Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Berryman, Mildred
- Abstract:
- Mildred J. Berryman was a researcher, writer, photographer, and stenographer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a lesbian member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, she did research concerning lesbian and gay communities in Salt Lake City, Utah. This collection contains her unpublished thesis "The Psychological Phenomena of the Homosexual," research, and relevant materials.
- Extent:
- 0.2 linear feet (1 half box)
- Language:
- Materials are in English.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Mildred Berryman papers (Collection 2170). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
This collection contains Mildred J. Berryman's research and drafts of her unpublished thesis titled "The Psychological Phenomena of the Homosexual." Also included are correspondence and other notes about Berryman's work.
- Biographical / historical:
-
Mildred J. Berryman was born September 22, 1901 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was the third and last child of Richard Gordon and Mildred Stokes Berryman. Until 1910, the Berrymans moved residences almost yearly, but after Mildred's mother passed away that year, the family settled and Richard worked tending bar at Hanak and Rumph which later became the Opera Bar. Mildred Berryman graduated from public secondary schooling and entered Westminster College in Salt Lake City on October 11, 1916. It was here that she met and befriended Theodora Anderson, who would later become her sister-in-law. Mildred expressed her desire to embark on a study of lesbianism, which the school refused to allow. Mildred temporarily ceased her relationship with Westminster until she married, "to try and escape her homosexuality." She soon left her husband.
In 1920, Mildred got a job as a stenographer for McLaren, Goode and Company and had her first lesbian relationship with a music teacher named Mae Anderson. Their relationship lasted a year. Mae Anderson would eventually become a faculty member of the Latter-day Saints School of Music, teaching alongside Willard Weihe. Weihe was the President of the Bohemian Club, a social group for homosexuals in Salt Lake City founded in 1886 and which Mildred Berryman would eventually join in the 1920s. Berryman joined the LDS Church around 1920. She received a Patriarchal Blessing from Mormon patriarch Richard G. Lambert in 1921. After another failed heterosexual marriage attempt, Berryman met Edith Mary Chapman in 1924. They lived together for four years in Edith's home, which she later turned into a boarding house for lesbians.
It was around this time that Berryman began working as a photographer, processing and taking photographs for the Superior Photo Company. She moved back home with her family in 1929 and Berryman resumed work on her thesis on homosexuality that she had started years earlier. Mildred gathered data for her case studies over the next several years, with people she had met primarily through the Bohemian Club of Salt Lake City. In her study, she included data on 24 lesbians (including herself) and nine gay men. By 1936, Berryman was doing so well as a photographer that she was able to open up her own studio in her family residence. That same year, Mildred met her next companion, known only as Z in case study 24. Mildred and Z were together for twelve years.
Mildred stopped working on her thesis in 1939, titled the Psychological Phenomena of the Homosexual, which she had hoped to turn in to Temple Bar College in Seattle, Washington in order to obtain a PhD. Temple Bar College, now defunct, is thought to have been a college operating through correspondence courses. Mildred continued her work as a photographer until 1941, but in 1940 her and her father opened the Berryman Menage at their residence, where they had a mineral showroom and lapidary shop which sold mineralogical specimens collected in Utah and Arizona. The first ad for the Berryman Menage appeared in the October 1940 issue of the Mineralogist. Berryman had published an article on a field trip of the Utah Mineralogical Society to the Wilcat Mountains a year earlier in the same publication. She published a second article in the magazine in July 1943 entitled "A Utah Locality."
During World Ward II, Berryman worked at a small arms defense plant at Hill Air Force Base, where she met 34 year old Ruth Uckerman Dempsey, a Mormon housewife who was working at the same plant. In 1943, when Mildred and her ailing father moved up to Woods Cross, a rural area just north of Salt Lake City, Ruth decided to move in with them. At the end of the second world war, Ruth and Mildred (who had adopted the nickname Barrie), opened their own manufacturing company called Berryman Novelty Manufacturing. Ruth and Barrie stayed together for thirty three years. Mildred J. Berryman died on November 7, 1972 at the age of 71. Her obituary states that she was a member of the Bountiful Community Church, past president of the Business and Professional Women Organization and past president of the American Legion Auxiliary. Ruth sent Mildred's research to her daughter, and parts of the study were published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 1978. After Mildred's death, Ruth moved back to Idaho to live with her son Clyde, She was buried in same cemetery as Mildred in 1979.
This biography draws heavily from "Mildred Jessie Barrie Berryman" by Connell O'Donovan, accessible at: https://www.connellodonovan.com/berryman.pdf
- Acquisition information:
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Gift of LeVern and Bonnie Bullough, circa 1990. Small amount of additional material donated at later unknown date. Transferred from the Mazer Archives to UCLA in 2013.
This collection is part of an outreach and collection-building partnership between the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives , the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) , and the UCLA Library .
- Processing information:
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Processed by Stacy Wood, 2013. Description enhanced and further physical processing completed by Sabrina Ponce in 2017.
Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices.
We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Problematic Content and Description in UCLA's library collections and archives.
- Arrangement:
-
Materials arranged by type.
- Physical location:
- Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Access and use
- Restrictions:
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Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Terms of access:
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Property rights to the objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Mildred Berryman papers (Collection 2170). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
- Location of this collection:
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A1713 Charles E. Young Research LibraryBox 951575Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575, US
- Contact:
- (310) 825-4988