Dorothy Liebes | 3. No Greasy Grind

Liebes assumed she would attend the University of California at Berkeley right after high school, but her father’s unsuccessful hops growing venture meant postponing her dream. The free tuition offered at San Jose Normal School (now San José State University) allowed Liebes to get a teaching certificate, an “anchor to windward,” as her parents called it. She became president of the senior class and active in several clubs.

In 1918, Liebes got her first job as an 8th grade teacher in Hayward, CA, where she boarded with the mayor and his wife in their son’s room. Despite being “only remotely aware of World War I,” Liebes vividly recalled the night her landlord’s son was killed in France – a coincidence realized later – when an inexplicable bright light suffused his room, terrifying her. Liebes learned that the soul returns to a place it was happy before parting for the afterlife. 

Finally transferring to Cal in 1920, Liebes enrolled in classes in the history of costume, the history of textiles, flat drawing, layouts,  the applied arts, and anthropology, the subject she treasured most. Throughout her life, she would mention anthropology in speeches and articles as a crucial discipline for artists to study.  She was influenced by legendary (and, later, controversial) Cal professor Alfred Kroeber. He “breathed life into the antiquities,” she recalled. 

Liebes was active in her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, raising money for President Hoover’s war relief efforts and partaking in its social life of the house. She lived with her parents who had moved from Santa Rosa; in the attic of this house, Liebes started her weaving career on a second-hand lacquer-red loom.

Not wanting to be thought of as a “greasy grind,” and worried that “intelligent women frighten off men,” Liebes nonetheless graduated cum laude from Cal and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.