She opened her own doors: ASU history professor retires from pioneering career

When Retha M. Warnicke started teaching at Arizona State University in the late 1960s, she was the first woman hired in a history department of two dozen men.

It was a time when women wore dresses or skirts to work — never slacks.

Workplace policies hadn't caught up to the changing demographics, and ASU had no maternity leave for faculty. When she had her second child over Thanksgiving break in 1974, she took less than a week off. Her students gave her a standing ovation upon returning.

As the first woman in her department, Warnicke served as a role model at a time when universities had few women with doctorate degrees.

She was among the first class of women to graduate with a degree from Harvard University in 1963. Before that, women received degrees from Radcliffe College, even if they took Harvard courses.

She later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and was promoted to assistant professor at ASU in 1973. She had a family and a career at a time when that was uncommon.

"She managed to do it all," said Philip Soergel, a former ASU history professor who is chairman of the University of Maryland Department of History. He was hired by ASU in 1989 and worked with Warnicke until 2005.

Warnicke, now 78, retired Jan. 1 after nearly five decades on the job.

While at ASU, she wrote seven books on English history, including a best-seller about Anne Boleyn that challenged conventional notions surrounding the doomed, second wife of King Henry VIII.

It was so unusual for a woman to have a Harvard degree in the late 1960s that The Phoenix Gazette ran a story on the recent graduate and her young son, Robert, headlined "Harvard Grad is Valley Mom."

The article, written by a female columnist, said the 29-year-old planned to teach at ASU in the fall of 1969, but noted the position wasn't permanent.

"Perhaps her qualifications are too staggering," the columnist wrote, taking a not-so-subtle dig at the university.

Humble beginnings

Warnicke, née Retha Biggs, was born in a rural Kentucky farmhouse with no electricity or running water. The bathroom was an outhouse.

Her father, Joseph, worked as a tenant farmer, growing tobacco on the banks of the Green River, a tributary of the Ohio River. Neither of her parents had an education past the eighth grade.

When she was 3, her father was drafted into World War II and was ordered to show up in Evansville, Indiana. He couldn't leave the family alone on the farm, so they went with him to the city.

When he got there, the military decided they didn't want him because he had ulcers. The family stayed in Evansville.

Her father got a job in the shipyards, and their new home was an improvement over their former one — it had electricity and running water.

She became fascinated with history at age 14 after she saw the movie "Young Bess," about Queen Elizabeth I. She went to the library and checked out book after book on English history.

During the fall of her senior year, the librarian asked her, "Well, which college are you attending?"

It had never occurred to her to go to college. She was taking stenography classes and learning shorthand to be a secretary.

She began looking at schools. Indiana University officials wanted to recruit women and men from low-income families, so they offered price breaks on room and board. She got a part-time job as a secretary and used a General Motors scholarship to pay for school.

Her junior year, she won an "outstanding history major award," and used the $1,000 scholarship to attend a summer research program in England. On that trip, she met another American man a year behind her in school, Ronald Warnicke, over tea. He grew up in a Chicago suburb.

It was a chance meeting that would change the future.

Professors: You're going to Harvard

Retha Biggs' work in the classroom impressed her history professors. They told her: You're going to graduate school at Harvard University.

She applied only to Harvard, on the advice of her professors, and was admitted. She and Ron Warnicke decided to get married and attend together, she as a history major, he as a law student.

She had received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to pay for her education. But she said the scholarship had a rule then that awards weren't given to married women.

"They took it away. That's the kind of world I lived in. They took it away," Warnicke said in a recent interview with The Arizona Republic.

Decades later, she said she still gets letters from the foundation, asking for donations.

She hasn't given money.

At Harvard, the couple supported themselves with help from Ron Warnicke's parents and student loans. By the time her husband finished law school, they had grown tired of the cold winters and walking to class in slush.

Ron Warnicke had interviewed at a Phoenix law firm the summer before his final year of school. They decided to move to Arizona.

Few women had careers in those days, Retha Warnicke said.

She had pursued a doctoral degree without giving thought to getting a job.

Brave enough to wear slacks to work

But she did get a job, as an instructor at Phoenix College in 1965. A year later, she became the first female ever hired in ASU's history department.

It wasn't a permanent job, though. She was hired as a lecturer. She taught for a year, then took a year off so she could finish her dissertation for her Ph.D. and have her first child.

She returned to ASU as a lecturer in 1969. She worked year-to-year contracts before being promoted to assistant professor in 1973.

She said she never felt really discriminated against, but she wasn't sure sometimes what she should be doing in the all-male environment. She tried to work around the social conventions of the times. She didn't want to be treated like a wife because she was a colleague.

She recalls being brave enough to wear slacks to work in the early 1970s before she got tenure, and one of her male colleagues — remarking on her attire — said that "women's legs don't get as cold as men's legs."

If a man opened the door for her, she didn't say "no."

But, "I didn’t hang out, waiting for someone to open the door for me. If a man had a lot of books in his arms, I would open the door for him, just as a matter of courtesy."

It was six years after she was hired before another woman, Mary Rothschild, would arrive in the history department.

'We were the role models'

Rothschild said she and Warnicke entered academia when there had never been professional women at their level. Neither had a female professor while in college.

"It’s not like we had role models. We were the role models," Rothschild said.

When Rothschild was pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Washington, she said people assumed she was getting a Ph.D. so "I would be an intelligent wife to my husband, who was a mathematician."

Warnicke said some academic majors, such as nursing, had women faculty, as did English and sociology. But political science had no women faculty when she was hired, and she can't recall any female science instructors.

Rothschild said when she first got to ASU, there were pink message pads in the offices on which to leave telephone messages if the person was out of the office. But the pads were prefaced with only one word: "Mr."

Rothschild, like Warnicke, didn't get maternity leave when she had a son in 1976.

She took two weeks off, returning to teach 400 students that semester.

The workload was sometimes lopsided, she said. Universities require faculty to do additional work, such as serving on committees, as part of their jobs.

There was a big push in the late '70s and early '80s to have at least one woman on every university committee to ensure there was a "woman's voice," Rothschild said.

This was a positive development, she said. But it also meant women faculty had to serve on many committees at once.

"At one point, a guy and I were hired the same year. I was on nine committees, and he was on none," Rothschild said.

Warnicke said she doesn't recall being on an excessive number of committees, but said it's possible that she was.

A teacher, a mentor

Warnicke set another first in 1992 when she became the first female chair of ASU's history department, serving for six years.

Colleagues say she made the history department more equitable with promotions and tenure for faculty. She recommended people for positions based on their qualifications, not whether she liked the person. She pushed in a strategic way to hire more women and minorities.

"She was this incredibly fierce, strong woman back when there were hardly any of them in the higher ranks of academia," said Anne Feldhaus, a professor of religious studies who was hired in 1981.

Warnicke persuaded Andrew Barnes, an African-American professor who specialized in European history, to leave Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. Barnes said when he was hired, there were two other African-Americans on the ASU history faculty.

Barnes had tenure at Carnegie Mellon and wasn't looking to leave. But he changed his mind after meeting Warnicke and a couple of her colleagues.

Once he got to know Warnicke better, he was impressed by how she mentored students.

"I hesitate to use the term 'old-school,' but Retha is old school. You sit there and talk them through it. You guide them through it. You don’t necessarily say, 'Go look at these five websites.' "

Colleagues said Warnicke was equally devoted to teaching and research whereas many professors tend to lean toward one or the other.

She served as a mentor to countless women professors and students.

"When I came up for promotion, she was meticulous in making sure everything in my file was as it was supposed to be and all my ducks were in a row," said Susan Gray, an associate professor of history who came to ASU in 1991.

Another time, when Gray was getting "hissy fits" from two students to whom she gave Bs rather than As, Gray said Warnicke told her to toughen up. Everyone isn't going to be nice to you here, she said. Gray said she learned that she should have handled the situation better so the students didn’t huff and puff as much as they did.

Groundbreaking research

Warnicke's daughter, Margaretha, remembers sitting around the dinner table as a young child, listening to her parents discussing her mother's work. Her mother was constantly thinking about her work, Margaretha said.

Margaretha recalls her mother's publication of a book in 1989 about Anne Boleyn, who was famously beheaded. "The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII" challenged several popularly held notions about the English queen.

Historians widely viewed Boleyn as a flirt. But Warnicke's research uncovered no such evidence. Allegations that Boleyn had sex with five other men (one of whom was her brother) led to her being convicted of adultery and executed in 1536.

But Warnicke maintains the real reason Boleyn was beheaded was because she gave birth to a deformed fetus.

Deformed children, in those days, were viewed as "monsters" and thought to be the result of the parents' illicit sexual behavior.

Warnicke said Henry VIII could muddy the identify of the child's father by accusing his wife of having sex with other men.

If Boleyn was having sex with multiple men, "how could they possibly point to him as the father of that deformed child?" Warnicke said.

Through her books, she has been able to correct some misinterpretations about the wives of King Henry VIII. Her research made her a sought-after speaker at historical conferences.

One of Warnicke's former students, Susan Walters Schmid, credits her with coming up with the idea for her doctoral dissertation.

Warnicke suggested she take a poem about Boleyn written in French by a secretary to the French ambassador that had never been fully translated into English.

The translated document revealed that some historians had taken bits and pieces of the poem to suit their theories.

Walters Schmid took the subject and ran with it, earning her Ph.D. in history in 2009.

"That saved me a lot of time, saved me from wasting time. She knew no one else had done this," Walters Schmid said.

Saying goodbye to teaching

About two years ago, Warnicke felt she was slowing down. She decided to put in for retirement after the fall 2017 semester.

Her colleagues feted her in early November with a retirement party at ASU's historic Old Main. They pooled their money to buy her a string of pearls, a gift that carries historical significance because Queen Elizabeth I draped herself in pearls.

Warnicke spent her final semester at a university with more than 100,000 students, four times larger than when she started.

The university doesn't have statistics available on how many women were on the ASU faculty when she started teaching. But when she began, she was the first in her department. Women now account for 45 percent of faculty at ASU.

Her classes went from being all in the same building to being spread across the Tempe campus.

Communicating with students changed, too. They prefer email to coming into the office.

One thing has remained the same: her love for teaching.

"When I look back, what makes me happiest is I've had students who have enjoyed my classes," she said.

Retha M. Warnicke career highlights

Ph.D. Harvard University, 1969.

Taught courses in early English history, including Tudor and Stuart England.

First woman in Arizona State University's history department, first woman to get tenure in the history department, first woman chair of the history department from 1992-98.

Hired more women and minorities while chair of the history department.

Author of seven books on English history, including 1989's "The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII."

Reach the reporter at 602-444-8072 or anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com.

READ MORE:

Season for Sharing: Helping Hands for Single Moms helps women through college

Few mountains are named for women, but Mount Lemmon honors feminist scholar

We need girls to raise their hands in class

Parrish: What makes women so strong? It's the magnificent contradictions