Dates

• Existence: 1924 - 1998

Biography

Louise Hilfman Goldman, public servant, feminist activist, and poet, was born in 1924 and grew up in Davenport, Iowa. She attended the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) and was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar who graduated with a degree in journalism in 1946. She married Bernard Goldman, then a medical resident, in 1947. He later became a doctor. The couple had two daughters. Goldman's concern for community mental health services led to appointments to the first Iowa Comprehensive Health Planning Council and the State Committee on Mental Hygiene. She served on the board of the Vera French Community Mental Health Center and on the founding board of Community Health Care of Davenport.

In 1958 Goldman was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a radical mastectomy. That experience led her to become one of the first volunteers in the Reach to Recovery program. Reach to Recovery volunteers, all former mastectomy patients, visited new mastectomy patients in the hospital to offer hope and practical advice for coping with the experience.

Goldman was the first woman to chair the Davenport Civil Service Commission. She ran as a Republican candidate for the Iowa House of Representatives in 1974 (losing by just four votes), and served on the State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Her involvement in the women's movement included writing for the Quad City Times about the role of women in Latin American government, leading classes for the local Women's Community Leadership Institute Project (WCLIP), and speaking, writing, and marching in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. She participated in several women's conferences, including the 1977 National Women's Year Conference in Houston, Texas.

In her later years, Goldman began to spend more time nurturing her talent for writing. She became the poet-in-residence at Davenport's Lincoln Center for the Cultural Arts, where her efforts to foster the love of reading, writing, and reciting poetry in children and adults earned her the nickname "Grandma Goldman." Her first book of poems, Six Seasons, was published in 1990. Louise Goldman died in 1998 in Davenport, Iowa.

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