and continued her commercial-art career together with other designers at P.I. who had also come to Washington during the war years.

Then from 1945 to 1973, while raising a family, she worked chiefly as a free-lance illustrator in her studio at home. In 1948, she illustrated the first of many children's books, While Susie Sleeps, for Young Scott Books. She went on to illustrate more than 50 children’s books for several different publishing houses over the ensuing decades. The most widely known are Poems to Read to the Very Young, and its sequel, More Poems to Read to the Very Young, Doubleday. She was a frequent cover illustrator for Junior Red Cross magazine and contributed numerous illustrations for several periodicals published in Washington, D.C.; she was a sought-after presenter of "chalk talks" at the Washington Post Children's Book Guild annual book fair; she designed sets, scenery, and costumes for the Washington Dance Theater; and she collaborated with her husband, author of Growing Up with Daddy (1957) and A Treasure Hunt (1972) for the National Institutes of Health. As a member of the Children’s Book Guild, she initiated the Action Committee for D.C. School Libraries and served as its chairperson (Erwin Knoll, staff reporter, Washington Post, December 3, 1959). In 1955, she wrote, “I am free-lancing in illustration and design. Among other things I am illustrating a collection of simple verse for children written by my husband and approved by our own children now aged 12, 8 and 6. As each child is in a different school I belong to three P.T.A.’s….”

In the course of the 1950s, Dagmar became concerned about the threat of the nuclear arms race. In 1961, incensed by the jailing of Bertrand Russell in England for protesting arms testing, Dagmar got on the phone to friends and started the mobilization of women around the country to strike for peace. She envisioned a one-day action in which women would symbolically go on strike, walk out of their homes, walk off their jobs, and refuse to work until men stopped making weapons of mass destruction. The idea resulted in demonstrations in 60 U.S. cities on November 1 when thousands of women across the country marched to “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race” (Women Strike for Peace, Swerdlow, 1). This national action launched the movement known as Women Strike for Peace, which continued to organize protests against atmospheric testing, to build relationships with women’s peace groups internationally, and later to end the war in Vietnam.

As the primary spokesperson for WSP, Dagmar led several delegations of women to international gatherings, beginning with a major conference on disarmament at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, just six months after WSP began. Other trips included The Hague where women opposed a NATO plan for a multinational nuclear fleet, and then Moscow—defying a U.S. travel ban to the USSR—to meet with the women’s peace committee there. As the war in Vietnam escalated, Dagmar led a small delegation of WSP women to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia at the invitation of the North Vietnam Women’s Union (Swerdlow, 218). The delegation also met with women from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. She firmly believed such trips were necessary to promote cooperation among women across the globe in opposing their governments’ nuclear policies and to secure their common goals of peace and the preservation of life (Swerdlow, 188).

In December 1962, several WSP women including Dagmar were subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) “relating to the Communist Party’s united front tactics of infiltrating peace organizations, with particular reference to Women Strike for Peace….” (Swerdlow, 108). HUAC was made to look ridiculous by the women who testified. A cartoon by Washington Post political cartoonist, Herblock, depicted a congressman on the committee whispering to his seatmate, “I Came in Late, Which Was It That Was Un-American—Women or Peace?” (Washington Post, December 12, 1962). Then in 1964, she was once again subpoenaed with two other peace activists to testify in a closed hearing about their effort to obtain a visa for a Japanese peace leader, Kaoru Yasui, to come to the U.S. When they refused to speak, saying they would testify only in open session, they were found in contempt of Congress and convicted. Ultimately, the courts refused to uphold the committee’s contempt citations and the convictions were overturned (Swerdlow, 123). (In 1969, Congress changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security" and ultimately abolished it altogether in 1975, when its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.)

On August 5, 1963, after more than eight years of difficult negotiations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (www.jfklibrary.org). President Kennedy credited Women’s Strike for Peace with bringing about its ratification, prohibiting atmospheric nuclear testing. Dagmar said at the time, “Who would have believed three years ago that the leaders who were preparing us to accept nuclear war as inevitable would today be declaring nuclear war as ‘unthinkable’?” (Swerdlow, 125).

In the mid-1960s, Dagmar began to retreat from public life and return to the easel. In 1969, she became a grandmother. In 1971, she and Christopher, who was nearing retirement, bought a house near Leesburg, Virginia, in an area where several artist friends lived. They left Georgetown and spent their remaining years at their Loudoun County home overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dagmar returned to her original interest—landscape painting—and exhibited in the Northern Virginia area. Her work is on display in the Loudoun County government offices in Leesburg, but most of her work since 1970 remains in private collections.

Dagmar created some of her finest paintings in those later years—scenes of Loudoun County’s disappearing rural landscape and northern Vermont, where she spent a couple of winters at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. “My interest is in the local scene, for the most part farm architecture and domestic interiors… I have found inspiration in such artists as Hopper, Scheeler and David Inshaw. I try to ferret out the abstract designs to be found in architectural structures and in sunlight and shadows. I like to reveal the subtle differences in qualities of light: between summer and winter, indoor and outdoor, direct and reflected. But my pictures also portray aspects of man’s work and his impact—not always beautiful—on the environment.”

Her husband Christopher died in 1985. Dagmar continued to paint well into her 80s and to be an active member of the Loudoun County Sketch Club. She remained active with Loudoun County Citizens for Nuclear Disarmament, a group she co-founded in 1978, and also the Preservation Society of Loudoun County. She died in Washington, D.C. on January 9, 2011, just two weeks shy of her 95th birthday (obituary, Los Angeles Times, Elaine Woo, January 30, 2011).

Note¬ Documents related to Dagmar Wilson’s activities in the nuclear disarmament movement are in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. www.swarthmore.edu.

Bibliography

Erwin Knoll, staff reporter. Washington Post, December 3, 1959. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. www.jfklibrary.org. Los Angeles Times, obituary, Elaine Woo, January 30, 2011. Wilson, Dagmar. Curriculum Vitae. February 1955. Wilson, Dagmar. Resume. Undated. Women Strike for Peace, Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Amy Swerdlow, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1993.

Brief chronological biography: 1916 - Born in New York 1919 – Moved with her parents to Berlin 1937 – Graduated from Slade School of Art, London University 1939 – Married Christopher Wilson and moved to USA 1942 – Welcomed first daughter into the world, Sally Marion 1946 – Welcomed second daughter, Anna Clare 1947 – Elected Phillips Gallery Fellow 1949 – Welcomed third daughter, Jessica 1961 – Founded Women Strike for Peace 1969 – Welcomed first grandchild into the world 1971 – Moved to Loudoun County, Virginia 1977 – Welcomed second grandchild 1978 – Founded Loudoun County Citizens for Nuclear Disarmament 2011 – Died January 9 in Washington, D.C. Some of her book illustrations: 1948 - While Susie Sleeps, Young Scott Books, NY 1960 - Close Your Eyes, Dodd, Mead & co., NY 1954 – It’s Fun to Peek, Gossett & Dunlap, NY 1954 - Up and Down We Go, Willis Music Co., NY 1955 - Christmas Carols for Children, Willis Music Co., NY 1957 - Living Today -Health, Safety, and Science, McCormick, Mathers, Wichita, KS 1957 - Growing Up With Daddy, Lothrop, Lee & Shepherd, NY 1957 - Billy’s Friends, Follett, Chicago, IL 1958 - Baby’s Playbook, Grossett & Dunlap, NY 1958 - Gertie the Duck, Follett, Chicago, IL 1958 - The House that Jack Built, Grossett & Dunlap, NY 1958 - Berlitz language series, Grossett & Dunlap, NY 1959 – Benny and the Bear, Follett, Chicago, IL 1959 - The Funny Mixed Up Story, Wonder Books, Inc., NY 1959 - So Big (a cloth book), Whitman, Publishing Co., Racine, WS 1962 - Casey the Utterly Impossible Horse, Scholastic Books, NY 1960 - Let’s Read More Stories, Doubleday, NY 1960 – Why It’s a Holiday, Random House, Inc., NY 1960 - Poems to Read to the Very Young, Doubleday, NY 1960 – I Love My Grandma, Whitman Publishing Co., Racine, WI 1961 – Let’s Hear a Story, Doubleday, NY 1961 - More Poems to Read to the Very Young, Doubleday, NY 1961 – The New Pony, Golden Press, NY 1962 – Songs to Sing to the Very Young, Doubleday, NY 1962 – Grandmas and Grandpas, Random House, Inc., NY 1963 – Somebody Hides, Whitman Publishing Co., Racine, WI 1972 - A Treasure Hunt, National Institutes of Health, Wash, DC 1955-1975 – Illustrations and cover art for American Junior Red Cross Publications

2601:19B:C703:4D60:6C7A:86CA:3A35:AEA0 (talk)Sally Wilson Ballin Clare Wilson Jessica Wilson